So, I’ve been working for K2 for about a year-and-a-half now and am still enjoying being part of an actual software company again. Today I found out they’ve produced a new How To video for the product I’ve been the primary developer on for the last year or so.

This component is a broker that connects to a RESTful web service and exposes its entities and methods as K2 SmartObjects – which can be used in workflows, reports and other K2 blackpearl or Appit processes.

The area outlined by the blue box below is the functionality I am responsible for:

Topics:  Free MS ebooks, Xamarin podcast, cloud server in 55 sec., squash your PNGs, Heartbleed fallout, RDP from Android.

• Former co-worker @_Shakeel passed along some free e-books being offered by Microsoft Virtual Academy.
• @munificentbob announced his free online book, Game Programming Patterns.
• I keep finding more and more Xamarin community resources. This week it was their podcast on SoundCloud.
• Also, useful for cross-platform development: Notes on Using Various PCL Profiles with Xamarin (via @WindowsAppDev)
• Cloud hosting service DigitalOcean advertises you can spin up a new “droplet” (i.e. VM) in 55 seconds, and has what looks to be a pretty reasonable pricing structure.
• Do you know what your TRAQ score is? Online comic Devil’s Panties (“not satanic porn!”) has a good write up about their ad revenue tanking after improperly getting flagged as an adult site.
• If you’re working on web pages be sure to check out these handy CSS tips.
• In the wake of Heartbleed the OpenBSD community is refactoring OpenSSL “one arcane VMS hack at a time.” (via Dan)
• Meanwhile, a security firm reports many Android apps (mostly games) are vulnerable to Heartbleed and most scanning apps are doing it wrong, but don’t tell us which ones are doing it right. (via Re/Code)

Tools, etc.

• Color Scheme Designer is a great online tool for generating/exploring color palettes.
• And while we’re talking design, Scott Hanselman reminds us to squish our image files – Trimage is a handy app to do that on Linux, Windows and Mac.
• Did you know Google has a Remote Desktop tool for Chrome? Well, now it’s available for Android too.

Projects, etc.

• Less than 30 days left in the FoodStats app fundraiser. We’re at $250 now. Pledge as little as a $1 or as much as you feel like – every little bit helps. Or just help spread the word: Use the share buttons on the campaign site or give this easier-to-remember URL to friends, family and those who might be interested: http://tiny.cc/foodstats
• Released an initial alpha version of Commit Message Editor – a simple, cross-platform GUI editor for commit messages in Git. The goal is to provide a light-weight editor with key features useful for writing commit messages. (This was a request from my friend and former co-worker Jonathan.)

Topics: Telecommuting tips, Heartbleed tools, the end of crapware?, Git tutorials, free education, ideas into products, humanize numbers, better Datetimes, a Git GUI.

• The Pluralsight blog has some good tips for those working from home.
• If you’ve been under a rock and haven’t heard, make sure you’ve updated OpenSSL on all your computers.
  • If you’re a LastPass user, they now have a report that will tell you which of the sites you have accounts on have patched the bug.
  • GRC (host of the Security Now podcast) has an online tool that will tell you if your browser is properly recognizing revoked SSL certificates.
• SweetLabs is working with PC vendors to replace OEM-installed crapware with a recommendation-based app store solution, letting developers sell their apps directly.
• The fledgeling OneGet community has apparently pushed to get the repository moved to Github. (via @fearthecowboy)
• Discovered that Atlassian has a nice set of Git tutorials and resources online.
• The Free Technology Academy offers free education in “Free Software, Standards and Hardware“.
• Local developer @EliThompson passed along an interesting new guide coming out soon: How to Transform Ideas into Software Products from Femgineer. Sign up to be notified when the guide is published and you can participate in a free e-mail course to get feedback on your idea.

Tools, etc.

• Wow. Humanizer is a .NET library that provides a mind-boggling array of ways to convert “strings, enums, dates, times, timespans, numbers and quantities” into more human-friendly text. (via Scott Hanselman)
• Scott also recommends Noda Time as a better library than what’s provided with the .NET Framework.
• Looking for a GUI for Git and/or Mercurial? Source Tree is a free download from Atlassian.

