August 2011
1 post
3 tags
Social Nerds Track Twitter Followers with github
Update: Be sure to check the updated source code. I wasn’t accounting for the paging mechanism in the Twitter API for followers. The old code won’t work with over 100 followers.
Recently, I logged into Github to find a notification for a new mention. When I went to check it out, I found that I was mentioned because someone was logging all of their tweets with Github.
Being as...
June 2011
1 post
2 tags
May 2011
5 posts
5 tags
So... here's what I did tonight
http://instaplac.es - Instaplaces is a tool for finding cool things around you that you may have never knew existed. By using your phone’s GPS or your computer’s location, I’ve listed below the places near you where people are taking pictures most frequently using the popular Instagram app.
I was playing around with Instagram and noticed that there were locations for each...
1 tag
Live-Blogging the Rapture
Nothing yet
9:43am - still nothing
6:23pm - still nothing
1 tag
5 tags
An Update on Self Compete
I thought I was due for an update on Self Compete. This is almost a personal blog post, which (for me at least) is pretty strange. Luckily, it is a personal post hidden within a status update on something that may actually interest you so it doesn’t get sappy or anything obnoxious like that!
Self Compete has come pretty far. The app functions well, with a few quirks, and the design is...
4 tags
April 2011
4 posts
3 tags
4 tags
Seriously, Use LaunchRock
Seriously, if you are building any kind of web application, you should be using LaunchRock. LaunchRock is a service that creates a viral “Coming Soon” page that you can use to collect potential users. Sounds simple, right? Too simple? Actually… yeah. But the return on investment is just huge. Let me explain how it worked for me.
The Need
I had gotten to a point in building Self...
4 tags
How MealSnap Works
If you’ve used DailyBurn’s new app, MealSnap, you’ve probably been mystified wondering how it works. MealSnap is an app that lets its user take a picture of the food they’re eating and, based on that image, will provide calorie information for that food.
I’ve used app for about 6-7 meals now and I’ve been pretty amazed at the accuracy. So much so that I had to...
5 tags
What is Self Compete?
On the road here, to search for the new headquarters of Self Compete in beautiful Raleigh-Durham. Well, not exactly… I am on the road, headed toward Raleigh-Durham (which is beautiful), and Self Compete is a thing but it’s not a thing that’s ready for a headquarters. So… what exactly is Self Compete? Self Compete is my entry into the wonderful world of web applications. The idea started as a...
March 2011
0 posts
2 tags
Convert Time to a Fraction
If you come across the need to store time as a float in ruby (I won’t judge you), you can use this bit of code. It assumes that each subpart of the time string is 60 parts of the previous part. This works for hours, minutes and seconds, regardless of how it is entered, and will always use the first part as the base measurement.
j = 0
timer = 0
"12:40:30".split(':').each do |y|
...
January 2011
2 posts
3 tags
Quickly Add Album Art to iTunes
If you’re obsessive about your iTunes collection, you may never get to this point. I, however, have left my library unattended to for quite some time and have found a few too many albums without artwork for my liking. I’d like to clean it up a bit and, as far as I’m concerned, necessity AND laziness are the mothers of invention.
First, I created a Smart Playlist to find all of...
6 tags
A Very Brief Introduction to bing-location
Over the weekend, I finally published my Ruby Gem bing-location. There isn’t much to it yet, but it is easily forked from the github repository and I encourage contribution!
Here’s a bit from the documentation:
This class is a wrapper for the Bing Maps API that makes it easy to get more information about a location or create maps.
Currently the class is built for dealing with one...
November 2010
2 posts
4 tags
SQLite3::SQLException: table already exists
Another installation of “Things that you can’t really find on Google!”
When using rake db:migrate you may run into a problem if you have previously created a table in a migration and have not done a proper down migration. In my case, I completely forgot to do a migration between doing a `rails destroy scaffold` and recreating the scaffold with new properties.
Doing so, caused...
4 tags
Rails Attribute Types
When you generate a model or scaffold in Rails, you can specify attributes along with their type. Using typed attributes is an incredibly useful tool in rails generator because it will generate the appropriate field types in your database and html in your views.
