I gave up waiting for RadioReference to issue me a key to their API. I guess I wasn’t destined to create a radio frequency app, oh well. So, I took the great Symegry template that I’d ported over to the $6 domain name frehq.com I bought yesterday, and made a similarly useful app.

This program takes the top six tech blogs with big full images and converts them into a responsive app across all platforms. It’s a great way to get current with technology.

I created this app in one day, like today. Click the image below to try it out:

I decided to play around with the RadioReference API today, of which I am a member thanks to a $15 charge to my PayPal. They possess a database of scanner frequencies around the world and supposedly allow you access to it if you are really a software developer, and they approve you.

Well, I am, so I just created a new website called frehq.com (pronounced freak) and then requested an API key from this address. That was several hours ago and I’m still waiting for approval, spinning my wheels while trying to decide if I can do anything productive with their data.

I’m certainly spoiled by the big players, like Google, who grant API keys immediately. The best part about this little project so far is that my provider BlueHost only charged me $5.99 for the name. I took the core code from my latest project Symegry and whipped up a shell, that has no function yet, and it looks like this!

Six bucks for a domain name that’s good for a year, you can’t beat that…

My latest app Symegry has been evolving nicely, for what it’s worth…

Symegry (pronounced like imagery) now has images in Google, Yahoo and NPR.

Hmmm, 621ms is just over 1/2 second, sweet. The site loads no images, just my html5 base, jQuery, my css and javascript code, along with a couple of plugins. The processing time occurs when you select the News you want to view.

I’m trying to get jQuery $.Deferred() Promises working, and it ain’t…

Update: Ok, not so stressed anymore, I got it working: Symegry

I got a notice today from my web hosting service BlueHost that one of my domain names, symegry.com, was about to expire. Normally I just localize a site so it’s usable and let the domain name fade away, but I had never really done anything with symegry.

Today I whipped up a little HTML5 along with a modded tilley hat image and ported it on up to the server. It still does absolutely nothing but it looks good and scales nicely across all devices from phones to monitors. Click the image below to try it out…

Maybe I’ll re-up the domain name and do something with this site…

On June 6, 2011 (4 years and 3 months ago) I was in Vegas and decided to start documenting my life. For years, I’d been taking pictures while attempting to convey them to an audience I couldn’t see or even knew existed. I finally had an epiphany and created this WordPress blog and the first post I made to it was this.

1,676 posts, 2,935 comments and 7,835 flickr photos later, here I am, emojified!

I drove Steph down to Idaho Falls today for a doctor’s appointment. It was in an area off Sunnyside comprised of nothing but medical facilities and I was just driving around killing time when I came upon this place. Nothing will stop you in your tracks quicker than a business with your email address for a name!

What were they thinking? Teton Post! What does that mean? I know what I was thinking more than ten years ago when I snagged tetonpost at gmail.com. I had a website by that name that I was trying to peddle some local valley advertising with. That didn’t work out, but it’s been my primary email address ever since.

Wait, I just got it: Teton Post Acute Care & Rehabilitation. This is too funny! ( link )

Here are a couple of media projects I’m working on. This video was shot on a trip down to Lava Hot Springs between Freedom and Soda Springs. I probably shouldn’t post this as I was doing over a hundred, but what the hell…

This is a test of my ability to take a photo this morning, transfer it to my new Acer netbook, adjust the color with Pixlr, rename it with Advanced Renamer, resize it with FastStone and upload it to Flickr with the Uploader.

The test is obviously successful, as you can see below, if not somewhat convoluted. I’m using the same tools as my desktop with the exception of Pixlr and the Flickr Uploader. I need to port my primary graphics editor over and see if I can find the old Flickr Uploader, as their new one sucks.

Anyway, this is the first post to my blog using my new Aspire Switch netbook entirely. Mission accomplished and she’s almost ready to hit the road.

Update: My graphics app Photo Brush is installed and I found the old uploader!

