When dealing with a CDN-based platform, the issue of synced files is often an issue. You’ve deployed to the CDN, and are curious if the deployed file is the updated file.

After running across this issue several times, I built a quick shell script to easily determine if two online files are the same.

After downloading, you’ll use it like this:
compare.sh URL1 URL2

If the files match, you’ll get:
Same.

Otherwise, you’ll get:
Different. Are either URLs password protected?

Download here:
compare.sh

With the introduction of applications such as Skitch and Pastebot into my everyday workflow, I’ve found myself yearning for multi-step historical clipboards.

One alternative to Skitch that I’ve construed was using the native screen capture functionality of OS X, and teaming it up with the unstoppable online storage service, Dropbox, storing all screen captures in a location that allows for persistent storage as well as very simple sharing.

First, if you haven’t, sign up for a Dropbox account. It’s free for 1GB of online storage:
https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTUzMTM4Njk

Install Dropbox. It will create a folder in your /Users/USERNAME directory

Second, modify the location of your OS X screen captures to your Dropbox. You can do this by invoking the following command in terminal:
defaults write com.apple.screencapture location /Users/USERNAME/Dropbox/Photos/

And you’re ready to go! No more Skitch-running-in-the-background necessary to easily share screen captures online.

As an effort to record the more memorable things going on, I thought I’d toss this little doo dad up.

I was biking down to my final day of jury duty (for a guy who punched a loud public cellphone talker in the face), and was crossing an intersection, when a Prius cut two lanes left and ran into the front of my bike, causing me to eat its front quarter panel. Embarrassed, I picked up myself and my bike, and hobbled over to the side of the road. By this time, the Prius driver was two blocks away. I limped to jury duty, and sat in silence for three hours.

When I got back to my office, I wrote the following Craigslist ad (with my good friend, Ryan’s help):
http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/sfo/1288922120.html

Fast forward to October 7th, when I received an email from my friend Lalit:

Jeff,

Jay Leno just read your missed connection from Craigslist. You are sure to
find her now, would love to buy tickets to your coffee brawl.

The video he mentions is available here:
http://www.hulu.com/watch/100880/the-jay-leno-show-craigslist-ads#s-p2-st-i1

So, for all you aspiring writers out there wondering how to get their foot in the door with Jay Leno, I hope this post helps you find your way.

Having trouble using your Mac webcam w/ Flash sites?  Macs are notorious for selecting the wrong camera on behalf of the user.

Ensure you’ve got the latest Flash player, and the proper webcam selected in your Flash Player settings.
Right-click the screen, choose Settings:

Then, click on the little webcam and choose USB Video Class Video:

Much like the Super Nintendo was a sweet Christmas gift in 1992, the traffic and feedback for BetamaXmas was pretty awesome.

To date, it’s spit out 340,000 pages to 210,000 unique users, 9,000 of which returned more than once.

How it works
I add a video to my 80’s Christmas holiday playlist on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=EE193C2FEDC59D2F
An hourly cron job uses the YouTube data API to snag my playlist.
If any videos have been added since the last time the cronjob ran, it adds it to my database (The TV Guide).
This adds the video to the XML running the site:
http://betamaxmas.com/getPlaylist.php
Another cron job checks to see if any videos have been pulled from YouTube and marks them as deleted from the TV Guide.

The TV Guide
The site works on a system that shows everyone the same TV Guide at the same time. So, if you’re watching Have Yourself a Very Winslow Christmas, you can tell a friend across the country, and it’s on at the same time for them. I thought this reinforced the old style of television watching, where you were at the mercy of the networks. This effect is created by creating a timestamp on the XML telling us what time the server thinks it is. Flash does the modulus of that time against the time of a channel, which gives us the current show in the channel.

Some cool things I learned about along the way.

The YouTube Chromeless player
When traffic started getting a little more frequent, so did the Amazon S3 bill. Senore Baio suggested I look into the Chromeless player for hosting directly off of YouTube, which saved me a mint.

Reinvigorate
Reinvigorate rocks. They’ve got wonderfully stylized reports, and best of all, realtime traffic reports. They also have a sweet little app called Snoop that runs and notifies you when someone is visiting the site, and the referring site. Here’s a screencap:

Facebook and Stumbleupon throw a shitload of traffic. Mark and Garrett rock.

