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13

Yay Digg Widget!

So I know most of you came here for the digg widget, so you’ll be happy to see that it’s back! Actually, it’s been back for a little while now. I did away with the random article in favor of a sort of “epalla widget”. I know that both are running a little bit slow right now – I’m going to have the digg/reddit widgets caching every hour or so which should speed everything up. I’m pulling from the RSS feeds now instead of the widgets.

I’ve got a few updates planned, but my time has been completely consumed with work, finding Jessica a new car and a new (paying, woo!) side project that I’ve taken on. I’ll post more about the car and the side project later.

Now I know I haven’t been in here forever because I’ve got 3 plugin updates and a WordPress update to install. Boo.

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03

Matt’s New Computer

It’s finally finished!

OK, so the goal here was to try to build slowly, waiting for deals on each individual component as they came up. For about a month I was all over Slickdeals and FatWallet waiting for the best picks. I was doing well for a little while, but towards the end I got anxious and did a few impulse buys to finish out the system.

OK, ready for a parts list?

Read the rest of this entry »

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02

Thank you, Portugal

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28

I’m such a geek…

I had a revelation today and it has simultaneously brought me great relief and the somber realization that I am a total geek. For a few weeks/months now I’ve been wondering just what the hell my computer situation was going to be. What would be my media center, what would be on it, which hardware was going in what system, etc. etc. I think today I’ve finally figured out how everything is going to work, and I’ve been really excited about it ever since.

Read on if you’re actually interested in the gory details

Read the rest of this entry »

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24

We’ve moved! … sort of

Well, with a lot of help from Josh we managed to move pretty much all the big stuff to the new apartment. We’ve got the couch, TV, furniture and the computers all moved and everything is still working beautifully (so far). Unfortunately, all the food and dishes are still at the old place, but we can bring stuff over as we need it. I also don’t have a desk to put any of my stuff on on, so Jess’ computer is set up on the coffee table (she sits on the bean bag) and I only got around to installing the new video card and checking out the new PC. IT POSTS! I’ll be hammering out about a million mail-in-rebates later this evening (I hope).

I’ll post more pictures and whatnot of the new place and the new computer soon. I feel some ikea trips coming on.

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22

Reminder: Top Gear S13x01

Top Gear season 13 started yesterday. The first episode had the bitchin Ferrari FXX (which apparently you can buy but not.. have), a new Lotus which they were calling a super car despite the fact that it’s slower than the Exige S, and a mediocre race between a bike, train and car.

Oh and I almost forgot.

THE STIG IS REVEALED!!

.. not really

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19

I would wear this one

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18

Manny’s was delicious

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18

Can the brands beat a custom build yet?

I’m reposting this because I accidentally deleted it. Thank you google cache

My old gaming/development computer is finally starting to show its age. It’s 5 years old now with minimal upgrades so I’m not terribly heartbroken, but I’ve run across three games now that I can’t reasonably play and that’s more than enough justification for me to upgrade.

I’ve always built my own computers and so far I’ve been approaching my new build with this intention. But it occurred to me that I only do this for the cost savings. I have no real desire to put my computer together, I just want to save a bit of money on premium parts. So I decided it would be prudent to see if any of the big brands can match a custom build at a given price point. I put together a newegg wish list so you can see my basis for comparison. Then I went to some of the big manufacturers and tried my best to match these specs with their models.

Read the rest of this entry »

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12

Dear Chipotle,

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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10

So long, daily dish

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

Using Javascript to calculate Dates

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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02

Fuck you Javascript

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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31

I need a bicycle

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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29

Exporting to Excel from a Query in PHP/MySQL

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.

// 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

Restoring Checkbox Selections from a Database

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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23

Bring Back Damn Interesting!!

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

Wooh long weekend!

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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21

I know a guy who would wear this

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20

A little perspective for EU Antitrust regulators

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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