Dick Wall's Blog

Technology Refresh

2011-02-04T21:45:00.000-08:00

Everyone makes new year's resolutions right? Well, probably not everyone, if truth be known, and I don't as a rule either.

However, since the turn of the new year, I have effectively had a complete technology refresh, some of it planned, and some of it just because it needed to happen.

My first refresh was slightly ahead of the new year. I ordered a Nexus S Android handset online the morning it came out, and got it delivered next day. I love it, although you can tell as a Nexus S owner, you are pretty much the beta tester for new releases of Android. This is true with Gingerbread as well - from glitches with battery life in Maps 5.0, through occasional (once a week) weird radio issues, to ringtones that seem to reset if you have to restart the phone. I hear an update is coming and I look forward to it, although in truth I am pretty happy with the package in spite of the occasional irritations - the good outweighs the bad by a lot.

The next replacement was a casualty: my much loved but sadly much abused HP pavilion laptop. After a couple of years of pretty heavy duty, I managed to smack the screen after a presentation at a developer conference, and the screen developed a subtle but annoying glitch on the bottom of the screen. I took it in to a local repair place (ITM computing, by the way - they were highly rated on the internet, but they certainly screwed the pooch on my poor laptop - I would steer clear of them if I were you). Anyway, after they got finished with my laptop, the screen did actually work again, but now the bezel routinely separates from the rest of the screen. I no longer felt able to give it the same hard life it had before, so it was time for a new laptop as well.

Instead of doing what I normally do, looking around for the best deal I can find at the time, I went instead for listing out the specs that I really wanted in a laptop, which included a long (8 hour) battery life, the best processor I could find (settled for a top of the range core i5 - very impressive performance) and portability. What I ended up with was an Asus U43JC Bamboo - a wonderful laptop - the best I have ever owned, which will give me a real 7-8 hours on battery, runs Linux well, has the fast processor, and as a bonus is very slick looking (my macbook owning friends can no longer poo-poo it as ugly as they typically used to do with my previous laptops). It's green too - a strong focus on recyclable materials both in the laptop and the packaging (the bamboo is real - many of the panels are made from the sustainable plant, and look amazing as well as being an eco-friendly choice).

With amazon prime, I stumped up the extra three bucks to get it delivered next day (in time for the trip to the Codemash conference in Ohio). Total - $1003 - still about the same as the most affordable macbook you could get, and a much nicer spec as well as being a bit different.

My EEEPC continues to live on, I swear it is indestructible. Despite being my workhorse for close to 3 years, being hauled around in my bicycle pack, packed in hand luggage or thrown around in a suitcase for more trips than I can count, being used with one hand while help by another, picked up by its screen on numerous occasions and many other indignities suffered, just like a timex it takes a lickin' and keeps on tickin'. That said, the EEEPC also received a technology refresh in the form of the excellent Jolicloud - an Ubuntu based operating system tailored for netbooks, with a nice integration between native Linux applications and web applications (strongly recommended if you are looking for a way to breath new life into your Netbook).

The most recent addition to the new stack is a Google Cr48 ChromeOS laptop which I picked up yesterday, and already I am amazed by the versatility of applications available for it that (of course) run on the web (or "in the cloud" if you want to be all trendy). For example, I can use teamviewer or VNC on the web to remote into my workstation, write "distraction free", even offline, watch videos, listen to music, play books, create presentations, etc. etc. I can even edit source code (anyone with the Chrome browser should check out SourceKit for a pretty neat solution to editing source code that works with Dropbox and uses Bespin from the Mozilla project for the source code editing). For a simple, on the go, just get online and do stuff device, it really is quite compelling. Long term I suspect I may go back to the EEEPC running Jolicloud, but for the time being it certainly is fun to experiment with.

Perhaps the nicest thing about my technology refresh is the way everything works so well together. The Nexus S, with T-mobile service, gives me both seamless USB tethering and a myfi (wireless hotspot). This works flawlessly and without setup with all of my devices. On Linux, I can plug in the phone via USB and get internet connection even while the phone is recharging. I can also go completely wireless with the myfi, and the kindle can connect that way as well. With a 2 hour train ride on the days I head in to the SF office, I can work the entire way, on the internet, listening to music and lost in the code. I am sure I could do this with a certain other technology stack, but it would also cost me about twice as much, for all the hardware and for the connection plan on the phone as well.

Apple Alternatives

2010-10-23T17:20:00.000-07:00

I have been an Apple computer fan for many years - in fact longer than most, through the (very) skinny times when the share price was junk and it looked like the future was dark indeed, if there was any future at all. I have owned macs since the very early models, fond memories of my venerable IIci still stick with me, I had a performa 6400 juiced up to the eyeballs with so much extra circuitry that it weighed twice as much as when I bought it. I have owned powerbooks, macbook pros, a macbook air, a mac book mini, an iPhone, an AppleTV (version 1) and those are just the ones I can remember.

Lately though, the shine has worn off. We have had a bit of a breakup, and like any really good breakup the blows seem to keep coming. From the Apple control over what I may run on my iPhone, through the abandonment of the AppleTV v1 (and the apparent expectation that like a good little customer I will come back for more and buy a v2), to the recent announcement that Java (the platform I have made a career around for the last 15 or so years and, continue to do so) will be deprecated on Mac OS X, it is clear that Apple's direction and my own no longer align even a little.

This leaves the question of what alternatives exist though. Even with the stifling level of control over my decisions exercised (on my behalf?) by Apple, I am honest enough to admit that, when you use it as recommended on the packet, Apple hardware does work very well indeed. For example, the AppleTV, iPhone and Mac Mini combination formed a very slick (if pretty limited) entertainment and multimedia back bone, the experience gave a nice portable remote control through the iPhone interface, the media selection available over the oh-so-silent mac mini (always running) and the AppleTV connected to the TV and audio receiver in the front room filling the house with sound (and sometimes movies, rented from Apple - that side of AppleTV always worked nicely, but it was a bit of a one trick pony).

Apparently I am not the only one thinking along these lines. Gizmodo, PC Mag and others offer plenty of reading on the matter. What follows is my own list of alternatives in use right now as alternatives for the way I used the Apple products in my life. I will start with the easy ones first.

Work / Home Computers

This is dead easy - for almost as long as I have been a mac fan, I have been a Linux fan (indeed, I have been a unix user much longer). Ubuntu linux has come on in leaps and bounds in recent releases and on most of my work machines I have been developing in Ubuntu for several years, in fact I stopped buying mac laptops some time ago in favor of more powerful, less expensive alternatives that run Linux well, and have been perfectly happy. I hear all the time how desktop linux is still too hard for regular people to use (usually from friends who are actually developers) but I wonder how many of them have actually tried? For me, Meerkat (the latest version of Ubuntu) is wonderfully friendly, super easy to install, lightning fast to use (especially on much faster hardware that often costs half of what the Apple alternative hardware does) and in recent incarnations, quite pretty as well.

So this one is easy - commodity PC hardware running Ubuntu Linux. As a bonus, the Java platform works superbly on Linux, and will continue to do so. What is new is that I have begun stripping Mac OS X off of my remaining Apple computers and replacing them with Linux (which works just fine with the hardware and also makes the boxes feel faster than under OS X). This future-proofs these computers beyond the useful life they would otherwise enjoy (once Java starts falling behind or is removed from the Mac OS completely). It goes without saying that Linux allows me to do much more with these machines for their uses here, for example I can share any directory across my home network easily, on any protocol (Mac OS X restricts the directories you may share using, for example, Windows file sharing protocols, unless you buy the server version of OS X - Linux of course has no such restriction - very useful for sharing my large music collection that is kept on an external drive with all of the machines and devices in my house).

iPhone

This has been covered already on my blog, but several months ago I switched to Android (a Nexus One device on T-mobile) and have never looked back. I won't rehash in great detail, but the Nexus One does quite literally everything I used my iPhone for and a lot more, including Google latitude updates constantly running in the background (so that Jackie can see where I am and how long before I get home in the evening, with no effort necessary on my part), integration with Google voice that even seamlessly takes over international calls and charges me 2c per minute through the Google voice plan when I dial to the UK direct, tethering and wifi hot spot included in the regular T-mobile plan and probably a whole bunch of other stuff I take so much for granted now that I don't even think about it (note that I can even tether my Kindle to the Nexus One wirelessly and download books and content anywhere, same with my netbook or laptop).

Recording studio

For a long time the Apple Mac Mini has been the computing cornerstone of my home recording studio (used to record the Java Posse podcast

It still is, but now it runs Ubuntu! Making the switch was dead easy, and the result is a Mac Mini that runs faster, cooler and more reliably. It will no longer talk to my stock AppleTV (which is one of the reasons I modded the AppleTV - more on that later), but it does serve as the backbone for my home multimedia system too, and as a bonus makes all of my music available to me anywhere in the world where I have an internet connection. Skype runs just fine on Linux for video conferencing, pulse audio in recent versions of Linux gives a more flexible alternative to Apple's core-audio for recording purposes (it's like using Mac OS X with audio hijack built in), and Ubuntu has had its own app-store (called Ubuntu Software Center) for a few years now which makes finding and installing software a breeze (and removing it without trace similarly easy too).

As well as the Mac Mini works with Ubuntu though, I probably won't buy another. Options like the Acer Aspire Revo (roughly the same power, much less expensive) or the System 76 Meerkat Ion (still less expensive, much more power) offer far more bang for the buck. I will keep the Mac Mini for a while and then replace it with something like these machines (or whatever is available that's even better at the time).

Home Entertainment

This was the big one to work out. As mentioned, the combination of iPhone, AppleTV and Mac Mini made a slick, if pretty limited, home entertainment system with nice features like genius playlists, remote control from the iPhone, access to my whole music library and so on. Once I got rid of the iPhone and converted the Mac Mini to Ubuntu, the AppleTV was not a lot of use (Apple does not allow the AppleTV to connect to any other kind of server than iTunes, through use of a closed API).

The first thing to do was to jailbreak the Apple TV and install Boxee on it. This alone made the AppleTV ten times more capable than it ever was in stock form, allowing things like Pandora, Hulu and many other internet sources of entertainment to be used from the box. It also meant that the box could once again see my entire music collection over the network from the Ubuntu mac mini. Playback of web flash content is even possible, although the horsepower is not quite enough to make it super smooth (it will do at a pinch if you just want to catch up with an episode of something you missed), however alternative internet content that uses one of the formats it understands natively (h264 for example) play back very nicely, so sources like CNet TV and Revision 3 work brilliantly. Music playback of Pandora, Live 365 and many others are flawless too.

I then picked up an old Roku Soundbridge and installed Logitech's Squeezeserver to drive it (the Roku can emulate a squeezebox, although I would recommend people looking to do this look into the real Squeezeboxes as well, since they can do some tricks like sync with one another in different rooms to provide seamless entertainment throughout the entire house - I love the Roku but I will probably upgrade at some point).

Remote control from the Nexus One is also possible, using an app called SqueezeCommander which I have to say is every bit as slick and easy to use as the iPhone Apple Remote was.

The result, between Ubuntu, Roku Soundbridge and SqueezeCommander is a home entertainment backbone that is every bit as nice to use as the Apple stack was, and can do a whole lot more besides (like playing BBC radio streams for example). Genius playlists were a little tricky until I found the MusicIP plugin for Squeezeserver (yes - it has plugins that are easily installable from the web UI - much like an app store you might say :-) ). In truth, this was a little fiddly to set up, and I would say there is an opportunity for an even easier genius playlist plugin for squeezeserver, and maybe there will be in time. On the upside, MusicIP is more configurable and seems to produce better mixes than Apple's Genius (I don't think I will be the only one to notice that certain tracks *always* seem to get played in Genius no matter what the seed song - it just doesn't feel quite random enough, and of course you can't change that - on MusicIP of course, you can change it to your preferences).

