Web Programming for me (Jeni)

San Diego Comic-Con 2009

2009-07-25T13:04:00.000-07:00

What a crazy busy week back after a week off! Had just a few days back before we had to head down to San Diego for Comic-con. Thursday afternoon we checked out MGM's Stargate booth on the exhibition floor. Snapped a photo of me near the Stargate, and checked that the form we setup for people to get exclusive Comic-con downloads was working. It was (is). Wandered around the exhibition floor with another member of the Stargate team, before we had to go to the hotel and get ready for the Stargate universe launch party.

The launch party was pretty spectacular. Especially for those of us who aren't normally associated with the promotional aspects of working on Stargate. Jonathan and I decided not to be shy, and introduced ourselves to much of the cast and Robert Cooper and Brad Wright. A good conversation was had with Rob about how best we can keep the site interesting for the fans. Elyse looked spectacular in a lovely pink dress (easy to pick out of the crowd). Brian J. Smith was very nice, although didn't get a long chat with him. Spoke for a while with David Blue, and I've decided that he's probably going to be my favorite. Both his character on the show, and the actor himself are someone I can relate too. David is very charming in person, and very good looking! I even got a wave goodbye when I was leaving the party late that night! (yes fangirl squeee!)

We had a good talk with Robert Carlyle (always loved his acting, so was quite shy about introducing myself.. had my boss introduce us!) and Alaina Huffman (she's even more beautiful in person) about them possibly helping us out with occasional blog posts or Q&A's for the site. Robert Carlyle has an amazing accent, I truly had to concentrate, and was thankful I'd decided not to drink.

The members of my team that could go to the party loved it. It was just so wonderful we were invited, and we feel like we also KNOW these people. We look at them every day, watch video's of them talking, and now they know who we are too!

Jonathan and I walked past Robert Cooper on the street before the party, and both of us almost waved him down... until we remembered he wouldn't know who we were. We told him that when we were at the party, and he said we should have said something, apparently he never gets recognized!

A funny story we were told at the party, happened when Elyse and Jamil went down to walk the exhibition floor on the Thursday. They wandered over to the Stargate booth, and were taking in all the sights, when one of the people hired to man the booth came over. The booth person wanted to know if they would enter a contest to win a guest role on the show! Too funny. It can only happen now, before the show has aired. Next year there won't be able to wander the floor without causing an incident!

I took tons of photo's, and I'm sorry to those who follow me on twitter, but I practically spammed tweets with pictures from all over Comic-con. Here are some of my favorite moments.

--Can you see my dreamy stunned look?

Anyhow, now all that excitement is over, it's back to some serious work starting phase two of the site next week.

BFN

ps. Love this video talking about Children of the Gods. I always hated the way they introduced the Samantha Carter character, turns out I'm not alone!

Lots of fixes after the vacation

2009-07-13T07:46:00.000-07:00

Currently my parents are in town for their annual visit from Australia, so we're off to Santa Barbara area today to get some rest time in.

Thanks everyone for the feedback, the bad spelling fix happened right before they presented the Photosynth at a big Microsoft conference. Was very relieved to have that fixed before they put it up on the big screen.

Thanks to Anonymous to catching the duplicate Search and Rescue content group. Not quite sure how that one managed to get itself published live, but it's deleted now. When I create a content group, it acts as the "page" for a group of images, or a video. The one was blank, so it just showed other stuff from that series, which right now is videos. I've been working to try and get the order of what comes out there changed, based on what you're already looking at. The media player used to only show stuff from that content in the strip, but right before launch I added some code to throw in stuff from the series so it didn't look so blank. Lots of things to improve!
http://stargate.mgm.com/browse/stills/series/2/season/15/episode/2795/index.html

JenR, I will definitely look into the captions. The full episodes are all from Hulu, so I am not sure if there is anything we can do with those, although they might have versions we can use, I'll find out. The clips are mostly produced by us, old clips we may not even have captions for, but again, I'll ask the video people and hopefully find something we can do there.

Watcher652, thanks for your tons of feedback. I'm not sure exactly what's happening with your navigation problems. Can you tell me what OS/Browser you're using? It could be a javascript/css problem. When you select "Atlantis" from the navigation menu, you should end up here: http://stargate.mgm.com/view/series/2/index.html this page loads the media player with Atlantis video and images. Next to the media player should be an ad to buy SS5 on DVD. Under the media player is a section with two tabs, summary and episodes. Everything in those sections should only be content from Atlantis.
The site no longer remembers which is your show preference. This is something I'd like to add back in during phase 2, but it was starting to get too complicated, so we took it out at launch.

On the images page, once you've selected "Atlantis" you can then see on the right of that, the list of seasons (1-5). If you then select a season, you will see under that the list of episodes, and can do directly to the episode you'd like to see images from. The images are ordered by when they were modified. This is something I'd also like to change, and is in phase 2, to order them by season, episode number.

We have such a large amount of content to enter, and only two people entering it, so keep watching the site, as the other drop down menu's will begin to get populated over the coming weeks. We also didn't get to upload the images from seasons 1-3 for Atlantis yet, those will come sooner rather than later, as I know the selects are complete, and I think seasons 2 and 3 are already ready for upload. With Comic-con next week, the only other person uploading images is super busy with that, and I'm away! :)

Related Tags are.. in need of some love. At the moment if we don't have data for the tag, it's randomly assigned a number. This was because before the site launched, we didn't have any data, so all the tags appeared to be the same size. I'm going to revisit how they are ordered, and what font size is assigned once we have more traffic data.

Some episodes we just don't have images for. There aren't any in the library, and none we can find elsewhere. For these we are trying to get some hi-def video's, so we can make some captures, but it's not going to happen very soon.

Thanks for catching that key episode error on McKay, I've fixed it. The order of Key Episodes is just the order I tagged them in. I would like our main content person to choose the order based on relevance instead, but first I'll have to program a way for her to do that.

We don't have a help function, or a site map, although the site map is coming, as we area creating one for search engines as well. I'm actually quite surprised you're having trouble with navigation though. On the whole the feedback has been the opposite, that people much prefer the navigation on the new site, and others have taken pains to compliment the navigation.

Thanks very much for all the feedback, keep it coming. We're trying very hard to improve, and fix the things we know aren't right, or aren't as good as they could be.

BFN

The monster lives!

2009-07-08T19:15:00.000-07:00

After a very exciting and intense couple of months, the beast has finally been unleashed. Unfortunately today was _supposed_ to be a soft launch, but apparently marketing has never heard of that sort of thing before.

We have DNS cache problems here in the office, that always means it takes DAYS for our DNS to update. This is a major problem, when the CEO etc. are trying to look at the masterpiece. I had to do a kludge and do away with the CDN to actually go live when it was supposed to.

Sadly the site has received a LOT more traffic than we really could have hoped for. This means I've had servers crashing left, right and center. I have brought 4 new servers online during the afternoon, and am trying to keep on top of the crashes. I think when I eventually go home, I'll just switch on the CDN, and let the execs work out why we can't see our own site from the building.

Sorry I've been quiet here for a while, as you can imagine we've been putting in quite an effort to get things straight. What I hope is that you will all offer your feedback. Let me know about things that might be miss-tagged, typo'd, offer descriptions for just about anything you see lacking. With a team of 3 we've had a rough time getting it all ship shape, but I think it's pretty good anyway!

In advance, I would like to apologize to all our international fans. In order to avoid Hulu, don't play anything that says: Full Episode in front of it. We ARE going to start work on international version of the site soon, which means hopefully we can offer some of the content, but through other means.

I welcome your feedback.

Oh and:

Anxiously awaiting your blog entry on the unveiling of the new MGM SG site (which is very cool, although I haven't figured out how to copy pics off the site (darned Flash). ;)

You can download the pics! Click on them to expand into full screen, then at the bottom is a link: get full-size image. Agree to sign your life away (jk) and it should open the massive version in a new window.
Let me know if it doesn't work.. it's supposed to!

For lack of anyone better

2009-06-16T09:44:00.000-07:00

I have been appointed team leader for the MGM Stargate Site! I was very afraid they were going to give the work to someone who didn't know the franchise (again) and had voiced my fears to our departing project manager. Turns out he agreed, and convinced my boss to give the work to me instead of someone with more time (and less passion).

This means that in addition to managing all MGM's domains, web servers (when I wear my sys admin hat), provide support for vendors who host movie microsites on my (MGM's) web servers, Database admin for Oracle and MySQL, doing all PHP code for all our sites... I get to approve content to go up on the site, and generally manage the direction of the site (of course always having to deal with requests/mandates from TPTB).

I'm very excited.. I think not only is it a good step forward for me (I was getting tired of being the one and only tech person who did everything, but couldn't advance because I was too "valuable") but I'm going to try and implement a lot more user generated content on the site.

Looks like the launch will happen July 9th, as they wanted it before comic con, but my parents are visiting and we're going out of town for the week of the 13th through 17th, so my boss moved the launch date from the 14th to the 9th.

We're going to try very hard to implement the first user generated feature we call "suggest a tag". Will explain more about that another day, we have to hash out the details, and see if we can get it properly coded and tested in the coming weeks.

Oh I almost forget, from yesterday's comments:

At present we can access the site by show (i.e. I have the link http://stargate.mgm.com/atlantis/ in my bookmarks. This works great for me, because Atlantis is the only Stargate show I'm interested in). Do you know if it'll be possible to browse by show in the new site as well? If not, any chance it'll be possible in the future?

Yes indeed. Pretty much everything in the site (characters, video, images) can be sorted by series, and we have a "filter grid" on content heavy pages where you can go by season, and episode, also narrow by type (behind the scenes, episodic etc).

Right now I'm trying to get that exact URL to still work, so it will redirect users to the new location.

BFN

Site launch delayed..

2009-06-13T10:36:00.001-07:00

I had a feeling it was going to happen mid last week when the panic seemed to stop. We were told late Friday that our launch would be delayed until the San Diego Comic Con.

I can't say I'm not bummed, as we're been going full blast on the new site since March, and I was really hoping to get it out there for people to see and use.

The project manager is now finished, as is the other programmer we had for the development cycle. This brings us back to a team of 3, and I hope they let us iron out the wrinkles and add a couple extra features instead of moving us onto different projects right away.

BFN

Been a while but...

2009-06-09T15:02:00.000-07:00

As soon as Monday the 15th June we may be launching the new version of MGM's Stargate site! It's been a very busy couple months, but we've been working very long hours and had our internal launch last week. We got some great feedback, but of course the most important feedback is going to come from the fans.

I only ask one thing.. I had to personally tag and upload thousands and thousands of images. I know I made some mistakes.. be gentle! We want to implement a "suggest a tag" and "flag a tag" features soon, perhaps by August, but until then feel free to let me know here which ones I messed up on. I was going cross eyed one night.. and tagged a whole bunch of images with Teal'C instead of Teyla (yes I know they don't look alike.. but their names are right next to each other in the list). I am pretty sure I caught them all, but you know how that stuff goes!

I loved this photo, looks like he's not sure if he should be happy or not!

BFN

How many people on a set?

2009-05-20T10:27:00.000-07:00

It is a constant surprise for me when I see a shot of a scene from a different angle, and there are TONS of people standing around. Often scenes which can seem quite intimate, personal, aren't really. Actors must have to work hard to not be distracted by the dozens of people it takes to shoot a scene.

Today I'll be recording voice overs for some promo video's for the Stargate site. I'm sort of excited and nervous at the same time. I have a very distinct accent, which has become a sort of mishmash between Australian and American. The worst part is I can now hear my own accent if I concentrate on what I'm saying, then it puts me off and I stumble around some words. Apparently after my read through's I am told I need to sound "more excited". The saddest part of that is that I was TRYING to sound excited! HAHA.. Oh well, I'll let you know how it goes.

Oh.. an image to show all the other people on the set, and I'm sorry I promise I'm still looking for that other image I promised!

BFN

Can't seem to locate...

2009-05-04T15:45:00.000-07:00

I just can't seem to locate a photo from "Spoils of War" that everyone hasn't already seen. I'll keep looking, as I know more images are being picked and approved all the time. In the meantime, how about something completely different?

Work on the new Stargate site is coming along well. Many of the pictures of my cats & lorem ipsum are being replaced be real actual honest to goodness content! It's exciting to watch it all take shape.

BFN

Guess the BTS Photo

2009-04-28T10:00:00.001-07:00

Work is coming along well on the new Stargate site. Had an interesting conversation with Hulu yesterday about integration options. I'm personally still procrastinating on how to finish the automatic image upload/resizing parts for the content manager. Pffft! I HAVE to finish something before today's meeting, this is getting crazy.

First guess on which episode this picture is from gets to pick... (I know you all want Atlantis) an episode of SG-1 that you'd like to see BTS for. OR I'll cave and you can pick an SGA eps. :)

BFN

Zelenka is Adrift

2009-04-24T09:53:00.000-07:00

I don't know why, but I just love them in their space suits! It looks very uncomfortable, but the thought of just those shiny white suits being the only thing between you and the vacuum is fascinating.

Zelenka appears to enjoy it, uncomfortable or not! Shep.. not so much.

Now onto the truly fascinating stuff: folder permissions. Been having the toughest time getting a small component to work. The hardest part is that the error is intermittent. I seem to fix it, and everything works fine, then a couple hours later I try it again, and it's broken without me touching it! I think I'm going to have to trace the error line by line, to try and work out which particular line it fails on. Drat!

Importing a list of "Other Characters" at the moment. Having a tough time deciding if a character is important enough to be added to it's own Character page, or be relegated to "other".

A comment from my other (99% non stargate) blog:

I have a question.
What is Kino?
I googled it, and didn't get a satisfactory answer.
Thank you!
Morjana

That is indeed a very good question. My answer: I'm not entirely sure. Here is how I understand it (although I may be wrong, since it's partially based on assumptions). Kino is another character... that's about all I can guess. I've heard it described as a small object which can go where it pleases, and looks at things from different angles. I know vague right? I'll be sure to keep you updated as we learn more!

* Species - Genomes? Extraterrestrial Life Forms? ETs?
* Places - Loci? Habitats?
* Weapons - Technology? Kinetic Energy Devices?
* Transport - Conveyance?
* Home Entertainment - Video Mission Logs? Video Archives?

