CNNSI Blogger says Philly has a chance lynch mob ensues

This is great.  Mike McAllister of CNNSI writes a blog giving his analysis of all the 0-2 teams that are in the first round right now...one of them being the Flyers that the Buffalo Sabres are totally man-handling right now.

Out of the four teams that are 0-2 and that are half way to golfing right now....the only team he didn't pick to be done and over with...that's right Philly.

Reading through the comments you can see the Buffalo Fans are furious with this prediction.  They are frustrated that the national media won't give Buffalo the credit they deserve.  They are a top calibar team but you wouldn't know that if you were anyone but a Sabres fan because the media just doesn't want to talk about the Sabres.

Nested Repeater Control Update

Back in January I posted about a Expanding Nested Repeater control I had developed.  Well I ran into some difficulties with it right after I launched it...actually the problem was always there I just didn't realize it.

For some reason that was unknown to me at the time the sub menu was skipping every other row of data that was getting returned from the database.  I spent hours looking at it and was literally beating my head trying to figure it out.

I left it alone for a while.  And I looked at it again last night.  Stepping through the code for the first time it hit me right in the face.  As I was going through the repSubMenu_ItemDataBound method I realized that I was not testing for e.Item.ItemType == 'AlternateItem' I was only testing for e.Item.ItemType == 'Item'.

I just needed to alter my if statement to check to see if Item OR AlternateItem.  I am glad I finally fixed it but holy crap that frustrated the hell out of me.

It's funny though how fast I found the bug after I set it aside for a while.   That always seems to happens.

Car Explodes in front of my House

My wife called me at work today and told me that there was a car accident in front of our house and one car was engulfed in flames.

From my speculation the car that burst into flames was turning onto a side street when a mini-van plowed into the back of him at full speed.  This pushed him into our lawn and at the same time the gas tank exploded.

My wife said the guy flew out of the car and stop dropped and rolled on the ground.  He got up and walked away.  He was very lucky he got out when he did a few more seconds he would of died.

When I got home tonight the local telephone company had a truck on our lawn fixing the lines as I guess they had melted or had some heat damage...but I looked at the grass and it's all burned up.  Even the street sign on the corner was burned  it's black and you can't read it.

As I was looking at the grass and the damage a woman gets out of her car and walks over to me.  Turns out she is the wife of the guys that jumped out of the car...she was looking for the guys that helped her husband.  She told me and my wife that he was ok but badly burned on his neck, chest, legs and feet.  As I looked at her she looked familiar and it dawned on me later after I left to take Brandon to baseball practice that she was from our church.  My wife confirmed that when I got home.

Any way here are some pictures from the accident my wife took with her camera phone.

This was taken as the fire was being battled...it was much worse before this.




Fire is out but there is nothing left of the car.




You can see the street sign in this picture and it is pitch black.

Some interesting links from the week

I have been so busy at work this past week I havn't had a chance to even think about my blog.  But it hasn't stopped me from finding some cool and/or interesting links on the web.

I have been looking into resources for AJAX.  I went to Borders yesterday and was looking through "Professional AJAX" from WROX.  It looked good but I found better resource from Rushi Vishavadia, AJAX Resources for Beginners.

Getting Started with AJAX - Author Aaron Gustafson takes you through writing a basic AJAX application (An address book). Lots of code there.

Mastering AJAX - This is a pretty good tutorial which gives you the nitty gritty basics, talks about cross browser compatibility which is really important with XmlHTTPRequest object in IE (stupid MSFT :-p) What I like about this tutorial is that it explains info in a very easy to understand manner and it also says why you need it. (Part 1 (introduction) of the tutorial is here)

Using AJAX with PHP and mySQL - Being a PHP Developer myself, this tutorial is really well written and very complete. Step by step instructions on how to go about working with the XMLHttpRequest object too.

XAJAX - Xajax is an open source PHP Library for building ajax based applications. xajax is very easy to use and damn powerful, allowing you to use php where you wouldnt unneccesarily use JavaScript. They have a very good tutorial here called Learn Xajax in 10 Minutes.

Another good tutorial by John Wiseman on Creating a mySQL connection with PHP and Ajax.(If the code seems too small copy and paste it intoyour favorite editor, or hit Ctrl + '+' on Firefox to increase font size)

Ajax Loading Indicators & Icons - You can make up your own indicator icons, but the ones provided are really nice and fancy.

Lastly, Max Keisler has a very comprehensive list Ajax tutorials, resources - from beginner to advanced.

Scott Hanselman had a couple of interesting articles about debugging/troubleshooting.

• Debugging the ASP.NET worker process running at 100%
• Tracking down a Trojan

To go along with the interesting links category Travis sent me this link the other day to a LASIK @ Home Kit.  I posted it on my forum with some "observations."

Remember that How to be a Rockstar Programmer post?  Well apparently there is some difference of opinion that is going around.

Lastly, and certainly not least Apple announced that they will ship a program called Boot Camp in their next release, Leopard, but a beta was pushed out earlier this week.  This really has alot of people excited.  Apple listened to "Bloggers" and provided them a way to dual-boot Windows and OSX on a Intel Mac.

Paul Thurrot has many many posts detailing his thoughts and experiences with Boot Camp.  I do agree with him that they should of made a boot loader menu show up on default rather then having to push and hold a option key to bring up the menu.

Still though didn't someone already do this with a IBM Laptop?