ace’s blog

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We got back from our trip to mass. on Tuesday. The trip was like our
normal trips, some fighting, some fun, more uncomfortable than anything
really. We had Aaron’s birthday party on sunday, in mass. He had a lot
of fun and got quite a few gifts. We had to mail ourselves a box full of presents even after we filled up the extra bag that we brought to fly some presents back with us! When we got home, we gave Aaron the presents that we got for him: a slushy maker and a fish tank! Meri took him to the pet store and got him a couple of small fish. He named them “grapey” and “orange”. He gets really excited when it’s time to feed them.

We got back Tuesday and I went to the 2008 LANSA User Conference here in Orlando. I got to talk to a few people I worked with at Terminix and attended some of the WAM sessions. Those were great! I found the AJAX lab to be a bit lacking and the speaker wasn’t that good in my opinion.

I worked from home yesterday and now it is Friday and I am back at the office. I haven’t been here for a week! I must’ve saved a ton of money on gas (well, like $60). Now I’m on-call for the weekend.

Yesterday, when I was working from home, I took a break for lunch (which is unusual for me), I sat with Eli for a bit and I was playing with him on the couch. I started making some weird noises and poking around his mouth to try and get him to smile at me. Normally, it’s difficult for me to get him to smile but he smiled at me for about 20 minutes! It was awesome! I loved it when Aaron first started smiling at me and I love it now that Eli is doing the same. I can’t wait until Eli is walking and talking as well.

Of course I mean my interest in my current job.  It seems I can’t stand to stay at a place for over a year (check my linkedin.com profile).  There are a few LANSA contracts in central Florida but with the economy behaving the way it is, I think I’m too nervous to take that step and work for myself. Meri can tell when I’m fed up with my jobs and last night, she told me that she would be OK renting the house and moving again. That’s the last thing I want to do. We’ve moved 4 times since I graduated from college and I’m sick of packing up all my junk and moving it around. I’d rather stay in central Florida as long as possible. I thought about maybe going to school to get a masters degree in something from UCF but I don’t think now is the time for that. Meri and I were talking and she’s very interested in going back to school to be a teacher. Right now, she’s looking at getting a master’s degree for herself. She’s looking to be finished in about two years.  That’s not a whole lot of time and we’ll be more than comfortable living on my income alone. We’ve been doing it for the past couple of months and we haven’t HAD to slow down our spending; we have cut back but not out of need, I just want to start putting a lot more away for retirement. I’ve also become very interested in getting back into web development. Basically, I’d like to do what I was doing at my last job, just with a stable company this time!

In other, less pleasant news, we’re flying up to Massachusetts to visit the in-laws and yes, we’re flying with both of our kids! In more pleasant news, we’re going to celebrate Aaron’s 4th birthday birthday while we are up there and and also let the rest of the family meet Eli for the first time. Aaron’s birthday is next Tuesday, May 6th.

I think that’s enough rambling for now. I have another blog that I’ve been posting short posts to, it’s at dfktv.com. Also, if you have any idea what Twitter is, follow me!  I can be found here.  Twitter is pretty damned addictive, especially if you use it in conjunction with twhirl!

Holy sheep shit! I just fixed a known (to me) bug in the vox-crossposter WP plugin I wrote a LONG time ago.

All I changed was the character encoding from

$email_headers .= 'Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1'."\r\n";

to

$email_headers .= 'Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8'."\r\n";

If you look at the second “known bugs” list at http://www.acedanger.com/vox-crossposter, you will see exactly what I changed. Now I need to get home so I can update the download link and the download from the WordPress Plugin site.

Edit: I updated the source that the download link points to.

I’ve been trying to make use of the Shared Items in Google Reader and show them on my blog. I’ve tried a couple of different RSS widgets without success, until this morning.

I found a widget that will display the feed correctly. It is called Google Reader widget and was written by James Wilson.

The problem with using the pre-installed RSS feed widget from WordPress was that the URL linked is malformed and if clicked, would take the user to a page that did not exist, resulting in an error page. For example, one of my shared items is a post that I wrote when we found out the gender of our new baby (which is a boy ). From the pre-installed RSS widget, the following URL is linked: “http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/acedanger/~3/173558267/http://www.acedanger.com”; from  the new widget, the URL linked is “http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/acedanger/~3/173558267/”.

The reason for the malformed URL is because of the formatting of the XML produced. The pre-installed widget is expecting the XML to be formatted according to the RSS 2.0 standard but  the XML produced by the Google Reader Shared Items feed is in the Atom standard.

That’s about as technical as I get. I know there is a difference but don’t care to be bothered with the details (not right now anyway).

