Mitchell Hislop

Developing the Developer’s Mind

Mitchell Hislop — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 02:52:08 +0000

As many of you know, I have been spending much more time developing than consulting. I have been working more on my PHP skills, while also learning Ruby on Rails and Python.

This is partly because much of my work has been both working on developing @SMCpros social media tool and with developing Facebook apps and contests.

When I first started developing, I was a freshman in high school. I wrote PASCAL, and was instantly hooked. These programs were basically long scripts, and used long control loops. This is the class that I learned how to scan things for exploits, write self-replicating programs, and generally be a geek.

Fast forward to 2 years ago, when I started with PHP. I was still writing long scripts, with big ass control loops, and they worked. However, they were slow, and bucked all major conventions.

Now, I write OO PHP. I am learning Ruby and Python, both of which use OO and the MVC ideas extensively. I am going from a script writer to an app writer. I am having to develop the developer’s mind.

This also means that I am taking debugging to a new level, writing tests, focusing on my tools and coding process, and actually acting like a developer, rather than just someone who writes code.

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Super Cool Web Thing Of The Day – Greplin

Mitchell Hislop — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 02:45:07 +0000

I have decided to put my daily trips around the internet to good use, and start doing a “Super Cool Web Thing Of The Day” post. Now, this will only happen on days that I do find something cool, but when I do, you will hear about it.

First up for this auspicious honor is a startup that I am in love with, even though I haven’t fully tried the service yet. Greplin is billing itself as a “Spotlight for the Cloud”. (For you PC users, Spotlight is Apple’s full computer search tool).

Greplin can search through most of your major cloud accounts, including GMail, GCal, Twitter, Facebook, Dropbox, Basecamp, and several more.

Signups are still getting processed, so you will have to be patient. However, once you are in, you will be amazed how much you need this tool on a day-to-day basis.

The $5/month (or $45/year) pro account gives you more storage, more services, and faster indexing. Once I get to fully play with it, I am sure that I will upgrade.

Greplin is currently in beta. You can sign up at Greplin.com.

NOTE: I have no material relationship with any company that I promote. I sometimes have a paid account with them, which will be disclosed at the time of writing. If I have an affiliate link to sign up, I will disclose that as well.

If you have a suggestion for a SCWTOTD that you would like reviewed, please let me know at scwtotd@mitchellhislop.com

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I love you, readers

Mitchell Hislop — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 21:34:00 +0000

Therefore, I want to hook you up. Click this link, and you can get into Digg V4 Alpha pre-launch.

You are welcome.

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On Ideas

Mitchell Hislop — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 20:29:55 +0000

Ideas are a fickle thing. Sometimes, they manifest themselves as the best thing ever, only to be an idea that has already been had some number of times.

I recently got into a discussion at CoCo about ideas. We were talking about how interesting it is that they can get lost. For example:

The Romans had plumbing and elevators, which then took several hundred years to get “invented” again
Several people have had similar ideas at roughly the same time, many miles apart, each thinking its their own
Similar ideas always end up at the same end

We were also talking about how there should be sattalies orbiting the Earth, storing and backing up the internet, so that we dont lose our place in the world should something happen.

That was what got me thinking.

It is not that we are running out of ideas, or that we are using them up faster in this day and age. Since we can all communicate instantly, wirelessly, we are just finding out that the idea is used faster.
We have fewer and fewer ideas happening simultaniously, since we find out that they are already being worked on.

This is going to lead to a drought of ideas, until some innovators really kick it up a notch.

This post is just something for you all to rattle around.

Will you be that innovator?
Where are your ideas coming from?
How can we protect knowledge better?

(p.s. This is the first post on my new server. I now rock a Linode VPS, and am so pleased thus far. Be nice to it, everyone. And let me know if you see issues. )

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CES 2011!!!!!!11!!1!1!

Mitchell Hislop — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 23:36:56 +0000

CES is here

Luckily, I am in a position to live the dream of every geek, and am attending CES 2011 as press once again, in Las Vegas.

If you are a MN person, or someone I know online, and are going to be there, please let me know so we can make plans. I would love to see you there, grab drinks, party, anything.

If you are a blog, or need a writer to cover the event, or want me to wear your logo (@cocomsp, I am looking at you. I need a sticker…), please use my contact form to drop me a line.

I will be there representing SMCpros, MitchellHislop.com, and every geek that cant be there. If there is something that you want me to track down, play with, get a picture of, or steal, I will do my best to accomidate all requests made. Hell, I will even grab you some swag if you want it.

I am also going to be trying to set up a group blog with several people I know that will be there, so if you are going and want in, again, hit the contact form.

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My New Desktop

Mitchell Hislop — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 15:01:35 +0000

This is a slight departure from the normal geek chat that goes on here, but I wanted to show you all my desktop.

