Code: https://github.com/nomatteus/conway-game-of-life-js

What is Conway’s Game of Life?

Wikipedia has a good article. Excerpt:

The Game of Life, also known simply as Life, is a cellular automaton devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970. The “game” is a zero-player game, meaning that its evolution is determined by its initial state, requiring no further input. One interacts with the Game of Life by creating an initial configuration and observing how it evolves.

Rules

The universe of the Game of Life is an infinite two-dimensional orthogonal grid of square cells, each of which is in one of two possible states, alive or dead. Every cell interacts with its eight neighbours, which are the cells that are horizontally, vertically, or diagonally adjacent. At each step in time, the following transitions occur:

1. Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if caused by under-population.
2. Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation.
3. Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overcrowding.
4. Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.

Coding

I remember playing around with the Game of Life many years ago, and have always thought it would be fun to program it. It’s a relatively simple programming exercise–you just need a grid of cells, and then apply the 4 rules of the Game of Life.

After finishing the main coding, I added an option to make the grid “colourful”. All this does is use a random color for each cell, instead of making everything black, but I like the results!

Some other things I could add:

• Work on creating a more efficient algorithm, i.e. don’t check each cell in areas that you know won’t change in the next few generations
• Make an interface to create/draw grids, and a way to import/share them
• Similar to the above, create a better way to make grids in code, to avoid having to have huge arrays of 0′s

Basics

Update Command-line Tool
 heroku update

Help
 heroku help

Get Started

Create App
 heroku create --stack cedar [<appname>]

Deploy App
 git push heroku master

Open App in Web Browser
 heroku open

Useful Info About Your App

Basic App Info
 heroku info

View App Config
 heroku config

Show State of App
 heroku ps

Show App Logs
 heroku logs

Advanced (Run Tasks/Database/Scaling)

Run task on Heroku (i.e. Rake tasks)
 heroku run rake task:name

Pull/Push Database (Use with Caution! Potentially Destructive.)
 heroku db:pull

 heroku db:push

Scale Web Process
 heroku ps:scale web=1

Set timezone for app. (Use TZ time zones from here [wikipedia].)
 heroku config:add TZ=America/Vancouver

For more, see here: http://devcenter.heroku.com/categories/command-line

Bonus Tip!

Avoid Free App (1 Web Dyno) Idling

Install New Relic Addon (Free): http://addons.heroku.com/newrelic
And Configure: http://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/newrelic
And then setup Availability Monitoring in “Menu > Settings > Availability Monitoring”

Download PDF Version (heroku_cheatsheet.pdf)

View on Google Docs

I like the idea of standing desks, but don’t really want to invest any money into it until I try it out, so I hacked one together with stuff I already have:

It’s just a table on a table, with some stuff on the ground to stand on, to reach the right height.

Some initial notes:

• Sore feet! I’ve only spent a few hours standing so far, but my feet get quite sore. Walking around once in a while helps!
• Typing feels much more natural. I think this is the first time I’m actually typing in an ergonomically-correct way, and it feels great!
• I probably need a stand for my monitor, so I don’t have to look down at it.
• I walk around a lot more, and can easily pace back and forth when I need to think about a problem.

Where to go from here?

• Standing desk or not, I need to get an actual desk. The Frederik desk from Ikea is adjustable, so it should work as either a standing or sitting desk.
• I’ll try this out for a few weeks and see how it goes! I only use this computer on evenings and weekends, so it’s not too crazy to stand for those times.

Side note: Also visible in the photo is the exercise ball I was using as a chair previously. 

Here’s a quick comparison of the features I care about the most:

The key is unlimited repositories, with only a limit on space. This is perfect for hosting a large amount of small projects. Most of my repos are only a few MB.

It turns out there are a ton of repository hosting sites–Codebase was the only one I found that had a limit on space, instead of number of repositories, and also had extra project features, like time tracking, code browsing/editing, etc.

So the plan for now is to move all my private Github repos to Codebase.

One last option is to host your Git repos on your own server. I looked into a few self-hosted options, Gitorious looks the most promising, but is apparently a bit tricky to install. I’m adding it to the “look in to someday” list.

Links:

• Codebase: http://www.codebasehq.com/
• Github: https://github.com/
• Gitorious Self-Hosted: http://gitorious.org/gitorious/pages/Installation

Luckily, for read-only access, you can open the 1Password.html file and view your passwords in a basic interface using a web browser (if you’re using Finder on Mac OS X, right-click your 1Password.agilekeychain file and choose “Show Package Contents” to see the HTML file).

However, if you’re using Google Chrome, you will see this:

How to Fix the “Problem loading 1Password data file” Error

A simple solution is on the 1Password web site:

The easiest way to workaround this is to store your 1Password.agilekeychain file on a web server or service like Dropbox. If you need offline access to 1PasswordAnywhere you will need to use another browser or modify Chrome’s settings by adding the –allow-file-access-from-files command line option.

A more complex solution is below.

The end result is being able to access your 1Password at http://1p.local (or domain of your choosing). This is probably only worth doing if you already run a web server locally.

1. Add a line to your hosts file (/etc/hosts on Mac OS X/*nix, c:windowssystem32driversetc on Windows) to point the address you choose to your local computer:

127.0.0.1    1p.local

The 1p.local address can be whatever you like. I like this address because Chrome will remember it and I can launch it by pressing 1 then return.

