Sunday, September 21, 2008

Lonely Ramblings

I've spent most of the past few months alone. Most of it has been because I've been abroad, some of it has been because I needed to decompress when I got home. Now I'm out in Dublin again and I've done scarely a thing in a city that I enjoy being in. This weekend and last I spent cooped up in my apartment lazying around and playing on the internet. Now tomorrow starts my last work week in Dublin for a while. I head back to San Francisco on Thursday. When I get back I don't plan on working until around the 6th of October (possibly the 3rd if I feel guilty). Some of this time I'll be in San Francisco, where everyone I know will be at work, as a result I will have even more solitude and time to myself but I am begininng to grow tired of my anti-social behavoir. There comes a time in every person's life where they just want to party like rock starts with their closest friends. Unfortunately, a lot of my friends these days are past the days of rock star parties. As we all grow out of College it seems that the fun parts about rampant drunken hyjinks are replaced by the monotony of pretending you're back in school. Even your drinking habits become habits and its less likely that you have the chance to meet someone new. That, I think was the main reason we had parties back in the day but now even when we go out for drinks its hard to find a place as good as Josh's DeKalb place or Chris' Chicago flat. Now its just loud music and a handful of us drinking away our work sorrows.

I felt like at Gen Con I had the chance to be a rambunctous overly social dufus again but it didn't seem like people were really in the mood for that.  I don't always want to be the guy running through the fountain alone, I miss team driven hijynks!  Bring back

Geeze, I think I just want to hang out and waste time with my friends. Any time I get to see people from Chicago its a special event so I always feel so pressured to make something of it. I miss those kinda-lazy Sundays where we would all hang out by sitting in the same room as eachother doing (home)work. What is it now that makes that not possible? It was great to know that over there Josh was studying for some crazy selling stuff class and steve was over in the other corner trying to catch up on all the classes he didn't go to during the week, all the while I sat and struggled on Calculus. I don't mind doing work, heck I invented a top secret project so that I could treat something like a job but not really have to rely on it for any sort of money or real responsiblity. I know, I know, a paragraph ago I was talking about drowning work-sorrows in alcohol but there is something that is satisfying about it.

I'm sure I've spent several hours in the past few weeks clickin refresh on Facebook and my Google reader shared feeds. I want to know what people are doing these days. Even the mundane is better than me reading another story on Tech Crunch about random tech company Q. I troll people's pictures hoping that I'll see something new going on that I can pretend to have been there.

To my friends who post on Twitter, update their status on Facebook or blag-o-blog about whatever, please keep doing it, its almost-but-not-even-close to those fantastic Sundays where we sat around together and did nothing together.

PS. This is my 500th post.

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Thursday, September 11, 2008

New Facebook UI

I like the little help "stickies" that are floating around... they help quite a bit. But, I didn't even realize that the app toolbar was ever there, I only noticed the "Online Friends" bit.

Also, the UI really reminds me of windows and I don't think that is a good pattern to follow.

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Sunday, August 31, 2008

Android/App Engine prototyping problems

Almost a year ago, Google unleashed its Android SDK in a preview capacity. One of the pain points I experienced with it was the tedium in creating ContentProviders. Today, I'm feeling the same tedium. A ContentProvider is the sole mechanism for an android application to share information with external packages. ContentProviders can be backed by any kind of data, file, database or live server with custom backend. The popular method is creating a ContentProvider that is backed by a database. Creating such a beast is a time consuming operation and making it with a SQL database is quite contrary to the BigTable based datastore API in Google App Engine (GAE).
In my top secret project, I'm using the HttpClientService api that I've defined in my Missing SVN repository (the top-secret project is indeed different than Missing) to interface with my server. Currently, the client does no caching of data -- all information it needs is pulled at user request, from the interwebs. When testing on my local machine, this is not a problem. I have a fast workstation and there isn't much packet loss or latency on a loopback interface.

Unfortunately, this won't work in the "real world." I'm now at the point where I have to implement a sql-lite backed ContentProvider that tries to model a table-based GAE datastore api. Not only does this mean I have to keep track of two different schema, one for GAE and one for Android, but it means I have to implement the same "get my data" api twice, with a layer of abstraction between the android UI and the ContentProvider I'm resenting having to create.

