This is one of my favorite scenes from one of my favorite movies! I am embarassed about the fact I can quote the entire film. Enjoy

I am just completely adore the Little Boy. I'm sure if you've read this blog at all you know that, but as he grows and he's thoughts grow in complexity, I love hearing what he has to say.  As you may also know I have wheat intolerance. Wheat affects my stomach the same way, a bottle of tequila affects ones stomach. So the Little Boy has been raised knowing this. He has a allergy to cherry flavoring and red dyes so he knows it's important to look out for things you are allergic too. I also happen to have a intolerance to milk. The Little Boy knows this to, but doesn't exactly know why. Anyhow so Saturday morning and I sleep in, so I got up around 6:15am, the Little Boy is already up and has the TV turned on to his channel for Krypto the Superdog. However Krypto doesn't come on till 7am. Yet he was willing to sit through 45 minutes of informercials to see his cartoon. I have to say I am very proud of that kind of dedication to Saturday morning cartoons. So he's there, a informercial for an Oreck vacuum is on the TV and the Little Boy has a glass in his hand. I ask him, "whatca drinkin'?", to which he answers "Wheat Milk.", I ask him again, "so what are you drinking", he replies "you know Wheat Milk, the milk you can't drink in the big jug, Wheat Milk". It was everything I could do to not laugh out loud, he had put together, that if I wasn't drinking it, it must have wheat in it!

Another example of his brilliance. Last night, my Beautiful Wife was under the weather. So he suggest that we buy her some flowers. A great idea of course. But I tell him, well I think she'd like it more if we just made dinner to night.  Then he looks me right in the eyes, holds his little hand up with his index finger raised in that I have an idea kind of way and says, "I have an idea, why don't we just do everything she says!". I told him I thought that was a great idea, truth be told, it was brilliant! He's six and he already gets it.

Happy Cooking

One of the things that has been occupying a good portion of my time at work lately is page load times. Sounds simply I know but believe me it is more complicated than you think. So why are load times important? Simply put your customers feel that the speed of your site, reflects the level of service that you are trying to offer them. And to a certian extend that is true.  Also most users don't know the difference between a 5kb static html page, and a n-tier application, that connects to a database on the backend and connects to a web service to get a calculation for some complicated insurance rate algorithm.  Should they? No, not really, so it is our jobs and developers to make the two very different examples have the same load times. Is that really possible? No it's not, but there are certainly some things that can be done to help.  There is tons written on code optimization, so we will let other people talk about that. We are going to go over some web server optimizations that can be done. These apply to whatever server you are on, as these are just basic web development principles that we all know, but somehow don't have time to follow.

Just say no to 404 errors.
This sounds really simple, but is terribly important. Our external website gets 100,000 to 200,000 visits a month. Not to bad, however lets just say that you have a broken image in the footer. Well know you have a 404 error per page load, not so good. And depending on the image, the web servers response can actually be larger than the image you requested. So how do you know if you have broken images, besides the obvious little red box with an X. What if you use firefox and it just hides it. Well, that is where checking your work in mulitiple browsers comes in handy. I am firefox user, however the Add-on I use the most is IETab. You can quickly open a new browser tab in IE (Internet Explorer) or change the browser engine for the current page you are on. One warning though this creates a new session for the new browser engine.

Another great firefox Add-on that helps sniff out 404 errors is Live HTTP Headers. There is a Internet Explorer utility very similar to Live HTTP Headers called ieHTTPHeaders. Both of these utilities write out every HTTP Header requests. Of course it helps if you know what the HTTP Status Codes are to decypher what their output. Another application that I have found extrodiarily useful is Fiddler. This application is one of those apps, written by Microsoft, but isn't widely known. Fiddler acts as a proxy between Internet Explorer and your internet connection and records every request and response. Infact you can record a request/response session, save it and replay it. Fiddler is also extensible. A quick change of it rules.js and you can add HTTP Headers to every page request and even slow down connection speeds, to reproduce real world speeds.

304 is your friend
The 304 HTTP status code is one that just makes you smile. Basically it just tells the web browser that object it has requested has not changed, so just use what it has in cache. This is good news for your web server as it only sending a 1kb response instead of a entire page or graphic.

Two articles I've found amazingly useful
Article 1
Article 2

The other day I was surfing the web, and off of a link on digg I ran across  "Reflections.js". It is a brilliant little piece of code that I've used on a site I'm building for a friend. I'm sure by now you all know that I am a big fan of apple, and the new album feature in itunes, where you see the album cover and it looks like it is being reflected on a glass surface, is something I find very pleasing to the eye. However to do a large site requires either a ton of time in photoshop, or something brilliant like Reflections.js. This is a terribly easy to use. You simply call the javascript into the page.

