Here are the crazy ones...

It's been a while since my last post. Sorry about that. Today I am here to recommend an advertisment to you. Yeah you heared read that right, an advertisement. But not a regular advertisement. It is an old advertisement from one of the most innovative companies in the world. It is an Apple Computers advertisement. Even though I am not a fanboy of Apple i.e. "Mac Boy", I find this advertisement quite inspiring and motivational. Every so often I find myself watching this 1.02 minute ad. I hope you enjoy it:

The original text was written by Rob Siltanen with the participation of Lee Clow. In addition the tv commercial was aired in 1997 and it was made as part of the 'Think different' campaign.

The people who appear in the video are:
Albert Einstein, Bob Dylan, Martin Luther King, Jr, Richard Branson, John Lennon, Buckminster Fuller, Thomas Edison (Tesla rules!!), Muhammad Ali, Ted Turner, Maria Callas, Mahatma Gandhi, Amelia Earhart, Alfred Hitchock, Martha Graham, Jim Henson, Frank Lloyd Wright and Pablo Picasso.

I hope you found some inspiration.

@sdemians

Andrew NG at #GMIC2013

Yesterday I found this post about Andrew Ng #GMIC2013, in my blog's dashboard saved as a draft, so I decided to finish it and publish it.

Enjoy!!

Apart from Paul Graham, another talk that I enjoyed a lot was the one that was given by Andrew Ng. For those who don't know this guy, let me introduce him to you. Andrew Ng is the co-founder of a MOOC site called Coursera. According to Wikipedia, Coursera is a for-profit company offering massive open online courses (MOOCs) founded by Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller from Stanford University. Coursera works with universities to make some of their courses available online, and offers courses of a variety of specialities such as physics, engineering, humanities, medicine, biology, social sciences, mathematics, business, computer science, and other areas in different languages. Moreover Coursera has it own mobile apps.

Andréw Ng stated that there are three key things they could identify in Coursera:

The fact that they allow speed video management
• Crowd source languages
• English captions, used mainly by non-native English speakers 

Regarding the correction system, Andrew sustains that the crowd source grader works really well. In order to prove this, he showed a chart which contrasted the grade given by a real teacher and the grade given by the crowd source system. The results were amazing because of the precision of the grader system!!

Talking about the future, particularly about the business model, Andrew says that Coursera is trying to implement a sustainable way to earn money. In addition, continuous education will be the target market. Nowadays all courses are offered for free.  However in the future (when this post was written) Coursera wants to implement a paid system capable of validating your identity. Using this system Coursera will give an additional validation to the certificates so it would be legal to present those certificates to an external institution, like a job. Andrew explained that the validation system uses a combination of factors in order to determine the person's identity.  One of the factors is the way the student makes the keyboard keystroke.

Andrew believes that if we can provide all the world with a shot to middle class education, we will be able to change it.

Regarding the future of education, Andrew said that big institutions like Stanford won't disappear, they will become mainly interacting places between students.  Formal education will be taught through MOOC or a mixed approach where the theoretical part will be virtual and the student will go to classes for the practical work.

Whatever the future of education is, it is nice to see how these initiatives that seek to give the whole world education are able to prosper.

@sdemians

#HTML5DevConf oct/2013

Last October, the #HTML5DevConf took place in Moscone Center, SF. Below you can find a bunch of slides belongs to the different conference's talks. As a mobile web developer (you can realize it because the header of this post is  horribly scaled), the talks that I found more interesting are the ones related to continuous integration using Grunt JS. 

Enjoy it!!
@sdemians

Keynote Day One
http://lazure2.wordpress.com/2013/10/05/intels-new-era-of-integrated-computing-look-inside-looking-ahead-by-renee-james-president/

Keynote Day Two
adobe.github.com

Large Scale JavaScript Application Architecture
@danpatricklynch
http://www.slideshare.net/pyramation/built-tolast

Image Layout Algorithms

@vjeux

https://speakerdeck.com/vjeux/image-layout-algorithms-html5-dev-conf

JavaScript Insights

@arobson y @ariyahidayat

https://speakerdeck.com/ariya/javascript-insights

http://ariya.ofilabs.com/2013/10/javascript-insights.html

Webapp to desktop-app with node-webkit

Dale Schouten
@OldGeeksGuide

Mastering the build process

@johnnyhalife

https://speakerdeck.com/johnnyhalife/mastering-the-build-process-number-htmldevconf-2013

https://github.com/johnnyhalife/html5devconf-2013/tree/master

Continuous Delivery 

@jsoverson

http://www.slideshare.net/JarrodOverson/continuous-delivery-for-the-web-platform

Form Validation

@tjvantoll

http://tjvantoll.com/speaking/slides/Constraint-Validation/San-Francisco/#/

New Rules For JS

@getify

https://speakerdeck.com/getify/new-rules-for-javascript

Leveling Up in Angularjs

@aliciatweet
http://alicial.github.io/leveling-up-angular-talk/#/
http://alicial.github.io/leveling-up-angular-talk/examples/directive.html

