I stopped by my local Highlander (Kroger) grocery store to pick up a few essential food items (that’s code for ice cream.) They’ve been pushing a locally grown message for a while now with posters and signs around the store. We’re in Northern Illinois and the store has stretched local to mean things like Michigan blueberries and Kentucky cucumbers. It’s within a long day’s drive, I guess.

But  I was not prepared for what awaited me at the front of the store. There, in the featured stuff spot, was big stack of pineapples sporting the largest “Locally Grown” banner the store has displayed so far.

My wife pointed it out to me and we both started laughing out loud. Remember, we live in Illinois, so this was that incredulous, uncontrollable  sort of laughter. I imagine we made quite a scene because I just had to take some photos and then go look at the box to see where all this lovely fruit was grown … Costa Rica.

It just kept getting funnier the more we thought about it. We were still laughing at the checkout so I thought I’d let the manager standing there in on our mirth.

Total stone face. She didn’t get the humor.

We did our best to hold it in until we reached the car then drove home to tell the kids.

I may be in the minority, but I don’t want a Verizon iPhone.

You see, I cheered when Apple chose AT&T for the iPhone. I had been a Verizon customer and was happy to leave. Why? Let’s not forget some of these things:

• Verizon is the company that has removed Bluetooth features from phones. They disabled syncing and file transfer so they could limit photo transfers to over the air where they could charge for each one.
• Verizon also blocked GPS features so 3rd party software or Web apps couldn’t compete with their VZ Navigator and monthly fee. Although they were forced to enable GPS features through a class action lawsuit, the important aGPS data still remains locked for all but VZ Navigator.
• Verizon has blocked transferring ringtones to your phone unless you purchased them through Verizon.
• Verizon is the company famous for lousy customer service and quietly renewing your contract every time you make any little change to your service.
• Verizon’s CEO is known for making boneheaded and customer-unfriendly statements.
• Verizon advertised unlimited data plans with no disclaimer then canceled customer’s accounts without warning for using too much. They were eventually forced to add an asterisk and fine print to their advertising.
• Verizon has a habit of selling personal customer data.
• Verizon has charged customers usage minutes for browsing Verizon’s own Get it Now store.

Now I don’t know how many of these practices still stand today, but they were all in place when I got my iPhone. I always felt like I was fighting my service provider to do the things that seemed natural to do.

Apple changed the game with the iPhone by requiring these kinds of features to just work as part of the package. Photos, ringtones, Web surfing, GPS, music, movies, etc. all work and sync as you would expect. AT&T was willing to play by the new rules and that has spurred the innovation we have today.

Sure, AT&T has experienced growing pains with the influx of iPhone customers. Any network would.

Cell coverage really depends on where you happen to be. It sometimes flip flops between which carrier has the best signal in particular locations, but most of the time I notice all carriers having some of the same trouble spots.

We do have a few areas around here where Verizon coverage is marginally better. But my AT&T coverage is good too and has improved immensely over the last couple years even though I’m not in a major city. We have 3G all over the area and I know AT&T has added towers, replaced antennas, and tuned signal directions. I’ve also seen them change to lower frequencies in some areas to better penetrate through trees and buildings.

The bottom line is that my iPhone has changed the way I do things for the better and the Apple / AT&T partnership has contributed to that experience. My shiny new iPhone 4 is scheduled to arrive tomorrow. It requires renewing my contract for a couple more years and I’m happy to do so.

I’ve learned a few things since then, plus the Gravatar service has a new option that removes the need for a workaround I had to come up with. So it’s time for an update to my now obsolete posts.

Reference Implementation One: Gravatar to an AppleScript Variable

The most common use case of Gravatar in AppleScript is probably to grab someone’s Gravatar image based on an e-mail address then pass it into some other application. Many Mac applications pass image data internally as a TIFF. So here’s an example of looking up a Gravatar and storing the raw picture data in a variable.

