It is a tad complex trying to figure out how one paces out goals on a journey that lasts a lifetime. It’s a bit easy to work out my practice as just a drop in the bucket of doing Kendo for the rest of my life. However, as with other things I’m involved in, I feel a need to pace myself and at least set small achievable goals. It’s proving a bit difficult to find advice on what is possible within a measure of time, so that one can figure out how effective one’s training is. The advice almost always seems to boil down to “keep trying, it will come”. My issues are not about hurrying or a complete lack of patience (I’m aware that even 8th Dans still learn new things), it’s a question of trying to work out what’s effective in my training… or perhaps this is something one has to work out for himself.

I find it a bit amusing how many means of communication there are these days. I’m old enough to remember a period where the primary means of reaching anybody, apart from one’s immediate neighbours, was the solitary home phone. However, these days there are so many ways of reaching people in remote areas of the world at strange times. It makes one wonder how the human race has adapted for these differences in such a short span of time. As a quick catalogue of the services I currently actively use {Facebook, Twitter, 3 E-mail addresses, Yahoo! Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, Skype, IRC and 1 mobile phone} It’s no wonder my sleeping habits are borderline non-existent.

Attended the February Twitter Developer Nest #devnest at Sun Microsystems. Saw some really cool apps and presentations. <Updated long post coming up>

Attended an “Introduction to Scala for Java developers” talk at Skillsmatter. Presented by Miles Sabin, of Chuusai (the chaps who make the Scala IDE for Eclipse), the talk covered an overview of functional programming and the Scala language (traits, duck-typing, “everything is an object”, case classes…) .  I managed to ask him about his thoughts on the growing comparisons between Scala and Clojure (as they both target the JVM). He seemed rather enthusiastic about the trend and praised the efforts of the Clojure team. Bottom line was – it’s up to the developer to choose according to personal taste, if you want a more LISP-oriented language then it’d be Clojure otherwise Scala. I’d have to vote Scala for now as it feels rather like Python…

I’ve found myself relating more of my kendo practice to the rest of my day to day life lately. Concepts such as Zanshin (loosely translated to focus) are important even outside the dojo. My dojo’s sensei, Victor Harris, explained a breakdown of Zanshin into 3 aspects: the initial Zanshin of preparation, that of execution (of the cut in the the Kendo context) and the Zanshin of finishing up, for the next task. This applied correctly could lead to a perpetual cycle of focused activity. Taken into my every day life as a software developer and student of life, I find a lot of time is spent without much focus. Applying this concept to simple day to day activities helps one trim the fluff, so to speak, and promote consciousness of one’s environment and the tasks at hand. Focus and analyse the problem at hand, approach the task heartily and survey your work on completion.

New post!

I’m sooo lazy

Chiming in a bit late on a Thursday night. At least another 51 posts to go… Welcome to 2010.

I spent yesterday at Google London attending the Android Developer Lab. There’re some really awesome devices on the Android platform (Motorola Droid!!!). I had a great day overall meeting some really bright people who are clearly passionate about building great applications. About 6 hours of fun with the Android 2.0 SDK and some multi-device testing.  It’s a great time to be in the mobile applications space.  :)

PS: I’m definitely picking up the Motorola Milestone when it finally gets a UK carrier (Wake up O2!) .

USING ANDROID GPS TO MEASURE RACE CAR PERFORMANCE
Paul Thomas talked about using GPS hardware on the G1 to turn the phone into a datalogger for lap times, G-forces and car positioning on the track. ^^ I actually missed this talk while rushing through the London Underground to get to Skills Matter and finally getting stuck outside their HUGE office doors (if they intended for visitors to get the feeling of being outside a castle drawbridge… I think they nailed it!). I did finally get in though.

OAUTH AND THE INTENT ECOSYSTEM
Carl-Gustaf Harroch from novoda presented his OAuth provider and explained its integration to the platform. He had a rather interesting presentation – demonstrating using the provider as a central management system for different OAuth implementations. Might this be the future of web application authentication on the Android platform?
http://github.com/novoda

MOTODEV, BEGIN YOUR ANDROID DEVELOPMENT WITH MOTOROLA
Karan Geddam from Motorola presented an Eclipse based development platform created by Motorola – MOTODEV. It aims to facilitate the creation and deployment of Android application. From the development process to the deployment on the market. All contained within a single IDE. It seems like pretty handy toolkit, I’d expect some level of widespread adoption simply due to the fact it simplifies many tasks related to Android development and eases the development process.
http://developer.motorola.com

Had a great evening overall. It’s cool to hang out in a room filled with bright people building interesting things.