:. The Fun Stuff
To the left you'll find branches containing different types of projects.
I finally passed 100 solved problems on Project Euler, an online math & programming "competition" of sorts. This puts me back in the top 100 perl programmers on the site!
In a related note, I taught myself some PARI/GP to complete some of the recent problems. It's a really spectacular programming languages for math. I'm going to be using it a lot more for several other project I'm working on.
You know what's annoying? The fact that the iPhone does not automatically add e-mailed calendar items to your phone calendar... they just show up as attached .ics files and it doesn't put them on your calendar, and depending on your version of iOS, you may or may not even be able to open them! How annoying!
Luckily, you have Shane Connelly to the rescue!
I've added something I call "iPhone CalSync" to iPhoneHome. How it works:
1. You enter your username, password, and POP3 mail server settings to the CalSync settings.
2. You add a "Subscribed Calendar" to your iPhone.
3. Every 15 minutes, CalSync logs into your e-mail account, checks for calendar entries, and if there are any, it publishes them to the subscribed calendar, which your phone downloads and adds the entires to your calendar.
Voila!
Check it out yourself and get yourself an iPhoneHome account at http://iphone.eskibars.com
I had the need today to create a PDF with encryption, but I don't have Adobe Acrobat (the full version). Boo! Anyway, I quickly got on the thinking cap, found some information about how to create encrypted PDFs, and made a little script to do it for me. Now you can use it too. Project link available above.
:. Compare yourself to the average citizenI found a neat report on the website of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics which describes how an average US citizen spends their time. I've made a little utility to allow you to compare your time to that average. Project available at the project URL, above.
:. Is A LendingClub.com Account Profitable?My Lending Club investment strategy seems to be working pretty well, with 16+% returns and <1% of notes in any late standing...

I've added a new project: a perl module to act as an API interface to the site lendingclub.com. Documentation, source code, and a link into the subversion repository is available on the project page (linked)
:. iPhoneHomeFinally! Introducing: what I'm tentatively calling iPhoneHome. I've been working on this project for a while, trying to build a modularized system for rapid expansion, and it's finally ready for a public beta.
The idea behind this system is a personalize website for mobile devices that looks and acts like an iPhone application. Additional modules can be added and configured per-user, dropped into folders, and rearranged through a web console administration.
An example (click to see live):
Registration is open at http://iphone.eskibars.com/register.php
I've released a new version of the MP3 secretary this morning. In this release:
Bug fixes:
:. directories that became unavailable caused some unhandled exceptions)
Feature additions:
:. the program now can store all your settings to be restored when you restart the application
:. now has a "whitelist" in addition to the "blacklist"
:. now adds a timestamp to transfer information, so you can see when you last had songs transferred
As usual, the app (and screenshots) are available directly at the link at the top of this post or directly here
(Download size: 11KB compressed .zip)
I wish I had more time to work on this, but I've been pretty busy lately. This version fixes a crash when the directory crawler thread stumbled upon a file with no extension.
It also now has an option to blacklist words in the file / directory name. For example, if you have a bunch of songs in a "christmas" subdirectory that you don't want to listen to during most of the year, just add "christmas" to the blacklist words and it will ignore this directory.
I also realized today that somehow the "active vision" project hadn't made the move to the new layout. I've added this to the list of projects