Final Thoughts

There are other advantages to choosing alternatives to Apple. For one, you start getting out of the "it must work with Apple" mindset. For example, earlier in the year we picked up an HD Tivo, which actually looks like it might be the one box that can unify the video media experience in the front room. It can also stream movies found on the network (using a Tivo server that runs on Linux and scans your machine for videos which the Tivo can then see easily). If Tivo can just work out some kind of deal for Hulu content, they would indeed be the one box.

Likewise the Google TV looks very interesting, and has the advantage of integrating very well with my Android phone. Since the new AppleTV 2 will be pretty much useless with my current setup (since nothing else in the house uses Apple now), it is much more likely that we will pick up the Google TV at some point, and I have much more confidence that it will continue to work in a heterogeneous environment and continue to be supported (not to mention that it already allows third party apps to run).

It's also worth mentioning that pretty much every alternative device in use is running Linux. From the Tivo, through the Roku soundbridge, to the Nexus One, Linux has arrived, it's already everywhere, and indeed it really is the alternative to Apple.

Switching to Android: Part 2 - Apps

2010-04-24T19:56:00.000-07:00

In the second part of my Switching to Android series, I am going to talk about the apps, including my own (see left - I just uploaded Andro Flubber to the marketplace where people can download it for free).

Apps were probably my biggest hangup with switching to Android, at least now that the hardware is (in the case of the Nexus One at least) slick enough to feel good in use. Apps and the fact that almost every music appliance we have at home has an iPod/iPhone connector on it anyway - more on that particular hangup another time.

So, when I got the Nexus, my first task was to find apps, in some cases equivalents to those I was already using on the iPhone, and in other cases, new apps that you can not get on the iPhone for various reasons (often because Apple doesn't let them through the approvals process).

Let's take a look at some of the app equivalents for those I used heavily on the iPhone first:

Music and multimedia apps: I came to rely on music applications like Pandora, Last.fm, various internet streaming radio and of course the built in music player on the iPhone. Happily there are equivalents for all of these in Android, and they work better (for one thing, they continue to play music when you switch to another application). I currently have installed on Android: Last.fm (with scrobbling for music you play in other apps too!), Pandora, XiiaLive, Slacker, Listen (for podcasts, includes background downloading), bTunes (a replacement player for music on the SD card) and RadioTime. There are many more, perhaps I am missing some good ones, but these have all my uses covered.
Next most used on iPhone was eReaders, in particular Stanza. Sadly there is no direct equivalent for Stanza yet (this is an area where Android is definitely behind right now). Aldiko and WordPlayer are both excellent reading apps, but they don't have the content deals worked out with fictionwise, books on board and others right now to be able to purchase and download books, and as much as I like reading classics, I like reading bestsellers too. eReader.com lets you buy books and has an application for Android, but it's a bit clunky - nowhere near as slick as Stanza. Kobobooks is looking hopeful too, but their reader is so immature as to be unusable (for example, it goes back to the beginning of the book each time unless you remember to bookmark it before closing the app - heaven help you if a call comes in and you forget). If Aldiko can get some content deals, or Kobobooks can improve their player, or if (as I hope) Stanza gets in on the act, it will be a great solution. For now, Android gets a C+ for effort, but eReading is something I used my iPhone for a great deal. One little bonus though is that WordPlayer will read the books out to you using text to speech - a neat feature, but of course not for best-sellers just yet.
Next up in my list of importance is Navigation/Maps. Android is almost universally ahead here. Of course, there is the killer feature - turn-by-turn directions in Google maps (with voice, street view, etc.) but in addition there is Latitude (which was rejected by Apple). Latitude on Android rocks - it updates my position for my friends to see in real-time if I turn it on (on the iPhone, you have to visit the web page to get your position updated). Layar is another great app - overlaying the world with virtual labels for all sorts of data. MultiMap and OruxMaps have great support for OpenStreetMap data (including OpenCycleMap), and finally Google's My Tracks rounds out my favorites - tracking and recording of your rides, runs, hikes, etc. with full altitude profile and trip statistics available. Google places directory gets an honorable mention too - see what's around you - I don't use it much, but it's useful sometimes.

There are a couple of disappointments though. Surprisingly, Google Earth is better on the iPhone (no reason for it to be that I can tell, it just is - e.g. no tilt with accelerometer support on the Android one), and another app I used a lot on the iPhone - everytrail, lags significantly in features (on the iPhone it lets you search for nearby trails and download them to follow, on Android it is record and upload only!).
Communications next - in particular messaging. Google talk is built right in to android and has background notifications, Hi AIM is a free (at least for now) AIM client that has background notifications too, and there are many other options. The GMail app is easily the best mobile gmail application I have seen. Twitter is well served - everyone knows seesmic, but I have actually been using (and slightly preferring) Twicca myself. Google voice is built right in too - wonderful online service and wonderfully integrated into Android (for example, I can choose to have just international calls routed through Google voice automatically, and it also doubles as my visual-voicemail option). Foursquare has an app that is the equivalent of the iPhone one, and the facebook app that comes with Android works just fine. Android is again ahead here in my judgement, just because of background processes and the freedom of applications to make it onto the platform :-).
Productivity and other assorted items: the only real hole here for me is, strangely enough, Google tasks. Just like the iPhone there is the online mobile targeted site, and that works fine as long as you are online, but I was surprised there was no local app that your todo list synced to on Android, hopefully it is in the works (as I tend to live and die by gmail, calendar and my tasks list). Calendar is fine (although I feel it could do with a UI makeover), syncing to the google calendar is perfect so far, and as I mentioned above it has the best mobile gmail app I have seen, but the lack of offline tasks, as well as features like location awareness for tasks, is a hole. For notes, there is evernote, wikinotes (I had to mention it) and many others, News and Weather built in options are good, but there is also the Weather Channel app which is worth a look.

In the other assorted items category, Shazam is available (thank goodness) and works as expected (if you don't know, Shazam listens to music playing somewhere and tells you what it is). The integration with the Amazon music store is good for impulse buys too :-). Google shopper is nice for sanity checks while shopping. Photo management also shines - the ability for new services to register themselves as send options means that you can install flickr uploaders that work with all apps capable of sending a photo, or send it via twitter or IM, etc. Very slick.
There are also some apps for which there is simply no equivalent on the iPhone, at least not yet. For example Goggles - which is like Shazam for images (take a picture, tell me what I am looking at). I mentioned My Tracks already, and turn by turn directions in Google maps. Listen - mentioned in multimedia, gives a real podcast client - one that actually just automatically downloads podcasts directly to the phone so that they are available for offline listening whenever you want. SqueezeControl gives me remote control over my squeezebox (there might be something to do this on the iPhone but I didn't think of looking before), and there are neat system features that I didn't have on the iPhone, for example I can see exactly where the power has gone since the last charge (display, apps, phone radio, background file downloading, etc.) and use it to find the battery hogs.
I should mention games too. I am not a huge game-player, so this is lower on my list, but it is also a domain where Android is weaker than the iPhone. I was actually quite addicted to Words with Friends while I was using the iPhone, but there is no Android version so I have had to kick the habit. I do have frozen bubble, and a couple of other puzzlers on there, and I also have Shortyz - a kick-ass crossword game written by my friend Robert Cooper, which is slick and almost perfect (will be perfect when it has cryptics available).

So, all in all pretty good, with some concern over gaming - there are good games of every genre to be had, but they are not as numerous as on the iPhone, and many are not as recognizable (you don't see many licensed games, for example Shrek Kart on the iPhone). Perhaps Google should consider some gaming stimulus money, or at the very least a few "gaming on Android" articles to publicize some of the more polished options out there.

However, there are a few things that are not so great with the apps story:

The top of my list is that you can't install apps onto the SD card still. This was a limitation when I was working as an Android advocate at Google, fully a couple of years ago now, but I can't believe it hasn't been rectified yet. This means you are resource limited by the available main memory on the device, 512 megs in the case of the Nexus. It's pretty easy to fill this up when you like apps as much as I do. Cyanogenmod (which I have now installed) does let you install apps on the SD card, but this is hardly a consumer level operation (rooting and re-flashing your phone is a pretty scary operation when you actually own the phone and have to pay for a new one if you mess things up).

Games seem to be an area where Apple is well ahead. This is less important for me to be sure, but it's going to be a big factor for a lot of people. I think the games situation is complicated by the SD card issue, since games tend to be big, and that will eat up a lot of the available internal memory. Some games designers have worked around this by downloading a big glob of data when you first run it - less than ideal but it works around the limitation. Even so, the glossy games market on the iPhone is a big draw.

The polish is also just a shade less impressive than the iPhone. By way of an example - the headphone remote control (the button on the headphones that can be used to pause, and skip, music playback). It works with other applications, just like on the iPhone, but the whole thing can get a bit confused with multiple music applications running. The way I would expect it to work is that the last music app to play, or the one currently playing, will get the headphone button click event and act on it. In practice, it seems to be a complex enough outcome that it seems kind of random exactly what will happen - instead of the podcast pausing, the music player will start playing over the top, or my audio book will carry on from where I left off. As a programmer, I know these details are a real pain in the butt to get right, but as a consumer I want it to just work. Apple is good at that in spite of (or perhaps because of) their other issues (for example, an over developed sense of control :-) ).

Alright - enough downers, let's get upbeat again.

The biggest plus, and this is huge, for Android applications is that I can write my own. Sure I could theoretically write for the iPhone if I wanted to abide by the following restrictions:

Sign up and pay $99 for the privilege (Android market costs $25 to register, but you don't even have to pay that just to write and distribute software unless you want to go through the market)
Agree to some truly heinous restrictions about development, like having to use a blessed language (C, C++ or Objective C), Apple having full rights to allow or block anything I write for pretty much any reason they choose (they blocked Latitude and Google Voice apps for reasons yet to be disclosed, etc.)
Develop on a Mac. I am a Linux developer, I like it that way, and I like to develop on Linux. Android development just works on Linux, it's dead easy, quick and I can use my existing skills rather than learn a whole new set of stuff which only works on one very close platform
Agree not to talk about the Apple developer agreement ever (this is a condition of becoming an iPhone developer). Since I co-host the Java Posse and I hate any attempt to control what I can talk about there, that simply isn't likely to happen

So, since I don't want to do any of these things, I am going to develop for Android, and it's dead easy. I actually just finished my first application for Android in 2 years - Andro Flubber. I actually ported this useful utility to Android when I was at Google, but never completed it and lost the source code in the intervening years, so I sat down and did it again.

It took me about 2.5 hours from new project to running app, and maybe an extra 2 for some polish and extra features (like sound, custom background image, etc.). I have since put the source code up on github, and the application up for free on the Android market. The details are:

Name: Andro Flubber (not the best name, but I had to call it something) - a Flub is a mistake in recording, therefore flubber tracks mistakes, and Andro for Android.

Description: marks mistakes on a timeline while recording a podcast, and then emails you a list of the mistakes in the audacity bookmarks format, so you can see where they are in post-production and edit them out.

Source Code: available from github at http://github.com/dickwall/AndroFlubber, not exemplary yet (I should sprinkle in a comment or two, probably some best practices not being observed), but it works and can be improved on. I chose to theme it with the Java Posse logo and put in some other features specific to the podcast, but you can fork the code and customize it yourself if you desire.

