Thoughts on Web and Mobile Interactive Development and Life
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Simple Tempeh Stir-Fry Salad with Peanut-Ginger-Lime Sauce
I’ve recently been trying to eat healthier. One of the great things about working from home is that you have your full kitchen available to you at lunch. Today, I decided to whip together a quick stir-fry salad, something I had never tried before but figured could help me get some vegetables and taste delicious. I was right.
I made up the peanut-ginger-lime sauce on a whim as we didn’t have anything but a garlic-y salad dressing and I really loved the sweet/tart/nutty flavors that emerged. I think the sauce would work great on noodles, too.
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Upgrading my Galaxy Nexus to Jelly Bean
I love my Galaxy Nexus; it has simply been an outstanding device. I got the phone around Christmas time through NewEgg. Since then a number of my friends have upgraded to the Galaxy Nexus and I noticed that they were talking about OTA updates that I wasn’t getting. Last week my phone finally updated to 4.0.4 (The latest version of Ice Cream Sandwich).
Now that the Jelly Bean updates are rolling out I was really excited to check that out. My friends were getting the updates and still I wasn’t able to trigger the OTA update (even using the somewhat neat trick of clearing the data of the ‘Google Services Framework’ application and then checking for new system updates). Then I came across an article that said that some Galaxy Nexus phones are running a firmware that isn’t truly stock Android; Samsung provides that firmware, runs the OTA updates, and does a few things like adding in a Chinese keyboard. That’s when I suspected I might have the wrong firmware.
To determine for sure what firmware I had, I checked by going to the Maps app (of all things), then Settings, and then About. In the list there it told me I had the firmware, “samsung yakjuzs.” The OTA updates to Jelly Bean were only rolling out for the “yajku” and “tajku” firmware and it was pretty clear to me that Samsung was lagging pretty far behind in releasing updates on their own. I have no need for a Chinese keyboard, so I decided to flash a new set of firmware to my phone and get onto the direct-from-Google software chain.
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Figuring Color at the ICA Boston
On Valentine’s Day, my beautiful wife Abigail and I went to the opening of the new exhibit, “Figuring Color,” at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. It is a wonderful new exhibit featuring the work of Kathy Butterly, Felix González-Torres, Roy McMakin, and Sue Williams.
It is a wonderful show and I highly recommend visiting it if the opportunity presents itself. (If you can’t make it, or just need a preview, check out the ICA’s slideshow of some of the pieces in the exhibit.)
I particularly enjoyed Kathy Butterly’s whimsical ceramics and Roy McMakin’s “Untitled (Sitting Wingback Chair),” which at first glance appears as a classic plush chair, but upon closer inspection, the back appears to be a plump human rear sitting on the floor.
It was also nice to see Felix González-Torres’ “Untitled (Lover Boys),” in a new setting. The last time I saw this piece was at the Art Institute of Chicago years ago on a high school fieldtrip. González-Torres died in 1996 due to AIDS related complications, which, while it has certainly fallen out of the media in recent years, is still a continuing problem.
A great friend (and co-worker, I am so lucky) of mine, Tim Cosgrove is currently training and fundraising for the AIDS/LifeCycle, a 7-day, 545-mile bike ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles. He has been an inspiration to me in how he’s really put his whole heart (and body) into training for this ride, so please support him if you can. In addition, if you donate, he will bake you a pie. For real.
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Hekyll: Impressive Presentations with Markdown
I am a big fan of Jekyll, a static blog generator developed by one of those smart guys behind GitHub, Tom Preston-Werner. I love being able to write posts in Markdown and being able to version my entire site in a Git repository.
In the past year or so, I have been using Prezi.com to create a number of the presentations that I’ve given at various camps and conferences. Prezi is great, but it’s Flash-based and authoring within their tool is not the easiest process, and there’s no way to version a talk. A few of my recent talks have been with my friend and co-worker, Steven Merrill, and then he has gone on to improve the talks and give them at a few other events that I wasn’t able to attend. Once or twice, he forgot to ‘clone’ the presentation in Prezi before making changes, so we accidentally lost a copy of the presentation we originally gave and now only have the updated one. Not desirable.
New to the budding JavaScript-based presentation software is Impress.js, which is actually a really great analog for Prezi, done entirely in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, which is awesome.
