a.muse

if you ever want to see your precious, little butter bear again...

Jessica — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 19:20:00 -0500

Regarding the events of June 8th, 2008, we are most displeased with your uncooperation in what was supposed to be The Risk Heist of 2008. Despite all of our planning, you failed at the most crucial of steps—distracting the infantry while we acheive world domination; for this we have confiscated one butter bear. We are willing to negotiate an exchange.

Sincerely,

Aesop, Blanche and a reluctant Maddie

Android Sheep

Jessica — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 17:12:00 -0500

The Goal

Using the Android development kit, create an Android application that allows users to scroll through images of electric sheep and vote on which images they like.

First impression of Android: rich, open API with quick-n-easy dev set up

Holy shit! The documentation is like drinking from a water hose, definitely worse than a JavaDoc. The pay off is that there is a ton of features that “come with” this open source SDK. As mentioned on android linux,

usually you have major companies forming an oligarchy of mobile handset programming, but not so much with Android, anyone, even the girl next door, could be the person making the next great Android based mobile application.

And if you are familiar with Eclipse and HttpClient and jaxp and a slew of other things int the java world, then developing an Android app should be a snap. :-)

First lesson learned: keep your performance tuning cap on

Go ahead and resize all images to fit the phone screen. One issue that Gloria and I encountered was that switching between images in the image switcher was slow. I am not sure what the best way to do this is if you do not know the screen size; i mean i guess you would simply detect the screen size and choose the corresponding image size, but this assumes that the appropriately sized image would be available to you.

I did change the scaletype to CENTER, but I didn’t really notice a big performance difference… I mean I couldn’t even tell which one was faster. Per the moderator’s comments… the thumbnail isn’t stretched. The thumbnail and the png are two different files. But the ‘stretching’ that could be giving us problems is the shrinking of the png to fit it inside the small screen—I can see this because when the scaletype is set to CENTER or not set at all, the image appears much larger and not all of it fits on the screen. But so, unless we resize the images, there will always be some stretching/shrinking… it seems reasonable to close the ticket; we can optimize by resizing if there continues to be a performance issue. Anyways… interesting stuff. I am beginning to see what some of the challenges would be in writing a mobile app.

Second lesson learned: be mindful of your focus

Either do not set the focus on the ImageView or pass in the gallery so you can set the focus back to the gallery. I received some great help from the Android Beginners Google Group.

Setup Tips

Another issue that tripped me up was logging. Sysouts won’t work… or at least Android provides its own logging. This logging how to helped me out. The short of it is use “adb logcat” command to view logging done by android.util.Log.
Don’t waste time decompiling; get the source. Although it never fails, I end up decompiling stuff anyways. <^_^>

Updates to Come: I wrote this post some time ago, and there are several cool things that I have learned since that time… more updates to come. Currently, I am working on displaying images downloaded from the sheep server given some set of sheep.

cute cupcakes come as camel-colored, carmel culinary confections

Jessica — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 21:32:00 -0500

We had another Atlanta Blythe Meetup a few weekends ago. There were a bunch of cute, new dollies to oogle over. Afterwards Linda taught me how to make bead headbands and clay cupcakes, for Blythes of course! Below are my notes and shopping lists for making these myself… next time.

Atlanta February Meetup by the Numbers

Over 30 dollies showed up
Approximately 8 pirate swords… Arrrrg!
5 Blonde Blythes
2 attendees with human offspring (aka Moms)
1 Irwin Street Market

Blythe Bead Headbands
wire
wire cutters
pliers
plastic beads

Clay Food
clay in different colors
clay knife
latex gloves

To make the clay food all you have to do is mix the colors, shape the clay into your cute creation, and bake for 13 min @ 350. Beat that Martha!

Next time we are going to make Matchbox Dressers. And maybe the guys can play Risk. Sweet! I can’t wait.

J2EE 1.4 Content Type Tidbit

Jessica — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 00:25:00 -0600

Using Wireshark, you can detect some subtle differences in the j2ee 1.3 and 1.4 api’s as relating to http responses. One is difference is that PrintWriter appends the charset to the end of the content type (e.g. the MIME type) with a default of iso-8850-1. Also, setting the locale using response.setLocale() after setting the content type also appears to cause the charset to be appended to the content type.

Why is this an interesting find? Well, these extra characters have the potential of breaking things if client side code hasn’t been written well. For instance, a browser plugin that decides what to do with the response based on the MIME type may not know how to deal with a MIME type where ”;charset: iso-8850-1” is appended to the end. If these changes to the api are breaking someone else’s code :-(, you can work around these differences by writing the needed string in a jsp.

See future self, how would you ever have remembered that one if you hadn’t have written it down?

aesop

Jessica — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 16:39:00 -0600

I wanted to give her two names, but that would require more typing. <^_^>

All of these photos were taken prior to doing anything to the doll. No combing, no washing, no nothin’. She is very pale, and her eyechips are what I would call carmel, deep blue, purple and grassy green (not shown here).

These RBLs are like a completely different doll. I can’t imagine what the first folks to get an RBL in the mail thought.