App on Marketplace: You can use the barcode scanner on the 2d barcode above to download it, or just go to http://apps.doubletwist.com/Andro-Flubber/-5965901916352705395 or look for Andro Flubber on Android Market from your phone. Right now it requires Android 2.1 - this is just cos I need to download and verify with earlier versions of the API which I will do in due course, but for now I just wanted it to get out there.

Ride through Marin Headlands to the Pub

2010-04-17T17:59:00.000-07:00

This weekend, I start my 40th circumnavigation of the Sun. To celebrate (in part - still some celebrating to do yet) Jackie and I took the day off work and rode through Golden Gate national recreation area (Marin headlands part) from the visitor center up to the Pelican Inn in Muir beach, had a nice lunch, and then rode back again.

If you haven't been to this amazing area, the mountain bike trails through it are challenging, strenuous and scary in parts, and they are pretty epic. By the end of the day, I was getting pretty good at bunny hopping over smaller ditches (there have been a lot of channels cut by the very wet winter), I must admit that I took the "discretion is the better part of valor" angle with some of the bigger ditches though - I could have probably made it, but failure would have been painful. About half of the ride was on fire roads and half on single track, including a very scenic and pleasant climb back up to the highest point of the ride on the way back from the pub (this particular trail you can only climb, not descend, and when you see it it makes sense why).

The stats on the ride were (for both directions): about 19 miles total, 3300 feet of elevation gain, 3 hours of actual riding time, 4 hours in total out on the trail (yes, we stopped for photo and rest breaks a fair bit).

This was only Jackie's third serious mountain bike ride, and it was pretty tough going (more than I thought it would be) with some downhills that had me a little concerned (it wasn't the hill, it was the huge water runoff channels that had sunk into the trail that made those very steep downhills a bit alarming). The climbs were pretty tough at times as well - 3300 feet is a lot of climbing in one day, at least for us.

For those interested, the pictures taken for this posting were from the Nexus One, which I also used to record the entire trip in both directions using the My Trails application (which worked flawlessly, and the whole 3 hour trail recording used about 25% of the battery in the nexus one, implying to me that I would run out of batteries before the new gizmo did, most likely).

For those interested, the tracks of the ride out and then back again are on my Google maps. If you want to know more about the route, you can download KML files (for Google Earth) right from the trail map pages. We went in and out on the same route for the most part (except from the first climb after lunch at the pub). This was partly because the trails you can bike on are limited in the park (many are hike and/or horse only). In truth, this wasn't really an issue - the trails actually did seem quite different in each direction, perhaps next time we would try and weave Bobcat trail into the return route or something like that though.

The Felt (new mountain bike) performed admirably and demonstrated that the limitation is the rider now and not the bike :-). Jackie did really well considering her husband made her do a pretty serious ride for only her third time really mountain biking. The various devices estimated about 3000 calories burned so we had a damn good meal last night, and a whole bottle of wine between the two of us (plus a couple of glasses at the hotel we stayed at to get the evening going).

Switching to Android: Part 1 - Introduction

2010-04-10T21:28:00.000-07:00

The other day I was lucky enough to get a nexus one for gratis. Actually, strictly speaking it was for writing an application for Android called WikiNotes (I wrote it in my spare time while working for Google as an Android Advocate - it was intended to demonstrate how intents and the android application lifecycle worked, but ended up being a pretty useful app). When I left Google, Dan Morrill kept up the development of the app and submitted it to the android marketplace where (from reports) it has done reasonably well. Anyway, just a few days ago I picked up my shiny new Nexus One - a nice, but unexpected, reward (maybe some karma catchup?).

I decided that I would write up my experiences of switching to it from the iPhone 3G that I have been using for the past 18 months, and I intend to be honest, both with praise and criticism, as I switch to the new device (which I will be doing - I have already decided that much).

The Nexus One came to me at a good time. I have been becoming less and less satisfied with the iPhone, primarily because I use it so much and the seemingly small limitations that Apple imposes on how I may use their device have grown over time into much more serious impediments. I will cover these limitations in detail as this series goes on, and discuss how Android improves on them (or in some cases doesn't! Life is not perfect in the Android world either, but it is better).

So let's start with a few of the higher level niggles with the iPhone. Of course, top of the list is lack of background applications. For a multimedia device, inability to keep applications like pandora or last.fm running in the background is extremely irritating. I jailbroke my iPhone to get around some of this, and could after a fashion listen to Pandora when replying to an SMS for example, but it all relied on me enabling backgrounding for that app, and it was far from a smooth user experience. Apple just announced that backgrounding was being added to the 4.0 iPhone OS, which is great, but apparently not for older devices like mine because they can't do it. Ummm, yeah, actually they can on jailbroken devices, and I am sure apple could make it smooth if they wanted to, regardless - I am out of that scene now.

Another one is that my battery life is nowhere near where it used to be. This is not due to jailbreaking (it has been that way for over a year), but more to do with the service cycle of Li Ion batteries, and the fact that they don't hold their charge in the same way after a year or two. Not a problem in most phones, but of course I can't just take out the battery and replace it with a fresh one. That's just lame, and I didn't realize how annoying it is until now. I could take it into an apple store to get it changed, but really, why? Why can't I just put a new one in myself?

So - enough of the iPhone, for the rest of this blog posting I am going to stick to my first impressions of the Nexus One. More details will be in future postings.

The Nexus One is the first Android phone that (in my opinion) measures up to the build quality and overall slickness of the iPhone (don't get me wrong - control-obsession aside, Apple did put together a marvelous device). The Nexus One is what android devices should have been all along.

The device is slim, slick and feels well built. It has an easily replaced battery, easy access to the SIM card, and a micro SD card slot with a 4G card provided with the device (but capable of taking 16G or maybe even 32G in the future). Easily replaceable storage. A nice feature (especially for large or varied media collections).

The first stumbling block was the connector. I had expected the now-defacto standard mini-USB, but it was something different - what turned out to be a micro-USB. Apparently this is the wave of the future, but the future does not yet seem to be here - a check at Target for example shows a ton of mini-USB chargers and cables, but nothing micro-USB yet. It wasn't hard to find some inexpensive converters at amazon.com though: http://tinyurl.com/y8g7rxs so I ordered a couple for all of my power chargers and cables that already use mini-USB.

The battery life is, as everyone seems to say, pretty much the same as the iPhone. The gauge is a little more honest (my iPhone reported itself as fully charged for half of the day, then started dropping quickly, while the Nexus One seems a little more linear in its estimations). One nice thing is that road warriors or power users can put in a double capacity battery (with a bulging battery cover to match). This will spoil the sleek looks, but it's a flexibility that iPhones can only get with awkward external battery pack options.

Here are a few more high-level things I have noticed about the Nexus One compared to the iPhone:

Audio quality through the headphones is at least as good as the iPhone, the included headphones sound fine but are a bit less comfortable than the white iPhone standard ones - either way, much higher quality sounding headphones can be found (I like koss personally)
Mysteriously, the maximum output from the Nexus is lower than that possible on the iPhone - I am not sure if this is because of some kind of effort to prevent hearing damage. Several third party apps drive the volume much higher, so clearly it is not a hardware limitation
The speaker built into the nexus one sounds more tinny than the iPhone - this includes the ringer audio sadly
The mic is phenomenal, eliminating almost all background noise, and this translates to much more clarity when speaking to people, and might explain some of the eerily accurate speech recognition that the phone is capable of
The animations are slightly more jerky than the iPhone, for example list scrolling or app-starting, but not bad by any means. The overall speed seems much higher than my 3G (although the 3GS is probably as fast). It does feel nice and snappy in use
The screen is amazing - high resolution, smooth fonts, vivid colors
Multi-touch works well, and typing on the soft keyboard is familiar from the iPhone and just as easy

There is, of course, plenty more to say, but I think that's good for part 1. In the next blog posting, I will take a look at the applications I used most on the iPhone, and their equivalent (or lack thereof) for Android.

The universe and many faces of the Doctor

2010-04-01T14:14:00.000-07:00

I have been meaning to write this article for a while now, I was even going to do a lightning talk about it (or something related) at the recent Java Posse Roundup 2010 but I ended up giving up my slot because of the numerous other interesting talks in waiting there. Finally I will get my thoughts out there about Doctor Who. This is a timely blog post because the new Doctor is about to start his journey this weekend.

I initially had the idea to write this during the excellent Codemash conference earlier this year. One of the openspace sessions there was titled something like "Doctor Who: The End of Time - a.k.a. the saddest thing I have ever seen on TV". That got me thinking, there is some kind of disconnect here. Sure, it was sad to see David Tennant's Doctor regenerate, and the whole thing was handled tastefully and sympathetically, but I didn't find it that sad, in fact I look forward to what's next.

I believe the difference is that, being English, I grew up with the Doctor, and not just one Doctor, but many. David Tennant (who did a fantastic job playing the Doctor) is the tenth person to do so:

These are the (now 11) faces of the Doctor. I first started watching the series with Jon Pertwee (the third face here, sort of strict and matter of fact, slightly pompous and very clever) back when he was stranded on earth, the TARDIS couldn't travel, and he had a flying car (he was attached to UNIT as a special advisor during this period of Doctor history). He was replaced by Tom Baker (zany, long scarf and curly hair, and with a love of jelly babies), and for me Tom Baker will always have a special place as "the" doctor, since those were my most formative "doctor" years.

I remember the sadness when Tom Baker regenerated. Time Lords can escape death by regenerating when the damage to their bodies is too great. Regenerating brings a new physical form and a new personality for the Doctor, while retaining all the memories of the former incarnations. This allows the new actors to take the character in different directions, and play to their own strengths and personalities, without which I believe the role would get stale and unpopular with new actors.

Tom Baker though was replaced by Peter Davidson who took the role in a new direction, that of a "very English" cricket loving gentleman who was very caring and somewhat bumbling when it came to technology (like control of the TARDIS for example). It was then that I realized how the changing faces of the Doctor kept the role interesting and the series alive and new. It is not healthy for the same actor to play the Doctor for too long, however much you love their portrayal, because eventually it will harm the story telling.

After a few years, Peter Davidson gave way to Colin Baker, again there was sadness in the transformation, but this time for me there was also curiosity to see where the story would go next. At first I really didn't like Colin Baker in the role - he took a new approach to the doctor, very arrogant and blustering, but he won me over in time and has become a firm favorite (even now in the audio adventures - more on those later). His arrogance was nicely tempered with a tendency to be quite wrong about things, and this brought his portrayal back into the sphere of human fallibility, and made it accessible (yes, I know the Doctor is not human, but in some ways he is a model for the way I wish humanity was).

Colin Baker was then superseded by Silvester McCoy who played the role until (it looked like) the end of the series in 1989. Silvester's portrayal had elements of a kindly but strict wise old grandfather figure, and also a kind of "universe weariness" of seeing too much evil in the universe, but at the same time some incredible understated bravery and some pretty epic decision making.

In 1996, Fox, Universal and the BBC collaborated for a made for TV movie, where the baton was passed to Paul McGann. The TV movie it was hoped would pilot in a new series but this never happened, and most people assume that this was the only outing Paul McGann got in the role. To appeal to a more american audience, McGann's Doctor was a little less thought and a lot more action (at least in the movie), the action vs. thought side has been played down in the Big Finish audio productions, where McGann's Doctor has had some of the most epic adventures of any of the doctors and has been quite prolific. McGann's Doctor is perhaps one of the most admirable and heroic even so, willing to sacrifice everything for what is right, and both thoughtful and non-judgmental. One of my favorite performances.

