• I turned 21
• I became an Apple Certified Macintosh Technician
• I discovered Tool and found myself
• I got 2 more tattoos (here and here)
• Other stuff happened

What a year it was. Here’s to the next one!

My favourite podcast, Film Sack, which I listen to most nights has just reached their 100th episode! Through listening to Film Sack I’ve discovered a ton of new films that I otherwise would have never seen.

I’d like to throw my 2 cents in to say congratulations to Scott, Brian, Randy, Brian and Scott for teaming up to create the best podcast ever.

Thanks, Film Sack!

Upgrading Snow Leopard to Lion on a MacBook Air: flawless.

Upgrading Snow Leopard Server to Lion Server: completely and utterly flawed.

For the record, my Lion Server installation lasted a good 6 hours before being shitcanned and a Time Machine Restore saved the day!

So, Lion’s out! Woo hoo! If you’re like me, you saw a ton of crappy apps in Launchpad and was very disappointed to see that there’s no way to remove apps from Launchpad without having to delete them from your system.

Locating the Launchpad would have been a painful task, but thankfully the clever cookies at HaiTeq found the Launchpad SQLite database. To locate this SQLite database, navigate to:

~/Library/Application Support/Dock

In there, you’ll find a file with the name something similar to this:

D7A515C6-6523-48B8-9C83-DD737AC41C74.db

This file, as mentioned earlier, is a SQLite database file, and can be opened in any SQLite editor. I’m a huge fan of Base, I recommend you use it! Once you’ve opened the database file, select the apps table.

Inside the apps table, you’ll find all your applications listed in a nice list. I found it completely un-necessary to have a number of apps, like Chess.app, Image Capture.app, Time Machine.app etc. To remove the app from the Launchpad database, just select the appropriate app from the list and hit the delete button!

Now, if you open Launchpad straight away you won’t see the changes. To fix that, open Terminal.app and type in:

killall Dock

This restarts the Dock process, of which Launchpad is a child of. Now, open Launchpad and see the changes!

I managed to condense Launchpad from 3 pages, to one page of apps I actually want to have in Launchpad for quick access.

Notes:

If you accidentally delete the wrong app, I have not been able to figure out exactly how to re-add an app. So, make sure you delete the right app!

I don’t normally write reviews for iPhone apps but occasionally an iPhone app comes along that is so excellent it warrants a full write-up. Now, I’m well aware that the app I’m reviewing is not exactly a brand new app — it’s been out for a while. Why the write up now? ‘Cause I can!

 

First thing you’ll notice when using this app is that there’s no date stamp on the app icon – far out brussels sprout! Thankfully, that issue is alleviated with the ability to set the current day number as an application badge (you know, those little red circles with numbers in them – think Mail.app!) Well – actually, that won’t be the first thing you notice – the first thing you’ll notice is the awesome UI.

My problem with the default calendar app on iOS is that in the month view (which I use, I refuse to use any other view), an event on that day is marked with an arbitrary dot beneath the day number. In my line of work, I’m often required to go to meetings and visit customers onsite, having an arbitrary dot for a day isn’t good enough for me. One super quick glance at Calvetica and I know by color coded calendars what event(s) are/is on that day.

As much as I love Apple and their design choices, the Calendar.app has often made me think I’d love to punch in the glass of my iPhone and eat the logic board (aka, the iPhones heart). Why? I often have to track back several months or years in my calendar – this task is not easy in the Calendar.app, but so very easy in Calvetica. All the months of the year are listed at the top for quick month-to-month access and a simple swipe left or right on the year moves 1 year backwards or forwards, respectively.

Pros: CAPITAL LETTERS, fantastic UX, quick overview of events on a certain day.

Cons: Hmmm… it doesn’t wire me money every day..? Yeah, that’s a totally valid con…

Overall, I’d rate this app a 10/10, plus it’s only $2.99 US on the App Store! So get the damn app already, or I’ll bite your face c***.

I spent a few hours the yesterday and today fiddling around with the Last.fm API to see if it was easy to make a Top 10 Albums of All Time (as listened by a specific user) utility that generated the necessary statistics and displayed it all pretty and such. Read on to find out how I went!

Turns out if you know even a small amount of PHP (I’d consider myself reasonably confident with PHP), you can get a simple image with the band name, album and number of plays in your library. This is what it looks like:

All that can be done in about 100 lines of code, from < ?php to ?>. I intend on cleaning up the codebase and releasing it publicly. However, for now, I’ll be making the service public for people to generate their own albums code.

So, how do I go about this?

Simple! All you need to do is:

[url=http://theblahman.net/last.fm.php?user=USERNAME&num=NUMBER&type=link][img]http://theblahman.net/last.fm.php?user=USERNAME&num=NUMBER[/img][/url]

Where:

USERNAME is your Last.fm username; and
NUMBER is the ranking, you can go between 1 and 10

Please let me know on Twitter if you use this tool, I’d love to hear feedback from users!

Good news fellow coders and GSX users, my PHP class for GSX is being migrated over to GitHub and will see a substantial re-write as I make some major changes to the codebase.

If you’d like to take a gander at the code, or fork it, please follow the link below:

GSX Web Services API PHP Class @ GitHub

UPDATE: (07/12/2011) I’ve resumed writing this class, keep your eye on the GitHub link above to check it out!

Another quick one folks, I promise.

At home I have a reasonable amount of computing power, which is often doing very little 90% of the time. My friend and boss referred me to Folding@home, a project that uses lots of computers as a giant cluster to calculate protein folding and other scientific research.

You can check out the progress of my machines and the machines at work by visiting the stretfold page.

I’ll continue to fold until the day I die.

Do you use Apple’s GSX service along with PHP? Tired of screwing around with SOAP? I was too, until I started work on a super-duper PHP class that allows for easy access to the entire GSX API (Mid 2011 included)!

Here’s an example of how easy it’ll be:


$gsx = new GSX ( $authenticationArray );
$gsx->part_lookup ( '661-5797' );


Yeah, it’s that easy.

The codebase is currently just under 1,000 lines of code, and I’m not even 20% of the way through (aagh!) I hope to have a RC1 release out in 1 month, which will work with the current GSX API only as the Mid 2011 API does not provide access to the production WSDL.

If you have any questions regarding the API, please email me at Enable JavaScript to see email.

Watch this space for more updates regarding the GSX Web Services API Class for PHP by yours truly!