Technology

TomTom – the aftermath

/ hsoi

So the TomTom finally got unpacked and set up, and we set off using it. Wife’s Granddaddy’s funeral was yesterday up in middle of nowhere Texas. It’s a joke to estimate how small a town is by the traffic control devices. Does it have a stop light? if so, how many? No stop light? Does it have just a flashing red or yellow light at some “major” intersection? How about a Stop sign? or maybe just a Yield sign? Or no signs at all… where everyone in town knows each other so you can just wave each other by?  Well, this town was so small I don’t think there were any traffic devices as you went down “main street”. Yeah, that small. So, since it was way up in north Texas and I had never been there before, might as well try out this navigation device and see what happens.

First, the geek part of me just got a silly giggle out of it. It’s just a new toy and it’s fun to play with. When we first left the house and I programmed in the way to get to my in-laws (first stop), I was totally a kid playing around. I’d play with the points of interest on the map. I got a kick out of how it could estimate your speed and how it would know the speed limit for the road you were on and then set off an alarm if you drove too fast (Wife was driving, so it was funny once the kids understood what the beeping was, how they would prod Mom about driving too fast). 🙂  I also had it set off an alarm when we’d pass schools. Wow, didn’t realize how many schools there were; everywhere we went.

I stuck the TomTom on the windshield so everyone could see it. I didn’t like how the speaker was so quiet. It’s loud enough if everything else is silent, but once you account for road noise, maybe a little bit of music playing, it’s tough to hear. I think a really geeky thing would be integrating it with the car stereo.

I was impressed with the maps being as complete as they were, tho they didn’t give me directions to my in-law’s house… just up to their main road. They live in the country, and while the maps knew about all the roads no problem, they couldn’t get the house number. Oh well.

Since we had it on a female voice, we kept personifying the device. Eventually Wife dubbed the device my new girlfriend, because she kept nagging “turn left, turn left, turn left”. 🙂

While I didn’t always find the device necessary to help us get around, what became the most useful part was the estimates. It could tell us how many more miles to go, how much time was remaining. This was the most useful part because it was a very long day of driving and inevitably you got the “how much longer?” questions from the kids. While it’s not a problem to estimate and figure it out yourself, being able to just glance at the screen and give an answer was very useful.

The device is nifty, and I do think on longer trips we’ll certainly bring it along as there’s no harm in doing so. Based off the one trip I don’t see massive amounts of gain in having such a device, so I am happy this was a gift and not my own money spent. Frankly, I think there might be more gain in a combined device. For instance, this TomTom ONE 130 isn’t “real GPS” but rather satellite triangulation (I believe). You get something like an iPhone 3GS, that’ll be “real GPS”, apparently TomTom is going to be bringing their software to iPhone, then you have all the additional things like Internet access and phone to more fully get around and get information and well… that I think could be more useful, or rather, a more cost-effective solution than a single dedicated device.

By the end of the day, I had pretty much ignored the device (tho the “girlfriend” ribbing from Wife remained) 🙂  The novelty had worn off pretty quickly. But there’s a place for such a device. Again, it’ll get brought along on trips. The true utility of the device still to be determined.

TomTom

/ hsoi / 2 Comments

I’m embarassed to admit it, but I’ve had a TomTom ONE 130 for a while and haven’t used it. My older sister and brother-in-law gave it to me as a Christmas present, and it’s been sitting unopened in my office for ages.

Why?

Because I just haven’t had a calling for it. I like using maps. Maybe it’s the Boy Scout in me, but I’m cool with just using maps. Plus I enjoy having my own sense of direction. If I get lost, I’m usually able to navigate my way out just using some reasoning and sense of direction. I prefer to rely upon my wits instead of some device, because speaking as a software engineer well… let’s just say I know what bugs are. 😉  Wife and I have gotten along this far in life without a GPS. We ask directions, we use maps, we know how to navigate the land, and frankly if we do get lost we don’t mind driving around a bit more because hey… it’s just all part of life’s adventure. It’s fun!