For some time now, I have been using GeekTool to embed scripts in my desktop. However, I didnt do any work to make them look good.

Now, after a night of ruby, php, and shell hacking, I have a functional, attractive desktop that tells me everything I need to know, right at the desktop level.

Scripts I used:

Day, Date, Month
A script to cURL the current weather icon from Yahoo
Several scripts for network stats (internal and external IP, transfer rate, SSID)
A few averaged pings to help me keep track of servers
Custom “ego” scripts: 2 ruby scripts for getting pageviews from Google Analytics, and 2 php scripts for current twitter followers (learning enough regex to make the php scripts happen nearly killed the whole idea)
A script to display my calendar

If you want help, or any of these scripts, leave a comment below.

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Hacking android

Mitchell Hislop — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 04:48:08 +0000

Motorola recently announced that the used the signed bootloader on the DroidX, and on the Droid2.

This is really bad news for anyone who wants to use custom roms, kernels, or even gain root access on their devices.

When the origional Droid launched, it had a bootloader that was unsigned, allowing users to replace it with a different bootloader that can use custom roms. This lead to the Droid becoming a favorite in the custom community, and remains one to this day.

When the international version of the Droid shipped (the Milestone), it had the signed bootloader.

That bootloader has yet to be defeated.

Motorola never said why they left the Droid so open. Their PR team stated that if you want a phone to use custom roms on, get a Nexus One.

I don’t get this. Why allow it on one device, but not all of them? Why lock it down in the first place? Android is ment to be open, so leave it open!

Android phones that CAN be opened to roms:
Droid
Moment
G1
Nexus One
MyTouch3G (also the slide, but its janky)
HTC Hero
HTC Evo
Droid Incrediable

Basically, everything but new Motorola phones. Which is why I won’t even consider getting one.

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Androids secret weapon

Mitchell Hislop — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 05:37:51 +0000

I have been spending quite a bit of time helping some of my friends tweak their android phones. It finally helped me nail down one of the factors that make me love Android over iOS:

Google App Engine.

GAE is a google service that many people don’t know about, but may use on a daily basis. It is a hosted app platform that developers can use to provide apps. However, there are several features that allow it to do things iOS could only dream of:

Single sign on capabilities: app providers can use google’s sign on rather than having to make their own auth system. This means that they can also have access to a users google services, if they allow it.
API: this is the big one. Mobile devices can access GAE, along with its data.

These two features coalesce to allow developers to be able to build webapps that can also affect a users mobile device. For instance, App Brain uses these features to make it so that a user can browse apps from the desktop, and sync them to their mobile.

It also drives things like the chrome2phone extension. This extension allows a user to send a link from their chrome browser to their phone. It basically stores the link in GAE, and retrieves it via the phone. It also lets me send a map that I am looking at in Chrome to my phone, which opens the map app. If I do it with a phone number, it opens the phone, and if I send selected text from the browser, it goes to the clipboard on my phone.

No other phone platform has a cloud based web app host behind them. This allows the computer and the phone to know of each others existence, and send things back and forth.

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Google Command Line Tools

Mitchell Hislop — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 02:59:37 +0000

Like any true geek, I constantly have a command line open. Therefore, I was super happy to see that google released their “googlecl” package, which is a collection of command line scripts to interact with google.

Therefore, I can CMD-tab to my terminal, fire off $google calendar today, and get my calendar for the day.

With this, I can also script it, to backup my gdocs, to display my calendar when I open my terminal, or even output onto my desktop, for quick, at a glance access.

Its written in python, which I dont know yet, so while I wont be contributing, I will be supporting it.

Find it here.

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My Android Homescreens

Mitchell Hislop — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 17:49:35 +0000

I figured it was time to do a post on what my homescreens look like, especially after upgrading to android 2.2. So, here you go:

Center Screen:

This is the default screen on my Droid. From top -> bottom, L -> R:

Search Bar: It searches things

NewsRob: Google Reader app, works very well

Mint.com: Keeps track of the money

Listen: Google’s podcast app, works very well

Dropbox: File sync with my Mac, and the cloud. One of my favorite companies

Facebook: Facebook App

Twitter: Twitter app

Foursquare: Foursquare app

Voice: Google Voice app, for managing my GV number

Gmail: Duh

Gallery: Duh

Springpad: Online notebook/task manager/external brain. Replaces an old love, Evernote

Assistant: Keeps track of some accounts for me, like my frequent flyer miles and netflix. Serves as a backup to Mint too.

At the bottom, you see something new from FroYo, which is the launcher. The phone and browser icon are VERY nice to have there, and the app launcher is now the 3D scrolling one from the Nexus 1, rather than the drawer it used to be.

The rest of my screens:

Have a question about any of these apps, or need a recommendation? Let me know in the comments.

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