That right there is the only tag cloud that I have ever found interesting. The cool part is that you can generate those tag clouds and with a lot more jazz at this really great service called Wordle.

How I Did It

For those interested on how I got all the tags for the above cloud (with weight) I decided to grab them myself. Here were the simple 4 steps I took.

The SQL grabs all of the tags used on blog posts (so not categories) at least once. It also grabs the number of times the tag appears on a post. Using a simple ruby script I take the tags (all single words) and multiply them by the number of times they appear. So a “ruby 3″ turns into “ruby ruby ruby.” Once that multiplication has taken place I can just plop them into Wordle and make the magic happen!

More clouds here!

I seem to have had some really bad luck doing what I thought would be very simple. I finally arrived at a solution that I really don’t feel is optimal, but it works and I’ll monitor it for a while and hope that it continues working. (You’ll know if something ended up changing).

Problem

I own “alpha.com” and I want to create a “blog.alpha.com” that actually pulls pages from “alpha.com/blog/” on the web server but the user should still see “blog.alpha.com” in their browser’s address bar.

How I did it with this WordPress 2.5.1 Blog

Hopefully if you look up at your address bar right now you see blog.bogojoker.com. If not, then this failed and completely ignore me! I ended up having to do three things:

1. I Setup redirection for a subdomain. I used my hosting company’s Control Panel to create “blog.bogojoker.com” and point it to “http://bogojoker.com/blog/”. Please note this change does not start working immediately. It took a few hours for the redirection to be broadcast over DNS Name Servers. Once it did work I went to the next steps. I wouldn’t recommend going to the next steps until this starts working because I believe they depend on this!
2. I logged into the WordPress Admin Dashboard. I went to “Settings” and put “http://blog.bogojoker.com” into both the “WordPress address” and “Blog address” fields. This put my browser into an infinite loop which I fixed in the final step.
3. I FTP’d into my server, went to the “public_html/blog/” directory and commented out these lines from the hidden “.htaccess” file: (Note that adding a “#” to the start of the line comments that line out)

   #RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^blog.bogojoker.com$ [OR]
   #RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.blog.bogojoker.com$
   #RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://bogojoker.com/blog/ [R=301,L]

Voila. That is how I did it. I ended up spending far too much time on what I considered “better” solutions that didn’t seem to work. In doing so I found out some things, but I can’t really be sure what I learned anything valuable from it.

Troubleshooting Tricks

If you end up having the same trouble, if you want to experiment on your own, or if you tried something that totally failed hopefully this can help.

At one point during the week everything crashed on me. Not only did the website not redirect properly but the direct paths weren’t working. I chalked it up to me turning the redirection (step 1 above) off. I stumbled upon a temporary solution to fix WordPress in the few hours it would take for that redirection to be reborn through DNS. It involves a little familiarity with mysql or phpMyAdmin and knowing your database schemas.

For those with phpMyAdmin access:

1. Log into your phpMyAdmin
2. Select the WordPress’s database. Most servers have username_wp### or the like, this you should recognize pretty easily or can find from your Control Panel
3. Browse the “wp_options” table
4. Modify the “siteurl” value to be the “real” path to the blog subdirectory, NOT what you want it to be but where it really is. For example “http://bogojoker.com/blog/” for me.
5. Now log into your WordPress by manually going to your domains wp-admin page like so: “http://yourDomainHere.com/blog/wp-admin/”
6. Go to the “settings” tab and change both urls to the url mentioned in step 4.

That should bring your website back up, albeit with the uglier URL structure. For those without phpMyAdmin access the you should have some form of access to your database, be it command line using the “mysql” command or via another graphical interface. Just try to follow the steps above as closely as possible.

I hope this helps you out a little if you want to accomplish the same thing. Even better though, come up with a better solution and let me know. I dreamed of solving this in a couple minutes and ended up spending a little over 3 hours taking a number of approaches. So I figured, what better to do but write about it!

In this blog post I’m going to give praise to Brian Ameriage, the developer of the Flow FTP Program available for Mac OS X Leopard. I’ll quickly go through some of the ways that Brian has impressed me over the short time I have known him over the web.

1Flow

I was involved in the Beta testing of Flow for a few months and as expected I ran into some problems. There was one, rather complicated problem that I decided to send in a bug report regarding. As a developer myself I knew what a good bug report would look like. I started from scratch, listed the steps to produce the bug (100%), etc. To my surprise I got a great personalized response:

Joe,

These issues should all be cleared up in Beta 5 (not yet released.) Keep in mind, though, that the issues you are experiencing are likely related to keychain, however, so it’s worth a shot remove all of your bookmarks, and to open up Keychain Access and remove any bookmarks tagged with “ConnectionKit Password.”

