I went from thinking of Object Oriented programming as this awesome paradigm I should know about, I remember having all these mental models of what objects where and learning all this new vocabulary that I really didn’t fully grasp until years later when I was designing and implementing bigger more complex systems.

At first I remember looking at objects as a collection of functions that kept a common reference to keep internal states and missing out on all the great features of inheritance and abstract classes. Looking at “interfaces” and using them like a recipe without really knowing their true power, I look at the past and I was so limited, hopefully I’ll look at this post 15 years from now and think the same.

There’s lots of books out there on best programming practices you should follow, on this short post I’ll share with you 6 principles that I follow that I promise you will make your code behave really well, less bug prone, simple and elegant when it comes to Object Oriented design. This advice will probably apply better if you code in a language like Java or C#, I’m not sure if you can say these principles will apply 100% to other OO languages (for instance those that allow multiple inheritance)

1. DRY principle.
This is one of the most preached ones, and I will also preach it. DO NOT REPEAT YOURSELF. Really, don’t. It ALWAYS comes to bite you in the ass if you have repeated code. Only repeat yourself if it’s too hard to not do so or if you’re absolutely sure that you won’t repeat yourself a third time, but I promise you that third time will come if it’s not for you for the next guy maintaining that code.

The obvious benefit of not repeating yourself is that you get to maintain code only in one place, the added benefit will be that your code will almost start being written by itself like a perfect equation as it grows. DRY code will be reusable, maintainable and the other principles I’ll talk about are related to the DRY principle in one way or another.

2. Keep the scope at the minimum, be as private as possible.

Keep your variables as close to your local scope as possible. This will save you many headaches, will protect you from bugs in logic because you did something to a variable in place where it shouldn’t have been in the first place, and it will keep things simpler.

This also tells you that your classes should expose as little as possible. Keep your variables local, if they can’t be local, try to keep them as private members, if they have to be used by extending classes keep them private, only use public when you really know it’s ok to make something public and that nobody is going to break the behavior of your object if they play with things at any point in time.

Keeping scope at a minimum can also prevent issues on longer lived objects like singletons that might be accessed by different objects. If you abuse the use of object properties you could have one object changing the internal state of the object while another tries to do something and you’ll get unexpected behavior, this tends to happen a lot in multithreaded environments where programmers are not careful and forget objects might be accessed by different threads/clients at the same time, tight scopes will protect you.

3. Be functional
Sometimes you’ll be tempted to be lazy and not pass parameters on a method and think that you’re so clever by changing an internal property of an object so that another function in the object will then get it. Big mistake buddy. This can be equivalent to that advice from functional programming languages where you’re told that using global variables are a bad idea.
Yes, we have object properties for several reasons, but if the logic of a method depends on the state of a variable, you might as well be explicit and pass it in the method.

This is in a way related to keeping scope at the minimum, and to some extend related to the advice some give of keeping your objects as immutable as possible.

4. Only abstract classes are worth extending.
If you have control over the class you are about to extend (if it’s in your codebase) before you extend that class take a look and make sure that it’s an abstract class. Abstract classes are MEANT to be extended, so you can be safe that you’re doing the right thing here.

If you’re extending a non abstract class, you should probably be composing it instead. If you don’t have access to the code of the class you are extending, things could not behave as expected when you extend, not all programmers are as thoughtful as you are.

5. Keep Object lifetime as short as possible.
This goes back to keeping scopes tight and trying to avoid singletons as much as possible (as convenient as they might be), in the case of java the JRE has a better time collecting garbage and will save you from memory leak headaches. Put those factories to work.

Feel free to disent and share your favorite principles, If you’ve coded long enough I’m sure you tend to think about these things too and I’d love to learn from your experiences.

                          

On this episode
Wish I was part of a secret society, a great unconditional support network.

Let’s form our own, only smart folks looking to change the world for the better should be in. Thoughts about free energy from the earth’s magnetic field (what would’ve Tesla done if he had wikipedia). Thanks to the 60 to 90 people who watch, I’m not talking to an empty room, yay.

Come to think about it, some religions are just that (powerful brotherhoods in the open), they just have a mythical pretext to come together.

                          

First of the year
Miami, FL
December 2011

Here’s my homage to Skrillex’s “First of the Year” music video, one I think will be remembered forever as a cult music video for Dubstep as it started crossing the mainstream frontier.

The model is my daughter who started joking with her fingers right after she saw the music video, which rang a bell in my head, and here we are.

In case you have not seen the music video yet, I’ll save you the Googling
First Of The Year (Equinox) – Skrillex [OFFICIAL]

This picture is Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

                          

1. Menu
2. Picture: Mode [Enter]
3. Picture Options [Enter]
4. Auto Motion Plus, set it to “Clear”

Voila.

                          

Here’s the solution:

1. Select the path with the path selection tool.
2. Go to Layer > New Fill Layer > Solid Color. (Or use the Create new fill or adjustment layer button in the layers palette)
3. You have turned a path into a new shape layer.

                          

Ranking actualizado Wed Nov 30 20:50:26 EST 2011

1. @ninja_gayden Total Score: 2230 – Content: 610 – Social: 75 – Bonus: 1545

2. @gubatron Total Score: 1350 – Content: 150 – Social: 1155 – Bonus: 45
3. @HelyPuerto Total Score: 1015 – Content: 670 – Social: 15 – Bonus: 330
4. @Davidilusionist Total Score: 520 – Content: 100 – Social: 0 – Bonus: 420
5. @Arrastra0 Total Score: 475 – Content: 10 – Social: 0 – Bonus: 465
6. @KevinAlej Total Score: 470 – Content: 110 – Social: 0 – Bonus: 360
7. @pachecogeorge Total Score: 355 – Content: 220 – Social: 0 – Bonus: 135
8. @Erika_Pellman Total Score: 275 – Content: 140 – Social: 0 – Bonus: 135
9. @Jhuvens Total Score: 210 – Content: 180 – Social: 0 – Bonus: 30
10. @kthy93 Total Score: 195 – Content: 60 – Social: 0 – Bonus: 135

Lanzamiento Tentativo, 2da. semana de Diciembre

Ya tenemos una API, con la cual hemos estado capturando y estabilizando durante los ultimos meses para calcular todos estos rankings, y organizar las palabras y definiciones que han enviado.

