If you don’t already know, I recently started full-time freelance development. The idea is that anyone who needs development work done, wherever they are, can contact me to help out on their project.

Whether you are a freelance designer who needs some development done (or even some training), or a freelance developer who needs an extra pair of hands, or even a bigger business who needs to bring someone else in on a project…  I’m available for hire!

I would love to hear any feedback on the new website too, so feel free to leave any comments in that regard as well.

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So I’ve decided to shift to a different domain name, and have (again) re-skinned the blog.  This time, I think I’ll stick with it.  Maybe a few tweaks here and there.  I also hope to blog a little more, and do a few guest posts around the place, which I’ll link to from here as well.

While I’m here, I might just tell you about an iPhone app I recently tried and love.  It’s called Instapaper and it’s fantastic!

You’ve possibly already heard of it, but if you haven’t, I suggest you give it a try.  I read quite a few different blog posts around the place, some from feeds in Google Reader, and some that people link to on Twitter.  More often than not though, I’m not in a position to read a full article right at that moment, and this is where Instapaper comes in.  What to do when I’m lining up to use the ATM, or sitting in a small room contemplating life?  I could read those articles!

Instapaper provides a bookmark you can use to say “Read later”, and it’ll save the page (in a readable format) to your Instapaper account, which you can then open on the iPhone.  The big bonus for me, is that it actually downloads the articles to your phone, so even if you have no connectivity you can still read them (assuming you sync while you still have a connection).  Considering the coverage some of the networks local to my area have, this is a particularly awesome feature.

Keen to hear your thoughts, both on Instapaper, and the blog in general, so feel free to leave a comment.

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• Currency (free)
• DomainScout (free)
• eBay Mobile (free) (official app this time!)
• FTP On The Go ($12.99 AUD, stricken from the list… poor value for money)
• Google Earth (free)
• Google Mobile App (free)
• iSSH ($5.99 AUD)
• Koi Pond ($1.19 AUD) (ok, this one’s not really a must-have… but it’s relaxing)
• Live Poker (free)
• Midomi (free)
• Ocarina ($1.19 AUD) (by Smule, they do really nicely made apps)
• OzWeather ($2.49 AUD) (better for us Aussies than the Yahoo one, comes from BoM)
• reMovem ($4.99 AUD) (I mainly bought this one for my wife…)
• SnapTell (free) (like Midomi, but for books and DVD covers, etc.)
• Tweetie ($3.99 AUD) (yes, Twitter is all the rage right now, so get this and follow @japh.)
• Units (free)
• Wikipanion (free)
• WordPress (free)
• Zenbe Lists ($3.99 AUD) (You’ll need to create an account at http://lists.zenbe.com/)
• Zen Bound ($5.99 AUD) (an AMAZING game!)

So that’s the update in alphabetical order, if you know of any other must-haves, let me know!

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As a follower of GeekBrief, I’d like to support Cali Lewis coming on over to Australia and briefing from our beautiful coast for a while!  So if you could please send her a vote (at least one, but one each day would be nice!), that would be much appreciated.

You can vote here:  http://www.islandreefjob.com/Cali

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Title: Create a Slick Flickr Gallery with SimplePie
Description: I’ve wanted to write a tutorial for quite some time now, and APIs have always been a particular interest of mine. So with my wife’s recent foray into photography, I decided a Flickr tutorial would be first cab off the rank! Using RSS, Flickr and jQuery all together was pretty fun too.

Check it out!

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Anyway, there’s currently no way from my control panel to see how memory I’m currently using, I have to run a command from a terminal, and certainly no way to tell usage over time. So, after looking at a thread my hosting provider pointed me to, I decided to have a play with the Google Charts API!

This is a pretty rudimentary solution, but it’s working so far for me.

1. A very simple bash script

#!/bin/bash
ps -u username -o pid,rss,command | grep -e mpm -v | awk '{sum+=$2} END {print ",", sum}' >> /path/to/webroot/mem/memdata.csv

The script basically just outputs the current memory usage at the time of running and appends it to a CSV file.

