Back from Michigan

I left Thursday morning to head back to Ypsilanti, MI, home of my alma mater, Eastern Michigan University for homecoming festivities. A quick run down of everything that transpired follows.

  1. Josh and I hung out with some of my fraternity brothers Thursday night and had a rather hilarious encounter with some girls from Bowling Green State.
  2. I hung out with Chris B and the crew at Pub 13 on Friday night and didn’t get to bed until 5:30AM the next morning.
  3. I rallied for tailgating, which started at noon on Saturday. As per usual, I didn’t make it to the game and, instead, opted to go to BW3’s to hang out with the old school Sig Taus.
  4. Saturday night I hung out with Charlie and some of the younger Sig Taus; after the old farts had went home to their wives and kids.
  5. Sunday I went up to West Branch with Jonathan and Erika to have lunch with my mom and dad. I had quite possibly the best burger of my life at Applebee’s. It was their new burger with pesto and mozzarella.
  6. Sunday night Josh and I hung out with Melissa and her friend Carrie to watch the Tiger’s second game of the World Series.
  7. Monday I went home.

All in all it was a great trip. I was able to catch up with a bunch of old friends and, after my weight loss and training, got a bunch of double takes from said old friends. It’s amazing how much people change, yet stay the same. Most of my friends from college are married and a good portion of them have kids, which scares the hell out of me.

jQuery Verification Plugin

I’ve created my very first jQuery plugin. It’s fairly simple in that it simply verifies an input field’s value via AJAX after a short delay from the key up event handler. Put more simply, you can verify emails, URL’s, usernames, etc. directly as the user is typing them into the input box.


$(document).ready(function() {
    url = '/verify.php';
    options = {
         verifying  : "urlVerifying",
         valid      : "urlValid",
         invalid    : "urlInvalid"
    };
    $('#email').verify(url, option);
)} 

This will, after a short delay, verify the value of the input with id="email". The script passes the value to the URI as /verify.php?value=foobar@example.com. The script should then echo 1 for a valid value or 0 for an invalid value. See the example for more information.

Download jQuery Verification 0.0.1

Framework 0.1.4

This is a fairly major upgrade for the little framework that could. I haven’t stopped developing Framework. Quite the contrary, I’ve been working on it extensively as I’m starting to build sites utilizing it. Other than the extensive changes, fixes, etc. anybody wishing to try this out will be pleasantly surprised that there is now an example document root in the examples.

  • Added Framework_Exception
  • Added Framework_Template for unified templating in modules
  • Added __sleep() and __wakeup() to Framework_Object and Framework_Object_DB
  • Added $this->template->plugins_dir = array('plugins',$path.'/'.'plugins') to Framework_Presenter_Smarty
  • Added Framework_Auth_ACL to handle Access Control Lists based on module/event pairings
  • Added Framework_Request
  • Added Framework_User::__isset()
  • Added Framework_Site_Common::stop() which is ran from Framework::stop() when processing has completed
  • Added config.xml for site configuration data
  • Added Framework_Presenter_JSON which utilizes php-json
  • Fixed a bug when creating custom user classes in Framework_Uset::singleton()
  • Fixed how Framework_User::__construct() detected the userField from Framework_Session
  • Fixed misspelled function call in Framework_User
  • Fixed a bug where Framework_Object was attempting to create a log file before Framework_Site_Common had been created
  • Fixed mispelled return code in Framework::start()
  • Fixed a bug where a module’s event was running before the session/user had been authenticated
  • Changed Framework_Presenter_REST to include XML_Serializer options
  • Changed all Exception‘s to Framework_Exception
  • Changed Framework_Object::__construct() to use Framework_Site_Common::$logFile to create instance of PEAR Log in Framework::$log
  • Removed a few references to deprecated constants in Framework_Presenter_Module
  • Deprecated Framework_User::$userTable, Framework_User::$userField, Framework_User::$defaultUser, Framework_User::$userClass (see config.xml)

Download Framework 0.1.1

Jamba Juice Triathlon in San Diego

Right after the finish!

I flew down to San Diego last Thursday to spend some time with Dana and participate in my second triathlon, the Jamba Juice Triathlon. Dana and I spent a few nights hanging out with friends, eating copious amounts of quality mexican food and, generally, having a good time.

On Sunday, October 1st, Dana’s friend Felipe and I did the triathlon. I ended up 52nd out of 119 in my age division and 450th overall out of about 1,480 participants. Not too shabby for my second outing. My overall time was 1:06:30, which was 13 minutes faster, but the course was quite a bit different than the Kirkland triathlon. It was a slightly longer swim, but the bike was three miles shorter and didn’t include any of the Seattle hills I had to deal with in Kirkland.

Next up is the half marathon this Saturday.