And, without any further ado, my current GeekTool setup:

Click to Enlarge

For the most part, it’s almost identical to what I was using on my last MBP. The major changes are (1) ToDo.txt, (2) GCal, and (3) iTunes. I know that I had iTunes embedded on my desktop in the last post, but with Lion now out, the program I was using did not behave the way I was hoping it would. I’ve since switched to a completely GeekTool related way of handling iTunes information. As was the case last time, some of these scripts are not my own – I’ve tried my best to give credit where I can, but if there are any problems, please leave a comment.

ToDo.txt

Header: echo "ToDo's"
ToDo.txt (Local Copy Only): /path/to/todo.sh
ToDo.txt (Web Synchronized): /path/to/unison todo.prf -silent -auto -batch; sed -i.bak 's/\\//g' /path/to/todo.txt; /path/to/todo.sh

I’ve written about ToDo.txt before, and included some screenshots of how I was embedding it on the desktop. If you only use ToDo.txt on one computer, embedding it on the desktop is as simple as executing the shell script, as shown in the second line above. If you want to synchronize your todo list between your computer and a remote server, you’ll need a copy of unison installed on both systems. In the last line of code above, the first statement synchronizes the text files between both systems, the second statement handles some formatting to ensure everything displays properly, and the last statement prints it out on the desktop. For those who are interested in the web interface, I will try my best to do a write up on it once I’m back at school and settle in.

Calendar

Header: echo "Calendar"
Calendar Script: Download and change the extension to ‘.pl’
Calendar Script Execution: perl ~/Desktop/Perl/gcal.pl

There really isnt much to say about the Calendar script – it pulls upcoming events from your Google Calendar and allows you to display them on your desktop. If you want to read more about how the script handles it, head over the author’s post for all the details.

iTunes

Click to Enlarge

iTunes Script: Download and change the extension to ‘.scpt’
iTunes Script Execution: osascript /path/to/iTunesInfo.scpt

As with the Calendar, a simple script is used to display the album information. The only real drawback from CoverStream is that, due to the refresh rate in GeekTool, this geeklet doesn’t operate in real time. That is, if you change a song, it might take a few seconds for your desktop to update with the new information. Check out the original author’s post for some more information on how the script works.

I know there aren’t as many geeklets as last time, but with all of them combined, my desktop has become much more functional. The ability to see my calendar and todo’s without having to open any additional programs is a huge time saver. As always, any questions, please don’t hesitate to post a comment below.

Anyway, the two main components I decided to leave stock were the hard drive and RAM (if you couldn’t tell already). The RAM I quickly found on Newegg for $30 – it was a G.Skill kit (which happens to be my personal go to brand for RAM) at the same speed as the stock RAM in MBP. By quickly found, I mean the 8 GB of RAM was installed within 3 hours of bringing the computer home. As for the hard drive, I thought I would be able to handle the switch from the SSD in my old MBP to a 7200 RPM drive in the new computer, but quickly came to realize that the speed difference is HUGE. Last week I found a 256 GB Samsung 830 Series on Newegg for $350 – if that sounds a little high to anyone, Apple charges $500 for the 256 GB SSD option, and, again, they keep the original hard drive. After debating if I should just get it already or wait a little longer, I ended up buying it. One interesting thing to note is that the hard drive that came in the computer was 9 mm tall, while the SSD was only 7 mm – there’s no issue using a smaller drive in the MBP, but I was definitely surprised when I placed the drives side by side. Here’s a picture of the SSD fully installed.

256 GB Samsung 830 Series in Late 2011 MacBook Pro

After upgrading the RAM and swapping out the HDD for an SSD, the computer is insanely fast. Not to say it was a slouch before – the quad core i7 is definitely a huge improvement over the Core 2 Duo that was in my old MBP – but the difference between a traditional hard drive and a solid state drive is staggering. The computer is virtually quiet during normal operation, and only audible when the fans kick on if its working a little harder than normal. Overall, I’m loving my new MBP – its amazing how much of a difference 4 years makes in the computer world.

