Logan Koester

Sometimes I wonder why I bother…

A project I've been working on watches Twitter for some search keywords, with the goal of finding new customers, jobs, items for sale, etc. For example, a computer repair shop might want to watch for the keywords "laptop" and "broken", and then reply to tweets where they think they can help.
But as anyone who uses [...]

This morning I came across a forum post containing a fairly large list of people I wanted to follow from one of my Twitter accounts. There are a lot of auto-follow tools out there, but most of them are spammy "viral marketing" nonsense, want to store my Twitter password on their servers and I don't [...]

Ion™ is a tiling tabbed window manager designed with keyboard users in mind.
In recent years I've been a GNOME / Compiz guy, but while I've enjoyed it's tight integration with Ubuntu and flashy effects, I've always missed the simplicity of so-called minimalist window managers, mainly fvwm. These days, however, practically everything I do happens inside [...]

First off, an apology to those who were annoyed all day today by Twitter spam: I'm sorry, I was asleep (I write better code at night) and didn't know what was going on until I woke up this evening. Not my favourite thing to wake up to!
I do a lot of freelance work with the [...]

I had the strangest dream this morning.
So I'm walking through a grocery store with an umbrella, and randomly I'm approached by a drunk Julia Deakin, who is yelling and slurring at me incomprehensibly. I look down to see what she's pointing at, and five black cats jump out of my umbrella. The topic drifts abruptly [...]

As a Web Service
TweetShrink, a web service from TRNSFR, uses a database of common instant / text messaging abbreviations to reduce the number of characters in a tweet. It's essentially a human-readable compression algorithm. For example, "Some text to shrink" becomes "sum text 2 shrnk" when passed through their API.
But it doesn't enforce Twitter's 140 [...]

I've spent the last couple of days working hard on a new app for managing your web presence.
There is a service called Ping.fm for broadcasting updates to your blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks all at once, from one place.
This can save you a lot of time if you're trying to manage a brand [...]

I use Amazon EC2 every day and yet I always forget how to use their command-line tools. Here are a few common scenarios I run into, and their solutions.
Okay, just kidding, there's only one. I'm planning on editing this post over time

AWS Access Identifiers
AWS Management Console

Bundling an AMI from a running instance

Use scp [...]

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