I think we decided on for categories:
Beings - Asgard, Goa'uld, Wraith, Genii
Places - Pegasus Galaxy, M7G-677,
Items - Staff Weapon, Ronon's Gun, DHD, Life signs detector
Transports - SGC Gate, Puddle Jumper, Wraith Hive Ship
Other Characters - Merlin, Captain Alicia Vega, Thor

Home Entertainment stuff is going to live someplace else, these categories are going to be mostly Lexicon type information, which can be tagged to other pieces of information, episodes, and characters.

BFN

Oops on the comment moderation!

2009-04-23T15:33:00.000-07:00

I forgot that this blog has moderated comments! I've published all the ones that were received, and going by the times, it looks like kimberlyfdr is our winner! I know.. was too easy for fans, but I wanted to start with something we'd all love.

I went through some of the images we have approved for release, and sadly we don't have BTS for every season. In fact, we are still missing seasons 7-10 for SG1, and 1-3 of SGA. This is only because the selects haven't been made, there are photo's for everything, they just live in a big archive.

I'm excited about some of the photo's that will end up on the new site. I don't want to steal the thunder, so I'm going to hold off until the new site is released.

I'll wait to hear from kimberlyfdr before I post a picture, can't wait to hear which episode you choose!

BFN

PS. Thanks everyone for welcoming me back to the blog-o-sphere!

Stargate all the way

2009-04-22T15:10:00.001-07:00

I've managed to never mention Stargate on the blog I occasionally post on now. For a while I was not working on the Stargate site, so it was easy to never mention it. However in the last couple months my team has been reassigned, and working on a revamp of the current site.

I plan on posting a couple images a week in a large-ish format as I used to. I'll be posting images only from episodes that have already aired here in the US, which means it could be from any SG-1 or SGA episode, but nothing from SGU until those episodes have aired. Will try and keep people updated on the joys of writing the site, as I know everyone is as fascinated by it as I am!
Release date on the new site will be a surprise. I don't know what marketing efforts, or other things are going into the launch, so want to sidestep any toes in advance by just not talking about a specific date.

Lets call this "Guess the Episode". For many this will be an easy one :) First right answer gets to help me pick the next series/episode the image will be from.

BFN

So long and thanks for all the fish

2008-03-14T16:06:00.000-07:00

Sadly this will be the last post for this blog.

I've enjoyed writing it immensely, and will miss reading everyone's comments each day.

Leave me a comment with your email if you'd like to stay in touch, I know a few of you already know how to get ahold of me, and I'd love if it you would!

Cheers,

--Jeni

PS. Nothing bad happened, I'm just changing my priorities, and don't want to become a shill.

Scheduled Outage

2008-03-13T17:10:00.000-07:00

We're working hard on the new Video's page for the Stargate site (when I say we, I mean our front end developer) so once he's done with it, I'll be able to put on the finishing touches (the data).
Hopefully it will arrange things much more nicely for users, and expose new video's more easily.

The answers from Robert Cooper are going up, Part one and two are available now, Part three will be available tomorrow, and Part four on the 15th (Saturday). The video as once piece was a bit.. dry? So they added some clips and broke it into pieces to jazz it up a little.

Anyone read any good fanfic lately to recommend while I await chapter four of "The Enemy You Know"? I was reading a story this morning (can't quite remember the title or who wrote it sorry!) and it actually made me fall off the treadmill. Just not something I was expecting at 6am. Must make a note not to print out anything marked "adult"!

I love some of the BTS photo's that have recently gone up on the site, so thought today I'd feature a couple here from "The Ark of Truth".

BFN

Intermittent errors with blogspot.. might be time to change

2008-03-11T17:11:00.000-07:00

For the last couple weeks I've been having some weird problems with blogspot. At first I thought it was because I was uploading images too large, but I've had different problems on things other than images. Mostly formatting, and comments disappearing/reappearing.

I turned on moderating the comments because of spam. At first it worked well, but now it seems to be messing with them (as Kristen noticed too).

I've setup other blogs I've written using wordpress, and have been considering the "move". I have my own hosting for my personal sites, but I'm not sure I'd be able to post so many large images to it. Along with the hiatus, which means I will be posting less stuff about Stargate, and more stuff about *snore* programming! Perhaps I'll wait until the Summer to move the blog.

Working on an exciting side project which has pushed my other side projects to the.. side.. It's not my idea to share (wish I could think up neato stuff like this), but I'll post a link to the beta once it's ready. I am imagining that this will take loads of my free time over the coming weeks, but am looking forward to seeing something working, since Stargate is so quiet!

I've been enjoying reading lots of fan fic, as I imagine it (along with Little McKay's YouTube offerings) will be keeping me sane until Stargate comes back. Current favorite (and awaiting the next chapter!) is called "The Enemy You Know" by Padawan Aneiki. Cool stuff!

Some Comments:
Thanks to everyone to clarify the ownership of the guitar. I was too lazy to go back and look through JM's blog, although I was sure I'd seen it there before. You guys have great memories!
Little McKay: Sadly no free DVD's.. actually I've never gotten any free, but we do get a deep discount a couple months later when we buy them from a special list from Fox. Loui is too impatient, so I think I'll be stopping by the shops on the way home to pick it up for him. Yay on your new script ;) I'll look forward to watching.

Eris: Sadly I have no pics except what's on stargate.mgm.com from BAMSR. I do have some photo's of Torri from the first two episodes, but nothing behind the scenes sadly!

lysambre: Welcome! I just realised that you're right! Martin Gero says it on the video for the super fan contest right?

BFN

The Ark of Truth is out today!

2008-03-11T11:37:00.000-07:00

The image I wanted to show in it's complete form.. without my dreadful edit.

Tomorrow is The Ark of Truth day!

2008-03-10T16:15:00.001-07:00

My BF Loui asked me over the weekend if I will be able to get a copy of "the Ark of Truth" from work tomorrow. He informed me that if I wasn't able to supply it, he would be force to go and purchase it!

I am pretty sure I won't be able to get one from work tomorrow, so I'll have to give my money to Fox, and buy it retail. If Loui could wait just a couple weeks, I could get it.. oh well! I shouldn't really hassle him, since I've had the opportunity to watch it already.

Other SciFi will have to tide me over the next couple months. I'm not sure how long is left of Torchwood this year? I was thinking it was the end of the season, because people kept dying.
Dr Who is supposed to start up again soon right? I feel like it's been a while since I saw any new episodes.

Sadly I've still found no confirmation here or elsewhere when Season 5 will air. People keep hinting Summer, but I can't get anyone to officially admit it. The ads during "The Last Man" said July right? I wonder why there is no word from SciFi channel on it.

On the guitar and chairs picture from last week, honestly I don't know who's guitar it is. I just assumed it was JF's since it was on his chair. Although Elyse you are probably right, that looks like Jason's aumakua (sp?).

archimedes: I'm so sorry to hear about your accident? I hope everyone is OK!

Little McKay: I have no specific requests.. you already seem to have it down, so I'll watch everything you can offer up. The rap sounds very cool! I doubt you'd get in trouble, since your stuff doesn't use copyrighted materials, and it's so darn original. It's very sad that you aren't able to enter the super fan contest, I think you'd give people who live in America a run for their money. It's mostly legal issues as to why the contests are only open to people here. Every country has different and sometimes complex laws regarding contests. Due to marketing budget limitations, they market only locally. Fox does some things specifically for the UK, not sure if they do anything for other countries through. They do the DVD distribution for MGM.
First thing I noticed about the picture with the chairs and guitar was how much smaller JF's chair is.. wonder why?

Ina: Welcome to my little blog, nice to meet you! I wanted so badly to post that image of JF on Friday, but it was before "The Last Man" so I had to edit out the rest of the photo.

Elyse: So um.. yeah I think I used your poll idea again this week.. Thanks!!

Results of last week's poll:
What do you think of Beckett's return to Atlantis?

It's Great! - 65% - 11535
Meh. - 16% - 2852
Huh? I thought he was dead! - 19% - 3404

Very much in the positive. Thanks for the question idea Elyse!

Our traffic stats for the Stargate site are looking very positive. This last week was our highest traffic ever! The traffic will drop off now until Season 5 starts, but I think it's very good, and hopefully we've been doing the right stuff to attract fans and fans to be alike over the past (almost) year that my team has been working on it.

I read some posts on Gateworld about the Season 4 ratings, and have been much relieved. We held a small "pool" here to guess the rating for Season 4 premiere, and unfortunately I lost, my guess was a lot higher than it ended up. Looks like the back half of the season did much better in the ratings, I hope that bodes well for a possible Season 6.

No images today, blogspot is giving me grief (errors).

BFN

Season 4 finale tonight!

2008-03-07T16:22:00.000-08:00

I can't believe season 4 is over already! I feel like it barely started a couple weeks ago. I remember reading in Joe Mallozzi's blog (what feels like recently) about the sand.. Whatever will I do over the hiatus? Go insane? Maybe I'll just have to watch more of Little McKay's video's on YouTube.

Today was spent finishing up the standard footer, not much exciting going on there after yesterday's frustrations. As we are moving CDN's, I've been trying to locate all the sites that link to the video's on the old CDN so we can either sunset them (if we don't have the source, or control of it) or update them with new links. Dealt with some DNS issues.. domains mysteriously switching name servers.

Many thanks to Morjana for once again finding a bug for me to squish. Luckily she noticed right after it went live, so I was able to fix it before too many people saw it. Nothing dramatic just a link missing. Attention to detail is everything! Morjana has it that's for sure.

Apologies for my ham fisted editing.. just wanted to make this image.. OK for today.

BFN

Source the file on the RIGHT server

2008-03-06T22:22:00.000-08:00

I literally wasted about 3 hours this afternoon trying to get something to work. I say wasted, because if I'd just uploaded the file I was trying to remotely access to the live server, it would have worked! For some reason either the config on our dev server is different.. or something to do with the firewall.. file security or whatever. NOT fun! I had only a couple minutes left in the day before I needed to take my carpool mate home.. and I thought.. hmm.. what would happen if I put the file I'm trying to access someplace else. Voila. Of course at that point I realised that the 50 different ways I'd tried all afternoon would ALL have worked! Argh.. That's what I love about programming.

Drive to work today took almost two hours. If I'd not had my carpool mate in my car, it would have taken me even longer! One freeway has a carpool lane for part of the way, and I think this morning it saved us at least half an hour. SO ready to move.

Stargate was quiet today (no whooshing) but I realised I'd forgotten to post the results of last week's poll!
What do you think of the casting changes for Season 5?

Yay! - 26% - 1594
Boo! - 27% - 1667
I'll Wait and See. - 47% - 2890

I'd say those results speak for themselves, thanks to Rose for that poll!
This week's poll was by Elyse! I'm not sure what we'll do for the poll during the hiatus, but after reading Joe Mallozzi's blog, I've got my fingers crossed that we won't have to wait until the fall. I don't have any "inside" information on it, as when the next season airs is all up to SciFi.

Some comments:
Kristen: Yes my project is pretty much just that.. a way to try out new technology. If I try and read a book about it, articles, or tutorials I get bored after 5 minutes and never finish it. When I make a "project" out of it, something I think is useful, I can motivate myself to actually complete it! I love NIN.. I was wondering how it was faring with their release, as I'd not been able to get to their site. What they probably had was just a regular server running their site, and no CDN (Content Delivery Network) to handle any spikes in bandwidth. We learned our lessons about bandwidth spikes when the movie Rocky Balboa came out. Luckily we did have a CDN, so it just cost us extra, as opposed to any downtime!

Alipeeps: Yep I love the BTS pics too! I was also wondering why the other's didn't even seem cold? I am not sure when that eps was filmed, but it must have been early on in the filming last year.

Little McKay: Yay! I will be hitting you up for testing once I have something working ;) I forgot that he was barefoot in that scene, that must have hurt.

morjana: There were a bunch of pics similar to that with him setting up that shot. I thought it looked really interesting.

d-odyssey: I noticed that marks on the floor too. We have posters up around our office from famous MGM movies, and there is a picture from Annie Hall, where Diane Keaton is talking to Woody Allen and they are standing on chalk marks. I don't think I'd be able to move to the right spot without looking down!

omglawdork, Mary, Padawan Aneiki, Elyse: I definitely love the pics too! It's just so hard to choose which one to post.

BFN

Simply comparing dates, sftpDrive

2008-03-05T15:01:00.000-08:00

It's really very easy, but I always have to look up how to do it. This time I'll write it here so I can come back and find it faster next time. Simply transform valid dates using strtotime, then compare. Voila.. easy huh? If only I had more room in my brain for such simple things!

$today=strtotime($TodaysDate);
$release=strtotime($ReleaseDate);
if ($release < $today) {
//preorder
$button="preorder";
} else {
//regular
$button="order";
}

I was introduced today to a wonderful little app that I've been waiting for someone to write a good version of. This one is called sftpDrive. Quite simply it creates a "map" on this window's machine to an FTP server. Since I am still using Homesite (still haven't found anything as convenient) I just open up the mapped drive of the server I've ftp'd to, make changes, save file. Test on server. No pesky "in between" ftp'ing the file up using a standalone app. I am at this point about 90% sure I'll get them to buy it for me here at work, but 99% sure I'll get it at home!
Such a simple piece of software, but such a time saver! Thanks Matt for linking me that.

Found an image amongst the many that are not approved to go on stargate.mgm.com that I think fans will like. I am hoping if we ask nicely that they will approve it, as it doesn't actually have any people in it! I guess the way the images are approved is that the marketing people choose a few from the many, and send them over to the show runners, who then yes or no them. After that I am pretty sure it goes through legal, to make sure we have rights and what not, then they get sent to us to post on the site. Seems like a big run around, but considering the hot water we could be in if someone didn't like what was posted.. seems worthwhile!

Starting a small project of my own today, (in my own time, not for work) to write some firefox extensions. They seem pretty simple.. will update on progress, and if anyone feels like being a guinea pig later? jk.. don't want to crash your machines! If anyone has written any before, I'd love any hints or tips you can offer!

BFN

Flingers are Fun!

2008-03-04T16:48:00.000-08:00

Am sure most have seen now either through Team Stargate email yesterday, or through looking at the stargate.mgm.com site, but the Flinger Giveaway has started!
They were the "prizes" I was working hard to put into envelopes last week. All 100 of them!

