the second phase

Alot of my time recently at work has been delegated to working on an internal tool that I wrote a long, long time ago.  When I originally created the tool ( which, by the way, is for task tracking/project management ) - I wrote it mainly as a lesson in XML/XSLT creation.  It wasn’t anything I ever intended to maintain.

Oops.

Now I’m left with this stinky pile of garbage code that I wrote, with a ‘It looked good at the time’ interface.  Unfortunately, my boss loves it.  Mainly because the part that does work - generating our weekly status reports - is all he cares about.

So once I started maintaining it, I realized just how awful XML/XSLT is and what a pain in the royal ass it is to do anything flexible in it.  So I started converting all the pages back to pure php pages.  Then, about half way through, I discovered jquery ( que light shining from heavens ) and started integrating some of that into the pages to make it more friendly.

Once I had started doing that, I realized how bad I am at organizing CSS files and styles and I’ve gotten so bored with this project that I haven’t bothered to go back and fix them.

What this all means, however, is that I’ve ended up with a project that, at the moment, is half XML/XLST, half pure php, with jquery integrated some places and pure javascript in others, with some disorganized CSS files laying around ( in some cases, I got so sick of styles I started putting them inline in the page.. oops. ) and generally this badly organized, badly coded mess of crap.

And that brings me to my final point - I put it up on phase2! I’ve no idea why I did this - if only to show you how (not) glorious my work is.  But then it turns out that my provider doesn’t have php5, which means I didn’t have access to mysqli.  Then combine that with security things they threw in the mix and I had a whole mess of new bugs.  I worked through them tonight and the page seems, for the most part, up and running.

So if you’d like to, check out my status, project management, task tracking tool here: http://www.phase2.net/status/

I made two logins ( oh yeah, I had to rip out all the LDAP stuff I had put in because we use it at work and change the DB around to use regular passwords ):

Login: admin, Password: admin

Login: jsmith, Password: jsmith

In all honesty, if someone finds this thing useful and wants it, by all means - let me know.  I’ll answer any questions you may have on it and help you if you run into some awful code issue of mine, but I doubt any one is going to want this thing.

And the funny thing is, I still have to keep improving it at work.  Oy.

I’ve always loved to cook. Unfortunately, I’m one of those people who only likes to cook with really fresh ingredients and I only end up cooking about once a month. That results in me buying alot of ingredients over and over and over, which costs me money, which makes me cook less. A vicious downward spiral.

However, I still like to collect recipes in hopes that one day I’ll have my gourmet kitchen and all the utensils and equipment for cooking that I’ll ever need. In the meantime, I have the need to really start categorizing and storing these recipes that I’ve been collecting. I went searching today for OSX software that was developed to do just that and I was surprised when I found out how many packages there are out there for recipe organization.

They all have different features and all are quite cheap, weighing in at about 25$ or so. As a ‘woot!’ bonus, they all have free downloads to try ‘em out, so I figured I’d do just that. After they run out, I’ll see which one I like the most and buy it.

So here’s the competitors for Haji’s Recipe Software Cookoff!

• MacGourmet
• CookWare Deluxe
• YummySoup
• Connoisseur 
• iCuistot
• Yum

I’ll be reviewing them based on these features:

1. Interface
2. iPod/iPhone export
3. Website recipe import
4. Shopping lists
5. Search capabilities
6. Printing Options
7. Website Export
8. Fullscreen view for cooking
9. Nutritional values
10. Meal planning
11. Price

As an added bonus to my quest for recipe goodness, I came upon three other little gems: BarGenieMac, Netflix Freak and BeerAlchemy.

I’ll post my reviews up in a few weeks.

I upgraded to wordpress 2.5.1 today. weee…

I’ll have my review of Hyperic 3.2.2 posted in a bit and I’ll be frank to say that I’m not too happy with it.

My brother recently started getting some new tattoos and it got me to thinking that I should get mine re-done and maybe get some new ones. ( I know my girlfriend is cringing at this point. ). If you haven’t seen my tattoos yet, I’m sure there are some pictures in my gallery somewhere of them but in order to save you the browsing time - I like tribals. I like the clean, artistic design of them. I like how they stay nice and bold, even as the tattoo gets older. And if you know me at all, I do not simply like dragons, I love them. I collect them. Hell, the Tiger calls me the Dragon.

The problem with tribal designs is that they are everywhere and when they are everywhere, it means you get some really crappy ones and some really good ones. After about 3 weeks of scouring the web, I found Dali Rău. This guy is just amazing. And the best part, he’s into computers and technology. Hell, he has his own wordpress 2.5 blog. I mean, c’mon, how cool is that? Most tattoo artists around here are just into bikes and skulls and crap. Here’s a dude who actually knows what XHTML is and is pissed when his site doesn’t validate. ( FYI, my site doesn’t validate, due to some issues with how Wordpress displays the link categories.. ). The only downfall? He lives in Japan.

So, me and the Tiger are thinking of planning an excursion for sometime later this year to make the trip to Japan, drink lots of sake, eat lots of sushi and get ourselves some tattoos from the venerable Dali.

If you’re into tattoos at all, check his site out.

I screwed up Week 2 of phase 2 again. I got through 3 days and then a combination of work and laziness on the weekend resulted in only 3 of 6 workouts being done. Way too low for me for me to consider a week accomplished.

So, once again, I’m restarting week 2. I completed today with no issues.

In other news, I was able to visit our San Diego campus last week on Friday to meet with our parent company and man oh man. Just take a look at these photos to see how insane the campus is:

What I wouldn’t give to work there and not the office I’m in. It’s not just the campus, it’s all about their corporate policies and such. They really understand what it means to be an enterprise company. Hopefully some of their learnings will come filter down to our management.