cleverswine.net

What’s good after a long day of intense yard work? Peanut butter cookies. I made them from scratch, with very little help from the wife. My only mistake was spraying cookie dough all over the walls with a poorly aimed electric beater. Oops. Now we’re going to watch some recorded episodes of Boston Legal and chow down.

I installed the mobile version of Firefox, named Fennec, on my Nokia n800 today. It’s intolerably slow (but it’s alpha, so that can be ignored for now), but has some potentially cool features like tabbed browsing and a “smart” URL bar.

Most software engineers prefer to avoid the sun and bright lights. At my office, we keep the lights out and the window shades closed. However, when we do choose to look out the window, this is what we see…

Click image for better detail

This is a satellite view of the Portland metro area. In the lower right of the map, you can see all of the less populated space. According to rumors, that space will be the next piece of Portland to fall to shopping malls and crowded suburbs. We’re considering a house where the red dot is (next to Powell Butte).

This is very cool:
Super Brenda
Super Kevin

This morning I was browsing Weather Underground because there are lots of neat weather related features on that site (almanacs, astrology, maps galore, etc). I was looking through the various Portland weather stations and came across one called “Felony Flats, Portland, OR“. I thought that was pretty funny. What’s funnier is the link to the station’s web site: Coffin Cruisers Hearse Club of Portland. I had no idea there existed a community of people who drive hearses (and have personal weather stations).

Since we’re searching for a house to buy, I’ve also been researching various neighborhoods around Portland. I’ve lived here long enough to be pretty familiar with all of Portland metro, but sometimes hard numbers add a little something. PortlandMaps.com has a decent tool for showing an overview, and details, of crime in Portland. The darker the red, the more crime there was in the past 12 months. I have to say, I’ve lived in some of the dark red areas (inner SE) and always felt safe. Still, it’s a nice overview.

I found the Aeros wordpress theme, downloaded it, made some modifications, added my photos/movies/music widget, and here it is! I’ve only tested in Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer 7. The font looks a bit strange in IE7… Anyway, I’ll be fiddling with it some more over time. Let me know if something doesn’t look right in your browser.

I know the sidebar isn’t very elegant (especially the photos/movies/music links). I am soooo bad at design. Fooling around with those 3 links took longer than anything else I’ve done with this update. Every time I tried to get fancy, the layout would go to hell. I have grand ideas - really.

I have a working tabbed (ajax) media widget. The tabs display media from Flickr, Netflix, and Last.fm. It looks crazy simple, but there’s actually a lot of processing and caching code going on. It’s about 250 lines of PHP, with some simple jQuery on the front end. (update) Now it’s in the side bar to the right.

It seems like I can’t use the following code on my server:
$dom = new DOMDocument(); $dom->load($recentTracksUrl);
because “URL file-access is disabled in the server “. I guess I’ll have to find another way to handle REST responses with php. I’m guessing there’s a better solution anyway. Research begins…