Yesterday I wasn't in the office (out sick) but was able to point those that were here in the right direction for setting one of the pages for the promotions. I'm always so happy when things go alright without me (Thanks Steger!!).

Those in Team Stargate probably already know about the third contest that will be appearing on the site later this week. The premise is that the fans submit "super fan" video ads. I only wish I had enough talent to try such a thing. Working on the pages to accept the video's now, and hopefully will be in final testing in the coming days.

We're working on changing the video page, as it was originally added quickly, we didn't get the time to make it the way we liked. The thought is that it will be tabbed, so the first tab will have the most recent 12 video's, and the other tab(s) will either be archive, or all the other categories. I'm just worried that if the other tabs require more clicks, that less people will see them. Still I think it's better than having one massive page to scroll through. I didn't think we'd end up with so many video's! We had to beg and scrape to get content before we launched last year, but now it comes thick and fast during the season.

I finally got a server with PHP 5.1 on it! Yippeee! Now to get all the sites working on it.. and the new version of mgm.com.. Yikes.

Some comments:
Elyse: Right now I don't have a dog.. but my cat ate my flinger. Wonder how DH's fared with Mars?
Everyone: My commute is doing my head in.. not sure why it's affecting me so much right now, even though I've been driving it for over a year and a half. Just this morning I found myself challenging a car to "just go ahead and hit me" until I realised that that would be dreadful..

BFN

The dreadful 80 degree weather + smog.. ick.

TGIF, outlook good

2008-02-29T16:51:00.000-08:00

Haven't had any increase in traffic from buying those words yesterday. Oh well! Still cute.

Stargate tonight! Can't wait to see more of our favorite Scottish doctor. Getting sad that there are only two episodes left! The wait until next season is going to be torture.

A new promotion goes up on Stargate on Monday, and another promotion will be announced which starts later in the week. That will mean we have 3 running at the same time (Unlock the Gate runs for two more weeks until end of season). Since my work has been partially on hold, awaiting the new server setup, and design to come through, I personally stuffed the 100 envelopes for the promotion starting on Monday. Don't want to "scoop" the site, so will post more about it on Monday once it's announced.

I really need to start getting ready to move. Once we get our tax returns we plan to find a new place over here on the west side, or in the valley close to the 405. The drive to and from work has been doing my head in. I get overly frustrated by the tiniest thing on the road, and know the longer I drive so much, the better chance of getting into an accident. At the speeds I travel at on the freeway, most likely I'd scratch the bumper, but I just don't want to get into an accident at all! I've started to dread leaving work in the evening.. knowing I have an hour and a half ahead of me sitting in my car, letting the brake off every so often to roll a foot further forward.

A video editor here working on American Gladiators showed us a most hilarious music video he was in back in the early 90's. It's just a priceless slice of life in Los Angeles in the early 90's.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IgXgmLqn5o
Our work mate is driving the car in the video, and playing basketball, wearing white shorts. It gave us all something to chuckle about today!

How about something Stargate flavored.. some photo's!

Guess who McKay just spotted in the above pic?

BFN

The sun did rise today!

2008-02-28T17:15:00.000-08:00

I chatted with my father yesterday, and as he assured me then, the sun did rise today. His advice was similar to most of your comments, document, document, document (for when everything all goes pear shaped).

One of our team mates (Deb) took us out for coffee this morning as a nicer way to start the day. The coffee was great! Seeing Val Kilmer sitting near us outside the Starbucks was pretty special too. He's very attractive in person. Some people don't look as good off screen as on, but he does.

My boss pointed out a very interesting article in Wired magazine this month.
Dear Hollywood Studios talks about problems with selling movies and TV online, and how it relates to the way Studio's handle it all.

I procured a couple words on The Big Word Project. Jenny and Gate. They both point to jeninason.com, then I put in a referrer check at jeninason.com which sends them onto (for now) my blog. Just wanted to be sure I pointed them to a URL I'd own in the future.. since I don't think my blog will be here forever. Here is the quickie code for my own future reference!

$pos = strrpos($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'], "thebigwordproject");
if ($pos === false) {
// not found... stay here
} else {
header("location:http://jeninason.blogspot.com");
}

I had a very strange thing happen yesterday at lunchtime when I was at the mall across the street from work with my friend Deb. I didn't mention it in my blog yesterday.. because my day was just so fubar I couldn't process what a strange thing it was. We walked into the Macy's, and went to the section where we usually get (or try to get in our sizes) the jeans we like. They weren't there! As usual Macy's had rearranged everything, and we turned to go look in other parts of the store, when I stopped and looked right, then looked back to my left where Deb had been walking, and there was a woman standing next to me. She turned to me and started screaming at me. It was the most bizarre thing. She was yelling about me "loitering" in Macy's, about me stopping too close to her, standing in her way, and generally being a very nasty person. The oddest part of it was she had a cat on her shoulder! A live cat.. on a lease, but perched on her shoulder like a parrot. Having no idea how to react, I just started laughing at her. I had to assume she was joking for some reason, as I'd never seen her before in my life. The sales associates just stood there and stared. Deb and I started to walk away, with the woman screaming after me, ranting about something or other. We left the store and came back to work. The only thing about the incident that bothered me was that the staff didn't do anything at all. They should have at least called security, or come and asked if there was a problem. I emailed the Macy's feedback address and explained what happened. They have offered me a gift card, but I sure as hell won't be going back to that store in a hurry! Besides the fact that I don't think they sell the jeans I was looking for anymore.

Sorry about the ramble today! Lots of topics, but none Stargate related I'm afraid!

BFN

Shiny big pics, to clear the clouds away

2008-02-27T18:28:00.000-08:00

Not literal clouds today, but just not a fun day. Here are some pretty pictures to make me forget.

BFN

The kindred

2008-02-22T23:01:00.000-08:00

Just a quick note.. after watching tonight's episode.. um.. ARGH! Seriously.. last week's promo for this week gave away NOT the last 5 minutes.. the last 5 seconds!

What the hell.. so bloody lame.

Sorry for my language.. Teyla looks awesome in her maternity outfit, really beautiful! Rest of the story was just "work out what happens until we know what happens from last week's promo". I muted the next weeks promo, just so they wouldn't spoil it for me!

Argh!

BFN

Migration plans.. no code :(

2008-02-22T17:13:00.000-08:00

As I was starting to write the code which will run the administration site for the new mgm.com, I realised there was a problem. I've been waiting to get an additional server, at our host, with everything setup like our current live servers, the exception being with the latest version of PHP. This way I can load all the current sites onto said server, and work to iron out any bugs. Still no server (I made the case for it last year). Now the question is do I write the whole new site in the old version? Or wait for a new one.

I met with my boss about it, and we went over the pros and cons (hi there boss reading this!), and so now I'm stalled until we can get the new server.

Fixed a couple bugs on Stargate.. and on the web server setups to handle errors. Apparently our new CDN doesn't work with our virtual hosts file in the same way as it did on the old one. None of my fancy "auto search" for mgm.com was working, and none of the error pages (for stargate, mgm, or mgmhd) either. The auto search feature is sorta cool, but only the members of my team know about it. Basically you browse to mgm.com, then add a /search words and it will try and find what's after the slash. For example, 'www.mgm.com/rescue dawn' will take you to that movie, as there is only one search result. Another example 'www.mgm.com/species' will take you to search results for species, as there is more than one result.
I was quite proud of this fancy lil code (actually it's kinda simple) but alas no way to tell people that it's there.

Wish there had been some documentation from our new CDN that would have alerted me to the fact before we switched, so I didn't just "happen" across the bug one day.

I'm definitely looking forward to tonights episode! After this short (but long feeling) week, I might buy myself some juice on the way home to go with the vodka in my freezer.. Is it wrong to drink alone? I'll be with my TV?!

Never mind!

BFN

Quick half day, farewell freelancers

2008-02-15T13:04:00.000-08:00

Today is a half day, because Monday is a holiday. Yep.. we get a half day off before a public holiday. Nice! I get to go home, clean up for girl's poker night.
Tomorrow is taxes and hair. Sunday is helping Steger move. Monday Loui and I are going back to the "Star Trek Tour" as I won those free tickets.
My boss and I went over the DB design for the new CM, and looks like it's done! That means next week I'll be writing the admin site. Had some minor snafu's on MGM HD that got resolved today.. something to do with css that Steger took care of, and my mistake (meant > not >=).

Was reminded today of the fibonacci sequence, and the golden ratio. This was all in a discussion about Reese's peanut butter cups. How they are like the golden ratio. Problems occur when they upset this ratio by changing the shapes (like the heart shaped ones for Valentine's Day), or by making them smaller. Fascinating stuff! Will try and represent that in a mathematical way over the weekend.

Pushed live the new weekly "game" on the Stargate site. I hate the game.. I usually have to test the darn thing, and always before I've seen the episode.. spoiled again. Luckily today's wasn't so, as I've already seen Midway!

Hopefully in the coming weeks our theatrical slate will bulk up. It's looking very anemic since the Writer's Strike. At the moment we've got nothing until Valkyrie in the fall. Some fabulous titles such as "cutting edge 3", and "species 4" however will be appearing on a tv screen sometime soon.

Up until today we had two freelancers working with our team as we have been short staffed. Today was their last day, so we all went across the street and had some gelato to mark the occasion (bought by our boss, sweet huh?). Our team will be down to 6 including email marketing manager, and our boss. Yikes.

Ah look at the time, it's 1.15pm, I should go home!

BFN

Wedding Daze and such stuff

2008-02-14T18:28:00.000-08:00

Today was mostly taken with following what was going on with the Wedding Daze sweeps. We're not sure if it's been a resounding success, or if the "special code" has just made it's way onto all the "sweeps" sites out there. Hopefully some people are buying the movie on PPV, and watching it there, but who knows?!
Trying to work out a method so in the future we can better ascertain where people get the code to enter the contest.

Went over the new mgm.com content management schema with Matt today. I think it's pretty much nailed down, and since I've only got a couple weeks to finish the administration tools, It's time for me to start writing some of that code!

All quiet on the Stargate front today. We had a meeting with my boss's boss today, and I dropped the "none too subtle hint" that if I found myself in Vancouver somehow.. would I make it to see a day of filming? We'll see! If I keep dropping hints perhaps they will just let me go to shut me up. ;)

Dan Clark was very amusing this morning, and he spent the whole day with the video editors going over clips. I stopped by a couple times to chat, as I kept finding excuses to go make another cup of tea. :D

I'm looking forward to everyone getting to see the David Hewlett Extra! clip. I see it is set to turn on on the 21st Feb, sadly Joe's doesn't turn on until the 6th March.

BFN!

Data move has begun!

2008-02-13T10:54:00.000-08:00

Yesterday afternoon I finally finished the transfer tool. This morning I showed Nancy how to use it, so in theory.. in a couple weeks.. all of the data should be in the new database!
Now onto more exciting projects, such as writing a new administration site to manage all that data. Woot. Another tool will have to be written to handle any/all mistakes that happen in the original transfer. I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

Nothing else too interesting this week, because we don't want to be going live with any great code changes before our long weekend. We get off at 1pm on Friday, and won't be back until Tuesday.

I love all the poll suggestions, and have passed them onto Nancy. That should keep it going at least until end of season! Sadly all things Stargate will go quiet for us after end of season until the Summer. That is both good and bad, as we have so many other projects it will give us time to play catch up. American Gladiators is still a big focus, but I just can't care about it so much...

Beaniesheppard mentioned a problem with the DVD sleeves and a promotion on the UK site last week, and I was able to pass on the issue to the right person! It should be working now for anyone who's had trouble using the site up until now. Thanks to Beanniesheppard for letting me know about it!

Midway early, Oracle is playing nice

2008-02-12T09:46:00.000-08:00

I got so caught up coding yesterday afternoon, I completely forgot to blog! The method described in "Life after Coffee" worked.. eventually. I was having trouble referencing the id in the array returned from the database. No idea why.. so I looped out all vars, and there was the ID! Woot! I was so excited I ploughed ahead until someone said "Why are you still at work? It's almost 6.30pm".
Finishing up that tool today, I see light at the end of the tunnel, I think we might just be able to complete it all before April! OK.. maybe that's going too far as I can't speak for design or front-end. :D
For my own future reference about getting back the ID:

if($db->query("select DBname.SequenceName.currval from dual")){
if ($got_id=$db->fetch()) {
//I know this next part is stupid long,
// but for some reason when I do "as the_id"
// $got_id['the_id'] doesn't work
//It also doesn't work with $got_id[0].. No idea why..
foreach ($got_id as $contents) {
$title_id=$contents;
// echo "The ID: $contents?\n";
}
}
}

Hopefully I can look up this post when I forget how to do this again. Sadly my blog has in the past been useful for this ;)

Onto things Stargate (and part of the reason I worked late) My boss got a call in the morning saying that for some reason Midway was on iTunes. That isn't something our team takes care of anymore, so he passed on the message to the proper people, but knowing that I'd be mighty unimpressed if he didn't tell me.. told me. YAY! I rushed into iTunes, nabbed me a copy before it got taken down. I watched it (while working) in the morning.. but wasn't as productive as I should have been. Ooops.. (hence the late working). I won't say anything about Midway until next week, so I can share in the fun with everyone!

I was reading some forums later in the day, and I noticed three posts about "who's fault it was". Since I'm not directly involved, I can't say who was at fault, but I'd like to clarify the process. Far in advance of an episode being posted to iTunes and to Amazon unBox, we (or SciFi.. not sure if the files ever come here) sends the raw files to an encoding company. They produce the proper encoded versions of the episode one each for iTunes and for unBox. People here make up a spreadsheet with all the "metadata" that each require (different sets of data for each). This data includes synopsis, air date, release date, release order etc. The spreadsheet is sent onto iTunes and unBox, along with the encoded episodes. It all gets incorporated into their automated systems, and everything is set to go.
A mistake at the encoding company meant that the episodes were ordered by their production number, and not by their air number. This is how episode 4 ended up being sent in place of the first episode. The spreadsheet was not read correctly, and the wrong column was taken for air order. I'm not sure what happened this time, but I assume that the air date was set wrong in either the spreadsheet, or when it was entered into the systems at their end. Since it only happened on iTunes, I assume the spreadsheet was correct, and something happened either at the encoding company, or at apple. There has been problems in the past with things going up on the wrong dates, not just with TV Shows, but with Movies.
To sum up, I don't know who was at fault this time, but saying things like "someone should get fired for all these mistakes" is quite annoying, then speculating about a process most people know nothing about is even more annoying. Reviewing the process to try and avoid errors in the future is what's probably going to happen.

