Sargon Benjamin

Cool Websites and Tools - thanks MakeUseOf!

2012-01-21T11:32:00.000-08:00

Daily tools to keep your tech life in order. Here's a top 5 list by makeuseof . One of the featured tools is ViBe for Android <3

How sexy does 'Best App Ever' sound! ViBe

2012-01-05T09:47:00.000-08:00

148 Apps (they're kinda big) hosts a Best App Ever Awards and ViBe for Android has bounced into the Finals. This is quite the honor considering there were 7,243 mobile apps in the runnings. I'm proud to be a finalist in the 'Best Special Needs' category, as we truly feel that ViBe makes a difference for the hearing impaired community. We've heard from a number of deaf advocates that ViBe has broken down communication barriers. Please spare 2 min to go in and vote with each link for each category. Jan 25, 2011 deadline.
Instructions:
1. Click the links below
2. Click 'Vote for ViBe' button
3. Repeat the process for each link (it takes 3 seconds for each link).
4. Comment on this blog post once you've voted and I'll send you some love

Voting Links:
Most Innovative App
Best Special Needs App
Best Use of Hardware App
Best Ringtone App

Vote for ViBe for Best Ringtone App
Vote for ViBe for Most Innovative App
Vote for ViBe for Best Use of Hardware
Vote for ViBe for Best Special Needs App

Vote: Mint & ViBe in the Crunchies by TechCrunch

2011-12-13T13:46:00.000-08:00

Final day to vote in the Crunchies Awards by TechCrunch.

My picks:
Tablet Application: Mint by mint.com
Mobile Application: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.base2apps.vibes (ViBe)

Here are the steps to vote:

Go to the TechCrunch voting page http://is.gd/oV8bKI
For Best Mobile Application, paste in the ViBe market url https://market.android.com/details?id=com.base2apps.vibes
Click 'Nominate'

Please do the same for Mint in the Tablet Application category by Tuesday Dec 13, 2011 11:59pm PST

Luck is what happens to you when ... (you vote for ViBe in the Crunchies)

2011-12-08T11:02:00.000-08:00

Shantaram is a heart wrenching and inspirational story of Bombay seen through the eyes of an Australian convict. The author, Gregory David Roberts, gifts the reader with numerous quotes, as the main character journeys to India and even skirmishes around Afghanistan with the Mujahideen.

"Luck is what happens to you when fate gets tired of waiting"

It's been a lucky week thus far. Heck, I even won a 49ers Patrick Willis jersey at work, this just after being present at Candlestick Park to watch the 49ers clinch their first NFC West Division title since I don't know how long.

My friends and I created a sweet mobile app that could use a lucky streak and your help is needed. Vote for ViBe in the Crunchies Awards by TechCrunch! Here's what you need to do:

Click this link: http://is.gd/oV8bKI
Scroll down to Best Mobile Application 2011
Paste in the ViBe market URL: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.base2apps.vibes
Click 'Nominate'
You can do this daily and let your friends know too

Thank you for your support. I'll leave you with another quote from Shantaram

"Whatever you do, in the privacy of your own rain shower, is your own business"

Lucky week. Won a 49ers Jersey @ work (Sargon Benjamin)

Getting your body ripped and shredded in an automated way - the Sogwiz workout

2011-11-12T12:10:00.000-08:00

Time to take a breather from all the coding - wheeeew. The absolute best way for me to strip away the mental rust that can come from a frustrating day of coding is actually to go BEAST mode on my body at the gym. It hurts so good.

(Sargon Benjamin) - Rowers at 3rd Door in Palo Alto - (Sargon Benjamin)

What it is: A treadmill interval and weight routine circuit with no more than 10 seconds rest in between the treadmill interval and the weight routine. The MOST important part of the workout to remember is that it is a DESCENDING workout. This means that you need to increase the speed of the treadmill on each successive interval. Why? This trains your body to progress through the workout, accelerate past the hurt, and get stronger longer.

