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All we need is pie. Pie, pie is all we need...

Collectively, Dan, Amy, and I have made six pies for tonight's pie party at the new house, which we are tentatively calling Maniac Mansion, for now. Pumpkin, chocolate pudding, formulation Z-626 chocolate-orange pudding, absolutely veggie, and a completely sustainable and local elk pie. Unfortunately, the pie party is still two hours away, so I am burning through time waiting for tasty tasty food.

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The house finally got its washer and dryer from the property management agency last weekend. A not insignificant smell was lifted from my hamper during that weekend, as I had not done laundry since I had moved at the end of October. I was a day away from having to wear a button down shirt, my clean clothes supply had drifted so low. Interestingly, I still had another week's worth of socks, and yet I always change them every single day.

Since the laundry was finally getting done, I finally took that as a sign that I should begin unpacking my boxes, which I had just left along the edges of my room for three weeks. There is nothing like moving to make me realize how little possessions I wished I owned. So, I purged about a quarter of my possessions. Had a tub full of clothes, another tub full of books, and a third of more books and miscellaneous items that went to Goodwill. And, I completely filled up our recycling roll cart with old papers, notebooks, cards, and letters.

Last, I tackled the six photo albums from my childhood. Over the course of two afternoons, I distilled eighteen years of photographs and collected items to a single shoebox and small album of the essentials, those things I would never wish to lose or forget. I then did the same thing to all of the photographs taken since high school that I had collected in envelopes kept in a shoebox. Much was tossed, but with hindsight I could see what really mattered and still matters to me, which is what I kept. Felt good to clean.

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Been burning through a number of books in the last couple weeks, but I am still trying to build up my strength to tackle Richard Dawnkins' The God Delusion. Just seems like one of those books that I need to be in a focused, mentally energetic mood to tackle. The other books though are a bit more light fair and in typical fashion I cruised through them.

Coraline - Neil Gaiman's story of a young girl who discovers in her apartment a door that leads to an alternate reality complete with more attentive and interesting parents and neighbors. Quite good, and I suspect the movie will be quite entertaining. Still, if you are a Gaiman fan, the story was too short to really rank as one of his best works.

Count of Monte Cristo - Probably one of my favorite books and this is my third or fourth reading. And, I just discovered, thanks to Wikipedia, that the story may have been inspired by real events. Great novel, highly suggested.

Guide to Getting It On! - Dan has most of his books in our living room, due to the copious amount of space needing to be filled, and one idle afternoon I picked this up and started flipping through it. While predominantly about sex in numerous forms, it is also an educational guide on all aspects of human growth and sexuality. Nearly every topic you can imagine is covered in an honest, straightforward manner: anatomy, massaging, abstinence, emotions, sex laws. If I have children, they will have this book to read.

Dharma Bums - Kerouac's semi-fictional account of a young man named Ray who is trying to reconcile many aspects of his life with his understanding of the tenets of Buddhism. Not sure how much I really enjoyed this book. Entire chapters I loved, such as when he is climbing Matterhorn Peak with Japhy or being a fire lookout. That joy and calm from being in the outdoors I understand completely. However, the city-life aspects of the book and the traveling to home and back left me feeling a bit apathetic about the main character. Might have to reread it again later, perhaps when I am younger.

Forgotten Book X - Er, I am missing a book here. I distinctly remember being in the middle of three books at once, but this third one remains a mystery hidden deep in my wee little neurons. Silly neurons, where did you put my mind?

The Children of Húrin - An excellent and finally complete tale that takes place during the First Age of Middle Earth, back when Sauron was a mere lieutenant of the Morgoth, a fallen Ainur (think Lucifer as a fallen Angel). Bring a piece of paper when reading of this book though, like The Silmarillion there is a venerable forest of information and names to keep track of and I spent much of my time referencing previous pages to keep track.

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Finally bit the bullet and started working through Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X last week. Been wanting to learn Cocoa for a while, but at EllisLab I never had the time/energy and I was rather strict in my anti-work mandate for the six months of my Summer Vacation. Now though, I am having a hard time not going through the entire book in one sitting. Been trying to pace myself to a couple chapters every other night during the week so I do not switch into my obsessive habits.

While things made sense off the bat, once I knew the structure of declaring methods and classes, I think my first real ah-ha moment occurred earlier this week when I solved one of the end of chapter challenges. Things clicked and my joy palatable. If anything, I am sort of disappointed that the learning has gone so smoothly. Took me a solid three to five months to get a firm grasp of the intricacies of PHP 4, and yet I feel if I put in a couple weeks of similar effort I could reach that level with Cocoa.

All said, I am not sure I will ever build a distributable application in Cocoa, I just wanted to learn another programming language and see what ideas develop because of it. Eternal student status.

Link. You hear that sound? That's me dying and going to geek heaven.

Link. I think Dan's comment sums up my feelings about this movie/trailer nicely: "Why didn't they get Vin Diesel to play Kirk?"

