The nerd gene infects another generation

Posted on April 13, 2012 | Leave a comment

I came by my nerdiness naturally. My grandfather loved to tinker with stuff. His garage was full of tools, car parts, radio equipment, old motorcycles. Anything he could tear apart and investigate, he would. For most of his life, he was an amateur radio hobbyist. He got up every morning at 4:30 AM and sent his CQ into the aether.

When I was about 9 years old, my grandfather made me a practice set, with a keying device and a warbly speaker. I would tune it and make scratchy noises as I tried out my name in code. dit. dit-daw-dit. dit-dit. daw-dit-daw-dit. From there to disassembling radios, to installing car stereos, to hacking a PDP-11/70 when I was a junior in high school to here. Along the way, I met and married a gal who is only slightly less geeky.

Our son turns 15 this summer and is going into his 10th grade year. We figured he was going to be pretty good at this stuff when he was turning on the Mac at 18 months, inserting disks, and finding the icons to launch the game. We didn’t realize how good until my sister kept him one weekend. He figured out Windows 98 while she washed dishes and he was less than 2 years old.

Every year, Elijah gets selected to the District Gifted and Talented program. At first we thought this was an honor, but then we realized how hollow it was. Like everything else in the public school system, the G&T program has no budget and no ability to do anything with the kids. The school gives them the honor on paper, but they have nothing to show for it other than a certificate. When I got on the school board, I’ve declined the program every year and will continue to do so until it’s fixed. Why have a program if you’re not going to do anything for the kids?

This spring Elijah went to the regional CareerTech (Vo-Tech) center that’s 40 miles away to look at their pre-Engineering program. I was skeptical at first because as long as I could remember, the Vo-Tech was where schools sent kids to be welders and diesel mechanics, not engineers. He was excited about it, so I talked to his guidance counselor. She says this is an entirely different thing–this program has Federal funding and is aimed at getting US students involved in STEM careers.

Last night we went to the open house. We spent an hour in the classrooms where the instruction will occur with the teachers, who seem real sharp. They have a rigorous curriculum that they say is harder than what the State Department of Education has for high school students.  The CareerTech schools get funding from the state that public schools can only dream about, which means they have new desks and chairs as well as nice workstations. They also have a couple of 3D printers, a laser engraver, and a CNC machine. And they participate in the FIRST Robotics Challenge every year.

I’m looking for the downside to this other than he will be on a bus for 45 minutes each way. He doesn’t play sports, so missing extracurricular activities isn’t a problem. The challenge will be getting him up every morning a little earlier and keeping him engaged with the homework. Maybe this is the reward for all those years of getting into G&T.

Elijah is talking about wanting to learn JavaScript. Twenty years ago, that would’ve seemed strange. Except it doesn’t. I was 16 in 1981 when I started writing PDP/11 Basic. It’s time to get him a new laptop and show him how Eclipse works.

When we moved back to Oklahoma ten years ago, I had a high school kid ask me if I would teach him how to program in C. I spent a couple of nights at the school with him. I gave him my copy of K&R and an old version of Visual Studio. He soaked it up like a sponge. He ended up scoring a 35 on the ACT test and finished college in 3 years. He is now working for Sandia National Labs. His mother is my son’s guidance counselor. I think there’s some symmetry to this.

Out on the Silicon Prairie you have to look for signs. Even if they’re scratched in the dirt.

 

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In Praise of Giardinera (obligatory baseball post)

Posted on April 5, 2012 | Leave a comment

Tonight being baseball’s Opening Night (ignoring that event in Japan last week), I’m compelled as a Baseball Fanatic to write a few hundred words on the topic.

In June 2008, I was in Chicago on a business trip. One of my co-workers could tell I wanted to take in a ballgame, and he set things up. We got there early enough that I was able to take in some of the legendary Wrigley Field ambiance. Then we headed into the stadium.

In the food court behind our seats, Mike stopped for food and a beer. Envision one of those guys from Saturday Night Live doing the “Da Bears/Da Bulls” skit. That was Mike, big guy, thick accent, and a total sports nut. Even though he was in his late 20′s, he drove a Cadillac. I liked him.

“You gotta have a beef samwich. And put summa this jardonera on it.” I grabbed my sandwich and a $9 Budweiser in a commemorative cup and we headed to our seats.

Talk about a view…

While the visiting Orioles were taking infield (yeah, Interleague Game), I ate my sandwich. That’s when it hit me. The sandwich was amazing. It wasn’t the beef, it wasn’t the bread, it was the spread. It made that Budweiser taste like Pilsner Urquell.

The night ended and (of course) the Cubs lost. I kept asking Mike what that amazing spread was, but the difference in Upper Midwestern English and Lower Southwestern kept me from getting it. It took a couple of email exchanges to get that what he was saying was “GIARDINERA”.

I looked for giardinera for years. I looked for bottles of the stuff in my local market, in Oklahoma City, Dallas, and Sunnyvale. No luck. I looked for recipes on the Internet, but none of them worked. They were all just pickle relish or olive tapanade.

