Buster Collings » Programming

March Madness Bracket Facebook App

Buster — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 18:18:01 +0000

Are you stoked about the 2011 NCAA Basketball Tournament? Are you a Facebook user? If you answered yes to both of these questions.. you should give yourself a cookie Actually, what you should do is take your March Madness and go play the BracketStar NCAA Basketball Brackets Contest. It’s a Facebook exclusive March Madness Bracket app.

You can visit the official BracketStar site to learn more: http://bracketstar.com or you can just go add it now on Facebook: https://apps.facebook.com/basketball-brackets/

Here’s a printable March Madness Bracket

It has a simple, but nice interface. You can add the app to your Facebook account now, but you won’t be able to make your bracket picks until after the official Selection Sunday show, when the 64 (plus 4) teams are determined. By the way, the Mens Final Four will be played in Houston this year and as always you can count on TicketCity.com to have tickets for all of the March Madness

If you’re wondering why I’m singling out this particular March Madness Bracket contest, over all the others I could just as easily blog about, well it’s because I helped build this one! I worked with Nathan to begin building what we think could become a killer, must have Facebook Bracket App. Perhaps not, but still it was fun to work on and we learned a lot, even though we had to keep cutting the project scope and we didn’t get nearly all the features we’d love to see it include. There’s always next year

Free Currency Converter for Your Website

Buster — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 21:30:05 +0000

a long time ago, i was looking for some currency conversion code, be it JavaScript or some server side code utilizing some public web service. to be honest there just wasn’t anything very decent for use inside your own website… not without paying of course. i wasn’t looking for an official and up to the minute foreign exchange service, just something a little better than what a dev like myself might hack up on the cheap.

thankfully i found exactly what i was looking for.. an unbranded currency converter that i could embed into my pages via an iframe. where do you think i got it from? you know… who else gives away more useful web tools that others charge for than… Google. i bet it’s even an up to the minute quality too… but i’m not making any promises. anyhow, i just figured there might be many of you out there like myself searching for ‘free website currency converter’ ‘iframe currency converter’ ‘currency conversion script’ or something similar. so here’s the best i’ve found.. free of charge

http://www.google.com/finance/converter

FIX FOR: SQL Express 2008 x64, file is corrupt during install

Buster — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 20:28:33 +0000

while setting up a new windows virtual server on the rackspace cloud i ran into a hiccup. not with rackspace, so far i’m liking their setup even though it’s still in beta mode for windows. the problem actually came about with installing microsoft’s sql express 2008 x64. the installer seemed to download without any problems, all 600MB of it, but when i ran the installer (actually a self extracting cabinet file) it would get 2/3 complete and then pop a message box with “File is corrupt.” so, i’m thinking.. that’s odd that i downloaded it straight off microsoft.com. so, i google the error message real quick.. i’m still addicted to google so no bing action. google came back with tons of discussions regarding this problem, many of them on m$ sites… google “sql express 2008 file is corrupt during install” and see for yourself. the only problem is that none of those discussions had a real solution. people, like myself, were upset with many of the m$ tech responses… paraphrasing: “just keep downloading it until it works.. something is probably wrong with your anti-virus software.” no help.

ultimately here’s what worked for me: i realized that because i was downloading the sql express 2008 software from the web server.. i was using the IE browser (because i didn’t have chrome or ff installed on it.. no need). however, i wasn’t just using IE.. i was using the 64 bit version of IE. i remember long ago, with vista x64 that the 64 bit version of IE corrupted every executable I tried downloading.. so i quit using the 64 bit version and stuck with the old trusty 32 bit version. anyhow, i just downloaded sql express 2008 x64 using the 32 bit version of IE and ta-da no more “file is corrupt.”

i’m too busy to login to all those sites discussing this problem, but hopefully anybody searching for a solution to “file is corrupt” when installing sql express 2008 will find this blog entry and save themselves some time and frustration.

iPhone 2.0 – 3G, GPS, 3rd Party Apps on July 11th 2008

Buster — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 19:14:23 +0000

it’s been announced… straight from Steve Jobs himself. the new iPhone planned for release on July 11th will not only have 3G (which should’ve been included on version 1 imho) but more importantly it will indeed have native GPS!! with the open SDK and soon launching App Store this device is a bargain at what the old iPhone sold for. but hold up… the iPhone 2.0 is going to retail for $299 for 16GB and $200 for an 8GB. yeah that is cheap. afterall what’s a decent GPS only device running these days… $200+

sorry Apple haters… they’ve once again pushed themselves out to the cutting edge… and for once their not pricing themselves out of the lions share consumers. i dunno about all you other windows developers but my plans to dabble in the world of iPhone development just bumped up a notch on my endless todo list.

here are some great blogs that ran live during Steve Jobs keynote
News.com
Crunchgear.com