Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

Should We Try a Suburban Chester County Blogging or Technology Meetup?
February 15, 2009

As many people know, I enjoy going into the city to attend technology events. I actually ran the Philadelphia WordPress meetup for a while, and I’ve attended many other meetups, including the blogger meetup, PANMA events, the PhillyCHI design slam, the Philly Standards meetup, DrupalCamp, and the Philly PHP meetup. I’ve even presented topics at a couple of these meetings. While all of these meetups have been fun and educational, I think it would be beneficial to have some events exclusive to the suburbs and attract suburban developers who might want to attend regular meetings without having to drag themselves into the city every month.

With the economy the way it is, some folks might consider it useful to informally enhance their skills or extend them into other areas. Networking with other people in these fields could also lead to more industry contacts when times get rough.

Out of My Element
February 11, 2009

While marveling over the release announcements for the Kindle 2 the other day, I watched a video of a Kindle user talking about how it has changed his reading habits. The thing that he said that struck me is that the Kindle had changed what he read; now he is reading things that he might not have considered before because with the Kindle it is so easy to obtain and easy to discover. That’s what I’d like to do, but with web content.

I need to discover things on the web that are of interest to me, but not within my normal realm of attention.

Cheat Sheets
January 27, 2009

This is a weird topic, since I’m not sure if it belongs here or at RedAlt, but I think until such time as I do it (since it’s not talking about program planning), it’s here for me to talk about. But if I do create the thing, I’ll put it on RedAlt for other people to use as a resource. Ok, with that out of the way…

I have a problem remembering the codes for the obscure date characters that PHP’s date() function uses. I know, it’s something I should just know, but it’s not. Yes, I have trouble remembering whether “M”, “F”, or “J” outputs the abbreviated form of the month name. I can never remember how to get the number of the day of the year. It’s a real mental block and an impediment to my day-to-day life.

cforms 2 and Buttonsnap for WordPress
January 26, 2009

A (long) while back, I created a library for WordPress that allows plugin developers to easily add new buttons to the editing area, regardless of whether an author was using the rich text editor or the plain text editor. I released the library to the community, and be necessity it is licensed under the GPL.

Along the way, others have used the library in their plugins. One of the people that has used the library is Oliver Seidel for his cforms plugin. Unfortunately, Oliver has come under fire recently because someone pointed out that his plugin is not GPL-licensed, and as such has rightfully been removed from the WordPress.org plugin repository.

Gimme a Little Credit
January 25, 2009

I’ve been role-playing with a group for a little over two years now. We started off as a group of four, but have added a few players in the past year to get us up to the typical on and off eight. Since more players have gotten involved, we’ve had some issues trying to coordinate game times around everyone’s schedules, so I took some time to cook up a little scheduling application. We’ve not been using it, for various reasons that have been bugging me.

Firstly, I should say that it’s fully functional. It takes everything that we were doing before with tons of email and phone calls, and puts it in a single, easily-configured system. It’s not yet an improvement on what we were already doing except that it’s now possible to keep it all organized and expand on what we had.