I just received the approval from the WordPress plugin repository for Enhanced-Calendar. The WordPress plugin I previously called Calendar-Plus will now be known as Enhanced-Calendar. Once I get the code all checked in and the proper structure, it should be available from the plugin repository. Hopefully that will happen in a day or two.
Author Archives: Mike Walsh
Need to rename Calendar-Plus
When I first created Calendar-Plus I had hoped it was a short lived project that would either get rolled into the Calendar plugin or deprecated by a new release. Unfortunately neither has happened and it continues to live on. Because I didn’t expect it to last long, I never put it into the WordPress plugin repository. I probably should have done that.
There is now a plugin in the repository called Calendar-Plus which results in a name conflict and the automatic upgrade system thinks mine is out of date. I should have put my code in the repository but I didn’t so I can’t think of a good way to resolve this other than to change the name and put the code into the repository.
So that is what I plan to do. But I am not sure what to call it.
- Calendar-Enhanced?
- Enhanced-Calendar?
- Calendar-MW?
- Calendar-Plus-Plus?
I am leaning toward #2 as it is close to the description I used when I wrote it.
wp-SwimTeam v0.2.503 released
This morning I finally had some time to track down the bug that was manifesting itself on the User tab on the Report page. This was a tricky one to find as it worked fine in my development area but not for our own swim team site (MacDolphins.org).
It turns out that if you had the right combination of user options turned on and they were Yes-No options, the filters were not being created correctly which resulted in the form not being displayed for the user. While tracking this down I also realized that the filters only worked for Yes-No options and not for No-Yes options which they should have been. So that has been corrected too although now that I think about it, the fix probably wasn’t applied to the Swimmer Report, only the User Report.
I have posted v0.2.503 which is available from the download page. I strongly encourage anyone using wp-SwimTeam to upgrade as this bug could be a PITA!
Documenting the .hyv File Format
Before I spend a lot of time writing code to read Hy-tek files, I thought it would make sense to try and document them first. I’ve started with the .hyv file format which describes the events that comprise a swim meet. I’ve documented the fields I’ve been able to figure out in a Google Docs spreadsheet. If you’re interested in helping me flush this out, let me know and I’ll provide the ability to update the file.
You can see what I have so far here.
Why doesn’t the new iPod Touch have GPS?
Yesterday was the big Apple iPod announcement event for 2010. There has been oodles of coverage of the event. I was surprised that the iPad didn’t get an OS update and was pleased to see buttons back on the Shuffle. The Nano is ok although I am not sure losing the slim rectangular shape and click wheel is a good idea, only time will tell.
The real interesting device was the iPod Touch. I have a second generation 8GB iPod Touch which I bought off of Craig’s List before I committed to the iPhone. I was unsure about only having a touch screen key board so a used iPod Touch let me test it out without committing to a two year contract for the iPhone which I eventually did.
I like the Touch and actually use mine quite a bit even though I have an iPhone. I was looking forward to the new Touch, in particular for the rumored camera feature. Having an HD video camera would be nice, the camera in my 3GS is so-so at best.
Today I was speaking with my co-worker Nick and we were talking about the Touch and my desire to have one, even though I don’t need it. Nick mentioned that if it had GPS, the Touch would be perfect. It got me thinking – why did Apple leave out the GPS?
If the Touch had GPS then it could:
- Geo tag photos and video
- Enable navigation with Google and/or Bing Maps (there is nothing worse than using my iPhone for GPS only yo have a call come in)
- Possibly replace dedicated GPS hardware
- All the location based services that Apps offer
I am sure there are other uses too but these came to mind. Lack of GPS is really the only short coming that I could see.
I was hopeful that the rumors about the new Apple TV would be true and it would be a screen-less iPod Touch for the TV. While the new Apple TV has some pretty cool features, I don’t see much differentiation over comting products from Roku, Western Digital, Boxee and others. Each of these streaming devices seems to have one limitation or another. I haven’t seen anything that says the new Apple TV supports UPnP which both my Xbox and WDTV Live do support.
I am disappointed in the Flickr support from the WDTV Live so was hopeful that the Apple TV would be more compelling than it is. As it is, if I had to buy something right now, I think I’d get the Roku HD for $69.
Working with WordPress 3.0 multisite
I started playing with WordPress 3.0’s multsite functionality this week. I have a number of WordPress blogs for various things and they are a nuisance to keep updated. I had looked at WordPress-MU about 18 months ago when I did the CASL Ambassadors site and determined that it had more limitations than I was ready to deal with so I just went with a separate WordPress installs.
WordPress 3.0’s multisite functionality is pretty straight forward and it only took a little while to set it up. I followed the instructions found in the this post on WpEngineer.com. I wanted to use the subdomain setting but it appears the hosting plan I have with GoDaddy.com won’t allow it so for now, I am using subfolders.
Now that I have things up and running I need to start moving my sites. The first one I moved is for Photos. I want to share photos with my family and host them on Flickr but I have never liked the lack of presentation that Flickr has.
I found an interesting theme called AutoFocus which tiles posts across the front page of the blog. I am slowly going back in time to create a post for each of the sets I have stored in Flickr. I had to create a work-around for the post image to appear on the front page.
AutoFocus uses the first image attached to a post as the image display on the blog front page. My posts don’t have one, at least I don’t want them them. I want the post to contain the oEmbed Flickr gallery and the thumbnails using the Flickr Gallery plugin.
What I ended up doing to get it to work was to add an image via URL from Flickr and then add the tag attribute style=”display: none” to the IMG tag. Works like a champ!
