Stephen's Blog

Disconnected from the 'Information Superhighway'

There was a FedEx truck going through the neighborhood and it ripped the cable internet line right off the telephone pole by my house! Incidentally, the power got knocked out for about an hour. But the real bummer (especially for a home web server admin like myself) is that the internet line took about 8 hours to get back online again! So all my websites were sidelined and crying... Now everything's happy again and running like a dream!

Here's the article as it made it into the Telegraph-Forum, our local newspaper: http://litlurl.net/30d8.

Youtube Chromeless Player

Now this is pretty cool! You can have control over Youtubes posted on your website. You can get to it from http://litlurl.net/youtube_api.

Looks like it would be fun to integrate and work with. It shows more stats than the typical player does.

LitlURL back up and running

Had a little glitch with the web server over the past several days (who knows how long!). MySQL would suddenly vanish away. It was noticeable as any of my websites that use databases wouldn't deliver any content. I kept restarting it and it would terminate unexpectedly somewhere between 5 minutes or 5 hours later.
:wow:
Anyhow, I thought I trashed my entire database. That would mean having to 1) restore a very outdated MySQL dump and 2) discover what the original problem was.
Well, it turns out that my database files were corrupted and have been for quite some time. Good to know! (That's what those server logs are for :-) ) So I made a current dump of all the databases and wiped everything out. Then I just restored the databases and all is well again!
:happy:

Oh the joys of being a sysadmin!

Philippines, Part II

I didn't think that this second entry would've taken so long to materialize, but it's not like I've been doing nothing since then. I had to get caught up on laundry... :tongue: Little bit of levity there...
Anyways... Here's part 2 of my exciting adventures on the other side of the world.

The food we ate was much different than here in America. It's much healthier! It actually took awhile for my stomach to get re-adjusted back to food in America. If you like rice, you'll love the Philippines. At their KFC, you get a roll of rice rather than a biscuit. That caught all of us by surprise! The best food we ate was fresh pineapple, bananas (saguin), and mango. It was delicious.

The people were very kind and serving. It is a little strange to be treated with so much kindness! The ladies of the church did everything they could to cater to us. And we respect them highly for their service to the Lord.

It was also my treat to learn a few vocab words in Ilanggo, the native language in Iloilo. Every now and then, Pastor Molinos would start talking in their language, and I had absolutely no idea what he was saying. Apparently, it's much more difficult to speak in English for them. Americans certainly don't understand multilinguality (is that a word?). Anyways, all the other Americans left for some R&R at the hotel on Wednesday. They couldn't find me so they left without me! I came to discover that a little later though. I decided to eat the Filipino food for dinner. It featured bangus, the national - and cheapest - fish. They had me start eating like a Filipino without any instruments, just my phalanges! I didn't know the spine of the fish was so sharp and got poked. Then they started teaching me some words, but I had trouble remembering them. They started writing them down for me, and I have around 80-100 words to memorize.

It was also my treat to play the piano! That is certainly one of my passions. I never much cared for playing what the piano teacher prescribed. It was more exciting to learn the songs that I sing at church - in the hymn book. I've loved playing sacred music since the beginning - 7 years ago. Since the preachers sang so loud, I started tearing up the piano! I didn't have to worry about people hearing my mistakes, so I got quite adventurous. It was quite surprising, even to myself.

It's also a blessing to keep in contact with a the Filipinos. I'm emailing a few of them. I hope I get to see them again soon.

The return trip elapsed 31 hours! From my experience, the only fun parts of the trip are the takeoff and where you can see the land from about 5000-15000 feet. The overnight flights are completely boring! But that Boeing 747 trip across the ocean was a very pleasant and sleep-conducive flight. We went from Iloilo to Manilla to LA to Cincinnatti to Akron-Canton.

Since getting back, I've stayed very busy. I put together a video presentation of the conference, started getting the sermons ready for the web, and organizing the pictures. Then I found a nice web template and got a website off the ground for the conference. All of it's available at http://gbpc.homedns.org. We showed the video last Sunday night at church. The website's almost finished for this year.

I can't wait to go back!

Entertainment with HDs

Here's a creative way to get rid of old hard drives.

In the Philippines

Hello all.

