Drew's Blog

Well, I think I’ve got the basic GUI layed out in my mind. On top of that, I think I’ve played around with the GUI editor enough to know how to get it to do my bidding.

Finally it’s on to actually making a handler for the Todoist API. For that, I just wrote a couple of simple python scripts for testing so I know what the links have to look like and what the results should roughly be. Here a short example:

#!/usr/bin/python
import urllib
q = urllib.urlencode({‘token’: ‘myToken’})
r = urllib.urlopen(‘http://todoist.com/API/getProjects?’ + q)
print r.read()

This script just forms the link needed and then gets the web response. In any case, using this method, I’ve started making a TodoistAPIHandler class that uses a WebRequest class that I’ve made. So far, I have it getting projects. I suppose the next step is to figure out a good way to hold the JSON data it returns.

To be continued…

I found this link on-line and found it to be quite useful.

http://www.beginlinux.com/server_training/web-server/976-apache-and-selinux

I refer to it often as I forget some of the commands once in a while when I add new files for Apache to serve.

If your data centre looks like this, you’re doing it wrong.

Data Center Image

A friend of mine set this up on his page for Christmas. I thought it was kind of cool, so I thought I’d post it here.

You can download the code from my site directly here. (Right click or option-click the link and choose “Save As…” to download this file.)

I found this very useful article on running DBDesigner 4 on Fedora 8, here. I followed the directions and found it to work on Fedora 11 and Fedora 12. I’m sure it’ll work for just about any distro, so I’m just reposting the directions here as I find it to be a very useful program.

Do not use the original DBDesigner4 download available on the fabForce.net website. Instead download the dbdesigner-fork package from here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/dbdesigner-fork/

Once you have unpacked it. Edit the bin/startdbd_using_kernel2.6 script and remove the assume kernel 2.4.1 text:

Original file contents: LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.1 LANG=en_US.ISO8859-1 LD_LIBRARY_PATH=./Linuxlib/ ./DBDesignerFork

Edited contents: LANG=en_US.ISO8859-1 LD_LIBRARY_PATH=./Linuxlib/ ./DBDesignerFork

Save it and run it. It should all work as expected on Linux Fedora 8 or indeed any other modern distribution like Ubuntu, etc.

Well, I’ve just started working on my first application for the Android OS. My reasons for it? I recently purchased a Motorola Droid and have come to a conclusion. All of the to-do applications really suck in comparison to Todoist. The only decent one is RememberTheMilk; however, you have to pay a yearly fee to use the app on Android and I’m just not a fan of how it’s set-up.

That said, I’ve decided to create an application for Todoist. Overall, the learning curve for how everything hangs together seems pretty easy. There’s a ton of documentation available and thus far I’ve basically set-up eclipse with the ADT plug-in and used the GUI designer and made a couple of custom views. The initial bits and pieces of trying to figure stuff out is a little frustrating, but it takes no time at all to finally figure it out and take off like a mad-man writing Java. So easy, a monkey could do it =)

Here’s a current view of what the GUI looks like. This isn’t actually pulling any data from Todoist’s site yet; however, it will be soon enough. And on that note, if you’ve never used Todoist or have never heard of it, I recommend you check it out. here.

In any case, let me know what you think of my design thus far.

Android Todoist App Design

The last time I used Visual Studio 6… Not having a scroll wheel drove my bonkers. Well, this time around, I was lucky enough to find this:

http://joebott.com/vb6scrollwheel.htm

Just run it in the background, and it’ll take care of everything. Much love to this one <3 It’s saved me much pain.

(Also, before you go off on me as to why the hell I’m using VS6… Well, I have to for work. We have software that has to be maintained that was originally made in VS6 and I can’t get the projects to migrate to any of the *newer* Visual Studios… not that they are any better >.> )