A blog about software development, startups, camping and beards
Byte Happens Interview I joined the Byte Happens podcast to talk about my journey through the tech industry, co-founding Gigwalk, building Headnote for law firm payments, and working at companies like AOL and Yahoo. We explored the challenges of transitioning from engineering to management, the importance of adaptability and continuous learning, and how timing and a willingness to embrace new…
When exporting photos from a service like Flickr, perhaps after they've given notice that they're going to delete our photos if you don't subscribe to their paid plan, you might run into an issue where the photos you've downloaded have incorrect created and modified dates. To fix this, we need to build a quick bash script to update all the created and modified dates from the photo's EXIF data.…
All Truthy and Falsy Javascript Values In Nodejs, every value has an associated boolean, true or false, value. For example, a null value has an associated boolean value of false. A string value, such as abc has an associated boolean value of true. Values that are associated with boolean true are said to be truthy. Values that are associated with boolean false values are said to be falsy. It can…
Google Forcing Nest Cameras Visual Indicator Light To Be On Received the following email from Google today... Full email text... Recently, we shared our commitment to privacy to outline how our products work in your home. As part of that commitment, we explained that you will always see a clear visual indicator when your Nest cameras are on and sending video and audio to Nest. So we're…
Posting to Twitter with Python - Part Two: Posting Photos NOTE: This is part two of my posting to Twitter with Python tutorial. If you haven't been through part one, it's here: Four Simple Steps To Post To Twitter Using Python In this tutorial, we're going to write a quick script to post to twitter using the Python and the Tweepy package TLDR; If you just want the code, you can grab the code repo…
Kalamazoo native is a force behind Gigwalk, a new cellphone app that puts iPhones users to work On May 15, 2011 I was interviewed By Al Jones on Gigwalk at The Kalamazoo Gazette Read Original Article The interiew is pasted below as well... The concept links iPhone users with small jobs they can do, quite often in their spare time. It links companies that need local data — like GPS service…
Doubleclick to open a file in VIM from OSX I use VIM for just about everything from note taking to coding to keeping track of my recipes. Of course I've dabbled with other text editors, but nothing I've liked so far. But I found myself more and more dealing with a txt file inside Mac's Finder app and then dropping to a terminal and spending time switching directories over to that file to edit it.…
Sign Into Gmail Without Signing Into Google Chrome Unfortunately, Google has made changes to Chrome since this blog post was posted which removed the options noted below. Sorry :( I'll update the blog post if I find another way. Recently, Google released an update to Google Chrome that effectively forces you to sign into the Google Chrome browser when you sign in to your Gmail account. If you're…
209 Netfix Categories You Dont Know About Netflix is available just about everywhere and in every country. But they change which movie and TV categories they promote in each market. That means there are some hidden Netflix categories you haven't seen before. So here's a set of links to 209 of the hidden channels available, listed below. There's a ridiculous number of very specific categories like…
Four Steps To Write An AppleScript to Gather ALL Windows on OSX I have no idea why, but there is no built-in way to gather ALL your desktop windows (from all applications) onto your main display window. There are some apps out there that will do it for each individual application but nothing that I've been able to find that will do it for all windows from all applications at once. And it doesn't…
Easy Recipe For Making Chili at Home with Matt Crampton Cooking chili doesn't have to be a pain, use this easy recipie to make it at home. Easy Recipe For Making Chili at Home Cooking chili is easy if you make it my way. Recipe as follows... Ingredients: 1 pound of ground beef 1 onion 1 can of Ro-Tel (chopped tomatoes and green chilis) 1 can of creamed corn 1 can of tomato paste 1 packet of chili…
Four Simple Steps To Post To Twitter Using Python NOTE: Don't miss the part 2 of this blog post: Posting Photos to Twitter with Python Automating Twitter can be an easy coding exercise once you have everything set up, but figuring out all the steps that Twitter puts you through to generate your access keys and tokens can be a challenge. I put these four steps together to make it easier to walk to…
The Mega List Of Free Image Sites For Blogging Blogging is hard work, and finding good images to make your content compelling can be even harder. Luckily a number of talented photographers and engineers have taken it upon themselves to make a huge number of free images available for commercial use. Take a look at the list below for a huge set of sites you can use for your next project. This list…
When You Pry It From My Cold, Dead Hands... I've been a die hard VIM user since the days of co-founding the Kalamazoo Linux Users Group back in 1998. It's a clean command line editor with a simple user interface and once you've mastered the admittedly steep learning curve of its robust keyboard shortcuts, I haven't found any substitutes that measure up for raw horsepower coding. But... Relatively…
Wall Street Journal Live Interview with Matt Crampton On 10/8/2014 I did an interview with The Wall Street Journal talking about Gigwalk and the larger economy Wall Street Journal Live Interview with Matt Crampton Download Interview Video File size: 53.8 MiB
