No, don’t look…

Save your self….

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     (#)
    (oo)
   (—–)
    >0<

It was one year ago, Feb 28, 2006 to completely precise, that TheCodeCave.com first came on line.  A week later I had a fairly functional website, running WordPress with a theme I was satisfied with and a bunch of great ideas. 

This site was mostly meant for my own convenience as a place where I could put Delphi and PHP code fragments  that I knew I could find later.  I have used it for that again and again and again.  It is a MUCH better resource than Microsoft Outlook’s sent folder.  Plus, now that someone named Meagan works at the office, every time I simply type ME in the To: address of an email, I send stuff to her instead of my home account.  (Sorry, Meagan, for all of those meaningless code fragments in your email account.)

Anyway,  my wife first suggested the name The Code Cave.  Since I liked caving and coding, it made sense to her.  Since it had multiple meanings, I, of course loved, it.  (A code cave, you know, is empty space in an executiple where all sorts of neat treasures can be hidden.)  So it worked.  

A year later, the site has a google rank of 357,000, which is not to shabby in my book.  Especially since I had a couple dry spells of 1 post per month.  I’ve just gotten my first Adsense check deposited and that pays for next year of hosting in full.  So, the site is self sufficient.   I’ve also been told that I’ve helped loads of people (Sweet).  And my life is enriched by coming to know loads of new people I’ve met through the site.

Not a bad year…   Her sites have done well too.  She hosts KnitChat.com of course (where I’d been doing php and WordPress for a whole year before TheCodeCave. came around), and Loom Out Loud, and now  a new knitting magazine site: Loom Knitter’s Circle.

 I plan to do a number of “Posts that never made it” posts, the first one of which was the Delphi source code for turning any 1and1 account into a Dyn DNS server posted yesterday.  I had a whole series of web automation posts planned, but I never put them up.  I hope to get a number of them up. I’ve found that when I stop using this site a repository, and start using it as a blog, I get less code up here and less posts up here. So, the posts will get up here when they get up here.

So, for an old Borland Turbo Prolog/Turbo C/Turbo Pascal coder, my venture into the web has been a good experience…  And I can’t wait to tell you all some of the good stuff that I’ve got going on right now…  I’m juggling a few nifty things right now and hopefully I’ll have some good news to share as a result. I’m smilin’ just thinkin’ about it.

code monkey - noun -

Download link

1. A person only capable of grinding out code, but unable to perform the higher-primate tasks of software architecture, analysis, and design. Mildly insulting. Often applied to the most junior people on a programming team. 2. Anyone who writes code for a living; a programmer. 3. A self-deprecating way of denying responsibility for a management decision, or of complaining about having to live with such decisions. As in “Don’t ask me why we need to write a compiler in COBOL, I’m just a code monkey.”      — The Jargon File

Three days into a new exercise schedule… Two days into getting to work an hour and a half early so that you can get a solid 45 minute work out in…. You may feel more awake, but it is a whole lot harder to lift your arms and legs….

For 2007, I will corrupt my site with a bunch of non-tech related posts and lots of ads. Well, okay… it is not as bad as all that… There’s no massive swing taking place. This is still cold storage for thoughts, ideas and code you or I might need sometime in the future. But I’m going to add a couple more things.

As you can see on the right, I have added an AdSense widget. Back in January of 2006, I added AdSense to my wife’s blog. It worked well and more than paid for the resources she used. However, it did not pay for 100% of my hosting cost. My goal for this year is to add a few more donated sites, to what I host, and to make my hosting of sites 100% self supporting. They are almost there already. It won’t take much to push it over the top. So, some non-intrusive ads will be shown on The Code Cave. A single day that is a New week, New month, and New year is just tooooo convenient stats-wise to miss. (I get a lot of traffic on the posts for my phones. Maybe if I get inspired, I’ll modify the widget to only show on those posts. Those folks are (I think) are more likely to click the ads anyway… We’ll see…)

But what of 2006?

And why were you tagged?
I heard a good quote yesterday “Who you are *today* is a direct result of the decisions you’ve made in the last six months.”

