Author Archive

Satirical look at the BP Oil Spill

Posted by Ben in Uncategorized on June 21st, 2010

A friend of mine shared this with me…satire makes anything better.

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Keg Cooler

Posted by Ben in Uncategorized on June 16th, 2010

I’ve been working on a keg cooler / kegerator that can keep a keg cold with ice. This way I can have a somewhat portable solution that doesn’t require a refrigerator.

The project started with 1 55 gallon drum, 1 30 gallon drum, PVC plumbing parts (for a drain), and 4 cubic feet of two-part expanding foam. Someday I’ll try to post a complete how to, but for now here are some pics of where I am currently.

Next I’ll be adding the tap and running hoses for the keg coupler and CO2 tank.


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Oracle String Concatenation from Sub Query

Posted by Ben in Tech Notes on June 4th, 2010

Table Structure:

Desired output:

ITEMNAME COLORSOFFERED
Shirt Brown, Blue, Green
Pants Green, Brown
Dress Brown, Blue, Pink, Green
Shorts Green, Brown, Blue

Have you ran into a situation where you want to combine several rows of data from a sub query in a concatenated string while querying another table? It seems to come up for me a lot, but I’ve historically addressed it in code while using Oracle.  I found a way using Oracle functions to do this fairly easily and thought I would share.  If you’re running Oracle 11g release 2 I’ve been told there is a LISTAGG function that would replace what I have done here, but this will work for the rest of us.

First, you have to create a function for the sub query:

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION "GET_COLORS" (ITEM_ID VARCHAR2)
RETURN VARCHAR2
IS
color_string VARCHAR2(2500) := NULL;
BEGIN
FOR cur_rec IN (SELECT C.COLORNAME FROM COLOR C, ITEMCOLOR IC WHERE C.COLORID = IC.COLORID AND IC.ITEMID = ITEM_ID) LOOP
color_string := color_string || ', ' || cur_rec.COLORNAME;
END LOOP;
RETURN LTRIM(color_string, ',');
END;

Once the function is created, compliled, and execute permissions granted, etc. you’ll be able to call the function like so :

SELECT ITEMNAME, GET_COLORS(ITEMNAME.ITEMID) AS COLORSOFFERED FROM ITEM

That’s it… Granted this could be tedious if you needed to do this often, but it is a fast solution

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GVSU seeks Web Developer

Posted by Ben in Uncategorized on May 26th, 2010

Grand Valley State University is looking for a talented Web developer to join a great team that works on a range of projects.  The GVSU Web Team primarily uses Adobe’s ColdFusion paired with an Oracle database environment to create cutting-edge Web applications.  If you’re looking for a position, or know someone that would be interested, I’d love to hear from you.

here is a quick snapshot of what we’re looking for:

To apply, or to find more information visit: http://bit.ly/9Qsp5R

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Really Good Soft Pretzels

Posted by Ben in Uncategorized on May 13th, 2010

I was craving soft pretzels for some reason today so I made a batch after getting home from work.  In case you ever get the craving here is our recipe (aside from not looking like your standard pretzel shape they are excellent):

Really Good Soft Pretzels

Ingredients:

  • 1 tablespoon yeast
  • 1 table spoon sugar
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 3 tablespoons butter
  • 1 cup warm water
  • 2 3/4 cups flour
  • 4 cups water, boiling (for water bath)
  • 4 teaspoons baking soda (for water bath)

Directions:

  1. Preheat oven to 475 degrees
  2. Mix butter, yeast, sugar, salt, hot water, and 1 cup of flour until smooth & bubbles form
  3. Gradually mix in remaining flour until dough is no longer sticky, add additional flour if necessary.
  4. Cover dough and allow to rise until it doubles in size (and hour or 2)
  5. Once dough has risen knead for 1-2 minutes, adding a bit of flour to make dough less sticky if need be
  6. Divide dough and roll out pieces of dough until strips are 1/2″ in diameter and long enough to form your pretzel shapes
  7. Let shaped pretzels sit for 2-3 minutes
  8. Drop pretzels into boiling water bath (4 cups of water and 4 teaspoons of baking soda, boiling) and let float for 1 minutes on each side
  9. Let pretzels drip dry on a wire rack and then transfer to a greased cookie sheet
  10. Cook for 13-15 minutes, or until pretzels reach desired brown-ness.

Once you start cutting the dough and shaping the pretzels it is helpful to have two people to keep the process going.  The pretzels will start to accumulate on greased cookie sheets after the water bath and then you’ll just have to wait for everything to bake.  To speed things up I usually skip the shaping step and just cut into 2 inch chunks which are great for dipping in something like a spicy or honey mustard sauce.  Enjoy!

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