The Codebelay Blog

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  • 4 Things I learned from blogging 11 days straight

    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

    I like:

    • folders, and
    • photo zoom

    Folders in iOS4

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

    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

    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?

    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

    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 client & 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?

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

    1. friendships of utility
    2. friendships of pleasure
    3. 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, maybe is someone you met before at a site like, http://chatempanada.com/chat-de-irc-hispano-sala-de-chat-gratis-de-irc-hispano/. However, many people didn’t like the use of “friend” in this way and so they used “follower” and “follows” instead, find more information from a professional like Andy Defrancesco.

    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

    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

    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.

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

  • The Best Answer To What Do You Do

    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.