So, I’ve picking up the tagging chain from Michael’s Technozid (I still try to type Technozoid but there’s no second o) and will review the last year… And I’ve spread the joy by tagging 5 blogs I think you all might like. (see the list at the end). I’ve only done this kind of a post once before, but hey… looking at your choices over the last year makes more sense, I think, than making a bunch of resolutions. If you want to make progress, you’ve got to know where you’ve been…

Here you go, who I am today is because of this:
Gained or lost weight?
I’m almost exactly the same as I was this time last year. Last year I was in the middle of a big swing in my weight. I’d already lost 30 pounds to get to where I am at right now (205) and would continue to drop 30 more. I’d stopped the strict dieting and much of the exercise and have been balanced at 205 for the last six months regardless of what I eat or do. So, that’s pretty good but I’ve been ramping up the exercise again since November. I’m putting myself into training for mountain biking more in the summer. I REALLY enjoyed the parks I went to this fall. I plan to do much more of this and might even participate in a race or two… not sure about that… I’ve got someone pushing me towards it though and I’d love spending more time with him. He’s a good honorable man, and everyone should have more good examples in their life.

Longer or shorter hair?
Hmmm…. longer for just another 20 minutes. Then it comes off! I was planning on returning to my longer than shoulder blades length in anticipation for getting back on two wheels (with a motor this time in the spring. I should have enough $$ set aside to get a junker bike that will last me for a year). But I also think that the longer hair is going to interfere with my exercise plans. So, now that the Christmas skits are over at church, I’m going back to short short.
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Yeeesh, what a Thanksgiving, three glasses of gingerale and two soda crackers for the day…

Some of you may know that we have a moderately sized family with four kids. We live out here in Ohio, with no relatives within hailing distance. Usually when one of us gets sick, there more than enough helping hands. But when all of us get it… oh, it is horrible.

After having my wife moaning about stomach cramps for two hours and then her and daughter empty their stomachs emptying their stomachs twice (my daughter hitting 5 “rooms” on her way to the kitchen sink after ignoring the bucket that had been beside her on the couch) I sent everyone in the house to bed at 8:30.

And so began one of the longest nights of our lives.

I’ll spare you the goriest details, but I was on the underwear and bucket brigade. Literaly for three hours I got one 5 minute break. The three year old slept through but Jaxom fell to it at 9 and Julian at 9:30. Azia’s bedding officially bit the dust at 10. And so it went. Finally after I got the load emergency load of undies started in the washer, I succumbed to it at 11:30, but still was on emptying duty.

A neighbor called and invited us down to her place again for Thanksgiving around 9am. Everyone was asleep. I tried to walk around a bit and checked on everyone. Our neighbor was wonderful and went bought us some 7up, gingerale and saltine crackers. What a blessing! I can honestly say I’ve never been so thankful on Thanksgiving ever in my life.

I think the bigger kids each had a hot dog around 9pm that evening, but that was the limit of our thanksgiving. Saturday I did work on the leaves some (we have a lot and HAVE to work each chance we get before the snow comes.) and fixed the tailpipe on the truck and installed a new horn. But I was WIPED at the end of the day. Sunday, it took all I had in me to complete the Sunday school class (I’m teaching on 1 Corinthians).

Today, Monday, I am actually feeling normal again.

Yeah, that was fun.

Just a quick hello! I can see that a bunch of you are still checking in daily and I haven’t posted much this week. So here’s a post to let you know I am still alive. I’ve got a mega-post I’ve been working on. I’ve finally broken down and used the WordPress Page feature and this post is now about 6 pages long. I’ve got about 5 other posts in draft form and I’ve finished another book, but the mega-post takes priority. I hope to have it out tonight. It’s all about WordPress security. And it contains references to various attacks on older versions of WordPress and I want to perform each attack on at least one of the three test blogs I’ve configured so that none comes back and says “THAT IS NOT POSSIBLE!”. So, I’m basically done and just need to do some fact checking.

In the mean time, I just stumbled across this picture and I have to say it creeps me out and I simply don’t get creeped out by stuff. Still I’ve found that there are some fears that go beyond logic… I stayed once at a house where a guy had a pet boa he teased regularly so that it would strike at the glass when people stood near by. It would sit there and inhale loudly inflating itself to three times its original size. He made money by betting people they could not keep their face up near the glass. That is the first time I felt what I’d have to describe as an instinctual fear of any animal. It was EXTREMELY difficult to go up to that cage.

This picture doesn’t scare me but I sure get the heebee-jeebees:

Original source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/57756784@N00/207151357/

I’d decided to install Rob Miller’s “Now Reading…” version 4.0 plugin ages ago to replace my Read in 2005 and 2006 categories. But I knew there was a new version of my current theme out. So, it didn’t make sense for me to manually add the required template changes especially when the new version of Binary Blue supported Widgets and writing a Now Reading Widget woud be simpler than updating the template all the time. Skip a few months and now Rob himself has investigated widgets and made his own available for Now Reading. So I rushed over to his site, grabbed it and installed it right away! S0000 SWEEET!

Unfortunately, my excitement got the better of me. I failed to notice that the download page for Now Reading had, not only the widget available, but also an updated version of the plug in. The current version of Now Reading was 4.2 and installing the plug in with 4.0 caused the side bar to blow up with a missing function error. I realized my probably mistake right away, uninstalled it all and reinstalled in the correct order with the latest.

Unfortunately, my woes did not end there. I found three problems with 4.2 that could be fixed with relative ease. The first problem was a ” *Fatal error*: Cannot redeclare now_reading_add()” Error. That was very easy to find. I had one link that didn’t work and one link for the same page that did work. A quick change to make now-reading-admin.php always use the “post.php?page=now-reading-add.php” syntax instead of “post.php?page=now-reading/now-reading-add.php” and the problem was solved.

The next problem was a “1 book *Warning*: Cannot modify header information -” error message that came up each time I edited a book. That looked just like a debug comment, and indeed Rob confirmed that this one was fixed in his own code already but didn’t say how. I didn’t have access to check out the latest code yesterday, so I fixed it myself. The total_books routine takes a parameter to termine whether or not to print to the screen. In one place, the parameter was needed but not specified. So I changed
if ( $count > total_books(0) )
to:
if ( $count > total_books(0, false) )

and that problem was solved.

I sent those two changes and a recommendation that the widget check for the correct version of the plugin to him and he replied with a thanks, he’d put in the changed the code as I’d suggested (b4 or after I don’t know) and notice that 4.21 was released! Cool, that means no one else should get these errors.

Unfortunately, I noticed two minor things after that point. First, one book I entered had an apostrophe in the title. Unfortunately, the plugin now put a slash in front of the appostrophe. I SUSPECT that this is a WP 2.03 issue and I have not reported it to Rob. I’ll install 2.04alpha/beta/whatever soon and see if the problem goes away.

The next minor issue was reported to Rob with the fix. After I put in the 12 books I read this year, the plugin was reporting that I had an average of 144 books a month. I admit that my 2 books* a month average this year is pathetic compared to last year’s 3.6 (I read nothing in March this year oddly enough - I guess that’s when I started the blog and nothing struck me as interesting enough to take my time away from that. And I’ve also been reading a lot from Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show), but I’m not going to bolster it to 144 books a month…

So, I dug into the average query and found the problem…

I shot another email to Rob just before two this morning:

>I’ll add a version check to the widget now, good idea.
Thanks!

Oh and I have one more update if you haven’t fixed this one already too..

Your average books calculation was off. You’re missing a MIN statement around the b_added.

So it should look like this:
SELECT
( COUNT(*) / ( TO_DAYS(CURDATE()) - TO_DAYS( MIN(b_added) ) ) ) AS books_per_day
FROM
{$wpdb->prefix}now_reading
WHERE
b_status = ‘read’

Nice plugin… Now I’m just trying to remember all of the books I’ve read so far this year… I just remembered another… So that’s 12…

That change is in template-functions.php around line 145. I think I’ll keep my current version installed till the fix is out.

So, now you can look at my sidebar now and see all of the books I am reading and have read this year. And if you like the idea of any of the books I’ve read, you can purchase it through the links and I’ll get a peice of the action. (Actually for now Rob will. I’ve not put in my own Amazon ID yet.) I don’t think I’ll put in last year’s 44+ books for a while yet. Each book deserves a comment but that’s 44 more blog entries I need to write. So, I’ll piece meal them in. If you like what you see, please visit Rob’s site and download the latest and greatest versions of now reading. Just click this link: http://robm.me.uk/projects/plugins/wordpress/now-reading/

BTW, I put together the promised context menu post I mentioned the other day, but was debugging something and decided to backup the file and wipe out most of the file so that I could Isolate what I was debugging. Unfortuately, I forgot I’d also already changed the name of the working file. *smacks head* So, I lost some of my change and all of my extended commenting. I just need to re-review the comments ( the second time you put in comments they are never as good as the first time you put them in ) and I’ll publish the post. Probably tomorrow. I’ve got a lawn to mow and a carpet or two to shampoo… Cheers!