Tenemos Logo, y diseño web listo. Tambien tenemos el home page listo.

Que falta?

- La pagina de Palabra, donde mostramos una palabra y todas las definiciones.
- La pagina de Usuario, donde se muestran todas las palabras y definiciones que ha creado un usuario. A futuro aqui tambien tendremos “achievements”
- Búsqueda.

- Otras paginas como Politica de privacidad, Terminos de Uso, Acerca de, etc, pero podemos lanzar sin estas.

No quiero mostrar nada aun para poder sorprenderles. Apenas respire mato todo eso.

Mientras tanto sigan jugando!, @ninja_gayden felicitaciones por ser la ganadora de este mes, aunque no prometimos ningun premio igual te vas a ganar algo :)

Trabajo

Una vez que lanzemos el sitio vamos a estar contratando personas en diferentes areas dependiendo de como se desarrolle todo. Estaremos buscando programadores, diseñadores gráficos, online-socialites, community managers, business developers y vendedores.

Interesados deben tener cuenta PayPal (para recibir sus pagos), pueden estar en cualquier parte del mundo, y pueden enviarme una carta a gubatron@gmail.com diciendome pq quieren y deben ser parte de diccionariochimbo.com. Si aplicas para la posición de business developer esperamos creatividad y algo de tu visión de negocios sobre que se puede hacer con diccionariochimbo.com (ten en cuenta que tenemos pensando en decenas de modelos de negocio desde hace mas de 10 meses)

Stay tuned, it is happening.

                          

Exit 66
Fort Lauderdale, November 2011

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

                          

Every aspect of the world evolves with technology except political systems.

If government was an industry (which it is) it’d be the largest most inefficient one. If you saw countries as companies and citizens as customers it’d be one lousy industry, one on which some companies get to even kill their own customers.

How would the forefathers have designed our government system if they had the internet? (I can give you some ideas for that)

It’s an industry that doesn’t allow for new companies, therefore it’s stagnated and the world is in major dudu.

In this talk they propose to use the sea as the place to experiment new forms of politics, medical care, entrepreneurship.

My only concern is, how do you protect those from countries and from pirates?

Blueseed,

Also make sure to checkout Blueseed a project to create the first Incubator Vessel 12 nautical miles west of California, out of the jurisDICKtion of the US, so that entrepreneurs from all over the world can come without having to apply for a stupid work VISA. This is not a project to employ foreign worker, this is a project to empower entrepreneurs that want to have an impact in the US economy and create the jobs we need in the US. Pretty sick idea, specially what they reveal about their business model: rent + equity of every startup on board, the potential to make billions, so basically a technologically nurturing environment at sea, the sea startup incubator.

The world needs to move forward, and lawyers politicians seem to be in the way of it all. This is a very cool example how creative minds tackle problems.

Related Links
http://www.blueseed.co/
http://seasteading.org/about-seasteading/introduction

                          

Here’s my 18 month old, watching Polish cartoons on YouTube right after waking up. Think of all the technology* that had to come together to make this happen and how technology helps to preserve and spread culture.

Just 10 years ago this wasn’t possible. She would’ve had to be in Poland or we’d have to buy a special cable package with a polish channel (which would probably not be available in South Florida since there’s not that many polish people down here). If we had gotten a polish channel, we’d probably have to have her watch tv at a certain time and the cartoon she’s watching is probably too old to be aired.

She’s able to watch Polish cartoons and her mom is happy to know her daughter is having a similar cultural experience as the one she had during her childhood, to reinforce the language.

I’m able to teach her so many things with a few creative YouTube searches or with Google/Bing image search (for vocabulary and object recognition exercises), my baby’s cognitive development and language development eclipses mine probably by 3 fold when I was that age.

Her vocabulary is not only far larger than mine at that age, she knows most of it in spanish, polish and english (there’s just no other way for her to interact with the grand parents). She’s probably listened to more music since she was in the womb than all the music I heard up until age 4.

I think we should all be making our babies consume as much knowledge as possible, the rate of change they will have to go through during their lifetimes will be brutal, and they’ll need the tools to handle it and stay current. It will be amazing to see what these babies will be able to do for the world once they grow up.

High level Technologies worth mentioning for this to happen.
C, C++, Linux, Android, High Speed Inter networks and all of their stack which is too big to mention (the internet), WiFi, Dual Core cpus (and all the technology to make that happen starting from nanoscale transistors), Flash Memory, capacitive touchscreen, lithium batteries, Liquid Cristal Displays, Video Codec Technology, YouTube.

                          

Hold down [Enter] and [Mode] while quickly pressing the [Power] button (DO NOT HOLD THE POWER BUTTON, just a quick press).

Continue to hold enter and mode for a few more seconds.

You should see the screen barely flicker on when you push power, and then nothing else should happen until you release the enter and mode buttons.

After you release the buttons, your unit should power up and go through the initialization screens.

Since this can be a difficult sequence to do, it is best to keep trying a few times if it doesn’t work at first.

This worked for me and I didn’t have to reset the unit. Looking at the Garmin forums a lot of people are having this issue after a first charge.

Unit not responding to Button Presses?
Say it’s on but it won’t respond to presses, press [Mode] and [Lap] simultaneously to reset the unit.

                          

Do not put a Kindle on a Backpack together with a laptop and an SLR Camera

==
Update (October 19th 2011): +Colin Noller and Amazon support Rock! They’re sending me a new Kindle today. Thank you Colin for letting me know that Amazon support was so awesome. I’ve just saved over $100 thanks to your comment on this post.

If you have issues with your Kindle call 1-866-321-8851 and press “3″. Representatives are nice, smart and reasonable. Also didn’t have to wait to be taken care of, they got it down.
==

The hardcover wasn’t enough to protect the screen, and now here I am, broken hearted.

Kindle 120pts : Paper Books 2pts (more durable, no batteries required)

So I guess now I have an excuse to try the Kindle Touch.
I’ll def. be more careful with it, would’ve never imagined my kindle would’ve broken inside my backpack, and with a hard cover in it. You live, you learn, you open broken kindle to see what it has inside. If I see interesting stuff inside it I’ll post pictures.

