Jefflog

I’ve been using a Palm Pilot for over a year to help me manage my day to day activities and have found it to be invaluable. I know Palm Pilots are so yesterday, what with iPhones and Blackberrys and other smartphones on the market, but I don’t have any need for accessing the Internet on my phone and certainly don’t want to pay more than the $100/year I’m currently paying for my phone plan. Also, used Palms can be had for under $50 on Ebay. I’m currently using a Tungsten T from 2001 that I bought for $50 last year and it works okay. It’s tech on the cheap.

Besides the usual calendar, address book, and to-do lists, which are great for organizing my schedule, I’ve found two other programs that really help me with my tasks:

1. HandyShopper works great as a shopping list that I can use again and again. Items are organized by store, and once added the entry stays around in the database making it easy to re-add it later by searching by the first couple of characters. Anytime I need to buy something or realize I’m running low on it, I whip out my Tungsten, make a few scribbles, and put it back in my pocket. In the store, I check off the items as I add them to my shopping cart. Very Handy indeed.

2. ReDo adds items to my To-Do on a schedule that I determine. Among other things, I use it to add my usual household cleaning tasks to my To-Do list, such as vacuuming the carpets or changing the sheets. The deadline date for each task is also quite flexible, so I can specify that certain tasks are due within a day of being added and others are just due sometime in the next week. It’s really helped me keep on top of what needs to be done, and gives me the satisfaction of crossing things off my list after completing them.

   Unfortunately, the website that used to host it is gone, and my attempts to reach the developer have been for naught. Among other things, it means I can’t pay the $10 shareware fee, and get a monthly reminder to register that I cannot get rid of. If you need a copy, your best bet is to look at the Internet Archive copy of the original page.

So far, I’ve been able to keep up with my To-Do list tasks because Hong is still on maternity leave from the office, but I have no doubt that I’ll have to scale back once she goes back to work in March. There’s no way the floors are going to get vacuumed once a week while I have to manage three small children.

Addendum: In case you’re thinking about buying a used Palm at this point, I would advise you to stay away from the Tungsten T model. It has a nasty bug where, after time, the pen’s register will drift away from where you actually pressed. I have to constantly re-calibrate mine, sometimes each time I turn it on. This only takes me a few seconds, but it’s enough of a hassle to warn people to avoid this particular model. As far as I know, the Tungsten T2 and T3 do not have this problem.

When I quit my software job about a year ago, I had calculated that I would be away from the job market for at least the next two years, at which point Oliver would be attending school at least part time. Now with baby number three on the way, my return date has essentially been pushed back by another three years.

To be honest, I’m a little dismayed at the prospects of not working for another three years. I really valued the time I worked as a software programmer, even when just doing it for my own projects. (You could probably say especially for my own projects.) Attempts to do work in spare moments haven’t worked out well so far, since trying to do development in half-hour chunks doesn’t do it.

Yet I am optimistic that it will all work out in the end. I’ve already snagged a domain name for my software business-to-be: rascalsoft.com. There’s no need to type that in your browser yet, because there’s nothing there. I’m not even sure what I’ll be doing, although I’m considering a business in custom Mac OS X development. I’m still a newbie at Objective-C programming, but I’ve got three years of half-hour development increments to get accustomed to it.

I could always just get a traditional job, but even once all three kids are at school full-time, I’ll continue to be the one to pick them up from school and take care of the remaining family obligations, so it would have to be a position that would be very flexible. In all likelihood. that kind of position doesn’t exist, so starting my own business is the way to go. Listening to the Stack Overflow podcast has gotten me even more interested in being my own boss. I may not make a lot of money from the venture, but at least I’ll be back in the computer development scene that I enjoy so much.

Yesterday was my last day at the office, but we had already told our nanny that today would be her last day, so I get to celebrate my taking a day off before my entry into house-fatherhood.

The first thing I did today was wipe Windows off of my computer and install Debian Linux. That machine will eventually become our home server, but I expect it’ll take me a while to fully set it up as such.

I’m also spending some time working on this weblog. I’m still working on trying to get the links to Gallery photos to work properly.

The adventure begins tomorrow!

