Well I haven't written an actual post in a while. I don't claim that this one will be an actual post either, but it will be closer to one them my last three or four attempts. Well between work, family and my hobby (obsession, yes you are right my Beautiful Wife) I've been keeping myself pretty busy. I haven't felt much writing. A blog or, well any other form of writing, journals, short stories, novels, three volume novel etc, are all ways of expressing ones self. Lately I've been doing that with my photography. So I haven't really felt the need to write. However dear friend I've recently experienced something that photographs cannot capture. Mostly because it's auditory.  So on to the back story, from the time I was about 14 years old till I was 24 or so I worked construction with my Dad. It was some of the hardest work and most fun I've ever had. I don't know if you've ever been on a construction job site, but in the 80s and early 90s when I was, there was always one radio on the jobsite with the volume knob turned to 11, blasting rock. Big Hair rock to be exact. Skid Row, Poison, Slaughter, Firehouse, White Lion and many many more. So as with most people, these songs bring back memories of the good times.

Some more back story, As many of you know my Grandma K passed away in November, in a very wise decision, my Mom and Dad and Grandpa K are remodeling Grandpa Ks house, so they can all live together. Being that both of my Brothers are in construction, my Dad is a Sr. Building Inspector for the city, and I have ten years in construction, we felt and knew that we could handle most of the work ourselves. It cuts down on costs and we know it is done right. So the first phase of the remodel/addition is to remodel the kitchen. It was just too small for the number of people cooking in it at one time Sis/Mom/Dad/Brother J, sometimes Brother K and occasionally me. So some walls were moved, some were removed and viola the kitchen is bigger, now we need cabinets for the new walls. We are effectively tripling the amount of cabinet and counter space in the kitchen. Which means there are a lot of cabinets to make. Well cabinetry was and still is one of my favorite facets of construction. So this was the part I was asked to help with.

Sunday was my first day helping build cabinets. We worked till 7pm that night, I was so stiff and sore. I had used construction muscles I haven't used in a decade. However it was a lot of fun. All the tools have been updated. The nailguns are lighter, the miter saw has  a laser sight on it, so you know where your cut will be. And the cordless drills are stronger lighter, and even have a light on them that shines when you are driving in a screw. So while these toys... I mean tools were very enjoyable to work with. Working with my Dad and Brothers was even better. It was like old times, but just a little bit better, because we are all a bit older and maybe even a little bit wiser. As the tools were updated, so was the radio, the Boys were cranking 80s music, however it was from a channel called "Hair Nation" on Sirius Satellite Radio. Man did this take me back.

Well last night I went over to help, we still have a ton more cabinets to build. And of course, we were listening to 80s rock. So I guess that until this project is done, I'll be a cabinet member of hair nation.

My Beautiful Wife sent this to me, and I have to say I just love this. I've watched it 5 or 6 times in a row.

I have no idea if this is a joke or not, by Adobe just released a site through their  Adobe Labs on  April 15 called http://adobenostalgia.com.It looks like it tries to "process" digital images as you would process film. It picks a tank size for the images you are important and even asks you which chemistry you'd like to use to develop them. Then you Using a enlarger you can make test prints, contact sheets and prints of your images. Like I said, I don't know if it's a Joke or not, but it has my interest.

 Warning: This is a tech post. So if this stuff bores you to tears, you may just want to skip it.

Sometimes you think you know how things work, or how a language works and you get a project that just makes you rethink how you use a certain technology or programming language. Well I've been finding that with Javascript lately. Especially digging in to AJAX/XMLHttpRequests objects. The IDE(Integrated Development Environment) I use for coding up html and javascript pages is HTMLKit. It's a great IDE and is shareware, which is fantastic and it allows you to write your own plugins for it. However, in browse mode it does use Internet Explorer (IE). Well IE is a great browser for lazy coders, it finishes your tables, and lets a lot of Javascript do a lot of things, that other browsers just don't do.

 

Firefox however likes to make you work for it just a little bit more. So what I found is while I was making a call to a page on an outside domain, I was getting a very strange and serious error. "uncaught exception: Permission denied to call methods XMLHttpRequest.open." Well this was confusing, how come it works perfectly in IE, but Firefox is giving me this error. Well after a quick google search on the error I found my answer. Simply put Firefox, or More correctly any Browser from Mozilla has a "security" feature that doesn't allow a XMLHttpRequest.open call to a url that isn't on the domain you are using. Funny enough, I've written several AJAX applications, but all of them only call within their own domain. So this error was completely new to me. One of the links that I helped pointed out that you have to set a specific property.

 

   try {
    netscape.security.PrivilegeManager.enablePrivilege("UniversalBrowserRead");
   } catch (e) {
    alert("Permission UniversalBrowserRead denied.");
   }

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