Cryptic Thing

I cobbled together a little (barely) interactive crossword puzzle engine. Here's a link to the puzzle I did a couple months ago, Transportation Alternatives.

It has some rendering problems, especially on IE, and there isn't any way to save your progress or check your answers yet, but the highlighting and everything seem to work okay, so I thought I'd link to it.

The interface is GWT which is very cool and fun. And sort of mind-blowing in that it even exists at all, let alone works as well as it does.

Update: changed puzzle link.

2010 NYC Alternate Side Parking Google Calendar

2010 NYC Alternate Side Parking Google calendar.

Another SMS Thing

I keep track of my checking account balance and track all my bills in a sparsely populated spreadsheet, with a row for each calendar day and a column for each category of credit or debit (paycheck, transfer to savings, gas bill, ATM, &c.). The resulting balance is tracked in the rightmost column.

My practice has been, when withdrawing money from an ATM machine, to pocket a paper receipt until such time as I find myself before my computer and may record the transaction.

So I made another App Engine service that lets me enter ATM withdrawals into a database,

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and publishes monthly accounts as XML,

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which are then consumed by Google spreadsheets' ImportXML() function:

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I called it "A.T.Them," and once I had it working, I added an endpoint to handle Zeep operations. Now when I withdraw money, I can decline the offer of a paper receipt, saving some trees, and text "atthem 61.50" or whatever and it will pop up right in my spreadsheet.

I can't figure out how to post the source without Blogger mangling the HTML, but it's all trivial in any case. One note is that ImportXML() doesn't do any kind of authentication, so the monthly lists of all my ATM withdrawals are not protected by anything beyond my keeping the URI's at which they may be found a secret.

Likewise (and this vulnerability, such as it is, applies equally to any Zeep service), someone who knew the URI that handles Zeep requests and my Zeep subscriber ID could impersonate "atthem" messages and populate my spreadsheet with junk. It's easy enough to add some sort of challenge and response to Zeep operations, but I didn't bother.

Pretty Neat

Jessae found a photo of herself on Google Street View. I don't think I linked to Andrew's article on using Street View for photography; maybe he'll write another one on using it for self-portraits.

Checking Scores via Text

Last night I was having dinner at friend Dorothy's house. Her and Robert had cooked up some amazing medallions of pork in a Tuscan style (I think), served with a salad of asparagus (both colors!), anchovy, and poached egg. It was so awesome.

Anyway, because I am a ridiculous boor, at
one pointseveral points I checked the score of the Mets game, using a service I found out about a couple weeks ago where you text "score Mets" to GOOGL and they text back the current box score a few seconds later. I reported the score to all those who were interested (nobody) and Robert asked how I'd checked it. Robert works for MLB and Dorothy for Google, so I told him that Dorothy was eating his lunch.

So he told me to try texting "Mets" (no "score" required! Think of the time I'll save!) to MLB-GO. I tried it, and damn! It was so much better! Not only do they give you the box score, but you get the names of the pitcher and batter and the current count. And the response fits in a single text message, whereas Google always seems to send me two-page responses.

So there's my plug. It's for a free product of a monopoly, so I don't think my endorsement matters one way or the other. Oh, and my poor Mets fell to the dastardly Padres.