Recently in My Web Development Category

I finally got the Pocket PC working correctly. I had been experiencing wierd behaviours with the Dell Axim I have from work. It seems that my first try at installing the driver for the Dell CF Wireless card was the wrong driver becuase I had thought the PocketPC was running PocketPC Windows 2002, but it was actually 2003. So, I had simply installed the right one, which got it working, but the Power ON button no longer worked. I had to use the RESET button. That was an even bigger pain when I realized that when the unit went into sleep mode, I also had to reset it to get it back on, which caused me to lose my place. I was thinking about trying to UNINSTALL the network card drivers and install ONLY the 2003 verison (perhaps the old 2002 driver had overwritten or conflicted with something in 2003), but I did not see any UNISTALL mechanism. So I did a hard reset, and then installed right away the 2003 Dell CF Wireless Card driver. It worked! I had to reenter all my settings for connection to my home network (for some reason, the DHCP on my Netgear outer doesn't really do DHCP, so I have to specify particular IP settings)

Now I am on a mission to find a good blog tool. My Movable Type blog is not at all friendly to viewing on my device. Is there a PDA-friendly set of templates for MT? Is there device-detecting code for MT that knows when a portable device has requested access? I have a fold out keyboard, and so I would like to be able to add entries, and also do the "BlogThis" function I have in both IE and Firefox where I can highlight text on another Web page, right click and select the appropriate MT this or WP this, and have that URL and text be pulled into a new post dialog where I can comment on the link.

Pocket Blog hasn't been updated since September 2002. Pocket Sharp MT requires the 2.0 release of the .NET Compact Framework , which is a 22mb download. That seems a hefty sacrafice for the limited space on Pocket PC storage. I'm not even sure as of this time what the .Net Compact framework does for me. But it sounds interesting. That's a matter for further review. In the meantime, where ar ethe blog tools for pocket PC?

Dave’s Wordpress Blog » How RSS can bust through

It must be easy to find relevant feeds. Too much hunt and peck is involved. The reason My.Yahoo and iTunes have been successful is that they centralize a lot of the discovery, they make it easy to find stuff you might be interested in.

Absolutely. And it is here that the Church 2.0 can gain big-time. When RSS hits it big (or bigger, depending on where you rate the success of RSS so far) this is where I see churches discovering much more of the rich array of gifted ministers we have amongst our number, and becoming more consistently connected with the things that are being done, being said, and being told. If evangelism is "good news", then anything which gives us more exposure to the "good news" amongst us is downright evangelistic.

And as for the traditional sense of evangelism: that of "bringing others to Christ", I believe that the stories from those on the fronts of the Kingdom is the most powerful form of "information evangelism", even though it does take some face-to-face reprentatives of this same good news to link these stories to what can happen in our own back yard, or maybe even what IS happening in our own back yard without our knowing it, and it took a story from someone online to alert us to God's activity in our "back yard".

When people who care about issues of human importance, and find that there are church folks who do this as a ministry and a mission, there are former opponents or cynics of the church who had dismissed the church due to a perceived irrelevance who get a dose of good news.

I have an image, http://theoblogical.org/movtyp/images/AuthChurch.jpg, that shows up to the left of tghe post below, but only in Firefox and Netscape. IE won't show it, although it is no problem with the rest of the images on the page. Anybody know what could possibly cause this? If you take the img url above and plug it in to IE to browse to it, it shows up fine. But not in those blocks to the left of my Authntic Church posts. ???????

What's up with that? IE is being way too wierd.

I have use of a Sony ICD-BM1 voice recorder for my trip. It records MSV files. It's included software only converts to WAV files. Is there a way to get this direct to MP3? I don't want to have to find a converter to convert the WAV files, nor do I want to have to do two conversions. Anything anybody knows of out there? I want to do some podcasts on the road!

I don't know exactly when, but sometime between Saturday and Monday, my iTunes feed that was validating just fine at feedvalidator.org (see it here is gettg error s now, saying the feed is not valid .

Today, this new error apperared: iTunes elements should only be present in feeds encoded as UTF-8
Yesterday, this was not even there. What changed from Saturday to yesterday was that my URL for the DTD was throwing an error: http://www.itunes.com/DTDs/Podcast-1.0.dtd. When I changed the case of DTDs to dtds and the filename Podcast-1.0.dtd to podcast-1.0.dtd , then the error went away.