                          

AI is one powerful discipline of computer science, one that many software engineers never experience first hand (this will be my chance to formally do AI for the first time, and I’ve been doing this almost 10 years now).

Personally I’m going to puke the next time I hear about another social oriented project coming out. We already have a sound Social Layer on the web, now it’s time to build amazing stuff on top of it.

The big guys of the internet do have a lot of AI and machine learning powering their services (I’d like to think that Facebook uses a lot of machine learning in lots of their products, pictures, the feed, ad displaying, etc.)

So, I truly hope that out of the 85,000+ people that signed up to the AI and ML courses, at least 1,000 will use the knowledge to build the next generation of AI/ML powered internet services.

I hope to be able to have the time and discipline to finish the course and come out with a lot more of understanding on these subjects, I certainly have lots of ideas on what I could do with AI and ML, and the future looks really exciting.

AI is going to leave a lot of people unemployed (it can already do so many jobs a lot better than humans), hopefully programmers will be among the last of them :)

Let’s see what comes out of this.

                          

All along they were parsing whatever it is that we talk about, but it seems they need to get more efficient at it, their solution? Make the user click on drop downs that describe those things advertisers have to bid the highest Cost Per Click for.

This image explains better what I mean

Go Zuckerberg! Nice try, not buying the timeline crap over here. Google+ gets better and better.

Follow the geek.

                          

I think that this has to be totally on purpose, I cannot believe that all the “geniuses” at Google haven’t felt the frustration of not being able to +1 or share a good picture from that view.

CEOs or Google+ project managers should be more involved in product experience. It’s cool how they are very data driven, but damn it guys, sit and use the product yourselves, or have you never used a social network before.

It’s just very hypocritical of Google to say that this is a service created to help people share, when sometimes it gets in your way of sharing at the very moment when you feel like sharing something with others.

And you wonder why they still haven’t opened the gates? It’s still far from ready to be used by the mainstream user.

What other fundamental features do you think are missing?

                          

More so, the browser is still limited and it seems that we’re bending over backwards (in javascript of all languages #facepalming) to be able to do what we’ve been already been able to do for years inside it. It’s like we want to throw away the powerful hardware now available on the tip of our hands (ever faster multicore technology, super duper video cards, amazing storage for almost nothing, solid state drives, you name it, we’re getting it, and it’s gonna get better in 18 months)… for the promise of the cloud (which is convenient, but you should try living without internet at home for 3 weeks, fuck the cloud).

A few moments ago I was thinking about this and about Google’s vision of “everything inside the browser” and then it hit me.

Our industry is full of disruption, who would’ve thought that web browsers would get so big and create whole new industries, can’t the same happen to the browser?

I think it’s totally possible that some new software, some new Desktop software could emerge and change the face of the internet once again. I don’t know what it could be, but after seeing how things evolve it’s plausible something like this happens.

Google shouldn’t be putting all its eggs on the browser basket.

Desktop software is here to stay, and it has all the powers today to out-innovate the browser, as crazy as it sounds.

Maybe a well done Microsoft App store would be enough to get a lot of people excited. By looking at what’s happened in such a short time for iOS and the Apple AppStore, the browser has plenty to fear.

                          

Now you’re running out of space and all your Google searches point you to stupid posts on the virtualbox.org forums that lead to nowhere, specially if you are a MacOSX user, look no further, you’ve found the solution to your problem on this post.

VirtualBox for Mac comes with a tool called VBoxManage, this tool is all you need to resize your virtual disk.

When you’re using the VBoxManage tool make sure your VM is not running, stop it completely to be safe.

Step 0. Backup your current drive (optional)

I recommend that before you do anything you clone your existing drive, just in case…

You can clone your drive using guess what? yes, the VBoxManage tool. No need to download any external tools.

$ VboxManage clonehd <path to your original drive> <path of the copy>

in my computer it looked exactly like this:

$ VBoxManage clonehd /Users/gubatron/VirtualBox\ VMs/windows7-64bit/windows7-64bit.vdi /Users/gubatron/windows7-64bit.cloned.vdi
0%...10%...20%...30%...40%...50%...60%...70%...80%...90%...100%

If you don’t know where your .vdi file is, it’s very simple, right Click your VM > Settings > Storage, and mouse over the .vdi to see it’s physical location on your Mac hardrive.

Step 1. Resize!

The command to resize is:

$ VBoxManage modifyhd <path to your vdi> --resize <new size in megabytes>

In my case I had a 20GB drive that I wanted to double in size (40GB), a quick Google search for “40GB to megabytes” yields the number 40960, so that’s what I put on my –resize parameter.

This is how it looked for me:

$ VBoxManage modifyhd /Users/gubatron/VirtualBox\ VMs/windows7-64bit/windows7-64bit.vdi --resize 40960
0%...10%...20%...30%...40%...50%...60%...70%...80%...90%...100%

The ‘resizing’ is almost immediate.

Step 2. (Re)Start VirtualBox

After you’ve physically resized your drive, both VirtualBox and your OS should know about the changes.

At this point, clicking on your VM in the VirtualBox window will show that it still has the old size:

Before: (Note the size of the drive at the bottom of the image)

After doing the resize, shutdown completely your VirtualBox, and launch it again. When you see the information about the storage drives attached to your VM you should see the new disk size.

After: (Note the size of the drive at the bottom of the image)

Step 3. Let your OS know the new logical size of the drive

When you start your VM, it won’t know right away what the new size of the disk is, you’ll have let the operating system know that there is additional space it can use.

If your VM is running Windows 7, the way to let the operating system know that it can use the additional space on your drive is very straight forward.

Click on the Windows (Start) Icon on the Bar > Right Click on “Computer” > Manage (You’ll need to be an Administrator)

The “Computer Management” window will open, in it go to:

Storage > Disk Management > Right Click on the partition you want to extend.

Select the option that says “Extend”, a Wizard will open, just hit Next until it ends if you want to use the whole space.

After you’re done, if you refresh your “Computer” on the File explorer the resized drive should show right away

That’s it, enjoy and let me know how it went.

                          

Saw these on a McDonalds near Paris.

Haven’t seen it anywhere in the US, if you have, please share a link of a picture and let me know how was your experience.

They did a great job with UX on it, it was quite easy to put together an order for three people, very flexible and easy to use.