Check out the screenshots below, and check back in the next few weeks – I’m hoping to clean up some of my modifications to the web-wrapper and repackage it for others to use. I only made a few changes with regard to security and formatting the output, but I think they’ll be helpful so that someone else doesn’t have to worry about. Any questions, leave a comment below.

GeekTool:

ToDo.txt Embedded on Desktop via Geektool

ToDo.txt in Terminal

ToDo.txt via the Web

Update [1/6/2012]: It seems that the organization behind ToDo.txt realized that they needed official iOS support and recently released their own native client. You can check it out here. I havent bought it yet (the $1.99 seems a little steep for what its actually doing), but from reading the reviews of it, you need to keep your todo file in your dropbox; not as clean a solution as I was hoping they would come out with, but probably offers a little more functionality than my web interface.

1. Download and install Cookies Manager+ for Firefox. Restart to complete the installation.
2. Open ‘Cookies Manager+’ and enter ‘PREF’ in the search bar.
3. Under sites, find the cookie for ‘google.com’ – the name of the cookie should be ‘PREF’
4. Double click the cookie to edit it. Change the ‘Content’ to ‘ID=03fd476a699d6487:U=88e8716486ff1e5d:FF=0:LD=en:CR=2:TM=1322688084:LM=1322688085:S=McEsyvcXKMiVfGds’
5. Reload any Google site (Gmail/Calendar/+/etc) and you should have the new Google Bar enabled.

Its a nice change from the toolbar approach Google was using before – everything is contained in a single drop down menu from the Google logo. Make sure to check out my friends blog (TheTechUpload.com) for some more interesting tricks and hacks.

I started by designing a simple layout that was aesthetically pleasing, and added in the basic functionality: register a new account and login to the system. Given that it was supposed to be a movie rental portal, I next had to figure out where to get a decent sized movie library that I could store in my database. After some thinking and googling, I decided to use IMDBs Top 250 as a starting point. I originally thought of writing a scraper from scratch to obtain the relevant information, but quickly found out that IMDB API was freely available. However, in order to use IMDB API, I needed to have the movie list stored somewhere; either in the database or as a text file. A little more googling led me to ScraperWiki, where I found a scraper that was already written to dump the Top 250 into a .CSV file. After uploading the .CSV file to my server, I put together a quick PHP script to parse it out and save the IMDB IDs into a table. Now I was in business – another quick script to run the IDs through IMDB API and I had a working movie database. I also ended up saving the movie posters from IMDB locally on my server to avoid hotlinking them every time the page was loaded. After getting the movies all put together, I started building out the rest of the functionality: rent/buy movies, checkout, request a new title, view/return rentals, view purchases, and view transaction history. To reduce the amount of reloads the user would have when navigating the site, I ended up linking almost all of the operations to AJAX requests that queried PHP scripts and updated the DOM using jQuery.

Some of the other fun features that stand include:

• Facebook/Google+ like notifications for when items are in the cart or rentals are overdue.
• A ‘Quick Cart’ dropdown that appears when the notification for the Shopping Cart is clicked.
• A few CSS3 hacks to create a wrapping effect around the body of the page.
• Embedded Trailers when viewing the details of a single movie.
• A scrolling interface for the movies page that allows the user to view all of the movies in the catalog without reloading the page
• “Employee” reviews of movies, with a 5-star rating system.
• The ability to request a new movie, or vote for a movie requested by another customer.
• Similar Movies (when on a Movie detail page) and Suggestions calculated on the fly based off of the genre of the current movie or previous transactions, respectively.

I’m sure I left a few things out – I’ve been working on the site for about 3 weeks now, so I know what I’m expecting to see at this point. Overall, it was a fun project to work on, and it allowed me to test out some new features that I probably wouldn’t have had the time to on a real production site. Anyway, you can check out the working prototype here – just register an account and start playing around with it. Any questions or comments, leave me a post below.

