web-ology.com

Disclosure: I work for the company behind joplin.com where we don’t pretend to be journalists but instead post news releases as we get them. We had all four of these stations as clients way back when.

This is just sad but worth saying something about. Here in Joplin, MO today a six year old boy drowned at a local water park (The Swimmin’ Hole) that my niece works at. She told me about this earlier today and the whole thing was just sad.

Here is the back story, Joplin Journalism at it’s finest… via KOAM (CBS Affiliate) but you would never know that by looking at their news article link. The “someone” mentioned in the article was my niece Amber who I’m told worked on the boy for over 20 minutes until the ambulance showed up.

The local ABC / NBC Affiliates had even less to report. The story was filed at 4:31 PM and although it mentions the boys name they state that the boys name was not release. Please learn how to update your story guys. This is just horrible (I did bold the mistake):

An afternoon summer outing turns fatal. Newton County emergency crews were called to the Swimming Hole water park near Joplin about one o’clock this afternoon. Six year Ethan Cory from Joplin was pulled from the water and taken to St. Johns Regional Medical center. Efforts to resuscitate the boy were unsuccessful. He was pronounced dead at the hospital… The name of the child has not yet been released. An autopsy is planned for tomorrow morning to determine the actual cause of death. The case remains under investigation.

The Joplin Globe listed the boy’s age as being 61 but they caught the mistake and fixed it. Evidentially people do read what’s on their site. KSN could learn a lesson from them…

I’m not a journalist nor do I pretend to be one, but here is what I know based on my conversation with Amber:

• My niece was scheduled to work at 11 AM today but her shift was moved back to 1 PM so that the owners could cut some expenses. (BTW, $17 was the price for two extra hours of having a certified life guard).
• When she came in at 12:45 PM there was a little boy lifeless on the ground for over 15 minutes.  His head was not tilted back and he still had water in his lungs which meant that no one properly performed CPR on him prior to her getting there.  She stated that one person tried but either didn’t do it right or didn’t know what he was doing because of the previously stated “state” that he was in.
• She immediately started performing CPR on the boy from the time she got there until the Ambulance arrived but it was too late yet she performed it for what I’m told was over 20 minutes.
• The owner of the property stated that they had seven certified lifeguards on staff whereas they only had two people working today that were “certified”. My niece is a certified lifeguard and to give CPR.
• She said one little boy told the employee at the bottom of the slide where they found him three times that a little boy was under the slide. Finally on the third complaint the employee checked the pool and found the boy and pulled him out.
• The boy that drowned was on a trip with the local Boys and Girls Club of Joplin.
• My niece walked away with the experience as being told that she was not responsible for the accident since she wasn’t clocked in and to get to work after it was over.
• The park remained open for the rest of the day.
• Neither the park nor the Joplin Boys and Girls Club had anything to say.
• My niece has had several paychecks that were not given to her due to the park owners “forgetting” to pay her or due to money shortages. (More then enough reason to quit.)
• She quit after being told to go to the top of the slide and watch the kids.  She couldn’t believe (nor could I for that matter) that the water park would remain over or try to lie to the police when the park gave their report despite multiple employees contradicting manager / operator’s”story”.

The water park should have been shut down or should have at least voluntarily shut down due to the nature of what occurred today. From what my niece told me I’m saddened to think that it takes something of this nature to open people’s eyes. If they were breaking the law by not having enough people, not paying people, and not having properly trained staff then they should be closed down and dealt with criminally.

I’m not sure what to think of our local Boys and Girls Club honestly. When you take your kids there you’re trusting that they will be safer then the alternative. I’m told that the director was there at the pool when the accident happened and was beside himself. I would like to think that this is all the park’s fault but some part of me may unfairly question how a six year old could be at a water park without someone being around.

My heart does go out to his family. I can’t imagine the pain, questions, sadness, and other emotions that they must be going through.

I’ve had too many projects as of late and getting my blog back up was high on my list but the furthest from my grasp so I decided to punt for now. I re-enabled my old WordPress blog and I gave it a new theme.

