Failed to instantiate the default view controller ?

One might run into this error when you delete your default View Controller (which has been automatically created by Xcode when you create a project) and create your own View Controller with new settings.

The following is complete error:

2016-02-03 15:31:24.954 VintageStore[8141:1258879] Failed to instantiate the default view controller for UIMainStoryboardFile 'Main' - perhaps the designated entry point is not set?
Message from debugger: Terminated due to signal 15

This error has a very simple fix:

Select the ViewController Scene. Now, select the inspector panel from the sidebar options. Check the “Is Initial View Controller” attribute option, save the project and build the project again.

Cheers,

SH.

 

How to install Android on VMware Fusion Mac OS X

It’s very interesting that you can actually boot Android on your machine just like any other OS. No kidding, as Android is kind of an another Linux Distro. Is it? No not really, it is based on Linux kernel but it cannot be called as a Linux distribution. Anyways, this is not our topic of blogpost right now, if you want more information on it, look at this Quora question and their answers.

Coming to our topic of interest, one need to have VMware Fusion or a Virtual Box installed on your Mac to install and run Android. We are not going to deal with the Virtual Box this time, it would be a good standalone post for future. So, if you don’t have VMware Fusion, download and install it by going here. It is paid, if you are a student, you can get it for free. If not, you have to purchase it or you can try the trial version or maybe you could torrent it, haha. No, please don’t do that. Who am I kidding, LOL.

Once you got it on your machine. I would like you to visit this amazing site called as android-x86.org, where you can download any version of Android iso images. Hats off for their amazing effort. Very recently, they even added the Android 5.1 too. I haven’t tested that one yet, but I tried playing around with the other latest versions.

Click on the Download page from the side menu, and you can download any of those images from the list. In this post, I am going to show the installation of android-x864.4-r2.iso. 

Download the image from the highlighted link as shown in the above picture.

Now, fire up the VMware Fusion on your machine,

Step 1: Click on the “+” button and select New from the drop down menu.

Step 2: Select the Installation Method as “Install from disc or image” and hit continue

Step 3: Now, click on the “Use another disc or disc image button” and choose the downloaded android iso file.

Step 4: After choosing the image, it should show up in the screen like the following: Hit Continue.

Step 5: You should see the following screen:

Step 6: Click on the “Customize Settings” button and Save the Virtual Machine image to any desired location on your machine:

Step 7: Once you save it, there will be two screens which will pop up, a black screen with a play button, and the other with settings:

Step 8: On, the settings screen, select Hard Disk and set it to how much space you wanna allocate: [I chose the default 20 GB space]

Step 9: Select the processors and memory. It will allow you to allocate the RAM for the OS. I gave something above 4 GB, you can set it to 1 or 2 or 3 based on your RAM.

Step 10: After setting the memory, close the window and click on the huge play button on the black screen. That should show you the following screen:

Step 11: Select the last option – “Installation – Install Android-x86 to harddisk” from the boot menu and hit enter.

Step 12: Now, we have to create a partition. You might see only two options. Don’t worry about it. Choose the “Create/Modify Partition“.

Step 13: We don’t want any GUID Partition Table. So, select the default choice which is “NO” and move on.

Step 14: Now, choose the “New” from the bottom menu. You can navigate through those options by using right and left keyboard keys. Press Enter.

Step 15: Select “Primary” and hit enter.

Step 16: Now, you will see the size of the primary partition as 21,467.68 as I have selected 20 GB at the start of our installation. If you have chosen different size, the value would be different. Just hit enter and proceed.

Step 17: Now, choose the “Bootable” which is the default option and hit Enter.

Step 18: Now, you should see “Boot” under the Flags  as shown in the below picture.

Step 19: As we have made the disk bootable, we have to write these settings to the partition. So, choose Write by navigating with the keys and hit Enter.

Step 20: Now, last step is to confirm and to create a new partition. Type “yes” and hit Enter.

Step 21: Now, navigate to the Quit option in the menu and hit Enter.

Step 22: Its time to select our created partition from the menu and hit enter.

Step 23: Now, select the filesystem for the created partition. Choose ext3 and hit Enter. You can even choose other options too if you need.

Step 24: Select “yes” from the menu and hit enter to confirm that you want to choose ext3 and format the partition. 

Step 25: Now, choose “Yes” to install GRUB boot loader and hit “Enter”.

