What's OFA Level 3 you say? It's Occupational First Aid (in Canada, BC), and somebody who has this ticket is the next best thing to a paramedic if you are physically injured at work or in an accident etc. I finally passed that course today and I am licensed now for the next 2 years. This is definitely a nice small milestone in my life.
2 weeks of non-stop classes, 8 hours a day, 2 hours of homework every night and then a midterm and a final test of half a day of practical and then a written test with 100 questions on it. It doesn't seem like much as I write it here but I've never been more physically and mentally exhausted for 2 whole weeks in my life.
It's most certainly not just sitting around in a desk copying stuff of a board or something, we got right in there rolling people around, applying all kinds of bandages and splints, tying people to spine boards and long minutes of continuous CPR. Anybody who has taken CPR before can understand exactly how tiring CPR can get when you don't have relief come in.. and this is pretty much everyday for 2 weeks.
In the test, the practical is a lot of work as you are given 3 scenarios with live patients plus a CPR scenario with a CPR doll called Annie. The 3 scenarios can really be anything and you have to be ready for it all. I think the hardest part really was just remembering every little thing that has to be done and in what order.
I had one scenario where a guy had been hit by a part of a tree that I was winching apart and it smoked him in the chest. Another was a crushed hand in a chain drive, and the walk-in (to the first aid room) was somebody who had stepped on a nail. As you can see these are all very different types of wounds, and the severity is all very different. Quite challenging.
Just to mention though, it's not like I plan on going out and working at a place to be the first aid attendent (even though I now could easily) I thought I'd take the course not only for my own knowledge (you never know what could happen) but perhaps one day I can get into volunteer Search and Rescue.
I'd have to say I learnt a LOT from this course and when I get a moment I'm going to put together a quick application I think with questions and post it here. Then people can test whether they know some of the basics of first aid and maybe a few hard questions. Hopefully people would be interested to see it and try it out.
If you are thinking of doing first aid for any reason I really recommend it. You really never know what is going to happen and it doesn't hurt just to have that extra info in your head when you are faced with some kind of emergency like a family member having a heart attack.
I stand half corrected on the CFMX6.1 issue, and believe me, nobody is happier about this than I am. We almost had to turn to the dark side there for a few days....
I believe a solution has been found to the problem of CFMX6.1 not understanding some XML UTF-8 feeds (as in not being able to read the encoding of the page to render out the right characters).
To give a little bit of background on this, I have been using the MXNA1.0/Fullasagoog aggregator code (which is in the DRK3) to put a blog aggregator up for the Japanese community on a site I manage/run. Up to this point I sort of let the problem of not being able to read in certain feeds go as for some reason others would get read in. It was odd, but by far not the first and most definitely not the last encoding issue of Japanese characters that we have dealt with. and.. other more important things came up.. (job etc..) and it got shoved to the back.
This month though, we are actually planning a major renewal for the site and I decided to take this chance to go over the CF code once again to get it working.
As I posted in my last post, there was nothing I could do to get the CF page (running on CFMX6.1 or CFMX7, although I did find a weird fix for CFMX7) to read in the "problem" UTF-8 feeds. Some people said there was no need to set anything to UTF-8 as CF supports that by default. Though I have read differently on MM's site. Oh well, that wasn't the problem anyways.
Thanks to Paul (in the comments), a solution has been found it seems (so far it works). Unlike some people who decided that I was wacked out, Paul was nice enough to point me to a blog entry that proved that it is CF that is a little out of wack but there was a solution to be found.
Check this blog entry over on Big Damn Hereos' site.
It turns out that CFMX6 (and 7 believe it or not) cannot support feeds as application/xml, which you will quickly note is not on CFHTTP's internal list of automatically stringified types.
Although it is noted in that blog entry that there could be a fix in the future for that.
So.. it wasn't an issue of not supporting UTF-8 it was an issue of not support application/xml in CFHTTP. This is an extremely interesting find I think. I wish that MM had made this a bit more open in a technote or something.
Well, the code that I have used up until now is now working perfectly (so far) which means we don't have to migrate to ASP.NET!!! Whew... not the direction I was looking forward to going, but when you gotta make something work, you gotta make something work.
I'm so glad that somebody else was willing to post how much trouble they went through to get the problem fixed which means happy times for people like me, stumped and dejected because no other "normal" way was working.
