Archive for 2007/06

I just returned home from a meeting tonight. One of the things I love about riding a bike is the enhanced sense of smell. On my way to the meeting I could smell people smoking cigars, bread baking and diesel trucks. Since I wear ear plugs, my sense of smell is exaggerated. [...]

Announced today, Sunbird and Lightning, the Mozilla Calendaring project (one standalone, one integrated) has released a major update. Time to throw this into the mix with my end-to-end synchronization project and see how it fares.
First 30 second impressions are slightly nicer UI and it’s a little bit faster. Uninstalling 0.3 and installing 0.5 [...]

Thanks to Dan, I took a look at jQuery today. Although Alex Russell convinced me at a 106 Miles meeting some 18 months ago to use Dojo, I’ve grown tired of waiting for the API to stabilize and have been looking for something else that I could use to Get Things Done. What [...]

I saw this mailbox in front of Moscone center today advertising uspsjedimaster.com. Dressed as R2D2 from Star Wars, there are apparently a lot of these mailboxes around the country. This was the first I had heard about it.
Although I think it’s cute, and if done extremely rarely, could be a successful buzz builder, [...]

Quick tip – if you use PostgreSQL, you should look into the INTERVAL data type. It’s a great way of expressing periods of time without using actual dates and makes things like calendaring and recurring events very easy.
Unfortunately, ColdFusion’s CFQUERYPARAM doesn’t have support for the INTERVAL type so I had to hack around to [...]

I’m in a quandry. I am building a reserved number system that will let a manager keep track of which competitor is entitled to a favorite number. These organizations run different types of events so this number manager must provide some flexibility. A schema with example data follows:

Participant
Event Type
Bicycle
Class
Grid
#

Brian

12

Joe
X-Country

12

Brian
X-Country
Klein
Pro
Red
12

Heidi
X-Country
Specialized
Pro
Blue
12

Mary

1002

Frank
Downhill

777

What IS OK:

Because this [...]

If you want to search by zip code, provide distance-from calculations or verify the city and state when someone enters a zip code, you’ll need a zip code database.
For MotorsportReg.com, I originally used a free but outdated USA zip code database with latitude and longitude. I know it’s outdated because my application sends me [...]

Jason from 37 Signals says the iPhone ads are “Perfect Advertising“. The ads themselves are quite nice but this phone will not work as well in person as it does in the ads because:

Humans have dirty hands. with the entire thing being a screen that you touch, it is going to be filthy. [...]