Weekly Review, November 15

By Saturday, November 15, 2014 2 Permalink 1

Yesterday was Oogis birthday! She’s 30 years old! That’s old!

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about using Bitnami to set up a local WordPress sandbox. I was surprised (and delighted) to hear from Daniel from Bitnami shortly after, thanking me for the post, and asking to send me a T-shirt! I definitely did not expect such a nice experience when writing the post. Kudos to the Bitnami team for engaging with their users like that. I can only assume that they are as responsive to complaints as well.

The OTA update for Lollipop started on Wednesday, Nov.12. It includes Nexus 5, 7 & 10. As with most Android updates, this update is rolled out in waves. Unfortunately for me, it seems I’m on a “late wave”, and haven’t gotten my update yet, 3 days later… 🙁

The wait is too long for me! With the factory image available for download, I see no reason to keep waiting! I’m not afraid of a little adb-ing and fastboot-ing. As I see it, the only advantage of waiting for the OTA is avoiding a full data wipe. But I want to start clean, so I don’t mind doing a full wipe. As I write these words, I’m backing up the Nexus sdcard to my MacBook, before performing the manual Lollipop flashing. You can expect a detailed post on this process soon, if I don’t fuck it up on the way… 🙂 (update: as I publish this post, a couple of hours after, I finished the manual upgrade, and working on restoring all my settings)

The Weekly Review is a recurring (so-far-)weekly summary, reviewing highlights from the last week.

Blog posts from the last week

  1. Wrote a short how-to on migrating a WordPress blog.
  2. Recommended to use cpplint to check C++ coding style.
  3. Shared my cpplint enhancement regarding external libraries h-files.
  4. The previous weekly review.

In the coming weeks, I plan to continue writing on the website side project, and the SCons series. Hopefully, I will be able to squeeze in some Mac training as well. The best way to keep up with new posts is to follow the feed.

Web selections

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) published a secure messaging apps scorecard. The scorecard compares around 40 messaging apps on various security & privacy related parameters. According to the EFF, it’s just the first phase of a larger campaign for secure & usable crypto.

Spark launched a new development kit, The Photon. It’s a sequel to the existing Spark Core, only faster, better, and cheaper! What’s not to love about it? Of course I ordered two (and managed to be in the first 1,000 to earn free shipping!).

Spark Photon

Raspberry Pi announced the Model A+ this week. At $20, with smaller dimensions and reduced power consumption, it’s a great option for RPi projects that don’t take advantage of the more powerful Model B+.

Smaller, more energy-efficient and crazy-affordable

Google partnered with The National Center for Women & Information Technology and launched EngageCDEdu. It’s a collection of open-source instructional materials for introductory CS courses. The materials are built to emphasize student engagement in the classroom. Sounds like a good emphasis for CS education 🙂 .

Side project updates

As far as the website project is concerned, I added some minor enhancements to the new Evernote-image-extraction feature. Nothing beyond that.

2 Comments
  • Gil Dollberg
    November 16, 2014

    Any first impressions of Lollipop?

    • Itamar Ostricher
      November 17, 2014

      It definitely made the phone smooth again.

      I saw reports on WiFi issues with this build, but I didn’t experience any. I did experience poor cellular reception though. In areas where I usually have full cellular reception, I now sometimes get dropped out of the network completely for many minutes at a time… 🙁

      Other than that, Lollipop is pretty nice. The new switcher is interesting – looks useful but requires time to get used to. Also the notifications on the lock screen are nice.

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