Juixe Techknow

In Java, object coercion from one type to another can led to interesting results, and possible bugs when done implicitly. For example, a common type conversion bug is when you have a method that accepts a primitive boolean but pass it an an object of type Boolean. If the object is null, the conversion from a Boolean object to a boolean primitive will cause a NullPointerException.

But mixing between Strings, characters, and integers can result in an interesting mix of results. For example, I think that any Java developer would have some doubt in describing the output from the following Java code.

System.out.println("Hello, "+(char)('A'+1));
System.out.println("Hello, "+('A'+1));
System.out.println("Hello, "+'A'+1);

The one rule to remember about coercion is that if you are performing a calculation with two different types, the least accurate type will be coerced or converted to the more accurate. In this case, adding a character and an integer will result in converting the character to the corresponding integer value before performing the addition operation. Because the integer equivalent of the char value ‘A’ is 65, then ‘A’+1 = 66. When adding between a string, character, and integer the character and integer are converted to strings because concatenating the values into a new string.

"Hello, "+(char)('A'+1); // Hello, B
"Hello, "+('A'+1); // Hello, 66
"Hello, "+'A'+1; // Hello, A1

From time to time I just blast tweets about software development, project planning, team dynamics, or whatever else comes to mind. Here is a synopsis of recent tweets and rants. If you want to follow the conversation follow me at techknow and/or juixe and I’ll be sure to follow back.

Software Development

• Worst than coder’s block is coder’s shiny tech infinite loop.
• I got 99 problems and a bug ain’t one.
• I’m a rockstar ninja guru mofo byte code copy editor.
• If you could Myers-Briggs test your code what type would your code be and what type of developer would that make you?
• Are you test driven or bug driven development?
• Spiderman had his spidey sense and I have my buggy sense and it is tingling.
• Software bugs can byte my shiny metal ass.
• Code is a continuum.
• Mo data, mo problems.
• Let there be APIs.
• “Hello, World” is a programmer’s first program. Blog engine is a web developer’s first web app. Consultant’s first product, time management application.
• Duh, #debugging.
• Code is never complete.
• Code less, debug less.
• I’m a bandwagon programmer!
• This is not the code you are looking for.
• I break for bugs.
• My code runs more than you.

Team Dynamics

• Passion is not a fruit, it’s a seed.
• Pitch your passion.
• Self help gurus first help themselves.
• If you are waiting for tomorrow you will always be waiting.
• In the evening be exhausted, in the morning exhilarated.
• Great ideas don’t join country clubs.
• Inside a large risk is a large reward, you just need to know how to unwrap it and then monetize it.
• Meetings begets meetings
• It’s not how the ball is pitched to you, it’s how you hit the ball, duh #winning.
• Replace “what if” with “when and how.”
• The way you think of a problem affects the way you think of the solution.
• Everybody lives in there own bubble, expand yours.

Product Placement

• I’m confused as to which photo service we are all supposed to use this month, flickr, picasa, twitpic, instangram, picplz, plixi, color, etc
• Color app seems like Bump for pictures.
• Why is the director of the FBI emailing my AOL email account from a io domain?
• 3G forecast: partly spotty with chances of AT&T fail.
• Out of all of Apple’s products, Jobs’ best revenue generating product must be the iPhone earbuds. At $30, it has $.50 of material.
• I’ve lost count, would Google Circles be Google’s third or fourth social networking attempt?
• Outlook should have a Save As option to save as a Word document.
• What Google giveth Google taketh away with one change in their algo.
• Ikea has made a killing by selling designer cardboard.

Quotes

• Standards are paper. I use paper to wipe my butt every day. That’s how much that paper is worth. – Linus Torvalds
• Seeing companies promote their Facebook fan page in advertisements reminds me of when companies promoted their AOL keyword. – @bencasnocha
• Every software package expands until it can send email. – Zawinski’s Law
• One great rock show can change the world. – School of Rock

Questions

• How many tweets does it take change a light bulb and start trending?
• Do you live in the moment or in a hurry to get to the next moment?
• Is #SXSW the equivalent to #Woodstock but for social media experts and tech hipsters?
• Forget Scientology, what Hollywood religion is Charlie Sheen practicing where he is a warlock and lives with goddesses?
• If William of Occam worked at Gillette how many blades would Occam’s razor have?
• Is Chris Brown the next Dennis Rodman?

