This is not a mundane detail, Michael.

Trying to cool down the hallway

Mike — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 08:12:35 +0000

Summer finally arrived in Bellingham. Yay! Now it’s too hot. And the hallway in our apartment is approximately 20 degrees warmer than outside or in our unit. The hallway is probably so damn hot because almost zero air moves through it during the course of a day. The 2 stairwell doors are always closed and the elevator doesn’t let in much air when it opens. At the end of the hallway is a window that lets in sunlight and the door to the “community deck.”

I had an idea this morning to prop the deck door open to let air in during the day. I figured it shouldn’t bother anyone and the door doesn’t lock so it’s not a security issue. I propped it open this morning with an empty plastic bottle and when I left for work 30 mins later it was gone. Dun dun dun…

I never see anyone in my hallway, or on the deck. I found it very weird that someone took the bottle out ruining my cooling experiment. I tried again with an empty milk jug this evening at about 9pm and it was gone again at 10:30. WTF. I think I will keep trying until our recycling bin is empty. I really wanna know who is closing the door (and indirectly taking out my recycling). It’s impossible to not notice the obsene heat in the hallway, so wouldn’t most people think it’s a great idea to prop the door open?

More as this story develops.

Can’t explain why I love these sites

Mike — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 21:13:14 +0000

http://www.isobamapresidentyet.com/ or http://www.isobamapresident.com/

Previously.

Recent Happenings

Mike — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 01:21:50 +0000

My Dad retired from 30 years as a Federal Employee

More retirement photos.

We went camping for Kelly’s bachelor party

More bachelor party photos.

Kelly and Katie got married

More wedding photos.

Flash for mac is bad for your HTTP_HOST

Mike — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 19:05:02 +0000

I’ve been testing the super awesome swfupload code for some projects at work. I have nice progress bars working and you can queue up multiple files. It’s sweet. I tested out my code in Opera, Firefox, Safari 3, IE 7, etc on Windows and Linux. Working great.

Of course, an hour before an important meeting is when we discover it doesn’t work on any mac browser. The flash debug output shows our site initialization code is just throwing a fit. No DB access settings can be found. Doesn’t make any sense why an HTTP request from flash on a mac would break our app.

Here’s the basics of how our our setup switches dev/production settings:

if ($_SERVER[‘HTTP_HOST’] == ‘example.mydesktop’) {
// LOCAL DEV SETTINGS
} else if ($_SERVER[‘HTTP_HOST’] == ‘example.com’) {
// PRODUCTION SITE SETTINGS
}

It makes considerations for www. etc. The problem in this case is that flash is adding :80 to the HTTP Host header. Instead of

GET /path/to/file HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com

Flash for mac likes to add

GET /path/to/file HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com:80

This will cause ‘example.com:80′ to show up in the php $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] variable. You can see how this would break simple host detection.

Scrabble word search

Mike — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 01:26:19 +0000

While playing scrabulous online recently, I found myself needing a site to search for words that start or end which what I have in my scrabble letters. I didn’t find anything good so I decided I would write my own. Not sure how to exactly describe the feature, I decided to call it scrabble lookup. You search for any part of a word, and it gives you lists of all the words that start with that phrase or end with that phrase. The lists show the length of the word and points earned, assuming no multipliers. It takes into consideration the maximum number of letters in scrabble which means that some words you would need the blank letters to spell.

And yes, there are words that end in q.

Greasemonkey script for twitter

Mike — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 03:45:37 +0000

A few weeks ago I was thinking about how hilarious it would be to view twitter pages with OMG: prepended to all the messages. I’ve had a post-it note attached to my monitor ever since that has 3 words: twitter greasemonkey omg.

I present my first greasemonkey script: twitter omg.

To be honest, I’ve never actually installed greasemonkey before. Writing the script was quite fun. I’ll be looking for opportunities to make a script that is actually useful…

I love code snippet challenges

Mike — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 07:01:10 +0000

I stumbled upon a blog with a random code snippet challenge. Here was the problem at hand:

Given a String (x) containing only characters a-z, write a function (f) that returns a base 10 integer, which converts the String as if it were a base 26 numeral. Function f is bijective.

