Author Archives: admin

Memory of R Programming and SAS

During my tenure as a CTO for the pharmaceutical company, I had to deal with both small and large datasets for biostatistics. The gold standard for data analysis in pharmaceutical is SAS since FDA reviewers use it. Although SAS is great and I got the basic training as seen below, the cost is rather higher than I liked.

SAS_cert

When I heard about R project through a colleague back in 2003 or 2004, I had to jump on it and find out. After evaluating what it is and where it’s headed, I instantly loved it. It was very early in development, but I knew that this would be awesome. In fact, I love it so much that I became a supporting member (see below).

R Members

I don’t list R anywhere in my CV nor rants/blogs I post since it’s been long long time and I don’t have the expertise to be comfortable with it. But now that I have to deal once again with a large dataset on my private projects, I’ll pick it up again. There may even be a video diary of my learning. 😉

Playground for Objective-C

With Swift, we get Playground that’s allows us to experiment learn. But for those of us still in Objective-C and don’t really care for the new language or can’t touch it until lucky enough to work on a new project, we now have Playground for Objective-C thanks to Krzysztof Zabłocki.

You can find the repository at https://github.com/krzysztofzablocki/KZPlayground.

He also made couple of screencasts. See below.

Demo – get excited

Playgrounds for Objective-C from Pixle on Vimeo.

In-Depth

KZPlayground overview from Pixle on Vimeo.

Hopper Disassembler

If you ever had the misfortune of working with a disassembler or a decompiler such as IDA, then you’d know that it can be painful. If this is the case, then take a look at Hopper. It’s for Mac and Linux, but more for Mac than anything else. The price is $89 for personal use and you don’t have to shell out crazy $$$ like, well, you know.

Take a look at the video and it web site at http://www.hopperapp.com.

Want My Help?

I’ve tried a site where people can ping me for questions and pair up. This got annoying real fast as I was getting pinged at all hours, especially during my pomodoro.

Rather than using a service, I’m donating 1 hour each week to pair up with anyone needing help with Ruby, Objective-C, or any other programming. The only request I have is that I’ll be recording the sessions for others to share. If I don’t know the answer, we’ll go through the process of finding out the solution where we don’t just copy and paste answers from Stackoverflow.

If you’re interested, please email me at my name at this domain with [selfthis] in the subject line along with your name, question/subject, and available time . I’ll reply with the time. Let me know if you absolutely need the instant gratification.

We can pair up using VNC, Skype, or Hangout.

The reason I’m doing this is to give back something for all the things the community has given me, there aren’t any other motivation other than the fact that hopefully I helped someone and his/her benefited from my existence.

Resources for Learning To Write Unit Tests in iOS and Cocoa

I used to joke that writing unit tests for iOS development is not necessary since there’s a compiler and laugh real hard. What I realized was that some people thought that it wasn’t a joke. Even worse, when I asked about unit tests during interviews, some candidates didn’t know how to write tests.

The root cause of this, as I see it, is that writing tests aren’t really covered at Apple’s developer documentations. And with all the new boot camps and training courses turning out iOS developers not covering testing at all, testing issue escalates to yet another level.

Here are a list of my recommendations to get started. I will create screencasts on iOS development in the future since I have more time and will ALWAYS show tests along with anything I do. Hope this helps and ping me with any questions, I’ll do my best to help.

Screencasts

Great screencasts by Jon Reid with real world examples
UIViewController TDD
iOS Model-View-Controller TDD
Objective-C TDD Example
Lynda.com has a course based on Xcode 4, but just about all the stuff still applies.

Books
Test-Driven iOS Development (Developer’s Library)
Test Driven Development: By Example

Blogs/Online
Since you’re already here, please check again for contents as I create them regularly (hopefully) 😉
Quality Coding for iOS Developers – Jon Reid
devmonologue.com – start with Introduction to Test Driven iOS Development

Creating Self-Contained Google Chrome App

Sick of opening different Google Chrome windows for work and private accounts? I use following script to create a separate standalone Chrome app for that. Take a look at the code and give it a spin. This is for Mac ONLY!!!


#!/bin/sh

echo "What should the Application be called (no spaces allowed e.g. GCal)?"
read inputline
name="$inputline"

echo "What is the url (e.g. https://www.google.com/calendar/render)?"
read inputline
url="$inputline"

echo "What is the full path to the icon (e.g. /Users/username/Desktop/icon.png)?"
read inputline
icon="$inputline"

chromePath="/Applications/Google Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google Chrome"
appRoot="/Users/$USER/Applications"

# various paths used when creating the app
resourcePath="$appRoot/$name.app/Contents/Resources"
execPath="$appRoot/$name.app/Contents/MacOS"
profilePath="$appRoot/$name.app/Contents/Profile"
plistPath="$appRoot/$name.app/Contents/Info.plist"

# make the directories
mkdir -p "$resourcePath" "$execPath" "$profilePath"

# convert the icon and copy into Resources
if [ -f "$icon" ] ; then
sips -s format tiff "$icon" --out "$resourcePath/icon.tiff" --resampleHeightWidth 128 128 >& /dev/null
tiff2icns -noLarge "$resourcePath/icon.tiff" >& /dev/null
fi

# create the executable
cat >"$execPath/$name" < "$plistPath" <

CFBundleExecutable
$name
CFBundleIconFile
icon
 EOF

RSpec 3.1 is here

RSpec 3.1 has been released with some interesting changes. Take a look at the changes here.

It has a ton of good stuff including easy exclude pattern, compound block matcher (this will have the most affects on current specs for me), and etc…

Where Are You From?

Personally, it’s extremely difficult to find humor in this video when you have to deal with daily. Same goes for my friends and family. This may be the reason why it’s hard for me to think of myself as an American although it’s my nationality and home.

Another annoyance is when someone asks me how’s wherever a place in Korea is. I grew up in NJ – that should be enough punishment.

Google I/O 2014

One conference I really enjoy each year is Google I/O. This year, it was really intense geeking out for two days.

Although big sessions are available on YouTube, the primary reason for me to attend is meeting the engineers to get technical insights. That’s the value of attending the conference physically. This year, they had “Box Talks” that were intimate and really get ton of information. Below is a photo of a screen I captured as a note in Go testing Box Talk.

go-test-io2014

The only complain I really have is that Box Talks had really tight space and was getting really hot at some points. In this aspect, WWDC is better.

I really enjoy attending developer conferences, but with Apple and Google, there are too many non-developers due to product announcements that affects Wall Street.