Online Regex Testing
Back in 2004 I posted about The Regex Coach, its a great app that I still use today, however it only really works on Windows so I have been looking for some alternatives.
There is a really great resources called Regular-Expressions.info it even has a cheap tool that you can use to do something similar to The Regex Coach. Today Lifehacker mentioned RegExr, its a great web app but also has standalone versions for Windows, Linux and OS X, full of sample regular expressions, good explanations of what a regular expression parses as etc, it is a perfect replacement for The Regex Coach, worth checking it out!
NetNewsWire is set free
I just noticed that the folks over at Newsgator has set pretty much their whole product suite free today, free is Newsgator for Windows, NetNewsWire for the Mac, the online version of NewsGator and so is NewGator Go! for your phone.
This is pretty huge news as all the products I just mentioned syncs with each other seamlessly and have great UI's, NewNewsWire has been my reader of choice for ages.
For the paranoids out there though there's this little tid bit in the new features list:
Sort by attention: NetNewsWire now tracks more information about what you do and can tell which feeds are most important to you.
So you probably want to find out exactly what that's all about first.
Processing Medical X-Ray Data
Recently one of our snakes died due to an abscess in her body, we tried everything to safe the poor snake but in the end - and almost £1200 later - it passed away one night.
While undergoing treatment we were given copies of the X-Ray data, at the time I tried to read the RAW data files but failed, finally writing it off as some proprietary format specific to the X-Ray machine vendor.
Today I came across an item on MacNN mentioning OsiriX which is basically an Open Source suite to drive all things medical. Turns out the data is encoded in a standard format known as DICOM which defines the data type and also a network protocol for these machines to communicate with each other and their image storage over a network.
The data I got was in RAW format so none of the DICOM headers were present, this led me to some other software and a FAQ for importing unsupported/unknown DICOM data. Using the information there I was able to work out based on file size that my data was 512 x 512 big with an Header offset of 6480.
Armed with this information I was able to do a pretty decent import into OsiriX, the output of the one X-Ray can be seen below (click for full size).
New Google Calendar Feature
I've previously mentioned a major problem I had with Google Apps for Domains Calendar function:
GCal also has a feature that mails you a short daily agenda, much like
what you see if you hit the Agenda button. Problem is the agenda mail
function ONLY reads from your primary calendar, it does not include
events from any subscribed calendars etc. This means that one of the
biggest selling points of Google for Domains is crippled, if you share
calendars you can't use them even in the rudimentary tools provided.
I am glad to report that this is now fixed, my Daily Agenda mails started arriving 2 or 3 days ago and they include entries from all my Calendars,
Brilliant.
Zoho Creator
I've heard a lot about Zoho before, essentially they provide Web 2.0 style office applications - many of them completely free of charge.
I didn't pay them too much attention really, being a mostly happy Google hostage. Today I read again about their CRM which led me to look at their other offerings. Boy was I impressed.
Initially I am just trying out Zoho Creator, it is your basic RAD database application development system, fully hosted, fully free and fully on the web and mobile.
I ofcourse had an itch to scratch, the itch being that I keep a list of my billable hours, sales, recurring bills etc all in a big old nasty VI file using VIM Outliner. This approach works but its hardly high tech or cross platform.
So I created a small Creator app that lists my clients, hours billed, sales items, recurring invoice items and some reports for listing invoiced and un-invoiced of each. Some screenshots of my app:
Adding a client
Adding an invoice line
Report of unbilled time
Bulk mark items as invoiced
You can click on the images for larger versions.
This is pretty impressive, you can really imagine coding a standalone version of this for some would be fun, for me it wouldn't be a challenge and so it would be dead boring and probably take many hours that is better spent on billable work. I'd also be stuck with something else to maintain in code rather than a snazy point-and-click UI.
So how long did this app take me? Not more than 2 hours end to end, free hosting, and it's available online via my blackberry for adding items etc while on the road.
Creator also has an API like all good Web 2.0 stuff and so it is really easy for you to integrate something into this, but you could also just embed a specific report or specific input field into any page of your choice via a simple iframe.
This is a great solution for small little web apps like this, soon in Q1 2008 they will also integrate the database from Creator into the Reports app then you can do some really nice multi dimensional reports, graphs and such.
I'd recommend checking out Zoho apps. As always be sure to read the T's and C's though before handing over too much overly sensitive data.
Web Bookmarks with GMarks
Nxsy mentioned that he is using Google Bookmarks and GMarks to access it from Firefox and I thought I'd give it a try since I'm really not liking del.icio.us at all anymore.
The problem with del.icio.us isn't just that the name is untypable and unpronouncable it's lack of good integration with Firefox just spoils it completely. Yeah they have an extension of their own and there are some others that compliment it, but really it's a pain. I ended up not using my bookmarks because I couldn't be bothered with the UI.
So I exported my del.icio.us and imported it into Google Bookmarks, re-tagged everything and now using GMarks I think I've used my bookmarks more in the last 2 days than in the previous 3 months combined. I love the home-home quicksearch box,the sidebar is marginally useful - mostly for editing/managing the bookmarks, the drop down list of bookmarks I am not fond of, but the quicksearch and convenient in-browser-ui for managing bookmarks makes this a winner.
activeCollab
A year or so ago I had an account with Basecamp, the very successful project management system that spawned Ruby on Rails. I really liked it but the project manager at work didn't so it kind of fizzled out and eventually I cancelled the $99/month account that we had.
