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By Marty, February 1, 2010 11:51 am

I’m stopping new production on this blog. I’ve created a new blog which should do pretty much what the old one did. Don’t bother commenting here.

My new blog is here. Bookmark it.

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By Marty, January 31, 2010 8:58 pm

I’ve been using Wordpress as the backend software to this blog for over three years. There’s a lot of content here. It’s been great – until now. These days, wordpress is acting crotchety. I can’t edit an existing article without going through some hoops. I’m finding that making comments is failing as well. My friend Jacek tried and gets a blank screen. I do too.

I’ve tried to get some technical support through the wordpress forums, but that’s a dead end. Wordpress is free and open-source, which means that the good people who make it don’t charge for it. It also means you get what you pay for and if it breaks, well, you get that, too. I used to be a programmer. It’s way more fun to write new programs and features than it is to debug and fix problems, so the multiple attempts I’ve made to get help have gone unanswered.

This isn’t just a simple matter of reinstalling. The content is mixed in with the software files and the articles are within a database.

I’m not sure which way I’ll take it. I may open a new blog and just call this my archived Korean blog. I may try to fix it which means something might break. I may just hobble along until a clean solution appears.

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By Marty, November 29, 2009 11:47 am

This past week or so I was busy getting seriously geeky.

First, there’s the background. There’s a push among the foreigners in my city of Ulsan to have some city services, particular emergency services, cater to the foreigners. Without going into too much detail, Korea imports thousands of teachers like me – people with university degrees and speak English. They do not require us to speak Korean. However, the society here is, despite the enormous effort to teach English, surprisingly unable to communicate in English.  A recent rape of a teacher here has prompted a lot of the foreigners to wonder how they’d deal with an emergency. Koreans can call 119 (Fire) or 112 (police) but unless you speak Korean it won’t do much good for a foreigner to call – all you’ll get is frustrated.

So, as part of my role of city reporter and techno-geek for my other website, UlsanOnline.Com, I had to get into some serious programming. I’ve dabbled in stuff since we started the site, particularly in the menus, and layout. But this time I had to bring out the big guns. None of my cohorts on this site are technical. In fact, few foreigners here are. None are technical to my level – no brag, just fact – I have a degree in computer science. So, I have to strut my stuff here and at least let you, Dear Readers, get a taste of my technical prowess.

First was to create a survey. We hope to use the survey as data that the foreigners are ill-served in Ulsan. The local police are aware and on board, provided we can prove there’s a need. The survey itself, can be found here.

(Unless you live or lived in Ulsan DON”T CLICK THE SUBMIT BUTTON!!!! )

It’s pretty. Sure. It’s just some forms that are easily created in HTML. No big deal. But I put in javascript code to validate the data – each field must be filled out, numbers in some, not in others. If you said other, then expect some text, etc., If you want to see the gyrations I went through, go to the survey and then on your browser click on “View” and click on “Page Source” and you’ll get the actual code I wrote to create that survey and validate the data.

But wait – there’s more. To get the 10 Ginsu knives, I had to save the data from all those submit button clicks. That means a database. We were out of databases on ulsanonline.com and would need to upgrade (that means pay $) to get more. But on this server, martypants.us, on which you are reading now, I have scads of database headroom available.  So I created a new database here and wrote the code to move data from the submit button click on the ulsan computer to this computer. Then I had to write code on this machine to stuff the answers from that survey into a database.   My Ginsu knife code cuts the survey into bite size pieces and puts them into tiny slots, each in their respective places.

But wait, there’s more! To get the handy tomato slicer, I had to write code to get the data back out. That’s another page that pulls the data out in tabular form so one can make charts, graphs, understand trends, etc., – essentially slice and dice the data like the handy tomato slicer.   That page actually lives on this server, as does the database.  To get a peek at the data, still in its early days of foreigners completing the survey, click this link.

In summary, I wrote HTML/CSS code to do layout and pretty work. I used Javascript code to validate it. I used PHP code to cross transfer the data and stuff the database. I used SQL code to create the database and accept the data into a database. Then I used PHP, SQL  and HTML again to pull the data back out for viewing.

And if anyone actually understands any of this, then you, too, get the 10 Ginsu knives.

And that, has been the extent of my week in Korea.

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone back home!

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By Marty, August 27, 2009 11:46 am

My internet rocks, and yours doesn’t.  Something I’ve known since 2004 when I first came here – Korea’s internet kicks ass and America’s doesn’t.  Bizjournals has a brief article on how behind the US is compared to us here in Korea.

