gregdoolittle.com

i rode up old la honda for the first time on saturday. wasn’t sure if i was going to make it, but pushed through, and am glad i got to the top. it was especially tough because i haven’t been spinning lately, but spending my time at the gym on weights and capoeira. next time i do a long weekend ride, i want to make sure i’ve done at least one hour of spinning during the prior week, preferably 2 or 3.

starting at cafe boronne in menlo park -> santa cruz ave. -> sand hill road -> the eastern face of the mountain on old la honda -> north on skyline to 84 -> down the west side of 84 towards the coast -> up the western side of old la honda back to skyline -> same stretch of skyline back to 84 again -> down the east side of the mountain down the hill back towards home -> portola road -> alpine rd. -> santa cruz ave. -> back to boronne’s.

34.7 miles, over 3300 vertical gain – my longest ride to date.

today i rode from my front door, up king’s mountain road to skyline ridge, where i could have seen the ocean were it a clear day. it rained off and on, and at one point it was so cold that i couldn’t feel my fingers. eventually the sun came out to save the day. thanks sun. i rode home on canada road along the reservoir where they block the street to through traffic every sunday. the end.

On Friday, I had my last day over at TechWeb. It was great working there, but the time had come to move on and seek out new challenges, and get out of my comfort zone (which sadly, I had settled into quite nicely with TechWeb). My last few days were spent documenting all the projects I’d been working on. We had a nice send-off lunch down the street from our office at the 21st Amendment, on 2nd Street, right next to South Park in the SoMa neighborhood of San Francisco.

Over the weekend, I started and finished a freelance design project for a friend over at carbonharmony.com. This week, I start my new position with Secorix Inc. as a Software Engineer / QA Support Engineer / Designer / Programmer.

Which brings me to the point of this post: I’m going to be working for Secorix as an independent contractor. I’ve been reading various info about working as a contractor, and I’ve talked to everyone I know who already is one… and it looks like the simplest and cheapest way to address my needs would be to form a sole proprietorship. At some point during my first day, I’ll ask other employees what they think is the best route to take. Then hopefully i’ll be meeting with a CPA, registering my business with the county, and setting up a business account at Wells Fargo. Even if it turns out that I don’t need to set up a business for this new job, I may do it anyway so that I can work as a full-fledged freelancer.

A friend of mine is going to Japan and was asking me if I knew of a quick study guide, to develop his tourist language skills. Two things popped into my head: Rosetta Stone (they have a free trial for every language), and MIT’s OpenCourseWare (though I had yet to really explore what OCW had to offer, I offered him the idea and told him what I knew about it so far).

I first heard about OCW on NPR. The story reported on how MIT wanted to provide its course offerings to the rest of the world for free, as part of a community outreach program. Several students were upset because they didn’t like the idea of sharing their expensive education with the rest of the world. Other students put forth the argument that by giving the courses out to the rest of the world, the worldwide level of flourishing would increase, thereby increasing the individual’s ability to flourish. On the OCW site, you can read their guiding principal:

MIT is committed to advancing education and discovery through knowledge open to everyone.

It is a generous thing to do, and so far I am amazed by the course offerings. There is so much information available – it’s overwhelming. I’ve looked at several different Foreign Language, Pre-Law, and Computer Science classes. If you’re a do-it-yourself learner, I highly recommend looking into OCW. While sites like OED and Wikipedia offer tons of information, OCW actually helps you learn the subject matter in an efficient manner. If you really want to become an expert on a subject area, OCW is a great tool to get you there.