Finally! Layout in CSS
@alanstearns
http://adobe-webplatform.github.io/html5devconf-2013/FinallyCSSLayoutTalk/#/
http://html.adobe.com/webplatform/enable/

Future of AngularJS
Miško Hevery
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1h3JCS5lwntUBddMv47lmpYQs3JUYy2LsUSfcy6YnlDg/edit#slide=id.p

Web Components
@rob_dodson
http://robdodson.me/webcomponents-revolution/#/

JS in iOS

@LostOracle

http://slid.es/nickdesaulniers/jsos/

Building collaborative HTML5 apps

@jtparreira

http://www.slideshare.net/jtparreira/building-collaborative-html5-apps-using-a-backendasaservice-html5devconf-2013-sf

Tips & Tricks for Tablet Optimization

@cyberneticlove

http://brendajin.github.io/tablet-optimization-presentation/#/

Designing in CSS & Programming CSS

Terrence Ryan.

@tpryan

http://terrenceryan.com/thanks/

High performance HTML5 apps

@demianborba

https://speakerdeck.com/demianborba/creating-high-performance-mobile-apps-with-html5

Top 10 Performance Techniques for PhoneGap Applications

@ccoenraets

http://coenraets.org/blog/2013/05/top-10-performance-techniques-for-phonegap-applications/

Unmasking the GPU Using Hardware Acceleration Correctly with CSS@divya

http://nimbu.in/html5devconf-oct/#/step-1

Streaming SVG animations on the web

@cconcolato

http://slideshare.net/cconcolato/streaming-of-svg-animations-on-the-web

Web based, mobile enterprise applications

@manishgarg

http://slideshare.net/manishgarg/web-based-mobile-enterprise-applications

Firefox OS, the Open Web & WebAPIs

@robertnyman

http://slideshare.net/robnyman/firefox-os-the-open-web-webapis-htmldevconf-san-francisco

From Developer To Entrepreneur

@tbiz

http://www.slideshare.net/biz/html5-devconf-oct-2013-d-bisgeier

Optimizing Memory for Smooth Infinite Scrolling

http://www.amar.co.in/hdc.pptx

Designing Coordinated Visualizations

@milr0c
http://bl.ocks.org/milroc/raw/7032589/#0

Web + Wow

http://slides.cjgammon.com/13-10-web-wow/

HTML5 Mobile Apps don't have to suck

@DaveArel

https://speakerdeck.com/davearel/html5-mobile-apps-dont-have-to-suck

Application building with D3

@jfire

http://jfire.io/presentations/graphical-web-2013/#/

W3Cs web content & creative constraints

@darcy

http://darcyclarke.me/dev/w3cs/

Intro to PhoneGap and PhoneGap Build

@ChrisGriffith

http://www.slideshare.net/chrisgriffith/intro-to-phone-gap-27549022

Browser Dance Party

@jsantell

https://github.com/jsantell/browser-dance-party-slides

Adventures in d3.js

@enjalot

http://enjalot.github.io/advd3/oct2013/

Backbone.rocks

Jeremy Lu
https://speakerdeck.com/coodoo/backbone-rocks-large-scale-single-page-app-done-right

Bootstrap vs Foundation
@jen4web
http://www.slideshare.net/mobile/jen4web/comparing-bootstrap-and-foundation-version-2

MongoDB
@conradIrwin
https://speakerdeck.com/conradirwin/mongodb-confessions-of-a-postgresql-lover

Distributed Application Architecture
http://ryanjarvinen.com/presentations/federated_html5/#/

Secure RESTful API Automation With JavaScript
@jcleblanc
http://www.slideshare.net/jcleblanc/secure-restful-api-automation-with-javascript?utm_source=buffer&utm_campaign=Buffer&utm_content=buffer52672&utm_medium=twitter

Embedding complex SVGs
@lakenen
http://camupod.com/html5devconf2013/#/

Developing web graphics with WebGL
@auradeluxe
http://www.slideshare.net/auradeluxe/developing-web-graphics-with-web-gl

Augmented Reality Mobile Apps in JavaScript:
@georgemck
http://www.georgemckinney.com/armobile/index.html#/

Fireside chat with Paul Graham at #GMIC2013

Two weeks ago, I was fortunate enough to attend the "Global Mobile Internet Conference" (#GMIC2013 ), held at the Mosconne Center in San Francisco , CA. It was full of excellent lectures about technological trends like "mobile health" , startups , mobile marketing and more. One of the talks that I liked most was the one that took place on stage A in the morning of the first day. It consisted of an interview with Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator seed capital firm, by Richard Waters, editor of the Financial Times.

During the conversation, Paul Graham stressed that his cell phone has only four applications installed. A few of the apps he has in his cellphone are Pebble, Uber and Lockitron.
Later Paul brought up several concepts about the current landscape of technology sector. Since the audience was full of tech guys some of the concepts turned out to be obvious. For instance the fact that the "software is eating the world".

