Syntactically Correct

It’s been a while since I posted pictures of Ace. She’ll soon be 4 years old and is still very cute.

If you want to create a transparent activity in your Android app, add the following style In your res/values/styles.xml file (if you don’t have one, create it.) Here’s a complete file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<resources>
  <style name="Theme.Transparent" parent="android:Theme">
    <item name="android:windowIsTranslucent">true</item>
    <item name="android:windowBackground">@color/transparent</item>
    <item name="android:windowContentOverlay">@null</item>
    <item name="android:windowNoTitle">true</item>
    <item name="android:windowIsFloating">true</item>
    <item name="android:backgroundDimEnabled">false</item>
  </style>
</resources>

(the value @color/transparent is the color value #00000000)

Then apply the style to your activity, for example:
<activity android:name=".SampleActivity" android:theme="@style/Theme.Transparent">
...
</activity>

Thanks to Mathias DESLOGES (aka FreakDev) for his posts on this thread in anddev.org.

Shameless plug: If you’re an Android user, check out my app, Dindy.

Sometime in June (no final date yet)

I’m so happy.

As long as I’m going to live Prodigy shows there will be Smack My Bitch Up videos posted on this blog. One of the all time favorite live Prodigy tracks, there’s no wonder there are so many of those videos online.

Highlights:

• 0:45 – Liam drops the beat and the crowd goes crazy
• 1:14 – the crowd shouts the catchy lyrics in response to Maxim
• 2:39 – Maxim shouts “we do this shit every day”, something I never thought I’d hear from a live performer :)
• 4:08 – beat is dropped for the second time, crowd goes nuts again

If you started using Google Buzz, I have some privacy advice for you:

• Hide your personal information from the groups Chat Contacts and My Contacts. The two groups are built in and the people on these groups are automatically added by Google. As a result, they can include people you sent some emails in the past and might not want to share this information with today. Edit these settings from your profile preferences page (if you don’t have a profile, I’m not sure where this is done from.) In general I recommend going to Google Contacts and organizing your contacts in groups to better manage your privacy.
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• Hide the list of your followers and the people you’re following from others. Here’s why. Again, this is editable from your profile preferences page.
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Here are some pictures from the birthday party I had 2 days ago, organized by good friends. I had a great time and so did other people, or at least that’s what they say :)

As always, I use my birthday as an opportunity to reminisce on the previous year of my life.

The year started with my 3 months trip around the world, which I can’t properly sum up in this short post, but I’ll try anyway: on that trip I met friends almost in every country I visited (one of those friends I’ve known for over 10 years but met for the first time in real life), made some new friends, had tons of fun and many adventures, including thinking I was going to die after losing my way in a snow covered national park, a powerful experience to say the least.

As part of the trip I got to see The Prodigy, my favorite band that released a new album in the meantime, 4 times live in the UK with two good friends. I got to see them twice more after that in Turkey and in Prague for a total of 6 times this year and 9 times during my lifetime. On top of that I’m going to see them two more times in Paris this April.

I also experienced quite a bit of grief from a relationship I hoped would go somewhere but didn’t – something started exactly one year ago, right before the trip, with a girl I was really into (aka Girl 1). I wanted things to restart when I came back but she was no longer interested and later in the year moved on to be with someone else. Unfortunately I fell, yet again, into the friend zone trap and only lately have started letting go of the hopes I had for that relationship. It’s still work in progress, which makes this birthday a little bitter, but all in all it’s been a great year.

I’m not in the habit of ranting about free online services, but I really want YouTube to become a better website because I think it has a lot to offer me when I’m looking for something to watch.

So what’s wrong about YouTube’s front page? You can add and remove “modules” but most of them are completely useless:

• Most Popular shows one video from each category and can’t be customized to show more or less videos from a specific category. A quick glance tells me non of those videos interests me, so I have to click “view all”, for which I don’t need this module at all.
• Spotlight is a periodic module currently showing videos with the theme “Merry Christmas”, blatantly ignoring the fact that I’m in Israel and have never taken interest in Christmas videos.
• Recommended for You is based on a sub-standard recommendation engine. I honestly expected more of Google – this module shows videos based on the titles of my previously watched videos. I can do string searches for my favorites myself, thank you very much. What I would have expected is same-genre kind of recommendations, which would expose me to new performers/comedians/bands, not ones I already know.
• Featured Videos is the most irritating module and it cannot be removed! Right now it’s showing me four different Israeli videos even though Israeli videos comprise about 1% of my YouTube activity, and despite the fact that I set my location to “Worldwide” instead of “Israel”. Even more upsetting is that YouTube chooses news-related videos and I try to avoid news as much as I can.

The only useful modules for me are Subscriptions and Recent Activity because I have total control over them and are the “social network” features of YouTube, which actually make sense.

I’ve been writing software for over a decade now and I think I’ve established a minimal, yet very effective, set of rules for writing software:

Amit’s rules for writing software

1. Make the users happy.
2. Allow for known future modifications.

Doesn’t seem like much, does it? But, much like code, the brevity of these rules says nothing about what they encapsulate.

The first rule requires you to make the users happy. And by “happy” I mean make the users think your software is worth the time, money and effort they invested in order to use it. Some things are hidden in this rule – shipping on time, for example, is something that makes users happy. But sometimes achieving this goal requires you to make compromises and write code that isn’t according to your standards. Maybe you had to make an ugly shortcut, duplicate code, a hack, whatever. As long as the users are happy it’s OK to cut corners but…

The second rule says you should allow for known future modifications. That’s where all of your education, experience and religious pursuit of perfect code come into play. To make software future-proof you have to write good software, which practically disallows the aforementioned hacks from rule #1.

A delicate balance exists between the rules. Making users happy will presumably allow for a great first version but you might end up with unmaintainable software. On the other hand, write code without compromise and you may never ship. If you manage to write non-compromising software that your users are happy with, kudos to you.

I never could.