I’ve shied away from JS frameworks on the mobile platform primarily due to performance. I had not been able to find one that came close to native performance on Android. This changed last weekend when I tried out the Sencha Touch 2.0 dev preview. Performance is vastly improved over Touch 1.0. Animations and transitions are smooth, even on my Android 2.2 device and I was able to get up and running very fast.
Grab the Sencha Touch 2.0 Dev Preview here: http://www.sencha.com/blog/sencha-touch-2-developer-preview/
While I was able to get a basic app …

With all the recent Goruck-ness it’s time to throw out a tech post. I’ve been prepping for a NodeJS presentation recently and wanted a unique demo. I had also come across the experimental build of Opera which supports accessing the native webcam of a mobile device. So I threw these two technologies together and came up with a Javascript powered way to stream a video camera from a mobile device to a bunch of desktop (or mobile) clients.
HTML5 had originally laid out support for a new element (the “device” …

It’s 7PM, Friday 9/9/11 and I find myself in a dingy one-room loft apartment in SOHO. I’ve just signed a death waiver so detailed that I’m not even sure I own my own soul anymore. The police are combing the streets trying to chase down a possible terrorist threat and I’m carrying 30lbs of bricks on my back. I’m sweating. I’m about to start the GoRuck Challenge New York City and experience some #goodLivin first hand.
Let’s backup for a minute. In April I completed the Tough Mudder in Bear …

More GoRuck training folks! Bruce Willis in Die Hard 1 says “fists with your toes” is a great way to get rid of that airplane feeling. Well I have another way: running across the Golden Gate Bridge! Last week I flew to San Francisco. I got in around 3PM PST so with a few hours to kill I decided to take a jog over to the Golden Gate bridge, it turned out to be quite the adventure.
If you’re interested I mapped the run here [LINK].
I was staying at the …

Last time [LINK] I discussed how virtual Worms could “eat” a picture, seeking out the lighter or darker areas as food and leaving a trail in their wake. I’ve dumped the source here: http://francisshanahan.com/demos/worms/test.html so you can interact, create your own images and figure out how it’s done. To be honest I haven’t had much time to clean this up as I’ve been focusing on other things and doing a bit of travel for work so be gentle.
Just enter a URL of an image and click “create drawing” to …

If you have not heard of Node.js (or “Node” as Ryan Dahl calls it) [LINK] it is more fun than a barrel full of monkeys and faster than stink. Node.js is built around the Google V8 javascript engine and aims to solve the issues of concurrency and blocking IO which are prevalent in todays web servers. It also improves over traditional OS threading by using an event model to handle requests. This leads to the ability to handle many more concurrent requests but also handle them faster since less memory …

In April I participated in my first Tough Mudder (LINK). I have never been one to “participate” in things like this but I have to admit the sense of accomplishment was pretty overwhelming. We also raised $3,000+ for Colon Cancer (LINK) which only added to the experience. Almost immediately afterwards I started looking for the next challenge. Another TM would be fun but 7,000 people completed the TM course (out of 10,000 entrants), I felt maybe I could find something a bit more “exclusive”.
In researching TM I’d heard of …

Mycelium (plural mycelia) is the vegetative part of a fungus, consisting of a mass of branching, thread-like hyphae. Hyphae are any of the threadlike filaments forming the mycelium of a fungus. And YES I had to look both of those up.
Typically they travel and branch along a source of nutrients, following the source. I came across this awesome work of Ryan Alexander [LINK] whilst messing around with Processing one evening. Ryan used Processing which is similar to Java. Processing is a great sketch-language which makes whipping up graphical wonders …

On April 9th 2011 together with my brothers in-law Dave and Chris, I ran the Tough Mudder PA course in beautiful Bear Creek. Together we raised $3,120 for the Colon Cancer Alliance [LINK]. Here’s a post-mortem for anyone interested in doing a TM event.
Short answer: I highly recommend Tough Mudder. It was the absolute most fun I’ve had in a long time. I came away with a wide variety of scrapes, a mild sunburn and an adrenaline high that lasted well into mid-week.
Long answer: We had a 10AM …

Here’s a rundown of everything I ran into when hacking my way through android development.
Setup Eclipse, run the Android SDK installer, install the correct USB drivers and finally check your device setup with “adb devices”. Your device should be listed.
If you don’t have an android device, be prepared for the emulator to be extremely slow especially during startup/shutdown. Be sure to mark your emulator as “Snapshot” (accessible from the ADB/AVD SDK Manager-> Start button). Also, don’t connect your device whilst the emulator is running. Adb gets confused.
I had …