AAMALIAA

"The desire for fulfilling work — a job that provides a deep sense of purpose, and reflects our..."

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 16:40:02 -0400

“

The desire for fulfilling work — a job that provides a deep sense of purpose, and reflects our values, passions and personality — is a modern invention. … For centuries, most inhabitants of the Western world were too busy struggling to meet their subsistence needs to worry about whether they had an exciting career that used their talents and nurtured their wellbeing. But today, the spread of material prosperity has freed our minds to expect much more from the adventure of life.

We have entered a new age of fulfillment, in which the great dream is to trade up from money to meaning.

”

- How to Find Fulfilling Work | Brain Pickings

I couldn’t find a triangles loading gif so I decided to...

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 02:04:00 -0400

I couldn’t find a triangles loading gif so I decided to make my own… still working out the kinks.

So, I started an online portfolio… Yep, it’s a...

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 11:30:35 -0500

So, I started an online portfolio… Yep, it’s a tumblr.

And now… time to fill it up…

"Dear niece - on your 8th birthday, As a future woman in technology, I want so much more for you than..."

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 16:45:00 -0500

“Dear niece - on your 8th birthday,
As a future woman in technology, I want so much more for you than I can articulate. Hopefully, things will have seen some change when you are ready to make this world your own. If that is not the case, here is what I wish for you, for every young woman, and for this industry…”

- To a Future Woman In Tech | @bitchwhocodes

Naturally, as a female—not to even mention, a minority—developer, Stacey Mulcahy’s letter really resonated with me. What really hit me, though, is to what extent each of her individual points relate to my own experiences… and the fact that it really took reading her note to find myself looking back on some experiences that seemed okay at the time now really leaving a bad taste in my mouth.

I suppose I have no choice but to be a trailblazer for now but can only hope that things will change sooner than later.

"Frank’s understanding of what a producer does is true to what it really is, that a producer..."

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 14:48:26 -0500

““Frank’s understanding of what a producer does is true to what it really is, that a producer ensures the physical manifestation of intellectual property,” Keith says. “However we arrive at the final goal, whether it be by me playing instruments, adding things, adding insight, talking to Frank, or supervising every single occurrence of his voice on the record: This is producing on the high level. This is my opportunity to produce on the Quincy Jones level.””

- Om’Mas Keith, The Chosen One - Village Voice

Github: Arduino/Pi-Powered Bathroom Vacancy Light

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 23:00:43 -0500

Github: Arduino/Pi-Powered Bathroom Vacancy Light:

This is a follow-up to Arduino/Pi-Powered Bathroom Vacancy Light [PART II]… I finally threw my code up on github! I am still working out the kinks so keep an eye on the repo in the coming weeks/months.

must learn this dance.

Fri, 07 Dec 2012 00:03:38 -0500

must learn this dance.

Yeah, I know. It’s been a while… like 6...

Tue, 04 Dec 2012 11:30:36 -0500

Yeah, I know. It’s been a while… like 6 months… but I’ve finally finished the first iteration of my Arduino/Pi-Powered Bathroom Vacancy Light!

Here’s PART I.
If you haven’t read it yet… you should, otherwise the rest of this post won’t make any sense.

THE RESEARCH
Since last May, I’ve discovered the Raspberry Pi, a credit card-sized Linux computer, and Pusher, an easy way to incorporate real-time updates into web-connected projects. I decided that the Pi would be a great substitute for the second Arduino that was originally going to receive signals and trigger the light in my bedroom and Pusher would act as a good notification system that both devices could easily access (and prevent me from having to bother with a pointless database table).

THE TOOLS

mini breadboards
jumper wires
resistors
LEDs

THE PROCESS
First, I figured out the Arduino bit. After reading a couple of chapters of this intro to arduino book, I was able to piece together a sketch that utilizes the WiFly to post data (a 1 if the door is closed, 0 if it is open) to a page on my server when triggered by a magnetic reed switch that is attached to the bathroom door.

