blinker with a "you"

Ok, I know the title is cheesy. blinkur.com is just an idea I am playing with. After being stuck in traffic several times, I thought it would be cool to have an easy way to check the roads not only before I left but also in transit and as I notice the cars backing up. It would be nice to know if it will clear up in a few miles or if I should prepare myself to sit for a while.

Along with blinkur|traffic, I'm trying to work through the idea of blinkur|directions. blinkur|directions will tailor the driving directions to the person taking the trip not only where you are going. For example if you are traveling with children, your directions may be different as they take you by more places to stop, on a motorcycle, get a more scenic route, etc. Directions that care as much about who's going as where they are going.

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New Edition

No, I'm not talking about the group but about the the new edition to my family...my son!! My wife delivered a beautiful baby boy last night at 8:50 p.m. Both mom, baby, and big sister are well and we are just praying to have everyone home from the hospital soon.

lions, tigers, and BEARS....oh my!

As my pregnant wife, three year old daughter and I went for a walk around our neighborhood today, we were startled as a black bear ran out in front of us across the street. I have seen them before while in my car but never on our street and never while out for a walk. I guess the dogs aren't the only thing we have to worry about anymore and you won't see me out for a walk holding a sandwich anytime soon . :)

Beanboy hard at work....

Last Thursday night (July 28) I sent Beanboy out to crawl 30 Java sites. As of today, and 8.9 gig of data collected, he' still crawling...hasn't even stopped for a water break. I can definitely see that if this is something I want to keep updated, I am going to need to get a few machines each crawling a subset of the list and then merging the results. Hopefully beanboy will finish soon as I am running out of space on my old linux machine.

Pro Spring

I recently picked up a copy of Pro Spring and I must say I am impressed. Some of the other online material about Spring can quickly get confusing and difficult to read. Pro Spring (at least the first few chapters) has been enjoyable to read and I am learning a lot about the framework. I am planning to start a Java web project in the next few months which will be built on Spring so I am sure the new knowledge will come in handy!

Beanboy

After seeing Marco's Beeblex, I was inspired to create a search engine for Java and Beanboy was born. It is still very early in development and I only have a handful of sites indexed, but it might be useful if you do Java development.

Development has been fairly easy so far as I have been utilizing nutch which is built on top of lucene. At some point I might pull out the nutch layer and use lucene directly but nutch helped me get up and running fast. I am currently running a crawl on about 30 Java sites which will hopefully finish up this weekend. If you are interested in checking it out, visit Beanboy. It is currently just running off an old linux box in my basement so forgive me if it is slow.

AJAX-safe for solid surfaces and Safari

While working on some code today I decided to use Ajax for one of the searches. It is nothing major, just a basic search that returns the matching results from the db as you type in the search params (the js is kicked off on the onKeyUp event). One thing I was surprised to find is Safari seemed to handle it all better than Firefox. They both worked ok for the most part, I just found that if I typed fast, Firefox sometimes seemed to get confused and even locked up one time while Safari handled it all very well. It didn't work at all in IE 5.2 but who cares about IE 5.2.....right?

Dennis the Menace

As my family and friends in northwest Florida hunker down and prepare for Dennis to roll down their streets..please say a prayer that it will spare them the huge destruction they are still dealing with from Ivan.

I grew up outside of Pensacola, Florida and we went back for a visit this spring and it was amazing and sad to see the damage one storm can cause. Many people there are still working to get their lives back to where they were before Ivan hit so we are praying that this storm will be all bark and no bite.

Cruisin'

Our build process currently consists of an ant script that checks out the code from cvs and runs our unit tests. Next week I will add a task to generate the code docs as well but there really isn't much to it. While the build process is fine, I really want to strive for a continuous integration approach. I briefly looked at Rephlux but really want to give CruiseControl a shot. I know it is geared toward java projects but I am curious to hear if anyone is using it for their php builds. It is supposed to work with jUnit so I am not sure if it will know what to do with the SimpleTest output or not....might end up writing some java code to make it all PHP/SimpleTest friendly.

If anyone is using CruiseControl to handle your php builds, please let me know what you think or if you are using Rephlux and like it, let me know also.

Let's play catch!

Yesterday, I had a chance to play a bit with exceptions. I have used them before in java but never in php. While I only have the basics in my code now, I am excited about their potential. In the past, when I wrote a method, I would just return false on any type of error. The method did contain error checking but ultimately would just send back false to let the calling code know there was a problem. This works ok but causes the calling code to handle some level of error checking and doesn't really allow the caller to know what is going on......sort of like going to the doctor and simply hearing..."Yep, there's a problem" and then having him walk out the door. I am hoping that exceptions will allow me to better control the error checking and keep it closer to the methods causing the trouble....then again I have onlly begun to play and may hate exceptions tomorrow.

Now to go play catch with my code.