I had my new Django based blog complete in one night but there were so many improvements that I wanted to add that it grew in to quite a monster. This was no limitation of Django but it was instead my lack of time to finish off my blog to a level of detail that I wanted.

It is a sudo Tumblelog but has so many ties in to it from blogging, listening, buying, tracking, and photos to name a few. I have tons of meta data including places and weather hooks but I’ll have to re-approach it down the road. I wrote a script to help document the scope of how large the project was becoming. Here are the stats by file type:

py

• total lines : 18378
• total comments : 1910

html

• total lines : 2100
• total comments : 119

css

• total lines : 7595
• total comments : 498

I’m using several JavaScript libraries which stated that there was 84,422 lines of code which is way over for what I was doing. I just thought it was an interesting statistic none the less.

I’ve used the same bank for almost ten years.  For the most part, I would like to think that I’m the perfect kind of customer that a bank would like to see.  I put more money in my bank then I spend and I use the ATM machine almost 99% of the time.  I never spend more money than is in my account and I get  periodic interest checks from them consistently showing that my bank balance tends to grow more then it shrinks.

For the most part, I can go years with out every walking in to the bank or having to call them.  In fact, 99% of my needs are covered through the ATM machine.  Over a year ago I received a new ATM card in the mail because my records along with many million other people’s had been compromised.   As if that wasn’t bad enough, my local bank makes the news every few months because it get robbed quite a bit.

I have tried half a dozen times in the last year to get my new ATM card activated and it’s started to be a running joke with my friends.  My old card is so bad that I’ve taped it down the middle because it split in to two.  Every time that I’ve tried to activate it, I’ve been given excuse after excuse for why the machine is broken.  With two bank locations in my town, only one is equipped to activate debit cards too.  I had two very pregnant ladies act mad at me because I asked when I could get my card activated and if I should try back in a week.  Their answer was to call first because it’s been broken for over three months.  One in fact was so helpful that she suggested that I try driving 30 miles away to their next closest branch or 60+ miles away to Springfield in order to get my card activated.  For the record, I tried calling twice over the last two months and stopping by once to only be told that it still wasn’t fixed.

This past week, I needed to get money before going to visit my father, and the first ATM that I went to was powered off and had a paper sign on it saying out of order.  I drove across town to the other location only to find out that my card would not fit into the debit card slot.  It was as if something was jammed in there.  Needing money, I parked and went inside.

When I showed the my new card to the clerk and I explained that both their ATM machines were broke so I might was well try to activate my card since I was in he gave me the oh crap look.  He was very nice and the man tried to activate it and gave me my card back and said “You’d better run it outside real fast and try it before you get down the road.”  Rather quickly, I told him that I’d like to but the machine is broken and that’s why I had to come inside.

Tonight I tried to use my shiny new card but once again, the ATM machine refused to accept it.  I made an attempt to contact the bank’s headquarters’ through their website to see if they could help.  I tend to be a gluten for punishment so I’m sure I’ll try to go back and maybe this next time between the machine and their ATM hopefully both will be operational.  Otherwise, I need to find a new bank.  Preferably one that wants my business.

2006-03-18 17:04:17

Originally uploaded by Jeff Triplett.

This week we took on Justin Augustine’s Task Force to free “Faathim the Kind”. The whole thing took just under three hours to complete. Next week we’ll be working on Faathim the Kind’s Task Force.

2006-03-11 22:44:00

Originally uploaded by Jeff Triplett.

Here is your a-typical Hamidom (aka City of Heroes biggest bad guy) raid. A few hundred people on the screen and taking pop shots at him. This was a failed attempt on Saturday night which eventually lead to all of our deaths…

2006-03-05 14:48:23

Originally uploaded by Jeff Triplett.

This is from the Sara Moore Task Force that Dev-Null and I went on this past Saturday. This was the first time that I’ve been on it and I’m told our 3 hours and 45 minute completion time was stood pretty good against the five to six hour average.