                          

So I had to work outside today, and as usual I wanted to use my Verizon 4G Android (Thunderbolt) to connect my laptop using the Wi-Fi hotspot feature, as I’ve been doing since I got the phone, it’s been a real life saver many times.

This morning I saw that there was a firmware update, and I gladly accepted it, after that upgrade, now dear Verizon has decided to charge 4G users with $30 A MONTH to use the Hotspot feature that was free on my phone.

Really Verizon…?

So well, the outcome is that, NO, I’m never gonna pay you $30 a month to use my own Wi-Fi card to share my internet connection, but instead I’ve gone and signed up for Clear’s 4G hotspot, which allows me to connect up to 8 computers.

Verizon, I was happy with you until now, you suck balls, Android users are not stupid, this is pure evil. I guess my $250 a month on my line and my family’s lines are not enough for you.

So, if Clear ends up working well for me, what I think I’ll do at the end of the contract will be radical and I hope more and more people will do the same, I’m gonna get rid of my phone line, bye bye stupid 10 digit numbers, bye bye dynamic monthly bills, bye bye Verizon. I’ll just have it connected to my Wi-Fi hotspot, I’ll have faster internet access, and if I need to make a phone call, I’ll use either GTalk or Skype, fuck it. I don’t answer the phone anyway, I’ll send everyone straight to Google Voice.

                          

See the Previous T-Shirt

                          

Getting this error every time you start Chrome?

Fix for MacOSX

Remove the “Web Data” file inside your Home’s Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default folder
“~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/Web Data”
Then restart Chrome and the error message should be gone.

Fix for Windows

Remove the “Web Data” file inside the following folder
%APPDATA%\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default
Then restart Chrome and the error message should be gone.

                          

Back (Message encoded in Morse Code)

See the Previous T-Shirt
See the Next T-Shirt

                          

Now imagine each one of those guys is a shared avatar too.
Putting the infinite into something small feels good in the brain.

                          

Here’s what I did

After I gave up on reading the documentation on what the hell happened to eclipse.ini and why it’s not having any effect on my eclipse, I just created my own eclipse launcher.

Here’s what it has inside:

#!/bin/bash
./eclipse -vmargs -XX:MaxPermSize=512M-Xms512m -Xmx1024m -XX:+UseParallelGC -XX:PermSize=256M

                          

<html>
  <head>
    <title>Playing with Canvas</title>
  </head>

  <body style="padding:0 0; margin: 0 0; background:black">

    <canvas id="myCanvas" width="1024" height="1024" ></canvas>

    <script type="text/javascript">

    //convert to CSS friendly Hex String
    function d2h (n) {
      var result = n.toString(16);
      if (n < 16) {
	result = '0'+result;
      }
      return result;
    }

    var preparingBackground = true;
    var canvas = document.getElementById("myCanvas");
    var ctx = canvas.getContext("2d");

    var canvasWidth = parseInt(canvas.getAttribute("width"));
    var canvasHeight = parseInt(canvas.getAttribute("height"));

    var r=255; var red;
    var g=255; var green;
    var b=255; var blue;

    var rectHeight = canvasHeight/256;
    var rectWidth = canvasWidth/256;

    var rectX = 0;
    var rectY = 0;

    var Rect = function(xval,yval,speedXval,speedYval,r,g,b) {
      this.x = xval;
      this.y = yval;

      this.speedX = speedXval;
      this.speedY = speedYval;

      this.r = r;
      this.g = g;
      this.b = b;

      //so colors dont jump from 255 to 0.
      this.rDelta = 1;
      this.gDelta = 1;
      this.bDelta = 1;

      this.width = 1;
      this.height = 1;

      //so rectangle colors wont change so fast.
      this.colorChangeDefaultValue=1;
      this.colorChangeAcumulator=1;

      this.move = function () {
	this.x = this.x+this.speedX;
        this.y = this.y+this.speedY;

	//if you reach a borders change direction.
        if ((this.x+this.width >= canvasWidth && this.speedX > 0) ||
	    (this.x <= 0 && this.speedX < 0)) {
	  this.speedX = this.speedX*-1;
	}

        if ((this.y+this.height >= canvasHeight && this.speedY > 0) ||
	    (this.y <= 0 && this.speedY < 0)) {
	  this.speedY = this.speedY*-1;
	}
      }

      //draw and change colors
      this.draw = function () {
	//play with color gradients when you have a chance...
	if (this.colorChangeAcumulator--==0) {
	  if ((this.r >= 255 && this.rDelta > 0) ||
              (this.r <= 0 && this.rDelta < 0)) {
	    this.rDelta=this.rDelta*-1;
	  }

	  if ((this.g >= 255 && this.gDelta > 0) ||
              (this.g <= 0 && this.gDelta < 0)) {
	    this.gDelta=this.gDelta*-1;
	  }

	  if ((this.b >= 255 && this.bDelta > 0) ||
              (this.b <= 0 && this.bDelta < 0)) {
	    this.bDelta=this.bDelta*-1;
	  }

	  this.r=(this.r+this.rDelta) % 256;
	  this.g=(this.g+this.gDelta) % 256;
	  this.b=(this.b+this.bDelta) % 256; 

	  this.colorChangeAcumulator=this.colorChangeDefaultValue;
	  this.width++;
	  this.height++;
	}

	//paint the reactangle
	ctx.fillStyle="#"+d2h(this.r)+d2h(this.g)+d2h(this.b);
	ctx.fillRect(this.x,this.y,this.width,this.height);
      }
    }

