Geek-Chic

Shutterbug

2011-01-02T10:01:00.000-08:00

This one has been around for a while but its a nice beat so thought i had to share it..

Scott Storch produced Big Boi (of Outkast fame) taken from the "Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty" album, which incidentally has been listed in some best albums 2010 lists..

Happy New Year.. (AKA another BttF post)

2011-01-01T04:44:00.000-08:00

Well, its been another long break from posting, largely as we have been crazy busy with work and not had time to do anything, but I saw this last week and decided i had to post it..

Its a trailer for a new episodic BttF game from the guys over at TellTale Games (they also have the Monkey Island and Sam and Max game franchises that they have continued in awesome fashion with episodes). So go check them out, they have a neat half price sale on a bunch of their stuff.. http://www.telltalegames.com/games

Happy New Year!

From Sonny to Claire

2010-11-05T12:55:00.000-07:00

At a guest post over at Tech Crunch, the author talks about a teenage director who made a short film and has started to get some hype around it, so I thought I would check it out. It's quite nice, the score (also created by the director) and photography is pretty nice, so its understandable why people are getting excited about this 17yo director. Anyways, I thought I would share it here with you..

A Vintage Russian

2010-11-05T12:36:00.000-07:00

The guys over at Geek-Chic-Dailly have got wind of an awesome museum in Russia that features classic Russian Video games. The site for the museum has some great pictures of the old machines as well as being able to actually play one of them online! You should head over there now and check it out!

PM's Tech Innovation Promises

2010-11-05T12:32:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, David Cameron made a speech about plans for investment in Technology Innovation in the UK. The plans come as great news for London, and the wider UK tech startup scene as he detailed plans to make East London (from Shoreditch to Old Street) a hub of tech startup to rival Silicon Valley (The roundabout at Old Street already known asSilicon Roundabout) and as well as promising to invest £200million the PM has apparently also agreed with several big tech players to setup tech innovation centres there (including Google and HP).

There is an interesting post over at Tech Crunch Europe that you should read for more details.

Better Run Run

2010-11-05T12:21:00.000-07:00

So, its 4 days late (from me, not from King Hammer) but here is MC Hammer's response to Jay-Z's diss on Kanye's "So Appalled".. check out the video below

Kanye West

2010-10-24T03:29:00.000-07:00

So, maybe Kanye is finally going to come with a good album**. His recent GOOD Friday's (he has been giving away a song every Friday for a few weeks now) have been really nice and been working with some good artists that could really make for a well rounded album.. so lets just wait and see!

His latest song "Runaway (the douchebag song)" comes with a 35 minute video, not to mention an auto-tune free singing kanye..

** I like a lot of Kanye's music, Gold Digger, Stronger, etc, are really great singles - and he has consistently released good singles, however, I have never felt he has managed to compose a good album - his non single tracks just don't seem to stand up enough as just regular listening.

PostScript 2 - Movie Quotes

2010-10-24T03:16:00.000-07:00

Speaking of the Spike Lee quote, I recently read an article in the New York Times (via kottke) about how the era of great movie quotes is over, and how its been probably at least a decade since we have had anything resembling a "classic" quote in a film, the type that has been repeated across playgrounds/pubs/living rooms for months after a film.

Trying to rack my brains of recent film quotes that I have enjoyed recently and I really can't think of any, in fact, I'm struggling to think of any truly great films of late..

PostScript 1

2010-10-24T03:05:00.000-07:00

On the topic of achieving anything, I heard an interesting observation recently whilst listening to a talk by Alain De Botton.

He observed, that if you go to a large bookstore and go to the self help section there is a clear divide between the bulk of the books - half of them are the big, bold, you can do anything! books, teaching its reader how to achieve anything and everything they have always wanted and how its only us stopping ourselves. The other half were books on coping with failure..

Whether or not this is strictly true in terms of what the books are, i thought it was interesting none the less.

Avoid the Grey Twilight

2010-10-24T03:00:00.000-07:00

For some time now I have been a big fan of the "Entrpreneurial Thought Leaders" lecture series they have been running at Stanford University, the basic premise being that every week throughout term they invite guest speakers from the world of entrepreneurship to come and talk about, well, anything they like.

Most of the talks are about how to become an entrepreneur, things to avoid, lessons learnt, etc, but they are always very interesting to listen to, so I highly recommend getting over to their site and checking them out. They generally put the new lectures up pretty quickly and have an archive of over 100 great lectures (a whole range of speakers including Steve Balmer (Microsoft CEO), Marissa Myers (Google VP), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook CEO) and many more - you can check it out at itunes.stanford.edu or just search for Stanford in your iTunes store and it should come up (all the lectures are free downloads, and there are also many more lectures and complete courses that can be downloaded).

The most recent one I have listened to is one by Alec Ross, who was chief tech advisor to President Obama during his campaign (which is a pretty massive role, considering the role that the web/tech played in giving him the edge) and is now chief advisor on innovation to Secretary of State Hilary Clinton. Alec gave 4 pieces of advice to anyone wanting to become an entrepreneur:

1. Manage your time like you manage your money,
2. Hire believers
3. Avoid the Grey twilight

Most of the advice was very similar to that given across the ETL series, but with different anecdotal stories, but I quite like his piece of advice "avoid the grey twilight" - this was in reference to a quote by Theodore Roosevelt:

"Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in that grey twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat"

I think this is a great quote, and have always remembered a very similar quote from Spike Lee's basketball film "He Got Game", which I can only assume is based on the above:

"And if we fail, at least we fail whist daring greatly, so we will not be remembered with those cold timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat"

I am of the mind that people can achieve anything, and if we put our minds to things they can be done..

Angry Birds

2010-10-16T10:49:00.000-07:00

Two pieces of news on the Angry Birds front this week, firstly, the full, free Angry Birds game was released to the Android market on Friday.. which is great news for Android users (even if it did bring down the market on release!)

There is also word of stuffed angry birds toys! check out the link below to TechCrunch who reported it (from geekchicdaily.com

Tech Crunch Article

Last Exit to Nowehere - Trading Places Tribute

2010-10-09T08:50:00.000-07:00

The guys over at LETN have created a homage to the Eddie Murphy classic Trading Places. I would have prefered it if the image was in the centre of the shirt rather than as an emblem, but its a nice one none the less.

Essential Zombie Graph

2010-10-02T12:17:00.000-07:00

(from yahoo)

the cold streets

2010-10-01T13:11:00.000-07:00

View Larger Map

Google Street View in Antarctica

.. that reminds me

2010-10-01T12:33:00.000-07:00

Seeing the Fallon and Timberlake thing reminded me how much I enjoy The Roots' "The Seed 2.0". I think it may be my favourite hip hop tune, so here's the video

The most unexpected history of rap ever

2010-10-01T12:30:00.000-07:00

Aaron Cohen over at Unlikely Words posted a link to a clip from Jimmy Fallon's show featuring Justin Timberlake where the pair do an "impromptu" performance of the history of rap. Its really worth watching

It might get taken down to due content restrictions from NBC, so you may need to search youtube for it to find it but worth the work

Stop... Hammer Time

2010-10-01T12:17:00.000-07:00

MC Hammer was performing over at Tech Crunch's Disrupt conference this week so the twitter-sphere has been a buzz with generally very positive reviews, however, one tweet that did get noticed was MC Hammer promising a diss track to Jay-Z to be released by the end of the month..

