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.

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

• 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.

Apple's Mobile Me

All mobile devices, from phones, tablets, and to laptops should have a built it self destruct feature that when activated would destroy all data on a compromised device. It is my belief that a phone is a very intimate and personal device, there is so much personal data in my phone from private contact lists, to confidential business emails, to other dubious activities that I may or may not be involved in.

In addition to having the ability to destroy incriminating data from a mobile device, such as an iPhone or iPad, I want the ability to program rules into the phone. Such as if the phone has not been unlocked in over 24 hours, or if the attempted to unlocked more than three times, if it activated with a given specific code, if it is located in a known police or government building, etc.

Find My iPhone

As soon as the details of the Google Chrome Notebook were made available I was immediately in love with the Google CR-48. It’s basically an ultra light weight cloud computing client running a slimmed down web enabled Operating System. The CR-48 is as portable as an iPad but with a full keyboard. The CR-48 has a smart track pad that supports iPad-like touch gestures. The CR-48 is always on, just like an iPad or Mac Air, so there is no boot up time when all you want is just check your email or post a tweet. That said, the CR-48 is not a official product and that is evident by the simple black frame, it’s even without a trace of corporate logo or Intel inside sticker. Because the CR-48 is not a official product, I won’t say much about the industrial design and finish of the hardware other than to say that unlike the iPad, it has a USB port and a SD slot.

Google Chrome CR-48 Notebook

As soon as you open the CR-48 it turned on magically and prompted me to sign in. Unlike the iPhone or iPad, the CR-48 doesn’t require you to connect to a computer before you can use it. After some setup steps, you can sign in and take it for a run. As soon as you log into the device, you will see a Chrome browser taking up the whole screen with a single tab. It does take some time to realize that the CR-48 is a laptop with just one application, a browser. That is all it is, a browser. There is nothing to see, move along, it’s only a browser. Your desktop is your default page as shown in a Chrome browser. It merits repeating, the Chrome CR-48 only has one installed application, a Chrome browser.

As soon as you log into the CR-48 you find a browser in full window mode and if configured correctly with your home’s WiFi, you can start surfing the net. I’ve been using the CR-48 for reading blogs, checking email, liking status updates on Facebook, and accessing the web applications I use on a daily basis. Google does have a Chrome specific Web Store where you can install free and paid applications but I’ve not found anything of interest.

Aside from the technical specification of the Google Chrome CR-48 notebook, what is more interesting for me is that this is the first cloud computing client, a sort of Web 2.0 Thin Client. I am a avid user of Google Docs, GMail, WordPress, and other online services that have a large amount of my data in their respective ‘cloud.’

Realizing that this is a cloud client, privacy issues and data mining concerns immediately become apparent. It is already known that Google saves user searches and that with this and other identifying data they modify search results. It is already known that Google Adsense ads are targeted to the sites you visit. Can you imagine how valuable your browser history and usage statistics is to a company like Google? Google has a large amount of identifying information with from all angles of your browsing experience, from Google Search, Google Adsense, Google Analytics, and now Chrome and it’s Chrome notebook. I can see a future where Google would be giving away Chrome and Android-based devises for free because they can collect so much valuable information and up sell users with highly targeted ads.

The CR-48 is a great little notebook but a machine like that would never replace my laptop. At this time and with it’s current specifications, it can’t handle the hundreds of pictures I am known to take over a weekend, it can’t handle the gigabytes of video I take on a trip, and as great as Google Docs is it’s still not Microsoft Office. I see the CR-48 as a great web surfing machine while TV surfing.

I prefer the iPhone over any of the available Android phones, but the one thing I love about the Google Nexus One is that you don’t even need to plug to play. Just turn it on and you are on your way. Even updates are done Over The Air (OTA) so you don’t ever have to connect your Nexus One to a computer. The whole premise of Cloud Computing is that you don’t have to be shackled to a desktop.

I just had to walk through what my neighbor needed to do to set up their new iPad and you should have seen the confusion and disappointment in the parent’s and kid’s faces, respectively. In a nutshell, they have to download and install iTunes, create an iTunes account, connect the iPad with their computer, and then they can play a song or surf the web.

I can’t believe that Apple can revolutionize the user interface of the iPhone to have one button and yet have a complicated user experience of setting up their new iOS device.

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.