In answer to a comment:
Elyse.. I finally fixed that bug where it wasn't showing image sizes on the admin site for the content person (I'll just call her Nancy from now on) when the images weren't small and big for the stills page. Woot! Happened to find another bug further down in the same set!
There are also Extra videos each for David Hewlett, Joe Flanigan, Amanda Tapping and Jewel Staite. Should be a new one appearing each week until end of season.

Last week's poll:
Do you think Ava Dixon will be a threat in the future?
Affirmative. - 37% - 1307
Negatory. - 40% - 1412
I don't know. - 23% - 835
Total: 3554

This week I just couldn't think of anything for a poll.. I'd love some idea's about what you all think? (Sadly no ship/slash ideas.. something legal might approve only):D

Dre, Steger and I enjoying Magic Mountain on Sunday (we're at the bottom)

Wonder Woman, AKA Steger at Magic Mountain

DH might pull a muscle :S

Ooops.. my programming fails me :S

2008-02-09T18:11:00.000-08:00

Thanks Elyse for your feedback.. It turns out my programming "around" such an error as your describe failed. Ouch.. Am going to try and fix it tomorrow. I wrote a page such as when people upload images, it should show a marker (check or x) if the thumbnail image is not smaller than the main image. I failed! In the meantime I've turned off the image altogether, as from home, I don't have access to the proper size.

Ugh my life is bugs! I feel like I squash one, and twenty more appear!

Thanks again, I appreciate it so much when you guys let me know what's broke.

BFN

ps. Kristen you really made my team's day. We receive so much negative feedback, it's such a wonderful thing to get something positive! Morjana also helps us tons, she's great like you! (and all the other fans, you all make Stargate what it is, without you we'd be lost)

Elyse, thankfully most of it doesn't have to get entered by hand, but someone has to look at every entry and determine where it should get moved to in the new schema. We only have one person looking after content on all our sites, and she's going to be horribly drained by the experience. She's the one responsible for all the new content on Stargate. She's awesome!

pps. Elyse.. I love your blog and I read it every day! Keep up the good work! Thanks for all the traffic to my lil old nerdville.!

Oracle's increment/id thingie

2008-02-08T17:45:00.000-08:00

I think I jumped the gun yesterday complaining about Oracle and it's "last inserted id" issues. Turns out there is sort of something I can do. "Life after Coffee" has explained a way I can do it, but I'm not quite to the part where I need it yet, so have not tested it in action. His method of doing the sequence/trigger auto increment worked, so I'm fairly certain the method he explained will work. Basically you get the "current value" of the sequence.. after the trigger gets the "next value" to insert as the auto increment. Fancy!

I managed to consolidate a list of 16 ratings (some old, some new, some wrong) down to 6. It was confusing for people inserting content, as they weren't sure which to pick (difference between Unrated or Not Rated).

On Monday I should be able to get content started on actually moving the data. There are over 4000 titles in our movie and tv database, so it's going to be a long process for whoever has to eyeball every single title. A lot of data will have to be entered after the move. I've created tables to hold episodic data for TV series, which previously wasn't kept in the site database. Stargate is easy, as I can run a dump from that site database and import it straight. TV Shows like the Outer Limits, Dead like me, Poltergeist are going to be tougher, as I'm not even sure if we HAVE all the data for them. Since "owning" and having rights for in entertainment can be really hazy, I've designed the new database to have at it's core only what MGM actually owns. An additional structure will exist for all the titles MGM has rights for (for example Reno911, Chappelle's Show which we have rights for syndication).

I printed out the database design a couple weeks ago when I thought it was finalized. I've changed it so much in the past week, my printout is now too old. Even with a tiny font, it takes four pages taped together to see the whole schema. :D

All quiet on the Stargate front today. Some comments on comments:

Kristen: I emailed your comment to everyone in my team, as we mostly only hear feedback in a "negative" sense, so they opened my email with the subject "Stargate feedback" with trepidation. Only to be pleasantly surprised by your comment! We plan on printing it out and framing it. ;) (only half joking!). As far as the problems with the video, all I've been told is: It works in Quicktime 7. I mentioned you'd updated your quicktime fully, so I'm not sure, but they are looking into it further. Can you try and open the direct url to it?

watcher652: I'll pass on your ideas for more Stargate stuff to marketing. I'd love more stickers and stuff! Everything in my cube aside from the posters from Comic-Con I brought in myself. I even have a "Joe" corner, with the signed photo (that I bought off ebay..) and two of the posters from Stargate magazine.

Morjana: Blow up enterprise's! That sounds brilliant! We should make blow up stargate's.. like.. life sized.. ooooooo! I'll ask the marketing people about the Team Stargate survey.. did that go out already? I didn't see an email. Strange!

Elyse: Stargate site won't be affected at all, it's got a nice brand new system database and all I designed for it last year. MGM had an old messy, badly planned database that I didn't have time to redesign when I moved the site about a year ago. We were in such a hurry we used the same schema when we switched from Sybase to Oracle. It's FUBAR! The front end is definitely changing for MGM.com.. to something usable, with actual content *gasp*

Pedantic Bohemian: Web Dev's and fangirls unite! :D

BFN

Oracle frustrates me with no id handling

2008-02-07T17:24:00.000-08:00

Well that's not entirely true, about the no id handling. Today was spent trying to work out how to get the "last inserted id" from oracle. It's pretty simple with mySQL.. it's .. LAST_INSERT_ID().
I think I'll have to kludge it for the transfer tools, and work out something for the new administration site.

Not sure if I'd mentioned it here yet but we're working on a complete redesign from the database up for mgm.com. It's been in the works forever, but it's not a priority for our PTB, so we only work on it when there's nothing to do on Stargate, MGM HD, American Gladiators, or any of the theatrical sites. Basically never.

Now onto the subject I know 99% of the people that read the blog are here for ;)
I finished watching "the Ark of Truth" at lunchtime. The only thing I'll say is that it's got some lovely whump in it for.. well.. just about everyone. I can't wait for it to be released, so I can sit on my couch and watch it properly (the version I was loaned was meant to be played widescreen, but I couldn't get it to "unsquish" - my technical term).

I checked out the video's that we'll be posting to stargate.mgm.com in the coming weeks from the People's Choice Awards. It's the viewer questions, and I don't remember seeing them before on the People's Choice site. Lots of fun. We're also posting the extended video's from when Extra was on the set with Genii Jerry. There's a video each for Amanda Tapping, David Hewlett, Joe Flanigan, Jewel Staite, and Jason Momoa which will be released over the next few weeks leading up until the end of the season. I watched them all, and was shocked to see I'd spoiled myself by watching two particular ones. That's probably the worst part about working on the site, and people at work knowing I'm a fan and showing me stuff that's not out yet. I constantly spoil myself ><. I checked with the content person and confirmed they weren't going to be posted on the site until after the particular spoiler content had aired.

Earlier this week I forgot to post the results of last week's poll:
Will the events in "Harmony" affect Genii relations?
As I see it, Yes. - 53% - 2399
Cannot predict right now. - 20% - 891
My reply is No. - 28% - 1259
Total votes: 4549

In response to some comments:
beaniesheppard: Actually we host that site (AtlantisDVD.co.uk) but we did not build it. It's maintained by a company in the UK, for Fox (who does MGM's DVD distribution). There is someone at that company who emails me to push files live for them, so I can certainly point your concerns in the right direction. Email me at jeniimages@gmail.com and I'll send your email on to them.
Kristen: Sorry I don't know anything about the pics specifically. We get a disc full of them, and then get told which few are approved by legal to put up on the site (like 10 out of 100). The designer then resizes them, and the content person posts them. I just happened to get a disc from early in the season and snagged some of the choice images.
Liz: I've tried to move that rss link, but I think it's a blogger thing. I can't find it anyplace in the template or settings to move it. I noticed other people with blogger blogs have the same issue.
Crystal: I love New Voyages! Great BTS pictures on your blog, very exciting!

Side note about today's pics.. nothing exciting from the show, but I'm almost out until after the end of the season (got some nice eps 20 bts shots) and after the Ark of Truth is released. These frisbee thingies were given to the cast when they were here to film the People's Choice bit in early Jan. David commented that Mars will take about 10 seconds to chew it to pieces.

This image for scale..

You sort of twist it down into a little circle and stuff it in a little pouch. Reminds me of a sun shade I used to have for my car, but much smaller.

BFN

Quick note today

2008-02-06T17:55:00.000-08:00

Can't spend time telling everyone all about the wonderful code I wrote today, or the awesome new system I designed for mgmhd.com's admin tool to automatically detect whether images have been properly uploaded for primetime. Don't have time! Have to run.

Got to see Ark of Truth today at work. Yep.. I almost fell off my chair when someone from another department came by and said "hey do you want to watch this? give me back the disc when you're done". Yeah!! I didn't manage to get all the way through it (my lunch break wasn't long enough) but so far it's just so awesome, I kept rewinding bits and watching them over. I forgot how lovely Ben Browder's eyes are, and how twitchy Vala is.
We also got a bunch of Stargate Atlantis flyers (sort of soft frisbee's) to be incorporated into a sweepstakes or giveaway of some kind. I took some photo's with it, except of course I can't find my camera download cable.

Nevermind.. here are some fun pics anyhow.

This one is from the main site, but a larger version if you click on it!

BFN

Finally a press release is released!

2008-02-05T16:06:00.000-08:00

What a relief that that release is finally out on SciFi. I had heard about the cast changes a couple months ago (not all the changes) in passing, and have been bursting to talk about it ever since!

I could see Amanda Tapping wanting to leave for Sanctuary, but Woolsey! I love Robert Picardo, but to me he'll always be an emergency medical hologram. His character on SG-1 was very unpleasant, and he didn't improve much coming to Atlantis at all. I read in Joe Mallozzi's blog that he points out that McKay was really unpleasant at the start too. Does this mean they will try and "makeover" Woolsey? That would be strange after all this time. Excited to see Michael Shanks, even if it's just for two episodes.

Not too much going on today, more dreary transfer tool stuff for mgm.com data. Updated home page for Stargate so that one of the sub banners rotates out with other images and links from the administration site like the old header used to do (before it was made using flash). Yesterday Amanda Tapping was moved in the header to the side, and made slightly smaller. I really don't understand all the rules and contract agreements about head size, billing order and such. The reason why Jewel had been flipped in the header was in the attempt to get them all to fit, all with the same "head" size. Yes.. That's the criteria.. same head size. *shakes head* Nothing gets marketing teams into a tizzy as much as billing.

I'd love to see your Star Trek pics Morjana! I actually just won two free tickets to go back to the Tour. Thinking about taking a day off work and going again.

BFN

Timing is everything

2008-02-04T17:42:00.000-08:00

People on my team switched out an image on the stargate site today. The change was subtle, but it was really all about the timing. We had planned to make the change today, because of news that was supposed to be released today. Unfortunately it came out early, last Thursday I think.. so we're slow again!

See if you can spot the difference? ;)

Much discussion today about writing documentation for vendors (people who write micro sites for our movies) so they can know what platform we run, how they can login, what we expect of them. I wish this didn't always automatically fall to me, but apparently I know more than most about what vendors should know, and about the mistakes they always make. I hate writing docs.. seriously hate it!

MGM HD website changes are in the works, tomorrow TPTB meet to talk about the future of the site. Apparently they want a site that appeals to business in a way that business will think it will appeal to consumers. That's a spec? great stuff!

Sunday Loui and I went to "The Star Trek Tour" at the Queen Mary Dome in Long Beach. It was an _awesome_ day out, and we had so much fun! I was so pleased that they had not only the TNG bridge (of which I'd already posed on a version in Las Vegas) but also the TOS bridge, as well as a mock version of the TNG engineering. Another favourite spot was a hallway containing a transporter room, quarters, medical and turbo lift from TNG.
We were in trekkie heaven, and luckily I am clueless about American Football, so I'd bought the tickets for Super Bowl Sunday! We had the place to ourselves (practically).

Lots of fun, and that's where today's photo's are from! If you love Star Trek as much as me, you'll see more pictures over at my site (jeninason.com)

Loui at the controls

What does this button do?

Inertial Dampers offline?!?!

BFN

Dreams of a full team and something working on it's own

2008-02-01T17:17:00.000-08:00

I know, I know.. pipe dreams right? On the day that I am pretty much alone (only developer here) the wheels fall off.

Starts off with an error Morjana let me know about. Something had expired a day early, and there was no default "whoops" image for the homepage, so it just picked the first one in the list, which happened to be miller's crossing. Arghhhhh...

Next was an email from our host, cheerily informing me that the cname had been setup for stargate. I use dnsstuff.com to check and find it's not there. Umm.. of course.. they wouldn't understand this sentence:

What I need is Stargate.mgm.com (not with the www, I’ll redirect them over to just Stargate.mgm.com) to have a CNAME pointing to mgmstudios.vo.llnwd.net.

They setup the cname on www.stargate.mgm.com. Arghhh... now it's showing a blank page, and some of the marketing material for stargate has that misbegotten url on it.
I call them, they promise to fix right away.. I check a couple minutes later and there is no longer a cname on the www, it's on the other one. JOY.

Two hours later I decide I should just check and make sure www.stargate.mgm.com is going to the other site (stargate.mgm.com). Nothing.. no resolve.. um. I check.. they deleted the entire zone file!! This means there is no site there at all! I storm into my boss's office and rant and rave for a while, pulling on my hair. I'd done a couple sites already this week, sites that get next to zero traffic. One of the large sites comes up for moving, and voila.. they can't understand the most simple of instructions. I call again.. please fix. Right now, 4 hours later, I still can't get to www.stargate.mgm.com, but friends in other parts of the country seem to see it ok. If anyone happens to notice it not working, please let me know, and I'll call the host in a screaming fit.

We're luckily planning to change over to manage our own DNS in the future. Although this means even more work and responsibility for me, it means that I won't have to deal with this crap. They are SLOW.. omg so slow.. and they get it wrong about 30% of the time.