What I'm considering doing is using something like Google's Protocol Buffers or Facebook's Thrift to define my data model and create stub interfaces for both GAE and Android. This seems like a bit of overkill for the current state of my project but even in the not-yet-ready-to-show-anyone stage of this project I'm having to consider these very-high-time-cost coding excersizes. This is going to consume time when I should be iterating on features and trying to get the app in a state where I can finally start to use it. I think I've proto-typed the android app as far as I can go but I don't want to start spending hordes of time on this when I have several core concepts not-yet-implemented.

I'm also feeling the pain of knowing that the stuff I prototyped at the beginning of the project are going to have to be fully re-written and if I don't provide a more featureful content provider.

One of the ways you can provide an abstracted interface to the ContentProvider is by wrapping it in a Service, which of course requires yet another interface declaration, this one with java primatives and simple classes using the AIDL interface spec provided by Android. I figure I'll have to cross that bridge some day, I'm just glad I don't have to do it right now.

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Monday, May 26, 2008

Statusinator

Last year after the Android SDK was released, I wrote a small app that allowed me to upload photos and update my facebook status with a native application. Here is the result. I re-implemented a subset of the official facebook API because I didn't understand it. (It wasn't "not invented here syndrome" it was more of a "I am not smart syndrome"). Anyways, I've posted the code at statusinator.googlecode.com and there is a Facebook app page as well.

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Thursday, May 15, 2008

The Social Network Wars Begin In Earnest: Facebook Bans Google Friend Connect

The Social Network Wars Begin In Earnest: Facebook Bans Google Friend Connect

I *think* Magoo and I can still be friends.

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Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Clips: Facebook employees would dress up as white ninjas, wouldn't they?

Clips: Facebook employees would dress up as white ninjas, wouldn't they?

Magoo Strikes again!

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Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Facebook | The Facebook Blog

Facebook | The Facebook Blog

My friend Ryan made a post on Facebook's blog about phishing. Have a read!

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Friday, November 2, 2007

OpenSocial - Google Code

OpenSocial - Google Code

Google's "Maka Maka" project looks like it finally launched. I'm quite excited by this change. Its funny that just a year ago I was talking with friends about how I wished someone would unify the social networking space and I think we're about to see that happen. I guess we'll have to see if we can really make this happen. I love Facebook and I always thought that they would be the ones to open up this space. They're a smart, innovative and daring company with a product I've proudly used for years. I wonder what their plans were before this news.

Though, to be honest, if you asked me what sort of app I would like to see on a social network I wouldn't have an answer for you. What about widgets on web pages? No ideas there either. I'm not really interested in looking at little doohickeys or playing scrabble or throwing sheep at people so why then am I excited? I'm looking forward to the day when I have *one* address book. Thats really it. I want to sort and tag and organize my contacts and I don't want to have to enter the majority of the contact information. With a little tweaking and some interopability I might someday be able to make sure that the contact in my email app has the most up to date email address for my friends. How will that make it up to date? Because their profile is controlled by them and when they change their email address they can update the profile and nobody will have to send a "changed my email" message, similiarly for phone, address, IM, etc. I think this is made more possible by Google's next move into this field, an open social graph but enabling people to get data is the first step in letting them control where it goes.

This makes you wonder. Why didn't XMPP take off? I'm still sour about the state of instant communications. Microsoft and Yahoo, Google and Jabber, IRC. Why are these things so hard to traverse. There isn't even a market in making money here - It not any different than email but with email I can talk to anyone no matter what domain they're on.

There are rumors that Facebook was ignored in the creation of the open social alliance. I don't think that was the case but if it was I'd be deeply disappointed in my company. I think its possible that this could have happened but I find it unlikely. More likely was that so and so talked to so and so but that never go to whos-its-face and thus the proclaimation. It seems people look at this as if it were only a strategy move, something to move into an upcoming industry but Google is an Engineer driven company. My bet is that someone here got fed up with the state of the social networking world, talked to enough people and then had a project to work on.

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Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Social Networking site with an API!

Considering the only social networking site I've found the least bit usable is facebook it comes as no suprize that they've released an API for their site. I haven't taken a look, but I'm excited at the prospect of integrating facebook presence into my expanding realm of really-easy-to-get-in-contact-with Joe tactics I've been trying to implement. More news at 10!

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