Noise from the Basement

After upgrading to Visual Studio Xamarin 4.1 from 4.0 our TeamCity build suddenly stopped working.  Actually it was working but won’t stop working.  The build would get hang after rebuilding out solution to create the IPA file.

The step in question looked like:

The TeamCity logs looked like:

[09:23:28][Foo\Foo.iOS\Foo.iOS.csproj] _SayGoodbye
[09:23:28][_SayGoodbye] SayGoodbye
[09:23:28][SayGoodbye] Compute signature for bin\iPhone\Release\FooiOS.app

The build would also hang if I logged into the build machine and ran the msbuild via the command line.  However, the build would not hang if built via Visual Studio.

I have been mastering small (and some medium-sized) goals, like working out every other day, purchasing a study manual for the APCAT (the written entrance exam for EPS), volunteering twice weekly at the John Howard Society, and driving around with a tiny police cruiser perched on my dash (for good luck, of course), to name a few. Committing to do each one of those is far easier than declaring, “I want to be a police officer,” and then feeling hopelessly lost and overwhelmed because the entire endeavour is so daunting that one might not know where to start.

As we continue to work on Goal Buddy I’ve been reading books and research papers about goal setting and its cousin productivity.  Productivity is just a fancy word for saying “get stuff done”.

Some interesting articles/podcasts about productivity I recently read/listened to are:

Freaknomics: How to be More Productive

Joshua Kennon: The Secrets of Highly Productive People

However, these articles don’t hold a candle to this best article about productivity.  Be warned that reading this article will shake you to your core.  You will re-think how you approach work and view your co-workers in a different light.  Make sure you are sitting down.

Support can make or break a goal. When we circulated a survey several months ago, asking the general public how (and if) they would use an app to help them achieve a goal, a large number of respondents indicated that lack of support was a primary reason that they had not met goals in the past. Support often comes from an external source - another human being close to you, typically - but powerful support also exists in electronic guises like social media platforms, forums, online discussion groups, and in apps.

[caption id=“attachment_1141” align=“alignleft” width=“169”] The very first Splash Screen. That sun can see dead people.[/caption]

I spent the better part of last Sunday doodling on an ancient version of Photoshop (ver. 5.5, but I’m dating myself), working on the welcome screen for our Goal Buddy App. I laboured over rolling green hills (going to town with the ‘gradient’ tool), soaring mountains (gradient!) and ethereal blue sky (gradient!). It’s the first serious version of the splash screen yet, and I wouldn’t argue that the previous version was a strange three-way mix of scary, hilarious and creepy.