Meet Rocky

It all began with an email to our neighborhood watch group titled: Found Kitten. I’ll fill you in on the entire story of how Rocky came to live with us later, but for now… We have found out that our 9 year old Thing Two is allergic to cats. Her allergies have become harder and harder for her to deal with now. Also, we’re having to keep Rocky closed in the kids’ room to keep her away from our 75lb yellow lab, Sonny. This is no longer a healthy lifestyle for Thing Two any more than it is for Rocky. We are now reaching out to all of our friends and family to try and find Rocky a better home.

Let’s rewind back to us receiving that Found Kitten email… We already had our 2 year old Yellow Labrador, Sonny, and we wanted a cat as well, but knew that the cat would either need to be a kitten or one that was already comfortable around dogs. So seeing this message raised our hopes that if no owner was identified, we may be able to get a little kitten for our family and we reached out to the neighbor stating that we’re interested if no owner was found.

One week later, the neighbor asked us if we were still interested. The next morning, I drove Thing One & Thing Two a few blocks with a nice clean kitty carrier to meet and pick-up the kitty. The neighbor that found this cat was unable to bring the cat into her home because she already had an indoor cat that had a contagious infection, so she was tending to this stray outside. She had begun calling the cat Rocky because of her raccoon-like tail. Rocky was so little we too thought she was a kitten and she was sweet and accepting of us so we agreed to take her in.

The following day I took her to our vet to have her checked and was shocked to find out that this “kitten” had an estimated age of at least 13 years! She also had a thyroid issue that required medication. So, one day and over $300 of vet costs later, we went from having a new kitten, to having a sick old cat. It was hard to take, but we loved her no less than before. In fact, maybe a little more because we now felt some extra compassion for her age and condition.

That was where our good experiences lessened and some unfortunate realizations began to manifest. First of all, Rocky did not like Sonny one bit and attacked him multiple times after he would make the mistake of rushing up to sniff her. This required us to keep them separate. Rocky’s realm became the kids’ room and any time Sonny would be either out on his walk or snoozing on our bed, we would let Rocky have free reign of the entire house. We hoped that the separation strategy we implemented would become part of Rocky’s and Sonny’s routine and we could all live harmoniously together. Instead we feel more and more that Rocky is wanting to be out in the rest of the house with all of us (minus Sonny) and that we’re making her life unpleasant.

Today I reached out to a local no-kill animal shelter and asked if they could take her. I was told by a friend about this particular shelter and that I should be prepared to offer a large cash donation for taking Rocky because of her age. Our family worked hard to save up $300 over the past two months. Unfortunately, my idea of a large donation and this shelter’s needs are very far apart. They told me that they could only take Rocky with a $2,500 donation. I don’t blame them at all as I know they would take good care of her and tend to all of her medical needs (which are not cheap).

So I am asking if there is anyone you know of that may be willing to give this sweet kitty a good home? She is gentle with all people (including children) and loves attention. If you or someone you know can help, please contact me here.

Well that was then. Today completed my three days with the Volt and I wanted to document and share my experience here on my blog. So here it goes…

Klout? Perk? Free Car? What Are You Talking About?

Every time I talked about this with a friend or a neighbor or a relative, these are the questions they would ask me. So I thought we should get these questions out of the way before I continue.

Klout is a website that (as they say it) “measures influence online” by scoring social network users' public interactions. Simply put, if someone that has a large number of followers on Twitter interacts with my Twitter account (@erraggy), Kout would boost my score more than interactions with lower follower count users. There are a lot of variables involved and Klout doesn't share all of the details to their proprietary scoring algorithms. Suffice it to say, my time working at MySpace garnered me connections to some pretty popular people in online media. That and how active I am on all of my social network accounts contributed to getting me past the minimum score of 40 for this perk.

Okay, so now you (hopefully) understand how Klout works, but why would Chevy offer Klout users with a certain minimum score a free car for three days? Well I don't know for sure, but I would think that Chevy is looking for creative ways to spread the word about this new offering in alternative fuel vehicles. For instance, before reading this post, how many of you knew what makes the Volt different from any other electric vehicle like say the Nissan Leaf? I didn't know the answer to that question before receiving this perk either. Turns out, the Volt also has a 1.4L Gasoline engine with a 9+ gallon fuel tank. But unlike my Hybrid Prius C, the gasoline engine in the Volt does not send any power to the wheels (not directly at least). Instead, the gasoline engine is only used as an electric generator to both power the electric motor as well as charge the battery. So even though the Volt only offers a range of 36 miles from a fully charged battery (roughly half of the Leaf's EPA rating), the gasoline engine can kick in after the battery is depleted and take you an additional 326 miles. So by adding these to ranges together, you get an electric motor powered vehicle with a range greater than the recently released Tesla S.

Looking over my previous paragraph, I can see how hard it is to describe the Chevy Volt. However, if I were to have a conversation with you where you could ask me questions about it and I could respond, I'm pretty confident you'll get a much better understanding. This is why I think Chevy has reached out to Klout and its users by offering this perk.

August 1^st, 2012 at 10:00am – The Drop-off

Having pulled a 3am night working to keep Gravity's huge amount of data moving smoothly through our not-huge-at-all Hadoop cluster (25 nodes), I almost forgot that I would have a visitor stopping by the house at 10am. I awoke just before 9am and got the morning chores out of the way (well all but Sonny's walk) before 10. The driver called to tell me he was here with the car at 10:30 (small scheduling snafu on the fleet management company, but they handled it well) and I went out to meet him. It was a silver-ish sedan (pictured top-left) and was shiny new and fully loaded with all of the options. I was given the key/fob as well as a key-card for ChargePoint charging stations so I could use them without having to pay out of my own pocket.

