Author: dale

I started as a technician, first setting up sound reinforcement and projection equipment at a convention facility, co-founded a DJ business and constructed our PA system from scrach, then got into electronics maintenance and repair at a community college. After obtaining a university degree in engineering, I designed integrated circuits for the first generation of 900 MHZ analog cellphones, the first generation of CA-code-phase tracking GPS receivers and digital pro-audio. I then progressed through a variety of leadership roles in product management, marketing, engineering product development and manufacturing, in fields such as industrial GPS-based positioning and navigation, pipeline integrity inspection and industrial process control.
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MyWind – Northwind on MySQL

The Northwind sample database provided with Microsoft Access is an excellent tutorial schema for managing small business customers, orders, inventory, purchasing, suppliers, shipping, and employees. My problem was that I wanted to experiment with it using MySQL and the Yii Framework.

I found a number of MySQL ports of Northwind on the internet, but none with all 20 tables in the current version, or that included foreign key constraints. The only solution was to make my own.

I’ve put the results on GitHub should anyone else be in similar need: http://github.com/dalers/mywind

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Fish Creek Park Videography

To be clear, these are not my video’s. 

Following up on my New Years Day 2014 Bicycling Ride post, my friend Ian reported he was able to find my winter biking video on YouTube directly by searching for “fish creek park calgary”, and then filtering for the most recent upload (at the time, it was at the bottom of the first page – with 14 views!).

Trying the search myself, I was amazed at the variety of fish creek videography being produced – and how many local videographers there are!

Here’s an “Ice Cave” exploration, reminiscent of Gerry Anderson’s Supermarionation.

 

Watch these snow boats fly east along a frozen Fish Creek towards the Ranch. Amazing that a propeller works in snow!

 

I don’t think I’ve ever encountered an RC plane flying in FCPP before.

 

This last one seems inspired by Wayne’s World and Home Improvement.

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New Year’s Day 2014 Bicycle Ride

I’ve gone for a bike ride on New Year’s Day for about 5 years now, and this year was no different – except this time I’ve got video to show, my first YouTube video!

Video in 720p format was captured by a Contour Roam2, a really nice HD-quality video Action Camera. Editing and rendering was done using Microsoft’s free Movie Maker 2012, a very satisfactory experience. The transitions and most of the titles were added automatically using a Smart Theme, and the Add music button conveniently linked to free content (legally free!). The edited project was rendered and uploaded to YouTube using the Movie Maker YouTube plugin. After uploading, YouTube suggested video stabilization – which I agreed to.

FWIW, Contour has an interesting back story. They unfortunately closed doors August 2013, and remind me a lot of IVL Technologies, a similar sized tech company I had the pleasure of working  for 1993 to 1997. BloombergBusinessWeek had an interesting post mortem article on Contour , with a few tips for all tech entrepreneurs.

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Column Types in Yii Migrations

I can never remember the abstract column types Yii supports, and never seem to get the right search string for google, but I’ll remember my own blog post.

Yii Database Abstract Column Types

Physical types are given in brackets using MySQL syntax.

  • pk: auto-incremental primary key type (“int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY”).
  • string: string type (“varchar(255)”).
  • text: a long string type (“text”).
  • integer: integer type (“int(11)”).
  • boolean: boolean type (“tinyint(1)”).
  • float: float number type (“float”).
  • decimal: decimal number type (“decimal”).
  • datetime: datetime type (“datetime”).
  • timestamp: timestamp type (“timestamp”).
  • time: time type (“time”).
  • date: date type (“date”).
  • binary: binary data type (“blob”).

If the abstract type contains two or more parts separated by spaces (e.g. “string NOT NULL”), then only the first part will be converted, and the rest of the parts will be appended to the conversion result. For example, ‘string NOT NULL’ is converted to ‘varchar(255) NOT NULL’.

I have shamelessly plagiarized this list from the Yii manual. Also see the Yii manual’s excellent article on migrations, and queirozf.com has a nice list of tips.