Thanks for the detailed report :-)

–
Thanks,
Extendmac, LLC.

Not only did he say that it was fixed in the next release, but he gave an indication as to what the problem was, a possible workaround, and appreciation for the report. From that point on I was sold on Flow. I continued to submit bug reports and they were all answered quickly, from a few hours to a few days after submitting them. They were all eventually resolved, and sometimes under extreme conditions. Did anyone ever wonder why there was such a quick jump between Beta 7 and 7.1 (or was it 8)? Turns out Brian stayed up past 2:30 AM hammering out some bug fixes.

2Passion and Dedication

I think Brian’s most recent blog post, Arrogance in Engineering sheds some light on this topic: (my emphasis)

There’s a tremendous difference between an engineer on paper and an honest-to-the-bone engineer. The great kind are tinkerers. They build things in their spare time and are positively eccentric about it.

Passionate developers do the best work because they are always thinking about how they can improve things. Developing, Engineering, etc. its not a 9-5 job… its an ongoing, never-ending, adventure to improve, innovate, and create. For a number of people perfection is not a goal, its the standard. I sensed this quality in the way that Brian handled himself developing Flow, supporting it, collecting critical feedback, and keeping patient by not releasing it before it was ready.

The release of Flow has been a great success. I saw minor improvements made over the last few weeks, and even hours before the launch (I was in email contact late that night) where Brian’s attention to detail, aim for excellence, and dedication really stood out.

3Finally, Composure

Composure is very different then Passion. The combination of the two characteristics is rare, but its something that I saw in Brian. Its especially something that I saw in a number of Brian’s blog articles (some of which I think have been lost). I remember seeing the blog posts and realizing the thought with which he put into his reasoning and his supporting arguments; knowing that what he was saying might not be the idea of the majority. Blogs are often just diaries, outlets for emotion, but those can easily be confused with rants. Either by design or not, Brian’s blog had reason and logic far beyond his years.

Brian who?

To steal a little content from Brian’s website, here is a just a small portion from his Bio:

1. In that sense, I design how software works. That encompasses engineering the architecture, writing the code, and illustrating the interface, but more importantly, thinking about how people will use it.
2. It’s not about technology, it’s about what it does. My passion is making tools for people.
3. I’m 17 years old. (And yes, I’m both embarrassed and depressed by the behavior of most people my age.)

There are Others

People like Brian are not a dime a dozen. I’ll admit he is one of my mini-heros. There are plenty others, who’s names I’ll leave out in the hope that I can contribute an entire article to them as well. But I figured I’d swallow a little of my own medicine. Now I better get back to writing some real programming on this blog before all my readers get confused!

You deserve it, Keep up the great work.
- Joe P

This post is just letting some steam out, so there is a lot of text and a lot of links, all because I recently made a very worthwhile purchase. I bought a brand new MacBook Pro laptop and I am more then happy. I didn’t really know what to expect, I was really looking forward to it… however it has exceeded all of my expectations.

The quick specs are that its a Silver MBP with a 15.4in glossy widescreen display with the newest LED back-lightning. It houses a 2GB of RAM and an Intel Core 2 Duo that knock the socks of my previous 512/1.6 laptop. The software takes a larger explanation.

I had originally planned on holding out on buying a Mac until Leopard was released. My plans were pushing forward when I won a bundle of applications valued at more then $500 from MacUpdate and MacHeist. However I had been looking at software to download for weeks before my purchase and the list of free, high quality software is nearly endless. Still, there are always programs you have to splurge on.

I splurged on TextMate, a programming editor that translates into about $55. Its the single tool that I have heard the most about from web developers all around the world. I have to agree with the masses, its a fantastic editor that is grows more and more useful as I get acquainted with the Mac.

On the free end of things I have to mention QuickSilver. I might argue that every Mac user has at least heard of QS as its popularity is nearly as high as that of TextMate. I really appreciate this little app as it really does just make my life easier. It took a few minutes to setup these global triggers for iTunes: ?P to pause/play and ??? to go to the next song. That means from nearly anywhere those key combinations will trigger iTunes. I’m learning more as I go but QS is useful in more ways than one.

For Instant Messaging I thought I would like iChat. I thought it was okay, it certainly was easy to setup and worked great, however it just wasn’t up to my standards. I had heard about a Adium and decided to give it a try. That is an amazing IM program. There are plenty of great themes and almost everything is customizable. Its and incredible chat client that easily synced with my Google Talk account (the only Windows chat client I am willing to use).

