Three till Seven

A Chrome extension that notifies you of new Reddit posts and comments by a particular user. Created to humor my boyfriend because he was tired of me pestering him to upvote my posts all the time.

I’ve written my first Chrome extensions because I discovered that ColourLovers has an API. Both extensions are about palettes, either using them or creating them. Page Colourizer grabs a random palette or pattern and applies it haphazardly to the current page. Some of the results are pretty garish, but it’s entertaining. It’s a fun way to discover new ColourLovers palettes at least. The other extension, Colour Extractor, grabs up to five colors from the current page and lets you make a palette with them. It also shows information about each color it extracts, and if a color isn’t already named on ColourLovers, you can click it to go to the Create a Colour page and give it a name.

A Chrome extension that pulls colors from the current web page and lets you make a ColourLovers palette from them. Intended to help web designers identify palettes being used on different web sites.

A Chrome extension that grabs a random ColourLovers palette and applies it to the current page. Can also apply a random pattern as the page background.

Yesterday I helped out at the first ever RailsBridge held in Lexington. We had twenty-five people sign up as attendees and maybe ten volunteer coaches, including myself. It’s intended to be an all-day session introducing women to programming, specifically by having them create a simple Ruby on Rails app. I gave the opening presentation, which you can find on SlideShare and also download as a PDF. It introduced the ladies to programming basics, and had them walk through several examples in IRB. Friday night we held an InstallFest where everyone brought their laptops and we helped them get stuff installed, including RailsInstaller in Windows, Git, Sublime Text 2 as an editor, and Node.js in Windows to have a JavaScript runtime. They also made a couple basic Rails apps that were no more than scaffolds, committed them to local Git repositories, and published them on Heroku. This was to prepare them for Saturday, when they did the same thing but with a more complex Rails app.

A command-line Ruby script that uses the Vocalware HTTP REST API to convert text to an audio file of speech.

I went through my first-ever surgery yesterday: a laparoscopic cholecystectomy. I had my gallbladder removed because I’ve been having gallbladder attacks at least once a month since last summer, and changing my diet to an almost vegan diet didn’t stop them. I’m recovering okay, taking off at least a week from work. Jon’s been keeping me fed and helping me get around. I slept a lot yesterday; the hydrocodone really knocked me out. I’m a little sore around my midsection, but it’s a tolerable soreness. Certainly not as sharp or painful as a gallbladder attack. The soreness intensifies if I tense my stomach, cough, hiccough, or bend my stomach.