Sprint Backlog Task: Ice Cream

One of the many, many reasons I love working on software is how whimsical it can sometimes be. I was reviewing a sprint backlog for one of the scrum teams that work on the Distribution Service and came across this sprint item.

Ice Cream

Building software is most of the time super stressful but I love when people find a way to add some funny in to the mix. Remember, getting the ice cream comes before updating the production server.

P.S. This backlog item reminds me of a similar story when I was working in China. One of our developers in China was reading a set up document written by a developer in the states. One of the steps read “install Windows Server”, and the step right after that said to “Enjoy a Dr Pepper” since the installation would take a while. Our dev had no idea what that meant and of course Baidu nor Google were of any help. In the end, he ended up having to ask his manager what that step meant.

Debugging iPhone Code Signing

Code signing on the iPhone can be frustrating, and it gets even more frustrating when trying to submit an app to the App Store.

There are two forms of builds, deployment and distribution. You can use the codesign tool from Xcode to verify the signature in your app bundle to ensure they’re signed correctly. The part that is bolded is which certificate was used to sign the app.

abansodmbp:~ abansod$ codesign -dvvvv yourapp.app
Executable=/Users/abansod/yourapp.app/yourapp
Identifier=com.test.builtwithflash
Format=bundle with Mach-O thin (armv6)
CodeDirectory v=20001 size=43398 flags=0x0(none) hashes=2161+5 location=embedded
CDHash=928599f1a2a6db645a3bbaf17388775912933f38
Signature size=4283
Authority=iPhone Developer: Aditya Bansod
Authority=Apple Worldwide Developer Relations Certification Authority
Authority=Apple Root CA
Signed Time=Nov 13, 2009 4:10:59 PM
Info.plist entries=19
Sealed Resources rules=5 files=7
Internal requirements count=0 size=12

In the above example you can see that it’s signed with my Developer cert. If the app isn’t signed with a developer cert it won’t run on your device. The same thing applies if you’re deploying to the app store. In that case, your app needs to be signed with your Deployment certificate, and you can use the same codesign tool to validate it’s signed with the correct cert.

Track of the Week: Sunrise by Yeasayer

Self described as Enya with a Bounce on their MySpace, I had never heard of these guys until their name was passed on in a music email list I belong to. This week’s track is Sunrise by Yeasayer off of All Hour Cymbals. The song (and most of the album) has long melodic undertones (synth + strings) that have this somewhat spooky sound to them. What hooks me is the rhythmic drumming on top of the backing sound that has a great layered effect. The vocals are fairly heavily processed with reverb and overdub which adds to the ambient sound. Most of the entire album is like this and recommended.

It’s worth listening to this one on different headsets/speakers. I first listened to this on my iPod through headphones, where are treble heavy, and then later in my car with tends to be bass heavy. Very different parts of the song come out in each scenario.

Flash Apps for iPhone Video

Lee Brimelow did a video cast of how you can use Flash Pro CS5 to build an app for the iPhone. Lee goes through setting up your project and builds a quick application that uses the new accelerometer APIs. Take a look at the video and the process that’s used to go build the app. Since it’s beta software, the UIs may/will change but the video gives you a good idea of how to get started building an app for the iPhone using ActionScript 3.0.

Track of the Week: Contemplate by Wale

Today’s track of the week is from Wale’s first studio album, Attention Deficit: Contemplate, featuring Rhianna. My favorite part of the song is Rihanna’s distorted hook and how it lays on top of a simple beat. I first heard of Wale from @airlai as a rapper coming out of the DC area via his mixtapes. Probably what’s most catching about his songs is the long verse format he raps in. I’d love to see a Kid Cudi + Wale track.

Chrome OS Screenshots

I downloaded the VMWare image of Chrome OS (actually of Chromium OS) and gave it a whirl. It’s still super bare bones and the video drivers seem to be unaccelerated (framerates are really choppy). It’s exactly what it’s billed to be: a web browser. I’ll hold off on passing any judgment on Google’s endeavor at this point given that the whole thing feels like it’s about a week after it started working.

