tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-48284906936262275282011-11-22T11:39:28.369-05:00<strong>Roberto Mansfield</strong>http://www.blogger.com/profile/09650618624377524988noreply@blogger.comBlogger151100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4828490693626227528.post-39322149488782632452011-11-22T11:32:00.002-05:002011-11-22T11:39:28.380-05:00

FingerHut does not make it easy to tell them you don't want to receive their catalog in your mailbox. I got routed in circles when calling their customer service number. So I called their sales number and found out the trick. Call their customer service number at 1-800-208-2500. Do NOT answer any prompts. They will repeat a few times and then move to the next prompt. This will go on for a while.

<strong>Roberto Mansfield</strong>http://www.blogger.com/profile/09650618624377524988noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4828490693626227528.post-88692229424596814952011-11-21T12:33:00.001-05:002011-11-21T12:34:48.557-05:00

I created a web site for my piano teacher. I tried to recreate the visual elements of a piano score cover into a web site. Check it out.http://academypiano.comule.com/

<strong>Roberto Mansfield</strong>http://www.blogger.com/profile/09650618624377524988noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4828490693626227528.post-50401246928470027922011-05-20T09:04:00.001-05:002011-05-20T09:06:56.664-05:00

Dear University employees,Given the media coverage of the predicted "Doomsday" event on Saturday, May 21st, we believe now is a good time to review the relevant HR policies surrounding the apocalypse and the resulting issues that may impact employees. We all must do our part to ensure business continuity!For those who ARE raptured:-----------------------------------While salvation is never 100%

<strong>Roberto Mansfield</strong>http://www.blogger.com/profile/09650618624377524988noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4828490693626227528.post-30381877430061778422009-08-17T12:19:00.002-05:002009-08-17T13:24:41.087-05:00

Last year around this time, I lost a lot of money and had a vacation ruined. The Air France gate agent out of Philadelphia neglected to check my partner's travel documents properly -- so we were turned away in Paris instead of connecting to our flight to Spain. Our vacation may have still been ruined had the gate agent done her job, but I wouldn't have lost nearly as much money.(It seems Air

<strong>Roberto Mansfield</strong>http://www.blogger.com/profile/09650618624377524988noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4828490693626227528.post-19883348906339648862008-11-12T12:31:00.002-05:002008-11-12T12:36:03.166-05:00

I've been using JQuery in a project and recently discovered that code that worked fine under Firefox3 was failing under Firefox2 and IE6. The issue turned out to be my misunderstanding of how to properly retrieve data from an ajax call. My code expected a proper XML object. I was using the jquery $.load() method mostly for its simplicity. Under FF2 and IE6, instead of getting an XML object, I was

<strong>Roberto Mansfield</strong>http://www.blogger.com/profile/09650618624377524988noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4828490693626227528.post-4885447828380269672008-08-25T17:25:00.004-05:002008-08-27T11:17:19.557-05:00

Joseph and I boarded our flight Thursday evening ready for a break. The trip that seemed like ages away when we planned it was here. I had considered following the latest fad to fight jet lag: pre-flight fasting. But some digging revealed that the study being quoted everywhere was actually done on mice, and the results had never been shown to occur in humans. Air France provided a very edible

<strong>Roberto Mansfield</strong>http://www.blogger.com/profile/09650618624377524988noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4828490693626227528.post-36079864915547469432008-03-17T15:22:00.009-05:002008-03-17T16:43:13.452-05:00

I've been trying to use ImageMagick's "convert" utility to convert a PDF image into constituent bitmap images -- for OCR and other purposes. If I just run:convert file.pdf file.tiffI end up with a really large mostly blank page with a very small bitmap in the lower left corner. That tiny bitmap is also very blocky when the size is blown up. So here is how to fix this problem:The Difficulty WayUse

<strong>Roberto Mansfield</strong>http://www.blogger.com/profile/09650618624377524988noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4828490693626227528.post-11442080993089358302007-07-23T14:00:00.000-05:002007-07-23T14:02:50.610-05:00

Joseph and I went to Maine. It is really stunning up there.http://fusion.sas.upenn.edu/~robertom/vacation/maine/

<strong>Roberto Mansfield</strong>http://www.blogger.com/profile/09650618624377524988noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4828490693626227528.post-17084169245078537512007-03-23T10:16:00.000-05:002007-03-23T10:21:08.049-05:00

Just checking back in accessing Oracle cursors within PHP. I thought you might be able to retrieve complex data objects using cursors (instead of XML) but that doesn't appear to be the case. When you a retrieve an Oracle cursor, it brings back a resource. You still need to loop over it to fetch the data. This is still better than multiple queries, and perhaps more straightforward than the XML

<strong>Roberto Mansfield</strong>http://www.blogger.com/profile/09650618624377524988noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4828490693626227528.post-85550585619642113802007-03-15T23:33:00.000-05:002007-03-15T23:37:23.823-05:00

Here's my talk on using PHP and Oracle.

<strong>Roberto Mansfield</strong>http://www.blogger.com/profile/09650618624377524988noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4828490693626227528.post-74590588799608448422007-03-14T20:17:00.000-05:002007-03-15T23:40:05.138-05:00

The first version of the skiing pics and videos are up.I need an exciting sound track for the videos since right now they just have my nervous laughs and yelps as I try to keep from wiping out while filming. Great fun though.

<strong>Roberto Mansfield</strong>http://www.blogger.com/profile/09650618624377524988noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4828490693626227528.post-80981059550780684122007-03-14T10:06:00.000-05:002007-03-14T10:14:07.052-05:00

I went to Chris Jones' workshop this morning at the PHP Quebec conference and picked up a few nice tidbits. The OCI interface supports passing arrays to pl/sql procedures and functions. You just bind the array variable like any other variable. In another example, he was creating XML through a query and the SELECT had an interesting feature:SELECT field, CURSOR(SELECT bla FROM bla) etc.It looks

<strong>Roberto Mansfield</strong>http://www.blogger.com/profile/09650618624377524988noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4828490693626227528.post-68825205063706382022007-03-10T17:24:00.000-05:002007-03-10T17:35:26.114-05:00

I survived the first day of skiing. Joseph, Morgan (mysql tech support) and I stuck together and stayed on the easy slopes. We are all about the same level so this worked out really well. Heading down one green trail, we saw the "Enchanted Forest" with inviting wood cut outs. We couldn't resist and were soon among the trees and and the large cutout illustrations. Apparantly though, "Enchanted

<strong>Roberto Mansfield</strong>http://www.blogger.com/profile/09650618624377524988noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4828490693626227528.post-45144127035272236882007-03-08T12:39:00.000-05:002007-03-08T13:55:34.328-05:00

I'll be presenting at the Conference PHP Quebec on Friday, March 16th. For full details see:http://conf.phpquebec.com/en/conf2007/I'll be speaking on how to take advantage of some of Oracle's features in PHP. The only Oracle/PHP talks that I've been to discuss the basics of talking to Oracle from PHP. I hope to give people some ideas on how to better use their database layer to reduce the amount

<strong>Roberto Mansfield</strong>http://www.blogger.com/profile/09650618624377524988noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4828490693626227528.post-40704294069881893972007-03-08T12:30:00.000-05:002007-03-08T12:33:39.598-05:00

Okay, I finally came up with a name for this blog which wasn't already taken. Its pretty funny to see that 99% of your creative thoughts and wordplays on "blog" have already happened in other people's minds -- most several years ago. I guess that's what I get for jumping on the blog bandwagon so very late in the game.

<strong>Roberto Mansfield</strong>http://www.blogger.com/profile/09650618624377524988noreply@blogger.com1