(my latest flash projects)

i figured out a cool way to use spirals to create these great kaleidoscope images. enjoy!

trying to figure out the optimal frames-per-second (fps), these files are all the same exact filesize. the 6fps animation goes runs on 12 frames, he 12fps runs on 24 frames, etc… the ball should be traveling at the same speed in all the animations.
12 fps is flash’s default.
24 fps is supposedly what we see on tv, which is what our teacher is us telling is to use.
30 fps is cinema, and to me looks noticeably better than 24, and i will use 30fps from now on.
above 30, it’s hard to see much difference.
teachers are retarded sometimes.

see the flash movies

the disclaimer:
1. it’s my first one… and there’s no button to reset it, so if you missed it you’ll have to reload the page.
2. it’s just the animation, it doesn’t do anything after it loads. bear with me, it’s only the third week.
3. i controlled the animation, but not the page layout. i just re-created it from a mockup (see below). you can direct your complaints about its ugliness, bulky navigation, and ridiculously large (and pointless) “home” button to my teacher.

see the flash movie

i just launched software2008.com at work today. i designed this project completely by myself, and i’ve got to say, i had a lot of fun doing it. it took me about 3 days to design the site, turn it into code, do browser/QA testing, and address all the feedback i received.

my boss is now asking me to work with him on building social network software for a conference focused on internet security. i told him about some of the open source social network aps that you can download/customize/install on your own server, but it looks like he wants to do something a bit more home-cooked. if this works out it could be a really amazing project, but due to the sheer scale, i’m a little nervous about it. i’ll let you know how it works out.

I just found a really cool Opera Mobile Simulator… It should be quite handy for mobile web development, since I don’t have a handheld device to test on. There are over 40 different mobile web browsers, luckily Opera uses the most common rendering engine. The iPhone is more of a miniature version of the Safari Browser which uses the KHTML gecko rendering engine. For those of us who think the cost of an iPhone is ridiculous, but realize the potential buying power of iPhone users, there is also an iPhone emulator for developing on this platform.

YDN/YUI is the one really strong thing yahoo has going for it right now. i just discovered their video section where they share internal presentations about javascript with the general public:

http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theater/

i hate to be a walking advertisement for another company, an infectious host for a viral marketing campaign, but i’ve got to say google 411 is really amazing. i saw a billboard for the service on my way home, and had to try it out. i give it two thumbs up.

first of all, it’s free (at least right now it is). i don’t know how long it’s been since at&t stopped providing the service, it seems like almost 10 years. on a cellphone, the cost for a phonebook service had been in the 1$ range.

second of all, the voice recognition feature is really, really good. i’ve compared to both bmw’s idrive recognition and apple’s built-in finder voice recognition on OSX.4. it’s hands down the best voice recognition technology i’ve ever experienced. if it’s not sure what you said, i.e. doesn’t have an exact match, it gives you a list of things you may have said, and you can confirm by number.

the computerized voice is better than anything i’ve ever seen. very natural sounding. the intonation makes it very easy to understand. there is some room for improvement here, but it is by far the best ever computer voice at this point in time.

the interface: you say the city and state; you confirm the location; you say which listing you need; you then get the address and phone number; you’re prompted as to whether or not you’d like the info in a text message; it then repeats the info; it then connects you automatically to the phone number. there’s nothing more i could want from a 411 service. it is brilliant.

really, you ought to try it out for yourself. go on, pick up your phone… (1.800.GOOG.411)

I missed the BarCamp conference in Palo Alto last weekend. I wish I’d gone, but I’ll just have to find videos from the conferences and watch them during my commute.

what’s new at TechWeb, you ask?

Our MediaLive group (the group I work with) recently took control of the software 2008 conference, a product of the people at sandhill.com. we’ve also expanded several of our current shows to international venues (Interop São Paulo, Web 2.0 Berlin…). We also recently launched bMighty.com, a journal/blog devoted to SMB’s.

I’ve been working with OpenAds, configuring our own ad server to replace our paid contract with double-click. I’m also trying to get us off of HitBox, which could easily be replaced with Google Analytics. I’ve installed the analytics-javascript file on all of our templates, now I just have to convince the higher-ups that the statistics from on Google Analytics are as good if not better than what we get from HitBox. Ah… bureaucracy…

i just installed apache with php and mysql (xampp) on my macbook pro. when i start up the server, everything runs a bit sluggishly, but it’s worth having so that i can work on php/mysql stuff on the train. if things are too sluggish, i can always just shut down thee olde kernel itself.

current projects:

• redo my php-craps game to take advantage of ajax, also integrate a gambling/wager feature, and beef up the graphics a bit
• create simplified ecommerce wedding registry
• negotiate a redesign

i just wrapped up a small freelance project for www.carbonharmony.com. some very basic javascript which helps you calculate your CO2 emissions on a yearly basis.

you can see what i did here, and hopefully soon, you will see it on www.carbonharmony.com.

