Blog
Getting over embarrassment:
In the process of making the film [Toy Story], we reviewed the material every day. Now this is counter-intuitive for a lot of people. Most people—imagine this: you can’t draw very well, but even if you can draw very well, suppose you come in and you’ve got to put together animation or drawings and show it to a world-class, famous animator. Well, you don’t want to show something that is weak, or poor, so you want to hold off until you get it right. And the trick is to actually stop that behavior. We show it every day, when it’s incomplete. If everybody does it, every day, then you get over the embarrassment. And when you get over the embarrassment, you’re more creative.
As I say, that’s not obvious to people, but starting down that path helped everything we did. Show it in its incomplete form. There’s another advantage and that is, when you’re done, you’re done. That might seem silly, except a lot of people work on something and they want to hold it and want to show it, say two weeks later, to get done. Only it’s never right. So they’re not done. So you need to go through this iterative process, and the trick was to do it more frequently to change the dynamics.
– Pixar President Ed Catmull
Arduino & Titanium communication via PHP
As of last week, I was not able to find a method to connect my Arduino to a Titanium desktop project. The Titanium SDK doesn’t natively support serial communication, but I knew the Arduino would be much more valuable to me if I was able to integrate it natively with a desktop app for several reasons:
- With an Arduino I can enhance my ability to add layers of interaction & interface design to my projects.
- The majority of my experience developing comes from web development, Titanium allows me to program in the language of my choice.
- If I could figure out how to connect it, I wouldn’t need to re-write my current app in an app like Processing ( Holy shit, processing is hard ).
There were people out there that were wondering about this same thing, I followed up on the leads they were given and stepped away with something that worked.
JQuery form validation with ketchup.js
This past month I’ve been developing a project required advanced data validation. Its not publicly released and I’m not even allowed to show it, but I can share with you my form validation methods.
For this Development project we needed to gather and validate all the users info needed for our billing and CRM systems. That’s right even Highrise integration.
I started with an already advanced JQuery plugin, Ketchup.js,.
“Ketchup is a slim jQuery Plugin that validates your forms. It aims to be very flexible and extendable for its appearance and functionality. Don’t like the default styling? Change it! Need another mark up? Edit it! No validation fits your needs? Write your own! Make your own ketchup with ease.”
They weren’t kidding about the with ease part. The Install includes adding 3 files ( assuming you already have Jquery installed
[php] <?php if ( in_category(’4′) ) { ?> <div> <?php } else { ?> <div> <?php } ?>[/php]
Highrise php api interface
With Push2Highrise.php as a building block, I’ve added functionality I recently needed to the open source Highrise API PHP class.
Push2Highrise.php is a simple PHP wrapper which adds form submitted data from your webpage directly to Highrise CRM system. Using the Highrise API, the wrapper supports the creation of contacts, notes, tasks and deals.
I’ve made changes to the following areas:
- Added The ability to attach new info to existing contacts.
- Added The ability to attach background info to contacts.
- Updated the search to look for people by email address, rather then first & last name (how many James Smith’s do you know?)
- Corrected problems I was having with the “add notes” function.