Software Development

• Being into computers today is not the same as it was in my day when you had to solder chips into boards, now it means you are on Facebook.
• I don’t know why you would fake such a thing but there are a lot of fake self described geeks.
• This holiday season remember to backup if don’t already have a backup system in place.

Thought Leadership

• Life has a funny way to keep you humble.
• Focus on simplicity, complexity is overrated.
• Whether I see the glass half full or half empty largely depends on what is in the glass to begin with.
• To much of a good thing is a bad thing. Not enough of a good thing is also a bad thing.
• No brain, no gain.
• There is no such thing as cheap thrills, only cheap tricks.

Product Placement

• I just realized that I have five phone numbers connected to my iPhone.
• Not feeling the new Twitter app. It feels like it requires too many clicks to do anything.
• Every parking lot should be covered with an array of solar panels. Some parking lots take more area than the base of the building.
• I hate when sites and apps require Facebook Connect to sign up. #pinterest
• I bet that Taco Bell taco shells are made in China.
• Like a true politician, Go Daddy flip flopped on the issue and now claims it does not support SOPA. #WhoDroppedTheSOPA
• Google Grinch: No Ice Cream Sandwich for Galaxy S, first Galaxy Tab, or original Nexus.
• The one feature that had been overlooked in Android is the ability to take a screenshot of your Android device.

Quote

• I’m putting you on the do not kill list. – Bender Bending RodrÌguez
• The truth is often stupid. – Bender Bending RodrÌguez
• Follow the fucking money. When a VC tells you what’s good for you, check your wallet, then count your fingers. – jwz
• Let’s go and invent tomorrow. – Steve Jobs

Question

• Who moved my cheese and then cut said cheese?
• Who is doing some last minute shopping?
• How many domains do you own?
• Church’s or Popeyes?
• Ancient Aliens or Modern Morons?
• If you could go back in time and would be stuck in prehistoric time, what skill would you need most to survive?
• If Mr Grinch is so mean what do you think Mrs Grinch is like?
• If the world is flat why aren’t international phone rates flat themselves?
• A touch device is a complicated device with many components, what are the chances that the Galaxy Tab would look identical to the iPad?

Randumb

• Looking forward to the future!
• Old Internet memes don’t die, they go remixed, go viral, and trend.
• It’s rumored that the same maker that built a weight scale with a built it twitter client that tweets your weight is working on a toilet.
• Money can’t buy you love but it can sure buy some lap dances.
• When it comes to teenage love, forever doesn’t last long.
• The surprise is the prize.
• Empty space is the enemy of clutter.
• You are the chaos/cause of you.
• You are the cause of you because you.
• It is what it will be and it will be what has been.
• Happy whatever the fuck you celebrate tonight.
• The Internet was invented for the sharing of funny cat videos and pictures.
• Make a right at the 3rd dimension and you are here.
• The best part of nothing is everything.
• Negative ideas manifest into real feelings
• Gift wrapping ain’t going so merry.
• If there is a way to hurt yourself with a tape dispenser I’ve done it… Why is my lip bleeding!?
• I think that The Terminator is the beginning of a long war against the machines that culminates with The Matrix.

Overheard

• OH: Annoying people are really annoying.
• OH: I would love to enjoy my own depression if I only I didn’t have to deal with other people’s depression.
• OH: I wish my life was an 80′s movie.
• OH: To be honest, I’m not being honest.

When I discovered that I was running out of disk space I immediately started to look for “disk space” apps on the App Store. I found Spacie to be what the HD DR ordered. With Spacie I found that I had multiple version of NetBeans each taking close to 1GB. I had multiple versions of the Android SDK each taking close to 1GB. Spotify was caching over 2GB of data. I found that iPhoto and iTunes was taking the bulk of the space. I easily had 20GB in iPhoto and 40GB in iTunes. In iPhoto, I started to export and backup photo sets older than a year or two so that I could reclaim more space. In iTunes, I found that I had a hundreds of podcasts taking over 100MB each. I pushed these photo sets and podcasts to an external hard drive and reclaimed over 40GB of disk space. Spacie helped me to identify what files where taking the most space and I systematically addressed each folder as best I could.

Spacie finds large files in your hard drive and helps reclaim disk space.

Spacie is available on the Apple App Store. It is currently priced at $1.99 and it’s well worth it since it saved me from having to upgrade to a new hard drive.