Last fall, Oklahoma City got a Whole Foods Market. It seems so trite–first we get an NBA team and now a Whole Foods. What’s next? A stop in the Police Reunion Tour? Anyway, we were walking about the store when I spotted a lone jar of something claiming to be giardinera.

Could it be? Could it finally be the one that brings back those memories of a sultry summer evening in the most venerated shrine of baseball?

In a word, “HELL, YES”. I’ve gone through 2 bottles of the stuff in 4 months. It’s too easy to just put it on hotdogs. Mix it with cheese plates, veggies, and bread. It’s all good.

The bottle I have is by That Pickle Guy. It’s the hot stuff, not the mild. Their address is listed in Chicago. I hope that’s authentic enough for you. I can tell you that it serves my memory of the finely chopped hot relish from the stadium. Maybe it’s not the same vendor, but it’s close enough for me and it tastes great. If you’re a fan of hot stuff, get a jar and enjoy.

Because Cubs fans have got to have something to look forward to.

Eric

p.s. If you click on that thumbnailof Wrigley, you should get a larger image that you can download to your PC.

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Dear Twitter Friend (you know who you are)

Posted on April 2, 2012 | Leave a comment

By “Twitter Friend” I mean my friend who works at Twitter, not a connection via Twitter. I need something and it doesn’t fit in 140 characters, but I’ll be brief.

I have friends and I care deeply for them so I’m connected to them via Twitter. They think the things that are important are things like

  • foursquare checkins
  • klout karma
  • pinterest pins

I really like these friends, but I would rather not see these types of posts, so give me the ability to filter anything by anybody that is a social media checkin.

Then there is the Chronic Retweet. I don’t care, most of the time. I was at EclipseCon last week and had 2 late evenings with James Governor from RedMonk. In those pre-dawn hours, he’s great. Bleary-eyed, the next day, I asked him how I can get the “James who doesn’t retweet” and he says “Um, yeah, that’s a problem“. But that’s what I want. Of the 349 posts he makes a day, I want the 7 that he actually creates himself. OK, I’m exaggerating only a lot, but you get the idea. As an analyst, he has to track everything that is going on and Twitter is his vehicle. Somewhere in there are the funny bits that I care about that actually bound me somewhere between 11:15PM and 3:30AM a couple of nights.

I’ll grant that some people could care less that I was blathering on about #EclipseCon last week and they might want to shut me up if I use that tag. Great idea, eh?

There are some people whom I want all their tweets and there are those whom I only want the ones they create themselves. Give me that control and give it to me easy. A hell of a lot easier than I had with Twitter lists.

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Back in the (Focus) Ring

Posted on March 17, 2012 | Leave a comment

I’ve been absent in the photography world for a long while. I need to get back into shape. It’s partly been work and lack of anything that inspires me.

I’ve never been an equipment junkie–I think talent is in the eye and not in the equipment. But, I like to have nice things and lenses can last a long time. So, about 4 years ago, I splurged on 2 new lenses before Jackie and I went to France. These were Pentax’ new DA* f2.8 lenses. One is a 16-50/f2.8 and the other a 50-135/f2.8.

The 16-50 quickly became my favorite lens. Even displacing my trusty old F50/1.7 that I used for 20 years, going back to the film days. The image quality throughout the range was exquisite.

Then problems started. The “silent drive” motor went out and I had to send it back to Pentax for repair. Discussions on various photo forums suggested others were having the same problem. Pentax unofficially acknowledged they knew they had issues. After a month, I had my lens back, working again.

Another year passed and the motor failed again. This time, the lens was out of warranty. Against my better judgment, I paid $250 to have the motor repaired because I really loved the image quality. But, not wanting to eat another expensive lens, I sold the 50-135/2.8.

The repaired motor lasted about 6 months and Pentax wouldn’t honor the repair under warranty. So, I set the camera and the lens to manual and I’ve been using it that way for the last 2 years. And I’ve slowly moved away from carrying my camera. Which is why you haven’t seen any output from me in 2 years other than a few opportunistic shots and phone camera snaps.

We’re heading for Washington DC on Monday. I have a conference in a week and it’s Spring Break for the kids. We’re spending a week in DC with our hotel 1 block from the Smithsonian complex. It’s the opening week of the Cherry Blossom Festival. There’s going to be plenty of reasons to have my good camera and my favorite lens.

I spent some time this morning investigating my problem. It turns out this lens still works with older Pentax cameras in “screw drive” mode. And, since the K10D works with older screw drive lenses, it’s just a matter of making the K10D work with the DA* lens in screw drive mode. I read some posts about using tape to cover the SDM contacts, but that didn’t seem to work.

I found a post that showed where the SDM support wasn’t enabled until firmware revision 1.30, which is what is in my camera. So, some searching with my favorite search engine revealed the 1.20 firmware. Except that Pentax prevents reverse installation of older firmware. I found a post that said the headers of the older firmware could be hex-edited to fool the bootloader to install the older firmware. I also found hacked firmware for my camera. I figured I had nothing to lose, so I tried some attempts at hex-editing and failed. Then I just installed the hacked firmware.

I’m happy to report that my camera now auto-focuses again with my favorite lens. It doesn’t use the silent motor drive, but I don’t care. The screw drive is plenty fast and it’s not that noisy. If it works, I’m happy.