I wanted to give it a stab in javascript not because it sounded particularly difficult but to play with different javascript code styles. Here’s my 4 versions:

function f(i) {
if (!i) { return 0; }
var parts, n, pow, val;
parts = i.split(”);
parts.reverse();
val = 0;
pow = 1;
for (n = 0; n < parts.length; ++n) {
val += pow * (parts[n].charCodeAt(0) - 96);
pow = pow * 26;
}
return val;
}

The first one turns the string into an array and reverses it before doing the math loop. My next try eliminates the array and iterates backwards over the string.

function f(i) {
if (!i) { return 0; }
var n, mult = 1, val = 0, offset = 96, base = 26;
for (n = i.length - 1; n > -1; n–) {
val += mult * (i.charCodeAt(n) - offset);
mult = mult * base;
}
return val;
}

Here I’m playing with chaining array functions. While I don’t create an array, this is very similar to the first try.

function f(i) {
if (!i) { return 0; }
var mult = 1, val = 0, offset = 96, base = 26;
i.split(”).reverse().forEach(function(el) {
val += mult * (el.charCodeAt(0) - offset);
mult = mult * base;
});
return val;
}

Finally, recursion instead of an iterative loop.

function f(i, mult) {
if (!i) { return 0; }
if (!mult) { mult = 1; }
var offset = 96, base = 26;
return mult * (i.charCodeAt(i.length - 1) - offset)
+ f(i.substr(0, i.length - 1), mult * base);
}

Checkout the test output of my functions. Works in Firefox 1.5+ or other browsers that implement more modern javascript functions. Shouldn’t work in IE.

Quick www. survey

Mike — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 00:41:32 +0000

I’ve been trying to pay attention to sites that either add a www or remove www from their domain. For example http://www.reddit.com/ turns into http://reddit.com/ or http://cnn.com/ turns into http://www.cnn.com/.

I’ve been defaulting any new domains I setup to remove the www. Remember, www. is deprecated.

Here’s a quick survey of some popular sites:

adobe.com	adds www
amazon.com	adds www
bbc.co.uk	adds www
bloglines.com	adds www
blogspot.com	adds www
cnn.com	adds www
engadget.com	adds www
facebook.com	adds www
forbes.com	adds www
google.com	adds www
last.fm	adds www
microsoft.com	adds www
mozilla.com	adds www
msnbc.msn.com	adds www
myspace.com	adds www
politico.com	adds www
salon.com	adds www
techcrunch.com	adds www
w3.org	adds www
washingtonpost.com	adds www
whitehouse.gov	adds www
wired.com	adds www

creativecommons.org	removes www
digg.com	removes www
gizmodo.com	removes www
news.yahoo.com	removes www
reddit.com	removes www
slashdot.org	removes www
tinyurl.com	removes www
twitter.com	removes www
wordpress.org	removes www

blogger.com	no change
boingboing.net	no change
boston.com	no change
delicious.com	no change
flickr.com	no change
geocities.com	no change
gmail.com	no change
imdb.com	no change
nytimes.com	no change
prweb.com	no change
technorati.com	no change
youtube.com	no change

Belchin’ Waffles is back!

Mike — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 02:19:49 +0000

It’s been a year or so since the domains dropped off the face of the Internet (I moved and was too lazy to put them up). They’re back!

The Original Belchin’ Waffles Zine: http://belchinwaffles.com/

Friend message board (the original twitter, lol): http://friends.belchinwaffles.com/

Douchey party pictures, etc: http://friends.belchinwaffles.com/gallery/

IE 8 Beta

Mike — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 23:24:02 +0000

IE 8 beta is out. Looks like they’re making great strides to improve their support for standards. I love that you can install the beta with out the need to uninstall it when it breaks sites. I’m hoping they keep the Emulate IE7 button for the final release. Or somehow tuck it away in a menu so the option is still there. An amazing feature for web developers would be an additional Emulate IE6 feature. Testing sites in Internet Explorer would be a breeze if that was the case. I haven’t played with the developer tools much, but I like how much easier they’re making JS debugging for IE. Here’s a post from the IE Blog about the new developer tools