Just got my grades back – all my classes passed! (WOO!)

Life’s been pretty busy the last few weeks coming into finals, so now that I’m on break, it’s weird not having a priority list in front of me.

Sometime in the coming weeks, I’ll be implanting my second magnet in my finger. This is particularly exciting because it’s NOT a parylene magnet; it’s a titanium nitride coated N52 from Dangerous Things — made just for biohackers! I’m super excited to set a date with Linda and get that puppy in there.

**TL;DR **twilio-sms-delete is a tool to iteratively delete all SMS and associated media from your Twilio account.

Twilio is a great tool for integrating SIP and SMS into your web applications. It’s got a great, simple interface, and API packages for many of the big languages (Python, PHP, JS, etc.).

When an SMS is sent with media (like a picture or audio; technically an MMS), Twilio makes it available to your application as a publically accessible (but very hard to guess) URL (the actual URL is provided in the JSON of the callback data; no non-text data is given in the callback).

It’s still a closed alpha, but I took a couple hours’ break from studying tonight to hammer out a few new features, especially features that help take DB in the direction I originally intended it – cold analysis of the crimes and locations, and less of a focus on the people and who they are (although that can be interesting).

I already had Frequency Analysis, which covers a small part of temporal breakdown by day, hour, etc (see the first pic). Tonight, I added Crime Analysis, which focuses on the crimes themselves – what’s most common, what occupations are seen the most, where are arrests happening, etc.

Fun side note: I just was deemed unable to give blood for right now due to my clotting the needle twice. I’m thinking of becoming a new super hero. PLATELET MAN TO THE RESCUE.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted about my magnet implant. It’s still chillin’, mostly subcutaneous, but with a little edge between my dermis and epidermis. I’m expecting some kind of trauma to jar it out one of these days, or for it to work itself out on its own (although it’s stayed at the same depth for the last two months, so we’ll see).

My latest project:

So Taylor Otwell just merged my pull request. I promise this is my last post freaking out about contributing to open source projects. BUT TAYLOR OTWELL.

node.js (sic) is a really cool runtime environment that allows for asynchronous, event driven coding. It uses JavaScript and runs on Google’s open source V8 JS engine.

I love the chat service ChatStep, but they advertise privacy and encryption without being willing to put their money where there mouth is and open source the system for full transparency.

I was frustrated with ChatStep’s purported security but unwillingness to open up their backend, so I decided to be the change I wanted to see in the world. I wrote an open source, mobile friendly, elegant chat that can handle image messaging. I tried also to comment my code (perhaps a bit too) liberally, as I wanted to be helpful to others who were starting in the same place I was.

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH AH AH AH AH AH AH AH AH

My first pull request to the Reddit codebase just got OK’d for merge by the admin. I officially contributed to Reddit production code!

Okay, fanboying done.

I was hoping to contribute to some documentation for a project that’s especially near to my heart. One of the biggest issues was inconsistent comma usage, so I wanted to remedy that. To aid me, I dipped my toes into Perl and RegEx to create OxfordPerl, and simple script that uses regular expressions to find sentences that should have an Oxford (AKA serial) comma, but don’t.

The script performs adequately; it rarely misses a spot that should have one, but often is fooled by other comma-delimited parentheticals. For the most part, though, it works well: in 448KB of text, I received two correctly identified issues, and five false positives. Not great, but it does what I need.