Mitchell Hislop » News

Developing the Developer’s Mind

Mitchell Hislop — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 02:52:08 +0000

As many of you know, I have been spending much more time developing than consulting. I have been working more on my PHP skills, while also learning Ruby on Rails and Python.
This is partly because much of my work has been both working on developing @SMCpros social media tool and with developing Facebook apps and contests.
When I first started developing, I was a freshman in high school. I wrote PASCAL, and was instantly hooked. These programs were basically long scripts, and used long control loops. This is the class that I learned how to scan things for exploits, write self-replicating programs, and generally be a geek.
Fast forward to 2 years ago, when I started with PHP. I was still writing long scripts, with big ass control loops, and they worked. However, they were slow, and bucked all major conventions.
Now, I write OO PHP. I am learning Ruby and Python, both of which use OO and the MVC ideas extensively. I am going from a script writer to an app writer. I am having to develop the developer’s mind.
This also means that I am taking debugging to a new level, writing tests, focusing on my tools and coding process, and actually acting like a developer, rather than just someone who writes code.

The developer’s mind is an interesting thing. It is the point when you go from script kiddie to an actual software writer. Its when your webapp needs work to keep it up and running. Its when you get the 3am calls about server issues. It is unlike any other mindset.

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I love you, readers

Mitchell Hislop — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 21:34:00 +0000

Therefore, I want to hook you up. Click this link, and you can get into Digg V4 Alpha pre-launch.

You are welcome.

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On Ideas

Mitchell Hislop — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 20:29:55 +0000

Ideas are a fickle thing. Sometimes, they manifest themselves as the best thing ever, only to be an idea that has already been had some number of times.

I recently got into a discussion at CoCo about ideas. We were talking about how interesting it is that they can get lost. For example:

The Romans had plumbing and elevators, which then took several hundred years to get “invented” again
Several people have had similar ideas at roughly the same time, many miles apart, each thinking its their own
Similar ideas always end up at the same end

We were also talking about how there should be sattalies orbiting the Earth, storing and backing up the internet, so that we dont lose our place in the world should something happen.

That was what got me thinking.

It is not that we are running out of ideas, or that we are using them up faster in this day and age. Since we can all communicate instantly, wirelessly, we are just finding out that the idea is used faster.
We have fewer and fewer ideas happening simultaniously, since we find out that they are already being worked on.

This is going to lead to a drought of ideas, until some innovators really kick it up a notch.

This post is just something for you all to rattle around.

Will you be that innovator?
Where are your ideas coming from?
How can we protect knowledge better?

(p.s. This is the first post on my new server. I now rock a Linode VPS, and am so pleased thus far. Be nice to it, everyone. And let me know if you see issues. )

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Hacking android

Mitchell Hislop — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 04:48:08 +0000

Motorola recently announced that the used the signed bootloader on the DroidX, and on the Droid2.

This is really bad news for anyone who wants to use custom roms, kernels, or even gain root access on their devices.

When the origional Droid launched, it had a bootloader that was unsigned, allowing users to replace it with a different bootloader that can use custom roms. This lead to the Droid becoming a favorite in the custom community, and remains one to this day.

When the international version of the Droid shipped (the Milestone), it had the signed bootloader.

That bootloader has yet to be defeated.

Motorola never said why they left the Droid so open. Their PR team stated that if you want a phone to use custom roms on, get a Nexus One.

I don’t get this. Why allow it on one device, but not all of them? Why lock it down in the first place? Android is ment to be open, so leave it open!

Android phones that CAN be opened to roms:
Droid
Moment
G1
Nexus One
MyTouch3G (also the slide, but its janky)
HTC Hero
HTC Evo
Droid Incrediable

Basically, everything but new Motorola phones. Which is why I won’t even consider getting one.

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Androids secret weapon

Mitchell Hislop — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 05:37:51 +0000

I have been spending quite a bit of time helping some of my friends tweak their android phones. It finally helped me nail down one of the factors that make me love Android over iOS:

Google App Engine.

GAE is a google service that many people don’t know about, but may use on a daily basis. It is a hosted app platform that developers can use to provide apps. However, there are several features that allow it to do things iOS could only dream of:

Single sign on capabilities: app providers can use google’s sign on rather than having to make their own auth system. This means that they can also have access to a users google services, if they allow it.
API: this is the big one. Mobile devices can access GAE, along with its data.

