Let it crash programming
Let it crash can be a good thing, especially if the alternative is empty catch blocks, or generally failing silently. If you can provide an equally attention grabbing alternative to crashing, like logging an error that also sends a critical message/email/event that could work if you can gaurantee not leaving the app in an unknown state.
Crash early and crash often for more reliable software
The only error checking a program needs are for errors that can actually happen during normal control flow.
Here are more posts on the subject.
Dog For Sale
A guy is driving around the back woods of Montana and he sees a sign in front of a broken down shanty-style house: ‘Talking Dog For Sale ‘He rings the bell and the owner appears and tells him the dog is in the backyard.
The guy goes into the backyard and sees a nice looking Labrador retriever sitting there.
‘You talk?’ he asks.
‘Yep,’ the Lab replies.
After the guy recovers from the shock of hearing a dog talk, he says ‘So, what’s your story?’
The Lab looks up and says, ‘Well, I discovered that I could talk when I was pretty young. I wanted to help the government, so I told the CIA.
In no time at all they had me jetting from country to country, sitting in rooms with spies and world leaders, because no one figured a dog would be eavesdropping.’
‘I was one of their most valuable spies for eight years running…
But the jetting around really tired me out, and I knew I wasn’t getting any younger so I decided to settle down. I signed up for a job at the airport to do some undercover security, wandering near suspicious characters and listening in. I uncovered some incredible dealings and was awarded a batch of medals.’
‘I got married, had a mess of puppies, and now I’m just retired.’
The guy is amazed. He goes back in and asks the owner what he wants for the dog.
‘Ten dollars,’ the guy says.
‘Ten dollars? This dog is amazing! Why on earth are you selling him so cheap?’
‘Because he’s a Bullshitter . He’s never been out of the yard’
Working with Adobe Illustrator Files (.ai)
Lemonade stand
Photo sent to me by childhood friend Randy Sawyer. Chris and Lisa Dunn also pictured.
I don’t always eat breakfast but when I do
Mac startup problems
Mywork MacBook Pro wouldn’t boot up. It was hung on the gray screen with the apple logo and the spinner spinning. THIS article told me what to try and fortunately, the save-boot did the trick. However the safeboot booted into the blue screen and I had a mouse cursor I could move but Finder did not appear. I turned it off and back on and it came up all the way. This article has more details on the problem.
Update: Next day wouldn’t boot up at all. Was stuck on blue screen. I took the following steps to backup files:
- Reboot and hold down <Command> S to boot into Single User Mode shell
- /sbin/fsck -fy
- mount -uw / ; Make drive writeable
- mkdir /Volumes/usb
- ls /dev/disk* ; Locate usb drive, should be last one listed
- /sbin/mount_msdos /dev/disk2s1 /Volumes/usb
- cp -r srcFolderName /Volumes/usb
- /sbin/umount /dev/disk2s1 ; !!! Important. Unmount before removing drive
USTA 4.5 2011
I had a great season of USTA 4.5 tennis this year. Counting the three matches I played this weekend in Houston (Little State) I went 10-1 ! Not bad for the last year as a junior. Next year I qualify for senior leagues!
Thanks to my tennis partners: Clay Johnson, Steve Gilmer (we went 3-0 in Little State), Russ Needler and James Bronson.
And thanks to Gentry Sparling for captaining our team and to Darrell Breeden for all his help this season and for scheduling most of my practice matches.
Android Development
I’m sticking my toe into Android Development
Here are some reference links
How to install non-market apps
What version of Android should you develop for? Many say develop to the oldest version that you can in order to support the biggest market share. However the older versions are only in a small % of the phones. The newest versions of Android are not supported in many phones yet. The sweet spot in my opinion starts at 10% coverage which today is 2.1. Visit this site for the latest stats.
Tutorials
Setting up application with multiple tabs
Confluence for collaboration
My company is standardizing on Atlassian products such as Jira (for issue tracking), and Confluence for Wikis and collaboration. I have yet to use a system that works better than a simple blog with categories, pages and RSS feeds. I mean what is better than subscribing to a Page, Category (or tag) and contributing to the comment thread of a post you are interested in.
So far, I’m finding Confluence’s support for blogs leaving much to be desired. Starting with the fact you can’t subscribe to feeds with many readers since they require authentication and many (such as Google Reader) don’t support authenticated feeds.
Here is one option that uses a proxy
I tend to agree with Scott that a wiki without RSS feeds is a non starter. Email notifications? I find it funny that Confluence promotes itself as a solution for email chaos but then offer it as the primary mechanism for notifications.