shwango! blog

This is a fitting post for Thanksgiving. Some of you may know I’ve recently taken an active role in my spiritual life – with a particular emphasis on Christianity. In doing so, I found the following very meaningful and have sent it out to several friends who have been especially helpful along the way… Now I wish to share it with all my readers – all two of you!

There was a sampled speech of this prayer in a song I downloaded (Spylab, “Facade”) and had to look up its origins:

These are the words that were found on a piece of paper in the pocket of a Confederate soldier over a hundred years ago…

Most Richly Blessed

I asked God for strength, that I might achieve,
I was made weak, that I might learn humbly to obey.
I asked for health, that I might do greater things,
I was given infirmity, that I might do better things.
I asked for riches, that I might be happy,
I was given poverty, that I might be wise.
I asked for power, that I might have the praise of men,
I was given weakness, that I might feel the need of God.
I asked for all things, that I might enjoy life,
I was given life, that I might enjoy all things.
I got nothing I asked for — but everything I had hoped for.
Almost despite myself, my unspoken prayers were answered.
I am, among all men, most richly blessed.

-Anonymous Soldier, American Civil War

I found many sites referring to this prayer. One, in particular was kind of cool: “As Through a Glass, Darkly”

My favorite lines are:

I asked for all things, that I might enjoy life,
I was given life, that I might enjoy all things.

They have become something of a motto for me.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Ok, so what do you think of the new design?

These are some of my favorite images I have and wanted to use them, but I’m not sure if the fit with the “shwango” name. I have another domain that I might move my blog to – fits my intentions better than “shwango” – I’ll keep you posted!

I’m trying all CSS – no tables. It’s still a work in progress, but wanted to get something up to show I have been doing something!

The comments CSS isn’t done yet (or even started) and haven’t got a new archives or links page yet.

I’m still getting a grip on all the CSS stuff. What’s the consensus on positioning? Relative versus absolute, etc. I’m only testing in IE 6+ and Firebird 0.7+ anymore normally – and the site prints nice for now until I can do a print media CSS.

Oh, and I’m still valid XHTML 1.0 transitional and valid CSS! That just gives me the warm fuzzies! But, I have to watch my posts… I need to find some MT plugins to fix problem URLs and other tags – like from Slashdot and Amazon.

Tomorrow Depeche Mode’s 101 comes out on DVD.

I know some fans were hoping for the whole concert, etc. But I’m pleased just to have it on DVD in 5.1.

I can’t remember how I got there, but somehow I stumbled onto Jason Salavon’s works page. He’s got some very interesting works displayed.

My favorites:

“The Late Night Triad”
“Every Playboy Centerfold, The Decades”
“Golem”

Although I’m not as happy with emusic since the stupid change in the subscription policy, I have found some great music.

Hefner’s Dead Media is quite a good album.

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Check out samples at emusic if you like. Also, you can check out Hefnet, or their new band, The French.

Wow, even I didn’t know some of them! Check out the 80’s Lyrics Quiz: People are What?

Maybe micropayments can be successful. BitPass seems to have at least a decent collection of merchants.

I posted about Peppercoin a while ago, but they haven’t seem to have gotten too far – still in beta and only a handfull of merchants.

We shall see… Here’s the thread at slashdot.

Hey Aaron, BitPass’s motto is “Your Two Cents”!

On a tip from meish.org, I had to check out crazy shwango! Quite ate up! Do it yourself!

Screen shot for posterity…

As I stated in my previous post, I found out that Mozilla does support some of the cool IE XML features. The “official” docs are at the XML Extras site at mozilla.org. If I get some time tonight, I might test some of the API. It’d be really great to see it work. As much as I like to bash Microsoft, the XML support in IE is really incredible and makes it nice to develop for. If I can do a few mods to make it work in Firebird, that’d be sweet!

Sometimes you do what you have to do. No posts for a little while because a project came up that was due yesterday so I had to hunker down and get it done. I’m getting too old for the all night coding sessions, but did stay up until 3am a few nights. (Sorry Jen, but you know I gotta pay the mortgage somehow!)

On the plus side, I was able to use a bunch of cool technologies to design this particular site. Since I didn’t have direct access to a database and had to use ASP, I used an XML file as the database and XSL to format the site from the database. Since I’ve been doing mostly backend work in the last few years, I also got a real crash course in CSS and DHTML.

I must say that the site looks really nice in IE and Firebird.

Also, the admin site was some really cool code – I know HTML forms are not the best way to capture data, but the browser is really great in some cases. I can be a perfectionist when it comes to layout and I took a lot of time getting my text boxes to look cool. Since I could dictate IE5+ for the admin site, I used MSXML extensivly. It’s really incredible what you can do. I love being able to capture data in an XML object on the client and pull down an XSL fill from the server and then transform it and pop the HTML into a div! And posting XML to the server is so much nicer than HTTP POST variables, etc. – I love not having to refresh a page or use hidden frames, etc., etc…

Since a file upload was involved, I decided to even post that as part of the XML data sent to the server, instead of two posts, one for the XML and one for the file. I found an article at 15 Seconds that laid out the basics of using ADO and the MSXML binary data types to create a base64 nodes from an ADO stream from the filesystem. Of course since ADO is accessing the local file system, the admin page has to be put into the “Trusted Site” in IE.

Also, besides learning a lot more MSXML, CSS, XSL, DHTML and XHTML. I found out the Mozilla (and I’m assuming Firebird, too) has something called “XMLHttpRequest()” which acts similar to MSXML, supposedly using the same API function calls. I found a few links, that I’d like to explore since I really like Firebird would love to support it more. (XUL Planet, Jibbering, and isolani’s Atom blog)

Once the site is made live, maybe I’ll put up links and post screen shots of the admin part. Anyway, now to step back, breath and catch up on life…