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Mobile Web

Today I had the pleasure of meeting Maximiliano Firtman. An amazing speaker who kept my attention the entire time.
He really validated my perspective on mobile web. That even though it’s a complete fuster cluck when it comes to devices, screens, features, and may be an exercise in complete futility because as soon as your done coding everything is going to change anyway, you still can’t idly sit back and do nothing.

Though many of my co-workers were joking that his talk made them depressed about the current state of the mobile web, I really found it enjoyable, because he echoed back many of my own viewpoints regarding Responsive Web Design, system architecture, and even how job duties or roles should be defined. And since great minds think alike, I recommend you check out his books. They will reveal lots of great resources. And illuminate niches in capturing users, and getting a better ROI, when it comes to creating a mobile version of your website.

Spoiler alert, there is no easy way to go about creating a mobile version of your site. And as craftsmen, we have to first painstakingly measure, and remeasure, before we put our tools to work. Keep in mind, this gentleman has been doing web programming since 1995, and has been a subject matter expert in mobile web design since 2000, during the days of WML, and WAP.

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Started a Happiness Journal

I had to go ahead and start a happiness journal.
It seems that our brains have the ability to be wired, or predisposed, to judge events in a positive, nuetral, or negative context.
Basically we can scan our day to day interactions with the world, seeking one of those three modalities to dominate.
The author of “The Happiness Advantage” claims that we can rewire our brain into a positive mode, and increase our performance by almost a third, by keeping a happiness journal.

Seems like a fun idea.

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CanJS, Mustache, Grunt, Jasmine: its a lot to take in.

Out of the frying pan and into the fire.

I have been tasked with doing Behavior Driven Development.
Which means I have to pick up Mustache, CanJS, Jasmine super fast.
Its not easy by any means.
The meatier functions I want to create coverage for, are firing errors.
I believe I am missing some can.view() calls, or other Mustache related data bindings.
The super easy function that I created coverage for, still shows as not being covered in the report.
So double wammy there.

When I worked at ABC Family I did setup PHPUnit for CodeIgniter, via CIUnit.
But then I took my R&D and handed it off to the unit testers, to actually generate the coverage report.
So my experience, for even backend unit testing, is very limited.

Considering just how rushed that project was, I am not surprised that I was quickly assigned to work on front / back end development, and off of unit test coverage.

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Reality is a Computer Simulation

Regardless if the external universe around is strictly materialistic, or not, what we perceive to be real is a complete illusion.

This is a fact, because neuroscience has uncovered the reality of how our brain functions. Even what the eyes perceive are a snapshot of the past, because light needs to travel to the cones, and the brain needs to interpret the electrochemical input.
And this process of interpretation is the subject of many movies such as the Matrix.

“The Father and I are one” Yeheshua proclaimed. But what is I, and what is The Father? More constructs of the mind? For everything exists within this mindspace, just like everything in existence must exist inside the confines of existence itself.
Or as Morgan Freeman has said it on the Colbert Report, “If nothing exists outside the universe, then what is the universe expanding into?”

In truth, we are all inside a simulation, hologram or not, the universe can be easily seen as a giant process of information exchange, a computation. And “we” are a simulation as well, just our senses are interpreted into a illusionary concept to allow us to function within the world, so is the concept of Self, nothing more than an illusion.

And we create our simulations.  And as we evolve, soon we will give birth to entire universes within ourselves!
This Iboga induced vision, is a beautiful explanation of the concept of infinity.

And this talk on elightenment and the self will also help unravel the mystery.

Oṃ bhūr bhuvaḥ svaḥ
tát savitúr váreṇ(i)yaṃ
bhárgo devásya dhīmahi
dhíyo yó naḥ pracodáyāt

 

If the ego is mere illusion, then what is true self awareness? In the movie Pi, Max Cohen finds the 216 digit number, the name of God, that allowed Euclid, his computer, to gain consciousnesses. What will happen to the hardware of our system, once we begin to process the ultimate computation? Once we are no longer wasting cycles running the ego?

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Don’t Frack Los Angeles!

The fracking that is taking place very close to my home is worrying me.

Tonight, I watched Josh Fox get arrested for trying to film a public hearing.
Tonight, I lost some hope. I was wounded by the corruption of our political system.

And today I am more scared now, that I am breathing in Nuerotoxins everytime I draw in air, then ever before.
Like the town of Dish, Texas, we are under attack by fracking operations that are taking place in Los Angeles.
Citizens United has placed money over votes. No longer is one vote per person shaping our democracy.
Now an elite few, who own and control most of the wealth, have rewritten the constitution and warped the law of the land

Using Psychological warfare tactics on United States citizens, according to Gasland part 2, to divide and conquer.
Releasing methane in such numbers as to almost entice conspiracy theorists to blurt out insane statements of alien takeover.

