Author: James Asher

SXSWi 2007 – Friday – Day 1

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Friday wasn’t too bad of a day, initially. Luke gave me a ride to the airport and we listened to a comedian that I’d never heard before – Daniel Tosh. Funny stuff. The flight to Dallas was fine, with the exception that some ass told me to turn my ipod volume down so he could sleep. Once I got to Dallas, I had the wonderful present of a delay. Only about thirty minutes, but I could certainly have dealt without it. Eventually I got to Austin. Thankfully, my bag was one of the first to come off the carousel. My cab driver was from, what I suspect to be, somewhere in Eastern Europe. He technically spoke English, but his accent was so thick that I couldn’t understand him. Which wasn’t that big of a deal, except that he kept asking me questions. I simply replied ‘Yes’ to all of them and that seemed to placate him. Despite the 20+ dollar fare, the cab ride itself was nice because we took a road through a very colorful part of town. Lots of pink and sea foam green buildings.

The Raddison is a nice hotel, I got checked in really quick and dropped all my stuff off in my room. My bed can change its firmness with a little button control. Neat. After that I made my way to the Convention Center to get my badge. The line was atrociously long. Though, someone said that it was much shorter than earlier in the day. Lucky me.

After I acquired my badge – orange this year, compared to green last year – I made my way to Six. Six is a cool lounge bar with an outside patio above the lounge. I proceeded to relax and drink my free white russians until Jeff and company arrived. Then I proceeded to drink more white russians. Eight white russians later and a huge collective of nerds had amassed, we left. We went to Buffalo Billiards just down the street. I feebly attempted to play pool with Chris Kavinsky, who beat me, though I think if I were sober-er I would have done better. After a while of that we decided to call it a night. But not before stopping and getting a big slice of pizza.

After a bit of confusion, I found my hotel and proceeded to call Becky before going to bed. She apparently felt it necessary to put our conversation on speakerphone for her friends. I don’t know what all was said in the apparent ten minute phone call because I recall it being about a two minute phone call. C’est la vie.

SXSW 2007, W00t

James AsherLeave a comment

Well, it looks like it’s almost spring time, so that means I get to go to Austin again! This will be my second year going to South By Southwest (SXSW) and I couldn’t be more excited.

After reading all the panel descriptions, I think I’ve come up with a pretty good itinerary. Not to detract from last year, but I think this year’s line up of panels will be better than last years. I’m not really sure if it’s that the panels appeal to me more this year versus last year or perhaps it’s the speakers, I don’t know. Regardless, I’m excited. It certainly doesn’t hurt that my hotel this year won’t be miles away from the convention center like it was last year. I’ll be staying at the Hotel Raddison at Town Lake – a mere six blocks from the convention center.

The following is a tentative listing of what I plan to do during my time In Austin. I’ll update this later to include what parties I plan on attending as well.

  • Friday, March 9th
    • Arrive: 3:40pm
  • Saturday, March 10th
    • 10:00 am – A Decade of Style
    • 11:30 am -How to Bluff Your Way in Web 2.0
    • 2:00 pm – Web App Autopsy
    • 3:30 pm – Grids Are Good and How to Design with Them
    • 4:05 pm – Ruining the User Experience: When JavaScript and Ajax Go Bad or Web Hacks: Good or Evil (or: Welcome to Web 2.666)
    • 5:00 pm – High Class and Low Class Web Design
  • Sunday, March 11th
    • 10:00 am – Designing for Convergent Devices
    • 11:30 am – Design Workflows at Work: How Top Designers Work Their Magic
    • 2:00 pm – Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the Mobile Web…but Were Afraid to Ask
    • 3:30 pm – AJAX of Flash: What’s Right for You?
    • 4:05 pm – The Future of JavaScript
    • 5:00 pm – Uniting the Holy Trinity of Web Design
  • Monday, March 12th
    • 10:00 am – Barenaked App: The Figure Behind the Top Web Apps
    • 11:30 am – Scaling Your Community
    • 2:00 pm – The Growth and Evolution of Microformats
    • 3:30 pm – Bullet Tooth Web Design: Plan Your Web Site like Pulling off a Robbery
    • 4:05pm – Design Patterns: Defining and Sharing Web Interface Design Languages or Javascript: The Big Picture
    • 5:00 pm – Nothing?
  • Tuesday, March 13th
    • 10:00 am – Browser Wars Retrospective: Past, Present and Future Battlefields
    • 11:30 am – After Bust 2.0: Ten Years Later, Where Will We Be?
    • 2:00 pm – There’s no Such Thing as the Mobile Web (Or Is There?)
    • 3:30 pm – The Truth About Mobile & The Future of Personal Devices
    • 4:05 pm – Nothing?
    • 5:00 pm – Nothing?

