I recently had the chance to throw together a small/simple iOS application using some of the newer frameworks I hadn’t used before. Specifically, the gesture recognizer and GLKit frameworks. I created a simple 3D Cube using GLKit and added gesture support, texturing, lighting, and dynamically changeable textures, just to get a feel for the API. …
Read MoreInteresting use of Computer Vision Algorithms 0
I recently came across an application called Sikuli, and upon digging in to learn more was very interested to learn that it accomplishes its goals through computer vision algorithms in part. CV has some amazing applications, but this is one of the more practical and applicable to my daily life. Essentially, Sikuli is an automation …
Read MoreAndroid ICS let down 0
My ASUS eee pad Transformer Prime finally arrived, and wow, am I ever disappointed. Not in the hardware mind you, the device itself is absolutely gorgeous. My disappointment is in Android. Prior to the TFP, the only Android device I’ve owned is my Kindle Fire. Granted, I’ve played with plenty of my friend’s Android devices, …
Read MoreASUS eee pad Transformer Prime 0
Seeing as I seem to perpetually be evolving my gear, I figured I’d give this tablet a go as my primary machine for a while. Unfortunately, they’re so hard to come by that only my keyboard dock has managed to arrive so far, but once the tablet itself actually shows up and I’ve had a …
Read MoreSiri as a service 0
An earlier post commenting on the iPhone 4S and Siri mentioned the fact that most of the heavy lifting of the Siri feature is done on the server side. Well, as a result of that fact, things like this are possible It’s a nice job of turning Siri into a service. I grabbed the code …
Read MoreiPhone 4S, and promising future for Siri 0
My iPhone4 went through quite the sequence of unfortunate events prompting an upgrade to a 4S, which I wasn’t originally planning on doing… My Apple devices have rarely had any concerns of loss or damage at my hands, until the ip4 that is. The original 4 went with me to, and helped me navigate Moscow …
Read MoreNotational Velocity… kicks ass! 0
I’ve been using my own auto-hide drawer note thingies for years, and while they never evolved to what I’d envisioned, I never came across something that worked better for me. Until now. I recently came across Notational Velocity, and ever since it has displaced my own jpeekaboo app Syncs via DropBox, keyboard driven, brilliant! I …
Read Moresoftware creativity vs. escaping poverty = similar psychologies ? 0
I read this article today, and saw similarities between the psychology described with that of the creative aspects in software development. Specifically, that in relation to common practices at a wide range of companies that enforce specific technologies and structure architectural review around the “how” instead of the “what, and why it’s important”, these practices …
Read Morebit.ly and 1.usa.gov, thanks bit.ly! 0
Wow. Just… Wow. Very rarely do companies surprise me in good ways anymore, but bit.ly surprised me in an amazing and positive way this week that I felt compelled to share. I recently read that bit.ly had started shortening .gov domains to 1.usa.gov/foo, and I just happened to be in the middle of attempting to …
Read MoreCubeSat nano-satellite embedded software fun 0
It’s been a while since my last post… The reason for the absence is that I’m nearing completion of my Computer Science Master’s degree, and have been buried by work between my full time job and a project I’m working on for my degree. This project is in collaboration with a number of other students …
Read MoreDeath March ? Indeed… 0
I recently finished Edward Yourdon’s “Death March”, and felt like commenting on a few of the things that stuck with me. First, he supposes that most, if not all, software projects are death march projects to varying degrees. I absolutely agree, from the point of view that we still lack comprehensive enough means and processes …
Read Moreand so the un-freeing of former Sun products begins… 0
OpenSolaris powers my home brew NAS, because ZFS, DTrace, and a number of other key items it provides simply rock, and allow me to do things more quickly and easily (with less grief) than alternatives I’m willing to consider. Yesterday, I saw Ben Rockwood’s blog post regarding a license change to Solaris proper, and it …
Read MoreIf you build it (web services), will they come ? 0
A recurring thought came to me again last August while attending a conference called CSIG (Cyber-infrastructure Summer Institute for Geo-scientists), that there seems to be a rush to use new technologies whenever possible, commonly without considering why or how they’ll be used. I’ve experienced this first hand not only in technology companies, but research centric …
