Month: September 2013

Recently I had to build a custom form for VSU’s implementation of R25 by CollegeNet.  The form was designed to allow individuals to schedule an event at VSU using our facilities and equipment.  The form is a multi-part form that branches off at the third page based on prior answers.

One of the hurdles in the form creation was the necessity of validating the form input on a page before proceeding to the next part of the form.  While this fairly routine process can be accomplished by using a self-referencing form and validating the contents of the $_POST superglobal, the number of form elements made it somewhat cumbersome.

Enter the PHP Form Validation Script.  While searching for some ways to make the validation more painless to code, I ran across a nifty PHP script at the HTML Form Guide website.  It is a object-oriented PHP script that make it much easier to do the validation on html form elements.  There are quite a few pre-defined validation descriptors, plus a method that allows for overriding the DoValidate function to create your own custom descriptor.

There is one thing that I would like the script to handle natively:

1. use of a “pretty” or “friendly” name in the validation error messages, currently it displays the element name

There is also an undocumented validation descriptor in the script.  The pre-defined selone is used for a select/option element.  According to the code the default error message is “Please select an option for %s” and it check to ensure that the value for the element is set and that the value is less than or equal to zero.  If either of those check fail then the error message is displayed.

Last week my friend Lindsay and I were making the rounds of the various thrift stores and used furniture stores in Valdosta.  It is quite interesting to see what people get rid of and to think of ways to use some of it.

At one of the thrift shops we found three VSU glasses.  One of them is a glass that was given out to the VSU student employees at the Student Awards banquet last year.  Another one was from the Faculty and Staff Campaign from 2002.  There were tons of promo glassware from all kinds of companies, restaurants and schools.  I wonder just how much of that kind of stuff is bought and given out only to end up in some landfill or thrift shop.

Quite some time ago I used to do a fairly regular Friday post of music videos.  It’s time to start that over, but this time I going to post one every Monday night.

Tonight’s video is She Talks to Angels by The Black Crowes.  The song was released in 1990 on the album Shake Your Money Maker.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1a76FeV2-Dw

Last week my friend Lindsay and I were making the rounds of the various thrift stores and used furniture stores in Valdosta.  It is quite interesting to see what people get rid of and to think of ways to use some of it.

At one of the thrift shops we found three VSU glasses.  One of them is a glass that was given out to the VSU student employees at the Student Awards banquet last year.  Another one was from the Faculty and Staff Campaign from 2002.  There were tons of promo glassware from all kinds of companies, restaurants and schools.  I wonder just how much of that kind of stuff is bought and given out only to end up in some landfill or thrift shop.

As many of my friends are aware I am a big fan of honey.  As the son of a second-generation beekeeper, I grew up eating honey in many varieties.  I learned early on that all-natural peanut butter mixed with honey was a great combination, and I have eaten it that way ever since.

I use honey in my tea, I cook with it, and often eat it plain.  In short, I really like honey.

With the major peanut butter companies getting on the bandwagon over the last few years, I am disappointed to see that almost all of them insist on mixing sugar, corn syrup or cane sugar with the peanut butter in addition to honey.  Today while in Wal-mart I noticed a new variety of peanut butter on the shelf and picked it up.  I was drawn to the product labeling which featured a stylized honeybee on the label.  The product was “The Bee’s Knees” by Peanut Butter & Co.  Upon reading the ingredients list, however, I was saddened to see that while the list was short compared to many others, it still included sugar.

I am continually amazed by all the products that use honey and yet insist on adding additional sweeteners to the ingredients.  Of the four different varieties of peanut butter for sale in Valdosta, I found that all of them included sugar, molasses, cane sugar, natural honey flavor (this is NOT real honey) or some combination thereof, in addition to honey itself:

• The Bee’s Knees – Peanuts, evaporated cane juice, honey, natural honey flavor, palm fruit oil, salt
• Skippy Peanut Butter Roasted Honey Nut (Creamy and Super Chunk) – Roasted Peanuts, Honey, Sugar, Molasses, Hydrogenated Vegetable Oils (Cottonseed, Soybean and Rapeseed) to Prevent Separation, Salt
• Peter Pan Honey Roast (Creamy and Chunky) – Peanut Butter [Roasted Peanuts, Sugar, Hydrogenated Vegetable Oils (Cottonseed And Rapeseed), Molasses, Salt, Partially Hydrogenated Cottonseed Oil], Sugar And Honey. Contains: Peanuts
• Smucker’s Natural Peanut Butter with Honey – Peanuts, Honey, Sugar, Salt.

