The following is my quote of the day, for this, the last day in November 2009:

Understanding unity helps to solve humanity’s biggest challenges. There is no such thing as an isolated problem. By injuring any part of the world’s system, you injure yourself. There is no such thing as a win/lose situation. Think of life on this planet in terms of systems and not detached elements. Broaden your field of vision and assimilate the knowledge you have. See that the environment does not belong to any single country to exploit and then disregard. You cannot afford to think of your relationship with the earth as a one-night stand. There’s no such thing as a free glass of milk. It’s time to buy the cow.–Za Rinpoche

ZaChoeje Rinpoche is a Tibetan monk that was born in Nepal and studied at Drepung Loseling Monestary to receive the Geshe Lharampa degree, equivalent to a Ph.D. in Tibetan Buddhism. In 2001, he founded the Emoho Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona. I would like to visit there one day.

GQAdonis.com now in the cloud

As of today, my personal and professional blog site fully resides in the Amazon Cloud. I am now using Amazon’s Relational Database Service (RDS) to store my blog data and an instance of Windows 2003 Server running in Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to provide a web server. This great post written on the CloudBzz blog describes what I consider to be the future of database deployment and application hosting. This article compares Amazon RDS to Microsoft’s upcoming SQL Azure offering, which provides SQL Server databases in the “cloud.”

Immediate Benefits

I have already observed several immediate benefits to hosting my blog in the cloud and leveraging RDS:

• My blog loads a LOT faster. Amazon’s servers have lots of bandwidth available to them, and communication between my virtual server instance and my MySQL RDS instance is speedy.
• I can pay for what I use as I go. I also have lots of options for configuring, scaling up, and rearranging instances to suit changing needs with minimal impact.
• Creating the initial web server instance was easily done using Amazon’s AWS Console.
• The database instances are very secure and comply with the strictest of application partitioning/security standards. Direct access to database servers can be restricted at any level.

Costs

I expect my database instance to cost around $80 per month while I actually don’t have a clear sense yet of what the web server instance will cost, since it is based on a combination of processing power utilized, bandwidth in and out of the Amazon network to that box, and my storage needs. My early estimates seem to indicate that I will easily beat the $400+ per month I was spending hosting servers in a typical ISP shared hosting environment.

What are you willing to do to maximize your potential?

“Are you willing to work sixteen hours a day? Rich people are. Are you willing to work seven days a week and five up most of your weekends? Rich people are. Are you willing to sacrifice seeing your family, your friends, and give up your recreations and hobbies? Rich people are. Are you willing to risk all your time, energy and start-up capital with no guarantee of returns? Rich people are.”–T. Harv Eker, from Secrets of the Millionaire Mind

As always, it is as easy and as hard as this…

I just wanted to record a few links I found that will be useful for Open GL and 3-D game development on the iPhone:

• Free Game Book. This is a free 3-D game development primer, providing the basis for math and theory related to 3-D game development in general.
• 8 Open GL Resources. This is a link to tutorials and other information related to OpenGL programming for iPhone.
• Blog Entry on WaveFront loading. This is a blog entry discussing a method of loading and display WaveFront 3-D files on the iPhone with sample code for iPhone.

Here are some other general game development resources:

• JavaScript game collision detection. This is an article about how to detect collisions between sprites in JavaScript. It includes sample code.
• Page Peel Effect in JavaScript. This is an article about using MooTools along with JQuery to add cool animation effects to JavaScript-based HTML applications.

Today, I came across a great article written by Jiva DeVoe describing how to use the GNU C __attribute__ mechanism enable a programmer to customize behavior scoped to a function as described in another article written by Guy English. Another article on generally using function attributes is here.

The Point

The point of Jiva’s article was to describe how function level tracing can be achieved using a scoped object (like an object on the stack in C++) when Objective-C only supports heap based objects. The technique described allows the insertion of a debug trace that automatically signals the entry and exit to a function.

Other Potential Uses

This mechanism can allow a multitude of other uses, including:

• It is possible to implement method call “interception” using this mechanism in a manner similar to how the Unity Dependency Injection container does in .NET.
• Other features that I wish I had in Objective-C based on class metadata can be implemented–like how attributes in .NET affect class construction and method behavior in .NET.

Conclusion

Wherever possible, I try to find ways to implement cool features and behavior I love to use in one set of languages/runtimes (like .NET) in other languages and runtimes (like the Objective-C runtime, JavaScript runtime in browsers, Java/Java ME etc.). This compiler trick provides another tool to use to establish a common conceptual programming model across languages and platforms.

Here is my quote of the day from one of my all time favorite philosophers, Transcendentalists, and teachers:

“If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary: new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or old laws will be expanded and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with license of a higher order of beings.”–Henry David Thoreau

Take the time to decide clearly what you want–not just in relation to yourself but everyone in your life. Have a divine purpose with which to align your desires–no matter what it might be with the only rule being that all is done for the good of all. Focus and do it. That is all that we are here to do on this earth. It is as simple and as hard as that.

As I prepare/continue to build my first two iPhone applications (more later on what they do), I have been researching ways to bring the world of Agile Development that is common on .NET to iPhone development. Specifically, I have interest in assuring I can apply the following concepts on my project from a technical perspective (more on the project management side using BaseCamp, Beanstalk and other integrated cloud-based online tools later as well)…

Mike Rundle posted an excellent article covering common iPhone UI Design Patterns that is a must read for anyone looking at designing an interface for an iPhone application.

In addition, an interesting article to check out that covers the details of designing a completely custom interface is here covering the design of Convertbot, which has a very cool non-standard interface.