Older blog entries for bradfitz (starting at number 237)

Election stuff

Obama: yes! (kinda like this)

Prop 8: boo. (aww/heh)

Lost my laptop: boo.

And Palin didn't know Africa was a continent and not a country? Love it.

Syndicated 2008-11-06 18:38:00 from Brad Fitzpatrick

non-US citizens for Obama

I work with a number of non-US citizens and I keep accidentally asking them if they've voted yet, then catching myself.

At dinner tonight I accidentally asked a German coworker if he'd voted yet and his answer surprised me: because he's not able to vote, he instead volunteered for the Obama campaign this weekend, calling voters in swing states and encouraging them to go vote. He figures he did his part that way, probably doing more good than 1 California vote anyway.

Awesome.

Syndicated 2008-11-04 07:27:51 from Brad Fitzpatrick

yay! android lj app.

Just noticed new android app in the market, ElJay. Yay! Now I can post quicker from my phone.

Syndicated 2008-11-03 20:40:48 from Brad Fitzpatrick

Amazon default shipping option

Any Amazon employees read this blog?

Please to be filing internal bug report, k thx:

* users should be able to set their default shipping destination

At least if it exists I can't find it. Make it part of the normal change-destination-during-checkout flow. Perhaps a [X] Make this the default checkbox. I do not want to ship everything to my parent's house. It's been awhile since I lived there.

Syndicated 2008-11-01 18:48:59 from Brad Fitzpatrick

Heh...

Brains...
http://google.com/robots.txt

User-agent: zombies
Disallow: /brains

User-agent: *
Allow: /searchhistory/
Disallow: /news?output=xhtml&
Allow: /news?output=xhtml
Disallow: /search
Disallow: /groups
Disallow: /images
Disallow: /catalogs
....

Syndicated 2008-11-01 01:00:01 from Brad Fitzpatrick

brad @ 2008-10-30T00:14:00

http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2008/10/30/the-single-sign-on-war-will-ruin-openid/

Syndicated 2008-10-30 07:15:13 (Updated 2008-10-30 07:15:33) from Brad Fitzpatrick

Android Garage Door Opener, part 2

This is a follow-up to my previous post to say:

SO. FUCKING. AWESOME.

I got it all working. I now have an Android Activity (GarageDoorActivity) which interacts with an Android Service I wrote (InRangeService), letting me start and stop the service's wifi scanning task. The service gets the system WifiManager, holds a WifiLock to keep the radio active, and then does a Wifi scan every couple seconds, looking for my house.

When my house is in range, it does the magic HTTP request to my garage door opener's webserver (HMAC-signed timestamped URL, for non-replayability/forgeability if sniffed) and my garage door opens. Complete with a bunch of fun Toast notifications (like Growl) and Android Notifications (both persistent ongoing notifications for background scanning, and one-time notifications for things like the garage door actually opening).

I just threw on some shoes and hopped on my motorcycle to do a test lap around the neighborhood. When I got to the corner, I pulled up the activity and press "Start" (aka "Going home now"). A lady on the corner saw me playing with my phone on my motorcycle and said, "The reception's not so good up here." I thanked her, not wanting to explain what I was actually doing.

I then finished the lap around the block and the garage door started opening a few houses away. By the time I pulled up, I could already back the bike into the garage. HELL YES.

Update 2008-11-16: The source code is now available.

Syndicated 2008-10-26 19:18:06 (Updated 2008-11-16 19:44:44) from Brad Fitzpatrick

Lala

I'm in love with Lala.com:

http://lala.com/

I'm having a hard time finding something to not like about it.

It's a music site combining purchasing, listening, uploading (your online music locker), social stuff, etc.

News about its relaunch today:
http://news.google.com/news?q=lala

Syndicated 2008-10-21 19:40:28 from Brad Fitzpatrick

Fun with Android

I've been having fun writing Android apps.

My main Android app I care about is my garage door opener. I have a webserver hooked up my garage door opener, so I can open my garage over the network. Combined with a background process doing wifi scanning, the idea's that when I'm on my way home, I pull up to my house on my motorcycle and the garage door magically opens and I back into my garage without taking off my helmet/gloves/etc.

Last night I wrote the background wifi scanning service part and walked around my house and neighborhood to get the signal strengths to the three different APs in my house (and the other ones of my neighbors). Looks like it'll work perfectly. Now I just need to wire up my wifi scanning service with my garage door opening code (simple http client that HMAC signs one-time timestamped URLs).

I just mentioned to evan that it looks like I have enough data to real-time triangulate within my house which room I'm in, since I have enough access points and their signal strengths vary enough. I was going to just make some stupid widget on http://bradfitz.com/ show where I'm at (which room at home, at work, in car via Bluetooth detection, on google shuttle via wifi detection, etc...) even without GPS (or with, if available).

But evan went one further:

make it turn on the lights for whatever room you're in.
that'd be cute.
you could call it "magic wand of light"

Hell yes.

Update: See the conclusion in Part 2.

Syndicated 2008-10-20 17:40:32 (Updated 2008-10-26 22:49:57) from Brad Fitzpatrick

Long day

Woke up at 6:30 am, got ready, picked up erinearl and drove to work. I almost never drive to work, but...

After work there was a memcached hackathon ~5 miles from Google at Sun's campus. So I went to that and met a bunch of people, both people I've met before and people I've only talked to online. And got some hacking done. It was weird working in C again after a year+ of C++.

So back now at ~12:30 am. Long day.

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I'm debating going to Seattle again this weekend (or this Friday, actually) for another UW event, this time not for a building's birthday, but they think I'm wonderful. And who could say no to that flattery?

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Debates & cooking & voting discussion party tomorrow (er, Wednesday) night at my house, if you didn't get the invite.

Syndicated 2008-10-15 07:53:40 from Brad Fitzpatrick