Israel Derdik @iderdik - Tumblr Blog

My Predictions for WWDC

Every year I tell myself to ignore the hype mill that precedes WWDC and every year I still manage to read dozens of unsubstantiated and sometimes contradictory rumors. Here are a couple of my guesses for things that I expect Apple to unveil during their flagship conference next week. I'm ignoring any "obvious" rumors like flat design or new MacBook Pro hardware.

Better interoperability between apps

Apple lags far behind other platforms when it comes to allowing apps to share data. I expect Apple to expand on their URL scheme in a big way - perhaps even expose a "sheets" API (like mail sheets or tweet sheets) that any app can use.

Revamped submission process

Lots of Tier 1 companies have started releasing new features in the Android versions of their apps before the iOS versions. The reason for this is quite simple: turn around time on an Android app is measured in hours while with Apple, days. I think Apple will, at the very least, talk about things they are doing to cut down the time apps spend "Waiting for Review".

I haven't seen either of these in the tech blogs but I'm feeling lucky!

#wwdc 2013 #apple

Quick fix for a pet peeve of mine.

Useful list of .gitignore files - especial for Visual Studio projects

Generate a .pfx for Azure from .cer

MIcrosoft's Azure platform allows you to deploy an SSL key with a Web Role but it needs to be in PKCS12 (PFX) format. GoDaddy's renewal process gives you a .cer file. You can use that cer file along the original private key file to generate your PFX with this command:

openssl pkcs12 -export -in my.cer -inkey my.key -out mycert.pfx

#Azure #ssl

Just put this in your address bar: data:text/html, <html contenteditable>

You'd think this would be easier :)

#aws rds

Using CreateIfNotExists with Azure Storage Blob Containers

If your application creates lots of blobs, chances are you'll come up with a partitioning scheme to group them into different containers to make each group manageable. You also might be tempted to create said containers using the seemingly convenient CloudBlobContainer.CreateIfNotExist method described here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/ee772864.aspx for every blob upload to eliminate the need for code to check if a container exists before attempting to upload.

Don't.

I've found that this method is horribly slow and generates a bunch of 409 errors under the covers. This will make your Azure Blob Storage success % look awful on your monitoring dashboard.

The approach that seems to work best is to assume the container exists and upload the blob. If an exception is thrown because the container doesn't exist, catch it and create the container. If creation of the container fails because another thread has already created the container, just try the upload the blob again.

This worked well for my application which rolls over containers hourly. There are some extra calls by the exception handlers above but those only come into play around the time the container roll-over happens. Meanwhile, all the other blob uploads are much, much faster!

#azure

This looks like it would be fun to build.

This actually sounds like it might be useful for closet cleaning time!

Awesome way to keep a constant copy of PhotoStream. Make the target_folder in dropbox for more awesomeness!

Shit Programmers Say.

Made my day!

Broken Tutorials

In the past, whenever a novice programmer asked me for tips on how to pick up a new language, I'd give them the same advice I'd been hearing for years. Play with it! There's nothing quite like identifying a project you're interested in doing and then diving in, following online tutorials until you are comfortable enough with the new language to venture off on your own.

However, my recent experience with node.js has shown me that there's an even better technique: Follow *broken* tutorials and struggle through the issues until you've made it work. This excellent tutorial is a bit out of date and requires a bit of tweaking to get running. However, once you've conquered it, victory is that much sweeter and you knowledge of node.js and express is that much deeper because of your struggles.

#node.js #programming

Some Thoughts on Google Buzz

As nearly everyone knows, Google released Buzz - a FriendFeed-like social lifestream platform that allows people to pull in updates from various sites like Twitter, Reader and Flickr, add status updates and consolidate them into a single feed accessible via your Google Profile and Gmail. Add in Gmail's natural social graph powered by your contacts list and we have a pretty compelling social offering.

However, with this offering comes another degree of confusion. Which of my feeds should my friends consume? I have a twitter feed which my twitter followers can consume. It posts updates to Facebook for Facebook users to read and comment on. People who follow me on Twitter and are friends with me on Facebook get these updates twice. Not a great setup but understandable. Now throw Buzz into the mix and suddenly Twitter posts show up in 3 locations! I can see that getting annoying quickly. To make matters worse, each platform has "some" content that won't show up in the others.

To combat this, I think Google needs to step up and make Buzz "the" aggregator for all of a person's social content. To do this effectively, it will need to eliminate duplicates caused by cross posting services and somehow incorporate site-specifc comments as well. (Sounds *a lot" like FriendFeed, doesn't it.) Aggregating site comments is extremely complicated, especially when we add blog commenting services like Disqus into the mix but if Google solves this problem, it will have positioned itself to be a dominant player in the social space.

In App Purchases (Part 2)

And now that Apple allows IAP on free apps, the App Store will become even more "shareware-y".

#iphone

iPhone OS 3

I think that when the iPhone OS3 drops, the App Store will be come a much less friendly place. Part of the beauty of its current incarnation is in its simplicity. You know what you're buying and how much you're paying for it. Once Apple allows in-game purchases, apps will start getting all annoying with nickel-and-dime upgrades on top of seemingly low app prices. "Sure you can get this awesome driving game for 99 cents! Oh, you want tires on that car? That'll be an in-game purchase of $3.99 please."

Get ready for the App Store to be a lot less fun to shop.

#iphone

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Israel Derdik