Here’s the script: (Open in Script Editor)

-- Download a Gravatar image for the given e-mail address and store in a variable as a TIFF image. Display error if a matching gravatar doesn't exist.
-- Released under GPL.
-- by Doug Smith, http://smithsrus.com
 
-- The e-mail address to look up.
set email to "someone@somewhere.com"
 
-- Calculate an MD5 for the e-mail address.
set md5_email to do shell script "md5 -q -s `echo " & email & " | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'`"
 
-- Construct the Gravatar URL.
set grav_url to quoted form of ("http://gravatar.com/avatar/" & md5_email & "?d=404" as text)
 
-- Get the Gravatar image with a timeout of 10 seconds.
try
	set pict_data to do shell script "curl -fsS " & grav_url & " -m 10" as TIFF picture without altering line endings
	tell me to display dialog "Yes, we have a matching Gravatar." buttons {"Okay"} default button 1
on error
	tell me to display dialog "Sorry, there was no matching Gravatar." buttons {"Cancel"} default button 1
end try

As you can see, we end up calling some shell commands because Applescript doesn’t have all of the needed functionality. That’s no big deal because it only uses capabilities built into OS X and should work on any Mac.

Reference Implementation Two: Gravatar to a File

There may be some cases where it’s more useful to download the Gravatar image to a file for later use instead of loading it into a variable. With just a few modifications we can simply save the jpeg file as served up by Gravatar.

Here’s the script: (Open in Script Editor)

-- Download a Gravatar image for the given e-mail address and store in a temporary file. Display error if a matching gravatar doesn't exist.
-- Released under GPL.
-- by Doug Smith, http://smithsrus.com
 
-- The e-mail address to look up.
set email to "someone@somewhere.com"
 
-- Calculate an MD5 for the e-mail address.
set md5_email to do shell script "md5 -q -s `echo " & email & " | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'`"
 
-- Construct the Gravatar URL.
set grav_url to quoted form of ("http://gravatar.com/avatar/" & md5_email & "?d=404" as text)
 
-- Make a file name in which to temporarily save the Gravatar.
set grav_file to (path to temporary items) & "gravatar" & md5_email & ".jpg" as text
set grav_POSIX_file to quoted form of POSIX path of grav_file
 
-- Download the Gravatar image to the temporary file with a timeout of 10 seconds.
try
	do shell script "curl -fsS " & grav_url & " -m 10 -o " & grav_POSIX_file
	tell me to display dialog "Yes, we have a matching Gravatar downloaded to " & grav_POSIX_file & "." buttons {"Delete the File"} default button 1
	tell application "System Events"
		delete file grav_file
	end tell
on error
	tell me to display dialog "Sorry, there was no matching Gravatar." buttons {"Cancel"} default button 1
end try

Filling Address Book with Gravatars

My goal for starting this whole project was to be able to populate my Mac Address Book with Gravatar pictures. Those then get automatically synced to my iPhone, which is really nice when receiving calls. A hat tip to Moritz Haarmann for his Gravatar Address Book plugin, which is what started me thinking about this in the first place. His plugin only works on one record at a time so I wanted to expand the concept to mass update selected records or the whole Address Book.

Rather than list the full script here, you can just download the application. You can open it in Script Editor if you want to see how it works. Be sure to back up your Address Book file, just in case. And if you experience errors or odd behavior, try quitting and relaunching Address Book, which often fixes little problems with it.

Be sure to let me know how you like it and if it works well for you. It would be interesting to know what percentage of addresses everyone is finding have Gravatars available now. Enjoy!

Well, today is March 16, 2010. The packet contains a letter dated March 15, 2010, which includes the following text in bold print: Please complete and mail back the enclosed census form today.

Okay, I guess I better get to it.

Question 1: How many people were living or staying in this house, apartment, or mobile home on April 1, 2010?

Hmmmm. There does not seem to be a blank to state that I don’t know how to tell the future.

I put screws and other small parts in the tray as I disassemble each section of the computer. If I’m following a numbered repair guide I try to match the cube number to each step. Otherwise, I just fill the cubes in numerical order as it makes sense. Reassembly is a snap and there’s no losing or mixing up those tiny screws.

Oh, and while I’m snatching kitchen items to use as tools, cookie sheets make great parts trays for longer-term projects. The whole project can be shelved to get it out of the way and then easily resumed without parts getting misplaced.