Have you ever notice that when you buy a $0.99 song on the iTunes music store you may be charged two or three days later? I’ve noticed that when if I purchase a movie on a Friday and a song on a Saturday, I often don’t get charged until the following Sunday or Monday and when I do both items are charged together. How does this save Apple millions? Typically, when you have to process a customer’s credit card to charge for goods or services, the bank or merchant account that processes the credit card will charge around $0.20-0.30 per transaction and an additional percentage of the total cost after a certain amount. This is why some small business don’t accept credit cards for less than some amount, like $5-10 dollars. If you are processing credit cards for your digital goods online store, PayPal charges a transaction fee of $0.30 plus 2.9% of the total price.

I’ve positive that Apple has negotiated the transaction cost to less what a brink and mortar business would have to pay, but as an example let’s say they pay $.10 per transaction. If you buy a $0.99 song on iTunes Apple still has to pay a transaction fee for charging your card, in this case $0.10 or 10% of the total charged. If you buy two songs over a span of two days and Apple bills you for the both of the $0.99 songs together, Apple will still only pay the $0.10 transaction cost to process the credit card, or just 5% of the total price.

This is why when you purchase items from iTunes it maybe be several days before you are charged, because it is better for Apple to charge you for multiple items than to charge you for individual songs separately.

Recently, a developer in distress sent the following email to the whole company.

I can’t delete any data from any UI screen.

That test doesn’t read like an email, it doesn’t even make sense as a tweet, it’s like an unfortunate cookie message. The email should not have been sent to the whole team, which include sales people, it is to vague, does not have any clear action or request.

Communication is vital for any team and the teams running on full speed need the right level of communication in the right medium. If you are interested in learning how to effectively use email to communicate with your team I recommend the following posts.

• Keep it short and simple
• Three Sentences
• Keep it short and simple

There is a fifth A; don’t be an Ass.

You can run the sqlcmd utility from the command line and run a input sql script and capture the output in a file. The input sql script file can run any sql statement, such as creating a new databases, views, tables, or procedures. You can also restore and backup any given database or whatever else you require.

To run the sqlcmd utility and have it read a file, createTables.sql, you can run something like the following from your command line, of course if you have SQL Server Management Studio and sqlcmd installed.

sqlcmd -S localhost -d dbName -U user -P password -i createTables.sql -o output.out

Google went at great lengths on this deal, it not only paid top dollar for Motorola but it even created a special “Facts about Google’s acquisition of Motorola” SEO-rich webpage which includes choice quotes from Android partners and a message from Larry Page.

Larry, CEO of Google, wrote about the purchase…

Motorola has a history of over 80 years of innovation in communications technology and products, and in the development of intellectual property, which have helped drive the remarkable revolution in mobile computing we are all enjoying today.

The last Motorola phone I thought was ground breaking was the first generation RAZR. Since then I have not been impressed with their phone offering, including their Android versions. In the press release, Larry made several references of the StarTAC, which Motorola originally released in 1996.

To appease other Android partners and licensees, the press release stated that Motorola will e a independent business unit.

This acquisition will not change our commitment to run Android as an open platform. Motorola will remain a licensee of Android and Android will remain open. We will run Motorola as a separate business

For me, the key and most revealing sentence in the whole press release was the following.

Our acquisition of Motorola will increase competition by strengthening Google’s patent portfolio, which will enable us to better protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies.

What struck me about the above quote is how hard Google is spinning this. When competitors buy up patents, it’s anti-competitive but when Google itself pays top dollar for a turkey stuffed with patents it will “increase competition.”

It has been reported that Google is paying $40/share, over 50% on top of the price at the time of the announcement. The reason Google is paying this price is clearly for the over 14,000 granted patents and over 6,500 pending patents Motorola has acquired over time. These patents will add to patents Google has added to it’s patent portfolio.

I’ve been one to always chase my customers and users, not trends and fads. That is why, I’ve been a huge fan of Microsoft DreamSpark and Microsoft BizSpark. Microsoft BizSpark is a program that allows small startups have access to many of its products, frameworks, tools, and resources for free.

Microsoft BizSpark Software Download

Through BizSpark you can get access to applications such as Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate, Office for Mac 2011, Microsoft Windows 3.1 through Windows Vista, and much more for free. There is no need for your CTO to look for serial numbers for Windows Server 2008 on Google and warez sites. BizSpark gives you legit licenses to key Microsoft products.

I’m a huge fan of any company that supports startups and software developers in general. I can’t say enough nice things about Microsoft BizSpark, even if they paid me. And not, they didn’t pay me but I am a proud member. I only wish that the Microsoft BizSpark program also included hardware.

