In my last post, I talked about some of the reasons why I started developing Android apps. The new Android 2.3 Gingerbread is even better than Froyo. I’m talking about a whole new Nerdy and the Droid factory. With Gingerbread released and rolled out on the new flagship phone, the Google Nexus S, the developers’ wait is over. Some of the new features and functionalities baked within Gingerbread are: 1. More power under the hood My Nexus One lasts me about a day running Froyo. Android is now way smarter in managing its electrons with
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The open-source, Linux-based and hardware-independent Android mobile OS, with the new Android 2.3 Gingerbread release is giving mobile developers a whole new ball court to play in. Android is the fastest growing mobile OS among its competitors and with its share in the Smartphone user market growing, Android is attracting more and more enthusiastic developers. Being a Java developer I jumped right into Android development about a year ago. There is a whole list of reasons why I chose to develop Android apps over other platforms and here are some of them: 1. Low development
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Yesterday we kicked off our first Medical Devices specific seminar in Boston, with our friends from SterlingTech and Vector Software. The day was all about software development for medical devices and more specifically, about managing software risk to help ensure you are compliant with all of the FDA regulations specific to software code. We had a great turnout, with over 75% of registrants showing up for this session. A couple of observations I found interesting from this event: The medical devices community seems to be fairly tight-knit. Everyone at the event seemed to know everyone else, and
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Do internationalization and localization take the fun and flexibility out of documentation? And here’s the answer: You betcha, sister! At the risk of starting a brawl in the documentation department, I’m going to respond to my manager’s post about our new policy to facilitate the translation of our wiki . It’s a policy I refer to unaffectionately as the Stamp-Out-Fun-and-Flexibility policy. And yeah, I know that internationalization and localization are important to humanity and, um, sales. It’s just that making things more translatable makes documentation less agile and less fun. 1. Wikis are agile
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In a previous post, I discussed the problems we encountered when considering translating our entire MediaWiki-based documentation suite. I talked about how to get content out of the wiki for translation, and then get translated content back to our users. In this post, I want to discuss translation and globalization requirements more generally, and how our small, agile doc team, working in MediaWiki, handles each requirement. Fulfilling these requirements results in lower translation costs and easier translation: Provide a medium for the translated documentation that accommodates text expansion Use preformatted styles Minimize the amount of
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After being a PC user for most of my life, I just can’t help but feel a little bit exposed without any kind of antivirus on my shiny new Mac. I mean, I’ve heard it ad nauseum that the Mac just isn’t as prone to attacks as PCs are, but I for one just find that hard to believe. It is a computer that connects to the Internet after all; there has to be some level of risk there. According to this site, there are regular updates to address new Trojan horses, and other security
Read More »We moved all of our user documentation from Author-it to MediaWiki a few releases ago. At that point, we translated only a part of our documentation to Japanese – the help pages for detected issues. For these wiki pages, we used MediaWiki language templates to display language links at the bottom, and we copied-and-pasted the translated text. For our most recent release, we expanded the translation effort. This meant more copy-and-paste – from the wiki to Microsoft Word, to send to the translator, and then from Word to the wiki, when we received the translated
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Time’s a precious resource, so the saying goes. Don’t waste it. That’s particularly true for developers, who live in the critical path lane. And if there’s someone who knows a lot about time management, it’s Russ Sherk, an intermediate developer here at Klocwork, and the father of three young ‘uns. Russ works on our Klocwork Review and Klocwork Inspect products and handles licensing. For Russ, these are lessons learned over his six-year tenure at Klocwork. “These are things you need to think about or you won’t progress as a developer,” he says. Here’s what to
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With our latest product release, we have ventured into the world of Apple. Yup, our product is now officially supported on the Mac. I think I can safely say that this was not something on our roadmap a few years ago, but we recognized the trends, and now have this offering for our customers. With this support, it was determined that we needed a few more Macs in the organization, the Product Management team included. Now, I’m not sure I stepped forward, or everyone else stepped back (except me), but I ended up being the
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I don’t know why, but every time I go back to some simple shell scripting I can never remember the one liner for loop. For those who know what I’m talking about, it is the one command you need over and over again when it comes to performing the same thing on a set of files. I can never seem to remember the simple syntax and it always leaves me scratching my head. So I thought I would ask a forum on shell scripting and was promptly answered with: for file in `ls`; do rm
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A teenager managed to shock the experts by successfully hacking a vehicle using only a handful of homemade equipment...
More organizations are opening up their code to developer communities but they also need to consider how they pursue open source solutions internally to maximize value...
DARPA demonstrated that it could hack General Motors' OnStar system, gaining nearly complete control of a Chevrolet Impala as a result...