By the time Waters asked about the the future of the technology industry, Paul had put ​​special emphasis on the phenomenon of mobile devices. He claimed that if anyone has an idea where something traditional is replaced by a mobile device, then it is a good idea. This is because today everyone has a cell phone and if you can improve a process using a mobile device you would be adding value to the world. Regarding the future, and in especially in relation to their investments, Paul Graham stated that we are entering to a multi-device world where both applications that coordinate people and wearable devices have great potential. Finally he concluded that in mobile market the monetization model should be charged for coordinating things. Furthermore, we should not try to export old business models that are successful in other technologies to cutting edge technologies, because this almost never works.

In regards to YCombinator, Paul Graham specifically told us that they seek good ideas that may seem bad but have potential. He also put special emphasis on the founding team. The team must be passionate and have a lot of potential.
According to Paul Graham, YCombinator has financed 564 companies that are valued at 13.7 billion dollars and they take 3% of the capital.

Deploying an airbnb rendr app in Heroku

Welcome to the second post about Rendr. In the following steps we are gonna see how to setup a Rendr app to upload it to Heroku. So less talking and more doing:

1. In the root directory we have to create a file called Procfile. Inside this file we have to write the following line:

1:  web: node index.js  

2. Then we modify Gruntfile.js, also in the root directory. Inside this file, at the bottom, we have to add the highlighted line:

0:    ... 
1:   // Default task(s).  
2:    grunt.registerTask('default', ['compile']);  
3:    grunt.registerTask('heroku:', ['compile']);  
4:   };  

3.  Due to the fact that we can't compile assets, templates and styles in the Heroku server, we have to compile those files in our workstation (running sudo grunt ) and then add them to the Heroku commit.
4. Upload all the files to Heroku and wait the start-up process.
5. Listo ;)

PS: If the dyno didn't start run : heroku  ps:scale web=1

I hope you find it useful.

@sdemians

How to integrate a third party library with airbnb rendr library

Hi all, today we are gonna integrate a third party library (we are going to use swipe as an example) with airbnb's rendr.

1. Download the last version of swipe.js from https://github.com/bradbirdsall/Swipe
2. Locate the library inside /app/lib
3. Inside the swipe.js file you have to replace the declaration line (line 8) adding "module.exports":

   Original file:

1:  /*  
2:   * Swipe 2.0  
3:   *  
4:   * Brad Birdsall  
5:   * Copyright 2013, MIT License  
6:   *  
7:  */  
8:  function Swipe(container, options) {  
9:   "use strict";  

With our small modification:

1:  /*  
2:   * Swipe 2.0  
3:   *  
4:   * Brad Birdsall  
5:   * Copyright 2013, MIT License  
6:   *  
7:  */  
8:  module.exports = function Swipe(container, options) {  
9:   "use strict";  

4. In the view file that you want to use swipe, you have to import it using the require function:

1:  ...  
2:     if (typeof window != 'undefined') {  
3:      var Swipe = require('../../lib/swipe');   
4:     };  
5:  ...  

5. Drop the swipe.css file inside assets/stylesheets/vendor folder. In addition modify assets/stylesheets/index.styl in order to import swipe.css stylesheet.

6. Listo ;)


@sdemians
thanks to: @spikebrehm and @ignavaldi

6 horas como turista en Buenos Aires

Hace un par de semanas me tome una mañana y me puse en modo de turista para recorrer algunos rincones frecuentados por turistas de Buenos Aires.

Contaba con unas 6 horas así que agarre la cámara de fotos y me encamine hacia el subte. Una vez allí me dirigí hacia la zona del obelisco. Allí pase por el teatro Colon, saque una entrada para la visita guiada por la sala principal donde cuentan detalles sobre la historia de la construcción del teatro y uno puede apreciar los detalles arquitectónicos del mismo. Luego camine por diagonal norte hasta plaza de mayo donde visité la catedral de buenos aires, en aquel momento le estaban reparando la fachada.

Luego cruce la calle, recorrí el cabildo, lamentablemente lo encontré bastante sucio y descuidado. Una verdadera lastima teniendo en cuenta los sucesos históricos que tuvieron lugar tras sus paredes. Por último conocí el nuevo museo del bicentenario ubicado detrás de la casa rosada; la objetividad del punto de vista del museo es cuestionable pero es recomendable visitarlo.

Desafortunadamente había mucha gente en la fila para acceder a la casa rosada, así que deje esa visita para la próxima vez. Les dejo un par de fotos, de alguno de estos lugares que recomiendo ir ya que a veces uno como ciudadano no se hace un tiempo para conocer y recorrer la ciudad que nos observa de lunes a viernes ir a trabajar. Además con solo 6 horas es suficiente para recorrido fugaz.

Visita guiada del Teatro Colon

Plaza de Mayo

Catedral de Buenos Aires