Angry Angels

“Fuck you bitches, you guys are ass-holes”. She screamed. The other lady who was also smiling and laughing happily but a few minutes ago was now throwing a tantrum. “Another one” had stopped recording from his snap chat by now. This wouldn’t look good for the camera.

Meanwhile, the manager seemed the only one in the room that wasn’t bothered by the scene. She shouted at the girls and asked the bodyguard to take them out, forceful if he must. This was the woman I was supposed to replace and these were the girls I was supposed to work with. All now looking disgruntled.

I had to act fast. “What is the problem, I asked?”. “Well, why don’t you ask Tara” , she answered back. One look at Tara, and I knew I wasn’t going to get any help from there too. She didn’t care. After today, it wasn’t her job any longer. This left me with the other lady, Cynthia, to ask what had gone wrong.

Has Cynthia explained the problem, I tried to move focus from her bosom, they were still dressing up apparently, to her lips. This wasn’t helping with my focus either. I got to understand that they had agreed a rate of $35 per hour earlier on for the Christmas angels shooting, this was $15 more than their standard rates and was raised because of the short-term notice. Now, Tara only wanted to pay them $20/hr. This wasn’t the agreement and the girls were angry and felt betrayed by this.

It also did seem they didn’t sign any agreement or contract papers. The relationship was built on trust and before today, Tara always paid what they agreed.

I had drawn my own conclusions, by now. Basically, Tara wanted to have me starting on a bad step. Destroy the trust and reputation and then handover to me sad angels. I looked at “Another one” who now was interested in the conversation I was having with Cynthia and demanded the girls be paid full dues.

Tara stomped out angrily. I didn’t care.

Reactions to Oba’s speech…

I feel very obliged to write this piece addressing the recent outbursts by the Oba of Lagos on the forthcoming Lagos gubernatorial election which you can watch by yourself here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXc1S6qO_Xg.

The audio and video has been a good source of sensational news for the hungry media, controversy spinners, political campaigners, bloggers in search of more clicks, and of course some disgruntled residents of Lagos to feast on for the past few days.

In this video, the Oba of Lagos is seen to address representatives of the Ndi-Igbo in Lagos and threatening “ill-fortune” to befall anybody that disobeys and refuses to support his candidate but good fortune and prosperity for the people that supports his will. Another interesting thing is that he alleges that the Igbo’s back at home won’t allow an outsider to influence the choice of the native peoples choice.

An attempt to comment on issues like this can easily lead to unintelligent outburst where people are carried away by sentiments and then the real issue to be debated is lost. It’s actually high right there in the same controversial hanger as discussions around religion, tribalism, and political debates. But like all good intelligent debates, it is good to stay on the subject and consider all angles to arrive at a meaningful conclusion.

My comment on the issue by the ruler is stated very clearly in the sequence of tweets here but as usual there’s a social commenter that’s not as open-minded, loves controversy, carried away by sentiments or just wants some more attention.

Seeing the stream of tweets above and the outburst “SHAME ON YOU” and then the refusal of same person to provide either alternative opinion and/or state the issue he disagreed with one would want to use a non-140 character restricted to clarify his view.

Our traditional system attaches a lot of power to the throne sometimes attributing godly like status to the king. The Oba had chosen to take a stance and in fact use is power to push his candidate and then swear that calamity “falling into the gutter/lagoon” would befall those who don’t support him. The Oba doesn’t seem to be aware that times have changed and you cannot simply enforce and make people vote for your candidate, follow your bid just because you say so. You can only urge with reasons.

Also, the wise thing to do especially since the Oba would remain king whoever comes victorious in the election and thus have to work with the new governor would be to play a non-partisan arbiter role in which is interests would be to ensure a peaceful election, and provide a good platform and enabling environment to allow people make better choices.

That said, the video doesn’t really come to me as someone threatening physical violence against a certain group of people. A lot of none-Igbos are PDP supporters too. Hell, half of my family are lagos-islanders and want someone from their compound to win. It is clearly a case of the king threatening that his throne (spiritual), tongue-cheek power if i might would allow people against is will to encounter misfortunes. It is by far NOT a HATE SPEECH. More like frustrated disgruntled speech.

The Oba should apologise and has already issued a statement clarifying statement but this isn’t sellable news to people that want to have an image of a warring king against a certain section of the people.

I wonder though if I’ll still get an outburst like the “SHAME ON YOU” if I had used an analogy like saying Oba’s threat is like the priest saying that those who don’t obey the gods and sacrifice their biggest goat would not have a good harvest and their animals would die.

Comments welcomed.

