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author: tim comments: true date: 2015-03-10 14:03:30+00:00 dsq_thread_id: '3716258245' layout: post link: http://tekside.net/iphonaddict/2015/1/11/games-i-was-addicted-to-in-20 slug: games-i-was-addicted-to-in-2014 title: Games I was addicted to in 2014 wordpress_id: 1805 category: Commentary tags:

I posted on TekSide:

I don't consider myself a gamer anymore. I used to be. Countless, countless hours in Final Fantasy 6-9, Zelda, Tetris, Alleyway, Neverwinter, Halo, Fallout, Half life, Oblivion. The list goes on. I cut my teeth on a gameboy and SNES and kept going. Things dropped off after Halo 2. I surfaced for Halo 3 (a lot) and 4 (less so). I didn't play much on my phone during my years on Android; the games really weren't that great or polished.

Part of my commute is a 10 minute subway ride. Something quick to play is appreciated, but I've been looking for something a little more immersive. Something I can sit and get lost in for a few hours. The other part of my commute is a 30 min commuter train ride where I'm either reading instapaper, napping, or playing a game while listening to podcasts.

Baldur's Gate - I found this very late in the year. In fact I think I installed it at my in-laws on Christmas morning. I had never played either of the originals and was curious. It was one of the few games that consistently showed up on "best iOS RPG" when I was searching for something to play. The face that it looked like Neverwinter was a huge bonus for me. The tutorial for this game is very, very buggy and was very off-putting. Once I got past that though, everything changed. The game mechanics started making sense: pinching and zooming the map is fluid and tapping on your party to direct their targets just felt completely natural. The story quickly swept me in and I started questing. When I play RPGs, I try to do all the side quests. Baldur's Gate is no different. I'm currently grinding my way through a number of maps looking for someone's lost cloak. Perfect gameplay for listening to podcasts on the train. Outside of that though the music and sound effects are top notch. If you were ever a fan of D&D style point+click RPGs, this will feel right at home. If you've never tried them, I can't recommend this game enough.

Tiny Tower & Pocket Trains - I put these games together because while very different games, they have similar gameplay mechanics. Build out your empire! In Tiny Tower, this takes the form of expanding a single tower. Inside this tower are all your Bitizens live: Where they eat, where they work, and where they have fun. Ala Sim City, but in an enclosed environment. In Pocket trains, you expand your train line, going for a trans-continental goal. Pick the cargo for your trains, build tracks, repair the engines, and race against the clock. Both games have IAP to buy coins and bucks to get you through the game faster. I've never used real world money in either and it's just as enjoyable

RGB Express - This is a good puzzle game where you draw routes for your drivers, picking up packages and making sure that every house receives the correct package. Setup your route, press play, watch your trucks zoom, and hope you didn't create any collisions! Pro Tip: You can set the playback to run the trucks at a faster speed. Kudos to the iOSDocked crew for making this the GameCenter Showdown in episode 77.

Threes - Threes is a tiny puzzle that grows on you. It looks simple at first. But at some point you figure out you need a strategy to go higher. Match the same number, it triples and collapses. Keep going. Build higher and higher. Compete with your friends. It gets harder the higher you go and becomes addicting trying to get to that next score. I play tower defense style: Building into one of the top two corners and slowly growing numbers in those directions. What's your high score?

2048 - This game is very similar to threes (maybe too much so). But, it's still fun. I keep this one around because it takes a little less concentration than threes. It's more mindless and good for when I'm tired or need to think. It's a good distraction. 2048 is my checkers to my Threes chess.

Honorable Mention: Monument Valley - I can't stress enough that you NEED to go play this game. There is no other experience like it on iOS. Control your character through immersive M.C. Escher-like paintings. The levels are gorgeous. You'll spend time just staring at them, moving pieces around just to see what they do. It only gets Honorable Mention because of replay value. I played through it once in a few hours and that was that. But, it's magical. Everyone should play it

Fussy Coffee

Over the years I've read or listened to some of the fussy drinking habbits of people I respect and follow. I've been meaning to write about what I do for coffee for a while. A coworker of mine has asked and a recent post by my friend Sam kicked me to sit down and write it.

Sam talks about Coffee Nerdery and it made me stop and think about how much I get into it. When I was younger, "nerd" had a negative connotation. I learned to not let it bother me a long time ago. Nerds are passionate about many things. For me it was comics, computers, books. Now, add a liiiitle bit of coffee into that.

Don't get me wrong, regular coffee is just fine. Half the time, at work, I just have a cup from the pot. (Granted, that's good coffee). But, as I've written about previously, rituals are important. Some of what I do with coffee is for the taste. Some of it is the ritual of preparing it and the comfort that it brings. Some of it is feeling included in a club, even if that club exists only online in the form of twitter, slack, and blog posts. Because of a few of the gadgets I use, I thought I was a little nerdier. But, the gadgets is where it ends. I don't fiddle with temperature or what I use to stir. I just get good beans and prep them with what I have.

At the end of the day it doesn't matter. If you are passionate about something, want to throw all of your energy into it, are just curious, or just want to fiddle. Do it. If it entertains you, it scratches an itch, or you get something else out of it. Do it. Nerdism is starting to feel like a post within itself. Back to coffee.

Here's what I do: I start up the kettle. When it hisses, I pour it in

The beans I use are usually from the Blue Bottle Coffee mail service. (<-- referral link. help me out!) I'll do a review of the service at some point in the future. For now, check out Marco's

I grind the beans by hand using a Porlex JP-30 Stainless Steel Coffee Grinder

Next is brewing. I use an AeroPress and LOVE it. Even if you use coffee grinds from the supermarket, the Aeropress make brewing so darned easy. Both brewing and cleaning. It makes one cup at a time. Add the coffee, the water, let it sit and then pump it out. Cleaning is just popping the "puck" of spent coffee into the garbage, rinsing everything with water, and throwing it in the drainboard. I use the "inverted method" as I find it the easiest. Check out this 1 min Blue Bottle video that explains it. Sometimes, I also use the AeroPress Timer app on my phone that, in theory, gets a better tasting brew. I stir it with the handle of the AeroPress scoop

Most of the time, I have the coffee exactly as it comes out of the press. This is a little closer to espresso than coffee. The instructions say "add water to taste". I've been home with Charlie the past few weeks and have been trying this. I like both, I'm not sure which method I'll end up with. Either way, I add my 2 ice cubes

Now. Bulletproof Coffee. I've done this on and off over the past few years. Gizmodo debunked it earlier this year. What do I think? For the most part. It works. For the first few months, you feel like you've had rocket fuel and can do anything. Then, it tapers off. I do it a few times a year, usually close to the release of a website for a little boost. I eyeball a tablespoon or so of Kerry Gold Butter and add a tablespoon of MCT Oil. If you are going to try it, don't buy the bulletproof brand. It's not any better and amazon can save you money.

However you take your coffee; whether you are super fussy, love your starbucks, or dabble a little bit at home: It doesn’t matter. ENJOY your coffee

Podcasts I Listen To

These days I almost exclusively listen to 3 podcasts/networks. Most of these are Tabletop Roleplaying Game Actual Plays of Dungeons and Dragons and Pathfinder. Think of it as listening to improve fantasy storytelling where dice rolls decide major decisions and you are a long for the ride right with the cast. They are great fun

These are some of the podcasts I used listen to every week. Some I cherry picked.

Apps

Once upon a time, I built native iOS apps.

I really wanted to learn native app development. Having a C background and having a bad experience with Android Dev, I got myself an iPhone 5, formed an LLC, and dove in on nights/weekends. In a perfect world I would have made millions! It's been a lot of fun. Lately, I've been learning Swift

It's been featured on:

Weather Notifications – Custom Push Alerts

Coming Soon: (clearly they didnt ;-)

Something fun with AVSpeechSynthesizer. (Coming in hopefully 2016)
Something Tinder-like using CloudKit for soon-to-be parents (Coming in 2015)
Something with CoreAudio for new parents (Coming in 2016)

Podcasts

Up until the pandemic, I co-hosted 3 podcasts on the Tekside. Combined, my shows garnered in between 10,000 and 15,000 listeners every month. It was great fun and I hope to be able to do it again some day

GTDGedi was a show about productivity; the apps, methods, and tools we used to stay organized and move fast in the digital age
JACKEDcast was about staying physically and mentally healthy, and making a better version of ourselves
The Show and Tell Cast was a love letter to movies. Every month all the hosts would bring a movie they had seen before and discuss everyone's experience watching it. It let me meet new people and connect with some very old friends

Check out the shows that I listen to

Projects

Most of my projects are client work and under NDA. If I have free time, I hack on random things

JiraTabs – I have a particular Jira workflow when I’m triaging and assigning to team members. This bookmarklet lets me open every Jira in view in a new tab to power through them faster
DoneCancelNumberPadToolbar – Adds Done and Cancel buttons to an iPhone Number Pad. Was my first experience adding to CocoaPods
JsonEndpoint – We needed fast and dirty JSON mocking for a project at work. Apiary didn't exist yet, so I rolled a quick one
Magento Callstack – A helper extension to aid in debugging Magento
PythonistaTrello – Used to add cards to Trello using Launch Center Pro and Pythonista. Tutorial here
Dot files – My config for oh-my-zsh.
casey.coffee – Quick fun site I threw together for Casey Liss and to try deploying static or php to Heroku
Inbox Zero Macros – The macros for both windows and Mac that help me keep Inbox Zero
JsonLint for Alfred – Part of how I Format JSON and save to gist with Alfred
django-solr-demo – An introduction to using Solr with django
django-admin-remainingcharacters – Django package to show the remaining characters on a field in the admin
django-admin-preview – Django package to enable inline template previews of a model in a list view in the admin
broder.us – A fun little website I threw together for my wedding

Launched Side Projects that are now deceased:

Twitter2Gtalk – I started this at an AppEngine hackathon the Google hosted years ago. It ran until I hit my limit on the free tier (about 10,000 users). I shudder to look at the code to this.
SimpleWod – I started a site to keep track of workouts I was doing. I had about 20 friends beta testing it. Then Beyond The Whiteboard came out and it was doing everything we would need
ReaderFollow – When Google removed comments from Google Reader, I built this to hold the comments. I had a pretty hardcore group of Reader friends. It was a combination of a Greasmonkey script and a Django backend that let my friends and I continue to comment. It had about 500 users when Google shut down reader entirely. I thought about building a full RSS service. But seeing what FeedBin was doing got me excited about that.
Beyond The Whiteboard 2 RSS – Used to create an RSS feed from your workout entries on <https: beyondthewhiteboard.com=""> on AppEngine.
Took it down after the BTWB redesign. I had a few hundred users for fun.

See my Github for more

Talks

I give talks at Cake & Arrow, conferences, and various Meetups around NYC

Saving Time and Money with Vagrant – Given at Meet Magento NY 2014 Vagrant can aid businesses and developers by creating development environments that mirror production. This talk discusses the basics of Vagrant, real world stories, and how it can be used in various projects. This is the 3rd evolution of this talk. Links and resources can be found here as well as v1 and v2
Jira Process and Etiquette – This is a talk I give every year or so at Cake & Arrow to detail how we use Jira as a company. It’s great for new hires and a gentle reminder to the old guard
Launch Week – was given to employees at Cake & Arrow as a discussion starter to the activities and events around the launch of a site: Why technology says or does the things we do, and why we may turn into werewolves. I also had wanted to try making a deck in a time box (45 mins) while learning DeckSet. Markdown for the slides can be found here.
Git and Distributed Source Control – This is an older talk I gave at I as an intro to DCVS systems. The audience was for technical people as well as non-technical so there was a common understanding of the tools we use

What's your best life hack?

Fri, 20 Mar 2020 00:00:00 GMT

To make sure I have time for a few non movable things each week or day. The 2-3 core things that are for me, my sanity, and my mental health. Skipping sleep isn’t great but these things would take priority on a weird day. If I found myself skipping sleep long term, I’d re-evaluate my schedule

For me these are the gym 3-4 times a week. I get punchy and anxious if I don’t go.

Daily it’s meditation and 30 mins of fiction (sci-fi and fantasy) before bed.

Kids are Home

Tue, 17 Mar 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Updated 03/18/2020

If you are fortunate enough to be able to work from home during the current crisis, your kids may also be home with you. We've been figuring out a handoff schedule, what hours to work; very early and late as needed, and what activities to do with the boys. Ours are 4 and 2. I understand we've very privileged to be in this position but I hope this list of links helps anyone else looking for activities to do

Activities

40+ Best Indoor Activities from Busy Toddler (Busy Toddler)
ABC Mouse (e-learning)
Alphabet Letter Tracing
GIANT LIST OF IDEAS FOR BEING HOME WITH KIDS
Glider Planes
IXL personalized learning (e-learning)
Lego
Little Thinkers Workbook
Origami
Playing Preschool (Busy Toddler)
Scholastic learn at home
Scissor Skills
State Parks (if allowed)
Story Creating
What do we do if school is cancelled? Are their online resources to help the kids continue learning and keep the family from going bonkers?
10 Homeschooling Resources to get you through Coronavirus
Brooklyn public library also does virtual story time every day
Little Learning Club Shop

Games

Candy Land
Chutes & Ladders
Guess Who
Hero Kids (cooperative table top RPG, similar to Dungeons and Dragons, but for kids
Monopoly Junior
Peek-A-View
Rush Hour
Story Toys are now free
Super Mario Junior

Schedules

My PhpStorm Tweaks

Fri, 21 Feb 2020 00:00:00 GMT

We are breaking ground on a new app at work and are tinkering with a few IDE's. Up until now we've standardized on Xcode and PhpStorm. Code is the gold standard for react these days but I've never really given it an honest try; to get everything set up right. In the past, for "regular" react work, I've opened the react project in PhpStorm (which has all the power of WebStorm) and everything "just works". Full intellisense gives me great autocomplete, introspection, auto importing, etc. Granted, Code can do all this too, but it was nice to just open the IDE I'm familiar with and get to work. Also, at least the last time I tried, a bunch of plugins were needed. I believe most of this works OOB now

Some of my co-workers are poking around with PhpStorm to see how they like it so I'm writing out the tweaks I do to any fresh install. Laracasts has an amazing (and free!) video series on the topic: Be Awesome in PHPStorm

I also just learned that you can sync your settings to git, so I've done that here

Editor Settings

Turn off confirmExit and showTipsOnStartup. They are annoying
Hide or minimize all the toolbars unless you need them. I rely on hotkeys
Change Editor Tab limit to 1 --> This, combined with the split editor hotkeys below, will make it so if you make a new editor window, cmd+w will close it instead of cycling through a history of what was in that tab. To get to recently opened files, with auto complete, use cmd+e instead which will open the Recent Files modal

Key Maps

Full keymap file is available here

Delete a Line

PhpStorm will copy or cut a whole line, if you don't have anything highlighted and you mash the appropriate keys. So, why not delete the line you are on?

EditorDeleteLine mapped to cmd+d

Split Editor Window

If you want to have 2 editor windows side by side, make as many as you want!

SplitVertically mapped to alt+v

Note: There is probably a better binding for this, but I already use those for my window manager, Moom

Common Default Hotkeys

cmd+e opens Recent Files
cmd+shit+o opens Open Project Files (shift, shift is also very useful but it can have a lot of noise depending on the type of project)
cmd+1 hides the sidebar

Styles

Theme

I go back and forth between these

Dracula
Material oceanic or deep ocean
I used to use Solarized Dark but I don't like it as much these days. My terminal still uses it

Fonts

I've used FiraCode forever and really like it. Can't beat how good the programming ligatures look
JetBrains recently came out with Mono which feels very similar to Fira. I'm using it now but the jury is still out

Small Wins

Sat, 07 Sep 2019 00:00:00 GMT

Great short read. Remember to value the little wins. Not just the big ones

I've missed out on a lot of moments where I could've been celebrating but my brain had already moved on.

It's way too easy to forget the hundreds of small things which go right.

Celebrate your progress, no matter how small. Don't rob yourself of the collective joy of each of those wins. Enjoy the ride. Work hard, knowing the only reward may be the knowledge of a job well-done, but by celebrating the small wins along the way, you could be motivated to break through to the next level.

Gtdjedi Podcast - Ep043 - App Battle Iii - Reminders Vs Omnifocus 3 Vs Todoist

Sun, 09 Sep 2018 08:17:00 GMT

App Battle: Task Managers: Reminders vs Omnifocus 3 vs Todoist

Jackedcast - Ep038 - Transformations With Timothy Broder

Tue, 28 Aug 2018 13:27:00 GMT

The Big Discussion

Transformations with special guest Timothy Broder

Episode Links

Keto in a nutshell
Reddit Keto FAQ
Reddit KetoGains FAQ
KetoGains macro calculator
KetoGains Suggested supplements that work well with all ketogenic diets (SKD, TKD, CKD)
KetoGains must have supplements
Tim’s Gummy Bears
FatHead Pizza
Keto Chow
Tim’s favorite recipes
Tim’s favorite recipe sites
- Keto Connect
- Ruled.me
Tim’s old bio from CrossfitNYC

Show & Tell Cast - S02Ep017 - Escape From New York, The Delta Force & Big Trouble In Little China

Mon, 27 Aug 2018 20:47:00 GMT

This Episode’s Films

Tim: The Delta Force

Jonathon: Escape NY

My Favorite Keto Recipes

Fri, 24 Aug 2018 08:30:00 GMT

As mentioned on my guest appearance on The JackedCast Episode 38

Updated: 08/24/2018

Mini Everything Bagels

This used to be hosted at Mommy Mania but no longer exists there

Ingredients

Bagels

3 Cups Shredded Mozzarella Cheese
1/4 Cup Cream Cheese
1 teaspoon Xantham Gum
1 teaspoon Baking Soda
1/2 Cup Almond Flour (Finely ground Almond Meal works too)
1/2 teaspoon "lite salt"

Everything Topping

1 teaspoon Garlic Powder
1 teaspoon Onion Powder
1 teaspoon Poppy Seeds
1 teaspoon Sesame Seeds
1/2 teaspoon "lite salt"
1/4 teaspoon Ground Pepper

Directions

Preheat oven to 400 degrees and line a baking sheet with parchment paper.

In a small bowl, mix together the almond flour, xantham gum, baking soda, and salt.

In a double boiler or microwave (30 seconds at a time on high), melt cream cheese and mozzarella together and stir until it forms a dough. Let cool slightly.

Knead together the cheese dough and dry ingredients until they are thoroughly and doughy.

Separate into 16 even pieces. Roll each piece into a long log shape and pinch the ends together into a bagel shape. Lay out on your baking sheet.

Mix all of the "everything topping" ingredients together in a small bowl. Brush the bagels liberally with water and sprinkle seasoning over them. Flip over and repeat until all topping is used.

Bake for 10-12 minutes, until they are browned. Watch carefully so they don't burn! Let cool slightly before serving.

Store extras in a sealed container in the refrigerator, reheat in a toaster oven or regular oven for a few minutes.

Nutritional Info: Each Mini Bagel: Calories: 117, Fat: 8.7g, Carbs: 3.2g (total), Fiber: 1.2g, Sugars: .5g, Protein: 7.9g

Show & Tell Cast - S02Ep017 - Escape From New York, The Delta Force & Big Trouble in Little China

Sat, 11 Aug 2018 09:09:00 GMT

This Episode’s Films

Tim: The Delta Force

Clay: Big Trouble Little China

Jonathon: Escape NY

Gtdjedi Podcast - Ep042 - Geeking Out With Mac Utilities

Fri, 03 Aug 2018 16:40:00 GMT

Jedi Weapons of Choice

Clay - Hazel, Bartender

Jerry - My Big Discussion Mac Utilities

Tim - TextExpander, Alfred

Gtdjedi Podcast - Ep041 - Noise Reduction

Thu, 19 Jul 2018 11:55:00 GMT

The Big Discussion

Eliminating the Noise & Getting Productive

Best Environment for Productivity

Maximizing Your Energy & Time

Multitasking vs. Single-tasking

Notification Settings

Do Not Disturb Settings

Screen Time Goals

Home Screen Setup

Show & Tell Cast - S02Ep016 - The Outsiders, Stardust & How To Train Your Dragon

Fri, 22 Jun 2018 09:09:00 GMT

This Episode’s Films

Tim: How to Train Your Dragon

Clay: The Outsiders

Jonathan: Stardust

Gtdjedi Podcast - Ep040 - Wwdc Recap

Wed, 06 Jun 2018 14:19:00 GMT

iLikes/iDislike

Clay: Siri Shorcuts, Walkie Talkie, Dark Mode on macOS
Jerry - WatchOS 5, Siri Shortcuts
Tim: iLike - Shortcuts hopefully having access to bluetooth, Dark mode iDislike - walkie talkie, pushing kids to play with AR instead of real toys, siri raise to speak on the watch

Bantha Fodder

What could you have done without?

Clay: AR Demos (not that into it), Pride band & watch face
Jerry: MeMoji
Tim: Leaning heavily on what they announced last year to pad time & the Adobe CTO

Read the full show notes here.

Show & Tell Cast - S02Ep015 - Casablanca, Amadeus & Forrest Gump

Wed, 09 May 2018 09:30:00 GMT

This Episode’s Films

Tim: Forrest Gump

Clay: Amadeus

Jonathan: Casablanca

Gtdjedi Podcast - Ep037 - Talking Drafts With Jedi Master Greg Pierce

Wed, 21 Mar 2018 17:31:00 GMT

The Dev Seg

Special Guest Greg Pierce of @agiletortoise

No title

Mon, 05 Mar 2018 19:10:00 GMT

I join my wife for a special episode of her podcast, Heymama

Laura is joined by her husband Tim this week for a show about life with two kids. They discuss their evolving nighttime routine, why the weekends are hard, and just in general: life with two kids is not relaxing.

Show And Tell Cast - S02Ep014 - The Postman, Reign Of Fire & Book Of Eli

Sat, 24 Feb 2018 09:18:00 GMT

This Episode’s Films

Tim: Reign of Fire

Clay: Book of Eli

Jonathan: The Postman

Gtdjedi Podcast - Ep036 - App Battle Ii - Notes Vs. Evernote Vs. Bear Notes

Wed, 21 Feb 2018 08:53:00 GMT

Note taking App Battle! I represent Bear!

App Battle: Apple Notes vs. Bear Notes vs. Evernote

Show & Tell Cast - S02Ep013 - Braveheart, The Patriot & We Were Soldiers

Sat, 03 Feb 2018 07:34:00 GMT

This Episode’s Films

Tim: Braveheart

Clay: The Patriot

Jonathan: We Were Soldiers

Omni Roadmap 2018 - The Omni Group

Fri, 26 Jan 2018 18:49:00 GMT

I amy very, very excited about this OmniFocus 3 news. I’ve been using Due for daily tasks and it will be great to go back to just 1 app.

My highlights:

The term that makes more intuitive sense to most people is tags: you can tag an item with a tag—or multiple tags—and later you can look at that tag to see all the items assigned to it.

Tags are incredibly flexible, letting you organize things in whatever ways make the most sense to you.

OmniFocus 3 solves this issue by letting each tag track its own independent ordering of tasks.

For OmniFocus 3, we wanted to add more flexible scheduling, but we also wanted to avoid overwhelming anyone with a bunch of decisions that they might not care about. To solve this, we turned to a design principle called progressive disclosure: we ask you to make simple decisions up front (like checking the option “does this repeat or not”), and as you proceed through the interface we progressively disclose more and more options based on what we already know about the task

OmniFocus 3 will still coalesce related notifications

Finally, for those cases where there is something that really absolutely must get done now, without delay (like taking your medication), we’re adding a new type of repeating notification that will keep reminding you about a task every few minutes until you tell OmniFocus that you’ve completed that task.

or OmniFocus 3, we’ll be adding powerful JavaScript-based automation much like what we’ve already shipped in OmniGraffle

This will enable dual-platform scripts which can be used to manipulate tasks in all sorts of ways, such as filtering, reporting, or creating content based on templates.

For OmniFocus 3, we’re adding support for linking tasks between unrelated databases. The idea is that I can send you a task (with its notes and attachments and due date) and propose that our tasks be linked, and you can choose whether to accept the link or not. While our tasks are linked, we can each see updates to the status of that specific task

we’re building OmniFocus for the Web. It will be greatly simplified from the OmniFocus you know

Gtdjedi Podcast - Ep034 - Our Favorite Things Of 2017

Wed, 22 Nov 2017 16:40:00 GMT

The Big Discussion

2017 Favorites

Favorite Device:

Jerry: iPhone X

Tim: Abstain (only new device was iPhone 8)

Clay: iPhone X

Favorite Accessory:

Jerry: Bose Soundsport Free

Clay: AirPods

Favorite New Software Feature:

Jerry: Multitasking on iPad Pro

Tim: Flashlight mode on Watch

Clay: Swipe Gesture Navigation on iPhone X

Favorite Productivity App:

Jerry: 1Password

Tim: Due

Clay: Newton Mail

Favorite Social Network App:

Jerry: Tweetbot

Tim: Narwhal (Reddit)

Clay: Twitterrific

Favorite Game:

Jerry: N/A

Tim: Baldur’s Gate

Clay: Conquist 2

Favorite Podcast (Non-TEKSide):

Jerry: MacBreak Weekly

Tim: The Glass Cannon

Clay: The Savage Nation

Favorite Movie:

Favorite TV Show:

Jerry: Real Time With Bill Maher

Tim: Stranger Things

Clay: Game of Thrones

Favorite Musical Artist:

Jerry: Bruno Mars

Tim: Dragonforce

Clay: The Chainsmokers

Show & Tell Cast - S02Ep011 - Star Wars Rogue One, Holiday Special & Force Awakens

Sun, 05 Nov 2017 08:39:00 GMT

This Episode’s Films

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

The Star Wars Holiday Special

Gtdjedi Podcast - Ep033 - Watching Forward

Thu, 02 Nov 2017 08:38:00 GMT

The Big Discussion

watchOS 4

My take on my Apple Watch Edition Series 3 with LTE

How has watchOS 4 changed how we use our Apple Watch?

What does the future hold for the Apple Watch? Could it become a primary device in the future? And what changes need to be made and what features need to be added for that to become a possibility?

Revisiting the Dock: The apps that have earned their place

How is the Series 0 handling it?

Our recommendation to listeners who are on the fence about a purchase?

Show & Tell Cast - S02Ep010 - Dune, Mystic River & Final Girls

Thu, 12 Oct 2017 08:33:00 GMT

This Episode’s Films

Tim: Mystic River

Clay: Dune

Jonathan: Final Girls

Gtdjedi Podcast - Ep032 -Mixed Emotions On Ios 11

Wed, 27 Sep 2017 08:28:00 GMT

The Big Discussion

How iOS 11 and macOS High Sierra can make us more productive

Our take on the latest builds.

Favorite new iOS features

Favorite app updates that take advantage of the new APIs?

What software changes we don’t like?

Where do we go from here?

Jedi Weapons of Choice (apps or features)

Clay - new device setup method, drag & drop

Jerry - iOS miscellaneous- new Screen shots, screen recording, Notes PDF capture..

Tim - Siri for todos -> Omnifocus

Show & Tell Cast - S02Ep009 - The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth & Tango & Cash

Sun, 10 Sep 2017 11:33:00 GMT

This Episode’s Films

Tim: The Dark Crystal

Clay: Tango & Cash

Jonathan: Labyrinth

Gtdjedi Podcast - Ep031 - An Array Of Topics

Thu, 24 Aug 2017 08:26:00 GMT

The Big Discussion

Follow-up (Tim)

Vacation Home screen (Tim)

Notability at a Work Conference (Jerry)

Goal & Habit Tracking (Clay)

Fuze Code Studio Will Let Kids Use The Switch To Code Their Own Switch Games

Sat, 22 Jul 2017 18:49:00 GMT

Amazing

Of the hundreds of noble efforts to teach kids to code, Fuze is one of them. Fuze has created its own programming language, Fuze BASIC, a riff on the classic BASIC programming language that was the foundation of Microsoft as a company and a formative experience for anyone who typed a program into an Apple II or Commodore 64. And now Fuze BASIC is coming to the Switch.

Gtdjedi Podcast - Ep030 - Health Tracking — Gtdjedi Podcast - The Tekside Network — Overcast

Fri, 21 Jul 2017 22:30:00 GMT

The Big Discussion

Apps We Use for Monitoring Our Health

Fitness

Nutrition

Special Needs

Mental Health

Lifestyle

Jedi Weapons of Choice

Clay - Health Kit, AutoSleep, Headspace, Lose It!, Peak

Jerry - OneTouch Reveal, Health Kit, Power Sync

Tim - Runkeeper, Beyond the Whiteboard, My Fitness Pal, Sleep Pulse 2, Sleep++, Zero, HealthKit, Headspace

Gtdjedi Podcast - Ep029 - Let'S Talk Sherlock

Sat, 08 Jul 2017 10:12:00 GMT

The Big Discussion

With WWDC behind us, the GTDJedi Council examines which categories of 3rd party apps may have been “sherlocked”.

Show & Tell Cast - S02Ep007 - Full Metal Jacket, Sneakers & Pcu

Sat, 08 Jul 2017 10:11:00 GMT

This Episode’s Films

Tim: Sneakers

Clay: Full Metal Jacket

Jonathan: PCU

Gtdjedi Podcast - Ep028 - App Battle - Ios Mail Vs Airmail Vs Newton

Sat, 08 Jul 2017 10:10:00 GMT

The Big Discussion

App Battles - Battle of the Email Clients

My pick won an Apple Design Award at WWDC 2017 🤘

Jedi Weapons of Choice

Clay - Newton

Jerry - iOS Mail

Tim - Airmail

Show & Tell Cast - S02Ep006 - The Wedding Singer, Super Troopers & Anchorman

Sat, 08 Jul 2017 10:09:00 GMT

This Episode’s Films

Tim: Anchorman

Clay: The Wedding Singer

Jonathan: Super Troopers

Gtdjedi Podcast - Ep027 - Device-Wise

Sat, 08 Jul 2017 10:07:00 GMT

The Big Discussion

Device Cycles (How long do we hold onto our devices?

Laptops/Desktops

Tablets

Phones

Watches

Cost vs. Features: How do you know when it is the right time to make a purchase?

Do you buy refurbished? The pros and cons?

How to maximize the life out of your devices?

Payment plan vs. outright purchase? Which is best for you?

Best way to get rid of your old device?

Show And Tell Cast - S02Ep005 - The Rocketeer, Reservoir Dogs & Groundhog Day

Mon, 01 May 2017 15:24:00 GMT

This Episode’s Films

Tim: The Rocketeer

Clay: Groundhog Day

Jonathan: Reservoir Dogs

Sensegrow PivotalTracker case study

Thu, 27 Apr 2017 12:45:00 GMT

For example, you should prioritize and select features based on an evaluation matrix and not just on the whims and fancies of individuals or customers.

Preach 🙏

Gtdjedi Podcast - Ep026 - A Day In The Life Of A Gtdjedi Master

Thu, 02 Mar 2017 20:55:00 GMT

The Big Discussion

Our Daily Routines (workflows that flow for us)

Kidfund is on Betalist!

Fri, 24 Feb 2017 09:31:00 GMT

My startup, Kidfund has been featured on Betalist!!

It would be a HUGE help to us if you could "heart" it. Doubly so if you could share on social media!

Feb 23 was a security day

Fri, 24 Feb 2017 09:22:00 GMT

Busy day yesterday:

Cloudflare leaked secrets
Google cracked SHA-1
Dropbox opensourced Securitybot: Automated Security at Scale

Show & Tell Cast - S02Ep003 - Blues Brothers, Drop Zone & American History X

Wed, 15 Feb 2017 08:28:00 GMT

This Episode’s Films

Tim: Drop Zone

Clay: American History X

Jonathan: Blues Brothers

The best iPhone case I've ever owned

Tue, 24 Jan 2017 19:29:00 GMT

Thank you, Jerry

The Sheath, the case is a svelte .90mm thick, full coverage case. Caudabe calls the material ShockLite, a soft gel-like flexible polymer with shock protection.

The Caudabe Sheath, on my iPhone 7+, is the best case I've ever used.

I need a case. I drop my phone on a weekly basis and I'm nitpicky. Apple's silicon grips my pocket too much. The leather feels weird when I sweat running. Bumpers are too wide. Other 3rd party cases don't stay on as well

This case nails it all: It feels great in my hand and pocket, its super thin, and so far has survived drop "tests"

Check out Jerry's full review here

Adding Smart Speed to any audio file with Audacity

Sun, 15 Jan 2017 09:18:00 GMT

The Overcast podcast app by Marco Arment has a killer feature called Smart Speed and it has ruined all audio listening for me outside of the app. Smart Speed dynamically shortens silences in talk shows; it saves you time, and makes them feel tighter and more produced. I wish I had it everywhere.

Tekside is a podcast network I'm part of, and while some of our shows are heavily edited, many are not. While doing some audio work for something else, my wife noticed that Audacity (cross platform) has a crud version of this type of audio processing. Here's how to set it up.

Setup

Download Audacity & install it. But don't run it yet. (If it opened as part of install, close it)
If you are working with audio files already, head to "Making it work". If you are pulling in .mov files from Skype Call Recorder see step 3
Install FFMPEG: If you are on a Mac, download and install this Otherwise, see these instructions

Making it work

Open Audacity
Click File -> Import Audio
Choose your audio recording
Optional: If Audacity prompts you to "Select Stream(s) to import", select all of them and hit OK
Select one of the audio streams and hit CMD+A to highlight all of the audio
Click Effect -> Truncate Silence
I currently have duration set to 0.9 and truncate to set to 0.5. What this does is find any silence longer that 0.9 seconds and shorten it to 0.5 seconds
Hit ok & let it run
File -> Export (As a WAV. You may have to hit OK a few times)
Done!

I'm still figuring out which duration will work best for which shows. It depends how fast the people on it already naturally talk and flow which each other. For Show and Tell, our movie podcast, the above settings strip a 55 min recording to 48 mins and it sounds a lot tighter.

Show And Tell Cast - S02Ep002 - Westworld, Point Break & The Departed

Sun, 15 Jan 2017 13:44:00 GMT

This Episode’s Films

Tim: The Departed

Clay: Point Break (Original)

Jonathan: Westworld (1973)

Remembering All Those Helpful Stackoverflow Posts

Mon, 09 Jan 2017 14:38:00 GMT

How often has this happened to you?

2 years ago

You are spelunking on Google and StackOverflow (SO).
You find what you need.
You graciously upvote and/or leave a comment.
You update your code and leave a comment.
You move on

Now

You come across the same problem. You remember finding it before. But it's a different job or project. Spelunking begins!
You look through your bookmarks
You try to remember how you Googled for it the last time
You eventually find it after an hour
You move on
This possibly happens again in the future

Now in the perfect world, we're keeping a programming notebook or remembering to bookmark/tag/organize what we find. If you do, awesome, I wish I was you. For the rest of us mere mortals, read on.

I wanted something that would let me search my collection of SO things so I could find it later. Here's where I ended up: Every SO post I star being automatically bookmarked with full-text search

The Flow

Use an instance of stack2rss to get an RSS feed of SO posts I've starred.
Run a Zap that pulls these in and sends them to my bookmarks (tagged as 'stackoverflow')
Search using Pinboard Premium which downloads the questions and archives them. (this is optional)

This has been working for me and I've already be able to re-find things that helped me before.

Setup

Spin up an instance of stack2rss. There is a demo available, but I've found it tends to go down. I've submitted a PR so you can 1 click install to Heroku. Click this
Get the url for your starred feeds: https://[YOUR-HEROKU-APP].herokuapp.com/2.2/users/[YOUR-SO-ID]/favorites?order=desc&sort=activity&site=stackoverflow
Login or Register with Zapier
Create a 2 step zap with the trigger being RSS by Zapier and Pinboard's create bookmark action
Set each up as follows

This has already saved me a lot of time. If you'd like help setting up, leave me a comment below

Show & Tell Cast - S02Ep001 - Dr. Strangelove, Young Guns & The Boondock Saints

Fri, 23 Dec 2016 09:19:00 GMT

This Episode’s Films

Tim: Boondock Saints

Clay: Young Guns

Jonathan: Dr. Strangelove

Gtdjedi Podcast - Ep022 - Where, When & How We Use Our Devices

Fri, 11 Nov 2016 13:26:00 GMT

The Big Discussion

Device Setups

App layout (home screens and dock)

Where, when and how we use our Apple Devices

Desktop

Laptop

Tablet

Phone

Laravel 5.4 – Higher Order Messaging For Collections

Mon, 07 Nov 2016 09:59:00 GMT

Two words: HELL, YES

The best way of showcasing this new feature is through code samples. Pretend you have a collection and you want to perform an operation on each of the items:

$invoices->each(function($invoice) {
  $invoice->pay();
});

With this new feature you will be able to simplify this into:

$invoices->each->pay();

via Laravel News

Using an Encrypted Realm in a background or notification processes?

Sun, 30 Oct 2016 13:54:00 GMT

Note: This post's primary purpose is to help me think through this problem. I have no prescribed solution at the end of it. The conversation will continue on Stack Overflow. I will update this post once I have a final approach.

Realm has a great write up and sample code for encrypting your database. This documentation and sample work as intended, until you try to decrypt realm when:

A user has a password on their phone
The device is locked
Your app is trying to do work with Realm when a remote notification comes in

This happens because we can't access the keychain to get (or create) the key to en/decrypt the Realm. The default kSecAttrAccessible value is kSecAttrAccessibleWhenUnlocked

There are a few options as I see them:

Change kSecAttrAccessible to kSecAttrAccessibleAlways. I don't like this because it's a) too open and b) it was slated to be deprecated in iOS 9
Change kSecAttrAccessible to kSecAttrAccessibleAfterFirstUnlock or kSecAttrAccessibleAfterFirstUnlockThisDeviceOnly. This is better but still feels too open to me, even though the docs state: This is recommended for items that need to be accessed by background applications
Create a second, non-encrypted Realm to use as a staging database. Store notification data here, then when the app wakes up from user interaction (the device would be unlocked), move the data from the staging Realm into the encrypted real one. This doesn't feel right either, as we'll have data temporarily not encrypted
Combine 2 and 3 and encrypt the staging Realm, and protect it's key with kSecAttrAccessibleAfterFirstUnlockThisDeviceOnly
??

I'm currently trying to decide if #2, if #3 is worth putting the time into, or if I can come up with a #5

Using iOS 10 devices with Xcode 7

Wed, 31 Aug 2016 16:33:00 GMT

Peter Steinberger started a GREAT gist on Using Xcode 7.3.1 and iOS 10 devices.

Below is what worked for me to get a few extra test devices (my carry phone runs the 10 beta) working with Xcode 7. Can't upgrade to 8 just yet. Working with a contractor and don't want to move too many pieces.

My Setup

Xcode 7.3.1 and Beta 6 iOS 10 beta 6 (Beta 7 is out, after getting this to work, I don't think I'm upgrading just yet)

Steps

sudo ln -s /Applications/Xcode-beta.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/DeviceSupport/10.0\ $14A5339a$/ /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/DeviceSupport
iPhone: Settings > General > Reset > Network Settings
Reboot iPhone (after it wakes back up from the network reset)
Reboot Mac (restarting Xcode alone didn't work)

It these steps don't work for you, check out the gist for other options.

How To Give Your Brain A Vacation

Mon, 22 Aug 2016 10:47:00 GMT

a 2011 UC study revealed that we take in the about 174 newspapers’ worth of information daily

😳😳😳

Click through for some great tips

Metallica’S New Song Is Their Ballsiest In Decades

Sun, 21 Aug 2016 10:58:00 GMT

The metal-heads who thought Metallica had turned into tired old wussies should sit down and shut up for three minutes, because the quartet is back with a new song that ranks as its best work in decades.

"Hell Yeah"

Metallica has been my favorite band since middle school. Their discography playlist is constantly played on Spotify. Since S&M, their work has been lack-luster. I've listened to it in the hopes it will be good. It never is.

After listening to this teaser song, I am VERY, VERY, excited. It's GREAT

Opening iTerm2 Tabs at Specific Directories

Thu, 21 Jul 2016 10:22:00 GMT

I love iTerm2. I can customize the stock Terminal.app just about as much, but it's much easier in iTerm. I find myself always opening the same 3 or 4 tabs when I get into coding mode. Luckily iTerm2 has great scripting support

The 4 tabs I always open for Kidfund are:

Our iOS project
Our Laravel project. Usually where I run artisan commands
Our Laravel project; Tails most recent file in the log directory
Our Laravel project; I jump around from here. Usually CD-ing to 1. the realm directory to pop it into Realm Browser

I didn't want this to run all of the time so I didn't have this script run each time iTerm opens. I instead wired it into an Alfred command. If you are interested you can download that here

The underlying script is as follows. It's crud, and could definitely be more flexible, but it works for me at the moment. Hopefully it can help you craft something to your needs

tell application "iTerm2"
  tell current session of current window
    write text "cd ~/workspace/kidfund/ios"
  end tell
  tell current window
    create tab with default profile
      tell current session of current tab
        write text "cd ~/workspace/kidfund/web"
      end tell
  end tell
    tell current window
    create tab with default profile
      tell current session of current tab
        write text "cd ~/workspace/kidfund/web && tail -f storage/logs/\"$(ls -at storage/logs | head -n 1)\""
      end tell
  end tell
    tell current window
    create tab with default profile
      tell current session of current tab
        write text "cd ~/workspace/kidfund/web"
      end tell
  end tell
end tell

Gtdjedi Podcast - Ep018 - Dock Worthy Watch Apps

Wed, 20 Jul 2016 09:18:00 GMT

The Big Discussion

6 Dock Worthy watchOS apps

Clay

Reminders

Drafts

2Do

Fantastical

Overcast

Workflow

Jerry

Reminders

Alarm.com

MLB At Bat

Automatic

1Password

Now Playing

Tim

Now playing

Workout

Omnifocus 2

Quick Switch

Runkeeper (future)

Gtdjedi Podcast - Ep017 - Automation Faves

Thu, 23 Jun 2016 18:35:00 GMT

GTDJedi Show Notes

Episode #: 17

Date: 06/21/16

Hosts: Clay Russell, Jerry Goldbaum & Timothy Broder

The Big Discussion

Top 5 Launch Center Pro & Workflow Use Cases

Hey Mama! Podcast

Mon, 20 Jun 2016 15:05:00 GMT

We bring our husbands on to discuss #fatherhood, have them share their #igotthis and #idontgotthis moments since becoming dads, and they make recommendations on apps, books and more for soon-to-be or new dads. We tell stories about their early parenting days and as usual, talk about our weeks.

I joined the Hey Mama! podcast for a very special Father's Day episode.

Check it out!

App Launching On Apple Watch

Sun, 19 Jun 2016 19:35:00 GMT

I love using the Stopwatch and Timer apps while I'm cooking or brewing coffee, but I don't want their complications visible during the rest of the day. The ability to swipe left and bring up an entire watch face devoted to them and any other complications relevant to cooking is a game changer for me. I'll keep my existing primary watch face configured with the date, and a few activity / fitness complications, and I'll also have my Movie watch face with no distractions that Ryan Considine inspired me to use.

I hadn't even thought about using different watch faces for different tasks or themes of tasks.

I already switch faces of its the weekend (don't need calendar for example) but this will take it to a whole new level

Github File and Link Tricks

Thu, 09 Jun 2016 10:25:00 GMT

2 tricks I learned today that I'd like to share: reliably linking to a specific line and searching for files using fuzzy matching.

Reliably link to a specific line

Say you are on the master branch, and you want to reference a line in a file. This could either be for a conversation you are having at that moment, answering a question in a PR, or adding information to a ticket. At that point in time, your link will work great. But, what about when that file gets changed tomorrow? More lines get added higher up, above the link, and the line that the link it pointing to, now points to something else!

You can easily have github switch to the latest commit for the file you are viewing. Just press 'y'. Then, when you link to a line, you are linking to THAT version of the file. You reference will always be intact.

Search for files using fuzzy matching

When you are browsing through files, there is a button in the upper right that says "Find file". I'm sure it's been there forever, but I just noticed it.

This brings you to a full file tree that you can search using fuzzy matching. Just like if you were in your IDE quick-opening a file!

Gtdjedi Podcast - Ep016 - Custom Keyboard Input

Thu, 02 Jun 2016 12:21:00 GMT

The Big Discussion

Custom Keyboards

Jedi Weapons of Choice

Clay - Gboard, Copied

Jerry - Gboard

Tim - Gboard, Bitmoji, MS Flow

Bantha Fodder (apps deleted from our devices)

Jerry - MS Flow

Tim - Rock Clock

Open source everything

Tue, 24 May 2016 16:51:00 GMT

Great 2 part series by @jesse_squires on the importance of documenting everything and the gains of working in open source. I picked up a few tricks, especially VVDocumenter-Xcode for docblock generation. But, more importantly is the ethos in which he approaches his work

Avoiding Blackberry’S Fate – Marco.Org

Sun, 22 May 2016 07:44:00 GMT

The BlackBerry’s success came to an end not because RIM started releasing worse smartphones, but because the new job of the smartphone shifted almost entirely outside of their capabilities, and it was too late to catch u

Today, Amazon, Facebook, and Google are placing large bets on advanced AI, ubiquitous assistants, and voice interfaces, hoping that these will become the next thing that our devices are for.

If they’re right — and that’s a big “if” — I’m worried for Apple.

Marco makes a lot of good points and I agree with this 100%. The mobile phone market as we know it is primed for the "next big thing" by someone. Who that is, and whether they are right remains to be seen. Do I mean that the current market is stagnant, or that innovation is dead? Of course not. But, I do think changes we'll see from the big 2 to their platforms will be incremental. There will always be new UI paradigms, features, and apps that can augment a platform.

The next large improvement will be what our devices start DOING with the data we give them. Not just inputs and outputs. But contextually understanding the data and begin to make predictions on it. Apple is "good" at the former; give them something and they will give it back to you quickly. iMessage and the new photos are examples of this. Passwords, backups, and sync are examples of where they fall short. However, they can't act on that data. Photos knows who someone is because you tagged them. Or knows how much you liked a photo or a restaurant because you gave it stars. Input and outputs. Compare this to Google photos (which is downright amazing) that automatically just "knows" who is in the photo or figures out that an event took place because you traveled to it.

Google is king of data mining and context (Facebook and Amazon are not far behind). As Marco explains in his piece, Apple just can't catch up to that. It's my hope that the awesome that Google will bring in the form of Ai to devices won't be restricted to Android. I'm sure that Android will always have the most seamless experience, but it will be nice if Google's apps bring much of it to iPhone. Even better, would be for Google and Apple to get along again ala when Google Maps came installed on your iPhone

Setup and Teardown the Database Once Per Test Suite in PHPUnit

Wed, 04 May 2016 16:15:00 GMT

I'm working on a series of integration tests where I want to set up and reset the database for each run. This could easily be done in the setUp and tearDown methods, but doing the full db each time is slow. Yes, I could just do the tables I need, but I was curious, and now I don't have to worry about which tables are setup in my testing DB. In this example, I'm using Laravel's migrations and SQLite as the test DB.

UPDATE 05/05/2016: As Sebastian points out below (thanks!) there is a much more appropriate way. Using setUpBeforeClass and tearDownAfterClass we achieve the same effect

public static function setUpBeforeClass()
{
    parent::setUpBeforeClass();
    exec('php artisan migrate --database sqlite_test');
}

public static function tearDownAfterClass()
{
    exec('php artisan migrate:reset --database sqlite_test');
    parent::tearDownAfterClass(); 
}

~~PHPUnit has listeners that you can tap into at various parts of your tests' lifecycle. I'm particularly interested in when a specific suite starts and ends. We'll need to do 2 things:~~

~~Create our Listener~~
~~Register this Listener in phpunit.xml~~

The listener is as follows:

class FullDBListener extends PHPUnit_Framework_BaseTestListener
{
    protected $suites = ['UserIntegrationTest', 'AccountIntegrationTest'];

    public function startTestSuite(PHPUnit_Framework_TestSuite $suite)
    {
        if (in_array($suite->getName(), $this->suites)) {
            exec('php artisan migrate --database sqlite_test');
        }
    }

    public function endTestSuite(PHPUnit_Framework_TestSuite $suite)
    {
        if (in_array($suite->getName(), $this->suites)) {
            exec('php artisan migrate:reset --database sqlite_test');
        }
    }
}

This does a few things:

~~Stores the class names of each suite we want to run the db migrations for~~
~~In startTestSuite it checks to see if we're in the right suite~~
~~If we are, run an artisan migration on our test db~~
~~In endTestSuite it checks to see if we're in the right suite~~
~~If we are, run an artisan migration:reset on our test db~~

~~Next, we need to make PHPUnit aware of this listener. Update your path accordingly~~

<listeners>
    <listener class="FullDBListener" file="./tests/app/FullDBListener.php"></listener>
</listeners>

That's it!

I do do some basic teardown in my test suite's setUp method to give me a blank slate. This has proven faster then doing the migrations each time

public function setUp()
{
    parent::setUp();

    User::truncate();
}

I hope this helped you, if you have any questions, let me know!

Sketch Git Plugin

Wed, 04 May 2016 11:10:00 GMT

A Git client built right into Sketch. Generate pretty diffs so that everybody knows what are the changes!

Designers can use git too!

Gtdjedi Podcast - Ep015 - Notes On Notes

Wed, 27 Apr 2016 09:22:00 GMT

Note Management & Organization

What kind of notes go where: images, text, bookmarks, photos?

Will we see services eventually go away as native solutions become more complete?

The importance of syncing and sharing

Note Widgets: Do you use them? Which ones & how?

Being A Developer After 40 — Medium

Tue, 26 Apr 2016 18:33:00 GMT

Good #longread for any developer. Regardless of how long you've been doing this

Hi everyone, I am a forty-two years old self-taught developer, and this is my story.

Presenting Unanticipated Errors To Users

Tue, 26 Apr 2016 10:25:00 GMT

This is the start of a really great series. It uses Swift for the examples but everything in the articles holds true for any language/platform

First, some quick terminology:

an error condition is a failed conditional check that results in a function skipping its usual functionality and instead returning an nominated error value.

an error is a value used to report that an error condition occurred and normal functionality was skipped

error handling is code that looks for errors and performs different actions based on the presence of those errors

error reporting communicates an error result from a user task to the user

Trying to Mock a Self Booting Laravel Model Trait

Tue, 12 Apr 2016 11:01:00 GMT

Bootable Model traits are pretty nifty. I'm using them to register certain events for the models using my Trait. However, I've run into an issue trying to mock models that are using the trait. Specifically, when a Mockery version of the model is instantiated, it's boot code agrees that it should have a bootMyTrait method, but can't find it when it tries to call it.

Sample Repository for the below, with commands to reproduce.

As an example, here is a trait:

namespace App;
trait MyTrait
{
    public static function bootMyTrait()
    {
        print("Booting MyTrait\n");
    }
}

And a model using it:

namespace App;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;
class MyModel extends Model
{
    use MyTrait;
}

Instantiating the model regularly works fine. This shows the desired output:

$model = new MyModel();

However, trying to mock this model does not cooperate. This:

use Illuminate\Foundation\Testing\WithoutMiddleware;
use Illuminate\Foundation\Testing\DatabaseMigrations;
use Illuminate\Foundation\Testing\DatabaseTransactions;


class ExampleTest extends TestCase
{
    /**
     * A basic functional test example.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    public function testTraitBooting()
    {
        $model = $this->getMock('App\MyModel');
    }
}

Fails. Adding some debugging to Eloquent:

    /**
     * Boot all of the bootable traits on the model.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    protected static function bootTraits()
    {
        $class = static::class;

        foreach (class_uses_recursive($class) as $trait) {
            print("\nTesting that class: $class has method: " . $method = 'boot'.class_basename($trait) . " because of Trait: $trait\n");
            if (method_exists($class, $method = 'boot'.class_basename($trait))) {
                print("Class: $class has method: $method \n");
                try {
                    forward_static_call([$class, $method]);
                } catch (\PHPUnit_Framework_MockObject_BadMethodCallException $e) {
                    print("Class: $class failed calling $method\n");
                    throw $e;
                }
            }
        }
    }

Gives us this failure:

PHPUnit 5.1.0 by Sebastian Bergmann and contributors.

E                                                                   1 / 1 (100%)
Testing that class: Mock_MyModel_9ee820db has method: bootMyTrait because of Trait: App\MyTrait
Class: Mock_MyModel_9ee820db has method: bootMyTrait
Class: Mock_MyModel_9ee820db failed calling bootMyTrait


Time: 129 ms, Memory: 18.00Mb

There was 1 error:

1) ExampleTest::testTraitBooting
PHPUnit_Framework_MockObject_BadMethodCallException:

mock-bootable-laravel-model-trait/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Database/Eloquent/Model.php:326
mock-bootable-laravel-model-trait/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Database/Eloquent/Model.php:309
mock-bootable-laravel-model-trait/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Database/Eloquent/Model.php:296
mock-bootable-laravel-model-trait/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Database/Eloquent/Model.php:277
mock-bootable-laravel-model-trait/tests/ExampleTest.php:16

I've also tried creating the mock a few different ways. Using DatabaseSoftDeletingTraitTest as an example:

use Illuminate\Foundation\Testing\WithoutMiddleware;
use Illuminate\Foundation\Testing\DatabaseMigrations;
use Illuminate\Foundation\Testing\DatabaseTransactions;
use Mockery as m;

class ExampleTest extends TestCase
{
    /**
     * A basic functional test example.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    public function testTraitBooting()
    {
        $mock = m::mock('App\MyModel');
        $mock->shouldReceive('bootMyTrait')->once();
    }
}

But here, bootMyTrait is never called:

PHPUnit 5.1.0 by Sebastian Bergmann and contributors.

E                                                                   1 / 1 (100%)

Time: 149 ms, Memory: 19.25Mb

There was 1 error:

1) ExampleTest::testTraitBooting
Mockery\Exception\InvalidCountException: Method bootMyTrait() from Mockery_0_App_MyModel should be called
 exactly 1 times but called 0 times.

mock-bootable-laravel-model-trait/vendor/mockery/mockery/library/Mockery/CountValidator/Exact.php:37
mock-bootable-laravel-model-trait/vendor/mockery/mockery/library/Mockery/Expectation.php:271
mock-bootable-laravel-model-trait/vendor/mockery/mockery/library/Mockery/ExpectationDirector.php:120
mock-bootable-laravel-model-trait/vendor/mockery/mockery/library/Mockery/Container.php:297
mock-bootable-laravel-model-trait/vendor/mockery/mockery/library/Mockery/Container.php:282
mock-bootable-laravel-model-trait/vendor/mockery/mockery/library/Mockery.php:142
mock-bootable-laravel-model-trait/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Foundation/Testing/TestCase.php:122

So, I can move the code I'm doing in the boot method to a ServiceProvider, but then I'll need to register each Model that uses the trait. This feels dirty, and using the boot method seems appropriate. So I think I've either hit a bug, or am Mocking the trait-using-model incorrectly. I've looked at getMockForTrait but I also need the mocked instance to extend Eloquent (a few of the trait's methods call eloquent methods)

If anyone sees something I missed, much appreciated

Update Apr, 22 (Friday) 2016-04-22 03:28 PM

Thanks to Marcin, we have a solution!

<?php

use Illuminate\Foundation\Testing\WithoutMiddleware;
use Illuminate\Foundation\Testing\DatabaseMigrations;
use Illuminate\Foundation\Testing\DatabaseTransactions;
use Mockery as m;

class ExampleTest extends TestCase
{
    /**
     * A basic functional test example.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    public function testTraitBooting()
    {
        $mock = m::mock('App\MyModel')->makePartial();
        $mock->shouldReceive('bootMyTrait')->once();
        $mock->__construct();
    }
}

Everything Is Possible But Nothing Is Free

Mon, 04 Apr 2016 17:47:00 GMT

What those asking really want to know, though, is one of two things:

Can you just build this thing I want, in addition to all the other things already on your plate, without moving any of your estimates?

Is this “easy” to do?

Here’s a simpler approach: I would like to have this and I’m willing to pay up to that.

Gtdjedi Podcast - Ep014 - Getting Social

Sun, 03 Apr 2016 15:30:00 GMT

The Big Discussion

Social Networking

Which services we use

Which services manage which relationships

Which services we stay away from

What routines are in place that help keep our circles and feeds streamlined

What does it take for a social network to have staying power on your devices?

Jedi Weapons of Choice

Clay - Tweetbot

Jerry - Facebook Paper

Tim - Cluster

Jumping Ship on Basecamp 3

Tue, 29 Mar 2016 18:06:00 GMT

I love Basecamp. I've used it in some shape or form for almost 7 years. I was super excited for Basecamp 3. I wish I could say "It's not you, it's me" but that would be a lie.

Basecamp 3 is not ready

Does it have bugs? No, none that I've seen. Does it have downtime? No, it's been rock solid. What v3 is missing are some key features found in v2. Ones I didn't realize were missing until I went to use them. I've tried to live without them, or work around them best I can, but I'm done.

I started at a new company in January and choosing our tools is my responsibility. Slack and Google Apps were first on the list. Next came something to handle tracking long form conversations and company/project todos. I love basecamp. A new version just came out. Easy decision. One that I now regret.

What I miss from Basecamp 2:

Email In
An API (specifically Zapier integration)
Sorting posts by most recently commented

(The third one pushed me over the edge)

Email-in

There are a lot of people in this world that don't like tools like Basecamp. "Why can't I just use email", "the search sucks", "It's just another thing I have to check" can be heard with regularity. Part of my job involved parading around the office championing Basecamp (or forcing people to use it). Email-in made part of these complaints bearable. It made it "just as easy" as email for starting, or replying to, threads. Basecamp 3 was the promise land that addressed a lot of this with better search and better notifications.

Email in isn’t on the roadmap nor is it listed on the “should we switch" page.

This functionality is partially there, hidden away in the "forward from client" section. When I found out it was missing I almost left, but I figured I could cobble something together with the API and Zapier...

API

I have a few main use cases for an API. The primary one being a hacked together Email-in. The second is replicating Basecamp tasks in my todo app. (I happen to use Omnifocus.)

Lacking an API, or a roadmap for one, I grumbled. But, I figured I could wait and make my tasks by hand. After all, that's me wanting to work the way I like to. Manually entering emails into Basecamp, littering messages with "as communicated by," seemed a small price to pay.

The missing API is listed on the should we switch page, after a long discussion on Github

The good news on the API front is that there has been GREAT progress. I got excited. Soon everything would be as it should

Post Sorting

This hurdle just dawned on me this morning while I was scrolling down looking for something. Basecamp 3 only sorts posts by their created date. Which meant that our most frequently updated post, with dozens of comments, is all the way at the bottom, with a bunch of fluff between me and it. It seemed like there had to be a way to change the sort, but I confirmed with Basecamp this is not available.

Use search! Ok, but now an app is asking me to take on cognitive load of something it should handle

You are using it wrong! Don't even go there, I spent years at my last job working with some of the best UX and Creative Designers I've ever seen. If "the customer just isn't using it right" was used as an argument, we hadn't solved the problem

Use notifications! I do, they go away

One could argue that I'm just annoyed that "things have changed and I just want things to go back to the way they were in 2". I thought about that. Is this just me? Am I just whining? Email in and an API are missing, not changed.

Using "Email In" isn't the way the product was meant to be used! Tough, it was there for years.

Even if I could suck it up and trudge through lacking email and API, It is beyond me why you would want older content above newer content

So, I'm leaving. We are moving too fast for this to slow us down. I can't wait for "someday/maybe" (Basecamp does not release timelines; I respect that but it doesn't help me here)

Tim, if you love v2 so much, just use it. I might! But:

I'm not sure how long v2 will be around
When it does get decommissioned, will my above issues still exist?
Will a v2 to v3 migratory exist? (I would hope so)

The barrier to switching will be much higher if/when v2 dies than it is now. Should I switch to v2? Probably. Should I take some time and look at something like http://asana.com? Yep, I have. Now if I could just get over how they format the emails...

How to Get Notified if someone stars, forks, or follows your Github

Fri, 25 Mar 2016 15:41:00 GMT

I've been using GitNotifier for a few weeks now. I get a weekly report emailed to me of who has starred or forked any of my repositories, as well as follow/unfollows. It's a nice little touch to put on top of Github's already great service

How To Set Up An Ios And Android Smart App Banner

Tue, 22 Mar 2016 21:04:00 GMT

Leveraging their link redirect and deep linking expertise, Branch just released a fully customizable, cross-platform, deep linking and tracking smart app banner. It works on all browsers: Safari, Chrome, Firefox, stock browsers and even desktop versions.

This looks pretty good. Curious how well it will play with JLRoutes

Tektok Podcast - Ep025 - Ocd & The Se

Tue, 22 Mar 2016 20:46:00 GMT

TEK Topics

Patrick: iPhone SE

What are your thoughts on the iPhone SE, was Apple smart to hold this device out for Spring announcement?

Jerry: Smartphone as a primary (and only) computing device?

Can your smartphone be your primary (and only) computing device?

Tim: Mobile Money

How comfortable are you sending money with your phone? (venmo, square cash, FBM, snapchat)

How comfortable are you giving these apps your CC or checking account info?

Snuck in some discussion about Kidfund ;)

Disclosed of course

Justin: RSS and news apps

What is your routine for saving news/blog posts? By the time you get to them are they already old news?

Clay: Homescreens on iOS

How would you like to see the home screen changed in iOS?

Gtdjedi Podcast - Ep013 - Default Worthy Apps

Thu, 10 Mar 2016 15:07:00 GMT

GTDJedi Show Notes

Episode #: 13

Date: 03/08/16

Hosts: Clay Russell, Jerry Goldbaum & Timothy Broder

The Big Discussion

Which 3rd party apps have you replaced native apps with?

Jira Filter Subscriptions

Mon, 22 Feb 2016 23:00:00 GMT

I'm working in a Jira that I don't have admin access to. It's been a while since that's happened!

I wanted a way to get notified if anyone in the system opens a new ticket, so I could decide if I wanted to watch it or not. Jira makes this fairly straightforward with filters and subscriptions.

First, create a filter that picks up any tickets created in the last hour. I named mine "Recently Created"

Then, click details, and new subscription

Setup the schedule to be every 30 mins, 24 hours a day, and to not email you if there are no new issues

You'll get a well formatted email if there are new issues, and you can cherry pick the ones you want to watch

Gtdjedi Podcast - Ep012 - Notification Organization

Wed, 03 Feb 2016 08:41:00 GMT

Hosts: Clay Russell, Jerry Goldbaum & Timothy Broder

Jedi Tricks from Around the Web (check out our website for links to all these GTDJedi Tricks)

Secret Safari Shortcuts by Rene Ritchie

How Email to 2Do Has Improved My Daily Email Workflow by Federico Viticci

Ultimate Omnifocus Evernote Integration That Actually Works by Alpha Efficiency

How to Master Slack at the Office by Jessica Plautz

If you, our listeners, have at trick you would like to share with us, simply tweet us @GTDJedi.

The Big Discussion

Notification Management

Jedi Weapons of Choice

Clay - my Apple Watch

Jerry - Notify, Apple Watch, Outlook

Tim - Slack, General iOS/Mac practices

Activist Engineering

Tue, 02 Feb 2016 18:16:00 GMT

What matters is that you’re the engineer that’s noticed this capital-B Bad Idea. You know why it’s a problem. This time it’s not just the technical debt or the time it’d take to implement. This idea is bad because it trades a worse product for a better “business”: revenue, eyeballs, impressions, you know the drill.

You have a choice in this moment. You can stay quiet and hope it goes away or point it out, question it, and even argue against it

Giving Better Code Reviews

Mon, 01 Feb 2016 19:08:00 GMT

Great read. I would have ended up quoting most of it. Enjoy

Your team is only as good as your weakest reviewer.

Trust no one

Giving a valuable code review requires that pull requests are small (<200 lines as a rough gauge)

Testing UIViewController Transitions with Quick and Swift

Sun, 31 Jan 2016 14:57:00 GMT

The examples below are using the Quick test framework, but the principals we're going to talk about can be used in any setup.

