Dan Ramteke

A text editor for the iPad/iPhone that used GitHub as the store. In otherwords, a text editor frontend for GitHub.

A subclass of NSArchiver that reads and writes YAML. Wrap it up as a nice framework and stick it on GitHub.

I will describe my current workflow for keeping track of my D&D 4e characters.

I keep all my files for my characters on DropBox. I use DropBox’s iPad app to refer to these files while gaming.

• I have a PDF version of the character sheet. DropBox is able to load PDFs, although it is a little slower than a plain image.

• For powers, I use Skitch to copy small square sections out of various player handbooks. I drag copied powers out of Skitch into VectorDesigner to arrange as many powers as I can into one 8.5” by 11” sheet. I resize as necessary, and export it all as a jpeg.

• For items, I do the same thing as for my powers. I use Skitch to copy powers out of D&D handbooks and into VectorDesigner, which I then export as a jpeg.

• For things that change a lot, like amount of gold, action points, healing surges, and number of hit points, I make notes in SimpleNote on my iPhone.

Improvements:

• I’d like to be able to create my item sheets and power sheets directly from my iPad. It’d be awesome if there were an app that could take square shaped screen shots from PDFs, and then arrange these as sheets, or in a scroll view.

Great raw oysters and clams. Great fish, too. Great atmosphere and people.

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Just saw oceanliner play a great set.

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This place is awesome. Jerk chicken, ox tail. Getting the shepherds pie today.

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Looks like my App got out of the review process and is now available on the App Store. I’m a little giddy, and a little nervous to see what sort of bugs pop up.

http://iTunes.com/apps/danramteke/placetumbler

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Met with Adrian and Brian from SkillSlate.com to discuss employment over lunch. @mattraibert made it to sit with Marina Ambramovic. Talk with Bruce about the next six weeks of the current project. More calls back & emails concerning my the resume. Lost badly at Chicago Express during game night, then won pretty nicely at Sylla. Won at Race for the Galaxy with an all genes tableau.

And now I find myself wanting to sit back and watch something. On my iPad. I usually don’t enjoy just sitting back and watching something. This iPad is changing me.

“Cheers, here’s to life!” - Gasoline Heart

Wherein, I ponder what my next side project should be. My previous side project is awaiting review at Apple’s App Store.

Some ideas from my notebook of ideas:

1. Percolate stat changes for a D&D character.
2. Share favorite restaurants based on location
3. Port a board game to the iPad, (Race for the Galaxy, Dos de Mayo)
4. A text editor with git support for iPhone/iPad.
5. An iPad app for Radtrack.com (an open source Kanban tool)
6. Mind mapping iPad app

The problem with number 1 would be licensing issues with Wizards of the Coast. Number 3 I feel the licensing issues would be a lot easier, but still possible. Number 6 isn’t quite exciting enough. Number 4 could be really useful, as would number 3. Number 5 also sounds good, contributing to open source and I could use a little KanBan, but isn’t fixing a pain point that I have. Number 2 is still a pain point I feel very much.

Because number 2 is still a pain point, but the others are nice-to-haves, I’m going to put a few more hours against that one, and check back in a week.

Made some minor tweaks to my website. Played 5 games of Race for the Galaxy. Heated up left over vindaloo, veggies, rice, and mah po to fu. Checked on my app (it is still waiting for review). Found some good songs on last.fm by Foster the People. Sent out some resumes.

A good night.

Stopping in, between visiting Central Park and the MoMA.

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The Tumblr app that I’m developing sometimes times out when creating a new post on Tumblr. It has never timed out when authenticating a new user, just when creating posts. However, the post gets created on Tumblr anyway.

(confused face)

I increased the request timeout in my app to deal with this for now. But I’ve also had times when 60 seconds is not long enough.

I wish this would not happen. : /

Varick St & Charlton Great hot sandwhiches with great horse radish. Had the roast turkey on a hero with lettuce, tomato and horse radish.

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At work

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Driving through the Lincoln Tunnel.

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DropBox and iDisk are both on the iDevices. What if you could open .graffle files in OmniGraffle for iPad from your DropBox? And when you were done editing, the updated file would replace the version in DropBox? That’d be cool.

