I guess I wrote a computer program that did music, I don't remember it but it seems like something I would have been into at the time.

I seriously just lost an hour of my life working on android and location accuracy. I am not even going to talk about it because like all of my other outside of work projects it will just get eclipsed by the high demand for my time that my actual job has.

Anyways, I was trying to get an accurate location and it kept giving me lat/long of 42 by 78. It was weird because it was saying the accuracy was like 1-28m. At first I thought it was because it kept selecting the network provider as more accurate as I was indoors. This got me running in and out of the house to try and get it to work.

But it wasn't working. Even when I explicitly chose the GPS as the location provider and set the accuracy to ACCURACY_FINE, it still was 42 by 78. After tons of frustration I looked at my logging code and I was casting the lat and long to int instead of a fucking double. Duh, it was being rounded. I could kill myself for not having noticed this and wasting so much time. I guess this is what I get for programming as entertainment at 2:41am on a saturday.

double lat = (double) (location.getLatitude());
double lng = (double) (location.getLongitude());

vs

int lat = (int) (location.getLatitude());
int lng = (int) (location.getLongitude());

Back in the late 90s, one of the first fun computer jobs I had was working in the foreign language learning lab at my school. Up until that point I was dead set on botany or german as a carrier. I had computer programmed and tinkered my whole life but never realized it could be a job for some reason.

While there I did so many different things, one of the most fun was a desktop app for mac that could check students in and out of the labs by swiping their id cards. I went to the cafeteria manager and asked him if we could borrow their card reader for testing and he let me, then when it worked I went to the professor I worked for and showed him and we got our own reader. The system really simplified and organized time tracking.



The code is so inefficient and redundant looking back but it's interesting to still have it.
::READ PDF::

Check out the amazing referral I got for the year I worked there. I wonder if my current boss could match this despite my significantly upgraded skill and dedication to my current job.
::READ PDF::

Lab assistants typically had little technical know-how and experience with software in this area. This changed when Paul Visco was hired. Paul started the job as student assistant and finished it as technical manager and technical support analyst. Paul brought the most varied and extensive background to the job of any of the LLC assistants I ever had, including one who served from 1991 to 1996. More importantly, the few Macintosh hardware and software applications in this multimedia lab that Paul was not familiar with, he taught himself at an amazing speed, not stopping until he had in-depth knowledge of the equipment or program. For example, Paul had never worked with FileMaker Pro, the database development software. When took up the software in my lab, he started from scratch to develop a lab visitation database application that he integrated with an I.D. card reader to automate the registration and sign-in process for students. I should mention that he managed to interface a card reader model made for Windows only with an iMac due to his astute technical skills and relentless efforts in searching the WWW until he found a solution.

There are two important testaments that I would like to make in regard to Paul and with a view of the position for which he is applying. First, after eight years of being a Macintosh lab manager, and at the time after almost 15 years of experience with Macintosh applications including desktop publishing, digital video, courseware authoring, MIDI, and image editing, Paul was the first person I met who knew more about the Macintosh in some areas than I did. As a result, I entrusted him with administrative duties such as system software maintenance, equipment and software trouble-shooting, as well as software installations. This freed up valuable time for me to meet my teaching, research, and service obligations while I was assured that the job in the LLC would not only get done on time but also effectively.

Second, I was thrilled to have a student worker in my lab who was intrinsically motivated to do everything in his power to ensure smooth technical operation, to search for new ways to improve lab management, and to identify software that could get certain tasks done better than the one the LLC had at the time.

Paul's work for the lab went above the and beyond the call of duty. He always put in extra hours just to learn new software or solve a problem, taking responsibility for attending to essential administrative and technical tasks without having to be assigned. I am convinced that to a certain (healthy) degree Paul identified with his workplace, a type of involvement in the daily and special routines that I had never seen in a student assistant before.

Paul was very pleasant to work with. Due to his exceptional skills and reliability,our work relationship quickly turned into one of cooperation and trust. He was well liked for his friendly personality and much admired for his expertise by his fellow lab assistants. Students using the lab were thrilled to have a peer who knew every facet of the lab and could solve their technical problems on the spot. Faculty frequently commented that they appreciated Paul's hiring because when they needed help and could not meet up with me, they knew they could receive qualified support in the lab from Paul.

I give Paul my highest recommendation because his technical skills, his sincere curiosity about everything Macintosh, and his open and cooperative demeanor make him an ideal candidate for the position of Multimedia Specialist in an educational and Macintosh dominated workplace.

I spent the evening moving my surebert repos from svn to git on github. After reading a lot of the git pro book I feel comfortable using it and the speed working with local repos is nice but there are a few things that stress me out.

The one thing that I hate/love is that tags do not actually exist as materialized files. One one hand this saves a ton of space. The repos are an tremendously smalller than in svn. I can export when needed but I liked having all of the tags in a repo for surebert because then I deploy all of the tags separately on the server and let the programmers link by defining the base path in their app. This was so easy before as I would just set the servers to sync the tags directory so that any time new tags were made, they were available immediately on all the servers.

