Adam's Blog

Everyday, I'm a little more amazed and impressed by Facebook. The way it works, the way information is connected is just so useful and really smart. First of all, I am simply blown away at the "friend suggestions" that Facebook offers me. I am constantly seeing people I really do know or names I recognize. I understand it's probably not a very complex algorithm - see who my friends have recently friended who is not on my friend list and present them to me - but you know what? - it works. And that other site is miles behind, tech-wise. I've also noticed that the number of people in my age group on Facebook is seemingly tripling every day. I can't believe the people I'm coming across these days - people I haven't even thought of in over a decade are cropping up regularly. And the fact that the "mini-feed" is keeping me informed of what they do via pictures and blurbs is just genius. There are plenty of concerns about Facebook, from their Beacon debacle to the privacy issues to the data mining they are presumably doing, but the truth is that they are providing an amazing service in...

I come across really funny internet videos often, but this one is really too perfect.

Opera Browser I've had a long and painful war with which browser to use on my Windows machine at work. Firefox has let me down many times before, and the Mozilla Firefox developers have disappointed me. So I switched to Opera, and it's made me very happy. I have really learned to love Speed Dial, and user javascript is nice. I enjoy the built-in BitTorrent client, the fact that it runs all day without consuming a terabyte of virtual memory, and the fact that it's about as standards compliant as it gets. But, I've had my share of problems with it -- small problems that, for the most part, are tiny nitpicks that on most days wouldn't bug me too much. But today, they got me. First of all, sometime in the last few months, Gmail version 2 starting working in Opera. It's frustrating enough that Google rarely support Opera, but in this case, by shooting Gmail the ?nobrowsercheck query string, things were functioning. In the last few weeks, though, that ceased working after about 5 minutes. Things would get stuck on "Still loading..." and I'd have to revert to the "old version." Easy enough, albeit frustrating losing my "Quick...

All too often, pop culture deaths have a more profound effect than they should. However, I was surprised when in January, I was more affected by the death of Heath Ledger than I expected to be. I guess I felt as though Ledger was part of my "generation." Fast forward to today, and I'm really quite upset to see that Leroi Moore, saxophonist for the Dave Matthews Band, has passed away. It appears that there were complications from an ATV accident in June. He was 46. Leroi Moore, 1961-2008 This is a great loss for music in general, and while it might not be on par with the passing of Jerry Garcia or Kurt Cobain, I really think the Dave Matthews Band has an enormous following, and like The Grateful Dead, operate as a unit that will certainly be worse off without Moore's unique style. Not only was Moore the saxophonist for DMB, he also played a large role, we're told, in helping Dave arrange his many songs. In July of 1997, I was fortunate enough to get to see Phish in Virginia Beach for their US tour opener. We were so excited, not only because it was the tour...

I have so many gripes about my iPhone 3G that I could write a decent sized essay, and yet, it's still the greatest phone ever invented, and by a very comfortable long shot. Poor Nate and Jensey caught a glimpse of mine yesterday, and suddenly their plan to "get iPhones this Christmas" was rapidly directed to the rubbish bin as Nate informed me about an hour ago that they were headed to the AT&T store. How many people have purchased the iPhone after inspecting mine? Enough that Apple ought to be giving me some kickbacks. But alas, I kid, because, honestly, the thing sells itself. One glance at the silky smooth native apps, Google Maps, MobileMail.app, MobileSafari, multi-touch, the App Store... it's hard to resist. iPhone 3G This device is magical, and once you have one, it's hard to deny that no phone has ever been as slick, as useful, as integrated, and as beautiful. I had some issues with battery life with my 3G where it would only last about 8 hours, talk or not, with the 3G enabled. I did a reset and restore on it last week and since then, I've had fantastic battery life even with...

"Halfway Homemade chicken soup" starts with a mirepois. Then you add pre-made chicken broth and two leg quarters of a chicken and egg noodles. The grilled cheese is hand wrapped fresh mozzarella and peasant bread lightly brushed with grapeseed oil griddled until golden brown. A perfect rainy evening combo.

I am very excited, because today, my lovely wife bought me a new grill. It was precisely the one I wanted. I do a lot of cooking and really enjoy attempting grand recipes, and it's going to be a lot of fun using this beast. With 42,000 BTUs across three horizontal burners, porcelain-coated cast iron grates, and a 25 year warranty, this might be the last grill I buy for the next few decades.

I recognize that I've been a little wordy about WordPress lately - no pun intended - but I'm afraid that it's really interesting to me, and probably will be for the next few days. So, if you're growing weary of the WordPress related posts, I'm sorry. Today I took my first stab at writing a WordPress plugin. Turns out, it's really easy. I'm mean really easy. The plugin is pretty simple: it just searches through every post and turns the unlinked words sethadam1.com into a hyperlink. However, it seems like it might be a useful plugin for some, even just as a text-replacement plugin. So we'll see if I publish it. In the meantime, though, it took me about 15 minutes to write and then it was recognized by WordPress, which was very cool. I have a few ideas for more involved plugins too that I may write, one day. But in the meantime, this one is pretty cool.

You can email me at: You can find me on Twitter at @sethadam1. You can find me on Instagram as sethadam1.

Beware: this post is definitely not for the feint of heart. It includes a lot of code. You have been warned. I wrote an application some time ago for my company that looks up the longitude and latitude of an address for use in our geocoding initiative. It relied on yahoo_geo(), a function written by PHP creator Rasmus Lerdorf and the Yahoo Maps API. It was largely dependent on this function: function yahoo_geo($location) { $q = 'http://api.local.yahoo.com/MapsService/V1/geocode?appid=rlerdorf&location=' .rawurlencode($location); $tmp = '/tmp/yws_geo_'.md5($q); request_cache($q, $tmp, 43200); libxml_use_internal_errors(true); $xml = simplexml_load_file($tmp); $ret['precision'] = (string)$xml->Result['precision']; foreach($xml->Result->children() as $key=>$val) { if(strlen($val)) $ret[(string)$key] = (string)$val; } return $ret; } This function worked for over two years for us with no problems at all. Then suddenly, in the last month, it started getting spotty. I fixed things by commenting out the caching parts of the function and forcing each execution to run again. Then I got errors about the libxml_use_internal_errors() function, so I commented that out. But today, the function just flat out failed, every single time returning the same error: Warning: file_get_contents(http://XXXXXXXXXX/XXX) [function.file-get-contents]: failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! in /home/intranet/html/fetch.php on line X What the heck? This code is all over the web. I've...