General Archives - Page 24 of 26 - {5} Setfive

A few months ago we integrated Google calendar into an application that we built for a client. Anyway, today I sat down to customize which calendars certain events were being created on. We’re using the Zend Framework’s GData package to interact with Google Calendar and surprisingly the documentation is pretty lacking.

Specifically, I was looking to create events on a calendar that was not the “primary” calendar for a user. After poking around and experimenting, I finally got things to work.

First, you can retrieve the list of available calendars with:

Next, when creating the events pass in the uri and the events will appear on the alternate calendar.

self::$service->insertEvent($event, $arr[1][“uri”]);

A week or so ago my Dad asked if we could have our designer put together a logo for him. Unfortunately, our guy was buried under a mound of work and generally couldn’t help us out. We haven’t always had the best luck with Craigslist so I was ready to try something new.

Over the last few months, I’ve been seeing a good amount of chatter surrounding “spec” design sites especially 99designs.com. After taking a look around the site I figured now was a good time to give it a shot. We were on a tight budget, tight time line, and my Dad didn’t have much direction for the logo.

I posted up a contest last Sunday here and we were looking at entries by Monday afternoon. Now things got more difficult. We were having a hard time coming up with “star ratings” and constructive feedback in general. My Dad’s staff was having a hard time not getting pigeon holed by the submitted designs and Setfive wasn’t doing a great job helping them along.

We did our best and we felt like the entries were moving in the right direction. Then the contest closed. In the last 8 hours of the contest the number of entries nearly doubled. With 70 entries we now had the problem with objectively picking a winning logo.

At this point, I wanted some more input on what people thought about the logos. I decided to create a set of Amazon Mechanical Turk tasks to get some feedback.

After about a day, I had 200 responses asking for user’s top three logos and any additional comments they had.

Some of the comments I got back were insightful and moving:

Don’t pick any of the logos on the second page. They all look terrible.
Due to nature of your business I would prefer a sober and serious looking logo.
I chose these three because they are visually appealing, and convey a sense of being able to ease pain.
I suffer from cronic pain. I wish you the best of luck in finding your logo. People that do your type of work are a life line for people like me. Hope I hope have helped.

I tallied up the results by weighting +3, +2, +1 for first, second, and third choices respectively. The results were interesting.

Every logo received at least one vote.
The top ten logos accounted for just about 41% of all the votes.
Only counting the top choice caused 3 logos to fall out of the top ten.

The top ten logos as voted by the Amazon Mechanical Turks were:

Entry ID	Votes	URL
88	76	http://99designs.com/contests/24619/entries/88
78	65	http://99designs.com/contests/24619/entries/78
75	60	http://99designs.com/contests/24619/entries/75
87	55	http://99designs.com/contests/24619/entries/87
91	51	http://99designs.com/contests/24619/entries/91
58	48	http://99designs.com/contests/24619/entries/58
47	42	http://99designs.com/contests/24619/entries/47
90	41	http://99designs.com/contests/24619/entries/90
43	36	http://99designs.com/contests/24619/entries/43

Personally, I like the top ten logos and my Dad’s staff seems to like many of the same logos that were voted up. It’s been an interesting experiment almost exclusively using the “crowd” to design and then select a logo. I’m not sure if we’ll use 99designs in the future but it has been a pleasant experience.

We still haven’t picked a winning logo but I’ll update once we do!

Update:

We finally picked a winner! We decided to go with the crowd and selected http://99designs.com/contests/24619/entries/88 as the winning logo.

For a recent project, I had to extract the text out of a PDF so that I could save it into a database table.

Normally, I would of used the popular pdftotext program but it wasn’t available in the particular environment I was working in. I contact support and they advised that the XPDF package has several X windows dependencies and that’s why they had not installed it. Fair enough.

I poked around a bit and found Apache’s PDFBox library. I downloaded the package and looked at the examples. Sure enough there was a program called “ExtractText” that did exactly what I wanted.

Using ExtractText is similar to pdftotext – just pass in the PDF file and the text comes back. Awesome.

Anyway, hats off to Ben Litchfield who wrote the ExtractText example. I rebuilt the ExtactText.java file as a standalone project and packaged it as a JAR.

I’ve attached the JAR and Eclipse project if anyone wants a copy of either.

The JAR

The Eclipse Project

Over the past few days we’ve been working with one of our clients to develop an enterprise search solution for one of their databases. Due to various historical reasons, the database is on MS SQL and has to stay that way. No worries right? Fail.

I decided to move forward with Solr because of its DataImportHandler feature and its ability to easily expose search results in various formats (JSON, XML, PHP serialized objects, etc).

For some reason I can’t seem to get MS SQL server to open on the port it is configured to. This proved particularly hairy to debug because I couldn’t tell if my JDBC DSN binding was failing, the JDBC driver was failing, or if the DB server was actually mucking it up.

The JDBC URL I’m using is:

url=”jdbc:sqlserver://localhost:1170;databaseName=dbName;User=test;Password=*****”

To try and narrow things down, I used the Eclipse Data Tools package to let me use a JDBC driver from within Eclipse to connect to the server. Using this, I could clearly see that the exception being thrown was that the MS SQL server was not accepting connections on port 1433.
As far as I can tell MS SQL is set up correctly.

I checked the MS SQL start up log and it was showing this:
Server is listening on [‘any’ 1170]

I tried using 1170 in Eclipse and Solr and bang everything fell into place.

What is weird is that the configuration is showing that the server should be running on 1433.
If anyone has any idea why this is happening I’d love to know for future reference.

I replicated this behavior on a production machine. In both instances I was using MS SQL Server 2008 Express. On the dev box I was running Windows XP SP2+ and the production box was running Windows Server 2003.

Looks like someone at gmail forgot to make sure the system won’t display negative time for future timestamped emails. I’m not sure where/how this email got a bad timestamp but gmail is displaying it as being sent in the future!
See it!

Category: General

Google Calendar API create on alternate calendar

99designs and Amazon. Design. Crowd sourced.

Update:

Extracting text from PDFs without pdftotext

MS SQL starts on wrong port

Gmail fail