If you haven’t heard of it, you should check it out: http://notifo.com/

It took me about 60 seconds to create an account, download the iphone app and send myself a test message. They have android and blackberry clients in the works as well.

The API is straight forward and is easily callable via curl.

I have a project I am working on that is currently relying on some buggy libraries (don’t ask) which cause the JVM to periodically exhaust it’s memory. I can alert myself when this happens using notifo simply by starting the JVM with

-XX:OnOutOfMemoryError="notifo.sh failure 'stupid thing failed again'"

-XX:OnOutOfMemoryError="<cmd args>;<cmd args>"
Run user-defined commands when an OutOfMemoryError is first thrown. 
(Introduced in 1.4.2 update 12, 6)

here is the simple shell script i am using:

#!/bin/sh
curl -k -u ${USERNAME}:${APIKEY} \
-d "to=${USERNAME}&msg='$2'&title='$1'" \

https://api.notifo.com/v1/send_notification

This is an extremely trivial example, but you can probably see the potential for sending yourself notifications easily.

update: check out my notifo java client and notifo log4j appender

I can’t believe it’s been 4 years since my last post here.

test post from my new phone.using pocket sharpMT

If film users didn’t have enough troubles with the digital explosion making traditional cameras practically irrelevant, now they’re going to have to pay more to take pictures.

The world’s largest maker of photographic film, Eastman Kodak, said today that it’s going to hike prices on its consumer, professional and movie films to offset the high costs of raw materials such as silver. Consumer and professional film will be jacked up by as much as 17 percent while motion picture film could rise as much as five percent.

‘Over the past year, Kodak has been absorbing unrelenting increases in the costs of raw materials used to manufacture film, including silver and petrochemicals,’ the company said in a statement. ‘These pressures have reached a point where they can no longer be offset by Kodak’s ongoing productivity programs.’

Eastman Kodak announces film price hikes [BusinessWeek]

(Via Gizmodo.)

here are some interesting stats from google’s “reader” blog:

% of errors	Error description
15.6%	Input claims to be UTF-8 but contains invalid characters.
14.9%	Opening and ending tags mismatch
13.9%	An undefined entity is used (e.g.   in an XML document without importing the HTML set)
7.8%	Documented expected to begin with a start tag, but no < was found
5.7%	Disallowed control characters present
5.5%	Extra content at the end of the document
4.2%	Unterminated entity reference (missing semi-colon)
4.2%	Unquoted attribute value
3.8%	Premature end of data in tag (truncated feed)
3.3%	Naked ampersand (should be represented as &amp;)
2.1%	XML declaration allowed only at the start of the document
1.8%	Namespace prefix is used but not defined
0.75%	Comment not terminated
0.64%	Attribute without value
0.17%	Unescaped < not allowed in attributes values
0.11%	Malformed numerical entity reference
0.11%	Unsupported/invalid encoding
0.10%	Comment must not contain ‘–’
0.10%	Attribute defined more than once
0.07%	Char out of allowed range
0.03%	Comment not terminated
0.02%	Sequence ]]> not allowed in content

from mosnews.com:

A team of thieves that broke into an abandoned missile silo not far from the Russian city of Kostroma in search of nonferrous metals was shocked to find the shaft packed with Soviet money bills, Regnum news agency reported on Tuesday.

via digg read the story

this a note-to-self to find out more about this type of process…

I hit a couple of thrift stores in San Diego today looking for cheap cameras. I found a Polaroid Square Shooter 2 in a nice leather case for $3.00 which I was pretty sure I could still get film for. After getting it home and putting some new batteries (AA not those hard to find, weird 3.5v ones with the 9v connectors), I was dismayed to discover the “electric eye” doesn’t seem to be working and the shutter isn’t opening: bummer. There were 2 other square shooters I spotted but I didn’t bother with them since I had already found one. Maybe I will go back and check those out before we leave.

Went to Death Valley on Sunday. it was snowing at the rim on the way in, it was drizzling and the temp was somewhere in the low 60’s at the visitors center (150ft below sea level), not very deathy…It was still pretty amazing, just not in a grim reaper kind of way.

According to this reuters article:

South Korean firm LG Electronics is poised to start marketing an air conditioner with a filter made using an enzyme from the pungent national dish kimchi that is aimed at protecting against the bird flu virus.

read the article