But there’s no need to have the bloat of Thickbox and jQuery loading on all pages when most of them don’t even use it. That’s why Joost de Valk detailed a nice tip to only load thickbox when needed by checking the page content for references to it. All it takes is a few lines of code in your functions.php file.

Unfortunately, you end up with some broken images because the built-in Thickbox defines their locations in thickbox.js as relative paths:

var tb_pathToImage = "../wp-includes/js/thickbox/loadingAnimation.gif";
var tb_closeImage = "../wp-includes/js/thickbox/tb-close.png";

Those paths get tacked onto the URL of whatever page you’re on, which results in an invalid URL and a couple 404 errors for each use. Now that’s not unique to Joost’s solution. It happens whenever Thickbox is loaded with wp_enqueue_script( ).

It can easily be fixed by adding a couple lines of javascript in the footer to redefine the image path variables. That’s as simple as a few more lines of code in your functions.php file. We’ll use Joost’s technique of only loading it when the page content requires it:

function thickbox_image_paths() {
	global $post;
	wp_reset_query();
	if (is_singular() && strpos($post->post_content,'class="thickbox"') !== false) {
		$thickbox_path = get_option('siteurl') . '/wp-includes/js/thickbox/';
		echo "<script type=\"text/javascript\">\n";
		echo "	var tb_pathToImage = \"${thickbox_path}loadingAnimation.gif\";\n";
		echo "	var tb_closeImage = \"${thickbox_path}tb-close.png\";\n";
		echo "</script>\n";
	}
}
add_action('wp_footer', 'thickbox_image_paths');

My theme uses multiple loops so I had to add the wp_reset_query() to be able to examine the original content. Otherwise it would be looking at the last post in my recent posts box and not see that Thickbox was used in the current content.

There you have it. A nice technique from Joost and a simple addition to complement it.

We purchased a nice solid oak entertainment center many years ago. But it’s worthless now in an age of widescreen TVs. I tried to sell it, and then later give it away, with no takers. It had been taking up way too much room in the garage for more than a year.

Before: the original entertainment center.

So rather than turn it into a pile of lumber, I decided to chop it down and make it useful again. I had to remove the trim, cut off the sides, lower the top, and put it back together. Then I added a drawer on the right to hold DVDs, drilled shelf bracket holes in the closed cabinet to move the big shelf down, and added new hardware to freshen the look. I also had to disassemble the large door, learn to cut glass, then put that back together into a smaller door.

Making the drawer front was probably the hardest part. A friend let me borrow his raised panel bit for my shaper. That huge bit turning at 10,000 rpm was one of the most frightening things I’ve ever seen.

Here’s the finished results loaded up with geeky stuff.

After: Modified entertainment center.

I applaud them for a great list of useful enhancement ideas, however, I would love to see it approached from a slightly different angle.

I’ve had the opportunity to train and observe many non-technical users as they deal with images in WordPress. It is clear that the current process is too hard many users, especially with advanced themes that require different images sizes in multiple zones of the design. Theme creators have attempted to use custom fields and such to deal with these scenarios, but that handling just doesn’t feel natural and intuitive.

Some of the proposed enhancement ideas involve allowing more custom sizes and configurations of images to be defined and used. Excellent!

But think about this: Why do we want an image of a certain size? Most of the time it’s because it needs to fit into the design somewhere.

So instead of adding user complexity to the WordPress admin in defining image sizes, why not push that into being a theme decision? After all, that’s where the images end up being used.

Here are a few components of my WordPress image handling dream:

• Make it dead simple for a theme to specify the image sizes needed and name them. Maybe this could be defined up in the header comments section of the main css file.
• Provide a function to easily display a named size image in the theme.
• Create and cache the various image sizes as needed. Switching to a new theme with different sizes should not then pose a problem.
• Allow the user to swap out a different image for a named size through the UI. For example, a thumbnail might be best cropped or zoomed a different way than the full-size image so allow it to be replaced with a custom variation.

So what do you think? Is it a good idea or flawed thinking? Either way, I encourage you to go take the survey on the enhancement suggestions and let your voice be heard.

But let me tell you about my favorite new feature: Safari can now get your GPS location via javascript! This is usually referred to as geolocation. You can easily grab the current location or get periodic updates.

