This is for my wife’s awesome pet rescue – St. Louis Pet Rescue. It’s our first event of this kind and we really wanted to make it easy for folks to help us promote in an inexpensive way. This is a grayscale 8.5×11 in poster/flyer made totally in Illustrator. I’m not an Illustrator guru, but I’ve been doing more with it recently.
The margins are funny, we’ll be printing a large quantity via a professional printer which allows for smaller margins than say what you’d find on a home ink-jet printer. The top and bottom of the poster are cut off when printed on the latter – eliminating the top row of checks. Not intentionally it looks like the little mouse is crossing a finish line! Don’t believe me? Print out a few copies and take a look. Oh, and while you have a couple on hand, stick them up at work or at the local coffee shop!
I’m a big fan of Panic Inc. I use Coda daily and am an advent follower of the smart dudes out of Portland.
They have a new app out called Status Board that allows you to mix different data sources to provide at-a-glance information on your iPad. What is even better is that it can output to a HD display for big screen status board updates.
At work I help manage a MediaWiki environment that we use to document stuff.1 Lately I’ve been trying to figure out how to leverage the MediaWiki API and the External Data Extension to manipulate data from external sources and content within the wiki.
With a few minutes time I figured out how display statistics from MediaWiki on a Status Board!
Basically I use the MediaWiki API to return some XML into a wiki page. That page is then in turn included as an HTML widget in Status Board. The result is something that looks like this:
Here’s the secret sauce. First create a wiki page to house your content. Then use the #get_web_data function of the External Data extension to pull in a xml feed from the MediaWiki API. Here’s what my code looks like for query of the number of jobs currently in queue.
Some other examples, as you can see in the screenshot above, are a list of the N newest articles, most recent edits, or even additions to specific categories (at the bottom). The sky is the limit!
Sony has this nice little utility for the PS Vita that allows you to sync and backup your content. It’s called Content Manager Assistant (CMA).3 It runs as a menubar item on your Mac (or a taskbar item on Windows) and after initial setup the interaction is managed from the PS Vita itself. You can back up your entire PS Vita, sync music and photos, and the whole thing works over USB or Wi-Fi. Pretty neat.
CMA Menubar Item
As a Playstation Portable owner I was happy to hear that they have a native Mac client. Back in the PSP days we had to hike both ways uphill in the snow with third-party software to sync content to our Macs.4
However – oh, you knew this was coming – there is an issue with how the application is installed. By default, and with no way to change this setting via the application’s preferences, it will run at login for all users. Trying to remove the login item via the Users & Group preferences pane will prove frustrating.
(All? All what? Oh, All Users…
WTF Sony.
Here’s how to remove this. Note: if you update or reinstall CMA, you’ll have to do this all over again. Yay!
First navigate to the “Macintosh HD/Library /Preferences” folder and look for a file called ‘com.apple.loginitems.plist‘. This is not the same as your User directory (~/Library/Preferences). You should be able to open it with something like TextWrangler.5
If the only entry you see in the entire file is for Content Manager Assistant or CMA.app feel free to just delete the file. You’ll be prompted to enter your admin username/password to remove the file.
Update:SkatyGarcia on Reddit schooled me on a much better way to remove CMA from startup. Instead of all the mumbo-jumbo I describe above, instead click the ‘unlock’ icon in the lower left of the Users & Group preference pane. Enter your admin password and then you can remove CMA from the list. Much more logical than my directions.
Restart your Mac, check the Users & Group preference pane and curse the developers at Sony (nicely, they did make an otherwise useful app).
I hope this helps regain some control and relieve some frustration for other Mac/PS Vita folks out there in Internetland.
This week at the The St. Louis WordPress Developers Meetup we discussed tips and tricks on how to ensure your WordPress installations are as secure as possible. I’ve collected my notes below.
For further reading, check out Eric Juden’s notes as well.
Change default “wp_” prefix to something unique. This is used by MySQL injections that search specifically for “wp_” (As Ken Johnson points out in the comments of the WordPress Meetup, this is probably only a good idea on new installations!)
Delete Default Admin account. You should never post from admin as it looks dorky and gives away that you’re using WordPress.
Use strong passwords! Don’t give clients the same lame password over and over. Be unique.
Delete unused themes and plugins. They just take up space and are yet another vector for attacks.
Use Akismet for managing comment spam. Not exactly security, but part of decreasing the amount of time you dedicate to meddlesome maintenance.
Hide your version number and change the readme.html file to something random. Nefarious people are looking for easy targets, changing things up a bit makes these automated attacks more difficult to pull off.
function remove_wp_version() {
return '';
}
add_filter('the_generator 'remove_wp_version');
If you’re thinking about attending one of the meetings I encourage you to do so. The diversity of knowledge and skill sets almost guarantees that there’s something new to learn. Everyone is approachable and there to share and grow together.
As a side project in my free time I’m helping a small business setup an e-commerce store front. One of the things we’ve discussed is the idea of a recommendation engine to suggest other items to purchase. This lead down an Internet rabbit hole where I ended up reading about The Echo Nest.
The Echo Nest is a self-described “music intelligence platform that synthesizes billions of data points and transforms it into musical understanding.“. It is widely herald as one of the largest and most comprehensive uses of data mining (to find the language and culture around music across the web) and big data (to store and present those relationships) within the music recommendation industry.
Yes! There is an industry. A substantial one. Apple’s Genius feature in iTunes, Pandora, Last.fm, Spotify – all are trying to provide relevant music based upon your listening tastes. Why? So you’ll buy more music of course!
Brian Whitman, one of the co-founders of The Echo Nest, talks in great length about the how and why behind what makes their product so unique – and so incredibly accurate. I won’t steal the thunder of the article, but needless to say, dedication and refinement are key.
This is totally sausage-making, behind-the-scenes stuff, but I encourage you to at least look it over.
Ok, so now the really fun stuff. Here’s something called The Infinite Jukebox. It uses some of the data points within the Echo Nest to create a version of a given song that never ends. It uses references within a song that are similar to other points within the song, makes some minor adjustments when needed (like tempo) and then plays the song forever. The presentation is neat as well, you can view the branches within the song where things loop and even click around the song to find points where things can loop.
At work we’re looking at ways of using the topics of big data, mining, and recommendation engines to provide better healthcare. Reading about The Echo Nest gives me some ideas on how these technologies could impact the care we give! If you have your own ideas or suggestions, please leave a note below.
