Juixe Techknow

As of late I have been more active on Twitter and often I just blast tweets about software development, business, and work life. Here is a synopsis of recent tweets and rants on business and design.

• Old media is not only old, it is also fat, slow, dumb, and decrepit.
• The work week: casual Mondays, martini Tuesdays, hump day Wednesdays, hookie Thursdays, and half-day Fridays.
• If there is blogging, micro-blogging, and nano-blogging, then what is giga-blogging?
• What about meta-blogging? It seems that a lot blogging is meta-blogging, link blogs and aggregators that rehash, repurpose, and repost.
• This so called business analyst is asking developers business question.
• Developing the brand usually takes longer than developing the technology
• Reading past typos and grammatical errors in technical books, currently reading JavaFX Script: Dynamic Java Scripting for Something or Other
• Maintaining a network should be more net benefit and not soo much work.
• No joke but I just had to help an MBA send out a fax, the funny part is that he has our CEO help him with the cappuccino machine.
• Marketing really exploits and abuses the misconception between free of charge and freedom. Free of charge is not free!
• 50% off + extra 20% off does not add up to 70% off, it means 60% off. This is Marketing Math, designed to confuse even more than normal math.
• Here is some more marketing math, ‘buy one and get second item 50% off ‘adds to 25% off.
• The yogurt container needs to be redesigned, it is not optimal for extracting every last bit of yogurt in it.
• Best shipping material: air bag used by Amazon. Worst package material: indestructible clear plastic used on electronics such as USB sticks.
• Scotch tape dispensers need to be redesigned, the protruding metallic teeth used to cut the tape can easily scrape your thumb in heavy use.

I frequently tweet and update my social status. If you like to follow m or befriend me, feel free to hit me up on twitter, identi.ca, and/or FriendFeed.

As of late I have been more active on Twitter and often I just blast tweets about software development. Here is a synopsis of recent tweets and rants on programming and development.

• Saying that a bug or a problem will be fixed in the a future release does not fix the it.
• I have heard that some teams follow the Software Development Life Cycle. But I have seen teams follow the Software Development Death March.
• It doesn’t matter how smart you are, or how smart I think I am. Regression testing will prove us both wrong.
• Technology books such as those from O’Reilly or Apress need a ‘best used before’ born on date freshness seal. The information in tech books is perishable.
• When people are too busy to learn, they are not being productive.
• I am refactoring a 5K LOC class that is a melting pot of half baked design patterns.
• This class is an exhibitionist, it doesn’t believe in hiding it’s private parts.
• I go cuckoo for cocoa touch.
• Obviously, you can’t connect to the server is you are not running the server!
• If programming platforms where like political platforms, .NET would be republican, Java would be democrats, and python would be green party.
• You can only stand in front of a client only if you know what you say you know.
• Detained in Guantanamo Bay or in an Apple Tech Talk, either way I can’t talk about it.
• The first rule of iPhone SDK is – you DON’T talk about iPhone SDK.
• In Objective-C, a class is an object… Wow.
• That is the mind bending aspect of it, an ObjC class is an object and yet there is +class methods… again, wow.

I frequently tweet and update my social status. If you like to follow m or befriend me, feel free to hit me up on twitter, identi.ca, and/or FriendFeed.

As of late I have been more active on Twitter and often I just blast tweets about gadgets, software and services. Here is a synopsis of recent tweets and rants on tech products.

• Apple, I am so freaking tired of having to update iTunes every other week. Not even windows is this annoying.
• Since the release of the iPhone 2.2 firmware update Safari keeps crashing. Funny thing is that I still have update from version 2.1. WTH?
• I wish Firefox had the double tap zoom in and out feature that the iPhone Safari has.
• Google Chrome first impressions: Slooooooooooow, cartoon-like look and feel, tight integration with Google search, almost retro-evolutionary.
• I have Firefox, MS has IE, Apple has Safari, Norwegians have Opera, Linux has Konqueror, and now Google has Chrome.
• Google Chrome is put together from open source components. What companies will now also release custom browsers with plugin to tie to propriety services? Adobe, Mcaffee, Amazon, EBay?
• Is Google just an internet search powered ad agency? It seems that no matter what they do most of their revenue is from ads.
• The problem with the G1 is branding. The phone’s brand image is split by different trademarks, T-Mobile, GPhone, Google Phone, Android, HTC.
• Is Google Analytics slowing down the web? Every time a site is slow, I read ‘transferring data from google-analytic.com’ on the browser status bar.
• Do no evil does not equal to do some good. If you going to do some good, you might do better if you ask who is benifits from said goodness.
• My Lenovo ThinkPad goes through it’s battery faster in ‘stand by’ mode than my MacBook Pro in ‘doing work’ mode.
• The Lenovo ThinkPad on a full battery last a few days on ‘stand by’ mode, the MacBook Pro last weeks.
• Abode is the Microsoft of the PDF standard. There is no good PDF solution, the only acceptable solution is their solutions.
• The multiple shareware, open source PDF solutions have a ton of limitations. You can’t print a half decent PDF document from Java.
• Is the Download Manager the new trojan horse? Adobe, do I need a download manager for a 30MB file? Is this an acknowledgment of bloatware?
• Amazon wishlist needs an upgrade. It needs a pie chart breakdown by category, price range. It needs a search for items on the wishlist, this is supposed to be Web 2.0 for God’s sake.
• And perhaps, most importantly, Amazon’s wishlist needs to multiple delete. It can’t believe they only allow to delete one item at a time.
• I have to say, except for the keyboard being cramped and the right shift key being out of place, the Asus Eee PC is really nice.
• Vista is pretty stupid. It actually allows you to delete your recycle bin. I asked around and folks have accidentally deleted recycle bin.
• When Microsoft VP say their products runs on multi-platform, they mean Windows ME, Windows XP, Wisdom Vista, Windows Server 2008, etc.
• Okay, I had to do it, I downgraded my work Lenovo T61 from Vista to XP SP2.
• There should be a class action lawsuit for the waste of time and money that Vista has ended up for end users.
• Why don’t gadget makers standardize on chargers? Do I really need a different charger with different jacks for similar devices?

