Android Event Bus

We've used Otto for event notification. If you're not familiar with this, it allows your application to subscribe to events and other parts of your application to listed for when those events are fired. Otto was okay for awhile, and still is. It comes with one major caveat - new Android developers don't realize they need to unregister() off the bus when the lifecycle of the view is over - this creates a memory leaks on apps with more than one Activity or Fragment, which causes apps to eventually crash.

One of the items I've been waiting for is either the ability for Otto to get a bit smarter and allow the user to register as a weak reference. A new library, EventBus (also boasting faster performance) has emerged, and one of the outstanding feature requests is to enable this very feature. Hasn't been implemented yet, but something I've subscribed to and am interested in seeing implemented.

Realm.io - Android/iOS Database

Coworker pointed out Realm, a mobile database for Android and iOS. Offers increased performance vs native SQLite databases, on both iOS & Android. In addition, there is a plugin for Stetho so you can view your database inside Chrome dev tools (Stetho is absolutely one of the most useful Android tools I've come across in awhile).

Chuck Norris Quick API

Came across a quick URL to testing hitting up an API (well aware there are roughly over a million of these already).

GET http://api.icndb.com/jokes/random

{"type": "success","value": {"id": 466,"joke": "Chuck Norris doesn't do Burn Down charts, he does Smack Down charts.","categories": ["nerdy"]}}

Recommended Podcasts

After having being recently asked some of my favorite podcasts, what better place to record than here. In no particular order.

1. This American Life
2. Radio Diaries
3. Love + Radio
4. 99% Invisible
5. The Memory Palace
6. HBR IdeaCast (nerdy, I know)
7. StoryCorps
8. Death, Sex & Money
9. The Moth Podcast
10. StartUp Podcast
11. Serial 
12. Reply All
13. Planet Money
14. Invisibilia
15. Freakonomics Radio
16. Criminal
17. Radiolab from WNYC
18. Criminal
19. Every Little Thing
20. Hidden Brain
21. My Favorite Murder
22. Revisionist History
23. Science Friday
24. Science Vs
25. The Daily Show 
26. The Kevin Rose Show
27. The Pitch
28. The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe
29. Tribe of Mentors
30. Uncivil
31. Without Fail

Ubuntu Gradle Update

Came across this issue when updating gradle on my Ubuntu VM. I'd run `apt-get upgrade gradle` which indicated it would upgrade to 2.1. However, a quick `gradle -v` indicated it was still on the 1.x version.

The fix for me was to remove the old file: /usr/bin/gradle and then link up the latest one:

sudo rm /usr/bin/gradle
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/gradle/2.1/bin/gradle  /usr/bin/gradle 

As always, hope this saves someone some time.

SSL Certifcate Fun...

Found it rather annoying to try to convert certificate files for the HealthVault platform. They expected .cer format which seemed to be of some funky variety. After digging a bit further, this is simply a self signed certificate which normally takes on a .crt file extension. Knowing this, you can simply google the best way to self sign a certificate for Microsoft, or you can use the commands below:

openssl req -new -key  server.key -out  server.csr

openssl x509 -req -days 365 -in server.csr -signkey server.key -out server.crt

cp server.crt server.cer

Hope this saves someone some time!

Local Testing from the Web

Useful tool that does port forwarding. It's a bit slow, but it get the job done if you need to test a local site on a device that isn't on the same network.

https://ngrok.com