Fernando Zamora

With the holidays fast approaching, many of us will want to purchase some cool tech toys such as tablets. Currently Microsoft is pushing their Surface 2 with Windows 8.1 tablets. Microsoft's current Windows strategy is misleading at the least and here's why. The Surface 2 cannot and will not completely replace your laptop. Why? Well that's because it cannot run regular Windows apps.  The surface runs Windows 8 RT whereas a laptop runs Windows 8 (no RT).  Each is targeted for a different hardware architecture.  Think of RT as a slimmed down version of Windows 8 that looks like Windows 8 but is only targeted for tablets. Sure it can run the new version of Microsoft Office, but that's about it (as far the legacy Windows apps are concerned). It can only run the apps from the Microsoft Store. Think of it more like an iPad with a keyboard that uses the Microsoft store, which by the way has fewer apps than the Apple App Store. This does not mean that you can't get a l...

I blogged today on the topic of what I envision for the future of technology in our society. Go check it out at Codematterings.com Flying Cars and Cyborgs

For the last couple of days I've been trying to setup a session in node. You know, so that I can access information as the user navigates from page to page. Typically this is so ridiculously easy to do with other stacks that you almost take it for granted.  The call backs to get and post requests have a req and res variable for request and response, respectively.  Typically you can access the session from the req in other stacks.  Not so in node.  At least not without the proper setup. Say you have a module like below exports.list = function(req, resp){ //do something interesting here and call your view } Well in that module you can access the session member of the req like below: exports.list = function(req, resp){ req.session.userName = "foo"; //do something interesting here and call your view } Then in some other function export you can use that session's property and use it for whatever.  If you are new to node this is...

It's been a couple of days since the Austin Code Camp 2013. It was a great turn out. Overall around 200 plus coders, eager to hear about the latest trends, attended.  Here are a few thoughts that I'd like to share regarding Austin Code Camp.  more...

Posted Easy Logging from a JSP Page Recently I was debugging an issue in a Java Server Page (JSP) and I wanted to track the logic path.  I didn't want to add the overhead of logging to the JSP.  Logging involves adding logging such as Log4J and then checking the log files. I wanted something much simpler like the alerts you use for debugging purposes from time to time in JavaScript. Except JSP is server side code so alert boxes or any other kind of boxes are out of the question. out To the Rescue To solve my problem I used the out instance in the JSP instance to send HTML comments to the page. To read the rest of this article visit: http://www.codematterings.com/programmer/easy-logging-from-a-jsp-page

Recently curiosity got the best of me and I decided to publish an  app  to the Chrome App store. Most of the information for doing this is  already online  so I won’t provide a how to here. Instead, I will provide some of the highlights and the lessons learned from the process. The apps in the Chrome App Store are web based so you will need to know HTML in order to create anything significant. Read more...

McClane Advanced Technologies provides a course in leadership known as The Leadership Challenge. I am enrolled in that course starting today. That has inspired me to write this small post on followership. Usually most people will make the distinction between followership and leadership, even though they are very closely related. My wife always likes to tell my son's to be leaders not followers. A good leader knows who and what to follow based on certain principles. During my run as lead developer and even prior to that, during my enlistment in the military, I learned that one of the strengths on a team is to have good followers. It is obvious that you must have good leaders, so I that's why I didn't mention that first. Continue Reading

Many times during the year my thoughts wander into reflection of the things that I’ve learned. The new understandings that I’ve gathered. At times, to the point that I even find myself explaining those concepts to kids. I think once you really understand something, the litmus test should be “can you explain it to a 3rd grader?”. You reach that point where it makes perfect sense and it is all so simple. But in the journey to that point it wasn’t really that simple. I found myself teaching binary counting with one hand to my eight year old grand daughter, recently. It took a few minutes but after about 10 minutes, she could count to 31 with one hand. Counting to 31 with one hand is not a small feat. That’s pretty amazing, considering that the average person never learns about any other number systems outside of the decimal number system. I, for example didn’t now anything about it, until I started my computer science degree 14 years ago. And the way it was explained to me back then was ...