Pauls Rants & Revelations

I am super stoked that the weekend is finally here. This last week was a little stressful and I was almost sure I was going to get fired. But almost everything worked out and the big things got done or re-organized and the little things I pushed to other people (my helpers, which is what they are there for).

Strangley though I recieved a few calls and emails from friends asking for my help with their various projects. And they were willing to pay me. It’s strange that at the time when I have no time available, everyone asks for something. I didnt want to say no so I just told them to hit me up next week.

Anyways, Im just thankful I survived. I know my job isnt physically dangerous and I’m not doing brain surgery, but it’s still stressful.

Well, I probably have only one more all-nighter before I am somewhat caught up with work. Hopefully some of these projects can be finished so I can start getting back on track with everything else. At least I have work to do so I suppose I should be thankful for that.

Anyways, Im awaiting my thid published work to be approved of any day so maybe next week I can share my latest literary creation.

Cheers

Why is it that whenever I get really busy with work, my productivity drops through the floor? I have about 10 projects that have to get done and none of them are moving at a sufficently expedient rate for me.

Is it because when we get so innundated we feel that it will never end and so become less productive due to some feeling of hopelessness? Or is it just that since stuff keeps coming in that we loose our concentration, or flow, and so have to start back in everytime our email client make a noise?

I certainly hope that Im not alone in this feeling. I know being busy means making money, but being late costs money, and that defeats the whole purpose of being busy.

I just finished hashing out this SQL query for a project and just had to share it.

A popular function to do on sites is to find the difference in 2 dates. In ASP, you can use the DateDiff function to find this value. However I wanted a way to select it straight from the database as there were already too many ASP function taking place on the page.

For those of you unfamiliar with SQL, there exists the SUM function where you can add the values of database fields right in the SQL query and select is as you would a normal field. In MySQL, there exists a TO_DAYS function that, when supplied with a date parameter, will spit back the number of days from day 0 (which is sometime in 1582). Using both of these in confunction will yield the desired integer when you have to find the difference between two dates. Here is the SQL query I used (although i removed the table names and such and made it more general):

SELECT SUM((TO_DAYS(Finish_Date) – TO_DAYS(Start_Date))) AS DiffDays FROM your_table

Using this query (either direct from your script or via a database view) will output an integer into the recordset field “DiffDays”. Then you just have to call it on your page and you are done.

But what if you have a great many records and have to find one with the largest difference in dates? Not a problem. Try this query:

SELECT SUM((TO_DAYS(Finish_Date) – TO_DAYS(Start_Date))) AS DiffDays FROM your_table ORDER BY DiffDays DESC LIMIT 1

This will output only one record, and that record will have the largest date difference of all the records in your table. If you want to find the smallest difference, swap out DESC for ASC and you will get the smallest difference.

For more info on the MySQL date object, check out the MySQL Reference pages.

Hope this helps, and happy selecting.

Cheers

At the time of this writing, I am working on the site of a client that wants to add FedEx shipping estimates and options to their checkout. It sounds simple enough, right?

Wrong. Very, very wrong.

The API that one has to use to ping the FedEx servers to get a shipping quote is fairly painless to install. The documentation even provides links to downloadable examples in several programming languages. I got the ASP examples and threw them in the test folder. Right off the bat the scripts start throwing errors. I call support and as WTF is wrong. They say that our site has to be approved before we can make transaction requests against their servers. Fine. I tell them to start the approval and they will email us once this is done.

Several days pass and not a word. I call support again and they say that due to some error our request didnt go through. I resubmit and 2 days later the approval notice comes in. I test the scripts again and still get errors, only now they are new errors.

On the phone to support again, they said that we have to be added to their beta servers before testing transactions will go through. Erg. I ask that they add us. They said no more than 48 hours and it will be done. 2 days later, it is still not done. I call again, and they resubmitted the request again, and I hand up again with a very potent feeling of foreboding.