We have some complicated logic further down our user registration flow. I want to make sure that the right UIViewControllers are appearing when they are supposed to. I've been reading a few different approaches on how to handle this. Below is where I've ended up, and I'm pretty happy with it.

For simplicity's sake, I'm going to show how to test if the user has tapped "Login" or "Register" on our opening screen. We can assume we have a LoadingViewController which represents the first screen. On this screens are two buttons, which correspond to these actions:

@IBAction func tapLogin(sender: AnyObject) {
    self.navigationController?.pushViewController(self.storyboard?.instantiateViewControllerWithIdentifier("loginview") as! LoginViewController, animated: true)
}

@IBAction func tapRegister(sender: AnyObject) {
    self.navigationController?.pushViewController(self.storyboard?.instantiateViewControllerWithIdentifier("registerview") as! RegisterViewController, animated: true)
}

We also have a UINavigationController taking care of the view hierarchy. I also want to use the transitions and IDs already set up in the Storyboard.

Let's start by referencing the UINavigationController and the UIViewController we're going to start with.

class LandingScreenUITests: QuickSpec {
    override func spec() {
        describe("Landing Screen") {
            
            var viewController: LoadingViewController!
            var navigationController: UINavigationController!
            
            
        }
    }
}

Next, we're going to instantiate the storyboard, both controllers, and push the VC onto the view hierarchy

beforeEach {
    let storyboard = UIStoryboard(name: "Main", bundle: NSBundle(forClass: self.dynamicType))
    viewController = storyboard.instantiateViewControllerWithIdentifier("loadingview") as! LoadingViewController
    navigationController = storyboard.instantiateViewControllerWithIdentifier("navigationcontroller") as! UINavigationController
    
    navigationController.pushViewController(viewController, animated: false)
    
    let _ =  viewController.view
}

Two gotchas to watch out for here:

Make sure Main.Storyboard is available in your Test target
Make sure to use the self.dynamicType bundle above

Missing either of these may result in a weird casting error:

Could not cast value of type 'MyApp.LoadingViewController' (0x10b9f5e50) to MyAppUITests.LoadingViewController' (0x11f894370).

Finally, lets call the appropriate methods on our initial UIViewController, and test the type of the UIViewController that has been put on the top of the hierarchy. Note: I use toEventually here to wait for the transition animation

describe("User wants to log in") {
    it("taps Login") {
        viewController.tapLogin(self)
        expect(navigationController.visibleViewController).toEventually(beAKindOf(LoginViewController))
    }
}

describe("User wants to register") {
    it("taps Register") {
        viewController.tapRegister(self)
        expect(navigationController.visibleViewController).toEventually(beAKindOf(RegisterViewController))
    }
}

For reference, here is the whole test class together:

import Foundation
import Quick
import Nimble
@testable import MyApp

class LandingScreenUITests: QuickSpec {
    override func spec() {
        describe("Landing Screen") {
            
            var viewController: LoadingViewController!
            var navigationController: UINavigationController!
            
            beforeEach {
                let storyboard = UIStoryboard(name: "Main", bundle: NSBundle(forClass: self.dynamicType))
                viewController = storyboard.instantiateViewControllerWithIdentifier("loadingview") as! LoadingViewController
                navigationController = storyboard.instantiateViewControllerWithIdentifier("navigationcontroller") as! UINavigationController
                
                navigationController.pushViewController(viewController, animated: false)
                
                let _ =  viewController.view
            }

            describe("User wants to log in") {
                it("taps Login") {
                    viewController.tapLogin(self)
                    expect(navigationController.visibleViewController).toEventually(beAKindOf(LoginViewController))
                }
            }
            
            describe("User wants to register") {
                it("taps Register") {
                    viewController.tapRegister(self)
                    expect(navigationController.visibleViewController).toEventually(beAKindOf(RegisterViewController))
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

Many thanks to the blog posts referenced at the top of this post

Tektok Podcast - Ep023 - Overly Connected

Thu, 28 Jan 2016 15:21:00 GMT

I had the pleasure of joining the Tektok podcast this week

Episode #: 23

Date: 01/25/16

Hosts: Brian Feldhaus,Timothy Broder & Clay Russell

TEK Topics

Brian: Android in more places. How do you feel about this??

JetBlue entertainment system, Clover payments, etc.

Tim: Communication: we are way past email and texting with slack, hangouts, Facebook groups, basecamp, hip chat, etc.

What is everyone using to communicate at home and at work?

Clay: Getting to Know our Panelists:

Name one app, movie, TV show, book and album that best define who you are.

Sweet & Sour TEK

Tim: Nuzzle for iOS

Clay: Interact for iOS (Universal $4.99)

The Wertzone: A History Of Epic Fantasy - Part 1

Sun, 10 Jan 2016 20:57:00 GMT

Rather than simply throw up my own list (although I may put together a Gratuitous List of such in the coming weeks), I thought it might be more interesting to look at epic fantasy, or at least the modern interpretation of the subgenre, through a chronological perspective. This has the benefit of allowing works to be listed without too much regard for whether they're any "good" or not, but more by their importance in the development of the field.

I'm only about 1/4 way through reading this blog series but it's very well written, I'm learning new things, and adding PLENTY to my goodreads list.

Highly recommend if you are a fan of the genre

5 Reasons Why You Should Build A Small Business — Not A Start-Up

Sat, 26 Dec 2015 10:24:00 GMT

The question we ask, whenever we hear about a new business or idea, whether it’s renewable energy or a messaging app or a fucking hamster sled, is this:

Will it scale?

You Can Focus On Simplicity

People Matter More

Vagrant 1.8 is out! Linked clones, snapshots, port, ansible and more!

Mon, 21 Dec 2015 18:59:00 GMT

Vagrant 1.8 is out and it's a huge update. My 3 favorite features are below. Click through above for the full list

Snapshots are a feature of hypervisors that allow the point-in-time state of a virtual machine to be saved and restored

This is awesome. No more copy disks around or worrying you forgot to back up the DB or git stash!

New command: port - This will display a list of forwarded ports to the guest machine. This is especially useful if Vagrant is auto-correcting ports in the case of collisions.

New provisioner: ansible_local - This executes Ansible on the guest machine rather than on the host machine.

Installing Vagrant and other Hashicorp products using brew cask on OSX

Fri, 18 Dec 2015 19:12:00 GMT

Came accross this awesome gem today while setting up a new laptop

➜  ~  vagrant
zsh: command not found: vagrant
➜  ~  brew cask install vagrant
==> Downloading https://releases.hashicorp.com/vagrant/1.7.4/vagrant_1.7.4.dmg
Already downloaded: /Library/Caches/Homebrew/vagrant-1.7.4.dmg
==> Running installer for vagrant; your password may be necessary.
==> Package installers may write to any location; options such as --appdir are ignored.
==> installer: Package name is Vagrant
==> installer: Installing at base path /
==> installer: The install was successful.
🍺  vagrant staged at '/opt/homebrew-cask/Caskroom/vagrant/1.7.4' (6 files, 82M)
➜  ~  vagrant
Usage: vagrant [options] <command> [<args>]

    -v, --version                    Print the version and exit.
    -h, --help                       Print this help.

Common commands:
     box             manages boxes: installation, removal, etc.
     connect         connect to a remotely shared Vagrant environment
     destroy         stops and deletes all traces of the vagrant machine
     global-status   outputs status Vagrant environments for this user
     halt            stops the vagrant machine
     help            shows the help for a subcommand
     init            initializes a new Vagrant environment by creating a Vagrantfile
     login           log in to HashiCorp's Atlas
     package         packages a running vagrant environment into a box
     plugin          manages plugins: install, uninstall, update, etc.
     provision       provisions the vagrant machine
     push            deploys code in this environment to a configured destination
     rdp             connects to machine via RDP
     reload          restarts vagrant machine, loads new Vagrantfile configuration
     resume          resume a suspended vagrant machine
     share           share your Vagrant environment with anyone in the world
     ssh             connects to machine via SSH
     ssh-config      outputs OpenSSH valid configuration to connect to the machine
     status          outputs status of the vagrant machine
     suspend         suspends the machine
     up              starts and provisions the vagrant environment
     version         prints current and latest Vagrant version

For help on any individual command run `vagrant COMMAND -h`

Additional subcommands are available, but are either more advanced
or not commonly used. To see all subcommands, run the command
`vagrant list-commands`.

➜  ~

Why Quizup Turned The Fastest-Growing Game In History Into A Social Platform

Fri, 18 Dec 2015 19:12:00 GMT

Being data-driven helped grow QuizUp from a hot new game that could acquire users into a social platform that could keep them around. They worked to understand how people were using their app, and what actions lead a user to be retained. Then they worked as a team to develop QuizUp’s social features and solve the second half of the growth formula. In the process, by utilizing usage data throughout the development process, they created the thing that their customers had been telling them they wanted all along.

Show & Tell Cast - Ep014 - Star Wars Prequel Trilogy

Fri, 11 Dec 2015 08:51:00 GMT

Star Wars: The Prequel Trilogy

Episode I: The Phantom Menace

Episode II: Attack of the Clones

Episode III: Revenge of the Sith

Listen in if you want to hear me intro the show as Jar Jar Binks!

Why 2Do Is My New Favorite Ios Task Manager

Fri, 11 Dec 2015 08:25:00 GMT

Great review of 2Do by Viticci. If I wasn't already so invested in Omnifocus, this looks like it would be perfect.

2Do perfectly adapts to the way I work.

This is THE most critical thing when choosing a task manager. Trello still maps 100% to the way I think, but Omnifocus fits seamlessly in with the way I work

New Manager Tools

Wed, 09 Dec 2015 10:45:00 GMT

This article leans slightly towards Technology Management but is applicable across disciplines

You've been a great senior resource, you've lead a team or a project, and you've made the decision, along with your manager to transition to some kind of management role. If you are still thinking about it, or wondering what it will be like, start here: This 90-Day Plan Turns Engineers into Remarkable Managers. This article will give you all of the thought starters your need to decide if management is something you want to pursue.

Below are some required reading to add to your utility belt. Start taking a read through these, and make sure you block off the appropriate amount of time each week to continue your learning! This list is meant to be a starting point for new managers, not an all inclusive list of manager resources

Books

Managing Right for the First Time - This book is intended as a field guide for first time managers, or for managers who want to begin doing a better job. David Baker worked closely with 600+ companies and interviewed more than 10,000 employees, then summarized the findings in an interesting and eminently readable form. Read this book and you're likely to understand management and leadership like you never have before, but also learn very practical steps toward becoming a better manager and leader.
Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity - Note: I'm not advocating for using the GTD system. Use what works for you. However, the first half of this book is a gold mine for how to think about planning, resources, and managing your own and other's tasks. I personally do use GTD, but the lessons, and the way of thinking that this book opens up is transferable to any system. It got me thinking about planning and delegating in different and exciting ways. Read the introduction and I guarantee that you'll see scenarios you recognize and want to scream "YES, YES I DEAL WITH THIS. I HATE IT! HOW DO I FIX IT?"
The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business - This book is, but isn't about MBA. It's a toolkit of how to handle various situations and grow your skill set. It's not meant to be read cover to cover, but peruse the table of contents you'll see things you want to read.
Emotional Intelligence for Project Managers: The People Skills You Need to Achieve Outstanding Results - Great book on emotional intelligence

Articles to read

This 90-Day Plan Turns Engineers into Remarkable Managers
Management Time: Who’s Got the Monkey? - How to delegate and not be caught under a fire hose of people waiting on you
Meetings that don’t suck
What Everyone Needs to Know About Running Productive Meetings
Managing Engineers Reading List on Github
Tough Love Performance Reviews, in 10 Minutes

Websites to subscribe to

Harvard Business Review - I subscribe to these tags and have learned SO much: Coaching, Decision Making, Leadership, Leadership, Motivating People, Leading Teams, Managing People, Communication, Managing Yourself, Productivity, Work-Life Balance
Software Lead Weekly
Marc Hedlund's Blog - This hasn't been updated in a few years, but skim the article list. Lots of good things
http://randsinrepose.com/

Listening

Manager Tools Podcast - A huge library of how to deal with any situation. Skim the list, there will be something in there you want to learn about. Don't forget to subscribe!

*Thanks to mshmsh5000 and jessicalippke for input If you have anything that should be on this starter list, let me know!

Omnifocus For Mac V2.4 Ready For A Push - The Omni Group

Mon, 07 Dec 2015 15:42:00 GMT

Due Soon also includes a new option—“Today”—which includes only items due before midnight instead of over “the next 24 hours.”

I am so happy for this. My most wanted feature. I use a hacky 8pm default time to make "due soon" be "today, sort of, even if I'm working a little late".

Now to figure out what my new default time will be!

So, over the past few months, we built our own service for Mac to match what Apple’s APN provided us on iOS.

This is just impressive

Still Using Feedbin

Mon, 07 Dec 2015 11:45:00 GMT

Feedbin is under continual development and every few of months there's a new feature released or small improvements made to the user-interface.

I signed up for Feedbin and Feed Weangler the day they came out. I was a huge Google Reader junkie (and had even written add-on modules for it ). I wanted to make sure I had a great service when it finally shut down. I paid for both services for 2 years to fully try them both out.

I've been more than happy with Feedbin. It gets regular updates, is super fast, and integrates with all of the apps I use on my phone or Mac. Feed Wrangler had the killer feature of not showing RSS items if you had already loaded them into Instapaper. I wanted this to be enough to keep using it, but unfortunately it wasn't. I love David Smith, his work, and all he does for the community. But it's obvious that Feed Wrangler isn't his main focus. That's ok! But, I want a product they continually approves beyond security updates

Five Lesser-Known Features Of Php 7 | Colin O'Dell

Fri, 04 Dec 2015 06:34:00 GMT

With the imminent release of PHP 7 on the horizon, I thought it would be cool to check out some of the lesser-known features coming with the 7.0.0 release

Craig Federighi Talks Open Source Swift And What’S Coming In Version 3.0

Thu, 03 Dec 2015 20:31:00 GMT

So many good things happened with Swift and open source today.

The project will be hosted on GitHub and will include the compiler, the LLDB debugger, the REPL command-line environment, the standard and core libraries, and code from supporting projects.

There is a LOT over on Apple's new GitHub

New to Swift (and also open source) is the Swift Package Manager

Apple engineers working on Swift will start using the GitHub repos, developing the language out in the open.

So instead of getting a big Swift 3.0 info dump at WWDC 2016 in the summer and then digging into the Xcode betas and adapting, developers can already find an “evolution document” on the Swift site that maps out where the language is headed in its next major version.

One of Apple’s goals for Swift 3.0 is source compatibility going forward so that Swift code that is written may need to be recompiled as the language continues to evolve, but it will need to be rewritten or changed less frequently or not at all.

“We’ll be supporting Objective-C and continuing to evolve it as necessary to fit into this evolving world. We do think that Swift is the language that we recommend for new developers to our platform who are investing for the future and building new apps. We think Swift is absolutely the right place to start. But we’ll continue to maintain, advance, and support Objective-C for as far as we can see

Awesome Self Hosted

Wed, 02 Dec 2015 09:37:00 GMT

Great list of self hosted OSS

First Timers Only

Wed, 25 Nov 2015 15:45:00 GMT

A suggestion to Open Source project maintainers

The hard part of getting into open source for the first time isn’t the implementation of a feature, but figuring out how to actually contribute code.

Great read on setting up your open source project for success as well as making it EASY for people to make their first contribution

Top Four 5: Podcasts

Sat, 14 Nov 2015 07:42:00 GMT

Marco and Tiff rank their four favorite podcasts (right now)

This episode of Top Four was great. It did NOTHING to help the number of podcasts that I want to listen to. I already listen to a lot so adding would have to mean removing something if it was for my personal queue.

Luckily, it did give Laura and I some great ideas for shows to listen to together in the car. As we get closer to holiday season and start driving around the northeast, these will be a huge help:

Roderick on the Line sounds like something I'd really enjoy. But, at 178 episodes it's too intimidating. I can only handle one "catch up" show. (Interesting that both of these involve Merlin). If I had more space/time, Reply All would be first up

Show & Tell - Ep013 - Star Wars Original Trilogy

Tue, 10 Nov 2015 09:24:00 GMT

Star Wars: The Original Trilogy

A New Hope!
The Empire Strikes Back!
Return of the Jedi!

This episode was a lot of fun and has a few surprise guests

Science Says Snapchat Makes You Happy

Sun, 01 Nov 2015 09:23:00 GMT

The study, titled “Sharing the small moments: ephemeral social interaction on Snapchat,” concluded that Snapchat interactions are correlated with increased “social enjoyment and positive mood” compared to those on platforms like Facebook. In other words, the quick-fire moments you experience on Snapchat — which is used to share videos and photographs that disappear after a short amount of time — might make you happier than other social media.

I need to get better at understanding snapchat. I feel like a dinosaur

I seem to have the mental bandwidth for 2 social networks. For me the non-negotiable one is Twitter where I read everything. Part of this is keeping the number of people I follow to ~200 and a heavy use of mute filters. I've recently gotten better at browsing Facebook and Instagram, more to see what my friends are up to. I went through a HEAVY unfollow process on Facebook. I now probably only see 30 people in my feed compared to the hundreds of people I'm friends with.

I do find myself chuckling when I get snaps compared to any other network so this article tracks

12 Months of the Show & Tell Podcast

Sun, 25 Oct 2015 17:56:00 GMT

The 12th episode of Show & Tell, my monthly movie podcast came out recently. We've been doing it for a year, and I can't believe I've never mentioned it on this site!

The show is hosted by Samuel Strickland, accompanied by myself and Ellyn MaNamara. Each month, we pick a movie that we've each seen before, and bring it to the show to discuss. We chat, rate, review, and once in a while go off the rails. It has been SO much fun working with the crew on the Tekside network, being part of a podcast, and leaning the ins & outs of recording and producing.

It's been great as forced relaxation for me. I was hesitant to jump into a show with people I'd never spoken to before (we had 1 Skype call before we recorded episode 1). Immediately, recording became one of the highlights of the week (month) that I look forward to. Sam and Ellyn are a lot of fun to talk to on the air or hang out in our Slack channel. There have definitely been movies I never would have considered otherwise that I really liked. We're currently gearing up for our Star Wars spectacular and I can't wait!

Our episodes to date (I started with Top Gun, obviously)

Episode 1

Top Gun
Fargo
Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Episode 2

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
The One I Love
A Most Wanted Man

Epidode 3

Mad Max
Oldboy
Snowpiercer

Episode 4

Calvary
The Lego Movie
Nightcrawler

Episode 5 (Nic Cage!!)

Vampire's Kiss
Face-off
The Wicker Man

Episode 6

Knocked Up
Inglorious Bastards
Blue Ruin

Episode 7

Alien
Empire Records
Practical Magic

Episode 8

The Princess Bride
The Master
Lost River

Episode 9

Inception
Her
John Wick

Episode 10

Inception
Django Unchained
Whiplash

Episode 11

Ray
Hard Candy
Ex Machina

Episode 12

Blade Runner
Never-ending Story
8 Mile

Sending Email to Omnifocus in Airmail2

Sun, 25 Oct 2015 09:10:00 GMT

Airmail2 is my desktop client of choice for Gmail. It keeps the same hotkeys as the web version of gmail and has some good integrations.

In outlook, I use ^O to send an email to Omnifocus. That workflow also attaches the outlook email to the task for easy reference later. I wanted something similar for gmail besides just forwarding the email to Omnifocus. With that, I still had to go find the email to actually reply to it. Omnifocus integration is the single most important reason (to me) for using Airmail. Airmail will add an in-app link back to the email in Airmail in the notes section of the task.

But, I don't like the default hotkey, I just want it to be ^O. To get this to work:

Go to Settings.app > Keyboard > Shortcuts
Add Airmail2
Add an action with the Menu Title of: OmniFocus...
Record your keyboard shortcut to be ^O

How to Sync Basecamp Todos to Omnifocus or Todoist

Sat, 17 Oct 2015 11:54:00 GMT

Basecamp is a large part of our process at Ai. It tracks most of our communication (a lot of this has been moving to Slack). Basecamp serves as our system of record for signs-offs and deliverables. We also use it's "todo" function pretty heavily in the planning stages and tracking client tasks. Once we get into implementation, we transition to Jira, as it's more powerful. Clients do not have access to Jira.

I don't have an issue tracking Basecamp tasks. It's really good at emailing you when something is due. But, as I've said before, I'd be even BETTER at it, if the tasks were in my world. My world is Omnifocus, but there is a VERY large contingent of Todoist users at Ai. I am the outlier in this. In the past, my reasons for not using Todoist were I didn't want Ai tasks and personal project tasks in the same app, the hotkeys weren't up to snuff, and I didn't want to pay for premium to get notifications. I've since ignored these rules with Omnifocus; It runs everything in my life, it DOES have great hotkeys, and I dropped the $$$ for premium Omnifocus which was more expensive than Todoist premium in the long run. But, this is a topic for another post.

Back on track. How to get Basecamp todos into my system? Again, Zapier to the rescue. Zapier can connect to Basecamp, do some basic filtering to make sure I only get tasks that I care about, and drop them into my Omnifocus inbox. Most of the following steps hold true for both Omnifocus and Todoist

Create a new Zap that triggers when a new Basecamp todo is created. Have it create a new task in your system
Select the appropriate Basecamp account and test it
Select and test your Todoist/Omnifocus account
Choose your Basecamp Account, Project, and Todo list. If you want to filter even more by only items assigned to you, add a custom filter. Do this by either Assignee ID or Name
Match up the Basecamp data to your tool of choice. First is how I send it to Omnifocus. Note, I do need to populate the due date by hand. In both options, I add the url back to the task in Basecamp so I can easy mark it off or comment in it when I'm done. Todoist lets you be a LOT more granular and handles all of the fields so you have no manual intervetntion
My tasks are now in my world. Profit.

Creating a Custom Podcast Feed Using Dropbox and Huffduffer

Tue, 13 Oct 2015 18:28:00 GMT

I use Overcast as my podcast client because of it's SmartSpeed feature. This feature is now 100% free with the new 2.0 update. SmartSpeed has spoiled me. Before Overcast I would listen to most shows at 2x. This resulted in "chipmunk voice" which I dealt with to try to get through a few more episodes each week. Overcast let's me reduce this by speeding up playback by removing a certain % of silence.

Sometimes I'll find other recordings, episodes, or files that I want to listen to. I don't want to see if they are already in a feed somewhere, or subscribe to a whole podcast. So, these files just sat in a dropbox folder that I'd "listen to one day". I forgot it was there. Recently, CGPGrey was talking on Cortex about a similar problem (though with audio books). The result was this workflow below.

I've been using it to create a custom podcast feed of random audio files that I throw in dropbox. I get a notification in Overcast when they are ready, and I can add them to my existing listening queue. Awesome

Prerequisites

Dropbox (iOS App)
Workflow (iOS App)
Any podcast client that accepts an RSS feed. (Overcast is 100% free)
Huffduffer Account
You have audio files in Dropbox somewhere

Setup

Setup Dropbox on iOS
Open this url in Safari
Tap "Get Workflow"
Allow Safari to open Workflow
Open the workflow in Workflow
Check to see if Workflow has access to Dropbox
Hit Done
Go back into the workflow and run it
Navigate to where your audio files are in dropbox
Tap the one you want, and give it a Title
Go to your profile page in huffduffer and grab the RSS url for your profile
Add this by URL in your podcast app of choice
You are done!

A Preview Of What'S New In Basecamp 3

Wed, 07 Oct 2015 16:37:00 GMT

Basecamp 3 is coming and I'm exited. Below are excerpts from Basecamp's preview post on what I'm looking forward to most

Basecamp won't send you any emails, push notifications, or in-app notifications if it's outside your specified work hours. Live a little! Work Can Wait until you're back at work.

group chat room for quick discussions

This is cool but it came a little too late. We've been using slack for project based and individual chat. It has a dedicated app that is easy to cmd+tab to. I see campfire in the browser sitting in an unchecked tab and not being useful

Show someone you care by clicking the Applause button on any message, comment, document, or answer on any automatic question. They'll get a discrete notification letting them know you appreciated what they said. This is a great way to show your support for someoneâs suggestion, idea, or point of view without also sending a notification to everyone else on the project.

e.g. What did you work on today or Are you blocked on anything?)

Hmm, I wonder if this could be used for virtual scrum?

@mentions: Psst!

YES, YES, YES, A MILLION TIMES, YES

They'll instantly get a notification letting them know they've been mentioned, along with a direct link right back to where you mentioned them

If you're not in the desktop app

Buhhh wait what? Ok maybe what I said about the tabs and apps above might not apply

You can bookmark just about anything in Basecamp 3 so you can jump right back to it from anywhere else

This will be handy. Here are always a few key threads I end up digging for. Usually long running threads about key deliverables

At the bottom of every project is a timeline of all activity going back to the moment you started the project

I like this if search hadn't been improved. This has a lot easier than scrolling through all the lists looking for something around a certain time

So you can make a folder and put a photoshop file, a Google doc

👍🏻

Now you can assign to-dos to multiple people. Now you can set date ranges, not just single due dates. Now you can bulk assign multiple to-dos with a single click. Now you can select multiple to-dos and move them as a group.

😭😭😭

Now you can save any new message or document as a draft before you publish it

Basecamp 3 allows you to see all the work you've assigned to other people

You can sign up for an early invite here

Magento 2: Q&A With A Systems Architect

Sun, 04 Oct 2015 16:55:00 GMT

Magento 2 has revamped the architecture of the platform. Many of these changes introduced tried and true design patterns into the platform. Although these design patterns are more advanced, they come with a lot of literature to describe how they should be used in practice (read up on the ‘Gang of Four’). For eCommerce managers, these fundamental changes provide their team with a more structurally sound platform to scale-up their business.

I am very excited about the direction Magento 2 has taken. It feels more thought out, more complete, and more flexible. Magento 1 feels bolted together by this point. Between composer, the new service layer, and it's component based architecture, Magento 2 requires a higher order of developer. This is a good thing. Script kiddies and SO copy/plasters will not survive or at least REALLY have to learn OOP and new architecture patterns. Bring it on

Using Omnifocus as a Honey-Do App

Thu, 01 Oct 2015 12:40:00 GMT

Laura and I are trying a formal Honey-Do List. We're both very task-oriented people and we really like lists. There are a lot of things I can do to help with Charlie but have to wait until I get home from work. Vice-versa, stuff I'll think of while I'm at work that Laura should take a look at on the days she's home.

We probably should have done this a long time ago but even suggesting that one of us ditch our to-do app of choice would have been blasphemy. I switched to OmniFocus this year and you'd have to pry it from my cold dead fingers. Laura really likes Remember The Milk [RTM] but I've never cared for it. One option was just use another app just for the HoneyDo list. The front-runner would be Wunderlist. This would work.... but meh. This would mean another slot on our coveted iPhone home screens. A space we didn't want to give up. I personally would have trouble remembering to go into it. If it's not in OmniFocus, it's not in my world.

There had to be a solution. What actually mattered? It boiled down to two things:

The tasks entering "our world" of to-dos
The other party being notified (or at least aware) that a task had been completed (or is still outstanding)

Neither OmniFocus or RTM have the ability to do 2-way sync. But, they CAN take in tasks through email addresses. Ok, there is a way for tasks to get into our respective worlds from somewhere else. Check.

The next step was to have something be the single point of entry for tasks. This entry point would also serve as the aggregate list of both our worlds. Wunderlist and Todoist both have great API's, there had to be something. There was also a good chance that IFTTT or Zapier could connect to everything. IFTTT was a bust, but Zapier hooked us up. I went with Wunderlist because Todoist's notifications are a premium only feature. We're not sure if we'll actually use the notifications, but I didn't feel like switching if we decided to in the future. Wunderlist could also handle shared lists, asignees, and due dates.

How to set it up:

Choose a trigger and action

When this happens: Wunderlist; New Task

Do this: OmniFocus; Create Task
Make sure your Wunderlist and Omnifocus accounts are set up
Create a shared list in Wunderlist and add someone to it
Tell Zapier to only trigger on the list you just created. (We'll add advanced filtering later)
Create the OmniFocus task. I put "BroderFam" in front so I know where it came from, the name of the task, and the due date. (I manually set the due date when I process my OmniFocus inbox)

In the body, I set urls back to Wunderlist so I can mark the item as done in there as well as in Omnifocus. The first URL is for when I'm on my laptop and want to open the Wunderlist website. The 2nd one is a deep link to the iOS app for when I'm on my phone

Keep note of the assignee ID on the first task that comes in, you'll want it for advanced filtering
Test the Zap and turn it on. Now, any task that goes into your list will go to OmniFocus. But, we don't want that. We only want the ones that are assigned to me.

Now that you have the assigneeID from the first task, go back into the Zap and add a custom filter

Also go back in and remove AssigneeID from the body of the task

So, a little bit of double work when marking things as read. But I'm really happy with this system. Let me know in the comments if you have any trouble setting this up and I'll help

Workflow 1.3 Brings Powerful Widget, Sync, Health Actions, And More

Sun, 20 Sep 2015 10:17:00 GMT

I’m even more excited about the ability to read and automate Health data in Workflow and combine the results with actions, custom UIs, and other iOS apps.

With a new Find Health Samples action, you can read any Health category where samples match filters that include dates, source, name, and value; this allows you to, say, fetch steps for the last month, calories logged by a specific app, or heart rate from your Apple Watch. Each unit can be grouped, sorted, and limited; once fetched from Health, you can also get additional details of a sample.

This is cool. I've been meaning to export all of the health data I've been collecting into a few spreadsheets and start picking through it. It's nice to know that there are a number of options available through Workflow to muck with this data

Adobe Aims To Bring Photoshop To Mobile Masses With Upcoming App - Cnet

Sun, 20 Sep 2015 09:32:00 GMT

Photoshop is so well known that the product name is synonymous with photo editing. But the software itself is a success only on personal computers, not smartphones or tablets.

Photoshop's maker, Adobe Systems, hopes that will change in October at its Max conference for developers and creative professionals when it introduces a new Photoshop app for editing photos on Apple's iPhones and iPads initially and Android-powered devices later. The free software, called only Project Rigel for now, is designed to bring a more accessible interface to what can be a dauntingly complex program on PCs.

Click through for full details

Threes’ Free Version Doubles Developers’ Profits

Sat, 19 Sep 2015 15:31:00 GMT

The free version of popular puzzle game Threes has doubled its developers’ profits, as reported by Eurogamer and as Threes developer Asher Vollmer shared in a series of tweets

Spotify'S Latest Trick Is A Personalized Weekly Playlist Of Deep Cuts

Sat, 19 Sep 2015 12:52:00 GMT

Spotify says the Discover Weekly playlist is built based on the music that you listen to in addition to what other, similar users have been listening to. It’s designed to surface the lesser-known tracks and deep cuts, as opposed to just being a playlist of the most popular songs out right now. It’s available at the top of each user’s Playlist folder.

I'm very, very excited about this. That was one feature I thought Apple Music did well. But, I still love my Spotify. Prior to this, the weekly "for you" emails that I got from Spotify were spot on. So happy this is now built right into the app!

Uie Article: Themes - A Small Change To Product Roadmaps With Large Effects

Thu, 17 Sep 2015 08:33:00 GMT

Themes are a Promise to Solve Problems, Not Build Features

The Best Place to Order Baby Supplies Online, In Bulk

Sun, 13 Sep 2015 16:07:00 GMT

We live in an age were BJ's and Costco are no longer the only game in town to get bulk supplies. Many websites are offering very competitive prices to the giant warehouse wholesale clubs. (Thank goodness, those places stress me out). We knew when we had Charlie that joining one of these clubs was probably going to happen.

For a while now, I've been seeing subway ads for sites that are going head to head with BJ's and Costco, but with free shipping and without the yearly membership fee. We've been using Amazon Prime forever and have always loved it. Very rarely has a package not shown up on time or damaged. We get most of our household items from their Subscribe & Save program. On some months this lands us 15% off Amazon's already low prices.

I knew there would be a good chance we'd stick with Amazon, but I wanted to check out the other contenders; Amazon Mom, Boxed.com, Diapers.com, and Jet.com. My test products were:

I had high hopes for either Boxed.com who really tout their competitive prices and free shipping over $50. I have a few friends who swore by Diapers.com for their kids. Jet.com was a new player, and technically did have the lowest overall price. But, they have a secret formula that they apply to your cart which lowers the price. I really didn't like not knowing how that worked of if it would change month to month.

In the end, Amazon won out. We get our usual 15% off Subscribe & Save the months we receive 5+ items (you play with it and game it a little) Diapers always get 20% off. If you find yourself running low, just hit the "I need it now" button and you will get your next shipment early. Bonus points: We also have an Amazon Credit Card (that is only used at Amazon) for an additional 1-3% cash back. We let this charge up and then every few years buy something nice with it. It's how we got our Sonos Playbar.

If you are interested in the spreadsheet above, it can be found here

Apiary Releases ‘World'S First’ Automated Api Ci Testing Service - The New Stack

Sat, 22 Aug 2015 10:45:00 GMT

Industrial API Model

This reflects Tung’s model which found that in the enterprise, API maturity often begins with an individual use case for an application or workflow which leads to the creation of a specific API within that use case department. But then, over the next six months or so, other parts of the enterprise take similar approaches to pilot projects quickly leading to a chaotic catalog of APIs that have been use-case built without a long term, industrial mindset for the agency’s broader needs. Accenture’s Industrial API model suggests that after the first couple of use cases demonstrate the power and efficacy of APIs, that future design be built using internal standards so that there is common nomenclature and endpoint descriptions for APIs, and that opening data sources and functionality via API is thought of in terms of wider potential uses rather than just a single use case.

We see this time and time again with our large enterprise clients. They either have one of two things. Hundreds of smaller APIs and services, with heavy overlap of functionality. "If you need this type of data, hit endpoint X, but if you need this one other enrichment field, hit this other endpoint. But that one isn't updated as frequently, so you really need to hit both, and do a merge or something on your end". There were a number of small teams, who needed data or a process, but didn't want to get tied up in a larger department initiative, and be tied to another teams timeline. So, they built their own to very specific use cases

The other case we see a lot, is a large company trying to unify all of their APIs and data, but going about it in the wrong way. They are tying all the systems to a large initiate and building a god system. A project like this usually spans years, and by the time you get to the end of it, the earlier changes are already out of date.

Part of the work we do with clients like this is to get the teams to agree on a unified API language first, then start converting different systems one by one. As we identify overlap, we will role those systems together. That transformation or merging should be transparent to anything consuming from those systems.

We do this for a number of reasons. First and foremost is so we can get user facing changed out faster. Get the new site, or tool public so we can begin testing it against real users. Then, if we need to make UI changes, we aren't locked down to a back office system. That is all behind an API that we helped define, and can assume won't change for a while. We can iterate faster, while the back office systems continue on their slower timelines

The Drupal 8 Admin Menu Needs a Fix

Fri, 21 Aug 2015 17:07:00 GMT

I initially wanted to lead with something like “The Drupal 8 Admin Menu Sucks,” but I remember repeated corrections by one my engineering professors that things don’t suck only blow inwardly.

I pulled in the WordPress top and left admin menus to a Drupal 8 module and named it WordPress Menu.

Nice. Check it out here

How Relay Fm Proves That Podcasts Aren’T An Overnight Success

Fri, 21 Aug 2015 06:29:00 GMT

Just a year later, Relay FM features 16 different shows and delivers 1.5 million episodes every month.

A huge congrats to Myke and Stephen. I listen to a lot of the shows on Relay and couldn't be more impressed or happier with the content the network puts out

While the number of shows has tripled during Relay FM’s first year, monthly revenue has quadrupled over the same period.

Just keep showing up

Thu, 20 Aug 2015 10:22:00 GMT

Just keep showing up

Very inspiring article by my friend, Jess

Surviving Anxiety, Or, How I Re-Met Adam Culp Today | Remarks

Tue, 18 Aug 2015 06:44:00 GMT

My running is teaching me two things. One is to “push through” – to go beyond a point when I want to give up short of a goal. The other is to pay attention and take a break when I need it lest I end up hurting myself.

One day I will write about my anxiety. But not yet

I encourage everyone to read Adam’s brief, powerful post. Even if you are not dealing with crushing anxiety, it’s certain that you know someone who is. It’s a terrible thing to experience, and it’s a wonderful thing to be past, though I’m always worried that it’s waiting for me in the wings – one never fully recovers from it, I suspect.

Cushion - From Beta To Launch - The Subdomain

Tue, 18 Aug 2015 06:33:00 GMT

When I started Cushion, I knew I wanted to keep the marketing website and the web app separate. I’ve worked on apps in the past where the marketing site is baked into the app code, so any change—even a typo—required a deploy of the entire app. This approach would make me think twice about updating the marketing site—it turned a simple task into a daunting one. Because of this experience, I deliberately separated the two, hosting the marketing site at the root domain while the app lived on a subdomain

Separation of concerns. This is a good idea. Curious about SEO implications though

Someone suggested get.cushionapp.com when I was looking for subdomain suggestions, but I dismissed it. I’m not a fan of the “get” prefix when you’ve already signed up for the app, but “get” does make sense for the sign up process, though.

At the time, I was also wrapping up the referral system for Cushion. Once I considered get.cushionapp.com, everything became crystal clear. I would use get.cushionapp.com for the sign up page, and the referral links could be get.cushionapp.com/REFERRAL_CODE. Now, the “get” prefix makes sense and reads well, too—“get cushion app”.

I couldn’t be happier with the combination of get.cushionapp.com and my.cushionapp.com. The simplicity and casual feel matches perfectly with the tone I’ve been trying to convey with Cushion. Everything seems to be falling into place, and I’m so relieved to finally be over the hurdle of this transition. Cushion has officially graduated and I’m so excited to see where it goes next.

Things I'Ve Quit Doing At My Desk

Sun, 16 Aug 2015 21:00:00 GMT

In reality, we do all sorts of things at our desks that aren’t real work (or affect our ability to produce our best work).

We do do a lot at our desks. It's interesting though how much of "work" has spilled onto our other devices. At least during the day I'm in outlook and Omnifocus on my phone. When I have 1:1s with my directs, I bring my iPad with Omnifocus to review goals or notes I've kept track of

Thinking: Nobody does their best thinking sitting at their desk.

I do my best thinking in the shower at home. I've had sooooo many epiphanies over the years in the shower. Either brand new ideas or some problem that may have had me stumped for days.

I think it's the sensory deprivation. There's nothing to distract you, your mind is free to wander, and there is plenty of ambient noise. Sing if it helps!

This doesn't work as well for me in the shower at the gym. I'm usually rushing to let the next people in or to get to work, and the water temperature is usually lukewarm or cold to help me cool down. Anything I can help to do stop my sweating before work.

Socializing

I think a standing desk hurts me on this regard. I notice that more people come up to me to chit chat than if my desk is down and I'm sitting

When Our Blog Became A Business - $2,000 From One Post

Sun, 16 Aug 2015 20:52:00 GMT

If I lacked passion or expertise I think my wife’s readers would be able to see right through it. Readers are smart; they know when you don’t care, and they know when you don’t know what you’re talking about. Don’t fake it.

Hmm. Should I try a daddy blog? With nerdery, tech, and productivity?

It’s tough building your thing online.

Gitlab: Almost Everything We Do Will Be Open

Fri, 07 Aug 2015 17:01:00 GMT

Today we’re announcing a move from doing the majority of our development work internally, to almost exclusively working in public issue trackers on GitLab.com. This means that anyone can view and comment on all of our discussion and work. This includes bugs, new features, performance issues and everything else that relates to our products.

Awesome. We use Gitlab for our source control at work and I couldn't be happier to see this.

We were not working in the open as a true open source project should.

Open Sourcing Energy - Artsy Engineering

Fri, 07 Aug 2015 17:00:00 GMT

It’s worth mentioning that we don’t just talk externally about Open Source. Internally, the Mobile team runs talks about Open Source for the rest of the Artsy staff. As well, we discuss the tooling and business implications of having our work in public repos. Artsy strives for an open culture, in this case the development team, on the whole, is just further along in the process.

A great read about Artsy's open source culture

Cutting Back

Thu, 06 Aug 2015 09:31:00 GMT

I actually treated a vacation like a vacation but I fully expected to be stuck attending to work, checking RSS, and the like. Turns out it was kind of... nice?

I think I'm pretty good about doing this. Work email and calendar are deleted from my phone when I go on vacation. If there is a true emergency, I'll get a text or a phone call.

Vacations are important. You need to recharge, you need a mental break. Give your mind some rest.

This is especially important from work, but other things as well.

On as many vacations as I can (especially beach ones) I'll go into "no devices mode". No phone, tablet, TV. just books. My Kindle gets a pass. Sometimes. Others I'll grab some library books. On vacation to Italy last year, I made an exception with Instapaper. I shouldn't have. Our train rides became about getting through as much Instapaper as possible instead of a relaxing read or enjoying the countryside

There is more new stuff on the internet that I'd like to be a part of than I have hours in the day to participate.

Yeeeeeah

It's been a long time since I had to accept that I won't be able to take it all in. Still, I try.

I do too. There are more tweets, RSS/Instapaper articles, and podcasts than I can keep up with. I want t,o but let's be realistic. I read Twitter as a completionist or I've been known to take a week or even a month off. For RSS and Instapaper I mark everything as read twice a year; On New Years and my birthday. My podcasts I should really prune. Some I listen every week, some I cherry pick. I think I need less that I want to listen to every episode

The hard part about letting go of my fear of missing out is the process of falling behind

Invalid predicate when filtering CKRecords by the same keys?

Sat, 01 Aug 2015 20:19:00 GMT

Originally posted on StackOverflow

I have a CKRecord type "Follow" which stores the user's ID and the ID of a friend they follow. (Assume that a user can only follow 1 person and the logic around that is handled elsewhere).

Screenshot of record definition in CloudKit

I want to query the Follow records to confirm that two users follow each other and are in fact, friends.

These are the base queries. Each works fine on it's own

let followPredicate = NSPredicate(format: "userID == %@ AND followsID == %@", userId, followsID)
let followedPredicate = NSPredicate(format: "followsID == %@ AND userID == %@", userId, followsID)

I want to combine these two predicates and query once, so that if two records come back, it's assumed that the different users follow each other

I've tried to combine them both manually and by using a NSCompoundPredicate:

let friendPredicate = NSCompoundPredicate(type: NSCompoundPredicateType.OrPredicateType, subpredicates: [followPredicate, followedPredicate])
let friendPredicate = NSPredicate(format: "(followsID == %@ AND userID == %@) OR (userID == %@ AND followsID == %@)", userId, followsID, userId, followsID)

I then use the query here:

let friendQuery = CKQuery(recordType: "Follow", predicate: friendPredicate)

In both versions of friendPredicate above, I get an Invalid Predicate Exception.

*** Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'CKException', reason: 'Invalid predicate: (userID == "_1570bb2652d0658c12320bcd658e5898" AND followsID ==
"_fb7ebeb0841f6411099ad094424d66ac") OR (followsID == 
"_1570bb2652d0658c12320bcd658e5898" AND userID == 
"_fb7ebeb0841f6411099ad094424d66ac") 
(Error Domain=CKErrorDomain Code=12 "Invalid predicate (userID == 
"_1570bb2652d0658c12320bcd658e5898" AND followsID == 
"_fb7ebeb0841f6411099ad094424d66ac") OR (followsID == 
"_1570bb2652d0658c12320bcd658e5898" AND userID == 
"_fb7ebeb0841f6411099ad094424d66ac")" 
UserInfo=0x14e63010 {ck_isComparisonError=false, 
NSLocalizedDescription=Invalid predicate (userID == 
"_1570bb2652d0658c12320bcd658e5898" AND followsID == 
"_fb7ebeb0841f6411099ad094424d66ac") OR (followsID == 
"_1570bb2652d0658c12320bcd658e5898" AND userID == 
"_fb7ebeb0841f6411099ad094424d66ac")})'

Am I approaching this wrong or making an invalid assumption? Any help is much appreciated

World'S Best Whisky Is Being Sent To Age In Space

Fri, 31 Jul 2015 09:38:00 GMT

will send six samples of its whiskies and other alcohols to the International Space Station (ISS) next month, in order to observe the effects of zero-gravity on the aging process.

The first samples will return to Earth after one year, while the other group of samples will remain aboard the ISS for at least two years. Unfortunately, there are no plans to sell the drinks once they come back to Earth.

Bummer 😕🍹

When To Give Up Trying To Start A New Habit

Thu, 30 Jul 2015 11:19:00 GMT

For me being active is like meditation, a daily ritual that keeps me sane amid the chaos of my life. Without it I feel weak, lethargic and a little depressed.

This very much holds true for me. There was a period of time a few months ago where the gym I was going to closed for renovations. I thought I could keep up with my activity at home. I planned on running, doing FitStar or Yoga from my phone, and doing kettle bell work. For the most part I stuck with this. But only in a certain sense. Yes I was going for runs. But not as hard as I should have. Yes, I was doing FitStar, but wasn't getting my heart rate up enough. I slacked on the kettle bell work. None of this had me lifting heavy or getting my hear rate through the roof. (I need both of these for stress relief)

It eventually had an effect on me. I became more stressed and depressed. It was harder to get up for my early alarm to try to be active before work. (I can't work out after work. I either don't have time, am exhausted, or want to go spend time with my family or TV).

I should have seen this coming. I wish I had but I didn't.

Part of this is the social aspect of the gym. I've been training with the same group of people for almost 6 years. Seeing them in the morning and shooting the shit is a strong part of my week. We've become close friends. Having that missing also contributed to my negative mood

After a while I stared realizing that our gym wasn't going to reopen. That I was using that as an excuse to not find a new gym. We had talked about it but were all lethargic about pulling the trigger. One weekend I couldn't take it anymore. "I need to lift something". I texted a few people and we did a drop in at a new gym that Monday. The facility is ok, the people are great, and the programming is fantastic. We've re-upped our membership and I'm very happy to be pushing myself again

Paternity leave threw a little bit of a wrench into this. I knew it was coming and knew I would have to find a gym close to home. (I train in the city near where I work). I found one close by. It's not one I would join full time, but it's great for a stop gap during leave/vacation or the odd weekend. I've only gone once a week (setting an alarm with a new born is risky. Yes I acknowledge that I'm using that as an excuse and should have sucked it up a lot more). I've also been running and last week did the first longer run in over a year. I'm in week 4 and I'm starting to feel like I really, really need to lift something. But, next week I'm back in the saddle with work, and will be re-joining my friends at our new gym

Giving up on something you have previously committed to isn’t an easy thing to do. It can feel like failure or defeat. But sometimes giving up your goal is the smartest thing to do. Sometimes the cost of achieving it isn’t worth the price of admission.

Continue reading at summertomatoe

Git 2.5, Including Multiple Worktrees And Triangular Workflows

Thu, 30 Jul 2015 10:26:00 GMT

Git 2.5 has been released with worktrees, better triangular workflows, and performance enhancements. Read GitHub's take on it here

The new Git subcommand git worktree creates additional working trees connected to an existing Git repository [1]. Each linked working tree is a pseudo-repository with its own checked-out working copy. Its .git is actually a file that refers to the history and references from the main repository

Nice. This is Git's solution to having multiple clones for different long running streams. I do this more often than I thought

Git has many features that support triangular workflows, but it’s sometimes hard to see how to use them together in real life. Let’s take a closer look at triangular workflows, including the new command line shorthand @{push} that was added in Git 2.5.

This is neat. It might take me a little while to adopt this. The existing flow works well for me

Reading: Getting Things Done By David Allen

Wed, 29 Jul 2015 22:05:00 GMT

How To Remember Tar Flags

Tue, 28 Jul 2015 17:43:00 GMT

how to remember tar flags 🎏

tar -xzf 👈 eXtract Ze Files!

tar -czf 👈 Compress Ze Files!

via @_tessr

Recent Omnifocus Reading and Things I Want to Try

Tue, 28 Jul 2015 15:56:00 GMT

I've been doing some reading on Omnifocus over the past few days. I've also purchased David Allen's new GTD Book. Below are pieces of interest that I've found along with brief commentary on things I want to try.

I use Omnifocus heavily for both iOS and Mac

A New Strategy for the Omnifocus Widget

Flags were always a part of Omnifocus that I didn't find much use for. So I was delighted to discover this unique strategy in making good use of them in a way that doesn't confuse but rather compliments my workflow. I have reserved the use of flags for today's tasks of priority. It allows me to make sure that the things I must get done today don't get lost in the the massive amount of stuff I am keeping up with at one time. Omnifocus allows for up to 4 tasks to be displayed in the widget. Any more and you will have to go back into the app to view those additional tasks. So my regimen now is just to simply review my forecasted due and overdue tasks and select up to 4 of the highest priority and flag them.

This is a very good and interesting idea. I've upgraded to OmniFocus pro on my laptop but haven't yet taken the plunge on my iPhone. While I do use custom perspectives on my Mac I don't immediately need them with me at all times though. I really like what Clay has set up though. It might be time.

OmniFocus Video Field Guide

The OmniFocus Video Field Guide is a screencast, not a book. A lot of people have asked me to write a book about OmniFocus but instead I made this 2.5 hour video that takes you, soup to nuts, through the Omni Group's supremely bad-ass task manager. The screencast can turn an OmniFocus novice into a task-managing ninja.

I'm about halfway through this video and it is well worth the $10

My OmniFocus Habits - Four Years Later

Personal Tandum (my day job) Freelance (my side business)

This setup would fit well for me. Freelance would be Taco23 (I don't have the time to Freelance these days. Taco is for fun/profit and a good creative outlet for me)

And that’s one of the key lessons I’ve learned as my use of OmniFocus has evolved. Don’t feel like everything has to fit into a neat, pre-existing category. Don’t artificially restrict yourself. Feel free to let things land wherever makes sense to you.

The final folder is for template projects. These are projects that have many steps and frequently repeat. Instead of recreating the project from scratch each time, I create it one time and place it on hold. Then, whenever that project occurs, I can drag a copy of it into one of my active folders.

This is nice. I need to do this for employee onboarding and new projects (steps which should also be on our Wiki)

One rule of thumb I’ve learned the hard way is to never nest folders. Folders within folders just lead to a world of hurt and cognitive load. I’ve found it’s best to keep as flat a hierarchy as possible. Your milage may vary of course.

Interesting. I do this

But after re-reading Getting Things Done last year, I came to the realization that most of my tasks are bounded not by what tools I have available, but by my energy level.

Very interesting. I'm glad I picked up GTD to read

You’ll also notice I have on-hold contexts for tasks that other people owe me. I wrote in detail about how I manage the relationships between tasks and other people a few weeks ag

Ooo!

The biggest and best improvement I made to my daily workflow was to codify my morning routine for picking what I’m going to work on that day. (In fact, a big part of determining what to work on each day was simply realizing I need to a concrete series of repeatable steps for choosing my day’s tasks.)

I want to start doing this. This is how I should start my day vs looking at a mountain of email

Embracing contexts and perspectives in OmniFocus Pro. | Greetings from the Grid

I manage everything in OmniFocus. Personal tasks, work projects, home renovations, writing activities, et. al. I have tightly organized project structures, but feel that I need to focus on critical tasks in specific scenarios, e.g., I don’t need to know that the trash goes out tonight if I’m standing in my office.

Same. For me, add chores, HoneyDo, code ideas, tasks for sore code projects, department ideas, items to talk to employees about at 1:1s

I’d avoided, namely flagged items and defer dates. I’ve used contexts selectively in the past, but never managed to make them really stick.

Reading this early in this post was exciting. I've avoided contexts and deferring. It's interesting to see how others are using them

First, I created three new contexts: “9am-5pm”, “5pm-9am”, and “Weekend”.

I'm not sure if this would work for me. I always work some hours outside of 9-5. Usually 8-6 or 7. I feel like this arbitrary bounds on "work" would stress me out if I was at work outside of the "rule". I think I'd rather do: work, home, taco

I also made the decision to start using flagged tasks to indicate dated or undated tasks that require a follow up activity either on my part or the part of someone else. (Some people use a “Waiting” context for things like this, but I could never make that stick either.)

"Waiting" feels more natural to me

Location is a modifier on time

I could see the reverse of this being true as well

Assigning Relationships Between Tasks and People in OmniFocus

Number one, tasks assigned to another person, can be handled as mentioned above by giving the task a context corresponding to the name of the person it’s assigned to. So, if I’m waiting on Jeff to complete a design document, I’d give that task an on-hold context of “Jeff”. This lets me quickly filter tasks that Jeff owes me whenever I run into him. Great. I’ve been doing this for years.

I can't wait to start doing this. Check the rest of the post for ideas on tracking tasks you are sharing with another person and tracking ones you are doing for something else

One Concrete Action

None of that would have happened if I had spent much time looking at my ever growing todo list. I would have been too overwhelmed. Instead, I’ve been making progress on all of my areas of responsibility by way of one simple trick.

Every day, no matter how small, I open up OmniFocus and find one concrete action I can take that will move me closer towards one of my goals.

Meetings, awesomeness and potential bodily harm: an OmniFocus story - Relative Sanity

But how on earth do I manage hundreds of contexts? The long answer is another article, but the quick answer is that I don't. I let OmniFocus do it for me.

A New Context

Urgency in and of itself is not a problem. The problem is when we find ourselves craving projects, work environments, and scenarios where there is a fire to put out. And thus we never have the time to do the important task which doesn’t have to be done today

🔥🔥🔥

I hadn’t touched my contexts inside of OmniFocus in, well, years. There was a ton of cruft in there stemming from various different techniques and ideas that I have tried over the years. Device based context, person based context, time based contexts, and location based contexts. For the better part of a year, all of my new tasks in OmniFocus simply went under the Mac context and — well — that’s not really using the tool very well.

All of a sudden it clicked: I should just have two contexts. One would be Urgent and the other would be Important.

O_o

Obviously that was rather ambitious, but I took my 30+ contexts and whittled them down to just six: Important, Urgent, Goal, Writing, Minutiae, and Waiting.

From OmniFocus to Evernote

I eventually figured out what it was: with the move to mobile devices, ubiquitous internet and functional data syncing, contexts have disappeared for me.

In the olden days, there were contexts. There was online and offline. There was work and there was home. I used to actually go to these places called shops. These locations and phases of the day were distinct and the affordances of each place were different.

Getting Things Done® - Inside OmniFocus

One other thing to consider: can you do it, or does it require someone elses action? If someone else: delegate it. Send them an email right then, or create an action to “Email Brian about this one thing.”

Yessss

Review

Reviewing is a key facet of GTD® that keeps everything going smoothly. In short, we’re periodically looking over projects and making some considerations.

The GTD Weekly Review® is just that: weekly. And it should do three big things:

Get Clear Did your desk get physically full over the past week? Clear it out. Scan in new items or type in notes so that you can file all of that clutter away. Get your Inbox to zero Now that you’ve just added to your Inbox, process it. Empty your head Anything else that needs to come out? Take the time to do a brain dump, like we did at the beginning, to make room for the next week.

I need to do this regularly

Then, we’ll get current. To get current, review each project and action list. Consider these questions.

Do I need to add a new first step? Is the first action action-able enough? Does this project represent your goals? Should I still be worrying about it, or should I drop it? Does the metadata represent what you want? Could you defer it? Should you set a flag for higher priority? Are my Waiting-For lists actionable yet? Has anyone emailed you? Should you check back on an unanswered email?

You can toggle specific calendars by using the View Popover in the toolbar.

And let’s say it’s the end of the day on Thursday, but you still have a few more things to do for the week. In the Forecast view, you can drag from 1 day to another—using the minicalendar—to reschedule, or modify the Due Date. Holding down the Command key will instead modify the Defer Date. Holding down both the Command and Option key will change both.

Sweet. Did not know this

Resources

Delegation

Listening

Intro to GTD and the following episodes on the Back to Work podcast. Merlin Mann & Dan Benjamin. OmniFocus & GTD by Kelly Forrester at the David Allen Company. Preneurcast 025: Getting Things Done With OmniFocus.

The Best Apps for New Dads

Mon, 27 Jul 2015 12:32:00 GMT

I posted over on TekSide:

We have a newborn named Charlie. He's 2 weeks old so I'm no expert on being a Dad, but there have been a few apps the have been extremely helpful throughout the whole process. I tried a number of apps with tips, data entry, tools, and other functions, but these are the ones that stuck. As always, my iPhone is constantly by my side and I couldn't imagine going through pregnancy, labor, or fatherhood without them.

Who's Your Daddy? The Pregnancy Guide for First Time Dads

As soon as you find out your pregnant, download this app and put in the tentative due date of the baby. The app will then start giving you daily tips. These range from the practical:

Make sure your life insurance is appropriate for a family
Create a gift registry
Pack the hospital bag (later on)

To things for you:

Go out for one last romp with the boys
Is your paternity leave sorted?
You have one responsibility now: be there for her

To things for her. (These are the true gems)

Being home her favorite snacks tonight
Tell her she looks beautiful today
Kiss her long and hard when you get home tonight
Schedule a date at your favorite place tonight
Hit the movies one last time

These daily notification were HUGE. They let me know when I should be doing things and gave suggestions on how to do them. The app also has a list of tools including a hospital bag list, baby name tracking, and a contraction counter. We ended up not using the contraction counter though. I didn't trust it. The app closed in the middle of one and it forgot that we had a timer going. We then switched over to the standard Full Term, which is mentioned below.

This app was on my home screen for the duration of pregnancy

Nurture

Nurture was great both as a visual log of my wife during her pregnancy, and as an information resource as to what was going on with Baby. Every week, the app prompted Laura to take a photo of herself. It was really cool to see how she changed from week to week. At the end, the app also strings these images together in a nice little animation.

The feature I liked most about Nurture was the description of how big Charlie actually was. It lists a fruit or a piece of candy which really lets you correlate his size to something real. From a Skittle, to a mango, to a melon, we looked forward to seeing the update every Tuesday.

Every week I would scroll through the relevant medical and parenting articles that the app suggested. Most were very good and worth reading. I also read a few books which I'll cover in a future post.

Full Term

This was our (and everywhere on the internet) contraction counter of choice. Starting and stopping the counter was super easy. Especially at a time where you can't really do more than glance at your phone. The app also presents the last contraction, an average of the last hour, and an average of the last 6 hours in an easy to read format. We ended up going through all of the labor at the hospital where Laura was hooked up to a machine. But, had we done it at home, this app would have been perfect to figure out when we should head in.

My one wish would have been having a watch app alongside this to make start/stopping even easier

BabyConnect

Data Entry! This app looks quite dated (It's still using the old iOS6 design language) but it is very, very functional. It can track:

Feedings
Diaper
Sleep
Mood
Activity
Medical
Milestones
Daycare Dropoff/Pickup
Messages to baby for the future
Photos

We've only been using the Feed, Diaper, and Milestone functions so far. Photos we're using a shared album in Photos.app which is shared with immediate family and very close friends. Mood and Activity are on the short list to start using. The app can aggregate any of these data points into graphs which give you quick info when you need it. "How many times per day are we feeding him?" This is handy when we went to the pediatrician early on and he wanted to know how many wet diapers Charlie had per day. (The only measure of if he's getting enough food when breastfeeding)

The killer feature of BabyConnect is it's sync capabilities. We have it set up where both Laura and I are the parents of Charlie and either of us can enter information from any device and it immediately syncs. Just in case we forgot to grab our phone for a night feeding, we also have an iPod touch sitting in the nursery with this app installed so we can track what goes on at night. I also have notifications turned on (for now anyway) so I can see when Laura does certain things with Charlie

Quick Tips

Great quick tips and how-to's for new dads. I find myself browsing these while I'm trying to get Charlie to calm down at night. How to deal with crying or feeding or tutorials on holding, diaper changes, and bath time.

DayOne

I won't go into Journaling as a whole in this article, but Day One is a great app to get frustrations or despair out of your head. Baby will pick up on these and it's a good mechanism to get back in the moment. Whether you are alone or it's not something you can or should discuss with your spouse at that point in time

Omnifocus

My to-do list of choice. Used for things like

Set up Will
Order Stroller
Confirm insurance
etc

Non-App Resources

TheNightLight - If you like the The Wire Cutter check this site out. It's from the same team and they have great reviews on everything from bottles, to monitors, to strollers.
Lucie's List - This is technically a mommy blog, but sign up for their weekly newsletter. The info is great and it's another source that will remind you to do things; Decide on circumcision, Picking a godparent, and more

Apple Music Followup: Part 1

Sun, 26 Jul 2015 21:55:00 GMT

A few new articles popped up in my RSS feed since I mentioned Apple Music

I got my music back. At least most of it

At this point, I’m just glad to have most of music back, but I still have no idea what happened to the other songs, for sure.

Jim was able to meet with Apple privately and investigate a lot of his issues. Check out his post for the full story

Dave Mark: Why I’m not done with Apple Music

My Mac and iOS devices might as well be on different planets. When I search for a song on my iPhone, I can tap the Apple Music tab and, assuming the song is available on the Apple Music library, I can add the song to my current playlist, download it to my device for offline play, and mark it with a For You heart. Easy peasy.

On my Mac, not so simple. Unlike the iOS universe, there is no Apple Music application on my Mac. On my iOS device, things are clear cut. There’s the iTunes Store app for buying music and the Apple Music app for streaming.

So all this said, why am I still pushing on? Why don’t I make the move to Spotify?

It’s all about potential.

Click through to continue

Apple Music ought to be better than this

Mark is not the only one willing to cut Apple some slack. I’ve heard other people — satisfied enough with Apple Music — sharing this kind of forgiving attitude.

Well, I don’t agree with it. I think people should expect better from Apple. A better service. Better quality, and yes, from day one. Apple has the resources to make it happen. Apple is a bigger company than any other in the music streaming industry. Apple has the advantage of its ecosystem, not to mention the data already accumulated through the Genius algorithm within iTunes. Yet Apple Music feels more rushed, more confusing, feels like a patchwork of different ideas and directions, and it ultimately feels more ‘beta’ than other competing apps and services when these first launched.

As I said last time. I expected more. A higher quality

The problems with iTunes 12.2, iCloud Music Library, etc., give me the impression that Apple Music’s features have been hurriedly bolted on the already pachydermic, bloated, jack-of-all-trades iTunes app, and shipped without extensive, thorough testing.

Would people be equally forgiving if third-party paid music streaming apps and services caused the same mess Apple Music did for a lot of users? Would they talk of ‘potential’, or things getting better with the next version/iteration? I’m not so sure.

A few people wrote me that I was “crazy” for not dropping Spotify and instantly switch to Apple Music like they did; none of them said exactly why I should do so, the only vague criticism towards Spotify being “It’s just a mess” (huh?)

I don't understand this

Don’t order the fish – Marco.org

But the iTunes Store back-end is a toxic hellstew of unreliability. Everything that touches the iTunes Store has a spotty record for me and almost every Mac owner I know.

And the iTunes app itself is the toxic hellstew. iTunes has an impossible combination of tasks on its plate that cannot be done well. iTunes is the definition of cruft and technical debt. It was an early version of iTunes that demonstrated the first software bugs to Grace Hopper in 1946.

Gigster Does The Dev Dirty Work To Turn Your Idea Into An App

Fri, 24 Jul 2015 11:31:00 GMT

Crew and Toptal pre-vet their freelancers, but all the management issues remain

We've had varying levels of success with TopTal. But, the management side of it wasn't the issue. The issue was code quality and expertise. But, we got what we paid for

Just go to Gigsterâs site, instant message with a sales engineer, tell them what you want built, and in 10 minutes you get a guaranteed quote for what it will cost and how long it will take. Give Gigster the go-ahead, and it will manage an elite set of freelance coders and designers to build your product and give you status reports each week. Once you get your project back, Gigster will even maintain the code, and you can pay to add upgrades or new features.

I'm trying to decide if this is worth trying. Next week when I'm back at work I might float a small project their way to see what the quote is. (Assuming I already know what it would cost us to do it ourselves

Apple Music Is A Nightmare And I’m Done With It

Wed, 22 Jul 2015 15:51:00 GMT

Jim Dalrymple at The Loop has had some scathing issues with Apple Music. My thoughts below.