Yesterday, and still today, this error :
column 0: Undefined item element: itunes:category (3 occurrences)
<itunes:category text="Religion & Spirituality"></itunes:category>

I fussed with this for quite a while yesterday, trying to get it to validate. Finally, I went ahead and tried putting the feed into my iTunes software, and it loaded fine. I put the Feed into Sage. Again fine. INto Bloglines, fine as well.

So is it feedvalidator.org that is confused? And why the change in case on the DTD file?

I'm confused.

My organization has recently moved a portion of its Website offiste to be hosted by an Application Service Provider. Until their system is able to output RSS for us from the content we add to that data almost every day (several times on many days , in fact), I am wondering if there is a way to build an RSS file from data received from say, a Web services interface on the provider. Presently, we are re-entering the content where we formerly entered it (our in house CMS) when we still hosted that content here. I jumped into the code of that CMS when the content was submitted, and wrote the RSS file using the file system object, so that the RSS got updated whenever a new story went in.

I don't want to have to re-enter this data, so getting it output in a form that I can then write into an RSS file would be ideal. Any ideas out there amongst you developers? (No, we don't have direct access to their database. And we can't write our own asp to give to them to pull it out of their database, at least not at this time).

I am feeling blogless, mainly due to my having had to type and read too much code, and stare at the screen too much over the past 3 days. But I have been looking at my RSS feed.

I'm here at Coffee and Cream at Lakeside OH (no, not at a Methodist conference...the East Ohio Conference is here this week)....for you non-UM folks, Lakeside is a UM founded place, and so some UM conferences hold their annual meetings here).....but, the most "blessed" thing here (in my world, is Wifi connectivity, and only 10 or so minutes from our place.)

So,I've gotabout an hour and a half from now to do my morning coffee and RSS rounds.

Wow!

Adobe to acquire Macromedia - Dreamweaver MX and UltraDev Zone - DMXzone.COM

We have found some very important news directly from the official Adobe website! Just read this:

Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq: ADBE) has announced a definitive agreement to acquire Macromedia (Nasdaq: MACR) in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $3.4 billion.

This is a strange request for me, but I am dead tired today, and have been working on and banging my head against this for too long today, and I need to get this done.

I have a form that has a drop down list of church denominations fed from a database (except for one hard coded option). I want a document.write method to happen if the selection is "UMC". The sample code is below

<select name="selDenom" onchange="GetDenomSel(document.form.selDenom.options[document.form.selDenom.selectedIndex].value);"> <option value="UMC"<United Methodist>/option>
<% While (NOT rsGetDenom.EOF) %>
<option value="<%=(rsGetDenom.Fields.Item("denList").Value)%>" <%If (Not isNull((rsGetDenom.Fields.Item("denList").Value))) Then If (CStr(rsGetDenom.Fields.Item("denList").Value) = CStr((rsGetDenom.Fields.Item("denList").Value))) Then Response.Write("SELECTED") : Response.Write("")%> ><%=(rsGetDenom.Fields.Item("den").Value)%></option>

<% rsGetDenom.MoveNext() Wend If (rsGetDenom.CursorType > 0) Then rsGetDenom.MoveFirst Else rsGetDenom.Requery End If %>
</select> </p> <p>
<script language="JavaScript" type="text/JavaScript"> if (document.form.selDenom.options[document.form.selDenom.selectedIndex].value) = 'UMC') {document.writeln('UMC selected')} else {document.writeln('UMC NOT selected')}

</script>

The data items are simply additoonal items for the Options in the select list. The javascript to pull the value of the selected item , to see if it is "UMC", is what I cannot seem to get to work and fire off the document.writeln.

This is like a desperation stab ih the dark in case some of you out there are javascript gurus (I am not , obviously). I'd like to be able to use inline javascript, but can use functions. Any ideas? I would be grateful.