When the series came back to TV in the mid 2000's, Christopher Eccleston had taken over (we never saw the regeneration of McGann to Eccleston - at least not yet). Chris Eccleston only did one season, but was very memorable and fun in the role. In the intervening time it was revealed that the Doctor had brought about the end of the great time war, eliminating the Daleks but also his own people (the Time Lords) in the process, leaving him with great sadness and personal demons, but continuing to fight the good fight. He made a good doctor, and even better, because we never saw the transition of 8 to 9th Doctors, there is ample chance to fill in that gap - something that is rumored for a big screen movie that may or may not happen - this would give both McGann and Eccleston another outing in the roles, and is something I would love to see).

Then Eccleston's Doctor sacrificed himself to save Rose and David Tennant's Doctor took the helm. Clever, knowledgeable, a bundle of crazy energy, and somewhat judgmental and even dangerous at times (I was alarmed when, in the Waters of Mars, he proclaimed that he was the winner and could do no wrong, that is very scary to hear from a character that commands the kind of power over the currents of the universe that the Doctor has). David T. has done a brilliant job in moving the Doctor's story forward, and in some ways the end of his regeneration (with the likely path ahead of becoming corrupted from the power of being the last Time Lord standing) is good timing.

The reason for all this explanation, well I hope to convince American viewers who found the Regeneration of Tennant's Doctor as the saddest thing they have seen on TV that this is part of the cycle, and not so sad at all. The 11th Doctor will be taken over by Matt Smith, and I can't wait to see where the character and the story goes next. Another reason I am not sad though, is that the nature of the Doctor is that he lives on in all forms.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the excellent Big Finish Productions continuing audio stories of the Doctor. These currently feature the 5th (Peter Davidson), 6th (Colin Baker), 7th (Sylvester McCoy) and 8th (Paul McGann) and feature the original actors, along with most of the original actors for the various companions through the Doctor's story. These are excellent stories - I can't recommend them highly enough, and as a bonus you can listen to them while you commute, mow the lawn or do other stuff. It's great to hear even more adventures with these Doctors, all of whom seem even more unique and original when hearing their adventures interspersed with each other. It's also great that Paul McGann really got to bring his excellent potential to the role in something more than the one 90 minute outing he had before.

So, in closing, don't be sad for the old Doctor, be happy (and excited) to see what the new one does.

One more thing though - according to the lore of Doctor Who, the Doctor only gets 12 regenerations, so unless something changes, we are getting pretty close to the end of the line now.

Java Posse Roundup 2010 - Day 4

2010-03-20T09:30:00.000-07:00

The 4th and final day of the Java Posse Roundup 2010 went off very well. Sessions included several business oriented ones (which I skipped), tips for IDEs, Functional/OO hybrid languages and increasing adoption, happy programmers, version control options (git, mercurial, svn, etc.), code reviews and a lot more.

Afternoon I mixed and published episode 300 of the podcast (which we recorded on Thursday night). We had a lot of snow during the day and it was still snowing pretty hard in the afternoon, so after getting the podcast out, I went and joined the group watching Hitchcock's Vertigo in front of a warming fire and hacked with Tor on the ZenWriterFX application a bit more (as well as transitioning to Mercurial on Bitbucket in the hopes that it would be a bit more user-friendly than git with Github).

Last night we headed out for a pretty spectacular meal at Django's up at the resort. Lots of small taster dishes, and some amazing food (and wine too). Had fun riding back down on the town shuttle as well, where we had pretty much the entire bus singing 99 bottles of beer on the wall :-).

Java Posse Roundup 2010 - Day 3

2010-03-18T22:33:00.001-07:00

Wow - that was a hoot. So the three sessions this morning were fun, and a small departure for me (even one on business matters for session 2). We covered higher level concerns - definitely back to a bunch of nuts and bolts tomorrow (including a git/svn/mercurial etc. comparison and a session on increasing acceptance of functional languages).

In the afternoon I headed out with Jackie for some more cross country skiing - one of the intermediate trails (I fell down a couple of times, but I also got down some hills pretty well and even figured out how to turn the direction I wanted - I don't think I will be competing in the winter Olympics any time soon. We did find a mostly snow covered disc golf course on our travels though, so if I come out in the summer I will be bringing my discs.

We just got back from the recording of Java Posse episode 300 which was a ton of fun (I was worried it was too long, but people say that the time flew by). That episode will be up in the next day or so, in fact tomorrow afternoon I am planning on demonstrating the full process of mixing, editing and publishing a podcast for anyone interested.

Java Posse Roundup 2010 - Day 2

2010-03-17T17:08:00.000-07:00

Day 2 update from the Java Posse Roundup 2010.

Three sessions this morning, there were some good choices but in the end I settled on my own proposal (about clouds, Amazon EC2, Google App Engine, etc.), then one about standardizing development across different application teams within a company, and finished up with what programming will look like in 25 years. All good, but I am looking for some more technical stuff tomorrow.

This afternoon, a bunch of us skipped the usual snow sports in favor of some extra technical discussions and demos. In the picture you can see the rigged up projection screen (a sheet over the fireplace in the house we are staying at. It worked pretty well. I led a study group on Scala, and I think picked up a few converts (people who had thought it was too complicated before now), and Fred Simon of JFrog led a discussion of build tools that improve on maven - the upshot is take a look at Gradle, and possible the Scala simple build tool (SBT).

More lightning talks tonight - last night's ones were a hoot, culminating in a fire eating demonstration (outside) by Bill Pugh - how many conferences can you say that you see a fire eating demonstration.

Day 1 of the Java Posse Roundup 2010

2010-03-16T16:12:00.000-07:00

Today was the start of the conference proper - the traditional intro/meet and greet, and the first two sessions (I took non-SQL databases and a session on Scala, but all the sessions looked good and it was hard to pick (well, OK - not *that* hard :-) ).

Non-SQL databases was a lively discussion about key/value, document oriented, column oriented and connected graph databases, and where it makes sense to use them. Of course, there are not usually "right answers" at the end of these sessions any more than there are in real life, but the theme was that it makes sense to use not only SQL in some cases, but that relational DBs still bring a ton of value, and if anything the new kids on the block have a lot left to learn from the old guard too - in particular when it comes to reliability, maturity and APIs.

The Scala session was more of a "what's it all about" kind of thing - with some discussion about whether the Scala learning curve is too high (it's definitely manageable), how to get into it (scalatest and soon hopefully scala-koans), whether it's enterprise ready (we think so) and the importance of a language visionary to give a language direction, as well as the trade-off between always maintaining backwards compatibility versus the freedom of being able to make breaking changes to improve a language.

After that we christened the snow with some cross country skiing, man that's fun but hard work. Tonight we have lightning talks, where I will be doing 5 minutes on genetic calculation 101 (based on some of my work at Navigenics).

So far, as always, people seem to be loving the conference - at approximately 60 people it's our largest ever (and certainly feels like it - if we get much large we will need to change venue). People are also engaging with each other really well this year - about half the attendees are alumni, and half are new, which is a great mix for keeping the flow of the conference going but still getting an injection of new ideas - an essential part of a healthy conference and community.

Day 0 of the Java Posse Roundup 2010

2010-03-15T22:16:00.000-07:00

The day finally arrived, and we had our (now traditional) day 0 of the Java Posse Roundup. This is the day before the conference officially starts, and is comprised of all day coding dojos and other fun events.

This year, Bruce Eckel organized an alternative business day as well - discussions around the issues of developing a business and moving it from a small startup to a larger concern without losing the spark of what makes it unique and fun among other things.

Another group went off to do a functional coding dojo covering multiple languages including Scala, Clojure, Fantom and others - including working on Koans (something close to my own heart and the subject of a future blog post).

The remaining two groups attempted to create the same application in two different environments. The application in question was based on ommwriter - a distraction free writing tool with a very nice user interface. One group got as far as they could with GWT to create an ommwriter-like tool, and hit some problems with interactions between HTML 5, database storage and the hosted mode in GWT - after working through those issues they came up with a pretty good result.

The group I was in did the same thing, but using JavaFX. You can see the results so far in the screenshot below (although there are background sounds and key clicks which don't come out in the screenshots of course :-) ). There is also a fade in panel of controls which doesn't have any icons in yet (soon).

We faced many of our own problems - some with JavaFX (Linux sound support is flaky at best, and crashes the JVM at work) and many more with github in a very active multi-developer environment, but all in all it was a pretty good day and it's always fun to do some buddy programming with Tor Norbye.

More bike map resources

2010-03-11T17:12:00.001-08:00

Yesterday I blogged about the new bicycle layer and routing feature in Google maps, which is excellent and very welcome. It's not the only option though, so I thought I would share a couple more options for finding bicycle routes.

The first is http://opencyclemap.org which is a fantastic resource for cyclists. Here is an example showing the coyote creek trail (part of the same trail I showed on Google maps yesterday):

Pretty isn't it - yes, and useful too. For those who don't know, opencyclemap.org and the site it is based on (openstreetmap.org) are the source of some amazing map data, more detailed than anything else I have seen in the US, and the data has some advantages over that available from Google maps right now, namely:

Available in other countries - someone responded to my blog post yesterday that they didn't have data in the EU yet, but openstreetmap (and consequently opencyclemap) data is pretty complete in many countries.
It has height contour data, very useful for planning your ride to see what kind of workout you are in for.
It is user-supported. OpenStreetMap and OpenCycleMap data is a bit like geospatial wiki data. If you know of a cycle (or other) path or road that is not on the map, you can add it. I have added a couple of paths I know of already, and it's pretty easy.
Off road (mountain bike) trails are on there as well, take a look at the following shot of part of Henry Coe park (near Morgan Hill) which has a lot of fire roads and single track:

Wonderfully detailed.

There are a few things Google maps does better though:

It's not always clear from opencyclemaps.org whether what you are looking at is a paved (road bike friendly) trail or a mountain bike track. If you want to do a road ride, the new cycle layer in Google maps is probably better. If you want to go mountain biking, OpenCycleMap has a lot more detail for that.
The OpenCycleMap servers are slower - naturally the Google maps server has a lot more performance and responsiveness.
At least on the OpenCycleMap site itself, there is no automatic routing option like there is on Google maps. You will have to figure out your own route from the data.

On the go, if you have an iPhone, I recommend checking out the OpenMaps application, which has both OpenStreetMap and OpenCycleMap data available. It is well worth the few bucks it costs on the app store. It has some really useful features on it like:

Download the street or cycle map data for offline usage (if you are going out into the wilds, this is probably a good idea). You can choose the detail and size of data to download when you ask for the tiles.
It has routing! You have to set a start and end pin, and maybe some route pins, but it will then find a nice route using bike paths and tracks - very useful in the wilderness.
You can carry it on your bike - on the handlebars even if you get the right kind of adapter.

OpenMaps for the iPhone

If/when I move to Android, this is one of the must-have apps I am going to need to find an alternative for.

Bicycle routing now in Google Maps

2010-03-10T10:25:00.001-08:00

I am rather excited about this feature, although it seems like it has been a long time coming. Google maps now has bicycle paths and bicycle routing, including estimated times.

Under the More… menu you can see the new bicycle layer. Turn that on and you can see recommended bike routes and bike paths. Better yet, maps will now route along these paths if you choose the bicycle routing option when you get directions, in fact it will favor them. Here is a snippet taken from my bike ride home:

Notice the coyote creek trail is highlighted and selected for the route. This is a longer ride than just following Monterey road, but is vastly preferable in terms of the quality of the ride and I was delighted that maps now knows it can route along those bike paths and does so.

The estimated time is a little higher than I know it to be (I can do the ride in about 55 minutes, Google estimates 1 hour 17), but that’s no worse than the driving estimates tend to be. This is fantastic news for cyclists.