I love Apple. I love them because they take difficult problems and come up with innovative, simple solutions. The things they make just work and we trust them. Unfortunately, my experience with Apple Music has been exactly the opposite. As of today, I’m missing about 4,700 songs from my library with little hope of getting them back.

I had high hopes for Apple Music. I really wanted it to work and become my default music streaming service, but after the problems I’ve experienced over the last couple of weeks, I’m disabling it altogether

I had mediocre hopes for apple music. A lot of my friends at work and at Tekside are raving about it. But, it's a service. A web/cloud/backend service. Apple historically has sucked at these. (Ping, iCloud sync, iMessage still isn't perfect).

This isn't a review because as I'm still playing with it. But I'm looking at it from the perspective of someone who has used Spotify for years. I've commented a few times that I've been delighted at the new music their weekly newsletter recommends for me. I end up LOVING about 80% of them and they get discography playlists. (Unless I'm listening to trance or classical I make discography playlists for every band I listen to. I usually listen to them in order. It never been one for a more traditionally playlist or shuffling different bands on a play. I like to listen to albums, the way they were destined to be listened to.

What I'm trying to get at, is Apple is coming to me at a high bar. Their music service can't be good, or even great. It has to knock my socks off. It has to make me love it. It has to make me want to go through the trouble of canceling my Spotify subscription and recreate the way I listen to music in it's ecosystem

I don't have to worry too much about music I've purchased. I went from Napster to Pandora to Spotify. There are a few bands that I own the music for the I've added to Spotify (looking at you Beatles and Tool)

Also, EVERYONE at work is on Spotify and playlists are passed around all the time. It will be interesting to see how his shakes out. (I've been home on paternity leave so I'm not sure what's going on with Apple music over there)

As if all of that wasn’t enough, Apple Music gave me one more kick in the head. Over the weekend, I turned off Apple Music and it took large chunks of my purchased music with it. Sadly, many of the songs were added from CDs years ago that I no longer have access to. Looking at my old iTunes Match library, before Apple Music, I’m missing about 4,700 songs. At this point, I just don’t care anymore, I just want Apple Music off my devices.

I trusted my data to Apple and they failed. I also failed by not backing up my library before installing Apple Music. I will not make either of those mistakes again.

I'm assuming Apple Music uses cloudkit. I'm hoping it does. If it uses iCloud sync, it's screwed. I've seen how that works. Heck I've built apps that use it so I know its shortcomings. I have little trust in apples cloud ability

Beats1 alone is not enough to take my money. But we will see how I use it over the next month. I'll be exclusively using it to give it an honest try

But, here's another thing. This launch had to be flawless. This has Apple and some of the biggest names in music behind it. Hearing repeat content within the first few days on Beats1 is inexcusable. Losing music is horrid. And downtime if such a high profile service is even worse.

All 3 of these things have happened. "It's a new service" is not an excuse for this. This isn't some startup or kickstater project. This is Apple and while they didn't trip out of the gate, it wasn't far behind

Sam: Ios Games You Need To Play

Tue, 21 Jul 2015 11:03:00 GMT

I wrote about my favorite games of 2014. Sam posted his list. You should take a look.

Sword & Sworcery This is one of my favorite games of all time. It tells a tragic and beautiful story full of fantastical mystery. The world is unlike anything else; creating an amazing blend between high fantasy, music culture, and otherworldly charm. Everything reacts to your touch. It makes you feel like you are a guide and a participant in this story, following the Sythian through her journey as a companion rather than an observer.

This has been on my list of games to try forever. It's not that I balked at the $4.99 price tag. Plenty of the Final Fantasy games I've bought were $15. I didn't like the look of sword and sorcery from the screenshots. But Sam's recent game recommendations to me have been great. I'm currently working on a combination of Final Fantasy 6 and Baldur's Gate. Maybe when I finish one of those

Botanicula & Machinarium Unlike a lot of adventure games, these never dive into obtuse logic puzzles or irreconcilable fail states. Instead, they let you freely explore their worlds and solve puzzles on your own terms.

I'll add another vote do Machinarium. After playing through the Room I & II last summer Laura and I looked for another puzzle/adventure game. We landed on Machinarium and have been playing through it together when we have time

realMyst A modern translation of the classic adventure game, realMyst takes the original game, Myst, and opens up the world to free movement.

I LOVED the original Myst. But replaying it scares me. I survived it. I conquered it. I don't know if I would want to open that back up.

It's HARD

Up In The Air: Meet The Man Who Flies Around The World For Free

Mon, 20 Jul 2015 20:12:00 GMT

This was a fascinating read about a quasi-underground culture or gaming airline systems and flying for free. Luxury only: business class and private rooms only

“At that point, I was like, ‘Screw it,’ ” he remembers. “I decided I might as well do this full-time.” In April 2014, at the end of his lease, he walked into Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. He hasn’t come down since.

This article reminded me of the Hitch 50 blog from years ago. Back in 2006, Scotty and Fiddy embarked on an adventure to visit the capitals of all 50 states in 50 days. Solely through hitchhiking. That was a fun tale to watch in real time

Blog Little Things - Coffee Coder

Mon, 20 Jul 2015 13:32:00 GMT

don’t fear to blog little things. It doesn’t need to be big, significant, detailed, mind-blowing to come out but just of a little value. It is helpful to think just of one person who had the exact same problem as yours and was helped by your post. Maybe the post won’t get thousands of shares as we see in our reading list but hey, it saved someone’s time

More Quick Blogging Workflows | Manton Reece

Sun, 19 Jul 2015 22:32:00 GMT

We all want to get better at writing and posting more frequently. As I mentioned in yesterday's post, the best way to improve anything is to do more of it, more often

100% agree. Rebuilding my blog was fun. Let's see if I can get myself to write mode ;)

I'm also trying a "habit app"

a big part of posting regularly is just having a system that makes it easy

Amen

Posting to a blog first and then Twitter second seems like a simple idea, but it is extremely powerful. Years from now you end up with an archive of all your short-form writing at your own domain. Not as an afterthought, but as the default.

This is a very interesting idea. It's somewhere in the list for my site rebuild. Somewhere in the middle

I do really like using buffer though. But I could still go to buffer from IFTTT

We Need More Bad Ideas

Sun, 19 Jul 2015 22:25:00 GMT

Manton Reece:

The essay reminds me of something that always stuck with me reading about legendary Warner Bros. animation director Chuck Jones years ago. He said that when he was young, his father would give him and his siblings essentially unlimited paper to draw on, unused supplies from his business. We all have 100,000 bad drawings in us. The sooner we get through all the bad drawings — in Shawn’s essay, the bad ideas — the sooner we can start producing our best work.

Write your ideas down. Good or bad. They aren't a thing while they just rattle around in your head.

Get them out: onto paper, Omnifocus, evernote, whatever. This makes them real

Then you can decide what's good or bad

Learning from Brent

Sun, 19 Jul 2015 21:42:00 GMT

I learn more about how to think about programming from Brent Simmons' blog than any place I can think of. I wish he wrote books or did full length tutorials. Probably more the later. I really like his thought process and how he breaks problems down.

A good follow up to his Swift Protocol issue can be found here by David Owen. I learn a lot from him too

Let's say I'm writing an RSS reader. (This is the example I tend to use on my blog, for historical reasons, and shouldn't be taken as indicative of anything.)

Let's say the RSS reader can have a mix of stand-alone feeds and feeds that are synced with FeedBin, Feedly, NewsBlur, etc. I might very well do this:

Create a Feed protocol. Create classes for each different type of feed: LocalFeed, FeedBinFeed, FeedlyFeed, etc. Each one of these conforms to the Feed protocol. (Why? Because each syncing system is different, and rather than have a giant Feed class that can handle all the different types, it's smarter to have a Feed protocol and then specific implementations for each different type of feed.)

RSS readers tend to have folders too. But folders may have different rules, depending on the system: folders inside folders may or may not be allowed, for instance. So, similarly, I might do this:

Create a Folder protocol. Create classes for each different type of folder: LocalFolder, FeedBinFolder, FeedlyFolder, etc. Each one of these conforms to the Folder protocol.

Open-Sourcing Jewelbots

Sat, 02 May 2015 17:08:34 GMT

I’ve always wondered why companies (and individuals) don’t put more of their

source code out there

PHP7 Vagrant Box

Sat, 07 Mar 2015 16:13:24 GMT

I’m keeping a close eye (or as much as I can anyway) on PHP7 and what it means for the future of the language. Installing in your local dev machine is risky, especially if you have ongoing work. As usual, Vagrant comes to the rescue!

Rasmus Lerdorf has put together a Vagrant box to ease in the setup and isolate your testing.

If you use Atlas, check out the box here. Otherwise, the readme is available on Github

Beyond UXKit - Robert Böhnke

Sat, 07 Feb 2015 15:46:33 GMT

Robert Böhnke wrote a good [piece](http://robb.is/thinking-about/beyond- uxkit/) on what UXKit could mean for the future of iOS/Mac UI Engineering

The new Photos for Mac is based on a new private framework in 10.10.3,

UXKit. It is essentially a replica of UIKit, based on top of AppKit.

He also comments on what something like react native could mean for engineers, and the attitude the community has had around other “non-native” in the past

Mongular, a Content Delivery System

Fri, 06 Feb 2015 16:03:23 GMT

Mongular is something to keep a close eye on. We’ve had a number of projects at work where we might want something… other than a CMS. Where content is king and that content is decoupled from the system using or displaying it. Other solutions that we’re excited about are Prismic and Contentful.

Systems like this would let us do whatever we wanted with the site. Not being tied to the confines of a particular CMS’ way of doing things could be freeing. These systems offer much more powerful ways to relate content or parts of content to each other. Going far beyond just weighted tags.

What is Mongular?

Mongular is a Content Delivery System (Framework?... not really) built to

take advantage of all the tools available to speed up the delivery of your content to users, and reduce server load.

Content Delivery System?

Mongular wasn't built to be a Content Management System, even though with

enough development it could probably be built to do just that.

Mongular was built to deliver content in an easy, efficient and extendable

manner. Where developers take it, is up to them.

Equality in the Apple Blogging Scene

Mon, 12 Jan 2015 00:10:24 GMT

Long time Mac developer, Daniel Jalkut posited a question last night on Twitter.

I find it far easier to follow brilliant women on Twitter than in blogs. Do

women in the Apple scene not blog as much, or am I missing them?

— Daniel Jalkut (@danielpunkass) [January 10,

2015](https://twitter.com/danielpunkass/status/553983430095302656)

This question came out of some of the responses to Marco Arment’s “hot” post last week about the state of Apple’s software ecosystem. Daniel got a good number of replies.

I’m always looking for more to read, especially technical blogs. I’ve gone through them and added the following to my iOS RSS folder:

Contributing to Magento2

Wed, 07 Jan 2015 17:04:00 GMT

The Magento2 dev team is now using Github in the traditional sense: They have an internal repo that gets pushed out to github at the end of their sprint. All commits stay intact. This is WAY better than the previous method of pushing a giant commit with everything each sprint.

Ben has a good walkthrough on submitting a pull request to the repo. He links to a few resources to get up and running on the new platform. Alan Kent goes into more detail on the “why” of the change.

It’s not just code that has been opened up. The documentation lives on Github now too.

These are all great changes. The more eyes we have on code the better. Do your part: Install the Magento 2 developer preview and get testing

My $2375 Amazon EC2 Mistake

Wed, 07 Jan 2015 16:02:04 GMT

A word of warning: Know what your modules/extensions/pods/plugins are doing, especially if they use any of your credentials.

I’m actually surprised that this actually was up that long. I accidentally did this once and Amazon was on the phone with me 10 mins later.

Turns out through the S3 API you can actually spin up EC2 instances, and my

key had been spotted by a bot that continually searches GitHub for API keys. Amazon AWS customer support informed me this happens a lot recently, hackers have created an algorithm that searches GitHub 24 hours per day for API keys… Once it finds one it spins up max instances of EC2 servers to farm itself bitcoins…

Boom! A $2375 bill in the morning. Just for trying to learn rails.

The Programmer's Dream

Fri, 26 Dec 2014 14:59:48 GMT

Great short piece by Nick Bradbury

Programmers dream of new code.

We spend a good deal of our time working on code we didn’t write for

software we didn’t create, much of which we believe is horribly written (or, at least, could be done much better). We dream of a chance to start fresh, working from scratch on a brand new piece of software that will eventually become something someone else has to work on and believes is horribly written.

If we’re lucky our software will look pretty solid from the outside. It may

do weird things from time to time or very occasionally crash, but on the whole end users will think it’s stable and well thought out. Those of us who can look at it from the inside are amazed by this because we see a house of cards just waiting to come tumbling down. I think one of the benefits of open source is that we can see more clearly that everyone else’s code is just as frightening as our own is.

Keep reading

Integrated Automation for iOS 8

Sat, 20 Dec 2014 21:34:24 GMT

I can't wait to play with Workflow more over the holidays

“Workflow – first teased by Ari Weinstein and team in January 2014 – takes

another approach: instead of relying heavily on a specific functionality (such as text editing) or third-party apps and services (like IFTTT and Dropbox), Workflow is primarily aimed at automating native iOS apps and features.

Workflow can automate Calendar events and Reminders, it can parse and

extract data from webpages in Safari, and it has full support for Photos and sharing services. It even works with iCloud Drive and extensions. Workflow’s first version lacks some obvious features like backup and sync, but what it does today is an extremely powerful proposition – from both practical and conceptual standpoints.”

Apple Pay and Magento

Sat, 13 Dec 2014 23:12:12 GMT

The Business of Apple Pay (Alec Simonson)

On the outset, Apple Pay is very cool and could very well be the wave of the future. A lot of this hinges on “what’s under the hood” in terms of Apple’s contract with the leading credit card companies who helped with the development. If everything is open, and companies like Samsung can let their customers pay with NFC technology as well, I could see this as something that will be successful, adopted, and an example of Apple leading the way. However, if Apple goes all proprietary (as they love to do) and contractually forces these major credit cards to only use their devices, or charges other companies like Samsung to license their payment platform, or otherwise mandate that all touch-to-pay via smartphone methods are hereby known as “Apple Pay,” I could see adoption problems happening. Open standards have frequently been key to paving the way to adoption, and this has never really been Apple’s model in the past. For example, AirPlay is really cool and loved but does not work outside the environs of iOS, and can therefore never reach greater than 14.8% penetration as of this writing. So Chromecast was born, and while not nearly as simple or feature rich, it’s open to both Android and iOS and therefore has a much higher potential of adoption. Feature expansion will follow.

One of the aspects of Apple Pay that I think is great is that merchants aren’t really troubled with much of everything, since most of this is really on the backend. A new reader with NFC capabilities, and they’re off and running. Low cost or no cost adoption. Or is it? Nobody has mentioned what Apple’s commission is on this latest development. An article on Forbes suggested it may be around 0.2%, giving Apple $0.20 for every $100 spent. That’s not much, but when you consider what percentage that is of the credit card companies’ net (perhaps around 14%), it starts to look more substantial. Credit card companies like their investors, so it’s hard to imagine them not wanting to pass that extra cost onto merchants, who will be all-too-willing to share that with consumers.

All of that aside, it’s very smart and forward thinking, and early adopters will likely be looked upon with jealousy by others. From an implementation perspective, adding Apple Pay will likely be as easy as it was to add Google+, and merchants will do it. But the long-term prospects will rely highly on what sort of deal Apple made….the devil is always in the details.

The Technology of Apple Pay (Tim Broder)

Out of the gate, Pay is native app only. This leaves Magento sites at a disadvantage. In the future I’d like to see Apple open up this functionality to Safari on both mobile and desktop. Pay already has one-time number generation. This could be implemented in the browser similar to how [1Password](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/1password-password- manager/id443987910?mt=12&at=11laRZ&ct=pro) can inject a credit card number into a form. Until something like this happens, only sites with a native app siting in front of Magento’s API will be able to take advantage. If you are looking to investigate this space, meets.io, an unofficial Magento SDK, is a great starting point.

I’ll be curious if a developer comes up with a browser dedicated to this functionality. Tap into the Pay API and generate credit card numbers ad hoc, and bridge between Pay and e-commerce sites. Or, take it a step further and develop a custom keyboard for iOS 8. If allowed, it would be more seamless than a whole seperate browser. I say “if allowed” because there are some restrictions on what 3rd party keyboard can do. For example, they cannot touch passwords. The stock keyboard reasserts itself when tapping on a password field.

Facebook, you creepy piece of sh*t

Sun, 09 Nov 2014 02:04:35 GMT

I debated posting this for a few days. I’m deciding to because when I was googling for something. I found nothing. I hope this helps someone:

A lot of people don't talk about this. Some do. Most don't. I'm not sure why. Maybe embarrassment. Maybe fear. Maybe they think they are alone. You aren't. It happens. It's real. I've talked to some people and we aren't alone.

Laura and I have been trying to conceive for a bit. I won't go into how long, at least not right now, so don't ask. Talking to some people has helped. But, only a little. The internet, as far as we have found (Googled) doesn't have much info.

"Just stop trying, it will happen"

"It's so much fun!"

"It just happened!!"

I'm happy for these people? I really am. But at the same time F**K YOU, it’s just not that way for us.

2 things have happened recently that have set me over the edge. We took a break this month, just casually "trying" without any kind of schedule. We randomly thought we had a bite on the line so I went to the pharmacy to buy a test. The cashier wished me congratulations when I checked out. Then she asked me if I was excited. There are so many things wrong with this type of person doing this. I had a few friends in high school that worked as a cashier at a pharmacy. They aren’t supposed to ask personal questions. If they see a classmate buying something like condoms they aren’t supposed to say anything about it to anyone. It’s private. Ok, back to the present. First of all, fk you. Second, that’s so dangerous. My response was “hopeful.” That’s about all I could get out without leaping over the register. It’s annoying enough that that is in no way shape or form the “congratulations” part of the timeline. You don’t know yet, that’s why you are getting the TEST. Second, can you imagine if we weren’t trying and something happened and this was completely unexpected. What would have been going through my head and then to hear those words? The response would have been: “Terrified, you bch”

The second thing happened this morning, and what spurned this post. I was still asleep. Laura was on Facebook. Facebook served her an adoption ad. Facebook, you fucking sleazy, creepy, f**king awful piece of sh*t. I don’t even want to know how you have the data to correlate that. I could probably figure it out, but that would probably end in me canceling my account. If you are going to show an ad like that (at least on Facebook), you need to KNOW that the person is looking to adopt. Not just something like “the person got married,” then “googled something baby,” and now months later, hasn’t googled “stroller”. Showing an ad like that to someone who is trying is beyond fucked up.

Facebook: For what you did to my wife this morning, if you were a person, I would have found you, and I would have hurt you.

Twitter is not a replacement for blogs

Tue, 04 Nov 2014 15:21:15 GMT

Too much of my writing in the last few years has gone exclusively into

Twitter. I need to find a better balance.

A Tale of Two iPhones: Part 2

Mon, 13 Oct 2014 15:02:46 GMT

My iPhone decision, posted on The Tekside Network

Size matters, and it’s all in how you use it. In my last post, I went through my thought process of picking a new phone. Since then, I’ve had a lot more hands on time with the 6 Plus, and came to a decision. Quick recap: Big screens are pretty, big screens are harder to fit in pockets, I read a lot, I should get a big one as a developer device.

A coworker of mine has the 6 Plus and was gracious enough to let me use his for some lengths of time. We were both at a conference last Monday. This gave me ample walking around and sitting time with the 6 Plus. The 6 Plus sticks out of the top of my front pocket. I tried it in two different pairs of Jeans (Express and Levis). Neither pair is considered a “skinny jean”. I might have been able to get used to that. Maybe. And no, I’m not going to put it in my back pocket. Risk of bending or not, I’ll forget it’s there and do something stupid. While it “fit” in my pocket, I couldn’t slide it around. There is a decent number of times where I have my laptop on my lap; On the commuter train going into NYC or on a couch at work. When I do this with my 5s, I slide it to the side of my pocket so the laptop isn’t sitting right on it. If I left it, it would dig into my leg or eventually do something bad to the phone’s screen. Not an option with the 6 Plus (it is with the 6, I tried).

Walking around with the 6 Plus in my front pocket wasn’t bad. I do tend to keep my hands in my pockets a lot and it was only slightly annoying. Sitting at the conference’s chairs wasn’t too horrible. I knew it was there, and it was different, but I could have gotten used to it. Back at work though, it felt very weird. At my chair at work, the phone was digging into my hip. I possibly, possibly could have gotten used to this as well. I probably would have started taking it out of my pocket to sit down. Then, knowing me I’d forget it at my desk and need it shortly after to check where I’m supposed to be or what meeting I’m supposed to be in.

Reading on a bigger device isn’t too much of a deal breaker. I don’t mind reading through my Instapaper queue or a Kindle book on my 5s (while on the go, I have a Paperwhite at home). 90% of the time I have my backpack with me which has my laptop and iPad Mini in it. I do a lot of reading on the iPad. The 6 Plus is not big enough for reading comics so there’s no way it could ever be replaced. I’ve made my decision at this point. Getting the 6. There was one thing still on my mind though: I was worried about was doing development work and having the 6 Plus with all it’s new size classes. I do my iOS dev on nights and weekends. If I did it full time, I could justify weighing that reason over the rest of my thinking. Maybe one day. For now, I’ll stick with comfort.

Space Gray, 64 gig 6, here I come.

(I wasn’t up for renewal until Sept 22. As of this writing, my phone will show up on Oct 17)

My Packing List

Tue, 07 Oct 2014 18:01:55 GMT

I’ve been traveling for work a bit this year. Sometimes with little notice and it’s helped me to have a go to packing list. I also use it for personal trips as well. I just need less things. I was originally managing this in clear. Lately I’ve been managing it in Listacular. I like that this app syncs text file todo lists over dropbox. Easy to update on my Mac.

Aftershave
Air bed
Ball
Bathing suit
Belt
Big headphones
Boots
Charge ipad
Charge kindle
Charge laptop
Coffee
Deodorant
Dress shirts
Earplugs
Foam roller
Hat
Hoodie
Inhalers
Kindle
Laptop
Laptop charger
Local currency
Meds
Money clip
Nightwave
Pajamas
Passport
Phone charger
Pillow
Razor
Sandles
Shaving cream
Shorts
Small Headphones
Socks
Sunglasses
Toothbrush
Toothpaste
Tshirts
Undershirts
Underwear
Watch
Workout clothes
Yoga Matt
iPad
iPhone

Meet Magento 2014 New York – a Personal Summary

Sun, 05 Oct 2014 22:56:35 GMT

Alan Kent, Chief Architect of Magento 2 has a great write up of Meet Magento NY

Tim Broder of Alexander Interactive talked about his use of Vagrant to build

standard images, ensuring more consistent development environments for all users. He pointed out you can have a Vagrant container mount a file system from your local laptop so you can use a local IDE while having the files run in a standard Vagrant environment image. In development you may mount it read/write and in production read-only. The idea was to ensure all developers had a consistent supported environment. Oh, and he mentioned a few times “Vagrant Share” which allows you to share your environment with anyone in the world. This looked really useful when collaborating with clients as you can guarantee they have the same set up as you are using to develop the code.

A Tale of Two iPhones

Sun, 05 Oct 2014 20:59:39 GMT

I wrote up my thoughts on picking a new phone over on the Tekside Network.

It’s almost upgrade time. Normally this is an easy decision: get the new phone. Apple threw us a curve ball this year by launching two entirely new phones. Now every Apple fan has a choice to make and it's a much, much harder choice than the 5s vs. the underpowered 5c last year. This year’s choice boils down to screen size. Yes, granted, the 6 Plus has better battery life and a better camera. Those two things will influence the choice of some people. Their scope pales in comparison to SIZE. During the keynote, when Apple announced the size, my initial reaction was to go with the 6. My gut reaction to the 6 Plus was “No. NO. No. It’s too big! It’s never going to fit in my pocket. WHY would anyone buy that? NO.” Now, I’m not so sure.

Let me take a step back. I’ve had big phones in the past. Prior to switching to iPhone, I was the Android guy at work. I liked how configurable it was and how it bashed the iPhone’s battery life, lack of copy/paste, and it’s “closed system”. We’re not going down that rabbit hole today though. The point is, I never had a “small” iPhone. I had a Droid, an Incredible, and a Galaxy Nexus. Each one getting bigger with the Nexus capping out at 4.65 inches. I really, really liked that size. Then for a number of reasons, I switched to iPhone. I was tired of apps crashing. I wanted something new and slick and I started writing apps for it. I picked up an iPhone 5, entering in at that form factor. I LOVED it. It took a week or so for it to stop feeling small, but then it felt perfect.

I initially thought: “The 6 is 4.7 inches and has a 3x screen? I’ve had that screen size before. Done.” I can upgrade on Sept 22 and now I don’t even have to think about it. I know what I’m going to get.

It’s currently Sunday, Sept 21. On Friday, a few 6’s started getting delivered to work. They exceeded everything I thought about the phone. They look great and the screen is insane. I'm still very happy with my decision.

Now some doubts are starting to pop up… I poked around in Xcode and I’m seeing the things the 6 Plus does under the hood with screen layout. On Twitter, I’m seeing other devs talking about how the 6 Plus behaves. As a developer, wouldn’t it be the responsible decision to get the bigger phone so I understand how it acts first hand? Do I need the better battery life? I read on my phone a lot, but I like reading on my Retina Mini more. The screen is gorgeous. Can I really pass that up?

Even with all of these questions, the choice still boils down to size. Will it fit comfortably in my pocket? That is the deal breaker. On Monday, I’m going to borrow a coworkers 6 Plus for an hour or so and sit with it in my pocket. I’m going to walk around with it. I’m going to climb some stairs. If it’s just too big, the 6+ is out. If it’s something I think I can adjust to, I am SO in.

These are the apps you want to try on your new iPhone

Sat, 20 Sep 2014 15:18:31 GMT

iOS 8 offers a whole range of features that let apps extend themselves — into other apps, and even into widgets inside notification center.

This is a great writeup of how exciting things are getting in the ecosystem for both new and old apps alike

On Morning Rituals

Tue, 16 Sep 2014 15:51:28 GMT

Rituals are important. I’m a creature of habit. But, I had never characterized some of the things I do as rituals. I read some posts by Casey Liss and David Smith that were not unlike some of the things I do. I like repetition. I like not having to think about a decision or even make one to begin with. Similar things for breakfast each day. If I cook a big meal I’ll have the leftovers for subsequent meals until they are gone.

Having these rituals help me get my day going. They let me know that all is right in the world.

My morning ritual is something of a decision tree:

Gym

I used to go to my gym a lot more often; 4-6 days a week. Adding in runs on top of that if I was training for a race. Lately 3 days a week seems to be my norm. I’ve grown to be ok with this. Personal and work stress are adding up, and that’s what I can do right now. Which is funny because the gym is a huge stress relief for me. But, I digress. If I go to the gym, I shower at the gym after my workout, then walk to work. I either have breakfast with me or I pick it up on the way to the office. If I have it with me, it means I cooked it the night before: 3-4 eggs fried in coconut oil, seasoning, maybe some sourcraut (It’s a lot better than you think it is). If I pick it up it’s some kind of veggie omelet or scrambled eggs with a vegetable. This has been my morning gym ritual for about 5 years now. I started drinking coffee about a year ago. I have a half cup from the pot of work if I eat breakfast there. I add 2 cubes of ice to it from work’s freezer. I want to drink it immediately and this brings it to the right temperature for my taste. Having this repetition helps me start my day. I usually eat my food at the cafe table, with my laptop, doing a quick pass of email. I’m trying to shift this into doing something with the first hour of my day, not just drowning in email.

Wakeup time: 5:35am. Catch 6:07 train into the city. My clothes are laid out the night before. Wakeup, chug protein shake so I’m not starving, wash face, brush teeth, do inhaler, run to train.

Home

If I sleep in, I eat and have coffee at home. I’ll wakeup and jump in the shower to wake up a little. Breakfast will be 3 eggs and sometimes a few strips of bacon. I put the frying pan on high. While it’s heating up I put the kettle on. I crack a few eggs into the pan. While they are sitting, I start getting the Aeropress ready. I love the Aeropress. It’s perfect for a single cup, or even 2 if I’m making one for Laura. I get my coffee from Tonx. If you aren’t familiar with them, I highly recommend. You get your coffee every 2 weeks for a monthly fee. The beans are roasted fresh, which apparently augments the taste. I don’t have to worry about running out, or remembering to pick some up from the store. It just shows up. Less stress. The amount of coffee I drink is perfect for their lowest plan. At most I end up with an extra cup and a half of beans. It’s very, very rare that I run out. I also tried Drifwaway coffee which I really liked. They send you a sample pack of 4 types of coffee. You rate each one and this effects what your shipments are in the future. I consistently got something I really enjoyed. I occasionally get something I’m not a big fan of with Tonx. You might wonder why I don’t just pick 1 thing and stick with it. That would be less stress, actually. But, I’m still getting into coffee and exploring what I like. I can’t tell you right now what type of coffee I like using the right terminology. But, Driftaway’s shipment size was too big for me, I ended up having a decent amount leftover.

Wakeup time: in between 7 and 8, depending on what my morning for work looks like

Run

I may, like I did this morning, get up 30-60 mins before my sleep in time and get a run in. If it’s going to be raining I’ll opt for this. I love running in the rain. The amount of running I’ve been doing recently has dropped drastically. I’m trying to get back into it. I really do love it. After the run, I fall into what I normally do at home.

I use an alarm for all of these. For the gym, I’ll set the Sony clock radio I’ve had since I was 6. I’m amazed it still works, though it took me a while to find a link to it online. I wake up at the same time for the gym, no matter the day. I just flip on the alarm. Laura keeps it tuned to NPR, so I wake up to that. The other days I’ll use my phone. Siri sets alarms for whatever time I need.

I never snooze. Never have, don’t think I ever will. If I’m not going to get up until 20 mins later, I’d rather just get that as real sleep time. My alarm clock has always been in a place where I have to get up to turn it off. (This was particularly helpful in college. I woke up at 4:40 for practice. Sleep was very valuable)

If you are frazzled in the morning or feel stressed out getting ready for work, think about repetition. What would you want to do every morning? What of your routine can be ritualized?

If you did a few things the night before (pick clothes) would that lessen your stress in the morning? Think about it. I love it. If you have any rituals that help you start your day, or lower your stress, let me below in the comments or on

The Rise and Fall of Communication Mediums

Sun, 07 Sep 2014 20:49:49 GMT

Brent Simmons:

My blog’s older than Twitter and Facebook, and it will outlive them. It has

seen Flickr explode and then fade. It’s seen Google Wave and Google Reader come and go, and it’ll still be here as Google Plus fades. When Medium and Tumblr are gone, my blog will be here.

The things that will last on the internet are not owned. Plain old websites,

blogs, RSS, irc, email.

Marco Arment:

This is why I’m still championing blogs, RSS, and using your own domain even

though supposedly “everyone” has moved to social networks.

I’m very, very glad I started blogging 7 years ago. I started out just wanting to help people. I’ve continued posting code both for tutorial purposes and to work through my own problems. At some times it’s been a voice for me, and I’ve dabbled in commentary. Facebook is older than this blog, but I’m fairly close to Twitter. I never thought we’d see the day when Google Reader would shut down. These days Google doesn’t surprise me anymore. Which, should say something. I was a HUGE Google fanboy. Since moving off blogger, I’ve managed the servers and software that run this blog. I plan on being around for a long time. It’s too much fun to stop

Don't Skimp on Coffee: A CTO's Plea

Thu, 21 Aug 2014 13:56:27 GMT

My friend Matt, CTO of DoSomething.org, posted a great article on the importance of coffee, ritual, and how they relate to the happiness, productivity, and health of your company

If you’re looking for an office Rosetta Stone, a way to assess company

culture across industries, coffee is it.

Podcast Reruns

Mon, 18 Aug 2014 18:06:58 GMT

Last year, I had been plowing through old episodes of a few Tech podcasts. I was able to get through all of Developing Perspective (they are short) and was working on Build and Analyze. I’m halfway-ish through B&A, but my listening has died off in leu of new episodes of other shows.

I’ve missed listening to it. The reason it dropped of is playlist related. Everything I listen to is in one playlist that I prune from time to time. I didn’t add B&A to it because I didn’t want to have to download each episode each time. I downloaded them all at once. If I added it to the playlist, all 108 episodes would have shown up. I had a separate playlist just for this show. But, I would forget about it.

I got to thinking about reruns. TV has them. YouTube has them. Why not this medium? Whether specifically for podcasts or RSS feeds in general, I thought something might exist. Something that would take a feed and give back the items at a pubDate+days interval. This way, whatever you consume the feeds with, will think it’s new. This could be done by modifying the pubDate, though some feed scrapers might not care that a pubDate might be in the future. The other method would be to restrict a feed based on a range of days (or weeks for Podcasts).

I googled around for a bit. The back of my mind thinks it remembers something from…. 5 or so years ago? No luck. Then I wanted to build a service to do it… Then I remembered time is scarce these days. Yahoo Pipes to the rescue!!

I got a pipe working that overcast would accept and process. Then tweaked it for more public consumption.

http://pipes.yahoo.com/timbroder/podcastreruns

The Pipe has 3 inputs (listed in a different order from that link for ease of explanation)

Feed URL: Paste in the url of your podcast feed here
How Many Weeks ago to start: This is when in the podcast to start pulling from. If want to start at the very first episode, use the number of weeks between when the episode first aired, and now. I want to start B&A at episode 49. It aired on 10/24/2011. It’s currently 7/29/2014. So, I want to start 145 weeks ago
How many episodes do you want per week: This depends on how much you want, and how often the podcast released episodes. If it was a weekly podcast and you want to get 1 episode a week, put 1. If it was weekly and you want 4 episodes a week to catch up faster, put 4. What this is doing is loading all the feed items in between the “start week” and this number at once. Podcasts that come out more than once a week will be multiplied by this number

Configure as needed, then cick “Run Pipe” to confirm you see the appropriate episodes. Then, grab the RSS url for this configuration. Load this URL into your pod catcher.

I’ve been testing this for a few weeks now and it’s working great! Another good use would be [Overcast’s](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/overcast- podcast-player/id888422857?mt=8&at=11laRZ&ct=pro) “Retired Greats” Section:

If you are interested in the inner workings of this Pipe, here is a screenshot. Though, looking at this now, getting more than 1 episode a week needs some tweaking.

“make” time

Wed, 13 Aug 2014 23:13:59 GMT

We’re often told you need to “make” time, a phrase that rankles me.

Drives me nuts as well. Our days are already packed. "Making time" isn't making it; it's prioritizing time. If you make time for something, you are acknowledging that the thing you are making time for has a priority at the expense of something else.

That’s why it’s important to know how long something takes, or to break it

down into micro projects. By doing so, you may discover that you can reclaim time “might” by being more efficient, or by delegating tasks (whether they be personal or business-related).

This is interesting. I'd be interested in trying it and seeing where all my time is during the day. (I already track all my work hours. Outside of that) I would worry about it being consuming though. Then stressing about missed logs. Maybe

UITableViewCell Action Swiping in iOS8 and Swift

Sat, 09 Aug 2014 20:43:58 GMT

Mail.app in iOS7 brought swiping cells to the inbox. The iOS8 beta added a 3rd button to it. Apple has also introduced an API to assist with creating this effect: UITableViewRowAction. Prior to this, I used SWTableViewCell.

Below is how to get the basic functionality working. Please note that you have to implement the 2nd function whether it has a body or not

class TIMUITableViewDelegate: NSObject, UITableViewDelegate {
    func tableView(tableView: UITableView!, editActionsForRowAtIndexPath indexPath: NSIndexPath!) -&gt; [AnyObject]! {
        var shareAction = UITableViewRowAction(style: .Normal, title: "Share") { (action, indexPath) -&gt; Void in
            tableView.editing = false
            println("shareAction")
        }
        shareAction.backgroundColor = UIColor.grayColor()
        
        var doneAction = UITableViewRowAction(style: .Default, title: "Done") { (action, indexPath) -&gt; Void in
            tableView.editing = false
            println("readAction")
        }
        doneAction.backgroundColor = UIColor.greenColor()
        
        var deleteAction = UITableViewRowAction(style: .Default, title: "Delete") { (action, indexPath) -&gt; Void in
            tableView.editing = false
            println("deleteAction")
        }
        
        return [deleteAction, doneAction, shareAction]
    }
    
    func tableView(tableView: UITableView!, commitEditingStyle editingStyle: UITableViewCellEditingStyle, forRowAtIndexPath indexPath: NSIndexPath!) {
    }

}

I can’t get the (-) delete indicator to appear when I put the table into edit mode though. Setting UITableViewCell.shouldIndentWhileEditing = NO is supposed to disable this effect. I’ve tried setting it in 3 places:

On the cell directly
In interface builder: http://screencast.com/t/TUg7To46vKd0
In the appropriate delegate method

I’ve had to add some workarounds to deal with this for now. I’ve filed rdar://17969970 against this. For now, this is how I’m handling by checking if I’m already in edit mode when I build out the actions array. This isn’t ideal at all. I don’t even want to be able to delete when I’m in edit mode, just reorder. Apologies for switching back to obj-c. The delegate I’m working in is older.

- (void) endEditing
{
    self.editMode = NO;
    self.editControlButton.title = @"Reorder";
    [self setEditing:NO animated:YES];
    //[self.tableView reloadData];
}

- (void) startEditing
{
    self.editMode = YES;
    self.editControlButton.title = @"Done";
    [self.tableView setEditing:YES animated:YES];
}

#pragma - mark UITableViewDelegate

- (BOOL)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView canEditRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath {
    return YES;
}

- (UITableViewCellEditingStyle)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView editingStyleForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath
{
    return UITableViewCellEditingStyleDelete;
}

- (BOOL)tableView:(UITableView *)tableview shouldIndentWhileEditingRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath
{
    NSLog(@"shouldIndentWhileEditingRowAtIndexPath");
    return NO;
}

- (void)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView didSelectRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath {
    TCORead *item = [self.fetchedResultsControllerDataSource selectedItem];
    manager.currentRead = item;
}

- (NSArray *)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView editActionsForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath {
    UITableViewRowAction *deleteAction = [UITableViewRowAction rowActionWithStyle:UITableViewRowActionStyleDestructive title:@"Delete" handler:^(UITableViewRowAction *action, NSIndexPath *indexPath){
        [self.tableView setEditing:NO];
    }];
    
    //workaround, rdar://17969970
    //normally don't want to be able to get into this menu when reordering
    if (!self.editMode) {
        UITableViewRowAction *shareAction = [UITableViewRowAction rowActionWithStyle:UITableViewRowActionStyleNormal title:@"Share" handler:^(UITableViewRowAction *action, NSIndexPath *indexPath){
            [self.tableView setEditing:NO];
        }];
        shareAction.backgroundColor = [UIColor grayColor];
        
        UITableViewRowAction *doneAction = [UITableViewRowAction rowActionWithStyle:UITableViewRowActionStyleDestructive title:@"Done" handler:^(UITableViewRowAction *action, NSIndexPath *indexPath){
            [self.tableView setEditing:NO];
        }];
        doneAction.backgroundColor = [UIColor greenColor];
        
        [self startEditing];
        return @[deleteAction, doneAction, shareAction];
    }
    
    return @[deleteAction];
}

- (void)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView didEndEditingRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath
{
    [self endEditing];
}

- (void)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView commitEditingStyle:(UITableViewCellEditingStyle)editingStyle forRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath {
    //empty on purpose
}

This post and the Radar helped me collect my thoughts to post on Stack. I’ve been afraid of backlash or Noob. Time to get over it.

Update 2014-09-11

Vanyas has a great sample application that addresses what I’m trying to do. I was forcing the delete button on the right hand side myself. Updating editingStyleForRowAtIndexPath to the below fixed my issue:

- (UITableViewCellEditingStyle)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView editingStyleForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath
{
    //return UITableViewCellEditingStyleDelete;
    return tableView.isEditing ? UITableViewCellEditingStyleNone: UITableViewCellEditingStyleDelete;
}

How to Restore a Time Machine Backup From a Synology NAS

Mon, 04 Aug 2014 22:28:26 GMT

My Sunday morning started off like this:

“There’s an error with the EFI system partition’s file system.” Well today’s

off to a great start // @siracusa — Tim Broder (@timothybroder) August 3, 2014

My laptop wouldn’t finish booting.

All I got was a backlit, black, screen. I went through numerous combinations of booting with option, cmd+R, cmd+shift+R, un-mounting, ejecting. In all methods, trying in vain to get the Disk Utility to verify and repair the hard drive. I tried from Recovery Mode and a fresh OSX install on a USB hard drive. The things I saw on my screen included:

The aforementioned black screen
A backlit, white, screen
A gray screen with a flashing Folder with a question mark in it
“Live file system repair is not supported”
There’s an error with the EFI system partition’s file system.”
Clean installs were failing: "An Error occurred while preparing the installation. Try running this application again.”
“Verified failure: unrecognized file system”

After a few hours I moved from “I need to fix this” to “I need to get my laptop back up.”

Ok let’s do a clean install: "An Error occurred while preparing the installation. Try running this application again.”

Crap.

At this point I booked a genius bar appointment for the next day just in case. 3 clean installs failed. Took a break to think about it…. I got back into Disk Utility and formatted the partition. Then deleted/recreated the partitions. Formatted again (why not?). At this point a clean install worked. Ok… Seems like the drive isn’t totally dead. But, I want to do a fresh restore from my Time Machine backup on my NAS. I normally also have a SuperDuper! backup. I didn’t. That’s a story for another time. Apple doesn’t quite support NAS Time Machine; there are a few hoops you have to jump through:

Get into recovery mode (Boot while holding cmd+R)
Open the terminal
Go to Volumes
```
cd /Volumes
ls -la
```
Make a place to mount the NAS mkdir synology
Double check it’s there ls -la
Mount your NAS. This is the IP of it in my house. This should be the IP you use to get to the admin console. My Admin is: http://192.168.1.205:5000

You’ll also need to know what share your Time Machine back is in. For me, it has it’s own drive, represented by “timstimemachine”. I’ll go into the details of my NAS setup in a future post mount -t afp afp://admin:[password]@192.168.1.205/timstimemachine synology

Check you see files in the synology folder
```
cd synology
ls -la
```
Even though we’re mounted, we won’t see this backup in Time Machine Restore just yet. Use hdid (hard drive image driver) to mount the sparse bundle image hdid [your back-up name].sparsebundle
If your drive or the backup was encrypted, You’ll need to enter it’s password at this time
Make sure your backup is still mounted ls -la
Ok, quit the Terminal and load up Time Machine Restore
You should see the backup we just mounted
Start the restore. It can take a while. Mine is around 360 gigs and it estimated 16 hours. It took a lot less than that but it finished when I was sleeping so I don’t have an accurate time.

Sunday was a stressful day. Hopefully this can help you.

Twitter or RSS

Sun, 03 Aug 2014 22:34:34 GMT

If you had to choose between only reading Twitter or only reading weblogs,

which would you choose? Losing Twitter would be a bummer for a lot people, but losing weblogs would decimate the web. We should do more to strengthen weblogs and RSS because they are the foundation for so much of the most important writing on the web.

#RSS4LIFE

Joking aside, I do get a lot of my news from twitter these days. I would say half the articles that I'd be interested in reading (dumping to Instapaper from Reeder or Mr. reader) I've already added from twitter. Luckily, I use Feed Wrangler so I don't see duplicates of something already in Instapaper when browsing my feeds.

The Most Dangerous Word In Software Development

Sun, 03 Aug 2014 19:12:41 GMT

“Just put it up on a server somewhere.”

“Just add a favorite button to the right side of the item.”

“Just add [insert complex option here] to the settings screen.”

If any of these sentences rings true or makes you cringe, read this article.

Dismiss a Modal UIViewController created in Interface Builder

Sun, 27 Jul 2014 22:31:11 GMT

There are a number of posts on this subject on Stack. They involve re-instantiating (this seems slower to me) or yanking the view from a UIButton (this feels dirty).

I’d rather just update the UIBarButtonItem that I already have:

All I needed to do, was attach the appropriate target and action to the UIBarButtonItem:

class SettingsTableViewController : UITableViewController {
    
    @IBOutlet weak var doneBarButton: UIBarButtonItem!
    
    init(coder aDecoder: NSCoder!) {
        super.init(coder: aDecoder)
    }
    
    override func viewDidLoad() {
        super.viewDidLoad()
        
        doneBarButton.target = self
        doneBarButton.action = "donePressed:"
    }
    
    @IBAction func donePressed(b:UIBarButtonItem) {
        self.dismissViewControllerAnimated(true, completion: {})
    }
}

Using PonyDebugger on a device

Sun, 27 Jul 2014 20:25:59 GMT

PonyDebugger is awesome. I use it mostly for Core Data debugging. Most of the time, I find it easier then firing up SQLite Professional.

When using the simulator, hitting localhost:9000 is fine. On a device, not so much; you need to hit your machine. xip.ioto the rescue! What it is: xip.io is a magic domain name that provides wildcard DNS for any IP address. We use this heavily at work if the machine we’re on isn’t hooked up to a subdomain or [Vagrant Share](https://www.vagrantup.com/blog/feature- preview-vagrant-1-5-share.html).

We can use this wildcard to have our iPhone hit our laptop’s instance of PonyDebugger.

First, get your IP. I use this Alfred workflow. Take note of your local IP.

Start PonyDebugger listening on that IP:

bashponyd serve —listen-interface=192.168.1.10

For handy access, alias this command:

bashalias pony="ponyd serve --listen-interface=192.168.1.10"

Load Pony in your browser by appending your IP to the a xip.io URL: http://192.168.1.10.xip.io:9000/

To access via the simulator or a device:

pony.connectToURL(NSURL.URLWithString("ws://192.168.1.10.xip.io:9000/device"))
pony.enableNetworkTrafficDebugging() pony.enableCoreDataDebugging() ```

UITapGestureRecognizer in Swift

Sun, 27 Jul 2014 14:47:33 GMT

I have a subclass of UIView that has a label:

class PlayerView : UIView {
    @IBOutlet weak var playLabel: UILabel!
}

I want to attach a Tap Gesture to it:

class PlayerView : UIView {
    @IBOutlet weak var playLabel: UILabel!
}

Creating a conforming delegate (UITableViewDelegate) in Swift

Sun, 27 Jul 2014 02:11:16 GMT

This tripped me up for a bit so I hope this helps someone.

I started out with this class, thinking I could just continue on my merry way. This errors in Xcode with: "class does not conform to NSObjectProtocol”

class FastListUITableViewDelegate : UITableViewDelegate { }

Hmm ok, but much there yet, what did I miss? This should definitely be a class; not a protocol (I have methods to implement), not a @class_protocol (wrong use, based on the docs), hmm.

This obviously behaves different than in objective-c. What is inherent in the obj-c version of this that would conform to NSObjectProtocol? NSObject. Every class and C eventually rolls up to this…

This is working so far:

class FastListUITableViewDelegate : NSObject, UITableViewDelegate { }

I’ll report back here if this solution changes

Why I turned off email notifications

Wed, 23 Jul 2014 01:02:24 GMT

Just about a week ago I had an epiphany: Email is a constant. It will never

end.

More often than not nothing is actionable I made a quick change — turn off

all notifications for email. None shall pass.

NO EMAIL NOTIFICATIONS. I've been doing this for about a year now on my phone and it's amazing. I've been doing it for 3 years on my laptop. I don't know why I didn't do it on all my devices sooner. (I don't get outlook or gmail notifications). It lowers stress and helps me focus on actual tasks instead of context switching into email all the time. Context switching is expensive

Reply too fast, expectations are set

No arguments here. If someone thinks you respond to emails within 5 mins, they will expect it. When you don't, you'll be under delivering.

If it’s urgent, why are you using email?

This is a huge pet peeve of mine. "Did you have a chance to respond to that email I sent you 30 seconds ago?" drives me nuts. If it's an emergency, send me an IM. If I'm offline or don't respond, get up off your ass and walk over. If I'm remote and offline for some reason, text me.

Coding Under Par

Wed, 23 Jul 2014 01:02:13 GMT

when it’s midnight and I’m on a perceived roll with some coding challenge,

there doesn’t appear to be any stopping me. I “have all night,” or at least that’s what my monkey brain says. Of course, the smarter half of me knows I should be getting calling it a day and getting some much-needed rest.

I hear this. As I get older, and keep to a rigid sleep schedule, I tend to find myself being useless after 9pm. I do miss the old days io burning through until 2am. Now that flux exists to take care of the circadian issues, we should be able to burn all night. Right? RIGHT!?!

Looping through subviews and downcasting in Swift

Tue, 22 Jul 2014 23:23:27 GMT

I've been playing around with Auto-Layout. This snippet was helpful to see what constraints were set on what views in my View Hierarchy.

Getting the downcast right on the subviews Array took a few tries:

func showAL(view: UIView) {
    println(&quot;!&quot;)
    println(view)
    println(view.constraints())
}

    for view in self.subviews as [UIView] {
        showAL(view)
        for subview in view.subviews as [UIView] {
            showAL(subview)
        }
    }
    ```

Functions or Read-Only Properties in Swift?

Sat, 12 Jul 2014 23:22:03 GMT

I’m not sure which is better. If it's returning something that is directly tied to the class: a slice/dice of properties is already has, I'm leaning towards properties. Because of the many examples I feel like read-only properties are the way to do. I’m not the only person [wondering](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/24035276/computed-read-only- property-vs-function-in-swift), so that’s validating.

Property:

extension String {
    var fullSentences: [String] {
        // stuff
    }
}

Function:

extension String {
    func fullSentences() -&gt; [String] {
        // stuff
    }
}

Playgrounds in Swift are Awesome

Sat, 12 Jul 2014 23:19:42 GMT

Man alive, I missed this from Python. More live editing, less edit+build+run.

Parsing sentences from a String in Swift

Sat, 12 Jul 2014 23:08:57 GMT

I’ve been looking at how to parse sentences from text recently. While I’m still looking for a more Machine Learning approach, I found NSStringEnumerationBySentences which can get me there faster (for now). I need to get all of the sentences from a given String. This could easily be an Objective-C category method. But, I’m trying to learn as much Swift as I can. I haven’t played with extensions yet. Here we go. enumerateSubstringsInRange:options:usingBlock: is what I’ll need, but I need the extension first:

extension String {

    var fullSentences: [String] {

    }

}

Fiddling with Swift’s closure syntax for a little while, and using the shorthand for NSStringEnumerationBySentences, I end up with this:

extension String {

    var fullSentences: [String] {

        var sentences = [String]()

        let range = self.rangeOfString(self)

        

        self.enumerateSubstringsInRange(range, options: .BySentences) { substring, substringRange, enclosingRange, inout in

            sentences += substring

        }

        

        return sentences

    }

}

This could have been condensed even more, but I find this very hard to read:

extension String {

    var fullSentences: [String] {

        var sentences = [String]()

        let range = self.rangeOfString(self)

        

        self.enumerateSubstringsInRange(range, options: .BySentences) { substring, _, _, _ in

            sentences += substring

        }

        

        return sentences

    }

}

Ah, but alas. Now I can’t use this in Objective-C. It won’t see the String extension. It needs to be NSString:

extension NSString {

    var fullSentences: [String] {

        var sentences = [String]()

        let range = self.rangeOfString(self)

        

        self.enumerateSubstringsInRange(range, options: .BySentences) { substring, substringRange, enclosingRange, inout in

            sentences += substring

        }

        

        return sentences

    }

}

I haven’t quite figured out the naming convention for Swift Extension files yet. Right now, I have this in StringExtentions.swift in my categories folder. Though…. I guess to be proper it should be NSStringExtentions.swift…

Apple's Swift Blog

Fri, 11 Jul 2014 17:46:58 GMT

This new blog will bring you a behind-the-scenes look into the design of the

Swift language by the engineers who created it, in addition to the latest news and hints to turn you into a productive Swift programmer.

I LOVE the new, open-er Apple. From the barriers between iOS and OSX coming down, some Apple devs being more open on twitter and in the dev forums, and now this blog.

It’s an amazing time to be using Apple dev tools

On Working From Home and Running a Business

Fri, 11 Jul 2014 01:11:46 GMT

Shawn Blanc talks about how he organizes himself and his company for working from home. One day...

I cannot express enough just how absolutely critical it has been to have a

budget — both for our company and for our personal household expenses.

Did you know that most of America’s millionaires are people who earn low-

six-figure incomes? They have a high net worth (between $1 – $10 million) because they live simply and budget their money.

When we were saving for the down pay payment on our condo we were using a combination of mint.com and an allowance (envelope method, cash) I've started playing around with mint again to get a better idea of what we spend lonely on and prep us for the next chapter.

Format JSON and save to gist with Alfred

Tue, 08 Jul 2014 21:02:32 GMT

At work, we have an Angular app that deals with a lot of custom JSON. With a distributed dev team, we pass a LOT of JSON around. Copying from Chrome’s net tab, formatting, adding to a Github gist for easy transport is a PITA when you are doing it 20 times a day. I have 2 Alfred workflows to help with this.

My Use:

Copy unformatted JSON to clipboard
Alfred “JsonLint”. Formatted JSON is now in my clipboard
Alfred “gist”. URL to raw gist is now in my clipboard
One of these days I’ll chain these together

To get this working:

You’ll need the Alfred PowerPack
Install my JSON lint workflow. (It needs work, but gets the job done)
Install AlfredGist

Be sure to follow the setup instructions.
I prefer to have the ‘raw’ url returned from AlfredGist. (in the clipboard and opened)

To enable this, open functions.sh
Look for this line: gist_url=$(get_json_key “html_url" "$json") Modify to: gist_url=$(get_json_key “raw_url” "$json")

In “gistconfig” set the gists to be private

You should now be able to chain together as I listed above

Let me know if you have any questions!

Whatever goes up, that’s what we do

Sun, 06 Jul 2014 19:57:34 GMT

This is a quite from a Facebook employee:

We’re blind. It doesn’t matter what any individual person thinks about

something new. Everything must be tested. It’s feature echolocation: we throw out an idea, and when the data comes back we look at the numbers. Whatever goes up, that’s what we do. We are slaves to the numbers. We don’t operate around innovation. We only optimize. We do what goes up.

There is a flip side to this too, right? Facebook HAS that kind of data. What I wouldn't DO for that kind of data. Do we have our own custom tracking (Google Analytics) on our magneto sites at work? Of course. Does it get us the data we need? Yes and know. We can track conversions, user flows, A/B test what we need. But, the pixel level knowledge of HOW a user is using the site that Facebook seems to have seems pretty slick.

SwiftInFlux

Sun, 06 Jul 2014 19:56:24 GMT

SwiftInFlux, a community-based project for cataloguing the changes that

Apple is probably going to make to Swift before 1.0 ships

I'm really happy someone is doing this. Even between seeds 1 and 2 there was a number of changes. The differences were buried in the Xcode release notes. I think they deserve their own diffs. If you agree, please file a radar

Don't Be Scared Of Functional Programming

Fri, 04 Jul 2014 14:07:25 GMT

This [article](http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2014/07/02/dont-be-scared-of- functional-programming/) made a LOT of things click for me. I hadn't quite grasped the concepts of functional programming. (I hadn't really tried to). It's a little long. But, worth it.

Functional programming can be daunting, but remember that it isn’t only for

PhDs, data scientists and architecture astronauts. For most of us, the real benefit of adopting a functional style is that our programs can be broken down into smaller, simpler pieces that are both more reliable and easier to understand.

Launch Center Pro to Trello via IFTTT

Sun, 15 Jun 2014 17:11:21 GMT

I previously wrote about automating adding to Trello from my phone using Launch Center Pro. That method involved some scripting and Pythonista. It was fun to figure out, but cumbersome to update.

Now that LCP has IFTTT integration, this process can be simplified. You can chain an event from LCP through IFTTT to email a card to Trello. Note: This will only work for 1 list per board. I haven’t figured out if there is a way to email to multiple lists on the same board.

Set up the Launch Center Pro channel on IFTTT.
Set up Launch Center Connect on your device

In IFTTT, create a new recipe. Set the “This” to the Launch Center Pro channel. Then, choose “Trigger”
Name the trigger something that will help identify it. I used “Roadmap”. Keep note of this, you’ll need the same name later

On the Trello board you wish to work with: Go into the settings and click “Email-to-board Settings.” Grab the email address for that board. Choose which list the card should be added and it’s position._ The email in this screenshot is hooked up to anything._

In the “Then” of your IFTTT recipe, choose Gmail. In the To Address, add in the trello address. Leave just {% verbatim %} “{{Value 1}}” {% endverbatim %} in the subject. This will become the title of the card. If you want to add a description or other attributes of the card, use the other Values that Launch Center Pro provides. More on how email variables are used by Trello is available here.

In LCP: Add a new action -> System Actions -> IFTTT. Name can be anything. Trigger Name must match the trigger name in IFTTT. For each value you want to use, add a text prompt. In this example I’m only using Value 1.

Hit done and you are good to go! Please note: After sending the information to IFTTT it may take up to 5 mins to appear in your board.

Opening SourceTree from the Command line

Fri, 06 Jun 2014 15:33:35 GMT

SourceTree is my weapon of choice for a git GUI. I do most of my git work from the command line, but it’s great to look at diffs and branch trees.

I was finding it tedious to open SourceTree with Alfred, then opening the correct project.

I use this alias to open it right from my working directory:

alias sourcetree=``'open -a SourceTree'

Then, just “sourcetree .” from where I am

Delayed Liveblog on the WWDC 2014 Keynote

Tue, 03 Jun 2014 01:08:39 GMT

I was stuck in meetings most of the day but I was able to download the keynote for the train ride home :)

Here are some thoughts. If I live tweeted, it probably would have gone something like this. Maybe a few more here..

The dev intro video was awesome. It’s like Apple saying “We love you, we’ve heard you”
That’s a lot of Apple engineers present
It’s a shame I can’t risk my laptop. I want to play with Yosemite! I dig the

new look

Ooo dark mode
Mail drop is huge for work
Airdrop from phone to laptop!!
Proximity awareness is great for starting an email on the can and finishing it at the desk ;)
Proximity hotspot is PERFECT for when I’m on the train
Texts in Messages!!!!!
Proximity calls is crazy. Listening to music on laptop with headphones, call comes in, boom.
Hmm, maybe I’ll install the public beta…..
Interactive notifications, thank god. one of the few things still on my “I miss from Android list”
Context typing looks hot. I missed switfkey
I’m curious if Health can accurately track my sleep. But, I don’t want my device in bed with me
Family sharing and photo stream will be cool :) The purchases is great. Laura and I overlap on so many apps and games
I’m really curious what your iCloud size limit is going to be. Unlimited? It can store ALL your photos. I wonder if people will be dumping photos into this from other services
Ah, there we go. Paid tiers. Will probably stick with Flickr for my ultimate backup. (All are also backed up to CrashPlan)
Hah, Shazam Siri. Nice
50 mins in the keynote for DEV
- App store improvements are awesome. The lists, searches, App bundles. Apple LISTENED. wow. Whoa App preview videos
- Ahh There’s Test Flight! And it’s free
- Extensibility: Inter-app. boom.
- Notification Center Widgets. boom
- 3rd party keyboards. boom
- Can’t wait for TouchID support in 1password
- The user implications of HomeKit are nice. We have a WiMo so I’m on board with other home automation things
- CloudKit. Boom. The cloud pricing wars were already insane. I’m worried about the performance and availability… Code once though…. I
- The Metal demos are sick. I don’t do much of that type of gaming. Might be time to start again
- Mentioning Objective-C. OMG
- Swift. BOOM. HOLY SHIT. Closures, Generics, Namespaces
- OMG the playground
- Grabbing the book right now. It’s trending. Pretty cool

————
Written using [MarsEdit](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/marsedit-blog-editor- for-wordpress/id402376225?mt=12&at=11laRZ&ct=pro)

Reordering a NSFetchedResultsController

Sat, 31 May 2014 16:14:22 GMT

I’m working with a NSFetchedResultsController backed UITableView. Up until now I’ve just been ordering the items by the time they were added.

I’m moving on to Delete and Edit. Editing the content itself isn’t needed, once an item is added to this list, it can’t be changed. Deleting is straightforward in

(void)controller:(NSFetchedResultsController *)controller
didChangeObject:(id)anObject atIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath
forChangeType:(NSFetchedResultsChangeType)type newIndexPath:(NSIndexPath
*)newIndexPath {

With reordering, I have a conundrum. I have an approach for the actual re-order that will have the View and the data playing nice. But, now I need to persist the order. I don’t have a property in Core Data for this (yet). I’m trying to figure out what to set this property to. The brute force approach is to use the indexPath of the cell. I have concerns with this. Adding an item automatically puts it at the top of the list. This would give it an index of 0 (I only have 1 section). But, then I would have to update the order property of every other item in the list. The same goes for moving: each item and every item in between (I can luckily skip the outer bounds) will have to be updated. I don’t like this. There has to be a better way, I just need to figure it out.

Some kind of indexPath+hash? indexPath+integer?

Eventually I’ll reach a list size where I run into performance problems with the brute force approach. The cop out would be to limit the size of the list. I don’t want to do that either. I don’t know if I’ll go to the extreme of Brent Simmons’ data set of 30,000 items from Daring Fireball’s archive, but I want to shoot for that.

I’ll update this post with my progress

Update 2014-05-31 01:02 PM

This is a great starting point for dealing with reordering. I was on the right track with only dealing with the differences between items that get moved. Dragging an item way down on a list may(?) not happen much, it’s annoying to do. I think I’m going with that assumption for now. I still don’t feel great about the number of updates for an insert…

Batch fetch/update/save is my starting point

Update 2014-06-06 04:04 PM

It looks like iOS 8 might have better bulk update support. Downloading this session now

@inessential

@brentsimmons You might like the Core Data video. new NSBatchUpdateRequest api with a “mark all as read” example as the demo

-- solsberg (@solsberg) [June 6,

2014](https://twitter.com/solsberg/statuses/474993780186447872)

The Old Reader on Good Ol’ RSS

Fri, 09 May 2014 22:40:24 GMT

It’s always odd to hear people say RSS is dead. The fact is, RSS is easily

the most successful stealth, insurgent technology on the web. It is pervasive and is the engine for much of the Internet.

Long live RSS!

Up and Running with MindSea: Doing it the Right Way

Fri, 09 May 2014 02:03:47 GMT

I once worked with a company that told me if just two lines of code are

repeated, then there’s probably a better abstraction that I should be using instead. A bit extreme, I know, but I took that to heart. I haven’t looked back and that advice has served me well.

Ash Furrow talks about the benefits of abstraction and how it can aid in ramp up. A good, short read

Poking at an AngularJS model from within an iFrame

Wed, 07 May 2014 16:07:24 GMT

Full Disclosure: This is dirty and hacky. You may feel unclean after reading. Grab soap.

For a few infrastructure reasons I won’t get into, we have an iFrame on a page that Angular renders. It pulls in a page that exists within our code base and on the same site. Thankfully, no Cross Domain issues to worry about. The page within the iFrame needs some configuration from the parent page. When a user is done in the iframe and hits a button inside of it, the parent page needs some information from it. This information has to be updated in an Angular model on the parent page.

Starting off a partial template:

<iframe src="/....html" width="100%" height="800" scrolling="no" seamless="seamless" style="border:0;"></iframe>

On the directive, I attach a configuration method to the window. Not great, I know.

link: function(scope, element, attrs) {
 
  top.window.TTTpassConfig = function() {
    config = {};
    config.RPCurl = attrs.initRpcurl;
    config.xml = attrs.initXml;
  }
 
},

This gets called from within the iFrame:

parent.passConfig()

At some point, the inner page is done, and needs to call back to the parent with data:

parent.callSave(outputXml);

But, this method needs to live in the partial template AND update the model. For simplicity, I went with inline JS and created the proper textarea to hold my data and bind to the model. Below I can see that the data is coming back, and the textarea has the text. There are two problems with this: 1) The model itself isn’t getting updated and 2) This js is outside of Angular’s scope so I can’t just call $apply. Angular’s dirty checking won’t see this change. I needed a way to update the model from outside Angular.

