This post isn’t about any dramatic or sweeping changes going on around here, I just felt I would keep people in the loop in case you’ve noticed some stuff going on in the past week or two.

First of all, you will probably notice that at this point in time the design of the site has been changed. This is due to the fact that along with the recent upgrade on the server to WordPress2.5, I have finally done away with K2. K2’s developers are “hard at work” (using their words – not that I don’t believe they are) to publish a release that fully supports WP2.5, but honestly I don’t much care anymore. K2 was a huge boon when the core WordPress installation didn’t do a lot of the cool functionality that K2 could provide, but nowadays the added bonuses just aren’t worth the headaches to me whenever the need to upgrade WordPress comes about. The past two upgrades have gotten completely messed up thanks to K2, meaning I couldn’t use the theme without some form of a “patch”; the upgrade to 2.5 rendered the entire admin section useless without either performing a database removal of the reference to K2 or, thanks to one intelligent soul who figured this out and shared the solution with others, adding some code to the admin login script so that you could actually log in to manage the site. Sorry K2, it was fun while it lasted but I’m moving on. It’s true that other themes may themselves have unforeseen compatibility issues with future upgrades, but they typically don’t hook into the core functionality of WordPress nearly as much as K2 did so future speed bumps will be much easier to overcome.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tonight the wife and I went to the Wine Tasting event hosted by LARC, her former employer. It was a good time last year, and it was a nice excuse for her to see a lot of her former coworkers again since she’s been at her new job for about 6 weeks or so. She never had a problem with the people she worked with, but the commute was hell and the new job looked to be very promising for her in multiple facets which was why she had left. And the added bonus this year was that she wasn’t “working” the event either, which meant we could spend all our time there together instead of her having to make sure only VIP’s made it into the VIP room or taking tickets from people at the door.

This being their second year putting on the event, it was obvious they had learned some things from last year. Number one, they brought in bottled water which was clutch. Last year they didn’t have anything bottled on hand and most of the people there were complaining about the water in the pitchers “tasting funny” since it was, truly, just tap water from a kitchen in the back of the Elks Lodge where the event was held. They also brought in some beer as well, which was a nice change of pace even though I am a wine fan. One of the distributors had some Dogfish Head on hand, where I got to experience their seasonal Aprihop for the first time. WOW is all I can say; what a great brew. It’s very reminiscent of Magic Hat’s #9, only it seems to hit all the right notes even better than the #9 does it. Another “Apricot Pale Ale”, Aprihop just really surprised me and I will definitely be buying some of this in the near future.

Read the rest of this entry »

It sometimes amazes me that after being in web development for as long as I have, some things can still jump up and bite you if you haven’t run into them before. This past week I ran into one such occasion.

I was developing a web-based “FTP” application for one of my clients, with Job 1 being “it has to work on the Mac”. The previous application that had been developed for this client by a third-party was clunky to use, both from a front-end and management area perspective, oftentimes would not work quite right, and many times outright fail – and 95% of the system errors occurred on Macs due to the way the code was written. Cutting out a lot of the details, the new system proposed would work like so… a front-end user would log into the system, be able to manage their previously uploaded files or view files that my customer had sent to them via the application, or upload a new file. If they uploaded a file, the page they looked at contained a few form fields which would be inserted into the database, which mostly helped track which Job Number the file belonged to and some other relevant data, a comments field, and the file field itself. The page also included two iframes, one hidden and one visible; we had decided to go with a simple remote scripting solution because we felt in the interest of the client’s budget that we wouldn’t try and implement anything fancier. In order to keep the user looking at the page they were currently on, the form had the target attribute point to the hidden iframe where it could process the information but otherwise keep the user in “stasis”: the second iframe would load a fairly standard progress bar upon form submission which would reload itself to allow user feedback for the user uploading the file, letting them see how their upload was doing as they waited. Once the actual processing script was complete, with the file written to the server’s hard drive and the database inserts all doing what they needed to do, an alert would be raised to the user letting them know the upload was successful and they would be redirected back to their main view.

Read the rest of this entry »