Miscellaneous Archive

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Pintrest Design Element

I love the Pintrest “Scroll to Top” button. Great yet simple design element that makes the site extra usable.

As mentioned a few weeks back I’m playing around with my blog and I’ve been quite displeased with 1) what I’ve gotten done so far and 2) the way it’s looking. At first I was going to use a canned theme and I found Elegant Themes, which is a really sweet site for getting cool WordPress themes, but none of the themes I found really worked for what I had in mind. This process of taking what’s in my head (disturbing as that sounds) and making it a reality is not something that comes naturally or easily to me. I can code all day long like that but the artistic design stuff is not something I’m good at…yet.

I should disclose that got this idea from Chris Coyier (http://css-tricks.com/video-screencasts/25-designing-for-wordpress-part-one/) who did something similar to his site (http://chriscoyier.net/).

Starting right now I’m going to rebuild the design of the live site from the ground up. I’ll start with the HTML5 Rest WordPress Theme and build from there. The site is simple enough that there’s not going to be very much coding so this won’t offer me any coding black holes to run away to for a sense of security, ensuring that I’m focused on the design process and not the coding process. I used Kuler to find a color scheme to start with. I settled on retro blue because I think it offers a wide spectrum of complementary colors to play with. I plan on posting snapshots of the site in the state that it’s in at the time of each post and I’ll try to post frequently throughout the process or at least offer posts with multiple snapshots and summaries of what was going on at each step. This should be fun.

[Updated with photo: Doesn't it look nice. ]

What To Write About???

Lately I’ve been wanting to write more about the things that I do on a daily basis, but I’m not really a fan of what I do by day so I’ve been hesitant to actually talk about it. By day I’m a dying Informix database administrator and a thriving SQL Server database administrator. Some would say, “You’re a whaaaa????”, if that’s you then lets just say I do computer stuff and leave it at that. Because of this swing in my day job I’m being forced into the Windows world more than I’d like to be. I can do just about anything with shell scripts and Perl, but using those on the Windows platform is exercise in frustration. So today I’m left flopping around in SSIS and T-SQL and for a few things I’ve tried C# or PowerShell. (As an aside, I’m kind of a fan of C# but not for scripting since it’s NOT a scripting language and I haven’t spent enough time in PowerShell to know if it’s awesome, just short of awesome or just plain sucks.)

In simple terms, I feel like used to drive a BMW 6 Series(Informix), but now I’m driving a BMW 3 Series(SQL Server) and I’m supposed to like it. I know that SQL Server has a much larger install base than Informix so my potential employment pool is much larger now, but there’s something really nice about being a part of an elite group of talented Informix DBA’s. As a SQL Server DBA I have become highly skilled, but even then there are many really amazing SQL Server DBA’s and there are so many crappy ones too that it’s could take a very long time to differentiate myself from everyone else. I find this to be demotivating, maybe I’m just getting old and lack the drive to make a name for myself. (There’s probably another posts worth of material just in that last sentence.)

Microsoft builds software that doesn’t require a tremendous amount of expertise to run. SQL Server is a great testimony to this, just install it and just start using it. Because of it’s simplicity anyone can call themselves a SQL Server DBA which adds to my concern that there are a lot of people who call themselves SQL Server DBA’s. In reality I’d bet that over half of those “DBA’s” are experts in their field, i.e. people who really understand the engine, how it works, how it doesn’t work and how to eek out the most performance from it. Placing ones self in that elite group of SQL DBA’s is the challenge.

The flip side to Microsofts software that just works is the software it builds that doesn’t work worth a damn. SSIS is a testament to that, I have found more limitations in that piece of shit software than in any other utility program that I’ve ran across. Basically if they didn’t say you can do “X” then you can’t do it or if you manage to find a workaround it’s the most convoluted mess of code you’ve hopefully ever created.

So in a nutshell, I don’t like Microsoft and I don’t like the software it makes. I don’t like that I have to use it on a daily basis and that I don’t get to work with better technologies like Ruby, Rails, Perl or shell scripts. I want to talk about those technologies but struggle to find the time to take deep dives into them because of my day job and requirements as a father, husband and business owner. I think I’d write more if I could spend more time on the technologies that I love. That’s my point.

Budweiser 9/11 Tributes

Many will remember this ad that Anheuser-Busch aired once back in 2001.

But I just realized today that Anheuser-Busch did a remake of that video for the 10 year anniversary of the tragedy that befell our great nation on September 11, 2001. I think it’s a remarkable show of honor to have remade this video that way that they did. You’ll notice that the original was filmed in winter when everything was dead showing respect to the fallen, but in the remake it’s filmed in the spring/summer when everything is green and growing showing respect to the resilience that NYC has shown. Good job AB.

Reboot Often????

After more than two years of painful neglect, I’ve decided to overhaul dlredden.com and start using it again. I just finished moving the WordPress installation off of my shared 1&1 host(referral link) to a slicehost.com(referral link) slice running 32-bit Ubuntu 10.10. I really like Slicehost, I won’t hold it against them that they sold out to Rackspace. Over the next few weeks I plan on designing and implementing a custom WordPress theme which should prove to be interesting. I’ve built custom themes before, but this will be the first time that I’ve designed the theme I’m going to implement. It should be interesting and will most certainly be entertaining at the least. Hopefully I’ll end up with a nice little site that is easy on the eyes.

Random Alphanumeric String Generator

I recently needed to be able to generate a random alphanumeric string in ActionScript 3. After a little Googling I found an example that was written in C# on this post. I could have just used the code via a remoting call but I didn’t really want to do that unless I had to.

As I read the code I realized it would be super easy to implement the same thing in AS3 and save myself the remoting call.

Here’s the C# code:

public string GetRandomString (Random rnd, int length)
{
 string charPool = "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234567890";
 StringBuilder rs = new StringBuilder();

 while (length-- 0)
 rs.Append(charPool[(int)(rnd.NextDouble() * charPool.Length)]);

 return rs.ToString();
}

and now the AS3 code:

public function GenerateRandomAN(maxSize:int):String
{
   var randomAlphaNumeric:String = "";
   // Purposefully omitting 1, I, 0 and O since they look similar
   var charPool:String = "ABCDEFGHJKLMNPQRSTUVWXYZ23456789";
   var randomNumberUnder100:int;

   for (var i:int = 0; i < maxSize; i++)
   {
      randomNumberUnder100 = Math.floor((Math.random() * 100));
      var position:int = randomNumberUnder100 % (charPool.length - 1);
      randomAlphaNumeric += charPool.charAt(position);
   }

   return randomAlphaNumeric;
}

DL Redden

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