Now, I just need to find a permanent home for my photos again…. But that’s another post for another day.

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Catharsis cleaning

Posted on December 28, 2011 | Leave a comment

“What do I do with this?” the wife asked me, pulling yet another logoed piece of crap out of the cabinet above the coffee maker. Thinking it was another coffee mug or metal water bottle, I didn’t even look over my shoulder when I said, “Put it with the others.”

“I think you’ll want to think about this one,” she replied. Like most times, she was correct. In her hand was a frosted reminder of my time in Hell.

 

If you were at PalmSource in the mid 00′s, you might remember the Palm OS 6 project, code named Sahara. If you weren’t at PalmSource, chances are you don’t remember it. The market had given up on PalmSource by that point, as had most of our partners. Palm was working on Windows phones and even had a secret project called Hollywood that was going to be the Next Great Thing (it wasn’t). A couple of OEMs were interested in licensing Palm OS, but it wasn’t the cash cow it was earlier in the decade.

Like many companies facing extinction, the execs convinced the rank and file that we were doing great things, but we needed to work harder. When we were done, we would have a party and the market would reward us by making us rich. So we worked harder and we delivered Palm OS 6, it seems, shortly before Christmas of 2004. I recall that our party was at The Tech in San Jose, but it could’ve been elsewhere. There was champagne and the execs toasted us for getting everything out the door.

Now all we had to do was convince the OEMs to get on board.

They didn’t.

Six months later, Dave Nagel was out on his ass along with most of the executive staff. And me. I got the notice from HR quite literally as I walked my wife out of the hospital of her last chemotherapy treatment. I kept that glass for years out of spite. When I would see it, it reminded me just how low someone can go when they don’t give a shit about the person on the other end of a phone line. Just another person on a list to RIF by the end of the day.

ACCESS is all but gone. So is Palm. There’s no point in hanging on to hatred that long. There’s no point in hatred, period. Cast it off. Move on.

But have a little fun with it…

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Android Wallpapers for RAZR and ATRIX

Posted on December 17, 2011 | 1 Comment

I probably should do a writeup of our trip to London, but I haven’t worked up our photos yet. Instead I’ve been wasting time this morning in Photoshop making wallpapers for my new Droid RAZR. My old RAZR was an engineering model and was just about on it’s last legs, so now I have a production model. Since I won’t be reflashing with engineering builds every 2 weeks, I thought it would be nice to have some cool wallpapers on this phone.

These are in 9×8 aspect ratio, ideal for the qHD displays on the RAZR and ATRIX, but they should work on other devices as well.

In honor of our trip to London, here are two versions of the iconic Underground Map. I didn’t know whether I liked it better with or without the words of the stations. The words make it awfully busy and distracting, but that’s part of the coolness of the tube map.

White Background with words of stations
White Background with words of stations

White Background, no words
White Background, no words

In honor of my beloved Pokes making it to the Fiesta Bowl, here is The Oklahoma State University Logo centered on a field of OSU Orange (R:217 G:89 B:0 or #d95900 if you’re curious).

The Oklahoma State University Logo

To use these files, download them to your phone (click the link or right click and choose “Save Link As…”) and put them in the camera folder. This is probably on the SD card in a folder called ‘Camera’ inside another folder called ‘DCIM’. If you are reading this on your PC or Mac, you will need to download first to your computer, attach your USB cable, set your phone to USB Mass Storage mode, and then copy the files into the correct folder on the phone.

There are several ways to set the image as your wallpaper, depending on which phone you have. Different manufacturers have different shortcuts to set wallpaper, unfortunately. Motorola phones allow you to use the photo gallery and choose “Set As” and choose “Wallpaper”. Other manufacturers probably have their own shortcuts.

One way that should work for all devices is to go to the home screen and press for 2 seconds. When the popup menu appears, choose Wallpaper from the list then choose “My Gallery” or something similar from the next list. Then navigate the Gallery to find the images that you downloaded from this page. You will have the ability to zoom in to the part of the image you want. Since I set the image sizes to be the size of the RAZR and ATRIX already, you should expand the rectangle to the maximum size. Choose OK, and that should be that.

Enjoy.

Technical Note (for the nerds)

The way these work, if you’re interested in doing this for yourself, is simple. Go to the manufacturers web site and determine what the dimensions of the screen. Motorola, for example, publishes information on our consumer site, but we also published detailed technical specifications on our developer site. The size of the wallpaper will be the height by 2 times the width.

Leave some room in your design at the top for the notification bar (for phones) or the action bar (tablets). Also leave room in your design at the bottom for the dialer (phones) or the notification bar (tablets). Save the image as a PNG-24 preferably with an alpha channel, but you could just as easily use JPEG and it will work fine.

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2011 Android Apps Buyers Guide

Posted on November 21, 2011 | Leave a comment

I spend a lot of time handling Android devices. This summer and autumn I had the pleasure of test-driving the DROID RAZR for a few months before it became part of the rumor mill. Now the RAZR is my everyday carry device. The LTE service is nice when I’m in a metro area, but out here in the boondocks the 3G reception in the RAZR is unlike any phone I’ve had.

