Posts from — December 2004

Most of the features of the picture manager are done now. IE support and lots of visual fixes are still to be done, but it’s ready for people to play around with it. I made a little page so that people who don’t have access to the band board can try it out. Make sure you’re logged out of the band board, then click here. Only works in firefox currently. That page makes a contrived public user, so you’ll all see the same thing. This could introduce some unrealistic race conditions that I’m not very concerned about (the same user using the system from multiple places). Give it a try and let me know if you run into reproducible problems.

One of my projects for the winter was to build a photo sharing application for the marching band. This needs to integrate well with the existing band board and make it easy for band members to share photos and comment on each other’s photos. I threw together the very basics of the site a couple of days ago, but tonight I worked on the photo management portion. This is what each user will use to add, modify and remove their photos. Instead of imitating “typical” web photo galllery interfaces, I decided that this management portion should be done with DHTML (surprise!). The result has me really excited, you can upload photos, browse different categories, modify photos, and more without reloading the page once (though I cheated and used an IFRAME for the uploading, but it’s very slick). I used JavaScript, DOM, PHP, SQL and XML to implement it. Plus some HTML, I suppose. Visually it could use some work, but I’m really excited about how this works so far. I should make a public demo so that other people can try it… and it would be a good thing to have on a resume.

Oh yeah, I’ve gotta add IE support. And figure out what to do about macs.

I hope to open it to band members for testing for the beginning of the spring semester.

“Wouldn’t it be cool if…” suggestions are welcome; best to get them in now before I’ve done too much.

Slate has an interesting article comparing how “dangerous” Iraq is compared to Vietnam, adjusting for changing medical technology and practices.

Jerry Orbach died from prostate cancer. He played one of my favorite characters on Law and Order.

If you’re looking for any information about the earthquake, I found that wikipedia has a great collection of information, text, animations, graphs, pictures, and links. Really well done.

After a 4 day hiatus caused by Christmas, I ran again today. The bulk of the workout was a flat 3 mile run on the treadmill. I found my old arch supports for my shoes. They made my legs feel better, but my feet will probably have blisters since they moved around during the run. I was able to keep an 8min/mile pace, which was good, plus I sprinted at a 6:30 pace for the last quarter mile.
3.5/80/60

Christmas went well.. I’m not going to bore you (and myself) with details, but I traveled a lot and got to see a lot of family members, many of whom I hadn’t seen in years. I actually have a moderate amount of activity in the next couple of weeks: a fair amount of travel, some work, hopefully a fair amount of fun stuff too. I’ll (most likely at this point) basically be out of state from Friday for 1 week, hitting NY, NJ, PA, and MA.

I bought myself a whole bunch of computer stuff last night, basically replacing the bulk of my 3.5 year old computer. I got an Athlon 64 3500, a new motherboard, new case, 512 MB RAM, and a 120GB SATA hard drive. This thing ought to be really fast and should hold me through until I get a real job (1.5+ years). If I’m lucky, I’ll get to put it together before I leave on Friday, but I might need to wait until I get back.

There’s not much reason for me to be doing things on 5 hours of sleep during vacation, so I think I’m gonna go back to bed.

This is why we should all go to Taco Bell a lot. Plus the chalupas are good, and the friendly service. And the romantic atmosphere.

I tried to go to sleep really early tonight (I have allergies and a slight fever now), but that didn’t work too well. After waking up and thinking random and nonrandom things for a while, I ended up writing part of my manager speech for the band banquet in my head. Worried that I would forget it all, I got out of bed and went to the computer. I got some of my thoughts down before forgetting the rest and ended up talking to a few people for a while. Found out about the terrible times a few friends are having this week, I really wish I could do more (or really.. anything) to help. Especially right before Christmas.

Lots to do tomorrow, but I’m not quite tired yet.

Today’s run was shorter, as I’m suffering from some sort of allergies. I did a warmup, then ran a 1/4 mile hill (10% incline) at a good pace, slowed down for a bit, then ran a mile in 6:30. I didn’t think I was capable of doing that these days.. I continue to surprise myself. I didn’t feel completely exhausted afterward, either. Running fast on the treadmill makes me feel a bit unsafe since I could hit either end if I vary my pace or stride a bit. So far, no accidents though.
2.5/80/60