Bright Ideas

I have been in love with my Kindle 2 since I bought it. That's not to say it's without some flaws. One of the things I constantly miss is the lack of page numbers as a frame of reference. On the Kindle, you don't have page numbers, you have "section" numbers. These numbers are dynamic based on font size and other things.

I recently have started using goodreads.com and wanted to be able to update my status with my current page number. To this end, I created a Kindle page calculator that you may find of use. There are some caveats, which I mention on the calculator page.

Let me know if you find this useful or if you have suggestions or problems.

Posted under the influence of [[Owl City :: Rainbow Veins]]

Several times a week, I wish that Visual Studio 2005 had an option where I could convert an HTML control to its ASP.NET counterpart. Generally, I am given a page mocked up by an HTML designer and I need to "make it work" in an ASP.NET application. Wouldn't it be great if I could right-click a 'input type="text"' HTML element and convert it to an ASP.NET TextBox? Or even better yet, run the conversion against an entire page and have every HTML element converted in one fell swoop. 'select' to DropDownList, 'input type="radio"' to RadioButton or RadioButtonList, and so on and so forth. If I wanted to make it really slick, it would capture attributes like "name" or "size" and convert them to the ASP.NET attributes like "ID" and "Width".

If anyone knows of such a tool, drop me a line. If I ever get a spare day, I might whip something up myself. Let me know if you'd be interested as well.

Posted under the influence of [[Ratatat::Seventeen Years]]

Don't ask why, but today I needed to solve a simple 3 x 3 matrix. Since I was a bit rusty, I first wanted to make sure that my system of equations had a finite solution. A quick google turned up a basic Javascript matrix calculator for 3 x 3 matrices, just what I needed. The online calculator quickly told me the solution to my problem. But, I had to implement this in code, so I figured I should be able to work it out on paper myself first.

An hour or two later, I was able to arrive at the same solution. During my struggle, I wished that the online calculator would "show its work" to see where I went astray. It didn't. Another few searches on google turned up no results. I guess this is a niche I should fill. I don't have time to do it now, but I would like to create a server-side app that not only solves a 3 x 3, but shows the steps along the way, with some explanation of what is happening. I found the tutorial on this site quite helpful in really explaining the steps and why the steps work. I plan on incorporating the work of both sites into a solver that explains step-by-step how the solution was reached.

Posted under the influence of [[Johnny Cash :: When the Man Comes Around]]

After spending about 30 hours on an osCommerce application involving complicated schematics and image maps, I got a bright idea. It would be really cool to leverage an OCR function to automatically scan an image for callout boxes, then draw a hotspot over it and setting the title to the number of the callout. This would save me literally dozens of hours on projects like this. Not to mention that when it comes time to update or fix a hotspot, having an app like this would make it a trivial task.

For a sample of what I'm talking about, check this link.

Posted under the influence of [[Rainer Maria :: The Contents of Lincoln's Pockets]]

Why do I always think of really cool projects when I have absolutely no time to work on them?

I'll leave that conundrum for another night. For now, I'll document an idea I came up with that would save me, and undoubtedly many other PHP coders, a great deal of time. I think it would be incredibly helpful to have a class that could be passed a minimal number of parameters and it would generate a nicely formatted report.

Someone has built a rudimentary report generator already, which is freely available online. The problem is that it is far too basic in its current form. Here is a list of the features my report generator (if it ever comes to fruition) should have:

• Accept a mysql recordset as a data source
• Allow me to specify my own column headings if the field labels in the recordset are too cryptic
• Let me specify any number of font, color, spacing and alignment properties
• Let me dynamically assign styles depending on certain criteria in the data (e.g. if ID is missing, text is red)
• Easily set pagination properties (number of records to show per page)
• Allow end user or programmatic sorting and filtering of ANY or ALL columns
• Provide buttons to allow the user to export a PDF or CSV file from the data
• Allow end user to create a "printer friendly" version of the report

I don't think I'm asking for too much. I do think that if I ever sat down and created this, that many people would find it helpful, and a great time-saver. If anyone wants to urge me to actually tackle this project, feel free to drop me an email.

Posted under the influence of [[Death Cab For Cutie :: We Looked Like Giants]]

A while back, I mused about creating a web interface to my iMac's local Mail.app mboxes. As usual, the idea hasn't really gone anywhere yet. Seeing another developer link to the article has rekindled my interest in this topic.

After further consideration, it seems to make more sense to use existing tools then to completely reinvent the wheel. There's no reason that an IMAP daemon on my Mac and a web-based mail client (like SquirrelMail or IMP) couldn't be properly configured to handle about 99% of my needs in this endeavor.

