Jeff Martin's Musings

Response to Twig 37 - Why users want apps.

2010-04-12T15:49:39Z

I just finished listening to this week's TWIG. They were talking about how users prefer apps over web based applications. It seems fairly obvious to me why this is but they didn't talk about it at all. I think there are a few reasons that web based apps didn't take off.

Transitioning to Java

2010-02-03T20:31:43Z

So my work, in the wisdom of someone that is not me has decided that we should standardize the language and environments that we program in to Java and Eclipse. I am sure you can already sense my excitement. I'm not particularly afraid of the Java language or even think it will particularly hard to learn the language. Its nearly identical to C# in syntax and even a lot of the framework is the same, I think. I think my biggest transition will be the tools around programming. This means going from Visual Studio to Eclipse.

A Custom Ellipsis Plug-in for JQuery

2009-11-09T21:49:39Z

I had a requirement to be able to show a long description for an item in a limited space. The descriptions were coming from a 3rd party database and could be of any length. The design called for the description area being two lines tall. There is a CSS attribute called text-overflow: ellipsis. It had several problems, however. First of all it only worked on a single line basis. Mostly it had the big issue of not working at all in Firefox as it was a non-standard CSS call.

Today is my 40th Birthday.

2009-09-23T16:29:48Z

Technically, its the 40th Anniversary of my birthday. I figured I should write something down today so when I am reminiscing 80 years from now, I will remember how it felt to be so young. If you aren't my future self reading this, well maybe it will give you a bit of insight into my life. If you aren't interested in that, why are you here on my site?

Exercise Increase

2009-09-09T14:56:03Z

For the last couple of weeks I have been focusing on tracking my calories, in and out. Much of it has been with the help of a great app my wife found called Calorie Counter on the Android. Calorie counter links to fatsecret.com which has a database of foods and exercise that you can enter in to keep track of your progress. A great feature of the app on my G1 is that I can scan a barcode and more likely than not, the food is in the database already. This makes it very easy to keep track of during the day. Although I have been trying to eat balanced with not too much of anything, I am not trying a low carb diet at this point. Just trying to keep the calories I am eating less than the calories my body is comsuming. You can see my progress at the fatsecret site.

Yesterday after walking my three miles in the morning (at about 3 mph). I was feeling pretty good and decided that today I would try to move up to jogging. Although I was able to run/jog down the street, I felt a lot impact on my legs and on my body in general. I decided that I would just try to increase the speed I was walking until I could lose more wieght and try to run again. So I completed 2 miles this morning in just over 30 minutes and could definately feel some muscle pain/soreness in my calves shins. So I will try to work on that speed for the next while until I feel pretty comfortable doing that for one hour or more.

Squarespace featured on High Scalability Blog

2009-09-04T16:49:31Z

The High Scalability Blog featured Squarespace recently and it was interesting overview of some of the technology that my site runs on. I have to admit that I feel a bit guilty not running on Dotnetnuke or another Microsoft platform but I do like the ease of use of Squarespace. I encountered Squarespace much the same way that Todd @ High Scalability did, through advertising on Twit.TV.

My main wish is that Squarespace was a bit more extensible. I'd like to add my own modules. I'd probably even plug through Java to do it if I had to. I'd really like to overhaul the Kingdom of Atenveldt Order of Precedence and put it on a platform that runs fast and is consistantly reliable. This weekend I plan on spending some time on the site, upgrading to the latest version of DNN and maybe working on the skin a bit. I have had a couple of designers show interest in helping me make a skin but nothing has ever come through with it. Maybe I can bring some more life back to the DNN based Atenveldt site with a bit of TLC. (tender loving care, not the learning channel... )

Rooted G1 For the Win

2009-08-24T15:55:03Z

I rooted my G1 this weekend after being convinced by an article on Lifehacker. I think it was a good decision. I installed the latest Cyanogen Mod, which was just released this weekend. I really like the new camera, the power widget and most of all the snappyness of the phone now. Cyanogen says it uses more battery than the standard ROM, but honestly I feel like I was spending so much time waiting for the phone to respond to what I wanted it to do, I suspect that the real trade off in time is very little.

The thing that took the longest was backing up my 8GB SD card. I also found the MyBackup app to be very handy in quickly getting all of my apps and shortcuts back quickly. (Although I did have to set each one back up... ). DoggCatcher has a very handy back up capability but a non-obvious way of restoring. I was able to short circuit the way described in the FAQ by using taskiller to kill the doggcatcher task and then the Lynda File Manager to delete the done.txt.

MotoRokr T505 + T-Mobile G1 = meh

2009-06-25T15:27:05Z

I recently purchased a Motorola MOTOROKR T505 to enable bluetooth in my car (Honda Civic Hybrid). I previously used a connector for my phone that let me connect power and a headphone jack to the car. The audio went to an auxillary jack that was built in to the car.

New Beginnings

2009-06-17T04:40:38Z

New college class, new exercising, back to fighting, making a change in schedule.

Altering the Look of the DNN FAQ Module

2009-05-30T19:11:26Z

I had an issue with the way that the DNN module for FAQ's was behaving. Some extra space was appearing around my lists of questions and breaking up the way the page was supposed to look. It turns out that the questions were getting these extra

tags around them.