cniper.breckenedge.com

One problem that I’ve tried to solve in a variety of ways over the years is finding reasonably priced used motorcycles for sale. Here in the DFW metroplex, we are blessed and cursed with a hyperactive local Craigslist for motorcycles. There are plenty of steals out there, but finding them involves sifting through thousands of spam listings and duplicates. Listings are also completely out of context: is a $10K 2003 H-D Street Bob a good deal or not? How much did other people ask for the same model?

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Solving a Structured FrameMaker 8 CALS Table Straddle Bug

At a contract gig, we’re using Structured FrameMaker 8 to publish a XDocBook-based manual. Normally, Structured FrameMaker does an excellent job of converting CALS, but I think we’ve encountered a bug. It seems to choke on straddled table <entry> tags when the corresponding <colspec> tag is missing the “colnum” attribute. This bug caused some text to end up in the wrong table cell.

We’re already using XSLT to make minor modifications to fix table titles. This XSLT template seemed to help fix the colspec. It just sets the colspec’s colnum attribute to “1″.

<xsl:template match="colspec[not(@colnum)]">
<xsl:element name="colspec">
<xsl:attribute name="colnum">1</xsl:attribute>
<xsl:apply-templates select="@*|node()" />
</xsl:element>
</xsl:template>

It appears that the only downside is that it’s now dropping straddling on rows that span the entire table width.

Google links to SQLite download not working

OK, ran across a weird problem today, took a minute to realize the solution. Since it’s provided by RubyGems, I don’t often download sqlite, but needed to get a binary today.

  1. Go to Google and search “sqlite download” and click the first link (it should be http://www.sqlite.org/download.html/).
  2. Click any of the download links and… nothing happens. Click any link on the page and… nothing happens.

Somehow, Google’s indexed a trailing slash “/” on the end of the Sqlite links. Take it off and it works. Bing’s search results don’t include the slash. Like I said, weird.

Access Database Join on Memo Column

Yes, I occasionally have to use Microsoft Access. Sometimes, this pain is self-inflicted. Ran into an error today that I had not seen before:

SELECT SomeField FROM ATable LEFT JOIN AnotherTable ON ATable.SomeField = AnotherTable.SomeField;

Cannot join on Memo, OLE, or Hyperlink Object (...)

The error message was spot-on, one of those join fields did happen to be a Memo-type field. It was only a minor annoyance. I attempted to convert the memo field to a regular ‘ole text field using the LEFT function.

SELECT SomeField FROM ATable LEFT JOIN AnotherTable ON ATable.SomeField = LEFT(AnotherTable.SomeField, 255);

And that worked.

Unsolicited Feedback

A friend went to my website today and had a few excellent comments. Although I often ask friends for feedback on my work, but I find that, like subatomic particles, their opinions change when prodded. But today, my friend’s comments were unsolicited. It’s my favorite kind of feedback, but very difficult to encourage and, sometimes for me, difficult to recognize.

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Minoff4Constable.com Is Live!

A Candidate Rises

About a month ago, we were approached by Barry Minoff, a referral in need of a website. He knew of the work we did for A & R Motorsports, liked the style, and needed a website for his election (he’s running for Constable in Denton County, Texas). It’s Barry’s first-ever run for political office, and we were proud to have the opportunity to help him in the process.

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Benchmark Building and Construction Deployed!

We just launched Benchmark Building and Construction’s first website. Check it out here: http://www.bbctexas.com.

At Benchmark Building & Construction, our primary focus is quality custom buildings and light-to-medium industrial construction. Whether you are building a new workshop, a home, a commercial facelift, new restaurant, or even a small barn, we have the experience and the resources to get the job done right the first time.

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