Archive for August, 2007

Seltzer’s back

Published
by
Chalupa
on August 10, 2007
in Friends, Story and sIIs
. 0 Comments

I saw Seltzer today.

To most of you that means nothing, but to a select few that might just mean a lot.  Seltzer was a buddy of mine back in college from Minnesota.  He was a fellow comp sci major and like me, was impervious to cold weather.  I wore shorts in the winter and he didn’t wear a coat.

I don’t remember exactly when everything started, but he had this lump on his back/neck that we used to joke was a tumor and kept telling him to get checked out.  When he finally did, it turned out it was a tumor.  He eventually left school, tried to fight the cancer with natural means for a long while and then eventually gave in and zapped it with radiation and chemo.

Seltzer’s doing great now.  We used to really worry about him because we wouldn’t hear anything from or about him for months and months at a time.  Sometimes even more than a year would pass and we would all wonder if something happened.  You know, like what if he died or something.  It’s not like contacting the guys from Centre Morris would be a high priority.

To say all that, Seltzer’s on his way out East to check out some grad schools.  It was good to see him.  Glad to know he’s back on his feet again and I wish him all the best.

Feedburner project

Published
by
Chalupa
on August 9, 2007
in Joomla, Nerdy/Geeky and Podcasting
. 0 Comments

With my pet project seemingly taking off so well, I’ve been looking for ways to enhance the website, advertise more, etc.  One idea I had was to have a counter of some sort showing the total number of downloads for each episode.  Feedburner already has something setup where you can show the number of subscribers as of yesterday.  I went ahead and put that on the “home page”, but would still like to have some counters for downloads.

The Awareness API, or AwAPI, is something you can activate within your Feedburner control panel under the Publicize tab.  This allows 3rd party applications to access your data.  If that doesn’t make any sense another way to put it is that you can create or use a counter that shows the total number of downloads.  Essentially it allows me to pull out any of the data it collects for the RSS feed or any of the episodes.  This includes downloads, hits, visits and subscribers by date and item.

If you want to use this API it isn’t just all cake and ice cream.  You need to know what you’re doing.  The three main calls for this API are GetFeedData, GetItemData and GetResyndicationData.  I want to use GetItemData to find out how many times each item, or episode, has been downloaded.  I could even get total downloads with this.  When you use one of these API calls it returns data in XML format.  You then have to translate or parse that data to use it in whatever way you want.

You can usually make API calls with several different languages.  PHP is what I’m going to use because it’s what I’m more familiar with and I think it’s easier.  Now even though I was a “programmer” in college, that doesn’t mean I’m a Bill Gates or anything.  I wasn’t exactly top of my class, but I think I have a pretty good understanding of theory and I’m able to figure almost anything out as long as i have some documentation, examples and a buddy or two to ask a couple questions.

Yesterday I spent several hours messing around with things.  Essentially I need to create some PHP code to make the API call, translate the data into something usable and then output my data.  For starters I installed the runPHP plugin on my Joomla! site.  Without that plugin, it doesn’t know how to translate the PHP code and thinks it’s a combination of plain text and HTML.  I then found an example somebody else made and tried to figure it out.  The first snag I ran into was I needed to download his feedburner class and include it in the PHP code I was testing.  After playing around with it for a while I eventually realized the feedburner class was returning empty variables to me.  Which is why I couldn’t get the example to output any numbers.

My next step was to try and get some help on the Feedburner forums.  People are pretty helpful in here, but they’re definitely not going to hold your hand with the APIs.  I asked a few specific questions in a stats thread and got some generic answers.  I then made a new post in the developer’s thread after my three hours of fun.  Right now I need to either figure out why the example I downloaded isn’t working, find a new class that parses the data returned, or find a good XML parser in PHP and tweak it for the data I’m using.

At the moment I’m in no shape to just sit down and create something.  It’s been so long since I’ve been coding somewhat regularly (about 4 years) and I’ve never done anything similar to this before.  I’ll need to do some more research and a lot of testing.  If I really put the time and effort into this I could possibly even submit what I create to Feedburner for others to use or just post it on my own web space.  If I end up sharing it to the world I’ll have to make sure I do some hefty testing and debugging.  I don’t know how far I’ll go with this, but it sure was fun to get back into that type of thinking again.  It’s like riding a bike I guess.

If anybody has any tips or ideas I’d love to hear them.  This month is pretty nuts with work and then I’m on vacation for the first part of September.  I’m also pretty busy with podcasting so this is a when-I-get-around-to-it kind of project.

Awake

Published
by
Chalupa
on August 8, 2007
in Advice and Podcasting
. 0 Comments

and I’m not sure why.  Maybe it’s the medicine keeping me up.  I finally got hungry; really hungry and ate some cheese and crackers.  First thing I’ve eaten since lunch.  I spent today after work doing some podcast stuff.

Feedburner
If you’re going to start a podcast, and you’re serious about it, you should definitely have some stats so you know if anybody is listening.  With the Lebowski Podcast, I didn’t have stats setup until July 9th - just a month ago.  We released Episode 1 on January 17th.  I really have no idea what the numbers were like before that, but we’ve had about 350 downloads of our latest episode in a week and almost 1100 total downloads in the past 30 days.  It’s pretty cool to see that people are actually listening.

