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?
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.
- Go to Google and search “sqlite download” and click the first link (it should be http://www.sqlite.org/download.html/).
- 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.
Rails 4 Beta Windows Batch
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.
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.
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.
Configuration of Ruby On Rails ActionMailer for Microsoft Exchange SMTP
You may find that your Microsoft Exchange server is not configured for AUTH LOGIN over STMP, and only supports the Microsoft-specific AUTH NTLM. When trying to use the default Net/SMTP library with an AUTH NTLM server, you’ll receive the 5.7.4 unrecognized authentication type error. Thanks to the ruby-ntlm gem, you can still authenticate.
Upgrades to St. Rita Readers
After a lengthy upgrade and redesign period, the latest version of St. Rita Readers has been released. The site underwent an upgrade of the existing Rails 3.0.3 codebase to 3.0.5, with some minor tweaks to the Controllers and Models to improve efficiency. However, the interface is completely new and, I dare say, attractiver.