the second phase

So I finally got the galleries going and I think I’ve gotten them to integrate into the site well enough.  I had contemplated messing with some of the flickr additions but I’m not sure I want to bother with that.

I’ll try and write up a few paragraphs about what I had to do to accomplish it but it’s 1 in the morning and I gotta go golfing tomorrow morning!

I’ve upgraded the blog to wordpress 2.6 and hopefully I’ll figure out how to write some decent looking gallerys like Matt has over at http://ma.tt.

So yeah, it happened again - I failed to update my blog for a few months as things got pretty crazy around here.   Most of this craziness was centered around moving to a new house as our rent expired on our old house.  The ironic thing being that we moved all of a fourth of a mile.  We’re literally one street over from where we used to live.  That, combined with stuff at work finally picking up and life in general has made for a hectic time.

I hate it when I don’t update for this long because there are so many things I’d love to talk about but I don’t want to write 10 pages worth of stuff.  Unfortunately, this means that I don’t dedicate enough time to those things.  A horrible dilemma.

So, to that end, I’ve decided I’ll break this post up into many individual posts over the next few days about all the things that have been going on, what I’ve been up to, what new tech stuff I’m involved in and the like.

I’ll also try and go back to some old posts that I promised would come and never did ( like that cooking software review.. ).

So please, stay tuned for alot of updates in the next few days.

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…