After signing some paperwork, my three days began, but I first had to walk a very impatient Sonny (our 2 years old Lab), so even though I got the car handed over by 10:35am, I didn't even drive it until almost 11. My first jaunt was to Gravity HQ in Santa Monica. After driving my very economical-eco-friendly-but-gutless-as-a-vespa Prius C for a month, the Volt felt very zippy in just normal driving mode. Just for kicks though, I switched it into 'Power' mode on the Marina Freeway and I was really impressed by its low-end torque. It's a weird feeling to step on the accelerator and feel the G-forces but hear no change in noise. Fun though! My drive to work ended with me realizing that I had forgotten to switch the parking permit from my car to the Volt. No biggie. LOL.

Well the drive home was nice as I enjoyed the satellite radio blasting as I ignored the usually annoying traffic all around. The Bose sound system is really nice and the fact that there is just about no engine noise at all, you have a great environment to listen to it in. Even though I had my foot in it on my way to work and had the AC pumping full both directions, I still had six miles of range remaining on the battery when I arrived at home. My one-way distance between home and work is just over 8 miles and the battery was not fully charged when it was delivered, so it showed 26 miles remaining when I got it.

When it came time to charging this baby I was concerned. The house we live in has a single car garage and it is FULL of our stuff that did not fit into the house when we moved in last year. Also, there is only one power outlet and it is almost all the way in the back (furthest from garage door) for the washer and dryer. There is a heavy-duty surge protector that allows us two additional outlets (five-outlet surge protector: washer, dryer, light). I checked the manual and although they do not recommend it, they do state it is acceptable and safe to use an extension cord. The key is that the cord must be 12 gauge or thicker and contain three prongs at both ends. Lucky for me we had just that. The car comes with a charging unit that has about a 12 foot cable and a base that has indicator lights to tell you if you can charge or if there is a problem. After I got it all setup, I had all green lights for a safe and good charge. Charging time showed just under eight hours to full.

August 2^nd, 2012 – Full Day

After I was ready to go the next morning, the car was fully charged and ready to go. It now showed 36 miles of range for the battery. I got in and now setup my phone via Bluetooth with ease. It is initiated by a few control button presses, but the rest of the process is all voice command on the Volt's side of things. I just needed to type the pairing code into my phone as it was read to me. It was nice that the car repeats the code until the pairing is complete. Much easier than me reading the numbers from one screen to enter onto my phone. With the phone now paired and the AC set to ECO Mode, I was off for a day of conservative driving. I wanted to see just how far I could go without getting down to the gasoline engine. Oh, I also remembered to grab that parking permit for the lot near the office.

Now that I had read a good portion of the manual, I tried to let the instruments guide my acceleration and braking more for extending the range of the battery. The gauge I'm referring to resembles a carpenter's bubble level. With acceleration displayed as the distance above the center mark and braking displayed as the distance below the center mark. They give you an animation of three leaves rotating within the bubble when you are keeping it within the efficient range and a solid bubble when you exceed it. I found you could accelerate pretty good (and faster than my Prius C) while still keeping the cute little leaves, but for some reason, the gauge seemed to be hypersensitive to braking as the slightest stop would pull the bubble below the happy little rotating leaves. This seemed even more odd to me as I know that the Volt incorporates regenerative braking, so I would think more braking, more charging of the battery, more range conserved. Oh well.

Driving in this conservative manner was easier than it is in my Prius; specifically, I could accelerate while keeping the rotating leaves and not frustrate the drivers behind me. So if that's all it takes for the Volt to get all of those miles it says the battery will take you, I'm impressed. Also as I mentioned earlier, I had now set the climate control to 'ECO Mode' whereas it was delivered to me in 'Comfort Mode'. If you know me well, you'll know that I can't take the heat, and when I say heat I mean any temperature higher than 74° F. With 'Comfort Mode' enabled, I remain as cool as a cucumber with the desired temperature set to 71° F. In 'Eco Mode' however, I needed to set the desired temperature down to 66° F. I'm really not sure if me doing this cancels out the ECO-ness of 'ECO Mode', but I can say that it did keep the fan blowing at a much lower RPM than when in 'Comfort Mode'. I arrived at the parking lot with 29 miles remaining on the battery. I had intended on taking a few fellow Graviteers out to lunch in the Volt, but we had food ordered in so enjoyed the free grub instead and decided I would do some sort of fun driving after work.

When I arrived home that night Thing One & Thing Two (this is how I refer to my daughters publicly online) were so excited and they not only wanted to go for a ride, but they also wanted to bring their friends. This was when I discovered the first thing that I didn't like about the Volt. The back only seated two, and I don't mean that it was too small to fit more than two comfortably, I mean there were just two bucket seats with a hard console in between them. I'm assuming something very important was beneath this console, but was frustrated that my tiny Prius C seats more than this much larger sedan.

The kids wanted dinner and a movie, but of course none of the four wanted to be left out. I came up with a plan to allow equal friend ride time. I would make two separate trips with my two kids and one of the friends for each. The kids were satisfied and also had no problems deciding which would ride to get dinner and which would ride to get the movie from the video store. Boy did they enjoy themselves in the Volt. They acted as if they were riding in a plush stretch limo! The highlight of the night of joy riding came in the form of an 80's hit that came on the satellite radio. Oh Yeah by the Swiss band Yello. I really wish I could have video recorded them for this. I also kept the car in the 'Sport' driving mode and would launch it to the speed limit from each light. Good fun for all!

Charging on this night proved to be a little more challenging than I expected. I mean, I had already setup the cords and all the previous night so I didn't think there could be any issues. Turns out having both the dryer AND the car charger both drawing from the same breaker would prove to be too much. I was alerted to this in two ways. First my wife asked me if I had turned off the lights in the living room, and second when the car sounded an alarm. It wasn't as loud as if you hit the panic button, but annoying just the same. I resolved to finish the laundry first, and then start charging the car. All's well that ends well.

