Great quote by Alan Moore on  where the next big ideas in entertainment will come from:

It seems that every movie is a remake of something that was better when it was first released in a foreign language, as a 1960s TV show, or even as a comic book. Now you’ve got theme park rides as the source material of movies. The only things left are breakfast cereal mascots. In our lifetime, we will see Johnny Depp playing Captain Crunch.

Love that – Johnny Depp playing Captain Crunch.

More from Moore on DC Comics’ continued attempts to milk the one of the best graphic novels of all time – Watchmen.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

To think different, sometimes you have to do the unthinkable – like maybe swallow your pride and make peace with your nemesis.

There are so many lessons associated with Steve Jobs and what he did and achieved at Apple, but here’s a pretty human and applicable one – no one is coming to save you. You are on your own, we all are. No one is going to show up some morning and pull the novel you’ve been dreaming about writing out of your head, raise your kids, brush your teeth or fix your broken company.

Didn’t matter who Steve Jobs was, or what he’d done, the success he’d already achieved, how much personal wealth he had in the bank. He had to make that call. “Hey Bill, it’s Steve…”

A really great essay by Jim Maiella (via SplatF by Dan Frommer)

Social Media Explained a la @ThreeShipsMedia http://instagr.am/p/nm695/

Figured out how to remove Uncategorized from the Tag Cloud widget, editing wp_tag_cloud function in category-template.php (the same function/file I modified earlier to display 100 tags instead of the default 45).

function wp_tag_cloud( $args = '' ) {
$defaults = array(
'smallest' => 8, 'largest' => 22, 'unit' => 'pt', 'number' => 100,
'format' => 'flat', 'separator' => "\n", 'orderby' => 'name', 'order' => 'ASC',
'exclude' => '1', 'include' => '', 'link' => 'view', 'taxonomy' => 'post_tag', 'echo' => true
);

Of course, modifying this file directly runs the risk of a future WordPress upgrade overwriting my category-template.php changes. But it will have to suffice until I figure out how to modify wp-includes files without modifying the actual files themselves.

For a while I’ve wanted to figure out a way to automatically send WordPress posts to my Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ accounts.  Some searching led me to How to Push Your WordPress Blog Posts to Twitter and Facebook. In less than an half an hour I download, installed, configured, and tested all three plug-ins.

There doesn’t appear to be a plug-in to let you do the same thing for Google+ at this time (read that the API doesn’t support this function right now).

Steve Jobs created an Apple juggernaut. Bill Gates created Microsoft and a better world – he doesn’t get the credit he deserves.

Source: frugaldad.com

In my previous post I designed for the data collection screen for the my MBTA Trip Tracker, one that mimics the layout of the paper tickets handed out by conductors.

There didn’t appear to be an android: attribute to put a border around Android’s TextView control (the equivalent of a .NET Label). A quick Google search turned up a post on Stack Overflow which suggested creating a new class that inherited from TextView and override its OnDraw method to create the border.

public class BorderedTextView : TextView
{
public BorderedTextView(Context context, IAttributeSet attrs, int defStyle)
: base(context, attrs, defStyle){}

public BorderedTextView(Context context, IAttributeSet attrs)
: base(context, attrs){}

public BorderedTextView(Context context)
: base(context){}

protected override void OnDraw(Android.Graphics.Canvas canvas)
{
base.OnDraw(canvas);

Rect rect = new Rect();
Paint paint = new Paint();

paint.SetStyle(Android.Graphics.Paint.Style.Stroke);
paint.Color = Android.Graphics.Color.White;
paint.StrokeWidth = 3;

GetLocalVisibleRect(rect);
canvas.DrawRect(rect, paint);
}

}

Combined with an XML layout and some help from these two web pages – Using Custom Views in a Layout and Declaring a Custom Android UI Element using XML.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<LinearLayout
xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
xmlns:app="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/mbta"

android:orientation="vertical"
android:layout_width="match_parent"
android:layout_height="match_parent">

<mbta.BorderedTextView android:id="@+id/setcurrentdate"
android:text="Set Current Date"
android:textSize="15pt"
android:layout_width="match_parent"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:gravity="center_horizontal|center_vertical"
android:layout_weight="1"/>

<mbta.BorderedTextView android:id="@+id/selectstarttime"
android:text="Select Start Time"
android:textSize="15pt"
android:layout_width="match_parent"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:gravity="center_horizontal|center_vertical"
android:layout_weight="1"/>

</LinearLayout>

Gave me the user interface I wanted.

Another hour or two of fiddling with Android layout XML and some reading about Supporting Multiple Screens gave me a final layout embedded in a ScrollView that appears the same on multiple screen sizes and densities.

Next, event handling for TextView touches.

I’ve been writing up a post on subclassing Android’s TextView widget to put a border around it.

I want to include some code examples in the post but the WordPresses editor isn’t the greatest for doing things like this. (I know, I can use <pre> and <code> but even with those tags there’s a lot of fiddling that has to go on and the results require a lot more work than I think is necessary.)

I love the Stack Overflow editor, especially how you can indent code examples just by adding four spaces to the beginning of the line. And I recall that Jeff Atwood had a post or two about it and the technology stack used to build Stack Overflow.

