Archive for July 2012

CI for iOS: Better Than Bacon? (CIDUG meeting, July 24, 2012)

Kevin Munc gave a presentation last night on doing continuous integration using Jenkins for developing iOS apps. It seemed somewhat complicated to set up, but I did like some of the things that he showed. Hopefully I will get a few free seconds here at my job to try and implement some of the things that Kevin showed.

Also, for those few of you who use Xnews for reading your Usenet newsgroups, it was acting up for me by not remembering that I only wanted to see unread articles when going into a newsgroup, I would have to hit the U key after the newsgroup loaded to hide all the read headers. This is far too much work for me. The way I found to get around this was to exit the program and spelunk into the folder on your computer where Xnews lives, and look for a folder called “data”. Inside this folder, you may see a folder or file for the group that you are having trouble with. When I saw this, I just deleted the file, started the application back up, and all was right with the world.

BTW, Happy Birthday to Doug Drabek, the former pitcher for the Pirates (and other teams) that I met briefly at last years Pirates Fantasy Camp.

Android Jelly Bean 4.1.1 Easter egg

I just stumbled on this by accident this morning. After my Google I/O provided Nexus 7 had an OTA update, I went into the About tablet section of the Settings app, and somehow I triple tapped on the Android version 4.1.1 table cell, and I got this:

Android Jelly Bean 4.1.1 Easter egg

I have always been a fan of Easter eggs ever since I found out how to find the secret room in Atari 2600 Adventure. BTW, Happy Birthday to Jerry Doyle, who was great as the security chief in Babylon 5.

ADDENDUM: Two things to add, one good and one bad. The good thing is that my buddy John noticed that if you draw around the outer edge of the big bean, you get a screen with a lot of littler beans, which can be flung about. No collisions though. And the bad, it is sad to note the passing of Jon Lord, a giant in world of music.

Using the new WPF themes

So I am looking around for some ideas on making this WPF based application for Windows that I am working on look slightly less sucky. And I see some nifty themes on this web page:

WPF Themes

And I am thinking that would be pretty cool to just swap in one line in the App.xaml file, and my whole app would look different.

Cool in theory, but some implementation details are a bit fuzzy.

Here is what I did to get it working with VS 2010 Ultimate:

  • Install the WPF Toolkit by clicking on the big purple “download” button on the above web site
  • Download the themes xaml files by going to this web site: WP Futures (scroll down to WP Themes and click the link to download the zip file)
  • Unzip the downloaded file and add the needed xaml files to your WPF project
  • Add a reference to WPF Toolkit in your application’s References folder
  • Add a ResourceDictionary line to the Application.Resources section of your App.xaml file to make it look like the one shown on the WPF Themes page above

Keep in mind that if you put your xaml theme files in a folder off the root of your project, you will need to adjust the Source property of the ResourceDictionary. For example, I put the xaml theme files in a Themes folder off the root of the project, so the Source for me looks like this:

<ResourceDictionary Source="/Themes/ExpressionDark.xaml" />

BTW, Happy Birthday to John Petrucci, who is quite clearly not a native of this planet.

The measure of a man

Sorry about the delay between postings, but unfortunately I learned of the passing of my father while I was at the day 2 keynote address at Google I/O. So I think that days 2 and 3 the conference were good, but I was a bit distracted.

The best that I can say of my dad was that he sacrificed much, and asked for little in return. That is the mark of a great parent.

12/1/1941 – 6/28/2012

Good bye Padre. We will remember you forever.