Yesterday (10.06.2015) Ionic announced the Deploy Alpha which enables you to update your app without having to wait for the review & approval.

They say that

Ionic Deploy lets you update your app on demand for any changes that do not require binary modifications.

You can roll back to a previous version of your app, automatically apply updates, and control every aspect of the upgrade.

Also, the features that they list as upcoming are stunning to say the least:

• live A/B tests
• analytics
• multiple version deployment to certain “Channels”

This is pretty awesome to be honest, and really shows that there is future for Ionic framework and that it’s a great time to be a hybrid app developer.

You can learn more about it from the official blog post.

[18.09.2015] edit: I honestly can’t believe it! This awesome book is now also available as an audiobook! Now I’ll be able to listen to this ever so slightly awesome content even in my car! John Sonmez, congratulations!, this is probably the first ever programming related book to be published as an audiobook!

I reviewed the book Soft Skills: The Software Developer’s Life Manual by John Sonmez with 5 stars on Amazon with the following comment:

I believe Soft Skills will indeed become every software developers’ life manual, in a similar way as Code Complete 2 is.

I really enjoyed the book, and am recommending it to all my “IT” friends (just lent it today to a co-worker :)) – John Sonmez really poured his whole life experience into this, and for this I thank him since I think we all have something to learn from a man who made almost 50 courses for Pluralsight, wrote a bestseller, retired at 33, was a fitness model, bodybuilding contestant, and who is, well, just pure awesome. Btw, I also found that he’s damn speedy in answering any emails, so kudos for not being a hot headed superstar author as some these days play out to be.

The book is divided in 7 chapters, and it’s packed with awesome content. Those of you who have been following my Books category know that I like to mark the passages that I find valuable from books that I read, like for example:

but here I won’t be putting them online since that would be a whole lot portion of the book, and I don’t want to be chased for some copyright issues . Instead I’ll just show you the images of the chapters and comment a bit about them.

In the first section John talks about topics concerning ones career and steps to take in order to make the most out of it. Topics ranging from how to hack the interview, how to actually set goals, work as a freelancer, and even how to quit your job.

In the second section John talks about how to create your blog as a first thing you should do to start marketing yourself. John also has a free email course on how to build a successful blog, so make sure to get that free resource if you’re into starting your own blog, or increasing the views of your existing one.

In the third section John talks about why is continuous learning something you signed up for the minute you decided to make programming your calling. Also, he explains his own 10-step process for learning, which he used to learn and produce almost 50 courses on Pluralsight.

In fourth section John talks about methods and techniques he uses in order to stay crazily productive as he is. Few of them are KanbanFlow and Pomodoro technique.

In the fifth section John shares his own method of how he retired at the age of 33. He seems to be highly influenced by authors such as Robert Kiyosaki, and you can see my notes from his book Rich Dad Poor Dad.

In sixth section John talks about the importance of fitness in developers life as a tool for increased productivity and better well-being. Also, he covers few of the tech gear for geeks like me (I love my FitBit).

Section seven is all about having the right mental attitude, and I’ll quote one of my favorite authors, Napoleon Hill: “You can do it if you believe you can”. If you’re interested, you can read more Napoleon Hill quotes from my notes from his book Think and Grow Rich.

After the book I went on to check out his http://simpleprogrammer.com blog, and what’s awesome is that he gives a free email course on how to build a successful blog. Am currently on week 5, and am really learning some key things on what one should do in order to increase his blog credibility and, well, views. So, hope to see those 100k+ users monthly soon 😉

I’m a big fan of Stack Overflow and I tend to contribute regularly (am currently in the top 0.X%). In this category (stackoverflow) of posts I will will be posting my top rated questions and answers. This, btw, is allowed as explained in the meta thread here.

My question was:

How to hide the cursor in Awesomium – I tried this:

<awe:WebControl x:Name="webBrowser" Cursor="None" Source="http://example.com/"/>

but the cursor still shows.

I figured that I could alter the CSS of the page by adding the following line:

*{
    cursor: none;
}

But, is there a solution for when I don’t have the access to the actual page that I’m showing?

The answer, by user Sjoerd2228888, was:

You can use a ResouceInterceptor and manipulate the page on the fly to insert custom CSS.

