It's a Doozy!
http://whencanireusethiscalendar.com/
Now you can go digging through that chest of crap from the 1990s and pull out your favorite cute puppies calendar. In 2010, you can re-use calendars from 1999, 1993, 1982, 1971, 1965, 1954, 1943, and 1937.
This morning I received a call from a gent with a Boston accent. He indicated that he represents a firm that is displeased with some data I’m using on isnoop.net. According to the caller, my theater listings page is using his client’s intellectual property and I’m not properly licensed to do so. The lawyer seemed nice enough. Perhaps I should have kept him on the phone longer so he could tick up some more billable hours…
Like some other things I’ve developed, theater listings was a simple service I wrote for myself to clean up an otherwise cluttered interface and make the data available in my favorite feed reader. Over the years, many people have written with questions and thanks regarding the page. Thank you to everyone who used the service. I hope you might find some of my other tools just as useful.
As of now, the theater listings page is closed. If you still want this information in your web browser, check out Google’s movie listings service. For you feed reader junkies, Yahoo Pipes is widely known as a useful service for turning any web page into an RSS feed.
I’ll investigate the possibility of re-sourcing the data, but don’t get your hopes up. Also, for those who are already firing up their email clients to ask me for the source code, hold your horses. I’ve been working up a post on ethical screen scraping and now I can finally share it without being hypocritical. I won’t share the source, but look forward to an interesting and useful guide to capturing and reusing data on the web, including some advice that should help prevent you from getting your own C&D.
As with most of my web toys, FeedSifter.com started off as a tiny tool that served a very simple need I had. Assuming a handful of people might have the same need, I publish most of these utilities and some of them actually manage to become fairly popular.
FeedSifter is a simple service that allows you to filter an RSS or ATOM feed for various keywords. There are many other services out there that do this same thing, but this site is anonymous, uncluttered, and intuitive–exactly what I wanted at the time.
Looking at the traffic stats today, I’ve found that feedsifter.com managed to become fairly popular while nobody was looking. Over the past 8 months, daily traffic has been steadily increasing and it is fast approaching 2,000 requests per hour. That’s a pleasant surprise and a good indication that I should put some effort into finishing those final few features I never got around to implementing years ago.
My Google maps making, RSS feed slinging, universal package tracker has moved to greener pastures. Boxoh.com is your new go-to place for tracking UPS, FedEx, USPS, DHL, and Airborne packages.
Backstory: In 2006, I posted a handy new utility I’d cobbled together which was a mashup between package tracking for for multiple services. It quickly became by far the most popular page on this site, with more than 1.4 million tracking requests last month. It gets more than three times the traffic of my movie theater RSS generator and four times the traffic of another spinoff site, FeedSifter, a simple RSS/Atom feed filter.
If you are familiar with MediaTemple’s GridServer service, you’ll know that using up all 1000 GPUs (server work units) for the past several months is not a good thing. Those cycles weren’t just going to waste on poorly written scripts, either. Each hit to the tracker consumed an average of 0.0002 GPU (WordPress uses 8 to 16 times that with each hit). It wasn’t always this way, though. Check back soon for an upcoming post on how I managed to cut down the CPU usage of the package tracker by 90% with some intelligent code analysis and a creative caching solution.
Boxoh.com is now hosted on a screaming VPS server with plenty of spare power. I’m taking full advantage of APC caching and several other behind-the-scenes tweaks one can only get a grip on when they are running a dedicated server.
Thanks to all of the people who have made the service so popular!
Also, thanks to Juplex for a fast and friendly site design!
This is the first growing season in our new house. We have quite a bit of gardening space, so my wife and I will be attempting to fill that space with beautiful and edible plants.
In an attempt to keep this information handy for my own reference, I have decided to start a journal. I’ve made it public in the hopes that it someone might care to share some advice or learn from my inevitable mistakes.
The blog is called The Nu Leaf.
Check out the Google Code Project.
Available soon: WiiSaber source as well as several of my most popular PHP utilities.
Due to the popularity of MacSaber and WiiSaber, I have received several requests to write iPhoneSaber. Now that the accelerometer has been unlocked, this has become a distinct possibilty.
There’s just one problem. I don’t have an iPhone.
To be honest, I just bought a house and my finance manager (wife) won’t allow the purchase. Therefore, I turn to you. I’m not one for begging, but I have been convinced this is for the greater good.
If you’re interested in a MacSaber port for the iPhone, please consider sending your spare change my way.
Thank you for your consideration.
Update
Thanks to everyone who helped! See next post for more information.
There was once a time when having a Gmail account made you part of an exclusive, trendy club among some subcultures. Having Gmail invites at that time made you even more popular. During those days, I ran a Gmail invite spooler that distributed over 1.2 million invites, making it the most popular Gmail invite service. Two years after pulling the plug, it is still the 4th most popular non-Google Inc. search result for the word Gmail.
Over the past few months, I’ve been asked several times to set up a similar service for Joost. After much procrastination, I’m now dusting off the invite spooler service, giving it a new face, and adapting it for Joost and other invite services.
This is where I need your help. I’ll need at least one invite in order to test the updated tool. If you have a joost account and have invites to share, please send an email to joostinvite@isnoop.net.
After just one or two revisions, your site’s CSS can get pretty cluttered with redundant content and inconsistent formatting. I’ve written a simple tool called the CSS Superdouche that programmatically rewrites your CSS, removing all superfluous elements and reformatting it in an attractive manner.
The CSS Superdouche is capable of streamlining already highly optimized CSS. It attempts to detect whitespace-stripped code and, if necessary to shrink file size, it will do the same.
Check out the CSS Superdouche
It seems that many people are in the market for an HDTV right now. With the Super Bowl fast approaching and the holiday splurges fading from memory, the lure of that new TV is hard to resist.
There are a lot of decisions to be made when choosing an HDTV. Do you want Plasma or LCD? Direct view or rear projection? How many inches? And then there’s the thousand-dollar question:
What resolution do you really need?
Of course, almost everyone would take the very best solution they can manage. However, you can save yourself a considerable amount of money if you realize that you can’t see or dont’ care about the difference between 720p and 1080p. That knowledge could mean a difference of $1,500 or more for the same size television.
I have found composed a resolution comparison demo video help illustrate the differences between the different television resolutions. The source file is a 1080p clip made by Red Digital Cinema with their jaw-dropping Red One (2540p @60fps native) camera.
The video is 1920×1080, silent, and composed of several sections:
SD (standard definition)
ED (enhanced definition)
720p
1080p
In the full-length comparison, each of the reduced resolutions is demonstrated in two ways. First, it is displayed in native resolution to demonstrate the original pixel dimensions of the clip. Next it plays again in fullscreen to simulate the picture quality of a television of a fixed size stretching the indicated resolution to cover.
The comparison ends with a fullscreen side-by-side comparison with 1080p, 720p, and 480p bars of the same film striped across the screen. This side-by-side segment is also available by itself in a separate download.
Most computer screens aren’t as big as 1920×1080. If your screen is not that big, I suggest watching the video at 100% zoom so the pixels aren’t distorted.
There are two versions of the HD resolution comparisons available:
Torrent full comparison video. (232MB)