Macromedia article I just found sound like a good way to try some PHP stuff, and play with a blog tool at the same time. (I may not get to it until after Christmas, however)

Macromedia - Developer Center : Building a Blog with Dreamweaver, PHP, and MySQL – Part 1: Creating the Basic Application

Building a Blog with Dreamweaver, PHP, and MySQL

I broke out the OmniPage Pro 9 software that I got long ago with my now defunct Canon Scanner (it gave out after about 18 months, and now I have an HP scanner that Larry gave me to do some OSG work.....which is, one of those deals we never got to......for another day, hopefully soon) Now, it was to OCR a page of The Peaceable Kingdom to put forth aas something that addresses my problem with the first of Hauerwas' books that I bought, Performing The Faith, on the fact that it was too much comparative analysis and not enough Non-violence and Bonhoeffer.

While this book is meant to be a primer or introduction to Christian ethics which I hope can be used both in introductory courses in college and by adult study groups, I am not providing a survey of what various ethicists think on current issues in the field. Nor will I offer any extensive analysis of past and current figures in Christian ethics. Instead this book is an introduction in the sense that it attempts to present one straightforward account of a Christian ethic.
from the Introduction of The Peacable Kingdom

Sounds like exactly what I was exp[ecting from Performing The Faith. Cool.

I TRIED to install my HP dj3650 under the 64-bit XP......no go. Driver install fails......printer detected, but "Problems" prevent the driver from installing. What's the deal here? How is it that Hp Printer drivers won't work? A search on 64-bit HP printer drivers yielded zip...nothing

The previous post leaves me with a disgust toward the state of "PC-Support" today by the major manufacturers. The "solution" of running a completely unnecessary wipe clean and start over is overkill and just plain wrong, since it ignores the fact that most don't want or need to re-configure everything from scratch again, in the absence of "config backup and restore" programs for all the major apps (like Outlook, Office, Macromedia Studio, and who knows what else).

This "mass market" approach, while understandable, leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth. HP won't take the small step of producing a recovery CD (that could also easily include a "Drivers and Setup" directory to quickly and painlessly reconfigure the major system drivers back to the "intended" state, as well as provide CD keys for the various software packages, for cases where customers have to resort to clean wipes. It is recommended by most computer literate people that one installs Windows afresh periodically anyway, and for this, it would be nice to have a backup opgtion for installed apps and configurations, so a Windows install could be floowed by an "Application Restore". This would be a welcome additonal utility to supplement a "Wipe and Restore" that ignores the fact that most people needing to use it would want to keep the configurations and appliactions they were previously running.

There need to be a class action lawsuit by consumers to demand this as a minimum. Of course, this would initially drive prices up, but all would be forced to compete and level this out.

There seems to be something in this that leads to another "theological" observation about Churches. That is, how often do churches resort to a "package deal" to appeal to a larger audience, and end up "dumbing down" the gospel (or worse, selling out for a more "palatable" Christianity.

More on the aforementioned HP (and other computer manufacturer's) resorting to ELCHEAPO customer support. It came about as a attempted to install the 64-bit XP on the HP Pavilion a530n, which sports an AMD Athlon 64 processor.

I am uploading this article in pieces since I just wrote about 5 opr 6 paragraphs that evaporated as MT-Blacklist (which was running in the background , deleting the glut of spam comments I have received, finished and refreshed my browser window which contained all my MT entry window....so I begin again)

Click the "Continue Reading" link below to read on

I started loading the XP 64 bit OS on an available partition on my new machine. XP Pro was installed and working. When the machine rebooted after the file copy phase, I got :
NTLDR is missing.
When I load Recovery console, I have no "fixboot" command. A "map" command shows that I have
C: fat32 (the HP recovery partition (4570mb)
E: ntfs my xp p ro install
J: the partition where my 64 bit install was going
D: my second hard drive

A: floppy
K: cdrom0 (m dvdr-cdr)
L: cdrom1 (my cdrom)

My XP Pro install had gone onto the partition available next to the HP recovery partition. That install worked fine. When I tried to add the XP 64 bit install to a partition on the remaining space, the above goofup happened. Any ideas out there?

I stayed up way past my usual bedtime, and I'm tired now.

HP Pavilion Mouse and Keyboard Drivers. I need them. I have a KB-0228, and a Mouse, neither of which I can find anywhere in links to various drivers, and CERTAINLY not on the HP site! Their support is abysmal for a company of their stature. Their "solution" is to Use the restore disk, which wipes the whole boot partition and all of the settings and programs installs with it. Right.

