Ninja Blogging » Programming

Google Voice Applications & Scripts

Administrator — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 05:01:18 +0000

I like most other users LOVE Google Voice and have found some useful apps that I would like to share with other Google Voice users.

1) Firefox Google Voice Add on
This is a nice little app that makes it possible to make phone calls, and text messages from your Google Voice account with out having another open window.

2)Send one message to multiple contacts with ContacTexter

This is a neat little app that was written using Java so it’s cross platform. The interface isn’t too pretty, but it works, and it’s FREE!

3) Get the BEST number on Google Voice Script
This guy figured out how to access google voice number search via a script, and run queries to grab the JSON file. This is definitely worth taken a look at if you are a developer/programmer of any kind. Unfortunately it is a script that was built for OSX 10.5 but is possible to modify and run in 10.4.

4) Scott’s SMS via Python for Google Voice Script (Everyday Scripting)
This is a neat little script to send text messages using Python.

4b) Scott’s NEW AND IMPROVED Python Script for Google Voice (Everyday Scripting)
This script allows you to send mass sms or mass call in an iterative fashion. Keep up the good work Scott!

5) How to write a Google Voice App
Well not exactly, but does give some insight in how Google Voice works since there is no API as of yet.

6) How to use Google Voice as your voice mail instead of your cell provider
This is basically instructions on how to forward your voicemail to google voice. This should help users with the Google Voice Transition.

7) How to enable Google Voice push notifications on iPhone 3GS

8 )One click International Calling with Google Voice

9) Another Google Voice Python Script
pygooglevoice brings the power of the Google Voice API to the Python language in a simple, easy-to-use manner.

10) Using Google Voice with Fluid (OSX Only)

11) Google Voice Grease Monkey Growl Script

12) Place Google Voice Calls directly from contacts on iPhone (Apple Script)

The script works by adding numbers to contacts in Address Book that dial your contact via Google Voice. The new number is prefixed with your Google Voice number, your pin, and the number two. It dials into your Google Voice number and places the call to your contact.

13) Google Voice Bookmarklet Generator (iPhone or iPod Touch)
Those of you who follow tech news know that there’s been quite a dust-up recently over Google Voice apps on the iPhone. First they were allowed, but now they’re banned. So until they work things out, or Google comes up with a more elegant web-based solution, placing a call using Google Voice on the iPhone is a long and drawn-out process. So Ironic Sans came up with this solution.

14) Google Voice Mobile Web Version
This is the mobile web version of Google Voice. I figured it would be good to note on here.

15) Import Facebook Contacts into your Google Voice Contacts (Script)
Facebook’s API + FBConnect is great but it has some severe limitations. Notably, it doesn’t expose all the functionality available on the Facebook site. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to copy a dump of my friends’ names and phone numbers off the site to load into a fresh cell phone. Unfortunately, looking at the API this isn’t possible. Never fear – Greasemonkey provides enough of a hook into Firefox that it would be possible to write a UserScript to accomplish this.

16) Turn Google Voice into a OSX Friendly Application
Google Voice’s web site is nice, but keeping it open in a browser tab can be cumbersome. Mac users, however, can get Growl notifications, complete with transcript previews, and app badge updates with the handy Fluid app. Unfortunately the Fluid App is only available for 10.5 and greater. This was enough reason for me to update, so maybe you should too.

17) Google Voice Dashboard Widget for OSX
Are you looking for an easy way to call or send SMS messages to your contacts using your Google Voice number right from your fingertips? GV Connect is your answer: a Google Voice widget which allows you make calls and send SMS messages from your GV number to your Address Book and Google contacts right from the Dashboard

18) Google Voice Notifier Windows and OSX
A simple system tray notifier for Google Voice. Lets you know when you have unread text or voice messages. The project is written in java and uses Google Voice’s REST service calls. This notifier will work on any platform that supports the java system tray icon.

Site Redesign

Administrator — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 03:14:32 +0000

Well, this weekend I decided to do a redesign my blog. My old theme was a modified Green Marinee WordPress theme that I found 3 years ago and was looking pretty out dated. I hope everyone likes this new theme and feel free to leave comments. I can’t seem to figure out how to get rid of the underline styling on my Flickr images in the sidebar. I’m no CSS master and after tinkering for 10 minutes, became frustrated and said screw it. I hope everyone had a Happy Halloween, I know I did. Katy and I went to Goshen friday night and brought some friends with us to a Goshen College party. Besides having to break up a fight due to my dumb ass friend, it was a pretty good time. Note to self: Do not allow a friend to pee on a stranger. Cheers!

