V2 - Vanish’s Vault

So, my doctor got down to the nitty-gritty of my life and said “Your 5 year ultimatum is almost up, and you have not succeeding in losing, and keeping off the weight you need to survive”. Yummy, huh? For those that don’t know/remember, my doctor gave me 5 years to lose a significant amount of weight, and keep it off, or my Diabetes would begin to control my life, instead of me controlling it. Not something he relished telling me, but it’s better to be straight and honest than to give patients false hope.

At my last visit, my blood sugar, for the first time in 5 years, was elevated. Damn, he was right. Diet wasn’t cutting it anymore, I was losing the battle. He explained that 5 years ago I wasn’t truly a diabetic. I was what is known as “Glucose Intolerant”. The doctors who reviewed my case at the time felt it was better to just tell me I was Diabetic so I would get free training and counseling on  lifestyle changes I had to make to get things under control. It worked… for 4.5 years or so.

As my doctor was writing out the prescription for Diabetic medication I would have to start taking again, I asked for 3 more months to make a concrete change in my lifestyle. He agreed. That time is up and I’m headed back soon, but I wanted to report my progress to others. I joined Weight Watchers (which I had always thought of as a joke) and have since lost over 20 pounds. 33 pounds is my target loss before my birthday in March. Dawn convinced me to start working out at home instead of wasting money at he gym on personal trainers. Instead of renewing our membership and fighting huge “resolution” crowds, then not using our membership for 9 months of the year, we instead purchased a BowFlex Xtreme II resistance workout machine, and a NordicTrak Elite 3200 treadmill. Total cost is roughly what we spent each year on gym membership and personal trainer fees.

Combined with some older equipment we have I now have a damned good at-home gym. The pounds will come flying off soon, when I finish the workout regimen for Dawn and myself. Look for a smaller, more svelte version of me in the near future!

Yes, things change, and for me they are changing at a rapid rate. When last I blogged, I was extolling the excitement of the development I am doing at Fisher Controls. I went beyond the Oracle DBs around the world queries into the realm of AJAX coding to provide a simplified, yet incredibly powerful web application for a manufacturing plant in Bao’an, China. It was so well coded and provided such tremendous functionality that other plants around the world have requested implementation of the application for their use. Sweet!

That’s not my big announcement, though…

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For those who don’t know, I left my job of nearly 10 years at Prairie Meadows to pursue new challenges. I landed at Fisher Controls International, LLC. (A subsidiary of Emerson Process Management) They are the world’s largest valve and controls manufacturer.

I am learning Java to support an application that uses XSLT to read HTML templates to generate PDF files of certified documents. (How’s that for a mouthful of buzzwords?) As nice and useful as that is, it isn’t the cool part. I cleaned up my PHP 5 OOP framework code, fully commented it, and am reproducing their web applications using it. But wait! That’s not the cool thing either. It’s the new applications I’m writing for them that are cool. It’s taking my development knowledge and skills to the next level, and their QA system far beyond anything they’ve had in the past.

I wrote a script that takes user-input and queries the local Oracle DB to return the necessary data in a table. If the record is not found locally, it then proceeds, one at a time, to query Oracle DBs around the world until it finds the requested record. Pretty slick. I thought “Man this is cool! I’ve never really used Oracle on the back-end for a web application before, and here I am in 2 days connecting to Oracle servers in 5 countries around the globe, literally, in seconds.” As cool as that was, it pales compared to this week.

My boss gets back from a trip to China and has a project for me to tackle. They need a form that auto generates an unique identifier based on the date, sets the current date automatically, and accepts input for a PO Number. Ok, no biggie. Once the PO Number is input, the page should populate the rest of the form automatically, including a table of component specifics. This table should also have input fields for each component and some of the form field names have to change based on the result set from the DB. Umm… wow. That was a mouthful. But wait! After all of that, it needs to accept user input for authorization and then, upon submitting the automated form, it needs to generate an XML file to be used for inputting into that Java system I learned first. Phew!

2 days later, and it’s done. Oh yeah. Love me some XAJAX, baby! I set an onBlur event on PONumber field which calls back to a PHP function that queries several tables in the database, automatically fills out the page complete with uniquely identified input fields for each component. Generates an XML file in the required directory on the server for importing and it’s good to go.

It works so well, it probably won’t be long before the other facilities start asking for it. FREAKING AWESOME!

If you want to try your hand at 3D art, now is the time!

Head on over to DAZ Productions and grab all the freebies from DAZ|Studio (a competent replacement for Poser), Victoria 3, Michael 3, Aiko 3 and Emotiguy models for working with, all the cool stuff in their Weekly Freebie Archive, and the great stuff in their forum’s Freepozitory. Sure, there are lots of other sites to nab free 3D Poser compatible offerings, and I can provide a list of some of the best if asked, but DAZ is the content king in this genre.

