Intersting TED talk: Dan Gilbert asks, Why are we happy?

Stumbled upon interesting TED talk:
http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy.html

"...natural happiness is what we get when we get what we wanted
and the synthetic happiness is what we make when we don't get what we wanted

In our society we have a strong believe that a synthetic happiness is one of the inferior kind... why do we have that belief?....well it is very simple
.... what kind of economic engine would keep turning
if we believed that not getting what we want could make us
just as happy as getting it ....
a shopping mall full of zen monks is not going to be particularly
profitable because they don't want stuff enough to make it profitable ...."

"...our longings and our worries are both to some degree overblown because we
have within us the capacity to manufacture the very commodity (happiness) we are
constantly chasing when we choose experience"


"Happiness is not a state to arrive at, but a manner of traveling."
~Margaret Lee Runbeck

Enjoyed being at the meeting with Saul Hansell

He recently came over from NYT to work for our company.
I really enjoyed the energy and passion that he has as well as the vision for the future of our product. Hope he will not get burned out too soon and will have enough leverage to implement his vision.

Following him now here http://saulhansell.blogspot.com.

Enabling PHP and SQLite on Mac OS X Leopard

just a bookmark for myself

PHP the Easy Way: Enabling PHP and SQLite on Mac OS X Leopard

Florida Trip - passing Georgia

On a way to Florida while driving through Georgia there are some places where the sulfur smell from swamps is quite strong. My daughter quickly learned this and on the way back, after 6+ hours driving through Florida, she started to ask me if we are in Georgia now or not. I answered, No.
While driving around Jacksonville, FL we hit the spot on the road where the sulfur smell from the swamps got pretty strong and I hear her voice from the back: "I told you, this is Georgia".

I was LOL :)

Android fun :)

Today was playing with all kinds of UI controls customizations. One thing I needed to do is to be able to draw the background shape around image where only right top and bottom corners are rounded.
After some research and trying different things (because that part of APIs pretty much missing any documentation), I found out that it looks like the left and right is messed up in the API. Here is what works :

<corners android:bottomRightRadius="0.1dp" android:topRightRadius="8dp"
android:bottomLeftRadius="8dp"
android:topLeftRadius="0.1dp" />

As you can see I had to use the bottom left radius to make the right corner round and for the rest of the corners I had to use 0.1dp , because 0dp just didn't work and made all corners not rounded.

Good luck ! :)

Busybox

Busybox is pretty useful set of tools for Android development as well:
http://www.busybox.net

Running Android tools on Windows 7 x64

Here is a link how to make it happen
http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=3917

Simple Things

Today I went to Halloween swim meet with my daughter. She participated in three different kinds of competitions. It was her first time of any kind of the "competitive" swimming.

The funny thing was that I was worrying, how she would do, and that she might get disappointed with results. etc., while she was just having fun swimming with her friends and not caring too much about results. She was excited and smiling after every race, no matter how she did.

I saw the happy human being today.


Happy weekend ! :)

Firefox strikes back

no comments :)

The power of positive reinforcement

...and the rest is here :
http://www.rolighetsteorin.se/en

Microsoft SQL Server Database Publishing Wizard

Recently I needed to migrate the database from MS SQL 2005 to MS SQL 2005. By the way, it's not as straight forward as it might look like.

After a little be of searching for solution I stumbled upon the
Microsoft SQL Server Database Publishing Wizard

This tool is pretty good at scripting the whole database structure with data. The name of the tool is not really intuitive. So, I'm saving this link for myself as well on this blog.

How to get the list of installed Android root certificates ?

Today, needed to get the list of trusted root certificates on Android phone to verify which ones are available out of the box.

Here are the easy steps how to do this :

1. get the certificates file
adb pull /system/etc/security/cacerts.bks cacerts.bks

2. download http://bouncycastle.org/download/bcprov-jdk16-141.jar and place it on $JAVA_HOME/jre/lib/ext/

3. run the keytool utility
keytool -storetype BKS -provider org.bouncycastle.jce.provider.BouncyCastleProvider -storepass -keystore cacerts.bks -list -v

Enjoy !

Incredible, amazing, awesome Apple

After watching the original Apple presentation I was left with the same feeling of audience being programmed with constant repetition of thee words : "Incredible, amazing, awesome" ....
Today I found this video:



Enjoy !

Gourse

Stubled upon:

Gource
software version control visualization



Pretty cool stuff :)

Snoop - WPF Spy

Today found pretty useful utility for the WPF development:
Snoop - the WPF Spy.

The best part that it comes with the source code.

Enjoy !

Nokia N900 on Maemo Linux

Nokia announced their new N900 smart phone that run Maemo Linux. The specs are pretty good. Looks like more mobile devices run the different flavors on Unix/Linux : iPhone, Android, Nokia ....

Here is a link to developers pages for Maemo platform :
http://www.forum.nokia.com/Technology_Topics/Device_Platforms/Maemo.xhtml

Wedding & Divorce :)

Wedding :)



... and 6 months later

Social Networks

The text under picture says:
"Social Networks
We all are so different here"

North Carolina Buoys - Weather

Stumbled upon the pretty useful web site, that shows all the date from buoys in the water off the North Carolina shore:

http://www.pdfamily.com/weather/buoy/SEbuoy.php

and the one I'm interested in particular the Oregon Inlet Buoy:
http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/station_page.php?station=ORIN7&unit=E

Currently it shows:
Air Temperature (ATMP): 80.1 °F
Water Temperature (WTMP): 77.4 °F

Memory leak detection for WinCE

Good write up on the Memory leak detection for WinCE:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/mobile/ce_crtdbg.aspx

Since the standard crtdbg.h is not available on the Windows Mobile, the author provided his implementation of _CrtSetDbgFlag to track the memory leaks.