Cool (Laptop) Hack

2009-05-24T11:04:00.005-07:00

I had to share the latest little hardware hack I did in the hope that it will be useful to others.

I have a laptop that, like many, gets a fairly warm hard drive with consistent (i.e. large build execution) utilization. Since I do a lot of that, I splurged on a targus laptop cooler like the one to the left.

http://www.targus.com/us/product_Details.asp?SKU=pa248u

The cooler is powered by USB, just plugs in and runs, and blows cold air over the bottom of the laptop. It works like a charm, bringing the temperature of both the HD and CPU way down to a very comfortable operating temperature even under extreme and consistent load. However, there were a couple of things I didn't like about it.

The primary one was the noise. Targus claims about 23 dB for the cooler - I am not sure if that is accurate, but either way it is still annoyingly loud when using it on your lap. Secondly it pumps out a lot of air, which is the point, but I wondered if it might be too much. Finally it does take its toll on the battery - driving 2 fans at full speed will do that. I appreciate the cooling, but not the fact that it appears to be taking more power than needed and turning it into noise. So I set about trying to hack it and fix the problems.

I thought about stepping down the voltage in a fairly efficient way, with some kind of clever electronic wizardry and even pulled an electronic engineer friend of mine into the problem, before I hit an embarrassingly simple solution.

Note: if you decide to try this for yourself, you are at the very least voiding your warranty on the cooling pad, reducing the cooling potential of the laptop cooler, and risking the whole thing not working at all afterwards. I point this out because I really don't want any messages along the lines of "I broke my laptop cooler and you owe me a new one" or worse "I broke my laptop when it overheated and now you owe me a new one". Assuming we have an accord, please read on.

So, what do you need for this hack?

You will need - a philips head screwdriver, a large flat head screwdriver, wire cutters/strippers, optionally a soldering iron, and some electricians tape. Also recommended is a multi-meter to make sure you have the right wires.

The principle (I warned you it was simple) is to re-wire the fans in series rather than in parallel. In the standard cooler, both fans are wired in parallel. This means both fans get 5v potential difference, running them at full speed, drawing twice the power of running just one fan, and making a fair amount of noise (including the occasional "fan mooing").

By connecting the fans in series, you are effectively changing the potential difference across each one to 2.5v. The eagle eyed among you will quickly note that the impedance of the fans might be different, resulting in one fan getting slightly higher voltage than the other when run in series, and I have no doubt that this is true - however for me at least they seem to spin at the same speed as each other after the hack, and the cooling is almost as effective as with both fans running at full speed. Also, the cooler is whisper quiet after the modification, and uses less power (approx half) as well.

Here are the steps:

Peel off the 4 rubber spacers on the top side of the cooler. Under each you will find a philips screw.
Unscrew all 4 of the screws, then use the large flat head screwdriver to gently prise apart the case. The top of the cooler is a little more reluctant to separate, so just work it gently on each side until it clicks apart.
You will see two fans with black stickers in the center. Carefully remove the black stickers from each (be careful not to damage the delicate coil wires in the fan when you do this).
When you peel off the stickers, you will see little solder points where the power comes into the fan. Grab the multimeter and work out on each fan which is +5v and which is common. In all likelihood the right contact (with the top of the cooler away from you) will be +5v and the left will be common on each fan, but it's a good idea to verify with a multimeter (if you don't have a multimeter, that's likely a sign that you should not be attempting this hack).
Trace the common wire out from the fan on the left, and cut it about half way along its length to the switch.
Trace the +5v wire from the fan on the right and cut it about half way along its length to the switch.
Tuck the two cut wires from the switch safely out of the way inside the cooler case, You can cap them off with some electrical tape for extra safety, but most of all make sure they will not tangle in the fans.
With the two cut wires from the fans, strip about half an inch at the end of each, twist them together and optionally solder them, then wrap them in electricians tape.
Test the cooler - connect the USB power and both fans should spin. Hold your hand above each to make sure they are both blowing air upwards. If they are not both blowing, you have isolated and connected the wrong wires. Either try and find the right wires, or if this has scared you, reconnect them to the old wires running to the switch, put it all back together in the old configuration and pretend none of this ever happened.
Assuming both fans are blowing upwards, you are done. Congratulations. Re-assemble the cooler taking care to route the wires internally so they won't tangle the fans or get trapped when you re-attach the top. You can choose to stick the black stickers back over the top of the fans, or leave them off like I did (I like the look, but now I have to be careful not to drop a staple or something in there that might cause a short). Stick the rubber separators back over the screws.
Try it out.

I have found that the mod makes about 1-2 Celsius of difference only to the temperature at which it keeps the hard drive, and with a much quieter running noise and less power draw. It is unknown if there will be any long term damage to the cooler fans running at the lower voltage but I seriously doubt it. Overall my laptop is now quieter than without using the cooler, since the airflow stops the internal fan coming on under all but the most extreme load, and the cooler tray is almost silent.

Mountain Biking In Anderson Valley

2009-01-25T09:44:00.002-08:00

Posted with LifeCast

Hiking In Uvas Canyon

2009-01-17T12:40:00.002-08:00

Posted with LifeCast

At the Morgan Hill music and movie night.

2008-09-06T18:12:00.001-07:00

Band is great, playing lots of R&B covers. The movie tonight is Ferris
Bueller's Day Off. I love this town.

Anderson dam cycle ride

2008-09-01T17:09:00.002-07:00

Jackie and I headed up to Anderson dam for a fun but strenuous bicycle
ride.

View from the Office

2008-07-29T12:39:00.002-07:00

This is the view I had while I ate my lunch today. I really must get out here and work more often...

Talking at the Google Technology User Group on Monday

2008-05-10T14:48:00.003-07:00

I will be talking at the Google Technology User Group meeting on Monday 12th May, about Google App Engine. There is some room left, so if you are interested, please sign up and come and mingle - there is a lot more than just my talk to see at these meetings, and the community is great.

You can find the signup page at http://sv-gtug.org/event/2008-05-12.html. I hope to see you there.

Cheers

Dick

WikiNotes Open Sourced

2008-03-04T21:39:00.003-08:00

I am very pleased to announce that a project I have been working on at Google has now been open sourced under the Apache 2.0 license. This application implements a personal Wiki for the Android platform and demonstrates a number of key concepts about Android software development. You can read the full announcement at http://android-developers.blogspot.com and the project is at http://code.google.com/p/apps-for-android. Enjoy.

On Air

2008-01-26T17:42:00.001-08:00

Putting the finishing touch into my new podcast recording studio seemed to be the ideal excuse to try and start blogging again. The sign you see on the left is an "antique" on-air sign that Jackie bought me for Christmas. I mounted it on the door today and put a little fluorescent light in it, and voila - the finishing touch.

Of course, a podcast isn't really "on air" but it is nice to let people know when you are recording so that they can avoid walking in during the recording. The completion of the studio is good for starting something else up again as well - the Podcasting book that I almost finished and then put on hold for a year while we moved out to California, started new jobs and all that other stuff.

I am pleased as punch with my studio - some of the highlights include a video-conferencing and media center powered by a Mac Mini connected to a 32" HDTV, and video conference capable as well. I have the room pre-wired with four microphones so that we can just sit down and start recording a posse episode, and also the mac mini has an output that runs straight into the 14 channel mixer along (with USB output) along with the mics - this means that we can record people in the room plus video or audio conference other people in and record them as well.

On top of all this, there is a monitor output from the sound board to an infra-red headphones transmitter, and four pairs of receiving wireless headphones so that we can all monitor the recording while it is happening, but not have any trailing headphone wires (it is also a wickedly good setup for recording conferences without the people at the other end hearing any echo, or their voice getting picked up by the microphones in the room).

The room is filled with comfy furniture, and I put up heavy curtains around three of the walls which, when drawn, help deaden any echoes. The results are pretty good - you can always judge for yourself at http://javaposse.com.

New article up at Developer.com

2007-06-22T10:21:00.000-07:00

It has been a while, but at last I am back to writing technical articles again. The first one in a while: Guicing Up Your Testing demonstrates how you can speed up and improve your testing for applications that use a lot of slow resources like databases, using Dependency Injection with Guice as a way of replacing the slow resource with a faster alternative. Future articles in this series about Guice will go into better practices generally for testing with Guice. The next one, for example, will cover using Guice with EasyMock. Beyond that, I am hoping to examine how to break up large code building dependencies using Guice and generally use it to improve the architecture of your application.

My Sister's New Enterprise

2007-06-20T13:09:00.001-07:00

Just found out that my little sister, Kirsty, has a new website/business called Flower, the PA (Personal Assistant). You can see the new site (which looks very nice) at http://www.flowerthepa.co.uk/ and if you have any design needs give it a look, she is very good at that sort of thing.

A Series of Unfortunate Firsts

2007-04-25T17:57:00.000-07:00

Yesterday's trip home was a series of firsts which I wish I had never had to experience.

The first was pretty decent - I was averaging over 16 miles an hour on my bicycle, riding home from the shuttle stop to my apartment - about 12-14 miles depending on the route I take. In fact I was feeling so good I decided to take the longer route.

Then the bad stuff started happening.

Due to some miscalculation - a moment of distraction, whatever it was, my bar ends on my handlebars just clipped one of those (silly my thinking goes right now) metal bars that they put on bicycle lanes to stop cars driving down them (is this *really* a problem?). Anyway, combined with a pretty high speed (above the 16 mph I was averaging - at least that's my guess), I went down fast and hard.

Then another first, I have been winded before, but not like this. I could feel my heart pounding but was totally unable to draw breath, I remember being quite calm wondering what would happen next since I couldn't draw breath.

What happened next was that I passed out. This truly is a first - I have never passed out before - I thought there might have been a couple of times I had, but nope - this was definitely something new.

Waking up (or coming to) was actually quite a nice experience. At first I was just in bed, all comfy, thinking I could sleep for a bit longer, but then it occurred to me that something was wrong. For one thing, my bed doesn't have grass or asphalt in it, then I realized that some things were hurting pretty bad - mainly my shoulder and my side.

I called Jackie to come and meet me, and with a combination of walking and cycling, made it to the road. On the way, I had what I thought was the worst attack of hay fever ever (certainly it felt like hay fever times 10). I think it must have been something else because by the time Jackie reached me, my eyes (and much of my face) had swollen to the point where I could only barely see out of one eye.

Then another first - I voluntarily went to the ER. I don't like hospitals much, and I have never been for an ER visit (at least not as an adult - I think there might have been a couple of times as a kid with my parents). In fact, if Jackie hadn't of suggested it, I would have, because on top of the allergic reaction which was causing me to have trouble seeing, my shoulder and side were really hurting.

Another first - we always make a point to scope out the local hospitals when we go and live in a new place, but for some reason we hadn't done it yet since our move to California. Finding the closest hospital was a bit interesting.

When we got to the ER, they saw us pretty much immediately. I think it was the allergic reaction that did it (it's such an obviously visible thing). This was followed by my first CT scan (My head had some scratches, and when they learned I had passed out, they just did it). I then had 14 X-rays as well - by this time the doc had told me I had almost certainly fractured a rib or two - he had felt it in his examination.

So - I guess after years of paying (or at least part-paying) medical insurance and being pretty healthy - yesterday I cashed in a lot of those chips.

I was counting myself lucky it wasn't much worse. The diagnosis was 2 fractured ribs and a separated shoulder, plus numerous abrasions and a head hematoma (fancy word for bruise). No casts, and the bike is actually in pretty decent shape too. My laptop made it, the laptop bag is another matter though - it's a little the worse for wear.

