Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

android tip – don’t call toString() on a Date object!

Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009

I was seeing slowness in my android application (1.5) and noticed the following line in DDMS log

“Loaded time zone names for en_US in 7451ms.”

I couldn’t figure out from searching around what that was about and had to resort to commenting out lines of code until I found the issue.

Turns out as long as I don’t call toString() on a date object I won’t get that issue.  I was logging alot of dates using something like

Log.d(TAG, “date=”+new Date(millis));

If I change that to

Log.d(TAG, “date=”+android.text.format.DateFormat.format(”MM/dd/yyyy h:mmaa z”, millis));

I don’t have the issue.

Most likely the problem would have gone away anyways when I removed log statements.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Simpler pente.org frontpage

Monday, August 18th, 2008

As I discussed earlier, I want to try to make the pente.org homepage simpler for new players, in order to get them to try the site and hopefully like it enough to come back.

Make a simpler front page, sounds easy, but it’s one of those remodeling things that easily becomes a big project quickly. Like when my Mom wanted a new toilet seat and 6 months later we had an entire new bathroom. I would love to change the whole site design, and change from an html table layout to use CSS instead, and also would like a new look and feel. I started to attempt this last week and quickly became discouraged. The changes are just too big, and I am NOT a web designer. Picking colors for me is like writers block. Reminds me of when I go to Home Depot or Lowes and my wife Sarah shows me those little 1″ square paint color swatches. Which do I like better?? I can’t even answer, my mind just shuts down and eventually she tells me to go look at power tools and leave her alone.

So instead I am going to try a more incremental approach. I’m going to stick with the ugly green for now. I’m going to mostly keep the current site the same. I will create a new front page using CSS that sort of looks the same but is much simpler, and with it a few pages to see the pente.org features.

From those small steps I should end up a simpler front page, and maybe provide a starting point for a bigger site redesign in the future.

And if anyone out there has a good feel for design stuff and wants to help me out picking colors please let me know!

-dweebo

Posted in Pente, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Bicycle commuting

Thursday, August 14th, 2008

For the past year or so I have been partially commuting to work by bicycle on occasion.  I live about 17 miles from my office so it is not practical to ride the whole way there and back.  I have done that a few times but it ends up taking close to 3 hours for the whole trip.  So most times I drive about 7-8 miles towards work, park in a parking lot somewhere and ride the rest of the way.

Yesterday was one of those days, but on the way home it was just such a nice day and I was really flying along that I just went right past my parked car and rode all the way home!  I even managed to average 15mph on the slightly uphill journey, which is very good for me, especially with all the stopping at lights/stop signs.

Of course this morning that meant I had to drag myself out of bed after staying up until 1pm and get back on my bike for the 7 mile trip to the car, ugh.   I just need to remember that soon the days will start getting shorter and colder and I really won’t feel like commuting…

Then when I got into work and unpacked my lunch I found that my mediterranean pasta decided it would explore the inside of my bag.  Everything’s better with olive oil right?

-dweebo

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Everything Is Miscellaneous

Monday, August 11th, 2008

I recently read this book Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder while on vacation at the beach. Not the usual beach book I’m sure, though I also read a few other books too. But it was an interesting read, dry at parts with its discussion about libraries and the dewey decimal system, but overall it provoked some thought.

My take on the author’s big idea is that now that we have the internet, and particularly with some of the new web 2.0 sites (twitter, digg, flickr, blogs, amazon book reviews, wikipedia, etc.), ordinary users (i.e. non-experts) can contribute their small bits of information about any and everything. Everything online is put into a big messy heap of unsorted data, but with the help of software we can analyze and find meaning (knowledge) from the heap that we couldn’t before. I guess its one of the reasons I want to try to blog, I normally am more of a user of the internet, not a participant. Hopefully I can add some bits to the pile that someone else will find useful someday.

The book actually gets way deeper, with a discussion of what knowledge actually is, how it is not something that is black / white but more relative to the observer. It sort of reminded me of the discussion of quality in Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance which I found interesting but hard trouble following! I never did finish that book but should pick it up again. The observer of the knowledge is not a single person however, but society as a whole. That started me thinking of some sci-fi books I’ve read where in the future the youth figure out how to link their minds with hardware and humanity evolves to the next level because of the “global brain” :)

Anyways, it was a good book!

-dweebo

Tags:
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Hello world!

Monday, August 11th, 2008

So I’m writing a blog, big wup right.

I don’t have a real clear idea yet what I will write about, or why anyone would care.  A few things that I’d like to write about:

  • Pente.org and what is going on with it.  Currently the site’s “news” is hardly ever updated and maybe there would be more posts in a blog and I could update the main page to show blog posts
  • Interesting projects I’m doing with my own development/hosting company hewittsoft.com
  • Point out good web sites I come across, or good books I’ve recently read
  • Put some pictures up, and other personal stuff
  • Document technical issues I resolve, to help others and to have a record for myself when I forget things!

We’ll just have to see if I can post regularly or not…

-dweebo

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »