Because of the half life of mobile application users, app developers are constantly updating their mobile apps. It depends on the number of apps you have on your phone, but if I don’t get the latest apps in a weeks period I would have 15 app updates waiting for me. I update one day and the next day there is another app ready to update. Because apps are updated so often, and they require the users permission to do so, mobile app users have are developing app update fatigue.

To create a universally unique ID in Java 1.5 or greater just call the static randomUUID method on the UUID class.

UUID.randomUUID().toString()

UUID has a wider range of possible values that I’m not concern of duplicate values or collisions for my application.

Code and Design

• Remove Multiple Null Values From a List in Java
• Launch Default Web Browser and Email Client in Java
• How to Print the Alphabet in Java
• Java String Conversion Puzzlers
• Find the Current Working Directory in Java
• Can You Spot the Infinite Loop
• Run-on Code Statement
• Common Causes for Out of Memory Exceptions
• Fix Common Java Errors
• Access Drives From Remote Windows Computers
• Create SQL Server Database and Database Tables From a File
• Copy Records From One Database to Another
• Copy Data Between Two Databases Tables

Reviews and Rants

• Avoid Overloading Meaning to Existing Database Columns
• Worst Software Bug
• Never Underestimate Your Users
• jQuery Mobile and PhoneGap
• Chipotle Online Order System
• Save on Merchant Fees
• Email Share
• Missing Feature: The Mobile Device Self Destruct Button
• Reclaim Disk Space with Spacie
• The Google Chrome Notebook
• Android Lacks Polish
• Microsoft Bizspark
• Does Lenovo Use Thinkvantage Toolbox to Spam Users?
• HP Printer Driver Wants to Phone Home
• Apple Ruined My Neighbors Christmas
• Google Starts Towards the Path of Evil
• Has Google Jumped the Shark?

Retweet 2011

• Retweet December 2011
• Retweet November 2011
• Retweet October 2011
• Retweet September 2011
• Retweet August 2011
• Retweet July 2011
• Retweet June 2011
• Retweet April 2011
• Retweet March 2011
• Retweet February 2011

Year in Review

• Year In Review 2009
• Year In Review 2008
• Year In Review 2007
• Year In Review 2006
• Year In Review 2005

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.

For two years straight the iPad has been the most coveted piece of technology on most self respecting geek. The iPad is great for geeks no matter their expertise, music, photography, gaming, social media, etc. A geek that travels a lot or enjoys reading on their iPad when at a coffee shop would enjoy the 3G iPad so that they can always be connected no mater where they are. Whether you give the geek in your life an iPad or if they already have one, there are a ton of great accessories, such as a envelope iPad cases from Poketo.

Poketo Envelope iPad Case

Over this last year there has been an explosion of tablets come into the market such as the Amazon Kindle Fire, and Barnes and Noble’s Nook Tablet. The Nook tablet at $249 is a great bargain but so is the Amazon Kindle Fire at $199. The Nook tablet is a bit faster and more powerful than the Kindle Fire, but if you already own a Kindle or have purchase Kindle ebooks then the Kindle Fire would be the obvious choice.

For the financial whiz in the family I would recommend the HP 12c Financial Calculator. The HP 12c Financial Calculator has a retro HP look and over 120 mathematical functions that would be appreciated by any business and finance power user.

Every engineer needs a notebook and there are no better notebooks than Moleskine notebooks. Moleskine has come out with a limited edition Star Wars notebooks perfect for that die hard fan. For the old school video gamer in the family, they also have a limited edition Pac-Man set.

As everyone already knows, the standard geek uniform is jeans and a t-shirt. Any self respecting geek needs to have some ThinkGeek shirts in his wardrobe. ThinkGeek gear is like Armani Exchange for geeks, binary fashionable and geek chic.

If you need more suggestions, take a look at previous years geek gift guides:

The Ultimate Geek Gift Guide 2010, The Ultimate Geek Gift Guide 2009, The Ultimate Geek Gift Guide 2008

My personal pet peeve with Android devices is the craziness with moving apps from the internal device’s memory to the external SD card. Even relatively recent Android devices such as the Google Nexus and Dell Streak 7 have less than 1GB internal memory so if you download a lot of apps you’ll soon need to move apps around to the SD card. But some apps you can’t move to the SD card so that presents a different issue.

Who cares if the phone’s memory can be extended by using higher capacity SD cards if a one year old device can’t even be upgraded to the latest Android version. So the whole thing with extensible SD cards and moving installed apps from the internal memory to the SD card I find completely and frustratingly useless. The whole concept of an Operating Systems is that best manages the resources of the device, the Android OS should best manage installed applications in either the internal memory or SD based on some intelligence. Why am I doing Android’s job?

Another concern I have with Android devices is that they usually come with a lot of pre-installed apps. For example, my Dell Streak 7 came with Kongregate Arcade app which I can’t remove and reclaim the wasted internal memory. Similarly, carriers and vendors add and customize Android so that no two devices have the same user experience.

My last concern with Android’s lack of polish is its dark goth color scheme. Most application’s menu and option screens are as if they were designed by a goth listening to The Cure. The Android UI design is not “Just Like Heaven.”

Software Development

• Making good UI means making ugly choices.
• There was a time when having a computer made you a nerd. Today, people being “good on Facebook” does not make you a nerd.
• Love working with jQuery Mobile.

