Category: Geekitude

CONGO – Motivation is Good!

I’ve been pretty lax on CONGO lately. Other Life stuff as well as being worn after Arisia has put coding on the back burner.

SystemUIServer

But in the last week or two, several folks have asked for updates and new installations, and my “I should get coding again!” bits have been tingling.
This week I had a great meeting with the Arisia registration head, and she and I hammered out a schedule of updates for the next release. I have about a month to implement a bunch of new features – most of which have been burbling in my head for a while, but it’s time to get them coded and released.
There’s been some nice input from other events (some far away, some local) interested in using CONGO, and my path to general release is pretty well established. Having said that, the current code is pretty solid, with documentation, installation instructions, and support available. Want to run it? Let me know, I love testers.
Anyway – code is being checked in and features are slowly getting done. It feels good.

The Age of the Smartphone

A post by my friend Jim made me think about how much smartphones have changed my personal day to day tasks and interractions. This, coupld with another convo I had with one of my cohousing neighbors before a pingpong match (“Hey, you have an iPhone, right? So, what do you do with it?”) gave grist for this posting…
So, it’s a phone, right? What do you do with it?
I…
* Have my entire contact list, email, phone, picture, address, AIM etc information with me all the time. It’s backed up, organized, and constantly updated.
* Am available to my family and friends whenever they wish to reach me, or I wish to reach them. If I don’t want that, I can mute the the phone.
* Am constantly charmed at getting and sending txt messages to my 11yr old son.
* Always have 20-30 books with me that I’m very comfortable reading, even on the smaller screen. (this has been one of the BIGGEST benefits to going with a modern smartphone)
* Have easy access to my email (both work and home) without requiring magic steps of connecting and signing in to the data network
* Have a hundred or so hours of music that is also synced and backed up.
* Very easy access to the 15 or so calendars that I need to be able to see for my duties as a parent, a business owner, an employee, and a community member.
* Able to respond to meeting invites, requests, or suggestions instantly (I get notified as soon as I’m invited to a meeting at work)
* Have a vast array of games to play – some simplistic, some maddeningly addictive.
* Able to keep track of a variety of ‘life’ programs such as calorie / weight tracking, habit trends, etc.
* Be able to look at, audit, and interract with all my bank accounts, including making payments or sending money to folks.
* Easy access to Wikipedia, the font of all knowledge, anytime, anywhere.
* Have a relatively functional camera with me at all times, and the ability to immediately upload / share / post the pictures where people can see them.
This all in a device roughly the size of a pack of playing cards.
The future is here, folks. And it’s pretty damned cool.

Palm’s Deathspiral Continues

According to [this article on money.cnn.com](http://money.cnn.com/2010/03/19/technology/palm_target_price_zero/index.htm?hpt=T2) :
> Morgan Joseph & Co. analyst Ilya Grozovsky, one of the two analysts to cut its price target on Palm shares to $0, said “Palm is essentially an accelerating death spiral.”
It’s not hard to see where Palm lost out. The [Palm Pre](http://www.palm.com/us/products/phones/pre/) is an excellent device. It has wonderful potential, a great form factor, runs Linux. On the feature list, it looks quite good.
It simply appeared two years too late.
Palm’s failures regarding the timeliness of it’s products [has been commented on by me before](https://planet-geek.com/archives/2008/08/iphone-over-pal.html) so I won’t go into them again. But it’s quite obvious by the time they got the Pre out the door, Apple, Rim, Google, and heck even Microsoft had filled up the smartphone market. The market is shaking platforms out and narrowing down the focus – not expanding onto new platforms.
We’ll see if the Pre, and by extension, Palm survives – they’ve weathered bad storms before, but unless the Pre sales level off and hold their own – something I don’t see them doing – I don’t see Palm around in two years.

Paypal is driving me nuts.

Why is Paypal so disorganized?
If you’re a developer, there are something like 6 different sites that are for use by developers. x.com, paypal-community.com, something called custhelp.com (which I was referred to, and sure as hell looks like a phishing site. Or something written by a 12 yr old).
All I want is an answer to why I’m having a problem posting an invoice to their ExpressCheckout, and I’m getting attitude and BS back.
Unbefrigginlievable.