UX & UI…Remembering User Preferences

User preferences allows users create a custom experience for their use of your application. Every user have specific ways they want to use your application. The engineering process of application development have long since arrived at this conclusion and I won’t want to reincarnate this here again (for the purpose of keeping this short).

The rules are quite simple for an app developer or so it seems.

Let your application come with reasonable defaults, allow some of these settings to be changed, and lastly (most importantly) remember user preferences!

If the user doesn’t delete your application or create a new user account, or clear browser cache or delete preference files which shouldn’t have been easily to locate in first place, do not FORGET user presences or make them have to create them again!

So I’m going to admit, BBM, Blackberry Messenger application’s behaviour on automatic updates is half the reason for this blog post. Every time an update occurs a user is sometimes forced to provide username/password to app – (1), then the most annoying of all provide user settings all over again. Basically, after an update I can’t find the PING action. Half the time, I can’t even remember how to locate how to enable the action even as it is well concealed so I have to meet jintau graphics guru and colleague @Ogb_o to help out with it.

At the risk of this post derailing to a rant on Blackberry company and their software process. I’m just irked that a company of that magnitude would miss that one simple clear important rule. REMEMBER USER PREFERENCES!

If you’re a developer, a resource involved on software development process/life cycle, hopefully this post would have helped point out the importance of UX and how easily it is to lower user satisfaction.

Random NOTES
1) writing this from phone while waiting for other phone to be repaired – hence hurried post
2) tried attaching screenshots of the BBM way of enabling PING but my GSM network won’t let me be great & outdoors

Disclaimer
1) I’m not one of ’em BBM users or YIM reincarnates spoilt with BUZZ who misuse PING to the extent of annoying contacts ^_^

Rejoinder: We Have an ASUU Problem

proudlyekiti

I try to avoid writing rejoinders for a simple reason; they don’t require original thought. All you have to do is show the ineptitude of another person’s work to look like a genius. My good man Feyi Fawehinmi posted this article http://aguntasolo.com/2013/09/25/we-have-an-asuu-problem/. Before I go into flaws in his argument, I must declare my bias. My father teaches Law in a Nigerian university (he’s done this for 35 years), and I’m immensely proud of him. Unlike Feyi, I also treasure the education I received at the University of Lagos, for this I’m eternally grateful.

1.90% of lecturers in Nigerian universities are useless – I didn’t get the logic of making a baseless statement, and following it up with an offer to be proved wrong. The more logical method will be to declare the result after the study, and like most of the article, the cart is put before the horse…

View original post 1,013 more words

Spring Data JPA – a simple clean JPA

Tenibot…a draft post.

Aptly named after a crush at that time (early 2011). I think i was becoming to like her and since i was too lazy to think of a better name i just went with that.

Enter…Tenibot, A GTalk chat bot that helps you look up words from the dictionary in real time. All you need to do is add tenibot@appspot.com to your contact. Send a word. Get the meaning back in seconds.

At the time of creation, i was experimenting with XMPP and stumbled upon an easy to follow Google App Engine/XMPP tutorial. Fortunately, there was some SOAP Dictionary web service so I consumed.

Source Code: Here

To Do:  Improve the code on some weekend – See if we can do a nice mobile client. Now that i think of it I don’t have a dictionary on my Blackberry (should look up something good on AppWorld – if i used my BB for much other than BBM, twitter & testing apps).

Side-Comment: Showed this app to my “crush”, her attempt at faking “IMPRESSED” didn’t impress me. The life of a programmer 😦

My favorite Tenibot word: Love.It defines it as:

LOVE, n. A temporary insanity curable by marriage or by removal of the patient from the influences under which he incurred the disorder.

Err…the end. ^_^

Functioning…in a Functional Language

For the first time in a while I have survived more than a few hours learning a functional language. Even though I am still far from studying the tutorial I am following (Learn You A Haskell), I am beginning to see programming from a different light. The functional angle.

The functional language of my choice is Haskell. Before I chose Haskell, I should note that I first made a weak effort at looking at and setting up Scala on my system. I did same with Clojure and even tried reading first few chapters in “The Joy of Clojure”, but it didn’t quite catch me well.

Of course, my intention isn’t to rub dirt on any of these functional language which I believe are good at their own respect. Even I somewhat agree that my brain has been so tuned to see everything as OOP  that I find it hard to follow the functional languages. That said, I would like to say that I have survived more than a few hours with Haskell and I’m so excited to share a simple maybe elementary program from what I have learnt so far.

