epbyte blog

Thanks to webdata over at the Joomla forum, you can view fix here:

http://forum.joomla.org/index.php?topic=150110.new;topicseen#new

It was a problem I was having internally.

eptakeover.com has been released. This is a forum where the young professional view of El Paso Government is expressed. Current events around town will also be discussed. Check it out.

If you’re viewing with these older browsers, please be advised that I’m working on fixing the problems I’m having with the epbyte.com homepage. Thank you…

I was leaving a family function today from West El Paso, thought I would shoot my drive to my current home, the good old LV. This video is complete with Asarco smoke stacks, UTEP campus view from I-10, J-Town, Downtown, Mountains, Spaghetti Bowl, The Star on the mountain, a nice old school ride when I get off on Yarbrough by Bel Air, and some other goodies that I’m sure you will enjoy. The sun was barely going down. A typical beautiful day in the EP cruising with my windows down.

All of that is accompanied with random music (RATM, Jay-Z, some Papa Roach, Led Zeppelin) from my iPod, and my windshield pellet gun holes. Notice that Madonna almost came on (totally inappropriate for this video), haha.

Edit: I have since moved the video to be viewed, it can be viewed at the following location

http://epbyte.com/random/west2LV.html

So I’m using the latest build of MS Operating Systems, Vista. I had a little problem with iTunes though. Once I upgraded the operating system, I ran iTunes. Vista had problems with my current build of iTunes, so I did what it wanted me to do, repair. Basically what my repair entailed was to uninstall the current version of iTunes that I already had when this was an XP machine, and re-download iTunes from apple’s website. I did that.

Ok, so here’s the kicker. I like to jam out to Jay-Z when I’m doing some work, or just chillin. Just for kicks after the iTunes install, I wanted to play a Jay-Z hit. For some awful reason, all of my Jay-Z songs were showing up on iTunes as being in my iTunes library, but once you double clicked on them to play a particular song, iTunes would prompt you with a message that it couldn’t find the song. It would then ask if you would like to manually locate it yourself. I was like, no, because I have hundreds of Jay-Z songs on my local machine. Ok, so the next thing I did was just run some tests, find out if these were just a couple of songs that iTunes couldn’t find, or what the deal was. It turns out the songs iTunes couldn’t find were pretty much all Jay-Z songs. I then looked at the iTunes Music Library (iTunes Music Library.xml), it’s an xml file located under C:\Users\”Your User Name”\Music\iTunes on my machine, and I’m pretty sure you can find this file on your machine if you use iTunes.

This file is basically everything iTunes uses to sort find and locate any media you are using iTunes to play, basically a mini database. This file will be huge if you are using iTunes to manage lots of media. In my case it was about 12 MB. You can pretty much open it with any text editor, but if you use a good text editor you will be able to see things clearer such as tags and other information. If you’re familiar to XML none of this will be new to you. I decided to use Dreamweaver 8 to open it, because of the nice ‘find all’ feature. Once I opened it, I noticed that all of my Jay-Z songs were tagged under a folder named ‘Jay%20Z’. The code ‘%20′ is used by URL’s to represent a space, you can view more about it here: link.

I had already known about this code representation for URL’s, but the problem is that all of my Jay-Z jams were in a folder named ‘Jay-Z’ and the iTunes library are thinking they are in a folder (based on the code) named ‘Jay Z’ <– note the space in that last part which is as I stated above represented as ‘%20′. To fix the problem all I did was go to the file named ‘Jay-Z’ and rename it to ‘Jay Z’ with the space instead of the hyphen.

In conclusion, I wasn’t having this problem before I upgraded this particular operating system. I had that folder named ‘Jay-Z’ with the hyphen for years. I did find a quick fix though, after some investigation. I hope this saves some of you a few hours of time.

To start off, I love my friends. All of ya, even the ones who weren’t always just ‘friends’. I have officially started a new job. I’m working for Blue Range Physician Management Services. I’m their Lead Programmer/ Graphic Designer. So far so good. I like the people I’m working with, and you can’t beat the professional atmosphere. I will be doing lots of things from creating various marketing material, to developing web applications, to managing sensitive data and building applications over it to make it work for us, so to speak. I hope you’re all doing good. Good luck with your brackets.