The Answer to Jay comes on Oct 31 ( Devils Nite) ..I saw him coming.

See, no need for such nastiness. I'm going back to the baggy pants that keeps you off guard. :)

The messages were in reply to a line form Jay-z on a recent track "So Appalled" talking about Hammer losing all his money. Personally, I'm looking forward to the 31st!

Geek Chic Apparel

2010-09-26T10:25:00.000-07:00

I thought I would share some geek-chic apparel with you all, well just for the fun of it, so here goes:

A pretty cool bright yellow calculator watch from Vestal - available here (there is also a similar, but cheaper one available here)

I like this one just because I like the Golden Ration.. sad isn't it. (available here)

A new t-shirt range from Zach Levi's new company - check it out at nerdmachine.com

Ghostbusters tribute from the guys over at lastexittonowhere

Harry Potter trailer

2010-09-25T07:03:00.001-07:00

Trailer for the latest installment of the Harry Potter films.. thats all.

Sporting Magic

2010-09-18T12:24:00.000-07:00

In this week's Sport magazine (a free sporting newspaper/magazine that is given away in London) there was an interview with Roger Federer which made me think. I am not normally that interested in tennis, but I was thinking, why is it that I remember moments of individual sporting excellence so well. Its a bit like when people say you always remember when you heard that JFK/Diana/Lennon etc was killed (I only remember one of those by the way..), I seem to remember these moments of individual sporting skills, Roberto Carlos' curling free kick in '98, Zidane's best goal, Usain Bolt's records, Dennis Bergkamp's '98 goal (of the tournament).. the list goes on.

Anyway, I don't really have any further thoughts on why 2 seconds of sporting genius may be so burnt in to my memory some 10 years after, but its all just an excuse to show some clips!

Bergkamp's Goal against Argentina in France '98

Usain Bolt's 9.58 100m record

My favourite ever Zidane goal

Federer doing some crazy stuff in between filming an advert

Ronaldinho's Crossbar tricks

Couldn't not put a Welsh try video up could I!

Android Market Update

2010-09-18T11:50:00.000-07:00

Well I released a third app to the Android Market last weekend, this time it is just a simple Shopping List application; it allows you to create as many shopping lists as you need, as well as creating "recipes" - custom ingredient lists for set meals that can then just easily be added to any required shopping list.

As well as that, I have just last night hit 1,000 total downloads in the market! which is nice, as it has realistically only been a few weeks.

The next project is a 2-D game that i am working on with some friends, so hopefully the next update will be 1,000,000 downloads..

Logorama

2010-09-11T03:38:00.000-07:00

Over at Jason Kottke's blog he has posted a link to the full version of Logorama available to watch online. I had not heard of this short animated film (released '09) but have to say, it might be the most awesome short film you may ever watch. Really. Watch it now.

Logorama from Human Music & Sound Design on Vimeo.

The film is set in a version of LA where the settings and characters are made from thousands of famous logos. Apparently won the Academy Award for best short animated film and the Prix Kodak in Cannes in 2009.

Like I said, it's awesome.

Google's Walk 'n' Talk

2010-09-10T12:28:00.000-07:00

Google have also introduced a new innovation for its Android platform in the form of Walking Navigation and Google Street View - Check out Engadgets write up here..

Google's Plans for Search

2010-09-10T12:23:00.000-07:00

Many of you may have noticed that Google's "instant search" is now available - If you haven't seen it, head over to google.co.uk and start searching.. whereas before Google's suggested search options were displayed in the drop down, the search results are now displayed as you type.

It isn't entirely useful, as generally if you want to search for something, the results you get back for half the search phrase aren't often relative (think of if you started typing "how do i.." previously, you had lots of suggested searches, none of which likely to be the desired search).

That said, it does allow for a more educational search experience, essentially spreading the net wide at first and as you continue to type the the search refines and narrows in on its selected results, but along the way you may find some results of interest that you might not have found before.

Atlantic magazine has a small follow up on their CEO Schmidt's recent talk in Germany and his plan for autonomous searching.

Fire It Up-Date

2010-09-05T01:39:00.000-07:00

Well it's been a little while since my last Fire It Up post, so here is some coverage the track has got from the beeb..

here is an article about it

Here is Kof on 1Xtra chatting with Twin B:

Two new Android Apps..

2010-08-30T11:28:00.000-07:00

I have finally published my first two mobile apps to the Android market.

You cannot actually search the market officialy online, as Google only permit it via an Android mobile device, but you can find them here

Its been a long time coming, but there is another one on its way shortly.

Power Laces.. Alright! (and 5 years early!)

2010-08-26T03:52:00.000-07:00

Awesome news has come in from over on the Engadget website - having already seen that the hoverboard has been created (see my post here), Nike have now submitted a patent to create self-lacing shoes!

It's all coming together now..

The God Delusion (for people who don't read much)

2010-08-26T03:33:00.000-07:00

Last night on UK channel "More Four" was the first episode of a documentary "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins; his book by the same name made a bit of a stir 3 or 4 years when it came out, upsetting believers across the country.

As it happens, I was skimming his book in Waterstones just before going on holiday recently (settled on the accidental billionaires instead) so when I saw this was one I was quite interested to watch.

On the whole, I was quite disappointed, it was two hours so i could waffle on for ages, but here were my two main gripes..

Despite being called the "God Delusion", he didn't really go after God at all, but rather religion and the stupidity of people (maybe it should have been called the "Religion Delusion", or just "Some People are Stupid").
The majority of the film saw Dawkins talking with extreme examples of different faiths and highlighting the errors of their ways. He talked about the opression of people (homosexuals, abortion), murder and wars (middle east Israel problems) and the restriction of freedom of thought put on people in these extreme groups (private Jewish communities in north London, extreme american evangelists, etc).
But despite at one point even comparing an American pastor's sermon to a Nuremburg rally, he failed to raise the fairly self-evident truth, that in fact, these acts are people's failings, not God's, and you only have to look to Hitler and the Nuremburg rallies to see examples of all of the above withot God being in the mix. Like I said, it just seemed to be saying that sometimes people get it wrong.
Throughout the film Dawkins referred a lot to people not being enlightend, about how people were turning to religion and not science, and the importance of science in schools. This considered, I would have like to have seen a more scientific grounding for the film. A particular lowpoint was his comparison of natural design and evolution, I will para-phrase below, but you can check it out online (it was in the firs 30mins or so i think)

[Richard Dawkins stands at the foot of a steep face of a mountain]
Dawkins: Lets call this "Mountain Improbable", believing in natural design is liking jumping one big jump up this huge cliff face to the top of the mountain in one go.

[Richard Dawkins now walks up gentle incline]
Dawkins: Evolution however, is like climbing this mountain one step at a time, a lot easier (and i guess somehow therefore more probable?) than natural design.