Anyway - the Doc said no work for a day, and no driving for the rest of the week, longer if my arm gives any pain when I try to drive. I have so much medication in my body right now that I don't even feel like myself - I rarely even take aspirin, right now I am on stuff to prevent swelling and muscle relaxants, high powered pain killers and strong anti-histamines (my eyes are still a little swollen even 24 hours later). No one seemed able to come up with a reason why I got the allergic reaction but speculated that I may have been bitten or stung while passed out.

Upshot is I am a little wiser today - getting the average speed up above 16mph (on a mountain bike mind :-) ) seems a lot less important than 24 hours ago. I can live with being slow and together rather than fast and broken. Ahh well - no real harm done. I will have a reminder for a few weeks about what happens when you are stupid on a bicycle, and then hopefully will be back to normal. That will give me enough time to fix the few things wrong with the bike now, and maybe take it in for an overdue tuneup.

And does anyone know if those damn metal posts really are necessary?

Oh, and if you like, you can read about Jackie's side of the story on her blog.

The top of El Toro

2007-04-21T10:33:00.001-07:00

The top el toro
Originally uploaded by QuaintRcky.

We joined in the yearly Morgan Hill expedition to climb up El Toro today. The view from the top was well worth it (camera phone doesn't do it justice though). 1400 feet, so fun but not a real tough challenge.

Wine tour of Santa Clara

2007-03-25T12:16:00.001-07:00

Wine tour of Santa Clara
Originally uploaded by QuaintRcky.

Time to get blogging again and what better occasion? Today we are taking a day out from the moving work and touring some of the wineries of Santa Clara valley - a mustang convertible is highly recommended on a sunny day like this...

My First Two Weeks at Google

2006-12-16T14:55:00.000-08:00

I have been wanting to blog about my first two weeks at Google. One of the first things that is impressed on you is to be careful what you blog, and I want to be. For one, I certainly don't want to talk about anything that could jeopardize what is the best job I have ever had (so far anyway), and for another, I see the reasons behind the need for confidentiality. As with most companies that rely on their IP, you learn very quickly that Google has a lot to lose from loose lips, and I don't want to see that happen.

That said, there are some things that I am pretty sure I can talk about safely, and I will. I will start with describing what life is like as a Noogler.

The first day is kinda boring - very typical admin stuff, fortunately it gets a lot better after that.

The best I can describe the first two weeks is like being back at uni - lots of classes to learn the ropes so to speak, but they are great classes. I found myself wanting to get some coding done and the classes kept breaking things up, but at the same time imagine getting two weeks of training in some very cool subjects indeed. I have learned a heck of a lot in a very short time.

As for the job itself, although it's early days I am very excited about the work and the team I am in. They all seem really sharp, and we have had some great geeky-talks about what they did before Google (a lot of diversity like mobile OS, experimental new apps, etc.).

On top of that - there are the perks - this is the gravy that goes on the workday "meat". Great gym facilities, the food rocks, it's a really nice atmosphere for working in - you can take off in the middle of the day and grab a latte at one of the cafes, and sit outside and work on the wifi - just like going to a starbucks, but the coffee is free :-)

I am really looking forward to getting down to some serious work now. I want to start earning this paycheck.

In fact, suffice to say that I can't recommend this place highly enough, and I can't wait to see what next year brings.

Sweet Ride

2006-12-16T14:31:00.001-08:00

Sweet Ride
Originally uploaded by QuaintRcky.

This is my new bike. Since the big move of all our stuff to CA is still a while off, and because my cannondale is now 12 years old, I decided to take the plunge and get a new one out here.

It's a Specialized FSR-XC and I just got back from my first real ride on it - a 2 hour jaunt around Almaden with Carl (Quinn). We did a bit of single track... Enough to christen it without making it too dirty (you see it here after the ride). It is by far the best bike I have ever owned, and I can't wait to get back and ride it after our vacation in England.

Christmas lights

2006-12-10T21:26:00.001-08:00

Christmas lights
Originally uploaded by QuaintRcky.

Some people don't know when to stop... :-)

Start of a new day

2006-12-03T04:25:00.001-08:00

Start of a new day
Originally uploaded by QuaintRcky.

And the start of a new chapter. Yonder beast of burden is set to whisk me away for two weeks of orientation at Google. The real chapter starts in the new year - this is more like that scene setting poem or quote, but you get the idea.

Leaving do...

2006-11-22T12:35:00.001-08:00

Leaving do...
Originally uploaded by QuaintRcky.

Like all good brits, I went down the pub for my leaving do. In attendance were John C, John W, KJ, Hon, Tim, Stewart and Josh. It was a great afternoon and I totally lost at darts.

Result of packing

2006-11-22T12:24:00.001-08:00

Result of packing
Originally uploaded by QuaintRcky.

My office finally looks tidy....

And the rest of my office...

2006-11-20T12:50:00.001-08:00

And the rest of my office...
Originally uploaded by QuaintRcky.

Unfortunately, the rest of my office is not quite as neat as the whiteboard. At least most of it is boxed or thrown away now. Should be able to finish up easily by tomorrow.

My work white board

2006-11-20T11:59:00.001-08:00

This design is now on my white board at work. Says it all really :-)

Finally I am Server Free

2006-11-12T15:28:00.000-08:00

As of today I have finally realized one of my very long term goals. Several years ago I decided the only way to get the flexibility I wanted for my home websites, email, file transfer, dvd database and numerous other things was to run my own Linux server at home. It was a fun and educational experience setting it up, and I certainly don't regret doing it, or learning how.

However, as time has gone on, running a server at home has become less of a convenience and more of a liability. For one - the version of Linux the server is running is pretty old now, as is the box it is running on. I have often thought of upgrading both, but the amount of work coupled with a lack of time has always put me off.

Having a home server was primarily a convenience for email - I wanted a central location (IMAP) where I could deal with my email from multiple computers - as a software engineer, using multiple computers throughout the day is just a fact of life.
I also ended up running an increasing number of websites on the machine (at one point it was running 6 different low volume websites on the same box). It also worked as a print server, FTP server, ran several PHP applications including a DVD database, and several other things that I have forgotten about now.

The risk has always been that power outages cause a lot of things to fail, and we get a fair number of them around the lake. On top of that, the version of Linux is old on there now, and hasn't had any security updates in a couple of years now. It is a testament to Linux that this box has never been compromised, but I have known for some time now that I am probably pushing my luck. One good hack, and 5 websites and much more would go down, probably taking hours or even days to repair.

The first step in moving away from having a server at home was getting a gmail account - I consider this solution superior in every way to the IMAP server I was using - and someone else has all the headaches of keeping it running.

Then I moved my blog away, onto blogger.com from wordpress which I was running at home - another great simplification.

Next up - my Bookmarks (oh yes - I had a php bookmark manager on there too) - that went to Delicious and I haven't looked back on that one either - it now syncs automatically with firefox, and I use the bookmarks far more than when I had the PHP app. It even integrates into my desktop search tools.

DVD Database? For this I found dvdspot - an amazing free service - highly recommended although the signup is a little quirky. Once you get signed in though, it is pretty much the ideal DVD cataloging tool, and ties in with all sorts of online services to get DVD details, price-compare for items on your wishlist, etc.

FTP and file transfer were taken care of by the excellent AMD vault online service - I blogged about this recently - it allows you to store up to 25 gigs of data with the free service, more for the for-pay options.

So - finally with the impending move to California to go and work for Google, I took the plunge and switched out the last thing my server was left doing - web sites.
For this, I went with the free services offered by my future employer - Google Apps for Your Domain - a brilliant service (I can say this after using it to transfer everything over for free today) that offers gmail, home pages, chat and calendar for any domain you own. I transferred all of mine over, including the one we run for another separate organization - I set them up with their own email site and calendar should they decide to use it.

As soon as the changes go through with my domain name service, I can finally turn the switch off on the poor little 200MHz P2 that has been doing this duty non-stop for the past five years. So long little Linux server, and thanks for all the hard work. Meanwhile, all I will say is it's amazing what you can find for free online these days.

Would you like to Digg this?

AMD Live Media Vault

2006-10-04T09:38:00.000-07:00

From time to time I duck into the world of gadgets, particularly online gadgets, to look for new cool things that might make my life easier.

For some time now I have been following the progress of a mono application called iFolder. Mono is an open source implementation of Microsoft's .NET and there are some interesting tools for it, although (and I consider myself pretty worthy at Linux at this point), unless a tool happens to be packaged for Linux already, I always find that Mono applications are way, wayyyy to hard to build from source on Linux (it never just works), it's like Java in the days of blackdown, only far worse! Mono clearly has a way to go still, I am sure it will get there, but where is the simple distribution that the CLR should enable? I thought that the idea was you should just be able to download one of the .exe files and run it!

Anyway, I did find a packaged version of the iFolder client for Ubuntu Linux, and installed it and it worked. However there is no AMD 64 version, and no packaged iFolder server - and as far as I could see there is no online provider of iFolder hosting right now. I abandoned the attempt as I have a number of times before.

However, I got determined about finding some way of getting an online drive that is Linux friendly. I looked at GMailFS and as best as I can tell, it too is broken right now as well (I got authentication, and the mount was reported as working, but I was denied permission, even as root, to access the gmail drive). I have to say I had my reservations about putting important data into something like this where a simple API change by google could render my data unrecoverable.

Then I hit upon AMD Live Data Vault after a bit of searching, and I have finally found a really good solution to the issue of an online drive for Linux. The free version offers 25 gigs of storage, and a maximum file upload size of 25 Megs. There are limits to how much you can download each month, so it's not really a good transfer medium, but for off-site backups this rules.

Security features seem a bit lacking, but you can easily just encrypt your files before you put them up there - I use OpenSSL for this:

openssl enc -aes-256-cbc -salt -in MYFILE -out MYFILEENCRYPTED

and to decrypt

openssl enc -d -aes-256-cbc -in ENCRYPTEDFILE -out DECRYPTEDFILE

These will ask you for a password when they run - choose one for encryption and remember it cos otherwise you won't be able to decrypt

Between that and the archiving tools built into ubuntu I feel safe storing even very sensitive files on the online drive, and it's great to have the peace of mind of an online backup.

They sell accounts too, with more storage and download capability, but 25 gigs is ample for me for now.

GTD: Treo now Syncing OTA with GCal

2006-09-19T11:12:00.000-07:00

I had all but given up with the idea of getting my Treo to sync with Google Calendar over the air (OTA) using the Java GCalSync midlet because it just appeared that the IBM Java Environment used on the Treo didn't support it. Then I came across the missing piece of the puzzle. Apparently the PIM access libraries for Java are in a separate directory when you download the Java environment and have to be installed explicitly. After I did this I was able to get GCalSync (a free program) to synchronize my Google Calendar with my Treo without needing any computer in the loop at all. This is a happy thing :-).

The steps, if you want to do this yourself, are:

Download the Websphere Everyplace Java VM from http://www.palm.com/us/support/jvm/download.html and unpack it.
Install the J9JavaVMMidp20.prc and JavaVMCheck_enUS.prc files from the JVM/ARM4T folder onto the Treo
Install the fileconnect.prc, pimop.prc and PIMPrefs.prc files from the JSR75 folder (you can also install localized prcs if needed, but english speakers will not need to)
Install both files from the JSR172 folder
Sync your Treo with the computer, so that the prcs are copied on to it
Reset your Treo, really, seriously, it doesn't make you but I found things work a lot better if you do
Find and start the IBM Java VM from the Treo launcher
Hit the install button
Type in: http://www.gcalsync.com/gcalsync.jar for the URL and hit OK
The gcalsync program will be downloaded and installed
Run it and follow the instructions (see the gcalsync site for help here)

That's it, no great mystery, I just can't believe I missed those extra install folders for so long. I also had to turn off the preference where gcalsync tries to use the google settings for timezone, otherwise the appointments came through at the wrong time, but otherwise everything works fine now.

