I had fiddled with this in a couple forms. I’m pulling data from wunderground.com, but tweaking it a bit to make it email and cell phone friendly. Check it out by sending a message to: weather_[5 digit US zip code] at rsbauer.com. I’d provide an example but I don’t need the spam bots spamming this. Oh yeah, you can put whatever you like for the subject and message body. (heck, leave ’em blank!)
Continue reading “Weather delivered to your email or cell phone”

Grassroots computing languages hit the big time. I’m waiting for the official announcement. I’m kind of curious if this will effect what I’m doing at work. There was announcement some time ago about Oracle to partner with Mozilla to use XUL and such although I don’t know what they’re current status of that is.
Continue reading “Oracle partners with PHP”

I was cranking along on this design and Paul, a graphics guy, jumped in and kicked it up a notch with this design. I should be able to roll out the new design over the weekend.
Continue reading “ASCC website design ready to go”

Its code that sits behind the scenes so its really not news worthy. But I point it out anyways because it now supports image handling. Again, not a big deal, except I have a new phone that supports taking pictures and sending them. Now I can snap a pic and send it directly to the website. I’m not planning on shifting the posting load over to the phone, but I’m thinking it’ll be a nice feature to have whenever I’m on the go and wish to add some news.
Continue reading “rsbauer.com email to news gateway upgraded”

For fun I rewrote my “blog” email site updater code. I ran into Pear’s Mail_mimeDecode::decode class and it really blew away my email string handling jumble of code. The email updater code sits behind the scenes and listens on a particular email address. Once an email comes in, it checks the sender. If all is ok, it’ll parse the email and post it here – all automatically. With Mail_mimeDecode::decode, I’ll be able to even parse emails with attachments (with things like an image). For a coding exercise, I would like to get multimedia messages from my cell phone to pop up here and look pretty. But its late and I’m no longer thinking straight so I’ll leave this project for another day.

Also new is the gallery page. On the gallery page, you can see all the highlight images of the subalbums. I think its a little funky at the moment, but a start to what I was originally thinking. That page is DEFINITELY not dialup friendly (I think this can be fixed by reducing the number of albums I show per page). Roll the mouse over the image to view the album name. Click on the image to hop directly into the album.

This is also related to the gallery and kinda neat: random gallery image or a random image from a particular gallery. Hit refresh on those pages to view a new image. Wish to kick it up a notch? Set your desktop to Active Desktop and add http://www.rsbauer.com/randimg/randimg.php or http://www.rsbauer.com/randimg/randimg.php?album=

no images were found

as the url. Then setup a schedule to refresh/resync every 10, 30, 60+ minutes (you pick). What ends up happening is you’ll get a desktop wallpaper that rotates when you want it to images in the gallery or gallery album of your picking. I think I’ll post the code for those so those running gallery can play with this.
Continue reading “PHP for fun and profit”

I’ve shuffled the albums around and put most of them in various main categories. Hopefully this will make it easier to find the pics…
Continue reading “Albums shuffle”

The fun to be had with GIS mapping… Here’s northeast Ohio. Nothing too exciting. Red = highways, purple = utilities, yellow = city boundries, blue = water.
Continue reading “GIS mapping”

I didn’t want to lose this link: Google Suggest Dissected
Continue reading “Google Suggest Decoded”

I was playing around with this today: Click tracking toy

Just click anywhere on the page. Click a couple times. You won’t see anything immediately – that’s by design. Click update or click reload. You should see some dots where you clicked. Resize the page and hit reload. If my code is working correctly, the dots will reload in the right spots (note: this means if you resize the page and do nothing, the dots will do nothing too).

If you’re using IE, you’re screwed. This page won’t work. in fact, you might get a funky error. The page works in Firefox and I suspect it’ll work in all the Gecko browsers. If it works in any other browsers, cool.
Continue reading “Click tracking – graphically”

I’ve added the SumArea TI-89 app to the TI section. Screen shot and notes included!

Its taken over a year for me to figure the layout for this page: Computer Science Class Requirements There’s a link off the school page. I have the classes I still need to take highlighted in green. Those not highlighted I’ve already taken.
Continue reading “New web stuff added”

Go to the web cam page and look for the archive link at the top. Click and look for the day you want to view.
Continue reading “Web cam archive now up”

Cam 1 is pointing at Powder’s and Murzik’s food dishes. The software is running for Cam 2 and cam 2 is plugged in, but I haven’t found a good spot with enough light and good wireless reception to properly set it up.

