Java!

Posted on by Jordan

I have a personal goal to not post with apologies regarding my lack of posting, sadly this may veer distressingly close to that line…

Interesting things have been happening in our lives, I just haven’t had a lot of time to pull together posts on such.

Things eating into my time include the fact that our church is in the process of moving to a new location. The new location just needs a near total demolition and remodel before we can move! I have had the opportunity to smash drywall and disassemble an industrial grade HVAC system that has been hanging from the ceiling for several decades 🙂

Most recently I spent the weekend at a Java developers conference here in Des Moines commonly referred to as “No Fluff”

The event lets you pack about  eleven 90-minute sessions plus a keynote and some breakout time into a single weekend. The majority of the sessions I attended were what you could call information dense. I learned a lot about subjects as specific as Spring configuration, as “hey look how cool this is” as a tech-demo of Spock or Ratpack, or as theoretical as a talk entitled “The complexity of complexity.” I can honestly say every single session was worth my time to attend.

While I can’t begin to pass along what I gleaned from the sessions, I can share a video made by a speaker and MC of the event. I don’t know how much context will help this make sense, but “Maven” is a tool used by programmers to automate the process of taking all the little pieces of code and “building” them into an actual program. It’s a useful tool, but like most tools in this space it has it’s detractors.

 

-Jordan

Household Projects

Posted on by Jordan

A couple of projects to talk about today, one more urgent than the other:

First up, our oven suffered a burned out heating element:

After a little research I found out this isn’t unheard of, and replacing the element is very simple. The big news here is just that Heather was standing right there when it happened and could shut the oven down before anything too drastic happened. Even then there was more molten metal involved than I like to have in my house.

The next item up I won’t go into much detail about just yet, but I am working up a simple database driven web app to solve a problem for Heather. It will be interesting to see if I can produce something fully featured enough for her to consider using it, but if nothing else it’s an interesting project and I don’t feel like I am reinventing the wheel.

How interesting? Well, it’s build on a Django, Python and MySQL. I have experience in none of those, so step one was just to get them working. My initial plan had been to run my dev environment inside a VMWare player, but I wasted a week trying to get a VM I was happy with and then decided to just run the whole dev environment on my PC. Fun fact, Python guys aren’t that into Windows. I wound up having to manually compile a few things… and then ran smack into the error in this post.

Hopefully I will have an actual demo site up in a few more weeks now that I have the tech stack configured and running.

-Jordan

 

Development Note

Posted on by Jordan

Putting the finishing touches on the front page overhaul, and felt like I needed to make this explicit:

When you are looking for javascript documentation, Google is often going to point you to w3Schools or any number of other almost useful sites. I think those sites must put more energy into being ranked in Google than having useful information.

The place you should go, and I mean the only place, is the Mozilla Developer Network. I wish I had figured that out months ago, but at least I finally have a good reference for the javascript api (and they call out things like best-practices too!).

Anyway, I think things will be ready to push live later today, so that’s pretty exciting! **crosses fingers**

-Jordan

Web Work

Posted on by Jordan

Wow, you blink and another week goes by.

So, what happened this week?

Heather’s parents came to visit. The occasion was the Huskers playing against Iowa State University. We only managed to obtain two tickets, as it turns out Husker fans suck up all the tickets far quicker than our planning could account for. That may have been ok though, as much as it pains me to say it, Heather is not a football fan. She would not have her moneys worth out of a ticket.

The game was… intense to put it gently, but in the end, the Huskers won it, if only by the smallest of margins.

Sunday afternoon Heather had the opportunity to take family pictures for a coworker. She was on cloud nine for hours, both during the actual picture taking, and the culling and cleanup stages on the pictures.

I would love to show off some of her work, but I don’t know that it is really proper to be throwing up pictures of other peoples kids here.

In less dramatic news, I played around with PHP and javascript to produce these. They are really rough, but I have grand plans for doing a super stripped down version of a gallery, after the program “Gallery” messed up my picture links. We shall see how long that motivation holds out 🙂

Up next week:

Nebraska Deer Season, and  The “Cake Boss” visits Des Moines. I will let you guess as to who is attending what event.

-Jordan

Changes!

Posted on by Jordan

I mentioned a few weeks back that I had worked on cloning the existing front page, and supporting pages, to an archive area.

Today I finally sat down and put together a new main page.

It isn’t anything fancy really, but I am kind of proud of it considering I coded it up from scratch.

The old wedding page was a free template I hacked up to meet our needs. Not to say that there is anything wrong with hacking up templates and tutorials, but I still wanted to force myself to approach the new site like a programmer. I didn’t use any canned code, and I didn’t use any graphical tools, just Eclipse and an FTP client.

Heather thinks it needs a picture of us on it…. expect some changes down the road I suppose 🙂

-Jordan

Small Steps To The Revamp

Posted on by Jordan

Well, it took me 45 minutes of digging around to get this done… and you probably haven’t even noticed the difference yet, but I actually made some changes to the site!

If you look off to the right, you should see a little site meter bar (unless you are reading this via RSS…. and then well pff)

I used to run site meter on the blog, but I had hacked it into the side bar code. During a WordPress upgrade somewhere along the way, my *ahem* edits got lost. I really wanted to do something closer to respectable this time around.

I undertook to write a side-bar widget, and ended up gutting a hello world tutorial as my foundation: Tutorial: WordPress 2.8 Widget API. My changes only caused the entire blog to display as an error message for about two minutes. I suppose I shouldn’t test on the live blog, but what fun would that be?

It’s kind of sad that my finished product does considerably less than the “hello world” example 🙂

If I can stay motivated maybe I will clean it up a little and set it up such that you could drop in another site meter key, but I haven’t had much luck sticking with hobby programming projects as of late.

Speaking of hobby programming, I found A slick little setup for doing local source control called Mercurial.  I guess I could setup a full blown revision control system, considering I already run a server, but this is a nice local method for tracking changes to source code. It does a whole lot more than that, but that is beyond the scope of this blog.

One final note on website changes, I opened the blog up so Google / Bing / Yahoo / whatever else can see it. It isn’t like the blog was hidden before it just wasn’t indexed, and it seems silly to hide it from search engines. (especially when I want to be able to search the page for things using something more powerful than the built-in search).

-Jordan