Step 26: Choose “Yes” to install EFI GRUB2 and hit Enter.

Step 27: Select “Yes” and hit Enter to confirm the format of boot partition.

Step 28: Choose “Yes” to install the /system directory and hit Enter.

Step 29: You should see the installation progress bar like the following:

Step 30: You should see the Congratulations screen. Choose “Run Android-X86“.

Now, you should see the Android booting up and the “ANDROID” splash screen. Your mouse or trackpad can be used to navigate through the whole user interface. The following are the screens after the android has been booted up on the machine. You have to also, enter your google email id and go through the step by step process of setting up your device.

ENJOY 😀

-SH

Remembering Steve

It’s been 4 years since Steve Jobs’s demise. But, he still remains in our hearts.

I am a huge fan of Steve. He is my model person. It was my dream to see him live, to attend his keynote, but it has been left behind as a dream forever.

His work and his vision will be remembered forever.

I always watch his commencement speech to get inspired. I always watch his keynotes to learn and mimic his presentation skills. I always remember him.

Whenever I visit a beach, I never forget to write down Steve’s name remembering him.

At SantaMonica Pier

At Atlantic City Beach

At SantaMonica

At Lake Michigan

I wish he was there, so I could tell him how big a fan I am.

REMEMBERING STEVE JOBS.

Sincerely,

SH.

10 Essential Lessons for Young Entrepreneurs

A fantastic talk has been delivered by Heidi Roizen recently. Today, In the morning I was reading the blogpost shared by the Stanford Business school and I duplicated it here in my post. In her talk for the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Series, Draper Fisher Jurvetson Operating Partner Heidi Roizen (MBA ’83) shared advice for young entrepreneurs on topics ranging from ethics to hiring.

1. Look for hard projects and problems to tackle.
“If you’re not doing something hard, you’re wasting your time,” believes Roizen. She encourages entrepreneurs to challenge themselves by looking for something difficult to take on each day or week. “I can tell you from my entire history of my career, there is nothing that has being as rewarding as being an entrepreneur and coming through the other side of that really, really hard stuff.”

2. Don’t compromise your ethics. Ever.
If you cheat, you will end up regretting it. How you act when you’re faced with ethical decisions sets the tone and culture for the entire company that you’re building.

3. Trust your gut.
Our intuition is built from months and years of observing human nature and interactions; it has been informed sometimes in ways we don’t even understand – so trust in it. Roizen shared the regret she felt when she didn’t go with her gut on some hiring and firing decisions.

4. Strive to NOT be the smartest person in the room.
The most important thing that you’re going to do as an entrepreneur is pick your team. “My goal truly is to be the dumbest person in the room,” said Roizen. You have to take the risk to find people who are so much better at you in certain areas. Your job is to manage and empower your team – not to know more than them.

5. Every time you meet someone, think relationship – not transaction.
“I believe everything is about relationships,” stated Roizen. Strive to build a connection with the people you meet so that when you actually need to ask them for something, you will have a deeper relationship as a foundation and will be able to collaboratively help each other.

6. Expect that life is going to be messy.
“Life actually is really, really random. Bad things will happen to you. You will fail, things outside of your control will happen.” Expect the messiness.

7. Get back up when you fall down.
“It’s not how many times you fall down, it’s how many times you get back up,” Roizen emphasized. “If you fall down and stay down, you will be down for the rest of your life.”

8. Allow randomness into your life.
Go to a meeting without an agenda. Meet somebody new. Allow yourself to be open to random opportunities.

9. Follow the 20-40-60 Rule.
Remember this rule: “At 20, you are constantly worrying about what other people think of you. At 40, you wake up and you say I’m not going to give a damn what other people think of me anymore. And at 60 you come to realize that no one is actually thinking of you.”

The takeaway, says Roizen, is “when you make mistakes, don’t worry about it. Because no one is thinking about you as hard as you’re thinking about yourself.”

10. Be your own advocate.
“If you are in a job you don’t like, you need to think about changing it. You cannot sit in your office and wait for someone to come and bring you an answer.” And if you are involved in something you don’t like, you need to empower yourself to go do something else because no one is going to do it for you.

Source: http://stanfordbusiness.tumblr.com/post/125445855164/10-essential-lessons-for-young-entrepreneurs

How to install Apache Spark on Mac OS X Yosemite

Hello data scientists,

This is a quick installation guide to install the Apache Spark on your local machine. I found the documentation on the website little confusing.