* One of the people in our shipping department had a discussion with the UPS guy saying both stated that they’d each only ever read 1 book cover to cover. How sad (not not meaning pitiful but saddening) is that…

Sorry for the long absense… I’m back online - This post describes all the bloody details of dealing with Time Warner Cable’s customer service. It’s a rant. You can skip it if you like. But, this is the second time the process was this rocky and I suspect it won’t be the last time… The only good thing we can say is that they are VERY good at appologizing, they offer credit for down time readily and when you get their support reps to your house with the needed equipment, the service is good and the people are polite and compent.

It took Time Warner Cable let’s see….

1 appointment? Nope! That appointment was canceled by them when my wife was checking the mail with out her cell phone and calling TWC back within 5 minutes of the original call counted for nothing. - They are supposed to call 3 times.

2. appointments? Nope! A very angry call from me to a support rep had gotten them to schedule another visit the same day as the first - or at least that’s what I was told.  This person never showed up and the person I spoke to did not record that I’d even called because she thought it was all taken care of. 

3. appointments? Nope! A nice competent worker showed up at the end of the day when he didn’t have enough supplies to correct the problem.  The problem?   The last time they had been to my place to bury the cable line (they didn’t want to have it running through the air because ladders were difficult on my side hill) they most likely knicked the line.  That experience involved many appointments and no records that I’d called and left complaints.

4. appointments? Nope!  Though scheduled for the next day, it seems my job was never given to the contractor.  I got a full months credit out of that call to their support department.

5. appointments? Nope!   The late in the day scheduling - and we SHOULD have been first thing in the morning after all this - meant that thuderstorms had rolled in…  I can’t blame the guy for not wanting to go up the pole with lightning around…

6. appointments?  Almost…  A local contractor came out and re-ran the line.  I like that they are using local small business contractors.

7. appointments?  Maybe…. They have to schedule at least one more visit because the person that ran the line could not bury it.  At least I have the Internet back…  until a squirrel chews through the line tomorrow…

As annoying as it was for me - not having reliable cable internet since July 1, it has been triply so for Denise as for EVERY day except for the 1th and 6th  appointment, she was obligated to constantly be on guard from 8am-8pm for a call from Time Warner knowing that any the 5th ring, could mean another blown appointment.  Additionally, the contractors are not obligated to call… So, she was expected to remain home all day long.  A nice half a month there…

Anyway, I’ll clean up the stuff I’ve been building up for posts and hopefully get something tech related out tomorrow (God willing and the Squirrels don’t arise…).  I’m pretty sure the first thing will be another context menu tool for use in IE.  Then a Xampp tip, another IE tool and by that time I should have some neat Delphi stuff ready for anyone who uses 1and1.com and wants to use their URL for dynamic DNS serving…  Hmmm I should probably make a post of the manual way to do DynDNS through road runner first…. 

Anyway, all that is coming…

It looks like I’m gonna be mostly offline, at home, until Thursday that’s the soonest RR will be able to come out to diagnose why the internet connection is soooo bad…

In the meantime, sticking the cable modem in the freezer for a time works to get me on line for a bit. I’ve also McGyvered* a cooling fan, from an old dead Pentium 1 computer, onto the side of the cable modem… That seems to help too.

The important thing is that I had enough online time to download last night’s Doctor Who. Anyone else watch it yet? I had to pry my wife’s hands off of the chair… And the kids were yelling, “I’m scared of …” well, you’ll find out what…

(*McGyver was a TV hero in the US that could fix anything with some gum, a toothpick, and a 3 inch piece of string.)

I’m not posting because I’ve been thrown into a bit of a panic. I’ll post the reason later tonight.

But I was looking through the humor folder at work for something a friend asked me to find for him, and I stumbled across this…

I don’t know whether this falls under a joke, a time capsule, irony, satire, political commentary, proof against revisionists, or what…

-

The President is meeting with Saddam Hussein regarding the recent
crisis. They are meeting in Hussein’s Baghdad capital, and halfway
through the meeting Hussein hits a button on his armrest. A fake arm
flies out and hits Clinton in the face.

A little while later he hits another button and Clinton ducks, only to
be kicked in the butt. A while later, this happens again. Clinton is
angry, calls a break, and they decide to meet again later, in
Washington.

When Hussein comes to DC, they sit in Clinton’s office. A few minutes
into the discussions, Clinton hits a button, Hussein ducks, but
nothing happens. A few minutes later, Clinton hits another button, Hussein
ducks again, but still nothing happens. This happens a third time, and
Hussein, by this point, is angry and paranoid.

He gets up and shouts “Enough of this! I’m going back to Baghdad!”

Clinton looks up and displays a funny-looking smirk to the Iraqi
leader. Then quite calmly replies, “What Baghdad?”

–