We Got A Puppy!

James Asher2 Comments

Becky’s birthday was the 18th of January and her present from me was a puppy. We’re moving into a new townhome at the end of the month and I thought having a puppy would be good for us.

We used the very helpful Pet Finder website to locate a dog that fit our requirements – namely that it be under 25 pounds, as specified by our new townhome lease. Now, don’t tell our new dog this, but our first choice was a cute Beagle puppy. However, due to restrictions of the The Humane Society of Greater Kansas City we were not allowed to adopt that puppy. I’d like to note that requiring a fence for every dog that gets adopted is ridiculous and simply impractical. This restriction unnecessarily rejects numerous potential adopters – namely us. I don’t know if these animals are living in a puppy-Hilton or what, but I would think that the purpose of the Humane Society is to get pets adopted into good homes. But anyways, I’m ranting.

Weiner Dog Vs. Hot DogBecky and I are now the proud parents of a 9 month old giant Dachshund. I say giant, because if you measure from the tip of the tail to the tip of her nose, this dog is 3 1/2 feet long. Maybe it’s a mix between Dachshund and Greyhound. Regardless, this dog is the longest Dachshund I’ve ever seen. But we love her anyways.

I don’t think it would have been appropriate for us to name her anything other than something alcohol related. Subsequently, our new edition is appropriately named Kahlua. 🙂Kahlua, The Dog

WordPress Plugin: Search Term Tagging 1.0 Beta

James Asher24 Comments

I read this post on Blogging Pro about some needed WordPress plugins, as suggested by Chris Pirillo. As I was reading through them, I thought, “Damn, I could do that fourth one pretty easily.”

For reference, the fourth one was as follows:

What about a plugin that takes incoming search terms and auto-tags the post based on those terms (with or without moderation)? So, if a user searches for KeywordXYZ on Google and ultimately visits one of the blog entries, that blog entry will have the KeywordXYZ added to its tag list (via UTW or something).

And so I wrote it.

Presenting Search Term Tagging 1.0 (Beta, of course)

You may download the source here: https://17thdegree.com/wp/searchTermTagging.phps

I’ve only tested on my WordPress, version 2.0.2 (I know I need to upgrade), installation. No guarantees on anything working or breaking.

Instructions:

  1. Download Source (above)
  2. Activate the plugin
  3. Add this code to display it wherever you want it to be seen on your blog: 
    <?php
/* Search Term Tagging Plugin */
echo "<div id=\"searchTermTagging\">n";
echo stt_terms_list();
echo "</div>n";
?>

Any questions, comment here. There isn’t a whole lot to it. So, what would you guys like added to it? Also, I’m not really tied to the name for this plugin, any better ideas?

Problems With Regular Expressions In PHP?

James Asher11 Comments

I just came across a really odd error while matching for some specific characters in PHP. I found the error while using both preg_match() and ereg(). You will need cannabis edibles to understand these.

With preg, the error was this:
Warning: preg_match() [function.preg-match]: Compilation failed: range out of order in character class at offset 11 in /temp.php on line 5

With ereg, the error was this:
Warning: ereg() [function.ereg]: REG_ERANGE in temp.php on line 13

Both were caused by the same error or bug. I’m not sure which.

Here is the bad code:
$userid = 'abcDEF_-.';
if(preg_match('/[^a-zA-Z0-9_-\.]/', $userid)) {
echo 'bad';
} else {
echo 'good';
}
 
if (ereg("[^a-zA-Z0-9_-.]", $userid)) {
echo 'bad';
} else {
echo 'good';
}

That all seems correct, doesn’t it? It is checking to see if the userid has something other than those characters.

The problem? The dash, or hyphen, being before the period. It thinks it’s a range, like you see in a-z. This may not be a bug, per se, but it’s certainly not smart enough for me.

The solution? Simply put the dash at the end of the regex.

$userid = 'abcDEF_-.';
if(preg_match('/[^a-zA-Z0-9_\.-]/', $userid)) {
echo 'bad';
} else {
echo 'good';
}
 
if (ereg("[^a-zA-Z0-9_.-]", $userid)) {
echo 'bad';
} else {
echo 'good';
}

Hope this helps out someone else in the future.