I have made an iPhone version of my NASCAR Countdown Widget and submitted it to the App Store. The NASCAR Countdown app displays a countdown to the next race, the name of the race and the television network carrying the race. On the flip side all of the races for the 2010 season are listed, and tapping on one of them will go to the nascar.com website for that track.

I'm not sure what made me think of these today, but I did a couple of Google searches to see if I could track down any more of these shirts. The only one I could find is the Creep shirt. There seems to be a lack of info on them on the web, so I'm going to help fix that. Stephen King owns a couple of radio stations in Maine, one is WZON and back in the mid 80's the Stephen King newsletter had advertisements for these t-shirts. As a loyal constant reader it was my duty to buy them, and I think these were the only ones offered. I wore these in rotation with my Bloom County t-shirts all through high school. They're a little worn, but really in much better shape than some of the shirts I have from places like Cafe Press.

This is a simple countdown widget for the OSX Dashboard. It is a pure javascript implementation so it will also run inside a web browser as you can see above.

This widget will display the time until the next NASCAR Broadcast, the countdown takes into account your local timezone.

This widget was inspired by the Sprint Cup Widget which is now outdated. I used the graphics for the Daytona countdown from NASCAR and modified it to calculate the correct time and select the next available race.

I have just updated my NASCAR Dashboard Widget for the 2010 season. All race time and channels should now be current.

I'm working on an application to manage my streaming media for my Roku player using sqlite3 and Python for everything. One thing I've learned over the years is that your SQL schema always changes. Once your code is in production you always have something you need to change about it, whether it's adding a new column, changing a type or tables to support new features. I wanted a way to automatically update the database schema when a new version of the code is installed. I don't want to jump into the complexity of using SQLAlchemy and migrate so I came up with this simple method. The database has a table named schema with a single row with the current schema version in it. This class checks the current version and executes any missing commands, bringing it up to the latest version.

I decided to move the blog from Wordpress hosting back to my own server. I want to be able to run my own Google Ads on the system and Wordpress doesn't allow that. I used the Export/Import feature of Wordpress 2.9 and found that it misses a couple of things. It doesn't transfer the theme over, the widets or the links. I had to handle all of them manually. Otherwise the move has gone smoothly.

Ever since I switched from Dish Network to a Roku player a few months ago I have had a couple of things I wanted my player to be able to do. The ability to categorize my Netflix queue is at the top of my list and it would be very cool to be able to play video from a local server. The SDK won't help me modify the Netflix application, but streaming from a local source is actually not a huge problem.

After many minutes of redesign the new look of SharePics was ready to go. I re-packaged the app, captured new screenshots, and re-submitted it to the AppStore. 9 days later I received an email notifying me that my app was now available for sale in the App Store!

Thanks to everyone who offered advice and design ideas after the crushing rejection last month. I couldn't have done it without you! Now you can easily share your pictures with your friends (note, you need an iPhone or iPod Touch with Bluetooth support and iPhone OS v3.0 or later).

SharePics is a simple application that uses Bluetooth to share pictures between two iPhone or iPod Touch (2nd gen) devices. You can also take pictures using the app and share them immediately. There is no need for a wireless access point or even a 3G connection. You can select your pictures from the iPhone album, or take a new photo with the camera and send it to your friend.

Support If you have comments, suggestions or need help with the application please send an email to bcl at this domain.

So I got my first rejection from the App Store today. According to their email it was rejected because - we cannot post your application because it appears to include features that resemble Polariod photographs. Polaroid has previously objected to other applications that include features that resemble Polaroid photographs, and believes that such features infringe its rights.

Say what? Now, I'm the first to admit that my icon is a bit simple. But it seems like a reach for Polaroid to be able to claim that all black squares on white rectangles are infringing on their rights. And Apple did suggest that you use distinctive colors and a strong outline to promote user recognition. Here are some other screenshots from the app: