Categories
kids

Stacy Park vs. Beirne Park

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We go to Berine Park a lot, we meant mostly Serentity and myself, sometimes my wife will also go. The main reason is it’s so close to our home, across the street from Olive blvd, and 2 to 3 minutes driving. It’s across the street from the Spoede Elementary School, if everything works out as we expected, that’s where Serenity will go for Kindergarden next year. Beirne Park has some nice feature, as explained by playstlouis blog here. I don’t have any complaints. The only thing is sometimes, it has very few people, probably due to its location (not exactly next to Spoede, tucked in a bit). It could be an advantage too, as sometimes we joked that’s a private park.

But as Serenity gets older, and more social, she really wants to play with other kids, because she is the only one (so far), she can play with kids mostly in parks besides in her pre-school. That’s Stacy Park comes into play. It’s a much bigger park, and has some nice feature too (playstlouis; yelp). And in addition to that, it has the “social feature”, both for Serenity and my wife, as it got more people. Interestingly enough, the Creve Coeur park website says Berine Park is one of the busy park in Creve Coeur, that is probably compared to other Creve Coeur parks. Stacy park got to another level. A few days ago, I think was July 3 evening, I saw bunch of many kids playing soccer, and play ground.

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Categories
Site Info Web

stlplace.com was hacked and restored, plus some thoughts

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I found out this site was hacked yesterday evening, as I saw the loading of site on Safari was slower than usual. It also shows incorrect theme, more like a plain theme. With the admin link redirect to spammer site. I decided to tackle it right away. I recall about one year ago something similar happened to this site, and google webmaster tool told me about it. I was able to remove the offending files/directories, by following the recommendation set out by google and some other wordpress sites.

This time I made an almost fatal mistake, during deleting some of the files in wp-includes, I accidentally deleted all the useful php files there. Panicked, I used both the website restore tool, and the import feature of wordpress (mojo marketplace), to no avail. The symptom of the problem was I could not login, and it shows blank page when I login via the wp-admin or wp-login.php after taking my credential. And I can only see the pages at uudaddy.com (I could not log in there either).

I filed for help at the hosting company. But I still feel helpless as this site has about 9 years of my blogging and uudaddy.com has my last 4 years of blogs. Fortunately I was able to find this wordpress help page about updating wordpress, and fix internal server error by deactivating the plug-ins. The latter comes only after I gained some web dev experience lately, knowing more about error 500 🙂

So long story short, I was able to restore all the blogs (those two plus my wife’s happy mandarin.com) by the following:
1) Restore .htaccess file to avoid the redirect to spammer page;
2) Restoring the wp-includes and wp-admin page: upload zip file, extract; in the wp-content directory, I renamed plugin directory as plugin.SAV (this way it deactivates all the plugins);
3) Run the wordpress update as soon as I can log in.

I also backed up the MySQL databases for stlplace and uudaddy, and backed up those two blogs to wordpress.com (this one and this one). I understand blogging itself is a declining trend, and it’s probably not easy for small web hosting company to defend against hackers like Google/Amazon/Wordpress do. That’s why I am also evaluating whether to move to wordpress.com or Amazon EC2 (self hosting). It’s a bit emotional decision as I have hosted this site for 9 years, but I need to consider both my time, the cost of hosting, etc. I will make a decision on this shortly. Meanwhile check out the new blogging sites I mentioned above, in which I will blog both about software development and raising kids.

Categories
advice and tips Fun

Good news, bad news

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The good news is if one searches “kids St. Louis” in iTunes App Store, my app To Market will show up between six flags and magic house. The bad news is, after spending hours trying to add the feature of “add to calendar”, the app crashes if one tap that button 🙁 🙂

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Categories
Software development

Rockstar developer

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I have thought about this topic for a long time. I remember seeing at one place that an exceptional developer can do work usually done by 10 developers. Or in other words, he/she is a rockstar developer.

Besides productivity, I think rockstar developer has the following traits:

1) Willing to share the knowledge with fellow developers, keep in mind we all learn from each other, rockstar can learn from (dare I say) ordinary developer too;

2) Attention to the details and code quality, and other good development practice such as TDD (test driven development), again sharing knowledge is applicable here;

Categories
iPhone app

Developer EQ series : 1

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Dont’s
Beat up people in code review or interview;

Change other developers’ code without proper communication, or reasoning; worse, making the working code no longer work (sometimes to satisfying the “tests” 🙂

Do’s
Learn, learn something everyday;

Acknowledge our own limitations: acknowledge our mistakes if applicable, we all do make mistakes;

In the same token, when we learn something from someone else, show our appreciation;

PS, also came across this piece “assertiveness from developers” by Jeff Atwood (@codinghorror), which I think is excellent. Essentially the point there is be a good developer is not to be a “nice person to everyone”. A good developer uses his/her best judgement, and speaks from his/her own mind, which includes saying something make other stakeholder uncomfortable (as long as it’s fair and honest statement).

And, slightly off topic, this one “Your Company Is Not A Family” from HBR (Harvard Business Review).

Categories
Fun video

Let it go

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and Chinese version.

Categories
Fun

We went to Edwardsville Route 66 Festival

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It was pretty cool. A bit small scale than I thought, but nonetheless liked the family friendly activities, food, and people. Their website is here, and their Facebook page is here. Can’t wait come back next year 🙂

The tour guide (the trolley bus) is really knowledgable about the history of Edwardsville.

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Categories
iPhone app

Working on new app DiscoverSTL

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Categories
iPhone app

Swift might the the language of the future

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Apple : the Swift language (unveiled in WWDC on June 2, 2014)

Tutorials
Developing iOS Apps Using Swift Tutorial Part 1 (Jameson Quave)

learnswift.tips

References and reviews
Matt Galloway : Swift Language Highlights: An Objective-C Developer’s Perspective (raywenderlich.com)

The Verge : The Swift effect: Apple’s new programming language means way more iPhone developers and apps

Ray Wenderlich: Swift Cheat Sheet and Quick Reference (raywenderlich.com)

arstechnica.com : A fast look at Swift, Apple’s new programming language

Btw, Jeff Lamarche (twitter: @jeff_lamarche), the author of Beginning iPhone/iOS Development book, already got book offers for the Swift language. At the same time, don’t throw away Objective-C yet (HuffintonPost).

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Categories
iPhone app

Some tips for submit app to iTunes App store

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Avoid the Payload validation error
To shorten the review waiting time. I noticed this recently in my own apps update. The one without warning has much shorter review waiting time. The rationale is App thinks the app may use private API in this scenario (see this explanation on stackoverflow). From personal experience the one with warnings could be in the “wait for review” queue at least one week longer than the one without warning. So clean up the code if we can. Btw, I was able to fix the first one below (it turns out to be a third party function I no longer use). For the second one below, I read it could be related to Facebook SDK (which my app uses), but have NOT been able to solve it for now.

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Validation
Validate before submit to App store, in Xcode organizer.

Keywords
Try put in relevant key words for the app during update (the only time we can change it); we can find some useful keyword by search App store. Also keep in mind search does not work all the time on iPhone.

Code Signing
This one is very subtle. I had two certificates, one was used both for dev and distribution; another one was for distribution (Ad hoc or App store). I found initially I could not sign the app by using the distribution certificate (provisioning profile) alone. After back and forth I was able to sign. And as I look at the certificate in Xcode now, it’s refers to the Ad hoc certificate, but in the submission process it still prompts the first one.