The large screen has caused a bit of resurgence in app buying these last few months. I’ve done some posts in the past about apps, so I thought I’d do a refresh.

Prerequisites

You have your contacts in Google’s contact manager, right? Last week I had a panicked call from my niece. She did a factory data reset on a Sprint phone because the rep told her to do so. Guess what? Sprint CDMA phones don’t have SIM cards. Neither do Verizon CDMA phones. Guess where her contacts were stored? In the phone memory. She’s screwed. We managed to rebuild a lot of her contacts from my database, her husband’s, my wife’s, and others, but she lost a lot of numbers. Learn from her mistake.

If you’re coming to Android, you must have your contacts in the online contact manager. Not only is it better for syncing and storing, it’s just a better way to manage the data. You’ll spend an afternoon doing it, but get your contacts off the SIM card or out of phone memory. While you’re at it, get your contacts into the format of every single human has a separate record. Not “Bob & Carol Smith”. That’s for greeting cards. This is your phone. Bob Smith has a cell phone in 2011 and does Carol. They need separate records.

Last APP off, First one on

Since I wipe a phone a lot, this is the process I go through. If you ever need to do a “Factory Data Reset“, this is good reading. If not, just skip to the next section.

After getting the Android Market established, I install a $5 paid app called “MyBackup Pro”. This valuable tool allows me to reinstall apps and data much faster without requiring root access like many backup programs. If you ever realize you need to wipe your phone, here’s the process…

  1. Buy MyBackup Pro and register the app. You will create a user ID and password the first time. You will need to save these for later use. You can also create a numeric ID for their web access and email it to yourself, which I found a nice touch.
  2. Backup your apps and data to the external (removable) SD card. This is the tricky part because some OEMs (Motorola included) create internal memory and call it the “SD Card” some times. If you aren’t paying attention, this can get wiped in the Factory Data Reset.
  3. Remove your SD card from the phone. This is just a safety precaution to make sure you don’t accidentally wipe out your backed up data.
  4. After you’ve backed up your data and apps, wipe your phone with “Settings->Privacy->Factory Data Reset”. This will take around 10 minutes to complete.
  5. Insert your SD card back into your phone.
  6. When you reboot, go through the setup process. Connect your phone to your Google account but don’t do any other activity.
  7. Log into the Android Market
  8. Install MyBackup Pro. When you reinstall the app, you will need to re-enter the numbers you used in Step 1. The app may say that it can’t authorize you. If you get this message, just reboot your phone and try again. I’ve never had this fail to fix the problem. It’s a quirk in the authentication mechanism when a phone is newly connected to a Google account.
  9. Install your other apps from the Android Market using the MyBackup Pro restore user interface. You will have to use the back arrow to come out of the market for each app, but this will take only about 10-15 seconds for each app and chances are you only have at most 20 apps or so. You probably don’t do a reset as often as I do and I don’t find this terribly annoying.
  10. Once your apps are installed, restore your data from the card using the MyBackup Pro UI.
  11. Go into each app and configure its operation.

This isn’t a perfect operation and some apps will lose their data. It’s unavoidable. But, it’s better than nothing.

MyBackup Pro is a nice interface for doing regular backups, which you should do periodically. It will backup to your SD card or their cloud interface and comes with 100MB of online storage for that same $5. Also consider letting Google back your data up in their cloud. This is an option when you first configure your phone in the setup process. I find this avoids about 15 minutes of configuration every time I do a full reset.

My Killer Apps

Google Calendar – I know this isn’t an app in the Android Market, but the Google calendar, both online and on my mobile devices is my #1 killer app. Even if Android did nothing more than make phone calls and show my Google Calendar I would consider it a success. My life is so completely driven by my Google Calendar that I wouldn’t know what to do without it. Yes, email is nice, but I think I would almost appreciate not having email when I’m on the move.

I have about 15 separate calendars in my workspace that I view:

  • work calendar
  • products’ timelines
  • team PTO schedules
  • open source project activities
  • wife’s personal schedule
  • personal schedule
  • a friends’ schedule who works 7 on/7 off (we watch his property)
  • TripIt itinerary
  • kids schedule
  • kids’ school public calendar
  • alma mater sporting events
  • several professional team schedules

All these things are beautifully interwoven and color-coded so I know what my days look like. Like this…

Click to enlarge

Pandora Radio is the background music to my life. I enjoy the service so much that I paid for the subscription and don’t regret it. Sure, there are some quirks to it, but I discover so many new artists based on qualities of artists I know. Start today for free by going to their web site and trying their web player and then download the mobile app from the Android Market.

DroidLight – This is the original “use your Android phone as a flashlight” app, written my co-worker Mike for the original Droid in 2009. It works on more than just Motorola devices, so show him some love. Download it and give him good reviews. I can’t tell you how many times this app has saved my ass in the dark. Fumbling around, looking for keys, finding a path through a cotton field, or when the power goes out in a snow storm. Trust me, the time to get this app is not after you need it.

