Microsoft was very close to making Windows 7 nearly perfect in every single way. It was going to be Vista, but a more polished version that would run faster. It’s going to run on netbooks without any troubles. They made it super affordable to upgrade (if you pre-ordered it). Heck, they were even giving it away free for a year if you wanted to be apart of the release candidate.
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This week while I was watching the Attack of The Show 1000th episode they showed a music video for a new song by Parry Gripp. I had never heard anything by Parry before, but I must say that I really enjoyed his new song. It is called “The Girl At The Video Game Store”. The song is a love ballad type song about the one girl that works at the local video game store.
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Recently I have become a really hardcore fan of jQuery and the millions of plugins that are available. Today I found one that I think is exceptionally useful. It is called Gritter. What this plugin allows you to do is create bubble like popup notifications for your website. In looking at the code, it really could not be any easier to do. Just a few lines of JavaScript code and you are good to go. Go check it out at http://boedesign.com/2009/07/11/growl-for-jquery-gritter/. If you are looking for a very easy to implement popup notification system, this really could be exactly what you are looking for.

You can download the class here.

The PHP Calendar is a class that generates a calendar for a given month and year. Best of all, it is extremely easy to use and can easily be extended to do whatever you want.
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You can download the Authorize.net class here.

The Authorize.net Class is used to interact with Authorize.net in order to authorize and capture funds off of a credit card. In order to use the Authorize.net service you have to sign up for an account on at Authorize.net. In order to use this class correctly you have to have the API Login and Transaction Key for your account.

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It has been a little while since I have blogged about anything so I thought I would post real quick about things that have been going on the past few weeks.

For now development has stopped in Podcasting Paradise. I sorta hit a wall on where I want to take it and I do not have the funds or resources to get it to the place I want at the moment. I am starting up another project that will hopefully turn out really cool. Not quite ready to show my hand on this quite yet, but it should be really cool.

Professionally, work is insane. We are working as hard as we can to get things done on time and I think that if we keep up the pace we will be able to get caught up. That is if we survive the time until we get there. Right now I am concentrating on the eBay integration for one of our clients. I have been on this for a few weeks and today we really made a breakthrough. Needless to say we have an incredibly brilliant strategy for working with eBay. Maybe after the eBay work is done for work I will work on my own eBay library in PHP as working with their API is very easy to do (even though the API is so intimidating).

Now that we have the work and personal project stuff out of the way, time to talk about new things in my personal life.

Shadow, our cat has decided he has a new favorite toy. It is not the $40 in toys we have bought him. No, it is Q-Tips. He LOVES them. He sits and plays with them forever. It got so bad that he started knocking over the trash cans in the bathroom just to get to them. Since it is really sick that he plays with my ear wax we started giving him clean Q-Tips. I think he was hiding them and waiting for him to have a ton of them because lately he is leaving 15-20 Q-Tips on our bathroom floor. At least he isn’t eating my earwax though.

More has happened, but I have lost motivation for now.

I have not mentioned many of the other project I work on.  For the most part I have way too many for a normal sane person.  However, there is one project that I keep close to my heart.  I am basically obsessed with podcasts.  I know that it is the future of television and there is so much content out there that is free. (more…)

Lately I have been trying to find cool PHP utilities that I can use to handle my day to day tasks.  Lately parsing CSV files in PHP has been something I have had to do over and over again.  Such a basic task can be such a pain considering all of the different formats that they can be in (mostly the quotes around some of the values). I would do find and replace on the file to remove all the extra stuff and hope that I did not corrupt the data. (more…)

I just ran into this awesome PHP class called dBug.  It works like print_r, but does so much more.  You can expand and collapse anything in the structure you use it with.  You know no idea how nice this will be to parse large data structures with.  So nice.  Check it out at: http://dbug.ospinto.com/

For any of you guys that are subscribing to the blog through one of the RSS feeds, I have a small request for you. Since I am trying to determine exactly how many people subscribe, I started running the feeds through Feed Burner. If you do not mind, would you resubscribe to the blog under the following URL?

http://feeds2.feedburner.com/JoshPennington

I would really appreciate it! The more people I can track the better I feel. The better I feel the more I post. So really, it benefits you, if you think about it.