Here’s how you can highlight and tidy json files from within vim.

Highlighting:
Download the json syntax highlighting file from vim.org and place it in your $HOME/.vim/syntax/ directory.

Place the following in your .vimrc file
au BufRead,BufNewFile *.json set filetype=json foldmethod=syntax
au! Syntax json source $HOME/.vim/syntax/json.vim

Tidy:
Install the perl module JSON::XS from cpan (if you don’t have it already)
sudo cpan JSON::XS
place the following in your .vimrc file
au FileType json command -range=% -nargs=* Tidy <line1>,<line2>! json_xs -f json -t json-pretty

Then whenever you need to tidify any json data you’ve opened in vim… just type
:Tidy

I searched around and found a bookmarklet that will change any page to straight black on white.  I changed the values to be the opposite: white on black and saved the bookmarklet. Clicking the bookmark while on a page will change the colors to white on black. Now whenever I visit a page that is too bright for my cave dweller eyes, I make like a Rolling Stone and paint it black.

Drag this bookmarklet to your bookmark bar to use it: Paint it Black

Here is the code for it:

javascript: (function(){ var newSS, styles='* { background: black ! important; color: white !important } :link, :link * { color: #0000EE !important } :visited, :visited * { color: #551A8B !important }'; if(document.createStyleSheet) { document.createStyleSheet('javascript:\''+styles+'\''); } else { newSS=document.createElement('link'); newSS.rel='stylesheet'; newSS.href='data:text/css,'+escape(styles); document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(newSS); } } )();

Congrats, you used the bookmarklet to find my super secret text!

I know it’s a piece of cake to look through the history…  but it’s even more easy to just start typing into the awesome bar in Firefox 3.5 some of the text that was in that page.  I just typed in subversion cpanel and it showed up as the first hit underneath the awesome bar.

Here’s how it works:

1. iPhone gets current latitude/longitude location via GPS satellites orbiting in space.
2. Location is logged to a file on the iPhone every time I move 5 feet.
3. Every 5 minutes the log is uploaded to gordonchild.com.
4. Website writes all locations received to database.
5. Google Maps magically shows the location and paths on a map.

I’ve been wanting to do this ever since I got the original iPhone, but since it lacked GPS capabilities I never was able to.  I got the new iPhone 3G about a month and a half ago and have been enjoying the GPS goodness that it has.

Additional things I plan on adding:

• Pinpoints of pictures taken on iPhone at the location it was taken
• Pinpoints for any location that I spent more than 1 hour at
• Ability to view path by time of day
• An estimated-path-taken if path has moved drastically from one location to the next.

Note to all stalkers, mafia, CIA/FBI agents and bigfoot: Chuck Norris is my bodyguard.

Note to all ninjas: You are welcome to come play RockBand at my house anytime.

ReadScriptures.com is a website that has the LDS Scriptures available for the iPhone and iPod Touch.  They have, since the announcement of the iPhone SDK, promised an offline reader. For a while many people have been looking forward to this offline reader of the scriptures for the iPhone and iPod Touch.  This morning this has been released on the Apple Application Store for $14.99.

To myself, I think that this is a little over priced.  Nonetheless, they have the potential of doing a lot with this application.  They have the potential of improving it tremendously.

In the mean time, I think I’m going to develop a LDS Scriptures reader using Apple’s SDK.  I would make this available for free on the App Store.  It would probably have less features than the one currently on the App Store, but nonetheless would be available as a poor man’s version of the scriptures with the same content.

I’ve told a couple people of my intention to do this.  And they’ve suggested to make it “donationware.”  I’d have to check with Apple’s license to see if I can do this.  But the idea would be to make this available without any required payment.

Update: It appears that someone has already beaten me.  There is a version of the scriptures on the AppStore that is free.  So there’s no reason for me to do this anymore.

I really didn’t need to show her anything.  She mostly plays games on the internet and she figured out quickly where the little launch icon is for Firefox.  However, she did call me up asking me how she could write a “rough draft” for a book that she wanted to write.  She didn’t know where Microsoft Word was.  I explained over the phone that there’s this great tool called OpenOffice.org.  I showed her how to get to it and off she goes with it.

I am terribly excited for her.  She’s 1 up’d the rest of my family.  She is the first one out of all of us to use Linux as her sole operating system (including me, I’ve been dual booting MacOS and Ubuntu Linux lately).  I’m gonna be following up with her to make sure that she’s using it.  But so far she really likes it.  She especially likes Compiz.  In her words, it’s “Awwesooome!”

I used a program called gphoto to take the pictures.  It only runs on MacOS and Linux.  I haven’t yet seen a port for Windows. As long as you have a camera that gphoto supports, you can have it automatically snap pictures. The minimum amount of time that I was able to snap pictures was 10 seconds. The reason being that the camera had to extent the lens, take the picture, then retract the lens. It would take about 10 seconds for it to do this. But the command that I used in gphoto to do this was the following:

gphoto2 --capture-image

Then I had it on a simple loop from there using a bash script.

After having taken pictures I used mencoder to put them all together into a video. Here’s an example of a command to use for mencoder.

mencoder mf://*.jpg -mf on:fps=25:type=jpeg -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=1500:vhq -ofps 25 -o timelapse-25fps.avi

Then from there mencoder takes it and makes an mp4 video of all the pictures. It’s really kind of slick.

Sunday night I set my iTunes to repeat and listened to these two songs over and over again until I went to bed.  I found myself more alive in the morning and was able to wake up faster. The morning went much better, especially for a Monday.

I think it’s really neat the effect that music can have on you.  In addition to this I’ve been listening to various songs by Percy Grainger (I played Children’s March in High School and it still gets stuck in my head!) and Adagio for Strings by Samuel Barber.

The solution: Create a podcast of General Conference.

After much trial and error and manually editing xml (for shame…), I have managed to create a podcast for the most recent General Conference. Podcasts are very easy to subscribe to. You simply fire up iTunes, go to Advanced >> Subscribe to Podcast… then enter the url of the podcast. The URL is below.

http://www.gordonchild.com/conf/rss.xml

Whoever reads this, feel free to share the URL of this Podcast. It’s too great a thing not to share.

Update: As soon as the titles of the talks and the audio of the Priesthood Session is released I will update the podcast to include these.

Update 04-14-08: I just checked lds.org and it looks like they added podcast feeds for both mp3 and mp4 (video). These are not mine, they’re the official ones. Here’s a link:

http://lds.org/conference/sessions/display/0,5239,23-1-851,00.html

I have listened to the music from the musical and have seen a few different movies based on the book. So I thought I was fairly acquainted with the story. But there is a lot of detail that is left out in everything that I’ve before encountered having to do with this story.

I’ve been especially impressed with Monsieur Myriel. A good portion of the book goes into describing him and encounters that he has. At first I wasn’t sure who this person was or why he was even talked about in the book. While the first few chapters were interesting, I was slightly confused at the detail that spent on a character that I thought was unimportant.

After a while of reading I figured out and saw how important this character is in the book. I won’t give it away for anyone that hasn’t read the book yet. But had this person not been in the story, there would be no story.

I can see how Victor Hugo is trying to paint a picture of what he believes to be, and what are, problems with most societies. It really makes you look and think about… to steal a quote from Babe… “the way things are.”