Paul Burdick:  What is it called when you and the person you are talking to are on completely different levels of thinking? Say, if you ask the question, "Yes, that is the way you are used to doing X but is that the best way to do X?" and they reply "We cannot think like that."

Derek Jones:  Life

Paul Burdick:  Yes! That's the word I was looking for!

Link. Remember that robot who was working outside the ship in Wall-E? This is his tale...

Many thanks to both Les and Erin for being the only two people to submit a reply actually giving a charity and a solid reason why I should donate to that charity. The one I found the most convincing was Les' comment about Child's Play, a charity dedicated to improving the lives of children by donating toys and games to hospitals worldwide. Not only was I able to be completely in control over where the money was being spent, but I also could choose the hospital that would receive the items. And now, thanks to Les, Legacy Emanuel Children's Hospital has thirty-four books, eleven board games, three DVDs, three learning toys, a 50 piece race car set, and a Nintendo Wii headed to their door. Should all be there in the next couple weeks.

Also, since there was still money left over, I donated the rest, approximately $100 Canadian dollars, to Movember in Erin's name. The least I could do for a cause that led a man to shave off his goatee of twelve years.

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Despite learning of two new causes and being pleased with my donations, I am still disappointed. Was incredibly crestfallen for most of the afternoon, actually.

Unless my stats are mistaken, there are at least a factor of ten more people reading this website than who replied to my original Spread the Wealth entry with either a comment or email. Where were their replies? Did the opportunity to fund a charity or cause not seem worth the effort? Silent observers was not what I was hoping for...

Curiosity drives me to try many different things. An idea has been stewing in my mind for a couple days now, and I have decided to just try it and see what happens. Hopefully, it will not explode in my face.

On a fairly regular basis, usually about once or twice a month, I donate money to a person, charity, organization, or what have you. It ranges anywhere between giving an acquaintance a Flickr Pro account to donating a substantial amount of money to a non-profit. While I would never consider myself blessed, I am fortunate to have had a well paying job for a few years and frugal spending habits in relation to that income. My investments are still doing relatively well and my part time contract work pays more than my bills, and like a certain Mr. Barack Obama I believe in spreading the wealth around and helping others/causes I believe in.

But, this month I want someone else to choose. The election is over, and I would prefer if we could keep some of this energy and momentum going. For months, people were seriously invested in the future of their communities and government. They should continue to be so, for their entire life, not just when there is an election. Keep your civic life strong!

So, here's the deal. I am going to donate $1,000. Write a paragraph, an essay, or a proposal explaining to me where I should donate this money and why, and then post it in the comments. The one I deem the most worthy will get the money (and yes, that means all of my personal biases might come into play).

There are no real restrictions. It can be a person, family, group, non-profit, cause, organization, or possibly just investing it in something like green energy. However, keep your arguments mature, responsible, and lacking any sort of anger or hate; I want to see the best of humanity, not the worst. Have at it. Oh, and you have until Monday morning.

Update:

A Mr. Derek Jones pointed out over IM that writing a check != community action. To which I say: duh. Of course, you writing an argument for where my money should be donated is not actually community action. Instead, this, like much of what I write here politically, is meant to start thoughts and a discussion. To get people motivated to thinking about what could or should be done in their communities, small or great, local or global. I have also received emails from other people who have talked about their own donating or volunteering habits. Things I like to hear. So, yes, if those are the topics you wish to bring up, go ahead and say something in the comments.

Link. Only been playing with this for about ten minutes, but I am rather impressed so far.

Amelia’s new professional website is now live and eagerly awaiting public consumption.  In September, she started pushing me for advice on how to buy a domain, get a host, design a website, and all the other fun things one does when creating a new site.  What I found refreshing was how quickly she took to the process of designing the site.  She coalesced in her mind its purpose, created a site map, and only then started on the design.  And as for the design, she first did parts of it by hand and then built a layout in Word.  I then converted it into HTML and CSS using my rusty design skills.  The end result is a focused website that is rather straightforward and does exactly what she wishes.

The one thing I changed was the Portfolio.  I knew we could design a better and easier to update Portfolio than what her original layout had planned.  Thanks to my playing with jQuery this past month, I finally found a remarkably easy solution for creation a Portfolio using jQuery and Flickr’s Feed API.  Honestly, at this point, I think anyone with a Flickr account could create their own online portfolio, similar to Amelia’s, within ten minutes.  And, I thought I might share…

Tools

• Magpie, RSS/Atom PHP Library
• jQuery, JavaScript Library
• Galleria plugin for jQuery
• Flickr Feeds
• A host running PHP

The first three can all be downloaded individually and combined, if you wish and have the skills.  However, I added some functionality to Galleria (on the request of Ms. Lohrenz) and updated the Magpie library to use a new version of the Snoopy library, as its version was woefully out of date.  Also, I thought you might wish to have a barebones demo using this technique.  So, I created a download with all of the pieces combined and working…

‹ Download Portfolio Demo ›

Inside the index.php file are two variables.  One is the $page_title and that value will be placed in the <title> tag, which is displayed at the very top of your browser’s window.  The second, $set_url, is the URL to your Flickr feed.  In Amelia’s case, what we did is create a new Set in Flickr for each section of her Portfolio.  If you go to the Flickr page for a Set, you will in the bottom left corner, a ‘Feed’ link.  That is the URL you will put in $set_url.  Flickr has feeds for photostreams, collections, sets, and even tags so you really can pick and choose which images you show in your Portfolio.

