Three till Seven

Back in the day, I created a group called Dachshund Lovers on Facebook. It was open just to people at my university, and it gathered a few members but wasn’t anything big. Then later, when I was able to open it up beyond my university, I made it a public group so anyone could join. Things were fine, people joined and I didn’t have to do anything about it. Just anyone who wanted in could join and there was no approval process.

I’ve picked up on my slow cooker cooking recently, trying out a couple new recipes and re-using some old recipes. I’m working entirely out of Fix-It And Forget-It Big Cookbook: 1400 Best Slow Cooker Recipes, a book I really recommend. Liz had it first and I decided to get it after looking through her copy, then I convinced my cousin to buy it as well. It’s been nice because of the variety of ingredients and recipes.

I’ve recently had some annoying experiences with Google’s apps on my iPad and iPhone. I was having a conversation on Google+ the other day with a friend of mine, and I wanted to share some photos in the conversation thread.  I had photos on my iPhone that I wanted to somehow get online and link to them in a reply on Google+.  I wanted to put them in a Google Picasa album, but Google doesn’t have a Picasa app for the iPad.  I’ve seen Picasa apps put out by third parties, but that always makes me nervous, giving some outside source access to my photos.  Why should I have to, anyway?  Google makes plenty of iOS apps, why not provide one for Picasa?  Picasa is something users can spend money on, too, which should be an incentive to make it convenient to use, regardless of your device.  I spend $20 a year to get extra storage space, but the best way to upload photos is still on my desktop computer.  This sucks because I don’t take the photos on my computer, hell I don’t even take photos on a camera anymore.  I take photos on my phone, and half the time I never sync the things to any other device.  I need to be able to share my photos on a dedicated photo-sharing site, uploading them directly from my phone.

I found out today that one of my favorite games ever, Okami, is coming to the PS3 this fall in an HD remake.  I’m so excited about this! I was actually just recently wanting to replay it on the Wii, but my parents have my Wii right now because my dad started playing Zelda Skyward Sword, and I didn’t want to take it away from him. I was just scrolling through my Facebook feed today when I saw mention from the Okami page, which I Liked a while back, about some kind of Okami HD. “What what WHAAAAAT??” I thought, and had to research more. I found a post on the PlayStation Blog, so it seems pretty official. 1080p, Move controls supported but not required, coming to North America and Japan at least, new trophies, $20 on PSN. The whole thing sounds awesome. Check out the trailer below.

Recently I’ve resumed work on a GTK# project I started three years ago: SnazzyCalculator, hosted on Github. I originally started the project out of curiosity about GTK#, and it’s been fun to develop – I know no one needs another calculator tool. I do intend to develop it into what I’ve been calling a wordulator: type in something like “one plus one equals” and it’ll respond “two”. Feel free to laugh, Jon keeps teasing me about it certainly. :P Anyway, what’s been really fun since I’ve resumed development is getting the parser and equation solver to work. I found this awesome tutorial by Eric White on writing a recursive descent parser in C#, and that gave me the bulk of my parser code. I did discover two bugs in his code that I fixed; I’ll share my fixes with you.

Using the Events Manager WordPress plugin at work, I noticed that the event tag archive pages showed only current and upcoming events with a given tag. I wanted them to show all events, including past events, with the tag. I made a custom loop to accomplish this, within the Genesis framework. Create a file called taxonomy-event-tags.php in your Genesis child theme:

I’ve been having a lot of fun at work recently using Spring 3 MVC, Twitter Bootstrap, jQuery UI, jQuery Mobile, and of course jQuery. Not all on the same project, but in a couple different projects I’ve been working on. Twitter Bootstrap has been really cool as a drop-in way of quickly making a pretty, clean layout. I love not having to style my tables manually, and the various spanX classes to have floating blocks a set percentage of the page wide are great. I’ll definitely be using Twitter Bootstrap in future projects; thanks for the suggestion, Joe.