One day at work, Steven and I were discussing getting started on our presentation for our upcoming talk at Drupalcon Denver 2012, and we thought, “Hey, wouldn’t it be awesome if we could write our presentation in Markdown and have an Impress.js-powered presentation? We could use Jekyll!” So, I took my lunch break and whipped out a prototype which I dubbed ”Hekyll” (pronounced heckle). And thus my new presentation engine side-project was born.
The idea for Hekyll is pretty simple: turn Markdown text files into a nice looking presentation. In the YAML front-matter for each slide (just like in each post in Jekyll), you can add attributes which can let you control all of the layout options provided by Impress.js, which includes position, scale and 3D rotations for your slides. Or, if you just need to get a presentation done quickly, there’s a “simple slideshow” configuration option for Hekyll that will just do simple cross-fades between your slides for you. But wait! There’s more! Hekyll comes with a decent set of default styles and also has a print page which will let you easily print each slide to a single page.
That’s it for now. I’ve been pondering a way to make easy themes for slides so that there can be a handful of presentation styles to get people started – it’s really just as simple as writing some CSS.
Wanna see Hekyll in action? Check out the documentation demo!
I’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback on the project. Get invovled if you’d like, we’re maintaining the project on GitHub.
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Adventures in Standing: My Standing Desk
For about six months now, I have been regularly standing up while I work. There is a lot of compelling research out there that suggests that standing while working helps you burn many more calories per day and has many other health benefits.
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All the New Things: My Personal Life
This is the third and final installment in a short series I’m calling All the New Things.
It’s now a few days after my birthday, I’ll wrap up my reflections on the past year and some of the changes that I’ve seen.
My Personal Life
This year has been a fairly big year for me in my personal life. As I mentioned last time, I started working from home. To be closer to her office and so that I could have my own dedicated home office, my wife Abigail and I moved to a new apartment in Cambridge, MA.
In addition, this year I have started doing things I hadn’t really done before: fundraising for charities I want to support, and exercising. Both at the same time, actually.
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All the New Things: Work
This is the second in a short series I’m calling All the New Things.
It’s a few days before my birthday, which seems like a good time to reflect on the past year and some of the changes that I’ve seen. Over the next few days, I’ll write a few posts on some of the more significant changes I’ve noticed this year in my life.
Work
For just about a year and a half I have been working from home for a Treehouse Agency. For nearly the entire duration I’ve been working on just a single project, Zagat.com. It has been an outstanding project and a great first year with Treehouse. Recently I have finished up my term with Zagat, so the past week or so has been ripe with change as I start on new projects.
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All the New Things: This Website
This is the first in a short series I’m calling All the New Things.
It’s a few days before my birthday, which seems like a good time to reflect on the past year and some of the changes that I’ve seen. Over the next few days, I’ll write a few posts on some of the more significant changes I’ve noticed this year in my life.
This Website
It seems appropriate to start with talking about this site as one of the many new things I’ve done this year. This website is brand new as of just yesterday.
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Developer-Enforced Design Flaws
This morning, I happened upon “Wired’s Essential Apps for 2011” and quickly found myself frowning. I wasn’t frowning because of the Wired editors’ decisions about which apps are the best, it was because I was frustrated with a glaring design problem in their article and I suspect I know the reason it looks so bad:
Developers Built it That Way
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The Stone Fence, a Great Drink for Autumn
This past weekend, Abigail and I hosted a party to celebrate Abigail’s birthday. Apple cider is one of Abigail’s favorite Fall treats and she asked if there were any good mixed drinks that used cider as an ingredient.
A few minutes of searching brought me to an old drink called the Stone Fence, which I heartily recommend.
From what I have learned, the Stone Fence is a traditional drink from New England dating back to around the time of the American Revolution. It’s a fairly simple and straight-forward mixed drink and has a number of my favorite Autumn flavors.
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Selecting text with JavaScript
Today I was working on a small tool to take some text that a user selects and copy it into a
textareato store ‘notes.’While I was researching how to do all of that, I figured out how to select arbitrary text on the page and highlight it, as though the user had dragged her cursor and selected it, using JavaScript.
The following snippet uses some jQuery to select an element, but it could just as easily be written without it.
<script type="text/javascript"> var rng = document.createRange($('p').get(0)); rng.selectNode($('p').get(0)); window.getSelection().removeAllRanges(); window.getSelection().addRange(rng); </script>
