With Rosh Hashana and a personal planned vacation this week, I had little time for anything else.
Oogi and I just returned from our first child-free weekend vacation since the twins were born (7.5 months). It was short and sweet. One night at Brown Hotel in Tel Aviv, with plenty of food, drinks, and sleep! We went for a package that included a treatment in their in-house spa, fancy dinner at Meir Adoni’s Mizlala restaurant, and an excellent breakfast at Lulu Kitchen & Bar. We almost forgot how it felt to be able to just do whatever we want to. Go out for ice cream? So easy! No half-hour-long diaper bag and stroller productions! The best part? Maybe waking up at 6AM, and falling back asleep, because nobody’s crying for a morning bottle. Or maybe waking up again at 9AM, being able to just stay in bed for a while, doing nothing. Oh, the simple things…
The Weekly Review is (hopefully) a recurring summary, reviewing highlights from the last week.
Blog posts from the last week
- Continuing the website project, with a project roadmap.
- Looking for interesting things to do with my new littleBits cloud bundle.
- Continuing the SCons series, with a multi-module C++ SCons project with a separate build directory.
- 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 Internet exploded with news about the Shellshock bug. There is plenty of material covering this hot topic. The Troy Hunt coverage is pretty good with the technical details. It can be a good idea to check if you’re vulnerable. If you are, there are patching instructions for Linux and Mac. I haven’t dug into it myself, so I have no educated estimate as to how bad it is. If you believe the Internet (and you shouldn’t), it’s really bad.
In less frustrating fronts, Eric Ravenscraft wrote a detailed article on running Android apps inside Chrome on Lifehacker. Obvious disclaimers aside, this hack has lots of potential. I love that the Android community was able to come up with this, probably putting some pressure on Google to support it officially, hopefully sooner than they planned anyway. There’s also a Chrome APK packager that helps in turning Android apps into Chrome extensions. As cool as it looks, I think I’m going to hold off on trying it myself. It seems very hacky, and I’m not sure it worths the hassle (at least for me). The only app I can think of that I really want on my PC is WhatsApp, and apparently it doesn’t work with this method (according to this Google spreadsheet of apps). Do you have Android apps you find useful on the PC? Were you able to make them work with this hack? I’d love to hear about it!
I liked the article by Belle Beth Cooper on teaching what you know. It’s sort-of what I’m doing on this blog, isn’t it? I hope I turn out to be the developer she wrote about, with the popular blog and huge audience 🙂 . Are you learning something from my posts? Let me know!
Netflix has an interesting philosophy on system testing and reliability. They actually inject failures into production to ensure fault tolerance. If you also found this interesting, you should follow their tech blog too 🙂 .
Google launched a developer survey. If you’re using Google APIs, platforms, or services, you can participate and maybe influence (I’m optimistic sometimes 🙂 ). Even if you’re more pessimistic about the potential impact of the survey, at least know your participation triggers a donation to one of six education-focused organizations: Khan Academy, World Fund, Donors Choose, Girl Rising, Raspberry Pi, and Agastya. As a Raspberry Pi user and enthusiast, the donation alone worths my effort 🙂 . The survey took me about 12 minutes to complete.
Side project updates
As you can imagine, I’m still elbow deep in the website project. As expected, a new site comes with new technical issues. Please, do report issues that cross your path.
Sadly, this week I had no progress whatsoever…
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