We had a dinner at Shadow’s Keep the other night and I heard about a girl in Clinton who was only 14 years old with cancer. She went through so many treatments her body could not handle any more. People in the town were auctioning off their livestock at this year’s fair and donating proceeds to help her pay medical bills. Hearing this, I decided to turn over all of Cancer Blasters’ inventory over to them to sell and keep 100% of proceeds for her cause.

As I learn more, I may post a donate link for them on Cancer Blasters’ site - the store is now out of stock. If anyone is interested in helping, I will post her contact information once I receive their “thank you” letter, and others may pitch in as well.

Jamie and I met on this day 2 years ago at our friends’ wedding, Jamy and Amber Frost - happy anniversary guys! Although our REAL anniversary is now June 24, we celebrate this day too.

Last weekend Jamie and I visited some friends in Seattle, saw the sights and did a little networking with some IT folks. We also took the opportunity to visit a restaurant called Wild Ginger which was featured on the Food Network and it definitely lived up to the expectations. Here are a few highlights (touristy pics) of our trip and I may post some individual pics of specific locales later.

Seattle skyline from park overlook (Queen Anne)

Standing in front of The Space Needle (a.k.a. ‘The Needle’) at Seattle Center

Seattle skyline from Lake Union

Seaplane taking off from the water in Lake Union with Seattle skyline in the background

Jamie with her cup of Starbucks coffee from the first ever Starbucks store checking out Pike’s Place Market. Jeff has a place on Western just a couple blocks walk from The Market. We were able to walk to most destinations including the Seattle Center and Pike’s Place and Taiphoon, a great Thai restaurant we ate at on Friday.

It was a very fun and productive trip and I’m pleased to say that the new Jetta, even with 4 mountain passes and averaging between 70-80 mph still only sipped the fuel giving us over 40mpg and less than a single tank each way for the 500 mile trek from Missoula to Seattle.

On Saturday we visited my uncle’s house in Green Lake near Woodland Park Zoo and also visited The Locks and checked out the fish ladders and some cool Yachts. We ate fish and chips and later took the Duck Tour on an old WW2 amphibious craft with a city tour and then water tour combined. Our Duck broke down which actually added to the excitement and we switched Ducks and completed our tour.

My uncle’s house near Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle.

The Locks in Seattle - packing in as many vessels as possible before closing the rear gate and filling it with water to allow the ships to enter the channel to Lake Washington.

Jamie and I sitting aboard The Duck embarking on our tour.

Lame Duck - the vessel in the background, not Jeff Our Duck blew a transfer case in the middle of downtown so we had to deboard it and hop on another to complete our tour.

Some of the skyline photos above were taken while floating around Lake Union aboard The Duck.

Great trip!

Today I joined Jamie out at the stables while she continues to break Aden. Here are a few pictures while she works on his trot and canter and becoming comfortable with reigns and saddle pads, etc.

Aden posing for the glamour shot. He’s actually pretty big already at 4 years. He is half Arab, half Warmblood and is already ‘fancier’ than Spirit, her Prix St. George Dressage horse (full Arab).

Here is Aden trotting along. I was amazed at how far he’s come already. Jamie could tell him to hold and he would stop and stand still. She could tell him to trot and he would and if she said canter he would break into a canter. Today was a momentus day as it’s the first day she’s “driven” Aden (meaning attaching left and right reign and ’steering’ and getting him responsive to the bit).

If all goes well she’ll be riding soon and hopes to begin showing him next season in regional Dressage shows.

Well I lost a day of my life getting this all to work so I thought I would save others their precious time. I recently embarked on interacting with a web service I built for a new service I’m launching. I decided to make the web client user-friendly and leverage AJAX to interact with the web service. There are hundreds of articles out there on the topics and some tools from IBM and others, but most were overkill or forced the result data to be converted into <div> or <table> elements.

When I had mastered the XMLHttpRequest object I ran into an issue, I wanted to test out my app by loading an xml document containing a SOAP request envelope and send it to my web service as a POST. I also wanted to reuse my xmlHttp object. It sounds simple but I ran into the following issues:

1. Mozilla errors when trying xmlHttp.open a second time
2. Security errors when trying to access an outside URL
3. cURL issues sending text/xml Content-Type as POST
4. XML declaration issues where PHP added underscore (xml_version)
5. Likely others, but I got them to work

Here’s how I solved them:

1. Adding a check for readyState == 4 and adding xmlHttp.abort()
2. Adding a proxy script for passing on HTTP POST and returning response
3. Overriding cURL defaults using setopt
4. Using str_replace(’xml_version’, ‘xml version’, $postvars)
5. Lots of searching and trial/error

Below I have posted the contents of my PHP proxy script. My web service was built using PEAR SOAP library which required content to be sent as text/xml. I ran into an issue that took hours to finally “see” and for some reason PHP was adding an underscore between the first XML element name and attribute? I used an ugly workaround until I figure out why it did it (php 4.3.9 on macbook pro - intel).

(more…)

This is a very simple example of how to connect to a remote address and retrieve text. AJAX allows you to build user-friendly web applications that do not require a browser refresh to retrieve and display dynamic data.

(more…)

I thought I had lost my photos from living in London and finally found them on an unmarked recordable CD. I thought I would post some missing team photos for my buddies back at BT to enjoy.

I am top-left, along with my client counterpart, Julian. We managed the delivery and migration of a major portal. It’s so great to find this photo because even though I don’t remember all the names, I remember the personalities of every single one - what a great bunch of people.

