Creating a news aggregator, showhn.blogspot.com

I have been a frequent leader of the tech news aggregator site at Hacker News. It is basically a collection of links and discussions of tech startup news, or just tech news in general that would appeal to the startup hacker.


When someone wants to show case their weekend projects, they usually post a "Show HN" posts on hacker news. As a way of increasing their presence, I have filtered all the Hacker News post for the "Show HN",  screen grab the webpage, voila, showhn.blogspot.com is born.


I have automate the collecting of data via an Google Spreadsheet App script. It uses the hnsearch api to grab the data.


The hnsearch api works directly with the Hacker News database. There are a couple of other hacker news API that performs a HTML scrapes on the Hacker News website and store it in their internal database. An API is available to access the scraped data.


The screen capture is performed using a Chrome screen capture plugin, specifically the Google Chrome Screen capture. 


At the moment, I am treating this as a learning tool. I am especially on getting a handle on how data can be obtained from the websites, and how that data can be manipulate. So far it has been quite a enlightening experience.

This is getting annoying...validation of an idea.

I got a email from Nev (of AppSumo fame) about how many people are having good success in validating their ideas. So the AppSumo guys thought it would be a good idea to run a competition to see who had best validations, and the winner gets a trip to Austin, Texas.

Well, I accepted the challenge and posted up a validation idea. Check it out here, http://totalcostofcar.weebly.com/ for the launching site.

So I posted up my validation response and ticked the box to receive any follow up messages. This was getting good until some crazy spammers started to post comments, eh spams, up. It was getting annoying.

 

As for my idea, I am going to run this as a slow ramp up. Firstly, I don't have the time to launch into full time, and secondly, I have many things to learn, and thirdly, it started to look like a small idea the start, but it is actually quite a complex application.

I am using weebly.com to create the launch page, however I came across launchrock.com which could have been a better choice as it has better mailing list integration. 

For mailing list management, I stuck with mailchimp.com as I didn't know anything else and I have heard that it was one of the better ones around.

The launch page has been up for about 1 week, and I haven't done and marketing for it. I have four subscribers, so lets see. I need to understand how mailchimp.com works to use it more effectively. 

unity, cmock and ceedling

This could be the first post about how I am using a unit testing framework that uses the mock concept.


Some background, I was researching some information on the best way to deploy a unit testing framework for embedded work. I started by posting a question on the programmers.stackexchange.com. The answers led me to investigate the solutions provided by Atomic Embedded, namely unity, cmock and ceedling.


Each of the tool by itself will provide some value of unit testing for you, but for embedded work and to help manage all the infrastructure, all the three tools need to be present.


unity is a bunch of macros that performs the tests that determines if the results are correct. 

cmock provides an intelligent parser and framework that mocks the underlying code. So for all the functions that you use, cmock would be your friend.


ceedling is like the glue that holds unity and cmock together. It is a bunch of ruby scripts the parses your code that is being tested and generates the calls to cmock, generates the test runners and builds the unit test executables.


The Atomic Embedded folks also have CException but I haven't investigate this option.

As I was researching Java scripting, I came across an interesting new language. It is called HAXE. For me, the interesting part is the cross platform nature. 


Having a quick look at it, it looks like that HAXE has quite an establish community of developers. There have been quite a few sites, applications and webapps using HAXE as their language of choice. 


Be cross platform, it means that I could be developing a Android application, but it can also be deployed for iOS or a Windows phone.


A framework is also available to create rich and engaging sites. The framework is NME.


I am not too sure what toolchain is required, but with NME as a framework, deployment of it to an Android device looks to be quite easy.

Choosing a host

On my journey to be the webapp guru :-), I started to search on the net for online tutorials and came across www.html.net. 


On the html.net, it gives some information for all the basic foundations of the building a webapp. I mean, the stack could include Ruby or Python or other. html.net concentrated a php for the server side functionality and javascript for client side functionality. That seems quite reasonable.


I quickly read through the html tutorial and the tutorials about CSS. It is now time to tackle php. I went with their recommendation on using 000webhost.com


The signup process was pretty easy and allow me to quickly get up and going quickly.


From my learning perspective, it said that it gives me full php functionality with MySQL. Technically, it gives me php version 5.2.17 and I can get access to a MySQL installation.


Well, let continue and see how far this gets me.


disclaimer: the link to 000webhost.com is an affiliate link..

Hacker News articles and webapp

I just read a couple of post that has quipped my interest in getting starting in webapplications. I found the posts here, where someone was learning Java Script. His results were impressive.

The other posts that I found were through a search on "profitable weekend project" on Hacker News and it brought up quite a few projects.

Some of the projects were quite simple to implement, include www.whatportis.com. It just allows the user to enter a port number and it tells you what it is used for. The other interesting thing is that a simple site like this is a great server for on-line adverts. 

So my motivation for learning Java scripting is to give me the tools to build these simple webapp. Perhaps getting more complicated as my skill set grows.

A startup for non-profits

Hang on a minute, the whole point of a startup is to make gazillions dollars, isn't it? Well sort of. Dodd Caldwell has just launched BellStrike about two weeks ago, and it seems to be off to a steady start.