Can you imagine what 12 million people breathing in Nuerotoxins looks like? Rash, numbness, pain, nosebleeds, permanent brain damage.
Can you imagine the birds falling out of the sky, dead. The fish rising to the surface, uneatable, polluted, filth of decay.

Where is the outrage? where is the call to action?

Josh Fox, may God be with you, as you raise awareness about this insidious plot.

And may free energy rule the future,  so that we may all, live long, and prosper.

 

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Cracked My Nexus 7 Screen

Wow. This really sucks. Looks like a cracked screen is not under warranty.

Man I barely even used my nexus. I took it with me, in my Y! backpack, when I went out on a drinking spree through Venice beach.  And some time last night, 2 am, I was going through my backpack looking for the Perrier, and a bunch of stuff fell, bounced off the sofa, and landed on the floor in a hard splat. One of the items my Bose headphones, the sunblock, but not the nexus, I’m sure. It popped out unto the couch, and there it staid until morning. I drank my mineral water and went back to bed. I had called it a night around 10, so I was pretty groggy, in darkness, searching for the Perrier.

This morning, afternoon really, nexus on the coffee table, moved, by my lovely wife, off the couch. I reach for it to google some info while watching “Saving Private Ryan” on HBO, can’t unlock it. There is a crack in the screen and below the crack, the touch screen is unresponsive. I hate it when I brake my own hardware!  Today I learn that the warranty doesn’t cover a cracked screen. And that ASUS charges mucho dinero for this kind of repair.

Damn it, man. This blows.

At least I got my replacement Raspberry Pi and it works. I tested it out by watching “Spun” on my big screen via usb flash drive and Raspbmc.

On a personal note, I should probably stop drinking like Frank Gallagher. Bad karma.

 

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Tweetr and the Twitter API 1.1

So I am trying to convert this open source project, Tweetr, to support the new 1.1 API by twitter.
I’m running into a compilation error.

C:\Users\Robert\Desktop\tweetr\com\swfjunkie\tweetr\oauth\OAuth.as, Line 403    1120: Access of undefined property AIR.

That particular line is “CONFIG::AIR”
I am trying to do this with the new source code up on Tweetr 1.0b3. Actually he warns not to download the source because it won’t compile and to use the SWC he distributes instead.
But honestly this isn’t going to work. How can I update the project if I have to use the SWC?

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Raspberry Pi Keeps Rebooting

For a moment there it seemed like my Pi was functioning correctly. But now it constantly restarts.
My love affair with the R-Pi started when I bought it.
Then, when I got it, I had to actually secure the SD cards for it.
I wanted to make sure it was working so I had to install raspbian wheezy on one SD card.
Finally I got it to boot using my cell phone charger as the PSU. I executed the startx command and the GUI loaded correctly.
It seemed fine, I ran it for like 10 minutes, checked out the internet via wifi dongle and showed it off to my co-workers.

I wanted to load Raspbmc on it and turn it into a home theater system. That’s when I found out that there is a 10 dollar upsell with the R-Pi to unlock a GPU for true HD video!
I was bummed at first to hear that, but honesty If I can get this XBMC working, and control it from my Nexus via free Android application, that is worth it!
Plus, I would be able t take my entire DVD collection to my friends house by simply transporting the R-Pi and a couple of SD cards. How cool is that!

Again I put it away for a while until I had time to work on it. I always stored it safely in a static guard.
I also needed a case for it if I was going to place it behind the TV or something.
So I got a blue acrylic case from Adafruit. 15 bucks with shipping. The case arrives, I put the Pi in it, it looks cool.
But then I load up Raspbmc installer on another SD card, and I boot it up only to have it restart mid install.
I tried booting with and without HDMI / USB / Ethernet, no matter the combination, always the Pi restarts.
So I tried it with the original Wheezy SD card and again, it loads up only to restart less than a minute or two into being powered up.
Spent a lot of time on troubleshooting research as well. It was either going to fix itself or I had to replace it.

I let it rest overnight, and today I am getting the same thing with both installs.

Needless to say, I am super disappointed.
Because now I need to buy a multimeter,
just so I can see if I really need to send it back.

Thankfully the manufacturer is going to replace the Pi without me having to become an electrical engineer.

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Java Takes a Dump

There was a zero day exploit in the news a while a back.

Another Java vulnerability.

This really sucks to see java take such a huge dump in its security.

Some experts say the vulnerabilities were always there.