2. Add a virtual host to your Apache httpd.conf file:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    DirectoryIndex 1Password.html
    DocumentRoot /Users/myusername/Dropbox/1Password.agilekeychain/
    ServerName 1p.local # Change this if you like
</VirtualHost>

Make sure the DocumentRoot is the correct path to your 1Password.agilekeychain.

I also added another few lines (still in the httpd.conf file) to disallow anyone on the same network from accessing the file (even though it’s not too likely):

<Directory "/Users/myusername/Dropbox/1Password.agilekeychain/">
    Options All
    Order deny,allow
    Deny from all
    Allow from 127.0.0.1 # localhost
</Directory>

3. That’s it! Make sure to restart Apache so the changes will take effect.

Now, you should be able to access your 1Password HTML file through any browser (including Chrome!) at http://1p.local.

ctrl-a: move to front of line
ctrl-e: move to end of line
ctrl-w: delete word before cursor

By default, the shortcuts for moving left and right are Esc-b and Esc-f. It’s much handier to use Alt/Option-left and -right, so this is how you can configure terminal to do that:

To configure it to Alt + left and right:

 - Open Terminal preferences (command + ,);

 - At Keyboard tab, select "control cursor left (or right)" and doubleclick it;

      - Left: Select the combo "modifier" to "option" and the action to 33b

      - Right: Select the combo "modifier" to "option" and the action to 33f

Sources:

http://www.infoentropy.com/terminal_window_keyboard_shortcuts_mac_linux

http://snipplr.com/view/28113/config-terminal-to-move-wordbyword/

Recently, I did a full restore on my iPhone to try and fix some of the many problems I’ve been having (we’ll save that list for another day). While SMS messages are generally temporary in nature, I decided to find out if I could export them somehow. There are a few programs out there that claim to be able to do this for you, such as MobileSyncBrowser (Mac/PC, free trial/$10/$20), iPhone / iPod Touch Backup Extractor (Mac, free), or an online tool like iphone backup sms extractor. I didn’t try any of these because I don’t want to pay, I am not on a Mac, and I don’t want to upload my private messages to some random site. Luckily, I discovered that it’s not too hard to do it yourself. Grab your iPhone, put on your techie hat, and follow the 3 easy steps after the break!

Step 0 – Before You Start:

A couple things you need to take care of before diving in to the tutorial:

• Make sure to do a sync/backup of your iPhone in iTunes before starting to ensure all messages will be extracted.
• Download SQLite Database Browser as you will need this to browse/export the database once finding it.

Step 1 – Find the Backup File:

The SMS messages are stored in an SQLite database file that is located in a backup folder somewhere on your computer. The file is (most likely) named

3d0d7e5fb2ce288813306e4d4636395e047a3d28.mddata

On Windows, the path to the folder should resemble something like the following:

C:Documents and Settings[username]Application DataApple ComputerMobileSyncBackup[some random id]

On a Mac, you should find it at:

home/Library/MobileSync/backup/[some random id]/

Or just search your computer for 3d0d7e5fb2ce288813306e4d4636395e047a3d28.

Once you find the file, you can verify that it is an SQLite database by opening it in a text editor and making sure the first characters of the file are “SQLite format 3″.

Just to be safe and, copy the file to your desktop or another folder and rename it something shorter like sms.sqlite.

Step 2 – Browsing the SMS SQLite Database

You will need the SQLite Database Browser as mentioned above, so go download it now if you haven’t already!

Once you have it downloaded, extract the program and run it! Click File > Open and navigate to where you saved the copy of the backup file. When you open this file you will see an interface that should be familiar if you’ve ever used any sort of database management tool.

From the Table drop-down menu, choose the message table. This is the main table we’re interested in and you don’t really need to use the other tables at all but go ahead and take a look if you’re interested!

There are a few fields that we are interested in:

• address: This holds the phone number of the person that sent you or you sent the message to.
• date: This is a Unix timestamp of when the message was sent.
• text: The actual message.
• flags: This should be either 2 or 3. The messages flagged 3 are messages that you sent (outgoing), while the messages flagged 2 are incoming messages.

Step 3 – Exporting:

Still using SQLite Database Browser program, click File > Export > Table as CSV File. Choose the messages table and click Export. Choose a filename like sms.csv, hit Save, and you’re done!

Now you can open the CSV using Excel (or equivalent) and laugh/cry/look at all the funny/angry/crazy messages you have sent and received over the years/weeks/days!

To convert the datestamp to a human readable format in Excel, use the following formula (from SpreadsheetPage.com):

=(((A1/60)/60)/24)+DATE(1970,1,1)+(-5/24)

where A1 is the cell holding the datestamp, and -5 is your timezone GMT offset.

You can also duplicate (copy/paste) the address column and then do a find and replace of the phone number with the person’s actual name (useful at least for the people you text the most with).

Notes:

This will not export emoticons/emoji/MMS messages. There may be a way to grab these (table msg_pieces may give some hints), but I’m not really worried about losing this info.

You will only get the phone numbers of the messages, not the names (though it’s easy enough to do a find and replace for your most used phone numbers).

That’s it! I hope this will be useful to someone, and if you have any questions or comments, or find any errors in this post just leave a comment!