Consumer and producer

One of the great advantage of living in the digital age is that it is much more cheaper and easier to become a producer. And by producer I mean producing any kind of content at all. Not just films but also photos, writing and others.

Almost any tom, dick and harry can pick up a computer, register himself on the internet and now he's a published writer read by hundreds or even millions or maybe nobody. Point being is that it is that much easier to put your ideas out there and effectively become a producer.

But then there's another side of the coin. All these contents have to be viewed by someone, liked by someone,  shared by someone. So now it becomes a choice for every single person,  do I want to be a consumer or producer. And most of the time the easy choice is to just be a consumer. Just spend your eyeballs time. Just browsing around, reading around, sharing around. Sometimes even when you have this great idea you think would be good to publish and share with the world,  you tend to put it off. Until finally it doesn't matter anymore, and there's an opportunity lost.

Maybe it's time for me to change.

Writing down my thoughts in public

Haven't written anything for a long time already. So just punctuating the silence with a burst of wacha...

Update to "Solat Malaysia"

Alhamdullillah finally I have done it. I have finally took enough time to upgrade the "Solat Malaysia" app to save the solat schedule for a whole month from e-solat.gov.my. So now it would update to the current day schedule even though the site is currently down (which it comes down a lot, and people start blaming the app for not updating). To be fair, it could be that the app was "part" of the reason the website kept on going down considering that there was thousands of "Solat Malaysia" users at least updating their app every single day (and every single solat schedule app that uses the same update model). It kept on going down so many times that I even though about proposing to JAKIM to let me have a go at properly setting up their server to cache, balance and handle such traffic for free. But never got round to that and finally just upgraded my own software to play nice instead.

Apart from the all important downloading the whole month schedule update, the azan works properly now too. At least properly on my experia active. Before this it relied on a running service to check when it was time to sound the azan, which usually the service gets killed and never start again, causing the azan to not happen. I've finally fixed it to properly set and use an alarm manager and thus there is no background service which might be killed to rely on. Truth be told I have no idea what I was thinking early on when I used the service approach. It is quite silly.

Other things which have improved a bit (but just a bit though) is I spent a little time on streamlining the process to change area and a bit of cosmetic touch up. Finally I've actually aligned the text in the widget.

And as always, the most important part for me from "Solat Malaysia" is learning how to program for the android and it's all still available for the public at https://github.com/abdza/solatmalaysia. Some of it like I said is a little bit embarrassing (like why on earth did I use a service for the azan) but it's also encouraging that I am actually improving my android coding and understanding. Finally I can put this to rest for a while and concentrate on my other projects. Thank you all for the support you gave even when the software really sucked and even I couldn't recommend it to my friends. But now I finally can recommend it to my friends, so Shazman, if you're reading this, install it NOW... :P