Category: Geekery

Could this be the smart phone I’ve been looking for?

Ever since the iPhone came out, I’ve been hoping for a smart phone that was a compromise between it and my Palm Treo.

I like the physical keyboard on my Treo. I like the fact that it does cut and paste. I like the fact that it can take an external data card. I like the fact that it has bazillions of third party applications. But I hate the slowness, the fact that it can’t even check for email in the background while you’re doing something else, and that the browser sucks. I hate the fact that it doesn’t have a decent music player.

On the other hand, the iPhone is sleek and beautiful. It has a truly beautiful hardware and software user interface. It does music excellently, as well as doing videos. It has a very good browser. It has third party apps, including a new version of my favourite flight planner CoPilot. It even has a built-in GPS. But it has a frustrating soft keyboard that doesn’t even have cursor keys, so you can’t move over a couple of letters to delete something wrong at the beginning of the word you just typed. It doesn’t have cut and paste.

For a while I thought the Google phone might be the answer, but the current incarnation, the G1, has other problems. The phone is clunky looking, and T-Mobile’s network isn’t very good around here – no 3G, and some pretty large gaps in even ordinary phone coverage out of town. Plus it seems like the gui isn’t very consistent between apps. It looks like a competitor to my ancient Treo, not to the iPhone.

But now I’m wondering if my answer might be just over the horizon, because the Palm Pre was just shown at CES. Very nice – it has a keyboard, it has multi-touch gestures, it has a new OS, it looks like a real iPhone competitor. Not beautiful like an iPhone, but not down right ugly like a G1. Plus it’s on Sprint, which has a family unlimited data plan that looks like we could both have smart phones for less than we’re currently paying on AT&T. The only open questions in my mind are whether the music player is any good, if it has cut and paste, and if it’s compatible with existing Palm apps.

New iPod

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My 80Gb Video (aka “Classic”) iPod stopped working on me the other day. Everything else was fine, but the buttons and scroll wheel wouldn’t respond. I tried the “5 R” trouble shooting on the Apple web site, but that didn’t help. For some reason, I thought I bought this iPod last summer, but when I got to the Apple store, they said no, it was bought in 2006. And of course, I’d procrastinated about buying AppleCare and now it’s too late.

So with no other options, I bought a new one. This time I got a 32Gb iPod Touch. As you can see from the image, that’s going to take a bit of getting used to. Oh well. Maybe there will be wifi near work so I can actually see things on the web properly instead of dealing with the horrible browser on the Treo.

Debugging through mollasses

I’ve had a very frustrating day so far, and it’s far from done. I’ve been trying to trace through the execution under two different conditions, one of which works and one of which doesn’t. It’s been extremely slow going. Even with everything that could consume memory exited (including IE and the client app after it fires off the report request), my machine is swapping like mad.

Clicking the next instruction arrow in Eclipse takes roughly 30 seconds (I timed a few at 22 and 24 seconds, and a few at 36 and 38 seconds, so average it). Waiting for it to then actually show you the current value of a variable in the Variables window seems to average about 1 minute, although I’ve seen it as short as 30 seconds and as long as 2:30.

If I had a decently fast machine, I would have been finished this tracing (and likely found the bug) before lunchtime.

I have to just keep reminding myself that I’m being paid the same if I fix one bug a week or if I fix 10 a week. If this is the equipment they’re going to give me, then they’d better be prepared to accept the pace that equipment forces on me.

It wouldn’t be so painful if I could spend those 30 second pauses reading Stack Overflow, but until I fired it up to post this rant, I’ve been keeping IE closed.

Update Just to top it all off, about 4:30 today I accidentally clicked the “step return” which returned me out of the method I was painfully stepping through, meaning that most of my afternoon’s work was for naught.

Well, I’m not going to get rich, but…

I just got a check for my share of the money Laurie Davis got from selling his new CoPilot for iPhone on the iTunes app store. If you just count the time I spent re-designing my database to accomdate the requirements of his app, writing the web app to provide the data for his app, and re-writing the load scripts to load in the new database format, I figure I earned about $50/hour. If you count all time I’ve spend on building and maintaining this database and web site, add in the money I’ve gotten from donations, and ignore the money I’ve spent on web hosting for navaid.com, and I figure I earned about $.00001/hour.

Still, it’s sure nice to have this check. Of course, my first impulse it is to blow it on something cool for myself, but on sober second thought I should probably bank (most of) it against a future jobless spell.

How I spent my winter vacation

I’ve been trying to import the data from David Megginson’s great OurAirports.com site into my Navaid.com site. The reason I want to do this is that they have a lot of data that I don’t. They crowd-source a lot of it, but some of the initial data loads come from sources that I never found for my site. My site, on the other hand, tries to get data from various data sources and merges it with other data from other authoritative sources like from the FAA (and the sadly obsolete DAFIF).
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