brett's blog

I have been telling myself for the past 6 months that I need to start some kind of diet and exercise routine. Well today is the day that it starts! I figure if I put it on here then I will be much more likely to stick to it. I just borrowed a book called "The South Beach Diet" that naturally explains the South Beach Diet.

It seems like a much more realistic diet than most of the other ones out there (I could never make it 2 days on something like the Atkins diet). Anyway, I expect be posting my progress on the diet over the next few months (hopefully) so stay tuned.

Google today announced the first major change to its understated homepage since its launch. Visitors to the site can now choose to personalize their Google page to create a Web portal uniting many of Google's different services. The traditional Google homepage is still available, now called Google Classic, and users can toggle between a personalized view and the classic search pane.

I'm not sure why this is such a shock since google news has been brewing for so long. Normally more competition is considered good for consumers, but I can see why both Yahoo and even MSN would be a bit uneasy about Google taking aim at more and more what they do. I mostly use Google but my view of Yahoo has changed in a positive direction over the last few years due to what seems to be a newer culture / attitude.

The options are pretty basic so far (especially compared to others like Yahoo!) but the one "cool" feature so far is the ability to drag and drop the content blocks on the fly to re-arrange the layout of the page. Yahoo can also dynamically re-arrange the layout but they choose to use an "edit" button where the user can decide from pre-defined choices on where they want the block moved to.

I will probably use it for a while since I use Gmail as my primary email client and the page lets me view my inbox but I am still going to stick with MyYahoo for the time being since I have more control over things like custom RSS feeds.

John Coggeshall talks about Oracles new addition to their OTN site for php developers.

While I was attending the International PHP Conference in Amsterdam, I had an opportunity to stop by the Oracle exhibit and get introduced to a brand-new PHP Developer Center on Oracle's Developer Network! This is the second such announcement from a major database company (SAP recently launched a new PHP Development Forum which I am moderating as part of a SAP/Zend joint effort). Between Oracle, SAP and of course IBM it is becoming increasingly clear that PHP has moved from a thriving open source project to an enterprise solution powerhouse for web applications!

Yahoo! has opened their Y! Local Traffic content to allow Apple's Dashboard to create a  Y! Local Traffic widget. For this to work, Yahoo has to expose the data in an easily digestiable format. As it turns out, Yahoo has decided to use RSS to accomplish this.

This is huge since it is now easily consumable by RSS readers, so other people can piggy-back on the feed. There’s already a blog post describing how the widget works and it even provides a little form for making your own URL.

http://maps.yahoo.com/traffic.rss?csz=45202&mag=4&minsev=2

The parameters are:

• csz The location from which you want to do your search - as far as I know only cities are supported at the moment. You can provide both a zipcode, a city or an address - all seem to work.
• mag The level of ‘magnification’. 3 = 4 Miles, 4 = 10 Miles, 5 = 40 Miles
• minserv The minimum severity of the traffic condition. 1 = Minor, 2 = Moderate, 4 = Major, 5 = Critical

I am looking forward to see how many interesting things people can come on ways in which this data can be used..

I had been trying to find the best approach to making my header logo into a clickable link that would return to the home page of one of my websites ( bearcatnews.com ). The problem was that I really wanted to leave the image inside my style sheet instead of marking it up inline.

Since there is no way that I know of to make a background image a clickable link, I decided to assign the "onclick" event to the div tag that contained my background image.

Here is the result:

HTML Markup -

I noticed an article from ZDNet announcing that Google plans to double Gmail capacity--at least.. I was first a little leary since it is April 1st but then remembered that Gmail was announced last April 1st so Google appears to have a sense of humor.

Here are some screenshots from my Gmail account that shows that they are in fact bumping up the storage as we speak. Notice the total amount of storage available:

I guess what suprises me most is the fact that it is slowly building up to the 2GB capacity. Is this dynamically adding the available storage based on how much drive space is available to the system? Could they possibly be allocating this much storage for EVERY user instead of counting on the 80/20 theory where 80% of users use 20% of the resources while the other 20% use 80%??

Here is some information on how to download a file over an HTTPS connection from PHP. This normally is not a big issue in both IE and Mozilla for HTTP but changing to a HTTPS connection breaks using IE for downloading.

For anyone looking at this issue of http vs https downloads I found that the only change I had to make to my working script was to add the header line:

header("Pragma: cache");

So my script ended up with the following:

I just stumbled on to this photo manager (think Picasa or iPhoto) written for linux that look promising. Here are some links and information on it. I will write more once I have a chance to play with it.

F-Spot Wiki

- F-Spot use cases

F-Spot project page
- Mailing list
- TODO from the CVS - the next closest thing to a roadmap.

Yahoo has one-upped Google with the announcement of their API. Google has been doing this for a while now (3 years), but you never hear anything new about it like you do with Amazon's API where new applications seems to appear on a daily basis.

The SDK includes BSD-licensed examples in Perl, Python, PHP, Java and JavaScript (Google's SDK includes Java and .NET examples), and accesses Image, Web, Video, Local, and News searches (last time I looked, Google did Web, Cache, and Spelling)! Yahoo's API uses REST rather than SOAP, which I personally find much easier to work with.

IBM is putting its corporate heft behind your favorite web development technology.

IBM announced a partnership with Zend to create a bundle called Zend Core, which includes IBM's Cloudscape-embedded database and Zend's PHP development tools. Zend sells tools built on the open-source edition of PHP and offers related services.