That was it. I would say that would pretty much be an all time low for any self respecting scientist. The fact that him talking about mountains really does mean nothing to anyone aside, he also very quickly skimmed over the fact that some of those small, easy steps up evolutions path were also pretty massive leaps up the mountain (oh jeez, hes got me using his crazy analogy now!), ignoring the big, challenging questions that face either camp.

The second installment is on next week, and despite my qualms, I will prob atill make the effort to watch in the hope it gets better. You can also watch the first episode again on the 4oD video here

Google announce phone calls from Gmail

2010-08-25T11:56:00.000-07:00

Google have recently announced via their blog that they are going to start allowing phone calls from a gmail account to regular phones. Apparently calls to US/Canada will be free for the remainder of the year and all the other rates will be "competitive".

Further more, if you have already registered with GoogleVoice then the caller ID will be registered as your nuber.

The feature is going be rolled out in the next couple of days, more info at http://gmail.com/call

Samsung launch tablet computing teaser

2010-08-25T03:46:00.000-07:00

Samsung have just released a video teaser of their forthcoming Galaxy Tab (due to be fully announced in Germany in September)

You can check the 19second video below,

You have to be quick, and rewatch the video several times to catch all the features they seem to be boasting but the most notable include Android 2.2, Flash support, HD video playback and an e-reader.

So we jsut need to wait untill September to see the full details..

Favourite Samples Part 1

2010-08-24T12:44:00.000-07:00

For a long time now I have been wanting to do a post on my favourite hip hop samples ever. I always love a bit of crate-digging and love to hear samples that other people have dug up.

A lot of these lists you wil see on the web focus on classic breaks, and thats all good and well, but no-one really wants to hear me banging on the importance and influence of Lynne Collins' Think break, Orange Krush's Action or the Amen. So this list is of the more melodic nature. Hopefully you will enjoy listening to these pieces of music as much as I do...

1. Wendy Rene - After Laughter Comes Tears
A beautiful soul tune from the ever reliable Stax camp that formed the basis for Wu Tangs 90's classic Tearz

2. Honey Cone - Innocent Untill Proven Guilty
Not normally a fan of Kanye's work, but his use of this track for Common's Testify from his album Be. Worth listening to some of the other tunes from this all girl soul group

3. Quincy Jones - Summer in the City
We can't really ignore Quincy's contribution to samplers everywhere, but this one is just too classic, sampled so many times, but most notably the intro sampled for hip hop classic Passin me By (Pharcyde)

4. Enoch Light - Hi Jack
It took me a long, long time to track this vinyl down, but after much hunting i managed to get hold of it from the US, listen close or you will miss the sample, but if you don't, you will recognise it in an instant.. Beatnuts Watch Out Now

5. Arthur Verocai - Na Boca Do Sol
Possibly my favourite sampled artist, this south American jazz artists finest piece of work.. (sampled by MF Doom and 9th Wonder). No clean video on youtube for this one, but you can head to his Myspace and listen there

Na Bca do Sol by Arthur Verocai

6. Irene Reid - Didn't We
Classic female soul interlude, done with real class. Taken from her The World Needs What I Need. The whole album was sampled heavily in Kanye's early work (if you check some of his early mixtapes)

7. The Moments - To You With Love
Absolute classic soul cut, that needs nothing doing, but Dilla managed it.. Last Donut of the Night (from Donuts) - had to include Dilla's version as well..

8. Ann Peebles - Trouble, Heartaches and Sadness
Another big soul tune (again worth checking here other work here) used for GZA's ShadowBoxing

9. The Mohawks - Champ
Had to include this one on the list on account of it being the basis of one of my favourite hip hop tunes ever.. KRS One - Step in to a world (the live version was also sampled by Prodigy for "Charly" incidentally)

10. Incredible Bongo Band - In A Gadda Da Vidda
Not the tune you expected huh? real nice vibe to this track, which was pretty much just lifted straight for Nas' recent "Hip Hop Is Dead"

hope you all enjoyed them! I will probably do another installment soon..

Fire It Up - MOBO Song of the week

2010-08-24T11:55:00.000-07:00

Ok, Ok, so this is the last "Fire It Up" post, I promise.. probably

But Kof ft. Wiley and Chelcee Grimes - Fire It Up has been selected as the current song of the week over at the MOBO site.. lets hope its signs of things to come!

Check out the article here

Travie Mccoy - Billionaire

2010-08-23T11:51:00.001-07:00

Another real nice tune as we approach the Bank Holiday. This one is Travie Mccoy and is Billionaire, of the Billionaire EP.

This is already available on iTunes and recommended..

Cee-Lo-Green - F*** You

2010-08-23T11:47:00.000-07:00

The new video for Cee-Lo's new single has been doing the rounds on the web recently and is a real nice tune. Definetly worth checking out, although as the title suggests it is NSFW.

The song is off his forthcoming "The LadyKiller" lp due to drop 4th October (apparently)

Fire It Up Released!

2010-08-23T05:09:00.001-07:00

Fire It Up Release... the countdown begins!

2010-08-22T12:34:00.000-07:00

Kof's Fire It Up is being released tomorow (or as of midnight tonight if your that keen!)

You can buy teh mp3 from Amazon here...

The Complete Single (remixes & B-side):

Just "Fire It Up":

The Remix:

Last Exit To Nowhere

2010-08-22T11:58:00.000-07:00

I thought it was about time i posted a link to mostly the coolest t-shirt company ever... mostly.

Last Exit To Nowhere make some really awesome film insired t-shirts, but not like the more blatant efforts you might find on an average high st. LETN build their designs around subtle people, events, corporations etc in classic films.. basically, it would take a real geek to spot the reference. Check the store out here, and I have also embedded their FlickR stream below as well to give you a taster:

I should also post some of my favourites:

Nakatomi Corporation, the company running Nakatomi Plaza, the setting for "Die Hard"

"Han's Tournament" from Enter the Dragon

Kof - Fire It Up - MTV Exclusive Video

2010-08-17T02:32:00.000-07:00

The official music video for Kof's Fire It Up has hit the MTV site, check it out! or just watch below..

Kof ft Wiley & Chelcee Grimes - 'Fire It Up' from MTV - The Wrap Up on Vimeo.

(p.s. this is not the same as the video posted last month).

Also, its available to pre-order on amazon now..

Steve Jobs in '95

2010-08-17T02:25:00.000-07:00

A little while ago, there was a post on kottke featuring a selection of Steve Jobs interviews; one from '95 (back at Apple and Pixar but pre-Toy Story), a year later and then the 2007 interview with Bill Gates.

Some of the transcripts are quite long but they are definitely worth reading.. its particularly seeing what he was saying back in 1995, and also has some very interesting ideas on education, which I think would be really interesting..

What does the State of California spent per pupil per year in a public school? About forty-four hundred dollars ... I believe very strongly that if the country gave each parent a voucher for forty-four hundred dollars that they could only spend at any accredited school several things would happen. Number one schools would start marketing themselves like crazy to get students. Secondly, I think you'd see a lot of new schools starting. I've suggested as an example, if you go to Stanford Business School ...You could get a bunch of people coming out of college tying up with someone out of the business school, they could be starting their own school. You could have twenty-five year old students out of college, very idealistic, full of energy instead of starting a Silicon Valley company, they'd start a school

read the 1995 interview here.

or read the next one here

Google Mobile Announcements

2010-08-12T13:19:00.000-07:00

Google arranged a press conference tonight to make two big announcements for their Android mobile platform.

