Beginnercode.com

One thing I thought I would look forward to as a home owner was the satisfaction of household manual labor. This is our first home and we’ve now been in it for 3 years. I’m not mr. fixit by any means but I’m learning as I go. I’ve repaired toilets, replaced ceiling fans, repaired mailboxes, replaced sump pumps, repaired dishwashers, replaced garbage disposals, re-routed heat placement by adjusting ventilation doors, minor landscaping, and the usual duties like mowing the lawn and shoveling snow. If I’ve got the time to learn I’m willing to take on most things. (Although I try to steer clear of electrical and plumbing duties).

I’ve found the novelty really wears off after about 2 minutes when it comes to shoveling snow and raking leaves (we live on a corner lot). The lot is a size thats small enough that it doesn’t really require a tractor mower. We have 3 silver maples that tend to hang on to their leaves until early December depending on the weather, and that is rarely predictable in Wisconsin. The trees are large and provide wonderful shade in the summer for the entire house, and they are nice to look at. In the spring they litter the yard and the gutters with helicopters. In the fall the leaves cover the land but not all at once. Some are from neighboring parcels.

It’s hard to get a nice weekend to rake where I’m home, and most of the leaves have fallen. Often if the maples haven’t lost their leaves it’s futile to get out there. Not knowing if it will snow soon (never know in WI) this Saturday seemed like the time to get out there. The best thing about the project is the family time.

(The day after raking)
Of course not all the leaves fell. So on Sunday we ended up re-raking a lot of it. If you don’t get the majority of them they get wet in spring and your entire lawn smells of decomposing leaves. I managed to get up on the roof to clean out the gutters too. Not cleaning them out often results in waterfalls over them. Which is neat, but bad for a home. Water is one of a homes worst enemies. It’s best to direct it away from the home.

A few years ago I invested in some ‘lattice’ type covers for about $0.98/foot. I tried it out on one section because if they didn’t work well, I didn’t want to remove the entire length of the house. They worked fine for the first season. But now in the spring the helicopters fall into the slots and stick there from the sap. It looks like I’m growing a garden of helicopters in my gutters. They keep larger leaves out, but twigs and smaller debris gets gummed up in there from the sap and I have to remove them, clean it out and replace them again. My advice: don’t bother. It’s just easier to get up there 3 times a year for about 2 hours cleaning them out.

I’m too cheap to opt for the ‘leaf guard‘ or ‘gutter topper’ type devices. Have any of you had experiences with these? Do they truly work as promised? I’ve heard some pretty pricey quotes on them, and I just don’t trust them.

Fall, leaves, raking

This may seem simple enough to many programmers out there but this threw me for a few days. This is how you install imagick on a windows server. If your site is on a shared host, you need to ask your host to install the extension for you.

For this example I am running php 5.2.4 on Abyss/Apache web server

Download the matching pecl5 Binary from php.net. In this case its pecl5.2-win32-200710121230.zip (matching my current php version).

Unpack the file.

Copy the php_imagick.dll into php/ext/ directory

Open your php.ini file and look for the “Dynamic Extensions” area. In there will be a list of items (some commented out). Add the following line to the bottom of the list: extension=php_imagick.dll

Save the changes you made.

Restart your web server.

If these steps were successful imagick will show up on any php page using the phpinfo() function.

imagick, pecl-extension, php-extension

I was writing up a few scripts and as I was adding my commenting I noticed I tend to comment differently depending on the difficulty of the script and how many different parts or procedures there are to it. I don’t have a set convention, but I suppose as with all things it would make things easier on myself and others if I had some kind of standardization…

For larger ‘areas’ that contain functions or a series of procedures that extract or parse sections of data I’m now starting with this:

/***
*
* This is a comment.
* Here I leave notes about the section and what it does.
* I may also include notes to myself here.
* Note: This could probably be done more eficiently
*
*/

As there are more breakdowns within these sections I’m using this:

/*  [ Parse out the text file ]  */

And further drilled down I use the more inline commenting

/*  [ Print data]  */

$parts = explode("|", $the_array); // get the parts

$color = false; // set color var for shading every other row

print("<table>"); 

// loop through data & print
foreach($parts as $key => $row){ 

    // CSS Note: shading <tr>'s with css mostly works with nice browsers
    // For IE 6+ one needs to shade the <td>'s

    if($color){
        print("<tr class=\"rowColor1\"> "); // start row with color 1
        $color = !$color; // unset the color so it alternates next loop
    } else {
        print("</tr><tr class=\"rowColor2\"> "); // start row with color 2
        $color = true; // set the color so it alternates next loop
    }

    print("<td>$row[first_name]</td></tr>"); // print cell data and close the row
}

print("</td></tr></table>");

The inline comments still seem a bit ‘messy’ to me. But for now it will work.

One of the reasons I decided to standardize is because even with commenting and extra line spaces in the scripts it was still difficult to sort out what exactly was going on. Another thing that tripped my thought was having a glance at phpDocumentor. It seems to function on how you comment your code. I did try to install it but for some reason it was way over my head. It looks like a neat tool but I rarely seem to write more than 4 different files and those are often less than 300-400 lines.

I’ve yet to test it in comments but my plugin to allow code viewing is much like bbc code. [code lang="php"] // comment [/code]

So whats your style? Is there a standard? What have you seen that looks the cleanest? Leave a comment… with some comments ;-)

Update 12/3/07 Elizabeth Naramore has written a nice article on the effectiveness of comments in your code over at the Chris Shiflett blog. It’s a great read on WHY commenting is good in your code.

php, comment, code, script, php+script, php+comment

Ever wonder how long it would take you to count to one million? Jeremy Harper is in the process of finding out…

The idea started as a “what if” and has now become a reality.

Jeremy is aiming to count for 16 hours per day (minus break time). Depending on the day’s distractions, we anticipate 12000-15000 numbers per day.

He counts aloud in his home and clicks a hand held device which updates the number on a monitor sitting next to the main camera. His house is stacked with webcams and switches to cover most the viewable area of his home. He counts as he does trivial house duties like dishes and tidying up. He will not be leaving his house until it’s done. Mostly the times I’ve seen him actually counting, he’s pacing in front of his monitor. At the time of this writing he is at 408,262…

The site didn’t work very well for me in firefox. I tried it on 3 different workstations. I’m guessing the video is in a windows native format. I tried Internet Explorer and things went much more smoothly.

Cleverly he and his ‘team’ have it set up in such a way that you can purchase adspace for select targeted numbers. So far it’s a pretty impressive list. Jeremy will personally read advertisments (for the right price) before the selected block of numbers. You can bid for space above his couch, even the bathroom door! The advertising proceeds will go to PUSH America:

Not only is the count to a million a crazy record breaking stunt, but it’s also a great way to raise money and awareness for a great cause. Push America is an amazing organization whose mission is to serve people with disabilities.

According to millioncount.com Jeremy has taken part in charity bike rides in the past to raise money for other good causes as well. Apparently his employer has also allowed him the time off to do this as well.

I’ve been popping in from time to time to see where he’s at. It kicked off on 06-18-2007 and They are estimating it will take 3-4 months to get there. 408,711… 408,712…

count, million, charity

The drama group that I’m privledged to co-lead is blessed with the opportunity to put on our most recent play, The Hiding Place (the Corrie ten Boom Story), at Lifest 2007 on Thursday night. One of the nice perks is that I get 1 free event pass. That is a pass for the entire week. Unfortunately due to rehearsing etc I can only go tonight. But we have family in town and are going to go see the action.

I’m REALLY excited about the last headliner of the night. Pillar! If you are into metal this is a show to see. Here’s a vid from them at GodTube.

Update 7/12/07:Excellent show. It’s more than what I expected. They have a great live show. Also heard some new tracks to their upcoming album. It’s a definite buy!