I’ve been meaning to do a re-design for an unpaid project for quite some time. This weekend I finally managed to dedicate a few hours to it, and this is what i have so far (keep in mind, I haven’t tested in IE at all yet, so if it’s a complete bomb, try looking in Firefox). What do you say mom, how much is it worth to you?

The interface is 100% more lick-able, the colors are brighter and bolder, and the code is much more clean. As soon as I get an opinion on it, I’ll fix it up and put the files at the root of the site, followed by carrying the re-design through to other pages of the site.

before | after

As a result of a legal battle with a patent holder, all embedded objects in IE require you to click the object before you can activate its controls.

When we started using a flash slideshow on one of our homepages, we were in a scramble to get all the copy-edits and registration systems up and running. Now we have some time to breath, so I went back and found an article about out how to get around this problem. (Read it here)

Adding a few lines of javascript takes care of the click-to-activate problem.

objects = document.getElementsByTagName("object");
for (var i = 0; i < objects.length; i++)
{
    objects[i].outerHTML = objects[i].outerHTML;
}

You can see it on one of our sites here: www.interop.com

***update 6/26:

Noticed some conflicts caused by the above version. Mainly happening with our drop down menus, and the javascript we use in our ad network didn’t like having it’s “outerHTML” messed with. The version below works great thus far:
http://activecontent.blogspot.com/

i realized that some of the sites i designed when i was first putting sites together all shared a common glitch. the problem was that pages with only a little amount of content didn’t get scrollbars, whereas pages with more than a screen’s capacity of content required scrollbars. the reason this is a problem is that when you navigate from one page to the next, the page layout jumps left and right by about 10px from pages with scrollbars to pages without them. minor problem, but some might say the devil’s in the details. it’s just one more way to make a site pixel perfect. i recently googled the words “forced scrollbars”, and found this article which shows how to solve this problem:

http://www.splintered.co.uk/experiments/49/

basically all you need to do is add this to your css, and you’ll get scrollbars on every page:

html { min-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 1px; }

it’s been several months since i last updated this page. my excuse: i’ve been insanely busy this semester. on monday, i finished a certificate in web programming from CSM. i’m not sure if i’ll go back for the full associate’s degree, could be worthwhile though, especially if i want to go to grad school for Computer Science. earlier this semester i got an award for honors called “ΦΘΚ”. being on the dean’s list from middle school and throughout high school seemed like a joke, but this one i’m kinda proud of.

anyway, now that school is over, i can spend some time writing here again. i’ll make sure i have something more tech-related here soon. this is just an update/apology for not posting in so long.

wrote some code at work the other day to make expandable lists using the DOM. i can’t show you the site until it’s finished, but you can click here to see an implementation of the code, to get a better idea of what it does. here it is:

function toggle(switcher) {
	if(document.getElementById) {

		reappearing = switcher.parentNode.nextSibling.nextSibling;
		reappearing.style.display=reappearing.style.display==
			'block'?
			'none':
			'block'
		;
		alternating = switcher.parentNode.firstChild;
		alternating.style.backgroundImage=(
			alternating.style.backgroundImage==
	  		"some-url/images/minus.gif)"?
	  		"some-url/images/plus.gif)":
	  		"some-url/images/minus.gif)")
		;
	}
}

<!--if the dom is not supported... -->
if(!document.getElementById) {
	document.write('<style type="text/css"><!--#' + id +
	'{display:block;}//--></style>');
}

if you’d like to use it on your site, keep in mind the main thing you’ll be changing is the string of parentNode/firstChild/nextSibling’s to match your document hierarchy…