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.

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

• 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.

Software Development

• Code. Money. Respect.
• Software bugs don’t take anything personally.
• Code more, sleep less.
• DONT THREAD ON ME

Thought Leadership

• Just having a goal is often times more important than the goal itself.
• Word programming, i.e. writing TPS reports.
• Code Complete = Tests + Implementation.

Product Placement

• Google is the casino, or better yet the Goldman Sachs, of online identity, ads, and search. You don’t bet against the house.
• What is cloud-accelerated web browser? Learning about Amazon Silk, the web browser in Amazon’s Kindle Fire.
• The project code name for the iPhone’s auto correct is auto cucumber.
• Spike TV should rename itself to Star Wars TV and the History Channel to Ancient Aliens Channel.

Money Angels

• Dr Evil is starting a venture fund.
• If Dr. Evil would have taken his Evil Corp. Public he would have made $1 billion on an IPO. And maybe Google would have bought his company.

Question

• How many uses can you think of for a paper clip?
• Where in the food pyramid is candy corn?
• Is Meg Whitman the new Carol Bartz?
• Are you changing the world or is the world changing you?
• What is the person equivalent to having your car lifted up in the air and balancing its tires?

Randumb

• The Internet made me do it.
• It’s easy to earn money while you sleep, if you sleep on the job.
• You are more likely to die due to medical error than a car accident. So if you are in a car accident, don’t go to the hospital, just walk it off.
• If I could get a nickel every time someone gives me their two cents I would arbitrage people’s opinions.
• Living the Internet lifestyle.
• If you don’t want your naked picture hacked from your phone don’t take naked picture of yourself on your phone.
• There are proposed bills that will make activities such as posting a lip sync video on YouTube a federal crime punishable with jail time.
• Forget the war on drugs, in the future there will be a war on content.
• History is not made, it is written, edited, scripted, and appropriated by Hollywood as a blockbuster movie about mutant super heroes.
• I predict the past.
• Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, behold yourself.
• This is not Sparta!
• Love me, hate me, but you thinking of me.
• Love it or hate it, take it or leave it.
• I love love and hate hate.

Overheard

• OH: When you frown you look like a Klingon.
• OH: Is everyone in the call on mute?
• OH: My dress code is to try not to show my butt cheeks.

In Da Future

• In the future, everyone will be a product guy.
• In the future, Facebook will be your permanent record.
• In the future, the revolution will start with a single tweet.
• In the future, when people say they are going outside the grid, they will mean they aren’t logged into Facebook.
• In the future, Android developers will need to program using the Android SDK and the phone maker’s proprietary SDK, and the carriers’s SDK.

Million Idea

• Million Dollar Idea: A treadmill with a weight scale.
• Million Dollar idea: there is so much artificial flavoring, color, and seasoning in food. Patent dinosaur meat flavoring.
• Million Dollar Idea: Car alarm system that steams video of the surroundings of your car and scans for perps faces.
• Million Dollar idea: wasabi guacamole
• Million Dollar Idea: Carfax for people, including driving record, background check, work history, etc.
• Million Dollar idea: pepperoni pizza flavored breath mints.

Software Development

• More code, more problems.
• Code. Money. Respect.
• Code war is the new cold war.
• The programer-designer is the philosopher-king or our time.
• Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to gold farm and he’ll eat for a lifetime.

Team Leadership

• When the world is flat and information freely available there is a premium on creativity.
• There is no such thing as free lunch, especially if it’s lobster.
• Give a silicon valley startup founder a lemon and he’ll make a social networking site for people that like lemonade.

Product Placement

• I hope Twitter doesn’t become the next MySpace.
• There is no i in Apple.
• Google is buying Motorola for $12.5 Billion. Google is also developing a autonomous car, so in a few years it might buy Ford.
• It’s not Thanksgiving, so why did Google pay so much for a moto turkey?
• AT&T charges for services you use and most importantly for services you don’t, and they sell you out to the feds on top of that.
• I know that many G+ users are still in the early adopter stages of denial, but honestly, Google does not know how to do social right.