We get the email saying the clients site is added to the beta servers and we can do test transactions. Woo Hoo. I start testing and tweaking and get to a halfway decent progress on it (this is over several days) and then their servers start throwing back errors again. AAARRRRRGGGG.

Another call to support says that they are upgrading their servers with some new functions and that intermittent (in other words, drastic) errors may (will) occur but it will be all better and functioning by Monday (today). With trepidation, I pull up the testing scripts. I try it out and I get, not an error, but a positive response from the transaction query. Rock!

So this evening I start testing and tweaking again because this project is WAY overdue and WTF happens? I get an error. And not just any error. Its an error that is not mentioned anywhere in the dozens of pages of documentation and no where to be found on any website or development forum. So, here I am, 11:30 at night, tired, stressed, more than a little perturbed, and ready to murder the next FedEx Customer Care Representative that tells me that “everything is fine”.

I have spent the last 2 hours pouring over the documentation PDFs and nothing is coming. Nothing that would explain this error let alone anything that would solve it. Maybe I got some code wrong? Maybe I swapped some object IDs? I have not idea at the moment. So what would anyone in my position do?

Thats right! I am going to get up, go to the kitchen, make me some chocolate milk, and dive back into the docs and the code. This project may take my sanity, but it will never take… my… um… well, I’ll just hope it doesn’t take my sanity.

Cheers

I really though that this was going to be a really huge deal. So much was toted about both new browser versions that I was near foaming at the mouth for the releases. I am an avid Firefox user and promoter but please don’t take my opinion as biased (even though it probably is). I installed both browsers and gave them a fair shake. But honestly, after testing both browsers, I must say, that I was disappointed.

Not by just one, but both browsers.

IE7 Review
I’ll start with the obvious target for scorn and ridicule, IE7, as they are the biggest let down in this sham of a new browser war. It starts with the download. I had to hop through a few hoops to get it. Not many, but it was certainly too many to go through just to download a file. Then I realize the installer is just an installer and will download the rest of the browser. In short, another hoop.

Once it was downloaded, I hit install (finally), went through a few confirmations, and then it said I had to restart my system. (WTF? Its just a web browser). So fine, I restart my system and finish the IE install. By now, it is approx 15 minutes after going to the IE7 page.

So, all installed and ready to go, I click the icon. Then I have to configure it. Errrrgg. I click a few boxes just for fun (and to get on with using it) then get a warning saying I have to restart IE for my settings to take effect. Great. I restart IE and get, not my homepage (Google), but another warning saying that my configuration is complete! I know its complete because I hit the freaking save button! Anyway, finally I hit F6, go to Google and stop my time tracker.

Total install time: 23:18.

Some may say “Wow, that was a decent install time”. I say “That’s 23 minutes of my life I would have rather spent poking venomous, ill tempered creatures with a stick”. I’m a little sarcastic like that.

The pluses for IE7 are few so I will name them here. It is said that IE7 has the best security of any browser. Well it must because anything that complicated to configure must be secure. It also has tabbed browsing (finally) which is quite handy and would be more of a wow factor if they had added it 5 years ago when we asked for it. Other than that, the removed the tool bar and made it a flyout menu on the right which is a little cool once you get used to it.

The minuses are, well, greater than the pluses, but here are some of the highlights for the minuses:

• Still has shitty CSS validation (if not worse than previously)
• No option to set for links that have “_blank” targets to open in a new tab instead of a new window
• I hate the gold/yellow color on the icon
• Set up was too complicated for most normal people and impossible for those who aren’t computer savvy.
• Way too many confirmation boxes to go through. If I want to set something, then I set it. I meant to set it. And if I want to change it Ill do it later. Don’t keep asking me if I’m sure. If I wasn’t sure, I wouldn’t have don’t it in the first place!

In short, avoid this browser like the plague it is. IE 6 was at least as good (if not better) than IE7 so please, don’t upgrade. For the websites you visits’ sake.

