Sgt Fitness: now available in the App Store

Help me give $1,000,000 to charity!

My latest creation for the iPhone, Sgt Fitness, the workout coach for the Twitter generation, is now available in the App Store.

It's an exercise reminder app that drills you daily with short workout sessions that you can do anywhere, anytime. Each one only takes a minute or two, but over the course of the day, these drills add up to way more activity than you normally get just sitting in front of your computer.

If you've been making excuses like "I don't have time for a workout" or "I can't afford a gym membership" or "there's no shower at work" or ... then Sgt Fitness is for you. Everybody's got time for a minute or two here and there, the app costs way less than a gym membership, and working out in micro-bursts of activity won't get you too sweaty for your officemates.

Sgt Fitness converts your iPhone into a pocket-sized dose of self-discipline to help you get and stay fit.

Watch out, though. Sgt Fitness has a voice! If the sound is on, sarge'll let you know it's time for a drill with a verbal "Drop and give me 20!" Or, if you're like me, and you hate it when your phone makes sounds in the middle of a conversation with somebody, you'll get the old "vvvmmmppp" vibration alert. Either way, it's time for some activity, private.

Got ADD? No worries: the sergeant tells you exactly what to do and when to do it. You don't even have to think about it. And by the time you get distracted while doing the drill, it's over anyway. On to the next shiny thing, and before you know it, another couple of hours and a few hundred web pages have gone by, and it's time for the next drill.

"David, this is fantastic!" you say. "I've been thinking I should get more fit, and Sgt Fitness will help me there. I get it. But how will this help you give a million dollars to charity?"

I'm glad you asked. But I'm not going to answer that question until the next blog post. For now, suffice it to say that I am seeking the first 4,000 users of Sgt Fitness, and that I hope to recruit them within a month. Friends and family, I implore you: help me sell Sgt Fitness to the whole wide world -- blog, tweet, linked-in and facebook it up for me.

Sgt Fitness is available exclusively for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch devices. Buy a copy today, and then let all your friends know there's a new workout in town. No gym membership required.

Stay fit!

Follow @SgtFitnessApp on Twitter for news and updates about the app... And check out the Sgt Fitness web page.

Building an iPhone Web Page

Excellent article on building a web page for display on an iPhone or iPod Touch: http://www.engageinteractive.co.uk/blog/2008/06/19/tutorial-building-a-website-for-the-iphone/

Thanks, man. That was helpful.

(Hard to believe that page is almost 3 years old now...)

xampp on Vista: Problem Solved

So xampp is cool. When it works. It's everything you need all rolled into an easy-to-install package to turn your computer into a web server. (This is crucial if you are a web developer and are trying to build/debug a web site. You must have one of the computers that is in the same room with you acting as a web server...)

But here's the problem: there's so much junk installed on computers these days that it is quite common to get "port conflicts" with some other piece of installed software. When you try to enable the Apache web server or the MySQL database server that are installed with xampp, sometimes they just won't start up. They seem like they're trying to, but then... nothing.

I googled it. Turn off skype, they say. I don't have Skype, can't be that.

Google again. Turn off the anti-virus. Nope. Not that.

Google again. Turn off World Wide Web Publishing Service. Nope. Not there. Not even listed as a service on my Vista laptop.

For the life of me, I could not see what was opening port 80. I use Process Explorer all the time on Windows. But there are so many things running on my Vista laptop, it would have taken me forever to find port 80 looking through things one at a time. I finally traced it down to a process called "System:4" (process ID 4, that is) by using a tool called Tcpview, from the same very cool cat that keeps Process Explorer in tip top shape. Thanks, Mark.

Finally... google led me to this post saying that I should also turn off "SQL Server Reporting Services (MSSQLServer)". Additionally, I turned off everything else SQL Server related in the services control panel. I really probably don't need them for anything that I actually use. They were "accidentally" installed/activated as a side effect of installing some Visual Studio or SDK, I'm sure...

Whew. Hopefully this helps somebody out. Maybe save you the handful of hours I just donated to the bit bucket.

One more comment: I really do not understand why Skype, WWW Publishing, SQL Reporting, or any of these other things should be grabbing onto port 80. What the heck? Port 80's for a web server. Go away unless you're a web server! Leave me alone so when I want to run a web server, it just works like it's supposed to. Or at least show me something when I go to http://localhost in my browser.

But hey, I'm done ranting. Apache and MySQL are running now. I can run CDash on my Vista laptop again and....

Life is Good (really, it is.... :-)
Dave