Dusty Reagan

I just found my new favorite Firefox add-on (extension, plugin, whatever). Using the Google Calendar “Quick Add” Firefox Add-on, press “cntrl” + “;” and your Google Calendar “Quick Add” box will popup in the middle of your screen no matter what tab or page you’re on.

So, you heard about a great event on Twitter? Hit “cntrl” + “;” type in the event and you’re done. I love it!

If you use Google Calendar you need to know about the “Quick Add” feature. It’s by far the easiest way I’ve ever seen to enter an event into a calendar. Somehow it can magically parse dates, times, locations, and even repeating events out of a one line description. It understands things like “every Friday,” “next Tue.,” and “noon - 3″ Check it out in this short video demo to get the idea.

Unfortunately, as of this blog post, the Google Calendar “Quick Add” Firefox Add-on isn’t compatible with FirexFox 3 beta.

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I got to do a little ActionScript 3.0 work today. I can’t help but wonder what type of things I could create using Flash and ActionScript. Seems like it could be pretty fun. Do ActionScript programmers make good rates compared to .Net programmers?

Anyways. Here’s a few examples of some really basic ActionScript 3.0 stuff.

Here’s an example of how to create and use a global variable in ActionScript 3.0.

var intClicks:int = 0;

function showDoves():void {
	++intClicks;
	if(intClicks >= 5){
		_movieDoves.visible = true;
	}
}

And here is an example of how to add an “on click” mouse event listener function in ActionScript 3.0.

_btnFact1.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, onClickBtnFact1);

function onClickBtnFact1(evt:MouseEvent):void {
	_fact1.visible = true;
}

That’s all I got. I just wanted to document this so I can reference it later. I hope it’s helpful to you.

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Want to promote the tech community in Austin? This is your WordPress plugin! You can see an example of the plugin on my blog’s sidebar.

The Austin Tech Events Calendar plugin is a “branch” of the wpng-calendar, a WordPress plugin for integrating a Google calendar into your WordPress blog. I’ve customized it to best display events from the door64.com events calendar.

To install this plugin:

1. Download it from here
2. Upload the plugin to the “wp-content/plugins” directory in your WordPress installation
3. Activate the plugin in your WordPress admin panel
4. Go get yourself a Google GDATA API key here
5. In your Wordpress admin panel, goto “Options -> Austin Tech Events” then enter your Google GDATA API key. If you’re running WordPress 2.5, look under “Settings -> Austin Tech Events.”
6. Under “Presentation -> Widgets” add the widget to your side bar, alter the options if you like

That’s it!

For more information about this plugin checkout the documentation from the the wpng-calendar site.

Drop me some comments if you have questions or feedback!

PS. This plugin uses Javascript to interface the Google API. I’d love to rebuild this plugin using PHP so that the links inside of the event descriptions would help each organization’s page rank in Google search. If anyone wants to take a stab at converting this from Javascript to PHP, I’d love you forever!

Have an old version of WordPress that doesn’t support widgets? Not using WordPress at all? Check out this post: Austin Tech Events Widget for those without widgets or WordPress.

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We have a lot of awesome tech and entrepreneurship communities in Austin: door64, Geek Austin, Social Media Club, Bootstrap Austin, Refresh Austin, Jelly, and Startup Drinks, just to name a few. Recently Austin has been doing really well intermingling and cross pollinating our communities, and that has got me EXTREMELY excited. Just the other day Social Media Club had their meeting during Austin Jelly, during that cross mingling Jelly got a few new coworkers and Social Media Club got some new member interest. How cool is that?

One large barrier I’ve found organizing Austin Jelly is the proliferation of calendars online for me to post my events to. And each of those calendars has their own small audience, so of course I need to post to all of them to reach the largest audience. What we need is ONE shared calendar feed with an API so we can display and post events from our organizations website. But the key thing is that the backend is shared, so we’re promoting each others events across the web.

Matt has done a great job developing the community and the calendar at door64.com. One great thing about the door64 calendar (aside from the amount of events posted there and the audience size) is that it’s already integrated into Google Calendars, which is a huge step towards making it easy to spread.

I’d like to help make the door64 calendar THE tech event calendar for Austin. I believe the way to this is by developing the following:

1. Create WordPress Widget for Austin Tech Events
   (Are you an Austin Tech blogger? Why not promote Austin Tech events by using this widget? PS. It’s almost done, check it out on the bottom of my blog’s sidebar.)
2. Create automated batch push of Austin events to 3rd party calendars via API
   (AKA: Post an event to door64.com and it gets pushed to these other event calendars.)
   1. Upcoming
   2. Craigslist
   3. What else?
3. Create an event posting API
   (AKA: Post events to door64’s calendar from your organization’s website. Keep your brand, but cross promote your event.)

What do you think? I’d love to hear everyone’s thoughts.

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Recently one of my clients was having some issues with a CGI script they purchased. They’re running IIS on all of their servers, and oddly, this purchased script worked on one of their servers but not the other. On the server where the script wasn’t running correctly, IE displayed “Content-type: text/html” at the top of the CGI page. If I remember correctly FireFox displayed the entire markup of the page in text.

After quite a bit of research I found this excellent Perl for Win32 FAQ and learned that when you setup Perl for IIS you have two options, you can use “Perl for Win32″ or you can use “PerlIS.” In my client’s case, they were running Perl for Win32 on the server with the working script and PerlIS on the server with the broken script.

Perl for Win32 = perl.exe
PerlIS = perlis.dll

They are both the same version of Perl, and both come included when you download Perl for Windows. However, even though they are the same version of Perl, they are different “interpreters.”

Perl for Win32 and PerlIS are mostly alike, but PerlIS requires that your scripts include the HTTP response status line as well as all headers for the response. Using Perl for Win32 you only need to specify the headers.

PerlIS is about two times faster than Perl for Win32. However, most CGI script that you purchase, or download for free, do not specify the HTTP response status line. This is because most scripts are not written for PerlIS. (Ok, I can’t backup that claim, but that seems to be the case in my experience.)

If your Perl scripts are displaying the content-type at the top of the page, try configuring your IIS server to run Perl using perl.exe instead of perlis.dll.

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