For the Houston Palm Users Group meeting today I wanted to put together a comparison of currently available PalmOS PDAs for people shopping for the holidays. The idea from the beginning was to present the information as accessibly as possible, and after toying with doing a slide-based presentation, but talking about them all, or some sort of giant table I settled on the table, mostly because members could check it on the website when they got home and use it as a reference. Of course, giant tables are generally as unfriendly as you can get online, so I started thinking about ways I could boil down the information into just a few values, objective and subjective, and how to present in an effective manner.

The architecture of the table ended up being simpler than I anticipated with just 7 columns: model name, street price, weight, internal memory, total pixels, screen dimensions, and the completely subjective MattRating. I chose the values based on what people seem to care about most at meetings, and with a number of assumptions. Internal memory is important, but less so now that nearly every unit supports external memory (memory stick or SD) transparently. Total pixels was a compromise to present the screen dimensions as a sortable value. “MattRating” is a subjective rating of how I think each unit rates as a gift, taking into account all its features, expandability, the unit in comparison with what else is available, and price. It’s the secret sauce that balances out the values included with everything else about a PDA that couldn’t be usefully quantified or there wasn’t space for.

Finally to make the table as useful as possible I was determined to make it sortable by the table headers. I search high and low and found nothing better than the unobtrusive DOM sortable table code from kryogenix.org. It functions exactly how I think great javascript (ECMAscript, whatever) should. My only problem has been it seems to sort things oddly when you first click on a header, but corrects itself if you click on that header again. I’m trying to track down what could be causing this, but haven’t had any luck so far. Still, even with that one flaw, it’s better by far than the other sortable table implementations I found.

The result of these labors can be seen on the HPUG website, Holiday PDA Comparison.

Now what would be cool is a way to do it with alternating row background colors

I just got an email from docs@mysql.com saying the following:

The user comment system in the MySQL manual is not the place to request features. You can do so using our bug-tracking system at http://bugs.mysql.com/. Thanks. (Actually, your comment is not a feature request, but it relates to another comment that is. The example you’re giving is nice, but this is a reference manual, so we have to restrict it to _a few_ useful examples.)

My original comment was:

You bring up some important issues, but dealing with ages really isn’t that hard. For example you could do something like this:

mysql> SELECT DATE_FORMAT(FROM_DAYS(TO_DAYS(NOW())-TO_DAYS(dob)), '%Y')+0 AS age FROM people;

Where ‘dob’ is obviously their date of birth. It’ll also work with pre and post-epoch dates. Please excuse the funky formatting as the
comment stem seems to insist on inserting line breaks into the code block. I ran into this problem while working on some genealogical things over at Mullenweg.com, a family site. I hope this helps!

Looking back, it’s funny that the comment is still around, I wrote it over two years ago. The date and time functions is the MySQL page I use most, so in some sense it was always nice to have my mark on there. For google and posterity I’ve preserved the comment here.

I’m glad they’re cleaning up the comments, as they are really bad in places and have atrocious formatting, especially when compared to say, the PHP manual. However there is a later comment (which is still up) that offers perhaps a better method. From Kirill Novitchenko:

The method posted by Mathew Mullenweg is good, but leap years goof it up on birthdays. (Try it. Use the current date and subtract exactly 5 years ago.)

Hopefully this will be the last ‘find age’ function. There is a simple premise to it:

1. Subtract the current year from the birth year to get the age.
2. If the current month and date is less than the birth month and date, subtract 1 from step 1.

Therefore, this should work with everyone who wasn’t born in the future.

SELECT DATE_FORMAT(NOW(), '%Y') - DATE_FORMAT(dob, '%Y') - (DATE_FORMAT(NOW(), '00-%m-%d') < DATE_FORMAT(dob, '00-%m-%d')) AS age

where dob is date of birth.

I’ve never run into any problems with my function but I see nothing wrong with the way this one works, so I may update my code to use it.