Quote

• Money is a terrible master but an excellent servant. – P.T. Barnum
• Wall Street is now a huge mathematical game of chess where individual companies are just pawns. – Mark Cuban
• Search is dead. What people want is an answer. … You don’t need Trip Advisor, you don’t need Yelp. – @Jason, #TWiST 171

Questions

• Got Woot?
• You think Papa Murphy’s is related to Papa John’s?
• Has Flash lost it’s fizzle?
• If G+ was spun out of Google as an independent company it would be valued at $50 billion.
• What company will be around in 25 years, Apple, Zynga, Facebook, Google, eBay, Microsoft, …???
• Now they are making movies in 4D… What is next, 7D?
• If this is your third startup, are you really still a starting up?
• I just want to know, why are those birds so angry?

Randumb

• When life gives you bullshit, make lemonade.
• Untangling headphones in the dark.
• Current Status: somewhere between FML and IDGAFF.
• Zoned out from being on the zone for so long.
• The future is retro.
• Don’t trust your shit to chance.
• MTV has as much expertise to produce MTV’s Music Awards as the History Channel’s has to produce Ancient Aliens.
• It’s ironic how many people misuse the word irony.
• Even though I haven’t gone back to school for a while now, I can’t resist a good Back To School sale!
• I tired of Shark Week. When will they have Turtle Week or Salamander Week?
• If Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were to be created now they would have been known as Angry Turtles.
• Total Retargeting
• Shift+Happens

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.

Software Development

• I can’t take an IDE seriously if it looks like iTunes.
• Beta at your own risk.
• Refactor and remix yourself.

Team Leadership

• Moving on to plan b, section iii, revision 10, update 8, …
• Everything happens for a reason but not every reason is meant to be understood.
• The key to being cost effective is first being effective.
• To change your life, try to change your trajectory.
• Who is in your development dream team?
• Originality is dead. I know this because I copied it from someone else.

Product Placement

• Install Lion, Xcode 4.0 not supported, need to upgrade to Xcode 4.1, a 3GB install.
• Apple already working on next OS X release, tentatively known as Sea Lion.
• Google Plus going after Facebook is like an 800 pound gorilla going after a 800 pound rhinoceros.
• Google’s motto: Do no evil without cresting a algorithm to automate evil.
• G+: don’t be a square join a circle.
• The next release of Windows should come with one key feature: a 100GB DropBox like cloud spaces for free integrated into the OS, Office, etc
• I wish I could use Google to search my memories to find where I last placed my keys.

Question

• What is the speed of time?
• Isn’t Captain America wearing the big Scarlet Letter on his forehead?
• Which is worse: different day, same shit or same day, different shit?
• Is it just me or is it hot in herre?
• Fruit by the Foot or Sugar by the Pound?
• Why does it feel like Friday when it should feel more like Wednesday?
• What is the weather report on cloud computing?
• Is Jack Dorsey the web 2.0 version of Steve Jobs?
• If you had 8 more hours a day what would you do with them?

Randumb

• There is no God particle. Sub atomic particles are atheists.
• A live police chase is the human equivalent of a lolcat watching a light beam.
• When time flies it does so in first class.
• Frankie Says Chillax
• Bay Area Forecast: Fog-Drizzle My Nizzle Fo Shizzle.
• I’ma power up with a power nap.
• It is what it is and it do what it do.
• La Gaga has jumped the outer space shark.

In Da Future

• In the future, a picture will be 90% filters and photoshop and 10% reality.
• If the future could travel faster than the speed of time then it would travel back in time.
• In the future, the revolution will be fought with tweets.
• In the future, every other word in a sentence will be a registered trademark.
• In the future, the exercise of free speech will be deemed suspicious.
• In the future, a large portion of the president’s state of the union speech will be redacted.
• In the future, action figures will be illegal and replaced by diversity and cooperation figures.

