A Google Street View car drives into Central Park in New York and then magically dissappears. Interesting. It almost seems as if the car had an out of body experience. See for yourself. Follow the cars path into Central Park for a surprise.

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It's great to be in Miami this week for MicroStrategy World. 

Today I went from -7C tempuratures in Totoronto to +27C in Miami. Pretty good for a Sunday.

Interesting things so far in Miami

• 27C weather! FTW!
• lazy lounging by the Ocean
• Local version of Pizza Pizza
• Wicked huge tree with super long haning vines (or whatever). There actually kids playing inside of this tree
• The most ghetto petting zoo I've ever seen

All this only around the Bayside Marketplace just down the street from my room at the Viceroy Hotel. Plus a short stop in South Beach.

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Who wants to work with a Ruby Rock Star? Whould one look something like this?

Ruby Rock Star is on Github

And, it seems like my Tux, the Linux Penguin pumpkin turned out nicely :)

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Thanks Google. I will never again have to tabulate my interests 
myself. You've done it for me.

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I've been planning a trip to Ottawa for Canada Day celebrations for as
long as I can remember. Finally this year was the one that we got the
opportunity to fulfill our Canuck duty and visit our beautiful capital
for the celebration of our nations birthday.

The trip was so great that we're already making plans for going back.
We've just got to decide if we want to go for Canada Day again, or
visit during the winter so we can go skating on the canal (if that's
where the skating happens). I'm craving Beaver Tails already, next
time I'll have to have the Nutella and banana flavoured kind.

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I'm be doing a Code Walkthrough talk showing some internals of my Green Parking Toronot Android App. You can check out the source code if you like. The slides are below.

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If you're interested in Android development, I encourage you to come out to this months meetup of The Toronto Android Users Group. I'll be presenting some of the code that I've put together for the Green Parking Android App in the Android Marketplace. I'll also be going through the steps necessary to check out the source of the app and contribute back if you like.

Check out the event here.

Here's a few points I'll try to cover:

• Using Google maps in Android Applications
• Using JSON data in Android App
• Fetching and updating data in a background Service
• Using github as a source code repository to share ideas and code
• Cloning and forking the Green-Parking-Toronto source tree

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A quick little project to get the #io2011 Samsung Galaxy 10.1 to let you change your time settings. I'm sure this will be outdated when Honeycomb 3.1 is released for the device. But, maybe someone will find this usefull

https://github.com/adamw523/android-toggle-auto-date-time-setting

Direct link to the apk

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Paul shares a great solution for exposing your local port on a public server using pow and nginx. I took his idea and added support for specifying identity keys and dropped the need to configure up pow and nginx. You do need socat installed on the remote machine doing the port forwarding for my solution.

This works well for me when I need to expose an app running on my local development machine to the world. Especially helpful when working on Facebook Apps or other services that need to trick to talk to your localhost.

Install Thor Module:

thor install https://gist.github.com/raw/963052/700a484a9c2d6b0d6842ed2b65f6d3d7e066ecab/tunnel.thor

The tunnel.yml file:

development:
  username: user
  public_host: host.example.com
  public_port: 8088
  local_port: 8088
  identity_file: ~/.ec2/path_to_ssh_key<

Start the tunnel (execute in the same directory as the tunnel.yml file):

thor tunnel:start

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It's great to be back in San Francisco. It's so great, I'm almost accepting of the weather not being as nice here as it is back at home in Oshawa. It's been quite cold and windy here.

I've taken a whole week to take in San Francisco this time. I've been doing a LOT of walking around and loitering at Starbucks until the Google I/O conference starts.

I've explored a good deal of the Downtown, the shore and Golden Gate Park. Today is a day to relax and recouparate from all the walking. Maybe I'll take a little stroll around the Moscone Center to check out the Google I/O preparations.

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I got the Digiwave 8-Bay Multidirectional HDTV Antenna from Durham Radio a couple of months ago. I was pretty happy with getting about 15 channels having the antenna in my attic. Luckily, the weather has gotten quite nicer and today I got a chance to mount it on the roof.

Now I get a whopping 35 channels. Most of them in beautiful uncompressed HD! I've got great reception on CBC, CTV, Global TV, CityTV, OMNI 1&2, ABC, Fox, and a bunch of other channels.

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I mounted it on a J-Pole that has been on my roof since we bought the house.

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Winning, Duh!

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One of these carrots does not belong

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I had a great time with my first crack at Android Development.  The app lists Green P Parking carparks in Toronto. The data backing the carpark locations comes from my project scraping the GreenP site at http://torontogreenp.appspot.com/

There's many features planned that I haven't got to yet. So updates will be coming soon

It's Open Source!  I've posted the source to my Github account: https://github.com/adamw523/Green-Parking-Toronto

If you're interested, download the source, build on it, comment, critisize or whatever.

In the Market: https://market.android.com/details?id=ca.tbcn.greenp

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So I finally set up a standing workstation for myself.

After a week of using it I can claim that I love it. I feel great about myself for not slouching over a desk all day long. I feel like it's easier for me to focus. Surprisingly, I haven't been sore or tired after a whole day of standing. I hear it's healthier too :)

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This thing is full of awesome!

It plays Nintendo, Super Nintendo and Genesis games. FTW

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I love using Green P Parking when I'm in Toronto. The pricing is reasonable compared to some other private lots, and I always know what to expect.

What I don't love, is having to go to the Green P site after I've already found directions to my destination on Google Maps.

So, I've crated a scraper at http://scraperwiki.com/scrapers/greenp_carparks/ and a site on Google App Engine to serve up properly Content-Type'd KML to easily paste into Google Maps right over the directions that I've already searched for. The KML source is even usable in Bing maps :).

Check it out: http://torontogreenp.appspot.com/

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I'm hoping to get a chance to get back here soon to get to check out
more of Golden Gate Park.

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My coffee this morning. Trying to tell me something?

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