1. Download the Apache Spark tar file from the http://spark.apache.org/downloads.html. [Choose any version you would like from the dropdown menu. I recommend anything 1.3.1 or above]

2. Unzip the file into your home directory.

3. Open your terminal and go to the spark directory by doing cd spark-1.3.1 [Assuming you are in your home directory]

4. Now, simply run

build/mvn -Pyarn -Phadoop-2.4 -Dhadoop.version=2.4.0 -DskipTests clean package

5. It takes at least 10 minutes to complete the whole build.

6. After the build’s completed. It should look something like the following:

7. Now run

./bin/run-example SparkPi 10

8. You should see something like this:

As you can see here, it says the Job has been finished which means you have successfully made it running 🙂

Note: I am assuming you have Java installed properly on your machine. This is very important.

How to make a background image fit the whole window using CSS?

The following piece of code will solve the problem:

body{
background: url(‘../images/black_bg.png’) no-repeat center center fixed;
-webkit-background-size: cover;
-moz-background-size: cover;
-o-background-size: cover;
-ms-background-size: cover;
background-size: cover;
}

Cheers,

SZ

Adding a placeholder to the select tag in HTML5

There is no placeholder attribute for the select tag. But there is a way around it. The following piece of code will help you solve the issue.

HTML Snippet:

<select name=”browsers” required>

<option value=”” disabled selected>Choose a Browser</option>
<option value=”chrome”>CHROME</option>
<option value=”safari”>SAFARI</option>
<option value=”opera”>OPERA</option>

</select>

CSS:

select:required:invalid {
color: #999;
}
option[value=””][disabled] {
display: none;
}
option {
color: #000;
}

Cheers,

SZ

The hot and sexiest job of the 21st Century!

You might be wondering what it is? It’s called “Data Scientist”. How cool is that? You are not just referred or called as a programmer or a software developer, but referred as a “scientist”. Pretty neat right?

It’s in huge demand throughout the corporate America. This year, the demand for data and analytics resources will reach a whooping 4.4 million jobs globally, but only one-third of those jobs will be filled, according to researchers at Gartner. The emerging role of data scientist is meant to fill that skills gap. And the reason for this explosion in what Harvard Business Review terms “data scientists”? Big Data  — a concept and an approach to business management that most large corporations are now embracing.

One of the nation’s largest companies, IBM, believes that “new skills are needed to fully harness the power of Big Data. Though courses are being offered to prepare a new generation of Big Data experts, it will take some time to get them into the workforce. Meanwhile, leading organizations are developing new roles, focusing on key challenges and creating new business models to gain the most from big data.”

Huge Ocean of Data

In this fast paced technological era, when most corporate functions depend on the technology of the internet and or the cloud for easy but secure access anytime, anywhere – data collection is no problem. Consider these statistics:

• Twitter generates 1000 “tweets” per minute.
• Google handles 700,000 “searches” every hour.
• Facebook features 700,000 “status updates” per hour.
• YouTube handles 600 new “video uploads” every minute.
• And “email messages” fly through the technosphere at the rate of 168 million per second.

Big Data is being generated by everything around us all times. Every digital process and social media exchange produces it, Systems, sensors and mobile devices transmit it. Big Data is arriving from multiple sources at an alarming velocity, volume and variety. This is a true statement that “Early adopters of Big Data analytics gained a significant lead over the rest of the corporate world.”

“We now live in the age of Big Data,” says Cynthia M. Wong, a senior researcher for Internet and Human Rights. “Our communications and activities routinely leave rich digital traces that can be collected, analyzed and stored at low cost. In parallel, commercial imperatives drive a range of companies to amass vast stores of information about our social networks, health finances and shopping habits. The plummeting cost of storage and computing means that such data can be retained for longer and mined for future, unforeseen purposes.“

Know, data collection is no problem but data management is. What do you do with mountains of data available to your learning organization? How do you determine what is relevant to learning? How do you incorporate it into a overall learning plan and, subsequently, into individual learning initiatives? Those are daunting questions, even for the most astute and technologically oriented learning professional. To extract meaningful value from Big Data, you need optimal processing power, analytics capabilities and skills.