EDIT:

The following implementation should do the job. (It assumes there is a text.css file)

class ManipulatingResourceInterceptor : IResourceInterceptor
{
    public ResourceResponse OnRequest(ResourceRequest request)
    {
        Stream stream = null;

        //do stream manipulation
        if (request.Url.ToString() == "http://your.web.url/test.css")
        {
            WebRequest myRequest;
            myRequest = WebRequest.Create(request.Url);
            Stream webStream = myRequest.GetResponse().GetResponseStream();
            StreamReader webStreamReader = new StreamReader(webStream);
            string webStreamContent = webStreamReader.ReadToEnd();

            stream = webStream;

            string extraContent = "*{cursor: none;}";

            webStreamContent += extraContent;
            byte[] responseBuffer = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(webStreamContent);

            // Initialize unmanaged memory to hold the array.
            int responseSize = Marshal.SizeOf(responseBuffer[0]) * responseBuffer.Length;
            IntPtr pointer = Marshal.AllocHGlobal(responseSize);
            try
            {
                // Copy the array to unmanaged memory.
                Marshal.Copy(responseBuffer, 0, pointer, responseBuffer.Length);
                return ResourceResponse.Create((uint)responseBuffer.Length, pointer, "text/css");
            }
            finally
            {
                // Data is not owned by the ResourceResponse. A copy is made 
                // of the supplied buffer. We can safely free the unmanaged memory.
                Marshal.FreeHGlobal(pointer);
                stream.Close();
            }
        }
        return null;
    }

    public bool OnFilterNavigation(NavigationRequest request)
    {
        return false;
    }
}

A video worth watching if you’re wondering how you should market your App. Also, a cool link I just stumbled upon today is the one on GitHub: App launch guide.

Btw, if you too like to increase your video playback speed, and you miss that in vimeo videos, check this post out to resolve this issue.

Lately I’ve been watching some videos from Vimeo and it really annoyed me that it doesn’t have a video playback speed  increase option (since, well, you can listen most videos on 1.25 or 1.5 even – and since we’re all about time hacking ;)). So, after googling, I found that there is a Chrome plugin which does the job well.

The quotes I noted from the book The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion. This book was actually recommended  by Bill Gates, and here’s what he said about it:

This is one of the most profound novels I’ve read in a long time.

I also liked this book very much and marked it as a favorite on my Shelfari account and have commented it as

Try to imagine Sheldon Cooper (TBBT OFC) on a mission to find a wife. Well, you don’t have to – you can simply read this book :).Though am not a fan of romances, this one is excellent.

Anyways, the quotes:

We will risk our life to save a person from drowning, yet not make a donation to save dozens of children from starvation.

I am able to hug Rosie. This was the issue that caused me the most fear after she agreed to live with me. I generally find body contact unpleasant, but sex is an obvious exception. Sex solved the body contact problem. We’re now also able to hug without having sex, which is also convenient at times.

I’m a big fan of Stack Overflow and I tend to contribute regularly (am currently in the top 0.X%). In this category (stackoverflow) of posts I will will be posting my top rated questions and answers. This, btw, is allowed as explained in the meta thread here.

My question was:

I see few rows like this in my table:

     id  | val
 --------+------------
    1    | {}
    2    | {}

Of course not all are equal to {}, and I would like to query them out and then update them to {0}. However, trying the following fails:

UPDATE table SET val={0} WHERE val={};

I must be missing something obvious, please point out what.

The answer, by user sandipon, was:

UPDATE table SET val='{0}' WHERE val='{}';

My notes from the book Progwriter [programmer + writter] by Azat Mardan:

It’s better to have fewer features with no bugs than lots of features with bugs.

Marketing is easy when you think about the value that you bring to other people. Think about how much frustration, and how many sleepless hours, other developers can avoid by reading your books! If your product is good, this is exactly what will happen.

Leanpub, Gumroad worth checking out. Simple webhosting via Github pages, and a lot more awesome content…

I actually liked this book very much, so that I wrote the short review (5/5) on Amazon:

Honestly, so much acquired knowledge presented in a straight forward way, one would have to spend years in trying it out himself. Great eye opener for all those who aspire to become a programming writer = progwriter.

My notes from the book The Lean Startup by Eric Ries:

Split testing often uncovers surprising things. Many features that make the product better in the eyes of engineers and designers have no impact on customer behavior.

Are we making sufficient progress to believe that our original specific strategic hypothesis is correct or do we need to make a mayor change. That change is called a PIVOT – a structured course correction designed to test a new fundamental hypothesis about the product, strategy and the engine of growth.

Single piece flow – one envelope at a time. It works because of a surprising power of small batches.

It matters how fast you can get through the entire loop of build measure learn.

I’m a big fan of Stack Overflow and I tend to contribute regularly (am currently in the top 0.X%). In this category (stackoverflow) of posts I will will be posting my top rated questions and answers. This, btw, is allowed as explained in the meta thread here.

My question was:

Well, the question is in the title. I searched SO (obviously) but nothing similar came up. Additional reading material (if you happen to know one) will be helpful to solve this mystery for me.

The answer, by user Eike Pierstorff, was:

No, not by default at least.

It is technically possible to contrive a serverside solution that measures referenced assets. But usually (i.e. when you use the javascript tracking code) Google Analytics will only measure documents that have the tracking code embedded. Since you cannot embed javascript code in image files they will not be tracked.

If you want to see which images have been called from other domains you can instead have a look in your webservers access logs which keeps track of all requests to your server and usually includes the address of the referring site.