makeramen

Let's join the party.

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 01:10:00 -0800

Wikipedia

BoingBoing

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A Long Overdue Update

Sun, 06 Nov 2011 17:31:06 -0800

Well, it's been a while since I've said anything about the app that is represented by that big purple checkmark on the front page, and I sincerely apologize for the delay.

You see, a lot has happened since I last posted about myself. I sorta kinda cofounded a company, but I wouldn't take much credit for it since I left due to differences in vision and location. Worked for an awesome local startup. Turned down a couple promising offers from big and small companies alike. Got rejected from a couple more. Now I'm relocated to the Bay Area, living with some great guys, working for yet another amazing company.

So the burning question remains: What's going to happen with Noodles? Well, I'm not too sure myself. I'd really like to get web sync going, but I think I've been debating among various options (for way too long now). Here's what I have on the table:

Google Tasks sync since they've finally released the API
Write my own version, probably in Django, but then I'd need to figure out hosting, with way too many options including:
- Dotcloud
- Heroku
- Gondor
- EC2/Rackspace
- AppEngine (probably not)

Then there are the choices of frameworks, just within python:
- Django
- web.py
- Pyramid
- AppEngine (probably not)
Also been looking into Parse, which might help greatly speed up development speed.

Honestly, I'm probably just making excuses not to get this done. In the meantime, if anyone has any insight or advice on these technology stacks and wants to help me make a decision, I'd love to hear from you!

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If I had one thing to say to all women out there...

Sun, 11 Sep 2011 02:02:00 -0700

I would tell you all to be the amazing and beautiful people you are with your actions and your words, not your make-up and your clothing. Be beautiful for the blind, whose vision is often truer than that of the sighted. Be beautiful in ways that can't be washed and stripped away so easily, and you will always be sought after. Be beautiful for those who want to help you share your beauty with the rest of world, not for those who want to own your beauty like a human ornament. Be beautiful for yourself. Please

That counts as just one big thing right?

Sorry, I've just been noticing how much subliminal brainwashing the females in American society (and probably many others) go through. And it's really limiting the talent pool I have to choose from these days. Women! Please! Don't let it get to you! Just be awesome! Please?

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Force Closes and the Future

Fri, 18 Feb 2011 17:25:00 -0800

First I want to apologize to all the users who started experiencing force closes after the last update. In my excitement to push out the last update, I missed one somewhat important line of code. For those who care, I simply forgot to call super.onStop() when I overrode the onStop method in the Preferences activity. Anyway, an update is out and all should be good again.

Meanwhile, I'm not planning on adding any new updates to the Android app for the time being. Instead I'll be trying to create a web version of noodles that will sync with the mobile app. After considering the various other existing systems to sync with, I simply haven't found anything that matches with the current model that Noodles uses. The closest one I found was Things, which has been working on web sync for over a year now, so I'm not going to hold my breath.

If anyone is interested in testing the web app or wants to help develop/design it, I'd love to hear from you! I'm most likely going to be using some combination of Django and Google App Engine for the backend. You can contact me at webapp [at] makeramen [dot] com.

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Evil Plans

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 23:54:37 -0800

Evil Plans is the second book by Hugh MacLeod, writer of the famous How To Be Creative manifesto which eventually turned into his first book Ignore Everybody. Not sure what it is, but something about Hugh and his writing just gets me off my feet and wanting to go do shit. I've already interrupted myself at least 2 or 3 times through this extremely short book because I was so inspired to start working on stuff.

I promised myself not to write about this book until I was done reading it, but here I am, 98% of the way through and I just couldn't help but write something down. The following excerpt is what got me out of bed onto my keyboard:

I've had my fair share of crappy jobs, as have we all. You know what? I never hated a job because of what it took from me — all jobs take a lot from you, especially the best ones.

I hated a job because it never allowed me to give enough to the world.

And that was it.

It explained everything. It was never about me "not appreciating the opportunities" I have. It was never about the salary, the title, the "experience," the "leadership opportunities." Fuck. That. Shit. All I ever wanted was the feeling that I am doing everything I possibly can to give as much as I can to this world. And not just to reach a local maximum by grabbing the closest easiest path to success, but to really find the global maximum output of my life.

Maybe I'll crash and burn along the way somewhere, but I can at least say I tried. What've you got to say?

