Best practices to run GNU Octave in a Windows box

GNU Octave is a very interesting software to run math computations on your desktop. It's an open-source high-level interpreted language, primarily intended for numerical computations equivalent to Wolphram's MatLab
So, usually you will run this on a Linux box but if you're like me, who has a preference for Windows desktops, you may have a few issues running it. So here is a small recipe that may help:
Install Cygwin (you have to install this lovely piece of software even if you don't want to run Octave)
Choose at lease the following packages:

• octave (and all the packages that you think you will want to use)
• xorg-server
• xinit
• xterm

and let Cygwin setup to select all the dependencies for you.
After you've installed this you can open a Cygwin terminal and then run:

# X   
# export DISPLAY=:0.0  
# xterm 
# octave (inside xterm)
# sombrero(51) (inside octave)
This previous commands will:

• Run the XServer
• Let every X application to run on the local XServer that you've just started, you can add this into your ~/.bash_profile
• Open a new terminal inside this XServer
• Start Octave
• Execute a beauty graph inside the XServer window

Enjoy you maths!

BlueMix + Android Development + IBM Mobile Data - First Steps

Trying to better understand some architecture patterns, I've tried to create my first sample application with IBM BlueMix to host the server side + Android Development to develop the client side + IBM Mobile Data to use as a foundation for the app.

Notice: I'm using the sample code found here as a start

While doing this I've found a couple of issues so here is a quick list of tips & tricks:

Issues with Application Id

At this point in time, properties.json is having precedence over the more specific code:
IBMBaaS.initializeSDK(context, "95569b05-5f16-421a-a9e4-xxxxxxx");

So bear this in mind and check that your properties.json has the appropriate information.
More info here

Issues with "strange" URLs being called

The IBMBaas API will call https://mobile.ng.bluemix.net/data/helo as part of its normal operation. I think you may be interested in this info as it is not yet document.

Issues regarding "cannot find symbol variable IBMBaaS" or some other

Not sure who is at fault here but I've had several issues with the ADT not being able to resolve symbols associated with the IBM libraries. Copying the libraries again nor restarting the ADT didn't work neither. I've found that calling Gradle to clean up the project solved the issues most of the times, so you may try that first before recreating the project.

More to come...

What is it a mashup?

Well, this is a great GREAT example ... imagine the possibilities

Talking about singularity

Follow this link to find some interesting articles about what is called by some as the technology singularity.