Recently I started work on an iOS game. I decided not to use the Core Animations framework provided by Apple and instead experiment with some third party game engines. I chose Cocos2D as it is an all in one package. It gives you the ability to add and control sprites, add cool graphics and animations, access to a sound engine and also 2 physics libraries.
You might imagine that this subject would be rather straight forward and hardly worthy of an article of any sort. Unfortunately, you would indeed be imagining. Adding an HTML signature to Mac Mail is not as simple as pasting the html directly into the signature field of the client like in Gmail or Outlook. With Apple Mail pasting HTML or images directly into the signature field just doesn’t work very well. In fact, the process for setting an html signature with images in mac Mail is remarkably un-Mac-like.
On a recent project, we needed a widget that would allow users to select a photo from their Facebook albums. “Surely the new Facebook Android SDK must support this.” I thought. Alas, my hopes were unfulfilled. “Well, I bet there is a third-party solution for this!”, I surmised, but again, my search was for naught. At this point I decided to roll up my sleeves and do it myself.
The Mystical 9 patch
You Do What Android Want = Android Do What You Want
Part 1: The Mystical 9-Patch
I recently encountered some blank stares from some colleagues regarding certain aspects of the 9-patch.
Granted, there doesn’t seem to be all that much documentation out there explaining the ins and outs of nine patch, possibly adding to the mystique, but then again, maybe there isn’t all that much to explain.
Here I’ll outline the basics of the 9-patch, and you can comment as to whether it indeed makes simple sense… or instead, communicate your own blank stare with some scathing criticism below in the comments section.
Like any working professional, software engineers are extremely busy. There is more code to write than there is time. For this, we can be very picky with which tools we choose to communicate. A normal day can be filled with meetings, email , and then actually trying to write code. For the engineer, we have time for few things, and writing code is top priority. So, what’s the best method for getting a developer’s attention?
Here’s some tactics that will help you get in touch quickly with the guys building the next best life changing tools.
I’m writing this post from Mysore, India where I’m working for the entire month of February.
Coming here was a nail-biter for me, but not because of typical western concerns like bedbugs, heat, smog, or monsoons. What terrified me was the idea of traveling all this way and not being able to do my job effectively. I oversee operations and finances at Grio, participate in business development, and am currently managing two projects. If anything were to prevent me from working, I would need to grab the next flight and go home – arriving a minimum of 40 hours later!
I recently reviewed a SQL query that was returning duplicate results. Since I expected, and needed, a single result from the query this was a problem. Here’s an explanation of why this bug occurred, and several different ways it can be resolved.
Stack Overflow requires that questions be largely objective, but is based around a voting system that would be largely unnecessary if all questions actually were. The requirement for objectivity can be readily tested by asking a subjective question and watching how quickly it’s removed, but it’s also made explicit in their blog posts:
Stack Exchange is about questions with objective, factual answers.
…open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site…
and the reasons a question might be closed:
We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or specific expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion.
The message is quite clear: objective good, subjective bad.
This year I worked on a project which involved populating a huge HTML table (up to 1,048,576 rows by 16,384 columns) cell-by-cell, with data retrieved via ajax calls. Needless to say, performance was not good.
As a software consulting firm, Grio strives to provide high quality, high value software to its clients. We embrace an agile software development methodology based on Scrum. This iterative approach provides our clients with flexibility to adapt and change their product over the course of development as discoveries are made while using the software.
This flexibility can prove challenging when providing up front estimates regarding project costs. The problem arises that providing an estimate that is too high may lose you the contract; Estimating too low can result in several outcomes: