su.percilio.us

If any of you out there use Convio for your non-profit’s on-line presence, ie website, donations, email campaigns, I’ve created a PHP library for connecting to their Open API.

I say it’s a “Library”… it’s really just a single wrapper file that aids in connecting to, making call to, and handling responses from, the Convio Open APIs.

There’s no documentation to speak of, but the two files included in the zip archive are pretty solidly commented, so you will probably be able to get a lot from them. The two files included in the zip are the library file itself and an example of how to implement it.

If you end up using it, let me know what you think!

Download the PHP Library for Convio Open API

Another year has passed. New lines have formed on my face, my stoop has become a little more pronounced, and another South by Southwest is upon us. Ah, South by Southwest, or SXSW as it’s more commonly known. Because, of course, how could a music and film festival possibly consider itself trendy unless one boils it down into a soulless, meaningless acronym. OMG SXSW is FAB like ACL.

So, once a year our fair little central Texas city is descended upon by cous-cous eating, cilantro seasoning, south Cali, Apple fan boys for three weeks of self-satisfying, self-appreciating, and self-nauseating fawning over music and film that’s too smart to be interesting. BTW, Chucks and horn-rimmed glasses aside, this entry has been, so far, largely self-loathing, as I am writing this very entry on a netbook running OSX and have just checked the time and weather on my iPhone. WTF ROFL AFK BRB OK. Oh and I’ve been listening to nothing but Silversun Pickups and M83, so I’m just about ready to watch MINE: Taken by Katrina.

Cynicism aside, SXSW brings a lot of interesting people and art to Austin and one of the interesting and less publicized aspects is “Interactive,” five days of technology related trade shows, keynotes, and seminars. I have been given the opportunity, by my great employer, sorry, MGE, to attend this year’s interactive event. Being that this is the first time I’ll be attending SXSW I’m excited to see what all the hub-bub is about and what sort of douchebaggery I’ll be faced with.

Editor’s Note: Firefox underlines all my misspellings. It underlined “netbook”, “iPhone”, but not “douchebaggery” … awesome.

Well, it looks as though John McCain has picked a running mate for his 2008 run for the White House. In, what I consider to be a deliciously clever move, he has apparently chosed Sarah Palin, the Governor of Alaska who has a sort of “I’m a cute little librarian who gets naughty behind closed doors” thing going on.

The question now, is whether or not this move is enough to scrape up the rampantly pro-woman Hilary supporters. In any case, I think it’s a smart move by McCain. It definitely alters the appeal, or lack thereof, of the GOP.

What I think is most apt about this move, is the fact that the Republican Party will now also be making a ground-breaking and historic move, which I believe a lot of Americans like. We like when people “shake things up a bit” and we like seeing “firsts.” Barrack Obama was the first black man to be nominated as a presidential candidate for a major American party and, if McCain wins, Palin will be the first woman Vice President ever. As I said: we like “firsts.”

Way back in the day, we’re talking 10+ years ago, I fancied myself a musician. I played drums in a Texas roots rock and blues band and over the years have had my hands in a number of projects as a singer/songwriter. I was a pretty good drummer, and pretty decent, albeit a tad middle-of-the-road, when it came to writing and performing my own acoustic tracks.

I’ve been doing a lot of introspective soul-searching lately, trying to figure out where I want to end up in the next 5, 10, 15 years. I feel like I’ve carved out a pretty reasonable career as a web developer, but every now and then I find myself at a real loss to find any sort of personal satisfaction in what is supposed to be my main endeavor. This leads me to think of four years ago, the last time I was on stage playing my guitar in front of people. I was pretty mediocre, but damn it was fun; it was a hell of a lot more fun than sitting in a cube staring at lines of code all day. And although I’ll never be able to replace my current career with one in music, I keep thinking that maybe I can supplement my job with a few acoustic shows around town.

Anyhoo, my longing for the limelight is sort of besides the point here. My roommate just recently purchased a new, pretty sweet, locally made guitar and that lead me to pick mine up again. In an almost eery coincidence, my friend, who I used to play with, told me he’d just put together a home recording studio and that I should drop by and lay some stuff down. I hadn’t recorded anything in five years or so and hadn’t recorded with proper equipment in almost 10, so with a newly charged interest in music and an opportunity to record I called him up and we recorded a song.

I refer to it as a “classic” in the title of this post and obviously it isn’t that, it’s just one of my old standards called Limelight & Tequila. I wrote it four years ago and maintain that it’s probably the best thing I’ve ever written. Not to say it’s some sort of masterpiece, but I always thought something just sort of clicked lyrically in it.

This will make the third time it’s been recorded and the first time in 4 years. This is probably the best it’s ever sounded, however, the performance is still pretty rough. The guitar was done in two scrappy pieces and the lyrics were done in one shot. And it’s all compounded by the fact that I can not, for the life of me, play with a click-track. Even with my raw, sort of amateurish performance, my friend, the audio engineer whizz, really brought out the best in it and me. I did notice a couple of things after listening to this version, though: It’s too long and it needs to be rearranged. Maybe someday I’ll get to that…

So, for a lack of any other way to present it to the general public, I now throw it up on my blog for you all to enjoy and/or crucify:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

A couple of weeks ago a friend asked me if I’d be interested doing a little contract work for the company he works for. The project was to come up with an on line quiz, mimicking that of FreeRice.com. Reasonably simple I thought, so I figured it might be good for a laugh and few pennies. The caveat being, if possible, for it to be entirely browser-side, as his company’s software did not support server-side code. Now that sounded interesting.

Being the impulsive code-monkey that I am, instead of waiting for the finalization of my contract to come through, I simply went ahead and coded the whole thing. Naturally, they decided to give this to someone internal and not hire me, so their loss is your gain. I didn’t have anything to do with this software after I’d written it, so I figured I would publish it here on my blog for the whole world to use.

The software itself is incredibly simple. Actually, I hesitate to call it software at all. It’s just one Javascript class file, some specifically name HTML elements and a single Javascript call to start the whole thing up. I like the Prototype framework, so I decided to use that to power JProQuiz, hence the “Pro” part. I also used the Scriptaculous builder so I wouldn’t have too much messy HTML in the class file. The entire class file (quiz.js) is less than 300 lines long and the majority of those are comments. (Can you tell I’m a little proud of it?)

The basic idea is a single class that acts as an engine and using a JSON configuration file, which contains all the quiz questions, options, and correct answers, drives the entire quiz experience for the user. Now, you’re probably wondering: “How do you keep the JSON config file obfuscated so that people can’t just look at the answers?” Err… well… you can’t. This quiz is entirely browser-side, so the data has to be available to the front end. The JSON file is sort of buried in the class file, so it’s definitely not immediately obvious where the questions are coming from. It would take someone who knew their way around Javascript to figure out what was going on. And if someone really wants to dig through your code and find your JSON file and read all the answers so they can get a 100% on your little web quiz, well, boogaloo for them. So, don’t use JProQuiz to power the new on line SATs, just use it for fun little quizzes.

You can download JProQuiz here.

And you can see a live example here.

If you use JProQuiz please let me know by commenting below. Or if you have any questions, suggestions, or bugs . . . bring ‘em on!