What I like about present Android development

6 September 2014 ⋅ 2 min read ⋅ android

Here are some thought on good things in Android development at its present state.

Constraints aware soft keyboard compensation on iOS

30 August 2014 ⋅ 3 min read ⋅ iOS

A while ago Apple introduced constraints-based layouts for Mac OS X and iOS user interface designs. It’s a huge and logical step forward from pixel-perfect fully manual laying out of things. The line of devices grows and creating all possible variations of interfaces has become a seriously tedious task.

One piece still missing from the puzzle is the set of tools for proper compensation for the soft keyboard. (It’s when the keyboard slides up from the bottom of the screen.) There’s a good chance that on a non-scrollable page your text fields at the bottom of it will become hidden by the keyboard. At this point you are on your own.

Rails: Foreign keys and more useful plug-ins

29 July 2007 ⋅ 1 min read ⋅ rails

The default Rails framework seems not support the foreign keys in database migrations and that’s a big omission. You are bound to deal with raw SQL to add these or end up with complex (and often ugly) code to emulate them.

Recently I found a very nice plug-in that adds foreign keys functionality to the migration classes. The syntax looks native and doesn’t stand out prominently. It is also clever enough to recognize some basic intentions, like ‘user_id’ being a reference to the ‘users’ table etc.

Check their other rails works too. They look handy!

Rails: Malformed Header From Script

29 July 2007 ⋅ 1 min read ⋅ rails

If you developed your application with WebBrick, deployed it to Apache and seeing something like below in your web server error log, make sure to check that you don’t have any output to console (like ‘puts’) left in the code. [Sat Jul 28 07:11:05 2007] [error] [client xxx.yyy.zzz.xxx] malformed header from script. Bad header=["a"]: dispatch.fcgi Whatever you output goes to the header section of the response and most probably the web server won’t understand it.

TC Electronic Konnekt 8/24D and Mac OS X

29 July 2007 ⋅ 2 min read ⋅ music

First of all, I’m writing this when the most recent firmware version is 1.22. It is important as you may guess from version to version things change, and in case of TC, not necessarily to good.

Your TC Electronic Konnekt 8/24D/Live Misbehaves on PC?

20 July 2007 ⋅ 5 min read ⋅ music

So you bought one of these Firewire audio-interfaces and tried them with your PC, but you can hear crackles, drop-outs (pauses) and all that unpleasant stuff. Let me show some possible reasons, and see if your setup has similar problems.

All three versions of audio-interfaces use Firewire bus to exchange data with a computer. All of the devices are very sensitive to what’s going on in this bus. When data stops coming, you hear the silence. When an audio stream resumes, you don’t hear silence. These pauses are called drop-outs and happen because your PC is busy with something that claims to be very important while on practice it’s usually a malfunctioning device driver.

Skypecasts Again

5 July 2007 ⋅ 2 min read ⋅ personal

It appears Skypecasts aren’t dying, but having some tough times there. Yesterday I had some great fun in one general chat room: met a few new people, showed some of my urban photography works, shared views on modern music influences. Today, I wasn’t able to stay in a room for more than 14 seconds; it simply kicked me out of it and dropped the call all the time.

Are Skypecasts dying out?

1 July 2007 ⋅ 1 min read ⋅ personal

I can’t get an idea of what’s going on there with Skypecasts. Can somebody enlighten me? I have recently got a headset and decided to have some fun with public chat rooms in Skype, but what I saw didn’t please me at all. There are four to six rooms running at any given moment with almost all of them having no participants. I mean half of these rooms never responded to my call, and the other half had a host user only, which isn’t fun, is it?

Some time in the evening yesterday I finally managed to connect to a group of English learners (they appear to be the only active users of Skypcast these days if I get it right), but after five minutes of me sitting there some weird talkative aussie broke in and scared all the participants off by making fun of them and asking stupid questions. I like one part though… Here’s the short script:

aussie: … yeah, that’s my name “… Dandy”. You know that Crocodile Dandy? I’m his brother. I wrestle crocodiles.

one Canadian: well, that’s cool. I wrestle polar bears.

The point is made. Am I missing something or this appears to be a dead branch and isn’t worth monitoring?

Follow Conversations? Easy!

29 June 2007 ⋅ 2 min read ⋅ sites

For a long time it was a huge pain in the neck to follow the blogs and threads I was ever commenting on. Most of the time I had to make a heart-bleeding decision whether it is going to be a fire-and-forget kind of comment or will I bookmark it somehow for the later returns. I realize everyone has similar problems, otherwise they wouldn’t ask us to add some kind of comments tracking to BlogBridge, so that I’m not alone in these sufferings.

Pito Salas on Blogs and Web Sites

29 June 2007 ⋅ 1 min read ⋅ sites

Recently Pito Salas of BlogBridge started a great new series of educational posts on Squidoo. These are intended to bridge the gap between geeky techies chirping with their awful terms, like ‘blogs’, ‘feeds’, ‘rss’ or even scarier stuff, like ‘aggregator’, and simple working bees surfing around.