Quick and Dirty Rails Performance Profiling
When I find some Ruby on Rails or Rake tasks running slowly, I throw a quick and dirty profiler around the suspect code to find the bottlenecks with ease. Here’s how I do it, maybe this approach can help you too.
iPhone Data Plan Follies
This week, three stories came to my attention regarding iPhone data plans and usage: man wins $850 from AT&T for data throttling, Siri is ruining your cellphone service, and its all about the camera. iPhone user wins $850 in throttling case Source: Judge awards iPhone user $850 in throttling case In short, so a guy who was sold the unlimited AT&T data plan gets throttled, sues AT&T in small claims court and wins some money.
Text Editing Fonts and Colors
In The Markdown Mindset I described how I use a variety of different editors to write Markdown in different contexts. I also use different fonts and color schemes to help me differentiate as I go along. For the record, everything was done in Monaco a few years ago. Cousine Blogging is done in Byword using Cousine 15pt and the light theme. It’s pretty close to Nitti Light as used in iAWriter, but has variable sizing and is free from Google.
Apple and Facebook
Ben Parr in Cnet’s Apple vs. Facebook: Why users are the losers gets it wrong! In the article, he postulates that Apple’s favorite social media service is Twitter and that Apple just hates Facebook (really?). He then explains there is no integration between Apple and Facebook because of some old Ping issues and some HP rubbish and some unsubstantiated hatred. Then he mentions that there actually is some Facebook integration, but its sandboxed in iPhoto.
The Markdown Mindset
Over the last year, I have moved all my non-code writing to Markdown format. I don’t even have Microsoft Word installed on my laptop anymore. Here’s why:
The 4G deception
These days, all the US mobile carriers are touting their allegedly hot new 4G networks, pushing people to upgrade their phones and get up to 10x faster mobile data speeds.
Note the only single consumer benefit touted is a possibly faster download time, it is not guaranteed.
This whole thing is a deception. Here’s why.
All to Octopress
I have moved all of my sites over to Octopress by Brandin Mathis. This means hiltmon.com, noverse.com and shukaico.com are all on the same platform.
Why?
The App Store playing field
Excellent article by Emeric Thoa in The Game Bakers called Money And The App Store: A Few Figures That Might Help An Indie Developer where he covers some myths about the app store and provides advice to indies trying to make it there.
I’m going to borrow his myths and reference my own experiences with my own apps.
Taking down my old iPhone Apps
Its time. As of right now, my first two iPhone App Store apps, Emergency List and Sights to See are no longer available for sale, anywhere. I have taken them down. These apps were developed two years ago, for old versions of the iPhone, and no longer represent the best we can do. We were learning iOS at the time, did not have access to the right designers and did the best we could back then.
Fix instead of Blame
I was saving this one up for later, but events of this week prompted me to write it now. Whenever something goes wrong, the first reaction of many people is to find someone else to blame. Arguments and vitriol erupt, things are said or smashed, as each team member tries to protect themselves from being blamed. I, for one, do not ever again want to be on a team that does this.