I also think it’s because most of my driving is done locally, and I’m pretty familiar with Austin’s roads. I really don’t need some device to get me around. I think once or twice I’ve thought “gosh, if I had a GPS it would have been easier to find this, but I found it without the GPS so… eh.”

I do think GPS technology is really cool. When I think about taking long trips into unknown areas, I think a GPS could be useful. Since they have functions like finding landmarks, hotels, gas stations, ATM’s, and those sorts of things, that’s a great deal of usefulness, especially if you’re in unfamiliar waters. One reason I want an iPhone is just for this sort of thing. Heck, TomTom is supposedly bringing their software to the new iPhone. Being able to fully get around, maybe find a hotel from the road, call it to see if they still have rooms and at what price, and so on. All useful things.

So anyway, since we have a funeral to attend and it’s in some middle-of-nowhere town Texas, I figured this would be a useful time to pull out the TomTom and see what it could do. I’m currently getting it configured, updated with all the maps and such (man, that’s expensive), and getting it ready to go. Since I’m a software developer, I can’t help but look at it from a programmer’s perspective, and they did a lot of nice things. I do think the Mac desktop client app, TomTom HOME, is a bit clunky because they didn’t write it as a Mac-native app (is this Java?). Little things like that which look like popup buttons have behaviors like combo boxes. Little things like that. Oh, and crashing too.

We’ll see what comes of it. So far it seems pretty neat.

Updated: Well, that didn’t last long. I’ve been running the updaters on it, going through the forced upgrades and such. I think everything is good, but then I remove the device and get a flashing red X. Look it up on their website, I need to disable Spotlight on the device. OK, that was dealt with. I try again, still flashing red X. So I use their instructions to uninstall then reinstall. Do this a few times. Still nothing but a flashing red X. In fact, the downloads vary. One time I got all of the applications and voices and other files, but now all I get is the application. I wonder if the fact the HOME application crashed one time while updating things somehow hoarked stuff.

I don’t know… I’m fed up. I’ll try calling their tech support in the morning.

Updated 2: Got on with their tech support, and spoke with “Gary” who was friendly and helpful. Gave him my information, explained the problem. He said since I had tried all the usual things without much luck, that the next step was to reformat. So I did that. Went into Disk Utility.app and did a nuke and pave… reformatting the TomTom’s internal drive. Then hooked it back up to the HOME desktop software, it recognized things were empty, it downloaded and reinstalled the main application and USA/Canada map (which takes a long time over that USB cable; I wonder if it’s USB 1 because it’s mighty slow). After that, it ran a few more updates to get all the updates. I also had to manually reinstall the voices. But after that, all seemed better. In fact, it seemed better than it was originally as a lot of other options in the HOME software became available.

So, while I got off to an inauspicious start with the device, in the end it seems to be working well. Nuke and pave, is there anything it can’t cure? 🙂

Oh, I’ll make one suggestion for Mac users. As soon as I reformatted the TomTom’s drive, the first thing I did was disable Spotlight from searching on it by going to System Preferences, Spotlight, Privacy, and adding the “INTERNAL” drive to the list. But I also did a secret little thing. Launch the terminal and:

$ cd /Volumes/INTERNAL
$ touch .metadata_never_index

And that’s all. What this does is creates an invisible “secret” file named “.metadata_never_index” that the Spotlight mechanisms will look for as a hint to never index this volume. I opted to do this because for some reason at time I’ve noticed the Spotlight Privacy panel will forget volumes listed on it, so adding this secret file ought to be good insurance to keep Spotlight from ever touching the volume. Here’s hoping.

Then once all the Spotlight stuff was disabled, THEN I did all the updating and so on.

Now if I can put my geek/programmer hat on….

