So I’m sure you’ve heard of the idea of the 3 hour diet right? Well if you haven’t, its simple. Eating smaller portions every 3 hours is the most effective way of keeping your metabolism up and your weight down. So you have breakfast, then three hours later a snack, then three hours later lunch, then a snack, then dinner, then a snack (if you’re up that late). I learned about this from my trainer who recommended that i start eating every 3 hours. So I did and i noticed that i had much more energy throughout the day and my fitness progress improved drastically. But i would sometimes forget to eat or wait too long between meals, so i searched the app store to see if there was any kind of reminder app. There wasn’t. So I just thought I’d build one myself.

I have extensive programming experience, but I’d never made an iPhone app and barely even knew where to begin. But just over a month later i finished this bad boy and now its live on the app store.

So, the app is really easy. After you wake up and eat breakfast, launch the app and hit the shiny button. Three hours later you’ll be reminded that it’s time to eat again. SO… eat! Then hit the button again when you’re done. You can also changed the default timer from 4:00 all the way down to 1:00 if you need prep time before you eat. There’s a handy meal progress bar on the bottom that keeps tracks of how many meals you’ve had and whether its “snack” time or “meal” time (big fork and knife vs little fork and knife).

So there it is. I really enjoyed making it and I learned a ton. Plus i really enjoy using it. I took great pains to make a very mundane task fun and visually appealing.

So if you have an iPhone or iPod Touch please install it and tell me know what you think. If you like it I would greatly appreciate it if you took a minute to rate it and leave feedback on the app store.

http://3hourdietapp.com

Problem

The problem i was running into was when i got to the /twiki/bin/configure part of the twiki install instructions i would get a white page and the error log simply said “Premature end of script headers”. I would then tweak endlessly with different configurations only to come up with the same error. It wasnt until i looked in the suexec_log on the server under /var/logs/httpd that i was able to solve the problem

Solution

This particular install was on a subdomain of wiki. I unzipped the installation files to “/var/www/vhosts//subdomains/wiki/httpdocs/twiki/”. The installation docs tell you to chown the entire directory as apache:apache. This will not work on your DV. Instead you need to use the ftp user as the user and psacln as the group. so you would do “chown -R :psacln twiki” replace with the ftp user for that subdomain. Most of the time this is already the case if you uploaded via ftp under that username. The other thing you want to make sure of is to turn off mod_perl. You can do this in the domains apache config file. This should be located at “/vaw/www/vhosts//conf/httpd.include” Now i know the comments at the top of the file tell you not to modify it but to use vhost.conf file instead, but i do not know how to turn off mod_perl that way, If you do please let me know in the comments. So we’re looking for the vhost declaration for our subdomain of wiki and looking for the line that says:

SetHandler perl-script
PerlHandler ModPerl::Registry
Options ExecCGI
allow from all
PerlSendHeader On


This will probably be listed twice for your subdomain, once for :80 and once for :443
Change that in both places to

# SetHandler perl-script
# PerlHandler ModPerl::Registry
Options ExecCGI
allow from all
PerlSendHeader On

Basically just comment out the lines to set perl scripts to execute under mod_perl. So that should do it, save that, restart apache and give it a whirl.

View Demo

Latitude and longitude is great for maps, but sometimes you need additional information, like an address or zip code. Unfortunately the native Geolocation API does not provide this functionality, but luckily Google’s Geocoding API does.  Google’s Geocoding API has the ability to do what’s called reverse geocoding.  You give it latitude and longitude and it gives you nearby addresses in a nice neat JSON package.  Here’s an example of the JSON returned by a reverse geocode lookup.  As you can see, it contains a lot of information about addresses around that area.  However for this particular article we are only interested in the Zip Code of the first result.

One caveat of using Google’s Geocoding API in JavaScript is that there is no way to add a callback to the end of the request. This rules out the cross-domain AJAX method of dynamic script tag embedding as a method of retrieving the data.  Currently the easiest way to achieve cross-domain AJAX calls is by using a proxy. A proxy is a server-side script that resides on the same domain as your client script and acts as a middle man between the two domains.  Your script makes an ajax call to the proxy, the proxy retrieves the data from the other domain and returns it back to your script.