Web cams
Continue reading “Web cams online again”

The other day I finished tweaking m2f (mail two forum) phpBB for Akron Sports Car Club. They have an email list managed by mailman. A large number of the members enjoy the features of the mailing list. But a number of the members prefer a web based forum. So, m2f links the two together. When an email is sent to the list, it automatically gets posted to the forum. Post a message to the forum and it automatically gets sent to the list. Nifty!

I’ve updated the web dev section. It now has the C/C++ code used for MySQL/PostgreSQL to calculate zip code distances. The zip code tool has also been tweaked a bit and you can actually test out the C function versus the SQL approach. Nifty!

I’ve been wondering about the importance of meta tags on this site. How do I do keywords if they’re supposed to be on the site and the site is mostly a blog? Dynamic key word generation to the rescue! Since the blog is template driven, I can actually scope out all the words I’ve used in the stories (and do it dynamically). I then take a count of the words (ignoring the popular English ones) and sort them by the number of times they were found. Then I grab the top 25. To see it in action, do a “view source” on this page. Then look for the keywords metatag. Then go to another blog page (scroll to the bottom to select a page number) and then view its source. The keyword list should be different. Nifty!

I’m thinking of keeping track of my calculus grades online. Haven’t figured out how I’ll organize them though. Hmm. It could be “nifty” though…
Continue reading “Working on nifty web stuff”

I’ve continued playing with my collection of zip data files. I’ve now merged some 1999 data with 2000 data and I think I have a nice mix now. The 2000 data has (in my opinion) more realistic location data. While the 1999 data links up the zip code to the city, county, and state.

The kicker? Now you can look up zips and get population, housing, land area, and water area included in the results.

You can find it all here: http://www.rsbauer.com/zip/
Continue reading “Zip Codes with a Kick”

Four years ago, I registered rsbauer.com and staked out my corner on the web. I would have gotten it MUCH sooner, but back then a domain had costed about $80 for 2 years and a crazy amount of money for monthly hosting.

Back then I could have been found on junior.apk.net/~rsbauer and gozips.uakron.edu/~rsbauer. With rsbauer.com, I’ve been able to play with all sorts of nifty technology as well as providing a means of accessing my home computers.

I just noticed: It was one year ago today I tossed this
“blog” (if you want to call it that) code together and started posting. Its worked out really well.

For those who are wondering, this is what happened last year.
Continue reading “4 Years Ago”

Did a bit of fiddling and I’ve got PostgreSQL doing zip code tricks. You can get the distance of one zip code with another. Or you can get a list of zip codes by radius.

All this works by a magic C function. It was originally writen for MySQL, but I was able to port it over to PostgreSQL with some effort (and much learning). If time allows, I’ll post the code and instructions in the webdev section. This cool is especially cool since it now includes location data which I didn’t have in the MySQL version.

Performance isn’t too bad for a query that has to hit 3 table to collect the data. The MySQL version goes supper fast, but it brings back a very limited amount of data (zip and distance).

Classic disclaimer: The zips are not 100% accurate, but close enough for most needs.
Continue reading “Zip Code Fun”

Just installed PostgreSQL on our web server. Now our web sites can use MySQL or PostgreSQL their database storage needs. I’ve been checking out phpPgAdmin which is a web front end to managing your PostgreSQL databases. Its pretty impressive! I’m liking it. Triggers, views, functions and all sorts of other nifty goodies not available to MySQL. I think I’m going to need to develop a few apps under PostgreSQL. I think its going to run circles around MySQL.
Continue reading “PostgreSQL”

My bad. Comments hadn’t been working for a little bit and it was because I locked the code down a little too much. Fixed it and now you can leave comments!
Continue reading “Oops – Comments now work”

Click on a category image and view a list of all the news items. An added plus, the paging found at the bottom works a bit better now.
Continue reading “Category Select”

Just added a site calendar. You’ll only find it on the news page (aka: home page). What makes it nifty? Only the days that have news items will be clickable. When you click on that day, you can view all the news items posted that day. Nifty!
Continue reading “New: Site Calendar Added”