Juixe Techknow

By the lack of features in iTunes, you would think the current version is still under better not version 10.1. As far as consumer applications go, iTunes is pretty polish but it is immediately evident that most of the engineering staff go into the iTunes store and not the management of your digital content. It feels to me that there are a lot of key features missing in iTunes. It might be that I just don’t know some secret incantation of how to do what I want, but I’ve searched online with little success.

Here is a short list of features I wish were available in iTunes.

iTunes should have the ability to activate, and most importantly deactivate, a computer or device from your iTunes account online. I want to log in and see what devices are activated with my account ad deactivate them.

One other feature I require from iTunes is the ability to sort and filter music and other content by the account that purchased it. I have a repository of music bought from several different accounts from different family members or friends. In some cases, I want to deactivate their account and delete their music.

One problem that I’ve frequently encounter is that the album art of music get’s corrupted. Over time I’ve seen that the album art for a song will be of a different artist. I wish I can have a way to tell iTunes to correct or update it’s album art repository.

I’m a student of creativity. I personally feel that the value add I contribute to any organization that I am a part of is thinking outside out of the box. One way to think out of the box is to do thought experiments to solve problems, to develop a theory which can then be tested, debugged, and ultimately solved. What follows are some of my favorite quotes on creativity.

Problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.
Albert Einstein

The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
Albert Einstein

No great thing is created suddenly.
Epictetus

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
Scott Adams

Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction.
Pablo Picasso

The chief enemy of creativity is “good” sense.
Pablo Picasso

Creativity is a natural extension of our enthusiasm
Earl Nightingale

Creativity is the power to connect the seemingly unconnected.
William Plomer

Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way.
Edward de Bono

Necessity is the mother of invention, it is true, but its father is creativity, and knowledge is the midwife
Jonathan Schattke

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.

There are a slew of collaborative and social tools that still compete with email. A bunch of web 2.0 document management applications that still compete with the shared network drive. A lot of financial software biggest competitor is excel spreadsheets. And not to mention the Customer Relationship Systems that compete with phone numbers in scraps of paper and a pile of business cards. Think of an industry, and your biggest technology competitor most often the dead tree technology like paper, and filing cabinets, and entry level end products.

Programming languages don’t die with a marketing bang, but fade away with the whimpers of programmers that have to maintain applications written in them.

Shared network folder must die.  Hard an slow to search or specific document, people are always restructuring the folders and moving the files, there are always duplicate files, common for people to forget to track their changes, track changes in word is horrible when the file changes a lot and often.

In a world with smart phones and 3G data plans, why do people still use cell phone text messaging?  People have done the math and proven that one megabyte of text can cost over $1000 dollars in phone charges but only cost the phone carriers pennies to provide.  There needs to be a simple service that does group text messaging that doesn’t rely on a single protocol, such as SMS. Just how Apple’s FaceTime works on Wi-Fi and does not depend on the phone carriers, someone should develop a text messaging platform that can work without a texting plan. An ideal text messaging platform would need to work with a other protocols, such as email, Facebook, Twitter, Google Voice, and SMS.

Microsoft should do anything possible to get mobile developers to start developing for the Windows Mobile 7 platform.  Microsoft should give out Visual Studio IDEs, books, free cloud hosting, and do a 1-day training tour to promote to mobile developers. But most importantly, Microsoft has to demonstrate how their platform can be monetized by independent developers.

The idea of a star performer is unfortunately often modeled after celebrity performers where a team is there to make the star shine brighter. In a development team a star performer makes the team better.

If Hollywood set out to design a better mouse trap they would rent you the mouse trap, charge for each mouse caught with it, and they own all rights to the mouse.

From time to time a semi truck or two carrying a shipping container full of Apple goods is delivered to a Apple distribution facility. Each shipping container is followed by a rent a cop security vehicle. Each shipping container holds anywhere from $1-3 million dollars worth of Apple products just off the assembly line in China. All of a sudden I feel like going on a mission.

It’s widely known that Michael Jackson purchase the rights to The Beatles music catalog. It’s also well known that Steve Jobs had for over ten years tried to get music of The Beatles into the iTunes music store. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but it’s of very little surprise that a year after Micheal’s death Steve Jobs was finally able to buy the rights to carry the whole music catalog of The Beatles.

The Beatles on iTunes

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

• If rhythm is a dancer, then algorithm is a break dancer.
• If you were a Java language reserve word what word would you be? I would be volatile!
• I get personally insulted when I am prompted to prove my humanness with a captcha. It makes me wanna bust a cap-tcha on some webdeveloper!!!
• Is there group think in the development community? Yes, but we build patterns around group think and call it Best Practices.