The keyboard works with baisc drivers, but I'd like to be able to see what the buttons at the top do. And the MS MOuse drivers that XP loads don't seem quite right. The pointer jumps around too frequently. I am a bit miffed that HP doesn't have everything available for people who want a little freedom with their Windows installation (like being able to upgrade to Xp Pro--- which is what I did, after discovering that the XP Home they have on the machine somehow doesn't want to let you run the Upgrade.

In Compusa's Ad today, they advertise that the a530n (HP model with an Athlon 64 3200+ processor, the box I have been about decided to return, as having a 1600Mhz Front Side Bus. Is this real, or are they playing with the numbers in some deceitful or unconventional way?

I also wonder if, seeing that it comes with 512mb pc2700, that it is capable of doing pc3200, if both sticks are 3200? My guess is that if it could benefit from 3200 memory, that both sticks would have to be of the same speed?

Any of you out there "in the know" about such things?

By the way, I found my DVD software......I already had Power DVD from the DVD Writer I bought last summer (ironically, an HP burner). So I'm much less inclined to return it now, but was going to be easily persuaded to switch to something else if an ad enticed me. Didn't see any.

HP Pavilion a530n. Looks like I'll be returning it (see my extra comment below the post below about trying to find the original DVD software)

Now that my system is running XP Pro (the HP came with XP Home), I no longer have the HP installed apps , and the first one I want back is the DVD playback software (even Windows Media Player will not play DVDs without it).

I made a recovery CD from the store's display model last night. I am looking for a way to use this, or the recovery partition that is still intact on my stystem, to pick and choose which pre-installed apps I want to reload (if there is any way short of using the total system restore which would wipe everything and re-install XP Home as well). Any ideas?

I'm really a bit put out by this backward bu apparently common "el cheapo" mass production , lack of support for knowlegable computer people that most companies have begun to implement. It's further down the line of disgust to make it impossible to upgrade the XP version to XP Home.

Finally, after a week of struggling with various roadblocks, last night I succeeded (sort of) in setting up my new computer with XP Pro. I bought an HP Pavilion a530n, which has an Athlon 64 3200+ (2ghz), 512 GB RAM (soon to be upgraded, when convenient), 200 gb hard drive, DVD Writer, and NVidia GeForce AGP 8X with 128Mb DDR memory.

Bought a new PC, a Pavilion a530n (Athlon 64 3200) which came with XP Home, DVDWriter, 200 gb hard drive, 512mb RAM. The system would not let me do the XP Pro upgrade that previously (on other PCs) will run from within XP Home. This time, a blue screen occurs each time the upgrade process does its initial file copy and restart.......I tried several steps suggested by HP Support to no avail.....

Following is a copy of an eamil I sent to HP Email support:

I haven't been blogging much. I've been working on my txes, interviewing for a job, going to second interviews, and then expecting an offer. The offer came this past week, and I am starting tomorrow. I'm not going to name the place, only say that it is in Web development, and in Nashville. I am excited about it, and also anxious (all the usual feelings about new places, and wanting to live up to expectatons, whatever those might be).

Thanks to all of you out there who have posted encouragements over the past year, and keep me in your prayers as I transition. Being unsure about where my next income was coming from was a different kind of stress, one which I do NOT prefer to the kind that comes with venturing into a new place...but both have their stress factor. I am optiisitic about this new place. They've already been doing good work, and I feel a re-affirmation of my gifts and talents.

Recently, a new wave of spam has hit, using my own email address as the sender, but with a different Name as the Recipient in the Outlook Inbox. Does anyone know how I could use Outlook to filter these out, when I already have the "SafeLists Only" option turned on, and my safe senderslist has a only a few addresses PLUS my Contacts list. I don't want to filter out all mail from myself, since I often need to send myself mail to test things, or in forwarding something home from a mail login on another computer. I need to filter out these scumbags who use some other name and my email address as the actual email address. Is this doable? (Example: My Inbox shows a note from :

Scumbag Spammer [me@mydomain.net] (thelatter is my actual email address, but the Scumbag Spammer is somethign other than Dale Lature.

Well, I thought I'd try the Toshiba PDA support, to see if there's any news at all about Windows PocketPC upgrades...and the answer: Nada. When I told the support person that I know of nobody that owns an e740 that will EVER buy a Toshiba product again, and that I will never consider Toshiba for any new Pocket PC (which I'm going to have to purchase-- when I'm able--- just to saty current.)

It's absolutely unbelievable hpow utterly callous Toshiba is being about this, and how utterly CLUELESS they are about how this affects their POTENTIAL BUYERS as well as their CURRENT (and often NO LONGER) customer base.

CONGRATULATIONS Toshiba, on one of the biggest customer reputation blunders of all time. Add to that the Blogging population of the Toshiba victims.....this is spread throughout ther Internet......nearly every customer review I read that is not on a sales site, reflects the disgust e740 owners have with being left in the lurch like this.

I have told many people that although I can't complain , given that I paid only $140 by getting it through EBay (where it was probably available because of the upgrade issue), I STILL will never EVER buy a Toshiba product, given this kind of abandonment of existing customers.

So, let me say: NEVER BUY TOSHIBA, or you may well get screwed in the same way ---- I would have chosen the IPAQ (that was an option I had when I bought the Toshiba). I wish I had. Boy do I ever. As it stands, I am happy with having a 802.11b device which I can use to check my email. But as soon as the job front situation resolves, it's one of the first items on my list. I'm a developer, and one of the things I want to be workign on very soon is making my sites PDA-readable, and I wanto tbe able to develop for devices which will probably be dominated by devices powered by Windows Mobile 2003 . Whose to say Toshiba won't be just as clueless about customer perception and compatibility with new upgrades? It's something I'm not willing to risk, when there's plenty of competitors out there.

I found an "unlisted" free wifi access spot that was, as far as I could tell, not mentioned among several listings when I did a search on Free WiFi Atlanta. It is in The Mall at Peachtree Station, Atlanta Bread Company. My Dad, 2 brothers, and I were staying at the Marriott Marquis, which is conected by walkway to the Mall, which then has a Marta entrance on the other side. We took the Marta to the games at the Georgia Dome each day, and I would logon and check email each time we walked by, after finding it initially on Thursday Morning, the day the SEC tournament began.

The georgia Dome apparently had TMobile access available, but not for free since I couldn't get on.

Of course, my email got stuck, as it often does, when there is are certain types of spam in my inbox (why, I don't know).....what I usually do is logon to the web mail interface on Comcast and delete spam messages, but their site wouldn't work via my IE for Pocket PC 2002....it told me my browser was out of date. I think it probably wouldn't recognize ANY pocket pc browser. so, who is it that's "out of date". I think it is Comcast. (To be fair, few websites are PDA friendly --- Bloglines, Google, and ESPN are the only ones I've seen , and Macromeida is not too bad.

I have a second interview with a Church related organization on the 16th of this month. I had a phone interview with them about 4 weeks ago, and I had given that possibility up for dead after a couple weeks went by. The email I received said I was a "possible match", so we'll see. I jotted down in my notes yesterday that if that job does NOT come to pass, then I will be desperate to find some addtional leads for development projects. The consultant that handed me some web work recently has said there was more to come (and the present project, the first phase of which is complete, has more to add....I already put out a photo-browsing album of about 440 photo captures from a DVD PR piece put out by a local church.

Funny thing just happened (I guess it's funny if you're geeky enough to have struggled with and used this feature)......I noticed that a link I had pointing to Chris hammond's post about his new project cDotText, registered a trackback on his blog, which is a dottext blog. I thought, "Hey, why does HIS blog successfully register trackbacks and mine doesn't. So I asked him in a comment under my trackback listing. Then I tried a test on mine gain for the first time in about a month, and Wala! It worked! Then I saw Scott's home page, where he mentioned that he was testing my trackbacks (which will now show up under his entry as a trackback. I wish more people availed themselves of this. I think it's a neat way to converse, and give each other credit and let others know we're listening when we react.

Chris Hammond has done some work on someting called cDotText which he talks about here

Flash is going to have to have its own Category now (but not right now), because I'm doing so much of it lately (at OSG and also with a new project I joined). I think it is inevitable that it will come up that somebody can't (and won't use Flash). Even though it's widely supported and integrated now, I believe that I need to do it (provide alternate non-Flash pages" to conserve bandwidth for bandwidth challenged browsing persons).