Great Music of the Last Decade
This is by no means intended to be an exhaustive list of the best albums of the last ten years. This is simply me posting a few of my favorite albums. Most of them are probably well known in any sort of indie circles, but since I have been on a bit of a nostalgia kick lately in my music, I decided to make a list of some, in my opinion, must-listens.
Bucketlist
While this is typically a technology blog, I wanted to put this up for others to give feedback on and more than anything to finally write it all down. Notice that I did omit the places I have already been like Paris, London, Milan, Torino, Rome, and some others. Feel free to leave comments of where I should go or what is not worth it. Thanks!
Javascript pop-up won’t reopen or refocus when I click on the link.
This one is a bit of a tricky one, especially if you are not primarily a Javascript developer and not intimately familiar with its inner workings. The issue arrises when you create a Javascript pop-up window, close it, and then try to open it again. Or when you create a pop-up focus on something else, and the click on the link trying to refocus on the same window and nothing happens. At least for me, this was a pretty big "What the hell?" kind of moment because I have lots of pop-up windows with Javascript and never have had a problem before. What changed?
My First Open Source Project Released… googlePop.
This week I released my first bit of open source code. It's an open source Hello World project to print Hello Worlds across the... world. No, I'm just kidding. It is a bit of code I wrote at work to pop up a window with a Google Map. It accepts latitude, longitude, and a string as parameters. The string is displayed on a blue banner on the bottom of the map. It's fairly simple code but I figured it could be useful to others. It is released under the MIT License meaning feel free to use, abuse, and mangle my code in any fashion you see fit for whatever project, commercial or otherwise. Feel free to ask me any questions you may have about it, but I think it is pretty straightforward. The code is written in HTML, CSS, PHP, and Javascript using the Google Maps V3 Javascript API. You can find it here on GitHub:
If you do use it, it would be cool to know where it ends up. Leave it a comment or send an email to gpop at bricode period com. Happy coding.
PHP sizeof() or count() not working on my string to return the length!
Quick PHP tip here. I spent a half hour trying to figure this out and I figure someone else must be seeing something similar. sizeof() and count() only work (as you would expect them to work, anyway) on arrays. If you use it on a string, it will return 1 because it views a string as an array of one string in that context. The function you are actually searching for is strlen() like in C. Hope that saves someone some time.
Free Stanford Online Courses: Databases, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning
I am becoming convinced day by day that Stanford is the greatest institution of higher education in the world. Rarely do I hear anything negative about the school and often do I hear things that are very positive. I am thoroughly impressed with their apparent to educate the world.
BDFD: Low – The Great Destroyer
I decided to start out with one of my favorite albums of all time to get the ball rolling. What a masterpiece album. Before you write me off as a huge Low fanboy (which, I give you, I am) I should tell you why I prize this album so much. One of the things I value most in music is emotion. That seems to be an obvious statement, but I judge the worth of a song or album greatly on how much emotion is I can perceive from an album. And not all music conveys emotion effectively. As much as it fun to listen to and dance to, Katy Perry's E.T. evokes no emotion for me. I also realize that music like hard rock and metal very effectively communicates emotions like anger, fear, pain, and other things, but not only am I not inclined towards to the music, but their not emotions in which I care to indulge.
Briday Friday!
In an effort to inspire me to write more to my blog, I'm commencing Briday Friday. Every Friday, I'm going to highlight an album that I've really enjoyed thoroughly. It may be new; it may be old; it may indie; it may be the Spice Girls (okay, probably not.) It's just going to be something I feel that it merits being highlighted. It'll come out every Friday at 12:00 AM MST starting this Friday with an amazing album. It'll destroy you, greatly (hint, hint.)
Game or application keeps minimizing or losing focus in Windows 7
This is a very frustrating because the problem is not usually apparent. There are so many issues that can cause this that it can be difficult to sift through all the possible issues that cause this head-meet-wall type of frustration. My issue ended up being completely undocumented and required hours of watching processes to figure out, but I will let you in on what are the most common issues and if those do not work, I will tell how I ended up finding my problem.
First, to give you an idea of what is happening (in case you do not already know) is that in Windows and just about every operating system, there is a concept called focus. The window you are currently working with and view is the window that has focus. Most operating systems have the windows without focus grayed out a bit. Normally shifting focus is not an issue because you just click on the window that you want to focus on and you normally will not even tell the difference. The issues lies is when you are in a full-screen application, like watching a movie or playing a game. When another application requests focus when you are in a full-screen application, it will minimize your application. This is the issue we need to prevent.
Final Thoughts on the 2010-2011 Jazz Season
What a roller-coaster ride. Though this certainly was not the Jazz's finest hour, it was still an enjoyable season with plenty about which to be happy. It really hit me how much the Jazz had changed when I was listening to the national anthem at the Jazz – Nuggets game. The only Jazzman from last year suited up was Paul Millsap. Literally everyone else was a brand new face. Who would have guessed? I remember last year looking at the Bulls and being slightly of the envious that their roster turns over a lot simply because of the fact they get to see a lot of different players whereas the Jazz hardly ever budged. After such a dramatic turn, I realize how much I appreciate the stability the Jazz had. That is not to say that I am lamenting the new players in Jazz uniforms, but I hope we start back on the path we were on before. Anyway, I have some disjointed notes on the season and how it went.