Read MoreDIY desktop glass multitouch/touchpad from a unibody Macbook 0
~6 months or so ago, I purchased a top case from a parted out 13″ unibody Macbook from eBay, with the intent to strip off the touchpad and make a DIY desktop touchpad USB device out of it. Similar things have been done before, albeit not for these glass touchpads. I thought it would be …
Read MoreClosure, perhaps it will convice some JavaScript haters to stop… 0
Google open sourced their Closure JavaScript Tools! If you’re not familiar with them, and you do any web development at all, now’s the time to read up. In short, this is a set of groundbreaking tools for the JavaScript developer, which bring some amazing capabilities to the table. If you are in any way involved …
Read MoreTo Wave or not to Wave ? 0
I’ve had access to Wave for a tad over a week now, and so far I have to say that I see the potential, but I will withhold judgment until it’s a final product, or heck, even a Google Beta(tm). The integrated communications platform that is Wave allows one to combine communication mechanisms in new …
Read MoreWhy is engineering software so hard/different than other engineering pursuits ? 0
I’ve been pondering this topic a lot lately, and have had several discussions with colleagues and friends on what steps one might take to improve matters when working on a project which has issues associated with this topic. This Dr. Dobbs article brought the topic to the forefront of my mind and has recently resulted …
Read Morejpeekaboo updated, new features added 0
Something finally motivated me enough to make some changes to jpeekaboo. Time does indeed fly, it’s been almost a year since the last release… I put in some infrastructure for settings, and used that to allow the note to be pinned to either the left or right side of the screen. The settings also have …
Read MoreMapReduce becoming ubiquitous ? => Collaborative Map-Reduce in the Browser 0
As an academic exercise, myself and a colleague at Sun are currently implementing a MapReduce client for iPhone which has a server component, and a number of other clients we’ve written in various programming languages (currently Python, Ruby and Perl). Our hope is to statistically prove iPhone and similar devices can be useful in a …
Read Morewolf3d on iPhone! 0
An immortal classic on iPhone at last, Wolfenstein3D! Buy it, or, grab the source and compile yourself! Many thanks to John Carmack for putting the source code out too, and thanks to Josh Buhler for saving me the trouble of resolving the compile errors myself per his post, Josh doesn’t have a cert so couldn’t …
Read Moreprogramming language typing, static and dynamic 0
I just read Bruce Eckel’s blog entry which discusses programming language typing, static vs. dynamic. His conclusion is that we, software developers, need “Strong testing, not strong typing.” and I couldn’t agree more. I’ll expand on his statements and reiterate that all too often software folks get caught up evangelizing their chosen technology and lose …
Read Moreroot cause analysis – keeping software simple and high quality 0
I posted a brief thought on RCA on my Sun blog In short, software developers could improve quality and simplify by employing RCA during development. Avoid getting caught up in what’s new and cool and focus on what your intended users really need.
Read MoreXCode breakpoint speech synthesis! 0
In mid December I attended iPhone dev camp Colorado, and among many other things, learned about the very cool ability of XCode to speak the value of variables and other items at breakpoints while debugging. XCode uses whatever voice you have configured in OS X to do the synthesis, and spits out not just variable …
Read MoreiPhone development joy 0
Seeing as it’s been a year now since I began coding for iPhone, I felt like rambling a bit on that topic… I got my 1st gen iPhone in September of 2007, and knew within minutes of actually using the thing (rather than just drooling over photos and videos) that iPhone was going to be …
Read MoreJavaFX 0
another day, another scripting language… I’ll reserve in depth comment until I’ve had time to thoroughly explore JavaFX, but the choices facing today’s software folks are staggering to be certain. Personally, I’m finding it harder and harder to keep anything in my own memory, syntactic details and the like. More often than not these days, …
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