Author Archives: Mike Walsh

02.05.09
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Meet event loading is working!

This afternoon I was able to get event loading working for individual swim meets.  The system allows the definition of a standard set of events.  These events can be loaded into a swim meet to seed the swim meet and then tweaked for the needs of the specific meet (e.g. running the 6 & under groups early).

In the process I fixed a couple other broken things, the most important one being the controls on the GUI Data Lists widgets didn’t work on the ones which had a drop down menu.  Now that the events are loaded, I can start working on bringing the results of a swim meet back into the system

Before I do that, I will probably work on the volunteer system as that is something I need for our own swim team soon.

02.04.09
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Dashboard icons updated

Tonight I worked out how to have a different icon in the dashboard when the menu is active, inactive, or hovered over.  This allows me to use a different color icon when active than when hovering over the menu or making it active.  The funny looking icon that was displayed when the menu is active now looks correct.

02.04.09
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Restructuring the Menus

I had some time today to work on the plugin and I was able to get a lot of the menu work completed that has been nagging at me.  I still have a little more to do though.  From the two screen shots below you can see that the icon in the Swim Team top level menu doesn’t look very good when the menu is active.  It looks find when another menu is active.  This shouldn’t be too hard to fix though.

I am pretty happy with the other changes I made.  The most notable being moving the Options tab off the Management page to it’s own page and breaking the huge form up into four separate forms.  The options (aka settings) are all now logically grouped.  I also fixed a couple bugs I encountered as I was testing it.

I also moved the Report Generator off the Management menu into it’s own page as well as I envision having several standard reports available in addition to the Report Generator.

wpstss01 wpstss02

02.02.09
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Dashboard Icons

This weekend I decided to start working on the Dashboard Menu.  WordPress 2.7 changes the Dashboard quite a bit and the way I had done the menus previously still worked but wasn’t very intuitive.  As familiar as I am with the plugin, I still found myself hunting for several of the items.

I used to have a top level Swim Team menu but had removed it because it didn’t play nicely with some of the Admin Menu plugins.  2.7 cleans up that problem (I think) and I have added the top level menu back in.  2.7 also supports adding a custom icon for top level menus.  I found a couple of SVG images on Wikimedia Commons that I will probably use with the plugin.

Right now I am using the diver as the icon for the plugin and it looks pretty good!

There is a pretty good write up on how to Top Level Menus and how to Add Icons to the Dashboard on WpEngineer.com.  I found one other explanation but this one is easier to follow.  I had posed a question on the Wp-Hackers mailing list about how big the icon should be but still don’t have an answer.

01.29.09
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Dell E4300 improvements

After all of the frustration I have had with the WiFi and wireless broadband I have had with my E4300, things are a little better.  The really odd things I am not really sure why.  Dell was supposed to have a BIOS update on January 19th but as of the 29th, it has yet to ship.  I have been checking their web site daily.

I had taken the SIMM card out of my laptop to use in a Sony-Ericsson Z750 UMTS phone that I have and when I put it back in my laptop, I noticed that I didn’t have a BroadBand device listed with the Dell Connection Manager.  Very odd.  I cannot explain why it went away.  After dinking with it off and on for a couple days, I decided to reinstall the Dell Connection Manager software.

After doing so, my BroadBand card was recognized AND both my WiFi and BroadBand connections have been more stable.  I worked for almost two hours Saturday night via BroadBand without any problems.  Last night I used my home WiFi connection for several hours also without any problems.  I had also noticed that there was a newer version of the Dell Connection Manager (A11 vs A10) than I had installed so I have installed it as well and all seems to be well for now.

I will continue to monitor this and I am sure that now I have committed it to a blog post, it probably won’t work worth a crap tonight when I need it!

01.22.09
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Audio Books and iTunes

Off and on I have tried to get Audio Books which have been ripped from CD to work correctly in iTunes and on my iPod.  The best source I have found so is Aldo on Audiobooks which has been very helpful but I have yet to be successful.

I need to try the Audio Book Builder and see if that helps – right now I am to the point where the books show up correctly in iTunes, under Audiobooks and each one separate, but on my iPod, all of the tracks are all mixed together under the Audiobooks menu.  Bleh.  Makes it really hard to listen to more than one book when the tracks are all jumbled up.

There has to be a good solution to this dilemma.

01.22.09
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I want an HTC S743!

Why is it all of the phones I am interested aren’t carrier subsidized?  HTC unveiled the S743 at CES.  This phone is pretty much everything I want in a phone:

  • Windows Mobile Standard
  • Slide out QWERTY keyboard
  • WiFi and GPS
  • Numeric Keypad

It’s a phone first, PDA / email device second which is exactly what I want.  I really wish AT&T would pick this device up.  Looks like it will be north of $600 unsubsidized at Best Buy, CDW, etc.  Bleh.  I like this phone better than the Xperia X1 I have had my eyes on for a while.

01.22.09
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phpHtmlLib as SVN external?

I have noodled on how to handle wp-SwimTeam’s dependency on phpHtmlLib on several occasions.  Today I was at the gym with my mind wandering while I was on the elliptical machine, I started thinking about it again.

I am considering pulling it into the plugin as SVN external.  This would allow me to ensure it is always installed.  Doing this will greatly simplify the download and installation process for the end user as well which ultimately will make it easier to support users of the plugin.  The more I think about it, the better idea I think this is.  I need to read up on SVN externals!

01.16.09
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My E4300 is driving me nuts

I really like my new Dell E4300 laptop but it has an odd behavior which is driving me nuts.  When connected with either WiFi or BroadBand (I have the AT&T card) it will lose network connectivity after some period of time.  Sometime is takes an hour or more, sometimes it happens very quickly.  Once it  happens, I am usually hosed and need to reboot.  But not always.  It only affects WiFi and BroadBand.  It has no affect on the wired Ethernet connection.  As long as I am in the office or at home I am ok.

I have been round and round with our internal IT people as well as Dell on this issue and haven’t found any resolution yet.  A new BIOS update (A05) actually made the problem worse.  With the A03 BIOS when it happened I could still ping other computers and eventually full connectivity would come back.  But not now.

Reportedly Dell has a production stop on the E4300 to resolve a bunch of issues and a BIOS update is supposed to be available on January 19th.  I hope so – I am about to spend a bunch of time on the road for work and having an unreliable network connection is not ok.

If you are considering an E4300 I’d hold off for now and see if reports improve over the next couple weeks.  That is of course assuming that Dell actually delivers a new BIOS update and doesn’t delay it again!

01.16.09
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Demonstration for TSA

I have been asked to demonstrate the MacDolphins‘ web based Swim Team registration system (which is wp-SwimTeam) to the Tarheel Swimming Association at one of their upcoming board meetings.

I will we out of town for work for their February meeting so it looks like it will be in March which should give me sufficient time and motivation to finish up a lot of the unfinished work.  I really need to get to work on a sample theme too – the theme I am currently using on the MacDolphins site is not widget ready which is a big limitation.