Programming My Life

I’ve heard a few bloggers advise against repeatedly apologizing for lulls in posting.  If I were to have apologized each time I lapsed on this blog, it might be filled with nearly as many apologies as topical posts.  Consequently, I’m not going to apologize here for taking a month off, but I am going to give you the primary reason for my absence:

The World Cup trophy. Source at link.

I’ll provide a link to the picture of Larissa Riquelme of Paraguay for work safety (no nudity, just a lot of cleavage):  http://inapcache.boston.com/universal/site_graphics/blogs/bigpicture/worldcup_06_25/w18_24042095.jpg

She claimed she would pose nude if Paraguay won.

The other person we would have seen naked had his team won: Diego Maradona. Source at image link.

There are far too many story lines from the tournament to list here, but there are several stories well told in pictures from The Boston Globe‘s galleries here, here, here, and here.  All images below are from these galleries.

This flag representing the host nation as well as all others in the tournament.

Certainly the best moment of the tournament for any fan of the US team.

Just one of many controversial decisions by the officials, this picture is of the goal never given to England in their match with Germany.

I've never seen as many angry Brazilians as I did in this game. One of the biggest upsets of the competition.

The only perfect record from the tournament came from Paul the octopus who went 8/8 in predictions.

The goal that won it all. This was the latest first goal in World Cup Final history.

The champions: Spain.

I can't imagine how great this must have been from inside the stadium.

I didn’t give any real consideration to traveling to South Africa until after the tournament began.  I’m going to start looking into how I can go to Brazil for 2014 in the next couple of years.

I should be back to my approximately weekly posting schedule for the foreseeable future.

I was recently approached about programming a small app for Android.  I have been following Android’s development for a while and decided this was a great opportunity to dive in and start seeing what I could do without an Android device.  I haven’t done much in the way of programming for Android yet, but I’ll be sure to update when I do.  In my search for information about how to get started with development for Android, I came across the Replica Island blog*.

While some blogs may have outdated early postings (who will care what I thought about Windows 7 when Windows 10 is out?), a blog devoted to one project, such as the Replica Island blog, is better read chronologically.  I appreciate the default layout of placing the newest posts first for most blogs; it makes sense for the vast majority of visitors to a site.  However, I haven’t seen any blogging site or software that gives the reader an option to reverse the posts and place them in chronological order easily on the main page.

In the case of a specific project blog, this is really the only order that makes sense.  When I came across the Replica Island blog, I wasn’t concerned with the newest post because I wanted to read about the entire project from the beginning.

In addition to blogs devoted to a single project, I have had to emulate this feature for other blogs I enjoy reading.  Before starting this blog, I decided to see how some of the bloggers I enjoy reading started off (Joel Spolsky, Jeff Atwood, Scott Hanselman).  As with this blog, each of those have a front page featuring all of the posts in reverse chronological order.  Instead of clicking a link that puts the posts in chronological order, I had to find the first post and work from there.

*For those interested in more about Replica Island, also see this video.