I must admit, I think the way the TomTom folks designed things is pretty slick. They let you drive everything from the desktop software and manage it all from there. While I think the GUI is very non-standard, it’s simple enough to understand and get by, and that’s what’s really important. I do think sometimes it could be better about flow; this goes for both the desktop software and the TomTom’s device software too. That is, sometimes you do something on a screen and want to keep working on that screen, but instead it exits you out to some earlier point in the process and you have to click click click click click to get back to where you were. For instance, in the HOME desktop software, there’s no way to just load up all my computer voices at once… I have to load one voice, then it exits me back to the main voices panel, click click, load next voice, etc..  Or on the device, I might want to change the alarm status for points of interest; it’s naturally a list, let me check and uncheck things as I want to then “Done” to accept the changes and exit or “Cancel” to discard all changes and go back to the original setup… but instead once you click something to (un)check it it takes you all the way back out to the main nav screen and you’ve got to click around to get back to the list. Fine if you’re working with one item, annoying if you want to work with more than one.

But I do appreciate how they did things as a device. It’s just hardware with a drive. That you can totally nuke the drive and the desktop software knows how to download and install and get it all going again, that’s great for disaster recovery and simplifying many processes. I like how they did that.

Really, from a geek perspective I like how they put it all together. We’ll see how my actual experiences go once I start actually navigating somewhere with it.

4.5 out of 5 stars

/ hsoi

I write Mac utility software for a living. A software bundle the company creates, CheckIt 2 Performance Suite, was just reviewed and received 4.5 out of 5 stars. The particular product I work on, Spring Cleaning, is the flagship software in that bundle.

What stood out to me in this review versus other reviews of the product is the reviewer seemed to look at the entire product and didn’t overlook key features. Many reviewers seem to only focus on the “pretty icons” and the basic tools, as if they just gave the product a 5 minute look over and then wrote a review. This reviewer appeared to fully examine the product and review based upon that:

Spring Cleaning comes with other features that are used to modify and limit how the other features work, allowing you to choose areas or files that you don’t want it to include. Finally, and very importantly, is the ability to schedule any or all of these functions to be performed automatically. For instance, it is probably a good idea to repair disk permissions once a month, and it is a good idea to allow the Unix maintenance routines to run. Using Spring Cleaning, you can easily set these up to automatically run when it works for your schedule.

Talked about things like Exclusions, and most importantly, the Scheduler. That’s one of the biggest strengths of Spring Cleaning, that you can easily set up automated schedules to keep your Mac running in top shape. As Ron Popeil was fond of saying, “Just set it and forget it!”

We understand a lot of functionality here is something an über-geek could do on their own, but not everyone is an über-geek. We strive to bring a lot of power and functionality “for the rest of us” so that anyone can keep their Mac running well.

I was just happy at the excellent review. Now go buy a copy and keep me in a job. 😉

Working elsewhere

/ hsoi

I am fortunate that my job allows me to telecommute. I work from home full-time and enjoy it. I have everything I need, all the comforts such as listening to whatever music I so feel like and as loud as I wish. I have access to my wife’s awesome cooking. I get to be around my kids. Life is good.

That said, sometimes I need to get out. 🙂

I used to be able to go to my buddy W’s house. It was perfect. Interet access, comfortable digs, good food, and someone to talk to about work things which made it like a mini office setting. But W recently moved, so I no longer have access. Consequently, I’ve been wondering what I can do and where I can go when I need a change of work surroundings.

The key thing I need is Internet access, given the nature of my job. What’s cool is Austin has a great many places with free WiFi. I found a couple nice lists here and here. Trouble is, none of the spots are really ideal.

Some places are just right out. For instance, I will not go to the airport just to get WiFi access. Or some hotels may have free WiFi but you have to be a guest and get their passcode. So those places are out.

What does that leave?

The Austin Public Library, or restaurants and bars (including coffee shops).

None of this is ideal.

The library actually seems like the best bet. There should be electrical outlets to plug into. The place will be fairly quiet and conducive to learning, and some ability to be private. The downside is no food or drink. Plus if I had to take a phone call, I can’t easily do that.

