Technology

Clearing the backlog

/ hsoi / 3 Comments

I’ve had a bunch of links backing up in my queue, things I wanted to post about. Just going to clear them all in one fell swoop. It’s a smorgasbord.

“What’s Behind The Shocking Collapse in Violent Crime” (h/t LowTechCombat)

A look at the most recent FBI crime statistics, and how violent crime is actually dropping in the US — despite what the media portrays. One possible reason they overlook is the growth of firearm ownership and concealed carry by law-abiding citizens.

TxDPS – Winter Storm Preparedness (h/t TxDPS)

A few simple checklists of things to help you prepare for winter storms. Be it supplies worth having in your car, to dealing with the aftermath of a storm, to helping the elderly.

“13 things a man should keep in his car” (h/t ArtOfManliness)

Going with the above winter storm lists, here’s 13 more things that are just good to have in your car all year round. I’ll take odds with #3 – MagLite was a great old standby but flashlight technology has evolved. Look at SureFire or Streamlight (or even Fenix); for a car flashlight I would want it to run on CR123A’s, because those batteries can sit around for years and still maintain power. I’d also look for a model that can either be somehow attached to say a hat brim so you can work hands free (need both hands to change a tire) and/or that can be rested on the ground and used like a lantern/candle to again shine light hands-free.

Read the comments for more suggestions. Certainly a lot of what you keep in your car will depends upon your needs, your particular car, where you are in the world, and how and where you’ll be traveling.

“Top 10 Secret Features in Mac OS X Lion” (h/t maczter)

I still haven’t upgraded all my machines to Lion, at this point mostly from inertia. But I have upgraded one primary dev machine and am growing to like it. Still, it has some quirks and issues, and this is a nice list of things to help make it a bit more manageable.

“Laws over BB gun use could affect your child’s Christmas”  (h/t NRANews)

While BB guns technically aren’t guns, they certainly can do some damage. You should still treat them like firearms, using them responsibly, adhering to all proper gun safety rules, and using them as a great way to introduce kids to firearms in a safe and responsible manner. The respect and responsibility starts here.

 

The VoIP problem

/ hsoi

In recounting my AT&T problems, folks have suggested I go with VoIP – Voice Over IP, basically telephone over the Internet (instead of your phone lines). This is services like Vonage, MagicJack, and even the local Time Warner Cable provides such service.

I’ve been reluctant to do this because VoIP can have issues, tho the software and systems are getting better and these days folks have reported generally good experiences.

The main reason for my reluctance? Time-Warner Cable’s Internet service has more ups and downs than a roller coaster at Cedar Point. Maybe not long stretches of outages, but if the service drops while you’re in the middle of a call and doesn’t come back for a couple of minutes, what good is that when you’re in the middle of an important phone call?

And in just the past 48 or so hours while I’ve dealt with this AT&T mess? My RoadRunner Internet connection has burped like this at least a dozen times. All short downtimes, but still interruptions in service.  Hell, as I write this post it went down twice! *sigh*

For all of AT&T’s customer service failings, the actual service has been quite reliable. Reliability is very important to me. Unfortunately AT&T’s customer service has been anything but reliable.

I just feel screwed no matter which direction I turn.

….

Oh and get this. As I write this, AT&T continues to boggle my mind.

I just got an automated call from AT&T (on the apparently now working line). They are now saying someone will be coming out tomorrow — Christmas Eve — between 2 PM and 6 PM.

Um… that won’t work.

And what happened to all this “priority” and “expedited” for this morning service?

Wow. AT&T. So much FAIL. So much FAIL.

These are the people making (uninformed) decisions

/ hsoi / 3 Comments

You expect people in positions of power, that are saddled with the responsibility to make decisions, to make the best decisions they can, right? And part of making the best decision possible is to be as informed as possible on the topic, right? There’s nothing good that comes from decisions made out of ignorance, is there?

Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, is getting railroaded through the US Congress.

I haven’t looked to follow the money trail yet, but I’m sure there are folks in Congress that are benefitting from this, else they wouldn’t be trying to hammer this horrible piece of legislation through.

What’s worse is that the legislation is being driven by people who have no idea what they’re talking about — and are content in their refusal to become educated. See this article from Vice (h/t Slashdot).

When the security issue was brought up, Rep. Mel Watt of North Carolina seemed particularly comfortable about his own lack of understanding. Grinningly admitting “I’m not a nerd” before the committee, he nevertheless went on to dismiss without facts or justification the very evidence he didn’t understand and then downplay the need for a panel of experts. Rep. Maxine Waters of California followed up by saying that any discussion of security concerns is “wasting time” and that the bill should move forward without question, busted internets be damned.