Next, I coded the page hosted on my server in php. It utilizes the PHP Pusher client library (found here) to forward the message posted to the page by the Arduino via Pusher.

Finally, I set up the Pi (with wifi adapter) to run a background python script that is subscribed to the same Pusher channel using the python library (found here). When the bathroom door is closed, the Arduino posts a “1” to my server, the PHP then uses that to trigger a Pusher message, which is then picked up by the Pi’s python script. When the Pi receives a “1”, it turns its LED on, and vice versa. Done.

NEXT STEPS…
If/when I choose to do more with this project, these are the first things that I might try to tackle:

throw my code on github!
make an awesome enclosure for the Raspberry Pi with an airplane-style light fixture
get rid of Pusher and figure out how to host my own websocket connection
collect all notifications in a database so I can easily graph bathroom usage over time, average bathroom visit length, peak times, etc. (my roommates may not be too thrilled about this idea, shhhh!) :D

fotoamalia: arduino + raspberry pi. finally finishing my...

Fri, 23 Nov 2012 18:15:25 -0500

fotoamalia:

arduino + raspberry pi.

finally finishing my arduino project. details coming soon!

"Make your surroundings a metaphor for who you are."

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 00:36:50 -0500

““Make your surroundings a metaphor for who you are.””

- George Lois
swissmiss | Your Surroundings

hi, sorry for this random question.. I've never been to a 'hack-day' type thing before, is it okay to go if you're not that amazing a programmer? I've never made an app before, but the hack day I want to go to is based on making apps in the area I'd like to build apps in.. Is it common for newbies to show up at these things or would it be kinda pointless?

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 11:34:02 -0400

YES. Of course it depends on the specifics of the hackathon or hack-day you’re attending but one of the things I’ve liked so much about the hackathons I’ve attended is the range of skill levels of the attendees.

I was a bit nervous before going to my first one but quickly realized that I wasn’t the only one who wasn’t an “expert” programmer. Everyone on a team can find a way that they can contribute to a project whether it’s programming, designing, wireframing (there are PLENTY of people who attend these things who don’t know how to program at all!), copywriting, or pitching. I definitely recommend going to one—they’re great for networking and learning new things!

experimenting with embroidery. #triangles

Sun, 21 Oct 2012 16:20:39 -0400

experimenting with embroidery. #triangles

geometrydaily: #285 Glass tower – A new minimal geometric...

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 11:26:00 -0400

geometrydaily:

#285 Glass tower – A new minimal geometric composition each day

Things I did on Saturday: brunched with a bff bought 2 video...

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 12:34:57 -0400

Things I did on Saturday:

brunched with a bff
bought 2 video games (NBA 2K13 and Dead Island, if you were wondering)
visited another bff at work
bought 2 embroidery hoops and some needles (what?!)
assembled/soldered my raspberry pi cobbler
(allows you to hook the RPi I/O pins to a breadboard)
flashed some LEDs with a python script
killed some zombies with a boat paddle

I’m now wondering how I never knew who Kate Moross...

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 12:30:29 -0400

I’m now wondering how I never knew who Kate Moross was… especially because she shares my obsession with three-sided shapes.

voteforjordanrich.com

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 17:43:42 -0400

Last month I received a frantic text message from my roommate. “I have an awesome idea but no one to do it with! :(”

His idea involved taking a swing voter in the upcoming presidential election and putting their vote up to a vote on Twitter. Each public tweet containing either one of our two hashtags would count as a vote in either direction and at the end of the project span, our swing voter would vote for whichever side had the most “twitter-votes”. A seemingly simple concept, somewhat controversial (if you’re passionate about that sort of thing, though I saw it as more of a fun/weird experiment than a serious statement), but it was definitely going to be a team effort.

As he had only seen the few hackathon projects I had done (and left unfinished and in “prototype”, un-hosted form, as most hackathon projects usually are), and most all of my other work is on internal company tools and apps, he was originally going to look elsewhere for a developer. I took that as a challenge—we were launching this thing within 2 weeks and I was going to code it.