Here's the lowdown:
Name: the Sogwiz workout

Treadmill: 15 minute SLOW jog at a moderate incline
Stretch your legs and shoulders for 5 minutes
Place 2 dumbbells behind the treadmill so that you can quickly access them after each treadmill interval
Perform 3 *rounds of 3 minutes
Perform 4 rounds of 2 minutes
Perform 3 rounds of 1 minute
Recover : Stretch

*Round:

Treadmill Interval: 3 minute treadmill interval followed by 20 second jog (you don't want to just jump off the treadmill as you'll want to keep your legs loose and warm. The last thing we want to do is get injured)
Weight Routine: Hop off the treadmill and perform the **weight routine

**Weight routine:

6-10 reps of bicep curl to shoulder press
6-10 reps of shrugs
Place dumbbells on ground and do 10-15 pushups

NOTE: The weight routine is all 1 exercise with no rest or placing of weights down

There are dozens of fun variations to this routine, especially if you have a group. The best variant I've performed is to alternate one person rowing a 550meter erg (land rowing machine) piece during the interval. We only stop the interval once that person finishes the 500meter erg piece - talk about pressure, sheesh!

I'd love nothing more than to have folks comment about their variations or tips to enhance this workout. I'd also love to hear your experience with this routine.
- Sargon Benjamin

What are you doing on 11/11/11 ?

2011-11-06T15:19:00.000-08:00

Twitter account @11ViBe is asking the question: What are you doing on 11/11/11 #eleven?

Replies are made mentioning @11ViBe and including the hashtag #eleven

Example tweet:
"@11ViBe I will spend my 11/11/11 like a king #eleven"

Could ViBe have saved Kim's marriage?

2011-11-01T11:03:00.000-07:00

Too bad Kim Kardashian didn't have an Android device. She could have used ViBe

Communication is key in all relationships. This fact manifests itself most in an intimate relationship or marriage where communication is the bond that holds together the trust and confidence two partners have in one another.
We're social creatures - we crave attention and connecting with others. ViBe lets you connect with those most important to you because it lets you feel who's calling you. If you're in an important meeting or getting your nails done, ViBe comes in handy as it will let you know if the incoming phone call is more important than your current activity. This is because ViBe vibrates your phone differently based off of who's calling.

Best of luck to Kim (and Kris) in all your future endeavors! Download ViBe for Android:

https://market.android.com/details?id=com.base2apps.vibes

Feel me - ViBe Android app lets you feel who's calling

2011-10-19T11:59:00.001-07:00

That's right. Custom vibrations based off who's calling you. ViBe is like CallerID or custom ringtones using distinct vibration patterns. Very simple and innovative idea for this Android app.

In the press:
oobly

California Luv

2011-10-19T11:59:00.000-07:00

3 Cali teams in the top 10! Yeah yeah, ratings don't matter but pride and bragging rights do. I can't remember the last time I saw 3 Cali teams in any sport make it to the top 10. Red and Gold baby

(copyright ESPN)

Automated build, deploy, and test process for iPhone apps

2011-08-11T17:02:00.000-07:00

Dear everybody,

It's been a second since we last spoke. How are you? As is the case when an acquaintance contacts you after a hiatus, it's usually because she wants something from you. This case is no different, though I am interested in seeing how you've been and reading about your latest and greatest Tweets!
See, I've been busy tinkering away with different mobile technologies and have run into a coding block. I can't quite figure out how to deploy an internal iOS app (.ipa file) to a physical iOS device in an automated way.
Why: A manual deployment and test process is too cumbersome and just doesn't scale. Our QA team needs a way to ensure the quality of our internal builds. Currently, we create a .ipa internal iOS app file for QA to then download from a repository. After downloading the file, a QA engineer then syncs the .ipa file to an iOS device via iTunes.

An ideal process would look like the following

shell script that does an xcode build
script to download the .ipa file from the repository and onto the QA machine
deploy internal build file to device using iTunes or iPhone Configuration Utility
run automated tests against the iPhone device using Instruments

I believe step 3 could be completed via AppleScript but I'm just not sure... Have you deployed an iPhone app to your device using AppleScript against either iTunes or the iPhone Configuration Utility? If so, I'd love to hear back from you.

Sincerely,

Pen Pal Sargon

Mini-makeover for the Base2 home page

2011-08-11T11:43:00.000-07:00

Would love to hear your thoughts about the new Base 2 Applications home page. Check it out!

Accelerating time to market on iPhone

2011-07-14T10:57:00.000-07:00

Bad ratings on the appstore are catastrophic in a time where app placement within the appstore dictate app downloads. A couple bad ratings can quickly kick an app down those charts. What this really means is that an iPhone user would now have to further scroll down, refine their search, or tab over multiple pages just to see said app.
The quality of an app cannot be stressed enough - generally, low quality = bad ratings (and bad ratings = minimal downloads). A framework that I'm currently using to perform automated testing is IMAT (Intuit Mobile Automation Toolkit). I highly recommend checking IMAT out.