If posing and rendering isn’t enough for you, and you want to start making your own models, well there are plenty of free options for that as well. The two best free 3D modeling applications are Blender and Wings 3D.

I have been asked what sites I frequent for information on coding web sites, whether XHTML, CSS, ASP or PHP. While such a list would be massive, there are two sites which are collections of resources that every web developer should know about. I visit these sites regularly for ideas, research, and just plain curiosity piquing.

The first site is the Web Developer’s Handbook, a massive list of resources maintained by Vitaly Friedman.

The other site is Essential Web Designer Bookmarks, a nicely organized collection of resources maintained by Bernd Lutz.

Give both a look-see. I think you’ll find them valuable.

Wow, it’s been a while! Sorry about that.

I’ve been extremely busy for the past several months. Things aren’t looking any better, however I get to be busy with things I enjoy now. So I suppose I should make my first return posting a sort of catch up with my life kinda thing. What the hell, why not? Oh how can I bore thee, let me count the ways…

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I recently received an email questioning the status of my existence, the sender having noticed that I haven’t hit my blog in over two months. “Are you dead? I didn’t see you in the obituaries. If you are dead, whoever is reading this for you should post about your demise on your blog… then sell me the gaminggenesis.com domain” Yeah, very funny. Oddly enough the sender isn’t a member of G2, so requesting ownership of that domain is even more humorous.

In light of my prolonged Blog Absence, I present to you the mega blog: A posting that actually has segments that fit into every category I have defined thus far. Grab a sandwich, your beverage of choice, and turn off your brain for a few while you traverse the ramblings of a man in over his head.

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Last Friday was my birthday. One would think I’d be depressed that I am now officially on the downhill side of life. One would be wrong.

Getting older doesn’t bother me. Never has really. So I’m 35. Whoopee. Feels the same as 34, which felt the same as 33, which.. you get the idea. Instead what made the difference to me was where I am in life, and that is what made my birthday a joy. I like to spend a little time alone on my birthday reflecting on my life a bit. Evaluate what I’ve accomplished, see what goals I have yet to attain, and set some new goals and standards for my life.

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A funny thing happened to me on the way to a blog the other day. My computing world flip-flopped, then shifted side to side. It all happened with the now infamous Apple Cube screen transition. I am in HEAVEN I tell you.

A couple years back I was looking for a good Virtual Desktop application, with an excellent pager system. I found precisely none that were usable. (This is all Mac OS X, BTW) The best at the time was Rich’s Desktop Manager, and I hated it. (Sorry, Rich) It just didn’t “feel” right somehow and it settled in my mind as more of a hassle than just one desktop managed through Expose. Blah. I checked again from time to time, but never found anything satisfying… until two days ago.

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My friend Bryan Baker (ka-klick) mentioned on the DM-MUG list that he preferred DarwinPorts (hereafter “Ports”) to Fink. I countered that Ports had managed to not work well for me and had at one point bungled my OS. Fink, on the other hand, had never given me problems. Bryan’s reason for preferring Ports was that it didn’t use it’s own pseudo directory structure to store installed files and libraries. I thought about it awhile and decided I should check out ports again. It had been nearly a year since I had done so. Ironically while I was debating this with myself, I was in the middle of updating Fink from CVS… and it failed.

Rather than dig through the errors, correct the problem by hand, and re-update from CVS, I dowloaded Ports, installed it and had a surprise. There was no GUI. I went about the ports site trying to find out what happened to the GUI only to find a note that it was being recoded from scratch to correct the numerous errors the previous versions had suffered. Aha! Perhaps that was my problem all along. I’m one of those people who use the command line regularly and am proficient at doing so, but still prefer a GUI if one is available. I went to the command line, and installed a few libs. It went quite well. So it gave it my “If you can do THIS, you’re my new software of choice” test. I typed:

port install freetds

And guess what happened? It installed it. No errors, fully configured, and I was able to get PHP to see and use it. Fink could never do it, and compiling freetds by hand on Mac OS is an effort in emotional pain and futility. I removed every piece of Fink crap I could find. Interestingly, the next weekend I decided to rebuild my Mac from scratch to cleanse it of all the alpha and beta testing I often do. The fresh install of everything and of ports had the install system flying. Bryan was right, it’s a better OSS package management system. I still disagree with his claim that it doesn’t use it’s own pseudo directory structure. It puts everything under /opt/ the same as Fink put everything under /sw/ but it still works better. I highly recommend it.