dot dot romkey

…a new project.

For some reason when I’m away from home and sitting in a hotel, I often really want to code.

I enjoy the initial act of creating something much more than I enjoy the act of completing and deploying it. This has been the case pretty much since I started creating things. There’s a thrill for me in the initial exploration of an idea, the initial design of a piece of software or web site, and in learning how to use new tools or pieces of software to build the thing that I want to build.

I lose interest when it comes to polishing it and deploying it, though.

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Apple’s first security update of 2009 for MacOS X may solve some security issues in the OS but it also seriously breaks Perl by installing old versions of some modules along with Perl. It looks like Perl works okay for things that MacOS X uses it for, but if you do development using it or have installed other modules than what it came bundled with you may find that it no longer works.
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I’m almost ready to update the production version of UVFood.com. I’ve been testing against Firefox during development, but I can’t possibly deploy the update without testing against other browsers. Safari turned up no surprises, and Opera has turned up a weird little problem that doesn’t make any sense.

But of course it was Internet Explorer that had the biggest issues.

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I’m rewriting UVFood to use jQuery instead of Prototype. I’m liking jQuery quite a bit and my code’s looking much better (and tighter).

I don’t always have reliable online access when I’m coding – in particular, I was on a bus today for a couple of hours and didn’t always have Internet access. There are a couple of dashboard widgets for MacOS X which I found that helped out on the jQuery documentation front.

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I have a bunch of half-written things that I haven’t finished because I haven’t been happy with the state of cross-posting between this blog and Livejournal and I haven’t really had the time to deal with fixing it.

I’m cross-posting to make it easier for friends on LJ to read my blog entries. I find that using LJ to follow friends is a great feature; it’s what keeps me coming back to LJ.

It looks like I have it working now. I currently have it set up to cross-post everything. I’ll be writing a lot more technical articles in the near term, with some non-technical stuff mixed in. If you’d rather that I didn’t cross-post, or didn’t cross-post everything, let me know and I’ll see what I can figure out about limiting it.

I have cross-posting set up to require that comments be left here instead of on LJ. If you want to comment, you can use OpenID to login – instead of creating an account, just use the OpenID option on the account creation page. You can then authenticate yourself with Livejournal and not have another account to keep track of.
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I often need to store a timestamp in the UVFood database. There are lots of things I need timestamps for – recording the time that a user account was made or a modification was made, for instance.

While MySQL has quite an assortment of date and time formats which it supports, I usually find it most convenient to store timestamps as an INT and just put the UNIX seconds since the epoch value in there. I don’t need to do funky searches on the timestamps, I just need to do simple comparisons.

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I’ve been adding some belated email notifications to UVFood and in the process I ran into a frustrating problem: it wasn’t working at all.

The email notifications are for things like messages people send through the contact form, new user signups, errors. After those are working I’m finally adding welcome emails, confirmation emails and eventually optional weekly summaries of changes to users’ favorites.
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Right now I have links to a few social sites that I use on the sidebar. These sites include Twitter, delicious.com, Google Reader (selected articles that I thought were interesting enough to share), and last.fm (music I’ve been listening to recently). At some point I’ll get UVFood and Flickr in there, too.

I like the idea of presenting my activity on these sites in the sidebar. It gives you an idea of what I’m up to, and helps make this blog a hub for my activity. At first I used various Wordpress plugins that were tailored to the particular sites. There were two problems with doing that. First, their formatting was all over the place. They used different heading tags, made assumptions about formatting, embedded their own formatting. They looked like a mess when taken together. The second problem was that they all loaded their info in real time, which meant it could take minutes to load a dot-dot-romkey page. No good at all.

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