Coverage
The Onion’s Tolerability Index (above Shatner’s show, mind you)
New York Magazine’s Vulture section.
Digg
Comedy Central

I live with two housemates, and am the main recipient of the bills.

After receiving months of email bills that required reading / math / forwarding, I wrote up a quick PHP script that:
- checks IMAP email for bills
- finds the dollar amount due in the email
- divides the amount due by the number of housemates
- emails housemates with amount due

I run it as a cron script every half hour.

bills.php_.zip

We had a small poker game, and found it was helpful in the later hours to have a quick reference guide for Texas Hold Em’.

It shows hand order, steps through the dealing process, and orients the dealer / big blind / small blind / first bet.

http://me.meandmybadself.com/images/uploads/pokercheatsheet.pdf

Happy Holidays, everyone.

To celebrate, I’ve created a time portal back to December 1988 at http://betamaxmas.com

So, go and check it out, as I’m making a list, and checking it twice, and I know where you sleep.

Thanks to Eddy Tofslie, Nick and Lucas

First day’s stats: First day stats for BetaMaXMas
Digg: http://digg.com/television/Have_A_Very_BetaMaXMas

Prior to purchasing the iPhoneBoredomKiller, I needed a way to get important emails sent to my phone.

So, I whipped up a quick script to do just that.

IMAP2SMS will log into an IMAP account (like GMail) and look for unread, unflagged emails. When found, it strips all the HTML out, flags it (so it won’t send you the same message twice) and delivers it to your cellphone.

Set this up using a cron job, to run every 10 minutes or so.

Naturally, SMS charges still exist, so be wary if you have a cap on your SMS’s per month.

IMAP2SMS

Being a sweaty, heavy-breathing nerd, I’ve found many occasions when I had a list of items and said to myself,
“Sweaty, heavy-breathing nerd, you should sort / dedupe / url encode or url decode this string.”

I would commonly start to do it by hand only to get distracted halfway through and start moonwalking with my fingers on my desk

But today, I actually got up off my fingers and spent the 10 minutes building this, my opus, the thing i call the sortdedupercoder

So, my boy Mike Nathanson and I wore our brains on our sleeves at Flashcamp this weekend.

We dreamed up a sweet idea of listening to stock prices, which we dubbed MoneyTalks.

It uses the new SampleDataEvent in Flash Player 10 to create sounds dynamically, which we map onto the value of a stock.

Not to pat ourselves on the back, but our app made Photoshop look like Minesweeper.

Sample videos of stock prices from Oct 06 - 10:
Google
Microsoft
Yahoo
Microsoft v Yahoo

These bad daddies require the Flash Player 10 beta:
Demo
Source

Stripey wallpaper

Here’s two iPhone wallpapers I whipped up this weekend using the art engine from meandmybadself.com

 
iPhone circle wallpaper
iPhone circle wallpaper2

With a little help from GarageBand I whipped up a quick
Chewbacca iPhone ring tone.

Have at it, nerds: Chewbacca iPhone ringtone

Make your own.

I love breakfast. Never mind it being the most important meal of the day. It is simply superior to the other meals as far as caffeine and sugar intake are concerned.

Around my neck of the woods, there are three places that I can commonly be found eating on a Saturday or Sunday morning: J’s Pots of Soul, Stacks, or It’s Tops.

There was another restaurant in my past, but it and I had a falling out. Many asked what happened, and I’ve kept quiet. That is, until today.

A few years ago, as a young chap, I stumbled upon a restaurant in the Lower Haight that had a decadent breakfast, and akin to that new catchy pop song you play over and over, I became an obsessive visitor to this establishment.

After a few visits, my repressed design sense began to take note of their horrible handwritten menus. Legend has it that they were scribed during the 89 earthquake.

So, I did what any good breakfast Samaritan with a design degree would do: I covertly photographed their handwritten menu and redesigned it.

After printing up the menu and laminating it, I delivered it to a manager, along with a CD containing the PDF and the Illustrator file. She stared like a monkey at a Rubik’s Cube. I awkwardly moved backwards towards the door and then ran away.

Three weeks later, they chose to go with another handwritten menu that was even more difficult to read, and I’ve never been back since.

The lesson learned? Don’t design things for free for jerks.

The redesign