I figured it wouldn’t be too hard to find the posts, particularly the one about the technology stack. I did some googling using terms “platform,” “technology stack,” and “tools.” I even limited my search to codinghorror.com. Nothing. Lots of hits on Coding Horror but given that it’s a technology weblog, the top ten choices weren’t narrowed down to what I wanted.

I had printed out the web page on the Stack Overflow technology stack but searching through a box of clippings that I’ve kept over the years didn’t turn it up.

I then started looking through the Coding Horror archives, figuring I could quickly scan each month to find what I want. I went through the 2010 and 2009 archives until I realized this was a sub-optimal use of my time.

So then I turned to Google Reader. I’ve been using this RSS aggregator since October 8, 2005, reading and tagging my way through 32,133 posts from between ten to fifteen sites (the number has changed over the years). I always thought I’ve had some sort of tagging mania, an unnatural desire to catalog stuff in case I needed it later. (Hence my box of pre-internet clippings which has been curated down to a single box from multiples.) I’ve thought at times that I should give up tagging, that if I ever needed to find something, Google would suffice.

So I looked through my Google Reader tags and found two – “stack overflow” and “stackoverflow” (I’ve changed my tagging style over the years, I also use “stack-overflow” for Delicious, which doesn’t allow spaces). Immediately I found the two posts I was looking for along with links to several others from those two posts.

• What Was Stack Overflow Built With?
• Reverse Engineering the WMD Editor
• Updating WMD Editor
• WMD Editor Reverse Engineered

Which doesn’t help me with my “embedding code in a WordPress post” problem but does make me feel better about tagging all those posts over the years (now if I can just finish tagging those 500+ Starred posts waiting in the queue).

Which also makes me wonder if WordPress is the best platform to use going forward. I like it’s ease-of-use but sometimes its PHP nature bugs the reptilian Microsoft/.NET part of my brain.

Update #1 – Just discovered SyntaxHighlighter Plus, a WordPress plug-in for code syntax highlighting (based on the original SyntaxHighlighter). I’ll have to download, install, and check it out (strangely enough, found out about it while browsing through the BlogEngine.NET list of extensions).

Update #2 – Installed SyntaxHighligher Plus after FTPing the files to my /wp-content/plugins/ directory. (Also discovered that there’s no difference between the WordPress /www and /public-html directories, /www is a shortcut to /public-html.)

The plug-in appears to do exactly what I want, allowing me to easily embed source code in a WordPress post using the tag “sourcecode.”

public class BorderedTextView : TextView
{

public BorderedTextView(Context context, IAttributeSet attrs, int defStyle)
: base(context, attrs, defStyle){}

public BorderedTextView(Context context, IAttributeSet attrs)
: base(context, attrs){}

public BorderedTextView(Context context)
: base(context){}

protected override void OnDraw(Android.Graphics.Canvas canvas)
{
base.OnDraw(canvas);

Rect rect = new Rect();
Paint paint = new Paint();

paint.SetStyle(Android.Graphics.Paint.Style.Stroke);
paint.Color = Android.Graphics.Color.White;
paint.StrokeWidth = 3;

GetLocalVisibleRect(rect);
canvas.DrawRect(rect, paint);
}

}

Pretty cool stuff. I guess I’ll stick with WordPress for a while longer.

I’ve got to get some sleep, McCoy and that damn Vulcan are driving me crazy.

As part of my regular commute from Rhode Island to Cambridge I’ve been logging information about my commuter train rides to try and “optimize” my trips. I’ve been using Evernote to hold the information for each trip  - date, train time, time when my ticket was checked, and the stations I was between when it was checked.

Of course I thought about writing an Android app so I wouldn’t have to manually type the information into Evernote.

My initial design was nothing special – a list screen displaying the data items that have been collected; selecting an existing item or creating a new item would display a detail screen where you would enter data using Android’s onscreen keyboard or radio and checkbox control spinners. Nothing special, I’ve seen hundreds, maybe thousands of smartphone apps designed that way.

On the train one day I found one of the punch tickets that the conductors give to passengers who buy their ticket on the train.

It made me think about trying something different for data entry besides the standard field and dialog box method of data entry. What if you could display a facsimile of this punch ticket onscreen and tap the various areas to highlight the selected region or initiate actions? It might make for quicker data entry. And it would be a pretty cool think to try and do.

First I had to determine how I wanted to layout the information on the data collection screen. Instead of having separate areas for month and day I condensed them into a single Date field – tapping the field would set the date. I replaced the zone list with the actual station stops on the Providence/Stoughton route since I’m not a conductor and don’t have them memorized. I also experimented with including the train start times.

I decided to eliminate the train start times since when the train leaves the station isn’t critical. Decided I liked the side-by-side layout for stations for its compactness. Included a Time field at the bottom that would function like the Date field – tapping it would set the current time.

Added a GPS field at the bottom to capture the latitude and longitude since I’ve got access to the smartphone’s GPS receiver.

And finally I decided that I wanted to capture the Start Time separately from the Punch Time.

So there you have it, one design prototype in fifteen minutes of whiteboarding. Turns out it’s easier to implement than I thought it would be thanks to Stack Overflow.

Next, overriding the Android widget TextView class to create borders around each TextView.