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by justin on 22/07/08
I decided I wanted a tablet PC to hang on my wall and display a Google calendar, and perhaps a few other custom pages I would write that could interface to a gallery app, etc. Requirements were: Thin and runs a browser, and not much else. I found some tablets on Ebay that looked like they might work. The idea is simple, a website will handle multi-user calendars, allowing friends and family to submit events to my calendar via sms, email, or a web page. The touch panel which would be on the wall in my kitchen would display my calendar and reminders, so I can throw away my paper calendar and stop writing things down everywhere.
But look at this on TechCrunch. Sweet Jesus. It's almost like they read my mind.
by justin on 21/07/08
So you're standing in line at big box retail, and they want to sell you these high quality cables, they're called HDMI and the sales person seems to insist that they're the best for the TV you've purchased. What do you do? Tell them no thanks, tell them you're not spending $30 - $140 for a $5 cable. Go home with your TV and buy your HDMI cables from monoprice.com instead. They're great cables and there is no difference in picture quality. HDMI cables carry digital content, 1s and 0s, and they either get to their destination or they don't, there's no "better", there's no fancier way to say 1 or 0. Anyone that tells you any different is a fool or trying to sell you something you don't need.
by justin on 21/07/08
I closed on my house on the 15th in the evening. Steve Hill was my Realtor and he was wonderful. I would recommend him to anyone looking to buy or sell a home, he really made the process easy on me, even when there were delays from the sellers, etc. Steve if you read this, thanks again!
by justin on 06/06/08
 I just hit the upload button on Flickr Uploader, they'll take awhile because there are a lot of them. Some of these pictures my friend Matt took, especially the ones I'm actually in. Can you find my least favorite picture? Matt's good at bad candids ha ha. No really, I had fun that day, was neat seeing so many people showing up with their various meats. This kind of stuff makes me smirk, do you think the PETA organizers realize they actually caused more beef and pork to be consumed that day?
I watched Fox news that night, they had about 2 minutes of coverage. Connie Randi was there , she was explaining their goal for the event. Quote: "We figured if we put it with a person, they would understand it, they could see that, they don't understand meat being wrapped but maybe they'd understand with a person.". Look lady, I've been on the slaughter floor, I know it's flesh, I know it's delicious. I'm pretty sure everyone everywhere understands where meat comes from. I've watched the hides come off, they slice up real nice.
Anyways, here are the photos.
by justin on 05/06/08
Since I'm an Iowa farm boy at heart, I will never understand why anyone wouldn't want to have some delicious beef or pork.
I could not pass up the opportunity to see a "Naked PETA Protest". My buddy Matt and I went downtown around 3pm for lunch. I had my delectable Arby's Big Roast Beef sandwich while I was there. It was even tastier than I remembered them being. There were several others that had the same idea, some were wearing their burger king hats.
I'll post the rest of the pictures later tonight but here's the fun shots.
by justin on 27/05/08
May 27th, 2008 and my GSoC student just checked in, he's working on his environment and researching the different mapping APIs along with some PHP examples and JavaScript.
Everything is "right on schedule".
by justin on 22/05/08
After my phone washing, I took out the battery and ran a hair dryer on it for a few hours. It didn't want to work at all, so I put it away and planned on getting a new one. I found one of my spare batteries and put it in, hooked up the charger, and BINGO, phone came back to life, though a little less than perfect. I can't make calls ( I can receive and hear but not talk ), but data works, and most importantly, my contacts were safe!
So, if you're trying to call and I don't answer you know why, it rings and I don't pick up.
I'm really amazed at the PPC-6700 and it's durability. It's been dropped, run over and dismantled, washed in a washing machine, dried for a bit, and still functions to some degree.
by justin on 14/05/08
Just got an email from the twitter folks, they've activated the source tag for my Geeklog plugin, so this is a test. I need to wrap it up and make it available for download this week, but I've had 0 free time.
by justin on 12/05/08
 When I got home from work I found my PPC-6700 to be dead. It seems it was a drowning victim, forgotten in a sea of pants put through a spin cycle by my oh so helpful girlfriend. It's so dead it won't even flicker on anymore. I have it sitting in a box with a hair dryer on it as I write this, but I don't think there is any saving it. 130 or so contacts lost, that's the real kick in the pants. Just a note: Sprint doesn't offer "contacts backup" services like some other carriers, or so I was told about a couple months ago when my phone was run over on the highway and survived somehow.