Program to Multiply a 2 X 2 Matrix in Haskell

multiply2DMatrix :: (Integral a) => ((a, a), (a,a)) -> ((a, a), (a,a)) -> ((a, a), (a, a))
multiply2DMatrix ((x11, x12), (x21, x22)) ((y11, y12), (y21, y22)) = ((x11 * y11 + x12 * y21, x11*y12 + x12*y22), (x21*y11 + x22*y21, x21*y11 + x22*y22))

Running:

*Main> multiply2DMatrix ((3, 4), (2, 1)) ((12, 0) ,(2, 18))
((44,72),(26,42))

So there it goes. A simple “script” to solve the problem in Haskell. 🙂

I think might have been motivated in staying longer with Haskell, majorly because of the widely acceptance that Haskell is indeed a purely functional language and I kind of thought if I was going to learn a functional oriented language why not just jump in with the “best”.

On a final note, I think we programs should play with stuff. More importantly we should try and rediscover the joy and fascination that once drew us to software development.

Friday the 13th

This is going to be one of those blog post am writing without having thought of everything thoroughly. Let’s call it a “freestyle” J. First of all though, I think I should mention that I am not superstitious, attach any importance to Friday the 13^th especially not tagging it as an unlucky day, and neither am I “friggatriskaidekaphobia” (new word I added to my vocabulary which am sure am going to forget like the other phobia words X_x). At best I am sarcastic about the day as a whole and can be quoted as tweeting “Friday 13^th is totally overrated (@twitter I think you should add the link tweet feature )” earlier on today.

Truth be told, work had beginning to feel more like work lately, and I had been looking for some fun easy cool stuff to do and share to friends and when a friend asked me what was behind the whole buzz about “#FridatThe13th” and what were people on about, the idea hit me. Genius? No i’ll say, I was just bored and my colleague and friend @Ogb_o made it also quite easy for me by agreeing to provide the user interface design for me for FREE 😀 . So I just setup project (better put program), coded, pushed and shared.

In case you’re wondering what am ON about, do check out

Love and First Choices

In love…

Am I in love…?

J

I picked up my pen and took a break from the computer system I was working on. Ever since meeting my angel again, my urge to write had increased more than ever, the intent to make paper wet. It didn’t help that I had Adele’s “He won’t go” playing underneath.

Okay, I lied. She wasn’t exactly my angel. In actual fact, she was dating another. But still I liked her much.

I remembered our first meeting. I had travelled back to Lagos for my convocation party. It was mid-afternoon and I was still running around trying to set things in place for the party later that same day. A soft knock at the day, then the door opened to show a young beautiful lady walk in. I was stunned. I can almost remember her exact outfit more than 2 years afterwards. She was dressed in a lovely but simple gown just touching her knee. She had this cute little scarf on. It was a case of balancing fashionable and still trying not to over exceed the Islamic values. I couldn’t even care less by what she was wearing. I was taken by her figure. Her person. I had too consciously calm myself down. My heart was literarily racing. Still I walked towards her, turning on my best “Mr. Nice Host” allure. My usual shyness relegated to the background.

“Hi”, I said to her. Moments later I did discover she had come on invitation of my sister. I just couldn’t believe I hadn’t met her before that day.

I liked her, but she was in a relationship. I couldn’t have her.

You know how we all picture that perfect man/woman we want to be with, even spend the rest of our life with. Then someone that comes close to the exact image comes along. You meet her, socialize with her, even try wooing her. No matter what you do, you still don’t end up together.

Sad?

Then the “not too wanted” becomes the “Miss Available” probably for a fling, sometimes a relationship or even marriage. But that’s not who you really want to end up with?

All of this got me asking, how many of us do date and end up with our first choices?

N.B

– this blog post is “fresh from the mint”, some 30mins old. You’ll probably never read it till it ages.

– was inspired by hanging out with “Miss I can’t have” some 2 days ago. Apparently, I was still madly “attached” to her for lack of a safer word.

MIGRATING GOOGLE APP ENGINE ECLIPSE PROJECT TO NETBEANS

Hi dear readers. In this blog I describe in details the steps you need to follow to:

i. Install and configure Google App Engine on Netbeans

ii.Setup and Deploy the sample guestbook app

iii.Migrate an existing Eclipse Google App Engine App to Netbeans and then deploy

 

Premises:

The instructions here might have a conversational kind of style, hardly formatted (created it first as a word document), and also might be “served” elementary as I was walking a none too techy friend through the process. Also, should I admit that having a tool (investigating ant) to perform this steps would be more succinct.

 

Now that that’s out of the way, BELOW is the steps you need to perform. “topriddy” here refers to an imaginary project folder. Enjoy and comment.

