Toby's Log page 81

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Going to the farm in Pennsylvania where my grandma grew up for a family reunion this weekend. Last year, I went for the first time since I was a little kid. There’s generally lots of food, some games played, and a big fire at night. As per tradition, some of us will be camping. I am thinking of using my hammock tent since the pole on my regular one-person is still broken. Probably won’t be good cellular reception.

GiveCamp 2016 done

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GiveCamp 2016 is over. Another successful year. The new Cleveland Garlic Festival site is live. I didn’t do much on the site the final day besides for fix some URLs and move some files to help with the launch. I did break away to help another team fix some issues with image sliders on the homepage. Not just any team, but one doing some updates to the Cleveland GiveCamp website. I don’t believe those changes are live yet though. During this, I got to work a little while with my cousin’s friend Dara for the first time.

As usual this year, I recognized a number of people from previous years. My project manager was a project manager from a couple years ago. I talked to several of the people I’ve worked with in the past and have seen multiple years. There is definitely a networking aspect to the event. Some of the people I see at meetups and other events.

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GiveCamp 2016 day 2

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Day 2 of GiveCamp is complete. My team is in quite good shape. We shed one member early on. I too left to be re-purposed, but that didn’t last long. I briefly helped one team determine that, after my attempt to help them hack a plugin, it was time to jump ship to another. They didn’t need my further assistance, and the organizers couldn’t find another place for me, so I went back to my original team. Another of our members went home early. Even at a relaxed pace and searching for things to do, we were able to complete their nice-to-haves and improve some things from their quick-setup state. Tomorrow should be easy.

The event of the day more present on my mind at the moment is that my tent pole broke. When I first lay down in it, I saw the pole going at a weird angle. I got out and pulled the fly partly off to find the pole split and rather sharp. The tent was standing alright, but, not wanting the pole to poke through the fly, I attempted to fix it. I spent like an hour between working on and thinking of a field repair. In the end, nothing really got the broken pieces to stay together when the pole was arched. Now I lay in a slightly tilted, wonky tent, tired My tent is a Eureka Midori, and this is the second Eureka I’ve had the pole break on. Neither had I used very many times, maybe a handful each. Disappointing.

Givecamp 2016 day 1

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First day of GiveCamp 2016. Working on the Cleveland Garlic Festival website. Seems like it’s going to be another relatively easy one, as I think the last few have been. We are rebuilding the site to run on WordPress and be responsive, plus other general improvements as we go. I’m on a team of four plus one organization representative. Things are going smoothly.

Library of Babel

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Awesome, there is a digital version of the Library of Babel. Everything that you could ever write is in there, with some caveats. Caveats are that:

  • each book is less than or equal to 1,312,000 characters
  • it is in the English alphabet
  • all characters are lowercased
  • all non-alphabet characters removed except the space, period, and comma

Any searches would have to be translated to those specifications.

I found this through Jeremy Keith’s discussion of the anchor / link element.

The writings of Charles Dickens, Adactio, and myself can be found in there, many times over.

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Today, I ran over and killed some sort of mammal with my car. It darted out from the side of the road and went under the side of my car. I only got a glimpse out of the corner of my eye. I didn’t get a chance to do anything before it went under my tire. I think it was a possum. I only remember killing a mammal once before, a raccoon at night when I was in high school. A sad occurrence. A side affect of our popular mode of transportation.

Quick regex to strip html tags

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Recently, I needed to strip some HTML tags from some data. The goal was to make a field in a database that was a WYSIWYG text area into plain text content that could go inside a link. I did it using a simple regex of /<\/?[^>]+>/ to find the tags so I could replace them with an empty string. In PHP, this looked like:

$string = preg_replace('/<\/?[^>]+>/', '', $string);

This is perhaps a naïve implementation, but it served my purposes fine. Of course, I had totally forgotten about PHP’s built in strip_tags() function, but on comparing it, it also seems to not do exactly what I want. For instance, it seems to get rid of the content of <a> tags.