Don’t track traffic in Google Analytics from your computer

Administrator — Sat, 31 May 2008 02:52:33 +0000

I recently built a new website that wasn’t getting much traffic which I was using analytics to track the traffic for. I found that while testing the site I was skewing the data which I had not accounted for initially, so I couldn’t tell who was visiting the site at first. Well I did some digging and found that I could set up a filter to not track certain IP addresses. I didn’t think this was a good idea since I knew that verizon’s DSL IPs were pretty dynamic and will switch about once a month or so. With some more research I found that I could set a cookie with a specific value and set a filter up in Google Analytics so that if the browser had the specific cookie it wouldn’t track it. Here are the stops to set this up:

1) First create a page called no_track.html or something memorable with the following code. Make sure to change the (“UA-XXXXXX-X”) bit to your Analytics account number for your domain.



	





	



	

 Welcome, your computer will not be tracked on this site as a cookie has been

set to exclude it.

---------------------------------------------------------------

2) Create an Exclude filter to remove data from visitors with this cookie. Follow these instructions http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55494
to create a filter with the following settings:

Filter Type: Custom filter > Exclude
Filter Field: User Defined
Filter Pattern: no_track
Case Sensitive: No

3) In order to set the cookie, visit your newly created page from all computers that you would like to exclude from your reports. Please note that if you clear your cookies on your browser that you will have to visit this page again to re-set the cookie.

Free 10 Week Online AJAX Course

Administrator — Sun, 16 Jul 2006 13:53:27 +0000

A free 10-week “AJAX Programming” online course is about to start from August 4th, 2006. This course is for anyone who wants to learn AJAX for the first time or increase their knowledge on AJAX. In this 10-week course, students learn basic concept of AJAX as well as how to use various AJAX frameworks and toolkits….

Free AJAX Course

More Free Courses

YShout Enabled

Administrator — Mon, 17 Apr 2006 22:36:42 +0000

I have recently discovered a neat PHP and AJAX powered, Web 2.0 standards compliant, Non-Intrusive shoutbox called YShout. It’s open source and anyone can download and install in onto their PHP supported webserver. Since the Yshout is AJAX powered you do not have to refresh the page, it’s dynamic! I just need to figure out how to format in to be in my sidebar. Anyway feel free to check it out on my site HERE.

I have changed the ability to see the persons IP address in the chat so that a person can not spoof another persons nickname. I also changed the log file extension to .html rather than .txt so that you can view the file correctly in a web browser. Here is a copy of my modified YShout: Modified YShout

To install all you have to do is install the yshout folder onto your webserver and it’s ready to go. Just point your browser to the folder and there you have it!

Pulse-width Modulation on the PIC 16F877A

Geoff — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 22:38:13 +0000

Ok, so if you made it past the title, you’re doin’ good. The 16F877A is a microcontroller made by microchip, and I just happen to be using it at work.

Pulse-width modulation is a way of controlling the brightness of an LED, not through resistance, but rather through its duration of being lit. For instance, an LED at half brightness would be on for exactly 1/2 of the time. Basically, it would switch back and forth between on and off at an even pace.

Last night, I had to find a way to control the brightness of a strand of LEDs based only on a 0-7 value off of an analog potentiometer. By design, the maximum brightness for the LEDs will be 1/8 of their maximum ability. This was to reduce heat and fire hazard.

With PWM, since the LED’s on-time is inversely preportional to its off-time, the calculation was rather simple. At the maximum setting (7), the LEDs are on 1/8th of the time. So I made the total duty cycle 56 clock cycles. I then assigned ON_TIME = Knob_Setting and OFF_TIME = 56 – Knob_Setting. This created a whole duty cycle where the LED was on and off evenly with the knob setting.

