A Person, Artist, Software Engineer, Geologist.

The basic beliefs of Buddhism is that there is much suffering in life and much of the suffering is self inflicted.  There are many things that have caused me pain and strife in my life, but I really work on not adding to the amount of strife that I'll already endure.  My developing software is always a source of self-induced strife and I look for reducing my self punishment as much as possible. If you have been in this business a long time then you have been approached by friends or associates to create some software for free.  It's a hard choice sometimes, but the best answer maybe 'no'.  Software takes time, the lifecycle is long (how long to maintain?) and it can distract time from your family and happiness.   Does this apply to companies as well?  I would think so.  Let me explain what I see is currently occurring in mobile developement. Knowing both iOS and Android development, I've noticed a divergence of benefit to the developers and to the respective c

I just finished reading "Sybil Exposed" which I found fascinating on multiple levels.  On one side it was about how much  a single person can influence a profession (for better or in this case for worse) and how the progression of the Psychotherapy field, evolved over time, with some truly bazaar concepts and methodology. This evoloution is not unique to this field but I'm using it to illustrate my points. At any moment in time, the actions, concepts and beliefs for any field may appear to be correct and normal. But when viewed in hindsight many years later, can be seen for what they are, bazaar and narrow minded. The concepts of Freud with the fixation on parenting and sex.  The use of drugs and hyponosis induced states to reveal memorys that never existed, was a common and accepted practiced.  Some viewed this as normal, but not now.  Today we know the detrimental effects of these therapies had and would not dare to revert back to those practices.  We've chang

This post is not about how-to perform multi-tasking for Android and iOS, it's about my thinking related to how I handle threading issues in Android and iOS. I've written multi-threading code for decades (in C/C++ and Java) before I got into mobile development.  Threading was one of those issues that used to be a black art.  You needed to handle and understand all of the semaphores, mutating and memory issues to provide a robust threaded application.  It's a lot easier now in both Android and iOS.  Clear examples and simplified code make threading quick and easy, but there is still complexity underlying the concept of threading for the UI. My biggest insight when switching to mobile threads is the pattern of placing the threading inside of the activity or controller.  This is a big plus for simplicity and ease of use for development.  The thread is right there where it's needed and the thread has access to the Activities (or Controller's) data members for updatin