Okay, so I’m excited over what may seem like an obscure geeky feature, but I think it’s a big deal.

Why GPS in Safari is a Big Deal

1. Location aware Web pages: Have you ever gone to a company’s Web site to find their nearest location? You usually have to type in your zip code. But what if you’re traveling and don’t know your zip code? Safari knowing your location solves that problem.

2. Location aware Web applications: It’s fairly easy to create Web content looks and behaves like an iPhone application. Now those can take advantage of location information.

   For example, I’ve been working with a company on an iPhone Web application that interacts with their internal customer database. Field reps can now easily find customers within a certain radius of the rep’s current location who meet various other criteria.

Web Geolocation Privacy and Standards

Don’t worry, all of this is built with good privacy controls. You are asked permission before your location data is revealed to a site. For convenience, it stops asking about a particular site after you have approved it a few times.

These location features are based on the upcoming Geolocation API Specification. Because it’s not just a proprietary Safari thing it should get widespread adoption. In fact, it’s already built into the latest Firefox 3.5 beta.

Web Geolocation Sample Code

The specifications do a good job of explaining the parts so no need to go over all of that. However, it’s worth pointing out how to check and see if geolocation features are available or not and take appropriate action. For example, you may only want to show GPS options if it can actually be used. This simple snippet will do the job.

if (navigator.geolocation) {  
	/* Code if geolocation is available. */  
} else {  
	/* Code if geolocation is not available */
}

Let’s put it all together in a simple Web page that displays all of the geolocation variables for your current location. The code is below or you can try my geolocation test page from your iPhone.

(Yes, you’ll probably want to use modern DOM techniques for a real project. The purpose of this is just to show a simple working example.)

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
	<head>
		<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
		<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width; initial-scale=1.0; maximum-scale=1.0; user-scalable=0;" />
		<title>Geolocation Test</title>
 
		<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
			function getLocation() {
				// Get location no more than 10 minutes old. 600000 ms = 10 minutes.
				navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(showLocation, showError, {enableHighAccuracy:true,maximumAge:600000});
			}
 
			function showError(error) {
				alert(error.code + ' ' + error.message);
			}
 
			function showLocation(position) {
				geoinfo.innerHTML='<p>Latitude: ' + position.coords.latitude + '</p>' 
				+ '<p>Longitude: ' + position.coords.longitude + '</p>' 
				+ '<p>Accuracy: ' + position.coords.accuracy + '</p>' 
				+ '<p>Altitude: ' + position.coords.altitude + '</p>' 
				+ '<p>Altitude accuracy: ' + position.coords.altitudeAccuracy + '</p>' 
				+ '<p>Speed: ' + position.coords.speed + '</p>' 
				+ '<p>Heading: ' + position.coords.heading + '</p>';
			}
		</script>
	</head>
	<body>
		<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">	
			if (navigator.geolocation) {  
				document.write('<p><input type="button" onclick="getLocation()" value="Show Geolocation Information" /></p>');
			} else {  
				document.write('<p>Sorry, your device or browser software does not appear to support geolocation services.</p>');  
			}  
		</script>
 
		<div id="geoinfo"></div>
	</body>
</html>

I can’t wait to see some of the great things others will create by combining Web sites with location. And it will only get better as more devices become location aware. Be sure to let me know of good location-aware sites and web apps you run across.

Now go create something cool!

This is a multi-part tutorial series on using Gravatar from AppleScript to update your Mac Address Book pictures automatically. These pictures then sync to your iPhone for Gravatar goodness on the go.

I’ve had some AppleScripts to work with Gravatars and Address Book hanging around in rough form for quite a while. But I was recently prompted to clean them up and write these tutorials when Matt Mullenweg posted about Gravatar on his blog saying that “we need a better way to get Gravatars into your Apple address book / iPhone.” I hope that the documentation and tools from this project will be used for other creative Gravatar integration projects.

We’re about to put all of what we learned in part 1, part 2, and part 3 together to make our working script. Be sure to check out the previous parts for the details of how it all works.

