Things to do when bored

As you may know, I find myself on the road for business from time to time.  Being married, with a family forming, this is far from ideal.  Beyond just being home sick and missing my wife, I find myself bored out of my mind.  This particular trip is nicer in that respect though.  I've been bitten by the development bug of late, so I've been doing a bit more hobby tinkering than normal.  Being on the road gives me a lot of time to tinker with random things that I normally wouldn't want to take time for during the week.

Yesterday I took the time to write a short script to set my timezone based on my fire-eagle location.  Tonight I converted afterfate.net to use the fire-eagle api directly instead of parsing the eaglefeed.me atom feed.  The performance increase is at least 2x based on some quick tests with time/wget.  This also means that time-zone information doesn't require me to contact a second service because the fire-eagle response contains that data already.

Tomorrow I think I'll take a shot at having the service I wrote on apps.afterfate.net take my location data and find the closest weather station.  I'm hoping I can find some way to use this information to automatically update my gnome weather applet data.  Of course, I don't actually have trouble setting my own time-zones or new weather location, I'm doing this only to say it's been done :)

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New Camera

After waiting for years I finally found a reason to buy a nice camera for myself. Apparently Nicole getting pregnant was the magic motivator to spend the money required (ah the irony). We decided that I'd pushed the old point and shoot about as far as I could and it was time to step up to something a bit more advanced. Nicole and I imagine she'll spend hours photographing the kids 9 months from now and on. For now though, so far all I've managed is cats and candles. Take a look here.
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FireEagle

After wrestling with BrightKite's api last week I decided I really didn't feel like screwing with it any more. That and the fact that FireEagle sits above bright-kite in the hierarchy of things, made me decide to use FireEagle instead for my stalker map. It all ends up being the same data, but FireEagle's api is well documented, and of course Net::FireEagle is easy to use. I may go back and work on BrightKite::Auth and BrightKite::User in the future, but I think the FireEagle re-factor should do.
Today turned in to one of those days where you set out to do something simple and blow it out of proportion. I managed to do that by refactoring my fe_maps app interface. Now instead of going to bkite_maps or fe_maps/ you have to go to /fe_maps/loc, and if you want to get xml or json you simple go to /fe_maps/loc.xml or /fe_maps/loc.json. All this thanks to Mason's dhandler system.
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Dashcode redux

We spent a lot of time on the road tonight so I didn't really get to mess with dashcode to the extent that I had hoped. Initially I thought 'hey I'll just mess with it for a few minutes and go to bed'. Instead I ended up messing with the graphics for the CPAN search widget. Yup, ZERO functionality.

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Discovering Dashcode

I was waiting for the dryer to finish so I could go to bed. I figured it didn't have enough time left on it to bother starting my FireEagle work, and/or continue screwing with BrightKite::Auth. So I said, 'I need a widget for CPAN, I wonder what dashcode is like'. About 10 minutes later, half of that messing with trying to figure out how to place an image, I've got a widget that opens a new tab in my browser with the search results for something on CPAN. It looks like crap, and doens't display search results inline, which would be nice. It just opens a new window.

Holy crap that was easy, I love dashcode, I want more. I'm going to start trying to think of other dashboard widgets I need and see how hard they are to put together. This should be fun.

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Round two of stalker enabling

In retrospect, iframe was a retarded choice. With as much XMLHttp stuff as I did this fall you'd think I'd have turned toward that initially. Well eating dinner managed to kick my brain into gear and I re-factored how I handle the BrightKite map support. Basically the application will serve up an img tag to be used in an iframe, XML, or JSON. Using Dojo I changed the page to make a call to the JSON response type. This required moving the 'display' portion of the app over to the afterfate.net vhost instead of apps.afterfate.net but that isn't too bad. Most of the 'work' for this app is handled by the back-end components which come off the same place in the filesystem.

The worst part is up until about two hours ago 'apps.afterfate.net' hadn't even been registered, so the iframe wouldn't have worked for anyone who wasn't NIS bound here in the _house_.

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Fun with google maps

I was bored this weekend with the typical fare. I decided I would take a cue from @ffg and 'stalker enable' my blog using the google maps API. On the back-end it's powered by a mason app loaded in an iframe on the blog's main page. Eventually I want to see if I can make a simple facebook app to throw this into the facebook profile side-bar. For now having it on my blog is fine. Before anyone shouts 'but privacy!', I'm not going to check in unless I want just about everyone to know where I am, duh.

I'm not sure if an iframe is the best way to do this, but I don't see any reason for the image to come off of afterfate.net rather than google itself. Since the afterfate.net/ blog is completely static I can't just make a call to my google maps code.

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Thank god for backups

It's 0100 and I'm going to bed because I just had to do the following: Blew away my .css files, and at the same time reminded myself why I do backups on this system. Of course, it was all in subversion, but for the same reason (tired) that I blew the files away, I forgot all this.
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I wonder...