Projects, etc.

• Working on something, which I hope to announce the next day or two. Stay tuned….

I’ll soon be announcing a project I’m very excited about: a portable library and Android app for the wonderful data provided by the folks at NutritionIX. NutritionIX provides comprehensive nutrition information for individual food items as well as popular restaurants – something that has been extremely useful in managing my diabetes (type 2). Watch this space for the official project announcement in the coming days.

Also, I’ve added a new option for donating to support my work: There are now PayPal buttons both here on my blog and at http://tiny.cc/support-cms which allow you to make a donation of any amount you wish using only a credit card. There is no need to sign up for an account. Thanks for your support; every little bit helps.

The Weekly roundup is my regular post of interesting and useful things I’ve found or done over the last week.

Topics: Diversity in tech, crypto, online verification, Windows pkg management, .NET Foundation, a better RSS reader, tutorials, taking credit cards, debugging mod_rewrite.

• New Mozilla CEO, who supported anti-marriage equality efforts, has stepped down.
• Watched a good, if old, overview of how to create a data-driven application in Visual Studio – in under 10 minutes.
• According to @shanselman Azure Websites now supports Java and Tomcat.
• Khan Academy has what looks to be a good course on cryptography.
• The New York Times has a well-written, comprehensive article about the technology industry’s bro’ problem.

From the //Build/ developer’s conference

• OneGet is a new effort at package management on Windows that builds off and extends the work Chocolatey started. It sounds like they’ve got the right ideas for moving in the direction we need to go.
• Microsoft announced new .NET Foundation to oversee(?) all the parts of .NET that have and will be open sourced.I think this approach is the right way to do this.

Tools, etc.

• Signed up with Keybase – a new service that facilitates public/private key-pair (e.g. PGP, GnuPG) encryption and verification. You can find my public key at https://keybase.io/shawns. And if you’re interested in signing up I have some invites – just give me the e-mail address you want me to send them to.
• If you’re still consuming RSS like me InoReader is a wonderful new online feed reader. The free tier gives you unlimited feeds and one filter rule along with folders that have their own feed, light & dark themes and an API.
• Looking at using Stripe – simple online payments for developers – to accept credit cards directly for supporting my work.
• Thanks to Dan for passing along this handy tool for debugging your Apache mod_rewrite rules.

Projects, etc.

• Published some SSH and GnuPG tips in my tech knowledge base.
• Re-published Understanding Binary and Hex tutorial I wrote many years ago.
• I now have a TrustCloud profile, which measures my “trustworthiness” online and assigns me a Trust Score – kind of like a credit score. You can see my Trust Card to the right.

Topics: Unit testing PHP, test images for color-blindness, hands-on learning, RSS on Github, myths of software development.

• The Open Data Protocol (OData) 4.0 has been approved, along with the OData JSON Format 4.0. If you’re not familiar with OData, it’s a standard for reading and writing to data sources with RESTful web services.
• Need to explain computing concepts to somebody? Computer Science Unplugged has some pretty nifty activities that do just that.
• I remember hearing about Flattr years ago – one of the early services for giving back to open source developers – but I had no idea they were still around. And doing reasonably well.
• Migrations in Entity Framework are a topic I could be stronger on. The ADO.NET Blog has some screencasts that just might do the trick.
• Friend Dan passed along another comic I need to add to my list of regulars: CommitStrip.
• Dan also shared some thoughts on a thought-provoking article from Model View Culture about the myth of the software developer. I hope to share my own thoughts on it later this week.
• OSS Perks is a listing of tools and services (including commercial ones) that are available for free to qualifying open source projects.

Tools, etc.

• Colblinder has a handy Color Blindness Simulator for your images. Upload an image then select different types of vision to see what it looks like. (via @DanielSolis)
• Portable.Text.Encoding is a portable (i.e. cross-platform) implementation of .NET’s Text.Encoding namespace. (via @migueldeicaza)
• Did you know Github repositories can have releases? You can find them using the following URL path:
  • https://github.com/<account>/<repository>/releases
  • To get an RSS feed, just add .atom to the end of the above URL.

Projects, coding, etc.

