There. I’m sure all League Commissioners will come running to my door for further advice on rule changes for 2014

While I’ve never endorsed the Democratic party, I’ve certainly voted for them in the last several elections to try and bring balance back to our country. The social liberal part of my character also embraces the values of providing for the less fortunate, for universal health care, and equity for all regardless of sex, race, religion, or sexual identity, qualities I typically find lacking in Republican talking points.

In the aftermath of the fiscal cliff agreement, I expected to be happy with the outcome. Increased taxes on the wealthy appeals to the social equity vision, but unfortunately, there is nothing, so far, to address the spending side of the equation. It’s not enough to simply increase revenues. If there’s no discipline to also restrain and cutback on spending, taxes will simply be a further drain on long-term economic activity.

And for those clapping your hands that you finally socked-it-to-the-wealthy, you didn’t get away without collateral damage. Neither party was willing to use up negotiating chips defending the expiration of the payroll tax cut, which means you got a 2% tax increase as well. Worse than that, businesses will be encouraged to continue and accelerate plans they’ve been executing for years…to reduce payrolls and use independent contractors that don’t cost them payroll taxes or healthcare benefits. See Igor Greenwald’s Forbes article for more details.

Nobody wants higher taxes for themself. We would only do so to support a higher purpose. So what is the higher purpose now? To pay for our past sins of spending irresponsibly? And will we learn from that, or will we continue to spend recklessly making not only this rise in taxes permanent, but insure a future tax raise as well. Obviously, the cycle can’t continue indefinitely as economic growth disappears.

So we have made one hard choice…seeing the need to raise revenues, we have raised taxes. Now we MUST finish the job and address the spending side of the equation, or it’s cutting off our nose to spite our face. I encourage everyone, elected officials and those who influence them, to keep working until we have equal results on spending.

“With all the carnage from gun violence in our country, it’s still almost impossible to believe that a mass shooting in a kindergarten class could happen. It has come to that. Not even kindergarteners learning their ABC’s are safe. We heard after Columbine that it was too soon to talk about gun laws. We heard it after Virginia Tech. After Tucson and Aurora and Oak Creek. And now we are hearing it again. For every day we wait, 34 more people are murdered with guns. Today, many of them were five-year olds. President Obama rightly sent his heartfelt condolences to the families in Newtown. But the country needs him to send a bill to Congress to fix this problem. Calling for ‘meaningful action’ is not enough. We need immediate action. We have heard all the rhetoric before. What we have not seen is leadership – not from the White House and not from Congress. That must end today. This is a national tragedy and it demands a national response. My deepest sympathies are with the families of all those affected, and my determination to stop this madness is stronger than ever.”

- Michael Bloomberg, 12/14/12

http://www.mayorsagainstillegalguns.org/html/media-center/pr013-12.shtml

First off, the latest Zipfile module (as of this writing) is version 0.1.21. This version is not available as a binary download from the Github repository. Fortunately, this post led me to a download for it.

I found this nice piece of code Dan Tamas posted in an answer to a question about downloading image files. I promptly copied that off to a FileManager.js file to ‘require’ into the app.

As I started testing, it wasn’t working and I didn’t know whether the file wasn’t getting downloaded or wasn’t getting extracted. By default, my simulator run configuration was setup for INFO. Turning to DEBUG revealed that it wasn’t able to locate the zip file. After checking that paths were being set correctly, I found this note at the Github project’s issues tab that applies to the 1.8x SDK codestream.

Replacing the following example code from the documentation:

with this:

did in fact solve the issue and everything works great from there.

It’s great for monitoring conversations as they go by without necessarily having to command-tab over to that application all the time.

Anyway, I’d like to see a Sametime implementation of notifications to Growl. Growl has an API they call GNTP (Growl Network Transport Protocol) http://growl.info/documentation/developer/gntp.php#intro, that has many language bindings, including Java with jgntp, http://code.google.com/p/jgntp/ Sametime has a Java API so it shouldn’t be very difficult to build a client plug-in to add Growl capability preferences. I don’t think anyone’s done it yet, so there’s your roadmap and ping me when you’ve got it done

While mobile devices have been great at providing a localized set of contacts, it hasn’t been practical to store/sync full CRM datasets that might be hundreds of thousands of records.  In the traditional sense of a client-server solution, it makes sense to have a Mobile CRM device provide an intuitive interface to this data, while maintaining it in the back-end system (whether Notes or something else).

Recently, my company has developed an iPhone Mobile CRM interface for company and contact information.  This client will be available for free in the App Store soon. What makes the client particularly useful is that when a profile is filled out, it can work against any number of Notes-based CRMs.  The client connects to an intermediate API application running on the Notes server that knows how to get data from the host CRM and provide it to the Mobile CRM client.

I’ll be writing more about this in the coming weeks with diagrams of how the infrastructure works.  In the meantime, we’ve got a couple of clients who are beta testing against their own CRMs.  I’m excited about this project as it really gave us a chance to work through the full spectrum of an Appcelerator Titanium project for client server communications to the Mobile CrM and we’ll be able to make this available on the Android platform as well.

Stay tuned, and of course, if you’re a potential customer, we’d love to hear from you at WorkFlow Studios, or go to my Contact page.

I had a million and one things to do, so of course I dropped them all to see just what this shiny new bauble could do.  Right now the module is in beta and there’s zero documentation, so the best thing is to check out some examples like pinball or a Hello World (more or less), and peek at the Objective C source code for a couple proxy classes, like Body and World.

Running the example from the github repository, you get a square and a ball that basically start at the top of the screen and fall down (and off) the screen.

