Comfortable Disappearance

So people often complain about Windows-based operating systems using “OK” dialogue boxes far too often. For example, you change a preference in one window, then click “OK.” You close that window and then click “OK” again to confirm your additional changes.

Why is then, that Vista removed a confirmation dialogue from the Shut Down menus? OS X has them, and they make sense there. It’s great when companies take queues from their customers’ complaints, but they should think about it a little!

Blogging takes time. Even though I don’t usually write much, it still seems to take up more time than I can commit on any regular basis. In order to keep a more timely recording of things I’ve found interesting, I decided to start a Tumblog. Tumblr is a site that allows you to post quotes, links, photos that you stumble on as you surf the web. You can see my Tumblog at http://vassego.tumblr.com/ and keep up with what I’m stumbling on as I roam the information superhighway.

I recently attended the FOSE conference, and had the pleasure of hearing David Pogue speak. He is a wonderfully dynamic speaker, and I’ve enjoyed his vlogs and posts over at The New York Times for quite awhile.

Pogue’s speech focused mostly on technology trends, and he mentioned something that I hadn’t heard a lot about - wifi phones, specifically, the T-Mobile Hotspot. The phones are cell phones that work off regular cell towers and wireless routers purchased from T-Mobile (of course).

So, while you’re at home with your wireless network, you can use your cell phone without using your mobile minutes. If you need to leave your house, you just walk out the door and the call goes with you. Once the signal gets too low to work off your wireless router, it switches to a cell tower. Turns out T-Mobile is the only major wireless carrier that doesn’t also have a land-line business, which is probably going to give them a lead in this market for quite some time.

Something like this would have been really useful in college when Travis and I lived in St. Paul where it seemed our building was a bomb shelter for cell phone signals. “Can you hear me now,” wasn’t quite as funny back then.

As you might be able to tell from the “ what I’m doing” notification to the right, I’m very excited. I try to teach myself new technical things in my free time, because I don’t have much of an opportunity to work on very technical tasks at work anymore. Tonight, I learned a new trick.

I will fully admit that I am a pretty poor code writer. I’ve been meaning to learn PHP for quite some time, and it always seems overwhelmingly difficult compared to ColdFusion, which is what I’ve been using for dynamic pages for quite some time (since version 4, if I recall correctly).

The main task that I’ve wanted to accomplish with PHP is parsing XML. This is a way to bring content from web pages elsewhere, and use it on your own page. This is how the “Now Spinning,” “What I’m Doing,” and “Recent Wine” items all work (basically). On my blog however, this parsing is all handled by WordPress, the software I use. I just tell it where the feed is and it handles the rest. I wanted to figure out how to do this on my own.

And today I did (kind of). I found this nice utility called, Magpie RSS, to assist me. Magpie is an XML parser for PHP that makes things a little easier. I am told that PHP has its own built-in parser, but I found Magpie gave me enough assistance to make this task as easy as I needed it to be. Magpie is free and open source, and will usually work anywhere, as long as your server is running PHP.

To get MagpieRSS running was pretty quick:

• I downloaded the software.
• Uploaded the files rss_cache.inc, rss_fetch.inc, rss_parse.inc, and rss_utils.inc to a new directory called “magpierss” in the same folder as the page that I wanted to use to parse XML. I also uploaded the folder extlib to the same directory.
• Then I used <?php require_once('magpierss/rss_fetch.inc'); to invoke the fetch function.

And that’s basically it. Magpie is ready to parse the XML. Now, I had zero base for PHP, so I also had to learn some proper syntax for creating the code to format the data into usable form. I snagged this code from a page in WordPress, and made some minor alterations to get it to work with Magpie.


<?php require_once('magpierss/rss_fetch.inc');

$url = 'http://corkd.com/feed/cellar/bmh';
$rss = fetch_rss( $url );
if ( $rss ) {
/* echo "Title: " . $rss->channel['title'] . “<p>”; */
echo “<ul>”;
$i = 1;
foreach ($rss->items as $item) {
$href = $item['link'];
$title = $item['title'];
$description = $item['description'];
echo “<li>$title<br />$description</li>”;
if ($i == 5 ) break;
$i = $i + 1;
}
echo “</ul>”;
}
?>


I’m still not positive what each piece of this code does, but, it works, and right now that is all that matters to me. As you can tell the code is fairly lengthy, especially when compared to the ColdFusion code I would need to do the same thing:


<cfhttp url="hhttp://corkd.com/feed/cellar/bmh" method="get">
<cfset quote = xmlParse(cfhttp.filecontent)>
<p><cfoutput>#quote.rss.channel.item[1].description.XmlText#</cfoutput><br />
~ <cfoutput>#quote.rss.channel.item[1].title.XmlText#</cfoutput></p>


This always seemed so much easier to me, but now that I’ve learned some PHP syntax, it’s not all that different.

It’s always nice to accomplish something like this, especially when I’ve been meaning to figure it out for awhile. I’m going to go ahead and pat myself on the back. And now I’m going to go play a game of FIFA ‘08 on the Wii.