Techcrunch Interview on Gigwalk with Matt Crampton On Feb 20, 2013 I was interviewed by Sarah Perez at TechCrunch on Gigwalk and the Gig Economy Read Article The interiew is pasted below as well... Gigwalk, the mobile temp agency that allows users to get assigned jobs (or “gigs”) from companies in need of real-world data or market research, is today upgrading its business-facing platform as the…
Salon.com Labormetrics Interview with Matt Crampton On 08-16-2013 I was interviewed by Andrew Leonard for Salon.com on labor and the Gig economy. Read Article The interiew is pasted below as well... The scary new labormetrics of work Gigwalk will get you a job through your smartphone, and that’s cool. But don’t dawdle about answering your email ANDREW LEONARD 08.16.2013•4:44 AM Matt Crampton is…
NBC Press Here interview with Matt Crampton I did an interview with NBC Press Here on August 29, 2013 with Chris Preimesberger and Levi Sumagaysay Download Interview Video File size: 26.3 MiB
Mobile Monday Silicon Valley panel with Matt Crampton On Nov 22, 2016 I spoke at the Mobile Monday Silicon Valley panel on Challenges in Starting an On Demand Service Download Video File size: 833.3 MiB
Human Cloud panel with Matt Crampton In December 2014 I participated in a panel discussion focused on Online Staffing and Human Cloud Platforms Download Video File size: 732.0 MiB
Huffington Post Interview with Matt Crampton On 03/16/2015 I was interviewed by Charu Sharma for The Huffington Post on Gigwalk and going against the flow. Read Article The interiew is pasted below as well... Matt Crampton is the Cofounder and CTO of Gigwalk. He originally founded Gigwalk to create a marketplace to help businesses mobilize people to get work done. Since launching in May 2011,…
Fox Business Interview with Matt Crampton On Jul 23, 2013 I did an interview with Fox Business talking about Gigwalk and the larger economy Fox Business Interview with Matt Crampton Download Interview Video File size: 24.2 MiB
Fox Business interview on furloughed government workers with Matt Crampton On Oct. 15, 2013 I did an interview with Fox Business talking about online apps that furloughed government workers can use to make extra money Fox Business interview on furloughed government workers with Matt Crampton Download Interview Video File size: 110.8 MiB
Fortune Magazine Live Interview with Matt Crampton On May 5, 2015 I did an interview with Fortune Magazine talking about Gigwalk and the larger economy. It was titled "Own a smartphone? You can work for some of the world's biggest brands" See the original interview here (Note flash is required to view the video embedded below)
CCTV Interview with Matt Crampton On Apr 12, 2013 I spoke with anchor Michelle Makori on CCTV on how PC companies will survive in a business environment shifting toward mobile devices. CCTV Interview with Matt Crampton Download Interview Video File size: 40.6 MiB
CBS Pulse Interview with Matt Crampton On April 11, 2016, I published an article on CBS Pulse about on-demand workers and the Gig Economy. Read Article The interiew is pasted below as well... The Rising Gig Professional By Matt Crampton of Gigwalk In recent months, news of on-demand workers undertaking jobs that have low barriers to entry has dominated the headlines as high-profile lawsuits…
8th and Walton show interview with Matt Crampton On 10/26/2017 I did an interview with the 8th and Walton show talking about Gigwalk and the larger economy 8th and Walton show interview with Matt Crampton Download Interview Video File size: 84.9 MiB
A camping trip can be quickly ruined if there's a medical issue with someone in your group and noone remembered to bring along a properly stocked first aid kit. Here's a list of items you need to remember to bring the next time you're on an excursion... Adventure Medical Kits Ultralight & Watertight .5 KT TAPE PRO Kinesiology Sports Tape The most advanced kinesiology tape, made from 100% synthetic…
Every Python Assert Method in One List I am constantly looking up assert methods on the Python 2 Unit Test Documentation and it's driving me crazy because that page is super long and hard to mentally parse. The lists of assert methods available are broken up in different sections on the page and I'm done searching around it. Writing unit tests in Python obviously requires heavy use of assert…
Converting a Javascript Dictionary To GET URL Parameters I've had serveral instances in the recent past where I needed to take a javascript dictionary and convert it into a set of GET parameters to be used in a URI. Usually this happens when I'm building an AJAX request. Anyway, since I've used this function over and over I thought I'd post it incase it helps any of you Googling for something…
Invalidate All Cloudfront Files From The Command Line As I mentioned before, this website is built using Jekyll which generates static html which is then hosted on AWS S3. This works great for me because it allows me to take advantage of the enormous capacity S3 offers while paying pennies per month for hosting and bandwidth. All the while I get to skip worrying about spinning up web servers,…
Checking if a variable is set in Jekyll This site is built using Jekyll which allows me to generate the entire thing as static html which can then be hosted on AWS S3. Working through the Jekyll documentation I couldn't find a way to check if a variable was set when coding in Jekyll's templating language Liquid. This is easy in python and javascript but after some digging I found this Github issue…
Al Jazeera Interview On July 27th, 2015 I spoke with Al Jazeera about the Gig economy and trends for millenials and companies.
