geekAbyte

April 30, 2013

noreply@blogger.com (dade) — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 09:11:00 +0000

This would be the first of my monthly recaps. I intend this to be one of the avenues I sprinkle some personal touch on this blog: a break from my seemingly impersonal technical post and rants. I hope I get to sustain it. :)

Trip to Nigeria

I was back in Nigeria from 22th March to 5th April. It did not feel as if I have been away for that long (don’t know if that is a good or bad thing). But the trip was nice. Met up with family and friends, and took a break from the gray weather of the Netherlands! :p

Hung out at CChub…for the first time!

Was already out of the country by the time CChub (Co Creation Hub) was kicking off, so it has always been at the top of my list… a really “must do list”… to pay CChub a visit whenever am in the country. I did. How could I have not? :)

Cchub is as I imagined it to be. I am really excited that such a space exists, at least if for nothing else (creating an open innovation ecosystem, Pre-incubation to start-ups gingering the Tech. community etc.), for providing a shared office space with constant power and internet developers.

Gtbank sucks!

Like really. The customer friendliness of the bank has taken a rather sad dip. Gtbank used to be the friendly bank: staffs willing to help, smiling and courteous and all; but my experience at the bank was really disheartening. Frowning and saucy staffs was the order of the day. Sad!

Then long queues have started creeping into Gtbank. I spent 2 hours at one of the Gtbank branch in Ibadan! Reminds me of the horrors of having to go to Union bank/First bank back then!

Not happy that Gtbank is going down this way. :(

Inverters have gone mainstream!

Well, that isn't surprising..is it?

And...

MTN still sucks!

Need I say more?

Cologn and Bonn...A nice weekend

The next weekend after I got back from Nigeria saw me in Germany (Cologne and Bonn). Hung out with a couple of colleagues I worked with last year on AIESEC International. It was nice to see everyone is fine and doing good. Meet some other guys in Cologne that were really into rap music...kindred spirits, we are, I’ll say and we spent some nice time bopping heads to some Biggie, Coolio, ‘Pac, 50, Dre and Kriss Kross.

While in Germany, I even got to compose a poem…while in a club :)

SimpleJSMap

April saw me making simpleJsMap public. It’s A MAP-like implementation that I wrote in Javascript that makes saving stuffs on the client side easier via keys and values.

JProwork

I also completed most of the work on JProwork and its ready to go. JProwork is a Java API wrapper for Prowork.

Kicked the Facebook Addiction

April is the month I eventually managed to rid myself off the attention sucking and time wasting and zombie turning Facebook! It was getting too much. It was like an addiction and it was getting frustrating. It got to the point that I couldn't concentrate on a task at work for 30 minutes straight without having the urge to go check Facebook. At that point it became obvious it was detrimental to my well-being and I needed to kick it out. I toyed with the idea of totally deleting my account but kept on holding back at the final stages; all thanks to Facebook’s various tactics and emotional blackmailing during the deletion process.

So instead of deleting, I trained my will power to totally get rid of Facebook. And I did it. I feel a lot better, less drained and focused now.

Queens Day!

Yes today is April 30! And in Netherlands it’s the Queen’s day! But in Amsterdam, its not just Queen's Day it is one hell of a party! Somewhat a street carnival. Everyone dressed in orange, on the streets, marijuana smoking, party rocking, and Liquor flowing!

It’s crazy!

So you guessed it, once I press the publish link on this post, I am hitting the streets too!

And if you ask me, it is sure a nice way to bring April to an End :)

JProwork Ready to Go

noreply@blogger.com (dade) — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 08:47:00 +0000

JProwork is a Java wrapper for Prowork.

Prowork itself is an intuitive project management app that makes team collaboration easy. It was launched 2011 at Start-up Weekend in Nigeria. It recently won the Apps4Africa 2012: Business Challenge.

For more information, check: About Prowork and the team behind it and How it works.

Overview
JProwork is then a Java wrapper for Prowork’s API. It encapsulates the API calls to Prowork and exposes Prowork’s entities as Java objects to the developer.

As can be seen below:

It sure would make developing on Prowork faster with Java.

JProwork has been a weekend project for a couple of weeks now and right now it is done as far as covering the existing Prowork's API is concerned. Just need to put some structure here and there regarding versioning before we can have a first official release. But in the meantime you can grab the Source code from Github and to give it a spin, compile the source, update your class-path as necessary and you should be ready to go:

Dependencies
Jprowork requires Gson: a Java library that can be used to convert Java Objects into their JSON representation and also to convert a JSON string to an equivalent Java object.

Roadmap and versioning

Things left to do?

Have a proper versioning structure in place. I plan to go with the format of: <major>.<minor>.<subminor> which, in this case, would translate to <Prowork's API Version>.<Major Changes in Jprowork>.<Minor and Bugfixes>

Mavenized JProwork and also have it available as Jar files.

Documentation
Documentation is in the code. You can grab a copy of the documentation using Javadoc. A generated Javadoc is also included in the repository.

Do give it a spin ;)

simpleJsMap

noreply@blogger.com (dade) — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 23:46:00 +0000

I find having to riddle the Dom with stuffs dirty :(

Just because there is no other way to easily keep stuffs on the client side, we sometimes do this; and it is painful! having to unnecessarily pollute the DOM.

I was in such a situation a couple of months back where I was on a project in which stuffs, AKA. the states of the application were being pushed to the DOM attributes just to keep them. Dirty!!!

I didn't want to continue doing this, so instead, I rolled up a little thingy that enabled me put my stuff out of the DOM. :)

I called it simpleJsMap.

simpleJsMap is a simple MAP-like implantation that enables me to keep and retrieve my stuffs easily in the memory via keys and values without having to set things in DOM attributes.

This felt a lot cleaner :)

simpleJsMap is on github so it can easily be grabbed, and hopefully, someone apart from myself finds it useful. :)

Getting Started

Include the simplejsmap.js file into your script. The variable simplejsmap would then be available.

// simplejsmap now available

</script>

I am a big fan of pure Javascript first before framework, thus simplejsmap is not dependent on any Javascript framework; not even jQuery :p

So once you have the script included you ready to go.