Back from Comic Con

Had a great time down in San Diego at Comic Con. Got to see the Stargate SG-1 Movie panel, and the Stargate Atlantis panel on Friday. On Saturday I went with my friend Brian and saw the Family Guy panel and spent some time looking at the exhibit hall.

I was excited to get the opportunity to go backstage before the panels, and meet some of the Stargate peoples. I was lucky enough to be introduced to Joe Flanigan, David Hewlett, Jane Loughman (David Hewlett's Fiance), and Amanda Tapping.

I was, as expected, stunned into silence, shook hands, said Hi and that was about it. I didn't even manage to get a photo.. oh well, I've got the memory!

On Saturday while down at the Exhibit Hall, I visited the MGM booth, and got this lovely pic:

Comic-Con San Diego

Tomorrow night we leave for Comic-Con. Already scoured the timetables, and created a document that I can print out and carry around with me to remind me where to go and when.

Hoping feverishly that I will be able to get backstage to meet the Stargate folks before their panel, and then to get some autographs later in the day. Also hoping that they decide to go to dinner with MGM people, and I get to tag along. Well.. at least I can dream :D

BFN

Docstoc

Through linkedin, I received a message about doing some dev work. Even though I'm not interested in the work, I liked the idea of this business:

docstoc

This is from their blog:

Docstoc.com is a free online document exchange database and social networking site that allows users to store, search, and share virtually any type of document (word, excel, powerpoint, pdf, illustrator, etc…). Similar in concept to Flickr.com (for photos) and YouTube.com (for videos) Docstoc.com will be the online community for sharing all types of documents. The users will post, categorize, and rate thousands of documents that can be reused by other users for a variety of purposes.

Sounds interesting huh?

BFN

6 Firefox Extensions for Web Workers

I haven't tried all of these, although I plan to try them on Monday! Personally my favourite for firefox is the webdev toolbar, lots of goodies to make it easier to debug/write pages.

Anyhow.. here's the other guy's list: 6 Firefox Extensions for Web Workers

BFN

Tabula Rasa - Beta

I was very excited to find yesterday in my email, an invite to join the beta of Tabula Rasa! I have been eager to try the game out, ever since I saw my first demo of it at E3 a few years ago.

I have started the download.. we're at 3%. I will update once I get into the game!

Tabula Rasa

BFN

Microsoft site W3C Compliant?

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.microsoft.com%2Fwindows%2Fproducts%2Fwinfamily%2Fie%2Fdefault.mspx

Methinks not...


BFN

Me as a Simpson character

Me as a Simpson character.

Article about the iPhone

I'd like to preface this link with a comment. I am posting this not as an iPhone basher, as my mate has it, and it looks neat. Mostly I am posting it cos it's pretty damn true, and extremely funny (as long as you're not an apple fanboy) Enjoy.

The iPhone is a piece of shit, and so if your face

BFN

PHP Twitter class

Just saw this class on the PHP Classes site, and plan to implement it on my website (jeninason.com) tomorrow. Mostly because I'd much prefer to use something that looks like it matches (with my stellar design skills) than the standard "badges".

http://jeninason.users.phpclasses.org/browse/package/4011.html


BFN!

How to define Web 3.0

Found this article very interesting at defining where things are heading.

http://howtosplitanatom.com/news/how-to-define-web-30-2/

BFN!

Publishing solved.. for now

As I've mentioned previously, I've been working to improve how the publishing to stage and live servers works on the main content management system.

I've just finished up with the changes, and this is how we went:
Changed the button "Insert to Stage" to "Save". On the titles, and the dvd's this either inserts to both stage and production with approved as no to both, or updates stage, setting stage to approved as no.
Another user can go to an extra page I made which checks the titles, and dvd tables, for all records that are active, but approved is no, and they can select "approve to go live". This updates stage to approved is yes, and production as approved is yes, and copies stage record to production.

The only places it's really different is for images related to the titles, videos, buy links and the such. These only have "save" and it updates and sets as approved on stage and production always. We decided that this stuff since it was part of the titles or the dvd's anyhow, should always go live, and doesn't need separate approval.