First of the announcements was about their Voice actions, they have enhance the Voice control for their mobile platform from more than just voice search to enabling the use and control of a range of applications by voice actions.

The second was Chrome to Phone - which is a continuous client application that allows any website you browse to push the site to an Android device, giving better control and experiences of other Google products like youTube, maps, etc.

Note to self..

2010-08-11T12:16:00.000-07:00

There are some fairly entertaining memos that have been found from the late 70s from the "Tiger Oil" company, based in Houston USA over on http://www.lettersofnote.com/

The CEO seems thoroughly angry and generally unpleasant, so makes for a great read - particular favourites are where he threatens to ban coffee in the office (like he had already done for food) and where he asks for no member of staff to speak to him...

Full list and transcript can be found here

Continuous Deployment and the Lean Startup

2010-08-11T12:08:00.001-07:00

For anyone interested in the "Lean Startup" (or in entrepreneurship on the whole - if this is new to you and you are interested in tech startups then it is very interesting - one of the main guys is Eric Reis and has a very interesting blog here) I read a recent guest post on Eric Reis' blog about Continuous Deployment by one of the head guys at kaChing (online/e payment startup).

Most of us are probably pretty up to speed with what continuous integration is, but the idea of continuous deployment, and the changes to the traditional design-build-test-fix cycle to a much shorter time frames (we're talking averaging 20 deploys to a Live environment a day!) really makes you think.

I'm not sure it would suit larger, or more traditional corporate environments, but its really interesting to see it put in to life over at kaChing.

You can find the blog here, and there is also a lecture video about the topic here along with the slides to accompany it here

Fire It Up - DJ Mag review

2010-08-07T03:43:00.000-07:00

Just a quick update on Kof's Fire It Up single (see earlier post for video) - i have just read the review of the tune in DJ mag, it got 4.5 out of 5, which is real nice!

The full review is here

Edit: The tune is being released the 23rd August on iTunes - although i will probably post an update closer to the date

Holiday Reading

2010-08-03T12:45:00.000-07:00

Whilst I was on holiday i managed to read two books. Firstly, I read "The Accidental Billionaires", which is a semi-fictional, semi-biographical account of the founding of Facebook. It was not a particularly well written book, and it tries to stay as true to life as possible as most of the research was based on accounts/articles from the time, so the author tries not to speculate or imagine too much of the finer details. That said it is still a fascinating read, and its nice to hear some details from the founding of Facebook, so i did enjoy it, if only for the insight.

The second book was "The Code Book" by Simon Singh. I have had the book on my shelf for a couple of years, but i never had a chance to get around to reading it, but i am thoroughly glad i got around to it.

The book is a history of encryption and secret codes from the start of time, and a long with it includes a lot of historical stories and details about the usage of code (ranging from stories of Xerces from Herodotus, to Mary Queen of Scots, Enigma Machine from WW2) and it is excellent. The stories, a long with the plainly written technical details of encryption make for a great read and is very educational.

2001: A Space Oddysey (remix)

2010-08-03T12:36:00.000-07:00

Read an amusing re-writing of the most famous scene of the famous kubrick film 2001: A Space Oddysey.

(snippet below, as Dave is about to start dismantling HAL)

Hal: Those are my memory cards.

Bowman: These? So they are.

Hal: You put my memory back right now, motherfucker. You hear me? You want a card on your birthday? Because I don't think I will remember to send you one if I do not have my memory cards. As that is what memory cards are for. Are you listening to me?

Its only short, and worth the read. Check it here

holiday snaps

2010-08-02T12:55:00.000-07:00

As mentioned, i have just returned from Zakynthos on holiday and whilst there i went for a stroll taking some photos of the real parts of the island.

my mother always complains whenever i show her my holiday photos, as they are always random photos of buildings or signposts and never of me and my wife and things we did, and this is true to form (there are normal photos, but, im not going ot put those up here..)

back from holidays, and some people dancing

2010-08-02T12:49:00.001-07:00

I have been off on holiday for the last week, and have had a great time relaxing in the sun by the sea/pool, just eating, sleeping and swimming.

As a result I have loads of thoughts and ideas, so there may be an influx of blogs coming this way soon, but in the meantime, here is an awesome video of some guys "turf dancing" (from kottke.org - and as kottke says, its basically breakdancing 2.0)

this years Princeton commencement speech

2010-07-22T13:51:00.000-07:00

The guy who founded Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos, gave this years commencement speech to the new students. The full text can be found here, its called "We are what we choose" and one of the things he mentions is that it is harder to be kind than clever, which i quite like - he goes on about the differences between gifts and choices, (clever=gift, kind=choices) and how gifts are easy really, but that making the wrong choices can often be to the detriment of your gifts. Ive not really done it justice, but its worth a read..

(from kottke - i figured i should start putting links to other sites/bloggers that i find this random stuff from, as they do the harder stuff in finding it in the first place)

Kof - Fire It Up

2010-07-22T13:44:00.000-07:00

So last summer, during two weeks I had off on my own (my wife couldn't take the time off work and I had to use up my annual leave), I wrote a tune, which has now been used as the basis for a track by upcoming independent artist Kof (from Urbeatz).

So I should have co-writing credits on the tune for the original track, but it was re-produced and spruced up by a talented chap called ChartStalker.

Also rather excitingly, it features established brit mc Wiley (of "what you call it", Roll Deep, dizzee rascal fame)

Its gonna be the first single from Kof's upcoming single and you can check the video below:

its getting lots of play on radio including BBC 1Xtra so feel free to request it on your local station!

Facebook the movie

2010-07-15T13:36:00.000-07:00

Film about Facebook (based on the book the Accidental Billionaires) called Social Network is expected to hit the cinemas in autumn, and the trailers have started to hit the net..

I know that Facebook really was groundbreaking, and at the time it was crazy the rate at which it grew (now eclipsed really by Twitter/Zynga et al) but you can't help but laugh when the climatic part of the traler is "it got 22 hundred hits in the first hour? ...no... 22 thousand!"...

I mean, really? thats hardly edge of the seat thriller stuff is it?

(footnote. I will probably still go and see it though, and having been reminded I may even go buy the book before my holiday this summer)

Back to the Future III

2010-07-15T13:31:00.000-07:00

well, i've done two so why not a third.. might as well go for the trilogy - someone has done a video syncing up Back To TheFuture video clips with a song called Tik Tok by someone called Ke$ha, which is pretty entertaining..

Encrypted Code in US Cyber Command

2010-07-10T07:54:00.000-07:00

The American military has a new Cyber Command unit, responsible for all things webby and hi-tech, and as you would expect the department has its very own logo, but the neat part is the logo contains an encrypted code message! (look closely at the inner circle surrounding the eagle)

You can read more about it here in Wired, but I will have to have at least a try at this later!

