• Strange Loop 2011: Mirah for Android Development

    January 2, 2012 at 3:15 PM
    Video of my Mirah/Android presentation from Strange Loop is available now. Here are a few extra resources: Mirah and Pindah on Github. My slides (pdf). The demo project I walk through at the end. I've written about Mirah in the past, too: Experimenting with Mirah for Android Implementing a Lazy Loading Android Gallery with...
  • The Birth of Hazel Belle Ribera

    December 20, 2011 at 10:40 PM
    On December 20, 2011, Hazel Belle Ribera was born! We had another great home birth with our wonderful midwives . Jessica was amazing, to say the least. Hazel is a great little girl, and so snuggly. At 7lbs 5oz and 21.25", she's the lightest and longest of the bunch. She takes after her mother in that way. I won't write qui...
  • An Appearance of the Strangest Kind

    June 21, 2011 at 1:30 PM
    Given my current time constraints, a single cogent blog post would constitute a strange enough appearance. But I have something rarer and more fascinating in store for you, Dear Reader: I'll be giving a talk at this year's StrangeLoop ! I'm incredibly excited about this. I'll be speaking on using Mirah for Android developm...
  • Ruby 1.9.2 on Ubuntu 11.04

    May 6, 2011 at 2:03 PM
    I've been building an application from scratch, and I want to go with the latest and greatest of the Ruby world. It's not yet clear to me which of Ruby 1.9.2, JRuby, and REE fit the bill, but I've picked 1.9.2. – at least for now. I'm building around Ubuntu server, and am automating this process with Chef. I've seen...
  • On Flashing OCZ Vertex 2 Firmware

    April 26, 2011 at 7:58 PM
    I recently bought a MacBook Pro (no, my opinions haven't changed) for iOS development. With it, I bought a shiny new SSD. As it shipped, I read nasty reports of a firmware bug that caused the drive to freeze or lose data when awaking from sleep/hibernate in OSX. Yikes! My drive arrived and did indeed have the affected firm...
  • Implementing a Lazy Loading Android Gallery with Mirah

    March 31, 2011 at 8:20 PM
    Image Galleries The Gallery is a horizontal scrolling list commonly used for displaying a list of images. Unfortunately, the standard Android Developers Gallery tutorial focuses on displaying a small, static list of local images. An API-based list of remote images is much more useful, but more complex. Laziness Needing to...
  • Using memcached -k to prevent paging

    February 27, 2011 at 11:51 PM
    Memcached is a powerful brute. Since it's basically just a giant in-memory hash map, you can safely run it on just about any machine that has spare memory. But be sure to know the sort of memory profile your machine has. If something causes memcached to go to swap, performance degrades significantly. Paging can block all q...