August 3^rd, 2012 – Final Day

Seeing that so far I had mostly driven the Volt as just a commuter, I decided to take the day off for our last day with it and take the whole family for a drive. Nothing big, but my wife hadn't even been inside the car yet. We had a very nice time rolling out to Fairfax and 3^rd to visit one of our favorite places: Farmers Market. After brunch and minor shopping, we dropped mom off at home and I took the kids to Jamba Juice for a snack and then on to a local park for fun. The service handling drop-off and pick-up was scheduled to pick up the Volt at our house at 4pm. I managed to get home with the kids by 3:30, but one family member had missed out on the Jamba goodness, so I decide to make a run for it in 'Sport' mode! I made it to Jamba Juice by 3:37 and wouldn't you know it the pick-up crew called to let me know they were waiting at my house for the car? They didn't mind waiting and were fine with me getting it back home by 4. I still had to order. Jamba Juice still needed to make the smoothie, and then I needed to get all the back. It is only 2 miles, but the area is very busy on a Friday at this time so it was a real challenge. All I can say is… I really love that car in 'Sport' mode! I made it back home before 4pm and the kids and I waved farewell to the Volt.

What Did I Think Of Chevy's Volt?

Overall the Volt proved itself to be a wonderful car to drive that the whole family (plus a couple neighbor kids) really loved. Page One Automotive, the fleet service that handled the delivery and pick-up, made the experience really special (please don't judge them by their website). Without their services, it would have just felt like a cool rental car, but with them it made me feel special and valued. One thing I must point out when it comes to the kinds of cars I've owned is that I usually get the version of a model with little or no added options. This version of the Volt was pretty much fully loaded. I checked out Chevy's website and basically built the version we had and it came out to an MSRP of $45,495. I can honestly say that even though I would love to own one of these wonderful vehicles, I couldn't even afford their base price of $39,145 much less could I afford one with so many of the things that had me sold on it as a great car. So thank you Chevy. Thank you Page One Automotive. And thank you Klout for providing me with a truly unique and wonderful opportunity!

If an inventor like Tesla emerged today with a mind on fire with ideas that could change the world, how would they be treated? My take…? This new inventor’s ideas would be treated as resources to extract and profit whereas the vessel carrying them would be thought of as a necessary nuisance to deal with.

How can we truly change our future from one of profit thirsty greed, to one of innovation hungry contribution? To a world in which progressing people’s lives is valued much higher than increasing one’s wealth. Are we raising today’s children to become tomorrow’s problem solvers or are we instead training them to work the existing system? What do we want most from the education we all speak of as one of the most important things we can give to our children? Is it success? What if instead we focused on teaching our children to solve new problems from within themselves? Teaching them to solve problems that have already been solved in the form of testing can only keep them in line with some subjective standard. Does anyone honestly think that tomorrow’s problems will follow the same answer key used to grade today’s tests?

Nikola Tesla did study. He had an astounding amount of discipline within himself to achieve. A major difference though is that he worked to achieve that which no one else had ever even imagined. That is the kind of discipline I want for my own children. Yes, study what has been done and gain understanding of that which interests you. Don’t stop at passing a test on it though. Don’t stop at all. Surpass what has already been achieved and also continue to learn knew ways to do them with even less effort.

When Tesla was unable to gain capital for his own ideas, he worked at improving others’. Progress was the game he was in and I cannot think of anyone who played it better. Each set back was transformed into a new opportunity. Some of his improvements to Thomas Edison’s designs were even awarded patents.

If you agree with me that teaching our children to solve problems from within themselves is more valuable that training them how to solve problems they expect to see on a test, how best do you think this may be achieved? Well look at that… I’ve got myself an opportunity here don’t I?

Hmmmmm…

[image credit wikipedia]

I’m currently working on a content ingestion system for Gravity‘s personalization and analytics systems. We already have in place a powerful and flexible article extraction library in place that we open sourced as Goose, which does a great job at identifying just the article text and optionally even its primary image. The problem is that all of the meta data for an article is not easily extracted from all sites the way we can algorithmically find which text is the article itself and which image is the best candidate to represent the article. Goose provides the mechanism to facilitate such extractions, but it is based on the DOM structure used by each publisher for their posts.

Enter RSS

Which brings me (and probably a lot of you) to RSS. Not only does RSS specify an article’s content, it even specifies a lot of that rich meta data we need. I thought I recalled RSS provided author meta data as well as image meta data, but when I got to work on exploring RSS as either a replacement of or in addition to Goose, I was a little surprised to find this wasn’t exactly the case. As described in the RSS Advisory Board’s Best Practices Profile, there is in fact an `author` element, however, it is specifically intended for the email address of the author and nothing else (although you can append a parenthesized name as well), and there isn’t an `image` element within each item at all.

RSS Specification version 2.NoMore

Since RSS has been frozen since March 30, 2009, all extensions to RSS are to be done, as the RSS Advisory Board states: “Subsequent work should happen in modules, using namespaces, and in completely new syndication formats, with new names.” Well I agree that all basic elements are well defined and therefor no longer require periodic updates, but it is very disappointing to me that after over 2 days of research, I have not found a single work that describes even as much author meta data that Atom 1.0 provides.

What I’m Looking For

To be clear, the elements I am looking to be additionally defined for any rss->channel->item should be encapsulated within some named author element. Since rss->channel->item->author is already defined, for the purpose of clarity I will use a fictitious XML Namespace (xmlns:profile=”http://somedomain.tld/rss/2.0/modules/profile”) for new elements:

...
<profile:name>Robbie Coleman</profile:name>
<profile:uri>http://robbie.robnrob.com/author/robbie/</profile:uri>
<profile:avatar>http://1.gravatar.com/avatar/dc77b368ec1f077dcc4aca3b9c003d2d</profile:avatar>
...