Now it's Friday at 3pm, and I've finished everything on that rather major project, so don't want to start anything new.. What to do.. What to do..

BFN

Funny

Someone actually told me yesterday that my myspace page was bland. There was "nothing to look at there, and no music". I shuddered.. EWWWW I can't express how much I _hate_ the pages slathered in useless noise, and images. Yuck.

Today I found this comic which really expresses how I feel about people and their dumbass myspace pages. So there! Credit for the comic going to http://xkcd.com/ Great comics, check them all out!

BFN

HTML & Email regular expression

For some reason this interface refuses to let me type in the title field.. strange.. hopefully it will let me edit it later!

Two things were the highlight of today. HTML. Argh! Trying to make something look good when you cut and paste it from a browser into outlook. It sounds easy. It's not. Our regular front end developer was out sick today, so MM and I tried as well as we could, to edit the HTML. After an hour or so, we just started the page over, and voila.. no more error!

We still don't know why it didn't work, but after wasting so much time trying to find out what was broken (basically we could see a small black line on the right of the email) we knew we could fix it just by rewriting it.

Sad.

My other highlight was a solution to a problem I'd solved in a different way. Regular expressions do my head in. I mean I can do them if I must, but usually I just find another way. A couple weeks ago I'd been asked to hyperlink an email address in a string as a mailto. I put the email in a seperate field in the database, problem solved, although not as "fancy" as i'd liked, it certainly meant for cleaner data.

My mate Brian today (Link on right to io intermedia) asked me how to pull a link out of an href without using a regular expression. I made some suggestions, but I think he already sorted it out, just needed to say it out loud (type it?). I told him about the email link thing from a couple weeks ago, and he sent me this link: http://textsnippets.com/posts/show/179.
ARGH! Lol.. it seems so simple, and I feel like a n00b. Oh well.. hopefully it helps me in the future!
Here is the code:

function extract_emails_from($string){
preg_match_all("/[\._a-zA-Z0-9-]+@[\._a-zA-Z0-9-]+/i", $string, $matches);
return $matches[0];
}

$text = "blah blah blah email@address.com blah blah blah email2@address.com";
$emails = extract_emails_from($text);
print(implode("\n", $emails));

BFN!

 

CMS process woes

On Monday, we decided to implement a new way of publishing content through the CMS. Our current CMS was pretty much a direct PHP version of the last Java version, with no revisions as to functionality.

The old version was terrible, we should never have copied it, but time was a serious factor.

In the old system, the content supervisor adds a new title, checks "active" and checks "approved", then clicks "add to stage". On the next screen, they can "add to production". This caused problems because they would just check both active and approved, then add to stage, and immediately add to production, sending content live that had never been proofed, or tested at all.

From a backend standpoint, checking active and approved set those fields to "y" (yes it drove me insane that they used y and n instead of 1 and 0, but that's a whole extra set of annoyances). Adding to stage literally inserted or updated it into the stage database, then adding to production inserted or updated production database.

So we changed it. But now we have more problems. Don't you just love doing things half assed? :P Now I'm back to the drawing board, going with the pro's and con's of having two seperate databases, and a way for another person to be in the mix, and approve the content.

BFN!

- Actually we get off at noon today (Tuesday before the 4th July), and they gave us Thursday and Friday too! I mostly liked won't post again til next Monday. Have a great holiday!

Software: FastStone Photo Resizer

I needed something to quickly resize massive amounts of photo's from my camera.
Previously I'd used photoshop, and it's neato Web Gallery feature, but since I've rewritten my site using PHP, and it's a single page entry to all my photo's, there's not reason to create an HTML page.

I tried this software out because I'd found it recommended on someone else's blog, and for the life of me I can't remember where, but when I find it, I'll edit this and give kudos to the person who showed me the light!

Loved it, In just a few minutes, I'd located the folder I wanted to resize, given the specs for how much smaller I wanted the images, and let it run. Now all my photo's are ready for FTP to my server.

Just what I wanted! Thanks FastStone, steller software, and freeware to boot!

BFN

Oh and the link to their software is: FastStone Photo Resizer