Tags: googlereader, widget, wordpress plugin

So I decided that I would attempt to use the OpenSocial API from Google.

This is not turning out to be a simple task…

I thought I would just be able to create a form, ask for some info, send a POST to some doctored-up URI to some API and then parse the response. Nope. There seems to be a bit of set up work. I’m still going to try this out but I guess it won’t be this morning.

Meri and I were in bed, getting ready to fall asleep and then she started talking about work and how she didn’t want to go back tomorrow. That got me talking (and thinking) about my job. Then I started bitching…and bitching and bitching and bitching. So now, about 2 hours later (yeah, we go to bed early here), I’m online. I feel like I should redo my once-proud website.

Revisiting development on that site got me thinking about Barry‘s site: FeedBang.com. Dammit man! I was once at peace with not continuing development on PeopleArray.com and someone alright with letting my PHP skills get rusty. Now that I saw that you’ve done work to FeedBang.com, I feel like I need to get off my ass and update that site! Good work on FeedBang.com Barry; it looks pretty cool and I really like that you’ve added the ability to login with openid.

I remember my days at Terminix when I had all kinds of time to develop a site like PeopleArray.com. I once went three weeks doing absolutely nothing, besides asking my manager for something to do. Yeah, that’s right, 3 weeks…in a row!

I loved working for Terminix (both because of the people and the company) but I hated Memphis. I’m glad to be gone but I’m not happy where I ended up. I love being back in Florida but dislike my job. I have learned a lot. I’m proud to say that I know a LOT about LANSA Web! I’m just hoping that I can find a job where I can continue doing either LANSA Web or get back to some Visual LANSA.

….

Ok, so insomnia is not letting go of it’s grip and I just visited Digg.com and Reddit.com. I haven’t been to those sites in a really long time. Normally I just read them through Google Reader.

….

Is it weird to laugh at something I blogged about a long time ago? I remember writing this and even the details of the circumstances surrounding the issue. Stupid financial month reports. Anyway, I laughed about this blog entry: http://www.acedanger.com/2006/06/08/808008704-megabytes/.

….

Good night (I hope).

My plugin was in a write up about WordPress plugins on the blog Mashable.  Here is a link to the entry: http://mashable.com/2007/08/02/wordpress-readers/.   How cool is that?!

I found it by looking through some of the incoming links to my blog.  I clicked on a link from an Asian site and saw a link to Mashable.com.  I clicked on the Mashable link and then did a search on the blog entry for “vox” and found my plugin listed!  That’s freaking awesome!

Long time no post!

Well things have been busy here at work!  The LANSA projects are wrapping up for me: the version 2 of the Gradebook, written in LANSA with heavy use of AJAX (and JavaScript) and CSS, has been handed off to the consultants we have been using since the project began; I re-wrote the Employee portal and just finished that up this morning.  Next on my plate here is Gradebook version 3!

The newest version of the Gradebook will be written in/with WPF.  There aren’t many people writing WPF code right now so for me, this is another ground-breaking moment (coupling LANSA with AJAX was the first).  Learning WPF will be great for me and my career and ultimately for my family.  I’m excited about learning another language and being productive with it.

Other than all that work stuff, there isn’t much to write about.  We have been busy painting and turning our house into a home.  We’ve put in new laminate bamboo floors in the downstairs portion of the house and also put up about half of the lights that we bought a few weeks ago (5 down, 5 to go!).

Here’s hoping I don’t neglect my blog anymore!

First and foremost, I want to thank David Chartier for the write-up he completed for the DownloadSquad regarding my WordPress plugin, the Vox Crossposter. I didn’t think the plugin was that big of a deal until users started to email me, asking me for help installing the plugin. I received a lot of positive feedback as well some suggestions for enhancements.

I have implemented a few of the suggestions and will continue to do so if I feel that the request actually enhances the plugin or if I get many requests for the same feature.

I was first contacted by David back in Jan 2007. I was very excited (and very surprised) to know that the plugin I wrote got someone’s attention who would be able to spread the word more than I have been able to. After a while, I forgot about the proposed write-up because after all, everybody gets busy! So fast forward to tonight when I just happened to check my email and what do I see? A wonderful message from Google Alerts (yes, I receive alerts regarding my own blog and yes, I do subscribe to it via Google Reader) :

As far as future development of the plugin, I am waiting on Six Apart to create an API for Vox like they have for LiveJournal or MoveableType.

Anyway, read about the development of and the pride I have in my plugin in my WordPress Plugin category. Thanks again David for the great write-up and the recognition.