Horses are terrible people

I've finished with stage one of the redesign and reimplementation of the ValenciaHills.com website. The next step will be to implement the PodCast sermon downloads and go through and setup some specific sections for the different ministries.

Ok, so I'm a bit late to the Firefly thing. I'm really not sure how I missed it on TV. Other than reminding me of Time Enough for Love, which Joss Whedon doesn't credit when he talks about how he came up with the idea, I really enjoyed the series and movie. Interestingly the move didn't start out that well in my opinion, compared to the series. I finally saw Serenity last night. The dialog between the characters seemed a bit forced and “different” from the TV show. But by about half-way through, it seems the writing and acting fall back into place. I really enjoyed watching the cut scenes, and one could only guess they were cut to shave off time from the movie, as they sure added to the story. If you've not seen the show and are a sci-fi fan, I highly recommend renting or buying the boxset, digesting that, then moving on to Serenity. It does clean up some loose ends but they killed off one too many people for me to think there will be any followup films or ressurection of the tv show. Books are coming in 2006.

Sure the acronym is cheesy, but I just committed to SVN an object that automatically builds administration back-end interfaces by passing a table name to it. Sure the screenshot is a bit simplistic, but it can handle 4 different types of fields right now, and I will be adding support for additional field types. It works by querying the table structure and dynamically building lists and forms. It is aware of the primary keys, non-nullable fields, and the like.

The TLadder object requires only two lines of code to use, though you can always use overrides to make things look nicer. To use TLadder one simply does: $ladder = new TLadder('table_name'); $output = $ladder->build();

Future plans include migrating the interface to use XSL for display, adding additional field type support, and adding support for foreign key auto-detection and turning fields with foreign keys into drop down fields with the contents of the dropdown populated from the foreign key data.

I just setup a Flickr account and uploaded some of my old photos up there. Is a pretty interesting site, but like all communities, I think I'll only get out of it what I put into it.

It occured to me as I was watching the Firefly DVD #2 yesterday how much Firefly's old-west settlers, towns, etc remind me of a section of Time Enough for Love by Heinlein. In the section of the book, about midway through, where Lazarus is talking about Dora (name sake for his ship) and the world they lived on, including their trip to settle some land, he describes a very old-west setting well in the space travelling future. I can't help but wonder if this very book is Joss Whedon's inspiration for most every planet, dress, and speech in Firefly. Another similarity of note is that in Time Enough for Love prostitution was dealt with in a very similar way to Firefly's portrayal of “companions.”

I've just completeed adding genetic support for XMLRPC weblog ping support for Technorati, Ping-O-Matic and Weblogs.com and Yahoo! Blo.gs. When enabled, it will send out a ping every time you post a new article letting these services know you have new content on your weblog / articles section of your Framewerk powered site.

Lately friends, family, and friends of family have decided that I need to be included in their flurry of forward emails. You know the kind, emails that are cute, funny, or scary. Perhaps they're a call to action or friendly warning. Generally these emails fall into two categories: happy emails and sad emails. Happy emails have funny or patriotic pictures. Cute and fuzzy bunnies and American flags with a crying bald eagle with "9-11 Never Forget" stamped over them. Funny emails of hot girls and ugly girls side by side. You know what I mean. These emails are a waste of bandwidth. Yes jokes are funny. But when I have to weed through every one of your friends email addresses, and their friends email address, and their friends email address to get to the joke, well I'm just tired and ready to move on. If you're going to forward cute and fuzzy emails, at least clean out the email headers from when you click forward. Better yet, don't forward it. Or if you want to be really cool, ask your friends if they want to be on your SPAM list of noxious cuteness prior to sending them said spam. Why is it spam? Spam's generally considered "Unsolicited Email." If I didn't solicit you to send me monkeys flinging poop at people watching at the zoo, then I'm not terribly concerned if my email program carefully files your email in the Spam folder.

Scary emails are where the hoaxes come in. It's unlikely the FCC is about to rule that Christianity can't be talked about on the radio or TV if you've not heard about it on the radio or TV, even if that email said Dr. James Dobson said it was so. It's very likely he didn't. And why not go to Dr. Dobsons website and see what he has to say about it? If he feels so strongly that he wants an email forwarded to all of your friends, he would probably ask for it on his website. In this case, his website dispells the myth. How did I find that magic article? Google. Simply typing "Dobson FCC petition" yielded several pages in the top spots pointing out it was a hoax. Amazing thing, it took less time to do that then it would take to include every friend, relative, and co-worker from my address book on my soon to be forwarded email.

Ok that's one scary type, the call to action... The other is the doomsday, sky-is-falling, internet is going to explode and President Bush has personally tapped your computer riding a patriot act cruise missle in a blaze of Dr. Strangelove glory. The worst virus ever is out! There is some benfit to computer related emails like this, it will possibly scare the person who is inclined to read it and forward it to me and all the world, out of opening attachments that say "Brittany Spears Nude Screen Saver" or "I make greeting card for happy you.zip." YES email viruses are real. They're real because people open attachements and run the viruses. But if you get an email that says "OMG CNN SAYS WORSE VIRUS EVER" why not check CNN and see if it's true? If not you're just wasting time and scaring people. If it is true, it's likely that when people check the news, watch tv, etc, they will find out about it. Unless they live on a small island in the south pacific and only enter the numbers 4 8 15 16 23 42 into their computer.