Snake Oil? Visualization of Science vs Health Supplements

Once again InformationIsBeautiful hits one out of the park.
Today’s fun is an interactive page ranking the scientific evidence proving a certain health supplement is effective vs it’s popularity.
Some surprises: Fish oil, folic acid, St Johns Wort, and green tea are well established with proveable scientific evidence to their benefits.
At the other end of the spectrum, Green tea, anti-oxidants, vitamin A and vitamin E have very little evidence as to their effectiveness.

Windows7 – So close!

I’ve been using Windows 7 on my laptop at work for a few months now, and I have to admit, grudgingly, that Microsoft has removed 95% of the irritating problems that make WIndows nigh on impossible to use. The new GUI is smooth, clean, has some very smart behaviours (things that the Linux desktops have been doing for years), and for the most part, it just works.
But.
There’s tidbits that drive me absolutely up a tree, and I’m flat out boggled that Microsoft could make mistakes that I’d expect from a junior hacker whipping up their first app.
Here’s a few highlights.
* One of the BEST enhancements is the ability to grab and drag a window that is maximized. In WinXP, you would have to un-zoom it, move it, then re-zoom it to move it to another monitor. In Win7, a zoomed window can be grabbed and moved. When a window is pushed to the top of the screen, it automatically maximizes. Fantastic. BUT. This behaviour… wait for it… does not work in Office 2007 applications. That’s right, kids, Microsoft’s flagship office suite takes so many shortcuts in their innovative (COUGH HACK) menu and window designs, that it breaks Windows7 default behavior. Stellar work there, guys.
* It’s a universal pattern. A scrollwheel on a mouse will scroll the window or component you’re hovering over. Browser, document, or spreadsheet, move the mouse to a pane, scroll the wheel, and the view scrolls. Except in the Windows 7 explorer (or whatever they call the filesystem browser). Open up the explorer, and resize the window so you have scrollbars on both the left and the right pane. Now scrollwheel on the right – it scrolls. Move the mouse to the left pane, and scrollwheel again. The right pane continues to take the scroll actions. This wouldn’t be a major problem if it weren’t for the next oddity…
* This one isn’t a Windows7 issue in particular, but something that irritates me about Windows in general. Having been using my Macbook Pro for the last 6 months or so, oddities in UIs jump out at me. On a mac, if you click on a non-focused window, the window becomes focused, but the mouse event does not get transferred to the new window. All the click does is make the window active. On windows, the click event does get applied to the window. This is particularly problematic when trying to raise a browse window back to focus, since so many websites have that irritating “click anywhere and I’ll pop up an ad!” – or other javascript idiocy in place.
For the most part, I have to agree with the Penny Arcade folks. “Windows 7. It’s less bad than you expected.”

Review: Altec-Lansing Backbeat 903 – Best Bluetooth Headphones Evuh?


Ever since I got my iPhone 3g, and jumped to OS 3.1, I’ve been searching for the best arrangement of comfort, functionality, price, and audio quality in a set of bluetooth headphones. I’ve tried the Apple earbuds, but I find them extremely uncomfortable. Several others have come down the Amazon.com-driven mail pipeline, but until now, I wasn’t completely happy with the results.
The Altec-Lansing Backbeat 903 (also available from Plantronics under the same name is a permanently linked pair of on-the-ear headphones that provide A2DP and HFP profiles to a bluetooth host (such as an iPhone). The tether between the headsets is part antenna part audio wire. It does not hold the headphones in place, it is simply an interconnect. The headphones sit on the back of the earlobe (similar to older Jabra designs), with an audio component placed over the ear canal (slightly inside it, in fact, but not putting any weight on it).
Personally, I find this arrangement excellent, and I’m bothered that it’s not more widely implemented (in fact Jabra appears to no longer make this style, sad).
The Backbeats use a pair of behind-the-ear components. Each side has an adjustable rubber centerpiece that I found quite comfortable and unobtrusive. The left earpiece contains telephone controls that allow a simple pickup / drop of incoming calls. The right earpiece has music and volume controls.
Of all the headphones I’ve played with, the Backbeats have the most intuitive control setup. In general use, just tapping the outside of the right ear piece triggers ‘play/pause’. Tapping the outside of the left ear piece answers / drops phone calls. Volume control is via a sliding control on the bottom of the earpiece. The right-left functionality means you don’t need to remember what little doodad to fiddle when a call comes in. Left side is phone, right side is music. Simple!
What really brought it all home for me was the comfort level of the headphones. I’ve worn them for 6-8 hours a day for the last few days without feeling any discomfort. Even better, when not listening to music, the non-earfilling ear piece means I can leave the headphones on and carry on a normal conversation. One particular enjoyment was spending an entire day skiing and listening to music, where the simple outside button was easily tapped even through a ski hat and while wearing gloves.
The volume level and audio quality is excellent, even with background noise and wind – I had no problems hearing music while zipping down a trail at 25mph.
In summary, I would highly recommend these headphones to anyone who is looking for lightweight, comfortable bluetooth headphones for their iPhone or other A2DP equipped device.