Now to top it off. I get emailed a link for the "game" that's on the stargate site on Friday's. Today I get the email, do my usual code updates to put it on the live servers, and push it live. It's not there. I check the servers over and over.. but to no avail. It just won't load. If I browse to http://stargate.mgm.com/games/ it works fine, if I go to http://stargate.mgm.com/games/index.html it shows last week's game. I have tried to "expire" the page with meta tags, I've tried to change the link to it in the nav, but it won't pick up the new javascript file. This CDN stuff is great.. until you can't make it work!! Akamai was pretty easy, you just login to their interface, and specify the file you want to renew, and it does it within 10 minutes. I've poured over the Limelight interface and can't find anything like it. We have a short 8 page document from them which explains nothing.

It's 5.30pm, and I am staring at the door. I know there are 4 beers in my fridge (Coopers!!) that are calling my name. It's been an alright week.. well up until today!

I'm excited that SciFi channel ordered 13 eps of Sanctuary! Thanks to Morjana for the heads up there.. I think they sent out the press release earlier than we were expecting though. There may be changes to the Stargate site in the new future.

All these great fanfic recommendations have been running my printer dry! (Happily!)

Have a great weekend!

BFN

CDN up for HD and American Gladiators

2008-01-31T17:22:00.000-08:00

Today we finally resolved that as long as the pages are being cached at our CDN, then we don't have to rewrite every img src and link to point to the absolute url. That was such a giant relief!!

After finding out this wonderful news, I went back to the HD site, which I'd already changed most of the links, and switched them all back. At least I was smart enough to start with the smallest site.. imagine if I'd chosen to do Stargate first! *groan* The best part of this whole CDN business is that the sites should be faster, especially for people outside the USA (since our servers are based in Ohio).

Aside the the CDN run around, we should be going live with a new contest on Monday (for the movie Wedding Daze) and I've just about finished writing that. Thank goodness I spent such a lot of time setting up a "contest" interface outside of Stargate last year.. made this one much faster to create.

American Gladiators site is live now, but better than that! It's actually behind the CDN. I wanted to switch stargate today, but there was a snafu in the cname update request through our host. They thought when I said "setup the cname on stargate.mgm.com" that I really meant.. "setup the cname on www.stargate.mgm.com". *sigh*

Our content manager today asked me to write her a new form for the administration site. Apparently she has SO many images to upload.. she gets tired of doing them all on one page. I'll write her a page where she can do 5 or 10 at a time, make it quicker.. that's what I'm here for! On a sadder note.. sounds like some of the Ark of Truth images will be coming off the site. Most of the ones she will take off haven't actually gone up yet (I wrote a nifty start and end date into the admin site so she can do things in advance).

Thanks for all the wonderful comments and recommendations for fanfic! In answer to some of the questions, I like it all (gen, het, slash, ship, au, etc). I have a fondness for SGA DH & JF, but definitely like SG1 as well.

I didn't quite get done reading "White Walls" this morning, but in my lunch break I read "Between the Lines" by Sholio, a.k.a. friendshipper. I will definitely check out more from her, and all of the other links and authors suggested!
I remember the first story I read, was by liketheriver called "Velocity Asymptotic". That got me hooked! I've read so many now that sometimes I honestly can't remember if some instances are an episode, or a story I read that was so vivid that I can "see" the images from it!

Mostly I copy the text into a text editor, then spell check. My only "peeve" with some fic is that not all typos get found or fixed. It can really distract me from the story.

Looking forward to reading more of it of course!

BFN

Stargate fan fic

2008-01-30T13:25:00.001-08:00

It must be hard to concentrate with a camera so close to your face!

I know SGA fans don't have a fondness for this ship.. but I sort of love their non-shipness even more!

I need to take a break from working on something entirely too frustrating.. so what better to talk about than one of my favorite things! I am not sure if I'd mentioned previously, but I am a HUGE fan of Stargate fanfic. I read as much of it as I can get my hands on (which luckily is a lot). Some of it I don't like that much, some of it is brilliant, either way I love it all.
Every morning I run (well jog/stumble) and recently I've been using the treadmill in my apartment building as it's dark outside that early. Since it's mind numbingly boring in there, and all I have to stare at is myself (wall of mirror = evil) I have taught myself to run and read at the same time. I print out the story I find, punch holes in the margin, and put it in a large binder which happens to fit perfectly on the display of the treadmill. You'd be amazed at how FAST 2 miles goes by when you're busy reading! I usually set the treadmill to cross country or some such program, so that it varies the incline and speed for me.

This morning I almost finished reading one of the best I've read lately, called "White Walls" by Eildon Rhymer. Got some nice whole team whump, plus major character growth for all of the team.

Any suggestions for good fan fic will be greatly appreciated! Apparently we're not supposed to accept "scripts" but heck.. I'm a programmer (in no way a writer or related to production), and these are such wonderful stories.

Thanks for all your kind words about Steger. A few of us went to visit him last night, and take him presents (teen girl magazines.. although he wasn't as enthusiastic about them as we expected!) and plant life. He's doing much better, although it seems the worst part of his whole ordeal was the Angiogram, sounds quite unpleasant.

BFN

Quick sad post

2008-01-29T10:00:00.000-08:00

A member of our web team had a minor heart attack last night, but he's OK now, obviously in hospital and we're taking a trek out there this afternoon to see him.

He's our Front end developer, and the one I work most closely with (besides my boss). He's only 25...

BFN

CDN link irritation and more bts

2008-01-28T16:51:00.000-08:00

After finally getting the time to read the documentation for setting up the sites with the new CDN.. we discovered a rather large issue. We have to change all the src and links to everything on all the sites. Doesn't sound so bad? We have literally thousands of pages, and ten times more images. Luckily at least a chunk of Stargate and MGM.com are actually content managed pages, so that won't so too much of a drama.. but there are tons of micro sites (sites specific to each movie) that will have to get changed once they are written.

The solution I came up for inserting the correct absolute URL and still have development and staging work is pretty simple. Just get this: $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] and assign them to a var, and stick them in front of every url. Ick.. anyhow.. I guess we'll do high traffic stuff first, and work our way through the rest later.
I had quite a panic on Friday night. I was watching SGA with the BF, and I saw our ad come up (Unlock the Gate Sweepstakes) and went WHOOPS! I didn't test to make sure I'd set it to turn on, and check that the word was right! I dashed over to my computer, and attempted to browse to stargate.mgm.com only to have it.. fail?! I go to google.com, jeninason.com yep.. they work fine.. only stargate.. I find my phone, frantically dial my boss, leave him a message. What to do! I reloaded a few times.. and _finally_ after at least 5 minutes of trying I got the page to load. Yikes.. that must have been some crazy traffic spike. I guess it's safe to say we'll be putting contest and sweeps pages behind the CDN. Slowly my breathing returned to normal, and I had to rewind part of what I'd missed on Harmony.

I know some people think the painting was mean for Shep.. and I agree to an extent.. but it was SO funny.. I can't help but love it! I spent a while this morning after I got to work trying to find out if we had any decent hires images of that painting to no avail! Oh well.. I put up some other random pics for today!

In response to a couple comments specifically:
Achimedes on the Hollywood Ashes; Looks like that's what our ex-cricket captains are up to! I was terribly sad that there weren't more people there, but I guess Americans for the most part just simply don't understand cricket. That's just not cricket I say!

Crownglass39; I too would love that picture on a t-shirt.. if only I could get a really great image of it! Thanks for the "bad day" comment too.. as I said.. it can be hard not to take things personally but now I think it's quite funny.

Kristen; Sadly I don't directly get any content. I wrote the pages that display the content, and an administration system so the content people can upload things and turn them on without anything coming near me. I do _sort of_ get a say in content, but usually only if my opinion is asked (being the resident SG fangirl) and each Monday the content person asks me what I want this week's poll to be, then she rewords it so it fits and sounds much cooler. Funnily enough PHP is my main language right now, but I started out in Perl, then some ASP, Java, C etc. Most of our sites are PHP with either Oracle or MySQL as our databases.

Morjana; Yep.. me too.. I save the eps on my DVR, and watch them all weekend, sometimes I just play them over and over as I'm doing housework. My workmates hate that I can sometimes recite the script verbatim.. addicted I tell you!

Rose; I honestly was sure I wasn't going to like Harmony. What a pleasant surprise! Plus I just love the McKay/Sheppard thing too.

Achimedes (again ;)) ; That's such a great description, Bing Crosby-Bob Hope.. definitely!

Ruffles; I agree with the poor John, he worked so hard and got the snub. Still.. was funny :)

A-Pilgrim-soul; Thanks for your kind words! I'll try and keep the pics coming.

Finally results of last week's poll. Wasn't very popular.. could have been both the topic, and the fact that it was without the submit button.. scared people off?
Do you think McKay will propose to Katie Brown?
Don't hold your breath. - 43% - 2166
Maybe yes. Maybe no. - 27% - 1393
Yes. They're MFEO. - 30% - 1537
Total: 5096

BFN!

Quick SGA eps thought

2008-01-25T23:04:00.000-08:00

Didn't you just LOVE the last scene.. my bf and I were rolling all over the floor at that last scene.. precious! I wish I had a screencap of that.. just brilliant!

BFN!

Busy day with DNS/faux sites for Natpe

2008-01-25T18:36:00.000-08:00

Next week americangladiators.com goes live with a new site, so we've been scrambling to setup the CDN to sit in front of it (for all that crazy traffic!) and work out where it's to be hosted.. where the DNS should go. I think it's much more complicated than it needs to be.. but that's pretty common!

Morning started with both our designer and front end developer's calling off sick. Seems something is going around the office, and I sure don't want it! Sadly that meant that I spent a large amount of my day putting my fingers in the dike. Edited a page that will be a "faux site" called KMGM, for NATPE, that will showcase upcoming syndication stuff like Reno911 and Chappelle's show. Fun stuff.. great videos good for a laugh!

I'm looking forward to watching Harmony tonight, hopefully I won't have so many DVR problems like last week!

Thanks to crownglass39, morjana (who is always the best!), kristen, rose and omglawdork for your kind words. Sorry I went a bit ape yesterday.. I guess I take things Stargate related a little too personally! I just love the show tons, and get tired of "fanatics" always dogging things we do, and calling us all sorts of nice things (yes I lurk on Gateworld!). We are human, we make mistakes, it's not because we don't love the show that these things happen.

I love it when you guys leave me hints as to what's broken (morjana has helped me tons of times!) sometimes we're in a rush, and don't check things properly.

Specially in response to kristen, I'm not actually the "web master" per se, just the web programmer. I started at MGM about a year and a half ago, and we didn't even work on the Stargate site until April last year. I had seen the show, and I am a sworn sci-fi fan (movies, tv shows, books you name it!) and I have all the toys and posters in my cube to prove it. I became a dedicated fan when we took over the site and watched all the episodes of SG1 and Atlantis back to back over a few weeks, here at lunch, then after work (turned my BF into a fan in the process).

I love the reactions of the fans to most of the polls, and how people get quite adamant about who should win! I report on their progress to our team, who all find the results interesting as well.

Anyhow.. it's late Friday night, time for me to go home! Everyone have a great weekend! Tomorrow is Australia Day (26th Jan) so everyone have a beer for me (or raise their glass!)

BFN

Limited space creates miscommunication

2008-01-24T15:07:00.000-08:00

Apologies in advance for this rant:

The one thing that we have problems with when creating new poll questions is space. We only have a small amount of space to work with, without the layout on the page getting screwy. Another problem is that many fans are so into finding things we do wrong, that they misunderstand the question.

My original question : Do you think McKay will propose to Katie Brown in the future. Sadly this didn't fit, so it was shortened to the current question: Do you think McKay will propose to Katie Brown?.

This has prompted fans to "correct" my error. Pointing out that the proposal was in Quarantine last week. To which I'd like to respond that in fact.. it didn't happen at all. McKay never asked Katie.. she just found the ring, and he told her what he was planning to do. Then at the end, he said he wasn't ready. From this I thought it would be neat to ask if you think it would happen at all.

TPTB here don't give a crap about the poll. They almost never even see it, ask about it, or in any way comment about it. If it weren't for me insisting that we keep it, it would have replaced by the hideous ad that appears below it months ago (I don't like the ads on the site either, but that's for another rant).

Anyhow, sending emails correcting the poll is only going to achieve one thing.. the removal of it.

For those that do understand my cryptic haiku like questions.. here are some more results from past polls:

Favorite Atlantis Slash Pairings
Sheppard/McKay 67% 12703 Votes
Teyla/Weir 13% 2529 Votes
Ronon/McKay 20% 3784 Votes
19016 Votes

BFN

DB Design finally final.. ish?

2008-01-23T17:06:00.000-08:00

I think we finally worked out what everything on my database design was meant to do. That might sounds strange, but I created it last summer, so our memory was rather foggy as to what everything on it was for. We spent lunchtime brainstorming why we did each table, and I think we've finally cracked it. Matt and I were rather impressed that we'd thought of just about everything!

For the Stargate poll that I posted the results for yesterday.. honestly I think that's the highest number of votes we've ever had in that amount of time! Current poll doesn't have quite as big a count, but also is much harder to script against.. being that it uses javascript & ajax. Well that's my theory ;)

I have made a folder with some choice images to post, but I'm fast running out! I only have images from production episode 1-4 (not air order), and we return the discs after we take the ones which are approved to go on the site. Bummer.. but I did however get my hands on some Ark of Truth pics. I don't want to post any until the movie is released.. to spoilerie of you know what I mean!

I like Joe's smile in today's pic.. although DH looks pained.. bad scene?

A previous poll's results (since they still haven't given me a place to post previous results on the official site):
Who would win in an intergalactic street brawl?
Ronon Dex 50% 7161 Votes
Teal'c 50% 7130 Votes
14291 Votes

Back to DB Redesign

2008-01-22T18:02:00.000-08:00

Pretty quiet day, went live with the new Stargate Poll.. although it looks almost the same (minus a submit button ;))

After working on the system to pulling the downloads from the contests, I went back to the Transfer Tool. Yikes.. Found a couple cracks in the database design I made with my boss many months ago. Looks like tomorrow will be reviewing that, as things have gone quiet again on Stargate, and MGM HD is also not too noisy. American Gladiators stuff is going well as well, but more on that.. another day?

I love cheeky "candid" pics like today's.

Edit----------->

Results of the last stargate site poll for crownglass39!

Sheppard/McKay 49% 29389 Votes
Ronon Dex/Teyla Emmagan 40% 24002 Votes
Keller/Carter 11% 6881 Votes
60272 Votes in total.