Great Scott Marty!

2010-07-06T02:21:00.001-07:00

You know, when I started writing this blog, I really did not expect to blog a single Back to the Future post, but it seems the fate has conspired in such away that we are having two in as many months!

Some of you may have seen alot of buzz about the twitter-sphere about the fact that yesterday was the day the doc travels to in the future in the original film.. but it turns out they were wrong, and we actually have another 5 years to wait untill the fateful date, for those dedicated enough there is a video on youtube with all the dates..

Designs

2010-06-27T10:23:00.000-07:00

Having done some fleeting design work for an independent recording artist/record label (Revolution @ GIFA Enterprises) I finally got around to creating a deviant art profile and have started adding some work I have been doing.

I was tasked with creating a coherent, consistent brand for Revolution and the label, which i have been working on at his myspace and website, as well as promotional artwork (cd/dvd covers, flyers, etc - above)

Summer Hols

2010-06-27T09:38:00.000-07:00

Well, I have just returned from a summer break in north wales, just in time to see England be knocked out of the World Cup in an abysmal fashion. All is not lost though, as this means Germany will likely meet Argentina in the quarters which should make for a good game as along with Spain they are looking like some of the strongest contenders so far.

My quiz application for Android (for the NBC hit series Chuck) is approaching completion, and functionally it seems to be just about there, now the focus is primarily just collating the questions, which is a pretty arduos task! But hopefully, once i have checked out the details that should be on its way to the app market, but you can see some screenshots of it over on my site thirdmindmedia (i have updated the main header with the shots). I have also approached UK broadcaster currently carrying Chuck to see if they are interested in endorsing it and getting some branding on it, but yet to hear anything back so I will keep you posted.

Well, im back now so hopefully there should be some more posts on there way now.

Back to the Future Hover Board

2010-05-30T08:49:00.000-07:00

Saw an awesome article on Engadget this morning about an artist who has actually recreated the hover board from Back to the Future (specifically II and then also in III), and it actually hovers!

This really made my morning, a bit like when I found out about WOPR being for sale (War Games computer... how about a game of chess)

HOVERBOARD - NILS GUADAGNIN from nils guadagnin on Vimeo.

Full article is here

Further FroYo

2010-05-22T05:30:00.001-07:00

I have just read that some Nexus-Ones have had an overnight update and are now sporting the very latest in Fro-Yo! I guess thats one of the perks of being Google's flagship (and only) mobile..

Android Fro-Yo Released

2010-05-22T05:21:00.000-07:00

As expected, Google have now released Android 2.2 (named FroYo) at their I/O conference this week. I havent had a chance to download it and have a run with it yet, but I plan to do so either tomorow or some time in the coming week. There is quite a nice rundown of updates here

In other Google news, you may have noticed that the homepage icon is currently a playable(!!) adaptation of Pac-man (including authentic sounds) to note Pac-Mans 30th anniversary.

I plan to have some serious time working on my latest android app tomorow, so hopefully expect some updates soon..

Google I/O Conference Kicks Off

2010-05-19T13:51:00.000-07:00

Google I/O is starting in LA today and there has been for some time been speculation as to what is expected to be being announced.

The update to Android to 2.2 is inevitable, with the giant "fro-yo" taken pride of place outside the Google HQ for a while (for those who haven't seen Google's previous Android updates check here..)

Today they announced some new updates to Chrome, including a Chrome app-store; in a similar vein to the Android (or apple) app stores for mobiles, but for your browser. The idea is users will be able to download apps for their browser (as long as they are using Chrome) just like you can on your mobile.

The big news expected for tomorrow is the announcement of a new Google, web-enabled TV platform - so we'll keep our eyes peeled for that!

Google Spoof

2010-05-18T11:01:00.000-07:00

The Onion News Network have done a pretty funny take on GooglePhone's "Whisper Targeted Ads" which is worth watching for a laugh..

New Google Phone Service Whispers Targeted Ads Directly Into Users' Ears

Chuck returns to the UK!

2010-05-18T03:06:00.001-07:00

Some awesome news that I have been waiting on for some time has finally been confirmed today.. Chuck Season 3 is returning to the airwaves in the UK this month!

Virgin1 (available on Freeview) has carried both the first two seasons of the show and is currently re-showing the second series during the day, culminating with the season 2 finale on the 31st, with the first episode kicking off that same evening.

For those who haven't caught the first two seasons, it comes highly recommended; the basic premise being a tech-support nerd accidentally downloads a computers worth of government secrets in to his head as part of a secret goverment project.

Confirmation of the show has come in the form of RadioTimes listing

hackers

2010-05-17T12:43:00.000-07:00

I read a great article today about the "Conficker" worm... its a worm that has been around a few years now and a crack squad has been set up to try and take it on.. you can read it here

updates from Twitter

2010-05-16T06:45:00.000-07:00

Unfortunately, as you may have all read recently, Twitter are going on a bit of a spree putting us poor hardworking developers out of business.. well, actually, not really.. they are just starting to plug holes, in an attempt to make Twitter a more rounded, fuller product - which is a smart move.

The downside is of course, as they are announcing official android, blackberry and undoubtedly other official Twitter mobile apps, it makes my twitter app in the making fairly redundant.

That said, I was primarily developing it to brush up on my android knowledge, and was only ever going to release it as a free app, so will probably still release it anyway.

I am currently working on a little quiz game at the moment, so keep your eyes peeled for that one!

Tablet computing

2010-05-16T06:39:00.000-07:00

So the I-Pad is finally available to pre-order in the UK, with an expected arrival date of the 28th May.

It seems to have taken off better than i had expected in all honesty, as apparently early sales have outdone the equivalent early sales of the i-phone.

I read recently about a £130,000 I-pad that is available at the moment.

Also in older news, i read quite a nice rundown of alternatives for those who are keen to get involved in tablet computing but dont want to buy an i-pad. The one that looks the nicest to me is the WeTab (formally named WePad in that list) from Germany, it looks slick and running a fairly nice spec and Android to boot I may have to have a closer look

HTC Desire pricing update

2010-05-16T06:35:00.000-07:00

the Desire has now hit all the major mobile providers in the UK, and unfortunately the price has gone up..

most providers seem to be in the £25/30 a month range now to get the phone reasonably. I spoke to T-Mobile yesterday, as there prices have now also seen a big jump and apparently the reason is that too many people were taking out the contracts at £10/month and paying a fairly meager sum to purchase the phone ( i think it was originally priced at £60-100 on the £10 contract) and then just sticking the device on ebay..

On a similar note, Google's Nexus One device will shortly be hitting our stores here in the UK, although i think it will be similarly priced, so the wise money would probably still be on the Desire.

HTC Desire hits the UK

2010-03-28T09:33:00.000-07:00

Some exciting news for UK gadget and Android fans is that HTC's Desire mobile phone has just last week been released on T-Mobile, and its looking likely that the device will be following on Orange, O2, Vodafone and 3 in the next month or so.

HTC are the manufacturers behind Google's very own Nexus One, and one first appearances HTC seem to have followed a very similar blueprint for the Desire. The look and feel of the phone are near identical to N1, with the exception that Desire has HTC's heralded "sense" UI and has a optical rollerball rather than the N1's physical rollerball.