Heres my proxy.php file

<?php
$path = ($_POST['path']) ? $_POST['path'] : $_GET['path'];
$url = $path;
 
// Open the Curl session
$session = curl_init($url);
 
// If it's a POST, put the POST data in the body
if ($_POST['path']) {
	$postvars = '';
	while ($element = current($_POST)) {
		$postvars .= urlencode(key($_POST)).'='.urlencode($element).'&';
		next($_POST);
	}
	curl_setopt ($session, CURLOPT_POST, true);
	curl_setopt ($session, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $postvars);
}
 
// Don't return HTTP headers. Do return the contents of the call
curl_setopt($session, CURLOPT_HEADER, false);
curl_setopt($session, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
 
// Make the call
$xml = curl_exec($session);
 
// does the service return XML or JSON? Set the Content-Type appropriately
$headerType = ($_POST['type']) ? $_POST['type'] : $_GET['type'];
// 'text/xml' or 'application/json'
$headerType = ($headerType) ? $headerType : 'text/xml';//default
header("Content-Type: " . $headerType);
 
echo $xml;
curl_close($session);
?>

Here’s the JavaScript. Notice I’m using jQuery.

$(function(){
   var GETZIP = {
      getLocation: function(){
         $('#status').text('searching...');
         if(navigator.geolocation){
            navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(GETZIP.getZipCode, GETZIP.error, {timeout: 7000});//cache it for 10 minutes
         }else{
            GETZIP.error('Geo location not supported');
         }
      },
      index: 0,
      error: function(msg) {
         if(msg.code){
            //this is a geolocation error
            switch(msg.code){
            case 1:
               $("#status").text('Permission Denied').fadeOut().fadeIn();
               break;
            case 2:
               $("#status").text('Position Unavailable').fadeOut().fadeIn();
               break;
            case 3:
               GETZIP.index++;
               $("#status").text('Timeout... Trying again (' + GETZIP.index + ')').fadeOut().fadeIn();
               navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(GETZIP.getZipCode, GETZIP.error, {timeout: 7000});
               break;
            default:
               //nothing
            }
         }else{
            //this is a text error
            $('#error').text(msg).addClass('failed');
         }
 
      },
 
      getZipCode: function(position){
         var position = position.coords.latitude + "," + position.coords.longitude;
         $.getJSON('proxy.php',{
            path : "http://maps.google.com/maps/api/geocode/json?latlng="+position+"&sensor=false",
            type: "application/json"
         }, function(json){
            //Find the zip code of the first result
            if(!(json.status == "OK")){
               GETZIP.error('Zip Code not Found');
               return;
            }
            var found = false;
            $(json.results[0].address_components).each(function(i, el){
               if($.inArray("postal_code", el.types) > -1){
                  $("#status").text('Your Zip Code: ' + el.short_name);
                  found = true;
                  return;
               }
            });
            if(!found){
               GETZIP.error('Zip Code not Found');
            }
         });
      }
   }
   GETZIP.getLocation();
});

A note on Safari 5: It seems that the current implementation of geolocation is a bit buggy. Sometimes it returns results almost immediately, other times it takes more than 10 seconds, but more often than not it runs for eternity without success. Firefox, on the other hand, seems pretty stable.

View Demo

Today, I installed Photoshop CS5 trial and used content-aware fill on a selection of the blutooth and i was pretty blown away at the results.

Below is the results. Before is on top, After is on bottom.

Of course i could clean it up a bit more, but this was just 2 simple steps.  Make a quick selection and hit delete.  Amazing.

Here’s the default “disjointed” photoshop setup on a mac

Now i wanna contain all those wild modal panels into one cohesive application window. So i choose “Application Frame” From the “Window” menu like so:

That leaves me with a beautifully framed and contained photoshop with a full size canvas. This is much easier to work with since i am no longer accidentally clicking the desktop and losing my application focus.

Keep in mind that this is CS4 and your mileage may vary depending on what version you are using.