However my favorite application so far has been Linkinus. That program has completely revolutionized IRC for me. Chatting in Linkinus is just fun. Its a work in progress and I plan to help out with the development. I am working on scripts, which require me to learn AppleScript, but it is worth it.

A worthy app to mention is Growl. You don’t realize how useful a standard messaging system is until you have used one. Almost every application I have can interface into Growl and therefore I have awesome standard notifications. Just typing this I got a notification that someone logged on Adium!! brb.

Looking for a really nice free RSS reader? Check out NetNewsWire Lite! RSS is fundamental when you are as busy as I am (which I expect you are). Have your news come to you, and link yourself back if you deem the article worthy of a visit. Most of the time I read it all in the RSS reader to save even more time. I sift through about 100 RSS articles each day, some are duplicates and many are short but I’d say that there are at least 5 full articles that I will read. They come from blogs and news sources alike, I currently subscribe to over 70 different feeds.

Common apps like iTunes and Firefox are obvious must haves. Although I will admit that I am interested in safari and I will likely give it a try for just common browsing (as it lacks many of the web development plugins that I have in Firefox). Photo Booth makes excellent use of the built in web cam aptly named the iSight that comes equipped on every MacBook Pro laptop. My recently engaged sister and said counter-part were kind enough to sit in front of my Mac for some pictures in Photo Booth. Half an hour later I was able to find a few serious pictures and I sifted thru another 30 or so pictures with various effects to get a group of pictures to put on my family website.

Now the beta apps. I am excited to try out Flow and I was able to sign up for the private beta, however I have not gotten any response yet. I did meet a nice contact chatting on Linkinus and got ahold of a the Skitch beta. Now Skitch is a really cool tool. I can take a picture of a section on my screen, add some quick features like (text, arrows, etc.) in seconds. That is impressive coming from the mspaint.exe experience, however it is not nearly Skitch’s coolest point. There is a drag and drop portion on the bottom of the app to allow you to quickly make a file in the most common picture formats (png, jpg, gif…). To top things off when you sign up for a Skitch account you are given a profile online. A single button on Skitch uploads the image to your Skitch site storage. That same button can then take you directly to the online image, some more single click buttons will copy the image location or xhtml compatible code and allow you to share the image with anyone in the world. You will be able to do all of this just by watching the 3 minute video included with the download. Skitch is a fantastic app! I’ve got some invites if anyone is really interested I might give one away.

Being a web developer its useful to have a local web server to test your work on. Although I manually installed everything I need to do Ruby on Rails development (ruby, rubygems, mysql, mongrel, and svn) I also downloaded a nice app to make things easy for myself. MAMP stands for Macintosh, Apache, Mysql and PHP and it is just plain simple. MAMP (like Easy PHP for Windows) is a completely isolated webserver with php and mysql. You can be sure that nothing else on your computer will be affected, for instance if you have another mysql database running. A great dashboard that even has phpMyAdmin. I made a few modifications to the default pages to add a quicklink to quickly accesses my web directories, but MAMP’s ease of use is much appreciated. A simple click to turn on/off… what more would I want?

SRS iWoW is an iTunes plugin that adds Three-Dimensional sound. I got it with the plugin but it a very cool plugin. Its enhancements to iTunes’ sound are immediately noticeable and gratifying. Simple to setup and customize you can have some real high quality sound. To be honest you won’t notice the difference until you try it, but once you do you will gasp at the difference.

I have a bunch more that I can write but I am going to finish now and hopefully finish working on my other website so that I can launch it! Goodbye for now.

Pete returned from Djibouti Africa on Saturday March 17, 2007. He is a member of the Marines and was stationed in Djibouti for the past 6 months. Everyone is glad that he is safe and back in the states.

I have always enjoyed customizing my desktop since the original wallpapers in Windows 98 and onward were so bland. I hope you enjoy this Widget view of the past year’s themes which involved WindowBlinds, CursorXP, and some deviant art browsing for wallpapers.

If you have any questions about any of the settings you see above feel free to ask me. I have close to a hundred vector wallpapers that will forever remain in my picture folder! Got a picture of your desktop? Drop me a link.

My first WordPress blog. I admit that I am very pleased with everything that WordPress has, and the themes that are available online are fantastic. I really look forward to using this blog and experimenting with everything that WordPress has to offer.

As for this blog, I imagine three categories: family, web development, and music. That means that reason you are here is most likely for web development and I welcome you with my warmest smile. I would like to be of some help to those who are just learning or experimenting with web development, or intermediate programmers like myself, and I hope I can make it more fun and interesting.

I hope you learn something while you are here,

Joe P