happy Happy New Year! To all readers, Happy New Year and may the new year bing you everything you want! :)
brand Brand Colors A while ago I've found a list of common brands' colors. Here it is: #121212 #464646 #9c0000 #c4302b #c41200 #cc0000 #cc0000 #cc0000 #d7584f #db4a39 #e41f11 #ef1d1d #ef4423 #f74425 #ff0000 #a82400 #d54e21 #dd4814 #e03500 #ec6231 #f05e1b #fc4f08 #634d40 #db7132 #e47911 #eb6d20 #ee802f #f47a20
android Make Dialogs Obey Your Material Theme Material design is nice. Flat, with well determined contrast rules... and most applications I've seen look excellent. I wanted my application to loon nice too and it does (well, almost right now :) ). One thing that is not in line is the dialog style. If you're here,
android Launch a timed service - Strategies An app I am writing at the moment needs to have a periodic timer, i.e. a way to run a bit of code at regular intervals. After digging through different sources, I've found two recommended patterns to code such behaviour: 1. Using a periodic alarm: Android has
distance Fuzzy String Matching in PostgreSQL A database I am working on has a lot of records (40M+) and the guys mining it are currently using python to process it. This is very powerful (nltk) but also quite slow. One of the guys has found that you can do fuzzy string matching straight in Postgres and
belgium Belgium Customs and DHL - A History of Legal Thieving The other day I ordered an item from Hong Kong, to be delivered with DHL, because DHL would be quicker. So the total cost was: * The item: 30.40 USD * The shipping: 33.80 USD * Grand total: 64.20 USD The amount of taxes I had to pay for the
android Split a Gradle Build File TL;DR: If you can, use ext {} with constants (hash). You can do call pointer things too! In the past days I've been trying to add some functionality to my Gradle build file so the version would be determined from the git tag. I've found this
drive Find Where Your Network Drives Map to The other day I was at home in a somewhat odd situation; I had a VPN connection but I could not, for the life of me, remember the mappings of the network drives from the other side. Also, of course there was no documentation how to do it. A kind
finder Fix Missing Icons in Yosemite Finder Today I've found that I was missing some icons in Finder: Not nice. However, after scouring the internet I found the simple solution: 1. Reboot in Safe Mode (use this link) 2. Log in as yourself 3. Reboot normally 4. Log in as yourself ...and voila! You have
belgium House: A Grand Project And now, something different... We have decided relatively soon we want to build a house. We had several reasons for doing this in Belgium: 1. Prices are high: Depending on area, prices are quite high; in a "good commune", you easily reach 500k for a house and 300k
android Android Dimensions - Pixels, DIPs... Building a mobile application is generally fun. New technologies, things to think about like memory constraints and threads... However, one thing that bugs me is a clear indication on how to build pixel perfect apps. IOS has a limited number of resolutions, plus their strategy is "normal size"
activity Android: Make Your Notification even Sticky-er In my previous post, I've expanded things to make a notification sticky. This worked in my tests until yesterday, when I've found a new case where my notification would go away: 1. Build an sticky notification as per the two previous posts 2. Activate the notification
android Android: Make Your Notification Sticky Following my quest from the previous article, I realised that my app would not be in the foreground, like an email, browser or a game might be, but it would work without any GUI, using something like a cron job. This is all nice and lovely, but I'm
android Android: Notifications with Custom Layout In the previous entries, I have managed to display a notification and make it sticky. Now, since the app I'm developing is supposed to be visible mainly through this notification, I wanted to see if I can customise the actual content. Yes, I know there are options by
android Android: Display a Notification One of the applications I'm thinking about I want it designed like the notification-based applications you see out there (Light Flow from reactle comes to mind). To be able to do this, I first need the app to display a notification on the device as a first step.
c C Optimisation - 2005 style TL;DR: This post is about an experience I had in 2004 and it’s part of my consolidating technical posts I wrote in time. It may or may not be relevant to today’s technologies. I was trying to optimize a bit of code and found out that 2
d-bus D-BUS: DBUS and Mad scientists... - 2004 Style TL;DR: This post is about an experience I had in 2004 and it’s part of my consolidating technical posts I wrote in time. It may or may not be relevant to today’s technologies. For the last while I was poking around with the glorious D-BUS... As it&
consolidate Qt: Embedding Multiple Widgets in a Menu Item - 2004 style TL;DR: This post is about an experience I had in 2004 and it's part of my consolidating technical posts I wrote in time. It may or may not be relevant to today's technologies. One night in October 2004 (WOW! it's almost 10 years!
bat BAT Files: Execute Multiple Commands in a Loop One of the tasks the other day was to load a large DB organised by year. The most efficient way was to loop through a sequence of years and execute the loader for each one. The first iteration I ended with was: FOR /L %%Y IN (1996,1,2008) DO
database Postgres: Show Schema Sizes in a Database While loading a large database from files to a Postgres schema, I found very useful to know how much space on disk it actually occupies (just in case I need to re-size the disk). I found this answer online: SELECT schema_name, pg_size_pretty(sum(table_size)::bigint) as
cache PyCharm: Change the location of .PyCharmXX In the good practice of IntelliJ application, PyCharm creates its own cache directory in your home. Mind you this can get really big (300Mb+) and if you sync your home with a networked drive, you'll get penalised (time-wise). Following this discovery (my login/logout time is up to
android Android Studio: Change the Cache Location (AndroidStudioBeta) Android Studio (AS) creates a directory .AndroidStudioBeta (which will likely be .AndroidStudio once it's launched officially). This happens for each user and looks like a cache directory, where local bits are stored. Unfortunately, the size of mine (after only a couple of projects) is of about 350Mb (1200+
cache IntelliJ: Change the default cache location (e.g. .IntelliJIdeaXX) Everything started from a problem I had with PyCharm, where it would create a ".PyCharm30" directory in my home, which would end up being about 300Mb, with a lot of files (2000+files, approx 200 directories). This gets taxed since my home dire gets synced at login/logout
android Android java.lang.VerifyError and Boilerplate code TL;DR: Change the java version compatibility in your gradle file (see below) or remove Hugo references from your e.g. "debug" code in Velcro. The other day I discovered a bunch of template-based application generators for android. While they are very interesting and apply some of the
android ELI5 - Injection Concepts TL;DR: Injection is the process to automatically initialise variables (or parameters) when building an instance. I'we tried to wrap my head around dagger for a few days until I realised I was missing actually the concept of injections in java (to my defense, I stopped using recent
