chrisstreeter.com » site

GCalendar Reminders

streeter — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 19:30:11 +0000

Google recently added the ability to create a birthday calendar. However, Google didn’t give one the ability to send reminders for the events on that calendar. This is the same thing that Apple has done for years with their Address Book and iCal integration. And I hate missing someone’s birthday when I don’t happen to look at my calendar that day.

I saw this as an opportunity for improvement. I also saw this an opportunity to learn about Google App Engine. So I wrote a python application that lets you schedule email reminders for the Contacts Birthday Calendar. In addition, you can select a specific hour in a specific time-zone to send the reminders at as well. The application use’s the Google App Engine user authentication and the Google Data AuthSub permission request API to get upcoming events for display and email reminders.

This gave me some good experience with Google App Engine’s scheduled tasks and Task Queues, as well as a chance to hone up on my Python. Without further ado, I present GCalendar Reminders. Feel free to use it to send yourself emails using the security of Google App Engine.

Singapore and Thailand 2008

streeter — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 18:25:57 +0000

Railay East sunrise.

I’ve finally gotten around to finishing tagging, titling and describing my trip to Singapore and Thailand that occurred in March (!!) of this year. I know that it is really late, but I guess it is better than never. I put all the pictures up on flickr for people to check out. Since I’ve got flickr integration now, you can see the pictures in my photo gallery on my site. I’ve changed the privacy settings for all the pictures that have people (I know) in them, so to see those you will need to be a contact of mine on flickr. However for all the other ones, you can check them out on my site.

Singapore Pictures (with a couple in Malaysia)
Thailand Pictures

I also have the trip up on my travel page, so you can get a general idea of where I went. You can check it out at here.

Cache Miss

streeter — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 08:30:33 +0000

I posted on the 5th about how the travel page now shows all my travels. Well, I also mentioned that the page loads really slow. I’m happy to say that I greatly improved the processing bottleneck that existed. I implemented caching which has sped things up considerably. Previously, the travel page took ~7 seconds. The average time from start to finish of script execution on the page was 7.223 seconds, which is crazy long. I even saw execution times over 10 seconds! After turning on caching, I’m now seeing times from .572 to .7 seconds. This is a 10x improvement, and I know I can do even better, especially since this was a quick first pass at improving the page rendering time. Hopefully visitors to the travel pages will no longer notice that it is my side being slow, rather it’ll be the javascript and google maps servers that are slowing down the page load.

Worldly Travels

streeter — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 16:43:25 +0000

I’ve had a bunch of ideas recently for my travel page that I’ve wanted to implement. However, in order to implement them, I’ve needed to rewrite the Javascript that powers the page. I chose to use the Prototype Javascript framework due to my familiarity with it and its browser compatibility. After some time spent rewriting the code, I was able to get the page back to the same feature set (for only like the 5th time).

The rewrite has allowed me to quickly and easily add two new features to the page. The first feature is the ability to view track segments. This means that I can have a track that is broken up into segments, and each segment can be shown individually. Currently, I don’t have any trips that have track segments, but I may start taking advantage of that in the future.

Second, when no trip is selected on the travel page, something interesting is displayed. Now, all trips are aggregated together and shown on the map. So so you can get an idea of all the places I’ve been at a glance. Note that right now the page load is really slow. I know this and I know why it is slow, and I’ve got plans to address it.

As a final note, I’ve tested the page on Safari 3.1.1, Firefox 3.x and IE 7. With other browsers, your mileage may vary. And seriously, stop using IE, please. It hurts the internet.

New Photos Location

streeter — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 04:13:18 +0000

For a long time I’ve had a photo section on my site. Initially, I wrote the code that just searched through a directory structure for pictures that I had stuck in there. This worked fine for what I initially wanted, but didn’t scale well. Plus, it was quite slow. At the time, this stressed my PHP abilities and so I searched for better solutions. What I found was the open source Gallery. This solution worked well for me for the past several years. Since when I was hosted on Berkeley’s OCF servers to today’s more robust hosting with my own domain name.

DSC_2878

However, I’ve just begun to realize that this solution is no longer viable for me. I’ve realized that my flickr and facebook accounts give me a much greater visibility in a much more social environment. In addition, the point of me having photos on my site was to share them family and friends. At this point now, I would have to post pictures in three places. And since each place has different privacy controls, I couldn’t just post the same pictures to each place.