Once I got back to my room, I decided to look into Haskell – I always enjoy playing with new languages, even if its just to brush the surface. After reading a little about Haskell, I came to the conclusion that its unlike any language I’ve ever programmed in before. Whereas Java/C++/C are imperative languages with control structures and a defined structure, Haskell is a functional language. The concept itself is a very interesting one – rather than modifying variables and data as the program executes, Haskell focuses on the functions. From one of the tutorials off HaskellWiki, “In purely functional programming you don’t tell the computer what to do as such but rather you tell it what stuff is.”

I’ll do some write-ups as I start to mess around with the language more – I’m excited to start working in a new programming paradigm.

I started by setting up a basic framework for the site, throwing some dummy text in to help me visualize everything. After getting the look the way I wanted it, I decided to switch gears over to the CMS implementation to get that squared away. Once I had the ability to add new pages, including whether they should be in the menu as a top level or a submenu, and could add the appropriate text, I threw a couple of pages into the database and went to check the front end.

At first I was going to use some .htaccess rewrites to make the URL look clean, and just pass the page names via the $_GET parameter – I’ve done this on a couple of sites already, and it helps keep a clean layout. After looking at the content that was actually being loaded, I realized that I wanted to take this site a step further. Rather than reloading the page each time a link was clicked, I decided to throw together a small PHP script to query the database, and use Javascript and AJAX to dynamically alter the page – I wanted to make it so that the user never left the ‘index.php’ page. After some testing, and re-testing, I finally had it working, and even got it to display a 404 error if the page wasn’t found in the database. I even tried to add a loading image, to be displayed while the database was being queried, but the whole process was firing so fast that it never got a chance to show up.

The final step was to add some analytics – I usually immediately turn to Google for this, but given that the site never left the index, I realized that this wouldn’t provide accurate tracking. After some quick searching, I found a tutorial on how to make a basic analytics tracker. I ended up modifying it slightly to fit into the AJAX implementation, but ended up getting it to save an entry each time a page was loaded from the database.

I’m putting the finishing touches on the site as I’m writing this, but expect a more in-depth tutorial in the coming weeks – I plan on using the entire framework from this site as my starting point for more projects in the future. To check out the site, head over here to test it out.

Rather than continue arguing with the registrar, I decided to work up a quick hack that would provide me with the end result I desired. I fired up Chrome and opened the developer console. I originally tried using some jQuery syntax, but quickly realized that Banner does not include jQuery by default. After some quick googling, I found two StackOverflow threads that addressed my needs: 1. Include jQuery via the console, and 2. Add a row to a specific location in a table. After some quick testing, I put together what was needed to add the student name under the heading of ‘Student Information’, placing it together with ‘Birth Date’ and ‘Student Type’.

First, you must add jQuery:

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var jq = document.createElement('script');
jq.src = "https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.6.2/jquery.min.js";
document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(jq);

Then add the data:

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$('.datadisplaytable > tbody > tr').eq(2).after('<TR><TH COLSPAN="2" CLASS="ddlabel" scope="row" >Student Name:</TH><TD COLSPAN="10" CLASS="dddefault">[NAME GOES HERE]</TD></TR>');

The code simply adds jQuery into the DOM, then finds the table (.datadisplaytable in my case), moves into the body of the table, then the rows, finds the 3rd row (starting from 0, so row 2 in this case) and appends the provided html after this row. Following the format of the original markup, I add an extra row with the appropriate information.

Finally, I had to enter the commands in Firebug, as Firefox was the only browser that I tested this on that placed a page break between the content I wanted to remove and the information that I actually needed. The end result: my unofficial transcript, with my name in an easily identifiable location, minus all of the unnecessary markup added to it by the system.

This should theoretically work for any school utilizing the Banner system for their student portal/unofficial transcripts. Any questions, leave a comment.