A few projects we’re still working on, and can’t wait to launch:

UTEP Centennial Museum, almost there.
Jay Noller.net, Bobsled Olympian from El Paso pursuing his dream.
Fuga, want to redesign their website entirely. You can get more info about them on epbyte.com
We’ll keep you updated. I’m on my way to get a haircut.

Did you ever get that feeling that you probably should have looked over a few old notes or books before you walked in? Yeah, I had that feeling. The problem is that the feeling came after the interview. Overall, I would say that I forgot two key things, don’t ask me why it was these two things. This was the first time I was interviewed by a team of people, about six. I wasn’t expecting some of the questions they asked me, but with my background I should have.

In this blog I will go over the two biggest things that I couldn’t remember. By the way, this interview was for a web editor position. Most of the questions felt like they came out of my Senior Software Engineering course, sort of like a final exam.

* Lifecycles. Software engineers use them to efficiently develop applications, sort of like a step by step process. My problem was that I couldn’t remember some of the phases in between, the meat of a particular lifecycle. I decided to talk about the lifecycle known as the waterfall model.

Basically it goes like this:

Interpret Software Requirements - document clients expectations of a product formally after an official meeting/s
Design - determine which type of solution is best for the problem at hand, there are some great design patterns out there which are great, see GoF
Impelmentation - the actual coding

Verification - includes testing individual modules of the product; then all as a whole

Maintenance - includes updating software, adding enhancements, basically you’re keeping things running and if a problem comes up you fix it to get it working up to clients needs
There’s more to this particular lifecycle model, but those are the basics. I completely forgot the design and verification phases, don’t know why. Maybe I was nervous.

* Joins in SQL (Structured Query Language). There are different types of joins, and they’re all used for different things. What you are left with after a join is basically another table that can further be queried. I think I couldn’t get it totally across that I had this comprehension. Joins are used to query against more than one table in a database. You can do this by making a SQL statement with sub statements within it to extract the information you need.

In the end, just remembering things is not always the best way of evaluating ones know how and experience. Now that I remember (get it?), I wasn’t wearing my lucky underwear. Have a good week.

~edit

I just received an ‘anonymous’ comment to this blog, hmm, and the IP is logged.  So how anonymous is that?  :-)  If I am humbling myself, please have the common decency to not believe you are as ‘anonymous’ as you think you are.  Thank you.

Some people ask me, “Hey Gibbi, WTF is a blog?” Let me start by giving you the definition from dictionary.com.

blog (blŏg)
n. A weblog.

intr.v. blogged, blog·ging, blogs
To write entries in, add material to, or maintain a weblog.

–

As you read a blog is a means of taking note of things that are going on, things that you are currently doing. It’s usually a publicly available digital journal. Most recently though, blogs are being used to get news out to the world. Blogs have become an important element of society. Not only are newspapers and news sources taking notice, they are becoming afraid. Blogs enable us to get news from other sources, which gives us more options. One thing that you’ll find out real quick about me is that I’m big on having options. I don’t know what it is, but I’m for always having more than one way to do things, or not to do things, if you get my drift. Ok, back to what I was talking about. Blogs also let those who are working on familiar projects collaborate with each other. Letting them give insight, answer questions, and what not. You’ll also see everyone and their mothers blogging away on myspace. I think that’s a cool thing. We’ll talk about some of the flaws that myspace has later, but one thing that is great is the fact that their users can quickly publish their works to millions of users, they do say they have millions of users right? Or was that billions?

Alright, this blog is going to be used for a lot of things. I’m going to be collaborating with my colleagues, friends, and strangers on all sorts of things. Yes, I’ll be writing about tech items, maybe some software engineering stuff, some web development stuff, some graphical design. I’ll also be talking about some life things. For instance I just got a haircut today, then I had an interview. After that I picked up a 12 inch Italian BMT from Subway. BTW, what do you get when you go to Subway? Until next time…

Short and sweet. Just started playing with the older build of wordpress. I will let you know how this turns out. Happy Valentine’s Day to everyone.