Now I must admit that the Smucker’s choice is much closer to what I ate as a kid than the others, however it still has that extra sugar involved.  It seems to me that if Smucker’s has been selling natural peanut butter for so many years with the only ingredients being peanuts and salt, then it would have been a snap to just add the honey in and leave it at that.  Why add the extra sugar?

Come on Smucker’s!  Everyone else has joined the “natural” bandwagon that you have been on for years, so why not pave the way to a variety sweetened only with honey?

Lately I have been taken with watching foreign films.  Some of them are ones I have seen before, but most of them have been new ones to my collection.

Unfortunately many foreign films are not available in Region 1 (or NTSC) format.  If you are lucky enough to know how to rip a DVD and watch it on your computer then you are able to watch them, however most DVD players sold in the United States are region locked.  If you use a Mac then you can change the region encoding on the DVD player application, but only five times, which makes it damned inconvenient.  If watching them on your computer isn’t working for you then take a look here for some region-free DVD players.

Here are a few of the ones that I have screened over the last few weeks:

What are some of your favorite foreign films?

As some visitors to arfore.com will have noticed I feature a list of recent etree.org downloads on my Listening page.  The files from etree.org are live shows recorded by dedicated fans and concert goers.  Many, if not most, of these recordings are posted in one of two lossless file formats: SHN and FLAC.

Both of these file formats are used for compressing audio files.  The reason they are used is due to the fact that they are lossless formats.  Lossless compression allows for the expansion of the of the file into an exact duplicate of the original recorded audio stream.

iTunes supports a different lossless format: Apple Lossless.  Unfortunately, iTunes does not support playback of either FLAC or SHN files.  So what is an audiophile to do?  Using two different free programs you will be able to easily convert both FLAC and SHN files to a format that iTunes can use, thus giving you the ability to take those awesome concerts with you everywhere on your iPod or iPhone. Continue reading

As some visitors to arfore.com will have noticed I feature a list of recent etree.org downloads on my Listening page.  The files from etree.org are live shows recorded by dedicated fans and concert goers.  Many, if not most, of these recordings are posted in one of two lossless file formats: SHN and FLAC.

Both of these file formats are used for compressing audio files.  The reason they are used is due to the fact that they are lossless formats.  Lossless compression allows for the expansion of the of the file into an exact duplicate of the original recorded audio stream.

iTunes supports a different lossless format: Apple Lossless.  Unfortunately, iTunes does not support playback of either FLAC or SHN files.  So what is an audiophile to do?  Using two different free programs you will be able to easily convert both FLAC and SHN files to a format that iTunes can use, thus giving you the ability to take those awesome concerts with you everywhere on your iPod or iPhone. Continue reading

As some visitors to arfore.com will have noticed I feature a list of recent etree.org downloads on my Listening page.  The files from etree.org are live shows recorded by dedicated fans and concert goers.  Many, if not most, of these recordings are posted in one of two lossless file formats: SHN and FLAC.

Both of these file formats are used for compressing audio files.  The reason they are used is due to the fact that they are lossless formats.  Lossless compression allows for the expansion of the of the file into an exact duplicate of the original recorded audio stream.

iTunes supports a different lossless format: Apple Lossless.  Unfortunately, iTunes does not support playback of either FLAC or SHN files.  So what is an audiophile to do?  Using two different free programs you will be able to easily convert both FLAC and SHN files to a format that iTunes can use, thus giving you the ability to take those awesome concerts with you everywhere on your iPod or iPhone. Continue reading

As some visitors to arfore.com will have noticed I feature a list of recent etree.org downloads on my Listening page.  The files from etree.org are live shows recorded by dedicated fans and concert goers.  Many, if not most, of these recordings are posted in one of two lossless file formats: SHN and FLAC.

Both of these file formats are used for compressing audio files.  The reason they are used is due to the fact that they are lossless formats.  Lossless compression allows for the expansion of the of the file into an exact duplicate of the original recorded audio stream.

iTunes supports a different lossless format: Apple Lossless.  Unfortunately, iTunes does not support playback of either FLAC or SHN files.  So what is an audiophile to do?  Using two different free programs you will be able to easily convert both FLAC and SHN files to a format that iTunes can use, thus giving you the ability to take those awesome concerts with you everywhere on your iPod or iPhone. Continue reading