[…]

So it was as proponents of the Hollywood-funded bill curmudgeonly shot down all but two amendments proposed by its opponents, who fought to dramatically alter the document to preserve security and free speech on the net. But the chilling takeaway of this whole debacle was the irrefutable air of anti-intellectualism; that inescapable absurdity that we have members of Congress voting on a technical bill who do not posses any technical knowledge on the subject and do not find it imperative to recognize those who do.

This used to be funny, but now it’s really just terrifying. We’re dealing with legislation that will completely change the face of the internet and free speech for years to come. Yet here we are, still at the mercy of underachieving Congressional know-nothings that have more in common with the slacker students sitting in the back of math class than elected representatives. The fact that some of the people charged with representing us must be dragged kicking and screaming out of their complacency on such matters is no longer endearing — it’s just pathetic and sad.

It doesn’t matter what the particular piece of legislation is (tho this particular one is terrible, and the only people coming out in support of it are the dinosaurs in Hollywood that still don’t get it). We don’t need decision-makers and law-makers who take pride in their ignorance and wish to make laws based upon their ignorance (like the “shoulder thing that goes up”). It will only lead to bad things.

But it seems not all is lost… it appears further debate will be delayed until after the holiday recess.

Regardless, witness the way things have proceeded. Pride in their ignorance, a desire to railroad things through, no original desire to hear all sides of the story especially from those that might actually have a clue about the impact of this… what does that tell you?

If you’re not disgusted… well, why aren’t you?

It’s settled… I can’t go back

/ hsoi

It’s official.

I prefer Xcode 4.

I’ve been using Xcode 4 almost exclusively the past few weeks and yesterday I had to switch back to Xcode 3 for another project.

I hated it.

I thought the “all in one” window setup would bother me, but I actually find that I like it. It works. It’s not 100% perfect, but I’m actually able to get around a lot better than I could before.

The constant compiling and checking from LLVM 3.0 gets annoying sometimes as you type, but on the whole it stays out of your way and it’s nice to stay on top of problems as they come up.

I’m not sure what does code indexing, but sometimes I use indexing as a shortcut to get to things. It seems the indexer only understands what is actually there. For instance, if I started invoking some new class within a file but the file wasn’t “aware” of the class yet (e.g. no .h #imported), the indexer may not recognize it thus no code completion. There’s some other quirks in this area, which get frustrating, but again you manage and hope the edge cases will be solved in future versions. If I can nail down a good repro case, naturally I’ll report it.

I kinda like how Find is just in the left sidebar and not another window. It works.

Still getting used to the debugger layout, but on the whole it’s alright. I’ve been trying LLDB and it’s worked out pretty well, but a few days ago it started registering a bunch of bizarre messages, something about “object so-and-so doesn’t recognize selector ‘count'” which of course was correct but there was nothing I was doing that could have caused that. On a whim I switched to gdb and the problem went away, back to LLDB and the problem reappeared, so to try to get past the problem I just went with gdb. Well… then gdb manifested one of its favorite things to do: go stupid. You step, it doesn’t step… it’s trying to obtain data but gets into some stupid mode and everything just hangs while it tries to time out and your debug session is totally screwed. *sigh*

It’s still hard to get used to Interface Builder being built in, but I do love the integration. It makes life so nice. I do hope there will eventually be a “IBPlugin” solution, including a transition strategy for past plugins and nib/xib’s made with custom stuff. I’m looking forward to writing a new iOS project and taking advantage of the “storyboarding” feature. That seems cool.

As a general statement, Xcode 4 seems to have attempted to simplify and better organize the growing mish-mash of commands and functionality. It’s appreciated and so far so good.

In the past, I always avoided code completion and letting the editor format my code and typing. Xcode has generally defaulted to having that stuff on, but in the past it’s always been more annoying than helpful so I turned it off. But now, I’m actually liking it, especially code completion. It’s working much better, more logically, seems to be more accurate. It feels more help than hindrance. Code autoformatting, I’m still letting it happen, but because it doesn’t do things 100% as I want them it’s a little annoying, but I’m adapting.

Still not totally adapted to the change in keyboard shortcuts, but that too is slowly changing. I still want to hit cmd-1 to bring up the main “info panel” when I’m in IB mode.