So I guess I'm stuck, I hate the PPC-6800, the "Mogul", basically every other phone sprint offers, I hate. I am not an iPhone fan, and Sony's uber-bar isn't out yet. I think I'll cut my services back to basic no-data and buy a cheap "phone phone" for now.
by justin on 10/05/08
 Both Twitter and TinyURL are very easy to talk to using PHP. I've tossed together a few quick PHP examples to demonstrate the basics of connecting to twitter and posting tweets. TinyURL's API is actually just a HTTP GET. Combining the two makes a great way to attach script monitors to services, rss feeds, blog postings, etc.
by justin on 09/05/08
Ryan Block over at Engadget has decided to do 30 days of Wii Fit, 7 days a week for 20 minutes a day. I wonder if he'll see any results. I would guess not a lot, since he's not what I would call "a huge fatty" by any means. I'm guessing someone that weighed 250+ with a mostly sedentary lifestyle might be surprised by the improvement and have fun doing it.
Read the full story here.
by justin on 09/05/08
If you're running the latest stable Geeklog and find your RSS feeds are not working for Portal Blocks, you may need to make a one-line fix until the next release. If you see a message that states "There was a problem reading this feed (see error.log for details)" and your log looks like this:
<timestamp> - Unable to aquire feed reader for <url>
<timestamp> - HTTP Fetch Failed _decodeGzip(): data CRC check failed
Then you can change one line in system/pear/HTTP/Request.php to fix it.
by justin on 09/05/08
 You've all seen the "Something is technically wrong" and HTTP 500 statuses while on Twitter. There are (some strong) arguments from both sides around the scalability of RoR. I have yet to do anything with Ruby, on Rails or otherwise so I can't really comment for or against it. TechCrunch apparently can however, and they've posted an article about Twitter l taking their site off Rails, with Java, PHP, and Ruby without Rails as possible replacements.
Read the full story here: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/01/twitter-said-to-be-abandoning-ruby-on-rails/
Read Evan's response here: http://twitter.com/ev/statuses/801530348
by justin on 07/05/08
I've got my Twitter Geeklog plugin called Tweet installed on my site for testing. I should have it packaged and released this week.
If you're following me you will know when it's ready as it will tweet itself as released.
Initially it will just twitter your new stories as you submit them.
Right now it just sends me mail whenever I save a new story, seems to work pretty well.
by justin on 07/05/08
Mootools 1.2 will allow you to optionally package a Swiff utility, which makes it easy to communicate with a flash .swf movie using JavaScript. If you read my other entry about SWFUpload and liked the idea, you'll definitely want to take note of FancyUpload as well.
Mootools is currently in 1.2 beta 2, you can go download it now.
by justin on 06/05/08
Finally! He has the signed offer and I can go pick up my copy and get my rate locked. I guess this makes me a homeowner. Not quite yet, but soon. (July 15th is closing).
by justin on 06/05/08
Turns out my domain had expired, I guess I got it renewed before someone sniped it.
by justin on 06/05/08
It seems that safe_mode will continue to make some things downright painful.
I'm working up a test script to explain this better and test the environments I am forced to work with.
Here are some more similar yet different details:
http://forums.devshed.com/php-development-5/mkdir-possible-under-safe-mode-78005.html
http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=33639
Related? http://www.titov.net/safemodepatch/
It may be that all I need is for safe_mode_gid to be enabled in the php.ini
I don't have access to the environment in question to see if it's already on/off or if the admin will even enable it. This is all fallout from PCI Compliance requirements.
by justin on 06/05/08
It looks as though Flickr is using either Lars Huring's SWFUpload (local demo)(download) or a very similar flash upload tool. I have not looked at it on my Linux box, or a Mac, only Firefox 2.x on windows. and IE6 on Windows. SWFUpload is an exceptional example of flash doing something better than standard HTML can. Yes I'm a fanboy. If you have not looked at it please do so! I will be continuing my testing with it in the next few weeks for a couple of my projects both personal and work related.
Side note: If I ever get around to writing my file management plugin for GL2, or Geeklog 1.4+ I believe it will make use of SWFUpload. I need more time in a day and longer weekends.
by justin on 06/05/08
 I've been waiting years for this point of my life. I've done my homework, saved money for a down payment, worked up proper credit scores, all the things I knew I needed to do. The housing market is perfect, the feds cut rates last week for what is believed to be the last time for awhile. So I decided it was time, time to purchase.
I knew what I wanted in my "first home". At least 3 bedrooms, 2 baths, 2 car garage, a real yard, and a decent sized basement. My ultimate wish was for a shop to work on cars and do some woodworking but since I also wanted to live in town I figured that was not going to be feasible.
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