rowejason.com

I’ve recently had several inquiries about my honeymoon in Belize. See my original Belize post for pictures. I decided to post my response as others might find it useful. Let me know if I can provide any further information for you.

Belize was a really great trip for me and my wife. We really loved the adventure, ocean views, and relaxation. In the area we stayed our resort was by far the best. We stayed at Jaguar reef (which is also called Almond Beach) and bought the adventure package.

http://www.jaguarreef.com/en/packages/multi-adventure.html

You really have to make sure you and your soon to be wife are OK with the following things:

1. It is a jungle and third world country outside the resort
2. At dusk the mosquitoes get really bad (we are from MN so it was not that much different for us and we knew to bring bug spray). So be prepared at dinner, you will get few bites and so will the mosquitoes. (sorry bad joke)
3. Some of the roads to the resort are bumpy and only dirt roads. Thus, you have to take a very small airplane for some travel.
4. (good for me bad for wife) - No malls, small amount of shopping at the airport

The good things:

1. It’s very real and not a tourist trap.
2. The daily excursions are really fun but you do share the experience with a group.
3. On one of our day trips we were the only couple and had the whole waterfall swimming experience to our self.
4. The people of Belize live very simple lives but are super friendly
5. The beach, Ocean, and pools are really nice.
6. The rooms are very nice at Jaguarreef.
7. They have wireless Internet but its a little slow.
8. They have DVD players in the room so bring some movies in case it rains.
9. They have sailboats, ask the people at the beach how to use it if you never have tried (really fun)
10. Free bikes but not that safe to peddle around on the busy dirt roads.
11. Free snorkel gear
12. The diving looks amazing but you have to have a license for it.

I started building a simple taskwidget to try out jquery. I hope someday to have something 1% as good as RTM or basecamp-todos using a json type interface and jquery.

Along the way I found a really cool mysql wrapper class for PHP. It makes it really simple to organize MySQL connection and queries. You can do things like this to connect to your database using a simple config file.

$db = new Database($config['server'], $config['user'], $config['pass'], $config['database'], $config['tablePrefix']);

Then a function would look like this:

$db->connect();

$sql = "insert into tmastertask (masterTaskDescription) VALUES ('" . $values[0] . "');";

$db->query($sql);

$jsonInsertArray[] = "success";
$jsonResultArray["InsertResult"]=$jsonInsertArray;
echo json_encode($jsonResultArray);

$db->close();

For the front-end of my test page for the task-widget, i used jquery heavely to build and display my html. It’s nothing fancy yet as I have not even worked on the style. It’s just a prototype at this point to see if the concept will work.

I like how jquery leads you down the path of only using it for the actions and the classes and functions are all up to you.

It’s exactly what I was looking for to work on my javascript skills. Sometime when I use YUI I have a hard time breaking out of the cookie cutter widget or style they provide in the examples.

The one bad things I ran into is having some issues with the $.get callback and how to pass the data results to a different function. So as a work around you can define this as a local variable and use it inside the function. I hope to find a better way to use this.

var foo = this;

$.get("test.php", function(data){
alert("Data Loaded: " + data);

foo.bar()

});

I had this issue today on a sql 2005 server and it appears to be a common problem:

 ”Unable to use SQL Server because ASP.NET version 2.0 Session State is not installed on the SQL server. Please install ASP.NET Session State SQL Server version 2.0 or above.”

My first reaction was search the internet… and that led me down the wrong path. Sometimes its just better to read the documentation. I can’t believe I had become the type of person not to read the instructions. I love that stuff! Well, anyway my solution was running the following command which I put together using the documentation on this site (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms229862.aspx).

But seriously, don’t just run this following command. Go look at the link above as it actually explains everything in detail.

aspnet_regsql -d <databasename> -ssadd -sstype c -U <username>