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 [...]

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 [...]

Ryan Pfisters: we’re not the only ones that share a name

Check out this New York Times article on people with the same name that keep track of each other on the Internet.
Obvious quote of the day:
“Why do so many feel a connection — be it kinship or competition — with utter strangers just because they share a name? Social science, it turns out, has an [...]

Guide to making a personal Web site (with a Penn State focus)

If you’re a Penn State student (or anyone else) who wants a spot on the Internet, here’s my getting starting guide based on my own experiences.
Topics covered:

Hosting your site (where to save your files)
Creating and updating files
To dot.com or not to dot.com (or .org, or .net)

Hosting your site
For people to be able to view your [...]

Goodbye, Netherlands Antilles

Great. Just when I get the excellent idea from ma.tt to register ry.an, I find out that the Netherlands Antilles is scheduled to be abolished so the country code might disappear. Oh well…I guess I can’t expect geopolitics to cooperate with my naming ambitions all the time.
UPDATE: Looks like pfist.er is out as well.

New Wordpress

Just upgraded to WP 2.5. I got some errors the first time around when I tried deleting wp-admin and wp-includes and then copying in the new versions — something about the wrong ABSPATH.
Instead, I just backed up my wp-config.php file and wp-content directory, deleted the old wp install, deployed WP 2.5, and then re-copied the [...]