In less than 3 hours I’m hopping on a Southwest flight from Boise to Oakland. I land in Oakland at 8:05 and will be greeted by my father-in-law (thanks!) who will drive me to Moscone to get my badge and queue up for the Keynote. In-laws in the SF area are very helpful when you’re an Apple geek.

Last year I ran a sale on rooSwitch for the week of WWDC. I even had business cards that advertised the sale. I still have plenty of those cards. Instead of making new cards, I decided to run the sale again. Benefit from my laziness: http://roobasoft.com/rooSwitch?WWDC=1.

I finally dropped .mac. When I was using an iMac and a MacBook, the iDisk and syncing were handy. Now that I just use one MacBook Pro, it wasn’t a justifiable expense.

If you, like me, were curious what’d happen to my username and other account info, here ’tis:

About your expired account status

You can continue to use your .Mac member name with .Mac Groups, iChat, or AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) and you can access your .Mac Account page to manage your .Mac account password or update your alternate email addresses. However, the iDisk storage, web pages, screensavers, and iCal calendars for your .Mac account are no longer accessible to you or visible to others. As a courtesy, you will have access to your .Mac Mail until 15 days after your account expiration date. You will also have access to your Group Preferences page for .Mac Groups so you can arrange to transfer ownership of the group to another .Mac member for any .Mac group you own.

I’ve used TextExpander off and on a few times now. At first I just used it for a signature (snore). A few weeks ago I realized TextExpander could detach what may have been the last dependence I had on browsers: Bookmark Keywords.

I love that I can use bookmark keywords to tell Camino (and OmniWeb and Safari (with an InputManager)) that ‘bugz’ is a shortcut to go to the bug database. So I just type ‘bugz’ in the URL field and it figures it out. It was annoying to have to go and recreate these shortcuts when I switched browsers. It was also annoying that Safari couldn’t do this without an InputManager. Then I realized this was a perfect candidate for TextExpander! Now I have TextExpander handle all my keywords. Since TextExpander runs in almost all apps, I prefix all the keywords with a ‘w’. ‘bugz’ is now ‘wbugz’. Works a treat and has really enabled me to create a ton more keywords and not worry about switching browsers.

I’m going to be showing some slides (and talking over the slides) and doing a demo of RubyCocoa tonight for the Boise ruby brigade. I’ll post the code and slides tomorrow for anyone that might care. Hopefully someone learns something (minimally, I think I’ll get a lot out of it)

<useless information>

27 years ago, I was born. On that same day, Professor Longhair passed away.

I’ll let you connect the dots.

</useless information>

Your favorite browser sucks! Mine does too. I rotate through Camino, Safari and OmniWeb. They all have strengths and weaknesses. After about two weeks, my default browser seems to have more weaknesses than strengths. So I switch!

“But what about my bookmarks!? and my saved form data!?” you say.

With that, I point you at WebnoteHappy[1] and 1Passwd respectively. These two apps let me bounce around from browser to browser without ever flinching. Hurray for independent software.

note: FireFox is not in my default browser rotation, but I do use it here and there to make use of firebug.

[1] - in the spirit of full disclosure: I’m friends with Luis of WebnoteHappy. But he doesn’t pay me to like his app.

We keep our home pretty cool during the winter. Since I work out of the house all day[1], I’m frequently bundled up with a hat and stuff. The one thing I can’t really cover well has been my hands. I needs to type. It’s what I do. To combat my whining about my cold hands, my wife threw together[2] these somewhat fingerless mittens. It’s not clear in the picture, but there’s a hole for the pinky as well as the thumb. The first beta was more of a flap with a thumb hole. That didn’t really help much. The v1.0 model (pictured) is great. Having it loosely wrap around my fingers worked really well. I can type just as well with these on as with off.

My wife seems to really enjoy making stuff. If you want a pair of these custom made fingerless mitten thingys, send me an email @ bcooke@roobasoft.com.

[1] - I have a day job, but I work remotely
[2] - She taught herself how to crochet a couple months ago and now cranks out all kinds of stuff

The traineo folks hooked me up with a simple API quite quickly (simple == good). The widget has two big improvements:

• You can now enter your traineo username / password (no longer relies on Safari cookies)
• The gauge is much more reliable and the NaN issue should be resolved.

It was fun working with the traineo folks at such a rapid pace (I posted the original widget on Saturday and they provided an API on Monday). Many thanks to them for supporting this.

Download version 1.1 now.

Let me know if you have any problems / suggestions.

Update: The traineo guys provided an API and I updated the widget. See: TraineoWeight.wdgt Updated

Like most Americans I’d prefer to be less fat. To help me with that goal I’ve been logging my weight on traineo.com. They offer plenty more than just weight tracking, but I haven’t gotten into all that quite yet. Anyway, it seemed silly to log into a web page just to enter my weight each day (who has the time for that! </lazy>). So I pinged the traineo folks and got this in reply:

I’m afraid that at the moment we don’t have an open API, although we are planning to release one in the not-too-distant future.

<snip>

If you want to input your weight remotely, this is possible, but not something we actively advertise, as it’s currently not really ready for public consumption.

If you were to visit http://they.made.it.sound/like/i/shouldnt/share while logged in (i.e. you have a cookie saved in your browser (they don’t go stale for a long time)), your weight would be submitted.

To which I said (to myself): “C Is for cookie, that’s good enough for me!”.

When I found myself awake at 3am[1]. I knew just what to do:

1) Fire up Dashcode
2) Author a widget based on a template Apple provided[2] using 1997 methods of screen scraping[3].
3) Publish widget with minimal testing
4) Hope traineo doesn’t change their response HTML

This took ~3 hours of my time[4] and surely has bugs and will surely break when traineo changes their response. I provide this “as is”. With that:

Enjoy! TraineoWeight.wdgt.zip Make sure you log into your traineo account with Safari first.

[1] our 3 year old likes to wake me up and make me tuck her back in (it’s not that bad really - I’m sure I’ll miss it when it stops).
[2] I can’t make pretty things. But I can copy pretty things!
[3] .substring() - I fought the DOM parser for too long and finally reverted to .substring(). Yes, this is a hack and this widget *will* break someday…possibly soon.
[4] I would have never tried this without Dashcode. It’s pretty slick. Two thumbs up.
[5] Wait…there wasn’t a [5]. Well, if you want access to the Dashcode project let me know and I’ll put up an svn repo. Feel free to take the widget and do with it what you will.

In order to keep myself busy, I’ve moved hosting providers again. If you notice any bumps, please let me know @ contact@roobasoft.com

The move is from pair (who I still highly recommend) to a slice over on slicehost (who I hope to be able to recommend). I got the slice to play with some rails stuff I’ve been doing and decided to move roobasoft.com over to reduce costs. The biggest pain/fear with running a dedicated server (even a virtual one) is taking care of mail. To take care of that I’m giving google apps for your domain a try. The biggest downside to that is the lack of IMAP support. I decided the gmail web interface plus POP access was good enough for now.