Thought Leadership

• Everyone has a vision, the difference is the scope, lens, and filter around the vision.
• Tomorrow is a fresh opportunity to be amazing and amazed.
• You ask stupid questions, you get stupid answers.
• I’m not on StackOverflow, so when people ask for my SO reputation I instead give them the the monthly referrals I get from SO.

Product Placement

• Sweet. Amazon just sent me a $5 credit because of a “technical issue on the Amazon.com website” that I am not even aware I encountered.
• Found my first handheld device… An HP iPaq RX3715 running Pocket PC 2003 Pro w/ Outlook 2002. It’s still in great condition!
• David Pogue wrote his review of the Kindle Fire, sounds like he wrote it from his iPad.

Overheard

• OH: Don’t they have Cliff Notes for the DMV driving manual?
• OH: Your brain cells are sexy!
• OH: Sometimes when you put things in the closet it doesn’t mean you have a clean house.
• OH: don’t do it but it you gonna do it make sure you get paid for doing it.

Thanksgiving

• I’m turkeyed-out. I had all major food groups and at least four different meat groups.
• McDonalds should have a McTurkey with McStuffing.
• Thanksgiving is the time to eat food you don’t like, I mean why do you only have it only for Thanksgiving?
• The holidays forces families to come together because everyone else is with their families.
• I dislike food holidays. Especially when everything is so good.
• Instead of counting sheep, I’ll be counting turkeys tonight.
• Gobble gobble gone.

Software Development

• To checkin or not to checkin a large changelist five minutes before you go home, that is the question?
• A test like a good movie, has three parts: the setup, the car chase, and the test of the results.
• Testing is like a tax, you have to pay 5-10% to have a good running infrastructure or system.
• Testing takes time, make sure you make the time, because it will save you time in the long run.
• All programmers have a black belt in hubris.
• One bytecode to rule them all.

Thought Leadership

• Your miles may vary, but it often depends on your attitude.
• Passion + Perseverance = Possibilities
• Sometimes you can’t afford to lose a client, but there are other times you can’t afford keep your client.
• Just like there should be no hard coded strings there should be no unwritten rules, or assumptions, or specifications.
• The dumbest people I’ve ever encountered are those that think that the rest of the 99.99% of people are a bunch of idiots.
• If you are unique no one can compete with you.
• Team meetings should not feel like an AA meeting, “Hi, I’m bob and I work here.”

Product Placement

• I’ve used the iPhone apps for Google Voice and G+ and I have to say, Google does not know how to make a good iOS app.
• I’m not liking the new Google Reader look. I would not be surprised if the next version of Google design has ribbons.
• Leave no smart phone behind. Google won’t upgrade the Nexus One to Android 4.0.
• Google is set to update its motto to “Do no evil if you ain’t getting paid for such evil.”
• Android is to Google what Internet Explorer was to Microsoft in the Browser Wars. MS gave IE for free just to take out Netscape.
• Siri is to Apple what Kinect is to XBox what Facebook Connect is to Facebook what Circles are to Google Plus…
• Every time I upgrade a MS product an angel loses his wings.
• Is Amazon also adopting social networking features? I just noticed that Amazon has a like button on its product pages.
• Facebook should update its mission “to trick people to over share and make the world more open, connected, and trackable.”
• Google should update its mission “to organize the world’s information about our users and make it accessible and useful to our advertisers.”
• @att has two options in terms of text messages. Pay as you use for $0.20 or unlimited for $20. What about a third option, disable texting altogether?
• Why does it cost half of the price of a stamp to send or receive a text? It’s endemic of an industry that has no competition or innovation.
• The Kindle Fire tablet is a modern day physical shopping cart for Amazon’s virtual online store.
• History is being made every day, yet @historychannel airs reruns of Ancient Alien.

Quotes

• OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW. – Steve Jobs’ Last Words
• I’m so embarrassed. I wish everybody else was dead. – Bender Bending Rodriguez
• Goodbye monobrains – Bender Bending Rodriguez
• There is no recession for great companies… – Jason Calacanis
• Software is like sex: it’s better when it’s free. – Linus Torvalds
• Coming together is the beginning; keeping together is a process; working together is success. – Henry Ford
• When all men think alike, no one thinks very much. – Walter Lippmann

Randumb

• On Monday mornings we are all zombies.
• Why am I listening to old school British punk rock? #GodSpankTheQueen
• The truth is that truth is absolutely relative.
• And then God said, “Let there be bacon,” and there was bacon. God saw that the bacon was delicious.
• You’re so vain, you probably think this tweet is about you.
• Fist pump for peace.
• Anybody that gets lost in a corn maze is an absolute moron.
• I hate Lifetime movies!
• Business is legitimate thievery.
• Some of the most common elements on earth idiotum and dumbtonium.
• meta-disrupt: Disrupt those disrupting disruption.
• I am, therefore I meme.

Thought Equations

• Meaning > money
• problem = opportunity
• means != ends
• Success > Perfection
• Experience != Information
• Thinking > Knowing
• Do > try
• Platform > product
• Creation > criticism
• Passion + Perseverance = Possibilities

Million Dollar Ideas

• Million Dollar Idea: Online Speed Dating Site
• Million dollar idea: a news channel with nothing but news tickers…
• Million Dollar Idea: self cleaning floors.