Love ASCII Art

I saw this ASCII art in a comment on YouTube and thought it was so awesome and wanted to share it:

I know it's probably all over the web and been around forever, but this is the first time I've seen it, and I LOVE it! Enjoy!

Two Tricks: Android Memory Leaks and Red Hat RPM Circular Dependencies

I learned two nifty tricks this week that are totally unrelated to each other.

One: if you get into a circular dependency when installing Red Hat RPMs, you can list them all in the install command at once. I think I knew this in the past, but it's been a long time since I had that problem, so I'd forgotten it.

rpm -ivh package1.rpm package2.rpm

Thanks to GeekGoesMeow for that. I was installing the gd-devel RPM, the exact situation as mentioned in one of the comments. It was maddening!

Two: quickly find one type of memory leak in your Android app by rotating your phone from vertical to horizontal orientation repeatedly. If you're storing Context, or anything derived from Context like an Activity, you will quickly encounter a Java OutOfMemoryError because on each context switch the previous context is not being properly garbage collected. Calling System.gc() won't help. Pass your Contexts and Activities from method to method, don't store them. This tip is thanks to Yusuf Saib speaking at a Silicon Valley Android Developers Meetup.

Fun With QR Codes and Android Phones

I couldn't resist playing around with QR codes today after a new bit.ly QR code generator hit the news.

This image is the QR code for my most recent post to this blog.

My Android phone worked incredibly well as far as reading the code and then opening the browser to the page. Such fun! Then I proceeded to get another co-worker with an Android playing around with it, too, and we then scanned every bar code we could find in our cubes, impressing our cube-mates with the nifty technology. I used the Barcode Scanner by ZXing Team.

Celebrating Ada Lovelace Day and Women in Technology

March 24th has been designated as Ada Lovelace Day and is an opportunity to celebrate the achievements of women in science and technology. FindingAda.com is encouraging women to blog about this today.

I've not paid much attention to her aside from being aware of her and knowing she's the namesake of the Ada programming language, but I've benefited tremendously from her contributions and the contributions of other women in technology for most of my life.

I read up on Ada at Wikipedia and learned this bit of trivia today, "she was the only legitimate child of the poet Lord Byron and Anne Isabella Milbanke."

I won't spend a lot of time dwelling on her interesting life, because Wikipedia does that far better than I could, but I'll take this opportunity to make mention of some current-day pioneering women in technology, the women who are advocating and teaching other women about Linux, computers, and other free software via LinuxChix.

LinuxChix is a community for women who like Linux and for anyone who wants to support women in computing. We are an international group of Free Software users and developers, founded in 1999 with the aim of "supporting women in Linux." Founder Deb Richardson described it as an alternative to the "locker room atmosphere" found in some online technical forums and gave LinuxChix two core rules: "be polite" and "be helpful." LinuxChix is now many things to many people, but it remains primarily a group for supporting women in computing, specifically in Open Source/Free Software/Software Libre computing.

If you're a woman in need of help or able to offer some help to others, check out LinuxChix!

The Christmas That Santa Got His Geek On

This year I received a lot of geek books for Christmas (2009), and I'm so delighted and intrigued by them that I thought I'd share them here and maybe somebody else will discover a wonderful book to read.

These are the six books I received:

1. The Code Book, The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography, by Simon Singh
2. Train Man, the novel, by Hitori Nakano
3. Zero, The Biography of a Dangerous Idea, by Charles Seife
4. The Geek Atlas, 128 Places Where Science & Technology Come Alive, by John Graham-Cunningham
5. The Annotated Turing, A Guided Tour through Alan Turing's Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine, by Charles Petzold
6. e: the Story of a Number, by Eli Manor

I haven't had time to read any of the books yet, but have thumbed through all of them enough to give a brief overview and my first impression of the quality of the book. It should be noted that these books were all on my Amazon.com wish list (thanks to Amazon for suggesting them for me) and I've read the reviews and any excerpts that were available.

The book that I've given the most attention to so far is The Code Book, and that's because I have three puzzles to solve. After my brother-in-law saw that I'd received a cryptography book, he asked if I like that sort of stuff and then promptly produced printouts for three puzzles he needs to solve to be able to locate geocaches. (I've solved two so far and one is partially solved)