{% verbatim %}
<script type="text/javascript">
    function callSave(payload){
        console.log('Data being saved from iframe: ', payload);
        var $elm = $('#iframe-data');
        $elm.val(payload);
    }
</script>
 
<iframe src="/....html" width="100%" height="800" scrolling="no" seamless="seamless" style="border:0;"></iframe>
<pre>{{parent[uuid][data.id].value}}</pre>
<textarea type="text" id="iframe-data" ng-model="parent[uuid][data.id].value" data-name="{{data.name}}" data-id="{{data.id}}" value="{{data.value}}"></textarea>
{% endverbatim %}

The trick ended up being that ngModel listens for an “input” event. Use that, hide the textarea, and I’m good to go

{% verbatim %}
<script type="text/javascript">
    function callSave(payload){
        console.log('Data being saved from iframe: ', payload);
        var $elm = $('#iframe-data');
        $elm.val(payload);
        $elm.trigger('input');
    }
</script>

<iframe src="/....html" width="100%" height="800" scrolling="no" seamless="seamless" style="border:0;"></iframe>
<pre>{{parent[uuid][data.id].value}}</pre>
<textarea type="text" id="iframe-data" ng-model="parent[uuid][data.id].value" data-name="{{data.name}}" data-id="{{data.id}}" value="{{data.value}}" style="display: none;"></textarea>
{% endverbatim %}

I know the Angular way to do this would have been a combination of $watch and $apply from within the directive. I went down that road for a few hours. Because of timeline constraints I have to leave as is. I’ve acknowledged that I’m incurring technical debt and marked a TODO that may or may never get addressed.

Facebook Launches AppLinks To Make Deep Linking Between Apps Easier

Sat, 03 May 2014 00:09:09 GMT

So with this new scheme, you just pass the app a web URL and if a compatible

mobile app is installed, it will automatically load that app instead of the web version. AppLinks will learn which links are handled by which apps. “We crawl the web for you. You don’t have to do it – but you can, you just don’t have to,” Sukhar said. Developers simply mark up their web pages with a few new meta properties. Facebook also offers a Parse module and an API to support these features.

Nice. Not the better inter-app communication that we've been wanting from Apple but it will help

How to be an open source gardener

Fri, 02 May 2014 21:09:48 GMT

A good read on triaging issues using the Rails project as an example

What are Issues?

The very first thing your project needs to do is to figure out what Issues

are supposed to be for. Each project is different. For example, in Rails, we keep Issues strictly for bugs only. Help questions go to Stack Overflow, and new feature discussion and requests go to the rails-core mailing list. For Rust, we have issues for feature requests, meta-issues… everything. For some repositories, closing all of the issues is not feasible, and for others, you’re shooting for zero. (If you don’t believe that this is even possible, check out Sequel. Issues are rarely even open for more than a few days!)

Ember, iCloud & App Reviews by @dancounsell — Realmac Blog

Sat, 26 Apr 2014 23:26:35 GMT

The worst thing is we can't reply to those users. It makes me sad to see

users that are having issues and know that we can help, but yet have no way of contacting them. This is one thing that needs to change on the App Store.

I agree. I sometimes have luck with stalking people down on twitter. But, it breaks my heart when I could easily help someone if they have an issue with Weather Notifications

Build 2014

Fri, 11 Apr 2014 23:58:54 GMT

Justin goes over his experience at the Microsoft Build conference this year:

With things like C#, the Roslyn compiler/frameworks, and the modern WinRT

runtime, it feels like Microsoft is way ahead of Apple in the future looking regard. As a developer, I’m jealous of a lot of the technologies coming out of Microsoft. As a user? They’ve got a long ways to go before I consider using Windows over a Mac. That said, this is the new Microsoft. They don’t need me to use Windows or Windows Phone as long as I use Microsoft services like Azure, Office 365 and the like.

After following what both he and Brent Simmons have been doing with Azure, I'm more than a little curious to tinker with it. I've only recently tried something higher level than AWS, I was a heroku virgin. So, I don't feel I'm biased. The price wars, as well as a number of arguments for/against VPS vs higher level have had this on my kind lately. Mobile Services as a first class citizen on Azure is interesting. AWS is trying with their push service, but it feels like an afterthought at the moment.

“Security”

Fri, 11 Apr 2014 23:53:21 GMT

Were the National Security Agency an agency charged with the security of our

nation, it would have reported the Heartbleed bug immediately instead of exploiting it.

NSA Said to Exploit Heartbleed Bug for Years

Fri, 11 Apr 2014 23:51:07 GMT

If an organized hacker ring sabotaged security standards and major tech

infrastructure for years, compromising the security of hundreds of millions of people and many governments including our own (and potentially causing billions of dollars in damages when these exploits were found by others), and exploited any flaws they found or created to spy on millions of people in the world including our own citizens, what should they be charged with? Mass criminal sabotage, cybercrime, cyberwarfare, and computer fraud? Obviously. Terrorism? Maybe, but not quite. At what point do the NSA’s actions qualify as treason? I’d say they’re well past that point.

~ Marco

Brian on Data Migration

Wed, 09 Apr 2014 22:32:16 GMT

Pretty much any migration can be done without stopping the world. You

migrate in steps, with double writes and double reads at some points. Here’s the general outline

Then and Now

Sun, 06 Apr 2014 13:46:28 GMT

inessential.com: Paul’s Talk on Core Data

Thu, 03 Apr 2014 12:41:35 GMT

it’s more that I’m eternally on the fence about Core Data.

Brent Simmons goes into a few examples on the mind games you have to play when thinking about Core Data scenarios. We are all pretty wired for relational thinking. More recently we've learned to think more TKTK. Core Data and it's object graph is yet another way of thinking

I'm learning Core Data as part of my next app and am enjoying it so far. Eventually I'll be tackling sync. I need to see for myself how bad Coe Data sync is. I've had some exposure to FMDB by tinkering with Marco Arment's FCOfflineQueue in the same app.

Begging For App Ratings

Tue, 01 Apr 2014 13:51:28 GMT

John Gruber recently suggested that users who are annoyed by “Please Rate

This App” panes should leave one-star reviews. We have a “contact us” menu item under our Help menu, but if users decide to post reviews instead, we cannot provide any tech support. So we also can’t tell the other four people that their crashers should be fixed now, and they should update to the version on our website (or wait for the App Store approval). Apple’s customers are Apple’s customers, except we’re supposed to support them, but we aren’t provided the tools by Apple to do so.

inessential.com: Azure Takes Over

Tue, 01 Apr 2014 13:50:22 GMT

There’s still a lot of the old Microsoft there, the Windows, Office,

Exchange, and Sharepoint (WOES) company. It’s most of the company by far, surely. (I just made up the acronym WOES. It fits.)

Brent Simmons talked a little about the new Microsoft CEO coming from the azure team and what it could mean. I love this acronym.

Tips and Resources for beginning iOS Development

Sun, 30 Mar 2014 17:41:32 GMT

While you are planning and building out your application, think about the

user experience and interface a lot. Tweak, try things out, and above all, design something that avoids complexity. If you look at all of the top selling apps, they are the ones that have removed complexity, and distilled down the application idea into its most simplistic form possible while still maintaining a good range of functionality. There's a fine line begin being simple and being useless, and it's up to you to find that line and stay on the useful side.

I'm trying harder to plan out the design of my next app when appropriate. This time I sketched out all the user flows I could think of, in advance, on paper. This helped a lot when modeling classes and data. This is something I really have to force myself to do, I really just want to jump into the code. But, we know that just bites you in the ass, you just end up with spaghetti code. Case and point being the massive UIViewController in Weather Notifications. It's due for a refactor. I have a post in draft about the new features for that app.

As I code, I do find issues with the flow. I'm playing around with the app in the simulator, realize that what I designed just doesn't work, so I fix it in the code. The philosophical question at this point is do I update my mocks? Why didn't I catch it? Is there a way I could have? Still thinking about the answer to those.

Quote of the day by David of 37signals

Sat, 29 Mar 2014 15:40:50 GMT

“But what’s the harm in over-testing, Phil, don’t you want your code to be

safe? If we catch just one bug from entering production, isn’t it worth it?”. Fuck no it ain’t, and don’t call me Phil. This line of argument is how we got the TSA, and how they squandered billions fondling balls and confiscating nail clippers.

ReadKit article sorting: group by feed in Feed Wrangler smart streams

Sat, 29 Mar 2014 15:40:16 GMT

I upgraded to Version 2.4 of ReadKit the other day and found my new

feeds—the ones in the RSS News smart folder—in reverse chronological order. I could’ve sworn I had them set up the other way in 2.3, so I hunted for a way to switch the ordering around. It’s not in the or under the menu. You have to right-click on the RSS News item in the left panel and choose from the popup menu. That brings up a sheet where you can set the ordering.

Thank god. This was driving me nuts.

Drafts

Fri, 28 Mar 2014 16:07:22 GMT

On the plane last night I realize that I have quite a number of draft posts sitting in Drafts. These came in from Instapaper on the train. I probably read an unhealthy amount of things in Instapaper. I’m going to try to be more diligent about posting these in real time. For now I’ve scheduled these out over the next few days

Automating Layouts Bring Flipboard’s Magazine Style To Web And Windows

Mon, 24 Mar 2014 22:52:37 GMT

We automate the whole process of layout design and editing by slotting your

content into custom-designed page layouts — like fitting puzzle pieces together. We start with a set of page layouts created by human designers. Then our layout engine figures out how to best fit your content into these layouts, considering things like page density, pacing, rhythm, image crop and scale. In many ways, that is the key to Flipboard’s signature look and feel: at its heart are the work of real designers.

I've worked on 4 major publishing sites at Ai. 2 were our custom django publishing platform, the other two were wordpress with heavy customization on the backend. The hardest part is designing, in advance, article templates that can be infinitely flexible for an army of editors you may never meet. (We try to meet all we can, but staffs change over time)

The way that flipboard handles this is fascinating. I wish we had time on one of these sites to get to this level.

How I use my Launch Center Pro homescreen

Mon, 24 Mar 2014 19:58:57 GMT

Recently there have been a few Launch Center Pro articles that have recaptured my attention. I had tried a few months ago to simplify my home screen, no luck. This time, it's sticking.

A few people have asked me on twitter what flows I use in LCP so I'm throwing this post together. Please note my screens are very much a work in progress. There are some Actions in multiple groups, as well as on the home screen. I also just noticed I'm missing a browser. A lot of these are app launches instead of true actions. Working on adding to that so it's more efficient. But, for things like Instapaper or Pinboard, they detect something in the clipboard on open so a custom action isn't needed.

I left a phone on my homescreen because I don't trust myself to realize I missed a call just with notifications. iTrans is a metro north schedule app that I check before I leave work because I'm paranoid a schedule has changed (very healthy, I know). Clear and Trello organize my work/personal life. (Aside from Jira, but I have yet to find a good iOS app). Check the weather has been my weather app of choice since it came out. It's fast and simple. At work I need to check my calendar a lot so Fantastical 2 stays. I've been trying to force myself to use Day One and Evernote a lot more. Having them on my homescreen has been invaluable. The last 4 (PocketCasts, Tweetbot, Riposte, and Instapaper) get opened multiple times a day on average so they needed to stay.

This is my main screen. From bottom left to top right: Text my wife Apps that I use to consume things Apps that I use to "do" things Contacts and logging to Day One Group texting and communication Random things and adding to Trello

Reading/Listening apps that I just can't live without. Instapaper stayed on the homscreen. Tried living without it, didn't work. I open that app multiple times a day. When I'm in the mood, I use Velocity for speed reading. Pushpin is a new addition. I'm a fan of Pinbook, but giving this one a try.

I've started playing around with more Actions here. New Day One entry, new Fantastical reminder, go right to search in Google Maps, go right to search in 1Password, new post in Buffer.

Fast ways to text/call/email my family.

Some quick logging that I've been playing with in Day One

This is one of the main things I miss about widgets in android. Quick texting a contact. This is THE reason I bought LCP when I first got an iPhone. I would go so far as to say I wouldn't have bought an iPhone without LCP.

Quick work contacts

Random things I play around with

AVSpeechSynthesizer's queue doesn't work

Sat, 01 Mar 2014 20:46:39 GMT

Sort of. It acts as a queue, but subsequent items have problems. Taken from the documentation of - (void)speakUtterance:(AVSpeechUtterance *)_utterance_

Calling this method adds the utterance to a **queue; utterances are spoken

in the order in which they are added to the queue**. If the synthesizer is not currently speaking, the utterance is spoken immediately.

This is true. You can queue up as many AVSpeechUtterance objects as you want, and they will be spoken, in order. The problem is if you try to act on the Synthesizer after the first Utterance has been spoken. Specifically, I'm having an issue with pausing. But, stopping has an issue as well. If I try to pause during the first utterance using pauseSpeakingAtBoundary:AVSpeechBoundaryImmediate, I get the expected behavior. The speech stops and I can start it again with continueSpeaking. (Even on the first Utterance, AVSpeechBoundaryWord, is giving me issues so I'm putting that aside for now). However, if I try to pause on any of the subsequent Utterances, nothing happens. The pausedSpeaking call is ignored. (The synthesizer isn't nil, I checked). So, why am I queuing up a lot of text? I plan on having AVSpeechSynthesizer speak a lot of text. This text is stored in CoreData. Let's say my main object is called Read. Instead of storing all of the text for that object in Read.text I've split out the text into slices, stored in a separate Text entity. A Read object can have many of these. This gives me control over how much text I load into memory at once. My original plan was to load each slice into an Utterance. When the speaking was done for that Utternace, queue up the next one (it should start immediatly or close to it). Fragments of this below:

    self.speechSynthesizer = [AVSpeechSynthesizer new];
    self.speechSynthesizer.delegate = self;
 
- (BOOL)addWordsToQueue:(NSString *)words
{
    if ( !words ) {
        return NO;
    }
 
    AVSpeechUtterance *utterance = [AVSpeechUtterance speechUtteranceWithString:words];
    utterance.rate = AVSpeechUtteranceMinimumSpeechRate;
    [self.speechSynthesizer speakUtterance:utterance];
 
    return YES;
}
 
//used in view
- (void)play
{
    [self.speechSynthesizer continueSpeaking];
}
 
- (void)pause
{
    [self.speechSynthesizer pauseSpeakingAtBoundary:AVSpeechBoundaryImmediate];
}
 
- (BOOL)isPaused
{
    return self.speechSynthesizer.isPaused;
}
 
#pragma mark - AVSpeechSynthesizerDelegate
 
- (void)speechSynthesizer:(AVSpeechSynthesizer *)synthesizer didFinishSpeechUtterance:(AVSpeechUtterance *)utterance
{
    NSString *words = [read getAndIncrementCurrentWordsAsString];
 
    if ( words != nil ) {
        [self addWordsToQueue:words];
    }
}

Again, the first Utterance works fine, the rest don't. I've also experimented with queueing multiple slices at once, as well as checking if the synthesizer I get in didFinishSpeechUtterance is the correct instance.

I'm not the first person to run into this issue. There are also a number of radars. I've added one as well.

There is a workaround, but it's dirty and shouldn't be needed. In didFinishSpeechUtterance I recreate my AVSpeechSynthesizer so I'm always dealing with the first item in the queue. I really don't like it. This is still broken in 7.1 beta 5. Hopefully it gets fixed. I'd like to implement this properly.

- (void) resetSynth
{
    self.speechSynthesizer = [AVSpeechSynthesizer new];
    self.speechSynthesizer.delegate = self;
}
 
#pragma mark - AVSpeechSynthesizerDelegate
 
- (void)speechSynthesizer:(AVSpeechSynthesizer *)synthesizer didFinishSpeechUtterance:(AVSpeechUtterance *)utterance
{
    [self resetSynth];
    NSString *words = [read getAndIncrementCurrentWordsAsString];
 
    if ( words != nil ) {
        [self addWordsToQueue:words];
    }
}

This unfortunately still happens in the 7.1 beta

Quote of the week: Brent Simmons on terrible things

Thu, 27 Feb 2014 16:43:15 GMT

I have to design as if terrible things could happen — because by doing so I

can better prevent terrible things from happening.

via inessential.com: Vesper Sync Diary #8 - The Problem of Unique IDs.

Expansion Followed By Consolidation

Fri, 21 Feb 2014 00:46:40 GMT

David Smith:

I wouldn’t be surprised, however, if the pressures of remaining a small,

independent fish in this Big Fish Pond became untenable or undesirable at some point.

:-/

That's a shame. Indie is something that's been on my mind to see of it was possible. We will see what happens over the next year for me as well

House of Cards regex mute filter for Tweetbot

Sat, 15 Feb 2014 22:12:22 GMT

Some regular expressions if you don't want to see spoilers in your timeline Just the show name. tweetbot:///mute/keyword?regex=1&text=(%3Fi)%23%3Fhouse(%20%3Fof)%3F(%3F%3D%20%3Fcards)

@housecards
#houseofcards
#housecards
House of Cards
House cards
house cards

Includes some cast member names and character names:

tweetbot:///mute/keyword?regex=1&text=(%3Fi)%23%3Fhouse(%20%3Fof)%3F(%3F%3D%20%3Fcards)%7C(%3Fi)%23%3Fkevin(%3F%3D%20%3Fspacey)%7C(%3Fi)%23%3FFrancis(%3F%3D%20%3FUnderwood)%7C(%3Fi)%23%3FRobin(%3F%3D%20%3FWright)%7C(%3Fi)%23%3FClaire(%3F%3D%20%3FUnderwood)%7C(%3Fi)%23%3FKate(%3F%3D%20%3FMara)%7C(%3Fi)%23%3FZoe(%3F%3D%20%3FBarnes)

Background fetch: An Unexpected Botnet

Sat, 15 Feb 2014 14:37:08 GMT

When enabled within your applications you are essentially building a

massively distributed botnet. Each copy of your application will be periodically awoken and sent on a mission to seek and assimilate internet content with only the OS safeguards holding it back. As your app grows in popularity this can lead to some rather significant increases in activity.

David Smith's article on the implications (and related cost) of background fetch gave me a few things to think about. I have a few parts of my new app that use background fetch. Thus far I have been guilty of #2: Be honest when your application didn’t get data from a fetch. This needs to change.

Quote of the Day: Marco Arment

Wed, 05 Feb 2014 13:09:33 GMT

“Emphasizing and rewarding length over quality results in worse writing and

more reader abandonment.” – Marco Arment

Follow Pie – The Story Of The Instagram Bot Made To Increase App Store Downloads

Sun, 02 Feb 2014 21:55:45 GMT

“How the hell do you have 18,000 followers on Instagram???”

Not helpful for any of my current ideas I don't think. Maybe one of the ides on the short list... Good read though

Interesting Lessons from Building a Pedometer - David Smith

Sat, 01 Feb 2014 14:25:34 GMT

It is a rare thing for a software developer to know that what I’m building

is tangibly improving the health and lives of my customers.

Such an awesome feeling. I can only hope my next app helps improve someone. This one won't help their health, but hopefully other parts of their life.

Hypercritical: The Road to Geekdom

Sat, 01 Feb 2014 14:19:54 GMT

Geekdom is not a club; it’s a destination, open to anyone who wants to put

in the time and effort to travel there. And if someone lacks the opportunity to get there, we geeks should help in any way we can. Take a new friend to a meetup or convention. Donate your old games, movies, comics, and toys. Be welcoming. Sharing your enthusiasm is part of being a geek.

Anyone trying to purposely erect border fences or demanding to see ID upon

entry to the land of Geekdom is missing the point. They have no power over you. Ignore them and dive headfirst into the things that interest you. Soak up every experience. Lose yourself in the pursuit of knowledge. When you finally come up for air, you’ll find that the long road to geekdom no longer stretches out before you. No one can deny you entry. You’re already home.

How I lost my $50,000 Twitter username

Sat, 01 Feb 2014 10:59:35 GMT

I had a rare Twitter username, @N. Yep, just one letter. I’ve been offered

as much as $50,000 for it. People have tried to steal it. Password reset instructions are a regular sight in my e-mail inbox. As of today, I no longer control @N. I was extorted into giving it up.

Another reason I am quite happy I recently moved all if my domains from godaddy to hover. (They even took my godaddy login and did it all for me). I'd like to cancel paypal but I just can't bring myself to do it

Google Bringing Chrome Apps to iOS and Android

Sat, 01 Feb 2014 10:49:51 GMT

Google today launched Chrome apps for iOS and Android, which will see

Chrome-based apps encased in a native application shell that allows them to be distributed through the Apple App Store and Google Play. Currently, Chrome- packaged apps are written in JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, but are able to launch outside the browser, access APIs and work offline.

I feel like this should just be called "yet another cross platform mobile solution." I'd like to say this will be crisp, feel native, actually work, or gain traction. Google owning or pushing products/technologies used to mean something. Open social? Reader? I've lost faith in them over the past few years. (And this blog's original name was gPowered) Time will tell but the "best" option IMO is still Titanium. I say that with finger quotes because they all suck.

My URL Schemes for Posting Links From My iPhone and iPad Using Poster

Sun, 26 Jan 2014 20:39:57 GMT

Instapaper → Drafts → Poster

This is awesome. Since I do most of my internet reading on iOS these days, maybe this wil convince me to blog more. Huge thanks to Shawn Blanc for posting this!

Motivation — Sam Soffes

Fri, 08 Nov 2013 14:13:07 GMT

This hit pretty home for me. I have motivation problems sometimes. Sometimes the TV just looks SO good.

Motivation — Sam Soffes: "My friend has a

great saying:

I want to program wet and naked.

— Ernie Miller

I love this. He was talking about getting ideas in the shower and getting so

excited that you get out and start programming before you can even dry off."

Weather Notifications on Lifehacker!

Tue, 05 Nov 2013 19:08:53 GMT

OMG. I’m on lifehacker.

[Weather Notifications Gives You a Forecast without Opening the

App](http://lifehacker.com/weather-notifications-gives-you-a-forecast-without-open-1458155902): "iPhone: One of the problems with weather apps on the iPhone is that you have to actually open them to get the information you want. Weather Notifications is an app that'll send customized notifications to your lock screen for only the information you care about.

At a glance, Weather Notifications isn't that different from the weather

information that's already in Notification Center. You can set it up so you get a quick forecast of your day if you want, but what's useful about Weather Notifications is the level of customization you can get with alerts. You can set it up so you get alerts for rain, snow, fog, temperature alerts, humidity, or wind. Basically, you can make it so you're only alerted to junky weather, and you never have to actually open the app if you don't want to. It's an interesting approach to a weather app that's worth a look if you're only curious about specific types of weather."

Why Android First is a Myth | steve cheney – technology, business & strategy

Wed, 23 Oct 2013 14:17:41 GMT

This article made me think back to when I switch to iOS to make apps. (I was a hardcore android proponent in general and at work). I’m happy to have other validation with my choice

[Why Android First is a Myth | steve cheney – technology, business &

strategy](http://stevecheney.com/why-android-first-is-a-myth/):

In mobile,

particularly in consumer markets, there has been an ongoing debate about when or if Android will become the first platform that sophisticated startups develop for. Often times, this argument is wrongly centered around vanity metrics for Android such as worldwide shipments or installed base of each platform."

GarageBand for iOS 7 to Become Free with In-App Purchases as Apple Reveals Full Set of New iLife and iWork Icons - Mac Rumors

Mon, 21 Oct 2013 15:01:03 GMT

With all the discussion around pricing the past few weeks, it's very interesting that Apple is using a IAP model in one of it's apps

GarageBand for iOS 7 to Become Free with In-App Purchases as Apple Reveals Full Set of New iLife and iWork Icons - Mac Rumors:

Aside from the new icons, the updated page also reveals in a footnote

that GarageBand will become a free basic download for all iOS 7 devices, joining the other five iLife and iWork apps that became free alongside the release of iOS 7.

GarageBand will, however, include in-app purchase content from Apple, with

additional instruments and sounds available for a fee. Licensing fees associated with some of those sounds had been the presumed reason why GarageBand was left out the original move to make Apple's iLife and iWork apps for iOS free of charge, and it appears that the company has settled on in-app purchases as a way around this issue, offering basic functionality for free and then premium content through the paid upgrade options.

inessential.com: Why Care About 30,000 Notes?

Sun, 20 Oct 2013 15:14:45 GMT

Brent Simmons posts some interesting philosophy on sample data sizes. I'm definitely going to be using this thinking in my next app

I’ve learned that I’m unlikely to over-estimate the amount of data people like

to keep.

via inessential.com: Why Care About 30,000 Notes?.

Gamasutra: David Framptons Blog - Postmortem: The Blockheads

Thu, 17 Oct 2013 21:50:50 GMT

The Blockheads is an extremely popular (and profitable) game. David Frampton does a great Post Mortem write up of what went right and wrong:

The Blockheads is an exploration/mining/crafting massive world sandbox game released for iOS in January 2013 and only just launched for Android. To date it has had over 7 million downloads on iOS, and has a passionate and growing fan-base, rarely dipping below 100,000 daily active users since its launch 9 months ago. The Blockheads was entirely made by one guy - me, over the course of about a year, and since version 1.0 Ive released 4 major updates. Its an ever-evolving game, and the potential additions are limitless. Perhaps in part due to this constant evolution, I havent felt I could write a postmortem until now. It still feels a long way from "complete", but I think now with the release of the 1.4 update it finally no longer feels "incomplete". So its time to share some of the story of its development, and where I feel I went right and wrong with The Blockheads.

via Gamasutra: David Framptons Blog - Postmortem: The Blockheads.

Why We Do What We Do

Sun, 29 Sep 2013 21:09:22 GMT

In his talk at Smashing Conf in Freiburg Germany 2013 Dan Rubin talked about the impact of motivation on our work. Here are some notes from his talk Why We Do What We Do:

via Smashing Conf: Why We Do What We Do.

Fixing YouTube embeds in Wordpress

Fri, 10 May 2013 16:42:32 GMT

In some wordpress themes, youtube embeds just show up as a black screen. As discussed here, the solution is adding a transparency setting to the iframe's src.

However, the solution in that thread only works if the src is right next to the frameborder. Updated code below if you are running into this problem

function add_video_wmode_transparent( $html ) {
	$pattern = '#(src=&quot;https?://www.youtube(?:-nocookie)?.com/(?:v|embed)/([a-zA-Z0-9-]+).&quot;)#';
	preg_match_all( $pattern, $html, $matches );

	if ( count( $matches ) &gt; 0) {
		foreach ( $matches[0] as $orig_src ) {
			if ( !strstr($orig_src, 'wmode=transparent' ) &amp;&amp; !strstr( $orig_src, 'hd=1' ) ) {
				$add = 'hd=1&amp;wmode=transparent&quot;';

				if ( !strstr($orig_src, '?') ) {
					$add = '?' . $add;
				}
				$new_src = substr( $orig_src, 0, -1 ) . $add;
				$html = str_replace( $orig_src, $new_src, $html );
			}
		}
	}
	return $html;
}
add_filter( 'the_content', 'add_video_wmode_transparent', 10 );

New thread in the wordpress forums can be found here. (The original was closed)

Automate Adding to Trello on iOS with Launch Center Pro and Pythonista

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 17:38:14 GMT

I love using Trello to organize my life and work. While I kind of like it's iOS app, sometimes navigating to a board to add a card can be a little time consuming. I want this process to be faster. I also use Launch Center Pro to get some quick actions that I miss from Android. Mostly around quick communication, adding events, and now, adding to Trello. LCP uses x-callback-urls for inter-app communication, but Trello doesn't have any that I could see. Inspired by Federico Viticci's article on automating his iOS workflow, I decided to take a crack at it using pythonista. All code shown below can be found on GitHub.

Pythonista lets you edit and run python scripts on your phone. There are a few ways to get scripts onto your device:

Edit right in the app
Import from a gist
Use pastebot. A great app that gives you multiple clipboards on your device that will also sync with your mac. This is my preferred method.

The endgame of all this: I want to be able to add a card to a specific board, with as few taps as possible. Check out this video for what we are going to build. Digging into the Trello API, we can see that to add a card, we'll need a name for the card and the ID of the list to add it to. We also see that we'll need a token for any of the API calls. To get all of our lists, we'll also need to know about all of our boards. This breaks our tasks out as follows:

Get an App API Key
Get an API Token
Get a list of every board we heve
Get the IDs of every list on each of these boards
Add a new card to our list of choice

To get an App API Key, you can generate one here. In theory, the one I distribute with these scripts should be ok. Get this first script into Pythonista and run it. It will generate a permanant API token for you that you can leave in Launch Center Pro when running these scripts.

#GetTrelloToken

import webbrowser

url = 'https://trello.com/1/authorize?key=3e2cd730f3dcccbe15eaf0d39d219a37&amp;name=PythonistaTrello&amp;expiration=never&amp;response_type=token&amp;scope=read,write'

#open web browser to get a permanant Trello API Token
webbrowser.open(url)

Now that we have our key and tokens, let's get get all of our boards and the lists on each one. Run this script and pass in your token and your email address as arguments. (In pythonista hold down run to get the "Run with arguments dialog"). Add your arguments separated by spaces. For me, this could look something like: "EGYlyiOdggDOaPoTUxaTQobmS6gtiX timothy.broder@gmail.com"

#List all lists by user

import urllib2
import urllib
import json
import sys

if len(sys.argv) != 3:
    raise Exception("Usage: list_trello_lists.py [token] [email]")

key = "3e2cd730f3dcccbe15eaf0d39d219a37"
args = { 'key': key,
    'token': sys.argv[1],
    'filter': 'open'}

#build out api url
username = sys.argv[2]
boards_url = "https://api.trello.com/1/members/%s/boards/?%s" % (username, urllib.urlencode(args))

#get board data from api
try:
    data = urllib2.urlopen(boards_url)
except urllib2.HTTPError as inst:
    raise Exception("Key or Token incorrect")

boards = json.loads(data.read())

#loop through each board
for board in boards:
    board_id = board['id']
    lists_url = "https://api.trello.com/1/boards/%s/lists?%s" % (board_id, urllib.urlencode(args))
    data = urllib2.urlopen(lists_url)
    lists = json.loads(data.read())

    print "-- %s" % board['name']
    #output each list in board
    for lizt in lists:
        print "\"%s\" %s" % (lizt['name'], lizt['id'])
    print "\n"

Running this, we'll get the IDs of the lists we need

Finally, we'll need to take our key, the id of the list, what we want our card to say, and hit the API with them. I also add in a position so the cards I add this way will appear at the top of their list. We'll pass these in as parameters:

"EGYlyiOdggDOaPoTUxaTQobmS6gtiX V12t3k6RQQ2r8X top the name of my card goes here"

Two things to point out inthis script:

we put the name of the card at the end so we can just loop through all the remaining words and not have to worry about wrapping the name in quotes to deal with spaces.
since the end game of this is to run from Launch center pro, we want to jump back to Launch Center Pro at the end using it's x-callback-url

#Add card to List

import urllib2
import urllib
import json
import sys
import webbrowser

arglen = len(sys.argv)

if arglen < 5:     raise Exception("Usage: list_trello_lists.py [token] [list_id] [position] [card_name]") name = sys.argv[4] #take care of spaces if arglen > 5:
    for i in range(5,arglen):
        name = "%s %s" % (name, sys.argv[i])

key = "3e2cd730f3dcccbe15eaf0d39d219a37"
token = sys.argv[1]
args = { 'key': key,
    'token': sys.argv[1],
    'name': name,
    'pos': sys.argv[3],
    'idList': sys.argv[2]
    }
card_add_url = "https://api.trello.com/1/cards"

try:
    data = urllib2.urlopen(card_add_url, urllib.urlencode(args))
except urllib2.HTTPError as inst:
    raise Exception("Key or Token incorrect")

#jump back to Launch Center Pro
webbrowser.open("launchpro:")

To run this in Launch Center Pro, Add an Action > Pythonista > Run Script with Arguments. Put in the name of the script, then in arguments, but everything from above except the name: "EGYlyiOdggDOaPoTUxaTQobmS6gtiX V12t3k6RQQ2r8X top," then hit the button that says input prompt. Now, when you run the script, Launch Center Pro will prompt you for text, enter the name of the card and hit go.

Add as many of these as you want! Just swap out the list ID.

Why Git?

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 15:45:55 GMT

A few months ago I gave a presentation at work about why we moved from SVN to distributed source and git. Totally forgot to put it in a post here. I also had a lot of fun playing with [reveal.js](http://broderboy.github.com/git- presentation/) for the slides and setting up github pages. I cover the following:

What is traditional source control?
How does distributed differ?
Why Git?
Git at Ai

Check out the slides here

Adding a Delete Line hotkey in Xcode

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 15:49:20 GMT

When I switched from eclipse to sublime text 2, the first hotkey I moved over was cmd+d to delete a line. I use it pretty heavily. After using Xcode for a few months it was driving me crazy that it didn't have delete line as an option under hotkeys. Thanks to stackoverflow for the solve. To add a new custom key binding, we have to edit the Key Binding plist file: (close Xcode)

sudo vi /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Frameworks/IDEKit.framework/Resources/IDETextKeyBindingSet.plist

Add this text just ABOVE the close of the <dict> at the bottom of this file:

<key>Custom</key>
    <dict>
      <key>Delete Current Line In One Hit</key>
      <string>moveToEndOfLine:, deleteToBeginningOfLine:, deleteToEndOfParagraph:</string>
    </dict>

Note that:

This is inside the existing <dict> so there is a </dict></plist> after this
This associates the named action "Delete Current Line In One Hit" to the three key actions in the string. I played around with different options here to get the right combination. For instance, if you try moveToBeginningOfLine, deleteToEndOfLine instead of vice versa, then using it on empty lines will delete the line and the entire next line. Which is unpleasant

Save this and open XCode

Open XCode Preferences
Select Key Bindings
Click on All
In the SEarch box type "Delete" and search for "Delete Current Line in One Hit"
Add your new binding.

I use cmd+d, so I had to map duplicate to something else first

Citrix CCA Exam for Windows 2003 Server and XenApp

Sun, 20 Jan 2013 23:26:19 GMT

Through the successful completion of the Citrix CCA XenApp Windows Server 2003 exam (1Y0-A23 exam) you can achieve validation of your administration skills with the achievement of a Citrix Certified Administrator (CCA) certification. This exam is the only requirement for achieving the certification, which is a valuable credential to obtain in the IT industry. As more and more enterprises across all sectors or the market utilize Citrix platforms, the XenApp 1Y0-A23 exam is a positive step in your professional development. Whether you work for a single employer, contract your services to corporate clients, or are a self employed IT professional serving a variety of customers, formally documenting your unique skills and abilities is essential. Passing the Citrix 1Y0-A23 exam is certainly a step in the right direction. The Citrix 1Y0-A23 exam features 66 questions in ten primary subject areas, including everything from implementation and configuration to troubleshooting and maintenance. A passing score of 60 percent or higher is required for success, and you’ll need to ensure you spend plenty of time and energy preparing for your exam. Citrix offers formal training in the discipline through online, self paced and instructor led training. Onsite, in person training is also available in some areas. Courses include labs that will allow you to hone your skills and knowledge through hands on application. Additionally, you can utilize other resources available through online prep services such as TestsLive.com, which include tutorials and full length, detailed practice exams. Practice tests are among the most valuable of exam prep activities as they allow you to measure your knowledge attainment and testing readiness prior to scheduling your 1Y0-A23 exam.

How to Remove or Change the way Wordpress Links to Images in Posts

Mon, 24 Dec 2012 20:34:43 GMT

By default, WordPress will link directly to an image in the category or post view. In a project I was working on today I wanted to change that. On the category view I wanted the image just to link to the post, and in the post, I didn’t want a link at all. Useful trick I found below:

function change_image_permalink($content){
	$format = get_post_format();
 
	//category listing page. link image to post
	if (is_single() === FALSE AND $format == 'image'){
		$content =
		preg_replace(
			array('{<a(.*?)(wp-att|wp-content/uploads)[^>]*><img}','{ wp-image-[0-9]*&quot; /></a>}'),
			array('<a href=&quot;' . get_permalink() . '&quot;><img','&quot; /></a>'),
			$content
		);
	}

	//post page. remove link
	else if ($format == 'image'){
		$content =
			preg_replace(
				array('{<a(.*?)(wp-att|wp-content/uploads)[^>]*><img}','{ wp-image-[0-9]*&quot; /></a>}'),
				array('<img','&quot; />'),
				$content
			);
	}
	
	return $content;
}
add_filter('the_content', 'change_image_permalink');

Getting Started with Varnish Edge Side Includes and Wordpress

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 20:20:35 GMT

There are a lot of cases on blogs where once you write the post, the cache for that page doesn't really have to be updated all that often. Comments can be powered by Disqus so you don't need to bust the cache every time someone comments. If you make a change to a post, it's page and any pages that display it (home, category, etc) should be updated automatically anyway; wp- varnish is the best plugin for that btw.

Now, the sidebar. That's where it can get tricky. On a lot of the content sites I work on, we can cache most pages for days, the backend doesn't need to keep generating them, the content just lives in varnish. Except for the sidebar. This could have things like "Popular Posts" or "New Posts". Things that are going to change outside of the context of the post you are currently looking at.

This is where Edge Side Includes (ESI) comes in. For a while, Akamai was the only way to get this behavior, and they are quite expensive. Don't get me wrong, they are amazing, but you have to be getting serious traffic to need them. Varnish is one of the best caching solutions you can use, especially for Wordpress. If you are unsure where to start with Varnish and wordpress, this article is a great starting point. I'v also bookmarked some other articles here.

ESI was introduced in 2.1, and really fleshed out in 3.0 and can be thought of as fragment caching for Varnish. It's really easy to fix the example I gave above: we want to be able to cache most of the content for 24 hours but refresh just the sidebar every 10 mins. Varnish will do this processing for us, keeping the rest of the page cached, and splicing in the sidebar (and having your webserver process just the sidebar) when it needs to. Most of what I'm going to do below is in the ESI [documentation](https://www.varnish- cache.org/docs/3.0/tutorial/esi.html).

We're going to assume that our theme has a dynamic sidebar called "Sidebar" and that there are cases where we want ESI to be active (production) and some where wordpress should just behave normally (dev). This is what we have before we start thinking about Varnish:

<div class=&quot;five columns&quot;>
<?php
	if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') || !dynamic_sidebar(&quot;Sidebar&quot;) ) :
	endif;
?>
</div>

The two varnish tags we are going to use are an esi comment, and an esi:remove tag. These are the switch that will process the page properly whether you have ESI or not. esi:remove will ignore everything between them if ESI is enabled. This is where we put our “normal processing” code. If ESI is not active, this code will run as normal. Inside the esi comment we put the code that we want to run if ESI is enabled. If it is not, the code will be ignored.

<div class=&quot;five columns&quot;>
	<esi:remove>
		<?php
		if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') || !dynamic_sidebar(&quot;Sidebar&quot;) ) :
		endif;
		?>
	</esi:remove>
	<!--esi
		<esi:include src=&quot;/wp-content/plugins/myplugin/esihandler.php&quot;/>
	-->
</div>

Now our sidebar display is ESI ready, but we need to give Varnish an endpoint to hit so it can generate the fragment of the sidebar. So lets create esihandler.php:

<?php
 
$cwd = getcwd();
$path = substr($cwd, 0, strpos($cwd, 'wp-content/'));
require $path . 'wp-blog-header.php';
 
if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') || !dynamic_sidebar(&quot;Sidebar&quot;) ) :
endif;

Lastly, we’ll have to tell Varnish to cache for different timeframes. A full Varnish config is out of the scope of this post, see the links above for more info. What we need is in the sub vcl_fetch call. Add this at the top:

if (req.url ~ &quot;esihandler.php&quot;) {
    set beresp.ttl = 10m;
}
else {
    set beresp.do_esi = true;
    set beresp.ttl = 1440m;
}

And you should be all set. When developing you can use smaller timeframes (10 seconds, and 1min). Drop some logging in to see it in action.

Let me know of any questions in the comments

Generating an InlineModelAdmin Form on the fly in Django

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 19:17:52 GMT

I'm adding drag/drop uploading to the django admin for one of our open source projects called Stager. A blog post about that will follow, it's not screen-shot ready yet. While doing this I knew we needed a pretty seamless transition after the upload finished, and that we would have to refresh the inline. I didn't want a full page refresh, so let's ajax it in.

For these examples just assume that we have a parent CompAdmin which has an model of Comp and an inline called CompSlideInline. We store the instance of the Comp in comp.

from django.template import loader, Context
from django.contrib.admin import helpers
from django.db import transaction
from django.contrib import admin
 
comp = Comp.objects.get(id=comp_id)
#get the current site
admin_site = admin.site
compAdmin = CompAdmin(Comp, admin_site)
 
#get all possible inlines for the parent Admin
inline_instances = compAdmin.get_inline_instances(request)
prefixes = {}
 
for FormSet, inline in zip(compAdmin.get_formsets(request, comp), inline_instances):
    #get the inline of interest and generate it's formset
    if isinstance(inline, CompSlideInline):
        prefix = FormSet.get_default_prefix()
        prefixes[prefix] = prefixes.get(prefix, 0) + 1
        if prefixes[prefix] != 1 or not prefix:
            prefix = &quot;%s-%s&quot; % (prefix, prefixes[prefix])
        formset = FormSet(instance=comp, prefix=prefix, queryset=inline.queryset(request))
 
#get possible fieldsets, readonly, and prepopulated information for the parent Admin
fieldsets = list(inline.get_fieldsets(request, comp))
readonly = list(inline.get_readonly_fields(request, comp))
prepopulated = dict(inline.get_prepopulated_fields(request, comp))
 
#generate the inline formset
inline_admin_formset = helpers.InlineAdminFormSet(inline, formset,
            fieldsets, prepopulated, readonly, model_admin=compAdmin)
 
#render the template
t = loader.get_template('tabular.html')
c = Context({ 'inline_admin_formset': inline_admin_formset })
rendered = t.render(c)

iOS: Multiple Lines of Text in a UITableViewCell

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 23:32:42 GMT

Have you ever wanted to display multiple lines of text in your Table Cell? It's easy to do in your UITableViewController.

First, let's define the type of font we're going to use. We'll need this in 2 places:

*)fontForCell { return [UIFont boldSystemFontOfSize:18.0]; } [/c]

Next, calculate the height of the cell by using the height of a Label:

- (CGFloat)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView heightForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath
{
    NSString *cellText = /* get your text */;
    UIFont *cellFont = [self fontForCell];
    CGSize constraintSize = CGSizeMake(280.0f, MAXFLOAT);
    CGSize labelSize = [cellText sizeWithFont:cellFont constrainedToSize:constraintSize lineBreakMode:UILineBreakModeWordWrap];
    
    return labelSize.height + 20;
}

Finally, we'll set some attributes on the cell itself to change the height and tell the text to wrap:

- (UITableViewCell *)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath
{
    static NSString *CellIdentifier = @&quot;MyIdentifier&quot;;
    UITableViewCell *cell = [tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:CellIdentifier];
    
    if (!cell) {
        cell = [[UITableViewCell alloc] initWithStyle:UITableViewCellStyleDefault reuseIdentifier:CellIdentifier];
        cell.textLabel.lineBreakMode = UILineBreakModeWordWrap;
        cell.textLabel.numberOfLines = 0;
        cell.textLabel.font = [self fontForCell];
    }
    [cell.textLabel setText:/* get your text */;];
    cell.accessoryType = UITableViewCellAccessoryDisclosureIndicator;
    return cell;
}

How to tell if it's HTML5

Thu, 06 Sep 2012 14:44:32 GMT

The top 10 best Wordpress plugins to get up and running with everything you need.

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 00:39:24 GMT

These are the top 10 best wordpress plugins I use to quickly get a wordpress blog up and running with everything I need. I used these last week to get a new site going in about 2 hours. Leave some time for analytics to catch up and you are all set.

Google Analyticator harnesses the power of Google Analytics for your blog. See where traffic is coming from, where its going, as well as basic hit tracking. The plugin also comes with an easily customizable widget that can be used to display specific information that is gathered by Google Analytics using the Google Analytics API. It supports all of the tracking mechanisms that Google Analytics supports such as external link tracking, download tracking, tracking without counting administrative users, and any other advanced tracking the user wishes to add. Google Analyticator works with a majority of themes as long as these themes provide the proper plugin hooks.Features:
- Supports standard Google Analytics tracking via the latest async tracking methods (faster and more reliable than the older ga.js tracking method)
- Includes an admin dashboard widget that displays a graph of the last 30 days of visitors, a summary of site usage, the top pages, the top referrers, and the top searches
- Provides a widget that can be used to display visitor stat information on the front-end
- Supports external link tracking of all links on the page, including links not managed by WordPress
- Supports download link tracking
- Supports event tracking with outbound links / downloads instead of the old pageview tracking method
- Supports site speed tracking
- Supports hiding Administrator visits without affecting Google Analytics’ site overlay feature
- Supports any advanced tracking code Google provides
- Installs easily, only requiring the user know their UID
- Provides complete control over options; disable any feature if needed
- Supports localization – get the settings page in your language of choice
FD Feedburner Plugin for WordPress lets you track subscribers to your feed by redirecting the main feed and optionally the comments feed to Feedburner.com. It does this seamlessly without the need to modify templates, setup new hidden feeds, modify .htaccess files, or asking users to migrate to a new feed. All existing feeds simply become Feedburner feeds seamlessly and transparently for all users. Just tell the plugin what your Feedburner feed URL is and you’re done.
FancyBox for WordPress will automatically show all images in a fancy popup window when clicked. Handy for resized images where you don't want your users stuck on just the image file when they click on it.
Easy AdSense manages all aspects of Google AdSense for a blog: insert ads into posts and sidebar, and add a Google Search box.Features:
- Remembers AdSense code and your options by theme, so that you don’t have to re-enter them if you play with multiple themes. [This feature provides a solution to Google's unwillingness to let you modify and customize the AdSense code -- you just store all the code variants in your blog database.]
- Enforces the Google policy of not more than three ad blocks per page.
- Sidebar Widgets:
  - For AdSense for content with custom title.
  - For search with customizable text or image title.
  - For Link Units.
- Rich set of Options:
  - To put Link Units or Ad Blocks in header or footer.
  - To suppress ads on all pages (as opposed to posts), or on the front/home page.
  - To add a customizable mouse-over border decoration on ad blocks.
- Control over the positioning and display of AdSense blocks in each post or page.
- Simplest possible configuration interface — nothing more than cutting and pasting AdSense code, and with sensible defaults for the few options present, all with clear instructions.
- Internationalized (multiple languages supported).
WordPress SEO by Yoast is the most complete WordPress SEO plugin that exists today for WordPress.org users. It incorporates everything from a snippet preview and page analysis functionality that helps you optimize your pages content, images titles, meta descriptions and more to XML sitemaps, and loads of optimization options in between. I use it to help generate a complete Google sitemap and tweak how my sites show up in Google.Features:
- Post titles and meta descriptions
- Robots Meta configuration
- Canonical
- Breadcrumbs
- Permalink clean up
- XML Sitemaps
- RSS enhancements
- Edit your robots.txt and .htaccess
- Clean up head section
w3-total-cacheis THE performance plugin for wordpress. It's the fastest and most complete WordPress performance optimization plugin. W3 Total Cache improves the user experience of your blog by improving your server performance, caching every aspect of your site, reducing the download time of your theme and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration. I use it heavily for it's memcached integration, front-end compression, and CDN integration.Benefits:
- At least 10x improvement in site performance (when fully configured: Grade A in YSlow or great Google Page Speed Improvements)
- “Instant” second page views (browser caching after first page view)
- Reduced page load time: increased visitor time on site (visitors view more pages)
- Optimized progressive render (pages appear to load instantly)
- Improved web server performance (easily sustain high traffic spikes)
- Up to 80% Bandwidth savings via Minify and HTTP compression of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and RSS feeds

Features:

* Compatible with shared hosting, virtual private servers and dedicated servers / clusters
* Transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration with Media Library, theme files and WordPress itself
* Caching of (minified and compressed) pages and posts in memory or on disk
* Caching of (minified and compressed) CSS and JavaScript in memory, on disk or on CDN
* Caching of RSS (comments, page and site) feeds in memory or on disk
* Caching of search results pages (i.e. URIs with query string variables) in memory or on disk
* Caching of database objects in memory
* Minification of posts and pages and RSS feeds
* Minification (combine and remove comments / white space) of inline, embedded or 3rd party JavaScript (with automated updates)
* Minification (combine and remove comments / white space) of inline, embedded or 3rd party CSS (with automated updates)
* Browser caching of CSS, JavaScript and HTML using future expire headers and entity tags (ETag)
* JavaScript grouping by template (home page, post page etc) with embed location management
* Non-blocking JavaScript embedding
* Import post attachments directly into the Media Library (and CDN)

Since most of my infrastructure is already on Amazon I use the Amazon SES DKIM Mailer plugin to use SES as my mail provider. It's a quick, easy way to get guaranteed delivery.
Contact Form 7 is the best contact form out there. It allows you to flexibly design the form and mail. You can manage multiple contact forms as well. In addition, it supports many features including AJAX submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering, file uploading, etc.
WP Smush.it taps into the API behind Yahoo’s excellent Exceptional Performance series recommends optimizing images in several lossless ways: stripping meta data from JPEGs, optimizing JPEG compression, converting certain GIFs to indexed PNGs and stripping the un-used colours from indexed images.
This last one isn't required for all setups, but if like me you have varnish sitting in front of your app servers, wp-varnish is a must have. It automatically clears your varnish caches as needed.

Get 18+ Gigs on a Free Dropbox account for $10-$20

Wed, 29 Aug 2012 14:03:28 GMT

Dropbox recently raised the cap on it's free tier to 18 gigs. But, you only get 2 gigs out of the gate. The rest is easy to get, but takes a little leg work. [![](http://timbroder.com/wp- content/uploads/2012/08/dropbox01.png)](http://timbroder.com/wp- content/uploads/2012/08/dropbox01.png) First, log into Dropbox and click on "Get free space!" at the top right. Then, do all the Facebook/twitter/social offers to get free space.

Really bumping up your space involves Google Adwords. You can max out your space by putting your referral link on Dropbox ads that will show up in Google. How much this will end up costing you can vary. One of my coworkers spent $7, another $11, and I spent $19. If you set it up like I show below, you don't even have to think about it.

Log into AdWords, create a new campaign and copy the below settings: (Click to zoom in)

After this the campaign should be approved and you are all set. Keep an eye on it at the end of every day and see if you want to continue it to keep getting more space

Get free space!

Compiling Textmate

Sun, 26 Aug 2012 18:24:16 GMT

TextMate 2 recently went open source on github and a coworker friend of mine was asking if I had compiled it yet. Here's the quick and easy on how to compile it.

Prerequisites

Either homebrew or macports (I'll be using homebrew for this post)
Xcode 4.4+ (make sure to open at least once and accept licence agreement)

Now install the needed apps with brew: [shell] brew install ragel boost multimarkdown hg ninja proctools [/shell]

ninja — build system similar to make
ragel — state machine compiler
boost — portable C++ source libraries
multimarkdown — marked-up plain text compiler
mercurial — distributed SCM system
pgrep and pkill - part of protocols

If the hg install gives you issues, get the latest command line tools from Apple. (At the time of this writing it is Command Line Tools (OS X Lion) for Xcode - August 2012) Compile

git clone https://github.com/textmate/textmate.git 
cd textmate
git submodule update --init ./configure &amp;&amp; ninja

Install and Cleanup

cp -R ~/build/TextMate/Applications/TextMate/TextMate.app ~/Applications 
rm -Rf ~/build/TextMate*

Getting Started with Solr and Django

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 19:45:56 GMT

Solr is a very powerful search tool and it is pretty easy to get the basics, such as full text search, facets, and related assets up and running pretty quickly. We will be using haystack to do the communication between Django and Solr. All code for this can be viewed on github.

Install

Assuming you already have Django up and running, the first thing we need to do is install Solr.

curl -O http://mirrors.gigenet.com/apache/lucene/solr/4.0.0-BETA/apache-solr-4.0.0-BETA.zip
unzip apache-solr-4.0.0-BETA.zip
cd apache-solr-4.0.0-BETA
cd example
java -jar start.jar

Next install pysolr and haystack. (At the time of this writing the git checkout of haystack works better with the Solr 4.0 beta then the 1.2.7 that's in pip.)

pip install pysolr
pip install -e https://github.com/toastdriven/django-haystack.git

Add 'haystack' to INSTALLED_APPS in settings.py and add the following haystack connection:

HAYSTACK_CONNECTIONS = { 
	'default': { 
		'ENGINE': 'haystack.backends.solr_backend.SolrEngine', 
		'URL': 'http://127.0.0.1:8983/solr' 
	}, 
}

Full Text Search

For the example, we're going to create a simple job database that a recruiter might use. Here is the model:

from django.db import models
from django.contrib.localflavor.us
import models as us_models

JOB_TYPES = (
	('pt', 'Part Time'),
	('ft', 'Full Time'),
	('ct', 'Contract')
)

class Company(models.Model):
	name = models.CharField(max_length=64)
	address = models.TextField(blank=True, null=True)
	contact_email = models.EmailField()
	
	def __unicode__(self):
		return self.name

class Location(models.Model):
	city = models.CharField(max_length=64)
	state = us_models.USStateField()

	def __unicode__(self):
		return "%s, %s" % (self.city, self.state)

class Job(models.Model):
	name = models.CharField(max_length=64)
	description = models.TextField()
	salary = models.CharField(max_length=64, blank=True, null=True)
	type = models.CharField(max_length=2, choices=JOB_TYPES)
	company = models.ForeignKey(Company, related_name='jobs')
	location = models.ForeignKey(Location, related_name='location_jobs')
	contact_email = models.EmailField(blank=True, null=True)
	added_at = models.DateTimeField(auto_now=True)
	
	def __unicode__(self):
		return self.name

	def get_contact_email(self):
		if self.contact_email:
			return self.contact_email

		return self.company.contact_email

The next step is to create the SearchIndex object that will be used to transpose to data to Solr. save this as search_indexes.py in the same folder as your models.py. The text field with its template will be used for full text search on Solr. The other two fields will be used to faceted (drill down) navigation. For more details on this file, check out the [haystack tutorial](http://django- haystack.readthedocs.org/en/latest/tutorial.html#handling-data).

class JobIndex(indexes.SearchIndex, indexes.Indexable):
	text = indexes.CharField(document=True, use_template=True)
	type = indexes.CharField(model_attr='type', faceted=True)
	location = indexes.CharField(model_attr='location', faceted=True)
	
	def get_model(self):
		return Job

	def index_queryset(self):
		return self.get_model().objects.all()

Create the search index template in your template folder with the following naming convention: search/indexes/[app]/[model]_text.txt

For us, this is templates/search/indexes/jobs/job_text.txt

{% verbatim %}
{{ object.name }}
{{ object.description }}
{{ object.salary }}
{{ object.type }}
{{ object.added_at }}
{% endverbatim %}

Now, lets get our data into Solr. Run ./manage.py build_solr_schema to generate a schema.xml file. Move this into example\solr\conf in your Solr install. Note: if using Solr 4, edit this file and replace stopwords_en.txt with lang/stopwords_en.txt in all locations. To test everything and load your data, run: manage.py rebuild_index Subsequent updates can be made with: manage.py update_index.

If that all worked we can start working on the front-end to see the data in Django. Add this to your urls.py

(r'^$', include('haystack.urls')),

At this point there are at least two templates we'll need. One for the search results page, and a sub-template to represent each item we are pulling back. My example uses twitter bootstrap for some layout help and styling, see my base.html [here](https://github.com/broderboy/django-solr- demo/blob/master/templates/base.html) if interested.

Create templates/search/search.html This gives you a basic search form, the results, and pagination for a number of results

{% verbatim %}
{% extends 'base.html' %}

{% block hero_text %}Search{% endblock %}
{% block header %}<p>Click around!</p>{% endblock %}


{% block content %}
<div class="span12">
    <h1>Search</h1>
    <form method="get" action="." class=".form-search">
        <table>
            {{ form.as_table }}
        </table>
        <input type="submit" value="Search">
    </form>
</div>
        {% if query %}
            <div class="span2">
                <h3>Filter</h3>
                {% if facets.fields.type %}
                    <div>
                        <h4>Type</h4>
                        <ul>
                        {% for type in facets.fields.type %}
                            <li><a href="{{ request.get_full_path }}&amp;selected_facets=type_exact:{{ type.0|urlencode }}">{{ type.0 }}</a> ({{ type.1 }})</li>
                        {% endfor %}
                        </ul>
                    </div>
                {% endif %}
                {% if facets.fields.location %}
                    <div>
                        <h4>Location</h4>
                        <ul>
                        {% for location in facets.fields.location %}
                            <li><a href="{{ request.get_full_path }}&amp;selected_facets=location_exact:{{ location.0|urlencode }}">{{ location.0 }}</a> ({{ location.1 }})</li>
                        {% endfor %}
                        </ul>
                    </div>
                {% endif %}
            </div>
            <div class="span6">
                <h3>Results</h3>
                <div class="accordion" id="accordion2">
                    {% for result in page.object_list %}
                        {% include 'search/_result_object.html' %}
                    {% empty %}
                        <p>No results found.</p>
                    {% endfor %}
                </div>
    
                {% if page.has_previous or page.has_next %}
                    <div>
                        {% if page.has_previous %}<a href="?q={{ query }}&amp;page={{ page.previous_page_number }}">{% endif %}&laquo; Previous{% if page.has_previous %}</a>{% endif %}
                        |
                        {% if page.has_next %}<a href="?q={{ query }}&amp;page={{ page.next_page_number }}">{% endif %}Next &raquo;{% if page.has_next %}</a>{% endif %}
                    </div>
                {% endif %}
            </div>
        {% else %}
            <div class="span6">
                {# Show some example queries to run, maybe query syntax, something else? #}
            </div>
        {% endif %}
{% endblock %}
{% endverbatim %}

And the templates/search/_result_object.txt

{% verbatim %}
{% load more_like_this %}


{% with obj=result.object %}
<div class="accordion-group">
    <div class="accordion-heading">
        <a class="accordion-toggle" data-toggle="collapse" data-parent="#accordion2" href="#collapse_{{ obj.id }}">
            {{ obj.name }}
        </a>
        <div style="padding: 8px 15px;">
            <p>Company: {{ obj.company }}</p>
            <p>Type: {{ obj.type }}</p>
            {% if obj.salary %}<p>Salary: {{ obj.salary }}</p>{% endif %}
            <p>Location: {{ obj.location }}</p>
        </div>
    </div>
    <div id="collapse_{{ obj.id }}" class="accordion-body collapse in">
        <div class="accordion-inner">
            <p>Contact: <a href="mailto:{{ obj.get_contact_email }}">{{ obj.get_contact_email }}</a></p>
            {{ obj.description }}
            {% more_like_this obj as related_content limit 5  %}
            {% if related_content %}
                <div>
                    <br>
                    <p><strong>Related:</strong></p>
                    <ul>
                        {% for related in related_content %}
                            <li><a>{{ related.object.name }}</a></li>
                        {% endfor %}
                    </ul>
                </div>
            {% endif %}
        </div>
    </div>
</div>
{% endwith %}
{% endverbatim %}

Start up your dev server for search!

Related Items

Adding Related Items is as simple as using the related_content tag in the haystack more_like_this tag library and tweaking out Solr config. Open up solrconfig.xml and add a MoreLikeThisHandler within thetag:

<requesthandler name="/mlt" class="solr.MoreLikeThisHandler"></requesthandler>

Our full _result_object.html now looks like this:

{% verbatim %}
{% load more_like_this %}
 
 
{% with obj=result.object %}
<div class="accordion-group">
    <div class="accordion-heading">
        <a class="accordion-toggle" data-toggle="collapse" data-parent="#accordion2" href="#collapse_{{ obj.id }}">
            {{ obj.name }}
        </a>
        <div style="padding: 8px 15px;">
            <p>Company: {{ obj.company }}</p>
            <p>Type: {{ obj.type }}</p>
            {% if obj.salary %}<p>Salary: {{ obj.salary }}</p>{% endif %}
            <p>Location: {{ obj.location }}</p>
        </div>
    </div>
    <div id="collapse_{{ obj.id }}" class="accordion-body collapse in">
        <div class="accordion-inner">
            <p>Contact: <a href="mailto:{{ obj.get_contact_email }}">{{ obj.get_contact_email }}</a></p>
            {{ obj.description }}
            {% more_like_this obj as related_content limit 5  %}
            {% if related_content %}
                <div>
                    <br />
                    <p><strong>Related:</strong></p>
                    <ul>
                        {% for related in related_content %}
                            <li><a>{{ related.object.name }}</a></li>
                        {% endfor %}
                    </ul>
                </div>
            {% endif %}
        </div>
    </div>
</div>
{% endwith %}
{% endverbatim %}

Facets

To get our type and location facets, we'll have to add them to a queryset and pass this to a FacetedSearchView instead of the default one. urls.py now looks like this:

from django.conf.urls import patterns, include, url
from django.contrib import admin
admin.autodiscover()
from haystack.forms import FacetedSearchForm
from haystack.query import SearchQuerySet
from haystack.views import FacetedSearchView
 
sqs = SearchQuerySet().facet('type').facet('location')
 
urlpatterns = patterns('haystack.views',
    url(r'^$', FacetedSearchView(form_class=FacetedSearchForm, searchqueryset=sqs), name='haystack_search'),
)
 
urlpatterns = urlpatterns + patterns('',
    url(r'^admin/', include(admin.site.urls)),
    #(r'^', include('haystack.urls')),
)
- See more at: http://timbroder.com/2012/08/getting-started-with-solr-and-django.html?preview=true&preview_id=1167&preview_nonce=f6c209628d#sthash.2NVpbeDJ.dpuf

Then, we can use the generated facets in the search template in the facets variable

{% verbatim %}
{% extends 'base.html' %}
 
{% block hero_text %}Search{% endblock %}
{% block header %}</p><p>Click around!</p>{% endblock %}
 
 
{% block content %}
<div class="span12">
    <h1>Search</h1>
    <form method="get" action="." class=".form-search">
        <table>
            {{ form.as_table }}
        </table>
        <input type="submit" value="Search"/>
    </form>
</div>
        {% if query %}
            <div class="span2">
                <h3>Filter</h3>
                {% if facets.fields.type %}
                    <div>
                        <h4>Type</h4>
                        <ul>
                        {% for type in facets.fields.type %}
                            <li><a href="{{ request.get_full_path }}&amp;selected_facets=type_exact:{{ type.0|urlencode }}">{{ type.0 }}</a> ({{ type.1 }})</li>
                        {% endfor %}
                        </ul>
                    </div>
                {% endif %}
                {% if facets.fields.location %}
                    <div>
                        <h4>Location</h4>
                        <ul>
                        {% for location in facets.fields.location %}
                            <li><a href="{{ request.get_full_path }}&amp;selected_facets=location_exact:{{ location.0|urlencode }}">{{ location.0 }}</a> ({{ location.1 }})</li>
                        {% endfor %}
                        </ul>
                    </div>
                {% endif %}
            </div>
            <div class="span6">
                <h3>Results</h3>
                <div class="accordion" id="accordion2">
                    {% for result in page.object_list %}
                        {% include 'search/_result_object.html' %}
                    {% empty %}
                        <p>No results found.</p>
                    {% endfor %}
                </div>
    
                {% if page.has_previous or page.has_next %}
                    <div>
                        {% if page.has_previous %}<a href="?q={{ query }}&amp;page={{ page.previous_page_number }}">{% endif %}&laquo; Previous{% if page.has_previous %}</a>{% endif %}
                        |
                        {% if page.has_next %}<a href="?q={{ query }}&amp;page={{ page.next_page_number }}">{% endif %}Next &raquo;{% if page.has_next %}</a>{% endif %}
                    </div>
                {% endif %}
            </div>
        {% else %}
            <div class="span6">
                {# Show some example queries to run, maybe query syntax, something else? #}
            </div>
        {% endif %}
{% endblock %}
{% endverbatim %}

And we're done! As I said, check out the [haystack documentation](http ://django-haystack.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html) for more information. Leave any questions in the comments and I'll be sure to answer them

[![](http://timbroder.com/wp- content/uploads/2012/08/solr2.png)](http://timbroder.com/wp- content/uploads/2012/08/solr2.png)

Hiding fields in the Django admin based on permission

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 16:53:46 GMT

Quick and easy if you have one group of users that can only edit an asset, and another group that has publishing rights

def remove_from_fieldsets(fieldsets, fields):
    for fieldset in fieldsets:
        for field in fields:
            if field in fieldset[1]['fields']:
                new_fields = []
                for new_field in fieldset[1]['fields']:
                    if not new_field in fields:
                        new_fields.append(new_field)
                        
                fieldset[1]['fields'] = tuple(new_fields)
                break

class PositionAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    ...
    def get_fieldsets(self, request, obj=None):
        fieldsets = super(PositionAdmin, self).get_fieldsets(request, obj)
    
        if not request.user.is_superuser and request.user.groups.filter(name='publisher').count() == 0:
            remove_from_fieldsets(fieldsets, ('is_published',))
        return fieldsets

Animate an AdWhirlView from the Bottom of the Screen

Sat, 18 Aug 2012 00:50:47 GMT

If you are using AdWhirl and want the ad to slide in from the bottom of the screen when your View loads, use this snippet:

- (void)viewDidLoad
{
    [super viewDidLoad];
    AdWhirlView *adWhirlView = [AdWhirlView requestAdWhirlViewWithDelegate:self];
    adWhirlView.delegate = self;
    adWhirlView.frame = CGRectMake(0, 430+kAdWhirlViewHeight, kAdWhirlViewWidth, kAdWhirlViewHeight);
    [self.parentViewController.view insertSubview:adWhirlView belowSubview:self.view];

    [UIView beginAnimations:@&quot;AdWhirlIn&quot; context:nil];
    [UIView setAnimationDuration:.5];
    [UIView setAnimationCurve:UIViewAnimationCurveEaseInOut];
    adWhirlView.frame = CGRectMake(0, 430, kAdWhirlViewWidth, kAdWhirlViewHeight);
    [UIView commitAnimations];
}

Adding Done and Cancel buttons to an iOS number pad

Fri, 17 Aug 2012 15:49:55 GMT

There are some cases when you may want to have a "Done" or "Cancel" button on an iOs number pad when editing a text field. This doesn't come by default, but is easy to add. See the example snippets below, or check out the code on github.