Today, Microsoft releases their much-touted Zune portable music player as a competitor to the reigning champ, the iPod. There’s been a lot of talk about this device in the last few months, not because it will necessarily be the “iPod killer” everyone always talks about, but because Microsoft has the clout to get people talking about it.

I haven’t actually used the Zune, or even seen one in person, so what I’m about to say is purely speculation on my part, but here’s what I think: despite it’s splashy intro and large marketing budget, the Zune will initially be a flop, gradually erode market share from the iPod, and will only eclipse the iPod if Apple falls asleep at the wheel (which it won’t), making the Zune the second-most popular portable music player on the market.

Consider the Zune’s most-touted feature: the ability to send a restricted copy of a song to another nearby Zune wirelessly. Let me explain why this is doomed to fail, at least in the short run.

Throughout most of college and all through graduate school, I used an HP-48 calculator. This was, and still is, the finest calculator you could buy. It was fully programmable, and I would spend hours tap-tapping on it’s tiny keyboard writing little programs for it.

The calculator had this neat feature: you could transfer programs between calculators through an infrared beam. Just place the two calculators facing each other, set up one to send and the other to receive, and it would transmit the program using the Kermit protocol. It was very cool.

Only thing is, I only got a chance to use this feature once, because hardly anyone else had an HP-48. Even when I did come across someone with the same calculator, I didn’t necessarily have any programs I wanted to share with them.

That’s my point. Nobody has a Zune yet, so who exactly are you going to be sharing with, at least in the short term? And when you do find someone with a Zune, do they really want to listen to your crummy music?

This may rectify itself over time as Microsoft begins heavily marketing the device and it falls into the hands of more kids. But, since those kids already have iPods, they’re not likely to get a new player anytime soon, unless their dimwit parents get it for them for Christmas, making Johnny a bit unhappy since all the cool kids have iPods and he’s stuck with lugging this bulky Zune instead.

Even if someone wants a new player, why would they buy a Zune? It’s not cheaper, and for every new feature it has (larger screen, FM tuner), it has a corresponding negative (bulkier size, lack of accessories, not as “cool”). Besides, is anyone going to bother re-encoding all of their music and stop using iTunes just to use a different music player?

That’s about as likely as someone ditching Microsoft Windows and switching to a Macintosh, and we all know how likely that is.

I just upgraded to Internet Explorer 7 on my work machine, and took a look at Jefflog through it. Sure enough, all of the rendering errors that showed up in Internet Explorer 6 have been fixed in the new version. Yay! It’s time to remove the warning message I used to display to Internet Explorer users on this page, or at least remove it for people using IE7.

Do I like IE7? Not especially. It’s a welcome improvement over IE6 (which hasn’t seen an upgrade in over FIVE YEARS), but Firefox is still the better browser. I just keep Internet Explorer around for those sites that require it, like my company’s intranet that likes to publish URLs with spaces in them. Firefox doggedly adheres to HTTP standards and ignores everything past the space, while IE happily accepts the space. If I was in charge of the company’s intranet, I’d replace those spaces with “%20″ and make it standards compliant, but since I’m not in charge I’m stuck with IE from time to time.

Besides, Firefox is Free software, and I will almost always choose the Free version over the non-Free, even if the non-Free has more features. It’s a stubborn philosophy, but I’ve been burned by non-Free software too many times, either because it’s been discontinued, requires a paid upgrade, doesn’t work on my new computer, etc. While Free software isn’t immune to being discontinued, having the source code available means that at least I have the option to fix it or, more likely, someone else may fix it.

Here’s some links to software I’ve found useful over the last couple weeks:

• Workrave is a handy timer that tracks how long you’ve been working and reminds you to take a break every x minutes. It’s unique in that it notices when you take “natural” breaks — basically, when you stop using the mouse or keyboard for a while — and resets the clock so it doesn’t “over” remind you. The reminder is also difficult to ignore, but not obnoxiously intrusive. It runs on Linux and Windows. My main gripe with it is that it uses over 10MB of memory for a relatively simple task. This is no doubt largely due to the GTK widget set they use. Why does GTK have to be so bloated???
• Google Calendar is the best on-line calendar I’ve used and outshines even some desktop calendars I’ve used. It’s very responsive for a browser-based application, and integrates with Google Desktop so I can see upcoming events without the need to visit the webpage. It has become my primary calendar application.
• Speaking of Google software, I’m also finding Google Notebook handy for making bookmarks of sites that aren’t important enough to clutter up my browser bookmarks with. Google Spreadsheets also looks pretty good for a browser-based spreadsheet, although I don’t use spreadsheets all that often so I can’t comment on it much.

