Morton Fox's journal

It was Chinese New Year, so I went to IHOP in New Castle. It's not as weird as it seems. Firstly, everyone else would be thinking of going to Chinese restaurants, so those places would be packed. Secondly, I still had the free pancakes coupon that I got for completing a customer survey after my visit last month. I also had a Double BLT.

I learnt about the Foursquare v2 API recently so I've been busy rewriting 4sqNoGPS to use it. The result is PlainSquare. In contrast to 4sqNoGPS, which was an attempt to write an app in one day, PlainSquare took 5 days, but I was busy and I was also aiming for completeness instead of just something minimally functional.

PlainSquare is the same idea as 4sqNoGPS. It is meant for older phones with limited web browsers, so there is nothing too fancy in the HTML and no Javascript at all, except for the experimental geolocation page. Where PlainSquare goes beyond 4sqNoGPS is in certain v2 API features that aren't in the v1 API, chiefly support for comments and photos. Foursquare check-in pages are friends-only so a screenshot will have to do. The corresponding page in PlainSquare is formatted in a narrow style for my phone and has input forms for adding comments and photos. The use case here should be fairly obvious. I check in at a restaurant and then I use the app to add food photos to the check-in record to make it more like a show and tell.

This evening's geocache was Kache On Arrival at Westbrook Park, a KOA campground that was turned into a town park, in West Milford. This location is quite a bit out of the way for North Jersey. I took the scenic route via the long and winding Westbrook Road to get there. On my way back, I saw that they were just starting to close off and repave Greenwood Lake Turnpike. Went to McDonald's in Mahwah for dinner and had a Angus Bacon and Cheese Third Pounder value meal. Thanks to Ryan / RXBX (who is both a geocacher and Where's Georger) for the coupon link. It's still good for a few more days if you'd like to print and use it yourself.

A screw came loose below the dashboard, so I went to Autozone yesterday evening. After testing the screw against their selection of tools, I got a 10mm socket and that did the trick. Later though, I noticed that the driver's side door lining had come loose. (Not related to the screw problem.) I wonder what I need to fix that. I'll probably try one of the adhesives that I have later.

I'm quite a bit behind on this because I only just started using Google App Engine. I figured I'd port my Sudoku Solver to GAE. Of course, it's a total waste of GAE because it could be implemented in Javascript entirely on the client side like this, but I wanted to see how GAE works before taking on more substantial projects. Installing ActivePython and GAE SDK was a snap to do. The SDK itself simulates the App Engine environment, including a simple web server, so I didn't need to install anything else. The bigger hurdle was relearning Python as I hadn't touched that scripting language in about a decade. However, after reading the online tutorial a bit, I found that I hadn't actually forgotten much. It's a simpler language than Perl.

The annoying part: After I was done and ready to upload the application, I saw that Google App Engine requires that I verify my account by SMS. I have text messaging turned off on my Sprint account so that is a little inconvenient. I'll have to ask Sprint to turn it on again temporarily just for this one text message, and that will have to wait until Sprint's customer service webchat comes back up. If at all possible, I'd prefer not to be on hold on their voice line for this.