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Hi, I'm Stephen Nicholas.

And this is my blog. I'm a software engineer by trade (but mostly for fun) with a wide variety of experience and interests. Some of which I'll write about here.

Posts

One month of plastic is how much?!

Recently at work, someone posted about their plans to go plastic-free for July, encouraging others to do the same. This is something I've been interested in trying for a while...

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Stephen Nicholas

Why do developers need to see estimates?

Estimates provide value, but also risk. By limiting the use and visibility of those estimates, we can help minimise one aspect of the risk, while hopefully retaining the value...

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Stephen Nicholas

LinkedIn-dentation & Formatting

Last week I decided to update my LinkedIn profile and I was surprised by the lack of formatting options. Luckily I found a few ways around that...

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Stephen Nicholas

Power Profiling: HTTPS Long Polling vs. MQTT with SSL, on Android

A follow on from my previous post: 'Power profiling: MQTT on Android'. This time I decided to look at the power usage of SSL enabled MQTT in comparison to HTTPS Long Polling.

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Stephen Nicholas

The Cost of Kindness

An experiment to see how much it would cost me to be a nicer person.

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Stephen Nicholas

Android: Removing the green onclick border

For a while now, I've been finding the green highlight / box that the Android WebView displays when you click something particularly annoying. Here's how to get rid of it.

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Stephen Nicholas

A simple SSL enabled Comet style Pub/Sub server with Node.js

My first attempt at programming with Node.js: a simple SSL enabled Comet style pub/sub server, in just over 100 lines of code.

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Stephen Nicholas

Android: Attaching files from internal cache to Gmail

How to use a custom ContentProvider to attach files from an application's internal cache to a Gmail message (as the standard way to reference files as attachments does not work).

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Stephen Nicholas

Reclaiming Windows Audio from Android Emulators & VMs

Recently, every time I run the Android Emulator, I lose all sound output on my laptop (running Windows 7) and have to restart to get it back. It's very annoying. But luckily the solution is fantastically simple...

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Stephen Nicholas

Finding processes on (i.e. ps for) Windows

As part of creating some test infrastructure for a work project the other day, I was looking for a good way to find any existing / leftover processes, so I could ensure things were in a clean state at the start of each test run. On Linux this is pretty easy, using ps, but I couldn’t find a good way to do it on Windows.

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Stephen Nicholas