Retiring Another Site

Published on May 16, 2010

After much consideration, I've decided to retire yet another website: Colddirt. This site was created as an example of how to use the different parts of Django, mostly in just one afternoon. I've decided it is time to just take a few screenshots and retire the site - the domain is expiring, and honestly, I don't want to spend $10 to renew the domain. So, here are the screenshots.

RIP Old Sites

Published on May 16, 2010

Over the years I've created several websites, some with the hope of becoming big and popular. Naturally, I'm still waiting to create a site that becomes big and popular. In the meantime, it seems appropriate to retire some of the older sites and ideas. The truth is, I'm moving all my little sites from MySQL on a mediocre VPS to Postgresql on EC2.

Because I put some sweat and blood into these sites, I thought it would be only appropriate to record how the sites looked for future sentimental value. I downloaded a small plug-in for Firefox to take full-length pictures, and I thus post them here.

Back in Taiwan I created a site to demo blogs. The idea certainly wasn't revolutionary, but I thought that somebody would find it useful. Nope.

The second idea was to send a bunch of little ducks around the world and track their progress. My friend Jamie took one to Europe, but besides that, I don't think most people really understood that they were supposed to hand the duck off to somebody else. The main reason I created the site was because my partner was out of town. I'll re-brand and launch it again if I can find a little twitter logo to send around, because hopefully people on twitter will understand to pass the duck onwards.

So photos for nostalgic sake.

It is always a bit rough retiring old sites, but looking back I learned a little, had some hope, and that's all I can ask for.

Fun with OSM

Published on Feb. 12, 2010

I have to admit, to me, editing OpenStreetMap is actually a little therapeutic. Sort of like gardening.

My first major contribution was when I brought my little QStarz GPS unit across Indonesia, by train, sitting against the window.

The most recent contribution was our trip to Dubbo, where I helped fill in a few missing roads, and added an initial outlay of Dubbo Zoo.

If you have a GPS or have $60 to spend on one, and like anything CAD-drawing like, give editing OSM a try!

French Word Collage

Published on Jan. 1, 2010

For the last year Yan-Shih and I have been studying French once a week (4.5hr on Saturday!) A few months ago I wrote some Python code to read the RSS feeds of the most popular French newspaper site, and then kept track of the count of each word. I repeated this every week for a few months.

In the end I had a database of the top ~3000 words used on the site. Today I decided I wanted to play with Processing, so created this little word collage. It is 1680x1050, my monitor's resolution. Two thumbs up for Processing!

Testing SMS Gateways

Published on July 14, 2009

For one of my projects I'm testing an SMS gateway, and decided it would be fun to build a useful alarm clock out of it. For those of you who know Python, you may find this funny. /dev/ttyUSB0 is my Arduino with a temperature sensor.

import serial
import urllib2

def check_temp():
    ser = serial.Serial('/dev/ttyUSB0', 9600)
    t = ser.readline().strip()
    return float(t)

t = check_temp()
if int(t) < 8:
    message = "It+is+now+%f+degrees;+chuck+a+sicky." % t
    f = urllib2.urlopen('http://api.clickatell.com/http/sendmsg?user=johnd&password=p@55w0rd&api_id=2132867&from=61433735555&to=61433735555&text=%s' % message)

And in crontab:

45 6 * * * python /opt/scripts/temp_alarm.py