I have taken the Metra (locomotive commuter train) for over seven years now and until about 5 minutes ago, had never been on a train that has hit a person or a car. This morning we hit a car and because I sit in the front car (third seat from the front) when we hit the car it was pretty scary. Even though I did not see it happen (I was playing Rocket Mania)as soon as I heard it and felt the impact my stomach sank. If you live in an area with an active trains DO NOT STOP ON THE TRACKS. Living in Chicago, we have a very active tracks…especially our commuter trains. There is no excuse for stopping on the tracks…ever. The trains give several warning cues that they are coming..I just do not understand why people put themselves in harms way…stupidly. I hope the driver and passengers are ok, but I also hope people on this train and perhaps people who read this will take extra caution next time they are near train tracks.
[tags]Metra[/tags]
Archive for June, 2006
All posts written in June, 2006.
do not stop on the tracks!
random points of interest.
I have been completely swamped with work for the last week, but I wanted to share some random points of interest that I have stumbled upon over the last few days.
- I sat down to relax after a long day of coding to watch a great show on the History Channel called: Hooked: Illegal Drugs and How They Got That Way Opium, Morphine, and Heroin. This was filled with awesome tidbits of information like:
- The Chinese first got hooked on smoking tobacco, then they added some opium to the tobacco…then they got hooked on smoking opium. Before this, eating little bits of opium was the most popular way to feel the effects of opium
- Morphine was used to treat alcoholism, and even though alcoholics then became morphine addicts, it was more socially acceptable at this time (around prohibition) than to be an alcoholic because morphine addicts were less likely to start fights or beat their spouses
- The hypodermic needle was invented to get morphine to into people’s systems faster
- Grant Lee Phillips, one of my favorite singers, released a new album this week and it is amazing. Anyone who is looking for a great summer album, be sure and check it out. (It is available on the iTunes music store.
- I am slowly bust surely getting through my PHP and MySQL web development book. I already have learned so much. I just need time at this point.
- I am getting ready to release two web sites in the next few days/weeks (content dependent). One is a “from scratch” web site, and another is a redesign.
- So far, my XOOPS 2.0.14 testing is going well. I have tested a handful of modules and will hopefully finish up all my testing tonight then push the update over to the production web sites
- Being swamped is one thing, but my goodness…Scott has his hands full.
[tags]History Channel, Grant Lee Phillips, XOOPS[/tags]
command line to the rescue…again.
While upgrading a client’s web site to XOOPS 2.0.14 I ran into some issues with the XOOPS 2.0.14 package file (a tar.gz file). Stuffit Expander would only extract a few folders, then report an error and quit. After a few attempts, and all failures, I had to chose to turn to the command line and bingo, no problems! So, if you ever have any issues with Stuffit Expander and need to uncompress a .tar.gz file, the following commands will come in handy:
- To uncompress a gz file:
gunzip file.gz - To uncompress a tar file:
tar [tar options (usually xvf)] file.tar - To uncompress a .tar.gz file:
tar xzvf file.tar.gz
Questions? Check out the man pages for tar and gunzip.
[tags]XOOPS, gunzip, tar[/tags]
fun with email and mail.app
I learned something today that I cannot believe I did not know/use before today…if you click on the replied, forwarded, etc icons within mail.app message list, it will open up the email that you sent in response, forward, etc. How very handy! How did I not pay attention to this for the last six years?
I will not say from who…but I just got a massive amount of attachments from someone…more than I thought would be possible!
[tags]mail.app, email attachments[/tags]
big update weekend.
The big talk in our wonderful city today was about the “Sears Tower terror plot” that did not happen, thank goodness. I am about two blocks away from the Sears Tower four days a week.
In other news, XOOPS is going to release XOOPS version 2.0.14 on Monday which among several things, will bring LDAP Authentication support to XOOPS. Yeah! Time to get ready to play with the new update before I push it to my production sites.
If all goes well tomorrow on the golf course aka, I come back in a good mood ready to put in a few hours of work…I will also check out the newly released alpha of Tasks Pro 1.7. I have been longing for tagging for awhile now and I know Alex King will not disappoint.
[tags]Chicago, Sears Tower, XOOPS, Tasks Pro[/tags]
much calmer morning.
Thankfully this morning has been much calmer. By this time yesterday I felt like I ran a marathon and today I feel refreshed. I got caught up on my unread RSS feeds this morning and wanted to mention a few really great feeds I have been reading:
- Life Hacker. Just a few days ago I learned how to make my garbage disposal nice and clean smelling from this feed.
- Creating Passionate Users. This is a great read for anyone that interacts with users.
- Escape from Cubical Nation. This is a great and inspirational blog written by someone who started their own business.
- 43 Folders. We all could use more organization and efficiency tips…and this is a great resource for both.
Time to sit back and enjoy the rest of my train ride into the big city…and to read more about PHP and MySQL.
[tags]RSS[/tags]
one of those days.
