San Diego Convergence Conference

San Diego was great.  Great weather, nice people, and Cecilia.

I had a lot of fun.  I also got to explore the world of Microsoft Dynamics and what they think is important and where the technology is going.  I must say that the futue of Microsoft for the Business focuses on interoperability, integration, ease of use, and Business Intelligence (BI).  Trending is an important part of business, but it is also important for businesses to know where to focus their training, people, support, and sales.  Business Intelligence is what will take business farther faster and helps them focus on the right direction.

Add comment March 16th, 2007 by carlton

Technical Upgrade of the Site

Hello all,

I have recently upgraded this site to the latest version of Wordpress along with upgrading my plugins. While Laura and I are off to Cancun, Mexico tomorrow, I hope everything on the site is working properly. I think it is, but you can just never be 100% sure!

I think there are some issues with some of the plugins and features in this version of Wordpress, but they mostly relate to some of my plugins not being built for 2.1 and some the fact that 2.1 is new, and uses a modified admin console.

Add comment February 7th, 2007 by carlton

Audioscrobbler.com - No More TopAlbums.xml

Audioscrobbler.com took away the topalbums.xml listing, so I setup a perl script to download the data I need (weeklytopalbums.xml and others), and added a cron job to run the update every 12 hours. I still use the recent tracks directly off of audioscrobbler (otherwise they wouldn’t be recent).

To view the perl script click here. If you use it you will need to create the images and xml folders and modify some lines. Then you can pull the xml data directly from your own site/server.

If you have any ideas on how to make my little perl script better, go for it, I am by no means a perl expert, and don’t write in it that often.

Add comment November 3rd, 2006 by carlton

Website Upgrades

I don’t want to feature kill the site, but I do want it to be very complete, full, clear, design conscious, easy to use, somewhat aweing, powerful, sleek, cool, and definitely me. Ok, maybe I rambled a bit… I finally got some of my plugins working, so I felt that I should go over the ones I am using:

• Breadcrumb Navigation XT
• Preserve Code Formatting (hey you never know - maybe I’ll put up some crazy code)
• No Duplicate Comments (nobody likes dupes)
• My Link Order (I love it)
• WP-Print (Everyone should be able to print)
• Page Link Manager
• Subscribe2 (I hope this works… I haven’t tested it)
• WP-dTree (My category/archive browsre - it’s awesome)
• WPG2 (Gotta use Gallery2 - It’s the best)
• Sidebar Widgets (Automatic is great… easily changeable)
• My Music page is a custom template that uses PHP5’s xml capabilities.
• The Login Widget is a hack from some post I read.
• The Gallery2 Widget was created using the sidebar code from the MX4 theme.
• GVisit (It’s awesome - but I haven’t enabled it just yet)

Ok - That is the update on the code. Maybe someday I’ll create some custom pages, or maybe upload some pictures.

Add comment October 27th, 2006 by carlton

System Update

I apologize for any downtime tonight and earlier today for the websites hosted on my server.  In attempt to fix some issues and speed up everything I have updated the entire system.  It is now using mysql5 and php5.  Welcome to the world of XML.  Pretty soon I will have my music page modified with some chart data.  Unforutnately it requried an entire system upgrade to handle it.  Hopefully this helps everything move a little faster as well.

Add comment October 24th, 2006 by carlton