Arduino LoL Shield Font Demo
Wednesday, December 10th 2014
Finally got my LoL shield finished.
0
Categories: Arduino
Finally got my LoL shield finished.
Arduino LoL Shield Progress
Thursday, April 24th 2014
I ordered a LoL Shield from Adafruit for my Arduino a while back. Just now getting around to playing with it. LoL stands for "Lots of LEDs." This shield just attached to the top of an Arduino. With the use of a special library I can program it to display all kinds of patterns or just text. I figured this would be a great project to learn how to solder better. The grid size is 9x14. That's over a 100 LEDs! I think after making 200+ solder joints I should be a pro right? We'll see. Above is my progress so far. It's been tricky to keep them all straight. It doesn't have to be perfect. It gets a little frustrating. I'm enjoying it. That's all that matters. If you're interesting in learning more about this project kit checkout http://jimmieprodgers.com/kits/lolshield/
0
Categories: Arduino
Tags: blue, electronics
Why I Love The ISO Date Format
Wednesday, November 13th 2013
After working with different types of data for many years you gain appreciation for a few things. One of the odd things I've gain favor of is the ISO Date Format (YYYYMMDD). This simple concatenation of a four digit year (YYYY), 2 digit month (MM) and 2 digit day (DD) makes it very easy to query and work with. Not to mention this format is internationally recognized and compatible with gregorian and julian calendars. With or without built in programing/scripting language functions I can break this date format down into easy to use parts. Let me show you a few PHP snippets I've used in the past.
Example: Parsing ISO Date Format Using date() and strtotime() Functions
$str_date = 20131231;
//strtotime() will convert it to Unix Time, date() returns part requested
$year = date("Y",strtotime($str_date)); //2013 - "Y"
$month = date("m"),strtotime($str_date)); //12 - "m"
$day = date("d"),strtotime($str_date)); //31 - "d"
echo $year.$month.$day; //20131231
Example: Parsing ISO Date Format Using substr() Function
$str_date = 20131231;
//even without the use of date() and strtotime() functions, I can parse this date format into year, month, day using the substr() function
$year = substr($str_date,0,4); //2013
$month = substr($str_date,4,2); //12
$day = substr($str_date,6,2); //31
echo $year.$month.$day; //20131231
Where I think this date format really shines is in SQL queries. Because of the nature of the date format being an integer it makes it easy to find all the dates between a range of dates. For example say if I wanted all records where the date is between January 1st 2013 and October 21st 2013. My query would look something like the example below.
SELECT * FROM records WHERE mydate BETWEEN 20130101 AND 20131021;
What if I needed a quick and dirty way of querying for all records during one month (April 2013) or even a full year (2013). My queries could look something like the examples below.
SELECT * FROM records WHERE mydate LIKE '201304%'; #Full Year-Month
SELECT * FROM records WHERE mydate LIKE '2013%'; #Full Year
One last thing about this date format. How can we convert to it? Well Below are some examples in different languages. I hope this may have inspired you to take a look at this date format. I know it makes my life easier as a developer at times. In a future article I'll talk about the benefits of using Unix timestamps as well.
#php (UNIX TIMESTAMP to ISO): date("Ymd"),strtotime("yourdatehere"));
#mysql (MYSQL Datetime to ISO): date_format(date(NOW(),'%Y%m%d'))
#javascript (JS Date to ISO): new Date().toISOString().slice(0,10).replace(/-/g,"")
#oracle (ISO to Oracle Date): to_date('20170101','yyyymmdd')
#mssql (ISO to MSSQL Date): CAST(CAST('20170101' AS varchar) AS datetime)
Sources: w3.org
0
Categories: Snippets
Tags: development, mysql, php
Starting Over
Thursday, November 7th 2013
I've decided enough is enough. I'm tired of WordPress. I've decided to develop my own blog system. I've named my project SmallBlog. Right now it's basic. But you're looking at it and it works! It has a lot of the features I enjoyed about WordPress without all the issues. I haven't decided if I'm going to release my code open source or not. One of the things I don't like about WordPress is the fact everyone knows it's vulnerabilities. Because it is so popular it becomes a target of exploit. More to come!
0
Categories: News
Tags: development, News