Example:
$ rails generate scaffold Post name:string title:string content:text
More accurately, these are the types supported by...
October 2010
1 post
2 tags
Whoops: Quit Chrome With Tabs Open
I do this so frequently lately. But luckily this time, I realized that Cmd + Shift + t (which regularly performs an “Undo last tab close” action) will bring back your previously opened tabs if you inadvertently quit Chrome :)
September 2010
4 posts
2 tags
Hotels.com Has a Skewed View of "Once a Week"
I noticed that hotels.com had become one of the more prevalent spammers of my inbox as of late, so I finally made the effort to unsubscribe from their mailing list. I was disturbed to find the frequency setting to be listed as “about once a week”.
They must use “about” very loosely around the hotels.com office because I’ve received at least 3 emails a week,...
3 tags
6 tags
Mute Mac OSX from Smartphone (More Simply)
Don’t forget to Follow Me on Twitter
Thanks to some of the great comments I’ve received on the last post, I’ve found ways to simplify the setup and enhance the presentation of the Mute OSX script. I’ve even written the script for you this time around!
Install the script
Head on over to this link on github and download mute.php. All you need to do is place this file in...
5 tags
Mute Mac OSX from iPhone
Don’t forget to Follow Me on Twitter
Countless nights, I would be laying in bed when my iMac would announce “It’s 11 o’ clock” from one room over. I had been listening to music or watching some video and left my volume up. Now, I was forced to either walk to the other room to turn it down or deal with Adium chimes and time announcements all night while trying...
August 2010
2 posts
2 tags
Multithreading in Ruby Like a Champ
Multithreading is a great tool when you know how to use it. For a recent project, I had to download hundreds of web pages. To speed the process up, I set the page download process up to start a new thread. The only problem with this is that opening hundreds of connections at the same time would cause server errors and I would get blank pages. My solution, which you’ll find below, was to only...
4 tags
June 2010
2 posts
6 tags
The AT&T iPhone 4 Upgrade Process...
Upgrading to iPhone 4 through AT&T’s website is an absolute mess right now. It is all kinds of screwed up, with frequent gateway timeouts, pages routing you to the beginning of the process, inability to move forward and general slowness.
But this one takes the cake. I just got this message in my “Message Center” inbox. This message has information that is, what, a year old...
4 tags
Check to see if a domain name is available (ruby)
# Check to see if a domain is available (unregistered)
def available?(domain_name)
# Use Net::DNS library via ruby gems
require 'rubygems'
require 'net/dns/resolver'
res = Net::DNS::Resolver.new
# Use Google public DNS for speed
res.nameservers = ["8.8.8.8","8.8.4.4"]
res.udp_timeout=(60)
packet = res.search(domain_name, Net::DNS::NS)
# Check for domains packets with Answers
#...
May 2010
3 posts
2 tags
There must be an easier way..
.. to create multidimensional arrays in ruby.
Here’s the only solution I found that works the way I expected it to. This solution works but I have no clue as to how. So, I’m assuming there is an easier, more intuitive, way of doing it and I am asking you for your help.
hash_lambda = lambda { Hash.new {|h,k| h[k] = hash_lambda.call } } teamOfficial = hash_lambda[]
...
1 tag
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Thunderbird - Incoming Server Already Exists...
David from Seattle wrote a nice followup to the Thunderbird Incoming Server Already Exists article in the comments section. In his followup, David explains how to fix the same issue on a Windows machine.
So without any further delay, here is how to fix the “Incoming Server Already Exists” bug in Thunderbird for Windows. I think David has really nailed the root of the issue. Maybe one...
April 2010
1 post
4 tags
Finding an Apartment with Craigslist
Finding an apartment with Craigslist can be a pain, but I’ve found a way to make it a little easier on myself this time around. Google Reader.
If you don’t already use Google Reader, it is an RSS feed aggregator, which takes all of the update streams from your favorite sites and manages them in an easy to navigate list. With Google Reader, you can keep track of items that you have...
