I’ve completed work on the pdf wallet generator and put up some notes on the work under projects.
Category Archives: Hacks
This week in review
So much happened this week, without even getting into the tornado that hit Bay Ridge.
On Saturday I met with my ex-neighbor Gina Mauro – she needs a better website for her art. I think Sam and I should be able to provide one. The big part of the project is taking her requirements and picking a Content Management System off the shelf that she can use. I was playing around with Drupal and Mambo, but I think she basically just needs a styled and themed version of Gallery2, plus a contact and about page. That’s it. My biggest worry is making sure that I don’t underestimate the work involved.
Started learning to use VIM again on Monday. I just think I can get more done with it. I need to get better at it. So I’ve started trying to use it for all my basic text editing needs. Within one week of use, I’m getting pretty decent at using VIM. It seems like it encourages you to write text like a programmer, thinking about how to minimize steps as you take them.
Sent out an improved ipc batch script to my coworkers and introduced them to the wonders of autohotkey. No one really seems all that enthused by the possibility of saving some time, but we’ll see if a little prodding helps it catch on. Next week I may tell them about launchy!
The big news is that I managed to reform Ryan Stewart’s PDF Wallet into a class and an edited version of ezpdf. I’ve got the first wallet from this new page in my pocket right now and I’ll be working to migrate Ryan’s stuff with him this weekend. Most of the work was done on the subway to and from my job. All of the work was done in Vim. More on that next week!
Next week I plan to put more effort into getting Gina an estimate for her website and then trying to knock it out in my spare time.
No progress on Spanish. I haven’t given up on it yet, but if I don’t do some more learning, I’ll start forgetting.
Sam and I took out the stitches in my foot together. I’m walking fine and everything seems to be working.
Next week I plan to put more effort into getting Gina an estimate for her website and then trying to knock it out in my spare time.
Work next week should be much quieter, one of the louder folks here has gone on to a new job. I wish him luck and more happiness!
Paper Wallet Generator
I was very excited to see Ryan Stewart’s paper wallet pdf generator a while ago. Excited, but frustrated. It was good, but had some flaws. I got in contact with Ryan, and he invited me to help out with fixing the problems.
Some of the issues are in the underlying ezpdf code for PHP, so I thought I’d go over them. Ezpdf and the pdf class underlying it have some bugs with handling rotated text, which I think I’ve fixed. It’s rough, but I’ll be putting it up soon, and then I’ll submit the changes to R&OS for inclusion into ezpdf.
Should be going up sometime this week.
pV=nRT
The Ideal Gas Law.
Pressure and volume are inversely related. Temperature is related to both. This means that the more stuff you have, you either are putting it in a bigger space or putting it under greater pressure. This is why rockets, guns, cars and jets work. If you increase the pressure on your stuff but don’t change the volume, you are going to see an increase in temperature. This is why pressure cookers work.
I really enjoy Manhattan Special. It is carbonated, sweetened coffee and it tastes heavenly. Though it is called Manhattan Special, it’s very hard to find in Manhattan and very easy to find in Brooklyn. I recommend it highly, except for one caveat. When you buy a warm bottle of Manhattan Special, do not, however much you want to, drink it. Stick it in the fridge. Let it cool. Because the Ideal Gas Law applies very heavily to Manhattan Special. If you try to open it warm, the bottle will fizz and spit and shoot everywhere quickly. This is not because you shook it up or because this one bottle was extra fizzy. This will happen every time you try to open a warm bottle of Manhattan Special.
A chilled bottle will behave nicely and will not overflow. Chilled, temperature T is much lower, and correspondingly, there is less pressure p in the bottle of constant volume V. Opening the bottle, the delicious beverage will not try to expand to occupy as much space and you will not be covered in brown liquid, cleaning up your kitchen. This fact is brought to you by me paying attention in physics class.
Interrobang
“You’re really going to start a band called interrobang‽” asked Tom excitedly.
Use Google Docs to get your resume in many formats
Check out my article on getting your resume in multiple formats – just like mine does, but much easier.
Turn Ads into Art with AddArt
Another great idea from the folks at Eyebeam. Take the idea of one of the most popular extensions for Firefox, AdBlock, but remix it to display art placeholders instead of blank space.
Instead of crappy banners, Fox news gets an eagle flying with an American Flag!
Now, this isn’t a final product – it’s still being worked on. I’ve sent them a mail offering development help if they need it. I love this idea.
Prosper.com/Tools is here!
Prosper has revealed their lending API/Tools section . Right now it is just a dump of data from their db, but the api section promises webservices coming soon.
What’s cool about this? Now you should see smart folks like me building tools to analyze and pick through prosper loans, flagging good stuff and dissing bad loans. By opening up the data like this, prosper is letting interested people create tools for themselves and others to get better results for their systems.
This kind of openness will be good for their business as reliability goes up and people can make better informed decisions.
USPS.com uses Google
Looks like the USPS website uses the google search appliance. I was messing about with the search url and turned this up:
Go to the search form and enter a search for a package.
At the page this takes you too, go to your address bar and erase everything after ?q=######## where ####### is your package search number.
You’ll see the secret easter egg usps google home page.
Firefox Speedup for Broadband users
If you’ve heeded my advice to get firefox for your browsing pleasure, then you may enjoy this little tidbit from devnulled, via forevergeek, via hack-a-day. Credit where credit is due, that’s my motto.
Here’s something for broadband people that will really speed Firefox up:
1.Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit return. Scroll down and look for the following entries:
network.http.pipelining network.http.proxy.pipelining network.http.pipelining.maxrequests
Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.
2. Alter the entries as follows:
Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”
Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”
Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.
3. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0”. This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives.
If you’re using a broadband connection you’ll load pages MUCH faster now!