Change in the Facebook API?

2011-03-16T10:23:00.000-07:00

I had to change both my Android and iPhone apps to account for what I think was an underlying change in the Facebook API. In particular, the 'feed' Graph API functionality seems to have undergone a seemingly significant change, though I can't yet confirm this with any other developers.

Issue: The "picture" parameter is not being honored unless an additional parameter called "link" is also supplied. I know that the picture would be displayed on facebook wall posts prior to Wednesday March 15, 2011; however, since then, the picture only gets displayed if a parameter titled "link" is also displayed

{code}

Bundle params = new Bundle();

params.putString("access_token", cc.getFacebook().getAccessToken());

params.putString("message", postMessage);

String urlPrefix = "http://www.sogwiz(dot)blogspot(dot)com";

//the facebook API for the wall feed allows you to provide an image url

params.putString("picture", urlPrefix + pictureString)

//NOTE: THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT PART. Picture no longer gets posted unless the link parameter is also supplied

//params.putString("link", "http://www.sogwiz(dot)blogspot(dot)com");

params.putString("description", "sargon's blog");

//send facebook the request

String wallReturn = cc.getFacebook().request("me/feed", params, "POST");

{code}

Can anyone please confirm and verify this?

Color Connect now on iPhone

2011-03-12T08:23:00.000-08:00

We just released the initial iPhone version of Color Connect! We're really excited about this and hope our users will be too. link to Color Connect on iTunes

Color Connect releases latest Android app update (9 penguin avatars now)

2011-03-04T01:14:00.001-08:00

"9 penguin avatars! Don't text and drive - shake to share instead. We just released our latest Android app update today B-)"

Color Connect just announced its latest Android app update today. Features include:

Facebook and Twitter integration with ‘Shake to Share’ (copyright)
Custom messaging for each Penguin Persona
Play with your penguin :)
9 beautiful, cuddly, and funny penguins that capture your daily activities and let your friends know when it is ok to contact you
Set phone's wallpaper with your custom persona

I'm including some of the colorful images from the app as well as a link to the app store listing and to the website thecolorconnect.com. It's come a long way and is looking really good. Its fun to play with your penguin too...

iPhone Testing : UIAutomation Instrument and Object Maps

2011-02-25T10:44:00.000-08:00

iPhone Testing : UIAutomation Instrument and Object Maps

Is anyone out there using their own javascript solution to store the UI object map? If so, any insight about how you're doing this is appreciated. I'm testing an app that has hundreds of UI objects (buttons, table cells, labels, etc) and just looking for various paradigms for approaching the situation of fetching each of these objects in a clean way instead of calling:
this.mainWin.tableViews()[0].cells()[0].textFields()[0];

Ideally, this would be abstracted in a function like :
getEmailTextField : function () {
return } Any ideas?

Twitter Android OAuth Error and Solution - Protocol Not Supported

2011-02-23T12:32:00.000-08:00

Error message during callback:

"02-22 19:26:16.415: ERROR/Tab(417): onReceivedError -10 myapp://oauthactivity?oauth_token=&oauth_verifier= The protocol is not supported."

Will get straight to the point. I wanted to integrate Twitter sign-in with my Android App and I ran into the above error message. The browser would redirect to an invalid page and not to my actual app. I made 'some' modifications and the integration somehow works now. I'm not sure exactly why it works now and not before BUT I did suspect the following:

1. String authUrl = provider.retrieveRequestToken(consumer, Uri.parse(CALLBACK_URL).toString()); : I was able to verify that this did NOT fix anything

2. ordering of Manifest Intent filters : I did try playing around with the ordering but it doesn't seem to change anything

Eh, sometimes as a developer you just need to accept oddities like this and continue flowing down the pipeline of feature requests...

Libraries used:

Twitter4J: twitter4j-core-android-2.2.0-SNAPSHOT.jar
signpost-core: signpost-core-1.2.1.1.jar
signpost-commonshttp: signpost-commonshttp4-1.2.1.1.jar

Setup:

+ I created a Twitter app using dev.twitter.com and chose 'Browser' NOT 'client'

Code:

+ Declare Variables

{

//Twitter

private Twitter twitter;

//private OAuthProvider provider;

private CommonsHttpOAuthProvider provider;

private CommonsHttpOAuthConsumer consumer;

private String CONSUMER_KEY = "XOXO";

private String CONSUMER_SECRET = "XOXO";

//CALLBACK FORMAT: HOST://PATH

private String CALLBACK_URL = "myapptest://testing";

}

+ onClick event for Twitter login

/**

* Open the browser and asks the user to authorize the app.

