Jun @1actobacillus-blog - Tumblr Blog

Having my appraisal today

So here are some verses I'm meditating on for later, courtesy of the gf. :)

If you need wisdom, ask our generous God, and he will give it to you. He will not rebuke you for asking.

― James 1:5 (NLT)

The Lord is close to all who call on him, yes, to all who call on him in truth. He grants the desires of those who fear him; he hears their cries for help and rescues them.

― Psalm 145:18-19 (NLT)

For I know the plans I have for you,” says the Lord. “They are plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope.

― Jeremiah 29:11 (NLT)

... and it gave Him great pleasure.

Oh joy, read something today that made my day.

God decided in advance to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ. This is what he wanted to do, and it gave him great pleasure.

― Ephesians 1:3 (NLT)

Oh Jesus I feel terribly alone today. Didn't talk to nobody the entire Sunday, seeing people post photos of Sunday brunches with their loved ones on Instagram makes me insanely jealous, and wondering why, again, I don't have anyone to do fun things like this with. Feeling terrible, but gonna go to church still because I need you so bad right now. When I'm alone, you remain my best friend, Jesus.

Mephibosheth

I know my weaknesses. I know the emotional struggles I go through sometimes, the bouts of loneliness and despair which I sometimes feel. There are days where your weaknesses stare at you right in your face. That, or the negative feelings are so strong. Yesterday was one of those days.

This morning, I listened to a bootleg recording of a 2011 DARE service on my way to work. Pastor Daniel was leading free flow worship, it was very, very anointed. I told Jesus, Lord today I wanna receive from you - I can't do life on my own. I need you, Lord.

Halfway through I was reminded of Mephibosheth. He was, like me, acutely aware of his own human shortcomings. His legs were useless, my heart is easily affected emotionally. Even Ziba, David's servant knew.

"Then the king (David) said, "Is there still someone of the house of Saul, to whom I may show kindness of God?" And Ziba said to the King, "There is still a son of Jonathan who is lame in his feet."

I think the conversation would have gone something like this. Yeaaah, Ziba would have said. There's this guy, but he's useless. Can't even walk! Oh King you don't have to bother about him.

But David was so compassionate, he went out of his palace to Lo Debar to seek Mephibosheth out. The king ignored Mephibosheth when he asked David what he wanted to do, rescuing a "dead dog" like him. Bringing him back to the palace, the king restored Mephibosheth such that he could eat at the King's table, like a family member.

I love it that the story ends with this line,

So Mephibosheth dwelt in Jerusalem, for he ate continually at the king's table. And he was lame in both his feet.

I know that we ought to believe God for healing and all that, but I felt so loved reading that. I'm sure David had to continually incur costs and inconveniences for Mephibosheth's sake - buying wheelchairs, renovating his palace so that it was handicapped-friendly. And never once did he banish Mephibosheth from the table because he was still lame, and caused inconvenience for everyone.

When Mephibosheth came to David one day and said, hey David, my legs are getting worse. I tried to massage them but they're not improving - David, I would imagine, never rebuked Mephibosheth for not trying hard enough. Do you know you bring down the value of my palace? It's hard enough keeping you and your wheelchair out of sight from my royal visitors already, now you still want to ask me for more help?

Instead, every time he ate at the King's table, he would be reminded of how undeserving he was, but how compassionate David was to love him till this extent. Even though his legs still could not walk, but he was never condemned for that.

Me also. I look at my life sometimes, and there are things which I don't like about myself. Things I wish I could have gotten rid of, especially since I've lived in the palace for such a long time already. But Jesus does not condemn me. Every time I run to him with the same problems, he loves me back into wholeness, without a word of rebuke. His compassion knows no bounds. I can plug my headphones in on the train and ask Jesus to love me, and I feel that me and Him are alone in the train, and He's 100% focused on me, mending my wounds.

Jesus.

9090432-deactivated20140709

lesbianmichelmishina

Friendly reminder that Vanellope von Schweetz is a disabled, bullied, homeless 9-year-old girl with no family and no friends.

goodbye-is-green

get out

powerbottomsonic

#she’s also a fucking princess #who is the strongest character in her entire game #and learned to use her disability to her advantage #not to mention when she turned princess she decided just to be herself #she literally let no code change who she was #and she’s still as every bit of a badass as calhoun was

Now I know why I've been having a craving for chiffon cake.

#wreckitralph #venellope #chiffon

blackaerin

WIR: The Von Schweetz

Guess what movie I saw…?

yes I’m quite aware that I’m a bajillion years late to this fandom, but omg, these cuties„„„

upperstories

WELCOME TO THE BROOD

BRING ON THE CUTE :D

1actobacillus-blog

Animated of GIF of Venellope making a point. I could watch this over and over with a silly grin on my face.

beatrixkiddos

upperstories

Wreck-It Ralph: A Color Analysis

Can I.

