I created a Google Docs Form to collect my daily step count. The collected data is stored in a Google Docs Spreadsheet. The form can be viewed in a web browser or in Google Docs for Android. Since I have an Android phone, the form lets me use my phone to still collect my daily step counts each morning. And since the data is stored in a spreadsheet, I can perform calculations on the data to get my total and average step counts and even graph my daily totals. Here is the process that I use.

I first created the form. From Google Docs, I selected “Create new” > “Form”. This opened the form editor. I entered the form title of “Step Entry” and description of “Daily step count entry”. My form currently has two questions; “Date” and “Steps”. The first question, “Date”, has help text of “Date steps were accumulated”, it is a “Text” question type, and the question is required.

Step Entry - Edit Form - Date Question

The second question, “Steps”, has help text of “Number of steps accumulated”, it is a “Text” question type, and the question is required.

Step Entry - Edit Form - Steps Question

Once this form is saved and created, it is linked to a spreadsheet. I renamed the sheet “Data”.

Step Entry - Data Sheet

I created a new sheet and named it “Statistics”.

Step Entry - Statistics Sheet

On the “Statistics” sheet, I added the “Total Step Count”, “Daily Average”, and a time line trend chart.

For the “Total Step Count”, the formula used was pretty simple: =sum(Data!C2:C109). Basically, the “Steps” column in the “Data” sheet are summed together.

For the “Daily Average”, the formula is a little more complex: =sum(Data!C2:C109)/countif(Data!C2:C109,">0"). First, the “Steps” column is summed and then divided by the number of “Steps” cells that have a number greater than zero. There is an “AVERAGE” function, but it would include cells that are zero (or don’t have a step entry). I found the technique to calculate the correct average from this web page: Excel Average Formula/Function Without Including Zeros.

The chart is a time line trend chart. The “Data” used for the chart was: Data!B2:B109, Data!C2:C109.

As new steps are entered, the statistics are kept up to date.

At this point, the web portion of the technique is complete. But I wanted to be able to add data through my mobile phone. My phone is an Android phone and I could use the Google Docs for Android app to directly edit the spreadsheet. But using the Step Entry form can provide a more “app-like” experience. I got the Step Entry form URL by selecting “Form” > “Embed form in a webpage…”. A new window was opened with a dialog that had the URL to paste into a “blog or website”. I copied the whole “iframe” code and pasted it into a text editor: <iframe src="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/embeddedform?formkey=foo" width="760" height="623" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0">Loading...</iframe>. I copied the “src” attribute value, https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/embeddedform?formkey=foo, and pasted it into a new Chrome window. I then used Chrome to Phone to send the form URL to my phone. The URL opened on my phone in the browser. I bookmarked the URL. Then I added the bookmark as a shortcut on one of the phone’s home screens. To do this, I “long held” my finger on the home screen and the “Add to Home screen” dialog was displayed. I selected the “Shortcuts” option. From the “Select shortcut” dialog I selected “Bookmark” option. I then selected the “Step Entry” bookmark that I had previously created.

Step Entry home screen shortcut

Now, when I want to enter my daily step entry, I select the “Step Entry” shortcut. The first time I select the bookmark a dialog allowing me to complete the action using “Browser” or “Docs” is displayed. I can optionally choose to select the checkmark to use my selection by default.

Complete Step Entry bookmark action

I used the “iframe” URL for the “embeddedform” so that there is no extra formatting. Since I am using the form on my phone’s smaller screen, not having the extra formatting actually makes the form easier to use. I also like the layout of the form when opened in Docs better than the Browser so I choose to complete the action using “Docs”. Here is the Step Entry form that I can use to enter my daily step total.

Step Entry data entry form

I enter the date, total number of steps from my pedometer, and then press “Submit”. The data is uploaded to the Google Doc spreadsheet.

This process is very convenient and easy to do. It allows me to continue tracking my progress. Entering the steps daily also helps keep me motivated.

Separator Screen Shot

Lifehacker had a pretty neat post yesterday which added “a Handy Separator Between Commands in Your Terminal on Mac OS X and Linux.” I use a Cygwin terminal on my Windows machine, and the Linux script almost worked: the dashes didn’t print. I tracked down my particular problem to the COLUMNS variable used to calculate how many dashes to print in the separator. In my Cygwin terminal prompt, running “export $COLUMNS” showed the variable was blank; meaning that no dashes were used for the separator. Looking at the Mac modification, I noticed that it used the command “shopt -s checkwinsize” to check the window size and if necessary update the LINES and COLUMNS variables. So after adding these two lines to the beginning of the Linux “.bash_ps1″ script, here https://github.com/emilis/emilis-config/blob/master/.bash_ps1, the separator worked for my Cygwin terminal.

shopt -s checkwinsize
export COLUMNS

“Remember that all the authentication in the world will not protect against a privileged user doing the wrong thing. It’s just that logging may help to determine what happened after the fact.”

mvn -Pserver

Here is what the profile configuration in the pom.xml looks like:

...
<profiles>
  <profile>
    <id>server</id>
    <build>
      <defaultGoal>test</defaultGoal>
      <plugins>
        <plugin>
          <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
          <artifactId>exec-maven-plugin</artifactId>
          <executions>
            <execution>
              <phase>test</phase>
              <goals>
                <goal>java</goal>
              </goals>
              <configuration>
                <mainClass>demo.hw.server.Server</mainClass>
              </configuration>
            </execution>
          </executions>
        </plugin>
      </plugins>
    </build>
  </profile>
...
</profiles>
...

When the “mvn -Pserver” command is executed, the exec-maven-plugin will run the demo.hw.server.Server class. The id identifies the profile id used in the mvn command after the “-p“. The mainClass element defines the class with the main method to execute. The exec-maven-plugin does all of the hard work. One of the benefits of this technique is the standard Maven classpath for the project defined in the pom to build and unit test your software is used to run the mainClass. This comes in quite handy if your program uses many jar files. I used to use a Windows batch file (copied from the Tomcat startup script catalina.bat) to run little test programs. This Maven profile technique is much easier to use for me, since I use Maven for most all of my Java development.

Settings -> Linked Accounts -> Add a new linked account: -> OpenID…

I then entered my OpenID URL and clicked “Link New Account”.

Using OpenID to access Facebook is a little bit different than other apps that I have used to authenticate with OpenID. To use OpenID to authenticate to Facebook, you actually authenticate with your OpenID provider first before accessing Facebook. Then when you access Facebook, it recognizes the existing OpenID authenticated session and proceeds to take you to your Facebook “Home”.

This is a great enhancement to Facebook. It makes it much more convenient for me to access the application.

I have just installed the Wordpress plugin OpenID (version 3.2.1). Installation was very simple: just upload the “openid” directory to the “plugin” directory and then active the plugin. The plugin allows you to assign multiple OpenIDs to your account to log in to your blog account.

After doing a bit of searching on Google, I came upon this post “Windows key “stuck” in Remote Desktop…“. This seemed to accurately describe my problem. But, the first comment in the post was able to work around my particular problem:

The best workaround that always works for me is:

1. Close the RD window
2. Open new RD but make sure the “Apply Windows key Combinations” is set to “On the remote computer”
3. Now press the Ctrl+Alt+End and lock the computer
4. Log in again and it should work.

amirhp
/’L'\mir

I put this here so that I can remember it for the next time. (Yeah, I pretty much expect that this condition will happen again.)

Issues included in this release:

• Issue 3: java.io.NotSerializableException: weblogic.logging.commons.LogImpl