So I’ve been doing the the freelance thing lately and I am just bad at organizing. Some people use Outlook or iCal. A lot of people keep notes or organizers, but I guess that’s just not my thing. So here I copied stole an idea from a friend. It is basically a wallpaper that functions in the same way as a pinboard. You just place stickies(Mac) or sticky notes(Windows) or whatever your preferred application that places post-it like notes on your desktop. For my wallpaper I divided it into 3 columns depending on priority.

Click to download

Urgent for urgent, Pipeline for things to come and Personal for non-work stuff

Here’s how you use it.

Wallpaper in action

You could also use wallpaper that looks like a calendar for the same purpose.

Cool, eh?

I don’t claim to be a usability genius but I ran across a couple of websites today that just made me say, “eh?”

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Been playing some games lately, even though I’m supposed to be working. Lol. And sorry, no Plants vs Zombies here.

Frets on Fire is a Guitar Hero clone that runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. It is written in Python by some Finnish Guys and comes pretty close to the real thing. It can even interface with your guitar controllers if you have any. I use my inverted keyboard. What’s really cool about it is that you can import songs from the real Guitar Hero games, or even, with some minor knowledge of guitar and tabs, load up any song (that you can convert to ogg), even your own. I’ve been using it lately to gain some practice so that I look decent when I go to Timezone.

My Hands on Fire

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Pragmatic Programmers releases the first iteration of it’s own e-magazine — for free Get it here

Includes the ariticles:

• The Layoffs Are Coming!
• Why Clojure?
• When Things Go Wrong
• Pragmatic Publishing

Ran across the full frontal site and I promise I did not rip them off (Sure, I ripped off alot of other guys but not them). Damn, now I have to change mine. lol.

Really good use of colors.

I wish I could attend though.

EDIT: plugin now available at Wordpress.org here. Wow that was fast! I gave it a 3 star rating.

Download the plugin here

I’ve been working with WordPress for quite awhile already but I never really read the plugin API for it. So after some stretch of boredom, in between Pugad Baboy and Neal Stephenson, I decided to channel Rachel Ray and “cook up” a wordpress plugin in 30 minutes.

Totally Irrelevant Photo

There are a lot of tutorials showing you how to use the “undocumented API” to embed Yahoo Messenger badges onto your website/blog. I call it undocumented ‘coz I haven’t found the official documentation describing the API (If anyone knows of the official documentation for this, that would be so awesome). So, the said webservice takes your Yahoo!ID as a parameter and returns a gif image which indicates your current presence/status on the messenger service.

The webservice is accessed from the URL: http://opi.yahoo.com/online?u=[username]&m=g&t=1. The u parameter is the yahoo ID you’re requesting status for, the m is for… I don’t know, and the t is for the ‘type’ or which image you want to display. They currently have 24 of these images available. I figured this was a simple enough starting point for our plugin.

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Was almost going crazy trying to remove .svn directories from my projects deeply nested directory tree. Tried to look at some bash magiczx to fix it and here’s what I came up with:

find . -name .svn -exec rm -rf {} \;

This is on OSX but I imagine it should be the same for anyone on bash.

Get a chance to get into Open Hack Day Manila!

The contest is all about building something on top of the Yahoo! Application Platform – a platform that allows you to create apps consumed by Yahoo’s user base. They have a PHP SDK and a Flash SDK, but it’s ridiculously easy to develop apps on their browser based IDE as well. I know there are a lot of people here who are on Yahoo services (like Mail or Messenger) so it’s definitely going to be easy getting ideas from friends and family on any useful apps they may need. YAP also supports OpenSocial which opens apps up for integration into social networks that support it – like Facebook, Friendster and MySpace. Just to give you examples of what you can do, here is a list of apps that are built on YAP. Below is the presentation given at Open Hack Day 2008 where they previewed the Yahoo! Application Platform.

So this is a great contest but the best thing about it is that top 20 apps get a chance to present at Yahoo! Open Hack Day Manila on October. It’s a chance for 90 seconds of fame to show off your skillz in front of your peers and top technology experts. Plus, the 5 winners selected by judges will each get an IPod Touch!

The deadline for entries is August 30 so submit your hack NOW!

Email me andrei at dreinavarro.com to get invited to the Purple Hack mailing list.

Had the chance to get into Google/Globe Developer Workshop earlier.

Interesting talks by Patrick Chanezon on:

HTML 5: Canvas and Video
People say it’s going to kill Flash and Silverlight. The demos we’re impressive but I’m really concerned about actual performance. (Then again, Flash doesn’t do too good sometimes either. I don’t know anything about Silverlight though). Selector syntax on HTML 5 is also great news.

HTML 5: Geolocation API
A lot of development is already leading to this and it’s good to see it’s being added to the spec. Don’t need Gears anymore lol.

Google Web Elements
He did a demo of the Conversation element. This is great and opens up their services to more people (It’s just as easy as cutting and pasting an IFrame snippet). I think a lot of us developers will stick to the JS APIs though because of the flexibility.

OpenSocial
It is good that developers here got to see what’s possible with OAuth. My only thought was how OpenSocial fits in with DSNP, I forgot to ask Patrick about that though. There’s a lot of potential here and if Multiply decides to support it that’s a big step towards local social networking.

Google Friend Connect
Two Words: Comment translation.

One other really really useful API I only found out about today: Static Maps.

Globe did their bit as well talking about their SMS, MMS, LBS and Voice APIs. I’ve always been interested in these but never got any ideas on an app to build using them. Patrick had suggested building a Firefox extension that geolocated users and integrated with the LBS API. Maybe you guys have some suggestions?

After the talks we were able to get a chance to talk with Steph Liu (Developer Technical Program Manager at Google) and got to talking about Wave (she didn’t have any invites at the moment lol) and the more importantly, about the local developer community. Like I’ve discussed with a lot of guys before, everyone seems to have their own silos and there’s no common avenue where the entire community just gets together. You have your Google Guys, your Yahoo guys, Microsoft Guys. Then there’s the freelancers, the “corporate”/”enterprise” guys, the startup guys. These different groups don’t really know each other too well I think and it would be great if we got some suggestions on how to get them together. When the community is tighter around here we’ll be able to bring in more talks from foreign developers and help grow the skillset and level of our local talent.

I’ve started to get active on the Filipino Developer Help Group and that can be a starting point for meeting other guys in the scene. Hope to see (and hopefully talk to) you guys in the next developer events.

I’ve only been using it for a couple of days but I am so loving Coda right now.

I have used Dreamweaver, Eclipse, UEStudio, gEdit, notepad++ and even Textmate but Coda makes my work even more fun. Having access to SSH right there was what sold it for me. The books function is cool too, but does anyone know how to import any ebooks that I have locally?

Anyone who’s on OSX can give it a try.

I am weirdly captivated to sing Third Eye Blind whenever I mention Coda

And I speak to you like the chorus to the verse,
Chop another line like a coda with a curse,