March 2010
3 posts
5 tags
Font Used on MTA NYC Subway Map
I was looking to recreate the look and feel of a NYC subway map for a project I’m currently working on when I realized that I couldn’t figure out what font the MTA uses for city names. I checked the commonly used standards, Arial, Helvetica, Verdana, but couldn’t find one that lined up good enough. The “M” in Manhattan is bent inward, a characteristic not found in any...
2 tags
Oh, The Places You'll Go (With GPS)!
I just read a really cool article about how Americans use their GPS navigation devices. I may be really geeky for liking this article, but this data says a lot about how humans act and how data is aggregated.
The article summarizes data released by TeleNav this week of the most common activity of users of their GPS devices.
Here are the top five places, so you don’t have to read the entire...
5 tags
Changing my iPhone email signature
To:
Sent from my iPad nano
February 2010
10 posts
4 tags
1 tag
I Do That Too
REBLOG IF you used to hide in the circular clothing racks when your mom was shopping
(via idothattoo)
5 tags
Highlight Text As You Type [JavaScript]
I wrote this technique to highlight text on a webpage as you type. It is a little clunky, but may get you off on the right foot. Sorry it isn’t tabbed properly. Tumblr is not the best for posting code.
Basically: You have a form that, onKeyUp(), runs a function to change the style of text that matches text in the form field. The one problem is that it doesn’t ignore html, so it may...
6 tags
Cake is NOT able to connect to the database (OSX)
It took me way too long to debug this error, so I’ll post it here so other developers can Google it and save some time.
If you’re using CakePHP on Mac OS X, and you’ve gotten everything set up but still get the error “Cake is NOT able to connect to the database,” this may be the solution to your problem.
Check app/config/database.php for typos
Try to connect to the...
7 tags
Ruining The Illusion
I was watching the music video for Ted Leo’s “Me & Mia,” when I got curious as to where the video was shot. I had just gotten back from a trip to New York City and my fascination with the immense amount of stories in the city grows every day. The fun part of these stories, however, is to be able to stand somewhere and say… “hey, isn’t this where that thing...
2 tags
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Surviving The Blizzard Without Electricity
This weekend, I learned the hard way exactly how ill-equipped I was to survive during a prolonged power outage. Much of the mid-Atlantic United States was blasted with two feet of snow in less than 24 hours on Friday, causing many homes to lose power. There were over 80,000 homes in the Pittsburgh area alone that lost power as a result of the blizzard.
Washington D.C. went absolutely nuts in...
3 tags
January 2010
8 posts
4 tags
1 tag
3 tags
Thunderbird - Incoming Server Already Exists
Don’t forget to Follow Me on Twitter
If you remove an e-mail account from Thunderbird, you may have trouble if you decide to re-add it later.
Because Thunderbird saves e-mail accounts in a very inefficient way, if you don’t do a proper uninstall, it will still think that your accounts exist when you try to add them again. Thunderbird will complain “Incoming Server Already...
5 tags
Vegetarian Week Reflection
This week, as part of my New Years Resolution, I (almost) ate a completely vegetarian diet. This post is my reflection of how it went.
First and most important, I have to say that I rarely ‘missed’ meat. The world of vegetables is a lot more varied than the world of meat and I had plenty of options open to me, even though I didn’t take advantage of as much this time around. The dietary...
3 tags
3 tags
The iPhone could not be restored. An unknown error...
Got this error when restoring my iPhone today. Did a little research and came across this blog post. This person was having the same problem and determined it to be caused by his USB hub. I realized that I had a USB extension cord between the iPhone and my computer. Removed the extension and plugged in closer to the machine and the error disappeared.
Strange, but I believe these two cases...
3 tags
Enable Emoticons on iPhone
Enabling emoticons on iPhone allows you to use them in messages to other iPhone users, whether they have enabled the emoticon keyboard or not. I’m pretty much going to steal this post from Appmodo. It’s not like I have a large audience, but I feel the people I do reach would like this information.
To enable emoticons on your iPhone keyboard you have to activate the Emoji international...
4 tags
Enable Favicons in Google Reader
Just found this setting in Google Reader that allows you to show the favicon next to your subscriptions.
Not sure when this was added. But it seems to have been done so quietly, because I’d have definitely turned it on by now if I had known. It really makes it easier to pick out feeds.