These two features coalesce to allow developers to be able to build webapps that can also affect a users mobile device. For instance, App Brain uses these features to make it so that a user can browse apps from the desktop, and sync them to their mobile.

It also drives things like the chrome2phone extension. This extension allows a user to send a link from their chrome browser to their phone. It basically stores the link in GAE, and retrieves it via the phone. It also lets me send a map that I am looking at in Chrome to my phone, which opens the map app. If I do it with a phone number, it opens the phone, and if I send selected text from the browser, it goes to the clipboard on my phone.

No other phone platform has a cloud based web app host behind them. This allows the computer and the phone to know of each others existence, and send things back and forth.

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Google Command Line Tools

Mitchell Hislop — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 02:59:37 +0000

Like any true geek, I constantly have a command line open. Therefore, I was super happy to see that google released their “googlecl” package, which is a collection of command line scripts to interact with google.

Therefore, I can CMD-tab to my terminal, fire off $google calendar today, and get my calendar for the day.

With this, I can also script it, to backup my gdocs, to display my calendar when I open my terminal, or even output onto my desktop, for quick, at a glance access.

Its written in python, which I dont know yet, so while I wont be contributing, I will be supporting it.

Find it here.

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Where to follow me

Mitchell Hislop — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 17:28:39 +0000

This is just a quick PSA post: 99% of the content I post here is going to be techinical, development-related, opinion, and decidely not personal news/updates.

If that is what you are looking for:

Twitter

Tumblr

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Owners of Data

Mitchell Hislop — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 05:48:54 +0000

Many people think that the next big leaders of the web are going to be the curators of data.

While I agree, I think that you are overlooking a very important group.

Data Owners.

This all came out of a thought that I had while driving from a meeting, listening to the Twins game. I started thinking “I am 100% at the mercy of the announcers. They could be 3 pitches behind, and I would not know”

This also has been on my mind while developing our webapp @smcpros. We are 100% at the mercy of the providers of data, whether that is the @twitterapi or @gnip. We can only do, leverage, and analize what is given to us.

Curators are also at their mercy too. They can only curate what the owners provide.

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Published Code

Mitchell Hislop — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 01:24:48 +0000

Over the last few weeks, I have been doing quite a lot of coding. I want to tell you about two of the bits I have written, that I am willing to release-some of it is under lock and key for work. If you use this, all I ask is that you either give me some sort of credit, or just a shout out/thank you. (basically, CC-attrib.)

Foursquare “Whose Here?”

This bit of PHP that I wrote can be found on the CoCoMSP site (disclaimer-I am working with them as a community-manager type role, sort of. Damn FTC and your vague guidelines). All it does is pull the people who have very recently checked in at a location on Foursquare and displays their avatars. I wrote this because there is no easy way to pull a recent list-and, it is easier to fully integrate this into your design, rather than a big clunky widget. I will be updating it with Gowalla in the very near future, so be sure to stay tuned.

Link to code on GitHub.

CSS Bar Graphs

This one is for WordPress. You can find an example at the site we did for the Overnight Website Challenge. This code pulls data from a custom post field called “status” (super easy to change), and displays a bar graph with the percentage given filled in. You can easily mod this to do more, but that is all was required.For instance, you can use it with voting buttons, store the votes in variables, and do some simple math to display the percentage.

Link to code on GitHub

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Why I am skipping sxsw

Mitchell Hislop — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:30:48 +0000

Another year, another missed SXSW.

But why? Why would a jetsetting, young, social interactive nerd and tech analyst skip a trip to Austin, TX in the middle of winter?

Well, the first reason is what I call the MV ratio-money to value.

SXSW would cost me about a grand, all things considered. For one, that’s a pretty big investment for a college kid working at a startup.

So, what would my ROI be?

Meeting other like minded people
Hangovers
Swag
Foursquare badges

Notice that I didn’t say “valuable content” on that list. Thats because I can get that same content, sitting in MN, on my MacBook.

I also dont know how you all are able to take off so much work for this. I am up to my eyeballs in client work-it would be nearly impossible to get out to SXSW, even for a weekend.

I would love to go one year. However, this just isn’t the year. I am looking forward to rocking out with the #notatsxsw crew, and following all of you in Austin.

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