Hollywood Ashes today!

2008-01-20T11:33:00.000-08:00

The batsman is Steve Waugh!

Meat Pie and Cricket.. nuff said.

Rugby Jersey.. but the right colors!

This post is completely off topic, but today I'm going to the inaugural Hollywood Ashes Twenty20 cricket match. For the Aussie team it appears Steve Waugh and Mike Whitney will be there! Excitement.. also meat pies, which is actually the number one reason to go IMO. Pics are taken from lots of angles, with my lil point and shoot digital cam.. so not great, but pretty!

http://www.hollywoodashes.com/

Woot! Cricket in LA.. strange!

BFN

Half day today!

2008-01-18T10:29:00.000-08:00

Thankfully today is a half day, so we're just tying up some small things before the long weekend, sadly even though my new ajax'd poll is ready to go, we never go live with any major code changes on Friday's (unless something is busted), so it won't go up until Tuesday.
I noticed someone had been messing with the last poll that was up. Honestly I'm shocked it took someone that long to work out how poorly it was coded, and take advantage of that to skew results.

A couple posts ago I mentioned Team Stargate and the results, and chevron7 asked me the following:
Why is Team Stargate only open to residents of the US and Canada?

While I don't know a "for sure" answer to this, and I've never directly asked anyone in legal, I think it's a combination of cost and law.
We have to abide very strictly to certain rules when running sweepstakes and contests. Team Stargate is considered a contest, as prizes are awarded, and every country (and sometimes state) has different laws governing these things. The marketing people who created Team Stargate have limited budgets (smaller than I'd imagined actually) and can't spend the extra money to have the contest available to other countries.

I've worked with some other large companies in the past, and they had the same challenges with running contest and sweepstakes online. Nestle only ran contests for US residents (not even Canada) and Toyota was the same. These companies have the advantage of having offices worldwide, and those parts of the companies in other countries can run local contests.

That was a much longer answer than I intended, but I wish we could do more for other countries, being that I'm not from here, and ran into the same difficulties.

I know some out there spend a lot of time finding stuff we do wrong on the site (like naming files that aren't supposed to be live a little too obviously) I ask you to please remember there's are only 4 of us.. and we can only spend a small amount of time on the Stargate site. Compassion please!

BFN!

Ajax poll and an image

2008-01-17T14:06:00.000-08:00

As no one has specifically asked for any pics, I'm just going to randomly pick some that I like. If you'd like them emailed in the largest size I have (from gmail) you can email me at jeniimages@gmail.com.
I like this pic, the cheeky grin of a man willing to show his belly on TV!

Ark of Truth photo's went up today, just a small sampling, and I think more each week until the DVD is released. Team Stargate announced their rankings and winners, and so they are now live as well.

Writing the Ajax poll has been much simpler than I had anticipated. I think I've been avoiding doing Ajax for so long as I loathe Javascript. That's why I worked hard to become that hardcore backend programmer! No more Javascript and browser shenanigans. Until Ajax. *sigh*
Essentially all it does it capture the contents of the form, and send them via query string to a php page, which updates the DB, and shows the results. I thought it was going to be much more difficult..

BFN

Stargate site changes galore

2008-01-16T10:21:00.000-08:00

Tons of work on Stargate site this week.. sadly to the detriment of the other sites.

I work hard to separate my love for the show, from my extreme displeasure at the marketing choices made by TPTB over what we can put on the site, what we are promoting, and the content they give us.

So pages are ready to go up (once legal approved) for Rankings and Winners of Team Stargate. This has been a major argument point over the last few days, but I won't go into it. The pages themselves are super simple, I wrote them to be database driven from the administration site, so our content person can update them as they get the ranks/winners. Along with this we have received all of the new images for Ark of Truth! Sadly I have to rewrite the stills page to accommodate these, nothing dramatic, but going to be partially hard-coded for each movie, since there will be no more SG1 seasons.

Between all these new pages, I've been rewriting the home page poll. It's just not been working the way we'd hoped. When we first wrote this site about a year ago, it was in a huge hurry (we had a month and a half!) so I cut corners where possible, and the poll was on a corner. Basically it's someone else's code, shoehorned into our administration site, and front end. It breaks when you put single apostrophes in the fields. I know.. simple to fix.. except who loves wading through someone else's code? not me! So I'm just rewriting it. Much simpler and easier for the content people to use.

That's about half of the updates just for this week. Sounds quick and easy.. but no such luck of course!

Going to a pre-screening of Cloverfield tonight.. WOOT!

BFN

Missed the fun.. nerdy cube though!

2008-01-11T19:47:00.000-08:00

So I actually missed the fun that happened when the pics were taken. I was only at the breakfast that was had before the filming of the speech. As a result, I have no idea what they were laughing at! I will endeavor to find out though. In addition I can't get any larger images from said event.

If only I had more pics to post! Sadly no.. so you're treated to the wonderful view from my cube.

BFN

Another day, another pic? :)

2008-01-10T11:06:00.001-08:00

Thanks everyone for your comments! I am trying to track down a couple extra pics to post today.

Unfortunately I don't have any rights, copyright or other of these pics, as I didn't take them (only the ones with me in it are actually mine).

These ones I also can't get any bigger sizes unfortunately (well perhaps the one that's on the news item at stargate.mgm.com).

I'll ask my boss today about posting higher res pics on the site, I think the only reason we don't do it now, is because it doesn't fit in the current layout. I know the originals that we're given (well.. I think someone in marketing retouches them first) are massive, and I can try and get specific ones, just let me know which particular ones.

Thanks again for everyone's lovely comments! As I mentioned in my last post.. I only wish I could be so interesting all the time!

More of SGA People's Choice piccies

2008-01-09T17:30:00.000-08:00

Yes.. More pics! I keep coming across them, so must share!

BFN!

ps. Thanks for everyone's comments! If only I could be this interesting all the time.

We are people people..

2008-01-09T09:36:00.001-08:00

Well not me.. Stargate Atlantis!

Here are some pics I couldn't post until today ;) (and I don't have rights to them.. so er.. well.. you know).

BFN

Stargate Atlantis WON!

2008-01-08T23:05:00.000-08:00

It's wonderful that they won the People's Choice Award for favorite SciFi show!

I was sad at how SHORT that clip on the show was.. seriously.. was that even 2 seconds?

*sad* I'll rewatch tomorrow.. but I don't think I FF'd through anything longer.

YAY!

Couple more pics from breakfast on Friday

2008-01-08T11:28:00.000-08:00

These weren't taken by me, but I managed to get my hands on them! More to follow:

We're all excited to hear tonight who wins at the People's Choice Awards. Everyone cross fingers for Stargate Atlantis!!

BFN

People's Choice?

2008-01-07T12:31:00.000-08:00

I found out we'll know on the 9th who won in the People's Choice Awards. I've still got my fingers crossed for Stargate Atlantis, but they were up against Battlestar Gallactica.. so.. well anyhow.

Did anyone see that x-files article in Wired this month? Very funny stuff. Let me see if I can find it online (maybe only in the print version?).
Found the link:
http://www.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/magazine/16-01/pl_screen

Here is the interesting part:

Mitch Pileggi X-Files ID Mulder and Scully's tough-guy boss, Walter Skinner. Current Cover Where hasn't this guy turned up? He was on the ill-fated Day Break and played a commander on Stargate: Atlantis. The Truth Everyone on TV eventually goes through the Stargate. It's a rule.

New contest coming up for the Stargate site, actually that's what I'm working on today. Of course it's another "custom" page.. can't they just settle on a type of contest/sweepstakes and stick to it!! No that would make my job too easy! I wish I could win this contest.. I like the prize.

Trying to work out a way I can find myself in Vancouver in March.. hehe.. see if I can get myself an invite to Bridge Studios!

BFN

Breakfast in heaven

2008-01-04T10:28:00.000-08:00

I just got back from an hour and a half breakfast with some of the Stargate cast!

Yes.. Srsly.. Once I get home I'll download the picture I took with David Hewlett.

I was lucky enough to meet Sebastian (Jane and David's son), and also Caden (Rachel and Loyd's son). They are very close in age, but Baz is much much bigger than Caden!
Both are extremely adorable of course, and you can tell their parents think the world of them!
Joe Flanigan was also there, but I didn't get to chat with him much, but I did get to have quite a chat with Jewel. Jewel is even more lovely in person! Most everyone else there were suits from MGM (some I think are my bosses bosses bosses!)

Many thanks to Adam Lewis who was kind enough to think of me again (he took me backstage at Comic-con to meet them as well) and call me up last night to let me know they'd be here, if I'd like to go up.

Gosh.. am so excited/happy to have had such a wonderful morning!!

OK.. James downloaded the picture for me:

Oh.. and here is the pic where I chopped myself off.. David thought it was very funny I wasn't able to aim the camera ;)

BFN!

Data transfer tool

2007-12-21T09:54:00.000-08:00

The tool is coming along, working with our content queen to setup an interface that will be easy for her to use.
I've ditched the ajax idea, in favor of a simple "checkbox" system. I've also thrown out the idea that I should move _all_ the data associated with each title at that moment. Instead I'm opting for just moving the title/product data. After all the titles are moved, I'll write another script which goes through the title data, and copies awards, talent, characters, images, collections, franchise and anything else left in the old structure.

As each title is moved, I'm marking it in the original table as is_moved, or is_removed based on if they wanted to move it, or throw it out altogether (mistakes that weren't deleted in the past).

We will see how it goes, but I'm fairly confident it will work. We have some new stuff going up on Stargate, something from the third party vendor. It's cute.. but not great. Luckily I'm OFF.. until the 2nd.. so I probably won't get time to post, as I'll be drinking heavily with my mate who's staying with me from Austin (oh and playing video games of course).

Woot! BFN

Running

2007-12-18T07:41:00.001-08:00

As many of my friends know.. I've taken up running in the past few months. Today (actually yesterday) I reached my 100 mile mark!
Nike Plus

Woot!

BFN

Dates, Times bane of my existence

2007-12-13T11:36:00.000-08:00

Seriously tired of trying to work out why my time and date stuff isn't working. It's not working.. and I can't work out how, unless I go to the site at the time it's broken. Herein lies the problem.. I then _break_ what's going to happen the next day.. at a different time.

Woe is me!

I've decided to take all the variables governing dates and times and stick them at the top.. then try and populate them with a variety of numbers, to see if I can replicate the error.

Anyone have any good ideas for dealing with this? Some sort of "fake time" tool?

OK.. wistful thinking I know...

BFN

Winding down

2007-12-12T18:19:00.001-08:00

Finally things are starting to wind down towards the Holidays. Stargate is off until 4th Jan. MGM HD is.. well.. my part is done. Unfortunately there are some snafu's keeping us from going live.
This means I get back to the main site! Woot! Actually I'm quite excited to get the whole thing kicking again.

Writing a tool, for our content people to use. It basically does this:
Shows an alphabetical list (limited on the page to say.. 50?) on the left, with all the current "property" titles. In the old DB this meant everything that was a product. Not a good way to arrange stuff. On the right is two blank lists. First column you choose to add one title from the left, second column you can add to from anything else on the left list.
What this does is define a "master" title, it's data is copied to the new table structure as a title, and it's merchandise (if any) is added as a product. Then the subsequent titles have their data added to the product of that main title.
Simple eh? I am thinking of doing it ajax style, so less page reloading (except when you run out).
It will need another tool to pick up loose ends.. titles with names that vary so much they weren't near each other on the original list. A way to take them, and move them to the new structure.
Once all this data is moved, we can finally start looking to recoding the tools, and the front end. JOY!

BFN

Move uploaded file.. where? not there!!!

2007-12-10T14:08:00.000-08:00

A plan we'd had for integrating tools from all the different sites together has come awry.

It is entirely possible that I am doing something wrong, so if anyone has insight, do please feel free to show me to way!

I was creating pages where content folks can edit some basic things on the page for mgmhd, and upload images.

The problem I ran into was that our main tools has it's own domain. The folder where these files lives happens to not be in the same path as the folder where I want to put the images. I can't work out how (using move_uploaded_file) to put the image where I want it to go.. it keeps trying to put it under /tools/foldername/image.jpg. Oh well.. mgmhd gets it's own tools! Yayz0rs.

BFN

A spec? No WAY?!?!

2007-12-04T14:32:00.000-08:00

Yes way. Today.. I wrote a spec. I'm dragging my poor coworkers kicking and screaming into the right direction. No one specifically has a problem with specs, they just believe there is no time to write them. I disagree. Strongly! I have wasted an inordinate amount of time working on projects that because they have no spec, we've constantly been asking questions, and making plain old guesses as to how they are supposed to work. Sadly my guesses (although often well informed) are only correct about 50% of the time (this is not a statistical number, just a .. well.. a guess).

To be honest I enjoy writing specs. I know.. weird huh? I find as I start the document, I start to see the pages and the code grow in my head. I can work through things I just know are not going to work right then and there as I type. Writing the technical spec is usually where I work through most of the thornier problems, and I get it down to pseudo code, it just appears in my head! I like to have everyone in the team review the spec once it's completed (I send it out pretty much as is, without any real proofing) and those who actually read it give me all the feedback I need (typo here, rename this thing, what is this?).

Today I wrote a spec, and those that read it (the important people) worked out we were seeing the problem completely differently.. and the design was going to be wildly different from the back end. What a relief to work this out now!! I know I'd saved at least a small amount of time, and that made the fact my fingers hurt from typing, totally worthwhile.

BFN

The wonders of photoshop

2007-11-30T16:42:00.000-08:00

Actually I use GIMP.. but our designer type person here uses Photoshop. In fact.. he used it to create these pictures of Steger! (With the help of my trusty Nikon Coolpix camera).

We really do work here.. honestly!

BFN

Stolen Sandwich.. the perils of a shared fridge

2007-11-29T16:55:00.000-08:00

We went up to the break room earlier today, and found this note stuck to the fridge. Sorry for the quality, my mate took a picture of it on his camera phone.

Click for a larger view.

Mantis, my new pest control

2007-11-29T13:44:00.000-08:00

I've been umm'ing and arr'ing about getting some bug tracking software setup. I never seem to find the time, until today. I considered installing bugzilla, but i'm not all that hot at server admin type stuff, so was worried to read things like "backup backup backup".
I set my browser to go to google, and typed in "bug tracker php". The very first (non paid) result was Mantis. Sounds good to me! I read a little about it, searched on whether it had a ton of bad reviews or not, and was thoroughly impressed with what I saw.