MIGRATING GOOGLE APP ENGINE ECLIPSE PROJECT TO NETBEANS

 

A. Installation of Google App Engine on Netbeans

Works with Netbeans 6.9 or Netbeans 7.0

1. Download and Install Netbeans 7.0 or Netbeans 6.9 if not already done. Link Here: http://download.netbeans.org/netbeans/7.0/final/bundles/netbeans-7.0-ml-windows.exe
2. Launch Netbeans IDE
3. Install Google App Engine Plugin:
   1. Go To Tools > Plugins > Settings and the click Add.
   2. When prompted enter Name: App Engine. URL: http://kenai.com/downloads/nbappengine/NetBeans69/updates.xml
   3. Switch to Available Plugins Tab, and hit the Reload Catalog button.
   4. Choose/Select Google App Engine modules (server, configuration, deployment, editor hints),
      
   5. Click Install Button

 

B. Create and Deploy Test App On Google App Engine

The below steps specify how you can deploy test GuestBook App sample on GAE from Netbeans:

1. Launch Netbeans if not already launched
2. Select File > New Project > Samples > Google App Engine > Guest Book
3. Click Next > Next…> Finish (leave defaults)
4. Select the newly created project under your projects View
5. Go to Web Pages > WEB-INF > appengine-web.xml to configure app specific settings.
   1. Here you might want to set the application name to name of project you created on your Google App Engine Online Account
6. At this point you can right click project and either :
   1. Click Deploy to test on local computer server
   2. Or Click on Deploy to Google App Engine to deploy to live GAE Server. You would be prompted to enter account details, i.e email and password

 

C.     Migrate an Existing Project to Run with Netbeans IDE.

Case in Focus: topriddy application

The following group of files are what is necessary to be in place:

1. Java Source Files usually located in $workspace/$projectname/src
2. Web Files (css, javascript, images etc): located in $workspace/$projectname/war (N.B: Exempt the WEB-INF folder from this list).
   
3. The configuration files: appengine-web.xml and web.xml located in: in $workspace/$projectname/war/WEB-INF
4. The library files usually “jars” located in: $workspace/$projectname/war/WEB-INF/lib (N.B: Exempt all the jar files that start with appengine*, google*, and datanucleus* from this list)

Now that the above is understood, I would now walk you through the process of migrating an existing GAE project in Eclipse to Netbeans.

Steps:

1. Download or Identify Eclipse GAE Project: E.g topriddy
2. Launch Netbeans and create “that first sample project” if you haven’t already done so. (Steps described in Section B)
3. Launch “Windows Explorer”, look for the sample guestbook project and duplicate it.
4. Rename duplicated guestbook folder to your desired name. Say topriddy-netbeans
5. To copy Java source files:
   1. Delete all files located in Netbeans project : …/NetBeansProjects\topriddy\src\java
   2. Copy src files from eclipse project here $workspace/topriddy/src and dump in above (i.e …/NetBeansProjects\topriddy\src\java)
   3. Done
6. To copy web files/artifacts:
   1. Delete all files located in Netbeans project folder: …\topriddy\web
   2. Copy ALL files from Eclipse Project $workspace/topriddy/war/ to …/NetBeansProjects\topriddy\web (N.B: Remember to exempt the WEB-INF folder here)
   3. done.
7. To Copy Config Files: appengine-web.xml and web.xml
   1. Locate Eclipse project config files in: $workspace\topriddy\war\WEB-INF
   2. Locate directory to copy to in netbeans project here: …/NetBeansProjects \topriddy\web
   3. If not already created, create Folder WEB-INF (case sensitive) in path mention in b. above.
8. To Copy Libraries from Eclipse project to Netbeans Project,
   1. Navigate to Netbeans Project Folder and create a “lib” directory in …/NetBeansProjects \topriddy\web\WEB-INF
   2. Copy all jars (except the already identified exemptied ones ) from the eclipse base: : $workspace\topriddy\war\WEB-INF\lib\ to the netbeans lib path: …/NetBeansProjects \topriddy\web\WEB-INF\lib
9. To Install Libs in Netbeans Project
   1. Launch Netbeans and open Netbeans project if not already opened
   2. Right Click Libraries under your project, select Add Jar/Folder
   3. On prompt of File Select Dialog, Navigate to your project directory and go to the lib path, copy all jars therein
   4. Select Okay. Then you;re done
10. Confirm that the appengine-web.xml is set to the GAE Project you previously created with Google App Engine Account.
11. Right Click and Deploy as mentioned previously