Update (6/1/2012):

A couple people pointed out (correctly) in the comments that atom’s author element provides [some of] what I need, but there is no place for an avatar uri within Atom 1.0, so I’m still short of the full solution.

Another point I would like to better state is that I’m looking for these additional fields to be present within other sites’ RSS so that I may consume it in a standard way. There are some sites that provide everything I’m looking for, but each of them have done it in their own way which makes my implementation for consuming it rather janky.

I now leave this up for discussion, which actually began on twitter here:

@erraggy @photomatt -- write a blog post carefully explaining what you're looking for and send a link. 140 chars is ridic.

— Dave Winer ☮ (@davewiner) May 31, 2012

The graph below from Tomaž Kovačič‘s study shows only a small amount of the data he collected in his analysis. If you are curious of how he compared these algorithms, I highly recommend you head over to his post. He does a great job exposing the details behind his analysis.

Goose's standing among other algorithms tested

So what is Goose used for at Gravity and why have we open sourced it?

Goose’s wiki provides a very detailed explanation about what Goose is and how it works, and also touches on the original need we had at Gravity behind its creation. Jim Plush wrote the first version from the ground up on his own and only recently gave me commit access to the repository. By the time I got into the project, it had all the bells and whistles required to compete in the analysis completed by Kovačič. My contributions to Goose have been to extend it to allow for more specific extractions of additional meta data outside of the primary content and have no effect on its standings above.

Such a utility can be applied to a wide variety of web content analysis problems, and I’m really glad Plush decided to share it with the rest of the open source community. At Gravity, we have been building a lot of exciting (to me at least) technology and most of it is held dearly by us and needs to remain a company secret as they make up a large part of our company’s overall value. When it comes to analyzing the content out here on the web, Goose can be looked at as our trusty messenger delivering our system plenty of content to analyze without a lot of the noise that comes along with it on the web pages the content is sourced from.

If you are looking to mine some of the golden nuggets of information that is buried under a ton of ads, peripheral links, site menu structures, and other distracting noise, then why not take a look at what Goose has to offer? If you find anything you think Goose may be lacking or have some ideas on anything else that may be improved, let us know on our Github repository: https://github.com/jiminoc/goose

Well things seemed fairly normal in the conversations I was having except it did seem that she was having a harder time than usual understanding what I was saying. I had a long wait between buses and I was getting pretty hungry, so I started instant messaging questions about my dinner options for home. In come responses from my wife that they had “GoodStuff” for dinner and when I asked if there was any left for me, a resounding “Yes!” with smileys came back. I knew that they must have finished eating hours ago, so I made a request for her to start reheating it so that I could eat quickly and then move on to doing bedtime for our two daughters. I was so happy when a quick IM response came back saying: “Sure! OK!” and again a long line of various smileys.

More small chat continued until I arrived home to find an empty table and empty stove. Although it was nice to see that everything was so neat and clean, I was a little disappointed that there was no hot dinner for me after the IM conversation we just had. I then noticed that my wife was busy with our laundry and my 7 year old daughter (aka: Thing Two) was next to her holding my wife’s phone (we use our phones for instant messaging). Not only was Thing Two happy to see me, she was also laughing a lot more than usual. I asked my wife about the IM conversation we had moments ago, and she looked a little confused. This is when Thing Two jumps up and says: “I fooled you Daddy! You thought I was Mommy!” We all had quite a laugh.

It was just shocking at how I was not able to notice the difference. My wife tends to be very terse in her IM communication, so it did not seem odd for me to ask a long question and then receive a small “ok” response. Boy has Thing Two come a long way in her pranks. I’m both proud of her and a little scared for what we’re in for as well.

LOL O_o

the plight of my klout score

I tend to focus less on my social networks when I have my head down coding. This time however, its effect on my klout score is pretty dramatic. LOL

I guess this is just a consequence of the typical life:work balance, but I wonder how other tech professionals maintain such a high score while also paving new roads in their field.

A couple of examples of the type of tech peeps I’m talking about:

1. Jeff Atwood – 73: klout.com/codinghorror
2. Matt Cutts – 73: klout.com/mattcutts

Anyway, I’m not complaining here people. I am just confused about how others manage to keep up their tweeting/blogging while “deep in the cut” of some tech project.

Do any of you have any tips? Please speak up here and let me know.

Image credit: audi_insperation

Things have been so exciting working @gravity this year and I am amazed at how much we have accomplished in the last few months. All of this excitement and hard work has worn my not-twenty-something body out just a tad and my family has become quite used to my MacBook on my lap during weekend afternoons.

So…. How nice it is that we all get a 3-day weekend to relax and spend some quality time with those people (and/or cats) in our lives that do not work at Gravity? I have also been able to work on this blog once again. After a nice day out with the family on this beautiful spring day, I found myself curious about what I needed to do next… NOTHING!

How great is that? I was really dumbfounded for a while until my brain chimed in with a wonderful suggestion: Relax! Well that is just what I am doing right now.

Here’s to having a moment to relax and accepting it! Hope you get a moment or to yourself.

peace.

1,317 of 4,947 songs added... OH HELL YEAH!

I just gained access to Google’s Music Beta and for the first time, I think my personal music library may be smaller than the amout of cloud storage available for free!

It is truly amazing just how far we have come from the the early days of cramming mp3′s into a JPEG image to store on a free image hosting site back in the 90′s. Napster not only broadened what was possible for music online, but also inadvertently set us all back a decade of fighting to truly OWN the music we legally purchase from the big music labels.

Yes, I know there are a lot of you that have second thoughts about giving so much to the Google Collective, and I have no beef with you and your own convictions.

I for one welcome our new online music overlords!

Sometimes you just can’t find a single pair out of the entire bunch.