I hope the same is true for you.

jFlubber Reloaded

2006-09-04T11:04:00.000-07:00

What a week - remind me to tell you about it sometime (when I can).

Anyway, one of the really cool things that happened this week was I got an email from Romain Guy, Formerly of Swing Labs fame. He, along with others from Swing Labs (like Josh Marinacci and Richard Bair among others) do several sessions at JavaOne each year where they take an existing rather plain swing app and pimp it up to look spectacular, mainly as a demo of what swing can do (with the right people doing it :-) ).

Well, I was delighted when Romain told me in the email that he had given my jFlubber application an extreme makeover. jFlubber is a simple application that I use literally all the time for podcasting. I slung it together in a few short hours using Matisse, in essence it is a stopwatch with a multiple lap timer, you start the timer, and each time you hit flub it records the exact time. It also spits out an audacity formatted labels file. The upshot is that when recording a podcast, you start the flubber timer with the recording, then whenever someone makes a mistake you hit the button and it records a flub time. At the end of the recording session you save the file out and load it into audacity, and you instantly get a bookmark track of all the mistakes in the podcast recording - very useful and a great timesaver.

Of course, I am not really a GUI guy, so the UI was serviceable (and I even thought it was decent), but it certainly wasn't a looker - until now. The new UI has bitmap textures, anti-aliased fonts, non-rectangular buttons, shadowed timer label and a fantastic custom flub button.

I used the original project as one of my developer.com demo articles for how to use matisse and if you check that out you can see what the original UI looked like - certainly usable but not pretty. The results of what Romain did you can see in the screenshot included with this blog entry - quite striking. I am very proud that one of my apps got a GUI makeover - thanks Romain.

jFlubber is hosted out on google code hosting and soon Romain's changes will be put up there too (once we get all the logistic sorted out like adding Romain to the project membership). In the meantime, you can download the source (and a pre-build jar file which you can run with java -jar jFlubber.jar).

Ubuntu Productivity Apps: Freemind

2006-08-26T08:21:00.000-07:00

Ubuntu is a new experience for me (at least, new outside of the Mac). With previous Linux distros I was always fiddling or fixing some niggle, with Windows I still find myself either trying (usually in vain) to get something working the way I want it, or just trying to ignore the irritation. The Mac isn't particularly configurable but the defaults are good and usually what I would want anyway.

But the big difference with Ubuntu is that it works so well out of the box that I can really concentrate on getting stuff done, while still being configurable enough to be personalized.

With this in mind I am going to start talking about some of the applications I use on a regular basis that give me a real productivity boost. Many of these applications will work not just on Linux but on Windows and Mac too (making them even more powerful in my opinion). The first of these is FreeMind.

If you are not familiar with the concept of mind-mapping, the idea is to capture thoughts, structures, outlines and so on in a semantic diagram - similar in many ways to outlining but more powerful (mainly because it is less strictly structured).

I really adopted the technique when I started writing articles for Developer.com a while back. I had used outlining and mind-mapping techniques a little before that, but the article writing was the real impetus behind making it part of my routine. That's when I discovered the Java application Freemind which is a completely free and open source solution for mind mapping.

The podcasting book I am currently writing was fully outlined in Freemind before I started the process of actually writing it, and it really helps keep the flow of writing going. Of course, things change during the writing process, but Freemind has some good features for re-arranging the maps easily with drag and drop, so it is not just a static item once created.

Freemind is not the only option - some related interesting applications include Conzilla which is closer to a diagramming organizational tool, and another one that I just can't remember the name of (used it for a little while then dropped it due to bugs) which was more like TheBrain from windows, but free and written in Java.

In truth though, FreeMind is the best of the options (at least for me). It is fast and easy to use and these days I don't write anything longer than a couple of pages without using it.

GTD on the go - the Treo

2006-08-21T04:37:00.000-07:00

The beauty of using web services for GTD is that they follow you around. Other GTD systems like kinkless GTD or the tiddlywiki based options (the former being a Mac OS X omni-outliner based solution, and the latter is based on a javascript wiki which runs entirely in a browser without needing a server to be installed on) mean that you have to take them with you - in the case of kinkless, you have to carry your mac with you - in the case of the tiddlywikis you can put the wiki and a suitable browser onto a jump drive which definitely makes things a lot more portable.

However, both of them require you to be in front of a computer - you can supplement them with paper (and many people do), making hard copies of the tasks, and writing down new ones as the occur to you later.

I take a different approach. By using both gmail and google calendar, both of which have some rudimentary level of integration with my treo, the treo itself becomes my connection to my organization tools while I am away from computers.

Since gmail is also where I keep my todo list (see earlier blog entries), it is easy for me to add todo items simply by emailing them to myself using the +todo address from my treo. I can also check my current todo items, and of course my mail (there are instructions for mobile gmail here)

More interesting is the calendar interaction. Firstly, google calendar offers an SMS interface - this can ping you when an appointment is looming, but also (and not a lot of people know this) has a two way feature where you can add appointments too. The quick add rules apply, so you can use plain language to describe the appointment - like "Dinner with ralph tomorrow from 8pm to 10pm at Psychos" - just SMS this to the 48368 number (you will have to "connect" your mobile to google's services first - but if you get SMS reminders already you are there).

The final piece is neat - the web browser in the treo can render simple HTML pages (i.e. it is not limited to WAP or xHTML). It doesn't cope with really big HTML pages very well, but smallish, plain HTML ones without loads of javascript work fine.

Google calendar has a plain HTML view available of your calendar from the calendar settings screen - it's right there next to the iCal and XML icons - by using the private one, and selecting the agenda view, you can take the resulting URL and put it into your treo as a bookmark. By using the bookmark you will get a nicely formatted agenda view of the next few days of appointments.

The integration is basic, but works. I never even sync my treo any more (well, except for addresses, but I tend to keep them on the treo anyway), the google mail and calendar integration are fine for everything else, and a lot less hassle. You do have to be connected to the internet with the treo to make it work, but if I am out of range of a connection, the chances are I am not wanting to get stuff done anyway...

Book Writing - it's not the writing that takes the time

2006-08-13T12:49:00.000-07:00

Right now I am in the middle of writing a book about podcasting. This is the first book I have written and it is interesting where the time gets sunk.

You might think, for example, that the writing takes time, and it does, but once I get into the flow of that I can actually get a lot done in a fairly short time.

No - with writing, what I find takes the time is double-checking what you are writing about. I want everything to be accurate and I certainly don't want to make any stupid mistakes, so I tend to actually do the exercises I am writing about while I am writing - so when I write up how to do a particular operation in Audacity for a podcast, I have Audacity open and running, and I try everything out. Much of the time I will take a few screen shots as well to put in the book - another thing that takes a surprising amount of time to get right (editing down the shots, making sure that the right things have focus, etc.).

The latest chapter I am working on is about setting up the podcast feed and submitting it to various directories, including the super-critical Apple iTunes podcast directory.

The problem now is that I want to get some screenshots of this, and run through the process, but in order to do that I need a feed that hasn't been submitted yet. Unfortunately (and here I think is a real limitation with the iTunes podcast directory), I cannot go back and edit the settings in my current podcast feed - it is very hard to change details or even inspect them once you have created the directory entry in the first place.

So - in the end I settled on making this blog into a fake podcast feed in iTunes, using the mp3 from the latest installment of the Java Posse (an interview with Steve Northover - the SWT guy - as it happens). I will link it up from here and hopefully that will enable me to run through the process and get some screen shots along the way. The chances are that I will pull the mp3 from here pretty soon after the exercise is complete, but if you do want more of the Java Posse content, you can of course go to the Java Posse site directly or subscribe to the feed in iTunes.

Oh, and here is the link to the latest podcast episode.

Spooky Synchronicity

2006-08-07T15:01:00.000-07:00

So - what I learned from yesterday is that Steve Jobs reads my blog, and Apple Engineers are really, really fast :-).

OK - so just kidding, but I find the synchronicity amazing about the new "Spaces" feature in the upcoming Mac OS X 10.5 - Leopard. It's virtual desktops, done right on the mac. In fact, the marketing spiel is good enough that if you didn't grok how useful virtual desktops could be from my description yesterday, I suggest you go and watch the movie - it will give you a much better idea.

Still no indication that Vista will get virtual desktops yet, but I imagine people will be asking now that the mac has them (got to keep up with the Joneses). I did find another option for windows- Virtual Dimension after a quick look around yesterday. So far it seems to work OK (don't expect miracles, but it beats the pants off not having anything).

Anyway, I am very glad to see that my observations about virtual desktops appear to be bourne out by others (notably Apple and the many Apple users happy about spaces). I also note that the default number is four - no surprises there - it has always seemed like the natural number of virtual desktops to me.

GTD Ubuntu: It's the Simple Things

2006-08-06T17:57:00.000-07:00

OK - back on the blogging train again, even if I have been a bit lax this week. If there's one thing you learn quickly with having too much to do, it's letting the less important things go for a while until you sort out the big things.

Although it's not very official yet, I am actually in the process of writing a book about podcasting based on my experiences with the Java Posse podcast and hopefully getting a few more people into podcasting. Of course, I am using Ubuntu to write the book (and OpenOffice.org 2 - more about that another time). Doing this kind of thing really re-inforces the reasons I love Linux for just getting things done.

When writing (I have written a few articles for Developer.com as well) I use a really good thought organization tool called Freemind. It's a mind-mapping and outlining tool that helps me get stuff organized before putting it down on paper, and I am using the same approach on the book.

Having the mind-map right there to refer to at all times is, of course, essential to writing like this, and I like to have it full screen to get the overall picture. I also like to have Open Office Writer open full screen as well (full screen apps = less distractions - a tip I picked up from a lot of different Mac oriented sites).

The big advantage with Linux is that virtual desktops are normal, and as a result extremely well executed. I have tried virtual desktops on Windows and on the Mac and there always seem to be enough glitches to just make them a little annoying.

A virtual desktop is a bit like having a second (and third, and fourth...) monitor but without the physical monitor. You get more than one desktop, and you can switch between them instantly. I use four, and tend to keep the four screens for certain uses. Desktop one is my primary work desktop, in this case with Open Office writer running full screen on it. Desktop two is the support work desktop, in this case with the full screen mindmap on it. Flicking between these two screens is instant and mapped to keys that are very quick to switch between them. This is faster than alt-tab selection of windows (at least for me), it's just instant to switch back and forth.

Desktop three tends to be my email and org screen - gmail, google calendar and other organization apps are running on there pretty much all the time my computer is on. Desktop 4 is for web browsing and miscellaneous stuff. Linux will let me have as many virtual desktops as I want (I think compiz maxes out at 32 or something crazy), but any more than four and I really lose the muscle memory and it ends up slowing me down.

Anyway, this setup really works for me, and Linux just executes it better than any other Operating System I have used. I don't get held up, I just switch back and forth and keep the work rolling.

I must investigate if the virtual desktop options have got any better on the mac. The best I ever found for windows was JSPager, but it got broken by a windows update at one point and I just gave up. Windows just isn't my choice for getting a lot done - in fact after really clicking on Linux for a while, windows is just frustrating and awkward - it feels like wading through syrup. The Mac is obviously a lot better, and ahead in some areas, but for me (and I accept that it is just me), Linux still has the productivity edge. If you want to give virtual desktops a try, there are options for Mac OS X and Windows (incidentally - the "official" windows one that comes with the powertoys stuff is pretty bad but it might work for you - sadly JSPager seems to have disappeared into the mists of time).