Now, there is a small limitation with how many images that can be displayed.  Flickr’s feeds only show the 20 most recent images uploaded.  However, that actually worked in our favor as more than 18-20 images would be a detriment to the design.  Sadly, there does not seem to be any publicly available around this limitation.  I can easily imagine someone using another jQuery plugin to create a nice scrolling list of thumbnails for display.

Once you have set your $page_title and $set_url values, upload all of the files up to your host.  Next, go into the ./script directory and give your ‘cache’ folder writable permissions (777, typically).  Open your browser and look at the page.  Here is my demo on reedmaniac.com.

The beautiful thing about this is that Amelia never has to learn any PHP or JS code.  Heck, she never even has to modify a single file on her server to update the Porfolio.  Instead, she uses her already existing Flickr account to add, edit, and remove images from Sets as she sees fit.  And, if she ever wants to add a new section to her website’s Portfolio, she just creates a new Set and I copy a file and change two variables.  Piece.  Of.  Cake.

That’s how it works.  We’ll probably be tweaking her design off and on for the next century, but the demo I provided here uses only the basic CSS required for the demo.  You should be able to play around with it and have loads of fun.  Since there is some DOM manipulation of the HTML, the Safari ‘Inspect Element’ ability should come in handy with any CSS tweaks.  If you want to learn a bit more of the technical aspects of what I did, continue reading.  Everyone else, go play with the demo!

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The Porfolio, Various Technical Details

First off, I admit the CSS is a bit messy in the demo.  Honestly, I copied it from the demos provided at the Galleria site and manipulated it thanks to ‘Inspect Element’ ability, which gave me a nice view of the DOM.  Sure would be nice if we could have a View Source for the DOM at any given time, no?  I expect I will clean it up once Amelia gives me the changes she wants done so that I can kill two birds with one stone.

Second, I hacked the Magpie library so that it looked for the Snoopy library in the same directory as the rest of the javascript.  Just streamlined the directory structure a bit.  Also, according to SourceForge the Magpie library has not been updated since 2005, so it has a tendency to output a few PHP errors when parsing feeds.  Instead of fixing all of its problems, of which there is no shortage, I simply turned off error reporting while it was processing.  Does not adversely affect results and saves me from hacking it any further.  Finally, as for the Snoopy library included with the Magpie Library, it is also rather old and Derek Jones informed me of a recent security fix in it, so it was updated as well.  I think that contributed the most to me creating the Demo for people to download and use.  Leads credence to the idea of Magpie being resurrected or replaced in the PHP community.

Third, if you look at the top of the Galleria script, you will see the list of changes I made to it.  Basically, Galleria allows you to add a caption to an image by putting it in the title=“” attribute of the <img> tag.  However, Flickr allows one to give an image both a title and a caption, both of which are included in its Feeds (the latter requiring a bit of processing to retrieve).  Amelia wanted both to be included in her website’s Porfolio.  What I did is added the longdesc=“” attribute to the <img> tag to contain the Flickr caption while using the title=“” attribute for the Flickr title.  Then, in the Galleria plugin’s code, I had a <div with a class of ‘caption2’ added just after the original caption.  I also modified the onImage trigger to include this second caption object, since I wanted to do a fade of the images and captions.

Looking in the PHP code in the portfolio_template.php file, you will notice that the Flickr caption was contained in the Atom feed’s ‘content’ element along with the image and a link to the Flickr page.  Thankfully, Flickr puts those last two items in paragraph tags right at the beginning, so it was a simple grep match to remove them and get the caption, no matter its length and number of paragraphs.  Also, since captions in Flickr contain HTML, I removed line breaks and did a bit of urlencoding to make it function correctly as an HTML attribute and validate as XHTML Strict.  A bit messy, but it works and works well.

Finally, the Flickr feed only sends us the small image URL, which is oddly given the suffix of ‘_m’.  For most Portfolios, this is too small of an image for detailed viewing.  Magically, by removing that suffix, you get the medium size image.  However, what you do not get is the width and height of this medium image.  Thankfully, Flickr resizes medium images so that no side is longer than 500.  With some quick math, you can determine the proportions of the small image and then what the medium image’s dimensions are.  At most you will likely only be off by a pixel, I believe.

That’s mostly it.  Just a bit of hacking, updating of outdated files, and massaging some data to fit our needs.  In the future, it might be prudent to use the Flickr API with REST to get data as it has more parameters and would allow pagination among other features.  Still, a good, simple first foray for people who want an easy to update Porfolio.

Link. Not so much a bubble as a mountain peak...