Sample Usage:

//In the view controller that's going ot use the component, put this in the header after the class being extended.
<DoneCancelNumberPadToolbarDelegate>
 
// Then instantiate your toolbar component where it's needed
DoneCancelNumberPadToolbar *toolbar = [[DoneCancelNumberPadToolbar alloc] initWithTextField:textField];
toolbar.delegate = self;
textField.inputAccessoryView = toolbar;
 
// Finally, implement the following two delegate methods
 
#pragma mark - DoneCancelNumberpadToolbar delegate
-(void)doneCancelNumberPadToolbarDelegate:(DoneCancelNumberPadToolbar *)controller didClickDone:(UITextField *)textField
{
    NSLog(@&quot;%@&quot;, textField.text);
}
 
-(void)doneCancelNumberPadToolbarDelegate:(DoneCancelNumberPadToolbar *)controller didClickCancel:(UITextField *)textField
{
    NSLog(@&quot;Canceled: %@&quot;, [textField description]);
}

DoneCancelNumberPadToolbar.h

#import <UIKit/UIKit.h>

@class DoneCancelNumberPadToolbar;

@protocol DoneCancelNumberPadToolbarDelegate <NSObject>

-(void)doneCancelNumberPadToolbarDelegate:(DoneCancelNumberPadToolbar *)controller didClickDone:(UITextField *)textField;
-(void)doneCancelNumberPadToolbarDelegate:(DoneCancelNumberPadToolbar *)controller didClickCancel:(UITextField *)textField;

@end

@interface DoneCancelNumberPadToolbar : UIToolbar
{
    UITextField* textField;
}

DoneCancelNumberPadToolbar.m

#import &quot;DoneCancelNumberPadToolbar.h&quot;

@implementation DoneCancelNumberPadToolbar

@synthesize delegate;

- (id) initWithTextField:(UITextField *)aTextField
{
    self = [super initWithFrame:CGRectMake(0, 0, 320, 50)];
    if (self) {
        textField = aTextField;
        self.barStyle = UIBarStyleBlackTranslucent;
        self.items = [NSArray arrayWithObjects:
                      [[UIBarButtonItem alloc]initWithTitle:@&quot;Cancel&quot;
                                                      style:UIBarButtonItemStyleBordered
                                                     target:self
                                                     action:@selector(cancelNumberPad)],
                      [[UIBarButtonItem alloc]initWithBarButtonSystemItem:UIBarButtonSystemItemFlexibleSpace
                                                                   target:nil action:nil],
                      [[UIBarButtonItem alloc]initWithTitle:@&quot;Done&quot;
                                                      style:UIBarButtonItemStyleDone
                                                     target:self
                                                     action:@selector(doneWithNumberPad)],
                      nil];
        [self sizeToFit];
        
    }
    return self;
}

-(void)cancelNumberPad
{
    [textField resignFirstResponder];
    textField.text = @&quot;&quot;;
    [self.delegate doneCancelNumberPadToolbarDelegate:self didClickCancel:textField];
}

-(void)doneWithNumberPad
{
    [textField resignFirstResponder];
    [self.delegate doneCancelNumberPadToolbarDelegate:self didClickDone:textField];
}
@end

@property (nonatomic, weak) id <DoneCancelNumberPadToolbarDelegate> delegate;

- (id) initWithTextField:(UITextField *)textField;

@end

Special thanks to [akozl ik](http://www.reddit.com/r/iOSProgramming/comments/ydrzv/adding_done_and_canc el_buttons_to_an_ios_number/c5v4rpt) for the help with delegates.

Improve your Magento workflow: Use git or mercurial

Tue, 31 Jul 2012 13:18:07 GMT

Most of our new projects at work are on mercurial and I've moved most of my personal projects over to git. We do, unfortunately, still have one Magento install that lives in our old subversion repository. If you've ever tried to work with a project the size of Magento in SVN with branching, you know the kind of pain this can cause. My machine at work is no slouch. An i7, 8 gigs of ram, 256 megs graphics card, and an SSD. Perfect for any number of high performance or online games, compiling, or video editing. Yet, switching branches on the mercurial project brings it to its knees. It's honestly better to go shoot a quick game of pool while its switching rather then try to get anything done. Eventually... we'll get it into mercurial. Anyway, to migrate a project from svn to git, use the following command: [code]git svn clone http://svn/repo/here/trunk[/code] To migrate a project from svn to hg, use the following command:

hg convert http://svn/repo/here/trunk```   

Branching is now much, much easier and if
that isn't enough for you to switch here are a few more reasons:

  * git is much easier to use than when it first came out
  * merging is exponentially smoother than SVN
  * distributed: you can branch, merge, commit, revert all locally without effecting your team until you push. All this happens locally = faster
  * you can work offline
  * can centralize only if you want to
  * branching takes on a whole new level. Create custom workflows base on release, or bug, or whatever you want
  * merging is exponentially smoother than SVN (yes, I listed this twice)
  * visual branch diagrams

iOS Game Engines

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 20:06:21 GMT

After playing Rovio's new Amazing Alex game for a while, and seeing this article on BGR this morning, it made me remember some old success stories that I had read about, and I got to thinking about what it would take to develop a game for iOS. More just to see what options were out there than anything else; I know nothing about game programming. Side note: Amazing Alex is great. If you have ever played the incredible machine, you'll feel right at home.

One success story I remember is Ethan Nicholas and iShoot, which made him over $800k. Check out how he did it, and how to get started with iOS here: iPhone developer in eight easy steps. If he can do it... why not? But, I digress. ManiacDev has great lists of both Open Source and Commercial graphic engines for iOS. As far as free goes, cocos2d and sparrow both jumped out at me. Sparrow seemed like the fastest ramp-up time and after a quick look at it's api, felt familiar. Without diving too much into the examples, it seems to follow similar patterns to some of the python/js UI frameworks I've used. Unfortunately, the forum seems pretty sparse. Cocos2d, while looking like a steeper learning curve, seems a little more mature and a much more engaged community. It's forum has 85% more posts than sparrow, which coming from a busy php/python community, I like to see. As for commercial engines, after reading about how Infinity Blade was Epic's most profitable game ever, and seeing that a license would only be $99, the Unreal Development Kit For iOS is totally the way I would go.

[sponsored post]

Refreshing all the css on a page using jQuery

Mon, 16 Jul 2012 19:16:03 GMT

I have a client project where we let them customize some css attributes in the admin, show them the updates in a small preview area, then save the changes back to the server. The custom css attributes are in a small css file that is generated on pageload and then cached to the server. All of the admin functionality is done through ajax, so I wanted a good way to update the UI of the site without having to do a full pageload. The below function was a great help.

function reloadStylesheets() {
    var queryString = '?reload=' + new Date().getTime();
    $('link[rel=&quot;stylesheet&quot;]').each(function () {
        this.href = this.href.replace(/\?.*|$/, queryString);
    });
}

Important Magento Security Update – Zend Platform Vulnerability

Fri, 06 Jul 2012 18:47:04 GMT

While doing routine sanity checks, on of our QA Engineers, Sammy Shaar, was alerted about an important Magento security update. The vulnerability potentially allows an attacker to read any file on the web server where the Zend XMLRPC functionality is enabled. This might include password files, configuration files, and possibly even databases if they are stored on the same machine as the Magento web server. To see if you site has been affected, please see this page. Luckily, Magento has released patches for all supported versions:

Magento Enterprise Edition and Professional Edition merchants: You may access the Zend Security Upgrade patch from Patches & Support for your product in the Downloads section of your Magento account. Account log-in is required. Download
Magento Community Edition merchants: Community Edition 1.4.0.0 through 1.4.1.1 Community Edition 1.4.2.0 Community Edition 1.5.0.0 through 1.7.0.1

To install the patch, place the patch file in the root of your Magento site and run the following command: patch -p0 < zendxml_fix.patch If you don't have ssh access or patch installed on your machine, please see this stack overflow post for alternative methods.

Setting up Office 365 email on Android

Fri, 25 May 2012 16:42:48 GMT

![](/images/2012/05/Screenshot_2012-05-24-14- 05-231.png)

Making virtualenv on windows with powershell a little cleaner

Tue, 22 May 2012 15:27:45 GMT

While I code on a mac at home, I can't live without my giant dual screens and solid state drive at work so I'm on a windows 7 box. Most of the time it's fine, does everything I need, and I'm happy. I became full of rage for the first time last week trying to properly get virtualenv to play nice with powershell. (If you code on windows and are in the terminal a lot, switch to powershell, its great and comes with windows 7. There is a download for Windows XP) I'm not going to recap how to set up virtualenv for your project as there is a great walk through on that here. The issue on windows is around when you want to activate your project. Powershell has a restricted execution policy turned on by default. The manual way around this is to run powershell as an administrator, and run this: [code] Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted [/code] Works, but that's an extra click. You can also change this value permanently in the registry at the key listed below, but that didn't seem to stick when opening powershell through launchy [code] HKLM\Software\Microsoft\PowerShell\1\ShellIds\Microsoft.PowerShell [/code] Enter my hacked up solution. Create a shortcut for powershell with these parameters:

Target: %SystemRoot%\syswow64\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe -ExecutionPolicy
Unrestricted Start In: %HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%

Then, if your workspace and projects are set up relatively the same, you can create a powershell script (or a cmd script if not using powershell), named workon.ps1 that looks something like this:

$ENV:PYTHONPATH="" 
cd C:\Users\tbroder\workspace\$args\ .\myenv\Scripts\activate

I threw this in my C:\Python26\Scripts folder. It assumes your project lives in a workspace folder, that your project name is a single word, and that all of your virtualenvs are called myenv. Example of using it below:

Windows PowerShell Copyright (C) 2009 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. PS
C:\Users\tbroder&gt; workon gsb (myenv) PS C:\Users\tbroder\workspace\gsb&gt;

Developing with multiple versions of Django on windows

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 16:47:46 GMT

At work, we have sites that use various versions of Django, so there is a need to switch packages. On my mac I use virtualenv to handle this, but I've never quite gotten it to play nice with windows, and just switching Django versions has sufficed so far. If you can set up virtualenv, that's a much better solution

Download junction (think symbolic links for windows). Put the executable somewhere in your path. I put it in my Python scripts folder (C:\Python26\Scripts)
Plan out your directory structure: Make sure you don't have any stock django eggs or folders in your site-packages folder
Create a django_veresions folder in site-packages (C:\Python26\Lib\site-packages\django_versions)
In this folder I put my different django installs

```
C:\Python26\Lib\site-packages\django_versions\1.1\django 
C:\Python26\Lib\site-packages\django_versions\1.3\django 
C:\Python26\Lib\site-packages\django_versions\1.4\django 
```

I also put a txt file inside the django folder to easily see what version is there (this will be helpful later to double check)

```C:\Python26\Lib\site-packages\django_versions\1.4\django\1.4.txt

Create a file called djangoversion.cmd and drop it in C:\Python26\Scripts ```junction -d C:\Python26\Lib\site-packages\django junction

C:\Python26\Lib\site-packages\django 
C:\Python26\Lib\site-packages\django_versions\%1\django
```

The first line removes any links that may have been there. The second line creates a new link to the version you'll pass in.
Now, to switch versions, just run this from the command line:

```
djangoversion 1.4 
PS C:\Users\tbroder> djangoversion 1.4 
C:\Users\tbroder>junction -d 
C:\Python26\Lib\site-packages\django Junction v1.06 - Windows junction creator and reparse point viewer Copyright (C) 2000-2010 Mark Russinovich Sysinternals - www.sysinternals.com Deleted 
C:\Python26\Lib\site-packages\django. 
C:\Users\tbroder>junction C:\Python26\Lib\site-packages\django 
C:\Python26\Lib\site-packages\django_versions\1.4\django Junction v1.06 - Windows junction creator and reparse point viewer Copyright (C) 2000-2010 Mark Russinovich Sysinternals - www.sysinternals.com Created: 
C:\Python26\Lib\site-packages\django Targetted at: 
C:\Python26\Lib\site-packages\django_versions\1.4\django PS C:\Users\tbroder> 
```

Switch as needed

Sync side-loaded content between your Kindle and other devices

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 17:35:23 GMT

I read a lot of books on my kindle that I got from other sources, mostly Manning and O'Rielly, but these won't sync between my phone and my kindle. Only books purchased from Amazon will sync between devices. [Again](http://timbroder.com/2011/01/getting-it-onto-the- kindle.html), Calibre to the rescue. For this to work, the book must already exist on the kindle and be sold through Amazon. The example book I'm going to use is Version Control with Git.

Add the book to your Calibre library
Update any needed metadata.
Jump over to Amazon and open the book's page
Make sure you are on the Kindle edition of the book. If there is no kindle edition, this will not work.
Make note of the ASIN code.
Take this code and use it as the ISBN number in Calibre (it will not like this, that's ok)
Convert the book to .mobi (Even if it is already in .mobi format, you have to do this)
Copy the book to your kindle via USB. Either by dragging it in your file manager or through Calibre. Do not use email, wifi, or 3g to do this, it will remove the ASIN code that we just wrapped onto the document. Once it is on the device syncing over wifi/3g will function as normal)
Using USB, copy the file to your device. For android this is the kindle folder on your SD card. I haven't tested but doing through iTunes is supposed to work for an iphone/ipad.

Enjoy!

Where the new Ice Cream Sandwich build of dropbox stores files

Sat, 24 Dec 2011 16:21:12 GMT

In the old version of dropbox, you used to be able to long press > download a file. This has been replaced by "favorite". Instead of going to: /sdcard/dropbox These files are now stored in: /sdcard/Android/data/com.dropbox.android/files/scratch

What do you listen to? (podcast edition)

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 16:25:07 GMT

I tend to listen to a decent number of podcasts. Usually while doing the dishes, running, or something or other in the park. Some are book/comic related and help me keep up to date with what's coming out and how some books were that I didn't have time to read. Others are tech and help me get other opinions on the new libraries or trends. I've found a number of fun libraries /how-tos from listening. Check them out below, what do you listen to? Tech

Sitepoint - Web Dev news, tutorials, interviews http://www.sitepoint.com/
Official jQuery podcast* - Javascript library http://podcast.jquery.com/
yayQuery* - Front End Dev podcast http://yayquery.com/
djangodose* - Had great news about jquery, but I think its dead http://djangodose.com/
techzinglive - Random tech/hacker news http://techzinglive.com/
The Dev Show - Ruby,Php, Java, Javascript http://5by5.tv/devshow
The changelog - Open source news http://thechangelog.com/
ATX Web Show - web stuff http://atxwebshow.com/
The javascript show* - great js news and library coverage http://javascriptshow.com/

Non Tech

iFanboy* - Comic book news and reviews http://ifanboy.com/
Sword and Laser* - Science Fiction and Fantasy book club http://www.swordandlaser.com/
11 O'Clock Comics - Comic news and culture http://bullpenbulletinspodcast.com/
Word Balloon - Comic creator interviews http://wordballoon.com/
Fuzzy Typewriter - Random media / culture http://fuzzytypewriter.wordpress.com/

** I listen to every episode, others I cherry-pick

Creating a stateless request in Magento

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 16:22:06 GMT

Have you ever wanted to create a stateless request in Magento? Something that doesn't touch any of Magento's sessions? We were having issues with some of the ajax calls on our cart and checkout pages mucking with the user's cart and had get stateless on these calls. The issue we were having was our checkout page was loading, then a javascript include was going out and bringing code from a 3rd party relevance engine into our dom, which was in turn calling back an ajax request to our servers. This issue with this being that at the start of the page load, the checkout session was being set to a certain state. This state was then being sent through the rest of the page load, and the ajax calls. Unfortunately, by the time the ajax call got back to our server, the session was different in both locations, creating a race condition. The ajax request usually won, removing the work the full page load had done with trying to process checkout. The good news was there was nothing in the ajax call that needed to touch the session, it was just some data lookup. So, nix the session part of that call, and our troubles should be over... Magento's api controller is the only place that implements a stateless request this but its fairly easy to do (after a bit of digging).

As long as Mage_Core_Controller_Varien_Action is a parent in your controller's hierchy, you are good to go (it probably is). This class has a const FLAG_NO_START_SESSION which looks promising. Digging into the code a little we see that it controls whether cookies are processed or the session is started:

<?php
...
        if (!$this->getFlag('', self::FLAG_NO_START_SESSION)) {
            $checkCookie = in_array($this->getRequest()->getActionName(), $this->_cookieCheckActions);
            $checkCookie = $checkCookie &amp;&amp; !$this->getRequest()->getParam('nocookie', false);
            $cookies = Mage::getSingleton('core/cookie')->get();
            if ($checkCookie &amp;&amp; empty($cookies)) {
                $this->setFlag('', self::FLAG_NO_COOKIES_REDIRECT, true);
            }
            Mage::getSingleton('core/session', array('name' => $this->_sessionNamespace))->start();
        }

By adding to the preDispatch() method of our Action or Controller we can toggle this:

<?php
class Ai_AjaxCatalog_Controller_Action extends Mage_Core_Controller_Front_Action
{
	public function preDispatch()
	{
		$this->setFlag('', self::FLAG_NO_START_SESSION, 1); // Do not start standard session
		parent::preDispatch();
		return $this;
	}
}

Now, any action in this controller will be stateless and not effect any sessions.

Jira Tabs: Open all those Jira's at once!

Fri, 22 Apr 2011 18:21:22 GMT

Update: Code lives on GitHub

Ever want to open all the Jira’s on the screen in new tabs? Jess does, I do, and you should too! For firefox and chrome we now have the JiraTabs bookmark button. Go to this page and drag the link up to your bookmarks bar. Then, whenever you are on a filter or search view of Jira's, click the button and all the jira's on your screen will open up in new tabs

Demo:

Google’s Groupon Competitor Goes Live

Thu, 21 Apr 2011 21:43:56 GMT

http://bit.ly/eFvNwn

Skynet Becomes Self Aware Tonight

Tue, 19 Apr 2011 21:25:05 GMT

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles [![Edit Terminator: The Sarah Connor

Chronicles section](http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb35594/common/skins/common/blank.gif)](http://terminator.wikia.com/index.php?title=2011/04/21&action=edit&section=1)

April 21, 2011. Judgment Day. Kyle Reese and Derek Reese witness the launch of U.S. missiles while playing ball in their yard.[1]

As a result of temporal interference by Sarah Connor, her son John, Miles Dyson, and the T-800 [2] destroyingCyberdyne headquarters and all backups of the research in 1995, the date for Judgment day is moved back to here.[3] Skynet is destined to go online a few days earlier on April 19, 2011 at 20:11

Extending a Magento Controller

Tue, 19 Apr 2011 21:16:46 GMT

We're ajaxing part of the Magento shopping cart so we need to modify/extend some of the cart controller functionality. Sometimes when modifying controller's you have to worry about updating the routes. For this, we don't need to, we still want all the urls to be used the same way.

app/code/local/Ai/Checkout/etc/config.xml:

<config>
    <modules>
        <Ai_Checkout>
             <version>0.0.1</version>
        </Ai_Checkout>
    </modules>
...
    <frontend>
        <routers>
            <checkout>
                <use>standard</use>
                <args>
                    <module>Ai_Checkout</module>
                    <frontName>checkout</frontName>
                </args>
            </checkout>
        </routers>
    </frontend>    
</config>

app/code/local/Ai/Checkout/controllers/CartController.php:

require_once Mage::getModuleDir('controllers', 'Mage_Checkout') . DS . 'CartController.php';

class Ai_Checkout_CartController extends Mage_Checkout_CartController
{
   public function updatePostAction()
    {
    	Mage::log(&quot;NEW CONTROLLER&quot;, null, 'tim.log');
        try {
[/php]

Moving Gmail Gadgets to the Right Side

Thu, 07 Apr 2011 14:56:39 GMT

I started using Remember the Milk recently but didn't want the gmail gadget to be so far down on the left hand side of my screen. There is no built in way to move gadgets to the right hand side with the exception of chat (labels used to do this but was removed in favor of drag in drop back in late 2009). If you don't have anything in the right hand column, enable Right-Side Chat from Gmail Labs. We are going to add in some custom css to gmail so install either [Stylist ](https:// chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/pabfempgigicdjjlccdgnbmeggkbjdhd)for Chrome or Stylish for Firefox. Add the following style:

div.TZ:nth-child(8) {
position:absolute !important; 
right:0px; 
top:165px; 
width:164px; }

In chrome you can also restrict the domain to mail.google.com. For me, the Remember the Milk gadget was the 8th child. Play with this until it looks right for you. You may also have to play with the "top" element depending on how much room your chat gadget takes up

New Digg reverse paywall coming

Wed, 06 Apr 2011 13:45:21 GMT

Interesting: http://about.digg.com/blog/cha-ching

_Welcome to the future of killing time on the internet, and getting paid for

it: Digg is implementing a reverse pay wall! We believe this will greatly enhance the Digg experience. Early reaction from test users has been great. Can Duruk, developer at Digg, sums it up well:_ "I thought Rebecca Black's 'Friday' video was great now that I got paid to watch it!"

Now, I used to be on Digg for at least an hour a day. then v4 came... and it kind of sucks now..... Losing nested categories was a huge loss for me.

(9:39:48 AM) Tim: i would totally go back to digg to get paid http://about.digg.com/blog/cha-ching

(9:40:46 AM) Laura: Hmm

(9:41:00 AM) Laura: Digg is so horrible, that's a little like being ok with becoming a prostitute

(9:41:03 AM) Laura: I mean, you get paid

http://about.digg.com/blog/cha-ching

42.75" New Box Jump PR

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 13:24:33 GMT

video

Firefox 4 landing

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 20:01:55 GMT

It will be updating on your current installs tomorrow.

To download now: Windows, Mac, and Linux

Setting a project as the default redmine homepage

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 23:31:01 GMT

Only have a single project running on redmine? want it to be the homepage?

In config/routes.rb in cofig/routes.rb

map.home '', :controller =&gt; 'projects', :action =&gt; 'show', :id =&gt; 'my_project_name'

Jump Higher

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 21:22:42 GMT

Crossfit 2011. Are you Ready?

Fri, 04 Mar 2011 18:25:24 GMT

Stress Relief: Blow things up

Mon, 28 Feb 2011 20:09:35 GMT

Online Physics Games

Running Mongodb as a service on windows

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 20:55:22 GMT

> c:\mongodb\mongod.exe --logpath "c:\mongodb\logs\mongo.log" --logappend --dbpath "c:\mongodb\dat
a" --directoryperdb --install
all output going to: c:\mongodb\logs\mongo.log
Creating service MongoDB.
Service creation successful.
Service can be started from the command line via 'net start "MongoDB"'.

> net start MongoDB
The Mongo DB service was started successfully.
>

> mongo
MongoDB shell version: 1.6.5
connecting to: test
>

A note on Magento and multiple nodes using Memcached

Fri, 11 Feb 2011 18:35:44 GMT

If you have multiple nodes using a shared memcached server, make sure you define a shared prefix for the keys to use.

In local.xml:

        <cache>
...
            <prefix>a1i</prefix>
            <id_prefix>a1i</id_prefix>
            <memcached>
...

Wolverine? Or 2 Batmen?

Tue, 08 Feb 2011 20:59:49 GMT

![](http://www.igeektrooper.com/wp- content/uploads/2011/02/wolverinebatmen.jpg)

Twitter recap of the superbowl halftime show

Mon, 07 Feb 2011 01:36:05 GMT

Ok so, the superbowl halftime was just god awful

@tomkaters I just put Prince on the turntable. #MakeMyOwnHalftimeShow

@cskilpatrick This halftime show needs more Bieber. #superbowl

@CobraCommander Who is this tranny singer butchering Guns at halftime?

@iamunscared Fergie is a train wreck, just ruined G n R.

@amyasparklethe sound from the halftime show is completely messed up. awful.

@garyvee No more pls

@tomkaters Enjoy halftime by tom. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bP48M2BEs0

@cskilpatrick They should play this halftime show when they're trying to get cultists to leave their compound. #superbowl

@brianshaler Glad everyone already tweeted about all the flaws in the Super Bowl halftime show. Now I don't have to.

@garyvee It's time for a new format for superbowl halftime shows, how about interviews at the 50 yrd line ...conan and Jon Stewart interview Prince

@brianshaler My favorite part of the halftime show was when they played the song "Where is the Lol? E"

@werty Pretty sure Fergie raided Ace Frehley's closet for her Super Bowl halftime show costume. #superbowl #blackeyedpeas

Want to output the full xml config Magento is running?

Thu, 27 Jan 2011 19:56:14 GMT

Mage::getConfig()-&gt;getNode()-&gt;asNiceXml('full_config.xml');

Where full_config.xml is the file you want it dumped to.

Getting it onto the Kindle

Thu, 27 Jan 2011 15:05:49 GMT

Been loving my Kindle 3 since I upgraded from my sony reader. There are so many options for getting various reading materials onto it. Here are a few of the ones I like the best:

Want to get some RSS feeds onto the Kindle? (12 feeds for free) KindleFeeder is the way to go. It also has a bookmarklet for capturing and sending whole pages from your browser.I use this to send articles in Google Reader that I want to read later to my Kindle. I use my starred items to do this. Starred items have their own RSS feed which you can put into kindlefeeder. For information on how to get the link to the RSS of your starred items, click here.
"Send to Kindle" for chrome is a button that will send the content of the page your are currently viewing.
The third method is the built in free Kindle email address that isn't broadly advertised: your.name@free.kindle.com will beam most docs that you mail it to your Kindle over wifi (does not work with 3G)
Calibre is great for managing what is on your Kindle and converting just about any file format to .mobi (a format the Kindle can read). Calibre can also be used to strip the DRM off of your purchased Kindle books

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xu_FgtM_Oqs

My picks for the 2011 Oscars

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 16:24:40 GMT

Best Supporting Actress

Amy Adams, The Fighter Helena Bonham Carter, The King's Speech Melissa Leo, The Fighter Hailee Steinfeld, True Grit Jackie Weaver, The Animal Kingdom This was close between Steinfeld and Leo

Best Supporting Actor

Christian Bale, The Fighter John Hawkes, Winter's Bone Jeremy Renner, The Town Mark Ruffalo, The Kids Are All Right Geoffrey Rush, The King's Speech As much as I loved the town, not even close_ _

Best Actress

Annette Bening, The Kids Are All Right Nicole Kidman, Rabbit Hole Jennifer Lawrence, Winter's Bone Natalie Portman, The Black Swan Michelle Williams, Blue Valentine

Best Actor

Javier Bardem, Biutiful Jeff Bridges, True Grit Jesse Eisenberg, The Social Network Colin Firth, The King's Speech James Franco, 127 Hours

Best Director

Darren Aronofsky, Black Swan ** David O. Russell, The Fighter** Tom Hooper, The King's Speech David Fincher, The Social Network Joel & Ethan Coen, True Grit Seriously? True Grit sucked balls_. I can't decide though _

Best Original Screenplay

Another Year - Mike Leigh The Fighter - Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy & Eric Johnson Inception - Christopher Nolan The Kids Are All Right - Lisa Cholodenko & Stuart Blumberg The King's Speech - David Seidler

Best Adapted Screenplay

127 Hours - Danny Boyle & Simon Beaufoy The Social Network - Aaron Sorkin Toy Story 3 - Michael Arndt True Grit - Joel & Ethan Coen Winter's Bone - Debra Granik & Anne Rossellini

Best Foreign Film

Biutiful (Mexico) Dogtooth (Greece) In a Better World (Denmark) Incendies (Canada) Outside the Law (France) Didn't see any of these

Best Animated Film

How to Train Your Dragon The Illusionist Toy Story 3 go Eli!_ _

Best Picture

Black Swan The Fighter Inception The Kids Are All Right The King's Speech 127 Hours The Social Network Toy Story 3 True Grit Winter's Bone INCEPTION INCEPTION INCEPTION!!!!

Breaking them in

Sun, 23 Jan 2011 18:24:49 GMT

![image](/images/2011/01/wpid- IMAG0003.jpg)

Want to trace the call stack in Magento?

Tue, 04 Jan 2011 21:35:38 GMT

Update: This code is also available on Github as a Mageno module

This has helped me immensely in situations like "Where is this getting called from??!?"

Create a helper like so:

class Timbroder_Stack_Helper_Callstack extends Mage_Core_Helper_Abstract
{
	private function get_callstack($delim=&quot;\n&quot;) {
	  $dt = debug_backtrace();
	  $cs = '';
	  foreach ($dt as $t) {
	    $cs .= $t['file'] . ' line ' . $t['line'] . ' calls ' . $t['function'] . &quot;()&quot; . $delim;
	  }

	  return $cs;
	}

	public function toLog() {
		Mage::log($this-&gt;get_callstack());
	}

	public function toFirePhp() {
		$stack = $this-&gt;get_callstack();
		foreach (explode(&quot;\n&quot;, $stack) as $line) {
			Mage::helper('firephp')-&gt;send($line);
		}
	}
}

That can be called from anywhere:

``PHP Mage::helper('stack/callstack')->toFirePhp(); Mage::helper('stack/callstack')->toLog();


I've also wrapped this into a module that you can drop right into your project.  Details here: [https://bitbucket.org/broderboy/magento_callstack/src](https://bitbucket.org/broderboy/magento_callstack/src "https://bitbucket.org/broderboy/magento_callstack/src")

Example output:

.../app/code/community/Timbroder/Stack/Helper/Callstack.php line 16 calls get_callstack() .../app/design/frontend/mongoose/default/template/catalog/cms/bikes_bmx.phtml line 12 calls toLog() .../app/design/frontend/mongoose/default/template/catalog/cms/bikes.phtml line 21 calls require_once() .../app/code/core/Mage/Core/Block/Template.php line 212 calls include() .../app/code/core/Mage/Core/Block/Template.php line 239 calls fetchView() .../app/code/core/Mage/Core/Block/Template.php line 253 calls renderView() .../app/code/core/Mage/Core/Block/Abstract.php line 668 calls _toHtml() .../app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/Email/Template/Filter.php line 190 calls toHtml() .../lib/Varien/Filter/Template.php line 134 calls call_user_func() .../app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/Email/Template/Filter.php line 501 calls filter() .../app/code/core/Mage/Cms/Block/Page.php line 100 calls filter() .../app/code/core/Mage/Core/Block/Abstract.php line 668 calls _toHtml() .../app/code/core/Mage/Core/Block/Abstract.php line 513 calls toHtml() .../app/code/core/Mage/Core/Block/Abstract.php line 460 calls _getChildHtml() .../app/code/local/Mage/Page/Block/Html/Wrapper.php line 52 calls getChildHtml() .../app/code/core/Mage/Core/Block/Abstract.php line 668 calls _toHtml() .../app/code/core/Mage/Core/Block/Text/List.php line 43 calls toHtml() .../app/code/core/Mage/Core/Block/Abstract.php line 668 calls _toHtml() .../app/code/core/Mage/Core/Block/Abstract.php line 513 calls toHtml() .../app/code/core/Mage/Core/Block/Abstract.php line 464 calls _getChildHtml() .../app/design/frontend/mongoose/default/template/page/1column.phtml line 55 calls getChildHtml() .../app/code/core/Mage/Core/Block/Template.php line 212 calls include() .../app/code/core/Mage/Core/Block/Template.php line 239 calls fetchView() .../app/code/core/Mage/Core/Block/Template.php line 253 calls renderView() .../app/code/core/Mage/Core/Block/Abstract.php line 668 calls _toHtml() .../app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/Layout.php line 529 calls toHtml() .../app/code/local/Mage/Core/Controller/Varien/Action.php line 389 calls getOutput() .../app/code/core/Mage/Cms/Helper/Page.php line 130 calls renderLayout() .../app/code/core/Mage/Cms/Helper/Page.php line 52 calls _renderPage() .../app/code/core/Mage/Cms/controllers/PageController.php line 45 calls renderPage() .../app/code/local/Mage/Core/Controller/Varien/Action.php line 418 calls viewAction() .../app/code/core/Mage/Core/Controller/Varien/Router/Standard.php line 254 calls dispatch() .../app/code/core/Mage/Core/Controller/Varien/Front.php line 177 calls match() .../app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/App.php line 304 calls dispatch() .../app/Mage.php line 598 calls run() .../index.php line 155 calls run()


Thanks to [nextide](http://www.nextide.ca/node/518) for some of the code

Want user available in every template in Django?

Wed, 29 Dec 2010 03:08:52 GMT

Create a context processor

settings.py

TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS = (
	'myapp.context_processors.user',
)

context_processors.py

def user(request):
	if hasattr(request, 'user'):
		return {'user':request.user }
	return {}

user is now available in any template:

{% verbatim %}
{% if user.is_authenticated %}Do Something Special{% endif %}
{% endverbatim %}

source: StackOverflow

Want to dump every SQL query Magento runs?

Thu, 02 Dec 2010 22:35:04 GMT

In: lib/Zend/DB/Adapter/Adapter.php

public function query($sql, $bind = array())
{
	// connect to the database if needed
	$this->_connect();

	// is the $sql a Zend_Db_Select object?
	if ($sql instanceof Zend_Db_Select) {
		if (empty($bind)) {
			$bind = $sql->getBind();
		}

		$sql = $sql->assemble();
	}
	
	$time_start = microtime(true);

	// make sure $bind to an array;
	// don't use (array) typecasting because
	// because $bind may be a Zend_Db_Expr object
	if (!is_array($bind)) {
		$bind = array($bind);
	}

	// prepare and execute the statement with profiling
	$stmt = $this->prepare($sql);
	$stmt->execute($bind);

	// return the results embedded in the prepared statement object
	$stmt->setFetchMode($this->_fetchMode);

	$time_end = microtime(true);
	$time = $time_end - $time_start;

	echo "SQL[$time | $sql ]" . "\n<br />\n";
	return $stmt;
}

Magento: Want CKEditor to appear on Category edit pages in Magento?

Thu, 02 Dec 2010 16:50:50 GMT

It is pretty common to replace the TinyMCE editor in the Magento Admin with the CKEditor using this extension

However, the way magento ajaxes the form fields into view on the category pages breaks this functionality.

This snippet should help anyone trying to get it to work in app/design/adminhtml/default/default/template/fontis/wysiwyg/wysiwyg.phtml

{% verbatim %}
<?php } else if($editorType == 'ckeditor') { ?>

	<script type="text/javascript" src="<?php echo $this->getJsUrl() ?>fontis/ckeditor/ckeditor.js"></script>
	<script type="text/javascript">
	var pageLoaded = false;

	function applyCKEditor() {
		if(pageLoaded) {
			var editable_areas = '<?php echo $editableAreas ?>';
			<?php if(strpos($this->helper('core/url')->getCurrentUrl(), 'catalog_category') != false): ?>
				CKEDITOR.instances = {};
			<?php endif; ?>

			<?php /* Add CKeditor to any matching textareas. */ ?>
			editable_areas.split(',').each(function(dom_id) {
			if($(dom_id)) {
				<?php /* Remove the required-entry CSS class so Magento will
				allow the contents of the editor to be submitted. */ ?>
				var loopCheck = 0;
				while($(dom_id).hasClassName('required-entry') && loopCheck < 10) {
					$(dom_id).removeClassName('required-entry');
					loopCheck += 1;
				}

				CKEDITOR.replace(dom_id, {
					width : 640,
					height: 350,
					protectedSource : ['(/{{[\s\S]*?}}/g)']
				});
			}
		});
	}
}

window.onload = function() {
pageLoaded = true;
<?php if(strpos($this->helper('core/url')->getCurrentUrl(), 'catalog_category') === false): ?>
	applyCKEditor();
<?php endif; ?>
}
</script>
<?php } ?>
{% endverbatim %}

in app/design/adminhtml/default/default/template/catalog/category/edit/form.phtml add this at the bottom but inside the script tag

if(typeof applyCKEditor == 'function') {
	applyCKEditor();
}

How Batman and Robin #16 should have ended

Thu, 18 Nov 2010 16:08:40 GMT

What really happened:

[![](http://timbroder.com/wp- content/uploads/2010/11/batmaninc1.jpg)](http://timbroder.com/wp- content/uploads/2010/11/batmaninc1.jpg)[![](http://timbroder.com/wp- content/uploads/2010/11/batmaninc2.jpg)](http://timbroder.com/wp- content/uploads/2010/11/batmaninc2.jpg)

What SHOULD have happened:

[![](http://timbroder.com/wp- content/uploads/2010/11/batman3.jpg)](http://timbroder.com/wp- content/uploads/2010/11/batman3.jpg)Thanks to John for the images

oh amazon

Mon, 18 Oct 2010 14:19:31 GMT

(10:18:07 AM) Laura: I think you ordered two plastic ball and chaisn

(10:18:10AM) Laura: chains

(10:18:20 AM) Me: i did

(10:18:22 AM) Laura: Oh

(10:18:24AM) Laura: Why?

(10:18:35 AM) Me: i got enough bachelor parties coming up where i'll use it

(10:18:39 AM) Laura: Ah

(10:18:43 AM) Laura: Cool

Pesto

Mon, 04 Oct 2010 20:35:20 GMT

Really want to try this this week (via Jon)

1 to 1 1/2 cups of olive oil
2 cups fresh basil chopped (i usually get a couple of bushels 3 or 4 depends on what much u want to make its breaks down, i usually just take it off the stem and throw it in)
1/2 tsp fresh ground pepper
5 cloves of garlic chopped
1 tsp salt
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese

Put like 1/2 cup of oil in blender to start with and add the basil. pepper garlic and salt. Keep adding basil and the rest of oil till it all blend smooth Mix with Parmesan cheese before serving

Huge omelet after OPT

Sun, 03 Oct 2010 13:49:39 GMT

![image](/images/2010/10/wpid- IMG_20101002_113547.jpg)

James OPT Fitzgerald came to the black box yesterday which was a lot of fun. Needed a huge omelet after.

Goo.gl url shortener goes public

Fri, 01 Oct 2010 14:53:20 GMT

Google's URL shortener service is now public, complete with QR code generation Check it out: http://goo.gl/AP5t http://goo.gl/AP5t.qr It will be interesting to see how this stands up to bit.ly

Some reading from django-nyc

Thu, 30 Sep 2010 18:04:45 GMT

Went to the django-nyc meetup last night, it was in Manhattan and much easier to get to then when it's at huge in bk. Wrote down a few things to read up on:

Celery - Celery is an asynchronous task queue/job queue based on distributed message passing. It is focused on real-time operation, but supports scheduling as well.
Django ideas - Voting on things with limited numbers of votes to spread around, ala UserVoice
Google tech meetup
Google prediction api
Nyc js
Ben Firshman class based views
Django con blip tv
Scaling worlds largest Django install
Maps of imaginary lands
Eric's keynote
Pony pwning security risks
How to sell Django
Nosql and Django
How to come up to speed with new codebase
Frameworks
Virtualenv wrapper
Fabric
Capistrana
Django picket ajax
Dajax

Face vs. watermelon = BRUTAL

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 22:33:52 GMT

Google goes Instant

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 19:21:05 GMT

Google Instant is a new search enhancement that shows results as you type. We are pushing the limits of our technology and infrastructure to help you get better search results, faster. Our key technical insight was that people type slowly, but read quickly, typically taking 300 milliseconds between keystrokes, but only 30 milliseconds (a tenth of the time!) to glance at another part of the page. This means that you can scan a results page while you type. The most obvious change is that you get to the right content much faster than before because you don’t have to finish typing your full search term, or even press “search.” Another shift is that seeing results as you type helps you formulate a better search term by providing instant feedback. You can now adapt your search on the fly until the results match exactly what you want. In time, we may wonder how search ever worked in any other way.

Benefits

Faster Searches: By predicting your search and showing results before you finish typing, Google Instant can save 2-5 seconds per search.

Smarter Predictions: Even when you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, predictions help guide your search. The top prediction is shown in grey text directly in the search box, so you can stop typing as soon as you see what you need.

Instant Results: Start typing and results appear right before your eyes. Until now, you had to type a full search term, hit return, and hope for the right results. Now results appear instantly as you type, helping you see where you’re headed, every step of the way.

Outtake from our engagement photo shoot.

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 18:31:54 GMT

Magento:: Enabling the Product Review form anywhere

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 18:03:07 GMT

the form code lives in app/design/frontend/yourtemplate/default/template/review/form.phtml in catalog.xml enable it with:

<block type="review/form" name="product.info.review_form" as="review_form" template="review/form.phtml"/>

and in your template:

<?php echo $this->getChildHtml('review_form'); ?>

Using widgets outside of the CMS in Magento

Tue, 07 Sep 2010 19:51:46 GMT

Magento ships with widget functionality that lets you build out data models and then reuse them on product and CMS pages. If you want to use these in a custom template however, you are out of luck. This can be done by extending the Widget Collection class.

Create the following directory structure:

app/code/local/Mage/Widget/Model/Myswql4/Widget/Instance

Copy app/code/core/Mage/Widget/Model/Myswql4/Widget/Instance/Collection.php into your new directory

The Mage_Widget_Model_Mysql4_Widget_Instance_Collection comes with a store filter but thats about it. To be more usefull we are going to add a type filter, a title filter, and a sorter.

class Mage_Widget_Model_Mysql4_Widget_Instance_Collection extends Mage_Core_Model_Mysql4_Collection_Abstract
{
    /**
     * Constructor
     */
    protected function _construct()
    {
        parent::_construct();
        $this->_init('widget/widget_instance');
    }

    /**
     * Filter by store ids
     *
     * @param array|integer $storeIds
     * @param boolean $withDefaultStore if TRUE also filter by store id '0'
     * @return Mage_Widget_Model_Mysql4_Widget_Instance_Collection
     */
    public function addStoreFilter($storeIds = array(), $withDefaultStore = true)
    {
        if (!is_array($storeIds)) {
            $storeIds = array($storeIds);
        }
        if ($withDefaultStore && !in_array(0, $storeIds)) {
            array_unshift($storeIds, 0);
        }
        $select = $this->getSelect();
        foreach ($storeIds as $storeId) {
            $select->orWhere('FIND_IN_SET(?, `store_ids`)', $storeId);
        }
        return $this;
    }

    public function addTypeFilter($type) {
    	$this->getSelect()->where('type=?', $type);
    	return $this;
    }

    public function addTitleFilter($type) {
    	$this->getSelect()->where('title=?', $type);
    	return $this;
    }

    public function addAttributeToSort($attribute, $dir='asc') {
    	$this->getSelect()->order("{$attribute} {$dir}");
    	return $this;
    }
}

Now we should be able to query any widgets from any template in our system:

< ?php 
$wids = Mage::getModel('widget/widget_instance')
	->getCollection()
	->addTypeFilter('masswidget/list')
	->addAttributeToSort('title', 'asc')
	->load();

foreach ($wids as $wid):
	$params = $wid->getWidgetParameters();
	echo $params['custom_param'];
	echo $wid->gettitle();
endforeach;
?>

The Primal Blueprint 30-Day Challenge

Tue, 07 Sep 2010 17:24:45 GMT

If you want to lose weight, gain muscle, reduce stress, increase energy or just generally look and feel healthier you’ve come to the right place. Oh, and you can win lots of cool Primal gear, too (Over $10,000 in prizes!). That’s right, it’s the annual Primal Blueprint 30-Day Challenge! Watch the following video and read the article for all the details.

Google Reader adds to trends view

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 13:22:38 GMT

Google Reader has added some more stats up at the top. Number of subscriptions, 30 days summary, when you started using Google reader, and total number of articles read From your 233 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 1,227 items, clicked 6 items, starred 0 items, shared 62 items, and emailed 28 items.

Since September 12, 2006 you have read a total of 72,380 items.

How fuc**d is your database?

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 20:53:42 GMT

Are you using PostgreSQL, MySQL, MSSQL, Oracle, SQLite, MS Access, or NoSQL? http://howfuckedismydatabase.com/

Gmail to real phone calling

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 19:07:05 GMT

We're playing with this at the office, pretty slick. Seems like google just really wants to be skype though "Gmail voice and video chat makes it easy to stay in touch with friends and family using your computer’s microphone and speakers. But until now, this required both people to be at their computers, signed into Gmail at the same time. Given that most of us don’t spend all day in front of our computers, we thought, “wouldn’t it be nice if you could call people directly on their phones?” Starting today, you can call any phone right from Gmail." Full info can be found here

AMC'S THE WALKING DEAD Trailer

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 17:53:49 GMT

Very excited for this!

Digg 4v and Hulu Plus invites to give away

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 19:32:25 GMT

If anyone wants invites to the new Digg site, or a Hulu Plus invite that can be activated right now, Post in the comments and I'll divvy them out

Why VPS?

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 15:16:43 GMT

Lately the four main web hosting options are shared, VPS, dedicated, or a cloud based solution. I'll follow up on this article at a later date with my experience with Amazon's cloud solution. We are rolling out a magento install into the cloud in a few weeks and I'll be commenting on how that goes. To start off, what is VPS web hosting? A Virtual Private Server (VPS) is a hosting environment that combines the benefits of both shared hosting and dedicated hosting. It does this by creating a virtual server that runs inside a hardware server via a specially designed partition. So why would you need one over shared hosting?

Speed: Much faster then shared hosting. There are fewer people sharing resources on the server and you have guaranteed resources. If another site is hogging 100% of the cpu on its VPS, this will not effect your sites performance. A VPS can handle might higher traffic loads then shared hosting.
Security: Your files are isolated from other VPS instances
Full root access to your instance
Reboot: Reboot apache or your whole server instance without effecting the other servers
Cost: Much cheaper then a dedicated instance with almost the same control/resources
More space for files
Custom Instances: More control over what you get, and is not dependent on the other instances on the same physical server. With shared hosting the provider usually picks the OS, with VPS there are usually dozens of options.
Private email, IP, and domain: Shared hosts will have one email server for all the hosts
Custom Security policies: From on server virus scanning to a customizable firewall
Reseller: if you have extra resources available you can usually resell these

The top VPS Hosting providers according to Web Hosting Geeks are:

Powering Chrome to Phone with Android to Device Messaging

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 18:42:08 GMT

Android Cloud to Device Messaging (C2DM) was launched recently as part of Android 2.2. C2DM enables third-party developers to push lightweight data messages to the phone. C2DM created a nice opportunity for us to pull together different Google developer tools to create a simple but useful application to enable users to push links and other information from their desktop / laptop to their phone. The result was Chrome to Phone - a 20-percent time project at Google. Chrome to Phone comprises a Chrome Extension, an Android Application, and a Google AppEngine server. All of the code is open sourced and serves as a nice example of how to use C2DM. I really can't wait for the 2.2 update to my phone. Check out the technical brief here

Fake Stan Lee vs. Comic Con 2009

Thu, 05 Aug 2010 15:01:33 GMT

Avengers teaser trailer from Comic Con

Thu, 05 Aug 2010 15:00:32 GMT

gpowered.net is now timbroder.com

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 19:48:27 GMT

Hi all, some of you may have noticed this site is no longer on the gpowered.net domain. I've been wanting to move onto wordpress for a while now and also do some additional writing beyond code stuffs which would be outside of the scope of gpowered. I also unfortunately (or fortunately because I love my job) don't have as much time as I used to to research and post how to's. Heavy django and magento going on lately, I'll try to post about those. There are two RSS links at the top, RSS has everything on this site including gpowered. the gpowered RSS will continue to contain only tech articles. Let me know of any issues on the new site

Pig Roast

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 21:40:21 GMT

Had a great time at Crossfit Virtuosity's anniversary pig roast this past weekend. mmmm pig

Front Runners New York Lesbian and Gay Pride Run (5M)

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 22:03:12 GMT

Was hot, humid, and I was still tired from Thursday night's Wallstreet race, but a good time nevertheless

Cook/bake off at #aiaio!

Thu, 01 Jul 2010 17:56:52 GMT

I made wings!

Displaying Custom Attributes on the Product Page in Magento

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 16:27:47 GMT

At some point you may not want to use the canned attributes.phtml groupings that magento provides, or you just want to cherry pick which attributes to show on your product listing page template/catalog/product/view.phtml

$_product = $this->getProduct();

//For the attribute bike_specs_rear_shock

$_product->getResource()->getAttribute('bike_specs_rear_shock')->getStoreLabel(); //label
$_product->getbike_specs_rear_shock(); //value

iPhone4 vs HTC Evo

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 17:24:17 GMT

Warning: cursing

Wedding Planning

Tue, 22 Jun 2010 21:39:41 GMT

Tim: aside from not being a buffet, the food looks redic Tim: also, they are using joomla for their site

via maybe-not.

SyntaxHighlighter Evolved

Fri, 18 Jun 2010 17:45:25 GMT

I'm currently in the process of migrating gpowerd.net over to this domain and onto wordpress. SyntaxHighlighter has been upgraded quite a bit since I last wrote about it. I came across a great plugin to handle the code highlighting for me on wordpress. I love the plugin, didn't have to go into the wordpress template. It doesn't support the old pre syntax that I had been using previously but it was simple to add in. Patch to add this to 2.3.8 is below, Thanks to Alex for the plugin

    --- syntaxhighlighter.orrig.php	2010-06-03 20:08:24.000000000 -0500
    +++ syntaxhighlighter.php	2010-06-18 12:27:35.000000000 -0500
    @@ -101,12 +101,15 @@
     			'tabsize'        => 4,
     			'toolbar'        => 1,
     			'wraplines'      => 1,
    +			'legacy'         => 0,
     		) );
    
     		// Create the settings array by merging the user's settings and the defaults
     		$usersettings = (array) get_option('syntaxhighlighter_settings');
     		$this->settings = wp_parse_args( $usersettings, $this->defaultsettings );
    
    +		if ( 1 == $this->settings['legacy'] )
    +					wp_register_script( 'syntaxhighlighter-brush-legacy',             plugins_url('syntaxhighlighter/syntaxhighlighter/scripts/shLegacy.js'),            array(),                         $this->agshver );
    
     		// Register generic hooks
     		add_filter( 'the_content',                array(&$this, 'parse_shortcodes'),                              7 );
    @@ -175,6 +178,7 @@
     			'javascript'    => 'jscript',
     			//'latex'         => 'latex',
     			'tex'           => 'latex',
    +			'legacy'        => 'legacy',
     			'matlab'        => 'matlabkey',
     			'objc'          => 'objc',
     			'obj-c'         => 'objc',
    @@ -583,6 +587,9 @@
     		echo "	SyntaxHighlighter.config.strings.noBrush = '" . $this->js_escape_singlequotes( __( "Can't find brush for: ", 'syntaxhighlighter' ) ) . "';\n";
     		echo "	SyntaxHighlighter.config.strings.brushNotHtmlScript = '" . $this->js_escape_singlequotes( __( "Brush wasn't configured for html-script option: ", 'syntaxhighlighter' ) ) . "';\n";
    
    +		if ( 1 == $this->settings['legacy'] )
    +			echo "	dp.SyntaxHighlighter.HighlightAll('code');\n";
    +
     		if ( 1 != $this->settings['autolinks'] )
     			echo "	SyntaxHighlighter.defaults['auto-links'] = false;\n";
    
    @@ -687,6 +694,7 @@
     			'tabsize'        => false,
     			'toolbar'        => false,
     			'wraplines'      => false,
    +			'legacy'         => false,
     		), $atts ) );
    
     		// Check for language shortcode tag such as [php]code[/php]
    
    
    @@ -771,6 +779,7 @@
     'smarttabs'      => 'smart-tabs',
     'tabsize'        => 'tab-size',
     'wraplines'      => 'wrap-lines',
    +			'legacy'         => 'legacy',
     );
    
     // Allowed configuration parameters and their type
    @@ -925,6 +934,7 @@
     settings['light'], 1 ); ?> /> 
    
     settings['smarttabs'], 1 ); ?> /> 
    
     settings['wraplines'], 1 ); ?> /> 
    
    +					settings['legacy'], 1 ); ?> /> 
    
     
     
    
    
    @@ -1062,6 +1072,7 @@
     $settings['smarttabs']      = ( !empty($settings['smarttabs']) )      ? 1 : 0;
     $settings['toolbar']        = ( !empty($settings['toolbar']) )        ? 1 : 0;
     $settings['wraplines']      = ( !empty($settings['wraplines']) )      ? 1 : 0;
    +			$settings['legacy']         = ( !empty($settings['legacy']) )         ? 1 : 0;
    
     if ( 'true' != $settings['padlinenumbers'] && 'false' != $settings['padlinenumbers'] )
     $settings['padlinenumbers'] = (int) $settings['padlinenumbers'];
    ```

Lazy bum

Thu, 03 Jun 2010 17:49:39 GMT

Jack guards the office

Never lose a bet at #aiaio

Fri, 23 Apr 2010 13:38:07 GMT

select foo, count(*) from bar group by foo in django

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 16:31:06 GMT

Every once in a while you need some old fashion SQL style queries in django. This is a common one for reporting and aggregation. Its fairly easy to replicate in a queryset. Say I wanted to get the authors and the number of articles they have written going back to the beginning of 2009 to the present:

from django.db.models import Count
Article.objects
	.filter(created_date__gte=datetime.datetime(2009,1,1))
	.values('author')
	.annotate(Count('author'))

The result:

[{'author__count': 1028, 'author': 17L}, {'author__count': 9, 'author': 9L}, {'author__count': 39, 'author': 12L}, {'author__count': 581, 'author': 10L}, {'author__count': 15, 'author': 7L}, {'author__count': 366, 'author': 13L}, {'author__count': 233, 'author': 5L}, {'author__count': 167, 'author': 15L}, {'author__count': 287, 'author': 14L}, {'author__count': 10, 'author': 6L}, {'author__count': 2101, 'author': 16L}]

IE9 platform preview

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 20:15:00 GMT

Interested in checking out the new Web platform capabilities of Internet Explorer 9?

Download the Internet Explorer Platform Preview right now.

Hide buzz without disabling it

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 16:27:00 GMT

If you want people to see your buzzes, but like myself want to keep checking people's google reader shares IN google reader, and see twitter in twitter, you can hide the Buzz label. Go into settings > labels > buzz > hide

Why Google Needs Buzz

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 14:34:00 GMT

Why Google Needs Buzz: "

[![](https://feeds.feedburner.com/%7Eff/krose?i=Ma- a6KVRROg:XtH5NORu2hI:V_sGLiPBpWU)](https://feeds.feedburner.com/%7Eff/krose?a =Ma-a6KVRROg:XtH5NORu2hI:V_sGLiPBpWU) [![](https://feeds.feedburner.com/%7Eff/k rose?d=7Q72WNTAKBA)](https://feeds.feedburner.com/%7Eff/krose?a=Ma- a6KVRROg:XtH5NORu2hI:7Q72WNTAKBA) [![](https://feeds.feedburner.com/%7Eff/krose ?d=qj6IDK7rITs)](https://feeds.feedburner.com/%7Eff/krose?a=Ma- a6KVRROg:XtH5NORu2hI:qj6IDK7rITs) [![](https://feeds.feedburner.com/%7Eff/krose?i=Ma- a6KVRROg:XtH5NORu2hI:gIN9vFwOqvQ)](https://feeds.feedburner.com/%7Eff/krose?a =Ma-a6KVRROg:XtH5NORu2hI:gIN9vFwOqvQ) [![](https://feeds.feedburner.com/%7Eff/k rose?d=yIl2AUoC8zA)](https://feeds.feedburner.com/%7Eff/krose?a=Ma- a6KVRROg:XtH5NORu2hI:yIl2AUoC8zA)

Google Buzz? Facebook Email?

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 16:55:00 GMT

Google Buzz quetly came out, adds friendfeed like functionality to gmail

Facebook is also launching email, interesting times ahead in the communication world.