The actual SQL code for extracting all of my blog posts looks surprisingly simple:

But if you look closely at it, you’ll see that there are to scalar functions in there: ‘dbo.old_url‘ & ‘dbo.make_slug‘. I was surprised to find not find any slugs in the CS DB tables. I assume that all of that logic is being handled from the compiled ASP.NET application itself because there was nothing in the tables, stored procedures, or even functions that did anything related to calculating/parsing URL slugs from post titles. To make matters worse, since my site was not in a running state (due to hosting shenanigans), I had basically just my memory along with the 404 logs on the new WordPress site to help me reverse engineer the rules for converting titles to slugs. This is best represented in my ‘dbo.make_slug’ snippet below:

CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[make_slug]
(
	@post_title nvarchar(256)
)
RETURNS nvarchar(500)
AS
BEGIN
	-- Declare the return variable here
	DECLARE @slug nvarchar(500)
	DECLARE @clean_title nvarchar(500)
	
	
	SET @clean_title = LOWER(dbo.deDupeSpaces(dbo.removePunctuation(@post_title)))
	SET @slug = REPLACE(@clean_title, ' ', '-')
	
	RETURN @slug

END

And that is used by ‘dbo.old_url‘ here:

CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[old_url]
(
	@post_date datetime,
	@post_title nvarchar(256)
)
RETURNS nvarchar(500)
AS
BEGIN
	-- Declare the return variable here
	DECLARE @url nvarchar(500)
	DECLARE @y_m_d nvarchar(10)
	DECLARE @clean_title nvarchar(500)
	
	SET @y_m_d = CONVERT(nvarchar, @post_date, 111)
	SET @url = '/archive/' + @y_m_d + '/' +  + dbo.make_slug(@post_title) + '.aspx'
	
	RETURN @url

END

There are still two more functions remaining (if you have been paying attention) that are used by ‘dbo.make_slug‘ and that is where the real fun comes in. First of these is the simpler ‘dbo.deDupeSpaces‘ which cuts all repeating space characters down to a single space:

CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[deDupeSpaces] 
(
	@input nvarchar(500)
)
RETURNS nvarchar(500)
AS
BEGIN
    /**
    *  Based on Nigel Rivett's SQL script found: 
    *    http://www.nigelrivett.net/SQLTsql/RemoveNonNumericCharacters.html 
    */
	DECLARE @i int

	set @i = patindex('%[ ][ ]%', @input)
	while @i > 0
	begin
		set @input = replace(@input, '  ', ' ')
		set @i = patindex('%[ ][ ]%', @input)
	end

	RETURN @input

END

And the more impressive and pretty much identical to the script I found originally written by Nigel Rivett:

CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[removePunctuation] 
(
	@input nvarchar(500)
)
RETURNS nvarchar(500)
AS
BEGIN
	/**
	 *  Based on Nigel Rivett's SQL script found: 
	 *    http://www.nigelrivett.net/SQLTsql/RemoveNonNumericCharacters.html 
	 */
	DECLARE @i int

	set @i = patindex('%[^a-zA-Z0-9 ]%', @input)
	while @i > 0
	begin
		set @input = replace(@input, substring(@input, @i, 1), '')
		set @i = patindex('%[^a-zA-Z0-9 ]%', @input)
	end

	-- Return the result of the function
	RETURN @input

END

So all of this so far is just to get my posts out of the CS DB in a format close enough to what I’ll need to stuff into my WordPress DB. In order to continue, I just ran the simple query (snippet at the top) and exported the results to an XML file. Now I could finally shutdown the virtual instance of Windows 7 that was eating up my MacBook’s resources and burning my lap from the CPU pegging.

The rest is pretty straight forward. I was unable to find any WordPress Plugins so to assist me in this completely custom hackery, so I thought a brute force insert directly into my WordPress mySQL DB was a great idea. I first imported the XML file into a new table that I called cs_posts. This table’s structure is identical to the original query used to export it. Once this was done, I built a basic INSERT INTO …  SELECT query to import these CS posts directly into my WordPress posts table:

INSERT INTO wp_xxxxx_posts 
	(post_author, 
	post_date, 
	post_date_gmt, 
	post_content, 
	post_title, 
	post_status, 
	post_name, 
	post_modified, 
	post_modified_gmt, 
	guid) 
SELECT 2 AS post_author, 
	cs_posts.PostDate AS post_date, 
	cs_posts.PostDate AS post_date_gmt, 
	cs_posts.FormattedBody AS post_content, 
	cs_posts.Subject AS post_title, 
	'draft' AS post_status, 
	cs_posts.slug AS post_name, 
	cs_posts.PostDate AS post_modified, 
	cs_posts.PostDate AS post_modified_gmt, 
	cs_posts.old_url AS guid
FROM cs_posts

From this point, all that was required was for me to correct any permalinks that did not match up to the slug I had calculated. But I also wanted to get 301 redirects in place for all incoming requests looking for /archive/YYYY/MM/DD/some-post-title-slug.aspx to find their way to the new URL /YYYY/MM/some-post-title-slug. This was much easier than I anticipated due to the luxury of John Godley‘s Redirection plugin. This gem of a plugin makes my introduction to the WordPress ecosystem a dream come true. In fact, after I set it up on both this site and my root: robnrob.com site, I was able to populate the redirection item table his plugin uses to skip the need to enter in each post’s specific redirection. The plugin also has an option for regex-ish pattern matching, but a lot of the permalinks I ended up with on WordPress would not directly transpose from the basic:

url pattern: /archive/(d+)/(d+)/(d+)/([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+).aspx
redirect to: http://robbie.robnrob.com/$1/$2/$4

In the end, I lost out on previous comments, categories, and tags, but what I gained was a much more reliable hosting environment and a much more enjoyable platform to hack on. Also, to be honest, I had only a handful of comments anyway.

Google Top Search Result for Robbie Coleman

Amazingly, just after one day of me installing/configuring this new WordPress blog, a search on Google for my name: Robbie Coleman returns this site as the very first result!

