Jun 23, 2008
In the last 3 months I have put on almost 1.5 stone. It is time to knuckle down and do something about it. Being a geek, the best way I know to do this properly is to build a webapp to help me track my progress. I have been working on a small app called TWEET MY WEIGHT. The system works by signing up for an account on the website www.tweetmyweight.com and entering in your details including your twitter name. Once you are signed up, each time you weigh yourself you can tweet the results to @myweight and TMW will scrape this information and build a sexy graph enabling you to track your progress. The graph is available via the website or as a small widget you can post on any website or social network. The basic system is built and working but before launch I am hoping to add more features, such as:
- Weekly progress reports sent to you via Twitter.
- Reminders if you stop reporting progress via Twitter.
- A leader board tracking the most successful users.
Hopefully I should have a beta open and available for registrations in a few weeks. Watch this space.
Update: Funnily enough someone sent me a link to a blog entry posted on Lifehacker today. It seems someone has already discovered Twitter can help dieters. Hopefully TMW should help people just like this as (I hope) it will me. Bye bye belly…
Jun 6, 2008
I wanted to take a moment to praise a new desktop product that has really changed the way I work. Dropbox is a desktop application that interfaces with an online storage service of the same name. It enables you to have a folder on your machine that is constantly in sync with the copy online, and any other machines you have the software installed on. I stumbled on a really useful way of using the service. I created a ‘web’ folder inside the Dropbox folder and moved all my website projects into that. I then opened up MAMP which I use to run a local copy of Apache and mySQL and told it to use this new folder as its default web root. I did the same on my work machine and my laptop. Dropbox syncs the files and folders, which means I can be confident that whatever machine I sit down at to work, I always have the latest versions of all the files ready and running locally. Great!
On top of that, by digging a little deeper you’ll find that the Dropbox web interface gives you extensive versioning information on all your data, letting you restore deleted files and roll back to previous versions. I recently deleted an entire folder of work, which after a few minutes of panicking I realised Dropbox could restore for me at the click of a button. For someone that can’t be bothered to get to grips with a full Subversion system this is a fantastic alternative. Currently the beta service allows you 5GB of storage. I thoroughly recommend it.
Jun 5, 2008
Sofa so good! A couple of mac software developers in my opinon are well ahead of the curve when it comes to usability and interface design. Panic, Sofa and Delicious Monster make the kind of software that is so good looking, you actually feel sexier when using it. One application I have been waiting for desperately is Sofa’s Versions. This new application is a Subversion client built for the rest of us. The perfect partner for online repositories like Beanstalk, or my personal choice Springloops. I have just installed the new beta, and I have to say, if works even half as well as it looks, then we are all onto a winner!
Update: I have had problems using Versions with Springloops as they use https:// connections for security. The kind people at Springloops suggest this fix.
Turns out that versions is using the command line svn client to communicate with repositories. So you need to mark the SSL certificate as trusted in the command line client and then versions will work automatically. To do that, fire up a terminal window and just list the contents of your repository:
svn list https://xxxxx.springloops.com/source/xxxxxxx
That should work on Leopard, but if you are on Tiger you’ll need to install the SVN client manually. Check out this handy blog post for more information on how to do that.
May 30, 2008
After what seems like the longest 30 days in history, payday finally arrives. Some important items on my ever growing to-do list have been stuck, waiting for this cash injection. Firstly, I bought some new halogen bulbs to replace the ones in my flat, which has over the past 6 months increasingly started to resemble a cave as bulbs die slow deaths. Before I could purchase them I had to start a new eBay account. My last (dating back to 96 when I opened it) was blocked, taking with it the 176 positive feedbacks I had worked hard to collect. Gutted. That will teach me to order 5 Godzilla DVDs from Hong Kong before checking I had sufficient funds. Ouch. Secondly was finally ditching Bulldog as my broadband supplier. I have paid off the outstanding amount and initiated a transfer of the line back to BT. The second that transfer is finished I will be ordering the Pro service from Be Internet. 25mb down, 2.5mb up, unlimited usage and a static IP address. All for just £22 a month. That is a bargain in anybodies book! If anyone is considering Bulldog, let me just jump in and say… don’t.
May 28, 2008
If last summer was the summer of love, this summer is most definitely the summer of hard work. With gigs coming in thick and fast and fabric’s workload getting more and more intense it really is a case of heads down and eyes forward. Typically this was the time my trust G5 Powermac decided to go to that big macstore in the sky. After making a strange clicking sound for a while began randomly resetting, and then finally decided to not boot at all. I could probably get it fixed, but after almost 4 years of being my main workhorse I have decided to hang up my dancing shoes for a while and save to buy a new iMac 24″ Aluminium 3.6 Ghz and Drobo storage robot. I will then be using my 23″ Cinema display as a second screen, perfect for both development work and video editing. The totaliser currently stands at around £40… quite a long way to go, but I should be there in a couple of months.
Work on the new fabric website is underway. The new design has been approved and I have finished the R&D and server side engineering. The new site will run atop Media Temple’s new Nitro platform on a modest server boasting a Quad Core Xeon E5345 2.33 Ghz, 8 GB Fully Buffered (DDR-2) RAM on 2x 300GB SAS disks (15,000 RPM). That should ensure the new site runs like proverbial shit off a shovel. I have chosen to build the site using the rather lovely Codeigniter PHP framework. My PHP knowledge has come on leaps and bounds in the last year, and with the help of Codeigniter I will finally be using a proper MVC coding practice. Version control will be done with SVN via Springloops. Springloops is a fantastic web-app which manages version control, deployment and rollbacks. I highly recommend it. Javascript will of course be handled with Jquery.
I plan on documenting the process of building the new website via this blog, although final designs will stay a closely guarded secret until launch.
