FriendFlash — Recognize your Facebook friends on sight

I’ve completed my first Facebook application: FriendFlash. It displays a photo of one of your friends and you have to pick which one it is from a list of choices. I built it because I have a lot of random Facebook friends and sometimes I have trouble remembering what they all look like.
Check it out!

Speak and print your daily tasks and events

I keep track of my tasks using Remember The Milk and my calendar using Google Calendar. However, I don’t have a Blackberry or other phone with Internet access, so sometimes it’s nice of have a paper copy of what I have to do on a particular day.
I created a Ruby script that reads in my [...]

Full Contact Search Code — Lessons in Google Authentication

Here’s the main code file for my Full Contact Search Application:
fullcontactsearch_code
I’m releasing it under the Apache license. Some of it is originally inspired from Google tutorials anyway. The portion of the code you may find useful is the self.GetAuthentication method. Basically, what you need to be able to do to permanently authenticate a user is:

Get [...]

Full Contact Search: Search all the fields of your Gmail contacts

I’ve created a new Web site called Full Contact Search using Google App Engine that allows you to search all fields from your Gmail contacts, not just name and e-mail. Check it out at http://fullcontactsearch.appspot.com.
When Google upgraded to a new version of its contact manager, it bizarrely took away the ability to search fields like [...]

Drop.io - very cool file sharing

If you ever have to share files on the Internet, check out Drop.io. It’s the simplest, quickest way I’ve seen to get a file uploaded and a link sent out. And check out the Firefox extension, which allows drag-and-drop uploads from your computer. Sounds like a prime Google takeover target to me…
I’m probably going to [...]

Executor: My new application launcher

I read about executor on lifehacker the other day. It’s a utility that enables you to launch programs using keyboard commands, such as “excel” for Excel. In the past, I’ve used Mike Lin’s MCL to do this. I’ve experimented with other launchers like Launchy, but I’ve found they’re too bloated and index way too many [...]

Shell commands to upgrade to WP 2.6.1

Just upgraded this blog to WP 2.6.1 via ssh. Went just fine (knock on wood). Here’s the commands I used, for my own reference as much as anyone else’s:

wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
rm -rf wp-includes
rm -rf wp-admin
tar -xzvf latest.tar.gz
cp -rpf wordpress/* .

Of course, you’ll want to replace “.” in the last line with the address of your wordpress [...]

Adding a subject to a text message sent to an e-mail address

Here’s a tip for text messengers that I discovering when configuring Remember The Milk for my cell phone:
If you are sending a text message to an e-mail address and put words in parentheses at the start of your message, they will show up as the subject of the e-mail.
For example:
(this is the subject) this is [...]

MT4 Right Fields to Custom Fields Conversion with SQL

Here’s a script to convert your Movable Type RightFields data to Custom Fields if your Right Fields data is stored in a SQL table. It is a modification of Chad Everett’s RF2CF plugin, which is designed for RightFields data stored in MT’s PluginData repository.
Download it here.
The folder in that zip file should be placed in [...]

Converting Right Fields when upgrading MT 3 to MT 4

Last week, the incoming Daily Collegian Web editor and I put in some very late hours upgrading our publishing system from Movable Type 3.3 to MT 4. We had a few hiccups; I’ll document them here in case any one else runs into the same thing.
Why we upgraded: MT 3.3 was getting slowwwwww. And worse, [...]