Not much more to say than that…

g’night intarwebz…

For now, all of my previous robnrob.com posts are tucked away in a MSSQL database hidden away from the world. Once I can get the data ported over to this WordPress instance, I will most definitely do it.

Short post, but I have a lot of work to do.

peace,
– robbie

That is the question I asked all of my friends and followers from all of those social networkie sites I’m active on. I asked this about 5 hours before posting the results here:

1. MySpace (view post): 6 comments:
   4 yes / 2 other (but of course all were a yes by the fact that they used it to respond)
2. Facebook (view post): 24 comments:
   10 yes / 9 no / 5 other
3. Twitter (view post): 4 @replies [ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ] + 1 direct message:
   3 yes /  1 no / 1 other
4. Brightkite (view post): 1 comment (actually 2 but from the same person):
   1 no
5. Work Email (lol, yeah, since a lot of my coworkers follow me): 1 response:
   1 yes

This makes the total “yes” answers 18 and the total “no” answers 10 out of a total of 37 responses.

Two interesting points are that out of the four networks I’ve inked to above, the most commented network gives me a link that can only be viewed by a logged-in facebook user and the 2nd network (twitter) has no “view entire thread” link as the other three do. Either way, I am not some social media guru, so I only have a “normal” following (under 600 on each network) and this may not be much of a representation of the web masses at all. I did however find it very interesting and really appreciate all of the responses. It is also worth noting that I posted this same question on  13 other networks without any response at all.

I also need to mention that out of those responding “yes”, about half of them mentioned either a minimal usage or tried to explain why they still do. As many of you know, I work at MySpace and a quite a few of the respondents do as well. 10 of the total yes answers came from my fellow employees at MySpace and 2 of those stated only using it for work. To keep this in perspective though, there are at least that many people that are my friends/followers that used to but no longer work at MySpace and that can affect their perspective differently.

Here are some of the key points made by the respondents (I don’t mention too much detail here but covered all of those not publicly visible in the links above):

1. If they do use MySpace, most noted that either not for social networking, or very little.
2. Some mentioned using it for either just music, or finding connecting with bands.
3. Out of those that used to use MySpace but no longer do, some mentioned they stopped when their moved on to twitter or Facebook.
4. Out of the other reasons why some don’t use MySpace, the two top were bad design and bad impression of what users are there.

As pointed out by Christina Gagnier in her article on the Huffington Post:

“The users of MySpace are diverse. It is superficial to cast off MySpace as merely a “digital ghetto” because its demographics may be different from that of the other social networks.”

My friends / followers do not represent the entire internet at all and in fact most like represent a very small demographic, but this is the same demographic that is most active in the “popular” social networking space.

I have more detailed feedback that I felt would be better suited for a separate post entirely.

My Wife Robin will have two pieces showing at the art gallery: Upstairs at the Market, 1057 South San Pedro Street Los Angeles, CA 90015 (see map) on:
Friday, July 3^rd @ 7pm.

This is a group show where she will be showing work for the 1^st time with several other artists and we are very excited.

Please come and view their creations.

Some brief info about Robin's work in this show:

U R HERE, a large wall hanging, featuring images of female family members and friends, collage with renderings of lace on paper, sewn onto fabric.

 

Paper Snowballs, are Robin’s personal journals, torn and then made into a paper pulp and formed into balls, which are then wrapped in thread, a playful reminder that life is consisted of moments.

Here is my first post to my blog via Windows Live Writer (WLW) and Cross Posted to Ping.fm via xPollinate.

We recently moved into an apartment not too far from Robin's Mom's house. We were living with her Mom temporarily while we were trying to both rent out our Yorba Linda townhome and find our own apartment here in our hometown of Culver City. All of the stress such a situation can bring was pretty high and constant. It was a relief to have another caring member of the family to help out with our kids and we were blessed with such an opportunity. The stress was primarily caused by the need to simultaneously get someone renting our place and solidify our own housing locally.

The new apartment is located on a street rich in families with children and so many of these children are close in age to our own children. We now find ourselves surrounded by an urban village of friends, playmates, and support. This has enriched our family’s life and allowed more moments that Robin and I can do activities together without the kids. I’ve longed for such a village for so long that I cannot even remember when such a wish was born. Our two girls are adjusting well to this new environment as well. I was beginning to think that some of the things that made my childhood great just aren’t possible anymore in today’s world, but now at least they can bounce from house to house after school and on weekends. Each household provides for which ever children enter into. If three neighborhood children are over playing and I’m making dinner for my own, I’ll ask each of them to check with their parent if they can stay over to eat. The same goes elsewhere, and even though we’re months from July, we’ve had at least 3 BBQ’s with our neighbors.

So this year I welcome spring and the new things in my life. I’m looking forward to how things will blossom and grow from these beginnings.

This is something that won’t be for everyone, and I do understand this; however, it is something that all of us need to live: Platelets. This little blood helpers replenish quickly in healthy people and do not make you feel weak in the process of self-replenishment.

I have a friend from work who’s son, Dylan, needs platelets to be donated in order for him to regain his health during his treatment. I will not go into all of the details of what his treatment is and all here, because his father, Eric, that also works for FIM already did a much better job with the whole story.

So… back to what I’m asking of you. I’m donating platelets tomorrow for Dylan and I’m hoping that you can do the same sometime soon. Even if Dylan’s platelet needs get met, there are many other children with the same need. Platelets have a very short shelf-life and must be transfused within five days of collection. I won’t lie to you, donating platelets takes a bit longer than just donating blood. But you don’t get to sit in the e-Chair (ultra-cool, comfy chair with easy access to: movies, games, internet browsing, and more) if you just donate blood. It takes about two hours to complete the platelet collection process, and part of this process is giving you, the donor, the rest of your blood back. This process allows you to feel much more normal shortly after your donation is complete.