You can try Basecamp for free on a single project and I've used it on and off since then, but it's not been ideal for me to use a hosted service. I tried a number of other products like dotproject. Yesterday I came across a Digg article about activeCollab, it is a GPL licensed Basecamp like project management tool currently in Alpha release.
It requires PHP 5 which I didn't have on any machine as it seems each of my machines has some code on that only works on PHP 4 but I did a quick install of it on a VMware machine and fell in love with it then put in the effort to fix up a PHP 5 on one of my servers. It is great, even in its Alpha state it is usable and reasonably bug free. I came across one error in tasks which I sent a patch about back to the authors other than that it works a charm.
Click the screenshot below for a view of it, or grab it from http://www.activecollab.com/
Little Snitch
The OS X Operating System might be free of virii and trojans at the moment but I cannot imagine this situation will last. Also being free from malicious code doesn't prevent otherwise trustworthy companies from 'phoning home' as is the case with OS X 10.4.3.
In the windows worlds the obvious answer is to just get the free edition of Zone Alarm but sadly there is nothing free in the Mac world.
I've often come across mentions of Little Snitch so I figured I'll check it out, from its website:
You start an application that tells you that a new version is available. You suddenly realize that with every start this application connects to the developer's server. Even statistics information about your computer may be sent this way. Little Snitch helps you avoid this situation.
Trojan horses - i.e. programs transmitting unconsciously data stored on your computer - can be detected by Little Snitch and prevented on the transmission of data.
So I tried its free demo for a few days and last night bought it via PayPal thanks to the strong Pound it was a bargain, below is a screenshot of it in action showing it even blocks shell commands etc.
I can really recommend this app, grab a copy if you are concerned about privacy and general security on your Mac.
Truecrypt for Idiots
Brad, in an unprecedented display of usefulness, has written up a nice little guide about using Truecrypt to protect your files, short and sweet.
I've previously blogged about Truecrypt you can read a bit of background on these entries:
On The Fly Encryption (OTFE)
Truecrypt Version 4
Online GPS Tracking
Most people who read this probably know by now I'm a bit of a mapping geek, I've been keeping track of my comings and goings since around 2000 using my trusty Magellan GPS 315. A few years back though I had a bit of a set back when years of tracks and waypoints covering 4 continents got lost when my Laptop got stolen and due to some unfortunate choice in application everything I had was useless since Fugawi requires a Dongle and won't give me a new one.
A lot has changed since and I've mostly moved my whole life online to various services like Flickr. It means that my desktop becomes totally portable since no data resides on it and backups can be centralized etc.
There is a gap in the GPS tracks world though a few online services exist like MotionBased.com but with heavy restrictions for free usage.
I'm busy writing a online application that will allow uploading of GPS tracks in the open GPX format for online storing, tracking, graphing and so forth. The idea is to allow for basic storage of tracks and waypoints for the hiker etc but also to cater to runners, cyclists etc who would like to track statistics over time using GPS units.
Key requirement is for the data to be available to blogs and other personal sites, you can store your data on the my system and it will allow you to display it on your own site if you choose, but only for tracks that you actually mark publicly available.
A quick demo of the data it provides, the below is pulled in directly from the database as it stands at the moment, the links to maps and graphs will work. The graphs especially requires some work still.
(If you do not see a table with information above this then please visit this entry directly via a browser, you'll need to have javascript enabled, it also seems some services like Bloglines strip out the javascript!?)
The above is from a walk that I took along the London South Bank on Saturday. The few data anomalies are due to bad GPS reception etc, I obviously did not walk on water, I'll look into ways to normalize the data at import time. This demonstrates though that any blogger can import the data using just one line of code into their own blogs 
Links
- @ripienaar
- Flashpolicyd
- Flickr
- London DevOps Group
- MCollective Plugins
- R.I.Pienaar
- Ruby PDNS
- The Marionette Collective
- Wiki
Tweets
- RT @jtopper Just been invited to a Facebook group "Soldiers deserve footballers wages!". Surely the opposite is more realistic?
- Giving up hope finding a iPhone twitter client that can do word filters
- Dante's Ingerno is a fun game
- DC visit done. Puppetmaster now has 4GB ram. What a PITA. Time to have good look at masterless operation
- Nice. Some aws ip trying to abuse my dev asterisk machine. Don't see many spammers/scammers using ec2 yet but clearly just a matter of time
- Sent a bug report about broken ruby stomp gem in 1.1.4, hopefully this mail does not fall on deaf ears like previous ones :( #activemq
- Damn you apple for inviting me to reserve an iPad when I do not live in the states and so cannot.
- Blog Post: New release of my Puppet Concat tool with 0.24.8+ support http://bit.ly/aA9RYh #puppet
- French village went insane after CIA spiked its bread with LSD http://bit.ly/9r2307
- It's ironic how you cannot send email with google charts api images to gmail users and expect it to work. way to go.
Reading
Planned books:
- The Science of Fear: How the Culture of Fear Manipulates Your Brain by Daniel Gardner
- Relentless by Dean Koontz
- Mind Over Ship by David Marusek
- The New Space Opera by Gardner Dozois
- The New Space Opera 2 by Gardner Dozois, Jonathan Strahan
Current books:
-
Ariel: A Book of the Change by Steven R. Boyett
Recent books:
- Hacking Vim: A Cookbook to Get the Most Out of the Latest Vim Editor by Kim Schulz
- Beautiful Architecture: Leading Thinkers Reveal the Hidden Beauty in Software Design by Diomidis Spinellis , Georgios Gousios
Categories
Archives
Licence