Encryption Software

Administrator — Mon, 30 Jan 2006 21:59:12 +0000

I have been using ccrypt for my encryption needs for quite a while now. I have mainly used it on my desktop but recently I wanted to install it on my lappy. The README that comes with the package can walk you through the steps pretty well but I did have to do some investigating to get it installed. After unpacking the latest version of ccrypt for OS X open terminal and type “echo $PATH” to determine where OS X will be looking for executables. This is my output on 10.4 “/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin” . I then copied the ccrypt executable to /usr/bin and while in that directory made a couple of symlinks by typing these three separate commands

sudo ln -s ccrypt ccencrypt
sudo ln -s ccrypt ccdecrypt
sudo ln -s ccrypt ccat

I then wanted to install my man page for ccrypt. You can find your man page path by typing “manpath“. This is my output: “/usr/share/man:/usr/local/share/man:/usr/X11R6/man”
I then copied “ccrypt.1” to “/usr/share/man/man1” so that now when I type “man ccrypt” in terminal it will output the man page. Now you are ready to encrypt some files!! Make sure you remember your encryption key because there is no way to recover a encrypted file with out the encryption key. This is why you encrypted them in the first place.

QEMU Mac OS X

Administrator — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 03:52:41 +0000

For my Operating Systems class this semester I get the wonderful privilage of implementing different aspects in an OS. We are working with an OS called MINIX, which is an extremely small and based largely on UNIX. To help start us on our project we were given Knoppix 3.7 with a MINIX package. Knoppix is a bootable live system cd that is also based on UNIX. In class we were given a walk thru of how to boot up MINIX in Knoppix using QEMU. My problem was that the given Knoppix cd will only run on PC. So I had to looked for a version of QEMU that would run under OS X. The program that I liked the best is called QemuX. The initial download is just a small app that will download and install the latest and greatest QEMU. Here are some others that I have found.

QEMU OS X Binaries
QEMU Darwin Port OS X

and here is an archive of the MINIX folder that was included on our knoppix cd by our professor. It includes a.img which is a logical floppy image and linux-dist.tar.gz which holds the b30m disk image to boot minix.

minix.zip 17.23mb

Wrapping Text Around Images

Administrator — Fri, 14 Oct 2005 06:00:05 +0000

I have added the capability to wrap text around my images. Although it does not work well when you have multiple images and not a whole lot of text, it still is nice to have this feature. Here is the code to go in your styles.css in your theme folder for WordPress (make sure you don’t already have this)
//This sets the border color and thickness around your image img { border:solid green 1px; }


	//This sets the border for when you want to hover over an image

a:hover img {

border: dashed green 1px;

}
	//this is for setting a border if the image is a link

//it's current set to no border

a img {

border:0;

}
	//sets the padding around the image

p img {

padding: 0;

max-width: 100%;

}
	//right justification

img.right {

padding: 4px;

margin: 0 0 2px 7px;

display: inline;

}
	//left justification

img.left {

padding: 4px;

margin: 0 7px 2px 0;

display: inline;

}
	.right { float: right }

.left { float: left }

//centering image

img.centered {

display: block;

margin-left: auto;

margin-right: auto;

}

And this is how you would use it if you were to left justify your image
class="left" alt="Front Of House Before "/>

Creating OpenGL Programs in Xcode V2.1

Administrator — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 01:00:07 +0000

Compiling Opengl/Glut Programs

On Mac OS X using XCode v2.1

OpenGL is an integral part of OS X —all of the proper libraries (Frameworks) are already built into
the OS. To create an OpenGL/Glut program—
-Open up Project Builder.

~~Go to File -> New Project. Select Cocoa Application (Do not select C++ Tool for a bare~~bones C++
application.)

-Name the project whatever you want.
Go to Project -> Add To Project… and add the GLUT.framework and the OpenGL.framework.
(located under /System/Library/Frameworks NOT /Library/Frameworks) Stick these Frameworks
under “Frameworks” in your project. Or right click on the Frameworks folder in your Project
and go to Add ->Existing Frameworks…

-Delete the file “main.m” from the “Other Sources” directory. Also delete “Other Frameworks” from
Frameworks. Be sure to only delete the references and not the actual files.

-Add your OpenGL and/or GLUT *.cpp and *.h files to the Classes directory. You can do this by
Highlighting your Classes folder and selecting Action -> Add -> Existing Files

-If your OpenGL program files have the include library , change this to .
If you are including and/or , you’ll need to change them to and/or
respectively.

-Build the program and run it.

*Note – If you get a “signal 10 (SIGBUS) Error” then you are not selecting “Cocoa Application” when
you creat your new project.