Recent Posts

Wedding Web Site Released

September 29, 2013 - Categories: Utilities And Other Useful Things

1 minute read

For those of you out there planning a wedding, you may have thought about setting up a website. Something to answer those common questions guests may have so that you can focus on all of the other aspects of wedding planning. There are some pretty slick WYSIWYG sites out there like Wedding Wire, The Knot, and Wedding Channel if you want to use a pre-built theme and just punch in your relevant information.

My wife and I couldn't find a theme and a site that fit our needs perfectly so I ended up building one for us.

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Querying vCloud Director API with Ruby Script

August 1, 2013 - Categories: Utilities And Other Useful Things

3 minute read

Well it's been awhile since I've posted since I started working on HireUpJob, but this one's good. I recently had a use case where I needed to get the virtual hardware version of a client machine provisioned through vCloud Director. Now, that information is not accessible anywhere on the client machine, so I had to look to the vCloud Director API for it. The process for querying the API also had to be automated for future provisions, so it had to be scripted. Enough back story and context, lets look at the ruby code.

```ruby #Need to import a few ruby packages require ‘net/http’ require ‘uri’ require ‘openssl’ #Here we are ignoring any issues that may arise with SSL certificates OpenSSL::SSL::VERIFY_PEER = OpenSSL::SSL::VERIFY_NONE

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HTML5 Canvas and a Horace Dediu-esque Chart

May 13, 2013 - Categories: IT/Software Projects,Utilities And Other Useful Things

9 minute read

A few months back, I came across this chart illustrating Apple's segment revenues on Reddit:

This is a great chart because it has impact with just a glance, and yet yields more solid data the longer you examine it. Ever since I saw this chart I wanted to build my own for my department, for startups, and offer it up to anyone else who might want to build a similar chart.

Horace Dediu of Asymco.com put this together using a chart-building iPad app called Perspective. Now, I should have just downloaded the damn app and made some similar charts and been happy. Instead I built my own from scratch using HTML5's canvas tag. Check out the demo.

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Web Scraping, PHP, and Wheel of Fortune

April 17, 2013 - Categories: IT/Software Projects

4 minute read

Be advised This post is quite old (17 Apr 2013) and any code may be out of date. Proceed with caution.

My fiancee loves Wheel of Fortune and watches whenever she can. The clever folks over at Sony (producers of Wheel of Fortune) introduced a loyalty program called "Wheel Watchers." People who sign up get a "Spin ID," and if your Spin ID is chosen for a given episode, you win one of the prizes they gave away on the show. Only catch is you have to watch every night.

This is a lot of random background information, but there's a reason. My fiancee asked me to write an application that would check the Spin ID every day and notify us if we won. This seemed like a great reason to learn some web scraping with PHP (although you could probably do this in just about any language).

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To Do List App

April 3, 2013 - Categories: Utilities And Other Useful Things,IT/Software Projects

2 minute read

Be advised This post is quite old (03 Apr 2013) and any code may be out of date. Proceed with caution.

Update Feb 2017 I’ve happily used this TODO app for the past ~4 years, but I’m taking it down with the rest of my old PHP hosting. In conjunction, I’ve removed the demo-related content from this post. For anyone interested, I’m now using Wunderlist

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