Objects fall from top of screen and then off bottom of screen

Here’s the code with no floor:

To get a floor for these objects to land on, I added this:

Square now lands on top of ball on the floor

But then I wanted to see if the objects would tumble down a hill, so the floor needed to have an angle to it.  This is where examining the implementation of the World proxy object came in handy.  the world.addBody(aBody) function returns a handle to the body it added.  With that in hand, you can then apply methods from the Body proxy object implementation, and there happens to be one in there named setAngle(someDegree). That led to this code:

ball bounces, then rolls down hill. Square tumbles a bit and then comes to rest

Lastly, I wanted to see if I could put up a wall that would let the ball bounce off the floor, roll down and then be stopped by the intersection of the wall and floor.  Here’s how:

ball has bounced off the wall and rolled back up the floor a bit

I’m looking forward to playing with Box2D module in more detail, maybe over Christmas break.  Hope you gained a little insight into its workings in Titanium Appcelerator.

1.  Run a pace you can run forever.  Which means run about 2 min per mile SLOWER than what you’re capable of doing for 1-2 miles.
2.  If you can’t talk while you’re running, you’re going too fast.
3.  For me, if my heart rate climbs too much over 150, I’m going too fast.
4.  All it takes is a little luck (to avoid injury), and commitment.
5.  Do a long run once a week, and increase the distance 2 miles every week or two until you get to longer distances (10+)
5.  And most importantly, the 5-1 rule.  Run for 5 minutes, walk for 1.

I’m terribly out of shape, yet I ran 6 miles today.  A lot of people who train for marathons aren’t in very good shape, yet they finish.  Why?  I can only guess how others have done it, but the 5-1 rule is critical for me.  The 5-1, or 3-1, or even 2-1, is a ratio of how many minutes running before taking 1 minute and walking.  This is huge.  If you’re sitting in your chair reading this today, you might think you could never run for 2 hours or 3 hours or 5 hours.  But anyone can get to the point where they can run for 2, 3, 4, 5 minutes at a time.  You wouldn’t believe the psychology of that.  You’re going, you’re hurting, you’re lungs are puffing and shins are hurting.  Focusing the mind on it will only be another 2 minutes before you can take a break makes all the difference in the world.

Now any distance is just a bunch of manageable segments.  It’s a giant reset button.  Sometimes we find ourselves feeling good and starting to run a pace that’s too fast.  Hitting that 5 minute mark and taking a break helps you reflect during that 1 minute about whether you’re going too fast and lets you start back at a good pace.  Or you’ve just been running up a long hill and thinking you’ll never make it all the way up.  Guess what, you don’t.  You just have to go for 5 minutes and then you can rest a bit.

Perhaps just as important is the break it gives your muscle groups.  Running and walking use different muscle groups.  If you find your muscles tightening up, walking for a bit relaxes those muscles and gives them a chance to recover and increases your chances of moving on through it.  Take advantage of the 1 minute walks to stretch a bit when it will help.  For me that’s usually about 15 minutes in.

So what happens come marathon time (actually I think it happens somewhere around when you can go 10-12 miles) and where are all these people doing 5-1s.  Your fitness level will definitely go up on this plan.  Sooner or later you find you don’t need the forced discipline of the 5-1 (or at least it was true for me).  You may end up doing 10-1s, or you may just find that you take a 1 minute break when you need it, or you take a little break every time you hit a mile marker or water stand.  So yes, a lot of people don’t actually do much walking by the time they get to marathon distance.  They no longer need it.  But a lot of us would never have gotten to that point without the initial training to get the body used to running long distances.

One last thing, I’m not doing it now and it may come back to bite me.  Train with others.  Guaranteed I wouldn’t have taken off 4 days this week if I’d had someone waiting out in the freezing dark to meet me at 5:30am.  My marathon year, I trained with a group of about 6.  Best thing I ever did, and best group selection I could have made.  One girl was my age, and the rest were her mother and mother’s friends.  They were running a pace several minutes slower than I was capable of (for short distance).  Training with them where the pace was easy and manageable made it extremely easy to keep increasing the distance.

Bottom line:  Do you really care if 20 years from now someone says you ran a slow marathon?  Or would you rather say, “I was going to run a marathon, and I could run a 7 minute pace, but I pulled a muscle training. Or, I just couldn’t make it past 8 miles”

Since he made such a big difference for me, I guess I should point you to the source, Run Injury Free with Jeff Galloway.

At 7:30 this morning, they all came be-bopping over to come play on the trampoline and snark some chocolate chip muffins, pancakes and bacon.  After breakfast the girls had me play, “momma in the middle”, and I introduced them to “missile launcher” which is where I lay down under the trampoline and as they are bouncing up, I push up on the bottom of the trampoline sending them an extra 2-3 feet up in the air.  We used to do this at the old house, but hadn’t done it in awhile.  Lauren’s gotten so big that if she takes a really good bounce she can certainly reach me unless I’m lying completely flat underneath, (maybe I’ve gotten bigger as well).

I can’t believe I didn’t make it running again after Monday.  We went today, and it was pretty painful.  At least we could do it, that wouldn’t have been the case if we lived back east where friends are getting 24″ of snow and more.  But that’s another 3.5 miles behind me, and I’ll see if I can do the 6 miler tomorrow.  Only 37 more days until the Rock ‘n’ Roll Half.

It’s also been fun teaching Lauren how to back in with your dribble and establish contact so that you can get position and pivot into the basket.  She’s suprisingly good at it, with the exception of only being able to dribble with one hand which kind of limits her pivot to one direction.  Even so, she scores pretty regularly on it.  I guess I’ve only been waiting about 10 years now for my kids to actually want to be taught anything about sports.  Fun times.