Restaurants have pretty much the opposite problem. No problem with food or drink; in fact, I’d argue if I was taking up a table for a long time that I better buy some food and drink. If I need to take a call, no problem. Electrical outlets can vary (one nice restaurant near my house apparently has only one open outlet, up by the front south-facing windows… heat, glare, no workie). But it’s going to be noisy, especially at meal times.

Bottom line is, it’s good to see Austin is quite friendly and accessible. While much of this free WiFi may be limited for circumstances like mine, what it really shows is you can whip out your Internet-enabled phone (iPhone or otherwise) and do things. So while you’re having dinner, you could look up where to go afterwards. Or maybe you just want to see what traffic is like, or what the next showtime is, or when the next train/bus is coming. Having free WiFi “everywhere” is quite a boon.

Now I just need to find a place that can work for me.

I am not an early adopter

/ hsoi

In the technology adoption lifecycle, I am not an early adopter. I used to be back in my younger days: early adopter, innovator, being on beta lists and other things to get in before the rest of the crowd. But the trouble with being an early adopter is you get to work out the bugs. I write/create enough of my own bugs in a day; why should I burden my life with someone else’s too? 🙂 Yeah, I finally see reason to get an iPhone, but the 3GS models overheating and turning pink? Yikes. No thank you, I’ll wait.

Who needs a new website?

/ hsoi / 2 Comments

Everyone’s all buzzing over the new Brownells website. I never found their old website all that bad, but it certainly wasn’t as sexy as the new one. Next time I need to shop for something they sell I certainly will give their website a more thorough look.

What I would like to see in a new website is one for Smith & Wesson. My quest for a snub-nose revolver continues, and I’m narrowing down what I want, but being able to do more direct comparisons would be really nice. Yeah they have some ways to “find what you want” but it’s just not as good as some other sites at helping you browse through their entire catalog, compare, and really figure what model is right for you.

What would also be really neat if S&W did was put their entire history online. A good used gun is a fine thing and finding a good used snub is just fine with me. It would be awesome if Smith had their entire historical catalog online. There’s just the cool history value of that, but it also would allow folks a one-stop repository to know about all past Smith & Wesson firearms to be able to research and say “yeah, a used such-and-such would fit my bill as well as a new such-and-such, or perhaps better”.

Ah well, just have to keep my Google-Fu high while I do my homework.

The Mac is dead. Long live the Mac!

/ hsoi / 3 Comments

So the next version of Mac OS X (10.6 “Snow Leopard”) is going to be Intel-only. That means those with the older PowerPC-based Macs are now left behind.

This is fine and good. The way Apple needs to move forward, they need to do it with the Intel chips. The old PowerPC chips just aren’t going to cut it any further, so it’s good for Apple to cut the losses.

I do wonder tho. In the keynote speech today Apple said after installing Snow Leopard that you’d regain a lot of disk space. My guess? The lack of the PowerPC portions of the executables. Makes sense to not bother shipping them any more.

These days for me to support PowerPC isn’t really a big deal. I work in higher level languages (C, C++, Objective-C, Objective-C++, Python, etc.) and I don’t have a lot of endian issues to deal with any more (e.g. we store things in neutral ways, like XML or plist-binary formats). So to deal with PowerPC is merely flipping the switch on the compiler to do ppc codegen. 

But it does mean that I need to buy a new iMac for the family. The old G5 one is certainly a relic now. I’ve always said with tech stuff that you should wait until the last minute to buy… wait until you absolutely must have it and can’t live without it any more for whatever reason, then buy and buy the best you can. Since there’s always something new and better on the horizon (and you know even better is just behind that, ad nauseam), that’s about the best you can do. I’ve put off the iMac purchase for as long as I could, and while I’m not rushing to The Apple Store to buy a new one, I know it’s coming.

WWDC 2009 Keynote Thoughts

/ hsoi / 9 Comments

Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference starts today, and of course the keynote is the big deal the world watches.

