Yacoblog - Personal

Happy Birthday Blog

Fri, 21 May 2010 05:00:00 -0600

My blog turns 8 years old today. Wow! That seems like a long time, but I know there are other people out there that started blogs a while before me. I remember when I first started hearing about the term "blog". I ignored it for a few months, and then finally decided to go figure out what "blog" means. I remember thinking that "blog" is a dumb term for what basically seemed like a web journal. The rest is history. :) I am not a prolific blogger, but I'm not apologizing for that. The way I see it, this is my blog and I don't owe anybody anything for it. If I only post once a month, I'm just hurting myself. So you'll never see me post one of those, "Man...I haven't been posting very often here. Sorry guys!" posts. It is what it is. I post when I want to say something, and when I don't, I don't post. So I generally don't want to say anything. :) As I always do on my blog anniversary, I'll post some stats*:

Total Number of Entries:	438
First Entry:	05/21/02
Total Comments:	1244
Average Comments Per Entry:	2.84
Total Views:	919467
Average Views Per Entry:	2099.24

Top 10 posts, by page view

JavaScript URL variables	40329
JavaScript isNumeric function	35882
Obtaining Affected rows from SQL Query	18666
Top 10 Crazy Eclipse Plugins	11811
Mozilla's answer to Adobe AIR	6622
Speed up page loads, defer your JavaScript	6271
Comet: Server Push to Browser	6171
ColdFusion dynamic variable names	6056
What does your name mean?	5930
Deselect all items in a Select List	5923

*My blog originally was on Blogger (before they were bought by Google). I lost all of the stats from my blog when I converted to BlogCFC. I can't remember when that was exactly, but I think these stats cover at least 4 years, maybe 5 or 6.

7 year blogger

Thu, 21 May 2009 00:00:00 -0600

My first blog entry was 7 years ago today. I am very proud of that fact, but I am not proud of the frequency of my posts over the years. I just did the math, and I have averaged 5 posts a month. Not horrible, but not as many as I would have liked. Oh well. When I first started blogging I had grandiose ideals that I was starting what would eventually become a very popular news site. I mostly blogged about current tech news stories. I was not a ColdFusion programmer back then, so I was not blogging about that yet (while that is my most prolific topic today, however). As I do every blog anniversary post, here are some stats for the curious:

I have been blogging for 2554 days.
I have had 1130 comments (actually more than that because I lost a lot when I converted from Blogger a few years ago).
I have had 663790 blog views.
I have averaged 1596 views per entry.

That last statistic is very surprising. I think it is because I have a few entries that have received a lot of google traffic over the years. For example, these two entries have had about 28,000 views each since they were posted: JavaScript isNumeric function, JavaScript URL variables. So it's not that I have very popular entries, but rather that those few popular entries throw off the average.

Setup Linksys WRT54G as a bridge

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 15:55:00 -0600

I have a bunch of networkable devices in my entertainment center in the living room. I wanted to find out of I could buy a cheap wireless router and then set it up as a bridge to our primary wireless router, instead of running an Ethernet cable to the living room. I found a way to do this. As the title says, I did this using a Linksys WRT54G (I found a cheap one on ebay). The primary router can be any brand/model, because you just connect to it like a normal WiFi client (you don't make any settings changes on the primary router). To make this work, you have to download and flash a 3rd party firmware called DD-WRT. This is free, and it adds some extra features to your WRT54G (it also supports some other routers on the market, btw). After you've flashed the DD-WRT firmware, you can follow this tutorial for configuring the second router as a client-bridge.

Housing Sharing site for travellers?

Sun, 22 Feb 2009 08:52:00 -0600

I normally think it's silly when people use their blog to ask a question, but I couldn't think of a better place to ask this question. I read a while ago about a website where people come together to trade housing for trips. So for example, if I lived in Denver and wanted to take a vacation in Chicago, I would go on the site and find people living in Chicago that would be willing to either trade houses for the week, or maybe they'd let me stay at their house for cheap. Has anybody heard of a site like this? I can't seem to find it, so I figured I'd reach out to my readers.

Calling all Math Nerds

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 20:24:00 -0600

Here's a problem that is a real life question I'd like to solve. I don't know if you could do this using ColdFusion (I know you don't need to), but if you do use CF, you get extra credit. :) My wife and I have argued about which of two possible routes home is the quickest, and I figured some of the Math geniuses out there would be able to quickly solve this. The diagram below represents a part of my normal daily travels. I want to get from point A to C. I have the choice of taking the A->B->C route, or the A->D->C route. As you can see, all for sides of the square are 1/2 mile. Let's also assume that I always start from a complete stop at point A, regardless of which route I choose, and I have to come to a complete stop at the end (point C), regardless of which route I choose. The tricky part is that there are varying speed limits. The first route (shown in red):

A->B = 40 mph.
No stop sign at B.
B->C = 25 mph.

