As much as this post is going to sound like an ad, I felt I needed to take a moment to endorse a great site, FreeHeadset.org. First, a brief intro of their site, taken from them:

“Since December of 2003 we’ve been running a worldwide wireless phone safety program that distributes free cell phone headsets in an effort to promote safe driving. So far we’ve given away over 260,000 headsets and we’d like to give one to you too!”

I believe I first stumbled across this site 2-3 years ago. I found it hard to believe that someone was willing to send out free headsets for cell phones for the cost of shipping. As skeptical as I was I gave it a try and shortly after received it in the mail, it was great. Time went by and I didn’t think much about it for awhile until recently when I wanted to look into a Bluetooth headset for my cell phone. I found the site again and seen that they were still around and did have a Bluetooth headset available. Now as expected, it wasn’t quite free like the normal headsets, they do charge $27 for them. By their claims this is a $45 savings off the retail price – try to find a decent one for that price elsewhere. With the cost of shipping it comes to around $30, not bad. In fact, I just ordered a second one, they have no limits.

With more places banning hand-held cell phone use while driving, I’m sure this site is likely to see an increase in use, or at least deserves more publicity.

The last month has been pretty good all around. The trip was excellent, had a great time. It really makes me sad that it will probably be awhile before I get the chance to go away again. I have also started my summer co-op with the government which I am enjoying, the people are great.

As for the site change I discussed last post, I have actually made progress. I came up with a design that is a mix of this design and my portfolio design, I’m happy with it. I still have some tweaking to do before I’m ready to put it up though. So, my current goal is to finish that off and get it up then go back to an old project. I had previously created a Facebook app called PhotoGrab to make downloading of pictures from albums very simple. I ended up neglected it so it isn’t online anymore but I want to get it back online and improve it.

I’m really enjoying the lack of homework and having a set work schedule Monday to Friday. It should make for a great summer.

A rather interesting email was sent to me today which I have copied below for your enjoyment. Mind you, after doing a quick Google search on it I found it less amusing but still a little freaky. I’ve cleaned up the formatting from the original email some. Also, this isn’t anything new, it’s been going around for a little while now.
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Was a little bored tonight so I put together a little epoch time converter that’s pretty basic. When working with some databases the times are stored as epoch values in which I need to convert. There are a number of ways to accomplish this but I figured since I was bored I would make a little script to do it for the enjoyment of all. I plan on adding a date to epoch feature to it later on when I’m bored again. Feel free to make suggestions for other scripts.
Epoch Time Converter

I finally came up with one project idea to work on and the initial version is completed. Based on a conversation with friends a little while back I realized that while it was easy to upload pictures to Facebook to share with others, it is a pain for your friends to download all of them if they want to have a copy on their computer. After reviewing the Facebook API I determined a way to make a simple application that allows users to login and download complete photo albums in a few easy steps. PhotoGrab is what I came up with. It is extremely simple but also very basic right now. If there seems to be demand for it I will probably built it out more and possibly add in other sites if requested.

PhotoGrab – The easy way to download your friends’ albums!

For the past few years now I have been doing work on a few different web projects, but they have all been with other companies and things that have already been started before I got my hands on it. There hasn’t really been a project that I have created from the beginning (code wise), and more importantly that I can call my own. The closest thing is when Mike and I rewrote RateMyTeachers from JSP to PHP, but even then he did most of the work and I can’t quite call it my own.

So, I’ve been thinking for the past few weeks about what I could possibly do. I’m not looking to make the next big thing, but something that could have a small community would be nice. The problem is, I really can’t think of anything. My mind keeps going in the direction of rating sites, but there are so many out there now that I’m really not sure that is the best route to go. Perhaps a site that doesn’t just focus on ratings, but has reviews of things amongst other information?

I’ve even been trying to think of simpler things such as just some random PHP scripts, but even then I’m stumped at what to do. Maybe I’m having some sort of programmers block. The weird thing is once I do have an idea for a project I could map it all out in my head about how things should work, etc.

