BenCrowder.net

I've been porting the BYUFHLC to PHP, and it's coming along pretty well in spite of a number of mini-setbacks. The only tricky part was figuring out how to parse the HTML from the screenscrape. At first I was going to use Troy Wolf's class_http, but it ...

Last week on Top of the Mountains I mentioned my FHLC/UVRFHC mashup (which I'm now calling BYUFHLC). It's written in Ruby on Rails and is 75% done (I just have to add support for the non-place searches, like surname and such). Here at the Center for Family ...

I'm probably switching back to Vim. Not for everything, mind you, but I've found that my fingers miss the speed of Vim's keystrokes. Perhaps it's possible to be as fast in TextMate, but it's been a while now and I still feel like I'm slugging through quicksand. ...

Stumbled across Mephisto today. It's a Rails-based blogging system, and dang does it look good. ~drool~ I am pleased with WordPress, mind you, and it's treated me well, but I'd really really really love to blog on a Rails blogging app so I could tweak things in ...

Last night I spent an hour or so working through Calculus and Pizza: A Cookbook for the Hungry Mind. While I don't care so much for all the pizza/food stuff (extra fluff that gets in the way of what I'm after), the math is good. I've relearned how ...

I'm going to learn to code PostScript. It's something I've been meaning to do for a while, and then today I found this page, which has links to Thinking in PostScript, the Red Book, the Blue Book, and the Green Book, so I certainly have enough reading material ...

I read Stevey's Math Every Day post, and darn it all, I need to start brushing up on my math! It's been ages since I studied it (five years, to be precise), and while a fair amount is still with me (like addition and subtraction ;)), it'd be ...

Some of our projects at work have been using ActiveXZip, a free zip compression library. The only problem is, it apparently doesn't work with ASP.NET 2.0 (we upgraded recently). Nor do I particularly care for the annoying splash screen that comes up whenever you initialize it. My co-worker ...

Seeing Jeff Han's multi-touch demonstration over at TED (and I'd seen a similar demonstration before, on Jeff's website) made me drool with goosebumpy excitement. (There's a bunch of other cool stuff on his site, too, like the LED touch display and the Media Mirror.) Innovation is ...

Lately, the need to finish these major projects at work before I switch jobs at the end of August has turned most of my coding time (well, all of it right now) into ASP.NET time. Blech. It's okay, I suppose, and it could be worse (COBOL, anyone?), but ...