//ToDo: Sohj's blog name here

Wow, what the hell? I look away for one second and I've already missed two posts? That's not a great start to the year... The Android class I'm teaching is  off to a great start though. So far we're 3 lessons in and have covered quite a bit. So far we've added new activities, created some helper classes, connected to a web service and pulled down data, as well as authenticated, created some settings we can save and load, set up a SQLite database, stored records to it, pulled them out, and then turned them into objects for us to see on the screen. We've adjusted the colors and properties of the items at run time and even created and utilized BroadcastReceivers, Services, and more. I'm impressed with what the class has absorbed so far, and what I've learned by preparing the class. I'm really enjoying it and the more Android development I do, the more I learn it's capable of, and the more I like doing it. In fact, our project for the hackathon I a...

So, I owe you two posts, and I'll deliver on those shortly. It's been a busy couple of weeks, so I'll break these up as they would have been had I wrote them on the original days they were scheduled for. Now, let us begin. I attended a hackathon last weekend at the Microsoft Offices in Chevy Chase. Myself and a team of 5 others (mostly co-workers) set out to create something to help prevent fraud and catch bad actors. We had access to Dun and Bradstreet's enormous dataset on near anything you would ever want to know about a business, including its financial information, how many computers they have, competitors, branches, offices, suits, liens, anything. It was a pretty amazing dataset. We decided to work on creating a graph to help visibly see how many degrees of separation existed between a seemingly reputable company and a potentially fraudulent one. It was a fun two days, filled with caffeine, code, and cold pizza. Our end product was, I thought, pretty good, bu...

Last week was host to the long awaited Nexus 5 (official) reveal. It was already leaked and all but confirmed in the weeks leading up to it's October 31st debut on the Google Play store, but now it's finally available for purchase. It looks to be a very nice phone, but I no longer feel compelled to upgrade. Starting a few months ago, about the time the Moto X became immensely hyped, I started taking a look at what I actually needed my phone for. There's making calls, sure, but aside from that, I really only used it for web browsing, email, and various other apps. I no longer have any games on my phone, I don't use it for streaming music or watching Netflix, there's the occasional Youtube video, and Google+. I realized that I am in no way taxing my phone's memory or processor, so what need is there for me to purchase a new device that is primarily a spec bump? If I'm going to purchase something new, it's going to be because it provides something that my c...