Sometimes Xcode does go stupid. I’ve had a couple crashes. But on the whole, I am actually liking it. Again, the most telling part for me is having to step back to Xcode 3 and hating it and missing lots of things that Xcode 4 brings to the table.

All hail progress.

Austin’s Tech Talent Shortage – Try Telecommuting

/ hsoi

Over at my company’s blog, I wrote about Austin’s tech talent shortage and how telecommuting could be the better solution (Austin, or anywhere).

Telecommuting visibility

/ hsoi / 4 Comments

IT World has a pretty good article addressing the question “Does telecommuting make you invisible?”

My answer? It can, but you can do something about it.

Some background on me. I’ve been at my day job for over 11 years and have worked it as a telecommuter the entire time. I’ve had different bosses, different projects, different teams, but it was always me that was out of the office. At my prior job, while I worked at the company HQ, the project I worked on was hosted out of Toronto, Ontario; that ended up being an interesting hybrid of “in the office” but yet I was still a “remote” that was for all intents and purposes, telecommuting. At the job prior to that, I worked in the office but most of the people I worked directly with were all full-time telecommuters located elsewhere in the world. I got to see and deal with a lot from “that side’ of the fence. So for quite a number of years throughout my entire career I’ve dealt with telecommuting, so I’d like to think I’ve learned a thing or two about it.

On the whole, I’d say the IT World article was spot on.

  • Your company’s culture and norms regarding telecommuting
  • The percentage of people at your company that work remotely
  • How visible you can be on a day-to-day basis to your boss and others
  • How effectively you can perform your job remotely

Those are things that will matter and affect how well it works. I’ll add a few things.

Regarding company culture, true that culture around telecommuting matters. If you look at what the article lists on this point, it talks about the company being set up for conference calls, remote access, and other “outside the office” work. Consider this. Is your company large enough that it has more than one physical office? If so, then it’s effectively dealing with telecommuting and other issues of being “virtual” or “remote”. It doesn’t even have to be a true office, maybe it’s a contract shop out in India or Russia. Either way, once the company is forced to go outside its 4 walls, it’s effectively dealing with the very same issues. If your company can be successful with multiple offices, it can be successful with telecommuting. I say this because often companies have multiple offices but are down on telecommuting because they view them differently. Sure they aren’t 100% the same, but for the most part in terms of day-to-day operations, they are. But of course, it can vary and depend on numerous factors, including if it’s a job that can be done outside of the office without incurring much problem and expensive.

Percentage of people can matter, especially because I know some people who may not get to work remotely may come to resent you and your ability to work remotely while they’re stuck in the office, dreaming of working from home. But if you have a larger number of people, or if it’s an option available to everyone, it’s not as much of an issue. This issue then blends into the next issue….

… visibility. This matters, and this is where YOU can make the most direct impact. Sure, if the whole team is geographically spread, that will affect process. If not, or even if still, you can and SHOULD make effort to make yourself visible. Call your boss every day or two just to chat. Call co-workers. You don’t have hallways, a photocopy machine, vending machine, water cooler, etc. around which to just congregate and talk, so you have to find ways to have social chatter as well as business chatter. Don’t be annoying, don’t cross norms or cause a problem, but just work to keep yourself in on the loop with things. Don’t be afraid to CC people on emails because you do have to force the communication. Every Friday send a “weekly progress report” to your boss and maybe even the boss’s boss (and the whole team, if appropriate) so people can be aware of what you’ve been doing all week long. Can you use Instant Messaging? If so, get the whole team on IM and use it as another means of chatter and communication during the day. Plus, IM provides a sort of visibility because, so long as you properly manage your IM, they can see if you’re online or not, at your desk, or not, in a meeting, on the phone, do not disturb, or whatever other status that may come along. It’s useful for visibility.

But be aware to not violate company policies or, most of all, lie. Don’t make things up because you will get flushed out sooner or later if you do. So much of telecommuting is based on trust, so everything you can do to foster and build trust in you, that you are responsible, that you can get the job done? That’s key.

And that brings us to the last point about how effective you are at doing your job. You do have to prove yourself. Well first, you do have to see if it is a job that can be worked remotely: someone on an assembly line just has to be there on the line, no avoiding it. As a software developer, so long as I have electricity and an Internet connection, I’m pretty good to go from anywhere in the world. Or you may find that your job can be done sometimes from home, but from time to time you have to go into the office. Whatever you do, you have to do it and find the balance to make that possible. You have to prove that you can do it, that you can have the discipline required to get the job done. A lot of people tell me they could never work from home — perhaps that is good because they know themselves and what they need to be properly motivated. I would also say, don’t sell yourself short. When you know you HAVE to get a job done else you won’t have that job and the income it provides, it tends to be a good motivator. 🙂  Yes it’s hard at first to get into the swing, find your discipline, find your groove, but you can get there. Heck, these days if I went back into an office I’m not sure I could be as productive — too many distractions!

