So today I completed parts 1 and 2 of the IBM Master the Mainframe Competition.  All total it took me about 4 hours to complete.  I’m hoping I got all of the part 2 answers right and that I finished within the first 60 (the prize is $100).  Some of the content was completely different than last year’s, but about half of it was pretty much the same as it was last year (too bad I didn’t take time to document the exact procedures from last year).

Since I’m not at school this semester while I do my co-op, I’m thinking I may take time to work on part 3.  The five people to have accumulated the most points in part 3 tasks by December 29 win an MSI Wind Laptop running Linux (the top two of those five get a trip to the Mainframe lab in Poughkeepsie, NY).  A laptop would be a sweet prize so I figure it might be worth the effort to work on part 3 (not to mention the fact that I’ll probably learn a lot from it).

It’s been a long time.  I’ll try to give updates on as many things as I can think of in no particular order:

Wedding:

Nothing much new here.  Joelle and I continue to brainstorm about miscellaneous pieces of the wedding, but we haven’t made any concrete plans in quite some time.  Keep an eye out on our wedding blog for updates as they come.

Subversion:

Tonight I decided to tackle the task of installing and configuring Subversion with Apache and WebSVN.  I would have liked to do it using the Apache installation on my Windows computer, but alas, Windows sucks (I would never pay money for it).  As a second option, I turned to an Ubuntu virtual machine created using VirtualBox (which I can run all the time thanks to my recently upgraded 4GB of RAM).  Installation of Subversion is really easy, it’s the following configuration of Apache and WebSVN that was the tough part.  I used a combination of this guide, this guide and finally found this template for WebSVN that looks excellent.  I now have a working Subversion repository where I can store any projects I decide to work on (something anyone working on a development project should probably be doing).

Work:

Work’s been alright lately.  I’ve had some interesting tasks involving VB scripts to look at (one was an Excel macro that I wrote, one was updating a script that queries Active Directory).  I’ve also been working on some documentation here and there.

School:

I looked at classes for next semester today.  My tentative course load looks like this:

• CS 444 - Operating Systems
• CS 445 - Compiler Design
• COMM 444 - Unix Web Administration
• CS 464 - Game Development (?)
• EC 350 - Microeconomics (?)

I’m not completely sure about the last two yet.  CS 464 may not actually be offered since it’s pending approval right now and I don’t really know if I want to take Microeconomics or not.  I’ll probably end up doing at least one, if not both, of them.

That’s about all I can come up with at this point.  Hopefully I’ll start posting more often again.

Sweet waterfall.

For the last few weeks I’ve been getting 15-25 spam comments per day on my blog.  I have had Akismet installed since the beginning, but I was getting tired of having to clear the queue on a daily basis.  I went looking for a better option and found the WP-SpamFree plugin.  WP-SpamFree uses some complicated JavaScript and who knows what else to make it very difficult for a spambot to post a comment (I haven’t looked at the source and the description of how it works was very vague).  As I understand it, the plugin can’t possibly block a real human from posting, since the logic used only affects bots (because of this, all spam comments are just deleted, there’s no queue to sift through).  Since this is a “front-end” spam blocker, you have to deactivate any other “front-end” spam blockers, such as captchas, but you can leave “back-end” spam blockers, such as Akismet, active (though the plugin’s author says it won’t be necessary).  So far, the plugin has blocked about 10 spam comments and nothing has slipped through to Akismet.

In addition to WP-SpamFree, I also installed WP Super Cache and AJAXed WordPress.  WP Super Cache adds caching functionality to WordPress to reduce the load on the server when pages are requested (by creating static HTML pages to serve up instead).  So far it’s working quite well.  AJAXed WordPress adds some awesome AJAX to WordPress if you have the time to modify your theme to accomodate it (there’s only like two things active out of the box, the rest require theme modification).  I haven’t had time to play with it yet, but there’s a lot of potential.

I was looking at my site’s stats on my Google Analytics account today and I noticed three referrals from a URL I’d never heard of before.  Drilling deeper into the report revealed that the referring URL was the “plugins.php” page of this person’s blog.  Still not understanding what was going on, I went to this person’s blog and poked around a little and then it hit me… the author of http://burkeism.com/blog is using my Google Calendar Feed Parser plugin!  Woo!

What a good feeling it was to see someone actually employing my code on their own website.  If you are a Google Calendar Feed Parser user, please leave a comment and let me know.  And, if you’re the author of burkeism.com, leave me a comment and let me know how it’s worked for you.  And, if you’re a user and you really like my plugin, link to it on your blog so others can find it too!

Edit: Further perusal of my Analytics reports revealed more users of my plugin!  I’m psyched.  In addition to these referrals from other blog’s “plugins.php” (which are a result of someone clicking on my name in their WP admin panel), I’ve also had 150 referrals from the WordPress Plugins site and my plugin has been downloaded 93 times.  Also, a simple search for my plugin (or any derivative thereof, including “google calendar feed”) on Google gets you to my plugin from the first page of results (a search for the exact title “Google Calendar Feed Parser” yields the number one result!).

We’re playing “Would You Rather” and this is what Joelle had to do for two turns.

Today I decided to run my homepage through the W3C’s Validator.  I found a couple errors (ampersands in URLs that needed to be converted to entity references and also some bugs in the way WordPress formats a post with misplaced <p> tags).  I fixed them quick and then added the provided badge thing to my sidebar.

Then I was reading this article by Jeff Atwood on his blog, “Coding Horror,” in which he mentions that Google’s homepage has 63 validation errors.  I think I did it once before, but just for kicks I decided to run Google through the validator to see how it’s doing these days.  Check it out for yourself.

Now, considering the fact that Google employs some of the smartest people in the world, why on earth can they not manage to include a DOCTYPE at the beginning of their page?

Moving past that issue and manually selecting a DOCTYPE from the dropdown yields far less than satisfying results.  What could you possibly be doing on such a simple page that you end up with 180 errors?  Get one of your geniuses to fix them real quick.  By the looks of the errors it would only take about an hour or so.  I’ll even do it for you.

Does anyone else think that’s ridiculous?

Today I set myself up with the ability to post to my blog from my cell phone (without paying for a data plan).  I know this isn’t really anything new, but the thought hadn’t ever really occurred to me before, so I was excited about it.  Using the Postie Plugin for WordPress, I configured my blog to post e-mails from my cell phone to a particular e-mail address.  I can send SMS or MMS messages (I pay for unlimited within-Verizon SMS/MMS and that comes with 500 outside-Verizon SMS/MMS) and anything that’s attached (like a picture) will be posted inline.  Postie has a lot of cool features, including the ability to cut off the Verizon-supplied message that appears at the end of whatever text I sent.  This functionality (among many other things) is not available in the core WordPress installation, so if you’re looking to post via e-mail or SMS, Postie is the way to go (also, posting a picture attached to an e-mail or MMS message is broken in version 2.5 of WordPress… hopefully to be fixed in 2.6).

So, expect to see random postings of things I find entertaining while I’m out and about.  They’ll be categorized under “Mobile” for easy reference.