LEARNING TO LEARN

Installing Tomcat on Mac can be done in three steps. Following the steps below you can have tomcat running on your Mac in no time. Step 1: Download and Install Tomcat Binaries Download the most recent stable build of Tomcat from an Apache project mirror site . Unzip the binaries into a simple location (I did it in /Users/username/Documents).  By default, the unpacked folder name will be something like "apache-tomcat-x-x-xx".  I recommend changing it to "tomcat" for ease of use. Step 2: Configure the env variables  For our purpose we need to set up JAVA_HOME and CATALINA_HOME variables. Setting up these variables will ensure we don't have to use the complete path name. To set the variables, open a new Terminal window and use the following command to open the system profile for editing. vi ~/.profile Once you've opened the profile, add the following lines to set the JAVA_HOME and CATALINA_HOME variables: export JAVA_HOME=/Library/Java/Home ...

I recently ran into an issue where my commits were not showing up on my github account. Initially I thought it had something to do with settings on my new machine as I started having this issue after I switched machines. However, the public activity page was listing all my contributions just fine which led me believe something else was wrong. After spending some time trying to debug this, I contacted github. They told me I was using an email address 'robin@Robins-MacBook-Air.local' in my .gitconfig which was the system login. Due to this, changes were not being attributed to my account. To change this I ran the following command: git config --global user.email <my_email_on_github_account> The email needs to match an email address in your GitHub account in order for the commits to be properly attributed to you. However, I also wanted my previous commits to be attributed to me. For that I had to add 'robin@Robins-MacBook-Air. local' to my GitHub account here...

 Recently I came across twitter bootstrap( @twbootstrap) a front-end toolkit to develop web applications.  Since Eejot's website needed a facelift, I decided to use wordpress and create my own customized theme using bootstrap.  Here are the steps that I followed:  1. Install WordPress. Here are the instructions to do it  ( wordpress installation guide).  2. Download Bootstrap and extract it ( bootstrap ).  3. Navigate to the wp-content > themes folder.  4. Create a new folder named "eejot_ver1" and paste the bootstrap folder.  5. Once we have done these, we need to create certain files to convert bootstrap files to WordPress template and WordPress file name requirement. We start by creating these files in the same folder we pasted the bootstrap folder in.  index.php header.php footer.php style.css Folder Structure 6. For this website we are going to use the carousel template. The html code can be found under boots...

While implementing menu bar for my app, I realized that instead of using an Options menu(which appears at the bottom of the screen after pressing the menu button) I should be using an Action bar to access options and actions. The main reason behind this was Android's decision to deprecate the "Menu" button as some newer devices don't have it. I didn't wanted my app to be confined to certain devices due to this. I came across ActionBar Sherlock and decided to give it a try. I downloaded the zip from http://actionbarsherlock.com/ . The next step was to add it to my project in eclipse. Here are the steps I followed: i) Create a new android project. Browse to the library folder and hit ok. ii) Right click on the existing project(or create a new project if you don't have one) and go to       properties. iii) Click on Android. iv) Click on Add in the Library section and add the library project from step (i). However, when I cleaned and build my projec...

I created a new android project in eclipse, but didn't change the default icon at the time. Later on I realized I wanted to use Eejot's icon instead of the default. This is how you can do it in eclipse: 1) Open the AndroidManifest.xml file.  2) Click on the "Application" tab at the bottom of the editor.  3) In the text box labeled "Icon" click the "Browse" button at the end. 4) This will bring up a "Resource Chooser" window. Click on "Create New Icon" button. 5) This opens a "Create Asset Set" window.  Enter a new icon name. Hit Next. 6) Click the "image" tab. Hit "browse" and navigate to the image you want to use. 7) If you would like to choose a background color, do so at this time. 8) Hit "Finish" once done. 

"There is an app for it" is a very common phrase nowadays. With that in mind, I decided to make a simple app for a non-profit organization, Eejot, which works towards helping students in the remote areas of Nepal with education. Before I began getting my hands dirty with the code, I created a mock-up of the design using Balsamiq. Here is what I envision it would look like: