blog.Techie-Jim.net

While looking for solutions to problems I run into, I wonder if this little peach is possible:

Can you use Ruby, Python, or PHP to capture server events? Such as "on download" to capture file download events? "On connection close" to run code when a client browser finishes loading a page and disconnects (or "on load complete")?

I looked through the documentation and it does not seem possible, at least from the scripting side. What about Apache? Is it possible to write something in the htaccess or config file, possibly like (pseudo-code):

if (file in directory)
    execute adownload.php
end

Anyone know of a solution?

If not, it would certainly be a great feature for future Apache or Ruby/Python/PHP releases!

What am I doing this weekend? Mostly relaxing. Some freelance work. I have some design ideas for a website for a local business to work on. I am not doing anything for the 4th (Independence Day). I have not done anything in a few years. I don't care to spend any money on fireworks anymore (a few people in the neighborhood always buy enough for the whole town). It is not worth it and I don't care to go to any professional shows either. Just a night at home eating hamburgers from the grill with my mom. I also hope for good weather this weekend. I would like to ride my bike and get outside some.

To all those that celebrate America's Independence, have a great (and safe) 4th of July!

(pictured at top -- image I took of fireworks from a previous 4th of July using my Canon EOS 300D [Digital Rebel])

This post is a catchup post. What has been going on this past summer so far? Well, quite a lot. One of my busiest summers on record!

First a bit out my job at YSU: I am close to done with one project (just debuggin/training to be done) and, as usual, had a few other yearly small projects to do. Repeat stuff mostly. The kind of stuff I get tired of doing. One of the biggest reasons for me to move away when I graduate (more on that in an upcoming post).

On the landscaping side we did not get a larger job that would have been a great intro into larger projects but the work has been steady. We seem to be getting one job after the other and it is going pretty well. I also have a new design for the website done and should be putting it live soon (awaiting a review and a few changes). The major purchase this year: a new Milwakee 6950-20 Miter Saw (pictured right -- picture from cpomilwaukee.com). I bought it to replace the quickly aging and malfunctioning Craftsman Miter Saw. I did not know just how beastly this thing was until it was out of the box and running! Putting the two saws side-by-side the Milwakee is not only much larger than the Craftsman, it is also much more well built. I felt like if I just kicked the Craftsman it would shatter into a million pieces. Kicking the Milwakee saw would probably do no damage to the saw, but would probably break my foot. The Craftsman Saw, when running, sounds similar to a cheap hand drill. The Milwakee's motor sound is much louder (it scared me when I first heard it). When at full speed it sounds as though I am in a loud woodshop full of wood-cutting saws. The Milwakee saw comes with a 5 year warranty so it should last quite a while. Like the Bosch hammer-drill I bought last year, we should get plenty of use out of it.

I have been wanting to go bowling for quite a while. I finally got to the lanes this past Monday. I went with my sister and her boyfriend. They beat me (of course), but considering I had not gone bowling in over a year I did fairly decent. I made a decent come-back in the last few frames. I only scored between 100 and 120. I used to bowl ~200 average years ago so it is starting to come back to me.

I have not been updating my blog very much. Why? Well, during school semesters it becomes a an issue of lacking time. Not so much over the summer (though 2 jobs does help). Unfortunately I was torn over what to post here: Do I post only entries about what I do, helpful code tips and hints or just rant about my life? I hesitated to do the former because I am very maticulous when it comes to blogging about code. I often ask myself questions before hand, such as:

Would this be something I want to divulge?
Is it too close to work I am doing?
Would it be too dumb of a post that some flamer will just write comments about how ignorant or ill-informed I was?
Would it even be interesting?
To how many people would it make sense?

Not to mention that I am a perfectionist when it comes to those things. It would typically take me weeks of pouring over it to make sure there were minimal mistakes. So I don't feel that it would be worth the time and effort to only write about programming.

I could also just write about new and upcoming technologies. It is a hit-or-miss subject which some are interested in and others are not. Unfortunatly I get my information from the net (sites and sources many do not even know exist) but at the same time it just seems like another one of the million and one reposts of the same old news (at least to me).

On the other hand I did not want to write about my life because my blog would just become another one of those millions of blogs that are lost within the Internet that include nothing but ranting, drama-filled posts about some random Sue or Dick that no one would even know about.

So, what do I write about? Well, life has won out. I would like to write more in my blog and writing solely about technology or programming just seemed much too time-consuming and mostly pointless. That is not to say that I will not write about them now and again, but many of my posts from now on may not include those topics.

My mom spotted a white squirrel in the backyard today. I had never seen an white squirrel before so I grabbed my camera... unfortunately it was getting dark so the pictures came out blurry (oh well). In the picture at the left you can see the white squirrel climbing around the branches.

The squirrel was climbing around the tree pretty fast so it was also difficult to get a clean shot.

I am not sure what kind of squirrel it is, but considering its size it may be a juvenile. There were a couple of flying squirrels living in that tree so it is possible that it is a baby flying squirrel.

Below is the albino squirrels friend or sibling sitting on a branch chewing away at what appeared to be a piece of pine cone:

I got a new phone, and it does want I want... mostly! I got a Blackberry Pearl and so far it is the best phone I have had. The main reason I wanted to get a Blackberry is because it is currently the only decent smart phone that Pandora (customizable internet radio) supports! I listen to Pandora a lot at work and home. Now I have it in my car and when I ride my bike and when I am digging out ponds! I got extra chargers, a memory card, a dashboard mount, and a set of stereo wireless headphones to go with it as well.

That is where the "mostly" comes in. The headset works to listen to the music, but the play/pause and fast-forward and rewind keys do not function with the Pandora application. I will send them an email suggesting that the play/pause button on any bluetooth headset/device should work as it was designed to and the fast-forward button should "thumbs-up" the song and rewind should "thumbs-down" the song.

Here is a photo and video (I took with the phone) of a Life Flight helicopter landing at Cleveland Clinic yesterday:

    I have been looking at Xara software for a while now. Mainly because early builds from years gone were available for various flavors of Linux. Unfortunately their latest is all commercial and it appears that development on the Linux / open source version has long since ended.

    However, a new product they offered caught my eye: Web Designer. It appeared to use elements of their graphics design application in a new web design and, at first, appeared to offer features I was certain would only exist after the widespread adoption of the CSS 3 standard. The most notable feature being the use of fluid text around images positioned anywhere on the page. Unfortunately, a look at their “example website,” shows that it is simply a parlor trick. Essentially, any design made in their software HAS to be a fixed width, either wise their trick falls through the cracks. I have a suspicion that JavaScript may provide a way to wrap text around an image in the center of a paragraph, but a few attempts at such a program proved that it would most-likely require a very lengthy code that may not operate well on all browsers (more to do with overall speed and performance than compatibility). That is not what is even attempted in their program. Since the designs are all fixed-width (e.g. the designs do not expand or contract to fit any browser window size) they simply create new division (DIV) tags for each wrapped line using separate CSS margin settings to simulate actual free-flowing text around an image with transparency or an image positioned within the center of text column (with text wrapping around both sides of the image). This was disappointing. While the software does output in XHTML and CSS 2.1 standards, I thought for a moment they had found a non-hackish way to wrap text around an image positioned anywhere. The proof that it is a hack lies simply in the width settings. If you set the width of the main containing divisions of the page to 100% or auto, the hacked text-flow around images suddenly falls apart. While many basic designers find this approach fine and an easy fix to a long-sought-after problem, to us developers and programmers it is simply caving in to the limitations of the current style-sheet standards. Just makes me long for the day when the upcoming CSS 3 standard is able to be widely used.