At the bottom of the article it mentioned the universal service payments on your phones. When’s the last time you paid the advertised price for your cell phone or landline? Never – it’s so laden with fees that are supposed to help pay for all that wonderful infrastructure that you don’t get.  My home phone here cost – $5/month.

OK. I’m done sticking my tongue out at you people in the US.  I’m going back to downloading more movies and music.

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By Marty, June 5, 2009 9:39 pm

That’s what Harry Eaddy, my former boss at SGI, used to say. When presented with what would appear to be a stiff challenge, he’d remind me of that little witticism. That’s me. I’m a stepper.

My biggest obstacle to getting Teri’s video uploaded has been time. I get to spend only a few hours dorking around with various solutions. Its lots of time just waiting. Waiting for uploads,  downloads, computer number-crunching as it creates video frames.  Then there’s trying out various incantations of software, each a series of waiting period. Last, there’s some brain power that takes some time, too.

But, as Peggy pointed out in her last comment, I’d figure it out. I nearly always do. I’m a geek. A guru. A computer nerd. And figuring out how to solve the problems become an obsession until it’s done. And now it’s done.

Briefly, for just an instant, I  thought that for all the work I’d put into it  just to get a frickin’ video up…but then I remembered. This is my daughter’s graduation!  This is Teri!  

 And the result is this:

Congraulations, Teri!

Love,
Dad

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By Marty, March 23, 2009 2:05 am

While out on a long ride on Saturday with my partner-in-website, Fin, we stopped at a local mountain bike shop. The owner has agreed to advertise on our site (and pay us $.)  While we talked about his ads, placement, duration, etc., I had his service department give my bike the once over. The previous few weeks I’d been rather hard on it and the gears were badly misbehaving.  Last week’s  run along the river to avoid the streets really took a toll.

Anyway, his service boys did a complete breakdown of the front sprocket set and realigned them, pulled out and reset the gear cables, adjusted the brakes and just generally did a complete system check. About 30 minutes worth of work while we talked advertising.

Total price: $5.

Oh, and the website – ulsanonline.com – has gone into the black. Expensives have all been paid and everything we make now is pure profit. Not bad for a part time gig that, for me,  is just enjoyable to write, edit, program, etc.

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By Marty, March 3, 2009 3:32 am

MyeongHee, in her usual photogenic pose, with the East Sea behind her.

We went down to Gangeolgot this past weekend. Its a nice, breezy little spot on the south end of the city. Sunday was very sunny, but out on the coast it was just a bit too cold and windy for comfort. While we liked the view and crashing of the surf, we didn’t stay long and headed back to the warm car.

I'm too cool for this photo

I try to strike a pose, too, but I come off looking a bit too “cool.”  My dog isn’t all as adoring as this picture might lead you to believe. I have her ball in my pocket and she’s just a tad OCD about playing with it.

Along the coast there are plenty of boardwalk vendors hawking their wares. Several were trying to sell their impressive strings of kites. They really were beautiful, but their usefulness back in the city would be limited with all the wires strung everywhere.

Hundreds of meters of kites flutter in the sea breeze

I went down on Saturday while MyeongHee was working and did a little exploring along the river. The city has made vast improvements in the parks over the past year or so and it was worth the extra effort to view it. I climbed one of the hills along the river where they’d built a small picnic pagoda overlooking the valley. Beautiful scenery, really. I snapped several photos to capture the wide expanse and had trouble putting anything of that size on this blog. Luckily, I have another website I author on, and I have more freedom to experiment. I put together some simple javascript code to show the panoramas of the river. I also, for the benefit of the other foreigners here in Ulsan, put some additional things in it that didn’t necessarily make sense to write here. A link to it never hurts, though. Check out my panoramic vistas on UlsanOnline.com (make sure you have javascript enabled to see this)

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By Marty, February 24, 2009 1:55 am

There are so many people on facebook these days it just makes sense.  I just included some code to connect my online newspaper’s restaurant guide with facebook to make it easier for people to interact with our reviews.  Seems like a nice little tool. With all the websites running around these days, each one requiring usernames and passwords to interact with, that reducing things just a little makes sense.

Therefore, if you have a facebook account, you can connect to my blog here quite easily. No more trying to remember your username and password if you can at least remember your facebook set, which should be slightly higher in importance in your internet world than just this simple blog.

See you online

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By Marty, February 10, 2009 2:34 am

On the right you’ll now see a link to my granddaughters website, as written by their mom, my daughter Jessica. Ain’t they cute?

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By Marty, February 8, 2009 2:40 am

My big brother Johnny took an IQ test and scored well. I did, too.  What can you do?

Free-IQTest.net – IQ Test