In conclusion, I have come to the understanding overall that I stand half corrected on this issue. Whereas CFMX does support utf-8 fully, it didn't support an important piece of the puzzle whereas so many others do. If only I had the tenacity to track down the problem as Roger Benningfield did.
I'm just glad there is a happy ending to this problem :) and to top it all off, no need to upgrade yet.
Sorry Coldfusion MX 6.1, but.... we've got to let you go. It's an unfortunate turn of events, but when you can't hold up to our expectations as an application server it's time to turn to different options.
Yes, we did try all kinds of things to get you to understand utf-8. From setting every page, component and function we could think of to use encoding utf-8 to even setting the cfprocessingdirective on EVERY SINGLE PAGE but you refused to understand the global language of utf-8. We also tried the far fetched idea of importing the data as binary and converting it over with the (newly added to 6.1) ToBase64 function to utf-8, but you spat out nothing but gibberish.
How sad we felt when we thought our savior was at hand after we tested Colfusion MX 7 with our new code and it worked! Praise the new version of Coldfusion! Even though setting everything under the sun to utf-8 didn't work, our far fetched idea of reading the data in as binary and converting it to utf-8 did! How surprised we were...
Unfortunately when we visited the Macromedia "Worldwide" store with our credit card in hand and eagerly tried to buy your newest sibling, Coldfusion MX 7, our "worldwide" Visa card was regected due to the application not understanding Japanese characters.
Feeling slightly dejected we decided to run off to the Japanese store, but to no avail as they are much too cool to offer the upgrade version of yourself and sent us off to a "partner" company who did not offer "real" online shopping as it said on their site. We would have been forced to make a bank deposit and only after that confirmation would we have received up to one week later our very much needed upgrade to make our application work as needed.
So alas, we gave up as our "experience" so far was quite disappointing and started to wonder if really it would be worth the cost of the upgrade. We have no clients that have asked for your services, which is most unfortunate but it is a fact, and to tell the truth most choose not to have their apps developed with you. Why? we can only guess...
So without further ado we set about to recreate your functionality with another application server... ASP.NET Thanks to our server being windows 2003, ASP.NET is in actuality, free. Just a bit of studying to be done on reading XML data and parsing it though. A small cost compared to over 600 dollars for upgrading we thought.
It's an unfortunate series of events that has lead to your demise here as we were actually so close to having you all sparkly in your newest duds. *sigh*
But have no fear as we still need you for one thing that upgrading to the newest version will have absolutely no effect, FLASH REMOTING. Yes, we still love your remoting ability, and that is what you shall do from now on. We use you profusely with our FCS apps, and our desktop flash CMS apps, which means you are still useful to us and that means you are needed.
Anyways, keep your chin up and turn that frown upside down because even though we've given up on you for normal application development, when it comes to ease of use of flash remoting you're tops in our books :)
Not sure why but MXNA 2.0 no longer accepts our feed. We're in the list of blogs they take in, but no matter if I ping it with the blog or manually from the ping page it doesn't read in.
Banned perhaps? dunno.. anybody else noticed the same problem. Solution?
You have got to try this out. It's an interesting way to get across the message.
Post in the comments if you think you know what kind of message they are trying to get across.
Link to most interesting banner
Via A LOT
In an MM meeting today some interesting items came up and one of them was that the next flashlite version (flashlite 2 or "deuce") is going to have support for Flash7/AS2! Finally!!
We do quite a bit of mobile work for japanese phones and have continuously been hampered by the lame abilities of flash 4 actionscript. Hopefully along with that will come audio and video so we can hook phones up to FCS too and perhaps stream out some vid/aud or even provide live apps/updates etc.
Really looking forward to it.
Another item was about FCS 2 (whenever that is going to come out) and that it is going to be much more integrated with Flex. I've yet to mess with Flex much but this might get me a bit more excited with it and actually dig in and see what is going on there. Good to hear though that they are still working on "edison" which is the next version of FCS, and one worry that I think a few FCS dev people out there have been thinking about, that is having FCS get swallowed up by Breeze. That's not going to happen it seems.
Another cool item, which I read in the whitepaper but it came up again, is that flash is now going to support PNG, GIF and progressive JPG's. I don't know how many times I've had to answer a support call from a client asking why the "slideshow app" we built for them won't load their jpg's. Finally... That along with the upload abilities rules. I can't even recall how many times that would have been nice to have in an app/site we've put out. Really looking forward to when enough people have the flash 8 plugin in so we can really take advantage of these new items.
Lots of interesting things happening in MM with the "new" flash platform. Good to see and be a part of so much activity going on.