Right now, I'm sitting in an internet cafe in Iloilo City, Philippines. It's quite hot and humid and I'm tired and sweaty. But this trip has been a lot of fun. My dad and I came here for the 3rd annual Baptist Pastor's Conference here in Iloilo. There have been a lot of firsts here on this trip.
This has been my first time on a commercial airplane! It was very exciting. 29 houts elapsed from the time we left the Canton-Akron airport to the time we arrived in Iloilo.
This has also been my first time out of the country. Well, I've been to Canada for less than one whole hour, but that doesn't count... It was a little strange to be the foreigner. I just feel like me. But I'm the one getting the strange looks now. Now that I've been here for nearly a week, I'm really getting to enjoy my stay here. I wish I could be here longer. Maybe that will be so next year, Lord willing.

The Pastor's Conference was a wonderful time. I can now say that I've heard 8 sermons in one day! I don't know anywhere else in the world that that can happen.
I'm also learning a few words in the native dialect, Ilonggo.

Well, my time's about up here, so I must be going. I'll write more later.

New Web Service

I've recently been looking into live streaming for our church services. I didn't understand where to get started. I saw tutorials for Linux and wondered if I could pull it off using Windows. Different tutorials said to use different software. So several months ago, I was quite confused and just gave up.

A few weeks ago, I stumbled on a really nice website that gives all the steps to setting up a shoutcast server in Windows. The streaming concept is pretty smart, and that's what I learned about. You use the Winamp plugin to encode the stream and it sends it out to a DNAS server. This is just a program running on a high-speed internet connection that receives the stream from the source and distributes it to clients.

So we now are capable of live streaming our church services on the web!

http://calvarybucyrus.org/live_streaming

Ohio Weather - Nuttier than an Acorn

What a weird place Ohio is. Wait 5 minutes if you don't like the weather, because it'll change! I know that's a dumb and over-used cliche...

Yesterday, it started getting warm in the afternoon. It was a little chilly in the morning, but rose to the mid-40's after church in the morning. It was windy, but it seems to have been windy for the past several months. There's a random thought for ya' -- when the wind stops... Anyways, it rose to 50 degrees and was quite pleasant for this time of year. At church in the evening, it was windy but sunny. Then it started to rain, and boy did it! The lights flickered a little and you could hear the rain beat on the roof of the church. They buzzed a little more near the end of the service and then the torrent came! It turns out it was hail hitting the roof with blistering speed. My dad couldn't hardly preach with that much noise, so he had to end his sermon rather impromptu, though at the regular time.

After church, I went home and discovered all the lights were off. We were out of power. Instinctively, I tried turning on several light switches, and guess what -- none of them worked! The church had power, the bank had power, BK had power, McD had power, the apartments next door had power, the stores across the street had power, but we didn't. That was kind of stinky.
So we had a candlelight breakfast for dinner after church. Cereal and milk was the specialty of the evening. The power was out from about 7:30 to 9:30pm. They got it on pretty quickly.

Well, after the torrential downpours of the previous evening, today we got a fresh snowfall. I'm beginning to get sick of this cycle. Uggghhh! It should get warm or we should get a huge snowfall that sticks. Well, now it's cold and all that water's going to freeze. Yay.

Hurry up spring!

AJAX!!!

Yay!!! Today I figured out how to do some AJAX. Yesterday I found a simple script that would perform an AJAX request, but I wanted something a little more in depth. I found just what I needed at

Generally, I avoid Javascript altogether. I really have no need of it and just plain don't like client-side scripting. But this AJAX stuff is pretty cool! If you have any good links or material, please post a comment.

Here's my first AJAX app. Sounds pretty nerdy! http://pksml.net/antipixel_ajax

AJAX links:
* http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/views ... ering+Ajax
* http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/j ... index.html

Code-Bin Update

Here's what I'm working on to improve the codebin:

Here's my post from a year ago:

3. Make a search feature. (difficult)
--Would be able to search by topic, type of code, poster...
Still working on this one... (Yes, I know it won't be THAT difficult)

5. Stop bots from rating the scripts. (easy - I think!)
-- Search engines go to every link they find, and thus rate one script 8 times, leaving an average of 4.5. They do that to this blog too. Arrrggghhh!
DONE. It was simple

Other updates:
1. A favicon.ico!!! Like it?
2. Implemented GeSHi, a syntax highlighter
3. Support for many more types of code
4. Cool web buttons on the left column

Make your own buttons --> http://pksml.net/antipixel_ajax