Firefox 2.0
After the debacle of installing IE7, I was hoping for a bit smoother ride form FF2.0. And I was not let down.

Went to the download page, clicked one button, and in less than 30 seconds had the executable on my desktop. A quick clickity later and it was installing (after pausing only momentarily to confirm the standard install stuff).

After that was done, it informed me that it was done and thanked me for using Firefox. Another clickity on the icon and a new screen appeared (and no, it wasn’t the browser). It was the Mozilla plug-in checker and it was scanning my plug-ins for compatibility. After that, it checked for updates for the incompatible ones, found some and installed them, and informed me of what was not going to work in FF2.0 (sadly, my screen grabber extension and 2 of my themes were affected).

Once it restarted itself (it didn’t bother to ask me or confirmation) it brought up my homepage (Google) just as it did before the install.

Total install time: 6:14.

Once it was installed I looked for the new features but they were not very obvious. There was no little paperclip character telling me what was new, and no floating arrow pointing to a new menu, and my homepage wasn’t hijacked to tell me how awesome the new browser was. The new features and changes were explained on the homepage (most of them being under-the-hood fixes) and not really toted a lot.

In fact, after the 6 minutes of installing and 5 minutes of reading the changes documentation, I was cruising the web as if nothing were different. I think once of the greatest advantages to the new version of Firefox is how seamless the upgrade went and how invisible the changes are. You may notice a speed boost or some minor things, but other than that you will not notice anything. This is FF2.0s greatest achievement.

The drawbacks are also bundled with the greatness though. The lack of new “hot features” may turn off some people (maybe more than some people) as they would want something that is as earth shattering as IE7’s tab feature (meh). This is sadly not going to happen. While FF2.0 is a major (and much wanted and needed) upgrade, it is not packed with all of the razzmatazz IE7’s upgrade was. However, this was the only bad thing that I found with it.

Conclusion
I will make this as simple as I can for those who are now probably quite tired of listening to my ramblings in their brains.

Avoid IE7.

Get Firefox.

Period. Fin. End of story. Goodnight Nurse.

-Cheers

Just went to Best Buy and got a new headset with my company Christmas giftcard. (Click Here for the Logitech products page). These are pretty sweet for only $26. They sound good and my boss even commented on the better output through Skype.

OK, enough product plugging. Just wanted to show off my new toy.

Cheers

Hello All. And greetings from the internet lounge at FF 2006 Seattle.

For the 3 people on the planet who don’t know what Flash Forward is, goto www.flashforwardconference.com for info.

Sadly, i want able to attend every session but the ones I did attend were quite cool (except for the one dealing with pedagogically use, that was a little weird).

The keynote from Kevin Lynch was interesting. He basically put the minds of everyone at ease by saying the following:

“We are NOT going to screw up flash.”

So we can all be safe in the knowledge that even though the Macro-Dobe merge is not entirely wanted, Adobe will not be sticking its nose into Flash and Dreamweaver.

Another highlight was the film festival. Out of the 20 awards to be given, only 3 or the recipients were actually present. The rest sent in letters and had goons to accept for them. Also worth noting, Miss Washington USA (total hottie) was handing out the awards. When asked why she was doing it she said “Because i think flash guys are cool.” So, for all those who are new to flash, not only is it a cool app to use to make cool things, but hot chicks will flock to you.

The closing and raffle are still to come (I’m writing this at lunch break), but I’m hopeful to win the raffle and get a free version of studio 8.

Josh Shelby also attended and terrorized downtown Seattle with me during the conference. Look forward to his review of things later.

Ill post more soon.

Cheers

I made this wallpaper out of boredom and a need to do something in vector. Hope you dig it as much as i do.

Here is a wallpaper I did for a contest on the Billy Bussey forum. The theme was “BB Studios Explosion” and this was my entry.

I won tickets to the BB studios premeir party and a t-shirt.

Still waiting on the t-shirt though.

Cheers