2. Add the script to the crontab

By running the following command (or one similar), I edit my crontab:

crontab -e

I then insert this line:

0 * * * * /full/path/to/script/memlogger

So now that bash script will be run every hour, on the hour.

3. Writing a PHP script to display a Google Chart

<?php
// Settings
$max_mem = 120; // Your memory limit, in MB
$data_file = 'memdata.csv';
$chart_width = 550;
$chart_height = 400;
?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title>Memory Usage</title>
</head>
 
<body>
<h2>Memory Usage</h2>
<?php
$md = file_get_contents($data_file);
$md = preg_replace('/(\s+|\n)/', '', $md);
$md = explode(',', $md);
array_shift($md);
$max = 0;
$min = 0;
foreach ($md as $v) {
	if ($v > $max) {
		$max = $v;
	}
}
$base = 0;
if ($max > 0) {
	$base = ((($max_mem) * 1024) / $max) * 1;
	$base = round($base, 2);
}
?>
<p><img src="http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=lc&chd=t:<?php echo implode(',', $md); ?>&chs=<?php echo $chart_width; ?>x<?php echo $chart_height; ?>&chxt=y,r&chxr=0,<?php echo $min; ?>,<?php echo $max; ?>|1,<?php echo $min; ?>,<?php echo $max; ?>&chds=<?php echo $min; ?>,<?php echo $max; ?>&chm=r,FF0000,0,<?php echo $base; ?>,<?php echo $base+0.005; ?>" /></p>
</body>
</html>

This code basically just imports the data into an array, and then works a few things out for proper axis labelling, and away it goes!  It’s pretty quick and dirty, and could probably have been done nicer…  maybe I’ll come back and fix it up some time.

It also uses your memory limit amount to show a red line on the graph if you go over

Here’s the chart using some sample data:

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Anyway, after installing it and sitting back to think “ah, that looks better!”, I browsed to another page on my site and… whoops!  All pages and posts other than the home page itself had an odd quirk…

When I was logged in to WordPress everything looked fine:

But when I logged out…

I was devastated… my near-perfect theme was ruined.  Then I remembered, I know PHP, all is not lost! 

So, after digging around, I finally worked out how to fix it!

In the comments.php file, the following lines:

</form>
</div>
 
<?php endif; // If registration required and not logged in ?>
 
<?php endif; // if you delete this the sky will fall on your head ?>
</div>

Should be:

</form>
 
<?php endif; // If registration required and not logged in ?>
</div>
 
<?php endif; // if you delete this the sky will fall on your head ?>
</div>

That’s it! Sorted! Hope that helped someone else

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Also, I will hopefully be releasing the code for The Grey Album in the next week or so

I’m in the process of giving my blog a new look too… please bare with me while I iron out the kinks!

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I decided to build a simple photo album script using mostly PHP and jQuery to do the tricky parts, and the SimplePie library for actually importing the photo stream. I’ve called it The Grey Album, and though I probably wouldn’t call it a complete and comprehensive script, it seems to do the job. Any feedback is most welcome!

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• Cannon Challenge (ok, so the first item on my list being a game isn’t promising, but I’m going in alphabetical order!)
• Currency
• Facebook (obviously not such a must-have if you’re not on Facebook… but who’s not these days?  :P)
• Flashlight
• FTP On The Go (not free)
• GarageBuy (for eBay users)
• Google Mobile App
• IceTV (free, but have to create an account on their website)
• iSSH (not free)
• LinkedIn (not relevant if you don’t have an account)
• Lonely Planet Mandarin
• Midomi
• Mocha VNC Lite
• MotionX Dice
• Palringo Instant Messenger
• Remote (controls iTunes from your iPhone)
• reMovem (free)
• Seismometer
• Sol Free Solitaire
• Stanza
• Tap Tap Revenge
• Twitterific (obviously you’ll need a Twitter account for this one)
• Units
• whois
• Wikipanion
• Zenbe Lists (free, but you’ll need to create an account at http://lists.zenbe.com/)

So there it is, if you know of any other must-haves, post a comment!

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