I frequently tweet and update my social status. If you like to follow m or befriend me, feel free to hit me up on twitter, identi.ca, and/or FriendFeed.

What do you carry along in your laptop bag? Whether going to work or traveling for business, what technology do you lug around in your developer’s travel kit? I recently clean out my laptop bag and found the following contents…

I found that I carry a number of USB flash drives, currently I am making a good use of a 32 GB flash drive. I take a lot of pictures so I usually copy them on this flash drive before I can backup into a 1TB drive I have at home. I think that USB drives are like diamonds for techies in that we can never have enough. I also have two 8GB and a 4GB flash drive. In addition to the flash drives I also carry a card reader to quickly transfer pictures from my camera SD card to my computer. I do have a Lenovo T61 that has a built in card reader but I still need a USB card reader for other machines I interact with on a daily basis. In my laptop bag I also found a 500GB USB portable drive.

I also can’t live without pen and paper, I am always taking notes and doodling on scraps of paper. I carry with me a small notepad of yellow post-its. I also have a bunch of conventional pens and high lighters but they don’t get much use these days. I am an early adopter of the Pulse Smartpen and carry the Smartpen with a small smart pad of smart paper journal. I have written about the Smartpen and I am amazed with the technology.

Another piece of gadgetry in my carrying case is the Kindle electronic book reader. The Kindle is simply amazing. I currently have a whole bookshelf of technical books on the kindle. I have seriously thought of burning all the big, fat, obsolete books I have at home and at work and simply replace them with kindle editions. The one drawback with the Kindle is that it makes it too easy to buy books.

The last bit of equipment that make my developer’s travel kit complete is a Ubuntu Live CD. I recently had to use this live CD when trying to recover data from a compromised machine. A live CD is like the IT equivalent of a Swiss army knife.

Not officially part of my travel kit but I don’t travel anywhere without my iPhone. I have personalized my iPhone with a ton, of mostly free, useful games and applications. When waiting in line or on the commuter train I always pull out my iPhone to catch with emails, blogs, and news.

Do I haul around too much technology? I’ll be honest, I never meet a gadget I didn’t like. What is in your developer’s laptop bag?

Here is a recap of the top Ruby-related links for the month of November 2008. Links for The Rubyist are provided by A Rubyist Railstastic Adventure, a tumblelog.

Ruby

• 15 Questions to Ask During a Ruby Interview
• The Opposite of Momentum or “Sophie’s Choice” for Rubyists.
• The Book of Ruby
• The Ranting Rubyist
• Zed Shaw responds to DHH's Ruby Myths
• Concurrency is a Myth in Ruby
• What is the next killer app for Ruby?
• FFI for Ruby Now Available
• Ruby’s Awesomely Dangerous awesomeness

Rails

• Many Eyes on Rails
• Moving to Rails 2.2 Headaches – Vol 1
• Simple Comet demo for Ruby on Rails
• Speeding Up Rails Development
• MythBusting — Rails is not a monolith
• The Rails Myths
• Rebuilding a site from Symfony to Rails
• Ruby on Rails guides
• Rails Rumble 2008 Winners

JRuby

• JRuby on Rails and Websphere
• The Closet JRubyists
• A Conversation with the Authors of JRuby Cookbook

Other

• Ramaze by Example
• Nanite: A Self Assembling Cluster of Ruby Processes
• Play with JMaglev yourself
• A Sad Day – Layoffs in Engine Yard's Rubinius team
• IronRuby for the Newbie
• Redshift: What Ruby and a nice API can do in the browser
• Merb 1.0 released
• JetBrains RubyMine IDE

The only prediction I am sure for certain is that I won’t make my living off predicting the future. That said, at this the time of year where pundits probe they don’t know what they are talking about by making bad predictions in their respective industries. So without further ado here are my predictions, composed via a random number generator.

• Bloggers will make more money collecting cans and bottles than from Google Adsense.
• Google App Engine will support Java, including a Wicket-like framework.
• At least 30 new Java web frameworks will be released.
• Sun will release a ton of small Java projects as Open Source and then cut funding and development effort on said projects.
• Yahoo will go to congress and ask for a bailout.
• Browser Wars II will be fought between IE, Firefox, and Chrome over HTML 5 and CSS 3 standardization.
• Mozila XULRunner will become a viable host for applications.
• Lisp dialects will make a strong resurgence and then retreat to the ivory tower of academia.
• Apple had me sign a NDA that prohibits me from making predictions regrading their product offerings.
• A clean tech cartel, akin to OPEC, will form, trade and set prices for the carbon credit market.