The guidelines I listed were the following:

We needed some way of continuously searching for tweets containing our hashtags and storing them into a database without going over API limits.
Once tweets were collected, we needed some way of showing them on our main site.
We also needed to be able to show the percentage of voters voting each way, and also update those numbers frequently.

So I took to Google…

The first thing I discovered was Twitter’s awesome Streaming API—it allows you to hook into their ridiculous firehose (though they make you limit your search, only a few huge data companies have access to the full firehose offering) stream of real-time tweets and apply your own filters.

The next thing I discovered was 140dev’s awesome open source PHP/MySQL solution for getting and parsing tweets from the Streaming API, called Phirehose—I was able to use their code as a base and filter our tweet votes (while also easily limiting the number of votes per user_id that we count into our database) with only 2 PHP scripts that run on the server at all times. The vote percentages shown in the middle of the two feeds are populated from a simple json file that is updated every 5 minutes from a simple query to our “votes” database table.

I knew that, in the event that the site was a huge hit, storing the full tweet data in our own DB and then constantly querying it to show the tweets in two separate feeds on our homepage might be a bad idea (I’m pretty sure I don’t have the backend chops to scale a database for that kind of activity)—not to mention it might violate Twitter’s new API rules. Referring to the Twitter API again, I found that two Embedded Timelines would do the job for free (and legally).

As for the back-end, I have been especially into AWS lately so it was all done on a basic micro EC2 instance and a MySQL DB on RDS.

Things I particularly liked about working on this project (I like lists):

working with designers—this was actually the first time I’ve worked together with a designer on a site and I liked not having to fire up Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator myself to get things done, not to mention the logos and photos look awesome.
it was quick—we started and launched this thing in ~2.5 weeks!
it’s finished—saying you’re going to do a project and actually finishing said project are 2 very different things

Things I want to explore for future projects:

I really really want to explore using node.js to provide real-time updates. PHP is fun and really easy to use, but I love the idea of an event-driven environment (i.e. showing updates to your database on your site or webapp as soon as they happen).
All of my projects thus far have used MySQL but am curious about NoSQL (think MongoDB)… we’ll see.

Thanks for reading! If you have any questions or just want to discuss nerdy things like this, hit me up on twitter… and PLEASE VOTE FOR JORDAN!

aaand I’m finally getting started on that Arduino project...

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 19:46:09 -0400

aaand I’m finally getting started on that Arduino project idea from May…

Way back in June I participated in my second hackathon,...

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 12:26:20 -0400

Way back in June I participated in my second hackathon, AngelHack NYC. It’s crazy that I feel as if I’m already addicted to going to these things even though I’ve only officially gone to two at this point (the Foursquare Hack Day that is coming up will most likely be my third!). It must just be the combination of feelings that you experience after 24 hours of straight planning/coding—pure exhaustion, excitement, relief, anticipation. As someone who is coming up with ideas on a near daily basis and wanting to jump from project to project, going to a hackathon is a serious exercise in focus. To start and finish a project prototype in a span of 24 hours alone is a serious accomplishment.

The project my team completed was Fanfare—an app that allows concertgoers to link up with their Facebook friends with similar musical tastes and assists with the group ticket purchasing/distributing of funds. As a huge music fan and concertgoer myself, I came up with the idea after trying and failing to find a friend to go see Quadron (an amazing band who hasn’t quite made its landing in the US yet) with me at Rockwood Music Hall.

Our team didn’t make it to the finals but won a prize from Facebook for Fanfare’s use of the Facebook Open Graph API! :) Of course this is an app that I would love to complete and launch, but alas it’s one of many on my queue right now…

I’ll update again soon about my current projects! Good things are coming.

Ronciglione, Italia (Taken with Instagram)

Wed, 29 Aug 2012 13:40:15 -0400

Ronciglione, Italia (Taken with Instagram)

Q&A session with Spike Lee after a screening of Red Hook...

Sat, 18 Aug 2012 21:37:30 -0400

Q&A session with Spike Lee after a screening of Red Hook Summer (Taken with Instagram at BAM Rose Cinemas)