Software Development

• Thread.sleep(28800000);
• You don’t need a PHD in PHP to be a great Web Developer.
• Not Another Expression Language. There should be one expression language to rule them all.
• I am not afraid of rolling up my sleeves and debugger.
• It’s a thin line between feature and bug.
• Code is a blunt instrument.
• We ain’t afraid of no code block.
• Web designers are modern day alchemists.
• If developers are a dime a dozen, then product idea people are a silver dollar a dozen.
• I don’t read romance novels or non-fiction before going to bed, I read programming language technical specifications.
• New Name For Rock Band: Death By SQL Injection
• Let there be code.
• Just code it.
• Code the future.
• Crack the code.
• Don’t be a code donkey.

Team Dynamics

• Are you a value creator, subtractor, divider, or multiplier?
• AWS failure is the perfect storm to the cloud.
• Stress is excess, we don’t need it in our lives.
• You can’t buy the scrappy mentality.
• Scale your thought process.
• The right time is right now.
• Strive to do what you do well better.
• People don’t scale and multi-task as well as computers do.
• Give a man a thought, and he will think for a day. Teach a man to think, and he will think for himself.
• You don’t want someone to reinvent the wheel, you need someone that makes it turn!
• Everyone has great ideas, what is needed is great execution of great ideas.

Product Placement

• Is Automattic, the company behind WordPress, working on an ad network? With millions of WP blogs out there, maybe it should.
• Jiffy Lube peeps are great at up selling you on add-on services.
• Forget HAL 3000, I’m afraid of my iPhone 3000. “I’m sorry Dave, but I’m afraid you can’t do that and I’ve notified the authorities.
• Google announcing that better ads are coming to GMail is like the power company announcing that a better billing system is coming.
• I feel like I get more snail mail spam than email spam. I wonder if GMail can also filter out my snail mail spam.
• If you add up all the zero-day holes in Adobe products, you get a lot of days spent patching and upgrading buggy software.

The Valley

• Welcome to the Blubble 2.0.
• The trouble with the blubble.
• I think we are in a #bubble when a website for listing free crap is valued at multiple millions of dollars.
• Don’t pivot while you pitch.
• How do you monetize the bubble?
• Ah, Silicon Valley, the land of vanity startups, founders with ADD, fan boi VCs, me-to products, one trick apps, companies on pivot mode…
• Bubbles are like snow flakes, there are no two alike, so we can conclude that this tech bubble I’d different from previous ones.

General Technologist

• If Arthur Miller were alive today he would have written a sequel to Death of a Salesman called Death of a Social Media Marketing Ninja.
• You know your service or product is successful if GOOG wants to buy you for a billion dollars, FB copies you, and if MSFT doesn’t get it.
• Any lawmaker who proposes any bill related to technology should be able to correctly setup a wifi router, Facebook privacy settings, …
• My iPhone knows too much about me. I think I want a dumb phone, instead of a scheming evil genius phone that is tracking my every move.
• If TinyUrl was a utilities company it would force upgrade everybody to use smart grid meter and charge us extra to use green friendly links.
• Twitter management seem to play musical chairs with titles. It seems like everyone at the company has had a turn at being CEO.
• There are different degrees of open in open platforms, from marketing buzzword open to data portability open.
• What I learned by reading Rework by 37signals: Emulate drug dealing celebrity chefs and up sale the by-products of what you do.

Gutenberg died broke, his problem was that when he invented the printing press he printed the Bible. Ben Bernanke learned that lesson and instead of printing religious tomes he prints cold hard cash.

Between easy and hard, you’ll see a lot less competition if you go for what is difficult and you’ll see a lot more adoption if you make easy what was once hard.

First they seized crack warez sites and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a cracker. Then they came for the torret sites and I didn’t speak out because I don’t pirate content. Then they came for offshore online gambling sites and I didn’t speak out because I don’t play poker. The they came for my blog and there was no one left to speak out for me.

Reading about the recent Dropbox security issue and I realized that I have more valuable and personal information in the cloud than in my home. I have family pictures, calendar events for contacts, tax documents, inner most personal writings and journal entries, and much more on Google Docs, Dropbox, Yahoo Mail, and whatever other cloud service I use. Yet police agencies do not require a warrant to access that information but they do to come into my home and conduct a search. The search warrant is now obsolete. Google and other online services has made the search warrant obsolete.

It was recently reported that the US State Department is developing a mobile phone panic button, probably in the form of an app, for pro-democracy activists in foreign countries to erase a phone’s contents when they have are detained by the secret police. At the same time, the US Department of Justice and California’s Supreme Court have upheld the right of police to search the contents of a detained person without being arrested or having a warrant. Police are using digital equipment that can read all of the data in a phone in minutes at the point that police has stopped someone. Welcome to the future of pre-crime proactive policing.