    //animation interval ids
    var prepareBackgroundIntervalId = 0;
    var rectsIntervalId = 0;

    var speedX = 7;
    var speedY = 7;

    var theRects = [new Rect(0,0,speedX,speedY,10,44,100),
		    new Rect(canvasWidth,canvasHeight,-speedX,-speedY,125,0,0),
		    new Rect(canvasWidth,0,-speedX,speedY,0,210,80),
		    new Rect(0,canvasHeight,speedX,-speedY,40,40,0),
		    new Rect(canvasWidth/2,0,0,speedY,-4,40,40),
		    new Rect(canvasWidth/2,canvasHeight,4,-speedY,0,100,250),
		    new Rect(0,canvasHeight/2,speedX,0,210,100,100),
		    new Rect(canvasWidth,512,-speedX,0,100,10,0)];

    function prepareBackground() {

      if (preparingBackground) {
	r=r-1;
	g=g-1;
	b=b-1;

	red = d2h(r);
	green = d2h(g);
	blue = d2h(b);

	ctx.fillStyle = "#"+red+green+blue;
	ctx.fillRect(rectX,rectY,canvas.getAttribute("width"),rectHeight);

	rectY = rectY + rectHeight;

	preparingBackground = !(r==0 && g==0 && b==0);
      } else {
	clearInterval(prepareBackgroundIntervalId);
	rectsIntervalId = setInterval("moveRects()",33);
      }
    }

    function moveRects() {
      for (i in theRects) {
	var rect = theRects[i];
	rect.draw();
	rect.move();
      }
    }

    prepareBackgroundIntervalId = setInterval("prepareBackground()",1);

    </script>
  </body>

</html>

                          

What you see above is a picture of the last 30 USED CDs I bought on Amazon.com.

These 30 CDs total a number of 454 tracks.

CD prices ranged between $1.61 to $9.18

The total of these purchases, including shipping was $291.78

This makes the average cost per track only $0.64.

ITunes charges $1.29 per track, that’s a 48% saving per track, and I keep the CDs and the booklets, if anything happens to my hard drive, I just rip the CDs again to put my music on as many devices as I can.

So I ask you… Should online music stores get their prices down to $0.50 per track? or you think $1.29 is the price of getting your song whenever you want, wherever you want?

                          

This week we have to make a final choice of what technology will be used to replace our somewhat big subversion repository (2 Gigs). Huge imports are beginning to be a pain and we’re tired of the .svn folders and not being able to commit if the central server is down. 

As time passed we become more paranoid and started making automated backups of the repo using good old rsync, so we’ve organically saw the need for a distributed option that can let us commit our work even if we’re online. 

The obvious choices are Mercurial on BitBucket or Git on GitHub. 

I’ve tried GitHub with the free account on open repositories, and I’ve tried Mercurial on my own since it feels a lot more home (command wise) if you are an old subversion user. 

If you’ve tried both of these services, I’d love to hear your opinion. 

http://bitbucket.org 
http://github.com

Posted via email from Angel’s posterous

Update: Bitbucket. During the week that I wrote this article Atlassian bought Bitbucket and offered free hosting. Also the tool is a lot more friendly to svn-brainwashed users like myself and our team. Couldn’t be more happy after switching to a distributed version control system.

                          

After coding on Android and learning about some of the tips for performance, like
"With an ArrayList, a hand-written counted loop is about 3x faster"

If you do use ArrayLists a lot you then have that tip in the back of your head and you end up with a lot of code like the following:

List<T> myList = ... ;
int size = myList.size();
for (int i=0; i < size; i++) {
  T elem = myList.get(i);
  //do something with elem
}

Eventually there was a moment when I said, I need a freaking map function, I’m sick of this little pattern, surprisingly I couldn’t find a map() function anywhere on the java collection framework. So I went and did this.

Warning: These mapping utilities are meant only for Lists with RandomAccess capabilities (.get(i) happens in constant time). Do not use with LinkedList or other lists that don’t implement RandomAccess, otherwise you’ll end up with up to O(n^2) times. Thanks to Roger Kapsi for noticing this issue. [you can now tell how much we like to use ArrayList]

//what I think would be the equivalent of a lambda or closure in Python...
public interface MapFunction<T> {
   public void map(T t);
}

And then on one of my utils classes I added a static method map that looks like this:

public static <T> void map(List<T> list, MapFunction<T> mapFunction) {
int size=list.size();
   for (int i=0; i < size; i++) {
      mapFunction.map(list.get(i));
   }
}

So now, everytime I need to iterate over a whole list and do something to each element it’s a lot cleaner

//let's serialize all the messages...
List<Message> messages = ...;
Utils.map(messages, new MapFunction<Message> {
   public void map(Message message) {
      Engine.INSTANCE.SERIALIZER.save(message);
   }
});

done deal.

Update

Here’s another Map utility that let’s your map() function know about the index of your current element. You may have to treat certain elements differently based on their position in the list.
This time your function takes a “IndexMapFunction” implementation.

public static <T> void map(List<T> list, IndexedMapFunction<T> mapFunction) {
		int size = list.size();
		for (int i = 0; i < size; i++) {
			mapFunction.map(i, list.get(i));
		}
}

The interface for IndexedMapFunction looks like this

public interface IndexedMapFunction<T> {
	public void map(int i, T obj);
}

In your implementation of “map(int i, T obj)”, “i” represents the position of the element being treated. You could do different things depending on what position of the List you are. For example, you could know if you’re at the beggining or end of the list, or maybe you could other data structure telling you things about some positions in the list in question.

                          

It had been ages since I didn’t play LEGO, after building a smaller project to see if we could get along as a team we decided to tackle a larger project.

Some life lessons you learn while playing with LEGOs:

1. Organization is key.
The more you can organize your blocks before doing any actual building, the better. The thinking is that you’ll have to find and use each and every piece on that box, you might as well do the indexing first and then spend no time looking for the pieces you need for your building.
Eventually we ended up separating every single kind of block and we put them in zip-lock bags or tupperware containers.

2. Attention to detail.

3. Focus.

4. Divide and conquer
But do so wisely, if you have to build the same module several times, that’s a perfect tasks to divide and do in parallel. If there’s a unique and very complex module to build, it’s better that you do it by yourself while your team builds other unique pieces. If they want to participate you could take turns, and spot each other to avoid mistakes. (sounds a lot like pair coding)

                          

- Physical Keyboard feels great.

- Not sold on the stylus, I think I might loose it. However it comes in handy when clicking on tiny links.

- Web browsing experience is clumsy if you try to use your fingers and you’re used to Android or iPhone where dragging occurs on a light touch. With the N900 you have to Tap harder to begin to drag, probably like that intentionally. I must admit I find myself making mistakes on the Droid maybe because it’s too sensitive.

- Using forms on the browser is inconvenient. There’s no way to move from form field to form field except using the stylus. Keyboard arrows won’t work to switch focus between form fields, and the lack of virtual keyboard (when you’re using the real one) implies that you won’t have a “Next” button to move through the form (or at least I couldn’t figure out a field hopping mechanism).