When docked in my bedside table, my phone activates Alarm Clock Plus. This app is which is an enhanced version of the stock clock app with added features. Highly recommended if you travel across time zones or want more control over how you are brought out of your slumber. The thing I like is this app has the notion of ‘gentle’ alarms that gradually get louder over the course of about a minute rather than something that shocks you awake. The author has an ad-supported version, as well.

Productivity

Dropbox is your big shared folder in the sky. If you don’t have an account yet, get one. The free version gets you 2GB. Install the software on your home computer and your work computer and the app your phone. Then put your shared files there and it magically syncs them. Of course, you have to use some common sense in how you share them, especially if you work in a sensitive environment. The Dropbox team has done a very good job of making the software work seamlessly on the desktop, tablet, and mobile device. http://www.dropbox.com

Google Docs is not up to the point where Microsoft Office was, not even in 1997, but that may be a good thing. It’s good enough for 80% of the writing I do and 90% of the spreadsheets. The fact that I can reliably pull out my tablet and show a Google Docs version to someone anywhere and edit it in real time is beautiful. There are products out there that provide MS Office-like functions for Android tablets, but I’m not a fan.

LastPass is where I store my web passwords. There are several other products out there with similar features, but I like the integration and syncing with my desktop web browser for the same low price per year.

Google Reader is an RSS feed reader with nice features that includes syncing with the desktop version. I subscribe to a lot of news feeds and use my phone to flip between them during the day while I’m traveling, in a doctors office, or just waiting on the kids to get out of school. I’ve also been trying NewsRob which handles much of the sync task, but I’m not ready to jump over just yet. If you read a lot of news from CBS, NY Times, Engadget, BBC, comic strips, blogs, podcasts, either of these apps will work for you. If you want the major headlines brought to you, Pulse Reader made a big splash last year and it is very attractive. Similarly, News Republic is very visual, but it uses more bandwidth than I want for just reading news articles.

Travel

Google Translate - I have a passable understanding of the Western European languages and I’m trying to figure out Portuguese. My team is in Brazil and we’re connected on Twitter and G+. During the day, they talk to me in English, but at night, I have to see what fun they’re up to. With Google Translate on my phone, I know how to say hangover in Sao Paulo and grapefruit in Paris.

Why would you need anything other than Google Maps? Well, if you’re in the middle of sub-Saharan Africa perhaps. Or maybe you can’t have a data plan. Or maybe you don’t actually have a phone. Mapdroyd is an app that reads files from the Open Street Map project and displays map data on your device. Pull down map bundles from the internet and store on your SD card and you can have reliable maps at your fingers without a data connection.

TripIt is a great service for anyone who does more than one flight a year. Forward those confirmation emails to their sync service and they do the hard work. The TripIt mobile app is a nice view onto your data. It’s not a requirement to use the app if you use the calendar to sync, but it doesn’t hurt to have the data in their app and in your calendar.

TripIt Mobile

Most of the airlines have an app with schedules. I’ve downloaded several with mixed results. The American app is pretty nice. The United app is pretty awful (or was).

Internet

Tweetcaster Pro is the Twitter client I use. Your mileage may vary. There is an ad-supported version as well. I prefer this app to the official Twitter Android client, but I’ll admit that I haven’t tried the official client in about 6 months. It might’ve improved greatly since that first release. I tweet a lot as myself and for my job, so I need to keep accounts separated and responsive.

Wikidroid for Wikipedia – When I was a kid, I read the entire World Book encyclopedia. All 26 volumes. Plus the 15 volumes of ChildCraft. So it should come as no surprise that I’m a Wikipedia junkie. Wikidroid is my favorite Wikipedia client. I also paid for the Wikidroid Plus key that removes advertisements.

I’m playing with Google+. It’s still growing and most of the talk isn’t very interesting yet. I’m hoping it will get past the early adopter stage because I have no intention of returning to Facebook.

Have you ever started reading a web article at work and realized that you couldn’t finish it? Say hello to Read it Later. This app includes a set of magical scripts for your desktop web browser that distill large stories into small files for your mobile device and syncs them. It’s like going back to 2002 and having MobiPocket, only this doesn’t suck. There is a similar product called instapaper, but the author of instapaper is hostile toward Android, so the apps you see in the Android Market are not official instapaper readers.

If you have an unlimited or high-rate data plan, you might be able to utilize some of that for your laptop or another device. If your phone doesn’t have a tethering app built-in, look at an app called PDANet. The free version of this app will allow you to perform HTTP requests from laptop to the web via your phone. If you need secure connections, you will need to drop down the registration cost, which is $15.95. Make sure your data plan will allow you to tether before you do this, though, as most carriers have monitoring processes in place to catch users who abuse tethering plans.

Utilities

Barcode Scanner - If you haven’t seen one of those square two dimensional barcodes yet, then you haven’t been paying attention. This barcode scanner is useful for more than just that though. If you’re furniture shopping and want to compare prices at another store, just scan a barcode. Or, if you want to keep you kids occupied while in Costco, give them your phone and let them play Barcode Beasties. On a more serious note, if you plan to use your phone for Google’s 2-step verification (and you should eventually), you will need the barcode scanner on your phone to use with the Google Authenticator app.