Django Admin inline preview

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 19:17:00 GMT

Update: This code lives on Github

To get inline Admin Previews in the list view

Inherit from PreviewAdmin in your ModelAdmin
In your model's template directory, create a folder called preview, and

create a template for that model's preview

Example for model Article

class ArticleAdmin(PreviewAdmin, other admin.ModelAdmin,,,_):  
	list_display = (..,.., 'admin_slide_preview')  
	...  
	...

then edit app_that_has_ArticleModel/templates/preview/article.html

Whatever is in article.html will be shown inline
Access your Article object through {{ object }} in the template

class PreviewAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    #add to your ModelAdmin
    #list_display = ('headline','created_date', 'state', 'admin_slide_preview')
    def admin_slide_preview(self, obj):
        return "<div class=\"previewslide\" id=\"%s/preview/\">+</div>" % obj.id
    admin_slide_preview.allow_tags = True
    admin_slide_preview.short_description = 'Preview'
    
    def get_preview(self, request, object_id):
        sub = self.queryset(request)[0]
        template = "preview/%s.html" % sub.__class__.__name__
        return object_detail(request, queryset=self.queryset(request), object_id=object_id, template_name=template.lower())
        
    def get_urls(self):
        urls = super(PreviewAdmin, self).get_urls()
        my_urls = patterns('',
            (r'^(?P<object_id>\d+)/preview/$', self.get_preview),
        )
        return my_urls + urls
    
    class Media:
        js = js = ('js/jquery.js',
                   'js/jquery.adminpreview.js'