If you are up to the challenge:

• Be at least 17 years old (there is no upper age limit)
• Weigh at least 110 lbs.
• Be in general good health
• Have not taken any aspirin or anti-inflammatory medications within 2 full days of donation
• If diabetic: No insulin (oral medications are acceptable)
• If asthmatic: No oral medications (Singulair is acceptable)
• Must be willing to allow approximately 2 hours for the entire donation process.

Then please schedule an appointment today for a time that is convenient for you. To do so, please call UCLA’s Blood and Platelet Center at 310-794-7217 and ask to make a platelet donation appointment. Please mention Dylan David as the patient you are donating for. The facility is located in Westwood Village (map here) and you can read more about them here.

Even if you do not do this for me, thank you for reading my plea for help.

Meet my two new friends: Ping.fm and twitterfeed. Well, Ping.fm has been a close friend for some time now, but he is quite the social butterfly and tends to find some pretty cool friends of his own. The interface for twitterfeed is a we bit clunky, but it is also exactly what I need. I am not one to complain when interfaces are not polished as my own tend to be more than rough around the edges.

The two most powerful features offered by twitterfeed are its tight integratration with Ping.fm and it’s support for bit.ly link shortening/tracking. Another nicety is the fact that you can create many feeds (the term used by twitterfeed to describe the linked configuration of an RSS feed to one of their supported endpoints). With all of these combined, I was able to create two feeds that do everything that I wanted for each new post I make to my personal blog here. The first of these pulls new posts detected in the RSS from my FeedBurner feed of this blog, and posts a “status” update to Ping.fm with the text “New Post: “ along with the title of the RSS feed item (blog post title), and a bit.ly shortened link to my post. The second consumes the same new post from the same RSS, and posts a “blog” post to Ping.fm. To do this, I simply repeated what I did for my first one but changed the Ping.fm method from “status” to “blog” and changed what to include from “title only” to “title & description.”

Since my FeedBurner RSS also splices in my Flickr photo posts (which happen to mostly be from Ping.fm MMS uploads) they also flow through twitterfeed.

Well… this should be the first actual blog post that goes through twitterfeed in the two ways I just described above.

I just wanted to test this out and see if it works with my Community Server 2008 and how it renders.

g'night.

Rules: Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with
25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose
25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I
tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you.

(To do this, go to “notes” under tabs on your profile page, paste these
instructions in the body of the note, type your 25 random things, tag
25 people (in the right hand corner of the app) then click publish.)

1. I used to have such a speech impediment in the 3rd grade, that my best friend would translate for his mom when I’d visit.
2. I sang tenor, baritone and bass (not at the same time) in my church choir from high school through Junior College.
3. I was in the bell choir for one year in my church as well. a regular ding dong ya know.
4. My first job was at L.A. Gear in 1989. I was basically a slave to any clerical task.
5. I have eaten Balut before. Seems so wrong, but I used to work in a warehouse with many Filipino, Cambodian and Vietnamese co-workers and they gave me one for my sending off party when I left Office Depot.
6. The first music that I ever purchased was Van Halen – 1984
7. In 1985 & 1986 I attended a two week performing arts camp run by Jane Fonda called: Laurel Springs. This is what propelled me into instant fame and popularity within my family only. I found my comedic balance and timing there working with sketch comedy and improv workshops. It was a lot of fun. My most surreal memory from this camp was one night I was feeling depressed about my parents’ recent divorce and my cabin mate noticed my tears and ran to get his mom to help console my sobbing. That may not sound too strange, but the boy in my cabin that ran to get his mom was Troy Garity and his mom was (and still is) Jane Fonda. She happened to know about kids and divorce and was very nurturing.
8. I barely squeaked by in High School and Graduated with a whopping 2.75 GPA. If it wasn’t for the make-up courses that I took the summer before and the extra periods my senior year, I wouldn’t of made it.
9. My favorite show on TV in High School was robotech. And seeing just the opening from the video I linked here makes me miss it a lot. This show sooo kicked ThunderCats‘ ass!
10. My first geeky passion was not computers, but instead audio/video. My family couldn’t afford a computer of any kind until I was out of High School. I used to love to make mix tapes and remember hand twisting one side of the cassette to get just the right gap between songs. My dad had lots of old stereo components and I would wire them all up to make a monstrous sound
11. One of the stupidest things I can ever remember doing was once in High School me and my best friend got up before dawn to ride to the beach and watch the sunrise. I’ve lived in Southern California my whole life and to this day don’t know how we missed one tiny obvious detail… the sun rises in the East! I mean we planned that trip for a couple days. Well… the cool pre-dawn bike ride was nice though.
12. When I was in the 2nd grade my sister and I would come up with roller skating dance routines in the court yard of our apartment building. I remember them being with music, but sadly I know we had no portable radio, so it must have been us singing along as well. In my defense, the Ice Capades were huge in the 70′s!
13. I’m obsessed with my online presence and work (probably too) hard at maintaining it.
14. I go to great lengths (sometimes heights and widths as well) to find a new and alternative way to look at something. I question just about everything. I also try to find humor in everything (which has gotten me into a lot of trouble over the years). If I could sum up my take on the world as described by comedians, they would be: George Carlin, Bill Maher, and Stephen Wright.
15. If I had an unlimited gift card for Jamba Juice and they remained open 24/7, I would never go hungry. I am a total Juice nut and cannot resist the yummy goodness that their twenty-something blender wizards spin up each day.
16. I have seen (the original) Star Wars (Episode IV: A New Hope) over 200 times and I surpassed 200 before the age of 13. We some how got a copy of it on Betamax when I was about 9 or 10 years old, and well… I just could not stop watching it.
17. Even though I work @ MySpace and have become quite the fan boy, my MySpace Display Name was at one time: “Robbie Hates MySpace” …and for the record, I changed my mind about the site before working here and in fact before my call for an interview.
18. previous to the 8th grade, I was extremely shy. I used to do the sets and lighting for the theatrical performances in my Jr. High school and never thought I would have the guts to be on stage with the lights on me. Not sure really what happened, but now you can’t take a mic or spotlight away from me. lol.
19. I never took the SAT. I was even more arrogant back in High School than I am today. It just really made me want to challenge such a lame system. I won… sort of… It took me many years to return to college and finally get an education that I wanted, but it’s done and w/o the freakin’ SAT.
20. I once bought a 1-900 number that provided fortune telling. I think I should have called the number before signing the check, because they may have been able to tell me it wouldn’t earn me squat. Taught me a lesson in advertising though. Not in me doing advertising, but instead it taught me more about not believing in the advertising you see.
21. I went to the Philippines in 1986 with a group of High School and College kids from my church. We went to help support our previous pastor who had been involved with the revolution that was just coming to a close there in Manila. We were there for 2 and-a-half weeks and visited sites that tourist tours never go to. The biggest thing we did was build a gated playground for a nutrition center located in a squatters’ area along the RxR tracks in Manila. At first I didn’t think we were doing anything too helpful. I mean, these people had a lot of core needs that were pretty obvious. Then I learned that the children became so accustomed to the train tracks, that they built little cars to ride and play on the tracks. There were children dying every week from the freight trains that would speed by. The playground was a success. We put in a basketball court and a high wall and fence around it to keep the children away from the tracks. I wasn’t much of a worker, and ended up playing and singing with the local children. Some really good memories there.
22. I used to think that the entire Wizard of Oz film was in Black & White. My family’s only TV was a black and white one. We didn’t get a color TV until I was at least 10. So when Dorothy stepped out of the house and into the land of Oz… yup… still black and white on our TV. The first time that I saw it on a color TV I made a remark to a friend that: “I can’t believe they colorized this classic film. It looks so fake.” lol.
23. Between the ages of 9 and 13 I used to listen to Dr. Demento on KMET while lying in bed to go to sleep. I used to have nightmares (previous to the musical dementia provided by the Doc) and my mom suggested I listen to music to fall asleep to. My favorite station at that time was KMET and Sunday nights was Dr. Demento. It may not have really done anything for the nightmares, but I sure do remember asking my mom a lot of questions about the off-color things I was learning in my Sunday night bedtime routine.
24. I didn’t learn how to swim until I was in Junior High. I was terrified of the water and rightfully so as I had almost drowned three times before the YMCA that I attended day camp and numerous summer camps with forced me to take lessons. They told me that I could not go to any more camps until I took lessons and was able to pass the deep water test. I was 12 for Christ’s sake! This lesson taught me more than how to swim, it taught me how big something can become in your head if you put it off due to fear.
25. The first complete novel I ever read was The Da Vinci Code in 2006. I never really liked reading and would constantly fall asleep mid-chapter any time I tried. How’d I get through school you may ask…? Well besides my #8 above, I would take Theater classes that covered most of my English requirements. Now the most reading I do is for Thing One and Thing Two. A common scene is me sitting with one or both of them as I read some stories and as I start to dose off, one of them will yell: “READ!!!!” and open up my eyes with their fingers.

