Author: Joe

Categories
Adventure

Christmas 2009

Christmas this year wasn’t too bad. Everyone I got a gift(s) for really seemed to appreciate what I’d gotten them. Got Dad a bunch of tools, something he always seems to need but never seems to have. I’m guessing they’ll all be missing too in just a few weeks. Got my younger brother Assassin’s Creed 2 for the xbox 360 and a big book of dogs. He’s always checking out different dogs online, not sure why but he likes that a lot.

I also got my older brother a credit card sized survival kit. It’s actually really cool, has a knife, whistle, light, toothpick, tweezers, and a fire starting thing all in a tiny credit card size package, very cool. Also got him a survival book to go along with the kit and a Judas Priest boxed set.

My Mom has had a pretty rough year. Losing her Mom, some of her siblings acting certifiably insane and really treating her very poorly, and my brothers just really letting her down. So I made her a big collage of old photos to remind her of the good times, back before everyone was so messed up. I scanned and re-touched and cleaned them up in Photoshop, bringing a lot of the ancient one’s back to life. She really appreciated it a great deal, and happy cried. So that made me and everyone else very happy, so that was a really good thing.

I got some pretty cool stuff too. We always joke that my Mom always buys us the worst clothes, which she does. So as I’m opening stuff up, she says how she asked the girl in the store to pick stuff out for me. I thought that was pretty funny, and it actually did work. All in all a pretty good Christmas with the family.

Categories
Development

WordPress 2.9 Embeds

WordPress 2.9 was released today, and the upgrade has some very impressive features. So far the coolest one to me and I’m sure that will be for many of my clients is the Embeds functionality.

Now all you have to do to embed something into a Post or Page is to simply paste the video’s URL on a separate line. WordPress will automatically properly embed the URL. It supports most of the popular formats.

Previously I’ve come up with some Custom Fields solutions to do something very similar to this, but building it right into WordPress should make the process even easier. Thanks WordPress, very cool.

Check out all the other WordPress 2.9 goodness.

Categories
Development

Calculate distance of longitude and latitude using MySQL

Recently a client wanted a search to be performed to return records that were within x amount of miles from a zip code.

Luckily there are a couple of pretty nifty ways of getting this to work with a MySQL db. The first obstacle was that the data didn’t have latitude and longitude coordinates in the db. Luckily there’s a couple of API’s available where we can feed them an address and it will return coordinates. I do recommend the Yahoo! Geo Technologies for this, they’re extremely fast and well documented.

Now if the records do have their coordinates stored in the db, we can make a SQL statement to find the records that are a certain distance from a point.

I found this SQL example here.

SELECT (
(ACOS(SIN(39.339806 * PI() / 180) * SIN(lat * PI() / 180) + COS(39.339806 * PI() / 180) * COS(lat * PI() / 180) * COS((-74.575122 - lon) * PI() / 180)) * 180 / PI()) * 60 * 1.1515)
AS distance, last_name, first_name, city
FROM doctors
HAVING distance<=10
ORDER BY distance ASC

The above example has a starting point hard-coded into it, which can be altered to whatever your starting point is. The HAVING then filters out in miles the records whose value is less than or equal to 10 miles. Again this value can be altered.

Again, thanks to My Random Blog for sharing.

Categories
Sports

Thanksgiving Game 2009

We managed to get in a fine game of flag football in this morning. Thanks to Wes and Josh for rounding up enough able bodies to play as well as providing flags and cones for a respectable game.

A big surprise addition to this game for me were the Shepherd and a slimmed down Alex both playing. And they both played very well. Alex did burn me for a deep score, probably the longest play of the game. The Shepherd with a late QB switch almost lead his team to victory on this fine morning.

However on this day, I was fortunate enough to find myself on the winning side. Kyle gave us some very solid QB play. Wes played an extremely good 2 way day, with the most difficult task of guarding Josh for most of the game. The gunslinger Dave had some amazing catches, including the game winning TD. Very impressive.

Haha, I had a ton of drops. 2 or 3 of which were definite touchdowns. Oops, sorry guys.

Great game with a great bunch of guys. We’ll have to have a rematch next year if all of our bodies have recovered by then.

Categories
Design Development

Playtown Cafe

Playtown CafeFinished up a site a few weeks ago for Playtown Cafe in Boca Raton, Florida. They were looking for a website and overall design package that was unique, fun, and really stood out. Geoff designed a logo for them that really nailed all those requirements.

The site is powered by WordPress, so that the client can easily maintain the site on their own. The client who claimed to be, “horrible with computers” was able to pick up the WordPress CMS in very short time and has really run with it. It’s always great when you can have a client see how easy it is to keep a site fresh and up to date using the latest web technologies available today.

Under the hood this site is using some very impressive technology to power it.

Working with client was a great experience. They had a great idea of what they needed, but also were open enough with creative and tech input that was a pleasure to work with. Check out Playtown Cafe.

Categories
Development

YUI 3 Gallery

I’ve really been meaning to make the switch over from YUI 2.x to 3.x, and I do believe the YUI 3 Gallery has made up my mind. The Gallery is a repository of YUI 3 modules that aren’t addressed by the core library. Also, all modules are released under the same BSD license as the YUI Library.

Even though the Gallery is fairly new, the amount of modules is already pretty impressive. Some that I’m very excited to play with are:

This looks very cool, and if you’re using YUI3 go now.