<script type="text/javascript" src="reflection.js"></script>

Now all you have to do is in your image tag add "class=reflect" and your image has a beautiful reflection.

<img src="myimage.jpg" alt="" class="reflect rheight75 ropacity65">

Add "rheight75 ropacity65" to the end of the reflect class call and now you've set the height of the reflection and the opacity of it too. Simply Brilliant!

Happy Coding

The other day on the way home on the train I had something I could only call "a Blog Moment". I was sitting at one of the tables on the train, laptop open and working away, when one of my fellow train riders comes up to me asks, do I know a blog called My Digital Splendor. Shocked I said, Yeah, that is my blog. This was someone I had spoken with many times on the train, his name is Gary.  I was stunned, how did Gary find my blog? Let alone read it and recognize it as mine. Well it turns out that Gary is Gary the Amish Chaser from DadGoneMad. So we talked about stories I had read, and stories he had lived with Danny, the writer and sole proprietor of Dad Gone Mad.

GAC (Gary the Amish Chaser) said that Danny's site is now getting 100,000 visits a month. Danny says most of that is people going to check out the hot girls on the T-Shirt page, and there is where he ran across my photo and blog. Well Gary, now, your on two blogs

Lately there has been some brilliant viral videos. Some very talented people have edited together clips from movies and tv shows that have nothing to do with each other and made them really work. This one is a great example of this.

Well it's been over a month since I've posted anything, and lets face it while that coaster from Japan was cool, It wasn't the best post I've ever done. So what have I been up to? Why haven't I blogged in over a month? Well I could say that I've been busy, which is true, but it's would be a cope out answer. The truth of the matter is, I just haven't felt like writing and I just haven't felt that interesting lately. So I'll talk about both those things a little bit.

Writing
Writing is something that I actually find very difficult. I have to reread my post over and over again to find the mistakes which there are always plenty of, but I have a good excuse, kind of, well it's an excuse. Being dsylexic I switch words a lot, and of course they are spelled correctly, they just aren't used correctly so the spell checker is of no help there. In fact the other day I send an email to a vendor. As I always start off my email to the vendor I say "Hello", but on this day, I left off the "o". I got an email reply from the manager at the vendor asking if it was a Fraudian slip. I was so embarrassed about that, but they took it in good stride and had a good laugh about it.

So with writing being so much work, sometimes I just don't feel like it. Which is kind of funny because I do the most documentation at work. I get to document processes and code and well you name it and I get to document it when it comes to our internal development practices.

Not Very Interesting
"Man, I ain't changed, but I know I ain't the same" - The Wallflowers, One Headlight. This lyric sums up how I've been feeling lately. Since Grandma K died, "Man I ain't changed but I know I'm ain't the same". Last october I had ridden a marathon fun ride and had been eating healthy and exercising and feeling a lot better, physcially and about myself, however I've had a really hard time getting back there since she died. I know that I should eat healthier and that I should exercise, but ...I don't know, it has been too cold to ride in the mornings but again that is just an excuse. Everything happened so quickly with Grandma K, that I've kind of been fighting an epicurean (eat drink and be marry for tomorrow we shall die) attitude which isn't me. I've physically been feeling the affects of getting heavier again. My asthma has been acting up way too much lately. Today however I saw a picture that just made me feel like my problems just weren't that bad, and that everything is doable. (Warning this may not be suitable for kids, while it isn't graphic, it isn't pleasant either). An unforgettable wedding photo.

Photos of Real Life
I found that photo very moving and sad. Good photos are like that you know, you have an emotional response to what you see. Everytime I look at the photo I see something new. My Beautiful Wife is very observant and has notice that photography is my winter hobby and cycling is my summer hobby. Well it is winter, so I am in the photography swing of my hobby mood. I am surprised sometimes about how passionately I feel about photography. I know that some people say that it isn't an art, you are simply making a copy of what is already there. However I strongly disagree with that.  I feel a good photographer, is an artist because they see the beauty that everyone else has walked passed. A good photo shows you how someone else sees the world and that is an amazing thing, and sometimes there is an honesty and truth about how someone feels that is strong then what they can say. I think this photo is a good example of what I mean.

I've been doing a lot of reading on black and white film and the whole process of developing the film and making prints. It's a science and an art that I would really like to learn. I know that most people have gone to digital, and there are some great digital photos, but there is something very romantic about film, about the process and the even the waiting.  I won't get into the whole film is better than digital converstation here, but you'll be seeing some black and white photos taken with film on the photoblog coming up pretty soon. (Just need to get them developed ).


Listening to: John Mayer - Waiting for the world to change.