If I like it maybe I will move more of my bizillion repos over. Thanks to the creators of svn2git

I was working on an update to the estrip android app which checks for network connectivity first instead and displays a nice little message instead of force quitting. I added this little homage to (e:tinypliny) who is the one that discovered the issue as I had never tried the app on a device with no network connection.



Just to give you an idea how unusual this is on a mobile android device - this is the message for the google marketplace. I think mine looks better.

First of all my nook color is going to bankrupt me. The ability to have every computer book on one convenient, internet accessible package is overwhelming. Especially when they use such sneaky tactics as sending me an email saying, "Its snowy out, wouldn't you like to get a new book for your nook without having to leave the house."

Anyways, the point of this is that I got an objective C book so that I couldn't finally spend some time on it and it does in fact suck. For me, its simply too verbose and the NS (NextStep), camel case bullshit kills it.

That plus Xcode is so freakin awful. I thought an apple designed IDE would be refreshingly better. Turns out not to be the case. It makes me miss eclipse. Apple seems to be losing it to me anyways. Just look at the non standard interface for the new app store and the new itunes. I think the only reason they are generally successful with design is they cut out features until there are very few things to add to the design. Of course its easy to have a clean interface on something that only has a few options. I guess Xcode is an example of what they do with a larger, complicated application..

Xcode gets to the point where you have ~10 windows all open and even have to drag between them to accomplish stuff. And yes, I can remember all the keyboard shortcuts to bring the different parts I want to the front but its still a cluttered mess.

Enough with Xcode, this was supposed to be about objective C.



Well here is an example of my point about objective C. Several language comparisons of making arrays.

Objective C
NSMutableArray *items = [NSMutableArray arrayWithObjects:@"One", @"Two", @"Three"];

Javascript
var items = ["One", "Two", "Three"];

PHP
$items = array("One", "Two", "Three");

Perl
@items = ("One", "Two", "Three");

Java
String[] items = {"One", "Two", "Three"};

C#
string[] items = new string[] {"One", "Two", "Three"};

Ruby
items = ['One', 'Two', 'Three']

I just spent 10 hours today working on the new estrip. The rain made me not want to go out so I thought I would take advantage of it and get the new version of the mobile site finalized. The mobile version is not that much different on the front end, althought a little more use friendly in the search area.



It was the one big obstacle between being done and not being done. The basic idea was to get everything updated to the latest surebert framework and toolkit and then I can easily add new features as I release new stuff for that and for work.

Now all I have left is some themeing and some testing/refactoring to do. Its realy minor. I decided to just freeze featrues and launch it soon. Then I can add the new stuff I want much more easily to that version. There is the new topic of the day system and the API which will left you post to estrip from more devices, places, etc. Both of them can be addons after the launch.

I also want to add a more robust chat, but same thing, can wait.

The worst part of the day was when I started working on the old server and the CPUs started to overheat. I guess after 7 years, the thermal paste between the fans and the cpu started to break down. Glad I was home to catch it happening or it would have been a disaster.

I was testing surebert against IE 8 last night and it wasn't working. Debugging in IE 8 sucks even with the script debugger. The script debugger open in a new window for every error.

Sothe problems which were kind of tricky to identify were:

1. The async argument to an xmlHTTP instances open method cannot be a 0 for false. In all previous versions of IE and in every other browser 0 was acceptable for false. They must be type checking now. This occurs even in comparibiltu mode which makes me wonder what else is not truly compatible.

One of the major feature additions was the inclusion of querySelectorAll. Annoyingly, it return an instance of StaticNodeList instead of just NodeList like Safari and Firefox 3.1 beta. That through me for a loop for a bit.

The inclusion of Element prototypes is pretty sweet. In general it is a huge improvement over IE 6 and 7.

What frustrated me the most is lack of support for the native javascript 1.5 array prototypes forEach, every, some, filter, map. I just don't understand how they left that out. Same thing with standards compliant eventListeners.

So I was really depressed this morning because for the first time in like years I programmed for like 20 hours and wasn't at a solution for my problem. I tried a lot of different approaches but none of them scaled how I wanted or ended up not having particular feature my system required that I didn't realized until too late. Anyways, today was the total oppposite. Everything went right and I got enough stuff done for a whole week. I attribute it to switching from eclipse to netbeans.

Then today I discovered that netbeans has this awesome collaboration software built right in that lets you edit code together, chat, and share code snippets, etc with your coworkers over an XMPP openfire server.

So I got openfire setup and it even integrated with AD. Tomorrow should be the beginning of a whole new dev era, lol. Either that or it just means I will get more questions and not get any exercise, lol. It will definately make code review easier.

Here is a to a video explaining it and here is a simple pic

Today, I was searching for my stuff on google and found this ransom note writer I made from artvoice clippings. I made me miss the good old days of having time to program stuff for fun instead of for profit.