One more thought on these emails. Usually people send these emails to all of their friends displaying all of their friends email addresses for all to see. This is like sending phone numbers out all over the internet. When I see a list of emails like that, it makes me want to email photos of you out to every email address I can find. You know the ones, you were at my party, drunk, dancing naked on the table. I don't think your Aunt Jean would want to have to endure THOSE photos. Think of Aunt Jean.

It's a bad thing.™ I figured it was smart enough not to send huge data files. I was wrong. Talk about chaos. See on Framewerk we have svn mail changeset notifications including the changeset diff to a mailing list. So imagine a 100 meg email being virus scanned, spam checked, then sent to mailman. Mailman then would send the file which would be virus scanned, spam checked, then sent out. Yeah, it's not a pretty thing. I think I need to zip data files that make it in the svn repository. ClamAV isn\'t CPU friendly on 100 meg database dumps.

Jumped into the Google Maps API today and came up with this. By taking the city and state location from the user data it gets the latitude and longitude for each users city and then adds those users to the map. I'll be adding this object to the Addons repository.

Jim Nasby sent an email to the pgsql-advocacy list pointing out this article comparing Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL from a getting started perspective. The author notes his predisposition to favor Oracle and calls it the gold standard. In his measure, PostgreSQL got the best score. It's worth a read as he has some valid points, both positive and negative on PgSQL.

My friend Jan is going to be participating in the AIDS Lifecycle event next June. She and her friend Lisa will be riding from San Francisco to Los Angeles. If you want to help by sponsoring her, visit this page. Thanks!

I just found PoetryDMV.com who is using the old pathetic.org source code to setup a new poetry website. It\'s kind of funny to see the pathetic.org site in a different form, but hey, best of luck to them :) The code is really bad and out of date, not the best thing to start a new site on. (Most of it was written for PHP3 and is over 5 years old.) Anyway I\'m glad to see that they\'re making a home for them based upon how they think a site should be run, and I\'m sure if they want it to, it could surpase pathetic.org in userbase.

I have moved most of my pgsql.gavinroy.com site to a new section on this site. This section includes my 2002 OSCON presentation, PgSQL artwork, a backup script, and some functions to take PgSQL query results and spit them out in XML using PDO.

I was speaking with my friend Bryan on AIM this morning and he recommended doing podcast tutorials that are in depth. So in response, I\'m going to put together some materials and examples and do an in-depth podcast on PDO. More details to come.

So it's been about a month since I did the last CradCast and I've been seriously thinking about how to best move forward with it. I've been toying with doing some interviews with various Open Source people, but am at a loss as to what else to podcast on. I don't like how CradCast has become \"I like this, I don't like that.\" I wanted to offer serious technical stuff and it's turned into \"you should check this out, if you haven't\" type stuff. I've been struggling with how to have in depth technical podcasts. Programming is inheirently a visual thing and talking about it without substance or detail behind it is light in my opinion. It's like showing up for a conference talk with no slides or materials. So we'll see how that goes.

As we've been getting closer to the Framewerk launch I've been contemplating doing a Framewerk specific podcast. Perhaps every other week detailing the development status and how to do various things. One week might be a bit on builing interface objects, the next on theme development. I don't know how much demand for it there will be so I'll keep that on the back burner.

If you have any advice or insight for me on my podcasting, or topics to cover, please drop me an email.

Out with the old and in with the new. I've finally decided to retire my old site and start over with a new one. This is pretty bare for now, but I will be migrating the photo gallery and maybe a few other features into this site. I'll probably end up retiring the pgsql.gavinroy.com site as well in the near future and roll the items there into posts here.

This new site is running the SVN HEAD version of Framewerk in it\'s near beta state. We have approximately 20 open tickets right now and are making progress daily. I\'ve been working on new Docbook formatted, XML based documentation using XSL:FO and apache fop 0.9.

I\'ll be adding more blog like capabilities to this in the near future with both the ability to comment and for trackback entries.

Michelle and I watched Rockstar: INXS pretty religiously and while she was disappointed with JD's selection, I thought it was a pretty obvious choice, from the available guys. Actually I think it should have come down to Mig and JD but that's a different story. When the new album came out I was on ITMS picking it up. It's a mixed bag and like most albums, it's got strong points and weak ones. One of the weaker ones is "Never Let You Go," a song destine for a musac rendition soon to be heard in elevators nationwide. I say destine because it's not going to take much alteration to make the musac version. I can't really put my thumb on why this song doesn't work other than they forgot to add the rock to the song, and the roll could be seen as the gentle lapping of waves. Not to mention the repetative (and shallow) lyrics. Now, if you are an INXS fan, or just like the band, one thing you'll probably notice is JD isn't too far from MH in his singing style. I guess that's what happens when you listen to INXS a whole bunch growing up, and then become their lead singer.

Highlights of the album include God's Top Ten which features Suzie McNeil doing more than backup vocals. The album is pretty good, I don't regret buying it, but it doesn't stand up against some of the other albums I've gotten recently, such as Spoon's Gimme Fiction. If you watched Rockstar: INXS like I did, you'll remember the song "Us" and enjoy hearing some of the contestants doing backing vocals. If you ask me, the TV show was a brilliant marketing move for this band, who if they just chose a new lead singer and released this album, it would be religated to go straight into the 9.99 bin. Instead there's enough hype to insure radio airplay and people like me will go out and buy the new album.

I had no idea that INXS was considered a "megaband." I really didn't.