Summertime

• Happy 4th of July. Let keep America free!
• Long live freedom, death to red coats.
• It’s going to be one hot fourth of July.
• Beerbeque.
• There is no freedom without choice.
• I’m so cool that the heat don’t get to me.
• Beans and cornbread.
• This heat is like kryptonite.

Even though Google’s latest attempt at a Facebook killer, Google Plus, has been well received it has also generated some of the most passionate arguments against any of their policies. Google Plus does not allow users to use pseudonyms, alias, nicknames, or any online handle other than their real names. There has been opposition against this stance from even within Google engineers tasked with implementing such draconian technology. The reasoning behind this rule makes no sense, and goes against a fundamental human right of self identity. I have the right to go and respond by any name I wish to be known as. In fact, many celebrities often use names other than their real names. Vic Gundotra, the Senior Vice President of Engineering at Google does not go by his real name that was given at birth so this all seems hypocritical.

The second misstep is their self serving stance on patents as written in a recent corporate blog post When Patents Attack Android. In this post, David Drummond, Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Officer at Google, practically accuses Microsoft, Apple, and Oracle of conspiring against Android with “bogus patents.” These are the same “bogus patents” that Google itself had tried to purchased from Novell for $3.14 billion. I doubt that any publicly traded company would bid $3.14 billion on “bogus patents” and in fact publicly complaining about having lost those patents demonstrates that they are not entirely bogus. Having lost the auction for said “bogus patents” Google went on to buy over 1000 patents from IBM for an undisclosed amount.

Google Plus does innovate on a few areas where Facebook has lagged and dragged it’s feet, such as in the concept of circles. That said, Google Plus is largely a clone+ of Facebook, which is a derivative of whatever social trend we’ve seen in the last five years. Depending on how you count, Google Plus is Google’s fourth attempt at this social networking thing. The current trend in social networking sites is that anonymity is to be banned. Facebook was the first social network to demand users use their real and legal names in their profiles and Google Plus has followed this trend.

Since Google Plus is the newest social networking site to see an exponential growth, it is now going through some growing pains in the way Google is policing the community. There have been a large number of reports of Google banning and disabling Google Plus profiles that don’t use “real names.”

The worst part, for those whose accounts have been locked out, is that there is no customer support, no due process, and not even a G+ profile to contact if your Google account is disabled or banned our right. If your Google account is disabled you may be locked out of GMail, Google Docs, and other Google products you may use, which might be have years of data.

The natural progression of these policies is that in the near future people will need to show their government issued identification card, passport, DNA sample, work history and resume, retinal scan, and perhaps a Google history scan to use Google Plus or similar social network. I can appreciate that Google wants to encourage people to use their real names, but there are so many instances beyond their automated algorithmic logic that people use nicknames, pen names, aliases, alternative spellings, stage names, witness protection name, and more. Is Google Plus going to force Jon Stewart to use his birth name? What about Lady Gaga? What about Dear Abby? Larry Brin uses the short form for Lawrence, is that okay? And don’t get me started with folks that are known by their initials or by their profession title such as Dr. Dre.

So why is Google, and Facebook for that matter, so against anonymity? It’s all about the data. The more data Google has on each user, the better they can serve ads targeting them. Google Plus is a user data collection service as much as it is a social network. Google Plus gives Google a new platform to collect even more data that it can then sell, trade, and use to target ads. Currently, most of Google’s ads work on the intent of the user. The more Google knows about the people in your circles, their name, age, background, location, work history, interests, trends, and communication patterns it can easily develop social ads that target you and your inner most circle members.

This whole debate is a red herring, the real issue is about the identifying data that Google is collecting on each profile.  There are already a large number of third parties that are forming a “fourth bureau” of sorts that collects any and every piece of information such as if you pay a phone bill on time or if you spend 6 hours in the middle of the day playing FarmVille.