Daniel Von Fange

More Hawaii Photos.

Experiment.

"If you don't run experiments before you start designing a new system, your entire system will be an experiment!" --Mike Williams

Some Hawaii photos.

Vacation.

Day 1:
Flight accross most of the US and most of the Pacific ocean, next to two smiling children - opps, I meant "crying" children - scratch that. "screaming" - children. After arriving I snuck out and splashed my feet through in the Pacific before sleeping. The air was sweet on the dark beach.

Day2:
Wake up and take photos of other high rises from my high rise. Get internet access and solve a customer's problem before breakfast. Climb up the inside of Diamond Head crater. Ride along the coast line and accros Oahu to see the rumored fifty foot waves. Explore the cruise ship from top to bottom - literaly, I started at the top and went down.

Desktop Geekery.

I was trying to procrastinate last week.. the upshot of it was that I now have all my tasks and todo's nicely listed on my desktop, along with with a list of my flagged mail items (Overview screenshot, close up). I just press F11, and fwosh - all the windows fly out of my way, and I can look at what next I have to do.

Unfortunately, this was then the end of procrastinating, because staring me in the face were all the emails I had forgot to respond too over the past year.

How did I get my todo items up? I hacked bsag's Rails GTD application to have a page which returned a plain text formated version of my todos. I used GeekTool to display them on the desktop using a shell window executing curl http://todo.faith.local/todo/list_text every five minutes.

The flagged emails come from an applescript (I'm not yet an applescript writer, corrections and hints welcome. Especially since I don't know how to talk to stdout.)

tell application "Mail"
	set theMsgs to messages of inbox whose flagged status is true
	set msgList to {}
	repeat with thisMsg in theMsgs
		set theSender to text 1 thru 9 of (sender of thisMsg as text)
		set the end of msgList to "
" & (theSender) & ": " & (subject of thisMsg) & "
"
	end repeat
	return msgList
end tell

It's called from GeekTool like this:

osascript /path/to/flagged_emails.scpt | grep -v "," | sort

Race car.

My little brother rendered a race car.

JBlast - Broadcast Faxing.

I used JBlast today to send out faxes for a small manufacturing client to their dealers.

Score card:
* Quality is okay.
* Reporting tools are great.
* Prices good.
* International faxing stinks.

To send faxes to multiple countries, you must first break your fax number data into separate data files, one per country. Then you must remove both the country codes and punctuation from the fax numbers. Then you must walk again through the faxing setup process and document uploading for each country you wish to send to. Not fun when you just want to send out a quick fax to fourteen different countries.

We will probably use them again, at least for USA and Canadian customers. Anyone know of other good faxing services?

Oracle.

The I-Hate-Oracle Club has some new banner images out.

I have to say that I am considering joining this august club.