I plan on documenting my configuration here at some point for posterity's sake.

Posted under the influence of [[The Delgados :: D'Estus Morte]

I had this idea a while ago. My main work machine is a 17" iMac which lives at my office. I have customized all kinds of automatic filtering and sorting option. This is a real time-saver, while I'm at work. However, I often work from home and find myself wishing I had access to my Mail.app information remotely. Currently, I use VNC to get a remote desktop and manipulate Mail.app directly. This is very clunky, and very slow at times. A better solution would be to fire up a web browser and see a hierarchical list of all my Mail folders from any machine.

This seemed like something that other people would want too. So, I did some searching and came up with very little. There were some existing solutions, like Zoe, but didn't match my needs precisely. The closest I came was another guy blogging about a similar wish/desire. I contacted him, and he never went anywhere with it either.

So once again, I'm going to have to tackle this one myself. Just not right now. Check back here in the future to see if this project goes anywhere.

Posted under the influence of [[Radiohead :: Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box]]

Let me start by saying that I absolutely adore iTunes (on OS X -- this is an important clarification). The dynamic playlists, the user interface, the wealth of objects exposed to AppleScript, the seamless integration with iPods (and other mp3 players), and many other things make it my mp3 player of choice on my Macs.

However, today I tried something that iTunes just couldn't do. I wanted to burn one of my smart playlists to a CD. Should be easy enough. I do this all the time. In fact, iTunes gives you 3 main choices when burning a disc: audio, mp3 or data. Audio CDs weren't an option. My playlist was well over 20 hours, and I don't have that much patience. The differences between mp3 and data are subtle. Both create a CD full of mp3s, however the data option will also include other non-mp3 files that happen to be in your playlist. I wanted the mp3 disc.

This becomes tricky when you consider what kind of CD-based mp3 player I have. It cost $20. That says it all. The player does not parse ID3 tags, does not accept mp3 filenames that are non 8.3 formatted, and will absolutely puke if a non mp3 file is included on the disc. Like I said, not a fancy player, but it does the job. An mp3 CD created by iTunes violates both of the rules imposed by my player. It leaves longer file names (though it does truncate them a bit, and trim out odd characters) AND includes a hidden XML file that serves no purpose for me.

To further complicate matters, none of these mp3s are actually stored on my Mac. They all reside on a Windows file server elsewhere on my LAN. Also, these playlists are mainly random, so it would be very time consuming to grab the individual mp3s outside of iTunes and burn a CD some other way. Other burning programs give you the option to create ISO9660 compatible CDs, but iTunes does not. Also, iTunes does not give you the option to omit that XML file when burning the disc. I propose several solutions . . .

1. Create an AppleScript to copy all the mp3 songs in the current playlist to the local drive. Then, I could use a program like Toast to burn an ISO9660 CD.

2. Create an AppleScript to import my iTunes playlist into a program like Toast. This is slightly more elegant because the files could remain on the network drive. There would need to be some sort of provision to handle playlists that are larger than one CD.

3. Create an AppleScript to hack iTunes into creating the kind of CD I want directly.

These solutions are proposed in order of increasing elegance, and difficulty. Stay tuned . . .

Posted under the influence of [[Mogwai :: Tracy]]

I thought it might be helpful to explain a little more about this section, and what purpose it wll serve.

Often, I will run into a problem in which there is no solution, or the solution is less than elegant. Many of these problems can be overcome with a little time, patience, and some sort of scripting/programming language. One of two things usually happens:

1. I immediately stop working on what I should be doing, and devote all my time and energy to create a better solution to my problem. It is not unusal in these cases to waste 10 or more hours to perfect a task that takes less than 10 minutes. I realize this borders on psychosis or mania, but I justify it with the rationale that if I ever need to perform this task in the future it will be much easier. This approach greatly hinders my current productivity, however. And it seems that it happens all to frequently when I'm really pressed for time.

2. I get a great idea, but instead of pursuing option 1 above, I have the self control to continue on the task at hand. While this might appear to be good, the unintended consequence is that I eventually forget my great idea and it is lost forever.

This section will be a grandiose repository for all of these ideas. Hopefully, this will remedy both of the situations listed above. When I get an idea, I can jot it down here and come back to it when I have more time, not needing to fear that it will be lost or forgotten. In addition, once I actually craft a more elegant solution, I can post the code here for others to use (or for me to reference when I forget where I saved that script).

Let the festivities begin . . .

Posted under the influence of [[Amon Tobin :: Hey Blondie]]