Stupid Foot

Back before Leopard and the tabbed Terminal.app I was using iTerm. I iTerm, I did everything I wanted. Leopard came along and with it the new Terminal.app. Hello tabs. With this new tabbed Terminal.app I no longer needed iTerm. As time went on I had pretty much forgotten all about iTerm. Just the other day a friend tweeted about iTerm which made me download it and give it another try.

Things I love about iTerm.

• Fuzzy transparency for a background
• More of an Xterm like feel

Things I missed.

• Option + Delete = delete previous word

The option + delete may not seem like such a huge deal but I used it all the time. After a bit of googling I’ve  found a simple way to make it work like it should.

Open the Manage Profiles window (Bookmarks -> Manage Profiles). Select the keyboard layout you use, and make sure +Esc is selected.

Apple approved #WHOIS, a whois client I wrote for the iPhone / iPod Touch. I’m glad they approved it. I had a blast getting familiar with Objective C and Cococa. Coming from a strong Python background it wasn’t that big of a leap. I’m not sure why I had been so intimidated by C before, It really isn’t a difficult language to use.

I’ve been hard at work coming up with ideas for the next few projects I want to do and should have the next thing submitted to Apple early next week.

All in all, the turn around time from submission to live was right around 7 days. Oh, I almost forgot, I have some promo codes to give out. If anyone is interested leave a comment, get in touch with me on Twittter (@trcjr) or AIM (stupidfoot)

I’ve been coding python for over two years now. I’ve mostly used it for console back end applications. Talking to Postgresql or Sqlite. I love Python. Before Python I was doing pretty much the same tasks with Perl. I’m not going to go into the Python vs Perl thing now but I will say that Python is a much, much more friendly language to use.

I got into Django with the 1.0 release. Developing with Django is fast. Crazy Fast. The Django ORM makes dealing with the database an extremely pleasant experience. Looking for a post with the slug ‘hey-i-am-the-post-you-are-looking-for’? Its as simple as Model.objects.get(‘hey-i-am-the-post-you-are-looking-for’).

Django follows the DRY principle. Don’t Repeat Yourself. The thing that I miss the most when dealing with other web frameworks, like CakePHP is the lack of  get_absolute_url(). I love that there is just one place where you define the url structure to a type of object. Want to change all of the links to your posts from /posts/<slug> to /not-posts/<slug>? Easy, change the value of get_absolute_url() in the Posts model.

With Django you can go from an idea for a webapp to a fully functional site in an afternoon. Django’s ORM is great to use even if you are not going to be using Django to build a web site. If you have not, spend an afternoon with Django. Get cozy. Learn to love it.

Last year I was turned on to Puzzle Pirates by Three Rings. If you don’t know anything about Puzzle Pirates, it is a MMORPG where you are a pirate and you join a crew and sail around attacking other people. You control the sailing and attacking and pretty much everything else through the act of playing puzzle games.

I played the game for a few days before I thought that there must be some way to autopilot the puzzles which would allow me to make in game money for doing little work. After a small amount of research I fount SCAR Divi.

SCAR Divi seems to be mostly centered around building bots for RuneScape. I have written several bots for Macroquest 2 back in the day so I figured writing a puzzle solver for Puzzle Pirates wouldn’t be too difficult.

In the span of a few hours I threw together a simple proof of concept bot that would play the Bilging game pretty well. I tinkered with it here and there for a few days and ended up with a pretty capable bot that would sit and play Bilging for hours on end making me a tidy sum of pieces of eight.

I’m betting that Three Rings didn’t like the fact that I had several accounts running my little bot for days on end which is probably why my computer was tainted.

If your computer claims to be tainted by Three Rings‘ game Puzzle Pirates then you can’t create a new account. There is an easy way to fix this.

1. Uninstall Puzzle Pirates.
2. Remove hash.dat.
3. Install Puzzle Pirates.
4. Create account.

I’m not sure where the file lives in Vista but in XP hash.dat is located in C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\

I’ll post later why I needed to figure this out.

It has been colder than usual recently. Florida is not supposed to get cold. Florida is the land of shorts and a t-shirt on Christmas day. It was 56 last night. That is cold and not supposed to happen. I’m pretty sure there was a memo sent out about this. I’ll have to get my people to contact Florida and make sure that the memo is read.

Brrr.

I was at Publix last night and found these. I almost had to buy them because they had Mickey Mouse on them.

Disney Eggs

Everyone has seen the Game of Life. Last week there was a post on digg about a project that used it to produce text. This morning I’ve stumbled across someone who effectively turned the Game of Life into a dot matrix printer. It is the kind of project that I think is really neat but can’t come up with a practical use for it.

I came across The World’s Smallest Postal Service on reddit.com tonight and just placed an order for my wife for our anniversary. This is one of the most awesome hand-made things I’ve seen in a very long time.

I was doing some research trying to decide how to price and promote the app I’m building for the iPhone and I came across this article. It points out the really obvious fact that if you are trying to do iPhone development full time then you need to charge enough for your app so that you can actually live on what money you do make.

It also points out that the current pricing structure of the app store is flawed. The article states that most if not all apps should be bumped up $10.00 in price, $0.99 apps becoming $9.99, $4.99 becoming $14.99. This is a very valid point, how can anyone expect to live on $0.70 a copy of their software? Don’t say they will make it up in volume because that is much harder than one would think.

I now need to sit down and figure out how much I should charge and make sure that I would actually be able to make money with what I’m planning.