ASTRO File Manager is the one tool you need for lots of duties. A lot of people will tell you not to mess with Task Killers and I’m one of them. But, you do need a file manager and ASTRO is a nice one and it will back up unprotected apps. It also has a pretty nice video player built into it.

App List Backup doesn’t backup your apps. It just backs up the full names of the apps to the SD card. This can useful because after a factory reset and restore, you can use it to tell Android Market to start restoring from the list that it contains. Because of the way that Android Market works, apps that are restored from a backup aren’t updated, but apps that are restored from links will be this is a better way to restore apps that you want to maintain over time. The UI isn’t very nice, though. This is just someone’s time-saver. It’s not an actual polished product.

Entertainment

I’m not a gamer, but I do use my phone to entertain me as well as keep me updated on work activities. I’m content with music, videos, simple games and puzzles for the most part.

Andoku (for phones) and Andoku 2 (phones or tablets) are a beautiful implementation of sudoku with several interesting variants. Thousands of puzzles built in and many ways to customize the user experience to meet your way of playing the game.

Shortyz is my crossword puzzle solver of choice. I’ve paid for crossword puzzle apps on Palm OS and Windows Mobile and this free app kicks the crap out of any paid app. It syncs daily puzzles from about a dozen sources in less than the time it takes to find a seat on the CalTrain.

Shortyz Crosswords

Have you discovered Google Sky Map yet? If not, download it, go outside, and point your phone at the sky. Day or night, but it’s best at night. Especially a dark night. You will be amazed. We live on the edge of a small town in the middle of nowhere, so I can be somewhere that my telescope can exploit in no time flat. On nights when the moon isn’t out, I can just sit on my back porch and explore with nothing more than my phone or tablet.

I bought Flick Golf on a whim after Romain Guy recommended it on G+. I’m actually quite enthralled by it. It’s not your typical “putt to win” type of golf game and the graphics are gorgeous. For $1, it’s a nice distraction.

I think the first Android Market app I bought was Abduction. This game is a platformer involving a cow that bounces upwards toward a UFO to find her friends. The kids have always thought it fun and I’ve paid for the upgrade, called Abduction world attack. The upgrade no longer works with my RAZR, but there is another title called Abduction 2.

Pocket God is utterly pointless and silly. I normally would say it wasn’t worth the dollar that I spent on it, but it kept my daughter in stitches for the better part of an hour while my wife shopped at Target. For that, I can assure you that made it worth every cent, so it stays on the phone.

Media

Google Books is the first thing that goes on my tablet. If you’ve read my blog this summer, you saw several posts about reading eBooks. I’m not reading books on my phone, but I’ve read at least 15 books this year on the XOOM. I’m pretty well done buying paper books for entertainment. The publishers need to solve the money thing, though, because I think I’d rather pay the author $8 directly than to pay a media company $12.

I’m in the search for a truly usable music player app, to be honest. The recent announcement of the Google Music service and music locker is great. The client app on the device is just OK and I use it when I have to. I don’t care if I see album artwork and I’d prefer they work on the navigation for playing from local storage. There are alternatives, each with their fans, like WinAmp, DoubleTwist, and PowerAMP, but they all seem to suffer from the same UI ugliness, only shifted around. The WinAmp wireless sync from the desktop is nice after you get it set up–you can fill your phones’ SD card with the music from your PC without messing with cables.

MX Video Player – For playing movies from your SD card. Playing video is hit or miss, depending on your devices’ CPU and the way the files are encoded on your SD card. If the file won’t play straight off the card, you might need to install a CODEC from the market. If that doesn’t work, try one of the other players, such as MoboPlayer or mVideoPlayer. Also, as mentioned above, the ASTRO file manager, which I’ve found to be quite good.

Car Cast podcast Player is Bob Hermann’s pet project that he uses in his car every day on his commute. He wrote this app because nobody else would and fixes it when he finds bugs. If you want a simple and usable podcast player that syncs to the online sources with big buttons for using on a car dock, this is the way to go. The UI isn’t pretty though.

I always install Shazam because I want to know who’s singing that song they’re playing at the restaurant or when I’m driving my crummy rental car with the crummy terrestrial radio.

Honorable Mentions

I installed the Photowall widget on my phone and my XOOM tablet because it’s pretty darn cool. It turned my docked tablet into a crazy cool photo viewer better than anything we’ve ever seen at Best Buy. Then 4 days later I noticed that I was getting about 40% less battery life out of both these device than I was before I installed the widget and it had to go. Which was a shame because it totally rocked.

Photowall widget

I’ve used Evernote for a number of years and I loved the way it just worked in everything I used. But somehow I realized about a month ago that I’d gone about 6 months with this new hard drive and it wasn’t installed. And if I had gone that long, did I really need it? Evernote, like Dropbox, is installed on all your computers and devices and it handles the synchronization chore. It’s less file based and more about the individual snippets that you’ve clipped.

