Facebook beat out the likes of MySpace because its data was structured in a way that gave it some context…
How Facebook Knows What You Really Like
Free form is cool until there is no context to it.
Source: Wired
Governments, the economy, schools, everything in society, are not for the benefit of the privileged minorities. We can look after ourselves. It is for the benefit of the ordinary run of people, who are not particularly clever or interesting (unless, of course, we fall in love with one of them), not highly educated, not successful or destined for success, in fact, nothing very special. It is for the people who, throughout history, have entered history outside their neighborhoods as individuals only in the record of their births, marriages, and deaths. Any society worth living in is one designed for them, not for the rich, the clever, the exceptional, although any society worth living in must provide room and scope for such minorities. But the world is not made for our personal benefit. A world that claims that this is its purpose is not a good world, and ought not to be a lasting one.
6 years
Today marks 6 years that the girlfriend and I have been dating exclusively. Of the 6 years, close to 3 or about half of the time we’ve been together, its been long distance with no end in sight considering the situation my professional life is at the moment.
Many people I’ve mentioned this fact to think that its way cool and goddamn impressive we’ve been able to be together so long despite being far apart for such extended periods. Some ask about our secret. Some also think its easy because we seem to give off that impression.
The truth of the matter is that it is fucking difficult. It took us sheer amounts of guts, patience and understanding. That and I think I’m a pretty lucky guy.
I think not being in close physical proximity is one of the toughest things to deal with when it comes to long distance relationships. In fact, I think the difficultly grows exponentially tougher for every 72km that people are apart. God forbid if you are in different timezones.
The distance brings to light what is really important in relationships. Clear communication and understanding ranks really high on the list. Having sorted out your issues before separation is a major plus. You have to put in double the effort for things. To revel in the simple things, not the complicated overboard dramatic gestures. Cherishing whatever time you have together if you are even proximally close.
You could say I have 3 years of experience with that. It doesn’t get any easier though. I’m still learning as things go on.
Whatever it is though, its been 6 wonderful years, I’ve been incredibly lucky and the situation is changing with the distance being reduced. I look forward to more, and with an eye on making this permanent.
So here’s to 6 years. Love you babe.
If that means you have to build or buy an IDE for OS X, then so be it. Having to reboot out of our native environment into Windows is enough of a deterrent; remember, these people don’t need you, you need them. They won’t flock to WP7 work to pay their bills, they’ll flock to iOS.
Sync iCloud Contacts/Calendar with Android
The bane of using an Android device having come from iOS is largely the inability to easily transfer your contacts and calendar entries over.
A cursory Google search doesn’t really seem to have any solutions to this particular problem either because iOS users are contented with their devices and Android users would probably never use iCloud over Google’s own cloud offerings.
Google lets you get access to your stuff via Microsoft’s Exchange Activesync. iCloud seems like largely a blackbox that doesn’t seem to have any public endpoints. However, a quick look at Apple’s history shows time and time again, the usage of open standards or at least proposed standards.
iCloud contacts are largely coordinated through CardDav, while calendar is CalDav, both of which are open standards. So at the end of the day, all you need is a system to pull data from those sources and push them to either your device or a service that can push them to your device.
In this case, I found CalDav-Sync and CardDav-Sync. These are basically Android applications implemented as Sync conduits for Android’s account feature. The paid version is not that expensive for what they do so buy it.
Having these available is still one part of the equation. Getting access to your data is the other. iCloud stores account information in ~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook and ~/Library/Calendars respectively.
For your contacts, look in the ~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook/Sources directory and hunt for Configuration.plist files. There should be a few if you’ve previously added multiple sources. What you are looking for is a URL in the rough form of https://<icloud user name>@pXX-contacts.icloud.com… what you are interested is the server pXX-contacts.icloud.com where XX is a number. That is basically your CardDav server you need to connect to. The username and password is your iCloud login respectively.
Similary for calendar entries, look in the different directories under ~/Library/Calendars looking for an Info.plist. This time search for a string in the rough form of https://pXX-caldav.icloud.com… The server for CalDav is basically pXX-caldav.icloud.com where XX is a number. Username and password is your iCloud login.
Here are a couple of screenshots for CardDav-Sync and CalDav-Sync.
Its that simple!
Coincidentally, this is also the way you can add Calendars from other Google accounts without syncing the entire account. Left as an exercise to the reader to figure out.
I am actually physically disgusted that so many computer science programs think that Java is a good introductory language, because it’s “easy” and you don’t get confused with all that boring string/malloc stuff but you can learn cool OOP stuff which will make your big programs ever so modular. This is a pedagogical disaster waiting to happen. Generations of graduates are descending on us and creating Shlemiel The Painter algorithms right and left and they don’t even realize it, since they fundamentally have no idea that strings are, at a very deep level, difficult, even if you can’t quite see that in your perl script.
Back to Basics - Joel on Software
Also why I think CS fundamentals like how shit works is more important than math for first year students.
For every good reason there is to lie, there is a better reason to tell the truth.
Live so that when your children think of fairness and integrity, they think of you.
inspired by charm: very PINteresting {delicious dips}
Best page eva.
@SirKenRobinson: If you’re not prepared to be wrong you’ll never come up with anything original.
Source: thegodfounder
Now THIS is my idea of the perfect workspace.
Source: linxspiration
Why I love rugby. Why I love the All Blacks. Ferocity personified.
(via all-b-l-a-c-k-everything)
Source: fuckyeahpiriweepu
MNCoder
Its been about 3 weeks, but I’m finally done with a piece of work that will be used (hopefully) in the iCloud capable version of Mindnode.
MNCoder is what I’d call a clever hack using NSKeyedArchiver and NSKeyedUnarchiver to help with portability of certain Apple classes between iOS and…
Some more bunch of code I wrote. Open Source on Github.
Source: ornyx
