Author: Joe

Categories
Sports

Mercer Madness Dodgeball Tournament

DodgeballThe first annual Mercer Madness Tournament is being held on April 12th. I’m in the process of assembling a team to participate is this monumental event. There’s four divisions being offered, looks like we’ll be participating in the Adult Open division.

I don’t think I’ve played dodgeball in probably 12 or more years, but I’ve seen the movie, and it didn’t seem too difficult. Now that I think about it, it’d be amazing if Chuck Norris was at this tournament like in the film. It would be a true honor to throw in Norris’ presence.

If you’re interested in playing or have an idea for a team name (haven’t thought on one quite yet) please let me know.

Categories
Development

WordPress Custom Fields

Found the Custom Fields feature of WordPress to be very useful. I’m using them on the posts on this site that have ratings. It’s pretty cool. I’ve also used custom fields for one of my clients so that they can easily embed videos into their blogs.

Setting up a custom field is real easy. Within the WordPress admin near the bottom of a Write Post or Edit Post screen is an option for Custom Fields. You can select from existing field names the enter a value for that custom field or you can type a new custom field name into the key field to create a new custom field. So, creating custom fields is pretty easy, but how do you now present that info?

WordPress offers a get_post_meta() function to work with the custom fields. Below is an example in PHP of using the get_post_meta() to display the contents of a custom field named video.

echo get_post_meta($post->ID, "video", true);

Three parameters are being passed to get_post_meta. The first is the ID of the current post, then the name of the custom field, and last is if you want to return a single string or an array.

Categories
Movies

Blood Diner

Blood DinerI’m not sure how or why, but I wound up watching many very bad B horror films this weekend. The one that really stood out amongst the crop was Blood Diner. Scott picked it from what was available On Demand, and we all just sat there and watched. Apparently the film was form 1987 and involves two brothers who open a diner and kill people in hopes of resurrecting an Egyptian goddess Shitaar. Oh yeah, under the guidance of their uncles’s brain that lives in a jar.

There was also a wrestler by the name of Little Jimmy Hitler. So as I’m sure this post makes no sense, the film made even less. This movie was horrible, one of the worst I’ve ever seen. But the name Shitaar will forever be etched in the minds of those whom braved this film on that night. Looking for a really bad B horror film to laugh at then this gets the highest of recommendation.

Categories
Development

Adding a Row to a Google Docs Spreadsheet

I create a lot of web forms and like to share the data with those whom the form was created for. And while I was brushing my teeth the other morning I thought why not dump it straight to a Google Docs Spreadsheet, since most of the people I do this for are very familiar with working with a spreadsheet anyway.

Thanks to the Google Data Spreadsheets API this and many other features are possible. The site is well documented and the Zend Framework PHP client is a huge help. Luckily someone else had tried the same thing and documented it on his blog, so check that out as that was a tremendous help for me figuring out just how to do this.

Categories
Video Games

Super Metroid

Super MetroidDownloaded Super Metroid for the Virtual Console and have been playing that for a little bit. It was originally released in 1994 for the Super Nintendo and is considered to be one of the greatest games of all time. After playing through it I’d have to agree.

While the graphics and sound are very dated by todays standards, I was hooked on the game. Found myself spending many hours in hope of defeating Mother Brain. I never played this game when it was originally released, but glad I did now. Very impressive game, especially for when it came out.

Categories
Development

YouTube API updated

YouTubeThe folks at Google have added some very cool features to the YouTube API. They now offer the ability to upload and make other write calls using the API. So now it’d be possible to have users make comments or even upload their own videos without leaving your site. This is very cool and I can already think of a few things I’d like to try out with this.

It looks like they’re also offering a Javascript API that allows you to control the player via javascript. Along with that they’re also offering a chromeless player too. So now you can make custom controls for embedded YouTube videos. I can’t wait to get started with these features. A custom player can really make the movies work better with someone’s site.

The PHP Client Library (Zend Framework 1.50RC2) was also updated today too.