After downloading it to me desktop, I decided (in my infinite wisdom) to try installing it locally first. I have Xampp running locally, so I thought it would be a breeze. Not so. I can't remember the errors I was getting specifically, but it was enough for me to give up and go straight onto the server install. That sounds dangerous doesn't it!! "Oh dear it won't run on my safe little local environment.. lets break the server!" But really, I don't expect a whole lot to run locally, Xampp can only do so much for this windows machine.

Turns out on the server I had a bunch more success. I had to patch the version I downloaded (small mysql typo/bug) but aside from that it went off without much of a hitch. With all the messing around I did, I'd say it took me about an hour from searching for it to having it running.

In the past I've avoided bug trackers because they've seemed over cumbersome, like a whole extra step I have to perform, along with the hundreds of other tasks I have to do every day. I am reformed. I'm tired of hunting through my notebook searching for a note I made 6 weeks ago on the bottom of a page which I think had a diagram of a server on it.. maybe not.. darn where is it?!

I've been using Mantis now for a grand total of 3 hours. If anything comes up, I'll be sure to post again about it. Since most management attempts fail because no one participates, I've decided that this is 99% for me, and 1% for everyone else. Even if people send me an email, an IM, a phone call, I'll put them all in Mantis myself, so I won't forget!

I'm really looking forward for the satisfaction of marking a bug as done.. I can't wait!!

Mantis is at http://www.mantisbt.org/

BFN

It's fixed!! (amazon etc)

2007-11-28T11:08:00.000-08:00

I am very happy to say.. it wasn't my fault for once! Woot! I have no idea what/how it was fixed.. but it was. I got a response from our host saying they think they found it, and try it. First time.. no, not fixed, second time, no, third time, no (This is where I started to panic.. this is day two by the way), fourth time, no, fifth time.. YES.

The error is completely gone. SOAP works perfectly (I think I will reimplement it) REST works perfectly.. everything is perfect. I wonder what was broke?

BFN

Temporary failure in name resolution

2007-11-27T17:45:00.000-08:00

Yep.. what the heck is that?! Temporary failure in name resolution...

I think this is why the Amazon links stopped working, it also explains what happened to a couple of the feeds.
This code:

$request = 'http://ecs.amazonaws.com/onca/xml?
Service=AWSECommerceService&AWSAccessKeyId=xxx&
Operation=ItemSearch&SearchIndex=DVD&Actor=Brad%20Pitt';
$response = file_get_contents($request);
echo htmlspecialchars($response, ENT_QUOTES);

Gets this error:

Warning: file_get_contents(): php_network_getaddresses: getaddrinfo failed: Temporary failure in name resolution in /var/www/html/includes/amazon_cart_small.php on line 16

Here is the most annoying part.. NOT all the time. I google'd it, tried a few things, emailed support at our host.. still nothing. Any clues?

BFN

REST did not solve anything..

2007-11-21T11:25:00.000-08:00

Seems there is seriously something wrong between us and Amazon.. we're not speaking.. sometimes.

My favourite kind of error, the intermittent kind! I'm ignoring it for now, sadly we will lose revenue while buy links are down, but I can't see a way around it yet. I'm having similar, although not as fatal errors with REST as I had with SOAP.

On a completely different note, I found a link to a member of my Clan from Tabula Rasa (video game) who actually makes a podcast.. huh: http://rumheroes.mypodcast.com/
The funniest part is this post: http://rumheroes.mypodcast.com/2007/11/Photonic_Cramps-57445.html

Whoa nelly.. People really like this stuff.

BFN

SOAP problems making me go REST

2007-11-20T10:45:00.000-08:00

The Amazon buy links have been live on the main site for almost a month. Yesterday they all stopped working. Strange.. I took them all off the site, so it's now like they were never there.

On further investigation (googling the error) it turns out _lots_ of websites are experiencing the same problem. The question is where to go from here. I read some more about ways to communicate with Amazon, and it turns out that REST is supposedly faster than using SOAP.

Luckily I'm familiar with some of the steps involved in setting this up, so perhaps later today we will be live again with buy links for the main site, and they won't take 15 minutes to load!

BFN

Stargate updates are live!

2007-11-15T18:44:00.001-08:00

Finally.

Woot!

Tired.. sleepy.. so glad it's Friday! OMG.. it's not *cries*

I guess tomorrow will be the "whoops it broke" day. Give me strength!

BFN

No new Stargate.. yet

2007-11-14T21:03:00.000-08:00

We had planned to launch today, but for some unforeseen circumstances, the launch has been put off for a few days.

It was finished though!

I was a little excited at some of the new things we got to do, but I guess only a few more days and you can all see it yourselves!

Loui and I had free tickets to a pre-screening of Beowulf today, but traffic worked against us, and by the time we got there it was going to be a long wait in a queue. We quit while we were ahead, and ate some sushi for dinner.

Unfortunately no interesting code to report today, all bug fixes and what not.. boo hoo!

I met some of the people working on Stargate Worlds, and they have promised to let us have a peek at the closed beta, so I'm hoping they remember me (I snagged a business card from someone who seemed important!) when the time comes for me to play!

BFN

Amazon unbox episode links

2007-11-13T17:03:00.000-08:00

Ah ha!! I think I have it.. well sort of. Not as wonderfully automatic as on mgm.com, but passable. I've added an extra field for each episode, which unfortunately will have to be manually entered when the episode is added (and ones already up will have to be retroactively done) for the ASIN. This is the ID Amazon gives for each and every product in it's catalog.

Using the ASIN, I can do an ASIN Search using the AWS API, to get the buy link for each episode. It won't be ready for launch, but as soon as our Content Queen gets a chance, she'll have the arduous task of adding all the ASIN's to our DB, then the buy episodes will work!

In the meantime, I am hoping that Amazon does something to it's IndexSearch in the AWS API to allow me to search for "Stargate Atlantis Missing" and find the right eps. Oh well!

BFN

Stargate site updates go live tomorrow

2007-11-13T13:48:00.001-08:00

All the work our designer, and front end developer has put in (with a tiny help from me) will go live tomorrow! That's the plan anyhow. It feels like whenever we get mostly done with something, TPTB push us in an entirely new direction. It's hard to make a kick ass site when you don't know what the goals of the site are. Is the site supposed to sell more DVD's? To sell more digital downloads (iTunes/unBox)? To get more people to watch SciFi? To get more people interested in general?
Who are we trying to get to watch Stargate? Is it people in their 20's? 30's? It's hard to go in a solid direction, and then be able to gauge our success without any particular goals.

Anyhow, we're at a point where a new version will be out of the site. It looks good, not a whole lot has changed, there is no new content, only some new looking bits.
The part I'm most excited about is the amazon unbox buylinks on the episodes. I ran into a snafu however. It seems that Amazon UnBox doesn't let you link to a particular episode, only to the entire series! Not even just to a season!

This afternoon I'll be messing around more with SOAP to see if I can get it down to episode by episode purchases, otherwise the whole thing will be rather simple (one link for Atlantis, one link for SG1!)

Anyone linked directly to episodes on Amazon Unbox before?

BFN

LOL cats.. crack me up!

2007-11-10T22:36:00.000-08:00

Although the stargate lolcats translation isn't as fun (mostly because parts of it are nonsensical) it's still funny!

http://lolinator.com/lol/stargate.mgm.com/

and mgm.com .. which is better imo:

http://lolinator.com/lol/mgm.com/

BFN

People's Choice Awards

2007-11-10T22:34:00.000-08:00

SGA is nominated!! Go vote!

http://www.pcavote.com/pca/

BFN

Error Handling.. Mail server bashing

2007-11-08T11:26:00.000-08:00

As my last post suggested, I've been working on error handling.

To finally put things in order, and stop error messages from showing up anywhere at all (although I think I've decided to put them back into pages for the dev servers at least), I put together a super simple function that captures the errors, and sends me an email.

error_reporting(0);
function myErrorHandler($errno, $errmsg, $filename, $linenum, $vars)
{
$dt = date("Y-m-d H:i:s (T)");
$errortype = array (
E_ERROR => 'Error',
E_WARNING => 'Warning',
E_PARSE => 'Parsing Error',
E_NOTICE => 'Notice',
E_CORE_ERROR => 'Core Error',
E_CORE_WARNING => 'Core Warning',
E_COMPILE_ERROR => 'Compile Error',
E_COMPILE_WARNING => 'Compile Warning',
E_USER_ERROR => 'User Error',
E_USER_WARNING => 'User Warning',
E_USER_NOTICE => 'User Notice',
E_STRICT => 'Runtime Notice',
E_RECOVERABLE_ERROR => 'Catchable Fatal Error'
);
$user_errors = array(E_USER_ERROR, E_USER_WARNING, E_USER_NOTICE);
$err = "Error.\n";
$err .= "\tDate: " . $dt . "\n";
$err .= "\tError Num: " . $errno . "\n";
$err .= "\tError Type: " . $errortype[$errno] . "\n";
$err .= "\tError msg: " . $errmsg . "\n";
$err .= "\tScript name: " . $filename . "\n";
$err .= "\tScript line num: " . $linenum . "\n";
$err .= "\n\n";

// if ($errno == E_WARNING) {
mail("something@gmail.com", "Critical Site Error", $err);
// }
}
$old_error_handler = set_error_handler("myErrorHandler");

I realise it sends me a bazillion emails when I'm not limiting it warnings or errors, but it's alright now, I setup a gmail account to handle it all.
I actually got a stern email, followed by a stern phone call from IS.. they said I was "causing emails to bounce" because of the volume I was getting from the server. So incredibly pathetic imo.. even iMail over at Impress could handle it.. c'mon.. like 120 emails an hour.. that's NOTHING!!!

Anyhow.. volume on those emails has gone down as I've fixed the obvious stuff. I guess once I get it down to one or two a day, I'll switch it back to my actual work account email for real emergencies.

BFN

Beowulf and Error Handling

2007-11-06T15:23:00.000-08:00

For starters I need to rave about the movie. Brian was able to snafu some tickets to the premiere of the movie Beowulf last night in Westwood.
We found the place to pick up our tickets rather easily, considering the throngs of people, and the security guards blocking off major portions of the block leading towards the theaters. There was no line at all, and we got our tickets with assigned seats.
As we went to cross the street, a security guard checked our tickets, and let us through, much to the envy of the large crowd straining to see people on the red carpet.

Suddenly I realised we're there, right in front of the theater, basically next to the red carpet. For the life of me I couldn't remember who was in the movie (I mean who did the voices) except for Angelina Jolie. The paparazzi were not going nuts, and it was early, at least an hour before the movie was to start, so I could only assume they weren't there yet. We were sent over the movie theater B. I guess that's where all the non actors went, which was fine by us, much less fuss! We picked up our free sodas, popcorn, and cool 3D glasses, found our seats, and settled in.

I won't write too much about the movie itself, as many of my friends actually want to see it, so here is the non spoilerish opinions. My eyes had a hard time at the start, as I kept trying to "refocus" on things that my eyes were telling me were close, even though they weren't. It was kind of annoying. Eventually (after about 20 mins) it stopped, and I was fine, no more focusing issues. I think the movie was beautifully drawn, the characters were interesting, and the fight scenes stellar! Sometimes it looked a little "2D with something behind it". Reminded me a little of a popup book, but mostly that wasn't noticeable.

We left just as the credits started to roll, and beat the bulk of the crowd outside. We crossed teh street, and stopped to watch the people leave theater A. After a short while, the paparazzi started screaming, and it was time for Angeline Jolie and Brad Pitt to leave! They came out across the red carpet, and jumped in a Toyota Prius! Yes.. seriously.. there were big huge limo's lining the street, and they got into a Prius. Besides the fact it had blacked out windows, it looked pretty stock standard.

I want to thank Brian for so kindly inviting me to go along, it was a very memorable event, and one I was glad to have been at!

Now onto the _really_ interesting stuff.. Error handling!!

Actually.. I'll post about that later ;)

BFN

The pumpkin collapse

2007-11-05T14:30:00.000-08:00

I knew the pumpkins wouldn't last long, but I was shocked to discover yesterday as I was tidying up for Rover to do his thing (the Roomba) that Loui's pumpkin was leaking. Upon closer inspection, the entire inside was covered in mold, and it was collapsing in on itself, while excreting some kind of clear liquid.

I promptly brought over the garbage, and slid the now squishy, almost completely collapsed pumpkin in. Not until I disturbed the pumpkin did I get a whiff of the smell! EWWWW!

Even though my pumpkin had yet to start this downhill slide, I threw it out as well. We carved pumpkins on Wednesday, and by Sunday it was moldy and rotten. That was a TON faster than I expected!

Tonight is the premiere of Beowulf the movie! My friend Brian (link over there on the right) got us tickets to the premiere event in Westwood, so I'm really looking forward to that this evening.

Right now my day pretty much consists of error handling. I've been extremely lax with this in the past, sort of crossing my fingers and hoping it wouldn't happen to me. Well it happened, and a little too publicly for my tastes. Today I hope to implement my error functions, and bring the ugly errors to a standstill (at least on live servers).

JoY!

BFN

Tabula Rasa in stores today!

2007-11-02T14:21:00.001-07:00

Everyone rush out and buy a copy, it's brilliant!

I had the privilege to play in the beta, and also the pre-order and now it's available for everyone. It's scifi meets mmo, mmo meets fps, guns over spells, fast paced skirmishes over drawn out sequences.

I've enjoyed it immensely, and look forward to you all letting me know your names in game, so we can party!

BFN

ps. I just noticed something interesting.. tonight is the Stargate Atlantis episode on SciFi of "Tabula Rasa" now that is a WEIRD coincidence!

Stargate posters from Comic-Con!

2007-11-01T16:51:00.000-07:00

TV marketing (who very kindly took me backstage at comic-con to meet some of the cast) let us know today that they had some posters from comic-con for us.

They are HUGE! Nice big shiny ones, on a hard back. One for Stargate Atlantis, and another for Stargate SG-1.

I will post pics as soon as I take some, they are wonderful! I had to take down some of the non-Stargate posters in my cube to accommodate them, and will need to invest in some strong tape.