Silicon Valley Business Journal - Best CIO: Matt Crampton On June 20, 2014 I was nominated as best CIO by Silicon Valley Business Journal Read Article The interiew is pasted below as well... Best CIO - Private Company: Finalist Matt Crampton, Chief Technology Officer & Co-Founder/Gigwalk Matt Crampton’s fascination with technology all started with his first Tandy 1000 286 that his parents bought…
Query an NTP server from Python This code has been updated to support Python 3. Thanks to @MarqueIV for noticing that it needed updating. I came across a need to query an NTP server to get the current time from a python script. There are some great python modules you can install which will take care of the heavy lifting (one great one is ntplib), but I wanted to be able to do these NTP queries…
Moving VIM .swp Files Vim has this annoying habit of creating .swp files in your current working directory when you're editing a file. I found a better way (inspired by this stackoverflow thread). To change this, create three new folders to house all your .swp files... mkdir -p ~/.vim/{backup_files,swap_files,undo_files} Then add the following lines to your .vimrc file… set…
JS Error using X-Editable If you're trying to use X-Editable and getting a JS error similar to this... TypeError: $.fn.popover.defaults is undefined It may be because you're using Bootstrap 3 and using their CDN urls for including their JS and CSS. Their CDN currently only hosts their Bootstrap 2 code. To use it with Bootstrap 3, you need to download their repository and host it locally.
Mac Terminal WIFI Commands I'm seeing over a thousand people a day show up here looking for the mac terminal WiFi commands. The OSX terminal has several command line tools that allow you to manage your WiFi settings. Connecting, disconnecting and scanning for available WiFi networks is easy once you know which command does what. Hopefully this list of command line wifi tools is helpful... #1. Turn…
SF New Tech Presentation on Gigwalk On Jul 30, 2013 I gave a presentation at SF New Tech on Gigwalk, crowdsourcing and the gig economy. Download Presentation Video File size: 119mb
Force VIM to stop overwriting your default buffer when pasting I use VIM all the time for development, one thing that always bugs me is when I yank a chunk of code into my default buffer, and then paste if over something else, VIM will take whatever was pasted over and overwrite my default buffer with it. So the next time I try to paste, it will paste the previously pasted over text instead of the…
Fixing "Viewport argument value" error in webkit's console I've been doing a lot of web development for mobile devices lately, and while I've been using chrome's developer tools, I keep getting annoying error messages in the console like this... Viewport argument value "1;" for key "initial-scale" was truncated to its numeric prefix. The culprit here is my viewport meta tag. Mine looked like…
Continuing on with my attempts to blog code and command snippets that I've found useful, Here's a trick if you need to copy a directory recursively, but retain all the permissions set on the first one. I needed this to back up a web app tree that had custom permissions set through out that I didn't want to mess up... cp -a /source_dir /destin_dir
Fixing position:fixed elements stuck in the middle of the page on iPhone Safari We ran into an annoying bug over at Gigwalk while building a mobile webapp running inside Phonegap. We have a toolbar at the top of all our pages which is set to position:fixed, but every once in a while it would get stuck in the middle of the page. We tried several different proposed solutions, but this one worked for…
Running a for-loop over a Jinja2 dictionary At the time of this posting, iterating over dictionaries inside a Jinja template is poorly documented, especially if you need access to the jinja dictionary keys and it's something I end up doing alot. Of course running a for-loop over a jinja dictionary is as basic an activity as you're likely to do, for whatever reason it's buried in the Jinja2…