Juixe Techknow

It is that time of year where we reflect on the accomplishments of the passing year and look forward to the one to come. Here is a window into the past year in technology through this year’s popular posts on TechKnow Juixe.

Programming Rants

• Software Engineering in Pictures
• The Resume is Dead
• Resume and Interview Tips
• Programmer Pickup Lnes
• More Hats, More Problems
• Working Code is Just One Corner Case

Products and Features

• Foursquare Missing Features
• Apple vs Android
• The Future of Apple TV
• Facebook Was My Idea
• Facebook Zuckerberg and Plain Text Passwords
• Google Has Lot Its Focus
• Google Dead Pool
• Amazon Should Buy Blippy

Tutorial and Resources

• Use Google Forms for Surveys and Polls
• Model Business in Google Docs
• Check if GMail Account Has Been Hacked Into
• Apple iPad Top Resources
• iPhone Frameworks

Patents and Trademarks

• Us Patent: Virtual Currency
• US Patent: Linked List
• Cease and Desist Trademark Craziness

Code Conversations

• Captcha This, Byatch!
• Mushroom Life Cycle
• Zombie Code
• The Mayor of Dead Space
• Remote Debug Your Thinking Process
• All Code is Inherently Evil

Retweet 2010

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

Random Thoughts 2010

• Random Thoughts December
• Random Thoughts November
• Random Thoughts October

Year in Review

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

No explanation required, here are some random thoughts that occurred to me during the past month. These ideas are usually to long to force into 140 character limit of Twitter but not fully develop to merit their own post.

Which is worse, a developer that will fight you every inch when you ask him to add a feature that upsets the balance of his understanding or the isometry of his code or a developer when asked to add a feature simply does it without question?

It is estimated that up to 90% of Internet traffic is spam. For some product searches up to 80% of Google results are spam because of black hat SEO.

In the span of year a typical teen on Facebook would have written more text than the whole of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare and would contain more drama than Shakespeare’s plays combine but it won’t be considered literature.

I travel for business a bit. I usually stay in the same hotel chain, if not the same hotel. I would like the hotel check-in process to be as easy as Foursquare check-in. In fact, if I am already in their reward program, and if they already have my credit card, they already know all pertinent information about me, why do I even have to check in or out at the front desk? Here is a million dollar idea, have a way book a hotel from you iPhone, you are immediately given a room number, if available, and your credit card in file or reward card is used to open the hotel room door. There is no need, unless you need more towels, to deal with the front desk.

Saying that listing to rap long enough will make you want to shoot someone is like saying that listening to country long enough will make you make love to your truck.

Google announced the development of an autonomous self driving vehicle that has the potential of revolutionizing and maximizing the use of roads, fuels, and other resources. I wondered out loud, via Twitter, what other struggling industries might need some of Google algorithmic-minded engineering.

• @techknow: In addition to moving into the automotive industry, Google should get into the airline business and revolutionize it from the ground up.
• @SchemaCzar: Google did get into the airline biz a few months ago by buying ITA Software.
• @techknow: You are right, I totally forgot about that acquisition. Okay, the business they still haven’t entered into: home loans! They could fix the mortgage industry

Spam and spambots are a big problem for website operators, but their solutions to get around spambots is hurting the web just as much as the spam. Personally, I despise captchas. Captchas are those cryptic and distorted letters or words that look you have to type to prove that you are a real person when signing up for a web application or service. I recently had to do an eye test and I have 20/20 vision and I have trouble entering captchas, imagine the accessibility issues that people with disabilities have to deal with because of these.

• @techknow: I get personally insulted when I am prompted to prove my humaness with a captcha. It makes me wanna bust a cap-tcha on some webdeveloper!!!
• @AaronBoynton: I so agree! There are better ways #downwithcaptcha
• @techknow: The worst part is that I start thinking that maybe I am a robot because I can’t read the damn captcha. A robot with poor vision.