Bugs and WP 3.0.1 testing
I have finally had some time to do testing against WordPress 3.0.1 and in the process, I have ran into a couple bugs that I need to fix. So far I haven’t found any issues running against WP 3.0.1 itself, the things I’ve run into would be an issue with any version of WordPress. These are known issues:
- Critical: Adding a Season will fail with an error regarding an Unsupported Action. This failure is due to a typo in a constant. I am not aware of a work-around.
- Critical: The Users tab on the Manage menu yields a blank screen. The cause is unknown and I am not aware of a work-around.
I hope to have these bugs fixed later this week and fully qualify WordPress 3.0.1.
Home networking woes
Sunday afternoon my home network went down. The way it went down I assumed it was simply a hiccup in the service from our ISP. After waiting a while I went to check on it and it was still down. Obviously not a glitch. Ugh. I don’t have time for this!
I spent some time with it late Sunday night and determined the router had gone bad. Odd? Yes. Unprecedented? No. I had a Linksys WRT54G go bad a few years ago. What is odd is that the whole thing wasn’t dead, just one interface, albeit and important one, didn’t work. When this happened a couple years ago I ended using the WRT54G as an extra access point (can’t have too many right?) and it has worked just fine in that capacity.
The WRT110 I replaced it with was behaving similarly. I figured I’d pick up a replacement in the AM at Wal-Mart. Unfortunately Wal-Mart didn’t have what I was looking for so I then went to Staples. At Staples I was going to buy a Linksys E2000 Wireless-N router but it was $129 which seemed high to me. I checked Best Buy on my iPhone and they had it on sale for $79 this week so I figured I could wait a while and ordered it over the web.
I should have stopped there. But I didn’t. When I got home I started thinking and for some reason, decided it couldn’t be the router. One interface just doesn’t go bad and the rest of it work fine. In my case, the router would not get an IP address via DHCP from the Cable Modem. Everything else worked as it should.
I decided to pull the router out of the loop and connect my laptop directly to the Cable Modem. A simple ipconfig /release followed by an ipconfig /renew didn’t work. But a reboot did. After rebooting my laptop I was on the Internet. That helps me but not the rest of the house. Back to the router. I reset, I updated firmware, I tried a number of things. None worked. I called Earthlink (who at one point told me I wasn’t a home networking customer and would have to pay an additional $18 per month – uh, no, I don’t think so) and called Linksys. Neither had any ideas. I hindsight, think I got off track because the woman from Linksys I was speaking with assured me the router was working properly based on the information on the status page and the lights on the box.
I dug up the old router and tried it (I had forgotten why I replaced it) and it too didn’t work (as it shouldn’t have). I was trying to take care of this while I was working and had to stop messing with it to attend a couple conference calls. I had to go a meeting and left the house to deal with it later.
Later in the day I still hadn’t made it to Best Buy to pick up the router I purchased but happened to be passing by CompUSA. I ended up buying a Linksys WRT160N for $35. Seemed like a pretty low risk solution. Took it home and plugged it in, change a couple settings, and ta-da, the Internet was working again! There was much rejoicing from the rest of the family.
It really is amazing how dependent my family has become on the Internet, myself included. Going without it or having limited access for 24 hours was a challenge. Can’t imagine what we’ll do if the power goes out for a few days! It’s been a while since we’ve had a hurricane or an ice storm to knock out the power, we must be due.
Swim Team results analysis tool
Periodically I search for new swim team related software to see if anyone else is trying to solve the problems I am trying to solve. Today I found something interesting called Natalog. Natalog is from a company called Natavision and it is a swim results viewing and analysis tool.
I think much of what this tool can do is available in Crystal Reports but this looks to be much easier and certainly something a parent or coach might find useful. It takes a variety of input formats including SDIF (.sd3), Hy-tek, and plain text. Since it accepts SDIF, it can report WinSwim results very easily.
I am slowly adding reporting functionality to wp-SwimTeam and I doubt I will ever do anything to this extent.
SDIF Forum Google Group
I get a fair number of questions about how to import swim team data from one place to another. Most of these questions are from people like me who have information in one place and want to figure out how to use it again without having to type it in again.
In theory, SDIF (Swim Data Interchange Format) should address this issues. SDIF is a standard published by USA Swimming. If you visit the USA Swimming web site and search for SDIF, you won’t find much. The SDIF 3.0 specification is pretty old, it was published in 1998.
There is a page which references the newer XSDIF specification but I am not aware of any swim software which currently supports it. So in reality, the 3.0 version of the SDIF specification (this is a very poorly formatted document – if you’d like a better version, download the SDIF specification from the WinSwim web site) remains the standard to work with.
If you are interested sharing ideas, solutions, problems, etc. with others who are trying to solve similar problems, please join the SDIF Forum Google Group. It seems like there are quite a few people trying to solve similar problems, the Google Group should help people communicate.
As it relates to wp-SwimTeam, one of the first things I need to solve is the ability to upload a Hy-tek Events File and connect the events to a swim meet. This is necessary in order to upload results for a meet and connect them to a swimmer. This information could be extracted from a results file but Hy-tek events files are frequently available so I want to leverage the information they contain.
Being able to engage in a dialog on how to parse the .hyv or .hy3 files would be really helpful for me, I am sure it would be beneficial to others as well. In many cases, someone has probably already written a script or Excel macro to extract the information. I can’t imagine how many times the wheel is being reinvented – I am guessing lots!