The Valley

• There is a “lifestyle business” bubble.
• To VCs, startup founders are like dogs to be sorted by pedigree.
• Is it a bubble if you can’t afford to invest in a seed round?
• Everybody is scared of a little bubble.
• Forget about building a better mouse trap, think about building a better people trap.
• Some party like a rock star, I party like a VC.

Technologist

• Single sign-on is something that should be native in the browser.
• Love thy neighbors, like thy Facebook friends, and retweet they twitter followers.
• People like liking.
• Tell me what smart phone you have and I’ll tell you everything about you, especially of you have it unlocked.
• Terms of Service do not void your constitutional rights.
• Love thy neighbors, like thy Facebook friends, and retweet they twitter followers.
• If there ever is a a zombie attack just remember that the Googleplex has the biggest brains, Hollywood and Washington not so big.

Tweeple

• Mr. Zuckerberg, tear down this walled garden.
• Mr. Jobs, fix my iPhone.
• I think Aaron Sorkin should write a treatment for a movie based on Stuxnet.
• Jeff Bezos to serialize his brain and store it Amazon’s cloud and allow developers to access it via an API.

Japanese Earthquake

• My heart goes out to the Fukushima 50 and all the search and rescue workers.
• I have the same feeling, level of disbelief and sense of magnitude, about Japan now as I did about New York after September 11.
• Earthquake + Tsunami + Nuclear + Meltdown = (Me Praying for the People of Japan)^8.7
• Wow, the Japan quake at 8.9 is 700x stronger than the Haiti earthquake.
• There is no match to the “shock and awe” that Mother Nature can produce in matter of minutes.
• I <3 Japan
• Stay strong Japan! If there is any country that can recover from two nuclear bombs, multiple Godzilla attacks, and a 8.9 quake Japan can.

From time to time I just blast tweets about software development, project planning, team dynamics, or whatever else comes to mind. Here is a synopsis of recent tweets and rants. If you want to follow the conversation follow me at techknow and/or juixe and I’ll be sure to follow back.

Software Development

• I wish I could Ctrl+Alt+Delete out of everything.
• The recommendation engine is the new search engine.
• Loop. Break. Null. Exception.
• How do you explain a feature is often as important as how you implement it.
• The implications of a code change are often much larger than the code change itself.
• There Will Be Bugs
• Don’t trust the cloud.
• This is my debugger. There are many like it, but this one is mine. My debugger is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I …
• Code fist and test later is like shooting first and asking questions later.
• I program with pen and paper.
• The debugger is my best friend.

Team Leadership

• Whining is not trying.
• Doing nothing is doing something.
• Don’t compound your problems by manifesting new problem.
• A great team chooses a great leader and great leaders builds a great team.
• Making good choices leads to better choices.
• The most narrow minded perspective is that “We Versus Them” attitude. There is no them, only we.
• If you have it, bring it, and if you brought it, don’t hide it!
• You are not who you used to be or who you will become.
• I am an idea artist, making you think is my master piece.
• Productize your expertise.
• Cheat off your own hard work.
• Instead of making the effort, sometimes people make excuses.
• If you can’t find reception don’t CALL ME.
• In search of a triple rainbow.

Product Placement

• Steve Jobs is one third innovator, one third imitator, and one third black shirt and jeans.
• If Yahoo were to close down Flickr, there would be blood in the streets.
• I got my hands on a Google CR-48 yesterday. It’s just a laptop with one single app, a browser. It’s a thin client for cloud computing.
• I CAN HAZ CR-48!
• I wouldn’t mind testing a Google CAR-48, their self driving car, for free.
• Atlassian should buy corporate twitter clone Yammer.
• I would like the hotel check-in process to be as easy as Foursquare check-in.
• Taco Bell is Moctezuma’s Revenge.
• I just had the yuckiest drink, Gatorade Recover Strawberry Kiwi. Claims to be a post game protein recovery beverage. Tastes like recovered gym shorts.
• This day will go down in history as the Great Skype Fail Whale of 2010, when people had to remember how to use a phone to call someone…

Quote

• It’s easier to invent the future than to predict it. – Alan Kay
• I aspire to inspire before I expire – Alina Morelli
• It is fun to do things others call impossible. – Emile Baudot
• I’m a hope fiend. – Frankie/Celebrity Rehab
• We now know that Visa, Mastercard and Paypal are instruments of US foreign policy. It’s not something we knew before. – Julian Assange
• Guantanamo is used for laundering people to an offshore haven that does not follow the rule of law. – Julian Assagne
• Assange had a lot of help making Sweden look like the last place on Earth that you would want to take your penis. – Scott Adams

Holiday

• Happy Shopmas Season!!!
• Jingle bells, cashiers ring, websites clicked.
• Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow… cash.
• Finishing up with xmas shopping.
• Santa is welcomed in my house any time.
• I think I developed carpal tunnel from opening all those gifts. Thank you santa.
• My new year’s resolution is to double surface area of my comfort zone.
• I’m gonna party like it’s 3999!
• We are going to one up 2010 in 2011.
• Getting ready for 2010++!
• 2011 > 2010!

