Category Archives: Technology

Words about technological innovation. The study of practical arts and sciences; the application of scientific advances to benefit humanity.

Code Colorizing MySQL

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An example of code colorizing MySQL table creation.
This example shows creation of a simple contact list, or client list.

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CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `clients` (
 `id` mediumint(8) unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment,
 `email_address` varchar(72) character set ascii NOT NULL,
 `firstname` varchar(16) character set utf8 NOT NULL,
 `lastname` varchar(20) character set utf8 NOT NULL,
 `date_added` datetime NOT NULL,
 UNIQUE KEY `id` (`id`),
 UNIQUE KEY `email_address` (`email_address`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=1 ;

What’s up with IS?

I guess IN and IS are considered key words in MySQL and the Geshi Generic Syntax Highlighter colorizing library. Is that a bug in the parsing routine, or what?

Facebook Markup Language Essentials

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Book Review

FBML Essentials – Facebook Markup Language Fundamentals, written by Jesse Stay, published by O’Reilly Media, July 2008, 167 pages, ISBN:0-596-51918-6,  $29.99

FBML Essentials - Facebook Markup Language - book cover

FBML Essentials - Facebook Markup Language - book cover

Facebook is the world’s largest and fastest growing social networking website (with 132 Million unique vistors in June of 2008).

FMBL Essentials, the new book from O’Reilly Media, is all about learning the essential markup elements and fundamentals of Facebook application design.  FBML (like HTML)  provides the basic markup tags for building a Facebook application.

According to the author Jesse Stay, this book is essential for anyone who wants to be a part of Facebook’s future. “FBML is only the beginning of your adventure in Facebook Development. Reviewing and knowing what tags are available will help save you time as you develop on Facebook.”

Whaaoo there Jesse, let’s not go-a-galloping on that horse so quickly. Some people might need to sign-up for Facebook first.  Or maybe read Facebook, The Missing Manual,  and get familiar with the Facebook blog and FAQ.

Somewhere along your journey of joining Facebook — and finding your first 20 or 200 friends –  you might have started thinking about becoming a Facebook application developer.  Perhaps you stumbled across the Facebook application developer area, and said to yourself – hmmmm, that would be fun to try. You might be  a curious technology geek like me, or “social geek” like FBML Essentials author – Jessy Stay.

OK, cowboy! Are you ready to ride? Buy this book. Read it. Learn FBML fast.

You’ll discover:

  • A sample Facebook application – with explanations of how it works
  • Design rules for images, CSS, Javascript, and forms – related to FBML
  • An introduction to FBJS, Facebook’s version of JavaScript
  • Concise explanations of all the FBML tags – logic tags, user tags, profile tags, etc.
  • How to create forms with FBML
  • Dynamic FBML attributes, including MockAJAX
  • Tips on testing your FBML code

You can tell Jesse Stay is a very sharp guy when you read his blog.  He wrote his first FBML application in just one week, and sold it 2 months later. Jesse has consulted for several of the top 100 applications on Facebook. Now Jesse’s working on an iPhone Interactive entertainment application that will help cowboys change gears faster, or something like that.

I Love Detroit – Grand Prix Racing

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We Love Detroit

Corvette, Porsche, and Viper on Flickr

See Andrew Larimers Photostream on Flickr for more Detroit, Grand Prix photos. These shots were taken yesterday at the Detroit Belle Isle Grand Prix held at Detroit’s Belle Isle Park.

Here’s a map of the island (in the middle of the Detroit River) if you want to do some virtual exploring. I look out of my office window in Detroit and see the island every day, so it’s nice to see Belle Isle in the news this weekend … and people were excited to see rookie Justin Wilson win the race.

Jazz, Innovation, and Scripting

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Maybe you figured out that I love jazz. I enjoy many musical genres, and musical styles, but lately I’ve been really exploring jazz. In a recent article I described jazz as being full of  images, mirrors, and reflections.  Jazz is like a bridge — always going from someplace to another place. Jazz is always asking questions, bending notes, refactoring routines, revisiting and revising themes, and making analogies. Jazz energizes me with its innovative musical poetry of patterns, parallels and allegories.

Jazz Piano Art - found at Detroit River Days

Jazz Piano Art - found at Detroit River Days

Back in April, I started talking about creativity, innovation, improvisation … and how it relates to jazz and the blues… meditating on the mysteries of musical creativity  … compared to creativity , innovation, and risk taking in other domains (like art, architecture, design, entrepreneurship, computer programming, product design, web design, etc.) … pondering the amazing results that often happen when a skilled musician begins  to improvise with a good idea and the right attitude.

Surprising success and fantastic results can happen in your life (or your business) when you understand how it all works.  Innovation – It’s not a new idea, and I’m not the only one talking about this. I’m just improvising on a great theme.

Nick Sieger (no relation to the Detroit rocker Bob Seger) wrote a great article in July called Jazzers and Programmers. I found Nick’s article while researching some things about Ruby on Rails, and JRuby.  NIck describes the history and styles of jazz and compares it to the history and styles of programming. He talks about jazz fundamentals, and compares the rhythm section (piano, bass, and drums)  to programming libraries, frameworks, and patterns. He compares Bass-Drums-Piano to Model-View-Controller. It’s really great stuff — and even includes a musical score from one of the jazz standards, Blue Monk.

Nick spiced up the article with nifty quotes from famous jazz musicians like: “It’s taken me my whole life to know what not to play” – Dizzy Gillespie … “Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple” – Charles Mingus  …  I won’t steal anymore of Nick’s thunder. Go read the whole article.

Are you catching my drift? We’re not done with this jam session yet. I’m just taking a breather in between songs.