So if you haven't bought the book yet, get it at Amazon. (Also if you're a student you can get free 2-day shipping with Amazon Student) I've already bought a kindle edition for myself an a print copy for a dear friend.

Meanwhile, I'm gonna go finish the last few pages and be back bright and early tomorrow working on some more awesomeness for noodles. I'll be back to update y'all then.

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Widget Sneak Peek

Wed, 09 Feb 2011 02:32:07 -0800

I have successfully commandeered the calendar widget and made it purple :) Now I just need to figure out how to populate it with all your wonderful todos.

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A minor Noodle update

Tue, 01 Feb 2011 05:58:00 -0800

Just submitted v2.9.1 to the Android Market, here's what's changed:

Some people didn't like the Today/Tomorrow lists, so you can now turn them off via preferences.
Fixed bug where "uncrossed" count that shows up next to lists didn't update in certain cases.
Many actions should be much more responsive now (no longer updating the uncrossed count all the time).
Drag-and-drop will no longer sporadically drop items when you move your finger away from right edge.

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Today/Tomorrow lists are here

Tue, 01 Feb 2011 03:10:00 -0800

As noted in my last post, I've added 2 new permanent lists to Noodles. These lists allow you to "star" items to go into either a Today or Tomorrow list. As the names imply, anything you want to do today, you throw into the Today list. If you want to postpone items, or know you need to do something but probably won't get to it until tomorrow, just give it a silver star and put it in Tomorrow.

Changing states between Today/Tomorrow/None is as quick and simple as tapping the bullet/star next to an item.

That's it for now. I plan on this eventually leading to a Today widget which I know a lot of users are looking forward to.

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Noodles update coming

Thu, 20 Jan 2011 23:17:22 -0800

Here's a little sneak peek.

See the full gallery on Posterous

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when no one is watching

Thu, 13 Jan 2011 17:31:58 -0800

I think it was somewhere amidst all this talk about chinese parents' superiority that I saw a sentence saying something along the lines of "it's what your kid does when you're not watching that is most important." But in today's world of infinitely connected social networks, more choices in how you want to contact a person than you have pairs of socks, and bragging rights for whoever can fit the most events into their calendar, how often do people actually get to sit alone to their own thoughts and intentions? I think it's just as much of a challenge now to figure out exactly "what do you do when nobody is watching?" Or maybe more accurately, when nobody tells you what to do: no schedules to keep, no assignments, tests, meetings, just you and... whatever you choose to do with your time.

So on that note, I'm hoping to use the next.... however long I have.. to figure out whatever it is I do when nobody is watching. A brief break from the hectic world for a little introspection.

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voting be sexayy

Tue, 02 Nov 2010 11:15:40 -0700

get out there peeps.

See the full gallery on Posterous

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my first web app

Tue, 26 Oct 2010 07:56:00 -0700

I'm not even sure I can legitimately call it a web app since it doesn't actually serve any real pages. But here it is: http://irandomlywrotethisforyou.appspot.com

It just redirects you to a random post at http://www.iwrotethisforyou.me

The idea spawned itself somewhere in my insomnia 2 nights ago when I realized that iwrotethisforyou.me didn't have a "random post" button. I found a few ways to embed a random button on a blogger site via javascript, but since I don't own the site, I can't actually do that.

Also, each post has it's own custom URL based on the title and publish date, so it would be a bit of a pain to scrape directly. Anyway I wanted to see if what I could do with Python since I started learning it the hard way a couple weeks ago. So over 24 hours total (not including sleeping, classes, and playing Starcraft 2, so more like 4 hours), I wrote my first appengine app, first python app, and first webapp. Sorta. I still don't consider it real until I actually serve a page myself. It was also my first experience with regular expressions and memcached, but more on that later.

Source is hosted here.

And all the important code pretty much resides in one file.

And the technical details:

The majority of the ~4 hours I spent was actually tracking down stupid bugs, as is probably familiar if you've ever written code.

First it took me forever to find out how to get the URL of a post. I first tried searching for the URL in the feed via regex, which actually worked until I found out the URL I found was for the image in the post instead of the actual post. Fail.

After a lot of calls to __dict__.keys() in the python terminal to find available methods of each object, I finally found the URL as 'href' in the last item in the link List of an entry: entry.link[-1].href

Then there was all the ridiculous looping I had to do since Blogger wont let you pull more than 500 items in a feed at once. So I would have to get posts 500 at a time and concatenate them together before picking a random entry from the list.