I guess this is the point where I ask people for ideas, anything at all. Please!
(Maybe I need to create a site for people to submit ideas for PHP projects *grin*)

Yet again I have gone awhile without updating this blog, I guess I need to think up of some more ideas for things to put on it.

Anyways, once it was officially announced that Aerosmith would be coming to PEI this summer (July 21) me and the guys decided that we had to plan a little trip to go to the concert. The fact that the tickets are only $75 (compared to the $100+ for some of the other big name concerts of late) only made it that much easier to decide. After a painful hour and a half on Saturday morning I was able to get the tickets online. As expected the box office site was swamped with traffic and very slow and unresponsive at times.

Now, as much as I want to complain about the problems using their site, with my job and experience I can understand some of the issues. First, I want to note that I was on the ticket site before the sale started at 10AM. Leading up to that time the site worked perfectly and was very fast but as soon as the concert web site updated and linked to the box office site, it came to a crawl. Noting that I had been trying since before the tickets went on sale, it wasn’t until 10:22AM when I was finally able to add the tickets to my cart. It took about 35 minutes (10:57AM) for me to complete the checkout process. Let’s just say that a lot of refreshing was involved, so much so that apparently I accidentally submitted the order twice but luckily they have safeguards in place for that so it only goes through once — which I applaud them on. All that said, I do feel their pain and understand. The ticket site is run by the Charlottetown Civic Centre and best I can tell is on a shared hosting plan (possibly clustered). Normally, this is probably more then enough for them but once you’re selling tens of thousands of tickets to a big name concert, it simply isn’t enough and they probably knew this. It would be interesting to see the traffic stats (impressions and bandwidth) for the day.

Is there a solution for this? Of course, two come to mind immediately. The first being that they could have got a couple of powerful dedicated machines to run the box office site but there wouldn’t be a long term benefit for them, an event like this probably would only happen for them once every 5-10 years. The second being using an existing service to sell the tickets for them, such as ticketmaster.ca (which I did hear someone say is where they would be on sale but they were obviously mistaken). Now, I’m not sure how the contracts and fees work for those sites, but they usually have the infrastructure in place to handle that traffic.

Personally, I think in Canada companies are still learning how to do online sales. Things have got better over the last couple of years with more stores opening up shop online in addition to their retail outlets, but we are still a long way off from the US. One example is Wal-Mart who has had their online store in the US for a couple of years now at least (not sure when they first launched it) but still hasn’t launched a Canadian online store. In fact, up until recently they did even have products listed on the site, it just had general information. Our culture is also partly to blame for this though. Until recently I don’t think many people have actually wanted to shop online, too many questions about security or just how it all works in general. I guess we just like to proceed with caution, but sometimes we really go too slow.

Anyways, it looks like I managed to squeeze out a decent sized entry this time, here’s to hoping I can do it again soon.

Well, I just spent most of the afternoon trying to figure out how to get a drop shadow working on a box that is compatible with some of the most popular browsers (Firefox, IE6, IE7 and Safari). Let’s just say it wasn’t as easy as I expected to be. There are a number of tutorials out there, but most seem to apply to img tags. With CSS3 there is supposed to be a box-shadow property but apparently the browsers don’t support it (I only gave it a quick test and it didn’t render properly, I didn’t investigate why).

I tested a number of methods and there was always something that prevented it from rendering properly in IE (whether it be 6 or 7). Luckily, I finally came across this page that had a tutorial that actually accomplished what I wanted. The one downside is that I was hoping to get the shadow without relying on any images, but I am happy with the result. I may expand on this later on, but I wouldn’t count on it too much right now.

(Side note: I am slowing learning CSS. The key being slowly.)

I’ve left NY and came back since that last post. So, I am currently back down here again. There’s quite a bit going on, but yet I don’t seem to have too much to say right now.

PeekYou.com – Coming Soon

A few days late, but we have added India to the RateMyTeachers family.

Where will we be next?