I'm not sure how many of you out there have this problem but we, at times, find it much faster and easier to purchase a whole product (with the rights to change it up for our needs) and then translate it over to provide a solution for our clients or ourselves that is required for a project. Generally these products will have the ability to change over the language easy enough by placing "language" files in the application and have all the pages use these files to put in the strings for everything.
The latest we have at the moment is actually a mailing list application. I suppose it would be possible to go ahead and actually build our own, but with all the other development going on over here right now, we just are lacking in a competent developer with time to do it.
So it's a purchase and off to translation world.
We generally translate from English to Japanese (every once in a while the other way around, but there aren't many J apps that we want) and the problem isn't so much just converting words over. If it was, I'd be done in about 50% of the time it actually requires to do these change overs. The thing is that most of the translations actually have to have their orders changed around due to the major differences in grammer etc.
Take for example this:
strHello = "Hello"
strHowAreYou = "How are you"
strToday = "today"
In English we would do this:
greeting = strHello + " " + userName + ", " + strHowAreYou + " " + strToday + "?";
In Japanese the whole string for "greeting" would not only have to have it's order changed around, but all the spaces would have to be taken out.
strHello = "こんにちは、"
strHowAreYou = "お元気ですか"
strToday = "今日"
greeting = strHello + "さん。" + strToday + "は" + strHowAreYou + "?";
I'm starting to wonder if it is worth it to only doing the translation and not building from scratch... But in this case, we will now have an English and Japanese version so I guess it is.. *thinking out loud here*
ho hum..
Anyways, it's most definitely interesting and takes away some of the mundane feeling of "just translating", although at times can be time consuming when some sentences just don't go together so well. In those cases, sentences get deleted and others built into one long sentence.
This doesn't even touch on the "change-languages-on-the-fly-multilingual" apps that we put together as that is a completely different story... Definitely adds that "extra touch" to the development of a site or application.
OK, back to translating for me..
And the long silence breaks today on the blog of the STi studio.
We've been busy...
Aaaaaanyways, I hope there are others out there that can feel my pain with this issue. If not, I can say one thing to all of you out there: PAL to NTSC conversion is a pain and annoying and all that kind of stuff. I've decided to not even bother doing it myself due to the trouble I would have to go through to not only have to get a machine or camera that can play the PAL tape (which are actually quite expensive if you can find them), but then to also have to convert the thing over on my computer.
It is of course very possible to do. There are steps that can be taken with Premiere and After Effects which will in fact turn out not so bad, but 2 hours of material is a bit much and there are some things in life where paying to have it done is worth it over doing it yourself.
The only problem was now how to find a reputable and reliable with good quality work company that can do this. This is the first time doing it here in Canada. I did some calling around and found a couple of places willing to do the work and then quite a few that didn't. It doesn't seem to be such a popular bit of work to do nor in high demand. That doesn't really surprise me and I was expecting it, but it makes me wish that much more that the world would just make one type of format and stick with it. Of course there are more than video formats out there that we all wish would stick with one format the world 'round..
Anyways, I'll be getting my 24FPS converted to 29.97FPS media back on a DVD tomorrow which should be interesting to see. This will give me an idea of the quality of work they can do and how I treat our client material from this point on. Hopefully they're good.. because they are really close and it's quite convenient.
The next problem is that I have no way to see the original video.. so how will I know if there are color or audio problems? Not being able to compare is going to be a bit of a setback I think when it comes to judging the quality of the conversion.
Anybody else out there that has dealt with this problem? What did you do?
On route back to an extended trip to the U.S., I am staying overnight in the Hotel Nikko, at the Kansai International Airport in Osaka.
Note, THEY DO NOT HAVE INTERNET ACCESS FROM ROOMS. Unless you want to pay for dial-up by the minute….
The "business center" which is open until 9pm offers broadband, however it would not play nice with my notebook and therefore I could not connect. Note that they have NO technical staff on hand to resolve issues like this. So, I am in the "lobby" of the airport writing up this post at 12:48am. Why am I here? I am taking advantage of their wireless hotspots, as I have a deadline to meet (which are not accessible from the hotel). So, if you have to get something done and have net access, DO NOT STAY AT THE HOTEL NIKKO in Osaka..unless you like hanging out in the airport in the wee hours of the morning.
The lights just went out and airport security guards are eyeing me in an unpleasant manner, so I guess it is time to head back to hotel hell....
You have been warned....