* Afterwards, we redirect the user back here!

private void askOAuth() {

try {

consumer = new CommonsHttpOAuthConsumer(CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET);

provider = new CommonsHttpOAuthProvider( "https://api.twitter.com/oauth/request_token",

"https://api.twitter.com/oauth/access_token", "https://api.twitter.com/oauth/authorize");

//WHEN I USE JUST CALLBACK_URL, I GET THE PROTOCOL NOT SUPPORT ERROR

//FOR SOME ODD REASON, WHEN I USE Uri.parse(CALLBACK_URL).toString(), THEN IT WORKS

String authUrl = provider.retrieveRequestToken(consumer, Uri.parse(CALLBACK_URL).toString());

Toast.makeText(this, "Please authorize this app!", Toast.LENGTH_LONG).show();

Log.d("OAuth", "url is " + authUrl);

startActivity(new Intent(Intent.ACTION_VIEW, Uri.parse(authUrl)));

} catch (Exception e) {

Log.e(APP, e.getMessage());

Toast.makeText(this, e.getMessage(), Toast.LENGTH_LONG).show();

}

+ onResume and onNewIntent(Intent intent) custom implementation that gets called via twitter callback

+ Manifest snippet

<intent-filter>

intent-filter>

Color Connect!

2011-01-10T01:07:00.001-08:00

I'm really digging this site: www.thecolorconnect.com . Cute and practical!

Link Crawler - internally hosted

2010-11-23T11:35:00.000-08:00

Does anyone know of a link crawler tool that will check for broken links given a domain? I've been asked to look for a tool that can access our public facing site as well as our private site (where the link crawler would have to login to the application).

A publicly available tool is : http://validator.w3.org/checklink/

I'm looking for something that we'd host internally and point to our internal and external domains. Anyone know of a good link crawler?

assyrian rally against terrorism

2010-11-08T16:29:00.001-08:00

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.5

Assyrian rally against violence - san jose

2010-11-08T15:56:00.001-08:00

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.5

World Cup - mint.com launches GOALS feature

2010-06-29T01:17:00.000-07:00

Mint.com just released GOALS. Saving for college, wanting to buy a car, or getting ready for the next soul searching travel? Mint.com has you covered. The Goals feature lets you track your goals and keeps you honest, providing some great advice along the way too. Best of all, its free! You're paying yourself if you use it and you're not paying yourself if you don't.

Testing cloud based services

2010-06-04T09:23:00.001-07:00

Ever wonder how Amazon tests out its EC2 services or how hosting services ensure the quality of their VPS (virtual private server) environments? No...errr...um well I do. The journey begins...

iPod / iTouch device upgrade to OS 4 beta 3 and then back down to OS3

2010-05-10T17:22:00.000-07:00

Is it possible to install the OS 4 beta 3 on an iPod device to test an app using the OS4 SDK and then revert back to OS3 on the device when done with testing?

Visualizing Jmeter test results and comparing 2 different runs

2010-05-03T14:50:00.000-07:00

Load Test Results repository...

I'm going to take a look at (http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/jmstats/wiki/WikiStart) today. I've currently been parsing jmeter result files and throwing the results into a mysql db. This gives me the luxury of comparing two test runs across two different builds of the target application.
I'm curious to see the out-of-the-box functionality of the jmstats tool. With some modification, it looks like it could be just what I've needed.

Every test run has specific properties and variables that need to be captured and persisted along with the results. This could include the number of test clients, the number of test targets, and even the version of both the test itself as well as the version (build) of the target app. Target application specific properties also need to be set like the allocated jvm heap size, the various cache sizes, and the number of db connection pools, among others. Currently, I don't see a place for properties like this in the jmstats tool and perhaps this could lead to a project improvement.

Not to mention the fact that we like to store jmeter configurations like rampup period, delay, thread counts, etc into structured and concise fields. This would allow for more robust analysis of test result deltas instead of scouring through a field called 'Notes' for this unstructured information.

Will update the blog once I'm done mucking around :)