I accidentally blew my little Acer Win 98 netbook apart the other day, a tech experiment gone bad… Unfortunately, that was my main tool for maintaining the blog while I’m on the road. I need image editing capabilities along with renaming, resizing and uploading tools and my Android tablets just didn’t cut it. So, I bought a new Acer.

It came in last night and I spent the evening upgrading Windows 8 to Windows 10. I’m still tweaking it today, adding my tools and diving deep into Microsoft’s new OS. I put a review up on Amazon if your interested and you can see the product here.

🚘+📷=😎

Birthday = Thursday:♋️

Today was a code day. Regular readers will recall how bummed I was when Google went with OAuth2 and threw my map projects into limbo. I put a weekend into it, converted all of my Google Spreadsheets to MySql tables, then converted the Zend data to MySql code. Whew, that’s a mouthful…

Next up I find that the code monkeys are depreciating MySql and recommending everybody update to MySqli (the improved version). In a previous post I thought they wouldn’t have the nerve but after a little research, they’ll probably kill standard MySql.

So, I thought, since my mapping apps are state of the art, shouldn’t my database code be also? Today I’ve been replacing all of that MySql code with PDO. This is a very cool interface for accessing MySql databases in PHP, and it’s the acknowledged leader over MySqli. It stands for PHP Data Objects and is very object-oriented.

Here are the current affected projects: all of the JimsMaps, along with bdjMap. I’ll have these conversions done tomorrow…

I’ve got 95% of the functionality of JimsMap back, still working on the new table code… Shortly I can wrap this up and go traveling. I’m sure you would much rather see photos of cool places here, as opposed to reading about my code crap.

But, since I have your attention, I might as well share an interesting observation regarding MySql. This open source database has been around since 1995 and is used by hundreds of millions of websites around the world. As I’ve been googling php mysql functions, to refresh my brain and to include in my code, I keep seeing this ominous warning message:

It reminds me of the message Google was sending out regarding oauth2, that I most conveniently ignored. The alternative they’re proposing is called mysqli (improved) which is basically an object oriented version.

I have dozens of apps based around mysql, and the conversion would be painful. I get it, these web jockeys want to upgrade to their latest and greatest, just like Google did with oauth2, but they’re delaying based on the potential firestorm fallout (did I mention hundreds of millions of websites?). This is a scare tactic, I don’t think they have the nerve. Google on the other hand just said screw it, and went for it with oauth2.

…and what’s up with the pink message? sheesh…

What an interesting, productive coding day it has been. My problems all started back around May 20 when Google dropped the standard Zend client login access to their spreadsheet api, and demanded oauth2. I was right in the middle of developing a great app called bdjMap when everything stopped working. I spent two weeks scrambling, trying to fix the access issues, and finally bailed.

I accept responsibility, I should have known they were going to switch to oauth2, but I missed it. An interesting note to make is that one of the core oauth2 designers quit the project, calling it out as crap.

Here’s his post.

There wasn’t a single problem or incident I can point to in order to explain such an extreme move. This is a case of death by a thousand cuts, and as the work was winding down, I’ve found myself reflecting more and more on what we actually accomplished. At the end, I reached the conclusion that OAuth 2.0 is a bad protocol. WS-* bad. It is bad enough that I no longer want to be associated with it. It is the biggest professional disappointment of my career.

Today I threw Zend into the garbage, along with oauth2 and the Google spreadsheet api. I’m transferring all of the data into MySql tables hosted on my site, and rewriting the code that accesses it.

Magically, everything is back up! Routes I had been planning for this summer vacation suddenly are visible again. As I was digging around inside my code I found the point at which I was currently working on, when Google pulled the access plug. Yea!

If you would like to check the project out, click here. You might see some strange trips in there because I’m testing it out. The two main routes so far are:

• June Trip
• West Coast Trip

Damn it’s nice to have my stuff back, tomorrow I fix JimsMap!

It’s also much faster and more responsive without the cumbersome overhead of the Zend library and the latency issues of dealing with the Google cloud. Lesson learned…