Welcome to my site. Here you will find some info about me, the things I do and a listing of upcoming (and past) presentations and lectures. While I initially expected most of my posts to be about Open Source/Free Software (hence the name), these days it's mostly rants and ramblings about running.

trashblog photos, Aug 13

Posted August 13th, 2011 by eric

summer streets

Posted August 13th, 2011 by eric

I'm breaking my photos into two posts today, the next one will be the daily trashblog photo, this one is some images of the NYC DOT's summer streets event.

Roads closed to car traffic making a complete path from the Brooklyn Bridge all the way to Columbus Circle. I was blown away by how many people were participating. The crowds of cyclists, runners and roller bladers just kept coming down the road for ever. I might just hop on my bike and ride along the route tomorrow.

photo, Aug 12

Posted August 12th, 2011 by eric

guest photographer, Aug 11

Posted August 11th, 2011 by eric

Today's photo comes from my first "guest blogger," comrade Milo Miller who took this photo in Eugene Oregon (with a few tone and contrast adjustments by me to help me not feel guilty about not posting my own photo today).

photo and applescript for situps

Posted August 10th, 2011 by eric

as has become my habit on days I have something to say: first the photo of the day, then the content.

today I crossed over to the dark side and wrote an applescript.

I feel like I have betrayed my perl roots, it's possible that I'll rewrite this in perl next week but I wanted to give applescript a try.

Jenna was forced by an injury to stop running with me in the Couch to 5k http://www.coolrunning.com/engine/2/2_3/181.shtml training so until she can run again we've started the 2 Hundred Situps training program http://www.twohundredsitups.com/ .

The big problem with this, aside from the fact that it is even more boring than running, is that you have to keep count. It makes it all very confusing for two people to try to do together.

So, I've written a small applescript to do the counting for us. When it runs, it asks you to pick a voice for the general prompts and situp number, and another for counting the 3 seconds you're supposed to hold each crunch for. It then asks for the number in each of the 4 sets that makeup each day's training.

Once it gets the input it needs, it gives you 30 seconds to get into place and starts counting, with a 30 second break between sets, and a final set of 200 where the idea is that you do as many as you can and then stop and record that day's final numbers in your training log.

I've attached the script in compiled and source code formats to the bottom of this post, let me know if this is useful for you or if you want to help port this to other languages to it can run on linux as well (next step for me is to research how to trigger a text to speech function in linux from perl).

The following web pages were critical in helping me figure out certain parts of this.

simple repeat loops: http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.20/20.12/RepeatLoops/index.html

how to display the menus for selecting the voice to use: http://www.devdaily.com/blog/post/mac-os-x/displaying-list-in-dialog-usi...

declaration and modification of variables: http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/iCal/workshops/applescript/1996/2_loopingNvariab...