The onshore delivery team after a long night - Steve and I sponsored dinner and we celebrated a successful launch. I managed the overall delivery of the project, overseeing nearly 70 people from 6 companies on 2 continents - we had plenty of reason to celbrate as it was an uphill battle all the way.

I enjoyed getting in the trenches and working with the delivery teams out at Stockley Park (near Heathrow). It was the one place I didn’t have to wear a suit. I spent at least 3 days per week out there while development was underway then spent the rest with the business or at Accenture’s Old Bailey office near St. Paul’s. The commutes were crazy, 2 trains, a bus and walk 1/4 mile (each way) so often I didn’t return home until after midnight. Unfortunately my diet many evenings were a diet coke and twix bar I picked up at the train station.

Some of the Accenture UK office folk out at our dodgy Irish pub next to the Old Bailey office.

Here are some more of the Accenture UK crew, along with who else, Darin Archer. I’m proud to say that his first ever stamp in the old passport was joining me on my return trip from London, staying a week and hitting the town.

In 2005, I actually contracted some of the offshore resources to work on one of my own projects. It was great to work with such a dedicated bunch of folks and I now continue to source work both in India and Europe, usually managing 2-3 projects simultaneously at any given time.

A few pics of my baby girls growing up and livin’ the life.

Dreaming of mice and balls of yarn.

Just hatched!

Wicker deamons!

I found a great article about maintenance for Mac OS X. Since I recently made the switch for all my personal computers, I wanted to learn what maintenance, if any, I had to do similar to routinely clearing caches and running disk defragmenter with Windows. I thought this link might be helpful to others as well:

http://www.macattorney.com/ts.html

Well it’s no wonder why Donald Trump purchased the pagents. I’ve never watched them but stumbled across the Miss Teen USA pagent the other night as “background noise” while I was working. Elimination round after another, I got pulled in as Miss Teen Montana kept passing. I noted to Jamie that I thought she could win it after being in the top 10.

Well she did so congrats to our Texas transplant, Ms. Blair of Billings! I just like seeing Montana well represented and she definitely did the job well. Also the other night I saw a U of M student on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno and he was sharper than many of the other people during the “Jaywalking” segment; way to go!

This coming Monday tickets go on sale for the Rolling Stones concert. Tickets will range between $68-350. About 4000 UM student tickets will be available for $78.

Tickets can be purchased monday at www.ticketmaster.com

There are many ways to “skin a cat” but this worked for me. I needed a script that would append Apache web server’s configuration file, adding some url re-write parameters for projects, etc.

Problem:
- how to append parameters with illegal characters (< or >) to the end of an Apache configuration file while evaluating passed parameters as part of the path

Solution:
- add echo statements within the bash script and output to the file

Example:

#!/bin/bash

#append text to Apache httpd.conf file
echo "<library /var/svn/$1>" >> /path/to/httpd.conf
echo "DAV svn" >> /path/to/httpd.conf
echo "" >> /path/to/httpd.conf

I learned that if the script leverages variables, in this case the $1 for first argument passed, then you use double quotes instead of single quotes. This will escape the naughty characters but still evaluate the variables.

Also, I learned that by the double >> will output to the end of the file, writing each to a new line. If you have text that requires double quotes, simply encapsulate it within single quotes (provided no variables) and you should be fine.

Enjoy! Mike

This weekend Jamie and I decided to buy her a new car. Some friends of mine recently purchased the Volkswagon Jetta TDI (turbo diesel) and we decided that was what we wanted. There has been a run for that model at all dealerships nationwide as they will not be producing them in 2007. I have a friend who works at the local dealership, but they only had one used model in stock and it sold after 2 days. I called VW dealerships on Saturday all around the state and even in Washington and found a deal on one that was going to hit the lot that day in Great Falls, MT. We negotiated a great price comparing to all the other quotes we received and opted to drive 170 miles to Great Falls to purchase her (our) new car.

It used less that 1/4 tank to drive home (unlike my Chevy truck) and gets between 44-54 miles per gallon. It will also run biodiesel. The car is very well built, good looking and has plenty of power with its 6-speed automatic (tiptronic) transmission. Here are a couple photos of the new family member:

2006 VW Jetta TDI - Blue Graphite (not black)

Rear view - complete with “shark fin” for satellite radio.

So now that we’re cruising a little more efficiently, our friends on the west coast better watch out or who knows who will be knocking on their door!

UPDATE (tinted windows):

Add tint as usual.

Side view with tinted windows - always helps.

Since mid last year I’ve been designing, clearing roadblocks and managing internal, onshore, nearshore and offshore builds of Goomzee’s multimodal interaction framework (MMI Framework) which allows for rapid scripting of voice, mobile, email and instant messaging - based applications or services. At first we were going to pitch the framework but recently switched gears and identified a few use-cases that could leverage the technology internally to build out new businesses.

One will be a service call management system, self service portal and communications gateway. In the short term, I decided to capitalize on another opportunity that I can bring to market very quickly and provide the most value to both customers and end users. That will be a text-message, voice and email based lead generation service called LeadsByCell.com.. This service will place buyers and sellers in touch, leveraging today’s mobile, Internet and voice technology.

Be on the lookout for the launch of this new service. Not only will we offer this to sellers (and/or agents), we hope to leverage this in our own marketing campaigns as well.