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Showing posts from May, 2011

First Android Application Released: River Water Level Stations

Update: I gifted this code and basically the entire project with related software tools I had made to my friend who I was trying to start a business with after we decided to stop. The app is still active and available on the market under his account and not “CWSolver” anymore. A friend and I just finished our first Application targeted for the Android marketplace. The application basically allows the user to monitor the level of rivers in the United States thanks to publicly available data that is updated frequently. This is useful to anyone who does boating among other various activities that have some relation to rivers. Here is the link to Water Level Stations on the Android market. Here is our official description: “Do you fish and hunt? Are you out on the river frequently for business or pleasure? It is important to know what the level and flow of the river is, so you can stay safe and maximize your enjoyment. We have an application tailor made for you.Water Level Stations allow...
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A little rant about Android SDK, Java, and Eclipse

I don’t often rant nor say the work “sucks” very often. However as any programmer knows, some tools just frustrate you to no end. Java, the Android SDK, and the Eclipse IDE are something I need to use, but are frequently on my “sucky tools” list. I’ve used a lot of programming languages and tools in my day, and these have made the frustrating Sh** king-of-the-mountain where things like Cobol and JCL reside. Here is an email rant I made recently: Wasted the whole day trying to get the settings activity working as I initially designed it. I eventually dropped that after wasting a large amount of time “playing” around with the code, so now the unit conversions happen outside of the settings activity. In the settings activity, it is just cut-and-dry select setting and select type of units. There is no unit conversion and re-selection of a setting value in the spinner as I had attempted to do earlier. For example, 10 for the search distance will me km or miles depending on if the use...
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ChatGPT is a new, and faster, way to do programming!

Currently ChatGPT is in a free “initial research preview” . One of its well known use cases at this point is generating software code. I’ve also just used it to write most of this article… Well, actually a future article about cleaning up SRT subtitle files of their metadata faster than I have been by hand with Notepad++ and its replace functionality. Update: I recorded a screencast of writing the SRT subtitle cleaner application loading and processing portion. I relied heavily on ChatGPT for code. It was a fun process! https://youtu.be/TkEW39OloUA ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, is a powerful language model that can assist developers in a variety of tasks, including natural language processing and text generation. One such task that ChatGPT can help with is creating an SRT cleaner program. SRT, or SubRip Subtitle, files are commonly used to add subtitles to video files. However, these files can become cluttered with unnecessary information, such as timing lines or blank spaces. To clean...
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Blogger Notable theme pop-up header issue fix (thanks to Gemini Pro)

I've made a few half hearted attempts over the years to to fix Blogger's Notable theme's rendering of the pop-up header that shows up when you scroll down the page a decent amount and then pull back to reveal that secondary header. On Chrome mobile I noticed a gray box that forms next to the magnifying glass icon. I never looked in detail on  Chrome desktop, but it had an issue as well which I'll detail below.  If you are looking for a solution and don't want all of the extra talk about how I was able to find it, here it is:  .centered-top-container .sticky .main_header_elements { overflow : hidden !important ; } I decided to try using Gemini Pro 2.5 to see if it was capable of finding the issue and giving me a fix. Turns out that it was able, but it took a bit of collaboration back and forth to find the actual problem.  Here is a modified article I asked it to give me based on our debugging chat (it was very colorful in the article which I scaled back a lot, ...
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Theme error in 2010s Android App after AppCompat Migration

I plan on releasing a lot of my old work as GPL open source, but most of it has aged to the point that it no longer functions, or if it does work it’s running in compatibility mode. Basically it’s no longer best practices. Not a good way to start off any new public GPL projects, in my opinion. The current project I’m working on is an Android app that calculates star trails meant to help photographers get or avoid that in their night time photos. For now I’m going to skip some of the import process because I didn’t document it exactly. It’s been mostly trial and error as I poke around Android Studio post import. The Android Studio import process… Removing Admob Google Play code before the project would run at all. After removing dependencies, it kind of worked, but when running it in the emulator it shows a pop-up message saying that the app was developed for an old version of Android. Going through the process of updating code to match current best practices… I had the IDE convert the ...
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