Here are the other super heroes that joined us:

Valaton, Kiku’s Shadow, Ruroni Kenshin, Dev-Null, Radiate Reverb, Aurora Stardust, Mini Havoc, Paragod

I found myself playing with a new feature in HeroStats that integrated information in to the City Game Tracker web site. The program logs several pieces of information about your characters every time you login. Support for badge tracking is suppose to be included in a future release which is a very cool add-on to CoH/CoV. Here is my stats page which has information my characters.

Data mining has been a topic of interest for me as of late. Something as boring as taking html pages and pulling information from them seems fairly simple at first glance but is really a very challenging problem.

There have been various times that I’ve needed to pull a piece or two of information from a web page and I’ve found myself researching the best ways to so. Before I started using Python and BeautifulSoup this was no easy challenge. My mind does not work in regular expressions and suspect that there really are very few individuals who’s mind does. I always seem to wing it enough because I rarely need to write them. Just when I feel the stroke of genius and accomplishment from getting just the right expression created then the whole thing melts before my eyes when an obscure test pattern does not seem to work.

A few weeks ago, I found the need to pull some obscure data from a few auction categories and I started pulling information and processing it with Python. For my purposes, I needed to pull feedback and item pages for a particular user then extract their auction details so I could store information and use it for statistical research. With BeautifulSoup this was very straight forward but neither quick nor very generic in nature. I was happy with BeautifulSoup because it’s the best tool that I’ve used so far but I was still hoping to find something better or more straight forward.

Today at work I was testing a shopping cart on a recently completed project and I pulled up some old web testing code that I typically use to help automate some of the more tedious parts that I hate testing. I used a very basic pipe delimited text file format and I used the Pamie library to handle the testing. There were a few features that I wanted to add to my file testing scripts and I decided to rewrite my file spec to be less data file and more of a generic language for testing. Within a few minutes, I came across the pyparsing library but I ran out of daylight at work.

When I got home tonight I started browsing through the example folder and I came across a SQL parser example. After playing around with the demo, I thought why couldn’t pulling website urls from a page be as easy as “SELECT a FROM example.html”. With in an hour or so of hacking I created just that!

With some more hacking my little demo started to become a pretty powerful tool. Not only could I pull out individual tags and attributes of html data as easily as pulling from a database, but I started working on pulling from multiple html files and other features. A pattern that I soon started working on was to pull the href property out of an anchor tag. So I settled on the syntax “SELECT a.href FROM *.html WHERE a.href <> NULL”. This will pull every non empty website url from a directory of html files and bring back a list.

Some features that would be cool to add:

• Pull data from live websites and not just locally saved files / folders. I would also want to add some intelligent data caching to speed up pulling down websites.
• Add UNIQUE and/or GROUP BY features and other various useful SQL commands to gather more info. Doing basic COUNT(*) would be useful to add.
• Add a LIMIT key word to limit how many records get collected.

As long as this tool is useful and I have time, I’ll continue to refine it. I’ll debate cleaning up the code and posting it but I’m not sure of the general usefulness to anyone but myself.

I’m hardly a mac switch advocate but earlier this year, I purchased a mac mini to get my feet wet in the world of apple. I was very unimpressed until I purchaseda 250GB disk drive and firewire case. My performance (stats) increase was 2 fold and I was much happier with my mac.

I had some major problems getting Eclipse IDE 3.0x and PyDev to work. I noticed that Eclipse 3.1 was out so I had pulled a new version and reinstalled everything. Here are a few handy links and the appropriate web installer links that can be plugged right into Eclipse’s auto-update / installer sections. BTW, PyDev worked just fine after upgrading. Seems a recent update that I ran pulled a 3.1 version that is not compatable with the older 3.0x system.

• PyDev (Python) - http://pydev.sf.net/updates
• PHP Eclipse - http://pipestonegroup.com/eclipse/updates
• Perl EPIC Website - http://e-p-i-c.sf.net/updates
• Subclipse (Subversion Integration) - http://subclipse.tigris.org/update