I’ve written about missing features in Foursquare and other location based web services before. There is little or no utility in checking into a location though Foursquare. In check into hotels more than I check into Foursquare. In check into a restaurant more than I check into Facebook Places. I want to be able to check into a restaurant and make an order. I want to check into a hotel and check in without talking to the front desk. I want to check into a parking structure and pay for parking. The following conversation started with that idea.

• @techknow: I would like the hotel check-in process to be as easy as Foursquare check-in.
• @ButtercupD: cool would be something similar Fastrak for bridge tolls–what about frequent guest card and walk in and autochecks you.
• @techknow: We should patent that. ;)

I was fortunate enough to get a free CR-48 Crome notebook from Google. People outside of Google had the opportunity to sign up for one and this was the first raffle/lottery that I have ever won. This is the first time I have ever heard of a company making available a test pilot product to people outside of the company in this fashion. I think it was marketing genius and Google engineers will mine a lot of real life usage data from pilot users.

• @techknow: My Google wish came true, and it came in a UPS box!
• @aaronhalford: aw, everyone is getting a CR-48 but me. Enjoy it!
• @techknow: Thanks! I hope you get one too! I also wish that Apple had a similar program. I also wish for world peace.

As mobile devices become more and more entrenched and as more mobile devices become available there is a growing number of people that want to quickly develop an idea into an app. Developers of all sorts are picking up Objective-C to develop the next top selling mobile-based and touch enabled app. If you don’t want to learn Objective-C, there are several mobile frameworks to choice.

Rhomobile – A cross-platform mobile app development.
Titanium – A cross-platform native application stack.
MonoTouch – Write iPhone and iPod Touch applications in C# and .NET.
iWebkit – A simple framework to create your own iPhone and iPod Touch webapps.
TapLynx – Rapidly develop iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch Apps without learning Cocoa.
PhoneGap – PhoneGap is an open source development framework for building cross-platform mobile apps.
jQTouch – A jQuery plugin for mobile web development on the iPhone, iPhone Touch, and other forward-thinking devices.
Cocos2D for iPhone – A framework for building 2D games and graphical applications.

From time to time I just blast tweets about software development, project planning, team dynamics, or whatever else comes to mind. Here is a synopsis of recent tweets and rants. If you want to follow the conversation follow me at techknow and/or juixe and I’ll be sure to follow back.

Software Development

• The worst class name of the day: PdfPTableEventable
• I be slaying bugs and zombie code from my killer app!
• I don’t know of it’s a good thing, a bad sign, or just 5PM when the hardest aspect of a feature is naming the database table!
• Writing convenience classes is being nice to your development team.
• What is the the “Hello, World” equivalent of entrepreneurship? Lemonade stand? T-shirt business? Blog network?
• In space no one can hear you scream, but in the internet everybody can hear you scream and they’ll remix you and add funny captions.
• It may be true that God created man in his own image. What I know as true is that developers implement features in their own self image.
• The other day I saw a book called programming for dummies. I’m sorry but there are already to many dummies in this field, myself included.
• Math makes stuff possible.

Team Leadership

• Hauling ass and kicking ass.
• Current success often hampers future success.
• I love problem solving, not problem bitching!
• No matter your problem it will be eclipsed by the sun going super nova.
• If you going to bring it you got to bring it with full force.
• Be quick to compromise, buy slow to relent.
• There is strength is self managing teams.
• If you going to throw rocks, you best bring your catapult!
• It may be true that the customers is always right, but very often he is also unsure and insecure.
• Cheerleaders are anything but leaders, they are mostly followers. Give me a original idea!
• Often times the fundamentals are fundamentally wrong.
• Theory yields to practice, practice cedes to skill, skill submits to experience.
• Big companies have big visions, but most importantly they have big problems. Often times addressing those big problems stifles innovation.
• There should never be a anointed team leader, leadership should not be a single player, leadership should be the ball that is passed around.
• Asking team members if they are done with x, y, and z and you don’t know that they are working on a, b, and c is a broken process.
• Don’t wait for an idea to run away with, take the first idea that strikes you out for a walk, maybe some coffee.
• There are several ways to meet a challenge, one is not make eye contact and see if it passes you by, the other is to walk right and say hi.
• Instead of trying to build a better mousetrap why not put your efforts to build a better mouse?
• Status quo is the enemy.
• Refactor, remix, and remaster company culture.

