Pages Menu
TwitterRssFacebook
Categories Menu

Posted by on 31st August, 2016

What I have learned in the last few years

What I have learned in the last few years

In 2013 I decided to do the unthinkable: leave a five-year promising career at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, WA, sell everything and go on a life adventure. Mind you, that leaving, included leaving a cushy five bedroom house with an outdoor Jacuzzi on a Jack Nicklaus signature golf course, a Nissan Z350 and so many other material “stuff” that was somehow supposed to make me happy. Especially in the US, it seems that the more we have, the happier we should be. It goes without saying that in the US, we are conditioned to base our happiness on our material wealth. Deep down, I never connected material wealth with happiness… I yearned for more but wasn’t sure what that meant. My wife and I had many ideas, and together we decided that we wanted to build something for ourselves. We needed adventure and a bit more than the regulatory two-weeks-a-year routine vacation. So we planned our escape over the following year and (after several garage sales) we left for...

Read More

Posted by on 23rd August, 2014

What are your tools?

What are your tools?

Do the tools you use say much about you? It’s like clothing, right? You might wear a shirt because you simply like that particular shirt or you like the style… or the brand, color, fit, etc. The same can be said about the tools we use for our everyday tasks like email, calendaring, storage, etc. So, let’s see what these tools say about us. I’ll start; I’ll show you mine, if you show me yours… Email Gmail My default email client for many years. It is fast, robust, powerful and simple, yet highly customizable. Works across all my devices. Calendar Google Calendar A bit on the simple simple side, but very functional. Kind of like the search engine from the same company. Cloud Storage Google Drive Many contenders in this area, but its tight integration with Google docs, makes this an easy decision. It is fast, functional and with more tools and space than I will ever need. Storage Sync InSync Google drive comes with its default sync tool;...

Read More

Posted by on 15th January, 2014

Cloud mining Datacoin

Cloud mining Datacoin

I missed the boat on buying hardware mining equipment but still wanted to try mining for myself. Besides the initial cost, the financials of electricity costs with diminished returns, it just didn’t seem profitable at the time, and even less now. Now, without owning any hardware, one can still mine with cloud hosted solutions; whether it is Azure, or any other cloud service, you just create a Virtual Machine, install the wallet software for the crypto-coin you want to mine for and let it run for days on end. Just come back after a while to check on your balance. On Digital Ocean, you can run a single instance for about US$5 per month. I picked a coin that is not very popular with low difficulty, so I could get some decent amount of coins in return for experimental purposes and not necessarily to make money. I picked Datacoin [datacoin.info] and here are the steps I followed for mining this coin: Go to digitalocean.com and create an account. Once...

Read More

Posted by on 15th October, 2013

China leading next Bitcoin rally

China leading next Bitcoin rally

The capture of Ross Ulbricht a couple of weeks ago, and with it, the demise of the Silk Road and the largest underground market ever, was big news in Bitcoin social circles. Forget the ethical dilemma: this market moved a lot of money… a lot… about 1.2 Billion dollars in sales every year. No small fry. Much had been speculated by analysts and sceptics that much of the Bitcoin economy was stimulated mostly by these kind of illegal transactions. In fact, this news, was going to be the end of it: this was Bitcoin’s blow to its  knees. Except, that it wasn’t. Let’s say it was a stumble, if one can call it that. The price dropped for a day or two and recovered to its previous levels in a few days. So, if Silk Road wasn’t driving the Bitcoin economy, then who is? The sceptics are asking who else is accepting Bitcoins. No legitimate, public company does, right? With current events in US politics causing some doubt in the financial...

Read More

Posted by on 29th August, 2013

Mesmerizing dots

Mesmerizing dots

I saw on Reddit a post titled Mesmerizing and it was just a gif with some coloured dots in motion in a particular pattern. It was quite intriguing and I found myself staring at the thing for more than I am willing to admit. So, it was almost midnight, I am thinking, I can probably do this in a cople of hours… right? Right? Sure, it would be a fun experiment in Javascript. And there goes my sleep… Update: note quite finished, but I think I going in the right direction. Very little code: a loop that runs 18 times, creates the dots and animation, while the index rotates the layer that the dot is animating on by 20. I need to get the timing of the individual dots right and perhaps also the changing of colors. Notice how all the dots just move up and down a static line. 18 dots, 18 lines angled at 20 degrees from eachother. I added a toggle button so you can see...

Read More

Posted by on 6th May, 2013

Running WordPress on Azure

Running WordPress on Azure

WordPress started in 2003 with a single bit of code to enhance the typography of everyday writing and with fewer users than you can count on your fingers and toes. Since then it has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on millions of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day. Today it power about 18.9% of all websites in the world. WordPress is a CMS [Content Management System] based on a PHP/MySQL framework that is very useful for many and most cases, especially if you need a website quick up and running with minimum effort. Now, can you run WordPress in on Azure? Azure is Microsoft and this thing is PHP and MySQL….and they don’t mix, right? Well, yes, you can….and much easier than you thought. Go to: https://manage.windowsazure.com to access your Azure portal Here you have access to everything you’ll need to tinker with your site: FTP, connectionstrings, IP, etc. That is it. It could not be simpler than...

Read More

Posted by on 28th January, 2013

Single Arm Clock in HTML 5

Single Arm Clock in HTML 5

I t has been a long time since I have written an experiment and even longer since I have written any blog post, so here is my comeback. Now, I had already done a few experiments, but never one with HTML 5, so what better way than to try to implement an existing one? I took the Single Arm Clock and started playing with it. The Continue Time clock is an original, physical wall clock by artist Sander Muller. I had already tried this experiment this in Silverlight a long time ago, so let’s try this in HTML5. For this experiment, I decided to use the Kinetic JS framework, since it handles a lot of the manual work to working with Canvas objects. Toggle clock speed It didn’t go as smooth as I thought, nor nearly as fast as I had hoped. I don’t know why. Maybe I am getting rusty. My weekend is over and I am posting what I have. The most difficult part, which is to...

Read More