Where does my time go?

Friday 11/21/2008  –  Category: Uncategorized

I’ve been using RescueTime for awhile to track my usage trends and see how (un)productive I am over a certain period of time.  Their web interface is pretty easy to use and it shows pretty graphs (see ma, I really do work!)
But part of me feels kinda weird having an app push updates to a [...]

Lost?

Thursday 11/20/2008  –  Category: Uncategorized

Is anyone else seeing this on the top of their Facebook home page?

Please reset your email notification settings.
Unfortunately, your email notification settings have been lost. You can reset them on the Notifications page. We’re sorry for the inconvenience.
I’m wondering how Facebook goes about losing things…perhaps someone accidentally dropped a table?  Whoops.

Finding distance and time between two places with Google Maps

Wednesday 11/19/2008  –  Category: Uncategorized

Instead of doing ghetto (and inaccurate) coordinate math, let’s use Google Maps to do the work. This is a bit obscure, but you can append &output=kml to any search query and it will give you output in KML (XML for Google Earth) which makes scraping just a tad bit cleaner.
Instead of parsing the XML, [...]

Talking vs Typing: Google Voice Search

Wednesday 11/19/2008  –  Category: Uncategorized

Google recently updated their iPhone app with voice search, and I must say…it’s pretty impressive.  I can imagine it being really convenient when I’m driving or in a situation where it’s not convenient to type.  You just have to hold it up to your ear and it prompts you to speak the phrase to search [...]

content_for in Rails

Tuesday 11/18/2008  –  Category: Uncategorized

I’m not sure why I hadn’t come across this before, but Rails has a nifty helper called content_for that allows you to insert stuff anywhere in your layout.
A classic use case is inserting a javascript source file that is only used on a specific page.
In your view:
<% content_for :head do %>
<%= javascript_include_tag ‘whatever.js’ [...]