//base.css
.previewslide {
	cursor:pointer;
	cursor:hand;
}

```javascript
//jquery.adminpreview.js
$(document).ready(function(){
 $(".previewslide").click(function(){
  $.ajax({
   url:$(this).attr('id'),
   context: $(this).parent().parent(),
   success:function(data){
    var $html = $(data);
    $('.previewed').each(function(){
     $(this).remove();
    });
    
    if(!$html.hasClass('previewed')){
     $html.addClass('previewed');
    }
    
    $html.addClass($(this.context).attr('class'));  
    $(this.context).after($html);
   }
  });
 });
});

Get the admin url for a django model

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 18:48:00 GMT

Add this to your model to be able to get their admin change link from anywhere

Useful if you want to jump to the admin screen of an object you are looking at on the front end

from django.core import urlresolvers
from django.contrib.contenttypes.models import ContentType

def get_admin_url(self):
    content_type = ContentType.objects.get_for_model(self.__class__)
    return urlresolvers.reverse("admin:%s_%s_change" % (content_type.app_label, content_type.model), args=(self.id,))

Remaining character count in django admin

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 19:28:00 GMT

Update: This code also lives on Github

Want to display the remaining characters on a text field in admin? (based off of maxlength or an override)

#have your ModelAdmin inherit this to use
class CounterAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    counted_fields = ()
    
    #really for textareas
    max_lengths = {'abstract': 400,}
    
    class Media:
        js = ('js/jquery.js',
              'js/jquery.charCount.js',)
        
    def formfield_for_dbfield(self, db_field, **kwargs):
        field = super(CounterAdmin, self).formfield_for_dbfield(db_field, **kwargs)
        print db_field.name
        print self.counted_fields
        if db_field.name in self.counted_fields:
            try:
                len = self.max_lengths[db_field.name]
                field.widget.attrs['maxlength'] = len
            except: pass
            field.widget.attrs['class'] = 'counted ' + field.widget.attrs.get('class','')
        return field

jquery,charCount.js
 
/*
*  Character Count Plugin - jQuery plugin
*  Dynamic character count for text areas and input fields
* written by Alen Grakalic
* http://cssglobe.com/post/7161/jquery-plugin-simplest-twitterlike-dynamic-character-count-for-textareas
*
* Copyright (c) 2009 Alen Grakalic (http://cssglobe.com)
* Dual licensed under the MIT (MIT-LICENSE.txt)
* and GPL (GPL-LICENSE.txt) licenses.
*
* Built for jQuery library
* http://jquery.com
*
*/
 
/*
* Modified 2010 Tim Broder for django-admin-charcount
* https://gpowered.net
*/
(function($) {
$.fn.charCount = function(options){
  // default configuration properties
  var defaults = {
   allowed: 140,  
   warning: 20,
   css: 'help',
   counterElement: 'p',
   cssWarning: 'warning',
   cssExceeded: 'exceeded',
   counterText: ''
  };
  
  var options = $.extend(defaults, options);
  
  function calculate(obj){
   var count = $(obj).val().length;
   var available = options.allowed - count;
   if(available < = options.warning && available >= 0){
    $(obj).next().addClass(options.cssWarning);
   } else {
    $(obj).next().removeClass(options.cssWarning);
   }
   if(available < 0){
    $(obj).next().addClass(options.cssExceeded);
   } else {
    $(obj).next().removeClass(options.cssExceeded);
   }
   $(obj).next().html(options.counterText + available);
  };
 
  this.each(function() {    
 
   $(this).after('<'+ options.counterElement +' class="' + options.css + '">'+ options.counterText +'');
   calculate(this);
   $(this).keyup(function(){calculate(this); });
   $(this).change(function(){calculate(this)});
  });
  
};
 
})(jQuery);
 
/*function init_counters(selector, len){
$(selector).each(function() {
  //console.log($(this).attr('maxlength'));
  if(len==null){
   len = $(this).attr('maxlength');
  }
  $(this).charCount({
   counterText: 'Characters Remaining: ',
   allowed: len,
  });
});
}*/
 
$(document).ready(function(){
$(".counted").each(function(){
  console.log($(this));
  len = $(this).attr('maxlength');
  $(this).charCount({
   counterText: 'Characters Remaining: ',
   allowed: len,
  });
});
//init_counters("input[maxlength]", 80);
//init_counters("textarea[maxlength]");
//init_counters("#id_abstract", 400);
});
 
/*
* <style type="text/css">
form .counter{
}
form .warning{color:#600;}
form .exceeded{color:#e00;}
</style>
*/

Override QuerySet.delete() (one way of preventing cascading deletes)

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 17:05:00 GMT

We needed to override the default QuerySet delete function to deal with a client problem that we were facing

Yes This is monkey-patching, and probably bad practice but if anyone needs to conditionally override the cascading delete that django does at the application level from a queryset, this is how to do it

from django.db.models.query import QuerySet

#save original delete method
orrigdelete = QuerySet.delete
def showdelete(self):
    #add on to delete method
    for test in self:
        if isinstance(test, YourObject):
            raise Exception('someone tried to delete your object')
            return  
        else:
            break   
    #call original delete
    return orrigdelete(self)

#set the queryset delete as our new method
QuerySet.delete = showdelete

A quick way to display your delicious links by tag

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 14:46:00 GMT

quick, dirty, and slow with lots of tags

<html>
<body>
<script type="text/javascript"> 
function goforit (posts) {
 for ( var tagname in posts ) {
  document.writeln('<scr'+'ipt type="text/javascript" src="http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/js/NYCEndurance/' + tagname + '?title=' + tagname + '&icon;=s&count;=100&sort;=alpha&tags;"></scr'+'ipt>'); 
 }
}
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/json/tags/NYCEndurance?callback=goforit"></script>
</body>
</html>

Jack Vs Spider and Happy Holidays

Thu, 24 Dec 2009 15:46:00 GMT

Happy Holidays and thanks everyone for a great year.

Check out my company's holiday E-card here

Our VP of Security takes on an 8 legged intruder

Django gets Multi-DB

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 19:58:00 GMT

For his Google Summer of Code project Alex Gaynor added Multiple Database support to Django, which just got pushed to Trunk.

The Documentation is available here.

Some of the offhand benifits I can see:

Multiple of databases. Got some legacy systems you don't want to migrate but have access to the data? no problem
Have a read and a write database. Want one of your databases to speed up by configuring faster indexes and disabling writes? done.
Multiple TYPES of databases. This is the one I'm most excited about. This is going to enable people to use some of the NoSQL databases (MongoDB, CouchDB, see here for a more complete list)

For a great application of MongoDB on a news site see Business Insider

Share Google Reader folders with friends

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 17:09:00 GMT

A quick rundown on how to share whole folders with friends so they can see what you are reading, there might be an easier way to do this but this was the quickest I found

Click explore
click "View all recommendations"

![](https://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Ng3QbVQfLZ8/SzD8khAOeNI/AAAAAAAAeX4/RBFGgN8O-B8/s1600-h/read1.png)

click Browse
click Create a bundle

![](https://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Ng3QbVQfLZ8/SzD88D6_mgI/AAAAAAAAeYA/6QirJn9t9fc/s1600-h/read2.png)

Fill out the form and drag folders or individual feeds.

![](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Ng3QbVQfLZ8/SzD9LFlFG9I/AAAAAAAAeYI/MRJizzHj1Sc/s640/read3.png)

After this is done you can email the bundle to your friends

Sneak some advanced logic into a Django template

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 17:03:00 GMT

I was adding on an app to a Django project at work where I was overriding an existing template but did not have access to the view that called that template. I was left in a scenario where I had the variables that the view was originally set up with, but non of the new models that I had added.

In a filter you can do whatever logic you want, and then pass information back to the view. Please keep in mind, this is probably a horrible practice, but it does have its uses. In this specific scenario I needed to query the new models without modifying the existing view, solution: add a filter and do the querying there.

This is the filter that I used to do the querying:

{% verbatim %}
from django import template
from stager.jira.models import JiraProject, ProjectLink
from stager.staging.models import *

register = template.Library()

def has_jira(value, arg):
    client = Client.objects.get(path=value)
    project = client.projects.get(path=arg)
    try:
        jiras = ProjectLink.objects.get(ClientProject=project).JiraProject.exclude(filter_id='')
        return True
    except:
        return False
register.filter('has_jira', has_jira)
{% endverbatim %}

Then, in my template:

{% verbatim %}
{% load has_jira %}
{% if client.path|has_jira:project.path %}
     <li><a href="jira/projects" >Jira</a></li>
{% endif %}
{% endverbatim %}

A more general example if this would be to work around the annoyance of not being able to have multiple tests in an if statement in a template: You can’t do {% verbatim %} {% if this and that %} {% endverbatim %}

A solution would be:

{% verbatim %}
def if_and(value, arg):
    if value and arg:
        return True
    else:
        return False

def if_or(value, arg):
    if value or arg:
        return True
    else:
        return False
{% endverbatim %}

{% verbatim %}
{% if True|if_and:False %}
show
{% else %}
don't show
{% endif %}
{% endverbatim %}

Let me know your thoughts, pros/cons of this method.

Ai's stager project is open source and can be found at [github](http://github.com/aiaio/ai-stager

We fix while we eat

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 16:48:00 GMT

Hey, thats me!

[We fix while we eat](https://www.alexanderinteractive.com/blog/2009/12/we-fix- while-we-eat.html): "

Ai's David Napolitan and Tim Broder fix a late night production bug

Google Wave Invites

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 15:01:00 GMT

I have quite a few Google Wave invites left, if you would like one email me, @broderboy me, or leave a comment below. In all cases, please leave the email address to send the invite to.

Take your batch into the cloud

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 22:07:00 GMT

From the work blog:

Take your batch into the cloud: "

About a year ago I wrote a webapp called twitter2gtalk, which simply takes your latest Twitter message and sets it as your Google Talk Status. Shortly there after I attended an App Engine Hackathon (GAE) at Google NYC. At the hackathon, I started porting the app over to app engine. At the time, there was no scheduling or cron support in GAE. I created a hybrid app running between GAE and my webfaction server. My webfaction server would handle the cron, proxy out the requests, and do some of the longer running tasks (the limit on an app engine request is 20 seconds).

Now with the release of the Task Scheduler and Task Queues, you can break up a long winded process into the cloud. My batch was taking around 18 minutes to run, with about 800 users being processed each time. For each user the app had to get their Twitter status, then connect to Google's xmpp server, and after a couple of xmpp calls, update the Google Talk Status. Even being single threaded, this whole process started eating up a lot of juice on the server. The rest of my apache processes suffered and the entire site slowed down

Using the new app engine features, I was able to do two things: 1) Move the scheduling into app engine itself and 2) have app engine do the bulk of the work, by having each user-update be its own task. These worker tasks are then processed anywhere in the cloud, and can be run in parallel, independently of each other

The original code was something like:

    for users in all my users:  
         get twitter status  
         connect to gtalk  
         get current status  
         update status

My process for converting this to app engine tasks was as follows:

Create a process to load all of the users into a Task Queue
Set up each Task Queue so that it can independently do the work for the

user that it is associated with

Schedule Step 1 to run every half hour

Skeleton Code for Step 1:

    class TaskLoader(BaseRequestHandler):

        def get(self):  
            logging.info("Starting to load tasks %s" %
datetime.datetime.now())

            users = Account.gql('WHERE active = :1', True)  
  
            count = 0  
            for user in users:

                send_key = # data to send to the worker  
                taskqueue.add(url='/worker/', params={'key': send_key})

                count += 1  
  
            logging.info("Ended load tasks (%d users) %s" % (count,
datetime.datetime.now()))

The Url call for this method: ('/taskloader/', TaskLoader),

The Skeleton code for step 2:

    class TaskWorker(BaseRequestHandler):  
         def post(self):  
             key = self.request.get('key')

             t = ''.join(["http://django.gpowered.net/xmppproxy/", key])

             logging.info("URL !%s!" % t)  
             result = urlfetch.fetch(t,  
                     None,  
                     urlfetch.GET,  
                     {'Cache-Control':'no-cache,max-age=0', 'Pragma':'no-
cache'})

Url call for this method: ('/worker/', TaskWorker),

So, TaskLoader loads all of the users into the Task queue. App Engine processes these when it has the cpu cycles to do so, and for each of these, TaskWorker is called

I can schedule these using cron.yaml in my project:

cron:

description: load the task queue  
url: /taskloader/  
schedule: every 30 minutes

This is a general overview of how to break up your batch in to smaller, easier to manage tasks. Please see the App Engine documentation for more detailed information.

Online advertising moving to.... your car?

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 22:38:00 GMT

Another one of mine on the work blog -

Online advertising moving to.... your car?:

With the release of [Android

2.0](http://developer.android.com/sdk/android-2.0-highlights.html) on the Motorola [Droid](http://www.motorola.com/Consumers/US-EN/Consumer-Product-and- Services/Mobile-Phones/Motorola-DROID-US-EN), the Google Maps for Mobile application brings turn by turn GPS navigation (with voice) to your car. A great feature by far, it actually made Garmin and TomTom's stocks [tank](http: //www.wiseandroid.com/NewsItem.aspx?category=News&path=October&itemid=37), but what does it mean for the future?

Currently adwords is all over the web; on pages, in your mail, on maps. Now picture this possibility and keep in mind this is all hypothetical: You are using Navigator to get you to the local movie theater and it randomly chimes in with 'You are about to pass Joe's Pizza!' This could be good and bad. Good because you might be able to set the navigator to find restaurants you've never tried and didn't know were there. Bad because it could get annoying. Good because it would open up a whole new form of advertising for small businesses.

Either way, just something to think about, times are changing with all the technology we now carry around in our pockets.

Google’s Christmas gift to America is free Wi-Fi at airports starting today (reblog)

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 21:03:00 GMT

Google’s Christmas gift to America is free Wi-Fi at airports starting today:

Those that hate Google but travel frequently might feel a bit conflicted over

the next couple of months because of Google’s holiday gift to America. Starting today and ending on January 15th, Google will be offering up free, no strings attached Wi-Fi at 47 airports while Virgin American flyers will be getting free in-flight Wi-Fi as of the 18th. The In addition to this, Google has set up a way for travelers at each airport to donate to charities Engineers Without Borders, the One Economy Corporation and Climate Savers Computing Initiative. Google will match each airports donations up to $250,000 and will also give the most generous airport $15,000 for the charity of its choosing.

Read

Google Wave as a Project Collaboration Tool

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 17:21:00 GMT

I'm a'bloggin on the company blog! (Alexander Interactive) Google Wave as a Project Collaboration Tool:

If you aren't already familiar with Google Wave, check out some basic info, and a very in-depth video here. Wave is a new project from Google that reinvents email communication. Forget everything you know about email, it was invented back in the 70's, things have changed; technology is faster, we have cloud computing, web apps look fancier, and for a while, a large portion of email users are moving (back) to web based clients.

Email is the current method of communication and collaboration when working on a project. You usually have a folder for that project in Outlook, some rules to filter project related messages into that folder, and an email chain for each issue. People reply to messages inside that chain somewhere, the thread gets continued, people get added to the thread, people drop off. You don't know where you are in the chain when you check in a few hours later, and you get bombarded by... STOP!

Wave is very early in its adoption, it's invite only, but it has the strong potential to fix a lot of these problems. It can clean up a lot of the clutter of project communication and throw it on the cloud so you can get to it anywhere. Wave does need some more security built in for the corporate settings, but that is in the pipeline. Right now waves can only be private or public, but once inside a private wave, that user can invite anyone.

Some notes on how Wave can help a project:

Each Project would get its own folder in wave
Anyone working on the project would have access to this folder
Every issue or conversation would get its own wave and everyone who needs to be involved in the issue is added to the wave.
At this point every project related message is confined to the projects folder. No Outlook rules or message dragging will ever be needed. If a new person needs to be involved in the discussion, they are just added to the wave, no forwarding or reply-all.
The conversation can continue similar to email, with individual replies, but it can be so much more. In line replies with related topics can appear right with the original topic, not hidden down 6 replies in an email chain
You can show only new replies on the wave and get caught back up in the discussion quickly
You can do a playback of all or part of the discussion and see who chimed in and when
Need to share documents? You will eventually be able to drag them right out of your file system into the browser and into the wave. (This is currently only supported for pictures)

As I said, Wave is very early in its adoption, but after more people join, and more developer plugins come out, I think it will be a very valuable tool both in the workplace and at home.

Use Google Voice with your existing number

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:17:00 GMT

WOOHOO!!!! It's working on my verizon blackberry!

"Up until now, if you wanted to use Google Voice, you needed to choose a new number (a "Google number"). Taking calls through your Google number allows us to offer features like call recording, call screening and getting text messages via email. But we know not everyone wants to switch to a new phone number, so it made sense for us to create a lighter version of Google Voice for people who are willing to trade some features for the ability to use their existing numbers.

We're excited to announce that you now have the choice to get Google Voice with your existing mobile number OR with a Google number.

If you sign up using your existing number, you'll still get many of Google Voice's features. Most notably, you'll get all the functionality of Google voicemail, as explained in this video:

[](http://www.youtube.com/v/Ua9Q5frlQ2M&rel=0&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf& hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1)[](http://www.youtube.com/v/Ua9Q5frlQ2M&rel =0&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1)[](http: //www.youtube.com/v/Ua9Q5frlQ2M&rel=0&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&fe ature=player_embedded&fs=1)[](http://www.youtube.com/v/Ua9Q5frlQ2M&rel=0&color 1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1)[](http://www.yo utube.com/v/Ua9Q5frlQ2M&rel=0&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=pl ayer_embedded&fs=1)[](http://www.youtube.com/v/Ua9Q5frlQ2M&rel=0&color1=0xb1b1 b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1)[](http://www.youtube.co m/v/Ua9Q5frlQ2M&rel=0&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_emb edded&fs=1)[](http://www.youtube.com/v/Ua9Q5frlQ2M&rel=0&color1=0xb1b1b1&color 2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1)

If you already have a Google Voice account, you can [add Google voicemail](htt p://www.google.com/support/voice/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=164652) to any mobile phone you've linked to your account. If you're not yet using Google Voice, you can request an invite or ask a friend with a Google Voice account to send you an invitation. When you receive the invitation to sign up, you can choose to use Google Voice with your existing number — or to get a Google number for additional features.

Google Voice is about giving you more control over your communications. We hope this new option makes it easier for you to manage your messages and personalize your voicemail experience."

Google Wave checker for firefox

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 20:12:00 GMT

I'm liking google wave so far (not loving yet, but there aren't that many people on it yet), but one of the annoying things was actually having to be in the app to see if I have new waves. Firefox plugin, problem solved!

Firefox Keyboard and Mouse Shortcuts

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 15:06:00 GMT

Here is a list of Firefox keyboard and mouse shortcuts for each of the three major operating systems organized by topic.

Checking if a remote file exists in python

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 19:51:00 GMT

Normally, to check if a remote web file exists I would use urllib's getcode() but that is a 2.6 and newer feature. In Python 2.5 its a little more interesting. Thankfully, wget's spider command can help us out.

from subprocess import Popen, PIPE
def url_exists(url):
    command = ["wget", "-S", "--spider", url]
    p = Popen(command, stdout=PIPE, stderr=PIPE)
    stdout, stderr = p.communicate()
    exists = stderr.find('ERROR 404')
    if int(exists) > -1:
        return False
    else:
        return True

Twitter get phone calls, Facebook gets voice chat

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 19:40:00 GMT

Twitter users on Thursday will, for the first time, be able to make voice calls directly to each other through the microblogging service.

Look out, Facebook users: Here comes voice chat.

Sometime in the next few weeks, the social network's tens of millions of users will begin to be able to have high-quality voice conversations, even as its third-party developers are able to start including voice in their applications.

Fight Gone Bad IV

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 19:18:00 GMT

Anyone want to help me out by donating?

Fight Gone Bad IV:

On Sept 26th I am competing in Fight Gone Bad IV to raise money for Wounded Warriors and Athletes for a cure. Fight gone bad is a CrossFit workout scored by the number of reps.

Description from the CrossFit website

4.3. Explain Fight Gone Bad In this workout you move from each of five stations after a minute. This is a five-minute round from which a one-minute break is allowed before repeating. We’ve used this in 3 and 5 round versions. The stations are:

Wall-ball: 20 pound ball, 10 ft target. (Reps)
Sumo deadlift high-pull: 75 pounds (Reps)
Box Jump: 20″ box (Reps)
Push-press: 75 pounds (Reps)
Row: calories (Calories)

The clock does not reset or stop between exercises. On call of “rotate,” the athlete/s must move to next station immediately for good score. One point is given for each rep, except on the rower where each calorie is one point.

If you can, please donate to help me support these initiatives

Location, Location, Location

Sat, 29 Aug 2009 18:39:00 GMT

This will be pretty cool when it comes out

Location, Location, Location: "Twitter platform developers have been doing innovative work with location for some time despite having access to only a rudimentary level of API support. Most of the location-based projects we see are built using the simple, account-level location field folks can fill out as part of their profile. Since anything can be written in this field, it's interesting but not very dependable.

We're gearing up to launch a new feature which makes Twitter truly location- aware. A new API will allow developers to add latitude and longitude to any tweet. Folks will need to activate this new feature by choice because it will be off by default and the exact location data won't be stored for an extended period of time. However, if people do opt-in to sharing location on a tweet- by-tweet basis, compelling context will be added to each burst of information.

For example, with accurate, tweet-level location data you could switch from reading the tweets of accounts you follow to reading tweets from anyone in your neighborhood or city—whether you follow them or not. It's easy to imagine how this might be interesting at an event like a concert or even something more dramatic like an earthquake. There will likely be many use cases we haven't even thought of yet which is part of what makes this so exciting.

Developer Preview

We're going to release geolocation to platform developers before we add the feature to Twitter.com. Most of the mobile applications people use and love are built by Twitter platform developers. Developers will have access to this new geolocation feature early which means it will most likely be available on your app of choice before it's available on Twitter's web site. Later, we'll add it to our mobile web site and Twitter.com as well.

We're very excited about the potential of location metadata combined with Twitter. Our platform team has been on a roll lately. Geolocation lead @rsarver is particularly enthusiastic about location given his personal interest and involvement in events such as WhereCamp and his career history with location-aware services.

Tech Support Cheat Sheet

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 18:32:00 GMT

Tech Support Cheat Sheet:

Send To Tumblr And Track With Bitly Google Reader Custom Link

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 13:43:00 GMT

Testing the "send to blogger" button... Send To Tumblr And Track With Bitly Google Reader Custom Link: "

Google Reader just launched a “Send to Twitter” feature that allows you to share bit.ly links to interesting items in your reader with your Twitter friends. First, awesome!

Second, Google Reader has been getting lots of product development attention lately, and with all the awesome stuff they are adding, I spend all of my time there as opposed to twitter.com/home, facebook.com/home, or Tumblr Dashboard. One thing I miss about Tumblr dashboard was easy reblogging.

![How to Create Custom Send To Links in Google Reader](https://labs.kortina.ne t/files/2009/08/2009-08-13_2354-300x173.png)

How to Create Custom Send To Links in Google Reader

There is a “Send to Tumblr” link as one of the defaults, but it doesn’t use bit.ly urls. So, I hacked together a custom “Send to Tumblr” link.

URL: http://tumblr.com/share?v=2&u=&t=Send To Tumblr And Track With Bitly
Google Reader Custom Link&s=Send To Tumblr And Track With Bitly Google Reader
Custom Link%0Avia%20kortina`

Icon URL: http://assets.tumblr.com/images/favicon.gif?2

[![Custom Send to Tumblr with Bitly Link from Google Reader Link](http://labs. kortina.net/files/2009/08/2009-08-13_2351-300x170.png)](https://labs.kortina.ne t/files/2009/08/2009-08-13_2351.png)

Custom Send to Tumblr with Bitly Link from Google Reader Link

Possibly related posts:

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Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy by Moving to Remote Village

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 21:20:00 GMT

Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy By Moving To Remote Village

The author of the Windows file copy dialog visits some friends

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 13:40:00 GMT

Android hacked to run on x86

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 14:51:00 GMT

I foresee this being my weekend project https://androidcommunity.com/android-hacked-to-run-on-x86-20090714/

Wordpress Plugin: Displaying your Google Reader RSS subscriptions

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 15:07:00 GMT

I've been meaning to write this code for a while, and I really wanted to take a stab at writing a wordpress plugin so here it goes.

The following takes in Google user credentials, and allows the user to display what RSS feeds they subscribe to on their wordpress blog

Example: The RSS that I read
Update: This plugin is now hosted by wordpress. click here

/*
Plugin Name: Google Reader Subscription List
Version: 1
Author: Timothy Broder
Description: Lists a users subscribed Google Reader feeds
*/
 
/*  Copyright 2009  Timothy Broder (email : timothy.broder@gmail.com)
 
    This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
    it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
    the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
    (at your option) any later version.
 
    This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
    but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
    MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
    GNU General Public License for more details.
 
    You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
    along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
    Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA  02110-1301  USA
*/
 
 
if (!class_exists('GoogleReaderSubList')) {
class GoogleReaderSubList {
  
  var $show_list       = 'show-google-reader-sub-list';  //the hook in a page
  var $login          = '';
  var $pass          = '';
  var $source         = 'wordpress-google-reader-sub-list-';  //the source the api sees when logging into Google
  var $service         = 'reader';  
  var $login_url        = 'https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLoginAuth?service=mail'; //URL to login to google
  var $subscription_list_url  = 'http://www.google.com/reader/api/0/subscription/list'; //URL that holds a users subscriptions
  
  function GoogleReaderSubList() {
   $options    = $this->get_admin_options();
   $this->login  = $options['google_login'];
   $this->pass  = $options['google_pass'];
 
   $this->source = $this->source . $this->login;
  }
    
  function show_sub_list() {
   $stop = false;
   if ($this->login == '' || $this->login == null) {
    echo 'Google login not set<br />';
    $stop = true;
   }
   if ($this->pass == '' || $this->pass == null) {
    echo 'Google password not set<br />';
    $stop = true;
   }
  
   //check to see if the zend plugin has been installed and activated
   //http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/zend-framework/
   if (!(defined('WP_ZEND_FRAMEWORK') && WP_ZEND_FRAMEWORK)) {
    echo 'The <a href="http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/zend-framework/" target="_blank">Zend Framework Plugin</a> is not active.  Please install and activate it.';
    $stop = true;
   }
   if ($stop) {
    return;
   }
      
   $client = new Zend_Http_Client($this->login_url);
  
   //connect, authenticate, and handshake with Google
   $client->setCookieJar()
    ->setMethod(Zend_Http_Client::POST)
    ->setParameterPost(array(
     'continue'             => $this->subscription_list_url,
     'service'              => 'reader',
     'niu'                  => 1,
     'hl'                   => 'en',
     'Email'              => $this->login,
     'Passwd'               => $this->pass,
     'PersistentCookie'     => 'yes',
     'asts'                 => ''
    ));
    
 
   //$error_level = error_reporting();
   //error_reporting(1);
   $response = $client->request('POST');
   $client->setUri($this->subscription_list_url)->setMethod(Zend_Http_Client::GET);
   $response = $client->request()->getBody();
  
   if ($client->request()->getStatus() == 400) {
    ?>Unable to login with supplied Google login/password< ?
    return;
   }
  
   //error_reporting($error_level);
  
   //got the feed, parse it
   $feed = simplexml_load_string($response);
  
   $hashmap = array();
  
   //organize the feeds by tag  
   foreach ($feed->list->object as $e) {
    $url = $e->string[0];
    $title = $e->string[1];
    $cat = $e->list->object->string[1];
    
    //make sure a feed is filed somewhere
    if ($cat == '') {
     $cat = 'unfiled';
    }
    $t = $hashmap["$cat"];
 
    //a category hasn't been used before
    if ($t == null) {
     $t = array($e);
     $hashmap["$cat"] = $t;
    }
    //category has been used before
    else {
     array_push($t, $e);
     $hashmap["$cat"] = $t;
    }
   }
 
   //sort the categories
   ksort($hashmap);
 
   //output
   ?>
   <p>Tags:
    < ?
    $endKey = end(array_keys($hashmap));
    foreach ($hashmap as $cat=>$t) {
     echo "<a href='#$cat'>$cat</a>";
     if ($cat != $endKey) {
      echo ', ';
     }
    }
    ?>
   </p>< ?
  
   foreach ($hashmap as $cat=>$t) {
    echo "<a name='$cat'></a>";
    echo "<b>$cat</b><br />";    
    foreach ($t as $e) {
     list($feed, $url) = split('feed/', $e->string[0]);
     $title = $e->string[1];
    
     echo "<a href='$url' target='_blank'>$title</a><br />";
    
    }
    echo '<br />';
   }
  }
  
  function addContent($content) {
   // Only do this if this is a page and it has the appropriate custom field
   if (is_page()) {
    $cust_field_values = get_post_custom_values($this->show_list);
    if ($cust_field_values != NULL) {
     if (defined('WP_ZEND_FRAMEWORK') && WP_ZEND_FRAMEWORK) {
      require_once 'Zend/Loader.php';
      Zend_Loader::loadClass('Zend_Http_Client');
     }
     $content = $this->show_sub_list();
    }
   }
   return $content;
  }
  
  function init() {
   $this->get_admin_options();
  }  
  
  function get_admin_options() {
   $admin_options = array('google_login' => '',
    'google_pass' => '',
    'use_accordion' => 'true');
   $options = get_option($this->adminOptionName);
   if (!empty($options)) {
    foreach ($options as $key => $option) {
     $admin_options[$key] = $option;
    }
   }
   update_option($this->admin_optionsName, $admin_options);
   return $admin_options;
  }
  
  function printAdminPage() {
   $options = $this->get_admin_options();
  
   if (isset($_POST['update_greader_sub_list_settings'])) {
    if (isset($_POST['greader_sub_list_login'])) {
     $options['google_login'] = $_POST['greader_sub_list_login'];
    }
    if (isset($_POST['greader_sub_list_pass'])) {
     $options['google_pass'] = $_POST['greader_sub_list_pass'];
    }
    
    update_option($this->admin_optionsName, $options);
    echo '<div class="updated"><p><strong>' .  _e('Settings Updated.', 'GoogleReaderSubList'). '</strong></p></div>';
    
   }
   //$submit = _e('Update Settings', 'GoogleReaderSubList');
  
   echo "<div class='wrap'>    <form method='post' action='" . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] . "'>     <h2>Google Reader Subscription List</h2>     <h3>Google Login</h3>     <input type='text' name='greader_sub_list_login' value='";
   echo _e(apply_filters('format_to_edit', $options['google_login']), 'GoogleReaderSubList');
   echo "' />
     <h3>Google Password</h3>     <input type='password' name='greader_sub_list_pass' value='";
   echo _e(apply_filters('format_to_edit', $options['google_pass']), 'GoogleReaderSubList');
   echo "' />
     <div class='submit'>      <input type='submit' name='update_greader_sub_list_settings' value='";
   echo _e('Update Settings', 'GoogleReaderSubList');
   echo "'/>
     </div>    </form>   </div>";
  }
}
}
 
if (class_exists('GoogleReaderSubList')) {
$greader_sub_list = new GoogleReaderSubList();
}
 
if (!function_exists('greader_sub_list_ap')) {
function greader_sub_list_ap() {
  global $greader_sub_list;
  if (!isset($greader_sub_list)) {
   return;
  }
  if (function_exists('add_options_page')) {
   add_options_page('gReader Subscriptions', 'gReader Subscriptions', 9, basename(__FILE__), array(&$greader_sub_list, 'printAdminPage'));
  }
}
}
 
if (isset($greader_sub_list)) {
add_action('admin_menu', 'greader_sub_list_ap');
add_action('activate_google-raeder-list/google-reader-list.php', array(&$greader_sub_list, 'init'));
add_filter('the_content', array(&$greader_sub_list, 'addContent'), '7');
}

Quick Google Authentication in PHP

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 15:02:00 GMT

Here is a quick way to authenticate against Google and retrieve a protected feed. It does not use the supported ClientLogin method but it does allow you to get to some unsupported feeds (Reader, Bookmarks, etc) The Zend Gdata library is required

$show_list       = 'show-google-reader-sub-list';  //the hook in a page
$login          = '';
$pass          = '';
$source         = 'wordpress-google-reader-sub-list-';  //the source the api sees when logging into Google
$service         = 'reader';  
$login_url        = 'https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLoginAuth?service=mail'; //URL to login to google
$subscription_list_url  = 'http://www.google.com/reader/api/0/subscription/list'; //URL that holds a users subscriptions

 
$client = new Zend_Http_Client($login_url);

//connect, authenticate, and handshake with Google
$client->setCookieJar()
->setMethod(Zend_Http_Client::POST)
->setParameterPost(array(
 'continue'             => $subscription_list_url,
 'service'              => 'reader',
 'niu'                  => 1,
 'hl'                   => 'en',
 'Email'              => $login,
 'Passwd'               => $pass,
 'PersistentCookie'     => 'yes',
 'asts'                 => ''
));


$response = $client->request('POST');
$client->setUri($subscription_list_url)->setMethod(Zend_Http_Client::GET);
$response = $client->request()->getBody();

if ($client->request()->getStatus() == 400) {
?>Unable to login with supplied Google login/password```

Diggnation NYC, June 4th!

Thu, 28 May 2009 14:29:00 GMT

Veeeeery excited about this. [Last

year](http://blog.gpowered.net/2008/06/live-diggnation-ny-photos.html) was a blast

When?

Thursday, June 4th, 2009
7:30pm

Where?

Webster Hall
125 East 11th Street, New York City, NY
[view map](http://maps.google.com/?q=125%20East%2011th%20Street,%20New%20York% 20City,%20NY)

Streaming?

Live Event?

Yes

Venue Website:

websterhall.com

Google Maps F-Bombs street names!

Fri, 01 May 2009 00:16:00 GMT

Good stuff. Link

![](https://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Ng3QbVQfLZ8/Sfo_Jqi6JyI/AAAAAAAAbHo/QilHprrfP9c /s400/Untitled.jpg)

How a Programmer reads your resume

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 16:00:00 GMT

How to manage podcasts in Winamp (screw itunes)

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 19:11:00 GMT

So I really have been digging the Windows 7 beta. However, Itunes does not sync podcasts correctly on the 64 bit version. IF syncing works at all, it takes a while. I had used winamp to listen to my music a while ago, but had switched to amarok when I started single booting linux (yes, I hated Vista that much). Now that I'm back to using windows a bit, I wanted my podcast experience to go flawlessly.

As much as I dislike iTunes, they have got podcast management down pat

search for podcast
subscribe to podcast
download episodes
sync with ipod
after an episode has been listened to, delete from computer hard drive

That last point is the most important part, everything else can be done manually

All this can be done with winamp. You will need two things, winamp and the ml_iPod plugin. While winamp does come with ipod support built in, ml_iPod has many more features. The following steps should get you up to speed on podcasting with winamp

install winamp
install the ml_iPod plugin (it will tell you it has to remove the built in ipod plugin, this is ok)
set a directory to save the episodes in

plug in your ipod
enable podcast support for the ipod
point it to your episode folder
set the query for when to delete old episodes

Add your podcasts by searching for them in the directory, or adding them manually using their RSS feed

After this you should be good to go. podcasts!

Big Appengine news: Cron, Java, Firewalled Data, DB Import

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 13:45:00 GMT

Java Support: This was the first, and most popular request in the bug tracker. Followed closely by PHP support. Google has merged the simplicity of appengine with the robustness of java, and added it to their Eclipse plugin to boot.

Cron Support: The cron support works by calling a URL at a given interval. I'm not sure if cron jobs are also restricted by the timeout policy, hopefully they will be allowed to be longer.

Secure Data Connector: An exampled of this would be accessing data behind a corporate firewall. Might be a (good/bad) idea ;)

Bulk Uploader: Dump data into appengine from another database or a CSV file

Twitter Blog: Replies Are Now Mentions

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 14:33:00 GMT

Twitter Blog: Replies Are Now Mentions Hopefully this is a step towards official support of @reply (or @mention) notifications again

First Google Chrome Extensions

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 17:11:00 GMT

Extensions are coming for chrome.

Google’s Matt Cutts in a blog post says: “Extensions currently have very Greasemonkey-like functionality: you identify which web pages should be modified, plus JavaScript to be added to those pages. By default, the extension’s JavaScript runs after the page loads, but you can specify that the extension’s JavaScript should run before the page loads. Right now, you can only load one JS file, but that could change in the future. You also can’t currently load Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), but that might also change.”

Personally, I think they should just port greasemonkey directly so chrome can take advantage off all the existing scripts

Google’s JavaScript/ Chrome Experiments Showcase

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 17:08:00 GMT

Google at ChromeExperiments.com released a showcase site for JavaScript experiments especially aimed as promotion to demonstrate their own Chrome browser’s capabilities. From games to 3D graphics, these demo's really show off what the chrome javascript engine can do

No Content Found

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 20:51:00 GMT

Test post from sms (now supported by blogger http://tinyurl.com/bx6vao )

GrandCentral finally resurected

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 13:46:00 GMT

GrandCentral lives again, as Google Voice. Google voice is rolling out, although currently only open to current GrandCentral users. To request an invite when it is open to all, click here

Features:

Google number - One number for all your calls and SMS

Call screening - Announce and screen callers
Listen in - Listen before taking a call
Block calls - Keep unwanted callers at bay
SMS - Send, receive, and store SMS
Place calls - Call US numbers for free
Taking calls - Answer on any of your phones
Phone routing - Phones ring based on who calls
Forwarding phones - Add phones and decide which ring

Google voicemail - Voicemail as easy as email, with transcripts

Voicemail transcripts - Read what your voicemail says
Listen to voicemail - Check online or from your phone
Notifications - Receive voicemails via email or SMS
Personalize greeting - Vary greetings by caller
Share voicemail - Forward or download voicemails

Voice features - More cool things you can do with Google Voice

Conference calling - Join people into a single call
Call record - Record calls and store them online
Call switch - Switch phones during a call
Mobile site - View your inbox from your mobile
GOOG-411 - Check directory assistance
Manage groups - Set preferences by group

Google Calendar gets offline access with Gears

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 13:50:00 GMT

4 of my 5 most used Google apps now have offline access through Gears (Gmail, Docs, and reader being the other). I use picasa heavily also but there is way too much data there for gears. Head over to your calendar to add the feature.

Installing Ubuntu Netbook Remix (with Jaunty) on an MSI Wind

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 20:51:00 GMT

I recently picked up a MSI Wind Netbook and love the damn thing. Ubuntu Netbook Remix brings in a great UI which makes navigating on the small screen much easier.I used Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope Alpha 4 as the base install, mainly because I didn't want to go through the trouble of converting my ext3 partitions to ext4 when it comes out on April 23rd, and the driver support is more complete. I haven't had many problems with it aside from a few random firefox crashes.

We're going to make a bootable USB stick to install Ubuntu
On a separate machine, Download the cd image. If you want to use 8.10, get the iso here
if you are already using an Ubuntu install of 8.10 or higher, skip to step 11
burn the image to a cd
Boot to the cd, do not install, load the demo OS
click System->Administration->Create a USB startup disk
point it to either the cd in your drive, or the iso
point to the correct USB stick
the rest of the settings can stay default
click Make Startup Disk
Insert the usb drive into your wind, power it on, and hit delete to go into the bios, change the first boot device to USB Drive
save and exit the bios
If the wind boots off of the USB stick correctly, you should see the same screen as when you had booted off the cd
Install Ubuntu
I made my partitions as follows:

|30 gig recovery partition|20 gig XP partition|15 Gig Ext4 Ubuntu Partition|4 gig swap partition|the rest of the drive as an ext4 partition
![](https://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Ng3QbVQfLZ8/SaYPBBQ2EmI/AAAAA AAAa74/DBWWqZQOEko/s1600-h/partitions.png)

That last partition is where I will mount my home directory, as well as mount from windows xp using ext2fs (I havn't actually tried this yet)
Add the netbook remix repositories to your system. This can be be done in synaptic or by typing the following into a terminal

sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

add the following:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/netbook-remix-team/ubuntu intrepid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/netbook-remix-team/ubuntu intrepid main

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install go-home-applet

sudo apt-get install window-picker-applet
sudo apt-get install maximus
sudo apt-get install human-netbook-theme

Select the "Human Netbook Theme" in System Preferences>Apperance
go into System Preferences-> sessions->startup programs and confirm that "Maximus" and "window-picker-applet" are thre
Disable Compiz Effects System Preferences->Appearance->None

This is what is required to get netbook remix running, I continued with the

following to tweak it some more

Delete the bottom panel by right clicking on it
Delete all the applets on the top panel by right clicking on them
Add applets to the top panel so it ends up like:

Window Picker Applet | Trash Can |Notification Area | MixerApplet | Clock

I also made alt+q the hotkey to show the desktop, makes navigating to it faster. Another option is the show desktop applet button that can be added to the top bar. Preferences->keyboard shortcuts->"Hide all normal windows....."

More info is available here.

Google App Engine Blog: The sky's (almost) the limit! "High CPU" is no more.

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 16:16:00 GMT

It looks like the app engine infrastructure is improving. No more High CPU request warnings, the response deadline (timeout) has been raised from 10 to 30 seconds, and the static file limit is now 10MB.

The Matrix Runs on Windows

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 19:39:00 GMT

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

How to get brightkite photos into an RSS feed (to post to a blog)

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 15:11:00 GMT

I started another blog so I have a place to rant about comics or movies or whatever else I need to get off my chest, and I needed an excuse to play with wordpress (something I've been wanting to do for a while). I plan on posting how I did certain things on that blog on gPowered. One of the things I really wanted to do was have my twitter photos show up as posts on that blog. For a while I have been using twitpic, but have recently changed over to brightkite. Brightkite provides an rss feed of all your activity, but I was only interested in the photos. Looked like a job for Yahoo! Pipes.

![](https://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Ng3QbVQfLZ8/SX3Uw_HR3KI/AAAAAAAAajI/XPnLMt02wdQ /s320/pipe1.JPG)

I imported the bkite feed into pipes, filtered on the items that were photo posts, and renamed the title so it would have the title of the photo instead of the bkite location (by default bkite photo titles are the location where you most recently checked in). I also did some URL generation so anyone could use the pipe The next step was to get this into wordpress. I Installed the FeedWordPress plugin and set it up to import the pipe's RSS feed. You can tweak the the settings on what user should be used to write the posts, categories, tags, permalinks (I set mine to point directly back to brightkite). Hope this helps someone out there, enjoy

Finding unread gmails (or: the best gmail filter ever)

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 15:45:00 GMT

As the year starts to wind down, I figure I should start the year off with a clean inbox. I try to keep no unread messages in my inbox, instead I tag and archive. These past few weeks however, my inbox has gotten a little crazy.

I found this filter to show me all my unread mail that is still in my inbox, hope it helps someone organize like it did me

is:inbox is:unread

Happy Holidays all

Google Reader gets a facelift

Fri, 05 Dec 2008 14:20:00 GMT

It's now less "bubble" looking. I'm wondering if its pulling from my gmail theme, but I unfortunately can't check that from work. I really like being able to hide the stats in the upper left. The only one I ever look at is how many total unread items I have.

Set / Change / Reset the MySQL root password on Ubuntu Linux (Ubuntu)

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 23:53:00 GMT

This came in veeeerrryyy handy just now...

Stop the MySQL Server

sudo /etc/init.d/mysql stop
Start the mysqld config

sudo mysqld --skip-grant-tables &
Login to the server as root

mysql -u root mysql
Ser your NEWPASSWORD

UPDATE user SET Password=PASSWORD('NEWPASSWORD') WHERE

User='root'; FLUSH

PRIVILEGES; exit;

туры на майские праздники днепропетровск взять денег в долг срочно

Gmail adds voice and video chat

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 22:54:00 GMT

Is the death of Skype iminent?

The plugin isn't out for Linux so I can't test it out just yet. Hopefully I'll be able to try it out on Laura's mac later. Until then, more info is available here. If you've tried it out, let me know.

Foxtrot Android

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 14:37:00 GMT

Android Market now open. Full source released

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 14:28:00 GMT

The Android Market is now open, register to add your apps! http://www.android.com/market/

![](https://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Ng3QbVQfLZ8/SQ8LWQBaTRI/AAAAAAAATtw/dg9Emi0zDTs /s320-R/market.JPG)

The full source code for Android is now available: http://source.android.com/

GWTPHP = Google Web Toolkit + PHP 5

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 20:28:00 GMT

I know there is a pretty high number of programmers who haven't tried to dable GWT yet because out of the box, the back end is java only. PHP developers rejoice!

_Unlike most of the other frameworks, GwtPHP is a framework for both client and server part. In GwtPHP you don’t need to hack JavaScript, you work with modern, object oriented languages. User interface (client) is programmed in Java, then compiled by Google Web Toolkit (GWT) to browser-dependent JavaScript. Server part uses PHP 5. _

Not yet available to the public, but you can sign up to be notified when it is

How to turn any webpage into an RSS feed

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 12:55:00 GMT

Using a tool called Dapper and Yahoo Pipes, its fairly easy to turn any webpage into an RSS feed. Dapper is a powerful HTML scrapping system and Pipes is a handy data remixing tool. Head on over to dapper.net and check to make sure someone hasn't already done what you are planning on doing (Do this by using dapper's search function.) If you can't find any, you are ready to go.

For this example, I'm going to scrape http://ifanboy.com/users/broderboy/comics which shows the comic books I'm interested in this week. Click "create new dapp" (located under the search bar). Once inside the Dapp Factory, input the url of the page you want to scrape. Then, change the format to RSS Feed. You can leave the format is Dapp XML if you want much more control over the data, as well as more options for output, but its harder to turn this into an RSS feed. I'll cover how to do this in a later article.

At this point I would recommend watching the Demo that will pop up. After the demo you should see a rendering of the page you were looking at. Click add to basket. Then, try to add more pages that are similar, but might have different data. For my example this would be other people's comics. Add these to the basket as well (you should try to have at least 4)

![](https://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Ng3QbVQfLZ8/SOoOoUkvuhI/AAAAAAAATJ8/WgfrxcqVv4E /s320-R/2.jpg)

Click next step, and the system will analyze your pages. You can watch another demo at this point. Now you can start selecting page elements. The more example pages you gave dapper, the smarter the element selecting will be. All I'm interested in is the title of the comic, which I'm going to use for the title of the RSS article, and the number of pulls it had, which I will use for the body of the article.

![](https://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Ng3QbVQfLZ8/SOoP7VrxYiI/AAAAAAAATKE/Sa8E9LiQTBU /s320-R/3.jpg)

After I have these selected, I move on to the next step. Here you can preview or save you dapp. It should have already grouped your 2 items into an RSS group for you. Exit the wizard to get the RSS feed and options.

![](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Ng3QbVQfLZ8/SOoRHt1LJRI/AAAAAAAATKM/xd4VjsOeDIk /s320-R/4.jpg)

At this point, you have the RSS feed and are done with that portion. If you only need the address of the feed for yourself, there is no need to go any furthur. I wanted to make the input very easy for anyone to use the feed for any user on iFanboy. Enter Yahoo Pipes. I used a text input, string builder, and URL builder to create the URL I would need. Then sent this url into the dapp, and pulled back the RSS. The orriginal URL for the dapp was http://www.dapper.net/transform.php?dappName=iFanboyComicsfortheWeekRSS&transformer=RSS&extraArg_title=comic_title&extraArg_description[]=pulls&applyToUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ifanboy.com%2Fusers%2Fbroderboy%2Fcomics. While the 'broderboy' could have been replaced directly in this url, it might not have been clear. The new Pipes URL makes it a little easier to see http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=GjdOGm9_3RGeKVooPxJ3AQ&_render=rss&username=broderboy.

![](https://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Ng3QbVQfLZ8/SOoTMSgH6JI/AAAAAAAATKU/f6s1x0hbHF4 /s320-R/5.jpg)

You can also merge multiple RSS feeds in the pipe using the Union node.

Enjoy!

Debate 2.0

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Last week during the presidential debate, the country was a-twitter. There were a bunch of sites doing some sort of realtime web 2.0 shows of the debate, with a lot of these using twitter and hashtags. If anyone knows of any sites that I haven't listed below, please let me know

We had the TV, a couple of laptops, and a few bottles of wine going and it turned out to be great fun.

My favorite site was definitely Current's Hack the Debate It displays the video/audio of the debate, as well as real time tweets that are tagged with #current. This is where I'll be spending most of my time.

Twitter weighs in with http://election.twitter.com/

#tweetdebate was an experiment to use twitter to track in real time who is winning, this is tracked using search.twitter.com. See the [site](http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2008/09/21/twitter-presidential- debates-sept-26/) for rules.

Other websites with twitter mashups for the debate
FriendFeed
C-SPAN (democrats)
C-SPAN (republicans)
http://www.perspctv.com/
[NPR](http://www.npr.org/blogs/politics/2008/10/help_us_factcheck_tonights_deb .html) (#factcheck)

I'm cooking dinner / having wine for the VP debate tonight with some friends. Follow us up on twitter if you want to join in on the fun.

http://twitter.com/broderboy
http://twitter.com/bingopajamas
http://twitter.com/franksstella
http://twitter.com/mrblondeau
http://twitter.com/delapaz поездка в танзанию

September Madness

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 18:54:00 GMT

A little off the beaten path from what I usually post, but have at, we're taking bets here at work, winner gets to claim Alaska as their sovereign kingdom of awesomeness

Digg and Facebook Heading to the Future of Web Apps expo

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 14:17:00 GMT

This sounds like a lot of fun, some good presentations (interesting topics and good presenters), a live Diggnation, and I LOVE London. Wish I could go

Here's the lineup:

Mark Zuckerberg - Fireside Chat
Kevin Rose - The future of social news
Dave Morin - A more social Web with [Facebook

Connect](http://developers.facebook.com/connect.php)

Joe Stump - Languages don't scale

To wrap up the conference there will be a live Diggnation on the main stage (Oct 10). Directly after that will be the wrap up party which is rumored to have an open bar, but you didn't hear that from me

What happens if you break the NDA with Apple's App Store

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 14:08:00 GMT

I JUST WON £500,000.00 GBP FROM GOOGLE UK!!!

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 15:27:00 GMT

Now, normally gmail's spam system picks up on these. I apparently was entered by using the "Googler" Search Engine. Oh well, next time it will know, and knowing is half the battle! ::hits spam button::

_This E-mail is to inform you that your e-email have emerged you a winner of £500,000.00 GBP (Five Hundred Thousand British
Pounds) in our online Give-away 1Oth year Anniversary draws.
GoogleUK has successfully organized for the second time a Cash Give-Away marking 2008 10th Anniversary in the UK. Over £20,000,000.00 (Twenty Million British pounds) is to be given out for this Anniversary Draws.
No purchases of tickets were required. Participants for the draws were randomly selected from a world wide range of web searchers who use the Google search engine (Googler) and other Google ancillary services. Google is now the biggest search engine worldwide and in an effort to make sure that it remains the most widely used search engine, Google is running an e-mail beta test. Winners were selected randomly through a computer ballot system from worldwide users of the Google search engine.

YOUR WINNING DETAILS ARE AS FOLLOW:
Computer Generated Profile Numbers (CGPN):7-22-71-00-66-12 Ticket number: 00869575733664 Serial numbers: / BTD/8070447706/06 Lucky numbers: 12-12-23-35-40-41(12)

To claim your give-away prize, send the following Your full names.................
,sex...............................,
Location............................,
Alternate e-mail address..................
Your winning details.................
To your processing agent (Mr. Francis Henson) who have been assigned to handle your winning file and payment processing.

Your Processing Agent contact:
Mr. Francis Henson,
Email: f.henson002@gmail.com
We wish you the best of luck as you spend your good fortune.
Thank you for using Google!
Sincerely,
Mrs Anita Simon

Woohoo! Google Maps adds NYC transit directions

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 17:55:00 GMT

Finally! Took em long enough. It even has the New Jersey Path.

I've been using GypsyMaps up until now if I needed directions, we'll see how they stack up against each other

http://maps.google.com/nyc

Google Android G1 T-Mobile announcement is streaming live

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 14:36:00 GMT

Watch it here

Twitter enters the Porn industry

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 14:23:00 GMT

Just got this at work, I must have missed the memo...

The site you have attempted to access has been blocked
_If you feel access to this site has a valid business justification, we welcome you to submit a request to access the site which will be reviewed for compliance with [my company here] Policy. _

URL Requested:

http://www.tweettrak.com/
URL Category: Sex
Date: 2008-09-23 14:20:25

How to stream video to an Xbox 360 from linux

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 22:05:00 GMT

There are a couple of different methods floating around to do this, but I think this is the quickest and easiest to get set up. So far, I like this better then FTP'ing files over to my old modded xbox. Some notes about further investigating will be at the bottom. Note: this was tested on an Ubuntu machine.

Make sure your 360 has all the current updates
Install ushare "sudo apt-get install ushare"
if ushare complains about a missing libdlna dependency, get it from here: **"wget http://www.geexbox.org/debian/pool/main/libdlna/libdlna0_0.2.3-0ubuntu1_i386.deb" **
Edit the ushare configuration "sudo vim /etc/ushare.conf" update any ports or network devices you need to (I changed mine to eth1 so it would just use the wireless) as well as what folder to scan
There is a mime-type you need to update "sudo vim /usr/share/mime/packages/freedesktop.org.xml" change mime-type type="video/x-msvideo" to mime-type type="video/x-ms-wmv"
restart gnome (ctrl + alt + backspace)
start ushare with "ushare -x"
Go to the media blade on your 360 dashboard
Press 'X' to change the source
You should see uShare (or whatever you named the share to in the configuration)
play videos!
note: **to play a .mkv file, rename it to .m4v **

To Do:

get uShare to automatically rescan the directory (currently if I add a video to the folder, the 360 will not see it until i restart uShare)
get 1080p HD content to stream. I have tried a few re-encapsulation methods so far, nothing working yet
this is an xbox thing, that hopefully will be fixed in the fall update, but navigating large folder trees can get annoying

Official: T-Mobile Android Announcement September 23rd

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 22:31:00 GMT

Cool, for T-Mobile users anyway. Hopefully Verizon or AT&T; is next in line, and yes, I will leave Verizon for AT&T; if they get it first

Man I would love to do this

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 20:48:00 GMT

Official Google Blog: Running Hood to Coast

"A 197-mile Oregon race that starts at Mount Hood, travels through Portland, and finishes on the beach in the town of Seaside. More than 1000 teams participate in the race, with 12 runners on each team running three legs each."

T-Mobile Android handset to retail for $199

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 20:30:00 GMT

iPhone vs. Android, go!

Offerpal Media Facebook to Publish Event Directory for Search Engines

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 20:04:00 GMT

Things have changed slightly since I last wrote about this, but for the better. Look like Google will be able to trawl some of Facebook after all.

Searchable data will include People, Pages, Applications, Events, and Groups.

Adobe AIR Beta Now Available for Linux

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Adobe air is out of alpha and can be downloaded here. Also check out Life Hacker's top 10 apps worth installing Adobe AIR for

Diggnation in your living room!

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 14:23:00 GMT

This could be a lot of fun. If you win, Kevin, Alex, Prager, the Hippie, and whoever else will come shoot an episode of Diggnation from your living room. I love Diggnation, either way, it will be a great episode.

"In this once in a lifetime opportunity, Kevin and Alex will travel to a fan’s house to shoot an episode of Diggnation this fall. From now until October 22, every time you use the code “diggcouch” when you purchase something from Go Daddy you are automatically entered to win. Go Daddy will choose one lucky winner at random. This fall, Kevin and Alex will travel to their house to shoot an episode of Diggnation in their living room.

In addition to entering the contest you also get 10% off your entire order when you use the code “diggcouch” at check out. So make sure you get over to GoDaddy.com and make some purchases and get your entry in today!"

Spread the word

Geek 1.0 vs. Geek 2.0

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 15:26:00 GMT

First Community run Android App Market goes live

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 16:38:00 GMT

Check it out

![](https://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Ng3QbVQfLZ8/SMan487MRKI/AAAAAAAATDI/V5qQCIr-QD0 /s400/and.JPG)

Chrome: Don't Clog the Tubes!

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 19:06:00 GMT

A buddy at work mentioned this. There are also a lot more listed over at lifehacker

![](https://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Ng3QbVQfLZ8/SMV4afne6pI/AAAAAAAATC8/PbOxUVJEpkI /s400/clog.JPG)

WINE Updates with Better Chrome Support

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 14:41:00 GMT

via lifehacker: I'll be trying this when I get home.

Django 1.0 released!

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 01:00:00 GMT

No, you’re not hallucinating, it’s really here.

NOW GO GET IT

Chrome coming to Android?

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 13:24:00 GMT

Android Community and a few other blogs have stated that Chrome will be making its way to android, but aside from the processing stack and improved javascriptability (yes I just made up a word), is it really going to be the full chrome app everyone is playing with or just a tweaked out webkit (which we already knew was going to be the native Android browser)

Android Market: a user-driven content distribution system

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 14:31:00 GMT

Android Developers Blog: Android Market: a user-driven content distribution system

Eat it Apple
The beta version of the market will be available at launch

|
|

Share your code at ‘Google App Engine Cookbook’

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 15:56:00 GMT

Google App Engine Blog: Our favorite recipes for App Engine, all in one place

I'll be submitting some snippets in the near future. Said code will also be posted on here ;)

New Android news

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 15:47:00 GMT

T-Mobile G1 phone images leaked!

Android Developer Challenge Winners Announced
Android App Market Confirmed. EAT IT IPHONE

Javascript pacman clone

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 15:40:00 GMT

A great example of javascript to create a pacman clone. (Uses YUI)

Official Google Blog: A fresh take on the browser

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 13:54:00 GMT

Official Google Blog: A fresh take on the browser

Not too sure how I feel about this. We'll see what it ends up being

More info: comic

Resistance is Futile: Microsoft Paperclip comes to Unix

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 20:40:00 GMT

туры в танзанию килиманджаро

New third-party party tool for monitoring App Engine cluster status

Sat, 23 Aug 2008 01:34:00 GMT

Cloud Status has some pretty cool real-time appengine cloud stats. Check it out

T-Mobile Android slated for Oct 13th

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 13:19:00 GMT

Highlights

pre-order will go until Oct. 3 at 5pm
Phones will be received on Oct 13th
Price: $199
$18 "upgrade" fee
2 year contract required
$35 unlimited data & messaging plan
$25 plan including 400 messages

Phone Features

Touch Screen
Full Qwerty keyboard
3G/ WiFi
Full HTML internet capabilities
Easy access to all Google applications (Gmail, Gtalk, search)
Maps
Street view
You Tube
Phone
IM/Text
Email
Camera 3.0mp
Video (playback only, no recording)
Music player & 1GB memory card pre-loaded
Applications, all available in Google marketplace (icon on the homescreen)

Back from Vacation

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 23:22:00 GMT

I did as much relaxing as I could on Vacation down at the Jersey Shore. No computers at all. Just me, the beach and a bunch of books. Went on the Human Sling shot (spring shot?) which was a lot of fun, see the video and pictures below.

Also, Check out goodreads.com. Its a lot better then any of the other bookshelving services I've reviewed in the past. The reasons why will be in a future post in the not so distant future.

[](http: //www.goodreads.com/user/show/1253891)

Vacation in WIldwood

Android: Analyst HTC delay rumors debunked - Q4 launch still on track

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 14:41:00 GMT

Well thats good. Fingers crossed for Verizon release.

Sorry for the lack of posts. 3 month project going live this weekend. Will hopefully have some free time after that.

Via Android Community

Heading on Vacation

Sat, 26 Jul 2008 13:45:00 GMT

Finally getting a vacation in, going down to the Jersey shore. Got a nice stack of books and comics. Can't wait to relax. My next project will be released a few days after I get back. It's almost done =)

![Got my stack of books for vacation at the shore. Bye world se... on TwitPic](http://twitpic.com/img/5gbx- 67847ad849843df02601c352bc7ad4b0.488b2aa3.jpg)

I'm not sure I like the new Facebook Design

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 02:19:00 GMT

Originally I had friendfeed taking care of all my Facebook status updates. I wasn't sure I liked this on the old profile and was experimenting. Now I definitely want it to go. But even working with other apps and feeds, I'm not sure the new profile can display what the old one could. These pics are from the new one. Some valuable information is missing from the posts, diggs, twitter isn't even showing up... I'll have to play some more. What do people think?

![](https://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Ng3QbVQfLZ8/SIaW5MGLaHI/AAAAAAAASOU/VaZMmEpswdw /s400-R/newfb2.jpg)

New and Improved Google Personal Homepage (ig)

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 19:56:00 GMT

I unfortunately haven't had time to touch Google reader in almost 2 weeks now, but just caught on lifehacker that Google is rolling out a new personal homepage. Some of you may have it enabled by default. If not, head over to www.google.com/ig/sandbox and sign up to get into the developer sandbox. If you aren't a developer, fake it. My favorite addition is definitely full screen Gmail preview, which I can't get to at work. I wonder how long until they block it....

![](https://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Ng3QbVQfLZ8/SID2FFUAMUI/AAAAAAAASN8/3uHMeD_JNbY /s320-R/ig.JPG)

gPowered Rated 8.2 on Blogged.com!

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 01:19:00 GMT

I recently received an email about someone submitting gPowered to [blogged.com](http://www.blogged.com/blogs/gpowered-by-the-power-of- google.html). To whoever submitted it, thank you so much!!

_ Dear Timothy Broder,

Our editors recently reviewed your blog and have given it an 8.2 score out of (10) in the Technology category of Blogged.com.

This is quite an achievement!

[ http://www.blogged.com/directory/technology](

http://www.blogged.com/directory/technology)

We evaluated your blog based on the following criteria: Frequency of Updates, Relevance of Content, Site Design, and Writing Style.

After carefully reviewing each of these criteria, your site was given its 8.2 score.

We’ve also created Blogged.com score badges with your score prominently displayed. Simply visit your website’s summary page on Blogged.com:

Click on the "Show this rating on your blog!" link underneath the score and follow the instructions provided.

Please accept my congratulations on a blog well-done!!

Sincerely,

Amy Liu
Marketing Department
amy@blogged.com
www.blogged.com

Mars Robot twittered from Space

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 18:34:00 GMT

The Mars Phoenix robot found water on mars and what does it do? Sends a tweet

"Are you ready to celebrate? Well, get ready: We have ICE!!!!! Yes, ICE, WATER ICE on Mars! w00t!!! Best day ever!!"

Android Handset’s Could Be Delayed Until 2009

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 18:28:00 GMT

Well... that would [suck](http://www.talkandroid.com/124-google-android- delayed/)

Social Badges

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 00:25:00 GMT

So, for whatever reason. I never added my social network badges to this site. I should have, a long time ago. Feel free to follow me on FriendFeed or Twitter, be my friend on Facebook or linkedin, see what I've Dugg or listened to, take a look at my photos, and more. Will definitly be seeing how this effects my social graph

![Picasa Web Albums](https://gpowered.net/php/imag es/picasa.png) ![LinkedIn](http: //gpowered.net/php/images/linkedin.png) ![Pandora](https://gpowered.net/php/imag es/pandora.png) ![del.icio.us] (https://gpowered.net/php/images/delicious.png) ![YouTube](https://gpowered.net/php/images/youtub e.png) ![Pownce](http://gpowe red.net/php/images/pownce.png)

Python 2.6 and 3.0 Beta 1 Released.

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 22:28:00 GMT

Get them while they're hot!

2.6

3.0 Beta

Wine 1.0 has been released

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 15:37:00 GMT

Big Day for software

Firefox3: Help set a world record starting at 1pm EST

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 15:15:00 GMT

Do it

Google I/O session videos posted with slides

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 19:11:00 GMT

As I said earlier, Quite a few presentations from Google I/O have been posted for your viewing pleasure. I'll be glued to these this weekend while I'm on call.

Topics include
Ajax
KML
Sketchup
Android
OpenSocial
Appengine
Data APIs
Theory Talks
Youtube
Gears
Mashups
Maps
and more!

Google Toolbar Available for Firefox 3

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 17:54:00 GMT

Finally, the Google toolbar is available for all those with the Firefox beta or RC releases. Just in time too... took them long enough... happy days are here again!

Live Diggnation NY Photos

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 11:31:00 GMT

The show was absolutely nuts. Had a great time at Studio B. Sorry for the crappy photo quality, I forgot my camera and the blackberry doesn't do so well in the dark... I think the estimate for this meetup was about 2,000 people inside and 600 waiting outside in the rain? Great turnout, great show. Diggnation better come back to NY. (As they said at the show, NY creates/diggs the most content on Digg then anywhere else in the world, GO NEW YORK!

[![](ht tp://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Ng3QbVQfLZ8/SEfPwSCzrtI/AAAAAAAASAk/uE3SLJhkVc4/s400/I MG00031.jpg)](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Ng3QbVQfLZ8/SEfPwSCzrtI/AAAAAAAASAk/uE 3SLJhkVc4/s1600-h/IMG00031.jpg) [![](https://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Ng3QbVQfLZ8/SEf PtyCzrsI/AAAAAAAASAc/peqDoJ87kDk/s400/IMG00032.jpg)](https://4.bp.blogspot.com/ _Ng3QbVQfLZ8/SEfPtyCzrsI/AAAAAAAASAc/peqDoJ87kDk/s1600-h/IMG00032.jpg) [![](ht tp://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Ng3QbVQfLZ8/SEfPrSCzrrI/AAAAAAAASAU/eCCoFaLbTwo/s400/I MG00033.jpg)](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Ng3QbVQfLZ8/SEfPrSCzrrI/AAAAAAAASAU/eC CoFaLbTwo/s1600-h/IMG00033.jpg) [![](https://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Ng3QbVQfLZ8/SEf PliCzrqI/AAAAAAAASAM/tpEyMMpkI9I/s400/IMG00034.jpg)](https://3.bp.blogspot.com/ _Ng3QbVQfLZ8/SEfPliCzrqI/AAAAAAAASAM/tpEyMMpkI9I/s1600-h/IMG00034.jpg) [![](ht tp://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Ng3QbVQfLZ8/SEfPgSCzrpI/AAAAAAAASAE/dSjsnwdN89U/s400/I MG00035.jpg)](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Ng3QbVQfLZ8/SEfPgSCzrpI/AAAAAAAASAE/dS jsnwdN89U/s1600-h/IMG00035.jpg) [![](https://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Ng3QbVQfLZ8/SEf PYiCzroI/AAAAAAAAR_8/knHsvfKP7Vs/s400/IMG00036.jpg)](https://3.bp.blogspot.com/ _Ng3QbVQfLZ8/SEfPYiCzroI/AAAAAAAAR_8/knHsvfKP7Vs/s1600-h/IMG00036.jpg) [![](ht tp://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Ng3QbVQfLZ8/SEfPRiCzrnI/AAAAAAAAR_0/qAMV4gBESLs/s400/I MG00037.jpg)](https://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Ng3QbVQfLZ8/SEfPRiCzrnI/AAAAAAAAR_0/qA MV4gBESLs/s1600-h/IMG00037.jpg) [![](https://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Ng3QbVQfLZ8/SEf PKiCzrmI/AAAAAAAAR_s/SAWtqLlV5Qw/s400/IMG00038.jpg)](https://3.bp.blogspot.com/ _Ng3QbVQfLZ8/SEfPKiCzrmI/AAAAAAAAR_s/SAWtqLlV5Qw/s1600-h/IMG00038.jpg) [![](ht tp://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Ng3QbVQfLZ8/SEfPGiCzrlI/AAAAAAAAR_k/9ZVOZXOuhq8/s400/I MG00039.jpg)](https://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Ng3QbVQfLZ8/SEfPGiCzrlI/AAAAAAAAR_k/9Z VOZXOuhq8/s1600-h/IMG00039.jpg) [![](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Ng3QbVQfLZ8/SEf PDSCzrkI/AAAAAAAAR_c/HuoFOMnMPvw/s400/IMG00040.jpg)](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/ _Ng3QbVQfLZ8/SEfPDSCzrkI/AAAAAAAAR_c/HuoFOMnMPvw/s1600-h/IMG00040.jpg) [![](https://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Ng3QbVQfLZ8/SEfPAyCzrjI/AAAAAAAAR_U/Fq-qaIQjk-E /s400/IMG00041.jpg)](https://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Ng3QbVQfLZ8/SEfPAyCzrjI/AAAAAAA AR_U/Fq-qaIQjk-E/s1600-h/IMG00041.jpg) [![](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Ng3QbVQfLZ8/SEfO-SCzriI/AAAAAAAAR_M/jaP9miTIGAE /s400/IMG00042.jpg)](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Ng3QbVQfLZ8/SEfO- SCzriI/AAAAAAAAR_M/jaP9miTIGAE/s1600-h/IMG00042.jpg)

Diggnation filming at Studio B in NYC tonight

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 11:36:00 GMT

Kevin Rose is filming Diggnation in Brooklyn tonight for Internet Week. It starts at 6 I should be able to get out of work in time. Anyone else going?

"Diggnation is a weekly video podcast produced by Revision3. It is hosted by Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht, who had previously hosted TechTV's The Screen Savers together. Its main purpose is to discuss the top stories from Digg, the social bookmarking website developed by Rose and others. The format of the show usually involves Rose and Albrecht reviewing one or more brands of beer at the opening of the show, of which they will consume throughout the show, (steadily getting more and more drunk until they are almost incoherent) followed by them discussing various Digg stories from the previous week. Both audio and video versions of the podcast are available from Revision3."

5 Reasons Why RIM Should Make A BlackBerry That Runs Android

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 23:21:00 GMT

I'd really enjoy this. 1) I'm obviously addicted to my crackberry. 2) I'm not sure how I feel about lots of typing in a touch screen. I played with the HTC Touch over the weekend. It was cool, it was pretty, but the screen wasn't as responsive as I would have hoped. We'll see what HTC can do with the Diamond and the Dream

I/O: MySpace installs gears

Thu, 29 May 2008 21:34:00 GMT

Myspace unveiled a new search feature of their message center at Google I/O utilizing gears. As you search your messages, results are shown in real time, coming out of the local cache stored in gears. Hopefully this will give gears more publicity and other sited (ahem, facebook) will take a look at it ;)

This almost makes me want to create a myspace account to go play with it... ALMOST...

I/O: AppEngine is open!

Thu, 29 May 2008 14:02:00 GMT

Appengine is no longer limited to the first 10,000 people or hackathon attendees. Anyone can set up an account but each account is still limited to 3 apps. Guess all those extra gmail accounts will come in handy eh?

I/O: Lots of Android UI Videos!

Thu, 29 May 2008 13:53:00 GMT

Check them out, as usual, youtube is blocked at work for me...

I/O: Web Browser, Meet Google Earth

Wed, 28 May 2008 22:14:00 GMT

Enabling you to switch a Google Maps mashup or page to 3D Google earth with just a few lines of javascript

I/O: AOL Joins OpenSocial

Wed, 28 May 2008 18:48:00 GMT

After today, AOL's products will support Google's OpenSocial.

I/O: Android on the HTC Dream

Wed, 28 May 2008 18:37:00 GMT

You might see some random I/O posts popping up from me over the next few days... ;) In the keynote at Google I/O, the HTC Touch was demonstrated running Android. Touch streetview, and heck, when you move the phone, streetview moves with you!

Video on Engadget and stills on Talk Android

Google hosting popular javascript libraries

Wed, 28 May 2008 16:04:00 GMT

I came across this yesterday looking for the mootools download link. Google is hosting a bunch of the popular javascript libraries on their server for you.

Pros:

Use Google's Bandwidth
Google takes care of keeping the files up to date
Common include code across your apps
Use Google as a Fast proxy
Gadgets will have access to cached files

Cons:

Have to rely on Google to keep files up to date
Probably won't include beta releases of libraries

The main page is here and currently includes:

Example jQuery:

<script src="http://www.google.com/jsapi"></script>
<script>
  // Load jQuery
  google.load("jquery", "1");
 
  // on page load complete, fire off a jQuery json-p query
  // against Google web search
  google.setOnLoadCallback(function() {
    $.getJSON("http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/web?q=google&;v=1.0&;callback=?",
 
      // on search completion, process the results
      function (data) {
        if (data.responseDate.results &&
            data.responseDate.results.length>0) {
          renderResults(data.responseDate.results);
        }
      });
    });
</script>

AppEngine Pricing announced

Wed, 28 May 2008 13:55:00 GMT

These look pretty cheap for what you get, and if one of my little apps actually got popular enough to fall outside of the free range, I'd gladly pay for it

Free quota to get started: 500MB storage and enough CPU and bandwidth for about 5 million pageviews per month
$0.10 - $0.12 per CPU core-hour
$0.15 - $0.18 per GB-month of storage
$0.11 - $0.13 per GB outgoing bandwidth
$0.09 - $0.11 per GB incoming bandwidth

Google I/O started this morning, unhappy I am not there...

Google Treasure Hunt Week 3 is up

Tue, 27 May 2008 18:36:00 GMT

have at

twitter2gTalk Goes Live!

Thu, 22 May 2008 19:01:00 GMT

Get your tweets onto Google Talk!

Twitter: A free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send "updates" (or "tweets"; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter website, via short message service (SMS), instant messaging, or a third-party application such as Twitterrific or Facebook.

gTalk: (Google Talk) is a Windows and web-based application for voice over internet (VOIP) and instant messaging, offered by Google.

twitter2gTalk: Takes your current tweet and sets it as your Google Talk status (away) message.

I've been toying with this for a while now. I really wanted to launch twitter2gTalk as a service that anyone could use. I had the backend code all done and was dragging my feet writing the django front-end. I went to a hackathon for Google AppEngine and converted most of the code to run on that. You need a Google Account to login, but then again, you need one to use gTalk anyway.

I hope some people will find this cool or useful (some people have been waiting for this and already signed up). Feel free to follow me or the app on twitter for feature updates or subscribe to this blog.

Why Microsoft will buy Facebook and keep it closed

Mon, 19 May 2008 21:42:00 GMT

Normally I don't just link to other posts, but Scoble's latest article is quite a read. It delves into Microsoft + Yahoo Search + Facebook giving Google and the rest of the open web quite a hard time. Definitely work the time to read.

Android Developer Challenge Judges and Top 50 Details

Thu, 15 May 2008 12:27:00 GMT

The Android developer's challenge has release most of the top 50 (a few opted to not be made public for now). A slide deck of the winners is available here. I've gone through some of them and they have been blowing me away. Lists are being put together with the websites for the winners. There is some really exciting work being done.

Even though its the first one on the list, AndroidScan still blows me away. It uses the phone on the camera to take a photo of a bar code, look up the product in a database, and then gets you all the information you would need about that product and where you can buy it right from your phone (amazon, ebay, etc). Do yourself a favor and watch the video.

I'll be going through that slide deck and will be posting some more of my favorites. Anyone else hope the HTC Diamond can run Android out of the box? ;)

Appengine Hackathon!

Wed, 07 May 2008 12:07:00 GMT

I'm heading to Google NY for the day for an appengine hackathon. I have a bazillion ideas banging around in my head. We'll see what I come back with. If anyone else is going to be there send me an email me or send me a tweet

View Larger Map

Got my Google appengine account!

Tue, 06 May 2008 23:59:00 GMT

But someone already registered gpowered =(

![](https://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Ng3QbVQfLZ8/SCDxA_mVqRI/AAAAAAAARz8/mPX39zsC2Vk /s400/no_gpowered.jpg)

New Work Blackberry

Mon, 05 May 2008 21:31:00 GMT

Got a new blackberry at work today: The 8820. Much nicer then my old clunker which... err... broke... yeah we'll go with broke. Getting the curve when it comes out on Friday for Verizon. I can't install any applications on my work one, but as soon as I get my personal one, Google Blackberry app reviews will be pouring out =)

Select Google I/O sessions to be posted online

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 00:17:00 GMT

I won't be able to attend Google I/O (It's a bit expensive on short notice for me) bit it's a relieve that some of the sessions are going to be posted online after the conference.

Added a tag cloud

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 22:57:00 GMT

I haven't been to crazy about how Blogger's default tag/label list looks lately. On some of my shorter posts it was taking up most of the vertical space on the page. I looked around to see if I could find a more traditional tag cloud. I found a pretty good (and very easy) tutorial and just installed it. I have to play with the colors a bit but I like the way it looks.

Distributing Ubuntu

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 20:39:00 GMT

... is much better then Windows ;-)

In other news: I requested my Hardy Heron dvd =)

Limit Google Search Results by Date

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 14:43:00 GMT

Tech Recipes goes into how how to restrict Google search results by date: Appending &as;_qdr=d to a search will display a drop down that lets you choose how far back in time to search.

A Greasemonkey script will also do this for you. Pretty useful if you are searching about a brand new issue. This would have helped me a lot when I was having a problem with Hardy

Fixing Nvidia 8600 GT on Hardy Heron

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 19:22:00 GMT

After updating to Hardy I got a white screen of death upon rebooting. After some research it turned out that this was more of an Nvidia driver issue rather then Ubuntu. This may not have been the most correct way to fix it, but it worked for me.

Completely remove nvidia-glx-new
Remove nvidia-kernel-common (this also removes linux-restricted-modules), (I am not sure if step 2 is required)
install build-essentials
Download the Nvidia beta driver that came out on April 10. You can get it here
hit ctrl + alt + f1 to break out of gnome
"sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop" to shutdown the X server
sudo sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-173.08-pkg1.run to install the driver. If it asks you to update you're xorg.conf file, let it.
Reboot. ("sudo reboot") You should now be able to enable Desktop effects. YAY FISH!

This issue has also been addressed on the Ubuntu Forums and on launchpad

Note: I have a Dell XPS M1530

Google Code Blog: Google App Engine Hack-a-thon coming to your coast!

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 14:42:00 GMT

I'm going to the NYC one, anyone else?

But Daddy! I want and Andoid phone NOW!

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 14:02:00 GMT

A Microsoft Office editor should be available at launch and based on these screenshots, its going to be pretty useful.

I'll have to fire up the Android emulator this weekend and see how this stacks up against mobile Google Docs and Spreadsheets.

[![](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Ng3QbVQfLZ8/SBHoRfmVqOI/AAAAAAAARzk/Z6ryO5Ce-mo /s400/veruca+salt.jpg)](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Ng3QbVQfLZ8/SBHoRfmVqOI/AAAA AAAARzk/Z6ryO5Ce-mo/s1600-h/veruca+salt.jpg)

Veruca Salt: Hey, Daddy, I want an Oompa Loompa. I want you to get me an Oompa Loompa right away.
Mr. Salt: All right, Veruca, all right. I'll get you one before the day is out.
Veruca Salt: I want an Oompa Loompa now!
Violet Beauregarde: Can it, you nit!
(Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory)тур в крым на майские праздники 2015 деньги в долг студентам в казани

Upgrade Ubuntu to 8.04 Hardy Heron

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 14:09:00 GMT

Hardy Heron came out this morning and ubuntu.com is very much down for the count

You can Still update though, click here for the Google Cache version.

Happy Updating!

New Features in this release:

Install on an existing filesystem without overwriting /home
When I moved from feisty to gutsy, I decided to do a fresh install. One of the things I had to do was back up my home folder, and when I finished installing gutsy I just copied it back onto my computer. This new feature will allow people to install the new version of Ubuntu without it overwriting their home folder.I'm sure this will come in very handy for people who like trying out different distro's.

Hardy Hardware Detection
This is more of a bug fix than a new feature. Gutsy already has excellent hardware support and the plan for hardy is even better and more robust detection of hardware. Sounds good to me.

GDM Face Browser
One of the changes I made to my gutsy is the GDM. I replaced the old one with something that allows me to just click on a picture of my username and login. This will hopefully be the default for hardy.

Auto Detection of Monitor Frequency
While I was testing gutsy beta I had to manually configure xorg.conf to get it to the right resolution. It wasn't fun. This should be a thing of the past with hardy as it will automatically detect everything for you. Huzzah!

Apt Authentication Reliability
Have you ever had an update fail for no reason? Well it actually fails because of 'transient network failures'. The aim is to make hardy more robust against these errors.

Redesign Restricted-Manager Code
They want to expand the role of the restricted manager and change it so that other distro's can share the joy.

Handling Full Disks
I've never had this problem with Ubuntu, but if your disk gets full, things can get quite ugly. They plan to add a notification and disk clean-up tool when your running low on space.

Desktop Effects
Make compiz fusion more robust and easier to use.

New Theme
Hardy Heron will be getting a shiny new theme, I hope they move away from the brown theme and choose something lighter and more fresh.

Easy File Sharing
To allow people to easily share files over a network. Not more I can say about this.

Dual/Multi Monitor Support
Currently you have to manually tweak Ubuntu if you want to use more than one monitor. They want to fix this for hardy.

Integrate Prefetch into Ubuntu
I noticed a slightly increased start up time in gutsy compared to feisty. Hardy will use file prefetch and other optimisations to speed up boot time.

Automatix-Ubuntu Team Collaboration
Automatix was extremely helpful for me in feisty. Although I don't use it in gutsy, its good that they are collaborating with the automatix team.

Single Click Install
Installing software is already pretty straightforward in Ubuntu. They want to make it even easier to install third party applications. I'm not complaining.

Apparmor Integration
This is already a part of gutsy, the plan is to increase integration to make Ubuntu even safer.

Firewall
Make it easier for users to configure their firewall.

Third Party Apt
Now when you install third party apps, you have to manually add the software repository to the sources.list. This spec makes it easy for users to install third party software and have it update automatically.

Revamped Logout Screen
They want to streamline the options you have when you click that big red button, to make things less confusing.

[Better Integrated Wine](https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/better- integrated-wine)
Better Wine will make it easier for Windows users to convert, thus helping to solve bug #1.

Xorg 7.3
This is one of the features that missed the gutsy deadline. This should make manual configuration of xorg.conf obsolete. Another much anticipated feature is Bullet Proof X, which will go into a graphical safe mode if anything goes wrong with X.

Slick Boot
To improve the boot and shutdown process and also make the things look nicer.

Almost time for a new Ubuntu

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 10:59:00 GMT

Ubuntu 8.04, Hardy Heron comes out in two days

Be ready for it.

(Or install it now)

Google Website Optimizer is out of beta

Sat, 19 Apr 2008 02:46:00 GMT

Google's Website Optimizer is out of beta. I'll be running the blog portion of gPowered through it to see what it thinks of a blogger generated page ;) Results to follow.

Everyone have a good weekend! I know I need it!

Non Google AppEngine hosting

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 20:05:00 GMT

If you are like me, and are waiting to get in on the action, check it out: http://appdrop.com/

Best Android quote

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 23:00:00 GMT

Android handsets are poised to spread like wildfire across the open source and

developer communities upon release.

I can't wait. Verizon better have Android

test from my blackberry

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 19:23:00 GMT

If you are reading this. I was able to post from my work blackberry, neat

(Waiting for a baby shower, I mean meeting, to start. Currently guarding the cake) Mmmmm cake

Blogger adds bloggroll

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 22:37:00 GMT

[Blogger](http://buzz.blogger.com/2008/04/blog-list-scheduled-post-publishing- on.html) in draft added 2 new features today: a blogroll page element, and post scheduling. Post scheduling is pretty useful, you can write up your post, set the time (in the future) that you want it to post, and Blogger will do it automatically. The second feature, a blogroll, I would like a lot more if it was done better. The main thing I like about it is that it integrates with Google Reader so if I'm linking to my friend's blogs, I just scroll to my 'Friends' Tag and add them. The thing I don't like however is that it does not support XFN or FOAF therefore not getting picked up by the SocialGraph API. For example, if I linked to my girlfriend's blog, the blogroll just lists this as

<a href='http://maybe-not.net/' target='_blank'>Maybe-Not</a>

A better link, for example from a wordpress blogroll would look something like

<a href="http://maybe-not.net/" rel="friend sweetheart" title="Laura&#8217;s blog">Maybe-Not</a><

...and get picked up but the SocialGraph as having a relationship to me. Blogger is great and I love using it, but the features of wordpress are blowing it out of the water.

Update Google Talk status with Twitter

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 23:11:00 GMT

I've had this idea in my head for a while and just got it to work this morning.

Basically you send a tweet from Twitter and this script runs, picks up your current twitter status, and if need be, updates your gChat status. I'm working on a service version of this where you could use gpowered.net to do all this for you. Stay tuned =) If I change the version of the script that I have running in the service, you will be able to see the source code that I have checked in [here](http://code.google.com/p/gpo wered/source/browse/trunk/gpowered/scripts/twitter2gChat.py)

For those of you that don't know what Twitter is: _
"Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send "updates" (or "tweets"; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter website, via short message service (e.g. on a cell phone), instant messaging, or a third-party application such as Twitterrific or Facebook. Updates are displayed on the user's profile page and instantly delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. The sender can restrict delivery to those in his or her circle of friends (delivery to everyone is the default). Users can receive updates via the Twitter website, instant messaging, SMS, RSS, email or through an application. For SMS, four gateway numbers are currently available: short codes for the USA, Canada, and India, as well as a UK number for international use. Several third parties offer posting and receiving updates via email." (Wikipidia)_

Requirements:
xmpppy
python-twitter

import sys, xmpp, os, twitter

class Twitter2gChat:
    
    twitter_login = os.environ['TWITTER_LOGIN']
    twitter_pass = os.environ['TWITTER_PASS']
    google_login = os.environ['GOOGLE_LOGIN']
    google_pass = os.environ['GOOGLE_PASS']

    twitter_status = None
    updated = False
    catches = 0
    
    #keep looping and wait for xmpp response
    def GoOn(self,conn):
        while self.StepOn(conn):
            pass
    
    #keep listening for responses
    def StepOn(self,conn):
        try:
            conn.Process(1)
        except KeyboardInterrupt:
                return 0
        return 1

    #handle responses
    def iqHandler(self, conn,iq_node):
        print 'in iqHandler'
        self.catches = self.catches + 1
        
        #we have looped enough, die
        if self.catches == 4:
            print 'i think we did it'
            sys.exit(0)
        
        #print response, don't need to send anything back    
        if self.updated == True:
            print iq_node
        
        #havn't updated yet, sent status update
        else:
            #we can build of response
            node = iq_node.getChildren()[0]
            
            #remove what we don't ned
            node.delAttr('status-list-max')
            node.delAttr('status-max')
            node.delAttr('status-list-contents-max')
            iq_node.delAttr('from')
            iq_node.delAttr('type')
            iq_node.delAttr('to')
           
           #update the current status
            curr_status = node.getChildren()[0]
            
            #no need to update
            if curr_status.getData() == self.twitter_status:
                print 'status is already tweet'
                sys.exit(0)
                
            curr_status.setData(self.twitter_status)

            #set response
            iq_node.setType('set')
            
            print 'sending'
            print iq_node
            self.updated = True
            conn.send(iq_node)
            print 'end of iqHandler\n\n'

    #start talking to the server and update status
    def updateGtalkStatus(self):
        
        #connect
        jid=xmpp.protocol.JID(self.google_login)
        cl=xmpp.Client(jid.getDomain(),debug=[])
        if not cl.connect(('talk.google.com',5222)):
            print 'Can not connect to server.'
            sys.exit(1)
        if not cl.auth(jid.getNode(),self.google_pass):
            print 'Can not auth with server'
            sys.exit(1)
            
        #build query to get current status
        iq = xmpp.Iq()
        iq.setType('get')
        iq.setTo('timothy.broder@gmail.com')

        node = xmpp.Node()
        node.setName('query')
        node.setAttr('xmlns', 'google:shared-status')

        iq.addChild(node=node) 
        print iq

        #register with server and send subscribe to status updates
        cl.RegisterHandler('iq',self.iqHandler)
        cl.send(iq)

        self.GoOn(cl)
        cl.disconnect()
        
    #get current twitter status
    def getTwitterStatus(self):
        api = twitter.Api(username=self.twitter_login, password=self.twitter_pass)
        self.twitter_status = api.GetUserTimeline(self.twitter_login, 1)[0].text
        
        #don't want to use replies
        if self.twitter_status.find('@') >= 0:
            sys.exit(0)

t = Twitter2gChat()
t.getTwitterStatus()
t.updateGtalkStatus()

Ressurection

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 02:15:00 GMT

Hi all,

I've been away for a while and for this I apologize. It's been a combination of work, real life, and traveling (both for work and for fun). Since my last post I've been to Tokyo, Southern Ireland, Paris, London, and Colorado, the longest stint being in London where I was working for a while. Check out my photos below.

A lot has happened in my absence. At the top of my list are Android, Open Social, the Social Graph, and many many more. Just this morning RIM released an eclipse plugin for their IDE (the original one was a royal pain to get working on Linux). Expect me to try to get some Google API's running on it quite soon ;-)

I'm toying with changing the format of the blog slightly: less articles, more content in each post. I would love to do a couple of posts each day like I used to but with work I just don't have the time. I work on Lehman Brother's Brokerage Calculation Engine, and believe me, it never sleeps.

I do have quite a few projects in the works though and I'll be posting about them soon: I want to try to get Google Bookmarks into a BlackBerry app, another side project to track online social web presence, and another involving twitter (which i joined a little while ago) and gChat. Should be fun, stay tuned ;)

![](https://lh4.google.com/timothy.broder/R7oQM3bLe9E/AAAAAAAAQyw/3s0RxCSXkeU/ s160-c/Ireland.jpg)

Ireland
![](https://lh6.google.com/timothy.broder/R7oW0XbLjZE/AAAAAAAARFI/NV_hA4idkxI/ s160-c/Paris.jpg)

Paris

![](https://lh4.google.com/timothy.broder/R7oyA3bLn1E/AAAAAAAARTA/1AHidVMV82c/ s160-c/London.jpg)

London
![](https://lh6.google.com/timothy.broder/R-B2C6mnXuE/AAAAAAAARlg/aDtJJCZj-fU/ s160-c/VisitingSeanInColorado.jpg)

Visiting Sean in Colorado

gPhone, or lack there of

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 01:09:00 GMT

To be honest, when I heard that Google was going to announce whatever it is they have been working on with a "gPhone" I was really excited. The announcement of Android, their new open mobile platform is cool and all, but I was a little disappointed. Granted thats because might have been expecting something as cool as the iPhone, or that I desperately need a new phone. I've been following the openmoko project and its going to be intersting how Android compares to it. For the full Android story, check out these articles

October Speedlinking

Mon, 05 Nov 2007 23:17:00 GMT

I haven't been able to post as often or as in depth as I'd like to have this past month. I chalk it up mostly to work, we all love 12 hour days right? But now that sign-off has passed and our last release of 2007 is calmly approaching (its on Friday), things have settled down a bit. Below are some great links from October, most of which I wanted to mention at some point and haven't gotten a chance to until now. Enjoy.

The JavaScript Library for Google Calendar was released. This allows for authenticated, cross domain access. Hopefully Picasa Web will follow suit.
GWT goes to the iPhone
The Python Client Library came out with version 1.0.8
The Digg Oracle demonstrates Gears' Worker Pool
Google's Stock broke $600. It is now well over $700
Orkut ramps up for a US push
Vortex combines the know-how of Dojo and Gears
LabeledMarker v1.1 in Google Maps comes out with Marker and Label toggling
Google Reader comes out with Subscriber stats. Read about the controversy here. Google responds here
Google Maps Goes Social
The AJAX Search API gives direct access to YouTube Channels
Blogger GData JavaScript client library released with offline Blogger client example
Google Code Search goes to SiteMaps
The Ajax API gets Dynamic Feed Control
You can now play Youtube videos in Google Earth
Summer of code wrapped up with Graduation
Google Finance adds new Gadgets and an API
YouTubes player becomes Customizable
A Greasemonkey script lets you have nested folders in Gmail
Blogger adds Comment Notification
Google cracks down on pages selling PageRank links
Google contributes to MySQL
Google Mac updates Leopard
Gmail enables IMAP
Google Maps gets Clickable Polygons
There is now a wizard for adding Google Gadgets to your blog
Webmaster central fixes the Cross Domain Sitemap errors
Google maps adds Flash Content into KLM
Google Notebook adds labels and bookmarks
Blog Search is now included in Google History
A cheap "Google PC" is on the market
A new Photo Picker for Gmail and Orkut pulls from Picasa
GTalk may soon be able to connect to other networks like AIM and Yahoo! Talk
The new version of Gmail comes out
Google Code gets a facelift
Webmaster Tools gets Geographic Targeting
The Google Gadget Directory gets a facelift
Microsoft is going to release the Microsoft Sync Framework to compete with Gears
Picasa Web gets opened. (Flikr can transfer a picasa album to itself)
Webmasters can now provide feedback on sitelinks
Blog.gears comes out
Mapplets gets a documentation and example update
New articles are posted for KML
The Ajax slideshow gets a full Control Panel
Map of the Dead!! Google Maps overlay shooting game!

Linux Distro Popularity According to Google

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 02:30:00 GMT

Over the years I've used a variety of Linux Distros: Mandrake, Red Hat, FreeBSD, Fedora, Gentoo, and Ubuntu. Distrowatch keeps track of everything we need to know about the distros, and recently there has been an enormous push in desktop Linux thanks to Dell putting Ubuntu on desktops and Compiz-Fusion bringing snazzy eye candy to even low end machines. Distrowatch gives some pretty decent stats on the main Distros but for a while I've wanted to know how Google sees their popularity; mainly by how many pages mention specific distros.

Using some python, a spreadsheet, and a little scraping, I was able to get my answer. To see how Google would rank different distros I'm using the number of results Google returns when searching for the Distro's name as my numbers. I'm going to write a HOWTO on the technical aspects of what I did sometime this week, but here are the basic steps

In a Google Spreadsheet I made a sheet that held the names of the top distros on Distrowatch.
Another sheet holds the full list from distro watch (366 on record at the time of this writing)
I set up a dapp to take these names, and return the number of results Google would have if you searched them
A python script pulls the distros out of the spreadsheet, queries the dapp, and puts the results back into another sheet

I have 2 sets of results. One is a query using the vanilla list out of the spreadsheet. The second is appending the word Linux to the distro if it does not already have it as the title, I was curious as to how this would effect the results. Below are the results of the most popular Distros on Distrowatch. Look, Ubuntu! The spreadsheet that has all of the findings (and all 366 distros) is shared here

Distro	Page Hist
Ubuntu	96,800,000
FreeBSD	36,700,000
Fedora	35,800,000
openSuse	29,500,000
Debian Linux	28,100,000
KNOPPIX	12,500,000
Mandriva Linux	5,720,000
Gentoo Linux	4,430,000
PCLinuxOS	3,170,000
Slackware Linux	3,010,000
MEPIS Linux	1,640,000

Stay tuned for the code behind it! Subscribe to the feed to get more updates.

Google Overheard in the Office

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 01:20:00 GMT

A few days ago I posted some Overheard in New York Google Posts. Today is some Overhead in the Office. It's not quite as good as the orriginal, but the office posts are still really funny. If you like these, subscribe to the feed, enjoy!

No Problem, Then
Coworker #1 on speakerphone: How do I Google something?
Coworker #2: Go to W-W-W dot Google dot com. Then just use it like any other search engine.
Coworker #1: What's a search engine?
Coworker #2: You know, like when you use Yahoo or MSN to look something up.
Coworker #1: I've never Googled before in my life, and I never want to again!

Overheard by: it actually got worse

Or Time Management. Whatever.
Office manager: I'm going to Google time travel!

What Happens When You Use Google China
Office manager: Civil War Battlefield Protection, how can I help you?
Woman on phone: Yes, I'm trying to find information on the Civil War and I just can't.
Office manager: Well, have you tried the internet?
Woman: Yes, I typed "Civil War" into Google and NOTHING comes up on the Civil War.
Office manager: ...Really?
Woman: Yes... so can you tell me who was in the Civil War?
Office manager: That would be the northern states and the southern states.
Woman: Not the British?
Office manager: Um, that was the Revolutionary War.
Overheard by: Astonished

Just Scan in His Photo and Use Face-Recognition Google
Boss: I went to school with this guy...I don't remember his name, but he just became the president of some real estate development company in DC. Can you look him up on the internet? I'd like to send him a note.

I Think You'll Like the Results
Boss : What is that red thing on top of a rooster's head called? I can't find a description anywhere on the Internet.
Employee: Just Google 'cock' and 'diagram.'

Internship
Boss: How many servers do you think Google has?
Lackey: Infinite.
Boss: Infinite? You're a retard.
Overheard by: choking on a brownie

Technical Know-How
Boss on phone: Wait, wait, wait, does your computer have Google on it? Yeah, just type it in there.

Update PR File
CTO: My interview article is in USA Today!
Programer: Can you send me the link? Never mind, I'll just Google "USA Today"

Back to Work
Engineer: I'm against Google Earth! The terrorists are using it! And the communists!

Sensitivity Training
Boss: So what's the going rate for hiring midgets these days?
Boss: Yeah, I'm sure you can just fire up Google and type in "Midget to hire tri-state" and somthin's gonna pop up.

Send Out Press Release
Boss: So see if you can find these people's email addresses.
Intern: ...You want me to find Desmond Tutu's email address?
Boss: Try Google if you get stumped.

Back to Work
Producer: My friend went to the Galapagos Islands and was astounded. They have birds called blue boobies. Google "blue boobies". You'll see pictures of them.
Suit: I'm not searching for blue boobies on my computer. I'll get called into the office for a talk.
Producer: Oh, I'll do it...see?
Suit: Wow, who would have thought that would't have brought up a porn site?

Scan PC
Tech: Oh crap, I've been infected by Google.

Install Yahoo!
Boss: Do we have Google installed on our internet?
IT guy: We put it on your machine yesterday.

Google Reader stats out of Wack

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 00:27:00 GMT

First, Techcrunch came up with a list of the top blogs that users subscribe to using Google Reader. The top 3 on the list were BBC with 202,463, Google News wih 192,100, and ESPN with 189,274 . Remember, these are only the stats if the subscriber is using Google Reader, obviously there are blogs with a higher subscription count, such as the Official Google Blog (They still haven't moved over to blogs.google.com eh?) with over 669,000 subscribers as reported by FeedBurner.

It was all well and good that Google Reader showed high stats for these blogs, but.... we were apparently duped...

In his article Google Reader Stats are BullSh*t (With Proof), Pete Cashmore goes into his explanation of the "default feed effect." A default feed is a feed that comes already subscribed in a news aggregator , or is part of a default group (like say Digg, Engadget, and Gizmodo being in the Technology group on Google Reader). Being in these groups is a major traffic boost.

However the system has some flaws

There is subscription data for feeds that don't exist
Google Reader does not check to see if a subscriber is active or not. (Someone signs up for Reader, adds a feed, and never touches Reader again, they count as a subscriber)
Feedburner pulls some stats from Google Reader
This problem is not limited to Google Reader. It includes many feed readers and start pages

Tune in next time after I do some research into how out wack FeedBurner statistics are.

New Blog Address

Tue, 23 Oct 2007 23:34:00 GMT

After doing quite a bit of reading over at Yaro Starak's Entrepreneur's Journey and Darren Rowse's ProBlogger.net I've decided to move gPowered onto my domain at http://blog.gpowered.net/.

Over the coming days/weeks I'll be updating the template on the rest of the domain to coincide more with the blog, as well as adding the top menu to the blog. The blog is still powered by blogger and the old address nicely forwards to the new one, posts included. I also updated the FeedBurner feed so if you use that to subscribe you shouldn't have to change anything (although with the forwarding I don't think it matters, but why risk it). I also set up gpowered.net and www.gpowered.net to forward to the blog as the main page. Any of my python examples will be moved from https://gpowered.net to https://gpowered.net/g/. I'm going to update all of the posts to reflect this.

Mashup of the Week

Tue, 23 Oct 2007 22:16:00 GMT

It's been a little more then a week... Chalk it up to quite a bit of traveling. I'm around now until December, I promise ;)

**This weeks winner: Mappington
** API's used:

Why it won: Mappington is the most inclusive map / location information hub I have ever come across. "Mappington is a user created atlas of the world." It covers the following:

Maps: Google Maps, Virtual Earth, Yahoo Maps, Google Earth
Photos: Flickr
Videos: Youtube
Wikipedia Entries
Opinions / Rating section
Social Web on Wikipedia, Facebook, del.icio.us, furl, Yahoo MyWeb, Wink, ma.gnolia, spurl
Discussions
History
News: Yahoo News
Blog: Google Blog Search, Technorati
Hotels
Flights
Weather: Weatherbug
Events: e:vene
Trips: Yahoo Travel

The layout is crisp, clean, and easy on the eyes. There are minimal load times and Mappington makes good use of Ajax. If you are planning a trip or just want to explore new places, Mappington is the best place to do it. I'm definitely going to use it to plan out my trip to Ireland in a few months.

What I think it could improve on:

The video's don't show that you can click on them (mouse pointer does not change)
The photos should tap into Picasa Web also
In the News section, it looked like there was supposed to be a left frame (Google News maybe?) but it never loaded
I wish you could blow the map up full screen
The thumbnail view in Google Maps wasn't working
Mappington should build some widgets / gadgets to get more exposure on personal web pages and sites like myspace

Runner Ups

Wind Surfing Clips

API's: youtube
Clean interface
For such exciting and energetic video's, the template is pretty bland
I'd like a link to the original video on youtube

Baby Name Map

API's: Google Maps
Very fitting interface
Maps are slow
The Javascript pop-up UI feels very out of place compared to the site's theme

My Next Dive

API's: Google Maps
The popup on the main page won't go away

My Map Chat

API's: Google Maps
Global shout outs are very entertaining

Zoogle

API's: Amazon eCommerce, CNET, del.icio.us, Digg, eBay, Flickr, Google Search, Windows Live Search, Yahoo Search, YouTube
The search box doesn't understand spaces?!? Ex: I put in "Tim Broder" it returned nothing and asked me if I meant "Tim+Broder" which returned some results that I expected

Croatia-Map.net

API's: Google Maps
Very smooth, clean, well done

CADoogle
Demonstrates Autodesk Freewheel. Allows you to search, preview, and download publicly available CAD files indexed by Google. It is free to use and leverages Google Search and Autodesk Freewheel Web services.

API's: Autodesk Freewheel, Google Search
Sluggish
Heavy Loads

Google Overheard in New York

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 00:42:00 GMT

If you haven't heard about Overheard in New York ( OHNY ), or don't subscribe to it, I can't recommend it more. It's absolutely hilarious. It's been around for a while and is constantly updated with a dozen or so quotes a day that people hear while walking / riding around New York City. You don't have to live in the city to enjoy it, though you might not get all of the humor. I used Google Reader Search to go through the feed looking for Google references. Here are a few, note: there were a lot more but not all were appropriate for all audiences.

He's Started Scooping Matt Drudge
Female Google suit: How's your son doing?
Male Google suit: Great! He's 11 months now, and he's starting to get a personality -- it's great!
Female Google suit: I'd love to see some pictures sometime!
Male Google suit: He's got a blog!
--Elevator, Port Authority building, 15th & 9th

But Which One? Which One?
Crazy guy: Can anyone tell me about the Chinese stock market? [Two minutes later] Can anyone tell me about the Chinese stock market? Come on, people, that's an easy question!
Suit, laughing: Here's an easy question for you: How far away is Saturn to Pluto?
Crazy guy: That is too easy. Why would you ask me something so easy? The answer is Google. Google is the answer. The real question is, are there aliens from Saturn and Pluto on this train right now? And how could you tell the difference? [Looks around, waits for an answer.] Well, I know, because I'm one of them! [Crazy guy gets off the train.]
--1 train

But We'll Find Out for Sure When the Anime Comes Out
Nerd #1: So, was she hot?
Nerd #2: According to Google Image search, yes.
--Math Building, NYU

**She Has Six Months Left to LiveJournal
** Doctor guy: Okay, we have the chest x-ray and it explains what's going on. See this lesion? It is pretty impressive.
Patient lady: "Impresssive"? Is that a medical term? Am I gonna have to google that, too?
--Office, 71st & Park
Wednsday One-Liners
Sketchy doctor: I Google everything! I treat my patients with Google.
--Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, 98th & Madison

Teen chick on cell: Yeah, it's funny... Google it. Wait, do you guys even have Google in Florida?
--54th & Park

Girl: Google is, like, totally taking over the world!
--Terminal 4, JFK

Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon is out!

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 12:01:00 GMT

Get it while its hot! (Or try to, the servers, as usual, are bogged.

To upgrade, do the following: (note: you can only upgrade using this method if you are already using Feisty Fawn)

Go to System -> Administration -> Update Manager
Hit the Check button to check for new updates to your current install (Feisty)
If there are any updates, hit the "Install Updates" button, this will install any updates for your current installation.
A Message should appear stating there is a 7.10 release
Hit "Upgrade"
Follow the instructions

My First Google API ticket has been fixed

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 02:57:00 GMT

My first ticket for the Google Document List API has been fixed. As I posted about [before](https://gpowered.blogspot.com/2007/08/quick-docs-api-example- python.html), the Document List API did not have the ability to just retrieve the documents from a given folder or tag. This has now been made possible, thanks API team!

Original ticket:

It would be ideal if we could pull back a list of documents from a certain

folder. This would give more functionality and make the size of the data smaller if you only needed to grab a list of file from a certain folder.

Possibly something like: gdata.docs.service.DocumentQuery(folder=['myfolder1']) or gdata.docs.service.DocumentQuery(folders=['myfolder1','folder2'])

Top Secret Picasa Features

Tue, 16 Oct 2007 02:14:00 GMT

Google Photos Blog: Lesser-known (and secret) Picasa features

Most people are familiar with Picasa's usual features; Editing, organizing, uploading, printing, etc, but Mike Herf, the Picasa Engineering manager is going to take us on a tour on some of the "easter egg-ish" features. He's going to be posting hidden features and tips on Wednesdays over at the Google Photos blog so check it out.

The first up is search. While you might be familiar with searching for a filename, or a directory you know you put the photo in but can't find, you might not be aware that you can also put in dates, camera models, flash (for if one was used), what type of lens was used, or even the iso settings. All of these are indexed by Picasa and will be returned in a search. Another fun search term is color:red or color:gray. Try is out ;) The last hidden search feature is under Tools->Experimental->Show Duplicate files and Picasa will list all the files that show up more then once on your hard drive, pretty nifty for cleaning space.

For more features on Wednesdays, subscribe to the photo blog.

Tennessee for the weekend

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 19:33:00 GMT

Be back Sunday
View Larger Map

How often do Google Blogs post?

Thu, 11 Oct 2007 01:43:00 GMT

Google has been using it's blogger platform to deliver news about it's products and services to the masses. Including the multi-language blogs, there are about 76 Google blogs out there. But how often do they post? I went through each one (of the English blogs) and figured out the average number of posts, per month, that they have for 2007 so far. If a blog wasn't around back in January, I took that into account also.

The top two are the official Google Blog, and the Google Code blog, which makes sense as they are all encompassing aspects of Google. Following these are Maps and Adsense, two of Google biggest products.

This chart is live from the spreadsheet I made which you can view here

Google Mashup Editor Blog: New Stuff - 10/4 Feature Release

Thu, 11 Oct 2007 01:43:00 GMT

Google Mashup Editor Blog: New Stuff - 10/4 Feature Release

There was a feature release for the Google Mashup Editor and they also created a new blog for all updates and notices.

Features include

Geo encoding of any element in feed
XPath helper in Feed Browser
In memory feed - ${tmp}
google.mashups.isUserAuthenticated(): method that returns true if and only if the user is authenticated
centerOnLocation(address) method added to map module: Takes a string and centers on the geo encoded location that is represented by the string

Bug Fixes:

Fixed IE6 error that causes fatal errors in some applications.
Fixed Maps bugs and upgraded to Maps API version 2.88.
Fixed the display of images in tabs.
Performace improvements for syntax highlighting in the Editor.

NEW! Google Mashup of the Week

Tue, 09 Oct 2007 03:47:00 GMT

So I've decided to add a new feature to gPowered, the Google Mashup of the week. So many of these get created all the time using various Google APIs and services. Each week I'm going to search around find a dozen or so of the newest ones, pick out the one I like the best and why... with a possible runner up. As for when I'll be doing these, the new mashups will be posted sometime in between Saturday and Monday. Usually on the weekend unless I'm going away... like next weekend (Tennessee).... and the weekend after that (Boston)...

... and the Mashup of the Week goes to:

Jolocate
APIs: Google Maps, Craigslist
The Good: Its craigslist... with a map. Or I should say its a map with Craiglist in it. If you've ever gone apartment hunting, you know the value of this. Smooth, no lag when changing grids, Craiglist opens right in the same window. I also really like the account feature. The site tries to profile you for people looking for roommates, and also from what I gather, is going to email me suggestions when I need to start looking for a place for a July 1 move-in.
The Bad: Not necessarily bad, but I would have liked the option to have Craigslist open in a new window
The Ugly: New York wasn't in the default list!

Other contestants:

[Spell Boy Beta](http://www.google.com/ig/directory?hl=en&url=http://www.sends ome.org/spellboy/modules/google_gadget/index.xml)
APIs: Google Gadgets
Why it didn't make it: For on the web FireFox or Google toolbar can spell check all the forms for you, and if you're mail client can't spellcheck... well.. get a new one.

http://www.careersix.com/
APIs: Google Maps, Indeed
Why it didn't make it: The website was VERY slow to load the first time, I almost stopped looking at it because I thought it was down. Also I didn't see any place to search by job? only by location and then I have to hit ctrl+F?

Checker-forum.de
Small community that uses the Youtube API to show off and comment on videos in users profiles.
APIs: Youtube
Why it didn't make it: I don't speak German

100 Mile Diet
APIs: Google Maps
"When the average North American sits down to eat, each ingredient has typically traveled at least 1,500 miles. Use this interactive map and the 100-Mile Diet book to eat local, think global."

FormSpring + Google Calendar
APIs: Google Calendar, formspring
Why it didn't make it: Formspring costs money for anything worthwhile, free gives u 3 forms and 50 saves per form?

Picasa gets a blog!

Sun, 07 Oct 2007 15:47:00 GMT

Google Photos Blog: Ready for our close- up

The Picasa team has gotten a blog in the form of the Google Photos Blog. I think this brings the number of Google blogs to 75 (including the international blogs). On the photo blog they will be posting feature updates to Picasa, photography tips, and the team's favorite photo albums.

In addition to working on Picasa and the Web albums features, they are also in charge of hosting blogger's photo upload feature, which is powered by Picasa web, developing Orkut's photo picker, and creating Mapplets for browsing geotagged photos inside of Google Maps.

Subscribe to their feed for updates.

Displaying what you read from Google Reader

Fri, 05 Oct 2007 02:04:00 GMT

I've been wanting to share what I subscribe to in Google Reader and using the functions I wrote I was able to do just that. Check out the article for the full run down on the unofficial Google Reader API. This is written in python but should be easily portable to php. If i get around to it, I want to make a WordPress plugin so bloggers can share what they read with their readers. This will be followed (or in parallel depending on my mood) with a Javascript version so Blogspot users can do the same in the sidebar. On to the code!

To start off we'll just copy the functions we need from last time. Generally this is the login and SID token functions, as well as the feed list function.

from django.shortcuts import render_to_response
from django.template import Library
from elementtree import ElementTree
import urllib
import urllib2
import re

login = 'timothy.broder@gmail.com'
password = '***'
source = 'gPowered'

google_url = 'http://www.google.com'
reader_url = google_url + '/reader'
login_url = 'https://www.google.com/accounts/ClientLogin'
token_url = reader_url + '/api/0/token'
subscription_list_url = reader_url + '/api/0/subscription/list'

#login / get SED
def get_SID():
    header = {'User-agent' : source}
    post_data = urllib.urlencode({ 'Email': login, 'Passwd': password, 'service': 'reader', 'source': source, 'continue': google_url, })
    request = urllib2.Request(login_url, post_data, header)

    try :
        f = urllib2.urlopen( request )
        result = f.read()

    except:
        print 'Error logging in'

    return re.search('SID=(\S*)', result).group(1)

#get results from url
def get_results(SID, url):
    header = {'User-agent' : source}
    header['Cookie']='Name=SID;SID=%s;Domain=.google.com;Path=/;Expires=160000000000' % SID
    print url
    request = urllib2.Request(url, None, header)

    try :
        f = urllib2.urlopen( request )
        result = f.read()

    except:
        print 'Error getting data from %s' % url

    return result

#get a specific feed.  It works for any feed, subscribed or not
def get_feed(SID, url):
    return get_results(SID, get_feed_url + url.encode('utf-8'))

#get a token, this is needed for modifying to reader
def get_token(SID):
    return get_results(SID, token_url)

#get a list of the users subscribed feeds
def get_subscription_list(SID):
    return get_results(SID, subscription_list_url)

Then we'll want to get rid off all the information in the feed that we don't want and load what we do into a data dictionary. After its in the dictionary, feed names and links (and the folders they are in) are ready to be displayed. As usual, I use Django to display my pages, but everything is the same up to the final return in the Feeds method. Below is an example of what each subscription looks like in the Google Reader Feed, and below that is how to process it

<object>
    <string name="id">feed/http://www.ubuntu.com/rss.xml</string>
    <string name="title">Ubuntu</string>
    <list name="categories">

        <object>
            <string name="id">user/16162999404522159936/label/dev</string>
            <string name="label">dev</string>
        </object>
    </list>
    <number name="firstitemmsec">1186137757794</number>
</object>

class myFeed:
    def __init__(self, name, link):
        self.name = name
        self.link = link

def Feeds(request):
    SID = get_SID()
    feeds = get_subscription_list(SID)
    tree = ElementTree.fromstring(feeds)
    d = dict()

    #loop through each feed
    for object in tree.findall('list')[0].findall('object'):
        strings = object.findall('string')
        key = object.findall('list')[0].findall('object')[0].findall('string')[1].text

        #tag already exists, add to the list
        try:
            d[key].append(myFeed(strings[1].text, strings[0].text.replace('feed/', '')))
        #tag doesn't exist, create list
        except KeyError:
            d[key] = [myFeed(strings[1].text, strings[0].text.replace('feed/', ''))]


    return render_to_response('pages/feeds.html', {
    'feeds': d,
    })

For those of you that use django or are just curious how I end up displaying the feeds, this is what i have in my view:


### My Reading
{% verbatim %}
{% for item in feeds.items %}
	{{ item.0 }}
	{% for feed in item.1 %}
		[{{ feed.name }}]({{ feed.link }})
	{% endfor %}
{% endfor %}
{% endverbatim %}

Again, too see what I subscribe to, click here

Comments turned on

Wed, 03 Oct 2007 23:10:00 GMT

For various reasons, I had these turned off initially when i started gPowered. I've now turned them on.

HOWTO: Use a Yahoo Pipe to filter feeds

Wed, 03 Oct 2007 22:59:00 GMT

One of my friends at work asked me today how I sift through volumes of news to find articles and information on Google and specifically on Google Code for my articles. The answer is simple, I don't. Granted, I DO read a LOT, but there just aren't enough hours in the day to read everything I want to. So, I have a Yahoo Pipe sift through the feeds for me. Pipes is "a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web." Its fairly easy to use and doesn't require any code or coding experience, although understanding the basic layout of an RSS or Atom feed is a definite plus. The method I'm going to describe could work for any blogger or anyone who wants to filter a single or large group of feeds by keyword. I'm not going to go into the details of Yahoo Pipes, there are plenty of tutorials and examples for that. I'm just going to describe how I built the small pipe I use to filter for Google news.

The first step is to log into or create a Yahoo account and go to http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/ and click on Create Pipe. The first node we're going to use is under sources and is called "Fetch Feed". Add as many of these as you want to pull in all the feeds you will need.

Then use unions (located under Operators) to join these Fetches together. If you have more then 5 feeds, you will need multiple unions.

Finally, add a filter, also located under Operators. Here, "Permit" items that match "any" of the following. Then, add rules where item.description > Contains and then the word or phrase you want to search for. This filter will allow any posts that have the words through, and block everything else. Send the output of the Filter to the Pipe Output and you are done.

You can then subscribe to the output of this pipe with the reader of your choice. When I subscribe to my pipe's [feed](http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe .run?_id=vF35LapU3BG9UzFodbq02Q&_render=rss) in Google Reader, I only see posts that contain the word Google or google. I also could have done that as one filter with a regular expression, or just with "oogle".

Here is a full view of the pipe

ProBlogger Birthday Bash: $54,000 in prizes!

Wed, 03 Oct 2007 15:53:00 GMT

ProBlogger's Birthday is here and Darren is running small contests throughout the week with over $54,000 in prizes. I missed the first few, thank you work and being on call, but the prizes have been pretty good so far.

The first contest was for copies of Aaron Wall’s SEO Book and all you had to do was comment on the post announcing the contest. The second set of prizes were free listings on SeekZap and all you had to do was sign up! (This is the one I'm really bummed about missing.) The final prize for yesterday for the first 25 responders was tubes of Mederma scar treatment. For the full prize list, see here

You don't have to have a blog to participate in most of the competitions so if you want to have some fun over the next few days, and into the weekend (this is actually pretty good for me, I'm stuck home on call, now I'll have something to do ;), add the feed to your reader and try to keep up.

Note: The current contest is for 2 20″ LG USB monitors

Good luck to all!

Google Apps September recap

Tue, 02 Oct 2007 23:28:00 GMT

Its definitely been a busy month for Google Apps with the launch of presentations (finally). As a result, there is a new video as well as an updated tour. There is no API available yet but as soon as it comes out I'll post a HOWTO.

Spreadsheets added new ways to pull external data. The external sources can include XML, a URL, HTML, or any feed based file. Spreadsheets also added autofill (type Dec and it can autofill December. Type Jan, Feb, Mar, and it will fill in the rest of the months for you. This also works with days of the week, time, and more)

The Reporting API was release into Google Apps Premier, Education, and Partner editions. This allows users to see detailed reports on how people in their organization are using Google Apps. They can track account activity, disk space, email client usage, and more.

Google StreetView Going Global?

Mon, 01 Oct 2007 15:41:00 GMT

Or at least to London? A VW bug with a camera attached to the top has been spotted in London. Could be Google? Maybe expanding to areas around their offices in other countries? Nothing has been confirmed yet.

I think this could pick up if Google started going to major Global Cities. Think about it, you could go site seeing without ever leaving your desk. The top cities on my list would be London, Tokyo, Paris, Venice, Dublin, and Hong Kong. I am hopefully going to two of these in the next 6 months (Tokyo and London) around the holidays. Although, Google might have some legal hoops to jump through if they decide to do this.

By the Power of Grayskull.... I mean Google

Sun, 30 Sep 2007 15:10:00 GMT

Most of my friends got the reference to the "By the Power of Google" tagline that I chose to use for gPowered. Being a child of the 80's I had the privilege to watch some of the greatest cartoons ever created. One of those, was He-Man where one of the popular lines is "BY THE POWER OF GRAYSKULL." When I was throwing around taglines with "powered by" (powered by Google), He-Man's line kept popping into my head and stuck. If you don't know what He-Man is, check out the short summery from wikipedia.

The show takes place on the fictional planet of Eternia, a land of magic, myth and fantasy. The show's lead character is Prince Adam, the young son of Eternia's rulers, King Randor and Queen Marlena. Prince Adam is a seemingly cowardly, blond muscleman dressed in a Cote d'Azur chemise. However, Prince Adam possesses a magic sword, and when he holds it aloft and says the magic words "By the Power of Grayskull! I have the Power!" he is transformed into He-Man, the most powerful man in the universe. He-Man is a brave, blond muscleman in a baldric and loincloth. Together with his close allies, Battle Cat, Teela, Man-At-Arms and Orko, He-Man uses his powers to defend Eternia from the evil forces of Skeletor, a tyrannical warlord with a skull for a face. Skeletor's main goal is to conquer the mysterious fortress of Castle Grayskull, from which He-Man draws his powers. If he succeeds, Skeletor would be able to conquer not only Eternia, but the whole universe. (wikipedia)

And now for a blast from the past, here is the opening theme complete with the famous lines.

Ubuntu Gutsy Goes Beta

Sun, 30 Sep 2007 04:59:00 GMT

Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon has gone beta and is on track for its October 18th Release. So, if you haven't been using it since tribe 2 like me, and want to upgrade from Fiesty Fawn, follow the below steps.

Open a terminal.
Type sudo update-manager -d
Follow the instructions

More information about upgrading can be found here

If you want to upgrade from a cd or do a fresh install, ISOs are available here

Google Developer Podcast Ep 9 QuickCap

Thu, 27 Sep 2007 23:36:00 GMT

I got some time today to listen to this Podcast today on the way to and from one of our other buildings today uptown. I was attending SAS training which is a pretty cool data mining / report generation tool.

This episode was an interview with T.V. Raman and his seeing eye dog Hubbell on accessibility in a developer's world. Quick recap:

Why care about accessibility? (As a developer)
- You DON'T know your user
- try to build for the widest range of abilities
Think about how people with different abilities will use the app
FireFox, Internet Explorer, Safari, Konquerer. Browser specifics are a problem
Generic browsers out of the box do not help vision, does not enhance views, or help the motion impaired
you have to add on to the browser
There is too much "slop", you need to take a step back and not assume what your user will use
CSS is good for getting developer / user balance
There are very good FireFox accessibility addons
Google results page is an html mess so it can work in all browsers
The standard GMail interface is an accessibility nightmare but this is remedied by using the mobile version
A year from now Ajax accessibility will get much better with FireFox 3
Bottom Lines:
- What is it that you are using for accessibility? Is it the base platform? Does it come with tools
- What is the focus?
- What platform are you on?
Google books scan and OCR to voice is decent
The mobile calendar is also good.

Google Developer Podcast Ep 8 Summary

Tue, 25 Sep 2007 03:24:00 GMT

I got some time today on the train today to listen to Episode 8 of the Google Developer Podcast. Normally I'll listen to it at work when it first comes out but it's been way to hectic. Here are some highlights some commentary thrown in.

ZohoWriter goes on Gears - See my opinions about this here. Google really needs to step it up and get Gears into their own services. The top two on my list being Gmail and Docs
Embed Google Maps in a "youtube like way". Also the Drag zoom and custom marker manager controls have been improved. Very easy to use.
Sky in Google Earth. I havn't played with this yet. I'll check it out after work tomorrow if Halo 3 isn't in the mailbox ;-)
- Stars
- Google's proof that there probably is life on other planets: Earth is not just a "one off".
- We need a Marvin the Martian Easter egg
Google Objective-C library has been updated for code search, Picasa, and calendar

The Guest in this episode was Mark Stahl, the Tech lead of GData since it started (about 2 1/2 years)

GData is the way to interact with Google Data, See most of my HOWTO's for examples.
Uses the Atom publishing protocol (REST)
Resources are represented as XML. Many, many libraries are out there for working with XML so no steep learning curve for working with the data.
GET, PUT, POST, DEL to manipulate Data
A feed is a container of Data Items
Atom: syndication technology. It is a feed document. Used as a response for "get me the latest version of.... foofoo data set
Atom publishing protocol added manipulation in the form of read/write
Atom beat out RSS because it already had an ITEF committee
GData builds on top of Atom publishing
- Way to query, by passing parameters through a URL
- Standardized parameters
Atom has no concurrency to detect conflicts / multiple writes
Etags are coming in the future to address this. Etags are strings that contain version info. This will enable for better caching solutions on the client, or any point in between the client and the server.
- The GData team chose REST because the web is built on REST ideas. It already had developer Acceptability. It's also easy to learn.
REST is a style, its good at certain things, but has trouble mapping certain operations that would perhaps be better off as an RPC
Atomic but not transactional
The first service to get GData was Calendar, and it currently gets the most request, followed (in order) by Blogger, Base, and Spreadsheets.
The most popular client libraries are the ones in Java and .net, followed by Python, PHP, Objective C, Lisp, and Ruby
Authentication can be done via ClientLogin with a token (Programmatic login), or via authsub (Google handles credentials)
Uses "kinds": Semantic level syndication (add custom info to an entry and helps define types of entries)

CanGoogleHearMe.com beta starts

Mon, 24 Sep 2007 12:10:00 GMT

The beta for CanGoogleHearMe.com has started (which I am part of), but that's all I can really say about it. If you don't know what CanGoogleHearMe is or what Aaron and the gang have been up to, check out the original story

Bring on the GDrive!

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 01:07:00 GMT

Do you want the GDrive? I know I do. Rumors have been flying around for almost 2 years about this thing, its been the brunt of an April Fool's joke, complete with official announcement and a Google Group (see below). Googlers use it, and if it ever comes out, it would change the way both home and corporate users think about file storage. Google is almost there, almost. When they integrate Gears into Docs they'll be one step closer. They would just need a few more features on the main Docs UI (bulk file upload, share files right from there instead of having to publish from within the document) and allow for any file type.

Quick recap of the internal GDrive / Platypus client:
Backup: if your computer goes down, catches on fire, or just plain old BSOD's, just get a new computer, install the platypus client, and your files
will be on the new system before you know it You can sync across multiple computers. Great if you have multiple buildings, cubes, or a laptop floating around
VPN-less access
Disconnect Access. Google Gears anyone?
Other users can just mount your shares on their filesystem
FAST

I took some time and went through similar offerings that are currently available

** Amazon S3**

uses Amazon account (just have to enable as a web service)
$.15 per gig
programmatic way to store files. No UI on Amazon's site

Xdrive

Pros

Nothing to install
Breaks into photos, docs, music, videos, downloads, and bookmarks by default
can upload a folder or multiple files from the same folder
good upload speed
5 gigs of space is free
you can make "shows" to show off your photos and/or videos

Cons

Had to sign in with my AIM account to sign up for the service. Then directly after signing up I had to sign in with my AIM account again.
can't drag files into folders
"Share with friend" email didn't come for 15 min
the "close window" button after logging out didn't work
login button is a little out of the way

Box.net

Pros

fast site
clean look
5 gig free
easy to embed folder into site or blog
easy to send links to files in an email
share folders as a link or an RSS feed
drag and drop file upload in a popup
there are groups in the paid account

Cons

friends have to sign up to send files (I would rather be able to give them a public link to my folder)
have to pay to get groups
contacts section felt ackward

MoveDigital

Pros

can upload a file from a URL
Uploads showed all the details: speed, percent done, etc
Has mobile phone access

Cons

Expensive. The pricing starts at $10 for 1 gig and goes up exponentially
Drag and drop is an install. And it didn't let me login (was using Vista to test these, I know... I know...)
Slow uploads

Omnidrive

![](https://lh3.google.com/timothy.broder/RvHFzfREi7I/AAAAAAAAMSA/P_Z24ztAeQ4/s 400/omni.jpg?imgdl=1)

Sign up was very slow
I tried to upload a 4 meg file and got a Java heapspace error

Microsoft Skydrive
Pros

Multiple file upload is very responsive and pretty
Can embed in blog
Has link to share with public

Cons

Needed to install an ActiveX control (had to use IE, bummer) for multiple file upload.
Doesn't show upload speed
Only 500 MB
50 MB Max file size

Overall I think I would have to go with Box.net. It was really smooth. Had some good features and it was really easy to upload files. the free 5 gigs wasn't too bad either.

Some related GDrive articles:

GDrive is Here, Almost
[Evidence of GDrive in Google

Apps](http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-09-04-n51.html)

GDrive Is On The Way
[Inside the GDrive Platypus

--Almost](http://battellemedia.com/archives/002986.php)

Another GDrive “Platypus” Leak
[Google Gdrive Client

Leaked](http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2006-10-13-n53.html)

GDrive -> GDisk
[When Will Gdrive Be Public (If

Ever)?](http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2006-07-11-n52.html)

GDrive plays whack-a-mole with bloggers
[Evidence of GDrive in Google

Apps](http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-09-04-n51.html) What Ever Happened To GDrive?

[Rumor: Was the Gdrive Release

Canceled?](http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-08-19-n82.html)

Using Blogger and Feedburner Sitemaps in Webmaster Tools

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 00:20:00 GMT

Blogger, good. FeedBurner, good. Google Webmaster tools, good. The 3 working together? A little more difficult. A few months ago blogger added support to have FeedBurner + blogger integration. No more editing template code, just change a setting in blogger, and viola, FeedBurner will track all your subscribers. However, this method did not go over so well with Google Webmaster Tools. Previously you could just add your blog's feed as a sitemap for you blog and the Google Bot would have no problem. If you turned on FeedBurner however, sitemap errors popped up all over because the FeedBurner links were on a different domain from the blog, etc..

Here is a way to make it work (assuming you already have a blog set up):

Make an account on FeedBurner and add your blog to it
Then, in blogger go to settings > Site Feed > Post Feed Redirect URL and add your FeedBurner feed
Finally, if you want to track your blog in Google Webmaster Tools you will have to add the sitemap a little differently then normal. Add a General Web sitemap as the "rss.xml?orderby=updated" feed off of your blog. FeedBurner does not pick up this feed in the redirects, so the Google Bot will not have trouble with it.

![](https://lh3.google.com/timothy.broder/RvE7pfREi3I/AAAAAAAAMRg/s_PLXzrV9hE/s400/FeedBurner3.jpg?imgdl=1)

After this your site will be tracked by FeedBurner as well as Google Webmaster tools and the Google Bot will be able to use the sitemap properly

Google Books “My Library” Vs. LibraryThing vs. Shelfari

Wed, 19 Sep 2007 02:11:00 GMT

I love to read. I always have and I probably always will. When people ask me why I read so much or about how fast I can, I usually attest to the fact that when I was a child, the household rule was no television on weekdays, so, lots of books and reading. I still remember the first book I was able to finish on my own without any help from my mother; The Mouse and the Motorcycle.

A few months ago when I was looking for a service to keep track of all my books (those I had read and those I wanted), the top two that I had come up with were Shelfari and LibraryThing. At the time LibraryThing seemed slow and clunky while Shelfari came off as fairly polished. Note that I really didn’t spend too much time at either during this initial assessment and that I ended up going with Shelfari.

Coming back to the present, I still use Shelfari and now that Google Book search has come out with the “My Library” feature, its time to do an assessment of this decision.

My Library
Launched on September 6th, this is the latest feature of Google Book Search. Normally I just go to Amazon if I’m looking for a book, but that’s more likely because that’s what I am used to. Check out my test Library here

Pros

Search doesn’t always return what I want. Sometimes I had to go find the ISBN and use that
Very fast searching
Once books are added to the library, you can search the text within those books and get a preview
Has List view and cover view. The list view has a link to Add Labels, Write a Review, and More Editions
Links to buy the book from Amazon, Barns & Noble, Booksense, or Froogle
Can look for the book in a library
Reviews from all over the internet (shows 10)
References from all over the internet (shows 10)
References from other books
Links to other editions
References from scholarly works
Can share list as an RSS feed
No need to sign up if you already have a Google account
Unlimited books

Cons

limited preview, I know other services don’t even offer a preview, but its such a tease
The library didn’t seem to be finding good results. I looked up a few books that I know are in the library up the street and it wasn’t finding them.
No user reviews
Only export format is RSS
Can only import by ISBN by typing a list or copy/paste
Need a Google account

LibraryThing
I had initially been turned off by this one because the UI seemed clunky and was sluggish when I first tested it out. A lot of this has changed. Check out my test library here

Pros

If you really like Amazon (me), then using that as the database is a pro
Good recommendations. The recommendations were pretty spot on. There are books on the list that I have been meaning to read for a while now (that I have not yet added)
Lots of “Find At” (buy) options: Abebooks, Alibris, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, BookFinder, BookSense, Worldcat, and more
The size differences and bolding in the tag cloud make it pretty easy to spot trends
Reviews by users
I love the book swapping links
Good rating system (out of 5)
Links to related Wikipedia articles
Lots of options for blog cloud
Can link with other social sites: Facebook, Digg, etc

Cons

only searches Amazon of the Library of congress
You can only save 200 books. Lame. They charge $10/year or $25/lifetime to store unlimited books
The Display styles of A, B, C, D, E are confusing if you don’t go look up what they mean
The “click on cover” menu takes a little while to get used to
Blog cloud is static
Has a lot of social aspects, but no “Friends”

LibraryThing Blog widget:

Shelfari
This is the service I originally went with. Check out my main shelf here

Pros

Multiple shelves
Friends and groups, seems more social then the other two. (LibraryThing links to social aspects, but doesn’t have them as built in as Shelfari)
Quite pretty
Member reviews and Amazon reviews (linked separately)
Can write notes (different from reviews) about each book or a shelf in general

Cons

Requires Flash
Can only buy from Amazon
Tag cloud doesn’t have enough difference in size
Ads at the bottom of each page
Has social aspect of friends, but doesn’t reach out to other social sites

Shelfari Blog Widget:

All in all I think I may stick with Shelfari. Yes My Library was the fastest for searching, and did relate the books to the most external sources, but sometimes it took a little longer to find the book I was looking for in the list. My searches in Shelfari, while slower always had the book I wanted in the top 3 results. I really like the recommendation and book swapping features of LibraryThing. What sold me on Shelfari and continues to do so, is the multiple shelves. I have a shelf for books I own and have read, a shelf for books I own but have not read, and a shelf for books I would like to buy. I just really like breaking it up this way. The only thing that could make this aspect better, would be if I could like my third list to my Amazon wish list.

Rest in Peace Robert Jordan

Tue, 18 Sep 2007 10:55:00 GMT

Alas and woes, one of my favorite authors, Robert Jordan has passed away. RJ is the author of the magnificent The Wheel of Time Series. The series currently had 11 books plus a prequel. Jordan was feverishly working on the 12th and final book entitled A Memory of Light. My old Roommate Kit got me into it and though I had previously tried the series when I was about 10 I didn't get into it, this time around I instantly fell in love with The Eye of the World (first book). I put RJ's work on the same level as Tolkien, who is my all time favorite author. Robert Jordan came to "dominate the world that Tolkien began to reveal to us." One of the words at the bottom of gpowered.net comes from a reference to the main character, Rand.

RJ, you gave me a great world to escape this one into. I will miss you dearly. Rest in Peace and become a Memory of Light.

Google acquires Postini

Sun, 16 Sep 2007 17:31:00 GMT

Google has acquired Postini to better improve Google Apps.

A blurb from Postini's website:
_With Postini Solutions, you can secure all of your electronic communications

email, instant messaging and the web – and manage your company's

communication policies from one central location. Postini Solutions can also make it easy to meet your archiving and encryption needs._

Things I would like to see come out of this:

The ability to encrypt Gmail messages and Google Docs without having to use

greasemonkey

A Google API to encrypt files and transfers in your own application or site
(Ad?) subsidized access to Postini services

The question on the tip of my tongue is, is Postini going to remain a separate entity though owned by Google, or are its services going to be completely integrated into Google's services?

GME 9/14 Feature Release

Sun, 16 Sep 2007 17:21:00 GMT

A new version of the Google Mashup Editor was released on Friday. Highlights of new features include:

Ratings and Labels for external feeds
Now uses GWT 1.4 (newest version)
New "Save" event. List and item modules throw a save event when new entries

are added to a feed

Smarter loading of external libraries
Documentation and samples were updated to support new features

Bug fix highlights:

Auto-complete can now be used when entry has a coma
"nowrap" style for blue-theme CSS class was removed
Documentation links in the editor now point to the correct docs
Source highlighting in the editor was fixed

For the complete list, check out this post

Playing Halo 3 on IMAX!

Sun, 16 Sep 2007 16:12:00 GMT

Completely off topic, but I had to share. Last Thursday I had the amazing privilege to play Halo 3 on the Lincoln Center IMAX Screen. It was amazing. For those of you that don't know, the Lincoln center IMAX screen is 70-something feet tall. The master chief was bigger then me. My buddy who got the tickets was on line around 6:30, I shower up around 8 or so (they were only letting the first 200 people play), and we got into the theater around 9pm.

Joe Tung and Luke started off by running through a campaign demo, showing off the saved video features, and blowing stuff up with Forge. The campaign demo we saw was 'The Storm' which had never been seen before. They fought through some baddies but turned off the demo as a gigantic spider mech came on to the screen, I guess we have to wait a few more days to see the rest of that...

After the demos they let us play some slayer! 8 people at a time in 6 min rounds, I was #164 so I had to wait a bit, no worries though, seeing the other games on the giant screen made it worth the wait. When I got to play though, they only let 6 gamers onto the consoles... why? Joe and Luke had decided to join the fun! Playing Halo 3 against a producer and developer... super cool! I, of course, had my ass royally handed to me. I wish I had some photos to show but the security was pretty tight. In retrospect I should have tried to take a few on my way out. I had played and had nothing to lose... oh well...

Halo 3 can't come soon enough (and I actually have a 360 now)...

Slight delay in next HOWTO

Thu, 13 Sep 2007 11:30:00 GMT

I was trying very hard to get the next HOWTO online last night. I got it about 3/4 of the way done but then went to bed so I could go to the gym this morning, but then I ended up setting my alarm for 6pm instead of 6am.... so that was a waste I probably could have finished it. Tonight I'm going to test out Halo 3 on the Lincoln Center Imax Screen which should just be crazy. Until then here's a good article I read yesterday entitled Will The Google Bashers Please Shut Up?

Till later, I'll see what time I get back tonight...

View Larger Map

Last week recap

Wed, 12 Sep 2007 01:24:00 GMT

These are just a few highlights from while I was gone...

Google Starts talking about a possible coding competition and gives some practice problems. Maybe I'll take a crack at them on the train on Friday...

Google Mashup Editor had a feature release. Check out the post for the full list but my favorite new features include:

Ability to edit XML, CSS and HTML files uploaded into the editor.
New Tab styling and custom placement of tabs via CSS
Documentation for new features

Blogoscoped reported that iGoogle now has gadget to gadget communication. I think this will lead to the design of whole tabs with smaller more placeable gadgets that talk to each other rather then bigger uglier (possibly sluggish?) gadgets.

Jessen Oller: "Python 3.0 Alpha 1 released: You want it because it’s cool." Mmmmmmmmmm python. Get it here

GWT 1.4 came out of beta

Google Gears 0.2 developer release ready for download. New features include:

Crosss-origin API support
HttpRequest and Timer modules (can be used as workers)

Blogoscoped reported that there are now new layout options on iGoogle. Check it out

Google Spreadsheets got autocomplete. Its pretty nifty. It even understands Sun, Mon, and then what should come next, same for months and others.

Back in NY!

Wed, 12 Sep 2007 00:57:00 GMT

Well as much fun as I had on the West Coast, there's no place like home and its good to be back. Highlights from my trip include Pike's Market, Tap House, Microsoft's campus, the Space Needle, and Mount Si in Seattle, and Dreamworks, Chinatown, and San Fransisco itself. Photos to come as soon as I have time to upload them to Picasa.

As I posted while I was gone, my favorite thing I glanced at in reader was the fact that Google Reader added a search bar. This is great for me, there are so many times where I think "what the heck was that article about that thing...".

Quick summery post of things I saw in reader coming up...

Google Reader adds Search Box!!

Thu, 06 Sep 2007 18:20:00 GMT

Finally!! No more using Yahoo Pipes to search the feeds!

I'm sitting here waiting for my friend Eli to pick me up from his apartment for a nice lunch over at dreamworks, glancing over a few feeds (I have a LOT to catch up on when I get back to NY), and one jumped out at me, the Google Reader Team has finally added a search box to Google reader.

This box will search all of your feeds! Also included in this release are:

Ability to hide side navigation (I just tried it, it's very well done)
Unread count is now 1,000+ rather then 100+ (this is going to be good for

me when I get back)

Forward and Back buttons now have more responsiveness when moving between

folders and feeds

Check out Google Blog Search for more blog searching.

gPowered.net update: Diggs and HOWTO list

Fri, 31 Aug 2007 23:50:00 GMT

Quick update while I'm sitting here waiting for my friends in Seattle to get home from work, and its dinner time in NY, I need food! Anyway, I added the Digg count and HOWTO lists to the Post List page as YUI tabview tabs.

HOWTO: YUI Tabview

Fri, 31 Aug 2007 23:25:00 GMT

A few days ago I added the Digg counts to the bottom of the Posts page on gPowered.net. Although, the more posts that I add, the further down on the page this section will get, so I decided to play around with YUI's tabview control and put the post list in one tab, and the diggs in another. It turned out to be really easy:

First we need a few dependencies

    <!-- Dependencies -->  
    <!-- core CSS -->  
    <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://yui.yahooapis.com/2.3.0/build/tabview/assets/tabview.css">   
    
    <!-- optional skin for border tabs -->  
    <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://yui.yahooapis.com/2.3.0/build/tabview/assets/border_tabs.css">   
    
    <script type="text/javascript" src="http://yui.yahooapis.com/2.3.0/build/yahoo-dom-event/yahoo-dom-event.js"></script>  
    <script type="text/javascript" src="http://yui.yahooapis.com/2.3.0/build/element/element-beta-min.js"></script>  
    
    <!-- Source file -->  
    <script type="text/javascript" src="http://yui.yahooapis.com/2.3.0/build/tabview/tabview-min.js"></script>

And then we just need to organize some DIVs

    <div id="demo" class="yui-navset">   
     <ul class="yui-nav">   
      <li class="selected"><a href="#posts"><em>Posts</em></a></li>  
      <li><a href="#diggs"><em>Diggs</em></a></li> 
      <li><a href="#HOWTOs"><em>HOWTO's</em></a></li> 
     </ul>               
     <div class="yui-content">   
      <div id="posts" style="margin: 10px">
       <h3>Posts</h3>
       content
      </div>
      <div id="diggs" style="margin: 10px"> 
       <h3>Diggs</h3>
       content
      </div>
     </div>
    </div>
```HTML

Vacation!

