Categories
perspective

Previously

If you enquired as to my health and i responded that i was previously ill, what would you assume my current health status to be?

And if you enquired as to my financial status and i responded that i was previously poor, what would you assume my current financial status to be?

If you enquired to my racial group and i responded that i was previously disadvantaged, what would you assume my current racial group to be?

And as with all things, when we attempt to be politically correct, instead of using plain black and white language, we start painting ourselves into the proverbial.

And if you reasoned that my current racial group is now advantaged by virtue of the fact that it was previously disadvantaged, what is the implication? For there to be a group that is disadvantaged, the assumption is that there exists a group which is advantaged. And now the existence of a previously disadvantaged (and hence currently advantaged) group implies there could be a currently disadvantaged- perhaps the previously advantaged?

It’s a language thing, and language lends itself to all sorts of abuse by implication, perspective, context and ignorance. And which is probably why language is so often used in politics- and the more the better.

Categories
perspective

BlackBerry Trickery

Learnt a very useful (albeit sneaky) trick today about running menu items off other screens. In particular, the phone screen menu items. Originally posted here.
And of course, a big thanks to simon_hain who’s helped with loads of development by virtue of his contributions to the online community. I definitely owe you a beer/coffee/tea or something if ever we meet one day 😉

Categories
Life

I’m Rich

I’m rich. Wealthy. Loaded. Rolling. Abundant. I have inherited millions over the last few weeks. Millions. In euros, pounds and dollars. And not Zim dollars. I’m talking USD, GPB and EUR millions.

It all started with Microsoft awarding me, not once, not twice, but over three times in the last few weeks, USD$10K at a time. Yahoo also followed and awarded me USD$1M. Just randomly. Can you believe my luck? Then, just as I thought I was getting lucky, I got real lucky.

In the space of 2 weeks, I won the Swiss Lottery (USD$100M), Spanish Lottery (EUR30M) and the Canadian Lottery (USD$28M). At least twice each. I kid you not. I have got the emails to prove it. Then my email address got entered into a lucky draw with billions of other people around the world and you’d never guess what happened? I won. 6 times. Twice, I won EUR1M, a couple times I won some other amounts. Whew! You’ll forgive me at this stage for not keeping track of exactly how much- you can imagine my giddiness. Besides, after a while, a bar here, a bar there. Who needs to keep track?

But it didn’t end there. The Nigerian government want to give me more money for compensating any losses I may have incurred because of email scams. Fortunately, I’m way too smart to fall for some pathetic email hoax. The Mali government want to apologise, in cash, for one of their citizens stealing my ATM card and transporting it all the way to their borders only to be apprehended by diligent border patrol. Apparently, the embarassment is too much? And the Saudi government want to use my bank account to transfer gazillions out of the country- a service they are only happy to pay for with 15% of the transfer. What’s 15% of a gazillion in USD converted to ZAR anyway?

On a sad note though, it just so happened that in the same last couple of weeks, a lot of my extended family have been dying. It turns out I have uncles, aunts, grandparents and friends of the family all over the world (whom I’ve never met) just bequeathing their entire estates (often worth more millions) to me alone. I need to chat to my mom about these family members and why we were never invited on ski holidays with them. Nonetheless, wrapping up all theses estates is going to take time and money- but money i have plenty of and I’ll just pay someone else for their time to do it.

The bad news however is that my bank have been sending me a lot of urgent notices to update my details so i can continue banking with them online. At first i ignored the emails- but then my millions weren’t arriving. No surprises there i guess. Afterall, they did say in the email that if i don’t logon with my username and password, all banking activity (online and off) will be suspended. Just shows: read your emails.

Anyways, so now I decided to update my online banking details after the umpteenth urgent final notice from my bank. Woohoo! My first of many millions should start arriving any day now….

Categories
perspective

Animated Gifs on BlackBerry

A clean and easy to use gem: HOWTO animated gifs for your BlackBerry development efforts. Courtesy of RIM.

Categories
perspective

Relaxing on The Couch

the last few days i’ve been looking at couchdb and started building my first app on it.
Coming from a primarily “backend coder” perspective (complete with domain modeling, object-mapping, type-safety and so on…), it’s been challenging getting to grips with JavaScript on steroids, plain HTML and jQuery along with couchapp all at the same time.
Sometimes my brain’s wires short-circuited but i’ve loved the journey so far. Very reminiscent of my experiences when i made the switch to doing cool stuff from “just doing stuff” for other people.
Lovin’ it.

Categories
Business Technology

zaFin Statistics Update

zaFinTools has been updated with a new function: the statistics calculator. Given a dataset, zaFinTools will give you a descriptive breakdown of the numbers, statistically speaking, by working out and displaying the following information in one go:

Length, Median, Mean, Sum, Sum of Squares, Minimum, Maximum, Range, Variance, Standard Deviation, Co-variance, Mean Absolute Variation, and then the 3 quartile positions and values.

Shew.

Download zaFin for BlackBerry.

Categories
Technology

ActiveRecord and Thrift Part Deux

I posted about AR and thrift earlier (or late last year) and was reminded this morning that I didn’t follow up that post with the solution. So here it is: Download spike code.

Now it has been a while since i solved this, and the versions may have changed since then, but I do remember that the “tricksy” part was boot-strapping ActiveRecord. That was done using the supplied boot.rb. Once that’s done, you can happily run the thrift server daemon based on textbook instructions and the rest is history. Your models and all the ActiveRecord learnings you’ve had with rails can be re-used quite happily.

Happy coding.

Categories
perspective

Time Value of Money

The most useful “fun” utility on the zaFin suite was the time value of money calculator which basically allows you to compare the value of money at different times.
For example, how many times have you heard someone older than you mention the price of something way back when and then proceed to complain about the price of things today?
“When I was 25 years old, the price of bread was only 50c. Today, it’s R10!”
Well, 50c way back then was equivalent to just exactly how much today? Remember, all prices are relative, thanks to inflation. Things get more expensive, but we don’t still earn R150 per year (hopefully), right?
Nonetheless, the zaFin inflation and time value of money calculator will help put things in perspective for you.

Categories
Business

zaFin for BlackBerry

At last, a version for the BlackBerry has been released and ready for general public consumption. Make some good decisions this year- based on numbers and data- not just emotional “got-to-have-x” or even more dangerous hype-based “woohoo-the-recession-is-over-we-can-spend-now” motivations. take the time to think it over a little… or use zaFin.

Categories
perspective

To The Power Of, by hand

I’ve often needed to create a power function, as in 2^3 or more commonly Math.pow(2,3) = 8. However, sometimes, the Math.pow() doesn’t exist and the operator ^ is reserved for other useful functions or not recognised at all. In times like that, you need to hand roll- so here’s a good link to keep bookmarked.