C is memory with syntactic sugar and as such it is helpful to think of things in C as starting from memory. One of the pieces that I think is often overlooked is variables and data types. If you have the right mental model for variables and data types it makes other concepts in C, [...]
Video Converter Script for HTML5 and Flash Formats
Here is a python script for video conversion that I created for one of the projects I am working on. It takes an input video file or a directory of files and converts them to html5 video formats including flv, ogg, mp4 (playable on ios), and webm which allows viewing videos on all browsers. The [...]
How I Would Start a New Business Today
How Not to Start a Business You have a great idea for a product. You have been in the industry for years and you are sure you know what people want. Everyone you asked has said they love your idea would definitely use it. You either go build the product yourself, get a programmer friend [...]
13 Years and 11 Startups
In the last 13 years I have been a founder, co-founder or have worked with 11 different startups that have failed. Each business had different dynamics but each one failed for similar reasons. Looking back I have learned some things. Things I wish someone would have taught me before I started my first business. So [...]
Basics of Function Pointers in C
This post is very detailed because I am attempting to create a mental model to help beginners understand the syntax and basics of function pointers. If you are ok with detail happy reading. Function pointers are an interesting and powerful tool but their syntax can be a little confusing. This post will going into C [...]
Android Image Downloading and Caching
One of the utility classes we created for the Singly Android SDK is a remote image downloader and cache. We wanted to be able to download images from remote sites, store them locally, and cache them in memory. We also wanted to be able to limit the number of concurrent images we were downloading, avoid [...]
Facebook Native Authentication on Android
Instead of using WebViews for oauth to Facebook, if the user has the Facebook Android app installed you can do native facebook authentication to get an access token. This is a more seamless experience as the user won’t be requried to re-enter their Facebook login and password if they are already logged in. Adding Facebook [...]
A Block Loading ListView BaseAdapter for Android
Over the last couple of months I have been having fun building drop-in Android social components for the Singly Android SDK. One component we created is a Friend Picker ListView that supports any number of friends. Believe it or not there are people out there who have friend lists with > than 15,000 contacts. The [...]
Android Dependency Management Made Easy
I was looking for a really easy way to do dependency managment for my Android apps where I could still use Eclipse and ADT. I wanted to be able to specify a dependency and have that jar and any of its dependency jars available in the Android project and built into the final app. I [...]
5 Minutes to Social Android Apps with Singly
Full Disclosure I now work for Singly doing android development. Singly provides a single API to access social data across multiple services. For app developers this means you can drop in the Singly Android SDK into your app, call a few methods, and just like that you have your user’s social data from Facebook, Twitter, [...]