Chris’ Blog

Well I’m slowly making progress on this site. Last weekend (I’m just getting some time to post this now…) I created a way to add albums to my site. This has given me the advantage of being able to have more pictures divided into their perspective albums.

This isn’t a difficult concept, but if you click on Photos on the right it should take you to a page with a drop down menu. Pick an album from there, and your set!

So yesterday at work, Will introduced me to a new Firefox add-on. Its called FireFTP.

I’m quite impressed with it, and here are a few reasons why:

1) Speed - It loaded the ftp sites pretty darn fast. I was impressed because I know its faster than what I use to use.

2) Run inside my browser - This can both be good and bad. Good because I don’t need to have yet another program running, however bad because it means that I sometimes lose it (I will probably just have to get used to having it in my browser, because I minimize the browser to upload something, only to realize my ftp is now in the browser…)

3) You can save connections - This isn’t really unlike any full application, however you can still save your connection information in the program.

4) An additional bonus to being able to save your connections is that it allows you to export and import them. The great thing about it is that it will ask for a password on export, and it protects and encrypts your file so that your connection information isn’t stored in plain text.

5) You can add an easy access link in the toolbar to open it.

I previously used FileZilla for my ftp needs. Its a great program, and I don’t think I’ll uninstall it from my computer yet. Sometimes its nice to just have an ftp program to do ftp.

I would highly recommend this add-on if you ever use FTP!

So I recently watched Robots and I really enjoyed it. It is a funny movie that has a great plot, and some great character development. I have seen it before, but it is so engrossing that although I had seen it before, three days after my sister-in-law started watching it and I saw the first half, I finished it on my own. One of my favorite lines is when Rodney has fallen in a garbage can, and fender is looking down in there. Fender says “Listen, if I seem to be getting smaller, it’s because… I’m Leaving!” and he promptly runs away with Rodney’s foot. I would highly recommend this film, and particularly to anyone who has kids!

Great news! My wife and I have had our first child. He was born Friday August 3rd at 5:40 PM. He weighed in at 7 lbs 7 oz and is 19 1/2 inches long. He has a full head of hair and he and mom are now both doing well. We’ve put some pictures up online so that you can all see him (http://jayden.cjhess.com).

Yesterday and today I noticed a problem with my feed creators. It seemed I was getting multiple feeds for each day. I knew partially why this was happening, and that is because my feeds are created by a php page so I created a script that would hit the web page and cause it to create the new feed with the new file. I set this program to run 3 times in the morning so that if one didn’t work, at least one of the others would. So when it happened two days in a row I knew I had a problem. I took a peek at the database, and found that this problem started happening in August, a new month… So, I looked at the code and found it was actually comparing dates that weren’t exactly the same. (The date comparison checks to be sure the feed is only created once per day.) Well the dates looked like this - 2007-08-2 and 2007-08-02 so we were getting a new feed each time the page was hit. To make it work I had to test it a bit and so it created 3 more for today, so we had come extras - do two a day for a couple of days, and see how that works then when you catch up you can be back to just one. Sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused… I should go do some reading now to catch up…