This morning as my fiance left, and the dawn was breaking here in coastal Georgia, I got into the shower, tears welling up as I kept coming back to the fact that Steve Jobs has left this earth. How silly is that? I never met him. But, Jobs was different. He made the things important to me …
Author Archives: xrd
The convergence of spirituality and science
We are coming to a point where we must recognize the convergence of spirituality and science. This might shock a lot those who identify as atheists, and it might shock people who identify as republicans, democrats, libertarians. It might shock anyone who identifies with a group as long as that group has a shared villain. …
Will the e-commerce of the future require creating a safe community?
There are so many interesting things about the fact that Amazon will no longer deliver Kindle as an iPad app but instead as a web app. A surprising yet natural response to Apple subjecting in-app purchases to a 30% tax. A tax which might be tolerable for a small developer who realizes that marketing will …
Personal growth is like git
Nerd talk ahead, be warned! Lots of people in my life know that I am an advocate of doing personal growth work, like what you find in the Landmark Forum. It often feels like people in the tech community regard this type of work as unimportant. “I need to spend time leveling-up on my ruby …
What a dog can do for your life
My fiance Nicole and I have restarted the book “Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work.” One of the best things about our relationship is our commitment to working on it even when things are going smashingly, as they are now. We are now on page 72, doing the exercise #3, “A Seven Week Course on …
Using JREngage (Janrain) to login inside your Android application and your Rails webservice
I recently started playing with the JREngage plugin for Android. I have been a long time user of Janrain’s multi-host OpenID authentication services, and was interested to see how easily I could build a login system within my Android application. It was trivial to get this working. And, as a bonus, you can then have …
Monitoring Wowza with monit
I figured someone would be using monit to watch the Wowza server, but this thread on the Wowza forums had no responses. So I rolled my own configuration. Obviously you will want to customize the email address in the first gist. And, then tail –f /var/log/syslog to see monit’s activity in syslog. I had to …
Google is not your daddy (or long term reliance on APIs is as bad as outsourcing)
At the near top of Hacker News is a post to the deprecation of Google APIs which the poster labeled “Why should anyone ever use a Google API again?” I’ll tell you why. We live in an incredibly exciting time. The proliferation of APIs allows you to build amazingly powerful mash-up businesses in weeks. There has …
eBooks are only licensed? Well, at least they are not living rent free in my house.
I get the issues behind eBooks and the fact that we don’t own the eBooks we “buy.” If I purchase an eBook through Amazon, with the flip of a switch Amazon could, theoretically, revoke my right to read it and I could do nothing to prevent it from being removed on all my Kindle devices. …
Has Google lost its mojo at I/O 2011?
At Google I/O today I have to admit it was comical when the presenter doing the WebGL track had to stop in the middle of his presentation because his laptop forcibly rebooted when Windows decided to apply a security update. He even joked that maybe Microsoft did it on purpose. But, who really believes Microsoft …