Just published my first Android app – Arcus

So I just published my first android app. This was my first attempt at writing an app, so any feedback would be awesome. I’ll admit I’m not the greatest at design so bear with me please.

Its a weather app (i know, i know.. yet another one)… which uses the new Forecast.io (formerly DarkSky) API for weather data. From darkskyapp.com, DarkSky “uses state-of-the-art weather forecasting to predict when it will rain or snow — down to the minute — at your exact location”.

It’s still a beta (possible even alpha) version, so there will probably be bugs. Tweet me @idioticgenius if you have any issues/comments/questions. All feedback is appreciated.

The name Arcus came about after looking through some weather terminology. Here’s the wiki definition:

An arcus cloud is a low, horizontal cloud formation. Roll clouds and shelf clouds are the two types of arcus clouds. A shelf cloud is usually associated with the leading edge of thunderstorm outflow; roll clouds are usually formed by outflows of cold air from sea breezes or cold fronts in the absence of thunderstorms.

Get it on Google Play



mounting virtualbox shared drive

Once you create a shared drive through the virtual box interface run this command from inside your vm (assuming linux guest).

sudo mount -t vboxsf name_of_share /folder/that/is/shared/in/vm

note: you must be outside the folder on the guest, otherwise you’ll have to go out of it, and back into again for it to show shared files.



Upgrade to Solid State Drive (SSD)

My laptop, which isn’t that old, less than a year old in fact, has been slow to wake from sleep and not as zippy as I wanted it to be. So i decided to upgrade my HDD to and SSD and see how much performance gain I could get.

Based on other internet articles the improvements would be significant. First, I’ll go over how I got it done, then I’ll show you my own performance gains.

5 Steps:
1. Buy SSD and Drive Enclosure.
2. Buy Drive Cloning Software.
3. Clone HDD to SSD.
4. Replace HDD with SSD.
5. Profit.

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upload canvas image to imgur and post to facebook feed

I had a canvas image and needed to export this image to a url in order to post to facebook feed.
I decided to use the Imgur API, and uploading the image to imgur, then using the imgur url as the source for my facebook post.

This process involved 3 steps:
1. get the canvas image and get into a format that is exportable.
2. upload image to imgur
3. post to facebook

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how to return the size of mysql databases

If you ever run into the need to find out the size of your mysql databases, i found this to work perfectly:

SELECT table_schema "Data Base Name", SUM( data_length + index_length) / 1024 / 1024 
"Data Base Size in MB" FROM information_schema.TABLES GROUP BY table_schema;

Source



Beginning mongo

I decided to take a stab at using Mongo as the NoSQL movement seems to be slowly gaining more and more traction.
I’ve read a few very good introductions to Mongo including the official documentation which is excellent (link to that below).

MongoDb

Since I was trying this out on a live site, I had to decide whether getting a VPS was worthwhile, until i found cloud hosted Mongo instances. I decided to try out MongoLab. So far I must say I am very impressed. Firstly, its free! Also, signup and set up was super easy even for a beginner like myself. Their web GUI for viewing collections is also very easy to use.

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H3ll0 w0rld!

Just a guy who programs stuff, always looking to learn new things.

Currently work with PHP, and experimenting with .NET C# and MongoDB.

Check out Suitify.Me