Just.

Take five minutes.

To appreciate the use of color and color symbolism that went into Ralph’s design? Especially when comparing his 8-bit avatar design versus his upon-closer-inspection animated model.

"Understanding that the piece is more beautiful for having been broken."

SDWebImage and lazy loading of images in UITableViewCells

I have been slowly switching image views from EGOImageView to SDWebImage in my projects because of better performance and maintainability, especially in asynchronous loading as it uses GCD and blocks behind the scenes.

Asynchronous loading of images in table view cells is an interesting problem because by the time the image is downloaded, the user might have already scrolled the corresponding cell offscreen. As cells are reused in the table view, there is a possibility that users may see the wrong image briefly appear in a cell's image view before the correct image appears.

Surprisingly, preventing this is easy, as UITableView has a method indexPathsForVisibleRows that returns an array of the index paths of the currently visible rows. At the same time, SDWebImage allows you to access its internal asynchronous downloader and use it independently of the image view. The downloader has a completion block which you can use to check if image it just finished downloading needs to be shown, and assign the downloaded image to the image view if it should be shown.

The code is as follows.

#ios #sdwebimage #uitableview

iOS Storyboard Localization

Rationale

Recently I discovered a better method to handle storyboard localizations. Traditionally, we had a Ruby script that would generate strings files from all our storyboards, and then diff each one of them with the canonical English storyboard. Once that was done, we would then update the other storyboards' strings files using the English one as a reference.

Not only was this rather time consuming, it was also error prone due because of three reasons:

Diff sometimes does not accurately reflect changes in the two localized strings files.

Manual editing of strings files introduces errors, for example, accidentally changing the file encoding, or using different forms of inverted commas when copying and pasting from one file to the other.

plutil on Lion is not much help when checking strings files for errors. It does not report which lines an error occurred, and because strings files are in an old-school plist format, the plutil checker will sometimes report false negatives when checking syntax.

Solution

Strings files can be converted into NSDictionary key-value pair representations. By using the keys from the canonical English strings file and existing values from prior versions of the ja/zh-hans/zh-hant storyboard strings files, we can build updated versions of the localized strings files.

Since there will not be an existing key in the localized strings files for new strings (that are present in the canonical English strings file) we can simply log it out and manually add in new localizations for them afterwards.

You first generate strings files from storyboards with the following command:

ibtool --generate-strings-file v3.0/en.lproj/MainStoryboard.strings v3.0/en.lproj/MainStoryboard.storyboard

I generated the English storyboard's strings file for v3.0 of the app. You should also use the same ibtool command to generate strings files from your localized storyboards from your previous version (in my case, the previous version is 2.9).

Secondly, read, understand, and use the following script to generate your localized 3.0 strings files.

Note that the new strings file is written out using the new-style XML plist format, instead of the "key" = "value"; old-school plist format. Thankfully, ibtool does not care which format it is in and it will happily parse both without any problems.

Thirdly, manually edit the generated strings file to handle new localizations if any.

Lastly, run the following ibtool command to generate new localized storyboards using your new strings files.

ibtool --strings-file v3.0/zh-hant.lproj/MainStoryboard.strings --write v3.0/zh-hant.lproj/MainStoryboard.storyboard v3.0/en.lproj/MainStoryboard.storyboard

Don't get frightened by the ibtool syntax, it's actually pretty straightforward: ibtool --strings-file --write

Further Reading

This blog post was indispensable in my understanding of iOS storyboard localization.

