Code Benders

Posted by Taus June 12, 2010

RailsConf was great this year. Got to meet a bunch of new people that I hope to keep in touch with.

After a crazy flight back to the west coast – 15 hours of flying, circling, diverting, waiting, unloading, loading, sitting, waiting for a pilot from Baltimore to Portland – these are the things that stick out in my mind the most…

As I previously tweeted, Yehuda‘s keynote speech was awesome. If you think Ken Kesey new how to mix up a tasty batch of Kool-Aid, you should taste Yehuda’s. Oh, man, was I inspired (and still am)! For all the bravado that is the Rails, Yehuda’s talk defined the moral center of this community. If there’s only one video to watch from the conference. This is it…

A good complement to Wy’s speech was Gary Vee‘s talk on the “Give a Fuck Economy”. Gary bring’s more emotion to his talks than a JV cheerleading squad, not to mention that he drops more f-bombs than Matt. During the Q&A, I got to ask Gary about his interest in social action. Although, I think he initially misunderstood that I was asking about charity, he did express some interest in the shifting world of non-profit, community action. When you combine Wy’s community participation ideology with Gary’s “mom and pop” grow a relationship with your constituents, I see a brighter future. And that future makes me even more optimistic about UniteNow’s mission.

Here’s Gary’s talk…

Lastly, although not a keynote, I really enjoyed Ian McFarland’s talk Agile the Pivotal Way. Whether you are a consultancy, a startup, a non-profit, a government agency or anything in between, these insights are invaluable. The slides and video have not been posted, yet. But I hope they will be uploaded here soon.

Posted by Taus April 28, 2010

Earlier this week, I wrote about the a crazy bug in the Android email app that I discovered on my Nexus One, which posed a significant privacy risk when users send emails from their device. I submitted the bug report to Google and earlier today I received a reply. The email (below) includes instructions to resolve the issue, including clearing the email app data and cache.

While I’m delighted to get such a quick reply, I can’t help but to think that the Android development team must have known about the bug for some time. The reply below gives no indication that this is a known issue. But it also does not request any further detail, which I assume they would have requested if they were unfamiliar with the bug. I did search the Android Code site, but I could not find a known issue.

If you’ve seen this occur on your device, please add comments/details to Android Code site here.

“Hello Michael,

Thank you for your email. We understand you are facing issues with your
email app.

To resolve this issue, please try the following:

- Perform a hard reset
1. Remove the battery from your phone.
2. Wait 15 seconds.
3. Replace your battery and try turning on your phone again.

- Clear cache of the Email application
1. Go to Settings > Applications > Manage applications
2. Press the Menu button and select ‘Filter’
3. Select ‘All’
4. Select the problematic application
5. Click ‘Clear data’ and ‘Clear cache’

- Uninstall any third-party applications that might be impacting the Email
application

1. Go to Settings > Applications > Manage applications
2. Press the Menu button and select ‘Filter’
3. Select ‘All’
4. Select the problematic application
5. Click ‘Uninstall’

If are still seeing inclusion of a separate email, you may need to do a
factory data reset

1. Go to Settings > Privacy > Factory data reset
2. Click ‘Reset phone’
3. Your phone will restart
4. After resetting your phone, you will need to re-sign in to your Google
account and re-download all of your apps

Please reply to this email if your issue remains unresolved after these
steps.

Sincerely,

XXXXX
The Google Team”

Posted by Taus October 23, 2009

In anticipation of 350.org‘s global day of action tomorrow, we are happy to announce that our development has beta launched the Unite Now Activist Network.

This project has been fun and intense. With only 8 weeks to conceive, design and program this social network for activism, the challenge was significant. To jump start the project, we looked at several open source Rails projects, but ultimately decided to leverage TOG, with hosting by Engine Yard and storage on S3.

There are a lot of features still hidden under the hood and we’ve got lots more to do on the site. So stay tuned – we’ll update the project soon.