All fine and dandy right? Until I deploy it of course. For some reason the 500 posts I was pulling was too long for the appengine atom parser to handle, even though it worked perfectly on my local machine. That wasn't as much a problem as the cryptic error message that didn't explain a thing, resulting in me banging my head against the wall for a good hour. Finally, I figured it out, reduced max_results to 400, and it finally started working. Relief.

But wait, it's slow as hell.

Every time you went to the site, it would fetch almost 1000 posts via atom feed, pick a random one, and send you to the URL. Not only terribly inefficient, but since I could only get 400 at a time, I would have to make 3 UrlFetch calls to get the Atom feed. This wasn't too big a problem except that the appengine quota for UrlFetch calls is rather low (relatively). And for good reason too, it's just a really inefficient workflow.

So memcached to the rescue! Turns out the python memcached API is ridiculously easy to use. Problem is the entire feed object is too big for memcached to hold (>2 mb!!). But no fear, I don't need the entire feed, I just want the URLs. A little refactoring and soon memcached was holding a List of 900+ URLs for me to randomly distribute to my visitors. I set the refresh for an hour so it keeps up with any of the latest posts. I could actually make that even longer since most people looking for a random post won't be looking for any of the most recent ones.

Well there you have it. My first time. Most of you are probably going "wtfvinceicouldcarelessaboutyourtechnologyandprogrammingcrap" and I can hear the real programmers silently yelling "noob!" in their heads. Shut up and let me have my moment dammit.

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History of Noodles Sales

Sat, 23 Oct 2010 02:10:00 -0700

ghetto excel screenshot ftw

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Deadmau5!

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 22:10:00 -0700

VID_20101019_213931.3gp Watch on Posterous

VID_20101019_214419.3gp Watch on Posterous

VID_20101019_220922.3gp Watch on Posterous

VID_20101019_223939.3gp Watch on Posterous

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noodles backup is here!

Sat, 09 Oct 2010 23:45:00 -0700

Automatic and manual backup/restore to SD card. Check the gallery. 'nuff said?

Please report any bugs!

See the full gallery on Posterous

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broken meetings

Wed, 06 Oct 2010 23:30:00 -0700

"Meetings are like homicide or murder, homicide because sometimes it's unintentional"

I always enjoy Merlin Mann's talks, he's so quirky yet naturally engaging. He's speaking to Twitter btw.

"Broken Meetings (and how you'll fix them)" from Merlin Mann on Vimeo.

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new favorite study spot

Wed, 06 Oct 2010 15:01:00 -0700

IMG_0063.MOV Watch on Posterous

too bad it'll only be like this for like a week more. sigh.

(the overkill because I'm testing the video on the new ipod touch 4g, and posterous video posting)

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backup coming! (I hope)

Wed, 06 Oct 2010 10:32:00 -0700

I had big dreams for providing an online sync for noodles, but good sync is actually terribly hard to get right. That means it would probably take quite a long time to get things working as I well as I want them to, and given that I'm still trying to finish my classes and graduate in a couple months, it's probably a long time coming.

In the meantime, I've found a fairly straightforward way to back up and restore the entire noodles database to the SD card, so I'm planning to implement that this weekend. I'm hoping this blog post (and my users) will hold me to it!

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Another update!

Wed, 29 Sep 2010 22:11:00 -0700

Just made another minor update yesterday as sort of a mid-week-procrastinating-from-homework project.

3 New features:

Uncross all items on a list — great for the lists you like to reuse
A new option to add to the end of a list instead of the beginning — this was definitely bugging me, so thank you to the awesome user who requested it to bring me out of my laziness to finally implement it!
The list-of-lists view now shows the number of uncrossed items you have in each list note: you still can drag-and-drop lists by dragging the number

Hope y'all enjoy! Here's a screenshot of those numbers next to lists:

As for everyone out there asking for backup/sync, I'm working on it! In what free time I have, I'm learning python the hard way, and looking into Google App Engine as well as some Ruby On Rails as an alternative. If for some reason I can't get something up and running quickly, or I find a quick and easy way to back up the database, I'll definitely just do that first.

PS: If anyone can come up with a better name for the "list-of-lists" view, please let me know ASAP. It's such a mouthful.

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Horrible Logo

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 12:55:06 -0700

Thanks to Horrible Logos for featuring us!

What a truly terrible logo :D

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