Let's assume that I can take the B corner at 8 miles an hour (no stop sign, and assuming that there are no cars coming that I'd have to stop for before making the turn). The second route (shown in blue):

A->D = 30 mph.
Stop sign at D.
D->C = 30 mph.

Assuming I didn't miss any assumptions, which route of the two would be fastest?

Migrate ALL Firefox stuff between PCs

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 06:21:00 -0600

I tend to keep a fairly static setup for a couple of years when it comes to my PCs/Laptops. So I don't migrate personal settings between PCs very often. But next week is my birthday, and my present was a new desktop PC (I built it from scratch). Anyway, one of the pain points for my migrations in the past was always Firefox. It's easy to get the bookmarks, but I typically just started over for everything else (saved passwords, extensions, etc.) Well, I wanted this to be a lot easier this time, so I did some googling and found MozBackup. This little utility is AWESOME! With it I was able to backup ALL of my important Firefox stuff, including Firefox settings I had changed, extensions, saved passwords, saved form data, bookmarks, browser history...the whole freight train. And then restore all of this to my new PC's Firefox. I LOVE it! However, I won't go into details on the pain and suffering I endured just trying to get the %#$@! backup file moved from my old XP laptop to my new Vista PC (the Jury's still out on whether or not I will keep Vista on here or not)... Off topic, but I know many people like to see what another guy's rig is made up of, so here's my specs:

Mother Board: ASUS M3A78-CM
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000 Brisbane 2.6GHz Dual-Core
RAM: 4 Gigs, Dual Channel DDR2 800
Hard Drive: 250 Gb Seagate Barracuda, SATA 7200RPM
Video Card: On-board ATI (I'm not very happy with this so far...will probably buy a PCI Express card later)
Case: Mid tower ATX, black Alien look, sweet mama :)
Monitor: 19" LCD

Upgrading my wife's PC = My wife ROCKS

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 07:35:00 -0600

Ok, that title may sound cryptic until you hear this story. First a little background. When I met my wife, I was instantly attracted to her because of her brain. She told me she is interested in sci-fi/fantasy books, likes computers and games, and had a job doing PC support stuff. So I'm telling myself...how can I ever expect to find another girl like this? I've got to snatch up this opportunity! Our courtship was actually a lot more complicated than that, but you guys probably don't care to hear all the extra details. :) Also, Dyany is not really passionate about nerdy PC stuff. She mainly uses her PC for games and web surfing/email. She never reads technical mailing lists/forums, doesn't keep up with the latest trends, and doesn't even have an IT job anymore (but she had one for a few years, a few years ago). But, her brain retains information like a sponge, so every little IT fact she's ever learned is still in there, for the most part. I have tried to talk her into learning ColdFusion, but she's not interested. Oh well, you win some, you lose some. So anyway, last month my wife's PC hard drive was showing signs of imminent death. So we launched the process of getting a replacement and migrating all the data between hard drives. The reason I put "My wife ROCKS" in my post title is because of how this all went down. First of all, she tells me she wants a 1 TB hard drive. Now that in itself is amazing. How many of your wives would even know what that means, let alone know that this is the amount of space she needs? I should note here that we use my wife's PC as our home "server", and we store all of our music, pictures, and videos on there, so that's why she asked for 1 TB. So we buy the drive from newegg, and while it's in route my wife starts planning how we're going to migrate the data. Again, this fact alone is astounding compared to most other women out there. She knew that her old drive is SATA, and the new one we bought is SATA. So she asked me if we had an extra SATA cable. We did, but when the drive shows up I found out that her mobo only has one SATA port. So Dyany goes out and finds a free imaging utility and takes an image of the old hard drive (she stores it on a second hard drive in the machine). I swap out the drives for her (she's not a hardware person). Then she puts the image on the new hard drive. She even did some partition reorganization, with a little help from me. So I ask you guys, how cool is my wife? :D

