A few days ago I received the usual e-mail I get every year from a Google Recruiter. Apparently my name must be in one of their databases of possible candidates from the days when I was actively seeking a position there. They like to check on me every once in a while. Here’s what I wrote back: Hi <recruiter name>, thanks for getting back to me. I understand that this is a general position open to anybody who applies. I’m quite familiar […]
Single page websites are quite a hot trend in web design, with vertical scrolling being the most popular (probably because of its ease of implementation). In this article I will summarize a strategy to implement a horizontal scrolling single page website for the purpose of achieving a certain usability goal. Too many times people implement a scrolling strategy just because “it looks cool”, or just because it’s the hot new trend, forgetting that a good design should be functional and aimed […]
The hardest debug situation of my life just ended. Celebrate! I was trying to make a USB audio adapter to work on an embedded device running OpenWRT, but Linux wasn’t recognizing the USB device. The device turned on, but wasn’t getting mapped to /dev. So I think, ok, I probably forgot the modules. I Installed the modules. Still no luck. Maybe I chose the wrong modules? I started trying different permutations of modules (with each try taking half an hour […]
A few days ago I found that there is no way to print on Sublime Text 2. I was a little disappointed with this discovery, printing is such a basic feature that even Notepad offers. Why doesn’t Sublime Text 2 include it? Ok, besides saving trees, I hate to print stuff on paper myself, but sometimes you will be asked to print your code, either by a professor or someone else wanting to review your code. In the meanwhile I […]
I have been busy designing a new application for Glassomium. I’m not sure of how I’m going to call it, but it’s going to work as follow: A user places his/her phone on the table. The table recognizes the phone, confirms the identity of the person. A menu pops out, providing the user with the ability to pull out pictures, videos, contact information and a business card. The menu responds to movements of the phone on the table. Other users […]
I have finally settled on a name for the table top surface window manager that I’ve been working on. It’s Glassomium, a combination of the words glass and Chromium (the open source version of Google Chrome). I’m surprised that I was able to pull out a nice logo out of my rudimentary design skills too! https://www.glassomium.org
Lately there’s been some some excitement about the new Samsung SUR40 table which ships with the latest version of Microsoft Surface. Cool piece of hardware indeed, if I could afford it I would put it into my wish list. Another device, another SDK, another user experience. Am I the only person who is getting sick of porting applications for different platforms? For the past 5 years the “apps” world has taken over. We have created sophisticated games and applications for […]
I’ve always been fairly satisfied with Programmer’s Notepad and PSPad for most of my simple projects with Ruby, Python or HTML. A few days ago browsing my G+ feeds I found Sublime Text 2. At the time of writing it’s still in beta and you can try it out for free, but the author does ask you to pay a small license fee for prolonged and constant use. Here are a few features that I think make this editor worth […]