Learning how Git works helps my development process greatly

It turns out knowing how Git works can help a great deal when using git.  Learning about git servers, bare repositories, and git hooks has streamlined my development process significantly.

I posted previously about how I do some Android app development work on my phone.  Then I use git, along with various other things, to get the code to my server.  On the server the apk is built, and then through other processes I get the apk back to my phone and installed so I can test it.

Starting Android development on my phone

I have been creating blog posts from my phone and doing a little coding.  I have been wondering, though, if I could do android app development work on my phone.  I want to do this for the same reasons that I post to this blog from my phone.  With young kids and other responsibilities I don't have much time to sit in front of a computer.

So using what I had learned from blogging and other activities on my phone I decided to give it a try.

Random picture maker with noise continued

Previously I posted about a script I wrote to generate random colorful pictures.

Picture maker and noise function

  It allows you to select an area using a box to guide the randomness of the color.  This allows you to somewhat control what the picture looks like.

Picture Maker and noise function

Several months ago I was working on some javascript that I was hoping would be able to draw random pictures that look like paintings.  The drawing would be guided by the user clicking on the image as it randomly changes.  This would alter the random drawing to use more of the color that you clicked on.

Creating posts from my phone part 3

In the last two posts I went over first why and then, in general, how I am writing posts using my phone.  In this article I will get into some more specifics about the setup of my dev machine and some apps that I am using.

Most of the time I'm at home so I can access my local dev machine on my home network.  This allows me to make an ssh connection and get to a command prompt.  My dev machine is a MacBook Pro.  Getting that far opens up a lot of possibilities.

How I finally started writing unit tests

I'd like to talk about why it seemed so hard to get started and how I finally got past it.

I've done a lot of reading and video watching on the subject of unit testing over the last 2 years or so.  Mostly what I was getting out of it at first was, "You should be writing unit tests for all of your code.  If you aren't doing it you are a poor developer and a horrible person."  I didn't want to be either of those things so I thought I should probably start right away.

Creating posts from my phone part 2

In the last post I discussed why I am using my phone to create and publish these posts.  In this post I will discuss how I create the posts.  I will also discuss some of the apps and other tools on my development machine that I am using to help create screenshots and code samples.

Creating posts from my phone part 1

Lets start at the beginning.  Why am I authoring most of these posts on my phone?

I have a full time job, a wife, and three little boys.  Those things take up most of my time.  Then I have other normal responsibilities like mowing the lawn, taking out the garbage, home repairs, etc.  With all of that I don't have much time outside of work to sit down in front of a computer.

Serializing a colfusion query with ObjectSave

There has been a lot of talk on the subject of serializing queries using JSON.  This has come up around the times of the last couple of major version releases.  Query serialization has all the problems that serializing other data types have;  leading zeros being lost, string and numeric data type mixups, no case preservation, and several other problems that I can't recall right now.  The representation of the columns and the data has also been discussed and debated repeatedly.  An option to change this formatting has been added to try to satisfy everyone.

Coldfusion 10 needs updates for MySql 5.6 support

On my local development machine I have Coldfusion 10.  Recently I needed to install MySql so I downloaded the latest version and installed it.  I was able to successfully setup a datasource but when I tried to use it I got the following error.

Using closures to make structs behave like objects

When they added closures and anonymous functions to Coldfusion in version 10 it opened up a lot of interesting new avenues to explore.  Some of these are very useful.  Anonymous functions can be created and passed as arguments to other functions without having to separately create a named function.  They added callback arguments to some of the array functions and various others.

Coldfusion Rounding Functions

Here is some code to show the differences between the various rounding and related function in coldfusion.  The results below are from Coldfusion 10.  I made use of the Rounding Wikipedia article to help explain, in more technical terms, the differences between the functions.

First

Wooooooooooooooo!