Here is the process the script will be doing:

1. Get a list of only the selected contacts from Address Book. This way we can control which contacts get their pictures updated if we don’t want them all.
2. Ask the user if we should overwrite any existing pictures or skip those contacts.
3. Step through each of those contacts and get all of the e-mail addresses associated with each.
4. Step through each e-mail address and download its Gravatar to a temporary file. If there is more than one address with a Gravatar we’ll keep it simple and just let it set each one in turn and we’ll end up with last one found. This could be improved in the future to favor a particular one if needed.
5. Update the Address Book picture, delete the temporary file, then repeat the process with the next contact.

Here’s the script: (Open in Script Editor)

-- Set selected Address Book contact pictures from Gravatar.
-- Released under GPL.
-- by Doug Smith, http://smithsrus.com
 
 
-- Grab the selected records and see how many there are.
tell application "Address Book"
	set selected_contacts to selection
	set count_selected to number of items in selected_contacts
 
	-- Bail out if there are no records selected. Otherwise ask about how to deal 
	-- with contacts having existing pictures.
	if count_selected < 1 then
		tell me to display dialog "You must first select some Address Book contacts." buttons {"Cancel"} default button 1 cancel button 1
	else
		if count_selected = 1 then
			set plural to ""
		else
			set plural to "s"
		end if
		tell me to set user_result to display dialog "We're about to try updating " & count_selected & " selected Address Book contact picture" & plural & " from Gravatar. Would you like to overwrite existing pictures or skip those contacts?" buttons {"Cancel", "Overwrite Existing", "Skip Existing"} cancel button 1 default button 1 with icon caution
		set overwrite to (button returned of user_result contains "Overwrite")
	end if
 
	-- Step through each contact and find Gravatars.
	with timeout of 600 seconds
		repeat with one_contact in selected_contacts
			if not ((image of one_contact exists) and not overwrite) then
 
				-- Step through the contact's e-mail addresses.
				set all_emails to emails of one_contact
				repeat with one_email_record in all_emails
					set one_email_address to value of one_email_record
 
					set grav_file to (my get_gravatar(my trim_email(one_email_address)))
 
					-- If we have a Gravatar image add it to the contact.
					if grav_file is not "" then
						set image of one_contact to my get_pict_data(grav_file)
					end if
				end repeat
			end if
		end repeat
	end timeout
	tell me to display dialog "Done. You may need to select a different record to force Address Book to refresh the screen before changes show." buttons {"Okay"} default button 1
end tell
 
 
-- Trim junk off the end of the e-mail address field. Assume space separated.
on trim_email(email_address)
	set AppleScript's text item delimiters to " "
	return item 1 of email_address
end trim_email
 
 
-- Look up a Gravatar from an e-mail address and save to a file.
on get_gravatar(email_address)
	-- Calculate an MD5 for the e-mail address.
	set md5_email to do shell script "md5 -q -s `echo " & email_address & " | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'`"
 
	-- Construct the Gravatar URL. Max Address Book picture size stored is 218 pixels.
	set grav_url to quoted form of ("http://gravatar.com/avatar/" & md5_email & "?s=218&d=" & "%22%22" as text)
 
	-- Make a file name in which to temporarily save the Gravatar.
	set grav_file to (path to temporary items) & "gravatar" & md5_email & ".jpg" as text
	set grav_POSIX_file to quoted form of POSIX path of grav_file
 
	-- Download the Gravatar image to the temporary file with a timeout of 10 seconds.
	do shell script "curl " & grav_url & " -m 10 -o " & grav_POSIX_file
 
	tell application "System Events"
		if exists file grav_file then
			return grav_file
		else
			return ""
		end if
	end tell
end get_gravatar
 
-- Read the picture data into a variable in TIFF format then delete the file.
on get_pict_data(grav_file)
	tell application "System Events"
		set file_ref to open for access grav_file
		set pict_data to read file_ref as "TIFF"
		close access file_ref
 
		delete file grav_file
		return pict_data
	end tell
end get_pict_data

There you have it. I have some ideas to take it further but I’ll let everyone test what we have and offer feedback before continuing. I’ll also make an easier to use application download for everyone once we’ve done enough testing to work out the kinks.