Michael Leo - Unreal Expectations

Zoom Busy Light Automation

How do I let the home office visitors know when a Zoom call is occurring

Backyard Cafe Lights

When I added cafe lights to define space in the backyard, I added automation control to programmatically turn them on and off.

home network

Network Closet & Awesome Home Network

Network Closet When I first purchased our new house, I wasn’t aware that a previous owner had updated various outlets in the house and run ethernet cable from the outlets to a closet. We never looked too close at this closet to see that the cables were all

iOS Development

XMPPFramework / iOS / libidn / -all_load failure

As I integrated the XMPPFramework it requires the libidn library for a couple of methods it uses. The latest version of libidn that the XMPPFramework included as of this writing is 1.15. Unfortunately, this version seems incompatible with the “Other Linker Flag” -all_load that other libraries

Multiple Language Meta Descriptions / One Page

During a post implementation design review today, the design and implementation failed to meet the basic one requirement of the enhancement. The requirement was to ensure the site in question would respond to Katakana characters when searched through google.co.jp. The english title of the site is returned quite

Install Your Own URL Shortener

A while back I acquired domain, zod.im with intent of setting up my own shortened URL service. While there is nothing wrong with the current offerings by bit.ly or TinyURL, I was academically intrigued by the notion of setting this up. YOURLS I went with open source package

Impressions of Sony Dash

For Christmas I received the Sony Dash as present from my wife. Having worked with computers, networking, and all sorts of technology in general I am both amazed and dismayed by Sony Dash at the same time. Since this article can live for a long time and the Sony product

ForbesPrint.com and Open Source

A year ago, my wife, daughter and I visited my wife’s aunt and uncle in Waterford, Michigan area. She signed me up to do a small web site for them to promote the printing business. The printing business has been in the family since 1946. I decided to

Blogging on the iPad

My new 3g iPad arrived today and I have spent the evening having a look through the app store for apps that are built for the device. One of the apps I found was WordPress for the iPad. This is my first post on the iPad and the initial impression

MAMP & PECL/UUID Module Working On Snow Leopard

I had a previous article that discussed in detail on how to get imagick php plugin working on MAMP. As always, as you get more exposed to technologies and frameworks you find new ways to do things. One thing to keep in mind with MAMP is that 1.8.4

Most Popular Room for iPad

My prediction for the iPad is that some survey will come out 6 months after the release that finds people use their iPad more often in the bathroom than any other room in the house. The logic on this is simple. People already have laptops, desktops and fully functional computers

Using YAML as Response Format for Services in Spring

Recently, we were developing an iPhone application where the iPhone developer was insistent on utilizing YAML as the response format for service calls. This seemed odd given the prevalence of JSON as a response format and an already built library for parsing and handling JSON within Objective C that works

Gadgets Galore - The iPad would just be a small incemental add

The Apple iPad was announced yesterday and I do believe the hype was so insane leading up to the announcement that Steve Jobs could have introduced a semi-transparent 1/4 inch laser screen that ran for a month on full charge and people would still have made fun of the

One Line Command - Print Directory Tree

While this blog is new, I want to ensure I keep content going lest it goes abandoned and six months from now I wonder what happened. Most of my original inspiration on putting content here is based on useful work I do. Not having anything interesting to share from current

MAMP & Imagick on Snow Leopard

Most web searches for adding the imagick extension to MAMP suggest using MacPorts to install ImageMagick and then use this compiled version as the library to running ‘pecl install imagick’. As I was in the process of setting up a clean Mac Book Pro, I tried going through

Video, from Camcorder to Nginx Flash Streaming

About two years ago before my daughter was born I talked my wife into the value of having a video camera to record all those wonderful moments that kids are supposed to have. At the time I was a fan of Sony products and we ended up purchasing the Sony

Nginx, FastCGI, Wordpress Permalink & "No Input file specified"

If you have spent any time recently look into the state of web servers then you know that nginx is getting recommended as the replacement for apache left, right and center. Apache has a rich history, platform extensive, and highly extensible, and while these are great traits it’s