What were you doing in 2000 (aka My first CMS)

Back in late 1999 early 2000 I was employed at Convergys and also having fun with web development using an IIS server and ASPs. My centre for awhile had a fairly open policy in terms of internet use which allowed me to connect via FTP to manipulate pages on my server at home when I was not too busy. However after awhile the IT group clamped down on what internet applications we were allowed to use and I was no longer able to manipulate my web site anymore.

At this point I began wondering if there was a way I could manage my website by using the web browser as that application was all that was permitted. I had not heard of other web based CMS’ or even the wiki application as I was very much living under a rock during this time so wound up trying to build something from scratch rather than use an existing tool.

My goal was to offer a way for me (or others) to create pages, and then create a navigational structure that would allow one to access those pages. The overall application was fairly simple, primarily a set of web forms that would submit to a back end database (in my case MS Access shudder, but hey I was young :) ). For page creation it would submit raw HTML to the tables, but I had some JavaScript that would allow you to highlight sections of that text and set bold, italics, and so forth.

I regret not keeping the various incarnations of my web presence now, but in looking through some boxes at work I have come across an old demo disk I made with others while at Convergys. On it is the original ASP code I had which I spoke of above, I think I will try and port it to PHP and SQLLite (as I do not have a Windows server anymore) but keep it in it’s original form just for nostalgia (btw you can use the wayback machine to look at previous versions of this site).

The demo disk did contain screen shots of my application which you can view below.

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Fun in sorting…a QuickSort example

Over the Christmas break I had plans to create a number of Java class for a variety of sorting algorithms. Part of this was to remind me of my early days in learning to code but also to eventually build a sorting demonstration tool such as this Android app I found recently called Sorts. Fortunately there were far better things to do over the break then program, as such it was not until recently that I had a chance to start on this task.

My desire was to create a class for each algorithm with the needed functions. The main function in this class should allow for any object that implements comparable so that these sorting algorithms are as universal as possible (a slight modification from my early days). However this was an area of working with Java that I have not had much practise in (that being to make use of generic in Java). As such after various articles found via Google I was able to come up with the following implementation of a simple QuickSort (I still need to figure out how to add some form of a demo layer).

package org.oavatos.sorting.algorithims;

import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.Arrays;

public class QuickSort<E extends Comparable<E>> {

	public ArrayList<E> simple(ArrayList<E> data) {
		if (data.size() <= 1) {
			return data;
		}

		ArrayList<E> alLess = new ArrayList<E>();
		ArrayList<E> alMore = new ArrayList<E>();
		ArrayList<E> alAll = new ArrayList<E>();

		E pivot = data.remove(data.size() / 2);

		for (int i = 0; i < data.size(); i++) {
			if (data.get(i).compareTo(pivot) <= 0) {
				alLess.add(data.get(i));
			} else {
				alMore.add(data.get(i));
			}
		}

		// Put the arraylist back together
		alAll.addAll(simple(alLess));
		alAll.add(pivot);
		alAll.addAll(simple(alMore));

		return alAll;
	}

	public static void main(String[] args) {

		Long[] myInts = { 11l, 6l, 3l, 8l, 9l, -1l, 23l, 8l, 0l, -2l };

		/**
		 * Simple quick sort
		 */
		System.out.println("QuickSort: Simple");
		ArrayList<Long> alData = new ArrayList<Long>();
		alData.addAll(Arrays.asList(myInts));
	}
}
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A year in pictures (aka Hello Picasa)

When my son was born 7 years ago we would take a lot of photos. At that time Google Picasa was new and I was leery of storing my photos on a remote server. As such I had installed Gallery to manage our photo collection. You can see the albums we have put up by going to gallery3. This year when I arrived at my in-laws I realised that I had not taken any of the photos off of either of our cameras since last Christmas vacation. I was not looking forward to having to upload them all again and label them as I had done in the past.

Now over the last year (since I purchased a smart phone (Android)) I have been uploading more photos to on-line photo sharing sites then I had ever thought of doing. As such I thought I would look into Google Picasa again. I had used it last Christmas to quickly sort our pictures into those of my son and those of my daughter then I uploaded them all to my home server. This time however I tagged the photos and had Picasa place them into folders named as year-month and then uploaded them all into the Google cloud. This has made dealing wit a years worth of photos between two cameras (have to dealt with the cell phones yet) very easy. I currently get 20G from google so will likely need to pull off old photos when I near that limit (at this point with Gallery we have 32G! of photos not including the resizes and thumbnails after 7 years).

2011-01
2011-02
2011-03
2011-04
2011-05
2011-06
Ottawa (2011)
2011-07
Wisconsin Dells (2011)
2011-08
2011-09
2011-10
2011-11
2011-12
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OS X Tips: Enable “path view” in Finder

A number of months back I switched from Linux (Gentoo) to a Mac at work. Over the months I have been slowly tweaking settings to make it work the way I like my environment to be. I however should have been making notes on what I have changed/found. I will now start trying to do this.

The below is taken from Terminal Tips: Enable “path view” in Finder
To make directory paths visible atop Finder windows, open Terminal.app (/Applications/Utilities/) and type the following command:

defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES

You then will need to restart the Finder.

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