Why not just use unix timestamps and avoid all the funkiness? When I first started writing everything I actually did, but then one day I got a call from my lovely sister saying that it was showing everyone’s birthday as January 8th, 1901 (or something like that). I had reached the negative limit of a 32-bit integer, the upper limit being sometime in 2038. Moving all the date functions into the SQL is probably bad from a programming point of view but it works great for the application. Of course I have no clue how it deals with the 10 days Pope Gregory removed from the calendar in 1582. Hopefully that won’t come up.

I’m not sure what it is, but Paul Ford has done something amazing.

Leonard does things different:

Hey, it looks like I’m the ‘Feed of the Day’ over at Feedster. Just goes to show that you don’t need things like ‘regular updates’ or ‘finished templates’ or ‘permalinks’ and ‘date stamps.’

I would link to the post, if I could. (Poor man’s permalink: scroll down on his homepage to just above the pictures of the Treo 600 and the Sidekick.)

I write this from the comfort of a tall stool in the brand new Coffee Guy store at I-10 and Highway 6/Addicks. Some of you may know the Coffee Guy as that cute little place at Richmond and Sage that mostly caters to a drive-thru crowd. They’ve decided to expand their business and have moved out to this swank new shop they built and designed from the ground up. The old place was so small it wasn’t really conducive to lounging the way most coffee shops are, plus it didn’t have any internet access, a requisite feature these days. I can’t speak for the coffee, because I’m not a coffee guy myself, but I can safely say that they have the best hot chocolate I’ve had anywhere—think multiple layers of whipped cream, caramel syrup, and chocolate syrup. However I have heard from people who do know coffee that The Coffee Guy at their previous location was quite good and I don’t see why this one should be any different.

With the new design they obviously had high-tech coffee lovers in mind, with power outlets everywhere, wi-fi and wired internet access, a big plasma TV, and lots of seats and tables. I can’t vouch for the coffee, but what I can vouch for is their internet connection, which has speeds consistent with a high-end cable connection. Connect to SSID TheCoffeeGuy and you’re good to go. I’ll have to tell my friends in the Houston Wireless Users Group about this. Here’s a few pictures I snapped:

I was going to end this on a bright note and recommend you try the Coffee Guy out, but Elissa (who works here) just tricked me into eating what’s called an “espresso pancake” by disguising it as a cookie, so I’m going to say whatever you do, do not visit or patronize The Coffee Guy. Unless of course you like good drinks and free internet.

How could Elissa do such a thing? Look at how evil she is! (She’s even evil looking with real cookies.) Anyway if you do decide to visit, I can tell you when Elissa isn’t working so it’ll be safe. Here’s their address:

14725 Katy Freeway
Houston, Texas 77079

If you notice this sort of thing, the last post and one several days ago about Charles Platt now have visible attribution as part of the inset quote, which is marked up using the HTML <blockquote element. Each of these block quotes has a cite attribute, which is invisible to the user but which I sometimes add when I feel like having million dollar markup. Honestly I had slacked off doing lately because I wonder: if you add an attribute to an element, and no one sees or uses it, does it make a sound? It does now.

Thanks to an ingenious script from Dunstan which he describes in this post my cite attributes are now clear for the world to see. Can you hear me now?

The validationists in the audience will notice that am I not using the cite attribute in the strict sense because the value “Albert Einstein” it isn’t a URI. They would be right: it is technically in violation of the spec. However it is correct in spirit if not implementation. The URI RFC says “Not all resources are network ‘retrievable’; e.g., human beings” and “An identifier is an object that can act as a reference to something that has identity.” We’ve got the “resource” and “identifier” part down, what about “universal”? To be fully in line with specification what we need is a protocol to indicate individual people. I propose something like the following:

person://Albert Einstein

Thoughts? Now I just need to work up the javascript chops to hack around with the script, or if I’m lucky Dunstan will get an itch and beat me to it. The cite attribute checking should probably allow for protocols such as ftp:// and irc:// as well, not just http://.