TwCLI

So,
you think you’ve had a lot of fun with twitter on the web and all those twitter clients you’ve played around
with?  What if I told you that you haven’t seen anything yet?  What if I told you that you
could use Twitter in a TRUE Command Line Interface with specific commands for interacting with twitter.

Welcome to one of my latest and greatest creations, title="Twitter Command Line Interface">TwCLI.

TwCLI supports
almost everything twitter has to offer, and will soon be expanding to support even more!  href="http://tech.gtaero.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/image3.png"> src="http://tech.gtaero.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/image_thumb3.png" width="500" height="404" />
TwCLI includes a long list of commands, help information for each command, a theme-able interface (Specify a
Pre-Determined theme, import from your twitter profile, or even specify an external CSS file!),
Geo-Location, Retweets, and even Contributor Support!

Go ahead, href="http://twcli.koneko-chan.net/">give it a try and tell me what you
think!

Geosense – I’m in Love

src="http://www.geosenseforwindows.com/images/logo.png" />

I love
applications that fill in where hardware fails, but this one is really taking the cake!  href="http://www.geosenseforwindows.com/">Geosense for Windows gives you the
capabilities of a GPS sensor in your computer (but without the actual hardware!)  It uses Google
Location Services to triangulate your location and provide your coordinates to applications that request
them.

href="http://tech.gtaero.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/image2.png"> src="http://tech.gtaero.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/image_thumb2.png" width="500" height="310" />

Unfortunately, not many applications use this type of data (yet) but href="http://www.istartedsomething.com/20100301/geosense-for-windows-location-released/">Long Zheng
and href="http://www.withinwindows.com/2010/03/01/geosense-the-first-really-really-cool-windows-sensor/">Rafael
Rivera are hoping that with this new default driver for PCs without GPS, that many more developers
will embrace the creation of geo-location in desktop applications.

Continue Reading for
Code Snippets

Rumor: Twitter Close to Unveiling Contributions

Do I know for sure?  Absolutely not.  Do I have inside
information?  Absolutely not.  Was I randomly observant one night and saw something that
seemed to push me to think in this direction?  Yes.

Back in December, Twitter
blogged about its “feature
test with businesses” of a new Contribution API they were adding in to Twitter.  One that
would allow companies to give users permission to tweet on behalf of the main account, and still attribute
that post to the user who wrote it.

If you wanted to see this in action, all you would
have to do is look at the main Twitter account, where almost every post and retweet is attributed to one of
the employees.

style="display: inline" title="image" alt="image"
src="http://tech.gtaero.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/image_thumb1.png" width="500" height="217" />

They originally announced that this feature would improve usage of applications like @ href="http://twitter.com/CoTweet">CoTweet and @HootSuite. 
But if you look at their timelines, you see very little Contribution API dabble – until recently, that is.

Looking through CoTweet’s posts all the way back through December, none of them have contribution
metadata – except for the latest two on February 18th and 19th.  HootSuite has only one, posted on
February 18th (none earlier, and none later).  This brings to mind:  Twitter must have
recently been rolling out (or testing) their Contribution Feature – or are we really supposed to expect this
to be coincidence?

And all of this with the Twitter Developer Meetup Scheduled for Monday,
March 1st 2009.

All I’m saying is, I think they’ve gotten much closer to
rolling out Contributions.  Maybe they’ll announce it at this small developer meetup, since
everybody already knows about it.  Then again, maybe they won’t.

How to Retrieve a Zipcode Using JavaScript

[codesyntax lang="javascript"]// Retrieve user’s Zipcode
// Demo
            at http://sandbox.gtaero.net/zipcode.html
function retrieve_zip(callback)
{

            try { if(!google) { google = 0; } } catch(err) { google = 0; } // Stupid Exceptions

            if(navigator.geolocation) // FireFox/HTML5 GeoLocation
 {

            navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(function(position)
 {

            zip_from_latlng(position.coords.latitude,position.coords.longitude,callback);
 });
 }

            else if(google && google.gears) // Google Gears GeoLocation
 {
 var geloc =
            google.gears.factory.create('beta.geolocation');
 geloc.getPermission();

            geloc.getCurrentPosition(function(position)
 {

            zip_from_latlng(position.latitude,position.longitude,callback);
 },function(err){});
 }
}
function
            zip_from_latlng(latitude,longitude,callback)
{
 // Setup the Script using Geonames.org's
            WebService
 var script = document.createElement("script");
 script.src =
            "http://ws.geonames.org/findNearbyPostalCodesJSON?lat=" + latitude + "&lng=" + longitude + "&callback="
            + callback;
 // Run the Script

            document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(script);
}
function
            example_callback(json)
{
 // Now we have the data! If you want to just assume it's the
            'closest' zipcode, we have that below:
 zip = json.postalCodes[0].postalCode;
 country =
            json.postalCodes[0].countryCode;
 state = json.postalCodes[0].adminName1;
 county =
            json.postalCodes[0].adminName2;
 place = json.postalCodes[0].placeName;
 alert(zip);
}
retrieve_zip("example_callback");
            // Alert the User's Zipcode
[/codesyntax]

simpleTAPI is Broken

Apparently I’ve completely broken simpleTAPI somewhere between Build 27 and
Build 30.  I thought I had fixed it with Build 29, but it seems that I was mistaken.

In
lieu of this, I am putting simpleTAPI on a temporary hiatus.  I will be re-constructing it from
scratch (though, probably looking back and using a good bit of the original code).  The next
version should have several configurable options, and will hopefully interact with the Twitter API much
better than the previous versions.

Build 30 was supposed to return results as an
array([“TAPI”] => data, [“result”] => data).  But all I’m getting from it at the
moment is “Unable to Authenticate User.”