She has no real identity yet, although I am pretty sure she can see into the future; she’s a pre-born. That child is an abomination!

More photos to come!

One Useful Infinite Loop

Jessica — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 20:49:00 -0600

If you are ever are in need of a page that would keep a url connection open for an extended period of time, as opposed to simply returned a 404 or 500 error, then you might consider simulating an unresponsive page by creating a page with an infinite loop on it.


<html>
<script>
   function infiniteLoop() {
   var i = 0;

   while (i<=0)
   {
     i = i-1;
   }
}
</script>
<body onload="infiniteLoop()">
</body>
</html>

Ok, so javascript won’t work (that is, you should get a 200 from this page) because it is on the client side, but do the same thing with a jsp or embedded ruby.


<html>
<body>
<% int i = 0;
while (i<=0) {
  i--;
}
%>
</body>
</html>

This is nice for testing timeout parameters on an http connection that you have opened up. For instance, using the java library HttpClient, you can set the connection timeout on a connection. Instead of attempting to connect with the availabe resource, try to connection to this infinite loop page.

Naming

Jessica — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 20:01:00 -0600

I’m getting a new doll! She is an Angelica Eve. I haven’t decided on a name yet. The baptisimal moment, both necessary and a priori according to Kripke, is almost as exciting as getting the doll itself. Some programmers say that they can’t start work on a project until they give it an agreeable name. There’s something about naming that I enjoy. Naming, in and of itself, isn’t about discovery, like Kripke’s intuitions show, rather naming is like putting a hook or a piece of Velcro on an object, so that the object can be referenced. I guess naming satisfies my need to organize and tiddy things, albeit word things. Anyways, enough about naming… I want to name her something with two names and more than 4 syllables.

I went to Inman Perk this weekend with Linda. We got a ton of great advice from Christy Petterson of ICE regarding putting on a large event. Maybe one day we will get to return the favor or pay the favor forward.

Here are our girls chillin’ literally outside in the snow.

Linda took the following beautiful photo. I am holding the top of Blanches head like a place kicker – that’s what Linda says. So, if you haven’t tried this method for photographing your doll, make sure to try Linda’s place kicker method! Ah, yet another name is given. :-)

Toys and Tech

Jessica — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 22:56:00 -0500

I’ve been so busy lately; ruby group, getting ready to go to New York and blythe con site design have been taking up all of my extra time. So, I’m sure my girls are feeling neglected.

Ok, I guess that answers that question.

Girl, you need to go get some clothes on. You’re going to visit your friends tomorrow, and you can’t go naked.

Anyways, a few lessons learned from ruby group are:

if you are being a total idiot & notice that a field appears to be written out to the db (no errors), but isn’t making it into the db, you might have a duplicate field. Just a warning!
in the rails script/console, you can use tab complete to view a more complete list of rails methods beginning with some word or part of a word

Essential SVN (for use on the run)
svn propedit svn:ignore db\schema.rb
svn revert -R
svn commit -m "did cool stuff"
svn update
svn co http://tools.assembla.com/svn/atlrug/atlrug01/trunk/atlrug01/ atlrug01 you can’t check out our code unless you are apart of our assembla group, but soon you might be able to, but here’s the repository anyways

Ok, ok! I know you need some TLC; I’m coming.

Recap from Ruby Coding Group: 8-11-07

Jessica — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 19:03:00 -0500

Make sure Ruby, Rails, MySql & Subversion are installed and working properly on your machine.

Create 2 databases: atlrug01_development & atlrug01_test

Login to Assembla where the atlrug coding project 1 is being hosted. You need to be invited to the atlrug project in order to checkout the project with subversion.

Checkout the atlrug project: svn co http://tools.assembla.com/svn/atlrug. You will have to enter your assembla password and username in order to check the project out.

Here are two options for syncing the data between development databases in rails:

1. export and import sql—using a command like this one…

mysql -u root -p atlrug01_development < /path/to/your/project/.../atlrug/atlrug01/trunk/atlrug01/db/development_data.sql

2. fixtures + yaml

I placed a rake task in lib/tasks that will take whatever is in the db and dump that into a yaml fixture located in test/fixtures.

After checking out the latest version of the project, you run rake db:migrate & rake db:fixtures:load to import the yaml to your db.

Full instructions here: http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/3393

A No-Touch-Up Photo of the New Blanche

Jessica — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 00:21:00 -0500

I finished Blanche’s customizations tonight. She is bald & waiting for some wigs. Her eye chips were replaced, face sanded and pastel blush and eye shadow applied along with lips painted. Oh yeah, new eye lashes, too!

My tips:

Follow all of the Puchi Collective tutorials.
Be patient and creative with your tool use. Figure out what you need to do and search around the house for objects that can help you do those things.
Use a bobby pen to re-attach the eye spring to the head. Attach bobby pen to spring and drop the pen down through the small hole in the back of her head before closing the head up. You may have to widen the spring’s loop in order to attach the spring to the head, as well as push the bobby pen off into the head and move the head around until you can grab the pen out.
It took me three days to get the head open. There was a ton of glue holding her head together. Soak, soak, soak.