What is even more good news is that the pricing from T-Mobile is very reasonable, offering contracts from £10 a month (the £15 a month contract the phone costs ~£95) - I am holding on to see what the other providers price it at, but I think one will be coming my way pretty soon!

Thirdmindmedia App Development

2010-03-28T09:30:00.000-07:00

Another aside, I have re-jigged the website http://www.thirdmindmedia.co.uk a little - I have decided to move it away from just a personal site, no longer just being an extension of the blog with my ramblings, but having it more dedicated to the android development, as hopefully in a few months i will have a couple of those apps in the app store.

So check it out, its a whole new look, but there isnt much content yet...

long awaited return...

2010-03-28T09:23:00.000-07:00

It feels like it has been ages since i have blogged, well, i suppose it has been a month to the day since my last blog, so I should post another update...

The main reason for the being so quiet on the blogging front is I have been swamped with loads of other things and so any time I have been having on the computer has been spent working on the projects.

Mostly i have been working on my Android Twitter app, which is coming along pretty nicely - i am smoothing out some issues and tweaking littles aspects here and there and it should be ready for general release soon. I will be releasing it for free, but still need to register with the Android market first to get it up on there. In the meantime i have also began a second app - this time a silly little trading game, based loosely on the classic 80s film Trading Places, its currently named after Eddie Murphys character Billy-Ray. Its just going to be a simple stock market game whereby you have 30days to try and make as much money as possible, with extra twists and turns such as being able to try your hand at insider trading (which could result in prosecution and bankruptcy!).

I have also been continuing work with my extjs/jpa web app - and have recently been looking in to testing the UI using Selenium (an automated web test tool). Selenium seems like a really nice tool, but i have already encountered several issues with testing ExtJs with it... a full post on that experience will hopefully follow!

Android update

2010-02-28T08:30:00.000-08:00

It has been a busy few weeks, what with the Six Nations rugby championship starting a few weeks ago, plus things in work getting a lot more hectic, I have not had chance to work very much on my projects or to be updating things here!

I have had some time here and there, and over the last few weeks (mainly just some time here and there on the weekends) I have been working on my Android project, and I must say I am quite enjoying it. The Android sdk/emulator platform combined with the Eclipse plugin is suprisingly mature for something that is only a few years old, and I have been making progress with my Twitter application (provisionally called Zippy - although the screenshots are still showing Soundbiter - my other microblogging platform).

I have been making Activities here and there, but today I sat down and starting stringing things together.

So now, I have a logon screen, a view of all the latest tweets from the current users friends, a list view of current friends and a profile view - next up is to add some functionality to the context menus and add a search, retweet, message options and it will be coming close to realease...

Updates

2010-02-13T09:56:00.001-08:00

Well, things have been pretty busy here and I havent had much dedicated time for my projects. That said I have been making some moves on some things, my GoogleApp project is coming on nicely, and it is going to be tieing in with some micro blogging and hopefully tie in to a couple of the popular sites (twitter, facebook, now probably Google Buzz!) - the UI aspect hasnt really begun, but the Domain model and the controller/daos have largely been put together, so hopefully once I have some basic UI components coming together I should have a beta version of the app ready to demo.

Something else that I have spent some time doing this week is setting up my personal site. Its hosted at www.thirdmindmedia.co.uk, which is an address I have owned for several years (it actually hosted a community forum for south wales from about 2005-2009) but had been dormant for a few months so I thought I might as well have some fun, and host some of the projects stuff there. So yeah, check it out at www.thirdmindmedia.co.uk

the iPad

2010-01-30T08:09:00.000-08:00

I know I am days late with this post, and that there are probably already into the millions of posts and forum discussions about the iPad on the web right now but I thought I would throw in my two-cents worth as well.

There was a lot of hype in the build up to the launch this week, as there always is with Apple, but there were some differences that made some people talk... normally before a launch Apple remain tight lipped, saying nothing and ocasionally unofficially leaking information to the press to try and lower expectations (it was suspected that the "analysts" predicting the price of the iPad was going to be coming in at $1,000 was in fact due to an unofficial leak - so when Steve Jobs announce the entry level price was half that its a big win straight away). However, this time Apple were not so quiet about it, with it being mentioned a few times by some of the top dogs, most notably mr Jobs himself saying it was the best thing he had ever worked on.

So is the iPad going to be any good? in my humble oppinion, that depends, but it is looking like it will be a yes. For the iPad, or any new tablet device for that matter, to be successful it needs to offer something different, it needs to change the way we use things and do things - Recently Microsoft announced their tablet, which was quite hugely panned, because it was just a Windows machine in tablet form, which doesn't really offer much to anyone, as apart from the touchscreen functionality what does it really offer more than a NetBook? There is no real reason to use a tablet at home or in the office over a laptop/desktop so if all it really offers is a different way to surf the web or read things on the move then its just not that good.

Why does Apple have any chance of doing better than the Windows tablet? basically because of the emphasis on user interaction from the iPod/iPhone has paved the way for where tablet computing can really revolutionise computing.
A lot of people have been talking about using tablet devices to read newspapers and books, and it will change the way people read news, and this is true, but it needs to offer more than just the ability to read the content like you would from a website, the content needs to be interactive, for example, imagine a cookery book where you could read the recipe but also pull down videos of various stages, details about the ingredients and suggested alternatives, all without leaving the recipe page; or a history book where you could read about the second world war and pull down biographical information about various generals or see timelines and photos, again all without having to leave the page - without having to trawl through links on wikipedia.

That would be revolutionising the way we read, the way we learn and Apples UI naturally lends itself to an interface that facilitates this sort of interaction. However, unfortunately, all this content needs to be created, and thats not something Apple can do - its up to the content providers to "tablet-ify" their news, and publishers need to do the same for books and encyclopedias, and this is a big ask!

Thankfully for Apple, there are already a few startups appearing with the sole aim of helping publishers and content providers get the information in a iPad friendly format, so maybe in the not so distant future we will be seeing the change in the way we receive information...

so like i said... maybe.

Web App Woes..

2010-01-30T04:46:00.001-08:00

So things have been really hectic with work this week which has only really left me weekends for any of my ongoing endevours, and most of last weekend ended up being dedicated to getting the web app project up and running.

It started off with some more playing around with Spring Roo generation framework and decided to go from there. The idea for the application has changed from a simple requirement gathering application to a more robust design capture tool (focusing largely on the design of SOA integration work) so thought i will start from scratch with the Roo generated stuff as the foundation.

On the whole I am quite impressed with the ease of use of Roo, I am still not using it for complete JPA entity creation, but for basic webapp project setup and boilerplate configuration its pretty good - its still pretty immature and occasionally it stutters a bit and an import will be generated incorrectly (for example import java.java.util.list) but the ease of setting up the config and then switching it is pretty handy.

That said, last weekend was not without its cursing as i worked through some teething problems of my app (not largely caused by my stupiditiy though!)...

