The Day I seized The InterWeb – HTTP Status Cats

I thought my biggest achievement of 2011 was the (un)successful launch of HP TouchPad, and the European tour to advocate the webOS development… but I should nominate the seizing the InterWeb before the government does (SOPA), for my greatest achievement of the year.

I got the certified cat geek lady status on the InterWeb, after my HTTP Status Cats went viral on Dec. 13th.

Within 24 hours I posted the pictures on my Flickr page and tweeted, it has spread all over the InterWeb, and now the status kittehs are officially an Internet meme.

What the meme does? It results the secondary and ternary awesome creations-
What made my day was Rogério Vicente has create the API with the cats.
And Heroku actually made it available. (This was made #2 spot on Hacker News on Dec.14th).
This is awesome. I love when fellow geeks make things into the higher level.

In case you have not seen the HTTP Status Cats:
See my Flickr set at http://www.flickr.com/photos/girliemac/sets/72157628409467125/detail/
I will post the missing status soon.

More Links

The HTTP Status Cats is featured on:
BoingBoing – HTTP status cats by GirlieMac: classic server error codes, now with cats
LaughingSquid – HTTP Status Cats, HTTP Status Codes Displayed Using Cat Photos
Neatorama – HTTP Status Codes Illustrated by Cats
CNN Money Tech – HTTP Status Cats
Mashable – HTTP Status Cats: Hilarious Motivational Posters [PICS]
I Can Has Cheezburger? – HTTP Status Cats

Translated to Japanese media:
らばQ – なんてわかりやすい…猫で覚えるネットのあの表示
Idea*Idea – HTTPステータスコードを猫で表現してみた

Thank you, Steve!

As a die-hard Apple Fan-girl, I started my very first web site on college web server (@csun.edu domain) in 1996, when people were speculating Apple was going out of business.

At that time, the Mac community was small but very supportive and exciting – I was particularly involved in the Mac desktop customization email lists, including Japanese ones where I help people with translation.
The Mac-user group in Northridge (maybe it was in Reseda) had a wonderful crowd, and I remember that everybody tried to help me out when my Performa died after installing OS 8.

When Steve Jobs came back to Apple, we, the community was truly delighted. We all believed that Apple would revive and become bigger than ever.

In 1998, the Bondi-blue iMac debuted with the catch-phrase “Say Hello to iMac”. Our mind was truly blown away. Steve totally did think differently!

After I graduated from college in the year, I moved to Boston and became a environmental microbiology researcher. Around the time, Mac OS X came out and I decided to do more “pro things” (LOL) on my Mac – I started studying computer science.

The funny thing was that a professor at my first comp sci class was also a die-hard Mac fan so I learned I could program in Java on Mac! I still remember his joke about our computer lab, which was entirely donated by Bill Gates, who used to study at the school.

Years past, my web site has been transformed from Mac-fan site to a web tech blog, I decided to keep the name GirlieMac! to show my origin, because without Macs, I would never decided to become a web developer.

Thank you, Steve, and good bye.

Open Web Camp III

I had this wonderful opportunity to speak at OpenWebCamp III at Stanford University on this weekend, and I feel very honor to be there with so many great speakers and attendees.

Apparently, I have been doing mobile development longer than most of people, I picked the subject on developing mobile web, and how it has been changed and what we can do next.

I covered the topics including:

• How the mobile development has changed from WML, XHTML-MP, HTML4 and finally HTML5 with CSS3
• Legacy to HTML5: using input attributes to make easier for a user to type on phone
• Dealing with smarter phones: Viewport and Media-queries
• High DPI display: CSS pixel != Device pixel
• Device API

My slides, “WAP to HTML5: Mobile web – past, present, and future” is available in html5, not Powepoint or Keynotes so I couldn’t post it on SlideShare!

I Can Has iPhone App on App Store

Finally, I have my app, called iCanHasLOL published on App Store!
Actually the app was reviewed within 24 hours by Apple, although I’ve heard it would usually take 2 weeks.

I mentioned that I had been writing an iPhone app using Appcelerator before, and an app was almost ready to go. However, I was not able to publish it with the particular contents so I re-wrote the app and re-created some graphics to finish up this brand-new app.