If you are a task-driven person, you might find that Remember the Milk (aka RTM) is a system that works for handling TO DO items. I’ve tried on 2 different occasions to fit myself into its’ model and cannot. Their system has a web interface that integrates into Google Apps, GMail, and has an Android client. They have a free and premium model and I tried both. It appeared that they had some success early on, but they didn’t grow with their success and haven’t fixed their software past the first releases. It’s a shame because it was a good start and any alternative to Google Tasks is worth a try. There were some Android client apps that worked with RTM and Google Tasks, such as Astrid. I don’t know why it’s so hard to make this work. Maybe it’s me.

Paid by the word?

OK, I’ll wrap it up. I have more apps that I install for testing and debugging, but they probably aren’t that interesting to most folks. These are the ones that actually get some play time for fun or work at least once a week or two on at least one of the gadgets I have around the barn.

Thanks for stopping by! I hope your holidays are filled with joy and maybe a new (Motorola) gadget or two.

Eric

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Summer reading

Posted on September 27, 2011 | Leave a comment

I just finished my summer reading. OK, it’s a few days after summer is officially over, but technically I started in the spring time.

I’ve never been a big reader of Stephen King’s work. I don’t care for horror, so a lot of his work is just lost on me. But there are some exceptions. I enjoyed The Stand the first time I read it back in the 1980′s, so I bought it as an e-book earlier this year and read it on my Motorola XOOM. After I finished it, Jackie suggested I try Kings’ Gunslinger series (a.k.a. The Dark Tower). He had written the first book in the 1970′s and had developed the series over the next 30 years as a labor of love.

The first book caught my interest. The pace was good and it was an engaging tale. The next books added new characters and dimensions to the story. I found myself drawn into the storyline and enjoying them. During our 2 week road trip to Cape Canaveral and Orlando, I read two books, staying up late the night before the shuttle took off because I couldn’t get enough of the story.

Then it happened. (Beware: minor spoilers)

Somewhere around the sixth book, he lost me. What had been a perfectly good knights errant tale, suddenly became something else entirely. Instead of going toward their eventual doom and defending the helpless along the way, the protagonists found themselves crossing into “our” world and running into characters from King’s earlier books. It wasn’t the crossing over that was the problem. It wasn’t even running into people like Randall Flagg from The Stand or Father Callahan from Salem’s Lot.

What disappointed me was when King inserted himself into the storyline as a character who influences the story. I knew he had a tendency to cameo himself in his books, but not like this. He tore down the fourth wall, poured petrol on it, and lit the damned thing on fire. He dropped self-deprecating jokes into the narrative and made his real life an element of the storyline. The reader was forced to read through his accident, where he was hit by a minivan on a country road while out walking. It’s such a cheap device to use and I don’t understand why he felt the need to use it, other than to punish the poor bastard who ran him over.

In the end, the series turned out alright. I liked the way he wrapped up the quest and he did his surviving characters some justice. For what it’s worth, I also like the way the movie Inception ended and the last episode of The Sopranos.

I know he was ready to be done with the series. In fact, in his afterward, he says he not entirely happy with the way it ended. It’s not the ending that I hated, it was the book and a half where I was forced to slog through his life instead of dealing with the characters and storylines that drew me into his world in the first place.

Now, onto my Autumn reading. I picked up an omnibus e-copy of the Hitchhikers Guide trilogy (all 5 books). That ought to keep me occupied through the chilly evenings.

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What’s Bugging the Android Market?

Posted on September 11, 2011 | Leave a comment

Have you ever found a bug in program? If so, did you try to tell the developer about it? If so, you have my sympathies.

The problem with developers (and I’m pointing a finger at myself here as well), is we like our routines. And the one routine we hate dealing with is bugs. To get around our hatred of dealing with bugs, we’ve created elaborate bug tracking systems whose common characteristic is they all have horrible user experiences. It takes special knowledge to create bugs in these systems and retrieve them.

Oh, and it takes a login and password.

A consumer has no patience for this. The train of thought goes like this: “You want me to create an account on your system, wait for the account to activate, create the bug, then go through several iterations of questions for you to tell me that it’s ‘User Error’“?

Um, no.

“Instead, I’m going to go into the Android Market (or Apple App Store) and give your app a 1-star review. Then, in the box where I give my review, I’m going to describe my bug, and press ‘send’“.

This happens thousands of times every day. Some consumers do it out of laziness or because they were raised by wolves.

And that’s the problem that needs solving here. Market reviews are not an actual indicator of how good an app is. It’s a constant battle between groups whose motives are not to tell other consumers about the quality of the app. There are developers who have fake accounts that they use to post positive reviews for crappy apps. There are users who give 1 star reviews because the author is from a country they hate. And there are users who are frustrated by bugs and use 1-star reviews to catch the developers attention.

What if it didn’t have to be this way? At least take one of those warring parties out of the fray. Some consumers could be great testers if they had the ability to do so in a consistent and painless process. Instead of going to the developer site (which may not exist) and having to interact with bug tracking systems, consumers should have an easy bug feedback system built into the Android Market that doesn’t take its toll on rating data.

OK, some 1-star reviews for bugs really are valid. If the app is so badly done that it needs to die, then it’s perfectly valid for users to rate it so. But if you have an otherwise good app that has a minor problem (or user error), the developer should have a way to resolve valid customer issues without getting dinged in their ratings.

