Categories
General

Four Things

Tagged by Julian Rickards.

Four jobs I’ve had in my life

  • Courier
  • Carpet cleaner
  • Gas jockey
  • Missionary

Four movies I can watch over and over

  • None
  • None
  • None, and
  • None (I don’t like watching movies I’ve already seen; I get bored)

Four places I have lived

  • Regina, SK (from 4–16)
  • Abbotsford, BC (where I graduated high school)
  • Surrey, BC (first three years of marriage)
  • Lethbridge, AB (currently, and where my children were born)

Four TV shows I love to watch

  • CSI
  • Lost
  • Food Network
  • Many TLC shows

Four places I have been on vacation

  • Rathtrevor Provincial Park, BC (honeymoon)
  • Regina, SK
  • Bowron Lakes, BC
  • Kelowna, BC

Four of my favorite dishes

  • Anything chicken
  • Pasta
  • Haggis
  • Toast with cheese and fried egg

Four websites I visit daily

Four places I would rather be right now

  • Edinburgh
  • Reykjavik
  • NYC
  • Sydney

Four bloggers I am tagging

Categories
General

Where I went in 2005

Jason posted a list of cities he visited last year. Here’s my list (one or more nights spent in each place or I ate there), in no particular order:

  • Seattle, WA
  • Bellevue, WA
  • Regina, SK
  • Swift Current, SK
  • Assiniboia, SK
  • Ponteix, SK
  • Cadillac, SK
  • Medicine Hat, AB
  • Magrath, AB
  • Cardston, AB

Where did you go?

Categories
General

The king of all blond jokes

Now, I have heard some doozy of blond jokes in my time. I was even known to tell some pretty good ones too. However, this blond joke has to be the one to top them all.

Hilarious.

Categories
General

My first digg submission to hit the front page

My first posting on the front page of digg.com. It’s a good thing I took this screenshot. I refreshed my screen, and it was gone. Some jealous crybaby probably rated it poorly in order to get his posting up higher. It’s a joke sometimes there.

digg Front Page

You can digg it if you want.

Categories
General

Import Firefox Bookmarks into del.icio.us

The one thing that stopped me from using del.icio.us was the fact that I couldn’t import my current bookmarks. Now I can thanks to Julian Bez’s new del.icio.us import web-based ap.

Categories
Google

Google Validation Errors

Google doesn’t appear to be very standards oriented. I noticed these validation errors while searching for something on Google.

5 errors / 246 warnings

Categories
Browsers

Firefox New Tab Shortcut

I discovered a new shortcut in Firefox 1.5 today. In the previous version of Firefox, I used the SuperDragAndGo extension to open links in new tabs. It turns out that in Firefox 1.5, you can drag a link onto the tab toolbar and a new link will open automatically. I love it when Firefox integrates functionality from my favourite extensions (like miniT).

On a related note, dragging selected text into the search box in the Google toolbar will automatically bring up a Google search page for the selected text.

Categories
General

Free domain names

RegisterFly is giving away free domain names. I have no idea how long it will last or how long the domains will be good for, but the catch is that they have to end in .be (i.e. wanna.be).

Categories
General

My New iPod

I have finally joined the 21st century. My new (and first) iPod arrived yesterday. My beautiful wife picked it up at the post office for me.

Unopened iPod box

Outer and inner iPod boxes

Opened inner box showing iPod

iPod, earphones, CD, docking cable, manuals and other items that came in the box.

The iPod is pretty cool, and I used it in my transit commute this morning. I am still trying to get the controls down pat. I keep trying to press down when I want the cursor to go down, but that pauses my music. I think I’m starting to get a hold of it though.

I guess Freepay really does work. Now if I could just get that digital camera.

Categories
Uncategorized

RSS and ColdFusion

RSS is rapidly becoming a popular format for providing content. It allows users to subscribe to bits of information, so they can be notified when new information has been posted.

I’ve been tossing around the idea of implementing RSS at work lately, and wanted to do it with ColdFusion. I finally buckled down and put something together. Surprisingly, it was much easier to do that I thought it would be, and I ended up creating RSS feeds for news articles, upcoming events, and job opportunities.

Here’s the process I used to create the RSS feed for job opportunities.

The first thing in my CFM file is a block of code that makes sure no HTML outside of the cfoutput tag gets displayed:

<cfsetting enablecfoutputonly="yes">

Then the query:

<cfquery name="qCareers" datasource="xxx">
SELECT * FROM Careers
ORDER BY Position
</cfquery>

Then I implement a cfsavecontent tag. This makes sure that all the content between these two tags is saved as a variable. The closing tag appears later.

<cfsavecontent variable="theXML">

Then comes my output. It is important than the root tag in XML for an RSS feed is “channel”, that the title of the feed is in a “title” tag, feed description is in “description”, a link to the HTML content of the feed is in a “link” tag. As well, every item should be within an “item” tag, which also contains “title”, “description” and “link” tags. Not following that format will cause your RSS feed to fail.

In addition, there must be an “rss” tag, and there must be no white space (including a new line) between the opening “cfoutput” tag and the “xml” tag.

<cfoutput><?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?>
<rss version="2.0">

<channel>
<title>Faculty of Management - Jobs</title>
<description>Current Career Opportunities</description>
<link>http://www.uleth.ca/man/people/jobs/</link>
<cfloop query="qCareers">
<item>
<title>#Position#</title>
<description>#Details# <cfif NOT IsDefined("StartDate") OR StartDate DOES NOT CONTAIN "1999">Commences #DateFormat(StartDate,'dd mmmm yyyy')#.</cfif></description>
<link>http://www.uleth.ca/man/jobs/index.cfm?id=#RecordID#</link>
</item>
</cfloop>
</channel>

Close the cfsavecontent tag, as previously mentioned.

</cfsavecontent>

Then output the variable that contains it all.

<cfcontent type="text/xml">
<cfoutput>#theXml#</cfoutput>

Simply upload this file to your server somewhere, and add the following into the page where you want the RSS feed available.

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="http://www.uleth.ca/man/rss/jobs.cfm" />

Simple as that.