Screenshot of Chrome OS

Track of the Week: The Distance by Cake

I send a weekly email to a group of friends that is my pick for a “track of the week.” The list has been going on for just short of two years and and is basically me sending music that was interesting that particular week. It tends swing between house/electronica, hip-hop and rock. Going forward, I’m going to start posting the picks on my blog. I don’t think I’ll post the actual audio files, but will link to the YouTube video if one exists. As a fair warning, at best I’m a mediocre music critic and an awful music writer, so reader beware.

This week is an “oldie” from 1996, The Distance by Cake, off of Fashion Nugget. I heard the song on the radio and realized I didn’t own the album. A quick trip to Amazon MP3 fixed that problem. I love how focused the song is in its sound & lyrics, and the deadpan delivery of the vocals makes it iconic. I remember hearing this song all the time in high school.

AIR 2 and Flash Player 10.1 Betas

Today we made available the betas for Flash Player 10.1 (on the desktop) and AIR 2. While there’s a ton of features in both runtimes, one of the things that’s coolest to me is the shared work that’s gone in to the core of the “Flash runtime”. Across both runtimes, apps will use less memory and consume fewer CPU cycles just by the nature of the work that’s gone in to the runtime.

Since the cores are the same between Flash Player and AIR both runtimes benefit from the shared work. All this matters even more as we bring the Flash Platform to mobile devices (esp memory and CPU). Plus, features like the global exception handler (something the community has wanted for years, as I understand it) get exposed in the browser and in the desktop.

On the features side, I’m most excited about the support in Flash Player for hardware decoding of H.264 videos on Windows. The demo that our CTO showed at MAX had Hulu HD running on a netbook sipping CPU. On the AIR side it’s a tossup between the new networking features and the new native process APIs. My coworker, Rob, has a full write up at Logged In in the Adobe Developer Connection, so head there to learn more.

Needless to say, congrats to the teams and send us your feedback!

Slides from Flash Apps on iPhone Session at MAX

I’ve uploaded from the slides from my presentation at MAX, “Building Applications for iPhone using Flash Pro CS5”. The slides and the talk cover some of the new capabilities we’re bringing to Flash Pro CS5 to allow developers to create native iPhone applications using ActionScript 3.0.

The talk is archived in two places. First, if you want the full experience with slides, video, audio and queue points check out the MAX 2009 archive. The archive is fantastic. It’s free, not geo-locked, and comprehensive. It’s almost as good as being at MAX in person. Second, if you just want the slides and voice over you can see it at Adobe TV.

Buliding Applications for iPhoen with Flash Pro CS5

Buliding Applications for iPhone with Flash Pro CS5

Moving to WordPress

I moved my blog and my website today over to WordPress. I have it running on my Win2k3 server, running in IIS with PHP and MySQL installed. I had written my own blog software in 2002, named TalkOut, that ran www.redyawning.com. From RedYawning, the RSS2 feed was syndicated over to www.adityabansod.net. I had started RedYawning to learn ASP.NET & C#. The site ran but I haven’t had any time to put in to it in the last two or three years. There were definitely bugs plus a set of newer blogging standards (like spam protection) that I would never have the time to keep up with, thus I decided to move over to WordPress.

So far, WordPress has been an awesome experience. I exported my entire old blog as an RSS feed, then imported it in to WordPress. Like that, my entire blogging history from January 2001 to today (719 posts) from my old blog were now in my WordPress instance. I installed a few plug ins and picked a theme, and it ready to go. Overall, a very good OOBE.

Hopefully now with a new blogging platform, one that’s more scalable and more integrated in to the rest of my online experience (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, etc), I’ll post a bit more. Looking through my blogging history, I was most active in early 2005. These days, I find myself using Twitter much more often.