On a side note, they had looked at getting me an extra set of hands (freelance style) but I'd convinced them I don't need it. I know, I know.. stupid right? Well not really! The team will be getting an extra front-end developer, and an extra designer. This will mean that I will actually be getting projects sooner, so instead of having 4 hours to do something that takes a week.. I'll have 5 hours!!

BFN

BFN

Virgin pumpkin carving

2007-10-31T20:42:00.000-07:00

Both Lou and I were virgins.. to pumpkin carving at least!

So tonight we popped our cherries. Together we each carved our very first pumpkins, and i've decided to post the fruits of our labor!

We were both surprised at how quick, easy, and not at all messy the process was. Honestly we both chose very simple designs, and next year we plan to do something much more difficult.

Here are our most awesome pumpkins:

First up is my pumpkin above.

Then Loui's classic design above

Loui posing with his extra head!!

Me.. cuddling with mine on the floor.

Besides various costume issues this year, I'd say it's been a most interesting Halloween!

BFN

Happy Random Costume day!

2007-10-31T11:28:00.000-07:00

The title of today's blog comes courtesy of my friend Brian H. Quite frankly I think it sums up today the best!

Today I was supposed to come to work in my costume, but in the end I chickened out :(

My costume in the end looked quite a bit too military.. the only thing really showing that it was from Stargate Atlantis was the patches on my sleeves! Even though I work on the site, I am pretty sure most people here wouldn't have understood, and would have thought I dressed up as a security guard (which is what I was mistaken for last weekend while wearing the costume).

I will put it on tonight once I get home, and take some pictures, so you too, can enjoy my security guard costume *sigh* If only I could get my hands on the pattern for the jacket they currently wear on the show! Either that, or find a good tailor to create a pattern from a photo.

Back to creating a tool to manage features on MGM HD. Currently it's done automatically, except I have to go in and alter the code everytime they put a movie waaaaaay outside the primetime slot. Awesome! Now someone is going to be personally responsible for managing it (not me).

BFN

Google Adsense now up on Stargate!

2007-10-29T10:52:00.001-07:00

It's barely 10.30am Monday morning, and I have already achieved so much!

I ate a delicious bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich (gave half to my boss.. better for my butt) followed by received the "you're approved" email from google.

Since I'd run through setting up google ads (I test all such fun things by adding them to my own sites, you'll notice google ads further down the side on this blog for example) it was pretty simple to zoom through, and setup the code.

We already had an interim ad running in a leaderboard space on Stargate, so in it went!

Imagine our surprise, when the first ad to appear was for an RPG game.. really?? RPG.. that's all they have related to Stargate? Second ad we got was.. Queer as Folk jewelry?!?! Wow.. finally the third refresh yielded an ad for Angel. Finally a TV show in the Scifi genre. After that the ads were ringtones, more RPG, more Queer as Folk jewelry. I hope once people realise we are advertising on the site, they will bid for space on it. That would be neat!

This morning I checked into our Amazon Associated account, and was pleased as punch to see we'd made money over the weekend!

I'd say that's a success, and nothing broke, so I'm glad we went live on a Friday afternoon after all.

Traffic was soso this morning, I was late to pick up James, but nothing dramatic. Ran two miles again this morning, faster again, with my shiny new running shoes (My last pair developed holes).

BFN

Amazon buy links at mgm.com

2007-10-27T09:07:00.000-07:00

Something good happened last week! After much back and forth over bank accounts, authorizations, email account setups that seemed to take forever (really long.. I think 3 weeks?) yesterday finally was the culmination of all that effort.

It only took me about an hour to write the code to put in the pages (I followed the instructions someone had kindly provided at DevShed.com), a couple more hours to test and improve, then on a Friday afternoon (worst time on the planet to go live) we pushed it live!

Although it doesn't seem like a very noteworthy moment.. it marks the turning point for our group, when we actually start making money! We don't think it will be much, but it is a lot better than simply sending people to Best Buy, from whom we get no profit share at all.

In the near future I hope to also add Amazon UnBox buy links to our catalog, especially for the Stargate Franchise although I think they will probably be linked someplace else first...

Just this last week we had a major outage. One microsite went down in the outage, as did one section on Stargate.mgm.com. It doesn't sound that major, but it had the potential to take down a lot more than that! We learned from the incident that we need to implement a failover plan not only for the hardware the databases sit on, but also the file storage package on which the data actually sits. To be honest we thought it already HAD such a failover. Turns out we were wrong. I hate "learning" things through serious outages, but it had the advantage of moving it to the top of our priority list.

Picture: My traffic fun..

BFN!

My very own logo.

2007-10-25T15:19:00.000-07:00

The time has come, where I now have my own logo. My very own! My twitter name is kangamoo, and I use that "nic" in lots of places, so the very gifted designer here at work (James) has made me my very own.

I even have a smaller version for an icon:

Woot!

BFN

Stargate Atlantis renewed for season 5!

2007-10-24T16:40:00.001-07:00

We just got the press release saying Stargate Atlantis has been renewed for a new season!

YAY!

Quote from Press release:

"SCI FI is proud to bring Atlantis back for another season," said Mark Stern, Executive Vice President, Original Programming for SCI FI. "Atlantis truly came out from under the shadow of its sister series this year and proved that it’s a hit in its own right. With this season’s exciting new characters and vibrant storylines, Atlantis also shows every sign of matching its sibling’s longevity."

"All of us at MGM are pleased to be extending the Stargate legacy with 20 new original episodes of Stargate Atlantis for our friends at SCI FI," said Charles E. Cohen, Senior Executive Vice President Finance and Corporate Development, MGM. "Viewers the world over clamor for exciting new stories of space exploration, distant civilizations and the marvels of technology, all of which continue to be delivered by Stargate Atlantis."

BFN

Browser testing..

2007-10-21T10:24:00.000-07:00

http://browsershots.org/ is very neat!

I checked this morning to be sure that my code worked on mgmhd.com. Had to switch out the featured movies. It didn't work. Oh well! I've fixed it now. Nothing better to do on a Sunday morning!

BFN

MGM HD and it's feed

2007-10-16T09:51:00.000-07:00

I should say, MGM HD and it's lack of feed? As much as I like taking a pretty picture of a schedule, and having to retype it, and format to upload into the database, then go through and correct all the typos (or plain wrong titles) to make sure my fuzzy titles matching logic works and the titles actually appear on the schedule... I can't wait to get the feed!

Looks like it will be further away now than originally anticipated, so I am steeling myself to entering another day at a time for the schedule.

I shouldn't gripe.. but we have so many other things planned. We're still only half way through the enourmous conversion of the old DB structure to my new design. The design was completed, signed off, and the new databases created back in June! Not to mention all the updates and revisions we have for the Stargate sites.

I have my fingers crossed for a new season of Stargate, but partially because one of the higher ups noticed the extra effort I was putting towards the project, oh.. and all the posters in my cube *grin* and suggested I might go up to Vancouver to see if I could find some more content for the site or something like that. Woot! I'd even buy my own ticket ;)!

So.. in the meantime.. let me retype this schedule.

BFN

MGM HD.. what day is it? wait.. what time is it?

2007-10-11T11:56:00.000-07:00

MGM HD site creation has certainly been an interesting experience. From what I understand the feedback on the TV Channel itself has been overwhelmingly positive. Which is great for us, because it means we're dealing with TPTB while they are in a good mood.

I can honestly say I never ever read a TV guide in my life. I don't know why, I just never needed to know when my shows are on, because I always had the power of advertising to let me know, and now my cable box tells me what's on when.
I thought someone had made a mistake, and messed up the "dates" on the excel spreadsheet I got, which had laid out (in a way no one could possibly script to get the data out of it) that each "day" starts at 6am, and goes through until 5.59am the following day.

Apparently that's how it's done in TV Guides, and TV Stations. Silly me to think that 12am marks the start of a new day! This has created tons of problems for me creating the schedule. As on the feed and schedule.. the date is correct literally, and the time is also correct. This means two things. I have to constantly be checking to make sure that today really is today.. it really is today if it's after 6am. Before 6am, I have to reset all the variable like it's yesterday.

My head hurts.. seriously my code has turned to complete spaghetti.. it's almost incomprehensible that I can't use plain regular old dates.. I have to always be checking the time to work out if it's really today or not.

The other snafu created by this crazy system is getting them out of the database in the right order, for the right "day". My query ended up like this:

select * from schedule where (air_date='".$now_date."' and air_time >='600') or (air_date='".$tomorrow_date."' and air_time < '600') order by air_date, air_time

Lovely aint it?

It's live, it appears to work, now I just have to wait and see what happens at the end of the month, and the end of the year. Lets hope I got all those calculations right!

BFN

Tabula Rasa - Commando!

2007-10-06T11:25:00.001-07:00

Love the way my character looks in Tabula Rasa..

MGM HD is feedless

2007-10-06T11:02:00.000-07:00

At least for the time being, there is no feed for MGM HD. How was I to make a website with a schedule without a schedule??

Yikes.. I basically took a layout of the schedule, and created a version that I could import sans feed. I had to write a new version of all the pages, to process a title as the key. A title is not a very good key, for tons of reasons, but mostly because people tend to misspell things, to use different punctuation, or to just plain get the title wrong.
I spent a large time yesterday going through and "fixing" all the title names. FUN!!

It's done.. I have to go over it again with the printed schedules I brought home, but for the most part my code worked!! I shouldn't sound to surprised.. but I am ;)

Today's task was to get the search working. This can mean many things, and because I am again working with no spec, and no direction.. I've made it up. The search just submits via get directly to mgm.com. I assume this is what it's supposed to do, but I could be wrong.. it's happened before!

I heard from a friend that I've not spoken to in year this last week! Am excited to be back in contact, and hopefully will see him next time I go home.

well.. BFN!

Ratings for Stargate Atlantis Season 4 Eps 1

2007-10-03T11:24:00.001-07:00

Finally a result is in, and I didn't win our pool over the rating for the season premiere episode of SGA. As reported at gateworld.net, it's a 1.2.

http://gateworld.net/news/2007/10/season_four_premieres_with_1.2_r.shtml

My guess was a 1.7 which turns out to be far off, but is super sad, because how it does in the ratings in the next two more eps (or one more) will determine if the show is renewed.

*le sigh*

BFN

Stargate is not over

2007-10-03T10:23:00.000-07:00

We were supposed to spend all of September making updates and changes for the Stargate website. October 1st there was a meeting with TPTB and looks like we'll be focusing on it for at least another couple months.

Means our other projects, and most of my "goals" for this year (to get my bonus) won't come to fruition. That makes me super duper sad. Oh well! I do happen to like the Stargate franchise tons, so I will at least get to implement some of the ideas I have to improve the sites.

All the scripts and tools are done for MGM HD, now we just await the mysterious "feed" which we won't see until the day it goes live (or perhaps after!!)... Love developing blind!

Today I will be creating a function to go through the synopsis of each episode, and find the character and actor names, and surround them with links directly to each character page. FANCY! Well not really.

BFN

ps. I'd like to say, I am not responsible for Team Stargate.. but sorry to those who couldn't pick their province in the first week, that was my fault *blush*. I'd also like to point out that that "game" on the site wasn't us either.. third party marketing fluff.

wget is easy as pie

2007-09-26T11:16:00.000-07:00

Impressed with how easy it is to use wget at the command line.

So cron scripts are done, everything is put in MySQL just fine, now working to match our titles, with the titles from tribune. We use the stars master title ID for our titles, but tribune has their own very special ID. The tool it quick, just searches on the title itself and the year, and gives likely matches to the user. The user checks the boxes of the ones to associate with each other, saves to our property database.
Not sure exactly what to do about ones that don't match.. in theory they should be in our database. Probably just put a text field so the user can manually add the stars master title id (we call it the smid).

Team Stargate is up. It has garnered the exact reaction I expected. Curses to marketing folk, you give me a bad name :( We're so often forced to create the interface for half baked ideas, but it really gets frustrating when we bear the brunt. Especially since they are not even employee's .. we get the bad name, they have the bad ideas.. WTF!!

BFN

Import delimited file into DB

2007-09-13T18:58:00.000-07:00

At first I was a lil worried about how I was going to make this happen at the command line. I am very comfortable with the command line, but it's been a while since I've used perl or other suitable languages. I had _no idea_ how I could possibly get a delimited file from the command line (in a script run as a cron) into Oracle, so I set that aside, and opted for MySQL.

First I wrote a script in perl. Just a quickie, to make sure i'd be able to ftp down the file, and insert it into MySQL. No luck.. none of the ability to connect to MySQL. *snap*.
Route two was to try and use the LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE commands in MySQL.. I couldn't seem to get it working at the command line.. no idea why, but I then went down another path.
Route three I found that PHP on the servers was CLI version! WOOT! Since PHP and I are most firmly aquainted, I wrote a quick script, also trying the LOAD DATA path. Some luck, but wasn't doing everything I wanted.

Final Route is just a good old read file and an explode, followed by a loop with an insert statement. Easy as pie.

Now I think I might have to use Oracle after all. Don't tell my boss ;)

BFN!

Great photos!

2007-09-10T15:55:00.000-07:00

My friend Matt took a trip to Europe and took some great photo's!

Here is the link to the goodness: http://web.mac.com/mattmaggard/Europe_in_the_Fall/Europe.html

Aren't they great!

BFN

Remote content

2007-09-07T15:44:00.000-07:00

Sadly the blog fell by the "i'm busy" wayside this week.

It didn't help that I didn't do anything particularly interesting.. .. ..

Only one this was moderately interesting. On the site, we have terms of use, and a privacy policy. Other sites within the realm use the same one, but previously someone just emailed them the content, and they repurposed it for their site. This was great.. until we updated them recently, and found many of the satellite sites are now out of date.

I created a version without a header, or footer, or styles. I've put the files in an easily accessible place, and have supplied the other sites with some simple code.

I wrote some pretty functions and stuff to go around it, but the code basically was this:
$this->data = join('',file($url));

Woot!

BFN

Where did the week go??

2007-08-31T12:19:00.001-07:00

Wow.. it's lunch time Friday, and I'm setting to go home for the week already.

I managed to get away with only doing annoying stuff at work this week, so nothing interesting to report here.

Next week is going to be more interesting, as I start working on the Stargate site updates, and Stargate Street Team things.

FUN!

BFN