This week we traveled to Baltimore, MD for the eduWeb conference on websites within higher education.

Baltimore, as a city, has some neat things to see – Mount Vernon Point, the monument to Washington, and a nice harbor with various touristy things to do.

The keynote was given by an excellent speaker, Sean Carton from idfive.com. He offered some interesting ideas and is a great public speaker.

Baltimore is nice for a day or so, but after a couple days I was ready to head back home. While we were there we did see the aquarium with some very impressive sharks and fish. I still think Henry Doorly’s beats it though.

If you ever travel there, definitely bring some cash:
ESPN Zone… $6 for a beer…? Jeez.

We also saw a Baltimore Orioles game against the Seattle Mariners. Good game, but the weather was so hot. Probably somewhere near 95 degrees and about the same humidity.

Just released some PHP PEAR packages for a University Event Calendar/Publishing System.

pear.unl.edu has all the 0.2.0 beta releases.

This release is a solid beta, with plenty of polish on the frontend. The system is based on Allison Bloodworth’s research at UC Berkeley for their calendaring system, and adapted for any university using PHP and PEAR installable packages.

The system is structured into three separate packages:
* unl/UNL_UCBCN (Database structure, data objects etc)
* unl/UNL_UCBCN_Manager (Interface to submit/manage events)
* unl/UNL_UCBCN_Frontend (Public viewing frontend for published events)

This represents about two months of on-and-off work by myself and Alvin Woon to replace the existing FileMaker calendar system our university is using.

The NEW events system is at http://events.unl.edu/ and management frontend at http://events.unl.edu/manager/, and will go live with the new UNL Templates on August 14th.

Big thanks to Alvin Woon who did ALL of the CSS work on the frontend and management portions – it looks magnificent.

http://pear.unl.edu/ has all the downloads.

The package builds on some great PEAR packages like:
* MDB2
* MDB2_Schema
* Calendar
* DB_DataObject
* DB_DataObject_FormBuilder
* Savant 3

Here’s some screen shots… Alvin does awesome work w/ CSS:

My FON router showed up in the mail yesterday, so now I’m officially a Fonero.

If you aren’t familiar with the FON movement, it’s a group that aims to provide wireless Internet access for everyone – provided that they share their own Internet connection. So if you’re a FONero, you can connect through any other FON access point all around the globe and connect to the Internet. This isn’t a replacement for your current ISP, you still need to pay for the Internet connection your FON router is connected to – but it IS free wireless Internet when you’re out of town and can find a FON access point. There are some limitations depending on how the person decided to share their connection, but that’s the basics of it.

My father in law mentioned it to me, and it sounded like a neat idea. Considering I’m in Lincoln, NE there probably won’t be many other FONeros connecting through my AP.

FON customizes the firmware on the Linksys router to use their own DNS server and to restrict access by first redirecting users to a FON login page, similar to the method used by many hotels to restrict their free Internet access to only paying patrons.

Cool idea. We’ll see if I can get wireless wherever I’m at now.

My buddy Aaron put that little gem together.

Ok, connecting Services_Weather to NOAA to get data isn’t that easy right out of the box.

First you have to provide a database to store the metar locations and airports. I created a database named ‘metar’ and added a user with privileges for that database.

CREATE DATABASE metar;
GRANT ALL ON `metar` . * TO 'metar'@ 'localhost';

pear install Services_Weather
php /usr/local/php5/lib/php/data/Services_Weather/buildMetarDB.php -l -t mysql -d metar -u metar
php /usr/local/php5/lib/php/data/Services_Weather/buildMetarDB.php -a -t mysql -d metar -u metar

Those last two commands actually connect, create tables and insert all of the metar info into the database.

Then modify the metar examples file to connect to mysql://metar@localhost/metar and the example should work.
To change the location to your own you can simply try different locations – I think the metar searchLocation function just connects to the database and finds an entry with location like %location%.

We’ve been working on some new templates to distribute to our university for the past few weeks, and had some trouble getting Dreamweaver’s design view to display everything without blowing up.

Here’s a screenshot of the footer creeping up into the main content div:

Our design is entirely CSS based, but didn’t have anything too complex wrt the layout. We have wrapper divs for the header, main content, and footer and each have margin auto to center them. Unfortunately Dreamweaver wouldn’t recognize our clearing for each of the sections unless you explicitly tell each div position:relative.

So adding position:relative to all of the divs didn’t have any real effect on the display in IE or FF, but corrected Dreamweaver’s design view.
In addition, Dreamweaver 8 for Mac rendered things according to the border box model which led to some overflow problems with floated divs in the main content area. We solved that issue by adding overflow:hidden to the parent divs, which had no effect in IE or FF, but would fix DW8 on Mac.

Fixed Dreamweaver Design View:

Oh, and the belief that Dreamweaver’s design view rendering is based on Opera may be true – but they’ve modified it so much that css hacking your way around Opera usually won’t work.

Hope that helps.

* We distribute the templates as Dreamweaver templates because we have a disparate/federated model of web services and these templates need to work on ASP/IIS, PHP/IIS/Apache, as well as many content management systems like Lenya, Mambo/Joomla, Xaraya etc. Dreamweaver templates is a great choice because the source is plain (x)html, and their template syntax uses html comments – so you can use the templates in any development environment you need.