Just got a new phone last week, and its one of the new Nexus phones

I recently bought a Nexus 5x from our favorite search engine, Google. Incase you didn't know I am an Android fanboy, to really specify I am an apple hater. Outside of iPhones my options are *droid or Windows Phone. Every time I have used someone else's windows phone I am honestly stricken at how great it is, but I stuck with what I know and love, which is android.

Why Nexus?

As you all are aware there are a large number of Android devices in the ecosystem that is android. The flagship phones of this year seem to be the Galaxy S6, LG G4, and various other phones that are not Nexus phones. The competitor to these phones in the Nexus line would have to be the Nexus 6p; Which is larger, and more powerful than the 5x.

UI

My huge gripe about non nexus phones, is that they are not really Android. Well they are, but they usually come with a ton of weird apps, and a non-stock UI. The UI that google ships for Android stock is fantastic. The OS looks crisp, clean, and somewhat futuristic without being tacky. Other UI's such as TouchWiz cannot even compete, and yet these manufacturers insist on adding this experience to their phones.

Updates and security

There is no doubt that Nexus phones get updates much faster than non-nexus phones. Incase you were not aware, Nexus phones get their updates pushed directly from google. These phones often receive more updates than non-nexus phones, which have to get updated though the manufacturer, working in tandem with the carrier. Google around yourself, and find out which phones got updated to Lollipop, or even Marshmallow. Most of the nexus phones have been kept up to date.

The updates are not just about features. Updates contain security fixes. At the end of the day a Smartphone is really just a computer that can place phone calls. Like any other computer, smartphones are susceptible to hacks and can be compromised. Updates can often contain security enhancements to reduce the surface area of attack to these phones, allowing your personal information to be stored safely.

Review?

Ok so I should actually review the phone right?

The Nexus 5x is the sequel to a phone (Nexus 5) that was a cheap phone that really competed with phones twice its price. The 5x fails to live up to that a little as the specs are at best what a good phone was last year. That being said this phone is extraordinary in both performance, size, and quality.

The 5x is about as fast as most Android phones. The camera is a 12 MP camera that takes pretty solid pictures. The battery life seems to last roughly 24 hours for me just doing daily activities on the phone. The fingerprint scanner can wake the phone from sleep, and is located in the centre on the back. This is a very convenient place that is usually where my index finger lands. This Nexus phone gets GPS locks every time, and never seems to stop performing beautify. Other phones such as the 6p would probably out perform it if you sat them side by side, but day to day you wouldn't notice any slowness in the 5x. Overall I'd say its a good buy for the value.

The future

I'd really love to see a day when manufacturers would stop putting custom UI's ontop of Android. I'd love to see a day where all Android phones get updates direct from google. Until that time we must live with what we have, which is a weird market place in Android land. iOS users do not have to worry about such things, and I believe the same needs to happen for Android.

I recently ported my ghost blog to hexo, and it was pretty easy.

Checkout my other hexo blogs:

• Hosting hexo in Azure webapps
• Why I moved from Ghost to Hexo

Getting Started with hexo

To get started with hexo run the following commands:

• npm install -g hexo-cli
• hexo init
• npm install

This will drop many files, and folders. The primary one we are going to talk about is the _config.yml. You will want to start by filling out the _config.yml file. Name your blog, give a descripton, etc.

Porting your blogs over

To get your data over you will need to go to this url: http://yourblog.com/ghost/settings/labs/ and click the export button. Place the json file at the root of your hexo blog, then run.

• npm install hexo-migrator-ghost --save
• hexo migrate ghost NameOfYourExportFile.json

Your posts should drop in the posts folder, but the tags will need fixing. Open atom (or another editor that can do find replace in a directory) and replace tags: | with tags: in all the files.

Now that it is done we need to fix the paths to your images. Download your images (if you are using azure you can get them via ftp), and place the folder in the source directory.

Now run hexo server, browse to port 4000. Your blogs should appear.

Backward compat. urls

We need to make some modifications to make sure the urls are backward compatible.

Set the tag_dir to tag, in ghost the path to tags is /tag.

if your post urls were just /Title then put :title/ in the permalink setting. Otherwise adjust the urls for the proper date format.

RSS

You will want to have an rss feed. You will want to npm install hexo-generator-feed --save

You can then add the following to your config.yml

feed:
    type: rss2
    path: rss
    limit: 0

If you were like me you registered your ghost rss feed to /rssinstead of /rss.xml. I have no perfect answer to fix this, but I used azure's Url redirect to redirect /rss to /rss.xml.

<configuration>
  <system.webServer>
    <rewrite>
          <rules>
              <rule name="SpecificRewrite" stopProcessing="true">
                  <match url="^rss$" />
                  <action type="Rewrite" url="public/rss.xml" />
              </rule>
          </rules>
  </system.webServer>
</configuration>

If you are using github pages you can use the jekyll-redirect-from gem.

If you have read this blog for any length of time, you know I am a fan of Azure. I thought about using github pages with hexo, but github pages only supports 1 doman name. I could start 301 redirecting my other domains, but I really didn't want to do that.

Blogging right? I can't believe I somehow stuck with it all this time. Even when I took a long break I still kinda blogged. I got started after being ~~convinced~~ inspired by a coworkers passion to start blogging. To say the least he, and I have very similar tastes, and he turned me on to ghost, and the ghostium theme. After a year and a half of Ghost blogging I have left Ghost.

So I know I do a lot of blogging about C#, or JavaScript, but I actually do a lot of nodejs apps as well as other languages. For a very long time I have not found the stack of my dreams. .NET has always been very close but there were multiple things about the app model that I was not a fan of. I think NancyFX has been the closest framework to my dreams in .NET land.

Around 6 months ago I started a project, and part of that project was to move us away from an old search tool to use elasticsearch.

Around a year ago I joined a new team where I work, and this team was starting to undertake a full rewrite of their code. We were going from a full c#/mvc app to a tiny c# api, and a very big SPA.

Early one one of the huge things to do was to make sure that our JavaScript error logs could land in our Log4Net infrastructure. I started to write something to do just that, and as I was coding I quickly realized this was less trivial that it sounded. We had something internal we could use, but it was tied to a lot of other code that we didn't want to pull in.

I started Bingling around and I stumbled across jsnlog. JSN log lets you quickly wire up your client side logs to your server. I have been able to get PR's into the code base and the guy behind it has been very friendly to me when I have had questions.

So Beta 8 was recently announced, and I thought I'd update DotNetMashups to beta 8.

In case you havn't been paying attention, recently it was announced that helios was no longer a thing. Helios was the loader for ASP.NET 5 in IIS. Instead they are using the http Platform Handler to proxy the connections to kestrel.

So I thought that this was going to be a difficult update. I loaded the announcements repo in my browser and got to work. You can view the Pull request here.

So one thing that kills me a lot in c++ is the switch statement. As you all know switch statements look like the following.

auto s = 0;

switch(s)
{
   case 0:
      doSomething();
      break;
   case 1:
     doSomething1();
     break;

}

So I have started learning c++ recently, and as a .NET/Java developer I always want to write the following code.

var s = new myClass().

In c++ you have to manage memory yourself, there is no garbage collector.

If you do not use the new keyword var s = myClass() you will create that class and assign it to on the stack.

Any stack variables will be cleaned at the end of the block, so in this case s will be cleaned. However if you use var s = new myClass() s will be allocated onto the heap and must be deleted, otherwise memory leaks will occur.

To clean the variable you must call delete when you are done with the variable, this will cause the memory in the heap to be cleaned.