Archive for September, 2007

dear class of 2007: “read promiscuously”

Published by dekay on September 25, 2007 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

I just stumbled across this quote by verstegan (here):

You’re not alone. I think a lot of PhD students, particularly in the humanities, have difficulty keeping track of everything they read: I certainly did. And it’s a good sign. One of the best pieces of advice I was given by my dissertation supervisor was to ‘read promiscuously’, as much as possible and as widely as possible, and not just within my own specialised field of research. Some of the books I read in my first few years as a graduate student have gone on influencing my thinking and writing ever since. And I realise now what I didn’t fully realise then: that the freedom to read promiscuously is a rare privilege. Make the most of it while you can; you may not have another opportunity.

coffeeblogger

Published by dekay on September 24, 2007 in Uncategorized. 3 Comments

Today (this sounds like I was posting to this blog in a regular mode…) I would like to present you a blog from by blogroll: Jonathan’s Coffeeblog. A fellow coffee-lover Jon is, but it seems he has many other interests as well, especially comics. And, incidentally I also have re-discovered an app that came bundled with my Mac: ComicLife. I assume that is what Jon uses as well, but see for yourself, his style is stunning, clever and just fun to read:

jon coffeeblog

And speaking of style: his blog’s design is interesting,. Definitely not as boring as my “off the shelf don’t have the time to redesign”-K2 theme. And if you like the curious, mind-expanding look at things close to everyday life (like “what is bright coffee?“), or some exciting piece of history that you never knew anyone would be telling you… (like Hulagu’s exit strategy).

Go, check it out, not only if you like coffee, but especially if you like to be surprised and entertained while being educated as well ;)

Playing with the Google API — part 2

Published by dekay on September 19, 2007 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

A short status update:

I have been playing quite a bit with that “other” webpage Rhein-Neckar-Tango, adding somne nifty google maps as well as embedding google calendar data inside the interactive map-bubbles. Fun and hard work for someone as unfamiliar with PHP and JavaScript as I am. Long live the web and it’s countless samples, articles and forums/usenet/googlegroups.

A short resumé what worked and what did not:

  • getting GoogleMaps to work is a pain, unless you use a nice php API like the GoogleMapAPI. It may be dated from 2005 (?) but it works like a charm
  • Adding my locations via a MySQL database which stores stuff like lat and lon, as well as other meta data like a pretty formatted name string, links and other stuff that I like to use on the web page — and you have one huge power horse working. This is real fun!
  • But I also wanted to display event dates within gmap. And since all my event data is stored in google calendar, more power was in reach, but not quite. Using google’s ZendApi for gcal was not something I had much luck with.
    • It started with the fact that I needed to use cUrl instead of socket SSL to get the gcal data — requiring some hacking of the Zend stuff. Not much documentation at google, but more via google ;)
    • Another great turn off: the Zend stuff might be useful or powerful, but the documentation is not my kind of tech literature.
    • Solution use the API from the URL side. Queries and other options are awesome. And what gcal does: it returns an ATOM feed. Perfect, not?
  • Ah, the simplicity of MagpieRSS, built into Wordpress. It could have saved my day, but no:
    • The version in Wordpress is outdated.
    • The available current version of MagpieRSS is also outdated — it doesn’t support all the tags in ATOM-gcal-feeds. Luckily someone offers a hack out there, just search for “MagpieRSS enclosures”. Still, no way to get this stuff running and especially parsing the start dates from gcal events. Speaking of which: it is great that gcal treats recurring events in a special way, but if you don’t pay attention you will never see a start date for those events!
    • Solution: SimplePie. Like a charm. Just don’t take every bit of sample code in the documentation for pure truth… ;)

So far it has taken me quite some time, was much fun and more is to come…