- Zooming in and out on a web page will be extremely unintuitive. Thanks to patents on multitouch gestures you’ll have to either double tap, or do a ridiculous tap+hold and twirl clockwise zoom in (in a controlled way), or tap+hold and twirl counter-clockwise to zoom out… wtf.
Nokia has to put up a fight on this, natural multi-touch gestures are a must on today’s smartphones.

- I still don’t know how to select, copy and paste text from a website. Very hard to quote text and twitter it.

- Default timeout for screen auto lock is way too short.

- It has a stand on the back, which as a developer I appreciate. It’s a pain to debug apps on the nexus one, you always kind of need to pick it up or create some sort of desktop apparatus to have the phone facing you while you test hands free.

Multimedia
- Video and audio playback were perfect. Droid and Nexus One have nothing to envy, so it’s not a selling point. Watch the 3 phones playing the same video.

- Navigation is convenient with top left corner control. It took me a few seconds to figure it out being used to Android’s back and Home Button and of the one physical button on the iPhone.

- The Media player comes with pre-installed internet radio streaming app. On Android I had to download one from the Market.

- Didn’t have to install Flickr photo uploading app, already comes with OS.

- OVI Store experience frustrated me. Should be an app, not a web page. I got asked for an HTTPS certificate while trying to install a Twitter plugin, it was basically the same exception you get on a web browser. The regular user would get lost adding the certificate and the security exception. Then after that I got asked to signup for the OVI store, and I gave up. Installing apps should be a breeze. Setting up your OVI Store account should be done as part of the phone setup process on an App.

The more I use the phone the more I think, Nokia’s hardware is hot, but they’re wasting their time with competing on software. Nokia running Android would kill everybody else, let’s hope it will happen sooner than I think, they just need to test with one cool device and feel the market.

Unboxing Pictures

Playing with it as a Software Developer
- No SDK for Mac environment, or at least not a very accessible or official version of it. The only solution seemed to be installing the SDK on a Virtualized Linux (e.g. VirtualBox).

- Maemo SDK not compatible with Ubuntu 10.4 64bit, it seems it’s only 32bit.

The project page confirms this:
“The development environment for Maemo running on the desktop is called Maemo SDK. You can only install Maemo SDK on a Linux operating system. Maemo SDK currently supports the following Linux distributions: Debian, Ubuntu”

Tried installing Scratchbox on my Mac with no luck.

- It was a little surprising to see the Nokia documentation for developers talking about GTK+ in all their examples and not Qt, given the acquisition of Trolltech by Nokia in 2008. However you go to the Qt page and it says that it’s the defacto SDK for Maemo devices.

In the end I decided to install it on a 32bit Ubuntu VirtualBox image on my Mac and deal with the performance hit, I couldn’t just return the phone without compiling something, otherwise I’d be speaking out of my ass right?

Hello World in GTK

Hello World in Qt4, exactly the same code I would’ve used for a desktop Qt4 app.

compilation is the same thing as if developing a regular Qt4 app on linux

/scratchbox/login
fakeroot apt-get install libqt4-dev

create your helloworld.cpp… then make your project

qmake -project
qmake
make
run-standalone.sh ./qt_helloworld

If you’re used to Linux development with GTK or Qt4 you will feel right at home, and you probably know right off what’s the most comfortable set of tools to code. If you’re not, it seems like Nokia has left the whole thing way too much on the hands of the Maemo community.

Documentation seems a little all over the place, unfinished Wikis, not very welcoming for non-linux developers, I’m talking about companies that come from actually making money on iPhone OS or Android, looking to port their apps to Maemo. The first impression won’t be the best and you’ll think that things aren’t as well prepared as for iPhone with X-Code or Android with the Eclipse extension which let’s you deploy a signed installer in just a few clicks.

It seems that Nokia is relying way too much on the Linux community for all of this, I’m not sure if this is going to get very far with mobile shops, specially after seeing how many hurdles a user has to go through sometimes to get an app from the OVI market (in comparison to iPhone or Android’s markets simple purchasing processes).

SDK experience Screenshots

Conclusions

First of all thanks to Nokia for sending the N900. My final conclusions which are mostly thinking from the consumer perspective might not be one you’ll like much (you=Nokia), but you probably need to hear this (I’m guessing this is why you sent the device in the first place).

In my case after being a faithful Nokia consumer I felt dissapointed with the software side when I chose the N95 over the iPhone, newer Nokia phones came, but the same shitty platform was running on them, I thought Maemo would change that but now I know it’s nowhere near what smartphone users today expect. Then Android came along to truly compete with the iPhone.

Now as an Android user when the time comes for me to upgrade my phone I’ll be looking for another Android device.

Let’s imagine what’s going to happen when my Droid is too old, by that time there will be even more Android phones to choose from also a richer Application ecosystem, if I were the kind of person that installs paid apps I’d probably like to keep my “investment” for my next phone, however even if there’s a myriad of Android phones out there, the only brands I’ll consider are Motorola, HTC, LG and SonyEricsson, I’m not too fond of any of them so I’ll have to research what each of the phones they’ll be offering will suit my needs.

An Android based Nokia smartphone would certainly make my decision a lot easier. As of now you’re entirely out of the picture, there’s no way I’m switching to Maemo, and Moblin is way too new to tell if it’s going anywhere.

Nokia, Stop playing outside the garden, don’t get cocky with your current numbers and admit you’re slowly decaying, if you don’t do something about it once Android is on every cheap phone you’re gonna die. Android could use some Nokia.

Follow the geek.

                          

I got this during my “Google fanboy period”. Now I’m a little more critical. I’m now going through an “Android fanboy period”.

There’s a funny story of this shirt. The first day I moved to Miami I was running an errand in downtown and some lady yelled at me from the other side of the street and told me “I use your page every day!”, I didn’t break her heart and just yelled back “Thanks!”

See the Previous T-Shirt
See the Next T-Shirt

                          

Serial Number: ??????????
AVD Name: N/A
Target: unknown
State: ??

Here’s the solution:

1. Create a script to fix this next time it happens, let’s call it “android_device_reset” and save it on a folder contained on your $PATH environment variable.