Last week, I had the unfortunate task of rebuilding my Windows machine at work from scratch. I was attempting to upgrade a vendor-supplied component and was getting an error every time I tried to install it, no matter what I tried. After six hours of trying, I figured there must be something wrong with my computer, rolled up my sleeves, and began the task of backing everything up, wiping the hard drive clean, then restoring everything.

What a painful process that was. It takes several hours just to get all of the Microsoft patches downloaded and installed. Naturally, I’ve got a bunch of other utilities I use on a daily basis, so I had to install those as well. Then I have to reconfigure all of my programs just the way I like them. This last step could have been avoided by copying my local settings directory, but I figured it would be better to start fresh. All in all, three days of productivity wasted.

What’s more, it didn’t solve the original problem of installing the vendor component! I was able to figure out the source of the error, though, and when I contacted the vendor, they said, “Oh, that looks like a bug…”. Sure is!!

On the plus side, my system runs faster than ever. After using Windows for two years, no doubt it had collected a lot of cruft along the way. Maybe it had collected some spyware too; although I’m usually very careful about what I download and keep my security patches and firewall settings up to date, nasty things could have still gotten though.

Here’s another plus: I discovered Google Desktop. I just happened to be downloading it on the day they released their latest version. The new sidebar is very nice, and uses far less memory than Yahoo! Desktop Widgets (neé Konfabulator). I was always annoyed that Yahoo! Desktop Widgets could eat up 10 or 20 megabytes of memory PER WIDGET. The Google taskbar, on the other hand, seems to be very conservative, only taking about 18 megs while running 8 widgets, and that’s including the search-index crawler in the background indexing my files. It’s not as pretty as Yahoo! Desktop Widgets, but the eye candy isn’t worth an extra 100 megabytes to me.

The last couple of weekends, I’ve managed to steal away a couple of hours and play with Ruby on Rails again. My initial attempts from a few months ago didn’t yield any fruit, but I’m liking it a lot more on my second attempt.

I’m working on porting my photo album webapp to the Rails framework. It may take a while to finish, though, considering I’m usually limited to a couple of hours in any given weekend.

I’m especially digging the unit test framework. So far, i’ve been doing Test Driven Development on this project. Yeah, it makes development a little slower up front, but when you can rewrite youe code, run those tests, and know that you haven’t broken anything else in the process…well, it’s a very satisfying feeling.

Photo Desktop is a Mac application that allows you to put up “Polaroids” of images from your iPhoto library scattered on your desktop.

I’m checking out eMusic.com today and am so far enjoying what I see. $10 a month gets me 40 song downloads, all in the MP3 format with no DRM attached.

What’s the catch, you might ask? Aside from the downloads being 128Kbps MP3’s (which sound okay but definitely not as good as the original CD), all of the albums come from independent labels.  Don’t go looking for the big names here. Although you can find some famous musicians on the site, most of the albums are from smaller outfits. This doesn’t bother me, since I generally listen to stuff out of the mainstream anyway, and there seems to be enough there I enjoy. I’m listening to Echolyn’s The End is Beautiful right now and loving it.

Oh, and if you’re using Linux, you’re out of luck; you have to use a special downloader application that only runs on Mac and Windows. That’s a shame, although once you download your tracks, at least you can transfer them to your Linux desktop and listen to them now that the MP3 codec has been licensed for GStreamer.

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Update: I have learned that the MP3’s that you get aren’t 128Kbps, but have a variable bit rate that is typically between 160Kbps and 220Kbps. They are also encoded using the LAME encoder, which is generally considered to be the encoder with the best quality. As a result, the files do sound quite good.