a Programmer's blog

With my new job, I haven’t had much time to add much to this website.

So here’s this small perl script I wrote that sends a summary of the weather in SMS format from my iPhone daily.
There was a need, so I figured why not help out those who need the weather forecast =].

use LWP::Simple;
use JSON qw( decode_json );
 
my $lastRun = 0;
open (MYFILE, 'weatherSMS_LastRun');
while (<MYFILE>) {
        chomp;
        $lastRun = $_;
}
close (MYFILE);
 
my ($S,$M,$H,$d,$m,$Y) = localtime($lastRun);
my ($S2,$M2,$H2,$d2,$m2,$Y2) = localtime(time);
if ( $Y2 == $Y && $m2 == $m  && $d2 == $d ){
	exit 0;
}
 
$json = get("https://api.forecast.io/forecast/APIKEY/LATITUDE,LONGITUDE?units=ca&exclude=currently,minutely,hourly,flags");
my $decoded = decode_json($json);
 
#ensure we can write the file
open(F,'>weatherSMS_LastRun') || die "Could not open file to mark execution";
print F time;
close(F);
 
my @timeslot = @{ $decoded->{'daily'}{'data'} };
my $forcast = "";
foreach my $f ( @timeslot ) {
	my ($S,$M,$H,$d,$m,$Y) = localtime($f->{"time"});
	$m = $m + 1;
	$forcast .= "$m/$d: ".sprintf("%.3f",$f->{"temperatureMin"})."-".sprintf("%.3f",$f->{"temperatureMax"})."C ".$f->{"summary"}."\n";
}
#printf($forcast);
 
`/Applications/biteSMS.app/biteSMS -send -carrier PHONENUMBER "$forcast"`;

In order to execute this daily, the following plist was used:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
	<key>Label</key>
	<string>com.joshho.weatherSMS</string>
	<key>LowPriorityIO</key>
	<false/>
	<key>Nice</key>
	<integer>1</integer>
	<key>AbandonProcessGroup</key>
	<true/>
	<key>OnDemand</key>
	<true/>
	<key>ProgramArguments</key>
	<array>
		<string>/usr/local/bin/perl</string>
		<string>/location to perlscript/weatherSMS.pl</string>
	</array>
	<key>StartCalendarInterval</key>
	<dict>
		<key>Minute</key>
		<integer>0</integer>
	</dict>
</dict>
</plist>

Submit it to be executed hourly by running `launchctl load [path to plist]`

Edit
Edits were made to cover the fact that your phone may not always have internet.
(It may be locked/sleeping – which may turn off the wifi?)

Hi all.. haven’t been doing much as I’ve been spending my time looking for jobs.

Anyways, here’s yet another completed game – Bejeweled.. this one took almost 4 days and isn’t as awesome as the Popcap one.

The main point of this exercise was the add the ability to click a location on the canvas and have the corresponding (top) object fire an onclick method. The previous version of the engine it’s running on did not support this. As a by-product in doing adding this, this exercise was to dabble my hands in creating a robust solution to onclick() and object mapping. I do not think this was achieved as there is no propagation to parent classes.

You can play it here.

I tried to polish it up with the menu and the layout, but graphics unfortunately aren’t my strength.

I was talking to a colleague the other day about HTML5-Snake, and somehow the conversation drifted to Pacman…

After a weekend of investigating the Pacman (enemy) strategies, I took a break from doing EulerProject questions and began work on it.
It seemed simple enough: the background was pre-made, (sprites were handmade),  and it seemed very do-able.

It took me 2 days for the base code, +1 for memory/cpu profiling.
It is without sound, but I think it’s quite playable.

You can try it out here.

Continued reading >