High-Tech Solution For Low-Tech Problem

Because od the nature of our lives, Jitushka often wakes up to go to work/school shortly after I go to sleep. This complicates any potential start-of-the day communication, especially concerning the dogs. It's not easy to let the other person know when our dogs were last fed/walked.

I solved this problem like a man. Like a geeky nerdy man, that is. I made a special CGI web application to track the dogs.



Because we both have www-enabled mobile phones, we now just use a private URL on my webserver where we can see when the dogs were last fed and walked and we can both set these times to "now" or to some predefined times in the past ("30 minutes ago", "1 hour ago" etc.). And we can see the info and set it from any place with network coverage.

I pity the people who had to solve this problem 10 years ago. They were screwed and had to resort to uncool paper and pen.

TODO: Automatic sending of alarm SMS when the dogs are not walked for 10 hours or more!

My Activity Stream on Jaiku.com

Jaiku.com might resemble Twitter but it's much more interesting. Apart from allowing you to publish your status (e.g. "Right now I am picking my nose and eating the snot.") using web interface, IM or SMS, it also also displays feeds from whatever sources you define. That means you can have one cleanly organized stream of your personal thoughts and all your public activities.

When you look at fuxoft.jaiku.com, you can see my status changes ("wha I am doing right now" - like on Twitter), but - more importantly - you can see my blogposts, my photos uploaded to Flickr, my videos favorited at YouTube and interesting links I found using Google Reader sharing. Everything on a single page with automatically generated RSS feed. If you want to know about "everything Fuxoft is up to", this is the page to go to (or subscribe to).

In order to prevent flooding of person's Jaiku stream with dozens of items each day, the items from each source are indexed only once every 24 hours. You have to click on "... and XY more" link in each post to see special page where all the items from this day and from this feed are displayed (in the right-hand column).

Jaiku has been bought by Google and you can probably expect its integration into Google infrastructure fairly soon.

Jaiku registrations are not yet public but everyone has been given an infinite number of invites recently. If you want to register at jaiku, I can send you the invite. But if you just want to watch what I'm up to, you don't have to register at all!

Google Code Hosting = Too Good For Me

I moved FFTempl project to Google Code Hosting and discovered it really matured (the Google site, not my project) and looks rather good, offering some extremely interesting features (like Subversion repository and online code review) for your Open Source projects for free.

Of course my tiny project will never use 99% of them...

Note To Warner Bros.

When you create expensive website for your expensive movie, be sure to check the spelling on the title page.



(Taken from sweeneytoddmovie.com.)

Yes, Google Maps Are Useful

And how! I started creating this map of interesting / useful stuff I discovered in Tokyo. I plan to expand it in the future. Note that this was done without any external tools and without uploading anything - directly in Google Maps web interface! Also note that when someone searches for "sushi" or "roller coaster" near Tokyo (and clicks on "See user-created contents"), he now automatically finds my placemarks in this map.

Also, yesterday I created a Google Map for someone just to explain where in Prague we should meet to walk the dogs and how to get there. One placemark and one line. It took a few seconds and I deleted it afterwards. But it's much easier than explaining it using words.

My Celebrity Look-Alikes

I really don't know what to say about this. Just look at it. You can get your own at www.myheritage.com, although you have to register and give them your e-mail address which they will probably use to spam you...