Thu, 30 Aug 2007 20:21:00 GMT

Hi All,

I'm leaving for vacation in a few. I'm going to be in Seattle, Washington until Wed morning and then San Fransisco until the following Sunday. I don't know if / when I'll be able to post anything but I'll try if I have some downtime ;)

Hey look, an embedded map!!

View Larger Map

HOWTO: Getting the Numer of Diggs from Digg (Python)

Thu, 30 Aug 2007 03:32:00 GMT

After 2 of my posts were on the Digg front page this morning (Thank you all very much to those that dugg them), I took my first look into the Digg API. I wanted a way to take a quick look to see how many Diggs certain stories were getting. In some ways it is similar to GData: make a call to a URL, get some XML back, parse it, etc. It does, however, feel lighter, probably due to its streamlined nature. It has one purpose, get information off of Digg. Using this, I've added a section in the Post List section of gPowered.net that shows the Diggs of a few of the articles that I have submitted on Digg.

The API is broken into 5 main sections or endpoints. Each of these will return related types of data:

Stories
Events
Users
Topics
Errors

In this quick HOWTO I'm going to take a quick look into the Stories endpoint so I can display the number of Diggs specific stories have. We'll start off by making a small class to hold our returned data (useful to send to a template or just for working with later on. We don't want to keep having to hit the ElementTree to get data out). All of the calls will be send to 'http://services.digg.com/'. In this example I will only be querying 'http://services.digg.com/story/{story clean title}'.

import httplib2
from elementtree import ElementTree

#for storing
class MyDigg:
 def __init__(self, title, link, digg, diggs):
  self.title = title
  self.link = link
  self.digg = digg
  self.diggs = diggs

 def __str__(self):
  return self.title + ' ' + self.diggs

#stories to get diggs of
posts = [
 'Google_NOT_releasing_it_s_Goobuntu_Desktop_OS_STOP_DIGGING_IT',
 'New_Digg_Home_Page_breaks_the_Linux_section_on_IE',
 'Google_Reader_API_Functions'
 ]

#hold returned info
my_diggs = []

#all calls go through this
digg_service = 'http://services.digg.com/'

#just looking at stories
service_endpoint = digg_service + 'story/%s'

#only need 1 result back
trailer = '?count=1&appkey;=http%3A%2F%2Fgpowered.blogspot.com'

#keep track of total diggs
total_diggs = 0

After we are set up, we will want to loop through each story we want to get Digg data for. Add the well formed title into the query string, and send it to the Digg service. Then, parse the response, and get the information we need.

for story in posts:
 curr_story = service_endpoint % story
 url = curr_story + trailer

 h = httplib2.Http()
 resp, content = h.request(url, "GET", body="nt", headers={'content-type':'text/plain'} )

 story = ElementTree.fromstring(content).findall('story')[0]

 d = MyDigg(story.findall('title')[0].text, story.get('link'), story.get('href'), story.get('diggs'))
 total_diggs = total_diggs + int(d.diggs)
 my_diggs.append(d)
 print d

print 'Total: ' + str(total_diggs)

And that's that. my_diggs now has all the information we need!

Google's Newest Data Center [Pics]

Thu, 30 Aug 2007 03:25:00 GMT

Information Week posted some photos of Google's newest data center near The Dalles' dam. Needless to say, I wouldn't mind access to this baby. Heck, I would want one, but there is no way I would be able to power it. I'm sure the proximity to the dam's power station and water supply were key factors in choosing the location.

NY State Fair Embedded Map

Wed, 29 Aug 2007 03:58:00 GMT

It's really, really easy to put maps onto any site or blog now using Embedded Maps. I threw this together real quick to demonstrate. This past weekend I drove up to Syracuse for the New York State fair. A great time if you have never been. Plenty of fantastic food and drink. I also had to pick up my old roomie, and using Google Maps new multiple destination feature this was easy as well.

First stop:

Adding the second stop:

Getting the code to embed the map by clicking on "Link to this page":

If you want, more advanced options:

And now, the final product:

[View Larger Map](http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&hl=en&geocode=&saddr=Hoboken ,+NJ&daddr=Morristown,+NJ+to:Syracuse,+NY&mrcr=1&mra=pi&sll=40.759195,-74.2540 55&sspn=0.207522,0.466919&ie=UTF8&om=1&ll=41.87761,-75.10599&spn=2.862977,4.66 9189&z=7&source=embed)

Codeless Embedded Maps

Wed, 29 Aug 2007 03:42:00 GMT

Google Maps released Embeddable Maps. It's as easy as embedding youtube videos. All you have to do is create your map, and then under the "Link to this page" menu, there is a new option under the link that has some HTML iframe code to add the map anywhere. Check out the next post to see the trip to Syracuse I took this weekend to go to the New York State Fair.

Programmable Web hits 500 API's!

Wed, 29 Aug 2007 03:32:00 GMT

This isn't a Google post per say, but if you haven't checked out Programmable Web, I highly recommend doing so. They catalog API's, Mashups, Howto's, and host contests.

Programmable Web has the following Google API's registered, next to them is each API's mashup count:

Google AdSense 14
Google AdWords 18
Google Ajax Feeds 5
Google Ajax Search 25
Google Base 18
Google Calendar 19
Google Checkout 4
Google Client Authentication 2
Google Code Search 1
Google Custom Search 0
Google Desktop 8
Google Documents 0
Google Gears 0
Google Homepage 32
Google Maps 1128
Google Mashup Editor 2
Google Notebook 1
Google Picasa 5
Google Provisioning 0
Google Research 0
Google Safe Browsing 1
Google Search 80
Google Single SignOn 0
Google Spreadsheets 2
Google Talk 3
Google Translate 0
Google Web Authentication 1

Old Google Design back?

Wed, 29 Aug 2007 03:29:00 GMT

Blogoscoped reports that some people have the old design (Google App links are above the search bar instead of the upper left). I checked at work on IE6 and firefox and at home on firefox (on Gutsy) and IE7 both logged in and logged out but still had the new interface. I wonder who has the old one...

Webmaster tools adds Internationalization support

Wed, 29 Aug 2007 03:27:00 GMT

You can now register domains in Webmaster Central with non-English characters in them by supporting IDNA (Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications). Originally only domains with a-z, A-Z, 0-9, or '-' could be used. I tested it out and it looks like its working good!

Google is NOT working on a desktop OS for the public!!

Tue, 28 Aug 2007 22:52:00 GMT

This is really just a quick response to this Digg. How it made the front page is completely beyond my comprehension. The article itself is a year old and Google has denied countless times they are going to release "Goobuntu". Heck, I've been to a tech talk where its been stated that Goobuntu is just their internal OS that developers can use that comes with some snazzy Google tools. See below for some other confirmations that Goobuntu isn't coming out.

I'm going to add to this list but I really need some dinner....

Goobuntu is on every one's most wanted list from Google, Heck I'd rather have that then the gPhone... maybe... but as of right now, I'll have to wait forever....

New Digg Home Page breaks the Linux section on IE?

Tue, 28 Aug 2007 17:05:00 GMT

So I'm sitting here eating lunch and go to see if there is anything new on Digg. Saw the new layout, looks nice, haven't really had a chance to play around with it yet. However, when i got to the Linux/Unix section, it wouldn't show up in Internet Explorer (6). It works fine in FireFox. Does someone over at Digg have a sense of humor or is my browser just acting on the bunk?

Blogger Update: Video in post is out of beta

Tue, 28 Aug 2007 02:01:00 GMT

Or out of "in draft" I should say. Not much to show in the ways of how to use this: A button has been added next to the add an image icon. Maybe I'll use this in my upcoming post about using spreadsheets and base as a database... hmmm...

Zoho Writer using Gears (cont'd)

Tue, 28 Aug 2007 01:45:00 GMT

In a quick follow-up to my previous article; Google code blog posted a video talk about the experience the Zoho team had in incorporating Gears with their Writer.

I hate to bring it up again, but like I said before, the Docs team better get moving... a Google product competitor using Google Gears first?

HOWTO: Google Reader API Functions

Thu, 23 Aug 2007 02:57:00 GMT

I've been wanting an API for Google reader since I started using it, and especially since i started gPowered so I could display a list of the feeds I read on the site. The official word on an API for reader is "It's coming in a few weeks," but that was back in late 2005. The reason being that at the time, the URLs the API would use were going to change a lot. So, after a bit of research and coding I came up with some python functions to do the job.

The first step was authenticating against Google accounts without using the client library. The Python Gdata Library makes login very easy but Reader isn't part of the Client Library yet (maybe I'll try to add it, we'll see...) but this was the method I was using for gdata and python pre-Client Library, and the principles still hold true for working with Reader. Thankfully, most of the research for working with the 'Reader API' was done for me already by Niall Kennedy. This is an unofficial, unsupported API and the URLs for some of the queries have changed since the writing of that article. Here we go...

We're going to use urllib(2) to handle the communication with this one. I rather would have used httplib, but I was having trouble with the authentication cookie. Each retrieval has its own URL to query against

import urllib
import urllib2
import re

login = 'timothy.broder@gmail.com'
password = '****'
source = 'gPowered'

google_url = 'http://www.google.com'
reader_url = google_url + '/reader'
login_url = 'https://www.google.com/accounts/ClientLogin'
token_url = reader_url + '/api/0/token'
subscription_list_url = reader_url + '/api/0/subscription/list'
reading_url = reader_url + '/atom/user/-/state/com.google/reading-list'
read_items_url = reader_url + '/atom/user/-/state/com.google/read'
reading_tag_url = reader_url + '/atom/user/-/label/%s'
starred_url = reader_url + '/atom/user/-/state/com.google/starred'
subscription_url = reader_url + '/api/0/subscription/edit'
get_feed_url = reader_url + '/atom/feed/'

When we authenticate against Google Reader with a gmail account and password in the browser, a cookie is stored. We'll have to recreate the values in this cookie. The static values are the Domain (.google.com), the Path (/), and Expires (we'll use 160000000000). The unique value, based on the current login session, is the SID (Session ID?), which we will need to retrieve. We'll do the login and retrieval in the same function:

#login / get SED
def get_SID():
    header = {'User-agent' : source}
    post_data = urllib.urlencode({ 'Email': login, 'Passwd': password, 'service': 'reader', 'source': source, 'continue': google_url, })
    request = urllib2.Request(login_url, post_data, header)

    try :
        f = urllib2.urlopen( request )
        result = f.read()

    except:
        print 'Error logging in'

    return re.search('SID=(\S*)', result).group(1)

We'll also need a function that can handle any of those URLs, create the header, attach a cookie to it, and retrieve the data from Google. I left the return as a raw data string so you could use whatever XML parsing library you want. I personally like using [ElementTree](http://effbot.org/zone/element- index.htm).

#get results from url
def get_results(SID, url):
    header = {'User-agent' : source}
    header['Cookie']='Name=SID;SID=%s;Domain=.google.com;Path=/;Expires=160000000000' % SID

    request = urllib2.Request(url, None, header)

    try :
        f = urllib2.urlopen( request )
        result = f.read()

    except:
        print 'Error getting data from %s' % url

    return result

The following methods are the calls that I've gotten working so far; I'm going to keep working on the 'edit' functions, like adding, removing feeds, changing tags, etc. See the comments for what they do. Note: Any edit against the API needs to send over a changing token as part of the call

#get a token, this is needed for modifying to reader
def get_token(SID):
    return get_results(SID, token_url)

#get a specific feed.  It works for any feed, subscribed or not
def get_feed(SID, url):
 return get_results(SID, get_feed_url + url.encode('utf-8'))

#get a list of the users subscribed feeds
def get_subscription_list(SID):
    return get_results(SID, subscription_list_url)

#get a feed of the users unread items
def get_reading_list(SID):
    return get_results(SID, reading_url)

#get a feed of the users read items
def get_read_items(SID):
    return get_results(SID, read_items_url)

#get a feed of the users unread items of a given tag
def get_reading_tag_list(SID, tag):
        tagged_url = reading_tag_url % tag
        return get_results(SID, tagged_url.encode('utf-8'))

#get a feed of a users starred items/feeds
def get_starred(SID):
    return get_results(SID, starred_url)

#subscribe of unsubscribe to a feed
def modify_subscription(SID, what, do):
    url = subscription_url + '?client=client:%s&ac;=%s&s;=%s&token;=%s' % ( login, do.encode('utf-8'), 'feed%2F' + what.encode('utf-8'), get_token(SID) )
    print url
    return get_results(SID, url)

#subscribe to a feed
def subscribe_to(SID, url):
    return modify_subscription(SID, url, 'subscribe')

#unsubscribe to a feed
def unsubscribe_from(SID, url):
    return modify_subscription(SID, url, 'unsubscribe')

Example usage:

SID = get_SID()
print get_subscription_list(SID)
#print get_reading_list(SID)
#print get_read_items(SID)
#print get_reading_tag_list(SID, 'me')
#print get_reading_tag_list(SID, 'nada-mas')
#print get_starred(SID)
#print get_token(SID)

#test_feed = 'http://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/base/user/timothy.broder/albumid/5101347429735335089?kind=photo&alt;=rss&hl;=en_US'

#print subscribe_to(SID, test_feed)
#returns ok but I don't see the feed in reader?

#print get_feed(SID, test_feed)

Like I said, I'd like to keep going with this and get the edit functionality to work better. I'm also going to take a look into the Client Library and see if I could set this up as a patch that people could use if they wanted to use the API.

View Google Groups posts in Reader

Wed, 22 Aug 2007 21:11:00 GMT

I don't know why I never noticed this before but you can subscribe to the mail sent to Google Groups through an RSS feed at the bottom of each group. I'm trying it out for a few groups, I might like it better then reading through the mail. I wonder if there is a way to subscribe to the rolled up versions of the posts...

Blogger resumes service

Wed, 22 Aug 2007 14:52:00 GMT

Blogger was down this morning from a little after 9:30 until a few minutes ago, but now, all is well...

Google Web Toolkit 1.4 Release Candidate 2

Wed, 22 Aug 2007 03:47:00 GMT

Google Web Toolkit Blog: Google Web Toolkit 1.4 Release Candidate 2 Short post I know, but its getting late and I'm off call at midnight so...

The latest release candidate for GWT is available for download. There are over 100 bug fixes included in this RC. Some of the enhancements include:

ArrayList toArray(SomeClass[]) is now implemented
SuggestBox value now gettable
DateTimeFormat parse defaults to 00:00:00 for dd-MM-yyyy format
The current browser event is globally accessible

Google Mashup Editor Blog: New Tutorial: Using Picasa Web Album Feeds in GME

Wed, 22 Aug 2007 03:34:00 GMT

The guys over on the Mashup team have posted a new tutorial on how to use the Google Mashup Editor to mash Picasa Web Albums with a Google Map. The example is here. I started working on my own but I haven't really played with the GME before. Hopefully I'll have that tomorrow.

Gadgets now on Google Calendar!

Wed, 22 Aug 2007 02:52:00 GMT

Google Gadgets can now be added to your calendar. Previously the only gadgets I had on my calendar were Google Doodles, Weather, phases of the moon, and PicasaWeb Photo of the day. Now just about anything is going to be possible. I briefly played around with it this morning and added horoscopes and Sudoku to my calendar.

Other new gadgets include Movie Release dates and famous people's birthdays. I expect that very soon there will be video game releases as well. Documentation is out for the gadgets, so get coding!

C'mon Google! Get in Gear!!

Wed, 22 Aug 2007 02:34:00 GMT

As of this morning (or at least sometime before lunch), Zoho Writer turned on offline mode with Google Gears. If you haven't heard about Gears yet is a small application (and framework for developers) to enable Ajax applications to go offline. It uses a very small local server and database to grab all the data you would need should the application go offline (this has to be set up by the developers of the application). There is a great podcast about it [here](http://google-code- updates.blogspot.com/2007/06/google-developer-podcast-episode-three.html) from the Google Developer Podcast. The first Google product to use it was Google Reader which I though was pretty nifty. Before you go on a trip, just hit "Go Offline" and it will download all of your unread posts... get on the plane and shazam, all your reading to keep you busy.

Zoho currently only supports offline read which I assume means Gears will grab all of your documents and you can read them over. Zoho says they will be adding read/write functionality in 3-4 weeks.

I must say though, I'm very disappointed that Google got beat to having this in Docs and Spreadsheets first. I'm sure it would help a great deal with the Google Office Hacks book that Philipp Lenssen is writing. C'mon Google, GET IN GEAR(S)!!

My current fav Google Map Mashups

Sat, 18 Aug 2007 23:18:00 GMT

These are some sites I've found since people have started making Google Map Mashups either because they are really cool or I use them a lot.

DiggMap - Diggs are shown in real-time on the map for users that have specified their location in their profile.

Google Maps Batch Geocoder

Google Offices - Shows Google Offices around the world

Traffic and Weather Maps - Mashes Traffic conditions, road closings, construction, and weather. Not too useful to me as I don't have a car anymore but it was when I did ;)

Walk in a straight line around the world! - Pick a spot on the map, then the direction you want to walk in, and the map will show you all the places you would hit if you walked around the world!

GypsyMaps - My all time favorite. Gives Directions with the NYC subway system. I like it a lot better then hopstop, it just seems more responsive

Walk Score - Put in where you live and find all the walkable places near you. Great for living in a City and you don't have a car.

Google Maps API - Not a map, but the starting resource for if you want to make a mashup

Google Maps with a spreadsheet - Power a Google map from

StreetViewr - A collection of funny, interesting, random photos that people have found with Google Street View

The EDU Map - See places of education for a given city

Walk Jog Run - Share routes with other runner's. I've found some new, less boring ones using this =)

Site Update: Post list and Links section

Sat, 11 Aug 2007 21:43:00 GMT

I Added an easier way to go through the posts I'v put on blogger and the site. Quick tutorial on it is here.

Also added a Links section that pull from my Google Bookmarks. HOWTO is here

HOWTO: Pulling Google Bookmarks with Python

Sat, 11 Aug 2007 21:22:00 GMT

I love using Google Bookmarks (usually with the Google Toolbar) because it lets me get to my bookmarks at home on my laptop or desktop, at work, or anywhere. It's great. Now I'm using those bookmarks to power the links section of gPowered.net
First we're going to need the httplib2 library so we can authenticate against Google and grab the bookmark feed and then the ElementTree to help process the rss feed.

import httplib2
from elementtree import ElementTree

Then we'll setup the link to pull the rss from, authenticate against the request, and pull back the feed

login = "timothy.broder@gmail.com"  
password = "*****"
url = 'https://www.google.com/bookmarks/?output=rss&num;=1000'  
  
h = httplib2.Http()  
h.add_credentials(login, password)  
 
resp, content = h.request(url, "POST", body="nt", headers={'content-type':'text/plain'} )

I figured for this a hashmap (or dictionary) would work well using the tags on the bookmarks as keys, pointing to lists of bookmarks. Then when we display them, just iterate through the keys. I also kept a list of the keys to make sorting faster later on. So we define our objects and then loop through the rss object pulling out the tags for keys, the names of the links, and the urls. I define a small Bookmark class which holds a name and url which will go into the hashmap to make storing the bookmark's easier. When I try to add a bookmark to the dict's list I try to append it, if the key(tag) doesn't exist I know I have to start a new list.

class Bookmark:
 def __init__(self, name, link):
  self.name = name
  self.link = link
  
d = dict()
sort_keys = []
for item in tree.findall('item'):
 key = item.findtext('{http://www.google.com/searchhistory}bkmk_label')
 if (key != None) and (key != 'gpowered') and (key != 'BP') and (key != 'Quick Searches') and (key != 'Me'):
  title = item.findtext('title')
  link = item.findtext('link')
  try:
   d[key].append(Bookmark(title.encode('utf-8'), link))
  except KeyError:
   d[key] = [Bookmark(title.encode('utf-8'), link)]
   sort_keys.append(key)

Then we'll sort the key list and the list of each key. To do this we need a small function that defines how to sort a bookmark

def bookmark_compare(a, b):
 return cmp(a.name, b.name)

sort_keys.sort() 
for key in sort_keys:
 d[key].sort(bookmark_compare)

Check out the static HTML version Here. I also made a fancier version using YUI's TreeView

HOWTO: Getting a list of post titles from blogger (Python)

Sat, 11 Aug 2007 18:25:00 GMT

This will be a quick one on how to pull the titles from your blog. I'm using it to Lists the posts I have available on gPowered.net. Firstly we'll set up our imports and call to the blogger service.

from elementtree import ElementTree
from gdata import service
import gdata
import atom
import getopt
import sys

blog_id = 413573351281770670
blogger_service = service.GDataService('timothy.broder@gmail.com', '*****')
blogger_service.source = 'Blogger_Python_Sample-1.0'
blogger_service.service = 'blogger'
blogger_service.server = 'www.blogger.com'
blogger_service.ProgrammaticLogin()

For this query we're going to use the summary feed because all we really need for this is the titles, not the full posts:

query = service.Query()
query.feed = '/feeds/' + str(blog_id) + '/posts/summary'
feed = blogger_service.Get(query.ToUri())

Then I just do a little counting so I can use the links on my site. All the information we need is in feed.entry

curr_id = int(feed.total_results.text)
for entry in feed.entry:
    entry.my_id = curr_id
    curr_id -= 1

Quick Docs Api Example (python)

Fri, 10 Aug 2007 03:04:00 GMT

To use the gdata docs python client you need to upgrade to 1.0.7 or higher. First thing is to import the modules you'll need.

import gdata.docs.service
import gdata.docs

Then, set up the usual authentication parameters for the client.

gd_client = gdata.docs.service.DocsService()
gd_client.email = 'timothy.broder'
gd_client.password = '*****'
gd_client.source = 'gpowered-docs-list-ex'
gd_client.ProgrammaticLogin()

The most basic query will just return all of your documents

feed = gd_client.GetDocumentListFeed()

However, if we want to display just the spreadsheets, we build the query like this:

q = gdata.docs.service.DocumentQuery(categories=['spreadsheet'])
feed = gd_client.Query(q.ToUri())

Finally, we output the titles

if(len(feed.entry) == 0):
        print 'No entries in feed.\n'
for i, entry in enumerate(feed.entry):
        print '%s %s (%s)' % (i+1, entry.title.text.encode('UTF-8'))

If we wanted to, we could also import the DateTime library and show when the document was last updated

import gdata.docs.service
import gdata.docs

from mx import DateTime

gd_client = gdata.docs.service.DocsService()
gd_client.email = 'timothy.broder'
gd_client.password = '*****'
gd_client.source = 'gpowered-docs-list-ex'
gd_client.ProgrammaticLogin()

q = gdata.docs.service.DocumentQuery(categories=['spreadsheet'])
#feed = gd_client.GetDocumentListFeed()
feed = gd_client.Query(q.ToUri())

if(len(feed.entry) == 0):
        print 'No entries in feed.\n'
for i, entry in enumerate(feed.entry):
        dt = DateTime.ISO.ParseDateTimeUTC(entry.updated.text)
        print '%s %s (%s)' % (i+1, entry.title.text.encode('UTF-8'), dt.strftime('%m/%d/%Y %I:%M %p'))

For me this outputs:

1 TDP2006 Contact Info (11/18/2006 05:41 AM)
2 contact info (07/23/2006 08:15 PM)
3 Tim and Rob (08/09/2007 10:18 PM)
4 nyc happy hour spreadsheet (07/04/2007 08:25 PM)
5 public_spring_2006_roster (10/16/2006 12:40 AM)
6 dax2006 (11/12/2006 11:23 PM)
7 project dream (07/13/2007 03:54 AM)
8 Stuff Tim should get (06/13/2007 01:53 AM)
9 Erg Test Results - 9/26 (10/15/2006 01:02 AM)
10 Head of the Charles Regatta Itineary (10/17/2006 04:54 PM)
11 tvshows (11/02/2006 11:44 PM)
12 HF (10/01/2006 03:36 PM)

New Documents List API

Mon, 06 Aug 2007 23:46:00 GMT

Google Data API posts now you can import your spreadsheets and word processor documents into Google Documents using the new Documents List API.

Until I write up a tutorial, check out the Documents List API

Posting to Blogger from Google Docs & Spreadsheets

Mon, 06 Aug 2007 01:17:00 GMT

I had seen some posts in the past (like this one) and figured I would give it a try. The first thing I liked was it feels a lot less cramped then the traditional blogger interface. Secondly it feels more responsive which for me is pretty good for me as I'm on a 6 year old laptop a lot of the time. Tagging is a little harder. You can tag existing tags in blogger but I found it easier to post from Docs & Spreadsheets and then go back into the Blogger interface to tag. Blogger picks up the post title from the title of the document, but you have to go back in to add the link for the title. Check it out, it might be better for you then the traditional interface.

I published this from Docs and Spreadsheets. Check out the doc here

HOWTO: Displaying Blogger feeds with PHP

Sun, 05 Aug 2007 22:44:00 GMT

This HOWTO is going to follow the basic structure of the Python one.

To start out you'll have to grab the Zend Google data Client Library and then set the include_path so you can use it

ini_set("include_path", ".:../:./include:../include:/home/gpowered/webapps/php/includes/ZendGdata-1.0.1/library");

We then import the parts the we'll need:

require_once 'Zend/Loader.php';
Zend_Loader::loadClass('Zend_Gdata');
Zend_Loader::loadClass('Zend_Gdata_Query');
Zend_Loader::loadClass('Zend_Gdata_ClientLogin');

One of the first things we're going to have to do is authenticate with google services. There are two ways to do this: AuthSub proxy authentication which has a user login using their own credentials, and ClientLogin username/password au thentication where you send a username and password. We will be using ClientLogin. I built a small class called gPoweredBlogger to hold the different parts I will need for this example.

class gPoweredBlogger{
    private $user;// = 'timothy.broder';
    private $pass;// = '**************';
    private $service;// = 'blogger';

    private $blog_id;// = '413573351281770670';
    private $uri;// = "http://www.blogger.com/feeds/" . $blog_id . "/posts/default";
    private $show_num;// = 5;

    private $client;// = Zend_Gdata_ClientLogin::getHttpClient($user, $pass, $service);
    private $gdClient;// = new Zend_Gdata($client);
    private $query;// = new Zend_Gdata_Query($uri);

    private $total_posts;

    public $output;

Then we start setting up our call to the service.

public function __construct($user, $pass, $blog_id){
    $this->user = $user;
    $this->pass = $pass;
    $this->service = 'blogger';

    $this->blog_id = $blog_id;
    $this->uri = "http://www.blogger.com/feeds/" . $this->blog_id . "/posts/default";
    $this->show_num = 5;

    $this->client = Zend_Gdata_ClientLogin::getHttpClient($this->user, $this->pass, $this->service);
    $this->gdClient = new Zend_Gdata($this->client);
    $this->query = new Zend_Gdata_Query($this->uri);
    $this->total_posts = $this->get_total($this->query);
}

For more info see the blogger developer's guide with php or the Google Account Authentication documentation
After we have authenticated with Google we need to start building up our query to GData. The first thing you'll need is your blog's id.
You can use the function in the dev guide to help you with this if you don't already know it.
Like the Python version, the below function returns the total number of posts that are in the feed. We can get a small response by sending 0 for the max results. Below is the function and the small response we get from it.

private function get_total($query){
    //query for no posts
    $this->query->setParam('max-results', '0');
    $this->query->setParam('start-index', '1');

    //get back entryless feed
    $feed = $this->gdClient->getFeed($this->query);
    return $feed->totalResults->text;
}

<ns0:feed xmlns:ns0="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
<ns1:totalresults xmlns:ns1="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearchrss/1.0/">5</ns1:totalresults>
<ns1:itemsperpage xmlns:ns1="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearchrss/1.0/">0</ns1:itemsperpage>
<ns1:startindex xmlns:ns1="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearchrss/1.0/">1</ns1:startindex>
<ns0:generator uri="http://www.blogger.com" version="7.00">Blogger</ns0:generator>
<ns0:author><ns0:name>Tim</ns0:name></ns0:author>
<ns0:id>tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-413573351281770670</ns0:id>
<ns0:link href="https://gpowered.blogspot.com/" rel="alternate" type="text/html" />
<ns0:link href="https://gpowered.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default" rel="http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#feed" type="application/atom+xml" />
<ns0:link href="http://www.blogger.com/feeds/413573351281770670/posts/default?max-results=0" rel="self" type="application/atom+xml" />
<ns0:link href="http://www.blogger.com/feeds/413573351281770670/posts/default" rel="http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#post" type="application/atom+xml" />
<ns0:title type="text">gPowered</ns0:title>
<ns0:updated>2007-07-18T10:55:06.728-05:00</ns0:updated>
</ns0:feed>

So we get the total number of posts and then we can start pulling data. Lets make a generic function, PostFrom, that can be used to show multiple posts, or just single ones, depending on what you pass to it. The start number that is passed to PostFrom has been set to the first post in the blog is considered to have an id of 1 and the latest post is the same as total_posts. This is useful so if viewers want to bookmark the page they are looking at, the post that is being displayed will not change. The following are the different functions that will make use of it.

//show latest posts
public function Posts(){
    return $this->ListPosts($this->total_posts);
}

//show posts starting from a certain point
public function ListPosts($start){
    $start = $this->total_posts - $start + 1;
    return $this->PostFrom($start, $this->show_num);
}

//show a single post
public function Post($start){
    $start = $this->total_posts - $start + 1;
    return PostFrom($start, 1);
}

//show count number of posts starting from a certain point
private function PostFrom($start, $count){
    //query for count number of posts starting at the given post
    $this->query->setParam('max-results', $count);
    $this->query->setParam('start-index', $start);
    $feed = $this->gdClient->getFeed($this->query);

Now we have all the data we need in the feed variable. Its been turned into an object so we don't have to worry about XML parsing here. Every node has become an objects and lists. Objects for single nodes(title), and lists for where there are multiple nodes of the same name (entry, link)

//for links
$curr_id = $this->total_posts - $start + 1;

//normalize data for output
foreach($feed->entries as $entry){
    //id for links
    $entry->my_id = $curr_id;
    $curr_id -= 1;
}

Of course we're going to need next and previous buttons as well. The way we've set up the math with total_posts and the start number, we only have to increment or decrement these by count (the number of posts to display on a page). I also set part of the link, as well as the page title, that I will use below in the HTML.

$prev = $this->total_posts - ($start - $count) + 1;
if($prev > $total_posts){
    $prev = null;
}


$next = $this->total_posts - ($start + $count) + 1;
if($next < 1){
    $next = null;
}

//showing single post
if(count == 1){
    $link = 'post';
    $title = $feed->entries[0]->title->text;
    //listing posts
}
else{
    $link = 'posts';
    $title = 'home';
}

The final part is to make a quick object that we can use in the HTML to output everything

        $this->output = new Output($feed->entries, $title, $prev, $next, $link);
    }
}

class Output{
    public $entries;
    public $title;
    public $prev;
    public $next;
    public $link;
    public function __construct($entries, $title, $prev, $next, $link){
        $this->entries=$entries;
        $this->title=$title;
        $this->prev=$prev;
        $this->next=$next;
        $this->link=$link;
    }
}

To the HTML!

The first part consists of displaying the post itself, along with its relevant information. So lets built up our objects

$blog = new gPoweredBlogger('timothy.broder', '*************', '413573351281770670');
$blog->Posts();

$output = $blog->output;

Below all the php we can run through out output object and display the posts

<? foreach($output->entries as $entry){ ?>
     <h2><a href="/post/<? echo $entry->my_id ?>"><? echo $entry->title->text ?></h2></a>
     <? echo $entry->content->text;
     $datetime = strtotime(substr($entry->published, 0, 10) . ' ' . substr($entry->published, 11, 8 ));
     ?>
     <p>Posted by <? echo $entry->author[0]->name->text ?> on <? echo date("m/d/Y",$datetime) ?> at <? echo date("g:i a",$datetime) ?></p>

      <div id="divider"></div>
      <?}?>

That's all for now. A working example is here

First Google Gadget

Sat, 04 Aug 2007 22:48:00 GMT

After being inspired about Google Gadgets from the Google Developer Podcast I came up with one that my old crew team can use. We have a shared google calendar that some of us use to keep track of races, meetings, etc. This gadget pulls and formats it nicely for the google IG or desktop.

Javascript code for the gadget:

```html
<style type="text/css">
div.exp{
	padding: 0;
	margin: 0;
}
div.loc{
	margin-left: 19px;
}
</style>
<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
/**
* Season info *
* 0 Fall: Aug 26 - Nov 1
* 1 Winter Training: Nov 2 - March 1
* 2 Spring: March 2 - May 25
* 3 Summer: May 26 - Aug 25
**/

/**
* Callback function for the GData json-in-script call
* Inserts the supplied list of events into a div of a pre-defined name
*
* @param {json} root is the JSON-formatted content from GData
*/
function processRaces(root) {
displayRaces(root.feed, 'races');
}

//meow
function displayRaces(feed, divId){
var now = new Date();
var season = getSeason(now);
var events = document.getElementById(divId);

//clear "Loading..."
if (events.childNodes.length > 0){
events.removeChild(events.childNodes[0]);
}

//display season
var d = document.createElement('div');
d.appendChild(document.createTextNode(getSeasonText(season)));
events.appendChild(d);

//loop races
for (var i=0; i<feed.entry.length; i++){
var entry = feed.entry[i];

var d = getDate(entry['gd$when'][0].startTime);
if(isCurrSeason(now, d)){
var title = entry.title.$t;
var desc = entry.content.$t;

//set up image and clicking to expand
var div = document.createElement('div');
div.className = 'exp';
var toggle = document.createElement('img');
toggle.src= 'http://timothy.broder.googlepages.com/p.jpg';
toggle.align = 'absmiddle';
toggle.id = i;
toggle.onclick = function() {toggleDiv(this); }
div.appendChild(toggle);
div.appendChild(document.createTextNode(' ' + d.getMonth() + "/" + d.getDay() + ' - '));

// get the href to link to the event
for(var j=0; j<entry['link'].length; j++){
if (entry['link'][j]['type'] == 'text/html' && entry['link'][j]['rel'] == 'alternate'){
var href = entry['link'][j]['href'];
}
}

//we can link to the cal
if (typeof href != 'undefined'){
var link = document.createElement('a');
link.href = href;
link.target = '_blank';
link.appendChild(document.createTextNode(title));
div.appendChild(link);
}
else{ //shouldn't get here but just in case
div.appendChild(document.createTextNode(title));
}

div.appendChild(document.createElement('br'));

events.appendChild(div);

var where = entry['gd$where'][0].valueString;
var tDiv = document.createElement('div'); //div that will be hidden initially
tDiv.id ='id' + i;
tDiv.style['display'] = 'none';
tDiv.className = 'loc';
events.appendChild(tDiv);

if(desc != null && desc != ""){ //we have a desc (should be the teams we're competing against)
var dDiv = document.createElement('span');
dDiv.appendChild(document.createTextNode(desc + " "));
tDiv.appendChild(dDiv);
}
//the location field is populated (hidden at start)
if(where != null && where != ""){ //we have a location
var it = document.createElement('i');
var map = document.createElement('a');
map.target = '_blank';
//link to location on google maps
map.href = 'http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl;=en&&q;=' + spaceLink(entry['gd$where'][0].valueString);
map.appendChild(document.createTextNode(entry['gd$where'][0].valueString));
it.appendChild(document.createTextNode(" ("));
it.appendChild(map);
it.appendChild(document.createTextNode(")"));
tDiv.appendChild(it);
}
}
}
}

//format the date a little
function getDate(when){
var data = when.split("-");
return new Date(data[0], data[1], data[2]);
}

//return int representation of season
function getSeason(d){
var month = d.getMonth();
var day = d.getDate();
var year = d.getFullYear();

var aug = new Date(year, 8, 25);
var nov = new Date(year, 11, 1);
var mar = new Date(year, 3, 1);
var may = new Date(year, 5, 25);

if(aug < d && d <= nov) return 0; //fall
else if(mar < d && d <= may) return 2; //spring
else if(may < d && d <= aug) return 3; //summer
else return 1; //winter
}

//figure out the current season
function isCurrSeason(now, d){
currSeason = getSeason(now);
season = getSeason(d);

if(currSeason == season){ //same season yes
if(now.getFullYear() == d.getFullYear()){ //same year also, match
return true;
}
if(season == 1 && (d.getFullYear() == now.getFullYear()-1)){ //diff year, prob winter
return true;
}
}
return false;
}

//return text for season
function getSeasonText(season){
if(season == 0) return "Fall Season";
if(season == 1) return "Winter Training";
if(season == 2) return "Spring Season";
if(season == 3) return "Summer Season";

return "no season"; //really shouldn't get here
}

//if the div is hidden show it, if not, hide it
function toggleDiv(where_id){
var div = document.getElementById('id' + where_id.id);
var img = document.getElementById(where_id.id);
if(div != null){
if(div.style.display != 'none'){
div.style.display = 'none';
img.src= 'http://timothy.broder.googlepages.com/p.jpg';

}
else{
div.style.display = 'block';
img.src= 'http://timothy.broder.googlepages.com/m.jpg';
}
}
}

//convert the location so it can be used in a link to google maps
function spaceLink(name){
return name.replace(' ', ',+');
}

//-->
</script>

<div id="races"><p>Loading...</p></div>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/rpicrew@gmail.com/public/full?alt=json-in-script&callback;=processRaces&orderby;=starttime&singleevents;=true&sortorder;=ascending&start-min;=2007-01-01T00:00:00"></script>


 
 
And the XML for the gadget

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Module>
<ModulePrefs title="RPI Crew Schedule"
title_url="https://gpowered.net"
author="Tim Broder"
height="150"
width="250"
author_email="timothy.broder@gmail.com"
thumbnail="http://timothy.broder.googlepages.com/RPICrewScheduleThumb.jpg"
description="RPI Crew Race Schedule, links to the RPICrew shared google calendar"
author_photo="http://timothy.broder.googlepages.com/timothybrodersimpsons.png"
author_location="NYC"
author_affiliation="gPowered"
author_link="http://www.gpowered.net"
screenshot="http://timothy.broder.googlepages.com/RPICrewScheduleScreen.jpg"
>
<Require feature="dynamic-height"/>
<Require feature="analytics"/>
</ModulePrefs>
<Content type="html"><![CDATA[


<script>
// Track this gadget using Google Analytics.
_IG_Analytics("UA-793489-6", "/RPICrewScheduleG");
</script>
<style type="text/css">
div.exp{
padding: 0;
margin: 0;
}
div.loc{
margin-left: 19px;
}
</style>
<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
/**
* Season info *
* 0 Fall: Aug 26 - Nov 1
* 1 Winter Training: Nov 2 - March 1
* 2 Spring: March 2 - May 25
* 3 Summer: May 26 - Aug 25
**/

/**
* Callback function for the GData json-in-script call
* Inserts the supplied list of events into a div of a pre-defined name
*
* @param {json} root is the JSON-formatted content from GData
*/
function processRaces(root) {
displayRaces(root.feed, 'races');
}

//meow
function displayRaces(feed, divId){
var now = new Date();
var season = getSeason(now);
var events = document.getElementById(divId);

//clear "Loading..."
if (events.childNodes.length > 0){
events.removeChild(events.childNodes[0]);
}

//display season
var d = document.createElement('div');
d.appendChild(document.createTextNode(getSeasonText(season)));
events.appendChild(d);

//loop races
for (var i=0; i<feed.entry.length; i++){
var entry = feed.entry[i];

var d = getDate(entry['gd$when'][0].startTime);
if(isCurrSeason(now, d)){
var title = entry.title.$t;
var desc = entry.content.$t;

//set up image and clicking to expand
var div = document.createElement('div');
div.className = 'exp';
var toggle = document.createElement('img');
toggle.src= 'http://timothy.broder.googlepages.com/p.jpg';
toggle.align = 'absmiddle';
toggle.id = i;
toggle.onclick = function() {toggleDiv(this); }
div.appendChild(toggle);
div.appendChild(document.createTextNode(' ' + d.getMonth() + "/" + d.getDay() + ' - '));

// get the href to link to the event
for(var j=0; j<entry['link'].length; j++){
if (entry['link'][j]['type'] == 'text/html' && entry['link'][j]['rel'] == 'alternate'){
var href = entry['link'][j]['href'];
}
}

//we can link to the cal
if (typeof href != 'undefined'){
var link = document.createElement('a');
link.href = href;
link.target = '_blank';
link.appendChild(document.createTextNode(title));
div.appendChild(link);
}
else{ //shouldn't get here but just in case
div.appendChild(document.createTextNode(title));
}

div.appendChild(document.createElement('br'));

events.appendChild(div);

var where = entry['gd$where'][0].valueString;
var tDiv = document.createElement('div'); //div that will be hidden initially
tDiv.id ='id' + i;
tDiv.style['display'] = 'none';
tDiv.className = 'loc';
events.appendChild(tDiv);

if(desc != null && desc != ""){ //we have a desc (should be the teams we're competing against)
var dDiv = document.createElement('span');
dDiv.appendChild(document.createTextNode(desc + " "));
tDiv.appendChild(dDiv);
}
//the location field is populated (hidden at start)
if(where != null && where != ""){ //we have a location
var it = document.createElement('i');
var map = document.createElement('a');
map.target = '_blank';
//link to location on google maps
map.href = 'http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl;=en&&q;=' + spaceLink(entry['gd$where'][0].valueString);
map.appendChild(document.createTextNode(entry['gd$where'][0].valueString));
it.appendChild(document.createTextNode(" ("));
it.appendChild(map);
it.appendChild(document.createTextNode(")"));
tDiv.appendChild(it);
}
}
}
}

//format the date a little
function getDate(when){
var data = when.split("-");
return new Date(data[0], data[1], data[2]);
}

//return int representation of season
function getSeason(d){
var month = d.getMonth();
var day = d.getDate();
var year = d.getFullYear();

var aug = new Date(year, 8, 25);
var nov = new Date(year, 11, 1);
var mar = new Date(year, 3, 1);
var may = new Date(year, 5, 25);

if(aug < d && d <= nov) return 0; //fall
else if(mar < d && d <= may) return 2; //spring
else if(may < d && d <= aug) return 3; //summer
else return 1; //winter
}

//figure out the current season
function isCurrSeason(now, d){
currSeason = getSeason(now);
season = getSeason(d);

if(currSeason == season){ //same season yes
if(now.getFullYear() == d.getFullYear()){ //same year also, match
return true;
}
if(season == 1 && (d.getFullYear() == now.getFullYear()-1)){ //diff year, prob winter
return true;
}
}
return false;
}

//return text for season
function getSeasonText(season){
if(season == 0) return "Fall Season";
if(season == 1) return "Winter Training";
if(season == 2) return "Spring Season";
if(season == 3) return "Summer Season";

return "no season"; //really shouldn't get here
}

//if the div is hidden show it, if not, hide it
function toggleDiv(where_id){
var div = document.getElementById('id' + where_id.id);
var img = document.getElementById(where_id.id);
if(div != null){
if(div.style.display != 'none'){
div.style.display = 'none';
img.src= 'http://timothy.broder.googlepages.com/p.jpg';

}
else{
div.style.display = 'block';
img.src= 'http://timothy.broder.googlepages.com/m.jpg';
}
}
}

//convert the location so it can be used in a link to google maps
function spaceLink(name){
return name.replace(' ', ',+');
}

//-->
</script>

<div id="races"><p>Loading...</p></div>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/rpicrew@gmail.com/public/full?alt=json-in-script&callback;=processRaces&orderby;=starttime&singleevents;=true&sortorder;=ascending&start-min;=2007-01-01T00:00:00"></script>




]]></Content>
</Module>
```

New Calendar API features

Fri, 03 Aug 2007 02:45:00 GMT

Google Calendar API posts new read and write features. They have added:

owncalendars: contains the collection of calendars that a user 'owns'
allcalendars: contains all the calendars that a user has access to

Useful for listing all your calendars if you manage a lot of them, or changing their settings all at once (both features have read and write capabilities)

domain!

Tue, 31 Jul 2007 01:31:00 GMT

The design and domain have been set up (actually I finished it a week or so ago but work's been keeping me pretty crazy). All my examples will be implemented on gPowered.net as well as a copy of theses posts. Enjoy.

Picasa Web Api updates

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 02:17:00 GMT

Google Data Api's posted a few updates today, a few of which I've really been looking forward to; Community Search, Retrieving a user's recently uploaded photos, Retrieving recently added comments for a particular user, Searching a user's photos, Filtering by tag, Uploading non-JPEG photos, Downloading the original photo.

(my fav) Downloading the original photo: You can now download the original photo, including all EXIF data. This is accomplished by retrieving the feed with the imgmax=d query parameter and value This will return a feed where the media:content elements reference the original downloadable image.

It's nice not having to use a backdoor for this anymore

HOWTO: post code

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 01:52:00 GMT

Posting code is made quite easy by using SyntaxHighlighter. It's pretty easy to set up and works on any html sites, as well as blogger and wordpress. I'll be using it heavily throughout these posts. 3 easy steps:

Include the SyntaxHighlighter.css file at the top of your page.

<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="/php/js/dp.SyntaxHighlighter/Styles/SyntaxHighlighter.css"></link>

At the bottom of the page, include the

brushes and other js files you will need, as well as the function call to stylize the <pre> tags:

```html
<script language="javascript" src="/php/js/dp.SyntaxHighlighter/Scripts/shCore.js"></script>
<script language="javascript" src="/php/js/dp.SyntaxHighlighter/Scripts/shBrushCSharp.js"></script>
<script language="javascript" src="/php/js/dp.SyntaxHighlighter/Scripts/shBrushXml.js"></script>
<script language="javascript" src="/php/js/dp.SyntaxHighlighter/Scripts/shBrushPython.js"></script>
<script language="javascript">
dp.SyntaxHighlighter.ClipboardSwf = '/flash/clipboard.swf';
dp.SyntaxHighlighter.HighlightAll('code');
</script>
```

Then, place the code you want in between these two steps using <pre>

tags that the javascript will stylize

```html
<pre name="code" class="html">
<!-- code here -->
</pre>
<pre name="code" class="python">
# code here
</pre>

HOWTO: Displaying Blogger feeds with Python

Thu, 19 Jul 2007 03:07:00 GMT

This first HOWTO is going to cover how I did the basic structure of the posts section of gPowered: pulling from blogger. The main functions we'll need are to show a range of posts, a single post, and a function to get the total number of posts that are in the blog. The reason I try to get the total number is so the different pages can be bookmarkable. When retrieving a GData feed from blogger. Entry 1 in the feed is going to be the newest post so there is no 'id' that is going to be static, so we'll do a little math to get a number we can later use as the id. I use Django to handle rendering the python to the browser. I probably won't get into other methods.

To start out you'll have to grab the following modules.

the gdata python client
ElementTree
mxDateTime (I used this for date formatting)

We then import the parts the we'll need (you can ignore the Django part for your own methods):

    from Django.shortcuts import render_to_response
    
    from gdata import service
    import gdata
    import atom
    import getopt
    import sys
    
    from mx import DateTime

One of the first things we're going to have to do is authenticate with google services. There are two ways to do this: AuthSub proxy authentication which has a user login using their own credentials, and ClientLogin username/password authentication where you send a username and password. We will be using ClientLogin. First off, set your login credentials to use later.

    #login info
    user = 'timothy.broder@gmail.com'
    password = '********'

Then we start setting up our call to the service.

    #set up service
    blogger_service = service.GDataService(user, password)
    blogger_service.source = 'gpowered'
    blogger_service.service = 'blogger'
    blogger_service.server = 'www.blogger.com'
    blogger_service.ProgrammaticLogin()

For more info see the blogger developer's guide with python or the Google Account Authentication documentation

After we have authenticated with Google we need to start building up our query to GData, which will return as an ElementTree of data. The first thing you'll need is your blog's id.

You can use the function in the dev guide to help you with this if you don't already know it.

    def PrintUserBlogTitles(blogger_service):
      query = service.Query()
      query.feed = '/feeds/default/blogs'
      feed = blogger_service.Get(query.ToUri())
    
      print feed.title.text
      for entry in feed.entry:
        print "\t" + entry.title.text

After you have the blog id we can start working on the query

    blog_id = 413573351281770670
    feed_url = '/feeds/%s/posts/default' % str(blog_id)
    query = service.Query()
    query.feed = feed_url

The below function returns the total number of posts that are in the feed. We can get a small response by sending 0 for the max results. Below is the function and the small response we get from it.

    #get the total number of posts for this feed
    def get_total(query):
     #query for no posts
     query.max_results = '0'
     query.start_index = '1'
     
     #get back entryless feed
     feed = blogger_service.Get(query.ToUri()) 
     return int(feed.total_results.text)

    <ns0:feed xmlns:ns0="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
     <ns1:totalresults xmlns:ns1="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearchrss/1.0/">1</ns1:totalresults>
     <ns1:itemsperpage xmlns:ns1="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearchrss/1.0/">0</ns1:itemsperpage>
     <ns1:startindex xmlns:ns1="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearchrss/1.0/">1</ns1:startindex>
     <ns0:generator version="7.00" uri="http://www.blogger.com">Blogger</ns0:generator>
     <ns0:author><ns0:name>Tim</ns0:name></ns0:author>
     <ns0:id>tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-413573351281770670</ns0:id>
     <ns0:link href="https://gpowered.blogspot.com/" type="text/html" rel="alternate"></ns0:link>
     <ns0:link href="https://gpowered.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default" type="application/atom+xml" rel="http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#feed"></ns0:link>
     <ns0:link href="http://www.blogger.com/feeds/413573351281770670/posts/default?max-results=0" type="application/atom+xml" rel="self"></ns0:link>
     <ns0:link href="http://www.blogger.com/feeds/413573351281770670/posts/default" type="application/atom+xml" rel="http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#post"></ns0:link>
     <ns0:title type="text">gPowered</ns0:title>
     <ns0:updated>2007-07-18T10:55:06.728-05:00</ns0:updated>
    </ns0:feed>

    #show latest posts
    def Posts(request):
     return ListPosts(request, total_posts)
    
    #show posts starting from a certain point 
    def ListPosts(request, start):
     start = total_posts - int(start) + 1
     return PostFrom(request, start, show_num)
    
    #show a single post
    def Post(request, start):
     start = total_posts - int(start) + 1
     return PostFrom(request, start, 1)
     
    def PostFrom(request, start, count):
     #query for count number of posts starting at the given post
     query.max_results = str(count)
     query.start_index = str(start)
     feed = blogger_service.Get(query.ToUri())

Now we have all the data we need in the feed variable. Its been turned into an element tree so we don't have to worry about XML parsing here. Every node has become an objects and lists. Objects for single nodes(title), and lists for where there are multiple nodes of the same name (entry, link) At this stage I play with the data a little so it's easier to use in my Django template.

     #normalize data for output
     for entry in feed.entry:
      #get link for template
      entry.my_link = entry.link[0].href
      
      #id for links
      entry.my_id = curr_id
      curr_id -= 1
      
      #format published date
      dt = DateTime.ISO.ParseDateTimeUTC(entry.published.text)
      entry.my_date = dt.strftime('%m/%d/%Y')
      entry.my_time = dt.strftime('%I:%M %p')

     prev = total_posts - (start - count) + 1
     if prev > total_posts:
      prev = None
      
      
     next = total_posts - (start + count) + 1
     if next < 1:
      next = None
     
     #showing single post 
     if count == 1:
      link = 'post'
      title = feed.entry[0].title.text
     #listing posts
     else:
      link = 'posts'
      title = 'home'

The final part of the function is a return to the Django framework to populate my template. I'm going to get into the template more in the next post, but you now have all the information you need stored.

     return render_to_response('posts/index.html', {
      'entries': feed.entry,
      'title': title,
      'tag_link': tag_link, 
      'prev': prev,
      'next': next,  
      'link': link,
      'tab_home': True,
      })

To the template!

The first part consists of displaying the post itself, along with its relevant information

    {% verbatim %}
{% for entry in entries %}
    
      <h2><a href="/post/{{ entry.my_id }}">{{ entry.title.text }}</h2></a>
      {{ entry.content.text }}
      <p>Posted by {% for auth in entry.author %}{{ auth.name.text }}{% if not forloop.last %}, {% endif %}{% endfor %} 
      on {{ entry.my_date }} at {{ entry.my_time }}</p>
      {% if entry.category %}<p>Labels: {% for cat in entry.category %}
       <a href="{{ tag_link }}{{ cat.term }}">{{ cat.term }}</a>
       {% if not forloop.last %}, {% endif %}
       {% endfor %}</p>{% endif %}<p><a href="{{ entry.my_link }}">More...</a></p>
       
    {% endfor %}
    {% endverbatim %}

And the second part handles the prev and next links

    {% verbatim %}
    <br></br>
    <div class="nav">
    {% if prev %}
    <a href="/{{ link }}/{{ prev }}">prev</a>
    {% else %}
        
    {% endif %}
        
    {% if next %}
    <a href="/{{ link }}/{{ next }}">next</a>
    {% else %}
        
    {% endif %}
    </div>
    {% include 'bottom.html' %}
    {% endverbatim %}

That's all for now. A working example is the gPowered.net site I'm putting up. All posts on there are getting pulled from this blog. I'm going to get into tags and comments next time, as well as javascript and php versions. Stay tuned!

A begining

Sun, 15 Jul 2007 18:33:00 GMT

I've been meaning to start this project for a while now so here it goes...

Part of my daily routine is reading a couple of comics including Calvin and Hobbes, Dilbert, Foxtrot, Garfield, xkcd, vgcats, and The Watering Hole. Following the quick comic catch up I'll look through some various project blogs including Ampache, django, YUI, and facebook. But the highlight of my reading has always been what Google is up to. On this front my favorite blogs have been Google Operating System, Googlefied, and Google Blogoscoped. They keep me up to date on what Google is doing technically and in the business world. When new api's come out I try to take a look at their documentation and see what they can do. I'll also scan over Google's official blogs to see if I've missed anything for the day.

So I guess now I have to get to the point of this project. With a little inspiration from CanGoogleHearMe? I envision a website, starting out as a personal homepage, that is entirely powered by Google; All the data stored somehow in a Google service. I'm going to chronicle my journey of creating news, updates, photos, links, a profile, and anything else you would want to see in a personal page, all Google powered. Then later I also want to extend the tutorials to integrating Google with the Facebook platform. The languages I hope to cover are python, JavaScript, and PHP. I would also like to touch on Java if I can.

I also will post some updates from Google themselves, but seeing that there are already popular sites that do that, those updates won't be the focal point of this blog. Without further adieu, let the tutorials commence!

Edit: Domain is live!