Article on the State of Microsoft – “The Lost Decade”

Joe Wilcox of Betanews writes an excellent article on why Microsoft is stumbling, and how they lost their initiative after the major gains in the late 90’s and early aughts…

Microsoft executives and product managers — Chairman Bill Gates, above all of them — showed great technology vision for the new millennium. The company was right about so many trends to come but, sadly, executed poorly in bringing too many of them to market. Microsoft’s stiffness, perhaps a sign of its aging leadership, consistently proved its foible. Then there is arcane organizational structure, which has swelled with needless middle managers, and the system of group competition — and in the new century compensation — that worked well for a growth company but not one trying to manage mature markets.

Read the entire article over at betanews.com…

Mail.app vs Thunderbird – Which one?

It’s been about two and a half months since I got my Macbook Pro, and all in all, it’s been a productive, happy relationship. The Mac functions beautifully for all the things I need to get done, and from my side, I haven’t had to spend any time yak shaving. In fact, I can’t think of a time where I really had to dig into the filesystem or look up tech articles to get something configured on the machine. Everything just plain works.
Somewhere along the line I decided to complete the Kool-Aid conversion, and switched from using Thunderbird to using the Mac’s native mail application, collectively known as Mail.app. Why? Well, part of my philosophy on tech platforms is to try to not carry over preconceived notions of “how things should work”, and immediately critiquing a new environment simply because it doesn’t exactly mirror the one I’m used to.
I’ve been using Mail.app for about a month and a half now, and… I’m not impressed. It works, it talks nicely to my personal IMAP server and to Exchange at work, but… sorry Apple, the UI has some pretty painful choices.
In a recent Facebook conversation (based on a tweet I sent out), folks asked what my issues with Mail.app were. So, here they are:
1. The ‘file to folder’ function is irritating to use. Shortcuts change regularly (F3-space-foldername-enter – BLEAH) – it’s better than the default non-existent methods, but still difficult. (Note this is in reference to using Act-On, a plugin for Mail.app that brings some of the functionality of the super-awesome Nostalgy plugin for Thunderbird)
2. Window management is poor. Composition windows are not floating in alt-tab rotation. If I want to flip back to my Inbox to view something, I have to mouse (no KB shortcuts to switch between inbox / composition / whatever)
3. No identity management – I can’t say “Compose this mail, but it’s business mail, so use my Biz address, footer, etc)
4. The thread management is WEIRD. So, If I have a single message, it’s one row in my inbox. If I have 2 in a thread, its’ THREE rows in my inbox. That makes no sense.
5. I can’t find anyway of skipping to the next unread message in the inbox. So I’ll see Inbox(1) and have to scan where in my inbox that one message is.
6. And who the heck determined that control-shift-D means “Send message” ? What, Control-Enter, a keystroke that is nigh on universal, wasn’t appropriate?
I haven’t come up with a good reason to stick with Mail.app yet. One thing I do worry about is contact management. I’m not sure how to manage that path yet, or how Thunderbird contacts will interract (if at all) with the contact manager on the Mac. That being said, I don’t know if I’ve been using the contact manager at all, so it may be a moot point.
The UI issues in Mail.app though are enough to have me close to jumping ship. Any reasons I shouldn’t?

OSX Snow Leopard MySQL startup problem – Fixed!

I do a lot of work on MySQL as part of the CONGO project (oh, and incidentally, as part of my full time job), so I was somewhat stymied when, after my upgrade to Snow Leopard (aka OSX 10.6.0), I was unable to start my local MySQL server – I’d get this:

yacht:~ dbs$ sudo /Library/StartupItems/MySQLCOM/MySQLCOM start
Password:
Could not find MySQL startup script!

