Moved from Justhost to GoDaddy. And got myself a domain. And SSL’ed it as well. It has taken me 6 odd months, $80 and a lifetime of lethargy to get this done. Finally, what really got me to do it is a desperate need to bring back my blog online so that I can write down a bunch of things. Motivation is a tough sell.
I am largely techie guy. In the sense, I can rarely understand what it is to be a non-technical person. Let me explain that a bit. I cannot fathom why some people cannot see how a certain idea or logic could be written as software. While here I am, trying to see the world around me as though someone wrote down code to make it work the way it does. I guess people are just wired differently. I have more recently come to terms with this fact and that some people are just better at other things than visualizing software. Its perhaps the same way that some people are visually challenged or aurally challenged (is that correct?). And I continue to remain indifferent to this difference. ...
It was a lunch time discussion between me and the wife. We were wandering multiple topics, as usual, and suddenly came to a point where we thought, there should be a coupon code to goto a specific place. And then I remembered my Dad was cribbing the other day about attending a wedding at some place so far away from the city, it almost felt like a picnic across the city. So we thought of this simple idea. ...
We have this mid 2009 model Macbook Air (MacbookAir2,1) that has been idle for quite a while. I made the mistake of upgrading it to El Capitan a couple of years back which made it a functional brick. It would boot, but would take a tonne of time doing that. And then anything you click would take 5-10 minutes to happen. I tried all the usual stuff. I threw the DVDs that came with the device, so I can’t so much as roll it back to its good self. I tried finding snow leopard or lion online, but mostly you get fake downloads for 3G that either don’t finish downloading or are useless post downloading! Trust me, I wasted quite some bandwidth doing just that. This was in late 2015. I briefly tried to get debian working on it. But I didn’t have too much patience to figure out the EFI stuff so everytime I reset my NVRAM or SMC, I’d promptly be back in an unusable MAC that would boot El Capitan and have no disk space. Then I destroyed all debian on that machine and reset it to stay El Capitan, put the device in the attic and tried to believe it doesn’t exist any more. ...
For a while, I believed that jQuery and bootstrap are the best tools out there for getting a frontend working the way you want. I am sure there are jQuery pundits who still stand by this. But I am not a jQuery pundit. In fact, I am quite bad with javascript – for whatever reason, I never managed to master this one skill. I have been using javascript from 2005 but I still have to look up every now and then for some super basic operations. The same holds true for jQuery as well. But I still manage to write some apps here and there using jQuery and javascript. So basically, I can find my way without too much of a struggle. ...
I have fancied publish-subscribe middleware(pubsub) architectures for quite sometime. When we were still very new in CTS, I came up with a wild suggestion to try this for getting a data dump from a legacy system into our moodle instance. I was quite clueless about what this would entail in terms of development effort, but I could create a PoC setup within a few days which made me quite confident of being able to pull this off. ...
So I got about 60% of one app working on my iPhone to a satisfactory extent. I still need to add a couple of features before it can used as an app. I thought this is perhaps a good time to think about and generally fix the horrible UI that I have created so far. Thinking about it, I suck so bad at UI that I have never written a GUI application all my life. I briefly dabbed with GTK, PyGTK, PyQT, Tk-Wish, WxWidgets and a bunch of others (including VB and VC++). I failed at each one of them. As in the buttons usually clicked and the labels and tables got updated as needed always. But I was never proud of how it looked. I almost hated myself for this failure. But then I stumbled upon websites of many programmers (friends, some times stuff that I just stumble upon) and found that most of them were really bad. And they didn’t seem to have a problem with it. That is when I started feeling very good about myself – at least I could see that my work is not presentable, even if it was worth presenting. ...
I attended the Singapore MiniMakerFaire this weekend at Tampines. It was fun. I had to keep it a short trip for other reasons, but am happy that I didn’t miss the faire at least. Next year, I really should present something or volunteer at the least. One of the things about attending this event is, it kinda puts me to shame. I can give you reasonably detailed steps on how to make most of the stuff in display. Yet, I haven’t made even a simple four wheel bot on my own. Shame on me. ...
Two years of iPhone has served me very well. Now I need to renew my contract and I can get another device with the new contract. I could forgo a device, but I may not be able to get a device in the contract later on. So, it put me in a fix. Fix because the contract does not support picking a 5S device. Or even a 4S device. And I am not sure if I want to lug around a bigger handset than that. iPhone 6 is big. Its bigger than I like a personal handset to be. Maybe I am stuck in the 2000s and the world has moved on. But I can choose to remain in my own little time warp, can’t I? ...
I have recently got on an exercise regimen to fight my back pain problems. It is sort of like Yoga but in a controlled manner. I don’t know if its fun, but it definitely helps to keep pain away. Typically, I’ll need to do 4-6 exercises twice a day. Each exercise is repeated three times and lasts 30 sec each time. Pretty simple, right? You need to keep aside about 30 minutes twice a day to take care of this. So far I am able to keep up. ...