News & Updates

Low carb day 90: 43 pounds lost and my favorite low carb foods

As I mentioned in my December 11 blog post about how I'd lost 30 pounds, I've been dropping weight.  Today (day 90) I'm down 43 pounds total.  I started out at 235 pounds and now sit at 192.  This is nearly the lightest I've been in 13 years (I got down to 190 in high school).  Other than that one time I've been heavier than this since I was about 12 or so.  I've never been able to get rid of the gut, which is now in my sights thanks to low carb.  And it all happened in just 3 months.

Reflections on My First (Real) Ruby on Rails App

I have completed my first real Ruby on Rails app and it's in production.  The app answers a problem I have at work: individuals ask me to format newsletter templates all the time and it breaks up my day too often.  It's called Newsletter Maker.

PayPal's User Experience Sucks

PayPal is a great convenience for me and a lot of others.  Unfortunately, their website user experience sucks.  Why do I need to search Google to find the pages I need on PayPal.com?

If you're selling online and have PayPal buttons created, you better bookmark the "My Saved Buttons" page, otherwise you're going to need to go five pages deep and find this small link when you want to get back to the list:

Star Wars: The Old Republic first impressions

I’ve been an MMORPG player for years.  I started with Star Wars: Galaxies and dabbled in others like Anarchy Online and Final Fantasy XI in the early 2000s.  I leveled to 80 in Age of Conan (yeah...). 

I started a low carb focused diet 42 days ago. I've lost 30 pounds (detailed analysis)

I'm not a fitness or health professional.  Growing up, I weighed 270lb at my maximum when I was 13 years old.  I implemented a slightly better diet with workouts and dropped to 195lb during high school.  That is my lowest weight.  I've come to realize that my ideal weight is somewhere around 190lb.  I'm 6'0" with a larger build.

Hacking Realtime Google Analytics for TV Display

EDIT 2/2/2012: Google likes to randomly change the CSS/page structure of the Realtime Analytics page.  You can always get the updated version at the demo page I have set up (since I use it for the TV display at work and fix it when it breaks).  It has changed twice so far since this post.

Android 4.0 (Icecream Sandwich) update breaks "existing devices" detection in Eclipse

I recently upgraded my Android dev kit to check out the Icecream Sandwich update.  It's important that app developers check that their existing apps work under 4.0 since it'll be coming to devices eventually.

Using Adaptive CSS to create mobile-friendly pages

I recently discovered the greatness that is adapt.js, or Adaptive CSS.  In a nutshell, it's a javascript tool that allows your website to activate different CSS files based on the user's current browser window size.  

Essential security feeds for web developers

I try to subscribe to security and release announcement RSS feeds in Google Reader since it's bad practice to let software become out of date, especially on a web server.  At the very least you'll know of a vulnerability and be able to patch it.  Here are some important ones I use:

The Android emulator takes a long time to load: solution

Having recently started development with Android, I noticed that the emulator takes ages to load up initially.  My original thought was that testing a change would take a very long time.  However, this is not the case.  If you launch an emulator from the Eclipse SDK, you must remember not to close the emulator window.  When you make changes and relaunch the application your changes will automatically be installed on the existing emulator.  This is something that wasn't completely obvious to me when I started.

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