I really like the way that Dodd has worked on this. This is a win-win situation that is not only for himself, but also for the non-profit community. As he rightly pointed out, most non-profits do not want to worry about setting up a website to get donations, or increasing their profile. BellStrike is an almost perfect solution as it has the right mixture of features required for such a website to work. 

At the moment, BellStrike is only able to do non-profits based in the USA. I believe that he has plans to expand beyond the American borders. I really want to see something like to succeed, anything to help increase the level of donations for the non-profits is always good.

Check it out!

unix tools and firmware package for the STM32VL Discovery

To complement command line tools chain from Code Soucery, I download the command line toolset of unxutils. unxutils gives you similar Unix tools but develop for native execution. So the rm or the ls or the mv tool does not rely on cygwin.dll.

To kick off the development, I download the STM32VL Discovery Firmware package. This package contains some examples which I have used to quickly verify if my setup is correct or totally wrong. The source code of the firmware that is shipped with the STM32 discovery board is also part of the firmware package. The firmware package has accompanying documentation with it. Look for application note AN3268 on www.st.com.

You may also want to consider downloading ST-Link utility. This will allow you to download the binary into your discovery.

setting up the development for the STM32VL Discovery board

I found myself with some spare time so I go started on setting up a dev environment on the STM32VL Discovery board that I got recently. This post talks about the compilers.

Compiler

There are three options recommended by ST as a compiler. These are IAR Workbench, Atollic True Studio and Keil MDK-ARM. These tools are pretty restricted in some way, except for the Atollic command line tools. The restriction usually comes in the forms such as code size limitation.

Now the STM32 is just a ARM Cortex M3 core device, so there are many other ARM compilers available. The GNU toolchain also support the ARM core. This is the compiler that I choose as it is not limited in anyway.

The simplest way to to grab the lite version from Code Soucery. This will provide you with the full GNU toolchain including the binutils as well. However, as it stands, it is only driven from the command line.

List of freely available books

I just came across a list of programming books that are freely available, and it is on stackoverflow.com. 

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/194812/list-of-freely-available-programming-books

Check it out.

STM32 Discovery

At the start of this week, I visited Embedded World 2011 in Nürnberg. It was a very good traide fair with plenty of demos by the big players, the semiconductor manufacturers, the tools vendors, embedded product developers etc.

One of the things I picked up from ST Microelectronics was the STM32 Discovery board 

The STM32 Discovery board is a simple eval board for the STM32F100RB (datasheet) microcontroller. The STM32 family of microcontrollers has a ARM Cortex M3 as it core. The board normally retails at about USD10, making it a very cheap 32bit eval board.

I haven't had a chance to fire it up, but it should be to start it up to develop some simple application for it.

There are some good resources on the net at

• http://gostm32.blogspot.com/
• http://cgi.cs.indiana.edu/~geobrown/stm32/Main/HomePage
• http://hackaday.com/2010/10/12/arm-prototyping-on-the-cheap-with-stm32-discovery/

Area51 Embedded Systems Design and Development

StackOverflow Q&A website has a site in their staging area Area51 for embedded system design and development. If you have any interests in embedded systems, get over there right now and follow up.

http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/15961/embedded-system-design-and-development

what does mean to be on trunk?

I like working with a version control system. It keeps my work in a pretty straight order, even using a really bad version control system such as VSS, it still something. Imagine the bad old days of software development without a version control system. Every time, a release is to be made, the whole source directory would be zipped up and copied to another directory before a build is made and deployed.

Using a version control system by itself is part of the way there, but it needs to be supplemented by a set of rules or procedures. At end of the day, the version control system is a tool and without a well defined set of rules or procedures, things can get rather bad.

To be on trunk means that the source code will always build for all the targets. If the trunk fails to build for any of the target, it is consider a broken and it is a show stopper.

To be on trunk means that it is a evolution of the latest stable release. If this is not the case, it means that experimental features are being trailed on the trunk rather than on a branch. I think that the only exception of this is a team of one, even this is potentially dangerous.

To be on trunk means that all the commits and changes on the trunk have a comment associated with it. The trunk contains the latest code set in it and all changes must be traceable. Not being able to trace changes on the trunk is just as bad as breaking the build on trunk.

The bottom line is that trunk is the most sacred of code sets and must be treated with care.

 

Giving git a go

Do we give git a go? I have only use a centralise version control system such as CVS or SVN, or god forbid, VSS. With the new project getting started, I thought I give git a shot.

Looking for the easiest way to get start, I did not want to start with a local git server. I don't have a spare computer laying about, nor do I have a computer that running Linux. 

So headed on over to github.com and signed up for an account. For all the experimentation that I am going to be early on, I will be making it open sourced. There is nothing that I need to hide as it is mostly just prototype code anyway.

The next thing I need to do is to install a git client. git started in the Linux domain and the majority of the tools are in the Linux domain. The Windows tools are available but are over a msys environment, meaning that the git tool is used in a Linux simulated environment. 

I am excited to find out how git can help me produce a better result as oppose to using SVN.

Vending Machines in Köln

The vending machines in Germany. You can get vending machines for quite a number of things, but by far the most popular thing you can get are cingarette. We are currently living in a small Rhein village call RheinKassel. The town does not have any facility shops such as a milk bar or even a bakery. However, it does have about six vending machines selling cigarettes.

The vending machines are out on the side walk, selling about ten different brands of cigarettes.