If you don’t know how Feedburner works, your “feed” is a URL at Feedburner that points to your actual xml file.  I took it one step further by creating a dummy xml file with a 301 redirect pointing to Feedburner.  That way if I ever decide to cut Feedburner out of the loop, I don’t have to have everybody resubscribe.

Podcast directories
Something you’ll need to do if you want listeners is to do a little advertising.  I created a website, Facebook group and a MySpace page.  I’ve also been submitting my podcast to different podcast directories.  A big chunk of the world thinks podcasts revolve around iPods and iTunes.  This couldn’t be farther from the truth.  Apple is just another name brand out there like Kleenex and Band-Aid.  There’s a lot of ways people can come to your podcast so get it out there every way you can.  One nice thing about Feedburner is that you can have all those directories run through it so you don’t have to check 15 different places to see how many people are currently subscribed.

Deep Freeze Enterprise

Published
by
Chalupa
on August 7, 2007
in Cool, Deep Freeze, Nerdy/Geeky, Software, Technology and Work
. 0 Comments

If you are using Deep Freeze or are interested in this product, I would highly suggest going with the Enterprise edition. We’ve been using it at work for the past 2 or 3 years but haven’t had the management software to go with it. We just upgraded to Enterprise over the summer and it’s saves a ton of time. Now, instead of spending 30 min to manually turn off DF in a lab I can do it with a couple clicks from my PC. You can also easily update your configuration, uninstall the software, schedule maintenance periods, restart, etc. There’s also the ability to create custom groups so you can break your machines into labs, buildings, etc instead of having a long list of all your machines.

If you have different VLANs you’ll want to make sure you setup your configuration files correctly. In the Advanced tab there are some network settings. If everything is on one VLAN, you can use the LAN setting. If you’re using multiple VLANs you’ll want to use the LAN/WAN setting. The last step is to input the IP address or name of the computer hosting the management software. If you’ve installed that on a server or have static IPs, then input the IP address. If you have dynamic IP addresses like we do, just input the name of the computer so it doesn’t matter what port you’re plugged in to.

Hair

Published
by
Chalupa
on August 7, 2007
in Funny, Life, Liz and Married
. 2 Comments

I don’t have much hair on my head.  I’ve been balding for the greater part of my life and I shave my head.  Liz on the other hand has lots of hair.  Not quite as much as she did as a kid, but still way more than I do.  One of those things I had to get used to after marriage was finding Liz’s hair everywhere - on the floor, on the bed, on my clothes, on my backpack, on me, etc.

Our vacuum hasn’t been working very well for a while.  I figured the bag was getting full.  So I went online and found this deal where it was cheaper to buy 50 bags with shipping than it was to buy 15.  Today I told Liz if she changed the bag (I didn’t want there to be a cloud of dust followed by me having a coughing fit) I would vacuum the house while she’s out with Lana.  Liz changed the bag and I vacuumed.  It still wasn’t picking much up.

On a hunch I flipped the thing over and realized the roller wasn’t even spinning.  Then I saw some hair wrapped around it.  So I turned it off, flipped it back over and started unwinding Liz hair.  About 10 minutes later I had a pretty impressive pile…but the roller still wouldn’t turn.  I then partially dismantled the thing and found there was so much hair wrapped around the drive shaft that the belt couldn’t stay on to turn the roller.  I had to get my knife out and cut the hair off.

After I removed all the hair the vacuum works awesome - just like it used to.  I left the pile on the coffee table for Liz to see when she gets home.

Sunday Afternoon

Published
by
Chalupa
on August 5, 2007
in Asthma, Liz and Movies
. 0 Comments

Well, it’s another Sunday afternoon.  Liz and I are watching Ocean’s 11 followed by Ocean’s 12.  We’re taking a break at the moment and I figured I needed to post something.  Had another asthma setback Wednesday night.  Somebody was burning some stuff and it affected me adversely.  Even though I get back to feeling “normal”, I still haven’t gotten back to where my lungs are 100% since I had pneumonia last fall.  Luckily I was able to get into my doctor Thursday.  He’s pretty cool.  He also listens and takes me seriously.  Since I’m not a big complainer, it’s nice having a doctor that I can tell what the situation is and he just takes my word for it.  I got put on some extra medicine temporarily and I was ordered to take a couple days off work.  I should be back Monday.

I also saw the new Harry Potter movie.  That’s what Liz and I were coming back from on Wednesday.  I liked the movie.  It was pretty entertaining.  When I saw the first one, I didn’t really know what to think of it, but I also didn’t realize that the books got increasingly difficult in reading level as they went.  I’m looking forward to the next movie.

Lofton, Liz and I recorded episode 7 of the Lebowski Podcast last weekend and I posted it very late Monday night.  In less than a week we’ve had over 300 downloads.  I just setup statistics July 9th, so before then we haven’t really had much of an idea how many people subscribe or listen.  This latest episode is a little less polished because we used an mp3 recorder in Lofton’s downtown loft.  There was some background noise and the sound kinda cuts out every once in a while.  It was nice to do something “on location” though.

My Lebowski Time Magazine “Man of the Year” mirror arrived this past week.  It’s pretty rockin.  I need to figure out where I’m going to hang it on the wall.  I’ll have to get some pictures of it and post em.