Programming

With wildfire season upon us, use this handy texting tool to find out what the air quality is in your area. Simply text your zip code to (415) 212-4229 for air quality updates. You can also add “map” to the text to be sent an image of your region. This service isn’t just useful for individuals with limited access to smartphones or the Internet. It also alleviates the load put on air quality sites like AirNow, which are often overloaded and unavailable during wildfire season due to the spike in traffic. Texting this number instead is a great way to get the same information without bogging down those sites, helping them to stay up for others who need to access them. ...

Ever been on a trip and, upon return, needed a quick and easy way for all your friends to send you their pictures and videos without burning CDs, sending massive emails, or using third-party services? Or, maybe a better question, ever wondered how to construct a basic Django application with Amazon’s web services, for instance S3? Look no further. Below is the basic code for a drag-and-drop Django web application that allows users to upload files directly to an Amazon S3 bucket. ...

Recently, I needed to plot numerous addresses on a map and, ultimately, find the geocentral location of all addresses. The geocentral location is the weighted center of all the addresses, which can be useful in helping determine numerous things, including the average distance between all addresses and some other location. The geocentral location is attained through relatively simple vector math. Let’s say, for instance, you have a set of points on a graph. Adding each point together would give you the weighted center of all the points, which can help you determine quite a bit about how that population of points interacts with you or each other. ...

When perusing the internet for discussions on PHP sessions and cookies in regards to credential validation and user logins, I’ve never been satisfied with the approaches I find. Many of the tutorials are just plain lousy or incomplete. And the others seem to imply that you should only use sessions or cookies and never mix-and-match, a confusion that would probably trip up many PHP novices. So I’ve decided to post a tutorial explaining the complete PHP login format I use for my sites and web applications. Before we start, I should let you know that you can grab all the source in this tutorial from GitHub. ...

For as long as I’ve been developing in Java, its lack of native support for OS X has always bothered me. This is more than likely an issue with Apple’s proprietary interface rather than Java, but, for the sake of being loyal to my Master, we’ll pretend the fault is on Java. I don’t want the default Java icon–I want my applications icon to appear in the dock! And why does setTitle not actually change the name of my program in the menu bar? It still remains the name of the Java package that the main () method is contained within. I don’t want people to know the package layout of my software. ...