Steven Mapes.com

Welcome to StevenMapes.com formally The Steven Mapes Network. Before you ask, yes this is a blog. Technically, this is MK2 of The Steven Mapes Network, MKI was a framework PHP website that I put up and just didn't have time to maintain.

Over time I will add content to each of the different sections of the blog, I have a vast number of interests and little time to talk about them all (due to work, my own websites, Japanese lessons and my own studies), but i will slowly add more content. For now, pull up a chair, have a JD & Coke and welcome once more to StevenMapes.com

One of the main reasons you are here is probably to find one of my free scripts or classes (written in PHP or Javascript), or to read and comment on one of my RFCs. Well either way just look under the Coding (for the scripts) and RFC categories for those entries. If you don't, you'll have to get passed all the other blog entries.

Every now and then a website that I work on has required a form where by the user needs to select multple entries from a SELECT input and submit them back to the server. The SELECT input which allows multiple selections is ugly and not especially user-friendly. As such, when developing version 8 of Transformers At The Moon, I wrote a JavaScript solution based on a input method proposed by my brother David Mapes.

The solution was to use a pair of SELECTs one as the original list and another as a "holder" which would be dynamically populated by clicking on an entry in the first list. We also wanted to the user to be able to remove items from the "holder" list and to be able to easily see how many entries there were in that list. To enable the solution a third input field was required. This time a HIDDEN field. This field keep track of each of the values which have been selected as a comma separated string. This means that when a FORM is submitted, it is the value of this HIDDEN field which is read, exploded and then used.

We decided that the first entry in each list would be a "header" and thus is ignored by the script. In the case of the "holder" SELECT, this OPTION is used to display the number of entries

You know those times when you see something family and it triggers a memory.  Well that happened again to me today as I was riding into work.  I starting thinking about the late friend of mine Brett.  Brett died on the 7th July 2006, a year on from the infamous 7/7 terrorist attacks here in London England.  I met Brett through my website Transformers @ The Moon, and we use to meet up at different conventions, pub meets as well as chatting regularly online.  Bretts sudden death came as a heavy shock to me, and I could not, and still can't, help but partly blame myself.  I had not spoken to Brett for a few weeks and was wondering how he was due to him feeling low over affairs of the heart.

I forgot to publish this entry a few months ago, so here it is.

My Visionaries fan site, The Visionaries .net which I run with my brother David Mapes, with some content help from CWF admin Minon has now been relaunched and can be found at www.thevisionaries.net

I can't believe how many unsecure wireless networks there are are still around.  Recently whilst both at work and at my GF, and trying to connect to the local wireless network, I noticed a lot of verying strength wireless connection, many of which named after the peoples routers or ISPs.  These networks are asking someone to connect and use their network connection for launching SPAM, DDOS and hacking attempts.  I suspect that many of these connections would, no doubt, be using DHCP services and most likely have either no protection or a default login to the router itself.

If you're in the Surrey area, and are an avid or would-be singer, then you might want to drop by The Vibe in Epsom.  The Vibe is a relatively small pub with a heavy music presence.  You'l find live music, open mic night, jam sessions and, of course, karaoke.  The Karaoke is (currently) every Thursday, Friday and Sunday, and there is certainly a good mix of talent with some very impressive vocalist often performing.  What is my connection to the place? I simply go along with my girlfriend, Sarah, once or twice a week so she can sing, that's it.  The place does have a good atmosphere, and you'll get a much better reaction than most other karaoke pubs i've seen.  So if you're in the area, why not give it a try.

A couple of weeks ago, I modifed my main website, Transformers @ The Moon, to support the popular free-text categorisation method known as 'tags'. For those of you do not know, tags are basically when you have an article of some kind and you list keyword that are appropriate to the content of the article. There are many ways on implementing tags. I decided for my initial method to simply have a varchar field against the news story which would hold a commar separated list of tags. An alternative way would be to have a look-up table storing the tags to allow a 1-many relationship and possibly even a 'tag' table to list available tags.

Anyway, I decide that it was time to write a tag cloud to read and use the data that I have been storing and the results can be seen on the Transformers News Tag Cloud page on Transformers @ The Moon.

If you click to continue to read you can view the class that I wrote to handle the basic functions required for generating a tag cloud