So I finally brought together two of my favorite services:

1. MySpace
2. Ping.fm

If you need an explanation for what MySpace offers then my wee little blog post is not the best resource for you. However, Ping.fm is a new up-and-coming web site that offers some great value to its users. It allows registered users to post status updates, micro-blogs, blogs, location (check-ins), and even pictures and audio to over 30 of the top social networks.

So… if you know me, you'll know that I enjoy getting around on the Internet. I've registered for over 20 social networking sites and Ping.fm was a treat for me. In one place I could broadcast my status to all of them. Old friends and colleagues begin to comment on my status updates and follow along with my life as they did when I sat, worked or socialized with them for realz. But, I found myself constantly switching between my Ping.fm browser tab and my MySpace browser tab.

A while back before we launched the MySpace Developer Platform (MDP) with its OpenSocial implementation, we had an internal competition to develop an app. I worked my tail off to create an app that would post your MySpace status updates to Twitter's API. I was close… and then we went from the 0.6 spec to 0.7 of Google's OpenSocial specification. My app was busted, and I was done with hacking.

When the holidays got closer, I got this uncanny urge to develop something new, and the "Ping 'em All" project begun. It took me two sleepless nights to get something solid enough to submit and now I am sharing it with you.

So, check it out (if you don't mind):
http://www.myspace.com/pingemall 

and speak your mind on the app's forum:
http://forum.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=messageboard.viewcategory&type=friendForum&friendID=434604650

Thanks!
  &
Ping ON!!

Tags: flock

Yup… full blown blog!

So, for those of you in my life that have been so supportive and offered me anything from a place to hang, to a dinner break, to even some drugs that I’ve never heard of (you know who you are)… Thanks!

The road ahead is brighter even though it may get bumpy, but I know that “It’s all right.”

doh dee dah – doh dee dah – doh dee dah dah…

Behold the source: http://src.chromium.org/svn/trunk/src/chrome/common/chrome_switches.cc
(full source root)

So far, there aren’t too many interesting switches. The two most intriguing to me are –record-mode and –playback-mode:

// Chrome supports a playback and record mode.  Record mode saves *everything*
// to the cache.  Playback mode reads data exclusively from the cache.  This
// allows us to record a session into the cache and then replay it at will.
const wchar_t kRecordMode[] = L"record-mode";
const wchar_t kPlaybackMode[] = L"playback-mode";

What I like most is the fact that I can keep up with releases and what is under the covers. Complete transparency! So… for all of you Google Fearing Americans out there… pick up a C++ for Dummies book and read along with the rest of us.