• Been studying up on WordPress plugins. There’s lots of documentation and tutorials out there, but I found that HardcoreWP has a very nice overview.
• Published a new KB article on Configuring PHPUnit for PhpStorm after introducing unit testing to a WordPress plugin project at work.

Topics: Incentivizing software issues, free images for your blog, testing Javascript, automating browser tests.

• I think Donay has a really compelling idea, but I ran into a lot of problems with their site just trying to get an account set up. Maybe if more people express an interest in being able to ask for and provide incentives for project features/issues… I hope they can get some momentum going and turn it into something workable. Spread the word!
• Bountysource is another service that lets people set bounties on existing Github issues they’d like completed. Visit my profile.
• GettyImages strikes a good balance between copyright, intellectual property and fair use: Embed images for free in a non-commercial context.
• I’m always looking for ways to increase productivity by automating processes. This week’s NuGet Package of the Week from Scott Hanselman shows how to use FluentAutomation (I love “fluent” syntax!) with Selenium and scriptcs to automate browser testing.

Tools

• There’ve been a lot of windowing enhancement add-ons over the years; the new Preme for Windows looks pretty feature rich, with some useful hotkeys.

Coding, projects, etc.

• Been studying up on the current state of unit testing with Javascript, including Jasmine and QUnit.
  A few good tutorials:
  • Testing your Javascript with Jasmine on Tuts+.
  • Unit test Javascript applications with Jasmine on Adobe’s Developer Connection.

If you’d like to support this blog and the work I do in general, I now have an Amazon Wishlist with hardware, software, etc. that I need. More options and information are coming soon.

Just finished watching the ReSharper Secrets video on the JetBrainsTV channel on YouTube. Several good tips there. Definitely worth watching. The presenter spends the bulk of the time talking about Annotations – which are how ReSharper works a lot of its magic and are now available to us for decorating our own code. He closes by sharing a few of his own favorite features he thinks are not very well known. I didn’t know most of them.

• My friend Dan recently asked
  

  Has anyone already written the code to use the AVR on the Gertboard for the Raspberry Pi as a simple GPIO expansion/demux?

  I don’t have an answer for him, but maybe you do, or know somebody who does?

• Seattle to sport one of the first Bitcoin ATMs in the U.S.
• SQRL (Secure Quick Reliable Login) – from Steve Gibson, the host of Security Now – aims to replace username/password login for websites. This is an open project, being worked on by Steve along with fans and followers.
• I’ve used Console2, and fairly recently heard about clink and ConEmu, but sweet monkey sundae! I finally saw a screencast of ConEmu in action. Must start using this!

Tools I’ve recently started using

• Chocolatey is an attempt at a package manager, kind of like apt-get (and I stress kind of), for Windows software. It’s still a bit rough around the edges, but I’ve been using it to help ensure my tools are up to date.
• A few of us at work have been using meetings.io when working from home and I like it enough that I’ve recently decided to go ahead and sign up for an account – which gives me a profile page, vanity URL and personal meeting room.  You can still use the service without signing up, however.

Projects, coding, etc.

• Published gist of a DataParameter implementation for ADO.NET. (C#)
• Began work on replacing CtcApi unit test code with database mocks. (C#)
• Submitted class to measure time elapsed for code execution to the CtcApi. (C#)

For the last year or so, I’ve been slowly building up a personal Knowledge Base using Evernote (a direct link is to the right). This is a place where I save tidbits of information related to software development – stuff that I think I’ll probably want to look up later, because I’ve forgotten the precise syntax needed, etc. I also made this KB publicly available (link is to the right) so that others could hopefully benefit as well. So far, this has worked pretty well, but I don’t always have the time to organize and format the notes as much as I’d like.

About a month ago, I became aware of Diigo – an online tool for highlighting, bookmarking and notating content on web pages. I’d seen tools like this before, but I liked the way Diigo also collected everything I’d noted in one place and allowed me to organize, tag and share it.

So I’ve started a new, experimental Knowledge Base (again, link to the right) using Diigo. I’m hoping this format will make more sense and allow me to collect and organize information more quickly. If it continues to impress, it will eventually replace my previous KB.