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NFC. What does it all mean?

NFC: Near Field Communications: a short-range high frequency wireless communication technology which enables the exchange of data between devices over about a 10 centimeter (around 4 inches) distance (via Wikipedia). Well that’s great, but what does it mean, especially when mentioned in conjunction with Gingerbread? As you may (or may not) have heard this week at the Web2.0 Summit Eric Schmidt talk about Android 2.3 and its support for NFC. This could indeed lead the way for mobile payments on…

Configuring LogBack in Roo

Gordon Dickens, one of our trainers and architects, recently posted this on his Technophile Blog, on Roo. LogBack is the more versatile logging strategy created by the same person that created log4j. Use the following steps to configure your Roo 1.1 project to use LogBack. 1. Create a logback.xml file in src/main/resources Continue here for the remainder of the post. See Also: Reasons to Switch to LogBack.

Post Presentation Thoughts from our Mobile Seminar

Kevin Griffin was one of the presenters at our first Mobile Seminar Breakfast. Below is a recap of his thoughts after he finished his presentation. “Yesterday I presented at the first in a series of events for Chariot Solutions, the topic was ‘Mobile Design Concepts’. My goal was to try present things that I had learned/seen/been shown/done over the last couple of years, and try to get the audience out of the ‘desktop browser’ mind set when developing for mobile….

Grails Validation Constraints Quick Ref

This is an excerpt from a blog post by Gordon Dickens, Chariot Architect and Trainer (via Technophile Blog) After several iterations of Grails, we have to go to 17 (seventeen) pages to see all the validation constraints? I wanted to see them on one page. Grails 1.3.5 – Validation Constraints blank – To validate that a String value is not blank. login(blank:false) creditCard – To validate that a String value is a valid credit card number. cardNumber(creditCard:true) email – To…

Monthly Mobile Musings from September

Firstly I should apologize for being a few days late, September was a busy month! I had the privilege and pleasure of joining a top notch panel discussion at ‘Mobile Monday Mid-Atlantic’ talking about mobile strategy. For anyone in the Philadelphia area interested/participating in mobile development, Mobile Monday is a must attend event, they have some great topics coming soon and we had a great attendance for the panel discussion again. My thanks again to MOMO-MA for the opportunity to…

Setting up TeamCity CI w/ Cucumber, Flex, FunFX, and Firefox in a Headless Environment: Part Two

Recently I had the “opportunity” (read: challenge) to setup a continuous integration build for a project with a Flex frontend and a Ruby/Rails backend. The project had been converted from Java-Hibernate-Tomcat to Ruby on Rails. Cucumber was introduced for GUI testing using the FunFX adapter. It was my first experience with Cucumber, so the combination of Cucumber, FunFX, Flex, and Firefox was a little daunting at first. But we got through it and actually, it turned out to be quite…

Setting up TeamCity CI w/ Cucumber, Flex, FunFX, and Firefox in a Headless Environment: Part One

Recently I had the “opportunity” (read: challenge) to setup a continuous integration build for a project with a Flex frontend and a Ruby/Rails backend. The project had been converted from Java-Hibernate-Tomcat to Ruby on Rails. Cucumber was introduced for GUI testing using the FunFX adapter. It was my first experience with Cucumber, so the combination of Cucumber, FunFX, Flex, and Firefox was a little daunting at first. But we got through it and, actually, it turned out to be quite…

Monthly mobile musings for August

August, appeared to me, to be the month of ‘Samsung’. They released/previewed/teased numerous handsets including the Seek, Flight II, Eternity II, Epic and Galaxy, and a few days ago released the Bada 1.0 SDK into the wild. Checkout the Samung Bada home for more details. There is also a developer book to go with it available via Amazon coming in September. More importantly they put up a teaser video for the ‘Galaxy Tab‘ which made me think I want one,…

Continuous Integration for iPhone

I was talking with a co-worker recently about Continuous Integration stacks for various platforms (because we are interesting like that, and because Chariot is running a CI event this fall). When we got onto the subject of iPhone he was surprised to hear how much of a complete stack was available, including unit, integration tests and full support for mocking, all of which we can bundle into our CI build. A brief run down of what we currently use: CruiseControl.rb…

Machine Learning: Google Prediction API

Loosely speaking, machine learning is using a computer to recognize patterns in data, and then make predictions about new data based on what it has learned. It is like a marriage between computer science and statistics. Besides its most obvious application (an army of sentient robots which wages war against mankind a.k.a. Skynet), there are a lot of uses for machine learning including: Predicting housing prices Recommendation engine for a retail website based on past customer purchases Spam filter or…

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