It turns out that as part of the MySQL upgrade, the path to the MySQL installation changed (or a symlink was removed, or something to that effect) – at any rate, /usr/local/mysql no longer existed.
Easy enough to fix, just put a symlink in:

yacht:~ dbs$ cd /usr/local
yacht:local dbs$ ls -ldt mysql*
drwxr-xr-x  17 root  wheel  578 Sep  1 00:31 mysql-5.1.37-osx10.5-x86_64
yacht:local dbs$ sudo ln -s mysql-5.1.37-osx10.5-x86_64/ mysql
yacht:local dbs$ ls -ldt mysql*
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel   28 Sep  2 12:52 mysql -> mysql-5.1.37-osx10.5-x86_64/
drwxr-xr-x  17 root  wheel  578 Sep  1 00:31 mysql-5.1.37-osx10.5-x86_64

After making the symlink, the startup script ran just fine:

yacht:local dbs$ cd /Library/StartupItems/MySQLCOM/
yacht:MySQLCOM dbs$ sudo ./MySQLCOM start
Starting MySQL database server
yacht:MySQLCOM dbs$ _

I share this to ya’ll for the betterment of geek-kind. 🙂

TechCrunch’s response to The Apple/Google Voice Fiasco

There’s an amazingly good post over on Slashdot that points out this article on TechCrunch regarding Apple’s rejection continuing review of the Google Voice application. The TechCrunch article does a good job summing up my reaction to Apple’s response to the FCC.
I feel that Apple has stumbled badly here, and is facing a public relations nightmare. Google is widely… well, if not adored, certainly respected (perhaps not by Steve Ballmer of Microsoft) – and while there may be legitimate reasons to be concerned over Google’s continued growth in the industry, making flat out lies about Google Voice (a product that’s getting enormous amount of attention) isn’t going to win Apple any points.

I own a Mac. Hades Ice Skate Order placed.

I’ve blogged before about being tempted by Macs, and in some ways my iPhone could be considered something of a ‘first taste’ of Apple products. But until now I’ve fought hard against really going whole hog into the Mac world.
I has a MacBook
Until now.
I’m the proud owner of what can arguably be called Apple’s top of the line laptop – a Macbook Pro 13.
This is a huge step for me. I am not only investing a significant amount of money into a small device that could easily be considered a ‘toy’, but I’m changing over to an environment I only have a passing familiarity with – OSX.
I’ve owned it for about 24 hours, and I will say – I’ve never worked with a sexier implementation of high end computing in my life. This is by far the fastest computer I’ve ever owned, let alone as my personal workstation, but with all it’s screaming horsepower, it is beautifully designed, with an operating system and environment I find… different, but not irritating. There are things I don’t know how to do, but I’m figuring them out. I have not had a single “oh that’s just plain idiotic” moment. I’m sure they’ll come, but so far it’s just been a series of “Hmm, that’s interesting… what if I… ah, that did it. Cool.” moments.
I’m still installing things, and still setting up my tools. This machine will be my life and blood for the next 3 years, so there’s a lot of work to do to bring it into full functionality. So far I have mail and chat and web stuff working fine, next will be my development environment. After that, virtual machines for running some of the business apps I’ll be using.
A particular thanks to all the people I talked to while making this decision. There was a lot of fantastic feedback and good commentary. It helped me affirm that I’m making the right decision.
Now, off to download Eclipse and get things set up so I can work on CONGO !

Server Maintenance done – we have a new home

New server rack
This morning we moved Homeport’s 3 servers, plus the blog host, over to their new home in Mosaic’s Common House. This is something of an experiment, as we’ll be seeing how well the Charter business cable handles hosted servers. So far so good.
The move went mostly okay, with a time overrun of about an hour and a half due to a mysterious firewall problem that we finally got resolved. All services are up and running now.
It’s nice to have immediate physical access to the boxes. I know I can go into the server room and make configuration changes, add new machines, whatever. The only real problem that has cropped up so far is noise. The 5 existing servers + network hardware makes a heck of a racket (though I suspect the Rackable server is making the lions share). We may have to do some sound remediation – I mean more than the blanket I nailed up over the door.