Kenny Singing in preschool

Thought I'd post this.  Its not really tech related, just a video of my son singing in preschool.

Expenses Simply 1.0

It's here, I've settled on an application name "Expenses Simply".  I did a bunch of Google searching and didn't see any hits on it.  It's a pretty straight forward application.

• Add expenses using the top bar.
• Delete a single item by accessing the context menu with a long press.
• Delete all items through the menu button.
• Undelete through the menu button.
• Items are sorted by date.

Please let me know if you have any issues with the application by leaving me a comment on this post.  

It should be on the android market soon. Link to application in the market.
QR code for those that know how to use them.

UPDATE:
Release 1.2 is here see post for details

Easy way to backup over ssh

Here's a really nice easy way to backup a folder over ssh.

tar zcvf - /localfolder | ssh user@remotehost "cat > /storage/location/filename.tar.gz"

Arduino 3x3x3 LED cube

I got bored the other night and took a first run at an LED 3x3x3 Cube.  Here it is.

The software side is still rather rough so I'm not going to post it yet.

As for how it's put together,  the cathodes (Negatives) on each level are soldered together, the anodes (Positive) are soldered together vertically.  Each column and each level is on a separate digital pin on my Arduino Uno.  The way to turn a LED on or off is by setting the level low and the column high.  To turn more than one off I just turn them on and off really fast.  The eye can't see that it's only one LED at a time.  I think I may switch to using a transistor switch to turn the various columns and levels on or off as that way I can better regulate the amount of power going out to the cube.  Look for updates in the future along with code snippets.

Removing "at" jobs in bash.

Here's a basic bash command to remove a job named 'poweroff''  this can remove other at jobs just by changing what you are greping for.  This is handy as I can use this in a script or send it out remotely to multiple systems and it doesn't require any interaction.

for job in `at -l | cut -f 1`; do at -c $job | grep -e 'poweroff' >/dev/null && atrm $job; done

Have fun with it.

How to use Syntax Highligher 3 on Blogger

So I tend to like to post a lot of code. In the past I used Syntax Highlighter on my own blog server. In this economy I've downsized to using the free blogger system. I did some Googling and came accross this post over at the Common IT mans blog. Nice and easy to follow to get Syntax Highlighter 3 going.

 Thanks.

Expense tracker part 2. Beginning with the interface.

So, I followed the directions to create a basic app at the android developers site. I wont more you with the details as the directions are pretty simple. To keep it simple I picked all the defaults and picked android 2.2 as my target.  I will probably be able to roll this back a bit based on the features I plan to use.

So I've decided to start with the interface and work back from there.  I've worked up this /res/layouts/main.xml based on the image from this post.

Syntax Highlighter seems to like have full close tags in it. go figure.

It ends up looking like this in the gui tool.

It doesn't look like much but the fields are all in the right location.  The alternating color listview is going to be handled programatically with a custom listview.  I can't see any other way of handling that.

I guess that's about it for this chapter.  Next I'll start on the application internals.

Expense Tracker basic design.

After getting my development environment setup using instructions from the android developers site, I have set about designing my first android app.

The main use case I have for this app is to keep track of the things I spend during the day so that they can be brought back to  my home computer and added to Quicken.

The features that I want are:

• Track date, note and amount for each purchase.
• Looks good in both layout and portrait
• preserves data across sessions of using it.
• delete single items or all items from a context menu.
• total values at bottom.

Here is a quick hack of a drawing of what I want the basic interface to look like.

Next post should start with creating the basic app and getting the data structure working.

Adventuring into Android development

So I got a Dell Streak in October.  It's an awesome device that I never seem to put down or quit tinkering on.  I'm running a custom ROM called Streakdroid. I've been itching to get into Android development for fun and profit since I got this thing. I've done a lot of Java programming in the past so this shouldn't be too difficult.  I'm going to chronicle my journey on this blog in hopes that it might help someone out there figure out what they need to do.  I am hopeful that other developers will see what I've done and give me better ways to do things as I am only a beginner at this.

For my first project I am going to do an expense tracker.  Why an expense tracker?  I currently use Quicken to keep track of my personal finances and would like a way to track what I buy during the day so that I can bring it back to the computer to enter into quicken.  If I don't do it this way I generally forget what I've bought and then have to go look in my online banking system and put it back into Quicken that way.

Again if anyone has a comment about the way I've done something please feel free to point it out to me.

a start of a new blog.

Its a beginning, I'm going to be posting random tech thoughts and tutorials here. I currently feel my writing style is pretty bad so this will be an evolution as well.  Please feel free to comment.  I'd actually appreciate if people would comment just so I know I'm not pissing into the wind.