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Would it kill you to take a note from the Pancheros of the world and mix up the ingredients of the burrito a little bit before rolling it up? I have now finished the rice-and-beef portion of my burrito, and am unfortunately moving on to the cheese-salsa-lettuce-hot sauce portion, which I suspect will be considerably less delicious.

Thank you.

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So I thought it would be a good idea to have a daily post of all the stuff that I’ve been digging, but it turns out it was just way too much clutter going up. There’s no reason we need to have a post every single day. So, I’ve done away with the daily dish for now, and I’m planning to move back to the old model where there was a permanent widget of the latest feeds from digg/reddit and the I’ll add “hot posts” from the forums. First, however, I have to figure out how the hell I want it to look, so it may take me some time.

I’ll post a quick “how-to” eventually for anyone interested in creating a daily post from their digg and reddit feeds, so stay tuned for that.

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02

This is also a part of this obnoxious and ridiculous reporting application that I’m using. I have a need to populate start date and end fields with a more user-friendly system. So I’ve got a dropdown with a few set options (Today, Last Week, Week to Date, etc.). Most of the code for these things is available around the internet, but the tricky part was calculating the weekly dates relative to the current date. IE grabbing “Week to date” and “Last Week” date ranges.

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I just spent 45 minutes tracking down an error because I had a typo somewhere. I had to insert alerts into the document until I found where it was breaking. I know there are debuggers and IE will tell me more about where it breaks and all that – but damnit, it was just supposed to be a quick fix.

today is gonna be awesome.

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I’m thinking in the $250 – $450 used range. I want a road bike so I could (in theory) keep up with Brandan, but not some hardcore ridiculous thing that I can’t go near without padded shorts. There are lots of varieties, heights, wheel sizes, pedal types, etc. etc. that I have to look into. I may head down to re-cycle in Uptown sometime this week to look into it.

I’m not sure I see myself commuting to work, but I need a good way to get out of the house every now and then

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I’m mostly posting this for my own future reference. This is the simplest example in the world for exporting from a simple SQL query to an Excel file while preserving row headers.

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// assuming we got our query from an htmlspecialchars encoded, slashes added POST
$z = htmlspecialchars_decode(stripslashes($_POST['query']));
$q = mysql_query($z);
$result = '';
 
// add the row headers
$numfields = mysql_num_fields($q);
for ($i=0; $i<$numfields; $i++) {
	$result .= mysql_field_name($q, $i) . "\t";
}
 
/* cycle through the query and add each row, note the casting via &$val and the \t separators for new columns.  Using commas, semicolons, etc. will create a .csv but Excel will not interpret it correctly as an .xls download */
while ($r = mysql_fetch_assoc($q)) {
	$result .= "\n";
	foreach ($r as &$val) {
		$result .= "$val\t";
	}
 
}
 
header('Content-type: application/ms-excel');
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=report.xls");
header("Pragma: no-cache");
header("Expires: 0");
echo $result;
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28

In a project I’m working on right now I’m making a dynamic reporting application. Basically I’m trying to take what I can do easily with a few lines of SQL and turn it into a usable interface for people who don’t know what they’re doing. It has summary reporting (group by), filters (wheres), etc. As you can imagine, this system has a plethora of fields that can be selected to be included in the report. No big deal, they’re all dynamically generated anyway. The catch is when I want to save a report, effectively restoring selections from a database.

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23

I used to love killing time by reading the long and damned interesting articles on Damn Interesting. Alas, I have gotten through the entire archive. At least, all of it that looks interesting. This blog is awesome, yet they haven’t posted anything new since October 2008. This is unacceptable.

Come Back, Damn Interesting.

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22

The weeks have been cruising by way too fast lately. It feels like the weekends go straight to Sunday evening and I’m stuck going “how the hell did that happen?”. Hopefully Memorial Day will be a nice little break. I plan to spend it shopping and killing zombies.

Jess and I signed our new lease yesterday and we have the new place on June 20th. We’ll have both apartments for the last week and a half of June which should let us be pretty relaxed about moving. So – if anyone wants to come visit that week or the last weekend in June we’ll have an extra apartment :) . The new unit is right across the street and quite a bit bigger than our last one (for $10 less a month – woooh savings). We also have real live guest parking now so you guys won’t have to search or pay for parking when you come downtown.

It still hasn’t quite sunk in that we’ll be moving yet. Time has been flying lately though so I suspect the next month will go by super fast.

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As you may or may not have heard, Microsoft is due in European court in June to defend itself for bundling Internet Explorer with Windows. Opera started the suit, claiming that IE “harmed the web” and demanded that IE be unbundled. Since then Google and Mozilla have jumped on the gravy train, and who can blame them?

But it’s pure bullshit. An operating system has to come with a browser. I don’t think anybody is seriously suggesting that MS should not bundle a browser with Windows (although that would be a great “fuck you” in its own right). So what are we really saying here? They should bundle a competitors’ product?

Nevermind that Microsoft has a legitimate case about google becoming a de-facto search monopoly if virtually any other browser is bundled (Firefox, Opera, and Chrome all use Google as the default search engine). What on Earth makes the EU think they can force Microsoft to bundle a competitors’ product?

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So Roger Federer upended Nadal on Clay to win the Madrid Open, his first title since October. I’ve been pulling for him since the last couple of heart breaking wins Nadal has pulled out against him in major opens. For some reason Federer just falls apart against Nadal all the time, so it’s good to see him pull one through.

I sure wish the two best players in the world were a bit more evenly matched. It’s sad to see Federer kick so much ass and then just lose his cool completely against Nadal.

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16

My dad’s 98 Expedition is about at the end of its useful life. He’s well into the 100ks and it’s about time for a new vehicle. My dad really felt the sting recently when gas was up over $4.00/gallon. The listed mileage for his truck is 12 city / 16 highway – and that’s before the EPA raised the standards and before he put a bill of miles on it. If you’re filling a 24 gallon tank every week, well, you do the math.

Long story short, my dad is now looking into buying a midsize SUV. He needs something capable of hauling our boat and some occasional lumber. No problem, shouldn’t be tough to find a midsize SUV that beats the Expedition for fuel economy right? Except my dad doesn’t want to stop there. He wants to buy a hybrid midsize SUV. Specifically, he wants to buy a Toyota Highlander Hybrid.

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I guess this is the first post here now, woooohooo. As you can see I’m making a lot of changes on epalla. The most noticeable being the giant blue rainbow on the right side of the site (and the new template in general). This is still very much a work in progress; hopefully I’ll have it up and running beautifully by the end of the weekend.

As you can see there are a few big things missing. It is my experience that most of you who still visit the site occasionally do so for the links in the digg widget. It’s gone right now but never fear! It will be back, I think. In the meantime if you can’t live without those digg links (hah) you can get to them here.

To be honest, I’m not a huge fan of digg anymore. Most of the same stuff comes on reddit earlier and the discussion has some real substance to go with the one-liners. I don’t know if I’ll ever stop going to digg completely, but don’t be surprised if it’s a reddit widget this time around and not a digg one.

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