Bully Bully

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I know I haven’t posted in awhile. But it’s because I’m obsessed with a new project. I get ideas for new projects all the time. I normally entertain these ideas, and then let them go. I’m very picky about which ones I decide to make physical. Because once I take one on, I’m consumed with it until it’s done.

This new project is called ‘Bully Bully’. It’s a remake of my old stock market program ‘The Bob Fund’. Because it’s a big project, I needed to have a lot of good reasons to actually do it.

  •  I opened Roth IRA accounts at Scottrade for Deb and myself. ‘The Bob Fund’ was built for a single account. I needed a new system that will manage multiple portfolios.
  • ‘The Bob Fund’ runs on my Windows desktop machine at home. I wanted to design a new system that can run on an open source hosting service, freeing up my personal machine.
  • I’ve been working in ASP.NET for awhile, and I don’t like it. I wanted to get back into PHP, and this is a good excuse to do that.
  • I’ve learned a lot about XML and XML Stylesheets. It will be fun to design a new system from scratch, taking full advantage of these technologies by building them right into the core of it.
  • I’ve just finished a book on web design called Don’t Make Me Think and I’m very eager to try out all the new stuff I’ve learned.
 

Glam-O-Rama

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We have this ritual, whenever we fly, Deb buys a copy of Vanity Fair magazine. After she’s done with it, I go through it and clip out the really cool ads. High quality commercial graphic art kind of stuff. This time there were also some goodies from the in-flight magazine from Southwest Airlines. Here is what appealed to me on our latest trip. Mostly booze, real estate, and Cirque Du Soleil ads.

 

Bumper stickers I’d like to see

 

Code Monkey

This is a boring post about programming. If you’re not into technical trivialities, you may want to skip this one.

Lately I’ve been playing around with a lot of different programming languages. If you combine them all together, using each one the way it was designed, you can get some amazing results.
 
I have a webpage that reads data, sorts it, and displays it in a table. Clicking on the column headings changes the sorted display. Normally a webserver would have to fetch, and sort, and transmit that information over the internet every time you click the page.

I’ve found a way, with a small amount of JavaScript and XSLT code, to make browsers do all that work. Browsers download the data one time only, sort it there, render it on the page, handle all the re-sorting and re-rendering. This greatly improves response time, and takes a load off the webservers and database servers.

Click here to see this bad boy (source code included) in action.

 

Mappings

View Actual SizeWhen I was a kid I decorated one entire wall of my bedroom with one huge map. Floor to ceiling, wall to wall. I found all the topographical U.S. geological survey maps of the local area, with our house in the very center. It was beautiful. Interesting colorful patterns when viewed at a distance, and fascinating detail up close. I was always finding some curious spot on the map that would prompt an adventure to see that place in person.

I’ve often toyed with the idea of doing that again, with a wall in my home office, or maybe in tile on the floor. Rather than take on an entire wall, I thought it best to do a 16×20 section first. Something I could frame, if it turned out well.

Recently I was looking at a detailed New York City map on Google. It was amazing, their graphical representations of the buildings is fantastic. This is perfect I thought. Plus, I could add collage elements of our recent visit, like theater tickets, and place them on the map right over the actual theater. Very cool. I also created a additional layer for the subway lines. These bright colored lines seem to hold the entire thing together.

Click here to see the full image. Can you imagine an entire wall done like this? I think it would be beautiful. I think if we ever moved to New York, I would have to do it.

 

Tourist


When we went to New York
It was obvious we didn’t know anything
It was all new and so ‘first time’
We explored and had adventures
It was exciting, and inspiring

When we got back to Vegas a friend said
“Now you should tourist on Vegas with that same spirit”
I thought that was a great idea
Take a fresh look around
Like a tourist, like an immigrant, like a young person
I found a “happenings” type of magazine
I saw that the Mirage has topless swimming pools
When the hell did that happen?
And how many other things are going on that I don’t know about?
Answer – I don’t know
But probably a lot

So, I’m looking around now
And I see that this is a very good age to be alive in
And Las Vegas is a very good city to be young in
Or have young eyes in