I wonder if the reason my twitter use has gone up, is because I'm noticing more things that I think(_I think_) are worth sharing(of course they may not be).  It seems to have an inverse effect on blogging(hate that word).  Rather than store up the nifty and inconsequential things that happen during my day, I can just blurt them out as they happen.  This probably goes back to the fact that when I'm idle, I have the attention span of a squirrel.
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Super Computing 2008

Certainly eventful but nothing worth blogging about. God I hate that phrase. In the end, we were damn busy and didn't usually get back to our rooms until around 22:00. So with that type of environment, I was rarely motivated to even boot up my laptop, let alone log in and write something up about the days happenings. It was reasonably interesting though at times hectic. Saw TerraSoft or their parent company in a booth showing off their clustered PS3's, guess I'll be setting up Linux on my PS3 before too long.
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SC2008 Booth Systems set-up Day One

I think the flickr photo set tells the story. Day one is primarily about the setup of the hardware apparently, I'll get on to software tomorrow. At the end of the day the main kiosk is holding a ton of stuff, cables, VGA splitters, two laptops, a server, Fiber->Copper converter, GigE switch, router, etc. A big mess to get wired up in an organized fashion, but I managed to do it. It's been a long day though, and the laptop is dying, time to sign off. Flickr pictures here
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Thinking like a mac (old post)

Those of you playing WoW since the latest patch have probably noticed a few of your favorite mods going through some growing pains. The most notable of which is probably Omen. Omen is a great tool but they've been having to update nearly every day (sometimes 2-3 times) because of the recent changes. Eventually Nicole and I became frustrated with this and she gave me a 'programming excersie' to write something to handle this.

My first instinct was to write a shell script to handle this, then dump it in a copy of the WoW Launcher app so it could be launched from the Dock as an actual application. This method is pretty hacky and I wanted to hand this out to some friends, and I didn't want it to be a complete hacky pile.

Enter my local Mac fanboy/oracle Dave (http://freeke.org/ffg) with a suggestion to use Mac's Automator app. Here is where my normal habits of writing some shell script on a Unix machine to handle simple tasks get called in to question. Dave's initial suggestion was to just put my shell script in an Automator, but this tool is pretty darn useful on its own. The screen shot below illustrates the simplicity of grabbing our latest mod version, unziping it, and starting wow. Something that a shell script could of course do pretty quickly, but this feels like the Mac way ;)

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

I'm quite impressed with how dead simple it was to get this working, and being a Automator n00b I'm sure I am going the long way round, it I still find it quite nice. The best part is the Automator workflow can be saved as a proper 'app' which can be launched from the Dock, all this in something like 15 minutes with Automator (which brings my life total Automator usage to 30 min).

The longest part of this whole experiment was putting the icing on this workflow. Figuring out how to effectively edit mac .icns files was an interesting experience in itself. (tip: When in doubt, type 'icon' in spotlight)

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

That is the least impressive icon you've probably ever seen, but the goal of this was to have an Icon, not to get an award. Once my app had an icon the next step was packaging. This was pretty easy once I looked over the hdiutil man page and used skitch to make a quick and dirty background.

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

Overall thinking like a Mac (with a little help of course) has given me a fairly simple way to keep my Omen settings up to date, and hopefully it'll help out some of our Mac WoW guildies. The whole experience was interesting just in learning a bit about the 'icing' bits like custom disk images with views and backgrounds, to editing icons. The funny part is it probably took 3 times as long to get all the 'icing' on the cake than it did to bake the thing.

Maybe someday I'll get off my lazy ass and write something that takes longer to make, than to package.

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copyright

So I had this idea for a facebook application. In fact a bunch of people have had this idea and no one seems to have done it right (and by right I mean something that actually functions). So I figure, I've got background with the flickr API, I can throw something together to display photos on my 'wall', no problem. Well there is technically a problem... Since the app displays photos, and could potentially be used by someone else, who could display photos they don't have rights to, there are copyright issues. I basically would have to go through a bunch of red tape, and mail something off with a check for $80 to the US Copyright Office to make sure everything is on the level.
Yeah screw that... Maybe if there is some app I can write that won't potentially display copyright protected material, I'll look in to it.
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facebook

So I finally caved and joined facebook. It would seem that it has become the preferred method of communication among my friends. I suppose it could be worse.... could have caved while they all used myspace. Overall it seems like it is reasonably well designed, a couple things that drive me nuts. See I think the facebook I wrote is much nicer... take a look over here at my alternative... Oh that's right, I don't have my own facebook product, or millions of dollars, so I'm going to shut up now :)
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the landscaping saga

It has been quite a week dealing with some damage to our home and trying to get reimbursed for it. Not worth going into at this point but it is quite frustrating.
I actually got so frustrated, that I destroyed the lcd on my razr while leaving them yet another voicemail. This, forced me to go out and get a new phone. Its not awful but its no Motorola (bye bye iSync compatability).
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