Product Placement

• Even Facebook’s design looks like big brother designed it. It has a plastic government agency feel.
• Most of Facebook’s features resemble social oriented spam.
• Facebook is what you do when you want to be social when you don’t want to be social.
• Can Tumblr be a Facebook alternative?
• Dealing with Amazon Customer Support and returns has left me feeling sad and upset, I feel so low that I feel like shopping!
• The next big Google product is not being built in Google.
• The only musical instrument I know how to play is my iPhone.
• I can’t wait until Steve Jobs makes an iPhone that you can control with your mind. Forget the iTouch, I want my iThough!

Thanksgiving

• Pass me a gravy IV, stat!
• The turkey has landed.
• Happy Turkey and Stuffing Day.
• Let there be stuffing.
• Yum yams
• Thankful and grateful, and just plain full.

It used to be that single the most important aspect of starting a new business was location, location, location. With online businesses, this translates to domain name, domain name, domain name. The domain name of you business is important for several reasons, because it will be your de facto business name, because this will be one of the avenues of how users find you, because there is a short supply of good domain names left, because you want to stand out from your competitors, etc. But in addition to finding a good domain name for your business you should see if it’s also available on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, WordPress, and any other relevant social networking site. As soon as I buy a domain name, I try to lock up the twitter account, the Facebook page, the Tumblr and WordPress blog for that domain.

Depending on the business or product or simply to proactively protect your business from competition and spammers, you should think about snapping up domain names that reference your company or trademarks. For example, try to buy the .net, .org, .me, and other TLD versions of the domain name you are considering if available. In addition try to lock up domain names that reference your company or product in a disparaging way.

Because most single word domain names are already taken, people often combine two words or more. It is common practice to not hyphenate two or more words in a domain name. But when placing two words together be careful that it doesn’t accidentally read something different than what you intended. For example, There is s site called Therapist Finder whose domain name is therapistfinder.com which can also be read as The Rapist Finder. The is a website called Speed of Art whose domain name is speedofart.com whose domain name can also be read as Speedo Fart.

Try to avoid using a name that ties your product or service to a particular technology. Find an inspirational name that denotes a feeling of though about what you are doing but not the technology you are using. For example, Twitter is a great name for their product. No most people use Twitter with mobile device apps over 3G, but SMS was a key aspect of Twitter in the early days. The word tweet denotes so well what people do on the service, they simply post a tiny comment. Once Twitter became a success and they opened up their API to third party applications then you saw the opposite, company formed around Twitter and named themselves a such like Twitpic. Twitpic is successful despite their bad choice of name but they it does narrow people’s view on you. In the case of Twitpic, they also have the problem that they misspelled the word tweet with twit. Twit has a completely different meaning than tweet.

Another example of a company name that relied heavily on a particular technology was PodShow. PodShow later rebranded itself to Mevio but only after the whole podcasting industry was threatened by Apple copyrighting and trademarking the term podcast. The term podcast itself relies on Apple iPod product line. The industry as whole talked of using netcast instead of podcast, but that never took off. By rebranding themselves to Mevio, the company speaks to broader audience, does not tie itself to one technology or open itself for legal dispute over trademarks or copyrights issues. In the case of Mevio, the name suits it well. The prefix is me and postfix vio sounds like the last syllable of video.

In the current state of search, short and clear domain names are known to get more Google juice to complicated, hard to spell, hyphenated domains. Your domain name should be easy to say and understand over a phone, it should evoke your industry, product, or service. The right domain is worth its price for the right entrepreneur. Not to take anything away from the founder of diapers.com, but I believe that the domain name had a lot to do to the online retailers credibility with customers which ultimately lead to diapers.com being purchased for over $500 million dollars by Amazon.

Owning the right domain name can help to take your business to the next level.