Team Leadership

• Change your perspective and you can change the world.
• If you don’t have an original idea you can remix existing ideas in original ways!
• Go hard, go home, go big. Pick two.
• If a web site’s end users are not paying customers, then the end users are the product that web site then sell to their advertisers.
• Why do people compensate their inability to communicate with the belief that others just know what they mean, you know what I mean?
• Hype is the food of lemmings.
• The plan was to have no plan, the backup plan was to leave the backup plan at home.
• Most people are natural born followers, it’s human nature.
• The toughest competition doesn’t always come from a competitor trying to build a clone of your product but from market shift in the industry

Product Placement

• In terms of hardware, mobile, and even operating systems Microsoft is anywhere between 3-5 years behind the leader.
• Startups age really fast in Internet time, by my calculation Digg is already and Old Media Company.
• Like what percent of Tumblr’s posts are reblogs and reposts?
• I want JJ Abrams to do a movie about do a remake of The Muppets in an alternate time line like he did for Star Trek.
• I want an iPhone that transforms into an iPad when I need a bigger screen.
• Google is an advertising company with great search technology. Facebook is a virtual share cropping company with great social technology.
• Who collects more personal data and knows more about a given user, Facebook or Google?
• Apple should add a few filters to their iPhone camera app.

Mini Meme Machine

• Scotty and Christopher Walken Mashup: Captain, I’m giving her all’s she got.  She needs more cowbell.
• You know who would be great in a reality television show? A prison gang! Imagine, Real World San Quentin.
• r-EPO, the performance-enhancing drug of champions!
• Monetize common sense because people don’t have it.
• I want to trademark the & char so that I could file a trademark infringement to all law firms with names of the form Dumb Dumber & Dumbest.
• The best part of a bagel is the creme cheese.
• My all time historical hero is Johannes Kepler.
• Your life comes with terms of service, batteries not included, void where prohibited.
• In Silicon Valley, everyone drinks the kool-aid but using bottled artisan water from a 10,000 year old glacier.
• In Silicon Valley, everyone is more interested in their piece of the pie than in the recipe of success.

Quote

• I didn’t mean for it to be released so quickly because I wanted to control peoples’ being offended by it. – Mark Zuckerberg
• I think people might be slightly offended but whatever, maybe there’s a way to control that. – Mark Zuckerberg
• Quitting while you are ahead is not the same thing as quitting. – American Gangster
• Living at home with your parents is a very powerful contraception. – David Willetts
• We should start a new social media web 2.0 holiday: Friend, Fan, and Follower Appreciation Day!!!

People are by nature social, they have always been so. Prehistoric people were social, Neolithic people were social, the Mesopotamians where social, the ancient Greeks, the Romans, the Barbarians, the Elizabethans, and even web 1.0 developers where social. By design, our technology has also been designed to be social, from written language to books to email to instant messaging. In fact, everything is social. Just about every physical object can be used in a social setting, rocks, bullets, and flowers.

Blogs too are social, it allows one group of individuals to share information and knowledge with a whole set of people, who in turn can comment, share, and add to that information. But since Facebook, social is sometimes meant to mean something different. Most features in Facebook have a element of social spam that forces a response. I people that first discovered Facebook because they received a spammy email from Facebook saying that someone they might have known, most likely some one they had an email correspondence, had joined Facebook. Facebook’s first spam social behavior was to email everyone in every of their users contact list, this behavior is the same as the Melissa virus. Facebook’s first element of social spam is borrowed a mass-mailing macro virus.

Everything is social and if everything is social, everything that is connected has a social graph. Facebook has managed to capture people and their relations to their friends, family, coworkers, church members, etc. Facebook has coined the pseudo geek speak social graph to describe a persons relationship to their friends and family. If everything is social, then everything has a so called social graph.

For example, since blogs are social it has a social graph of all the people have have posted comments. If Mark Zuckerberg would have designed WordPress, the blog platform I use for my blog, then each person who left me a comment would receive email telling them that if they wanted to participate in recent blog posts and even unsubscribe to the email they would need to sign up. WordPress.com and Discuss, the hosted commenting service, has millions of emails of people that have commented on blogs! If they choose to exploit and zuckerpunch all those people they can.

Everything and everyone is inherently social, technology like Facebook is not making users any more social it just simplifies how we interact with each to the like button.

I’ve always been a book lover. I have a private collection of Ruby, Perl, and Java books, amongst other topics, that would make a public library jealous. In fact, I recently moved and was surprised that that the bulk of the items boxed up where books. I’ve been making the trend of moving my library to ebooks. I was an early adopter of the Amazon Kindle, I still use my first generation Kindle. Here are some books in my collection, which I’ve use as reference.

• The Programmer’s Kindle Book Club
• The Android Learning Library
• The App Engine Learning Library
• The Ruby on Rails Library
• Beginning iPhone Development

I’ve even dedicated a blog post to a few of my favorite books, such as the following.

• Peopleware
• JavaScript: The Good Parts
• Smart and Gets Thing Done
• 97 things every software architect should know