May 14, 2012

30 Day Do It Challange: Go Vegetarian for a 30 Days

By Bogdan Varlamov

A few months ago I watched a TED video about trying something new for 30 Days. It was an interesting idea, and I have been looking for something to try… I also love playing around with cooking different foods, and have decided it would be a great challenge to go vegetarian for the month of June 2012.

By limiting my ingredients, I hope to learn more about developing flavors without using meat as a crutch.

I created an account and group to track my progress here on 30DayDoIt.com

The 30 Day video is for reference here:

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May 11, 2012

Rooting the Cruz T301 Tablet

By Bogdan Varlamov

The other day, woot.com was selling the Cruz T301 tablet–a 7″ Android 2.2 device–for $60. The stock OS was a customized version of Android that had a lot of applications missing… For one, instead of the Android Market, it had the “Cruz Market”. I figured I’d buy two and try to root them to get a real Android device–in case I bricked one I could still use the second one as an e-Book reader (the stock OS includes the Amazon Kindle App).

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March 16, 2012

Projection Mapping Class results

By Bogdan Varlamov

Last week I took a course on projection mapping at the Center for Design and Innovation. It was 6 days, 3 hours per day, and I learned a LOT. On the last day of class work, we spent a few hours applying everything that we learned into quick videos which were projection-mapped onto a 3D surface (3 blocks painted white).


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December 14, 2011

Target SQL Server and SQL CE with the same Entity Framework objects while using Sync Framework

By Bogdan Varlamov

When developing a sometimes-disconnected application in .NET, you have the ability to create a “local data cache” (Sql CE file) and then synchronize this local database with a server database periodically (when connected) to keep the data relevant.

Of course to actually interact with the data from your .NET application, you will want to create a data model with Entity Framework. There are a few tricks that can make the whole process much simpler.
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December 14, 2011

Manually running MongoDB in Kubuntu

By Bogdan Varlamov

When I am developing against MongoDB I don’t want the server to run all the time and use up my memory. Instead, what I do is manually start/stop the server and specify config files so that it can run on various data directories.

To set it up, I downloaded MongoDB to ~/Downloads, and then extracted to a directory where I keep various apps: ~/Apps/mongodb-linux-x86_64-2.0.1.

Inside the MongoDB directory is a bin directory. I create a symbolic link to everything there from my home bin directory (~/bin).

When I log in, the ~/.bashrc file in Kubuntu adds everything in ~/bin to the $PATH. This way I can easily run mongod from the bash manually and specify a config file for mongod to use (so I can switch between database directories easily for different projects).

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December 7, 2011

Force Restart in Linux

By Bogdan Varlamov

When the computer freezes (as has happened multiple times under Ubuntu w/Unity to me), press ALT + PrintScreen/SysRq + R + E + I + S + U + B.

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December 2, 2011

AccessViolationException, EntryPointNotFoundException, and Change Tracking Error on SyncAgent.Synchronize()

By Bogdan Varlamov

Recently I was working on a data-driven application which needed to continue operating in sometimes-disconnected environments. In theory, this is a fairly simple problem to solve with .NET Sync Framework using a “Local Data Cache” implementation of SQL Server CE file and SQL Server database–a solution that I have implemented several times in the past.

Never have I had to jump through so many crazy hoops.
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November 18, 2011

Hate Unity, Upgraded to Ubuntu 11.10…now to fix the UI

By Bogdan Varlamov

As many folks, I do not like the Unity interface in the latest versions of Ubuntu. In Ubuntu 11.04, I had used the “Classic” mode when logging in, but after upgrading to 11.10 I’ve had to take additional steps to avoid the Unity UI.
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October 20, 2011

gunzip Multiple Files in Different Subdirectories

By Bogdan Varlamov

Recently I had to unzip a lot of files located in subdirectories. To do this, I used a combination of the “find” and “gunzip” commands in Ubuntu:

find * -maxdepth 1  -name '*.gz' -exec gunzip {} \;

This finds all of the files with .gz extensions to a subdirectory depth of 1 maximum and then executes the gunzip command on the file.

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September 18, 2011

Setting up a GIT repository server with Gitolite for source control

By Bogdan Varlamov

There are lots of instructions for getting setup with git around on the web, however all of them seem very verbose and since this is the third time I’ve set up a git server I decided to write down a short version.

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