RISKS VS. BENEFITS:

When mountains of proprietary data are being stored, security is always a question. Because corporate investments are put on line when the decision is made to integrate Big Data into a corporate philosophy, the first question that C-level executives might ask is, “Is building an advanced analytics capability really worth it?” Until now, the answer to that question has not been resolved.

But a recent Bain & Co. study found that early adopters of Big Data analytics gained a significant lead over the rest of the corporate world. Examining more than 400 large companies, Bain found that “those with the most advanced analytics capabilities are out performing competitors by wide margins.”

Early adopters are:

• 2x as likely to be in the top quartile of financial performance within their industries.
• 5x as likely to make decisions much faster than market peers.
• 3x as likely to execute decisions as intended; and
• 2x as likely to use data very frequently when making decisions.

BIG DATA AND LEARNING:

The first thing that managers of corporate learning programs must realize is that you are not in this quest alone. You, your business leaders and your information technology leaders must join forces to realize the value of the data at hand. And it won’t hurt to have one of those sexy “data scientists” on loan from the business side.

“Learning adds veracity and value to Big Data,” says Eric Burner, chief technologist at GP Strategies Corp. “Learning data can include the time of day during which it is referenced, the format/device from which it is consumed, where it’s being consumed, what kind of ratings the different lessons are receiving, how long it’s on the user’s screen, and how many starts and stops the user is making to consume it. It can tell you what your learners like and dislike.”

Where do you find existing Big Data? According to Douglas Laney of Gartner, unused sources of Big Data can be found beneath your feet in the form of operational data you collect during the normal course of business. You can start with data that your learning management system already spits out.

“Increasingly,” Laney says, “organizations are looking to extend this data with additional sensors or instrumentation.” Many organizations are also finding value in the intersection of operational data with externally available data. This external data comes from a growing cadre of syndicated data providers and public data, made available by government open-data policies and initiatives by many western countries over the past few years.” Of course, Laney adds, organizations should already be tapping into social media streams. “If you are not listening, then you won’t be leading,” he notes.

Good Learning data:

• is relevant to the user;
• comes in smaller chunks;
• is simple;
• is always available (just-in-time);
• is flexible;
• fits in the work stream; and
• provides a means of interaction.

Furthermore, IBM believes that “insights from Big Data can enable all employees to make better decisions, deepen customer engagement, optimize operations, prevent threats and fraud, and capitalize on new sources of revenue.” But escalating demands require a fundamentally new approach to architecture, tools, and practices.

CONCLUSION:

Big Data’s most important corporate function is to increase the effectiveness of decision-making within the organization and, more specifically, within your learning/training department. It will help you determine the programs and initiatives that are best for your learners, how to proceed with their implementation, and hot to adjust them over time.

“Big Data analytics is the application of analytic capabilities (descriptive, diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive) on enormous, varied or rapidly changing datasets”. The application of analytic capabilities combined with increased scope, content, and context of big data – particularly when merged with more traditionally structured datasets – has drastically increased the variety of use cases for decision support, and in some cases, decision automation.

Source: Elearning magazine.

Cheers,

SZ

How to remove the white background from a logo?

Removing white background from a logo is really useful sometimes. It is annoying when you have a white patch behind the logo. There is a simple hack for this. We cold use magic tool from photoshop and can make it possible, but we could also use Microsoft powerpoint which is lying around in our applications.

Its quite simple. Open Microsoft Powerpoint and create a new slide. Now, go to the insert menu and click on the picture to insert a picture. Choose the appropriate image. After inserting the image, select the image on the slide and choose the color option from the picture tools menu. In the color drop down, select “set transparent color” and it should show a pen like cursor. Now, click on the white background of the image. That’s it, it magically removes the white background. It works most of the times but sometimes it doesn’t. You can right click on the image and select save as picture to save the image to your desired location. If you open the exported image in a any kind of image browsers, you can see that the white background has been removed.

Note: I will add screenshots to the post soon so that it will be much more easier to follow the steps.

Cheers,

SZ

Centering an Image in CSS

I have been working with some designs and I had to center an image in few pages. Previously I used to use <center> tag around the image tag and it works like a charm. But the <center> tag is deprecated in HTML5 and there is a beautiful way around to do this using CSS. Add the following code to make the image aligned exactly to the center of any web page.

img{
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
text-align: center;
}

This piece of code works like a charm.

Cheers,

SZ