Time for a beer! Nothing like waking up at 5am and putting in multiple hours of “work” before you actually start your day job. To begin the day…I could not sleep (because of the humidity) so I decide to get up early and check my consulting company’s email figuring I can do a few simple tasks before I start my day job. No new messages. I think to myself that I should have something…I should at least have my daily tasks email from Tasks Pro that is sent every morning at 430am. I then look into the problem and notice I cannot send mail either….everyone’s favorite 550 smtp error. I call my hosting company and have them look into it. I start to sweat because this is affecting my entire VPS…all my domain names, and all my clients. After getting disconnected four times from my hosting company but finally get a call back from the last person I talk to and he assures me he is looking into it. An hour goes by and no fix. I call back and talk to someone else who is now also looking into it. Meanwhile, a client calls me and tells me she is going to demo the XOOPS CMS I built and she cannot log in with the administrative account. I confirm the problem, and luckily I recognize this issue…and a simple database rebuild takes care of the problem. As I get off the phone with my client, I get an IM from another person I am doing work for and they are having some CSS issues. ID issues, the ever-so-lovely unclosed div tag issue – luckily this was not too bad of an issue and I like CSS so this was not too bad. Next thing I know I get a call back from my hosting company and my issue has finally been resolved. It is now time to stop my consulting work so I can start my day job…unfortunately I am already stressed out and it is not even 9am!
My work day officially begins…and finally ends. I take a conference call during my lunch break and get piles of more work to do this evening. I start to think my day looks up when my Vonage (sorry Jerry, I misplace your refer a friend email and was so lame I did not email you back about getting another copy – lunch is on me when you are in the city next time) equipment arrives (I am using it for my business) but to continue on with my wonderful day…I cannot get a dial tone. Whoops, I do not have a Vonage compatible router. Off to Best Buy to buy a new router. I then had to come home and reconfigure the router (I have quite a few custom port forwarding settings for PS2 and for my home servers). Finally, I am able to sit down, take a breath, and start some work for my consulting business….knowing I really should be out mowing the lawn. Serenity Now!
[tags]serenity now, tasks pro, VPS, CSS, XOOPS, Vonage, PS2[/tags]
my first wordpress plugin: WP-rssStats.
After talking to Scott I finally have a plugin which I am excited to develop and excited to share with the WordPress community…a plugin that will allow WordPress admins to see exactly how many people are subscribing to your WordPress RSS feed and who these people are. Why would I do this when Feedburner is out there (and I used it currently)? I like Feedburner but I do not like redirecting my RSS feed to a non jappler.com URL because I want to be in control of my own stats.
Why start with this? Scott had mentioned this to me and it sounded very interesting. With this project, I will be able to learn quite a bit about PHP, the WordPress API, MySQL, as well as RSS. This past weekend, between meetings, I read the documentation I blogged about yesterday and I started reading PHP and MySQL Web Development, which Scott recommended. I hope others will find this useful! I plan to really dig into this in the next few days. I am going to set up my test WordPress setup tomorrow so I can begin messing around with project.
For more information on this, check out Scott’s podcast on learning PHP and this project.
[tags]WordPress, rssStats, PHP, MySQL, RSS[/tags]
writing a wordpress plugin: helpful documentation.
I have been gearing up to write a WordPress plugin for a week now in my “free time”. Since I will most likely write another plugin at some point or another, I wanted to document the resources I have found very helpful:
- WordPress Codex. This is a catch all for WordPress development. This site has also been very useful when developing themes.
- WordPress Coding Standards. Let’s face it. I love WordPress and I love standards.
- WordPress Plugin API. This section of the WordPress codex addresses the API (Application Programming Interface) hooks available to WordPress plugin developers.
- Writing a WordPress Plugin. This is a must read for anyone developing a new plugin.
- WordPress Database Description. This, as you would expect, describes the WordPress database tables.
I will write about the plugin details later this week once I will hopefully have some more time. It is catch up time now!
random coolness.
I have a busy few days coming up so I am not sure how much I can post. I decided to post a few random things that I find cool:
- I have officially gone through all my bookmarks and moved everything to de.licio.us so if you ever want see what I feel is bookmarkable…take a look. This is potentially really cool because you could get a RSS feed of all my bookmarks to see my latest additions or you could get a RSS feed of a specific tag or tags that I use for my bookmarks. Pretty slick. I have also convinced Doug to use this service too so I can easily access all his bookmarks too.
- We welcomed a new member (nephew) into the family on June 12: Nicholas was born just before 2pm
- Kittens like Front Row!
- Ubuntu 6.0.6 is out. I am downloading the PowerPC image as I type…
- A friend just pointed out to me that you can do crosswords online for free at Chicago Sun Times’s web site. Yes, I am a Sun Times fan not a Chicago Tribune fan. No one understands this
- I have been using a Safari plugin for the last few weeks and have forgot to mention it: Safari Tidy. This plugin is validates all the pages you browse for (X)HTML compliance. I am always interested to see who cares about web standards.
- Get your golf balls with custom imprinting!
- Tetris (with sound!) using the Yahoo! User Interface Library
[tags]random, de.licio.us, Ubuntu, crosswords, Titleist, Safari, YUI, tetris[/tags]