#!/bin/bash
# android_device_reset script
sudo adb kill-server
sudo service udev stop
sudo adb start-server
sudo adb devices

Save it and make it executable

chmod +x android_device_reset

2. Open this file /etc/udev/rules.d/51-android.rules

Make sure it looks something like this

SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", SYSFS{idVendor}=="0bb4", MODE=="0666"
SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", SYSFS{idVendor}=="22b8", MODE=="0666"

Each line represents a different android device. If you have just one, the file should be one line long.

On that example I’ve configured the rules for a Motorola Droid and a Nexus One.
If you need to know the idVendor numbers for your Android device go here
developer.android.com/guide/developing/device.html#VendorIds

3. Whenever the problem happens, just open a terminal and type

android_device_reset

It’ll ask you for your password, only administrative users will be able to execute the script.

Hope this helps.

                          

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language                      files          blank        comment           code
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
XML                            4130          26919          62996        3044624
C                              7191         494387         685731        2826741
Java                          16473         423278         986294        2084883
C++                            5623         349754         385625        1754053
C/C++ Header                  12278         300773         653608        1153456
HTML                           2325          13539          14681         348935
Bourne Shell                    501          45684          46947         317410
Javascript                     1717          41901          76306         208012
Assembly                       1704          18732          51392          96700
D                              2181          16936             24          59142
m4                              116           6026           1813          49502
Perl                            221           8189           8246          40058
Python                          236           9805          14225          38852
make                            381           6844           3837          37059
IDL                             421           3128              0          24181
Objective C                      93           2804           3371          10032
yacc                             15           1300            742           9660
CSS                              42           1760            617           8566
Teamcenter def                   41            631             95           5430
C#                               93            863            537           5283
Bourne Again Shell               99            569           1643           3784
lex                              21            776            754           3492
Expect                           20            105            168           2170
Ada                              10            599            560           1681
Ruby                             14            393            228           1433
XSLT                              8            105            110           1328
XSD                               7            182            359           1048
Pascal                            4            218            200            985
DOS Batch                        34            252            399            911
awk                              14             92            198            899
DTD                               9             66             42            289
sed                               9             32            143            277
Korn Shell                        1             39             46            223
Lisp                              2             32              5            144
MSBuild scripts                   1              1              0            140
NAnt scripts                      2             10              0             89
ASP.Net                           3              5              0             76
YAML                              6             27             42             66
SQL                               1              5              0             21
PHP                               1              0              0              3
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM:                          56048        1776761        3001984       12141638
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Update

It seems like this post got some attention on Reddit, YCombinator news and other sites on monday. I hadn’t noticed until today, so here are some answers to many of the FAQs about the post.

Yes it was done using cloc. Don’t shoot me I’m just the messenger.

It was run at the base folder of the entire Android OS source checkout, so yes it will include sample and tests I suppose.

C#, Ada, Objective-C? I also thought the same… It’s probably worth the try doing a few finds and greps to see if this is true, again I just posted the output of cloc, I didn’t intend to make this a scientific paper, just a fun and curious post to get a rough number on the lines of code, that breakdown was just icing on the cake for me (as inaccurate as it maybe)

Update
This post is now being referenced in Wikipedia! on the “Android (operating system)” article.

About Gubatron & Android
Ever since the iPhone OS handicapped millions of smartphone devices with its draconian laws, I started looking more and more seriously at Android as THE platform for every non-iPhone device coming to the mobile and TV space. Now I’m part of the developer team of FrostWire for Android, an application that exploits all the power of the device and the freedoms of the platform to allow people to connect and share.

                          

Nexus One

                          

Let’s see what the story will be with Android 2.2 (Froyo)

                          

17 files get their MD5 calculated on the Droid

and 17 files get their MD5 hash calculated on the Nexus 1

Nexus 1 pwns.

Here’s the code in case you’re curious.

	public void onClick(View v) {
                                _logTextView.setText("MD5 Benchmark on " + Build.DEVICE + "\n\n");
				if (GlobalVariables.APP_CONTEXT == null)
					GlobalVariables.APP_CONTEXT = getApplicationContext();

				List<FileDescriptor> sharedAudioFiles = Engine.INSTANCE.LIBRARIAN.getSharedAudioFiles(0, 17);
				for (FileDescriptor fs: sharedAudioFiles) {
					long start = 0;
					String md5 = null;
					long length = 0;
					try {
						start = System.currentTimeMillis();
						File f = new File(fs.path);
						length = f.length();
						md5 = FrostWireUtils.getMD5(f);

					} catch (Exception e) { }
					long time = System.currentTimeMillis() - start;
					_logTextView.append(FrostWireUtils.getBytesInHuman(length) + " in " + time + " ms @ " + (length/(double) time)*1000 + " b/s\n");
				}
			}

And here’s how we do the MD5

	public final static String getMD5(File f) throws Exception {
		MessageDigest m = MessageDigest.getInstance("MD5");

		byte[] buf = new byte[65536];
		int num_read;

		InputStream in = new BufferedInputStream(new FileInputStream(f));

		while ((num_read = in.read(buf)) != -1) {
			m.update(buf, 0, num_read);
		}

		String result = new BigInteger(1, m.digest()).toString(16);

		// pad with zeros if until it's 32 chars long.
		if (result.length() < 32) {
			StringBuffer padding = new StringBuffer();
			int paddingSize = 32 - result.length();
			for (int i = 0; i < paddingSize; i++)
				padding.append("0");

			result = padding.toString() + result;
		}

		return result;
	}

                          

$ cloc .
   11642 text files.
   11383 unique files.
   42549 files ignored.

http://cloc.sourceforge.net v 1.51  T=193.0 s (56.3 files/s, 11577.2 lines/s)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language                      files          blank        comment           code
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Java                           9259         309032         469814        1123643
HTML                           1079          24512          16894         196291
XML                             205           3152           4552          34709
C++                              62           2923           3738          16397
C/C++ Header                    103           1874           4249           6685
C                                17            842            729           2498
XSD                              15            132            124           1358
Perl                              6            301            752           1323
Objective C                      10            249            237            798
DOS Batch                        19            118             65            704
CSS                              15            184            171            675
make                             14            206            355            623
Bourne Shell                     23            154            172            601
XSLT                              4            134            298            553
Bourne Again Shell               12             69            141            426
Python                            9            126             79            416
Javascript                        7             42             21            188
IDL                               1             14              0             52
Teamcenter def                    1              0              0              9
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM:                          10861         344064         502391        1387949
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

If you want to count lines of code for your projects give cloc a try.