Google maintains the relationship at both ends, but doesn’t provide the ability to connect the consumer to the developer. For bug reporting, that’s exactly what needs to happen. I understand there are issues to solve to keep abuse from occurring, but that’s a very solvable problem. Microsoft did this how many years ago with Dr. Watson? Granted, most Windows consumers didn’t allow bugs to upload, but some did, and sometimes those logs actually helped find real bugs.

Here’s my proposal. It’s not meant to be an architectural thing because I really don’t know how these systems are implemented, but just consider it an overview…

On the consumer side, modify the Android Market client to allow someone who has an app installed to submit a bug report just like they can submit a review. This is an opt-in experience and has to be enabled explicitly. The user experience would allow the consumer to free-edit some information on the bug such as how it was triggered.

The Android Market client would collect some information the developer needs, such as device type, OS level, and carrier. There are different levels of bugs, so it’s going to be hard to come up with a strategy that gets useful diagnostic data. Some times it’s nice to have kernel panic logs or stack traces, but it’s going to be difficult getting that on a consumer device in a consistent manner. It might have to be enough for now to just let the consumer give a narrative.

On the web site, again allow consumers to submit bugs because often it’s just easier to use a browser than a phone or tablet for writing a narrative. Because of the nature of the web, controls need to be put in place to prevent malicious submissions and abuse. Something that Google has done in other systems and understands how to do.

On the developer dashboard, the tool provides the ability to manage the bug queue. The developer can handle it through the dashboard or they can export it to their own system. The Google Code site already handles issue tracking. The Market backend system could generate a schema and XML with the data so clever developers can write import scripts for bugzilla or JIRA.

Here’s the important part and where Google can use their ability as the middle man to make the connection. The consumer can opt to just submit the bug report and that’s it. No identifiable information is presented unless they did it in their bug report. Or, they can choose to give their contact information (gmail address) to the developer. At this point, Google is out of the loop and it’s up to the dev to start a conversation (or not) with the consumer. Or, they can opt to allow conversation with the developer, but they can revoke that connection at any time if it becomes abusive. This is with Google handling the conversation through a proxy system. Craigslist uses such a mechanism to provide some level of anonymity.

The developer would have the ability to perform automated screening or reject users as abusive. As a developer, I sometimes found certain users who couldn’t be satisfied or were just difficult to work with. By opening this channel, Google would be creating a great opportunity for both parties, but it needs to ensure that abuse on either side can be dealt with easily and without fear of reprisal.

So here’s the final link. The app submission system has the ability to connect bugs to a new release. The consumer who reported the bug in the first place gets a notification that their issue was addressed. With this connection, the developer has another chance to have a happy (and hopefully paying) customer.

I’ve talked to enough Android developers at conferences to know there is a need for a system such as this. Maybe it’s already under development and it just hasn’t been announced yet. It certainly needs refinement by people who understand the details of how the Market works, but consider it as a concept.

Thoughts?

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Commoditization of American beer

Posted on June 4, 2011 | 5 Comments

If you know me, you know I have an affinity for beer. When I travel North America, I always search out the local brewpub or I order the local micro on tap. When I’m overseas, I stick to the local brew. For several years (before children), I helped organize the Great American Beer Festival in Denver, which was (and probably still is) the largest celebration of fermentation on the planet.

So, I find it ironic that I have absolutely no loyalty when it comes to American beer at my local package store. Anyone who can claim to distinguish between Bud, Miller, Coors, Pabst, Pearl, etc. in a blind taste test is lying. I know this, because I’ve conducted this experiment among a group of biased individuals who make claims such as “Coors Light gives me the runs”, and “Bud tastes like horse piss”.

Truth is, they all taste like horse piss. Oh, and my Canadian friends have no room to talk. Your beers taste like moose piss.

If I could say that I “have a brand”, I suppose it would be Original Coors (the “Banquet Beer”). Nobody drinks Banquet Beer anymore, so I think I buy it just to be different and because it was my fathers’ brand. It certainly isn’t the taste.

So yesterday I was getting some gas and preparing to join my friends in the field for my annual “pretend to be a farmer” day. I help out during wheat harvest for a few hours and smell the dirt. I had some snacks and bottled water in my cooler. I went into the beer cave to get something for everyone to enjoy. I deliberated on a couple of choices, but in the end it wasn’t the brand, the price, or the calories that was the deciding factor.

It was the shape of the can.

I chose Michelob Ultra because a dozen cans would fit better into my ice chest than the others. The Ultra can is taller and narrower than the traditional US beer can, while still containing 12 fluid ounces. I’ve never been a loyalist to Michelob in the past, but I don’t hold any bias against it. At 10 pm, when the wheat was in the trucks and we were standing around the bumper of my pickup, it was cold and quenched the thirst.

And I guess that’s the only measure that counts. Those guys who claim they only like Bud light were perfectly content drinking a cold Michelob Ultra. Even if they didn’t brag about it the next day.

All those marketing dollars that are spent on talking frogs, beautiful mountain scenes, and race car drivers, could be saved if they just spent some money learning how their customers buy their beer and why.

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