Those wanting to use simpleTAPI should use href="http://github.com/navarr/simpleTAPI/commit/cc1567ce27c270a4314ba030f14d20684b128bf0">Build 27,
though you will have to deal with some minor quirks in the way results are returned.  (the TAPI
array is simply appended to the results array, making things slightly complicated if you don’t
unset($result[“TAPI”]);

What will be simpleTAPI 0.4 should have better error handling,
better return data, and better built-in caching.  I’m also hoping to build in support for xAuth and
Delegated OAuth, if at all possible.  (Though probably not since simpleTAPI is built upon another
OAuth library).

So, I’m asking for any and all feature requests.  Is there
something about simpleTAPI you don’t like or want to be improved?  Please, post in the comments
below!

Y’all Don’t Love Me, Do Ya?

Remember way back in November
when I created something so ridiculously awesome I had to learn two whole new web technologies to do it?

If you don’t, or if you just picked up on my blog, that very incredibly awesome something was
called Google
Voice OMS – It allows you to send text messages through Outlook using your Google
Voice account, without having to pay a third party company per-message.  Essentially making this
very awesome feature in Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2010 FREE.

At
first, I didn’t want to Open Source it.  I wanted to keep it for awhile and sell it to Google or
something if it caught on – but there seemed to be so tiny of a reaction to the post that I href="http://tech.gtaero.net/2009/11/google-voice-oms-code-on-github.html">published it on Github. 
Do you guys seriously not like it?  I asked for SSL Hosting or Donations three months
ago and I haven’t received a single cent to pay for the cost (nor an offer to host).

Not that there was really anything left to add to it, but I’ve pretty much just let the project
die.  Nobody’s approached me about funding it, or providing hosting for it, and definitely not
Google although it would be the best thing in the world to kick-start Google Voice for Businesses.

And I was even thinking of doing something cool like seeing if I could create a twitter client
replica of it.  But you know what?  Never
Mind.

How “Windows Phone 7 Series” Makes Sense

I’m sure every single person in the tech world can agree that Windows
Phone 7 Series is a stupid name for a product, almost as bad as iPad.

However, if we take a step back and re-think about this incredulously long name and what it means
exactly, you’ll see it may not be as entirely stupid as it was at first glance.

Windows
Phone 7 Series describes the combined devices that will be running this new Operating System. 
Just like the older OS devices will be called Windows Phone Classic Series. 
“Series” is simply an added word to describe the devices together.

Therefore, in truth,
Windows Phone 7 is the name of the OS itself, which is a lot less stupid than Windows
Phone 7 Series.

I’m still wondering if there is a specific way they could make
the name for the series itself more appealing.

My Problem with ID3 Taggers

I have yet to find one that will automatically tag my vast library of music
that isn’t English.

I love animé, and until about my third girlfriend I didn’t have much
or any music on my computer, I didn’t watch many videos either.  My library was dull and void. 
But now, I have 532 songs occupying 2.7 Gibibytes of data, and I’m pretty sure less than 100 of those are
English.  Some of the music I don’t expect to get any data from, music my friends made, or I don’t
know the origin of at all, but I have a lot of Japanese singles that were openings and endings from anime,
or were in an anime, but all of these singles also belonged to albums, or had album artwork, or an artist,
or all kinds of rich information that isn’t in my library – or are in any of the main databases.

To top it off, I tried using some auto-tagging software I don’t remember the name of anymore,
didn’t clearly understand the instructions, and screwed up the tags on a whole heck of a lot of my music, so
now I have some songs I don’t know the names, artists, or album info to at all as its improperly labeled
(and in Japanese).

Someone (I’d be willing to help any way I could) should compile a
database of the way songs sound (Some type of wavelength ID that could easily identify a song via a piece of
it, identify different versions, etc.), approaching music labels and artists from the United States,
Britain, Australia, Japan, and all those other countries.

Or does such software already
exist, and I simply don’t know about it?  If you know something I don’t, please leave it in the
comments =)

Facebook Chat launches XMPP Support

In a move that has me saying “Well its about freakin’ time!” – Facebook has
launched XMPP Support for their popular Chat Service.

Now, normally I don’t take the time
to write out about this kind of thing – except that no other blog post has detailed what your connection
credentials are – so I’ll go ahead and write those for you.

Login: [email protected]

Password: Your freakin’ Password

If you do not yet have
a username (What the heck is wrong with you?  Why not?!) then you can create one at href="http://facebook.com/username/">http://facebook.com/username/. (By the way, that’ll also
be an email address soon, just so ya know).

Needed in (X)HTML 5 – An extension to the Meta Tag

I was thinking today, while reading an article about redirect – that there is
currently no way to accurately and semantically tell a user/bot that a web page is located somewhere else
when you only have access to static (X)HTML files.  However, there is a workaround a lot of people
use that dampens usability, and there is an attribute whose name would seem to imply that a way to do it
should be possible.

By this of course, I’m referring to <meta http-equiv=""
/>.

Currently, people wanting to relocate their web pages rely on an older value
to this tag that seems to have been originally designed for moving one person from one page to another in a
set increment of time:

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;URL=http://domain.tld/location"
/>

This doesn’t appear to be what this value should be used for, and has very
negative consequences for search engines and parsers.  Instead, don’t you think we should be using
http-equiv to its full potential?

To this, I propose the addition of <meta
http-equiv="location" />, to properly match the HTTP Header for redirection.

I think there should be two ways to use this:

<meta http-equiv="location"
content="http://domain.tld/location" /> and

<meta
http-equiv="location" content="301;http://domain.tld/location" />.

Obviously, the second example gives us both a *three digit* HTTP Code, and the URL for redirection. 
Since HTTP codes are only three numbers (though in the future may be greater digits) there still should not
be any problem.