Installing MySQL Cluster on Mac OS X Lion

We had to work with MySQL Cluster for our midterm assignment in AA class. Most of my group members were on Macs, and we found out that there were no precompiled Mac binaries for MySQL Cluster. Furthermore, the instructions given by MySQL were misleading. Their [documentation](http://dev.mysql.com/doc/index-cluster.html) stated that > Mac OS X users should download the Quick Start Guide for Linux. But said nothing about the fact that the Linux binaries were incompatible with Mac OS X. So after a few false starts, we realized we had to compile MySQL Cluster from scratch. Luckily, the compile was not that complicated. Here's how we got MySQL Cluster running on our Macs. **Downloading** Since we're compiling source code, we need our toolchain to be installed first. The Mac doesn't come with development tools like compilers and headers by default, but you can install them by downloading and installing Xcode from the [Mac App Store](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/xcode/id497799835?mt=12). Do note that Xcode is a two-step install. After the download finishes from the Mac App Store, Xcode isn't actually installed yet. You have to look for an **Install Xcode** in your Applications folder, that's the installer for Xcode. Run that and Xcode will install along with all the development tools. The latest version of MySQL Cluster (7.2.4) as of this writing requires a more complicated build process. Thus, we're going to use the previous version which suited our needs fine. Download the MySQL Cluster source code from [http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/cluster/7.1.html#downloads](http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/cluster/7.1.html#downloads). For Platform, you should select *Source Code* and then download *Generic Linux (Architecture Independent), Compressed TAR Archive*. **Compiling** Open Terminal and navigate to where the file was downloaded. In this case, it went into the Downloads directory. Then execute the following commands line by line to unpack the archive, configure the build to enable *ndbcluster*, compile and install the binaries. Do note that the compile will take some time. On my Core i5 MacBook Air, it took about 10 minutes to fully compile the source. **Post-compile steps** The final step will install the MySQL binaries into `/usr/local/bin` and the Cluster-specific binaries into `/usr/local/libexec`. For most people, `/usr/local/libexec` is not in their path, so we should add it now. There is a file called `.profile` in your home directory, if you don't have it, create it by running `touch ~/.profile` in the command line. Open the file, and add the following line to the end of the file. `export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/libexec` Save the file, and you're done!

Trying out Play!

[Play!](http://playframework.org) is a spankin' new Java web framework that looks a lot like Ruby on Rails, but in Java, of course. It's cool and refreshing and exciting because it does away with complicated J2EE stacks and throws the concept of servlets out of the window. However, for not being able to deploy a Play! app in a traditional way, you get many awesome things that eluded Java web development for ages, including * A Share-Nothing approach to web development (YAY!) * Hot recompiles upon saving your .java files (WOOHOO!) * A nice built in web server * Database migrations (don't bother about the database anymore!) * Easy deployment to Heroku via git (AWESOME!) amongst other niceties. I'm excited to be trying it out for a few questions for my SingPath API assignment this midterm break.

Make SMU's Facility Booking System Use All Browser Space

Hello SMU world. It's the time of the term again where people make mass bookings to secure GSRs for the study break. Which means, there's bound to be a lot of cursing and swearing at the decade-old Facility Booking System which CIT (now IITS) doesn't care to fix for modern web browsers like Safari, Chrome and Firefox. So here's something which I wrote to maybe help alleviate this year's collective suffering a little. By the way, this is tested on Safari 5.0.4 and Firefox 4.0 and Google Chrome 10 ONLY. But I would appreciate feedback on whether this works on Internet Explorer though. :) Update: Doesn't work on IE8. IE8 complains about an "error on page" and hangs there. Sigh. I'll try and look into that when I get bored of mugging. 1) I've provided a bookmarklet which contains all the juicy Javascript code. The bookmarklet is here: [Make FBS Better] Don't click it, but drag the entire [Make FBS Better] bookmarklet to your bookmarks bar for easy access. 2) Access the Facility Booking System from the direct link here, and not from OASIS. This is very important. We don't want no OASIS on our browser. 3) Make a booking. Get to the page with the orange color calendar view, as per my screenshot below.

3) Click the bookmarklet! You should see the content expand to fill up the available space in your browser window. Now it should look like this...

So now, you don't have to keep scrolling left and right and all to make your facility bookings. As a result, you get to see more of the calendar view now, which should make choosing empty rooms to book much, much easier. That being said, this comes with no warranty whatsoever. If it doesn't work for you, please make sure you are using either Safari or Firefox or Chrome. If you are and it still does not work, drop me an email at mohawk.riceball at gmail and I'll try to help. All the best for your exams! Much Love, Jun Kit

Despite my unbelief and doubt My Jesus He has sought me out In my weaknesses He's strength That leads me on For no one else can comprehend My thoughts and fears not known to man (but) it's His perfect love that Casts out all my fears That casts out all my fears Modulate.

New Creation Church - Love's Come Down (the Christmas album)

Visit Original Link

I finally got round to googling the lyrics of 钉在十架 Nailed On The Cross, the 10th track on New Creation Church's Justified Hokkien album. I don't understand Hokkien, and when I saw the words, it just blew me away. 有一个人根本无罪但这个人为我流血看他得刺的身躯看他受伤的脸耶稣的性命和我罪人对换为拿去我罪替我钉在十架是怎样的人有那么大的爱是代罪羔羊天父的最爱我无法完全了解主耶稣的爱为拿去我罪替我钉在十架 I like the 有一个人根本无罪但这个人为我流血 and 是怎样的人有那么大的爱 part. It's beautiful. What kind of man is this, with such great a love?

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Jun