I’ve attended WWDC many times in the past, but I intentionally skipped it this year. Saving the company a little money, WWDC has turned into an iPhone luv-fest, the quality of the conference has gone down over the years (yes, I’m an old-timer), it’s packed, the fan-boys are in way too much effect here… it’s just not worth it. I mean, people were lining up outside the convention center at 4:30 AM to be “first in line” for the keynote. Sheesh! I’d rather spend the week being productive and working. Any of the few sessions that’d be worth attending I can catch videos of later.

Oh well, so what came out of the keynote.

  • Updated the entire portable/notebook line. That’s good stuff and looks like they’re moving the whole line towards their new form factor. Good deal. I’d love to buy a new one to get that sort of new battery life.
  • Simple Snow Leopard improvements, like Exposé in the Dock, faster install and recovery of disk space is good. Enhanced “previewing” support directly in the Finder. They are small things, but the devil is always in the details.
  • Chinese input via drawing on the trackpad? That’s interesting. I need to check on how that works and if it works for other “symbolic” languages such as Japanese, Korean, etc..
  • I like Safari 4’s “crash resistance” setup, because without question the highest crashing thing on my Mac is the Flash plugin.
  • That QuickTime has finally become “X” and gotten the much overdue overhaul is great.
  • Grand Central, OpenCL, 64-bit hardware and the OS fully committed to 64-bit, multiple core CPU’s and wicked powerful GPUs, just awesome stuff for a geek like me.
  • While I think MS Exchange is a huge steaming turd, I do know how many organizations are based upon it for all of their electronic communication and organizational needs. So that Apple is embracing this and putting Exchange support directly into the OS is good, both for Apple and for Microsoft.
  • Overall I’m liking that Snow Leopard is going to be what they said it was going to be: refinement. Leopard really brings about a maturing Mac OS X in terms of features and user experience, so now you need to stop adding on features and making the features that you have really solid and stable and refined. Snow Leopard is doing that in a big way. Thing is, as a geek I know it’s good and will move to it. But from the early days of Snow Leopard (as a developer, I’ve had access) I was always curious how Apple was going to make this appeal and be marketed towards consumers because the non-geeks well… I don’t know how it will appeal to them to plunk down the money for the OS upgrade that does a lot of awesome stuff under the hood which then enables us developers to do awesome stuff…. but that doesn’t equate to simple whiz-bang features that you can list on a box or in an advertisement. What’s there to really entice the consumer? 
    • Now I know. Pricing it at $29, or $49 for a family pack. Smart move on Apple’s part. They know there aren’t any whiz-bang flashy features to really sell to consumers, but make it a cheap upgrade that gets you lots of things towards the future. It mainly helps developers out, so now we can write software that use the new technology, the $29 OS upgrade price is a negligent barrier then for people to upgrade the OS to use our softwares. This is all good stuff. Glad Apple did this.
  • Snow Leopard will be available in September.
  • iPhone. Cut/Copy/Paste/Undo. Gosh, such essential parts… about time they’re here. Landscape mode all around, good. Spotlight, neat. Of course more iTunes/Store integration, which is great for them and AT&T.
  • “Tethering”. Nice. But AT&T won’t support it and who is the iPhone carrier? Sheesh. 
  • “Find My iPhone”, only through MobileMe. Way to drum up business! 🙂  I actually think this is pretty cool, but on the surface appears ripe for abuse or other evil things, so hopefully they thought about that (likely so) and it’s a fairly controlled and unabusable experience. But yeah, this is cool.
  • P2P support is good, gamers will like that. They’ll also like the in-app purchasing ability. Hardware accessory support is very good.
  • Push notification. ’bout time.
  • Other little iPhone OS 3.0 things that are good, especially the expanded language support. It’s nice to see the OS coming along, maturing, catching-up.
    • Available June 17.
  • OO… TomTom for iPhone.
  • But 8 iPhone demos. Ugh. I know Apple wants to trot out a lot of people and cool things, but when you’re at the show, sitting in cramped quarters (the chairs are all clamped together, they’re barely wide enough for a child to sit in, then consider most geeks aren’t exactly svelte and it makes for a very uncomfortable 2 hours), man… this is painful. And I’m not there and it’s painful, but from dealing with it in the past I know the pain.
  • iPhone 3GS. Faster, better camera, video, digital compass, voice control, encryption and data wiping. Awesome.
    • $299 for the biggest (32GB) version. Nice.
    • Also, the existing 3G iPhone (8GB) for $99.
    • Available when? Depends: 3G today, 3GS June 19. 
  • There was no “one more thing”, and for that I’m glad. While it was a cute thing in its day, I’m glad it went away. People got way too hyped up and it got ridiculous. Fanboys get all excited prior to the show and work up expectations that there’s no way Apple can live up to, then people moan and grow because their unrealistic expectations weren’t exceeded. So I’m glad they’re doing away with it. In the end, I think the keynote offered some great stuff and really showed where Apple is going. They are focusing on making the OS very solid towards the future. They are making their hardware platforms grow and improve, and working to make both the hardware and the OS work very well together (one of Apple’s strengths since they sell them both… it’s part of what makes a Mac a Mac, vs. using Windows atop any old hardware or using any old hardware with whatever OS). Plus it’s evident iPhone is #1 at Apple, because you know the revenue streams are ridiculous here. Many of the new things demoed during the keynote rang of $$$ for them, carriers, and developers.

