The Codebelay Blog

4 Things I learned from blogging 11 days straight

barce — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 20:17:18 +0000

I said I was going to blog for 6 months straight but last night after a streak of 11 days I stopped.

I was at home, and after I moved my things into my new flat, I just passed out. I’ve been plain tired with the start-up, planning for the CSS meet up, an early and long drive from SF to LA, and a touch of jet lag from returning back from NYC.

But even though the project is a fail, here is what I learned:

I learned that you can blog from your smartphone using the WordPress App. This really helped while I was in Brooklyn and didn’t have my laptop.
Weekends really suck for a tech blog. My traffic just dropped.
Keyword focused-posts and quality posts grow traffic. There is no way around this.
A really good blog post can take up 4 hours of your day.

What I Like About iOS4 for the iPhone 3G

barce — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 06:49:58 +0000

I like:

folders, and
photo zoom

What I Hate About Apple: iOS4 slowed down my iPhone 3G

barce — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 01:24:36 +0000

I just want to chime in and say that my iPhone 3G is God awful slow now after updating to iOS4. I did the hard reset twice on it.

There was a moderate improvement, but I still run into spots where it’ll hang for a minute or two.

I really do hope they come out with an improvement to performance, which is rumored to come out soon.

Dineovore Gives Techies an API

barce — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 01:44:37 +0000

Check out Dinevore if you’re a foodie who is a techie. Their API is now live!

Contact them via twitter or contact their team via email.

Have You Used Facebook Places?

barce — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 22:55:32 +0000

Have you used Facebook Places? Do you find it useful? I used it once and didn’t find a need for it, or didn’t get hooked the way I got hooked with Foursqaure.

I have seen interesting interactions by folks who don’t use Foursquare in terms of creating fun pages for a Pho Venue in San Francisco.

That Pho place already has a great Yelp page, but now they’ve got a page on Facebook, too, so it really helps drive more eyeballs onto a business.

Comment below about what you think of Facebook Places.

Working on the Road

barce — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 01:16:18 +0000

Here’s how my Friday worked out.

5:30 am PDT Wake Up
5:45 am PDT Catch a Cab to SFO

6:25 am to 6:55 am PDT Work E-mails

7:25 am PDT Wheels up SFO
8:30 am Arrive LAX
8:30 am – 8:55 am Get Ticket for NYC & go through security again
9:00 am – 10:00 am Log into IM & plan out day

10:00 am – noon Make the database faster by sending search traffic to prod02, adding indexes where needed and optimizing table.

12:00 – 12:20 lunch at airport bk

12:40 – 14:00 Work on Android bug
14:00 – 14:55 compare SQL_CACHE vs. memcached. Use both? Where?

14:55 – 15:25 Board Flight; wheels up NYC.

15:25 – 15:45 Internet Blackout
15:45 – 18:00 Work on hosting issue for cluent & registration for business users

Hours worked: 8
internet outage: 20 minutes
miles Traveled: 3,124
Hours awake: 19.5

What is a social media friend?

barce — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 14:12:44 +0000

Aristotle defined 3 kinds of friendship in Book 8 of the Nicomachean Ethics:

friendships of utility
friendships of pleasure
friendships based on the good

Perfect friendship is the friendship of those who are good. — Aristotle

What kind of a friendship is a social media friendship?

At first, a social media friend was merely someone whose name, picture or avatar appeared on one’s profile because that someone had approved a friend request. However, many people didn’t like the use of “friend” in this way and so they used “follower” and “follows” instead.

Algorithmically, a friend is just a node 1 deep in the B-Tree of life.

Marketing-wise, a friend is just a potential viral link.

From Aristotle’s perspective, a social media friend can be useful (get you a job), be pleasurable (funny comments), and share in some good (charities and fundraising).

Social media extends a very real world practice of seeing and treating people as things, or as means to an end into the on-line world.

This, however, is the sublime melancholy of our lot that every You must become an It in our world. — from “I and Thou” by Martin Buber

Commands I Use Frequently

barce — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 04:33:44 +0000

Here’s a list of commands I use frequently, where the first number represents the number of times I used that command today:

86 git – the best version control software ever
59 cd – used to change directories on the command-line
54 ls – used to list files in a directory
41 vim – when textmate just isn’t fast enough for moving and manipulating text I use this text editor
24 grep – this is great for searching through code
21 sudo – I use this for stopping and starting servers and anything that requires super user access

I figured this out by using the following:

history | cut -c8-20 | sort > commands.txt

I created the following script in Perl:

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use strict;
use warnings;

my %h_list = ();
my @sorted = ();
my @listed = ();

open(LS, “commands.txt”);
while() {
if ($_ =~ /(\w+)/) {
$h_list{$1}++;
}
}

close(LS);

foreach my $key (keys %h_list)
{
push @listed, $h_list{$key} . “\t” . $key;
}

@sorted = sort { $b <=> $a } @listed;
foreach (@sorted)
{
print $_ . “\n”;
}

Apollo Coffee is Great for Coding

barce — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 16:36:01 +0000

There’s a feature that I need to get done in the next hour or so before leaving SF. It’s a business log-in for MyChamberApp so that businesses can update and edit their business listing that shows up on our mobile apps.

When I was thinking about places to code, the one place that looked good on all levels was Apollo Coffee.

The have

free wifi,
comfortable couches,
lots of outlets to plug-in your laptop,
friendly clientele who are most likely coders or designers, too, and
great latte art.

If you can, please give them a great review on Yelp.

The Best Answer To What Do You Do

barce — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 14:06:28 +0000

This video from Dave Berzack pretty much sums up what an application developer does.

Killa Appz by Dave Berzack:

Not to belabor the awesome nerdcore in this video but ya, a good application developer makes legacy apps faster. Also some folks do try to de-compile a closed source app, and it’s a waste of time.