The first bump in the road was that I had selected to use EclipseLink as my JPA implementation, as I had worked with it before, however, I soon found that Roo still has some issues with EclipseLink, plus I intended to use JPA2.0 and Roo and EclipseLink2.0 definitely didnt play well together, so i have now switched to Hibernate
So on switching to Hibernate, the out of the box web site fired up fine and i was able to configure the basic security to allow login, and the first thing i wanted to do was move away from the basic xml configured users to using my own implementation of the Spring user security stuff. So I created the custom implementations of the Spring User class and the UserDetailService and plugged them in to the security configuration ("applicationContext-security.xml" - below for reference)


<beans:bean id="userService" class="com.tmm.design.security.UserDetailServiceImplemntation">
<beans:property name="accountController" ref="accountController" />
</beans:bean>


<authentication-manager alias="authenticationManager">
<authentication-provider userserviceref="userService">
<password-encoder base64="true" hash="md5"><beans:bean id="userService" class="com.tmm.designdesktop.security.UserDetailsServiceImpl">
<alt-source property="accountId">
</salt-source>
</beans:bean>
</password-encoder>

My security service now plugged in to the web login, I fired it up again and nothing - running through the debug my DAO was returning "account not found" - so I put together a quick java class that created an Account object and persisted it using the JPA layer, all seemed fine and a quick query showed the admin user now existed in my MySQL table. Once again I fired it up and tried to login, but still no account found... Baffled, I spent some time going around in circles, failing to understand how it was not finding my newly created user. As it turns out, this was my own fault - in the persistence.xml file i had defined the following Hibernate property.

<property name="hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto" value="create"/>

As it happens, this means everytime I restarted the server all the tables were dropped and recreated. Coming from EclipseLink, this would have been equivalent to the property "drop-and-create". I promptly changed to "update" and my acoount was finally being found!
Having now found the account, my app was still refusing logon - this time it was definitely my fault... I had created my Account entity (persisted Java class) and had created a method setAndEncodePassword(String password); that allowed passing of a plain text password to the method and it would then use the Spring MD5 Password encoder encode it, the only problem being that I was using the account ID as the salt for this encoding, and the ID was autogenerated by hibernate, so at the time of creating the new Account object and setting the password the ID had not yet been generated, so it was using null as the password salt, then as soon as the new account was persisted to the database the ID was updated making the password impossible to use!! I have now moved the password encoding to the AccountController class to ensure that the account object is persisted before any password is encoded.
The final strange thing i noticed, was that when in Eclipse, I normally set my Server settings to "Serve Modules without publishing" option for ease of development and refresh, however, I found that selecting this option prevented the site from displaying complaining that it could not find the .tagx files...

So I finally got my user security setup, this weekend I will get on with designing the domain model (I will be trying to model both a "Business Service" and a more general "Data Model" and have already got some interesting decisions to make with regards the solution, so it could be interesting)

Evolutionary Computation Roadmap

2010-01-17T09:20:00.000-08:00

Following the first release of the evolutionary programming framework last week I though I would put together something of an early roadmap for what is going to be being added along the way.

In no particular order:

GrayCode Individual/chromosome implementation and all re-combination methods
Arithmetic crossover
Cauchy Mutation
Gaussian Mutation
Best individual selection, tournament selection, roulette wheel selection
Best copuling
Invert coupling
Random coupling
Linear fitness scaling
Exponential fitness scaling

Spring Roo Test Run

2010-01-17T05:26:00.000-08:00

Just last week i was introduced to Spring Roo, and despite it having been around for a couple of months this was the suprisingly the first I had heard of it.

Those who were as oblivious as i was, Spring Roo is a generation framework for quickly and easily generate Sprin/JPA projects - and having skimmed through the overview and having read the quick start tutorials I was liking what I was hearing so throught I would have a play (i would like to make clear that this was not another distraction! this falls broadly under some of my web app projects... kind of). On the Spring Roo site () there is a 10minute tutorial as well as some slightly more comprehensive examples, although realistically even the other examples can be completed in under 10 minutes so I played around with both.

The idea is that from just a few commands a lot of the core boilerplate stuff for the project can be quickly and easily created, and in fact, with just a few more a lot of the code code can be generated also.

It can create the project and maven setup, create all the spring and JPA configuration files, create the tests and it can be used to define the JPA entities and the controller classes - and true to its word, you can get a web application created and deployed pretty quickly. I think in reality I would maybe not use it to create the JPA entites, as I prefer to be able to define that in an IDE (it also has a "perform eclipse" command which can create all the files so the project can be imported straight in to Eclipse, which was a nice touch) but it is definitely going to be of use for a lot of the boilerplate stuff.

I did hit a couple of minor glitches whilst playing with the tutorials, which I will share below in case anyone else experiences the same:

EclipseLink with the PizzaShop tutorial - Having most experience of EclipseLink JPA implementation I decided to use that again whilst following the tutorial rather than recommended Hibernate - when it came to then deploying and trying to start my Tomcat server I was getting an "Error creating bean with name "transactionManager", not particularly wanting to spend time trying to debug the tutorial example I reverted to Hibernate (which is easily done with just a few commands) and this problem was resolved
Next, once my Tomcat server was starting without error, when I visited the app I was getting the error "File "/WEB-INF/tags/language.tagx" not found" - thankfully, this time some quick googling discovered that this was linked to the server configuration within Eclipse - unchecking the "Serve modules without publishing" option fixed this and my pizzashop was online!

On the whole I was fairly impressed with the framework, and will surely save some time on future apps with the config and general setup - so is recommended.

Evolutionary Computation Framework BETA 0.1

2010-01-10T13:09:00.000-08:00

The first beta version of my evolutionary computation framework project has been finished... i say first version, its not really practically useable in any real way, but it seemed like a good point to pause for a moment and review the progress.

So here we are, the current release includes:

AbstractPopulation class - this contains the method to score the individuals, which must alway be overriden
AbstractIndividual & AbstractChromosome - these are abstract to allow different implementations (for example, binary/graycode etc)
BinaryIndividual & BinaryChromosome - binary implementations of the abstract classes

The binary implementations only currently contain single-point crossover recombination, and a simple implementation of the binary bit flip mutation method.

TMM Evolutionary Framework BETA 0.1

Google Collections 1.0 Final Released

2010-01-05T14:05:00.000-08:00

I noticed over the holidays that Google have released the final 1.0 release of their Goole Collections library. The Google Collections library is a custom extension of the Java Collections API, which at first glance seems to be very useful. The main benefit seems to be the reduction of code that developers would have to write for fairly common patterns using the existing API - the last few months I seem to have coded a lot of fairly ugly nested Maps, for example:

Map> map = new Hashmap>();

public void makeSale(Salesperson salesPerson, Sale sale) {
List sales = map.get(salesPerson);
if (sales == null) {
sales = new ArrayList();
map.put(salesPerson, sales);
}
sales.add(sale);
}

Multimap multimap = new ArrayListMultimap();

public void makeSale(Salesperson salesPerson, Sale sale) {
multimap.put(salesperson, sale);
}

(Taken From http://publicobject.com/2007/09/series-recap-coding-in-small-with.html)

Now it's just going to be a case of getting in to the habit of using the library, and I will see how it works out.