The alternative for iPhone developers seems to be building their own custom syncing, like Simplenote.

I find that a radio alarm clock tuned to NPR is better at waking me up on the morning than a loud-repeating-noise. I suspect that the intellectual stimulation gets my brain going again — like my brain that keeps going at night and keeps me awake thinking at night. But loud-repetitive-noise is merely an annoyance, and can be mentally blocked out like bad advertising.

While developing an app on top of CherryPy, I would get an insidious error: the browser would show a blank page. Randomly. This would happen about 10% of the time, but go up to 40% or 50% over time. Needless to say this was difficult to diagnose.

Here’s how we fixed it: Because we were running CherryPy behind Apache we told Apache to send HTTP/1.0 messages to CherryPy instead of HTTP/1.1 request. Here is the snippet from our Apache configuration file:

<Proxy *>
Order Deny,Allow
Allow from all
SetEnv force-proxy-request-1.0 1
SetEnv proxy-nokeepalive 1
</Proxy>

(Relevant Apache documentation)

I was unable to find the bits of the internet that helped aid the discovery of this bug, but it was a lot of Google searches. I did manage to find a link to a similar ticket: http://www.cherrypy.org/ticket/847, and it seems to be fixed now.

I started working on an iPhone portion to Delicious Restaurants. I made a branch in git to store it named iphone, with the rails app still living in master. So far I’m happy with this set up, except that Xcode complains that everything on disk got deleted everytime I checkout a different branch.

I also learned this: To convert a branch to a tracking branch, add

[branch "iphone"]
    remote = origin
    merge = refs/heads/iphone

to your .git/config, although there are also some git config commands you can use intead.

I’ve been working on an iPhone app, using Apple’s Xcode IDE.

I miss the intelligent and quick refactorings in IntelliJ for Java. My fingers want to type the short cuts for common refactorings like “extract method” and “inline variable.” But they don’t exist in Xcode. It feels crippling. I’m so used to easily molding code without doing a ton of copy-paste-modify-check.

Xcode does have a “rename” refactoring. But it takes at least three clicks and 5 seconds once I actually hit “go.”

I could use all the ones I miss from Java, plus some new, Objective-C oriented ones. Like “Move to new category.”

These refactorings I assume probably exist somewhere, but I have yet to find them. Any clues?

With an impending move, I thought I’d take a few moments to chronicle some of the best eats on the Upper West Side.

My favorite sushi was Suma Sushi between 107th and 108th Street on Amsterdam Ave. Fuji Sushi on 56th Street between Broadway and 8th Ave is a very very close runner up. Which ever is closer is the decider here.

There are two great Mexican Restaurants on the UWS. Taqueria y Fonda between 107 and 108th wins on best entrées and delivery service. Highly recommend all their chicken entrées: Chicken Pipian, Chicken Chile Verde, Chicken Chile Aho, Chicken Mole. All of em.

Mama Mexico is a great Mexican Restaurant in a different way. I always have a lot of fun in their atmosphere, and their alcoholic drinks are particularly tasty. Be sure to spend the money to get fresh made guacamole (they make it right in front of you). The actual entrées I don’t find particularly compelling; they are the one boring part in a great night.

My favorite fancy Indian place is Indus valley, on the corner of 100th Street and Broadway. I have yet to find a Chicken Vindaloo to rival theirs. Great dishes all around. The one quirk they have here is that they spoon the food onto your plates when they bring you the food. This is exacerbated if you’re eating with a group of friends. But the food is worth it. Great naan and palak paneer, too.

For great rotisserie chicken, get delivery from Chirping Chicken. I really like their delivery service. Great delivery ribs. Also recommended is their lamb gyro platter, which comes with a nice tzatziki sauce, with fries, rice, and a big salad. Honorable mention for the arroz con pollo.

My favorite Chinese place is Sichuan Gourmet on 39th Street between 5th and 6th Aves. I know this isn’t UWS, but the food is exceptional. Best Ma Po Do Fu in town.

Wild card! My favorite Haitian restaurant was Krik Krak on Amsterdam Ave between 101st and 102nd street. Tasty although slow. Poulet Maison takes the slight lead in their dishes.