                          

The video demo covers how to create and run Unit Test classes for regular Java classes on Android, and also how to create and run Unit Test classes that test classes that depend on Android “Context” or “Activity” objects.

If your Android unit tests are not running because of frustrating error messages, the time spent watching this video will save you a lot of reading and headaches.

Check the screencast after the break

How to Unit Test on Android [SCREENCAST]
Uploaded by wedoit4you. – Explore more science and tech videos.

Download the Eclipse Project sources

                          

Last night I saw this on my blog and other pages where I have Google Analytics installed to be let down by the amount of visitors that come from links seeded in Twitter feeds. The graphics above represent the amount of visits sent to my blog during the last 12 months from Facebook.com and Twitter.com.

What’s surprising is that I consider myself a Twitter addict (15,647 updates, 1500+ followers) and I hardly post updates on Facebook, however I’m getting 12 times more visits a year from Facebook. This has me thinking about how I should market my products and services on the social web.

Today, a reaffirming headline comes from the folks at Mashable “Facebook Now Commands 41% of Social Media Traffic”. Their numbers make sense against mine, Twitter only commands 8% of the Social Media Traffic.

I’m a heavy twitter user, I’m not spamming everyone, I try to tweet to be re-tweeted when it comes to links. I will only mention my products or services when I’m really proud of something or when I think something truly deserves to be shared because it’s cool.

However I think what’s obviously happenning when you look at Twitter vs Facebook is the following: In Twitter Nobody Is Listening, Everybody is Talking. In Facebook (at least someone like me) I have a circle of people that I actually know in real life, and they do care about what I say. I’ve a real life reputation and life track record in front of my peers, family and friends, and If I say something, they know I’m not spamming them, so they’re more likely to click, and recommend what I say.

The other thing that’s happening I think is that Twitter is still a small niche compared to Facebook. That 40% of the Social Media traffic means your mom and dad are on Facebook, and if they’re on Twitter they probably signed up and never used it again, they care more about their Facebook daily Gossip Dose or FarmVille addiction, which will eventually lead them to your wall, and to your links.

However, Twitter does prove to have a lot of mention to my products and services everyday (search.twitter.com), sometimes many times a day your brand could be mentioned, the question is, is anybody listening? is this bringing direct traffic that can’t be tracked? I’d like to pick your brains on the subject, I invite you to run the same reports on your Google Analytics, tell us what you find.

                          

What I did:
Add a ScrollView (with android:fillViewport=”true” and android:layout_weight=”1″), then add a LinearLayout (yup…), and then add the TextView to fill all of that up (android:layout_weight=”1″ too)

Here’s the only thing that worked for me:

	<ScrollView android:layout_width="fill_parent"
                              android:layout_height="wrap_content"
                              android:layout_weight="1" android:fillViewport="true">
		<LinearLayout android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="fill_parent">
		<TextView android:text="@+id/TextView01"
			android:id="@+id/logTextView"
			android:layout_width="fill_parent"
			android:layout_height="fill_parent"
			android:textColor="#000"
			android:background="#fff"
			android:layout_weight="1"></TextView>
		</LinearLayout>
	</ScrollView>

Then on your Activity, do this:

_logTextView = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.logTextView);
_logTextView.setText("");

//and here comes the magic
_logTextView.setMovementMethod(ScrollingMovementMethod.getInstance());

                          

“3.3.1 — Books may only be written in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use any other non Apple word processing software. Books must be originally written in Apple iWork or Apple TextEdit (e.g., Books written ORIGINALLY in Microsoft Word, Wordperfect, Notepad, or in Paper Type Writers will be rejected). Books may only be read using the iPad iBook reader”

[buzz href="http://www.google.com/buzz/gubatron2/BQ6D8vPj6nD/funny-criticIPhoneSDKFascistClause" show_content="0" like="13"]

                          

1. C# 73,833
2. Java 43,006
3. PHP 35,371
4. Javascript 31,244
5. C++ 27,340
6. Python 22,070
7. Objective-C 10,350
8. Ruby 8,773
9. VB.net 7,778
10. ActionScript (Flash) 5,230
11. Perl 4,496

What do these numbers mean to you? Languages on the rise of popularity among programmers, or lack of good documentation?

[buzz href="http://www.google.com/buzz/gubatron2/UJr3LGeN53k/Programming-Languages-Popularity-by-the-number-of" liked="14"]

                          

The one think I like about this phone is the keyboard, however It’s very annoying that when it’s closed the touchscreen side doesn’t have the Search button that the Droid and the Nexus have.

So, everytime you want to perform a search, you’re forced to do so with the keyboard, the search button is only to be found in it.

The way that it opens is not good for people with clumsy hands, this phone can end in the floor a lot if that’s your case.

The phone has been a bit buggy, sometimes it won’t receive or make calls and it has to be fully turned off (battery out and every thing)

It’s an OK entry android phone for the average user, If you’re looking for speed and a physical keyboard get the Droid, it’s far superior. If you don’t care about the keyboard, get a Nexus One.

                          

Frank was kindly demoing his new iPad to anybody that would come by, he was sitting right in front of the store.

More pictures after the break

He mentioned he’s applied several times for a job at the Apple Store in Miami Beach (with no luck), he was hanging out demoing the product to whoever asked, getting pictures taken, etc. He also said he was hoping after this that they’ll be willing to take him. How awesome to create a brand that draws so much affection.

Apple has it easy to promote this product, lots of fans, and even some free press, there was a TV van with it’s microwave antenna, the crew was interviewing a lot of people and by the looks of it they were also going give live coverage. (I don’t know of what…, it’s not like something amazing was about to happen, just a bunch of early adopters waiting in the sun to pay a lot of money for a device that’s just hyped.)

However it’s far from Gubatron ready, it had the potential of being a great product, but Apple has done this and it will keep doing it, they know they don’t have to have the perfect product the first time, they can milk a lot of fanboys while they’re still not done, create hype and beat everyone else to market innovative toys.

For my opinion on the iPad, read iPad, iPass

                          

Google is still king of the hill in search.