Firefly - the best damn sci-fi in ages

2006-08-01T13:19:00.000-07:00

I know I need to get back onto the getting things done with Ubuntu, and will as soon as I have time (ha ha, if you get that this is a GTD joke, well, you are probably a bit of a GTD geek).

Anyway, while catching the latest Chad Vader episode at lunchtime on youtube, I stumbled across this gem - it's a 5 minute teaser for the Joss Whedon's Firefly series - I won't even try and describe it because it won't do it justice - suffice to say that it is (or was) the best sci-fi series on TV - and the movie Serenity is based on it.

If you like action sci-fi, watch this and if it doesn't make you want to watch the series, I would check your pulse. I have to say this is an excellently executed teaser.

Incidentally you can buy the firefly box set for under $40 (under $20 sometimes if you shop around) for all 14 episodes, and check out the serenity movie as well.

Oh, and should watching the show make you a huge fan (it tends to do that), definitely check out "The Signal" podcast - it's all about getting a sequel baby.

Back to the regular blogging soon, I promise.

Deskbar - Ubuntu's answer to spotlight

2006-07-27T15:22:00.000-07:00

So finally we get on to some of the Ubuntu specific tools to get things done. The first I am going to talk about is Deskbar - this is a relatively new feature to gnome (and hence ubuntu) and is a lot like spotlight for the mac. While at present there is nothing quite as slick as Quicksilver for Ubuntu (although Katapult might get there one day), deskbar offers some of the same productivity tricks and has some really good features (and plugins).

On Ubuntu, you may need to install it ("sudo apt-get install deskbar-applet" or use synaptic), and then in your panel right click and select Add To Panel, then select the Deskbar option.

The real interest with Deskbar is in it's integration with other applications and with Ubuntu as a whole. Some of the best plugins are the live beagle plugin (I will talk about beagle in a later blog - it's a file searching tool for linux, like the search part of spotlight or google desktop for windows), and the gmail and delicious plugins I have as well (integration with the web applications is a theme that will run through a lot of the GTD with Ubuntu blog entries).

For the beagle live plugin, make sure you install python-beagle as well as beagle itself. Right click on the deskbar and select properties, and you will see a host of different search options to turn on/off. Before you activate the gmail one, edit the plugin file you downloaded to insert your username and password for gmail.

Also, you can set the activation key, <Alt>space works nicely for me (like command-space on the mac), and will focus on the deskbar and let you start typing there.

With a bit of practice, deskbar will become second nature, it's still a long way off of Quicksilver, but hopefully we will get there in time (the actions feature is the killer part of Quicksilver by the way, as demonstrated by Merlin Mann on Macbreak. OK - so I will freely admit that Ubuntu can't match every feature for GTD on the mac, but on the other hand it is already ahead in some other features.

So - if you are an ubuntu user, you owe it to yourself to get deskbar up and give it a try.

GTD: Ubuntu: Web Apps Ctd - Google Calendar

2006-07-24T06:21:00.000-07:00

After this posting I am going to take a break from the web apps for a bit (although there are many more to go that I used to get things done) and start delving into what makes Ubuntu in particular good for GTD and general productivity, but in the meantime there is one more web app that I really want to mention.

Google Calendar was the missing piece of the puzzle for me. I looked at 30 boxes, airset and various other online calendar apps, but they always had one big drawback, other people I knew were not using them. Now most other people I interact with a lot (at least from the organizational side of things) do have a gmail account and now also have a google calendar account too - the fact that other people use it is the biggest selling point (now I can schedule events with other people).

There are some nice general usage features as well with google calendar. For one, it picks out events from email - or at least tries to. It is not perfect, but if someone sends an email to my gmail account asking if I want to meet them for lunch at such and such a restaurant tomorrow, it will try and pick out the details to make an event just from that description - it even tries to come up with a google maps location - very nice.

It also works with my treo. Now this is far from seamless, but it works well enough to be useful to me right now. I can SMS the calendar to add events and I have also added the private HTML URL for my calendar as a bookmark into my phone, so using the web browser on the phone I can see my agenda (it even formats nicely on the small screen). This gives me the basics I need to schedule events and see my upcoming agenda. Just grab the private html feed from the calendar settings - it's dead easy and it works pretty well.

GTD with Ubuntu: Web Apps

2006-07-21T11:14:00.000-07:00

OK, as promised I am going to start rolling out how I use Ubuntu Linux to get things done.

The first thing has little to do with Ubuntu per-se, except that it makes an excellent platform for browsing the web and using web applications, it is stable, reliable, fast and with firefox, very compatible.

GTD with Macs often seems to revolve around kGTD (based on omni outliner) and iCal, my personal choice of weapons include GMail, Google Calendar and Writely (for starters - more will be mentioned in the future).

A bit of history, email has been a critical service for me for a long time (let's face it, it is for pretty much anyone these days), but I never liked POP - I use more than one machine during the course of a day, and it bothered me to either have emails downloaded to one machine and not another, or to have to deal with the same email twice.

My original (and in hindsight, foolish) answer was to run my own IMAP server at home - in fact I had a phase where I ran loads of stuff at home on my server, and I always seemed to be having to work on or maintain the server, which just made me more stressed and busy.

GMail was nothing short of an epiphany - here was a centralised web app, that worked every where with no setup, had better search and management tools, and someone else did all the work of keeping it up and running.

Gmail has become the hub of my task tracking - which I have adapted largely from the GTD with Gmail whitepaper and many other tips and tricks off of 43 folders related to GMail. In fact, Gmail has become a lot more - I run and log all of my instant message chats through gtalk (including AIM using a jabber gateway). You can go "off-the-record" if you choose, but having the chats, emails and todo items stored in one searchable database makes this the perfect "dashboard" for GTD. When google calendar was released as well, I nearly cried with joy - since this enables the missing element - the "Tickler" file if you like.

Anyway, I will delve into calendar, writely, integration with Ubuntu and my Treo, and much more in a future blog posting - for now I had better get back to doing things :-).

Getting Things Done on Ubuntu

2006-07-20T18:44:00.000-07:00

I used to blog a lot more, back before we made a successful podcast. For some reason I fell off the wagon - well - not for some reason, actually because I felt I just didn't have the time to do it.

Jackie finally told me that with the new book that I am working on, and the podcast taking off, people were going to start reading my blog again, and that having an 8 month break since the last entry wouldn't look too good. Over the past few days I have revived it in a new form with blogger (more on that in a later note) and I have discovered something, I really like blogging and I have missed it.

Now this is not to say I won't still be doing the podcast and loving it, or working on the book, but the podcast is a partnership (and a damn good one), and the book is a work in progress and has a defined subject and goal. The nice thing about the blog is it is all on me - whatever I want to write about.

One of the subjects I want to explore is getting things done. My own GTD system is a work in progress (and I suspect will be forever) but I already see that it has had a beneficial effect on my life, productivity and stress levels. I will endeavour to explain what and how I use online tools and my laptop (and treo) as a part of the system, with ideas often adapted from 43 folders although the emphasis there tends to be on Mac OS X (Merlin Mann's personal choice of operating environment), while I now favor and use Ubuntu pretty effectively.

As I mention, Ubuntu is the OS I really look forward to using, but it is also a heck of a basis for getting things done, and I will explain more about that as I get into this subject.

Ubuntu - the OS I look forward to using

2006-07-20T11:15:00.000-07:00

So it's an older story now, but I wanted to add my own 2c worth on Ubuntu Dapper, and using it on a day to day basis. See Slashdot | Nerds Switching from Apple to Ubuntu? for some context to this.

Anyway, I have been using Linux for about 7-8 years I had Redhat 5 point something as the first one I installed, and then quickly discovered Mandrake which became my favorite for a long time as being the linux distro that just worked better than the others.

All that changed with Breezy Badger (Ubuntu 5.10), I had messed with the Hedgehog (5.04) but it still wasn't up to Mandriva (as it had been renamed at that point) for just having stuff work - particularly installed on my slick AMD 64 box at home - 32 bit apps worked better on Mandriva than on Hedgehog.

With Breezy, the tables turned - Breezy was easier out of the box, and smaller and quicker to install too, plus I discovered that the community was a lot more active - the wiki and forums are a great place to get questions answered and find out how to make that little tweak that makes everything better.

So, now I am running Dapper Drake (6.06) on both my home AMD 64 machine and my laptop, and I couldn't be happier. I also am a Mac OS X fan (anything but windows really), and the Mac has a certain "feel" about it - it's pleasant and appealing to use, it makes you look forward to sitting down and getting some stuff done with it.

With dapper, I find the same feeling is present - I look forward to just getting stuff done. There are some rough edges comparatively, for example, sound still needs some work, and installing compiz was tricky (it is early days and not really part of the distro yet though, so that is expected to some extent).

I can see why geeks are giving ubuntu a go - it has that same "excitement" about using it that the Mac does. It isn't stressful and irritating, it is instead fun and pleasant. It got a lot better over the weekend when I installed Compiz and AIGLX - now Ubuntu has eye-candy that beats even the Mac - some of the most wonderful transitions and effects imaginable, and improves the user experience even further. Deskbar and beagle also give equivalent functionality to Spotlight on the mac as well - pushing the usability up several more notches.

I can't wait to see what the future holds for Ubuntu - development is happening at a breakneck pace. There are still some things I would like to see - the Mac experience is more than just the operating system - take a look at Omnigraffle and Keynote to see what I mean - what I would give to be able to buy (yes pay money) for those on Ubuntu. Sure, Kivio and OpenOffice.org impress will do the job, but they are just not in the same league from the user experience perspective.

Still - I am happy with Ubuntu as my day to day vehicle. I don't need anything that I don't have to hand, and it's fast and reliable and runs on my existing hardware so I don't have to go out and buy something new.

Don't forget Groovy and Grails

2006-07-19T12:44:00.000-07:00

I just saw that Sun's CTO hinted about support for Ruby, Rails, JavaScript and Python in NetBeans to support JavaScript, Python ... but what is most interesting is the ommission, Groovy (and Grails).

Now, it's early days for both Groovy and Grails for sure, but it's also a new language, something which the others can't claim (believe me, I am a big fan of them - particularly python, but new they are not). The newcomer groovy has some tricks to teach the old guys, and integrates superbly with Java and the JVM already.

It's got a way to go - there is an early access version of the book but otherwise documentation is extremely scarce. Even so, the builders, streaming markup and other ideas are fantastic. What it needs, apart from maybe some funding and development time, is an environment that lets people take advantage of the new stuff.

And so my plea is simple - if adding support for the other languages in netbeans, please include Groovy and Grails in the considerations.

2006-07-15T19:51:00.000-07:00

So, I have decided it is about time I got blogging again. I have a lot coming up in the next few months. The Java Posse is a wild success and has been sucking up all of my time recently, but now I have other things going on too. I am currently writing a book about podcasting with my good friend and fellow posse member Carl Quinn, and I will keep the news coming about how I am getting on with that.

I have also become a huge fan of Ubuntu since the Dapper release. I was already pretty pleased with Breezy, but Dapper is frankly amazing. I pretty much had decided that Mac OS X was so far ahead it would be a while before it got caught by anyone, but Dapper is getting really close - in fact it is already ahead in some areas, others like the sound system and the "it just works" effect have a little way to go - although they have improved in leaps and bounds. It is already more stable though - I hate to say it, but the Mac still doesn't feel as solid as linux.

Anyway - that's it for now, but hopefully more will be coming soon.