Posted on June 29, 2022
| 2 minutes
| 403 words
| Dan Syrstad
If you’re not familiar with HTTP and Flutter widget tests, testWidgets() mocks the Dart http.Client to always return an HTTP 400 status! Surprising, I know. The idea is that you shouldn’t make real HTTP calls from your widget tests. But I think 99.9% of the time, this is not the response you want.
Typically, you could mock the HTTP client with MockClient. This will work if you can provide an HttpClient directly to your widget.
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Posted on February 28, 2022
| 8 minutes
| 1573 words
| Dan Syrstad
Over the years, I have used AWS Route 53, CloudFront, and S3 to deploy single-page web apps (SPA). Most of the time the backend API is delivered alongside the web app. This has a lot of advantages:
Eliminates CORS issues Provides superfast delivery of the web app via CloudFront’s CDN CloudFront may provide faster access to your API than connecting from the browser/app to an AWS region. This is unintuitive, but if the CloudFront edge node is closer to your browser, there will be less latency.
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Posted on January 31, 2019
| 6 minutes
| 1161 words
| Dan Syrstad
I was at my wife’s holiday dinner about a month ago and a conversation came up about
Google Home and Amazon “Alexa” (a.k.a “Echo”). Mind you, the rest of the people there are not as technically savvy as my wife and me. Just about everybody had an aversion to these devices. One person at the table said “Dan, they’re always listening right?” I said Google isn’t always listening. The device is listening for the “Okay Google” key phrase inside of the device, then sends what it hears after the key phrase to Google.
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Posted on September 12, 2010
| 2 minutes
| 330 words
| Dan Syrstad
I was enthused about the announcement of the Android Market Licensing Service. This is a step in the right direction to fight rampant piracy. You can actually now use a pirated version as an opportunity to sell your app. If someone downloads a pirated version, you can use the licensing service to detect it and direct them to buy the paid version.
However, there are a couple of problems. First of all, the generic version of the licensing code has been cracked.
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Posted on May 16, 2010
| 1 minutes
| 202 words
| Dan Syrstad
My Dell Studio 15z (Windows 7) has been waking up by itself at night for some reason which I haven’t determined yet. It’s not waking for virus scans. The bad part is it doesn’t shut itself back down. The other night I had it hibernated and it was not plugged in. When I got up in the morning, the battery was dead.
After some searching, I found that it’s a Windows 7 thing.
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Posted on March 1, 2010
| 10 minutes
| 2015 words
| Dan Syrstad
I’ve always been greatly inspired by the U.S. mission to the moon. The moon mission drove my passion for electronics, computers, and science; as it did for many others. I’ve read quite a bit on the moon mission and watched quite a few documentaries on it. I recently watched a couple of episodes of “Moon Machines.” This series caused me to connect some thoughts I’ve had lately - none of which have anything to do with actually being on the moon.
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Posted on May 16, 2009
| 1 minutes
| 90 words
| Dan Syrstad
AlphaMixr, my game for Google Android (T-Mobile G1, et. al.), was reviewed the other day and got 4 out of 5 “droids.” You can read the review at Android Tapp. You can also read AlphaMixr user reviews on Cyrket (an online Android Market browser). In other news, AlphaMixr Demo hit the 10,000 download mark today at Android Market. I think this will pick up even more as additional Android-based devices are released globally this year.
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Posted on February 21, 2009
| 1 minutes
| 91 words
| Dan Syrstad
Google released paid apps today on the Android Market today (2/20/09) and so my game, AlphaMixr (now Syrious Scramble®) was released into the wild. AlphaMixr is a scrambled word game in the spirit of Text Twist and Jumble. It adds another dimension of Global High Scores so you can compete with other players around the world. You can read a glowing review from a friend of mine who’s been a beta tester at This and That Visit SyriousGames.
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