All this so far is just to say that I’ve decided to leverage the power of WordPress, and install the FAlbum plugin. So now all the pictures on my site are from my flickr account, which will allow me to more easily manage them. With this change, photos.chrisstreeter.com is now deprecated and has started pointing at the new location of my photos. FAlbum lets you view the photos just fine embedded in my site, but one will have to go to flickr in order to comment on them, which I encourage people to do. As you can see above, I can also now embed pictures from my album into my posts really easily, which is something else I’ve been wanting to do for quite some time. All in all, I think this is a great change.

Added Posts RSS

streeter — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 13:42:08 +0000

I fixed up the RSS link for my site. So now people should be able to get updates more easily.

Domain Name Change

streeter — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 17:49:42 +0000

I’ve got a new domain! I just secured the domain chrisstreeter.com! Previously, I only had chrisstreeter.net, which was nice and all, but .net just isn’t at the same level as a .com TLD. I set up some 301 redirects on my old domain which should make the transition as painless as possible for people.

The only downside is my search engine ranking. I was the number one hit for Chris Streeter on Google and number two on Yahoo. The domain name change will, invariably, affect the rankings, but it is for the best. A temporary hit now to become the number one Chris Streeter now, and hopefully, the number one Streeter eventually.

The Yearly Update Post

streeter — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 07:19:52 +0000

Well, it looks like I’ve neglected this “blog” long enough. It really isn’t much of a blog, rather, a place of (not so) periodic updates. I’ve really just focused this site on my photo gallery. Speaking of the gallery, I did some updating recently. Previously, I hosted galleries for 3 other people: my sister, Amy, and my 2 former roommates, Joe and Marcus. Well, I decided to finally separate these galleries from my main gallery. As such, I’ve created two new subdomains. My gallery is now located at http://www.chrisstreeter.com/photos/ and the hosted galleries are at http://photos-hosted.chrisstreeter.com/. I really don’t know how many people check out the hosted galleries, and so I’ll soon get a better idea. Through some apache mod_rewrite magic, I’ve tried to make the old links backwards compatible, so they do a 301 redirect to the new locations. I did some quick tests and it worked without any hitches… for me. Your mileage may vary.

So that’s an update on my site, how about what’s going on with me? Well, a little less than a year ago, I moved to Santa Barbara, California and entered Corporate America. Santa Barbara has been great and is such a great place to live. I recently acquired a Hobie 18′ from my Uncle and have been working to make it ship-shape as the boat has been sitting for at least 7 years. I’ve had to do a number of things to get it ready for sailing, but as of this past weekend, it was finally ready to sail. However, the weather wasn’t as cooperative. One of the greatest things about Santa Barbara is the ability to get permits to park your cat on the beach. This should provide a new activity to consume me each weekend for quite some time.

As for my job, I am currently really enjoying it. My job has been a great mix of different skill sets, utilizing a large amount of my previous experiences, along with my education at Cal. In addition, the experience and knowledge I’m gaining at the job is awesome. I am 100% positive I made the right choice last year with coming to my current job.

So, this should be a pretty good update. We’ll see how long it is until I post again, though I’ll try to make it sooner rather than later.

Various Un-needed Tweaks

streeter — Mon, 14 May 2007 03:48:00 +0000

I decided I wanted to do some maintenance on this site, and so updated the design slightly. The updated design fixes some tweaks with the layout that I’ve been wanting to do for some time. It also moves the sidebar back to the right, where it usually is. In general, the site should be more accessible to all different types of browsers as I read through the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. I wanted to try to conform to a number of the guidelines, and hopefully made some progress. But in general, I believe this layout and design is a bit more polished as the design continues to evolve over the several years this has been around.

Santa Barbara News Press Apartment Feed

streeter — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 17:51:25 +0000

I’ve been hunting for apartments in Santa Barbara recently, and one of my resources is the Santa Barbara News Press newspaper site. However, there isn’t any way to tell new postings. And since there are so many listings, I couldn’t remember them all. So I created a script that scrapes the Santa Barbara News Press apartments listings website and then creates a feed of all the listings. I’ve found it pretty handy to follow all the new listings and maybe someone else will too.

I removed the feed, since it hasn’t been updated in a very long time.