Jacob’s Technical Blog

A while ago, I found myself needing to upload many document files into Google Docs. I saw that Google had a new API for doing such, so I decided to write a quick little app for the Mac to do just that. Just drag and drop documents onto the icon, and away their uploaded.

I had never written any sort of real Mac application, so I just kind of glued something together out of Python, applescript, and a couple of helper apps. I threw the source up at Google Project Hosting, which has been good, because otherwise I would have been supporting the thousands of downloads.

Recently, my little droplet app became more famous. It was featured on lifehacker.com as a featured Mac Download. My favorite line from their post was, “Gdocsuploader is still new and a bit unpolished.” I think it should be considered more than just a bit unpolished. They should have said, “this thing might work, and is about as unpolished as lava rock.”

There have been a multitude of other posts about my little project:

• Web Worker Daily claims it could save you a bit of friction.
• VinodLive says it shines with some cool drag and drop options
• i use this shows 2 people are using it. I wonder how many people use i use this.
• samjones jaiku’ed it saying it saves time. Erik also jaiku’ed it when he added it to his del.icio.us bookmarks.
• Geekout.tv actually mentioned me by name! Thanks to them for the nice personal reference
• It hass even gone international at macworld.idg.se. I don’t know what they’ve said, but I hope it is nice.

Thanks to everyone who wrote something nice about it.

Google should provide an option to allow projects hosted at Google Code to display and profit from Google Ads. Project owners who would opt into the ads would benefit from the revenue they collect. Google would benefit as well by collecting their share of the advertising revenue. Users might benefit because they can perhaps find other advertised services similar to the project they might be currently looking at.

Recently I’ve decide to open source some more code and templates that I’ve written. I could either share that code from my own website, or I could share it on Google Code, being able to make use of some of the other features they have there. The biggest advantage to providing the code from my website is that I’m able to collect on any advertising revenue, which in the past has been around a dollar or two per thousand views. If Google could provide me a way to generate similar revenue by hosting my code on their site, not only would I consider hosting my code their, but I would find more incentive to write open source code projects.

The only major problem with this might be abuse. If I wanted to make a few extra bucks, what is stopping me from “forking” someone elses project just to host their code under a slightly different name on Google code and profit from the visitors I would have stolen from the more legitimate site.

According to a story on Slashdot today, The SCO Group received $100 million of investment to get themselves out of bankruptcy and back in the forward business direction.

SCO has been in loosing in law suits it brought against Novell and IBM.

I couldn’t think of better news. I mean, from the people perspective, any good engineers still left at SCO might not loose their job. From another people perspective, now SCO has money to pay Novell, so they don’t have to lay off people.

All in all, I think all this means is there is a bigger turkey to roast and cut up.

Today I discovered that a link to a post on my blog is included in the source to JBoss Richfaces. The blog post that was referenced was a small note I made about bug in the Safari web browser. They provided a workaround in Javascript code for a suggestion box, and they referenced my post in a comment in the source code.

It makes me feel good when I see things that I’ve written appear in real-world applications. It is also nice that the source code is open, which means that anyone can look at it and appreciate my website address.

Well, OSCON 2007, the open source conference of the year, is over, and like two previous years, I walked through the exhibit hall and attended a few of the free lectures. I thought this years even wasn’t quite as great as last years even, but still pretty good.
Continue reading OSCON 2007…

For one of my classes, I’ve been playing around with GNU Octave. Octave is a free and open source program very similar to Matlab. From the Octave web site:

GNU Octave is a high-level language, primarily intended for numerical computations. It provides a convenient command line interface for solving linear and nonlinear problems numerically, and for performing other numerical experiments using a language that is mostly compatible with Matlab. It may also be used as a batch-oriented language.

Sometimes, I’m away from one of my own computers, but I still want to do a little bit of Octave work. I’ve written just a tad bit of PHP code that allows me to access Octave over the web. You can type in your Octave code, and it will return the output results and output graph.

Because I would rather not hammer my server with octave requests, I won’t be showing a demo, but I’m making all the source code available, and you can put it on your own server and try it yourself. I’m hosting the project at Google Code: http://code.google.com/p/web-octave/

I thought I would throw a few marbles around about my current personal coding project. It is an object oriented content management system written in PHP. In one of my other jobs, I’ve written something very similar, which means there is a good working proof of concept.

A lot of the ideas for features have come through my experiences with Plone, a content management system written on top of Zope in Python. Plone is an excellent CMS, but it is a little complicated, and my CMS should be quite a bit easier to hack on.

I’m calling my project Harvest or Harvest CMS, I haven’t decided which one yet. It goes along with my domain, peargrove.com which I use for various project hosting.

As the project gets underway, I’ll post a link to the project page or project blog or whatever else comes along.

About 9 or 10 hours ago, Wordpress 2.2 was released and announced. Wordpress is free, open source software which used to create blogs, like this one, but can also be used as a simple content management system, like how I used it to create my mom’s business site.
Continue reading Upgraded to Wordpress 2.2…

Despite having a pretty cool name, Cyberduck is a pretty cool program.  It is an FTP/SFTP program for Mac OS X.  I like using it to upload files to my webserver using SFTP.  It integrates in with my Mac operating system pretty well, and best of all, it is open source.  Being open source means that I'll never be charged for it, and I can copy and redistribute it as much as I want.  I can even change part of the program if I want.  Anyway, I just wanted to give a shout out and applaud those who have worked on Cyberduck and say, thanks.

Continue reading Cyberduck…

I've been using OpenOffice.org on macs long before I even owned a mac.  OpenOffice.org was just barely turning 1.1 back in those days, and installing it on a mac required learning how to install and get running X11.

NeoOffice is a version of OpenOffice.org rebuilt entirely for the mac.  I've been using versions of NeoOffice for some time, but it has finally hit a level of maturity that makes me feel more confortable about showing it off.  The latest version, 2.1, is available for download and is based off of OpenOffice.org version 2.1.

This is the first version of NeoOffice that is completely convincing as a mac application. Continue reading NeoOffice ships version 2.1…