It is that time of year where we reflect on the accomplishments of the passing year and look forward to the one to come. Here is a window into the past year in technology through this year’s popular posts on TechKnow Juixe.

Programming Rants

• Software Engineering in Pictures
• The Resume is Dead
• Resume and Interview Tips
• Programmer Pickup Lnes
• More Hats, More Problems
• Working Code is Just One Corner Case

Products and Features

• Foursquare Missing Features
• Apple vs Android
• The Future of Apple TV
• Facebook Was My Idea
• Facebook Zuckerberg and Plain Text Passwords
• Google Has Lot Its Focus
• Google Dead Pool
• Amazon Should Buy Blippy

Tutorial and Resources

• Use Google Forms for Surveys and Polls
• Model Business in Google Docs
• Check if GMail Account Has Been Hacked Into
• Apple iPad Top Resources
• iPhone Frameworks

Patents and Trademarks

• Us Patent: Virtual Currency
• US Patent: Linked List
• Cease and Desist Trademark Craziness

Code Conversations

• Captcha This, Byatch!
• Mushroom Life Cycle
• Zombie Code
• The Mayor of Dead Space
• Remote Debug Your Thinking Process
• All Code is Inherently Evil

Retweet 2010

• Retweet December
• Retweet November
• Retweet October
• Retweet September
• Retweet August
• Retweet July
• Retweet June
• Retweet May
• Retweet April
• Retweet March
• Retweet February
• Retweet January

Random Thoughts 2010

• Random Thoughts December
• Random Thoughts November
• Random Thoughts October

Year in Review

• Year In Review 2009
• Year In Review 2008
• Year In Review 2007
• Year In Review 2006
• Year In Review 2005

No explanation required, here are some random thoughts that occurred to me during the past month. These ideas are usually to long to force into 140 character limit of Twitter but not fully develop to merit their own post.

Which is worse, a developer that will fight you every inch when you ask him to add a feature that upsets the balance of his understanding or the isometry of his code or a developer when asked to add a feature simply does it without question?

It is estimated that up to 90% of Internet traffic is spam. For some product searches up to 80% of Google results are spam because of black hat SEO.

In the span of year a typical teen on Facebook would have written more text than the whole of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare and would contain more drama than Shakespeare’s plays combine but it won’t be considered literature.

I travel for business a bit. I usually stay in the same hotel chain, if not the same hotel. I would like the hotel check-in process to be as easy as Foursquare check-in. In fact, if I am already in their reward program, and if they already have my credit card, they already know all pertinent information about me, why do I even have to check in or out at the front desk? Here is a million dollar idea, have a way book a hotel from you iPhone, you are immediately given a room number, if available, and your credit card in file or reward card is used to open the hotel room door. There is no need, unless you need more towels, to deal with the front desk.

Saying that listing to rap long enough will make you want to shoot someone is like saying that listening to country long enough will make you make love to your truck.

As mobile devices become more and more entrenched and as more mobile devices become available there is a growing number of people that want to quickly develop an idea into an app. Developers of all sorts are picking up Objective-C to develop the next top selling mobile-based and touch enabled app. If you don’t want to learn Objective-C, there are several mobile frameworks to choice.

Rhomobile – A cross-platform mobile app development.
Titanium – A cross-platform native application stack.
MonoTouch – Write iPhone and iPod Touch applications in C# and .NET.
iWebkit – A simple framework to create your own iPhone and iPod Touch webapps.
TapLynx – Rapidly develop iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch Apps without learning Cocoa.
PhoneGap – PhoneGap is an open source development framework for building cross-platform mobile apps.
jQTouch – A jQuery plugin for mobile web development on the iPhone, iPhone Touch, and other forward-thinking devices.
Cocos2D for iPhone – A framework for building 2D games and graphical applications.