The TWG group has an outstanding set of iPhone icons suitable for tab bar item. Kudos to these guys for making this set of great icons available for the rest of us. You can use these icons in products. Here is the terms of use.
Great free iPhone icons
April 3, 2010What does a Barnacle look like?
April 2, 2010
Aquacue Barnacle in a water meter pit.
Aquacue at Launch: Water
April 1, 2010Here is a brief introduction to Aquacue created by the Launch: Water organizers:
Waiting for hot water or how to waste 13% of your daily water
March 29, 2010
The hot water in the master bathroom takes a while to heat up. Today I measured it and the result was surprising. On average we use 50 gallons of water per person per day (see the graph generated by Aquacue system – the data collection started on March 7th with the brand new V2 Barnacle). The shower has a low flow shower-head: 2.5 GPM. It takes 2 minutes and 30 seconds for the hot water to start. That is 6 gallons of clean drinkable water is wasted to deliver hot water to the shower. Assuming a 6 minutes overall shower time, the 6 gallons corresponds to 42% of the water used during the shower and it represents 13% of my daily water consumption. Wow, I didn’t realize that I was wasting 13% of my daily water just waiting for hot water.
Adding your own colors to core-plot
March 29, 2010In HTML colors are typically specified in a HEX format, where each color is a number from 0 to 255 represented as a two digit hex number. For example, the aqua blue shade color is represented as 0095D2, where the value for Red is 00, the value for Green is 95 and the value of Blue is D2. For iPhone development, the colors are specified in RGB float where each of the RGB colors is a number between 0.0 to 1.0.
In core-plot, you can add your own colors via Objective-C category construct from within any of your own header and implementation files.
@interface CPColor (AQ_COLOR) +(CPColor *)aq_blue_color; // #0095D2 @end
@implementation CPColor (AQ_COLOR)
+(CPColor *) aq_blue_color {
static CPColor *color = nil;
if ( nil == color ) {
color = [[CPColor alloc] initWithComponentRed:(0x00&0xff)/255.0 green:(0x95&0xFF)/255.0 blue:(0xD2&0xFF)/255.0 alpha:1.0];
}
return color;
}
@end
Now you can use this color to fill a bar chart, e.g.
barPlot.fill = [CPFill fillWithColor:[CPColor aq_blue_color]];
Core-plot and iPhone
March 27, 2010Core-plot is a charting library for the Mac and iPhone. It is relatively easy to use and the resulting charts are not bad at all.
One issue that I ran across was that the iPhone application that I created to test core-plot worked fine on the Simulator but not on the iPhone where I would get a system exception resulting from the core-plot library calling sizeWithTextStyle method that was not linked in. To fix this issue, in Xcode right click on your application in the Targets group and select Get Info. Select the Build tab and enter “Other Linker Flags” in the search box. Make sure that you include the flags: -all_load -ObjC.
Here is an excellent tutorial on core-plot.
PDFpen is worth every penny
March 22, 2010Every now and then you want to add your signature to a PDF file. This simple job is not possible in the current version of the Mac Preview application. The simplest way for doing this that I’ve found is the PDFpen application ($49). This application is affordable and works really well. Kudos to the PDFpen team.
LAUNCH: WATER & AQUACUE
March 19, 2010
This was truly a special week. Aquacue was selected as one of the innovative water projects in the world and the venue for the conference was the Kennedy Space Center. As part of the event, we got a VIP tour of the Space Shuttle facilities and got pretty close to the launch pad that has been used for Saturn, Apollo and the Shuttle missions. I never thought that I would get this close to the place that launched Apollo 11. The entire event was very inspiring. Details of the LAUNCH event.
Robert Watson (the founder of LEED) had this to say about Aquacue.
Did you know that the on the space station 83% of water is reused? Each astronaut consumes only 2.5 liters (0.7 gallons) for drinking and sanitation per day. Talk about efficient use of water.
See the list of other projects. All of the projects were pretty amazing. Mark Tonkin’s innovation was mind blowing: using sea water (untreated) to grow plants in the desert. Then there was Stephen Kennedy Smith‘s Large-Scale Vertical Hydroponic AG System that can grow vegetables using literally a fraction of the water that is used by conventional methods. Check them all at launch.org.
How to run a business in the 21st century
March 15, 2010
I rarely read a technical/biz book in its entirety. REWORK is an exception. I read it when I was trapped in an airplane for 8 hours traveling from San Jose to Orlando. Remarkable book, definitely worth reading. Lots of good advice and kind of justifies the seat-of-the-pants style of decision making. The book is well written, brief and witty. It is 273 pages, but the font is big with double line spacing, so it is about 100 pages with normal font and spacing. Brevity is what makes this book great. A required reading for anyone that joins Aquacue.
I enjoyed the chapter “Sell your by-products”, how true. At Aquacue, our data visualization services for the Barnacle morphed into its own product that works really well with Utility monthly billing data or customer’s own data. I never thought of it as a by-product, but that is exactly what it is.
روزنه امید
January 7, 2010My old friend Mahmood from University of Manchester days visited California and introduced me to his friend, Kazem Shakeri, who writes and sings Persian songs like this one called روزنه امید. Very nice.
