PolarLava::Blog

Today marks the first anniversary of PolarBlog as it was one year ago today that I first publically released it.  Thing started off fast and there was a lot of activity during the first several months before it was put on hold so I could work on several other projects.  But in the past couple of weeks I've finally begun to work on it again and anticipate that there will be a (minor) release in the next few weeks.  After that will be the more significant "Homing Pigeon" release that will add support for posting via email.  The release after — "Bloodhound", will focus on the addition of trackbacks for entries.  And that's about as much as I've mapped out at this point.  So here's to its first year and continued development!

I try to get out and go for a brisk 20 minute walk at lunchtime most days if it's not raining and my workload allows it.  So one day last week I'm walking down Main Street here in Buffalo and started thinking about all of the cigarette butts that I seen in the sidewalk cracks.  Just the week before I heard a report about how Buffalo is one of the cleanest cities in the country, which I have to agree it is.  But then I'm looking at the literally hundreds (thousands?) of cigarette butts stuck in those cracks.  What the hell is it with smokers that they can't seem to act responsibly and not just chuck their butts on the ground anywhere they please?  Yeah, I know…you smoke and you don't do that.  I know it's not all of you, but it's clearly a good number of your breathren.

And it's not just the sidewalks.  I've seen many a smoke go flying out a car window, sometimes bouncing off my car.  Gee, thanks for the consideration asshole.  My favorite are those who drop them out the window while sitting at a stop light.  I've often been very tempted  to get out of my car and go over, pick it up, drop it back into their car and let them know that "Excuse me, you seemed to have dropped this."  But alas, I've never followed through.  Chicken after all I guess.

So if you're a smoker and participate in this behavior, please leave me a comment below.  What gives you the right to just drop your trash wherever you please?

My additional enhancements for PolarLava CycleLog V2.2.0 (I'iwi) are complete.  The following are the changes that were completed:

• Minor Name Change - Henceforth instead of just calling it "CycleLog", it will be known as "PolarLava CycleLog".  This is in anticipation that I may publically release this project in the future.  Although it's not currently packaged and documented for public consumption, if you're a PHP hacker, a cyclist and are interested, just ask.
• Search Improvements - A lot of changes were made to the search page.
  1. Searches no longer are required to be date bounded.
  2. Added minimum and maximum distance bounding.
  3. Added minimum and maximum average speed bounding.
  4. Added the ability to do ad hoc searches of the notes field.
  5. Added some basic search help on the page.
• Sleep Time/Quality - Added "hours of sleep" and "sleep quality" fields to the ride Personal Data section.
• Yearly Summary Page - Similar to the home pages "Year-To-Date" display, a page that displays this same information, on a year by year basis has been added.
• Security Upgrades - A full security analysis of all SQL queries was performed and all queries now use SafeSQL.
• Miscellaneous Bug Fixes - As always there were handful of small bugs to fix!.
• Calendar View - A monthly calendar view that shows basic ride info for the days that I've ridden in a month.  This includes a weekly summary on each Saturday and monthly summary below the calendar.  This component allows you to navigate to any month year which you might want to view..

• Search Improvements - The ability to search based on a bounded temperature range similar to the distance bounding.  This is a little more involved because of the temperature data is not readily available in the same place as the ride data.
• Bike Page - A page to display information about each bike along with a picture.
• Records Page - A new page to list some extremes: longest ride distance, longest/shortest ride by time, fastest average speed ride, maximum speed, extremes of weather, etc.
• Summary Update - Make some of the elements clickable to the rides they relate too.
• Bike Maintenance - A sub-component of the Bike Page to allow for maintenance records for each bike.

Last week on the local sports talk radio they were discussing whether poker is a sport or not.  And they arrived at the conclusion that it is indeed a sport because after all, it's shown on ESPN.  What?  Are you out of your mind?  Although ESPN is nearly all sports, this clearly illustrates a return to their roots as the "Entertainment and Sports Network".  Welcome to the entertainment folks…although personally I don't see it.

A long time ago I railed against golf and bowling not being sports.  Basically, for most people they are recreational activities.  But theycan be consider to be a sport at the appropriate competition level.  The litmus test of course is "if you can drink beer while you're doing it, it's not a sport".

So, now let's look at poker…you can drink while playing poker, so it's not a sport, right?  Alright, you can also play poker, not drink, take it very seriously and make some outrageous money at it!  No doubt about that, but sitting around a table making staring at a handful of cards and chucking chips is not a sport.  There's almost no physical exertion.  It might be an intense mental battle and prove challenging, but that makes it no more that a friendly(?) competition.  But it's not a physical activity that is required for it to be a sport.  With the serious money that can be made playing poker these days you might stand a better chance of arguing that it's a legitimate livelihood!

So I guess my litmus test now needs to be modified too: "If there's no physical activity and you can drink beer while you're doing it, it's not a sport."

As part of my ongoing upgrade, one of the features I wanted to add to my CycleLog was a monthly calendar.  I've written some calendar stuff previously, but I didn't want to do another "one off" or reinvent the wheel if I could find something that potentially would be reusable.  And I must say, I was certainly not disappointed when I found Active Calendar.  This is an absolutely wonderful and well written piece of calendaring software licensed under the LGPL.  So this is my plug for Giorgos Tsiledakis and his well thought out and implemented work.  Thus if you're a PHP developer looking to do something with calendars, I'd highly recommend you check out Active Calendar before you waste your time writing something inferior and less flexible to this work.