While I was watching various live webcast coverages, when Bertrand Serlet was up I found myself reciting all of his quotes with his accent.  Then Scott Forstall came up for iPhone stuff and gosh, I remember when Scott was just a low-level guy at Apple; it’s really neat to see how every year or two he’s climbed further up the ladder there at Apple. That’s quite awesome for him. Then while watching the keynote, near the end, Wife IM’d me and said “one more thing”… Wife doesn’t understand what “one more thing” means in the context of an Apple keynote, it was just a funny coincidence. All this stuff? It was just like I was there, but with a better seat. 🙂

I will say, this is one thing tough about my current job. I have to ship product that works for the existing users, so I often end up being behind the curve. All these new things are great, but I still have to support Tiger users (Mac OS X 10.4). I don’t get to really take advantage of new things for quite some time. Frustrating, but I can see what I can look forward to.

That said, one thing people find hard to believe about me is that while I’ve been an Apple user since I was a kid and have spent a good portion of my life developing software for the Mac, I don’t own an iPod or an iPhone and never have. Main reason? I don’t have a need. But the iPhone has been full of want, and that iPhone 3GS seems like maybe a good time and place to start. In fact, maybe a 3G for Wife and a 3GS for me (Wife isn’t as techno geek).

No Jobs this year

/ hsoi

No no… not talking about employment, but rather Steve Jobs.

Apple’s annual World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) is always highlighted by a keynote speech from Steve Jobs. I’ve been a Mac developer for quite a while, and I remember the days when WWDC was explicitly about developer-only stuff and the keynotes were explicitly devoid of product announcements and horse-and-pony show stuff. It was a developer conference after all, so it was all focused on us geeks. That’s changed over the years, and so has WWDC in many ways. The WWDC keynote tends to be a big hype event now, so Monday morning is always a madhouse. And this year, one change will be the lack of Steve Jobs at the keynote.

IMHO, that’s fine. Jobs has well-known health issues and he needs to care for himself first. I think it’s also good because too many people pin Apple’s success upon Jobs. In some ways that’s true, but they have to remember that Apple isn’t just Jobs, but a lot of other talented people as well. Apple will go on without Jobs.

Of course, I’d like to see how Apple’s stock does today, as this word gets out, and then how the stock does during the keynote. It’s always been amusing (sad?) to watch the by-minute changes in the stock price. Steve sneezes, price drops. Steve announces the expected hyped-up gadget, stock rises. The gadget doesn’t live up to the ludicrously inflated dreams of the fanboys? stock price drops. It’s all so amusing to watch.

But in the end, get well Steve.