This is free of charge also ad-free (for now, at least!) so get your copy now!

Hello, Palm! I am back to Sunnyvale!

Since the last CES announcement, I have been pretty excited to learn about Palm’s WebOS, been to the meetup and DevCamp, and have created 2 homebrews and co-wrote Net2Streams app.

Now I have joined the human interface team at Palm, inc. It’s awesome I can work with a shiny new toys (Pre and Pixi), also I am happy to keep working on WebKit!
(Plus, it’s cool I constantly bump into my ex-colleagues and friends from Yahoo! in the area!)

PREtty Cute Suite -Another Cute app for Pre from me!

Can’t have enough cute!
Instead of upgrading my previous app, iCuteOverload for Palm, I have created this power-up version of cute app called, PREtty Cute Suite.

This app is more offensively and obnoxiously cute with more cute-related rss feed and flickr pics.
Included feeds are:

1. Cute Overload
2. I Can Has Cheezburger
3. Cute Obssesion
4. Epicute
5. Super Cute Kawaii
6. Cupcakes Take Tha Cake

Also, a bunch of cute picture streams from Flickr.


This app allows you to save the pix/feeds you like as your favorites, also share the links via email.

Currently available as a “Homebew” app on PreCentral.net for free.
I have no plan to submit this to the Palm official app store in this moment, at least for this version 0.9.

My First WebOS App – iCuteOverload for Palm v1.0

As a front-end web developer, also a mobile-web developer, the Palm’s new WebOS SDK for Pre sounds very attractive, and I could not wait to create some applications although I am still a iPhone user and haven’t been convinced to switch a service provider.

Then I felt like, I already got this web app, iCuteoverload for iPhone but yeah why not for Pre? So I decide to re-create the same app from scratch. Sure, the existing app is a web app that wrote with JavaScript framework iUI and PHP, does run fine on Pre’s web browser since Pre is based on Webkit browser. However, I wanted to make this app a standalone client with Mojo framework so I needed to code from scratch.

Anyway, here it is, iCO for Palm is now available at PreCentral. The official store is not yet open, so the installing the app may require a bit of geeky skills, but if you happen to be a Pre user and would like to try, follow this tutorial on how to install homebrew apps on Pre for Mac users (And this is for Windows users instruction).

By the way, I keep this app name begins with i, because I already have named so for iPhone and wanted to keep it for consistency. However, in Pre community, this seems to be a pretty bad thing to do. People see me as a clueless Apple fan

iPhone App – MuniApp for San Francisco Muni riders!

Ta-da, finally there’s an app for that! – I mean an iPhone native app that I involved is available on App Store!

This app is called, MuniApp, and this gives you access to San Francisco’s MUNI transit system on the go with real time predictions for buses, metro and cable cars.

I have worked on some UI and icons, while my friend Alberto has coded all the Obj.C. We are both SF residents and rely on MUNI pretty frequently and we do use this app on daily basis. Honestly, this is really simple and useful app

The official website for MuniApp is at www.obapp.com/muniapp

To directly go to App Store on iTunes, go to this link!

TweetTrendDunno – Played with APIs

I had a plenty of time to stay home and play with code right now so I mashed Twitter trend API, mixed with some BOSS news and image search stuff I used before, also Microsoft’s new Bing search results to create some silly and handy web app called TweetTrendDunno.

Basically, this grabs Twitter “trending topic” terms, and as a user click on each term you want to know about, it displays news articles, images, and Bing results (usually summary from Wikipedia helps you to figure out what the term means in general).

If you are Twitter user and ever wonder what people are talking about, give TweetTrendDunno a try!

WTF!!!

I have lost all the past blog entries…

The web hosting company went out of business, and left all customers including me without any notice.

I didn’t even backup anything from MySQL.

All the blog entries you see before this post has been added retrospectively by scrapping some cached content from Yahoo and Google search results. (Nothing was found on Web Archive).

Also, I’d like to say thank you for you guys who have left comments for me. I am pretty upset for losing the comments