For more information, some guys have been doing a blog on lots of little before and after scenarios highlighting some of the nice features of the API which can be found here: http://publicobject.com/2007/09/series-recap-coding-in-small-with.html (the example above was taken from there, and of course, the library itself can be found here: http://code.google.com/p/google-collections/

more distractions...

2010-01-05T14:04:00.000-08:00

I sometimes think if I am being too fadd-ish, with my seemingly ever growing list of projects and technologies that I am working on - am I spreading myself too thin? following my expedition in to the DJango tutorials, I have now found another two things I want to work on, so these are being added to the list! (Django was not added to the list, that was just a bit of a jolly!)

Google Apps - having read an email regarding some google apps work, and having a brief look at the Google Apps for Java overview, it seems quite interesting, and not a million miles away from normal webapp with persistence data object development - so I am going to have a look in to that
This next one is coming more from a need than a particular interest in the technologies in question; I am going to have a look at building a Checkstyle extension to handle Javascript (Checkstyle is a Java code quality checking tool - with eclipse & maven plugins). I will not be writing the ANTLR Javascript grammar though, and will just try to re-use one of the available grammars on the web

So thats it (for the moment) for the list of things I will be playing with, lets hope it does not continue to expand too much...

So it begins

2010-01-05T14:02:00.000-08:00

So, towards the end of the seasonal break, after being distracted by the intrigues of Django, i managed to actually make a start on one the web app project (extjs/jpa).

It took relatively little time to get the server side stuff setup, setting up a basic domain model to allow modelling of my requirement structure (i will add some class diagrams in a later post) and the EclipseLink annotation to persist the objects to the db appeared to work with no problems - all good so far!

I put together a basic UI using EXTJS, with the grouped tabs example available in EXTJS 3.1 as the foundation for the layout of the app. I kept a lot of the example content for now, but created a few tabbed panes to display my new content. I decided to start creating the admin panel first of all - this decision seemed a little strange to me, but was driven by the fact that none of the tabs would have had any data to display in the first instance, so decided to start by providing a global admin control to allow easy addition of projects/users etc.

That was the Model and View started, so next began on the Controllers - the Controller structure i am using has three core controllers:
The Account Controller - this will be used for all the boilerplate user admin. I decided to keep this controller seperate from the main Model Controller as the users and account objects are not kept together with the domain model, so decided this would be the best approach
The Model Controller - this will be used for all Domain model updates/retrieval and will be the central controller for most actions in the app

The JSON Controller - the web app will be using JSON objects to send data between the UI and the controllers and this will be the central pivot point that receives all the http requests from the UI and then passes the data on to the necessary Controller to complete the action

Having a very bare skeleton of my entire MVC I decided to plug it all together with the simple example of a page that allowed new user creation.

I quickly generated the three controller classes, adding methods to the Account Controller to create/retrieve users and a chunk of the normal functionality you would expect around user authentication and created a method in the JSON controller that would be used to create a new user. I also added a form to the EXTJS UI that captured the basic user information required (name/email/password) and added an ajax request from the form to my new method in the JSON controller.

On deploying and firing up the application on tomcat it worked and logged in fine (having created a single user account using a quick Java app i put together), however, it all came unstuck when I tried to create load the table of existing user details.

The error i received was regarding a problem trying to execute a closed entity manager:

"Attempting to execute an operation on a closed EntityManager"

Unfortunately, Googling the issue did not throw any more light on it, with most of the forum posts/blogs with similar issues seemed to be resolved by adding @Transactional annotation to the methods using the EntityManager or not correctly adding the AnnotationDriven configuration option to the app context - but these were both fine in my case.

After spending several hours trying to resolve this, i finally had some joy on realising that the error had been born entirely out of my haste to get something strung together - Instead of parsing the data from the original JSON object within the JSON controller and then passing the data to the Account Controller to handle the DAO action, I had been lazy and was just getting the Account Controller within the JSON Controller and then directly accessing the user DAO from there. As a result, the EntityManager was open and worked fine when to create the Query within the DAO but then was closed following that so attempting to execute the Query triggered the resulting error. On promptly moving the EnittyManager and DAO action to the correct Account Controller it all worked fine, so we have started!

I am still curious as to why the EntityManager was closed after the initial use, as I had tried adding the @Transactional annotation to the JSON Controller method - I suspect I will have to do some further reading in to this, but for the time being, the app is working correctly so I will continue!

Distractions...

2009-12-31T09:49:00.000-08:00

hmm, ok, ok... i know it wasn't on my original plan, but i got distracted last night, so another one for the projects lists is learning/using Django. Django is a lightweight Python based web framework and so far it looks pretty slick!

I started the first tutorial last night to create a simple web poll application and i must say i am impressed so far - a few class path issues aside it was very simple to get up and running and i am very much liking the boilerplate bits and pieces that come as standard. I will post more on this as and when i do anything more exciting than just the tutorial!!

The Setup

2009-12-27T09:31:00.001-08:00

I thought i would start with a quick overview of the dev environment that i will be using for the projects:

Eclipse Gannymede; I thought about moving over to Galilleo, but have not made the move yet
Java 1.6x
EXTJS 3.x
Maven - I had my doubts about this one, having never enjoyed great success with the eclipse plugin, but I thought I would go for it id only for the library management (not having to worry about downloading JARs or the version numbers) and for its easy integration to things like Sonar and Artifactory...
Artifactory - having only ever used Archiva (and not been hugely impressed) and having read various posts about the best JAR management to use I have decided to have a go with Artifactory - and I will let you know how that works out!
Sonar for code quality assurance etc
I have Hudson as my preferred CI app, although its unlikely that will be put to great use
Subversion for CM

The Projects

2009-12-27T08:07:00.000-08:00

Hey,

so I have decided to embark on a few new tech related projects, and thought i would start a blog discussing and detailing my experiences. Ok, so historically when i have tried to start more serious blogging it has died a death after a few posts, but this time it will hopefully give me some time away from my projects when i will undoubtedly be googling for answers to whatever problems i am stuck with.

So to the projects, for so long now there have been a tonne of stuff that i quite fancied getting in t0 (or back into in some cases) so the things i have on the go are:

- Android - im finally going to get in to gear and start learning how to program mobile apps if google's Android

- WebKit - I quite fancy learning about the exciting stuff that is going on over at the WebKit OS project so will get that fired up and see what its all about

- AI - I studied AI as my degree, so quite fancy getting back in to that, particularly Evolutionary Computation and Artificial Neural Networks. I am thinking about starting to build up a framework for the two areas initially and will then see where it goes from there...

- A Business Requirements tool - I have been getting in to using the EXT JS JavaScript framework recently and I quite fancy working on a project using this. I know that requirements capture and management has been done already, so i may change my mind on this one, but i wanted to build some sort of useful real world tool, so at the moment is all about the requirements (anyone has any better ideas then let me know!)

That is mostly it at the moment, hopefully not spreading myself too thinly but im keen to get started so will hopefully post details soon. I will of course be publishing most of the stuff here so feel free to use/copy whatever you like!