Telecommuting isn’t for everyone, but I’m happy to see more of it. There’s many good things about it, if it can be done. The lack of commute has multiple benefits from less time wasted in a day to less impacts on our roads, our environment, vehicle wear and tear. All good things. Less costs. And ultimately, a higher quality of life.

Wacom Bamboo Create… and we’ll see what he creates

/ hsoi

Whereas Daughter is very self-motivated, Oldest is a lot more laid back and enjoys life as it comes. Sometimes I wish he’d have a little more “pressing desire” for things, but he is who he is.

One thing that he’s always been is creative. The medium might change, be it crayons and paper, LEGO, or these days, Spore (and all the creation you can do with it). But he’s always creating stuff. So fine… if that’s what you enjoy doing, can we please find some way to channel all that creativity into something productive? The world needs graphic designers, storyboard artists, moviemakers, video game designers, whatever….

I’ve actually pressed him on these things in the past, but I guess it took him to get all obsessed with Spore to have the breakthrough. I mentioned a Wacom tablet in the past, but it was met with a lukewarm reception. Recently I brought it up again, and he thought that would be so cool.

So I just bought a Wacom Bamboo Create. Well, it’s ordered… whenever Amazon gets it here.

Looks like it’ll be a good model for him to get going with, enough features to be meaningfully useful, but it’s not ridiculously expensive. I like that it comes with software like Sketchbook Express, Photoshop Elements, Corel Painter Essentials… sure it’s all basic stuff, but it’s more than ample for him to get going, learn the ropes, and so on. When he gets to the point when those tools are limiting him, then we can go on to the full pro tools. As well, I want to get him Poser and Anime Studio, because I think those will play well into the sorts of things he’ll like to do.

So we’ll see what happens. One step at a time… and geez yes, if the boy gets good enough at it, he’ll be able to get paid for what he loves to do. Hard to beat that. 🙂

Steve Jobs – weightlifting philosopher?

/ hsoi

Numerous seemingly disparate things come together quite harmoniously in my life.

For example, my company, Hsoi Enterprises LLC, blends things like personal defense and computer software. Witness, the DR Performance Practice Deck for iOS.

So when I read this article, “11 Steve Jobs Quotes Applied to Weightlifting“, it brought two things in my life — Apple and weightlifting — together.

The reality is, most of the Steve quotes in the article apply to anything in life, or just to life itself.

The quotes that stood out most to me?

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

and

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

Tho every single quote in there applies and is useful to contemplate. Next time I’m under the bar — or under any sort of stress — these are some words of wisdom worth heeding.

Ghostery

/ hsoi / 1 Comment

You don’t realize how much you are being tracked, until you can see it.

Thank you, Ghostery. A simple browser plugin that does a great job at showing just who is tracking your web browsing habits.

Even if you don’t use it to block anything, just to see how heavily you’re tracked is enlightening.

(h/t emartin)

Steve Jobs resigns

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Steve Jobs, founder and head of the “rebirth” of Apple, resigns as CEO.

Really, this is no surprise. Steve’s health has been deteriorating for some time, so it’s really never been a question of “if” but of “when”, and now we know. That he’s stepping down from day-to-day operations does make me believe his health is getting worse, so on a purely human (non-business, non-Apple) level, I do feel for the guy and hope things are OK for him.

On an Apple level… it’s really business as usual. One must consider that Apple is full of very creative people, and that folks like Tim Cook, Phil Schiller, Scott Forstall, Jonathan Ive, are really part of the whole picture. Heck, it’s been Tim Cook that’s been running Apple in many ways for some time now, and yes he makes logical sense to take over as CEO. Apple != Steve Jobs, Apple > Steve Jobs. Folks need to remember that.

Granted tho, Apple won’t be the same without Steve. From the original foundings and his drive for perfection, to his return and how it truly changed the world… sure, Apple in many ways wouldn’t be what it is if not for Steve Jobs. Heck, WWDC is going to seem a little odd without him on stage. But, things will go on. Hell… they’ve been predicting Apple’s demise every year for the past 20-30 years, so what’s new? 🙂

Thank you Steve. Get well, or at least, enjoy life.

Meantime, I’ve got Mac and iOS software to continue writing.