My Blog is 6 years old

Wed, 21 May 2008 10:00:00 -0600

Today marks the anniversary of my first blog post 6 years ago. I usually mark my anniversary by posting some stats, so here they are: Total posts-361
Total comments-858
Avg. comments per entry-2.4
Visitor stats for the last year: Page views-15,319
Unique visitors-13,186
Avg. Time on Page-2:48 My top five most popular entries:
JavaScript isNumeric function with 16210 views
JavaScript URL variables with 10,891 views
Obtaining Affected rows from SQL Query with 7,023 views
Top 10 Crazy Eclipse Plugins with 4,526 views
What does your name mean? with 3,785 views

I guess I'm not much of a nerd

Sat, 08 Sep 2007 18:29:00 -0600

5 years of blogging

Mon, 21 May 2007 09:39:00 -0600

Today marks five years since my very first blog entry, about the openning of Google labs. I originally started blogging with Google's Blogger (wasn't owned by Google back then), and have since moved to Ray Camden's BlogCFC. ColdFusion has been my most common topic, followed by Microsoft (not usually nice things to say about them). I have been a fairly light blogger, only 315 entries over five years. I always say that I'm going to blog more, but I find I go in spurts. In the end, I guess it doesn't matter because it's my blog, and I only want to blog when I have something interesting to say. My most viewed post was JavaScript isNumeric function, followed by Obtaining Affected rows from SQL Query.

One of those meme thingies

Wed, 07 Feb 2007 14:54:00 -0600

I normally don't participate in the meme trends you see in the blogs today, but since Erik directly requested that I do one, here it goes. The subject is 5 things you probably didn't know about me.

The first time I kissed a girl was when I was 23, and she was my first real girl friend. I had dated a lot of girls before that, but nothing had ever gotten beyond 'just friends'. That wasn't because I didn't try, though. ;)
I was a floor supervisor at McDonalds once. I worked at McDonalds for about 3 years after high school, and I worked my way up to being a supervisor. I generally didn't like my job at the time, as it was generally boring and/or stressful.
I've taken piano lessons a few times, from when I was a kid until a year or so ago. I have yet to stick with it long enough to get really good. But I am a pretty good singer, and have sung in a lot of choirs over the years. I've sung in a duet before a crowd, but I've never done a solo.
I love Italian food, and am a fairly good cook (if it's Italian). I can make pretty good pasta, a tasty lasagna, and I'm Ok at American food.
I was born in New Mexico, and lived there for 2 years. My family then moved to Prescott Arizona, where I lived until I was 13. Then we moved to Boise Idaho, where I've lived since (aside from a 2 year LDS Mission in Italy).

So there you have it.

My crazy cat

Fri, 03 Mar 2006 21:09:00 -0600

He makes these noises when he sees a bird, or some other live prey.

Training

Fri, 27 Jan 2006 17:40:00 -0600

I have been pretty inactive on my blog and the mailing lists this week, and that is because I've been in training. I was attending a class on Microsoft's Analysis Services for work. We use that at work, combined with Proclarity. It isn't part of my primary job description, but I do help support it with the others on my team, so I figured it would be good to increase my understanding of this product. Next week I have to give a presentation on Ajax for the BSDG meeting. I've got most of the presentation together, but I still need to tie some loose ends and gather some links for examples. I will probably use this presentation, expanded and modified, in the upcoming Boise Code Camp, where I'm again presenting on Ajax as well as Regular Expressions.

New toy

Mon, 07 Feb 2005 14:27:00 -0600

My wife got me a digital camera for my birthday (which was yesterday). Its the Olympus C-60, and its pretty sweet. 6.1 megapixel, 12x digital zoom, quicktime movies with sound, lots of fun stuff.
And to top off the joy of the new toy, I can plug it in with USB while in SuSE linux, and it auto mounts it as a hard drive, then pops up a Konquerer window to view the pictures right on the camera! I can cut them from there to a spot on my hard drive and it removes them from the camera. Nice!

I got a job!

Wed, 18 Aug 2004 13:05:00 -0600

Monday I got a job offer from Idaho Power. I had interviewed for the position last and I wasn't very hopeful about it. I didn't think I did a good job in the interview, but they told me they were very impressed (there were 5 people interviewing me). Anyway, this is a Systems Analyst position, in their finance department. I am not sure all that that entails, but I know it involves Cold Fusion development, interfacing with databases. That's right up my alley. Pay is good, and benefits, so we are happy. Also, my wife was just offered a job yesterday that she will be doing from home. Its a report writer for Thomson Elite, a vendor she dealt with extensively at her previous job. Again, pay is good with benefits. She will have to travel quite a bit, but most of the time she'll be home.