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Too Soon

Uncategorized Aug 20, 2008

I think everyone has a core group of artists they grew up listening to — that made an indelible mark on their lives. LeRoi Moore was one of mine.

Dial a Phone Number Using Grand Central and PHP

Uncategorized Aug 15, 2008

If you’re lucky enough to have a Grand Central account, here’s a quick PHP class that will login to your account and dial a phone number. This is probably one of the more random bits of code I’ve ever written, but I think it’s useful. And that’s it. Grand Central will call $yournumber and connect you to $theirnumber. So, you…

Let Google Do The Work For You

Uncategorized Jun 17, 2008

One of the major challenges in web scraping is figuring out which page to scrape in the first place. Here’s a scenario: Say you need to pull some information for the film 30 Days of Night off IMDB. It would be great if you knew in advance what the URL was — something you could construct programatically — unfortunately, it’s…

Sort Apple Mail Messages Using the Keyboard

Uncategorized Jun 10, 2008

I don’t know how I ever missed this Apple Mail plugin, but you absolutely have to give MsgFiler a try if you’re a heavy keyboard user. It lets you move messages into any folder in your mailbox using only the keyboard. Press ⌘9 to pull up a TextMate-like list of your mailbox folders. Then, select a folder by typing the…

Introducing Appcaster + OpenFeedback

Uncategorized Jun 02, 2008

Today I’m proud to announce the release of two new open source projects: Appcaster and OpenFeedback. I’ve been working on them off and on for over nine months, so I’m very excited to finally see them out the door. Appcaster, which I’ve written about before, is a web-based dashboard for indie Mac developers. It’s designed to manage payment and order…

Scraping IMDB With PHP

Uncategorized May 21, 2008

For an upcoming project, I need to pull in metadata about movies and TV shows — genres, plot summaries, actors, etc. The de-facto source is, of course, IMDB. Unfortunately, they’re behind the times and don’t offer an API to access their data. (At least not one that I’ve ever found.) So, here’s a quick PHP class that takes a movie…

Two Weeks With Drobo

Uncategorized May 18, 2008

So it’s been two weeks since my Drobo arrived from Amazon. I’m sure they’re selling like hotcakes, but I don’t personally know anyone else with one — I figured I might as well gather my thoughts and post a review. Hopefully this will give a good overview if you’re not already familiar with the device. If you are, I’ll be…

Using Amazon S3 as a Content Delivery Network

Uncategorized May 09, 2008

[Update: You might also be interested in s3up for storing static content in Amazon S3.] Earlier this week I posted about my experience redesigning this site, focusing on optimizing my page load times using YSlow. A large part of that process involved storing static content (images, stylesheets, JavaScript) on Amazon S3 and using it like a poor man’s content delivery…