Axodys

One long meeting down, one short one to go.

Today I discovered Blogdex, an intriguing link popularity tracker being developed at MIT’s Media Lab that analyzes thousands of weblogs. Wired has an article offering further information.

We had a 3.2 magnitude earthquake right around 6:40 PM tonight. It seemed pretty similar to the others we’ve experienced in the last month and a half in that there was a distinct boom and a small amount of shaking. It sounds like seismologists are going to be watching our area a little closer now.

Well, I’m done with basketball for the summer. It’s going to be nice relaxing during the evenings for a change during the coming weeks. I’ve got a few web database projects I want to work on and various other things that I’ve put on hold for a while. There are several movies that I’ve been meaning to see as well. Oh well, all in good time.

Incidentally, Best in Show is a fairly amusing movie.

David K. Every (of Mackido.com fame) has a three part series of articles comparing and contrasting WebObjects and PHP. iGeek: Web Objects or PHP?, iGeek: WebObjects - Diamond in the rough?, and finally iGeek: PHP: The Zen development tool.

My web programming interests have swung mostly to PHP for the time being (mostly because of ease of integration with MySQL and MacOS X), but eventually I know I’m going to get interested in Zope again. Here’s a link to a binary package of Zope 2.4 and Python for MacOS X.

I bought Paul DuBois’ MySQL book earlier this week and have finally had some time today to start working through the tutorial at the beginning of the book. I’ve been meaning to learn SQL in some form or another for over a year, but it’s only been recently thanks to MacOS X that I’ve been able to do it easily.

I just found this recent article on PHP on MacOS X over at O’Reilly. Their tips are useful and informative, but somewhat different than the configuration flags that I used on my machine since I have installed most of my libraries using Fink packages (Fink creates a special directory /sw for all the software that it installs). Here’s my most recent configuration:
./configure --with-mysql --with-apxs --with-gd=/sw --with-png-dir=/sw --with-zlib-dir=/sw --with-jpeg-dir=/sw --with-freetype-dir=/sw --with-xml --enable-shared --with-gd-imgstrttf --enable-safe-mode

Ming is a really cool PHP extension that allows you to create Flash animations on the fly, but unfortunately I haven’t been able to get it to fully build under MacOS X. I’ve managed to build the static library, but not the actual PHP extension.

Today while fiddling with Ming I discovered that an annoying side effect of running the recent Apple Software Update for Apache was a complete downgrade on my PHP installation. So I ended up spending a fair amount of time configuring and recompiling 4.06 in order to restore GD and extension support. In the end I was successful so it was time well spent, but it was definitely annoying.

I’m so glad the weekend is nearly here.

A couple Gonzaga alumni and their three children are taking a year off to travel around the world.

The Nolan family headed down to El Paso on June 24, where they walked across the Mexican border into Juarez and have now made it all the way down to Guatemala travelling mostly by bus. I’m really looking forward to following their continued exploits around the globe over the coming months.

Well, Team III exceeded my expectations and took University III to overtime before eventually losing by five. We were actually leading by two with 9 seconds left, but thanks in part to my decision to pressure full court we ended up fouling with four seconds left in the game. U-High hit both their freethrows and we failed to get a good shot in the final four seconds of regulation. I think there’s a good chance that the outcome would have been the same had we simply fallen back into half court defense for the last ten seconds, but it’s hard to say for sure. On the one hand I’m really pleased with the job my team did, but on the other hand I’m pretty disappointed that we didn’t quite pull out the victory when it was ours for the taking.

Team I won their game fairly easily and plays tomorrow night at 6:10 PM.

Not an especially eventful day. Mary and I went for a 30 minute run this morning around Manito Park. I felt pretty good over the course of the run, but Mary struggled with some nausea. My calves have been pretty sore since the run though so I didn’t come away completely unscathed.

Morningstar Farm Veggie Dogs are so good that I’ve had six this weekend. And I think that your average person would be hard pressed to distinguish them from their beef filled cousin.

Tomorrow Ferris Team III has their big playoff rematch with University III at 5 PM. I think we’re capable of beating them, but it’s going to take our best effort offensively and defensively.