MichaelRunyon.com – All Things Geek

I (most generously) received a Blackberry Storm through a work plan just before Christmas. For those of you who haven’t seen the pervasive TV ads and CDMA hype, the Blackberry Storm is the first touch-screen Blackberry. What’s different about it is the haptic feedback built inherently into the device. The screen clicks as you interact with it, letting you know the difference between your selection and your actual mechanism of motion. Sweet, right? I know that I was elated to get one, and my wife was supremely jealous. But what I’ve found is that, like many first generation products, there are some flaws. Some even serious ones. 

The main selling of the phone over the iPhone and over phones is that it’s a Blackberry. There is already an army of Blackberry users out there, mostly corporate warriors, who are in the field constantly checking and sending email. A touch screen device that utilizes all of it’s beautiful 4″ screen and still allows them to use the time tested tools that RIM and the Blackberry provide make it a home run to the established crowd. 

I, however, am in with the Joes who have never used an iPhone or a Blackberry. My experience with the device thus far has been mixed, but positive. My screen is still responding to clicks from my fingers, unlike my co-worker, who has had to send for a replacement after just 2 weeks. His is a common problem, one that the community is rapidly coming up with fixes for, but still irritating for a launched product. I found the typing to be a little aggravating at times, the letters being selected from the screen a little differently than I had imagined them to be. I found the SureType keyboard ( a virtual software keyboard laid out like the original Blackberry keyboard) to be much more useful at typing anything but extremely precise names or URLs. 

Verizon’s network thus far has been pretty good. I have gotten reasonably good service in some locations that I had terrible or no service with T-Mobile, always a plus. The speed of my phone, especially in the office and around the house, is quite good as well. The same cannot always be said of the phone itself. It doesn’t automatically close programs and gets quite bogged down if you leave more than a couple of applications open, causing you to have to (somewhat laboriously) manually select and close running programs. 

Another problem with the phone that I’ve had is with the media playback. I looked up some of the codecs available for the audio and video, but even after conforming to those, had some issues playing anything but the most basic files. I had to get a special converter to wrap my videos in a 3GP wrapper (MP4 core) to get them to play right on my phone. Even the videos that the video recorder on the phone took won’t play, which is especially weird and irritating. 

On to the camera….two words: it sucks. It really does. It’s 3.2 MP, which caused excitement at first. It even has a nifty LED flash. But…it takes forever to focus, the flash is blindingly bright and off-color, it’s focus is easily disturbed by motion and light change…it just overall sucks. It is not useful for pretty much anything except taking pictures of non moving objects in well lit areas. Really. And how often does that situation present itself, when you aren’t already taking a picture of something?

Everything else has been pretty fun. the IM clients for MSN and AIM work well. The email app is a slam dunk (no surprises there). RIMs servers have been beating my POP server every 45 seconds looking for new emails and in heavy traffic, my phone beeps a lot. But that’s OK…somewhat to be expected, even. It’s pretty easy to retrieve and open attachments, view them, respond to emails, etc. It’s nice to be so connected in some ways. 

The GPS issue is somewhat troublesome. Verizon wants you to pay for and use their VZ Navigator software, which costs $7/month. They did enable GPS to work with BlackBerry Maps, but that software kinda stinks. I installed Google Maps, which works wonderfully with cell tower triangulation of your location (within 3000 meters or so), but it doesn’t offer turn by turn directions or real-time, precise GPS locations. It still works pretty well without it, but kinda annoying that Verizon disabled access to the GPS chip.

My last gripe (and not really even a gripe) is the lack of applications. There are probably 20-30 applications out there for the Storm, and quite a few of them are just re-revved apps from the past Blackberry lines. But, the product just launched and i’m certain that Verizon will try to take advantage of the App Store concept that has worked so well with the iPhone. I’m anxious to get my feet wet developing my own apps for the phone. I would love to make some apps for my homegrown budget software and maybe replicate (with much less pinache) some of the cooler apps that I’ve seen for the iPhone. 

Overall, a great phone, works well for what it’s intended for. I’ll agree in general with critics that it was rushed to market, but as long as BB keeps updating their firmware, and the apps keeping growing, I’ll be more of a convert all the time….until my phone screen stops clicking, that is.

I am certainly not the first to make the clever pun of referring to whatever addictive object or concept that rhymes (in any way) with Crack as such (Blackberry/Crackberry, World of Warcraft/World of WarCrack, etc). How juvenile…:) But to say that StackOverlow is akin to CrackOverflow would be an understatement.

Crack, er, StackOverflow was released as a private beta from the creators of Coding Horror and Joel on Software (Jeff Atwood and Joel Sposky, respectively) about 6 weeks ago. I joined the private beta pool (which was by request/invitation only) about 3 weeks ago, and found the site to be a great idea, if the original users were a bit caustic (very picky about staying within the realm of realized discussion and answers). However, the endless searching of topics that you know about or want to know about quickly rose the site to the level of Wikipedia for me. To clarify this point, let me explain…

I love information. I love to study data, read it, extrapolate it, make judgements, etc. It’s little surprise that I chose my current profession (web developer/programmer) given this analysis, as I primarily work with data, often creating reports, etc. Wikipedia is perhaps the largest and complete source of interlinked information ever (save the entirety of the Internet), and one can get lost in its vast caverns of subjective and interesting information. I have put in mental stopgaps to prevent me from blowing an entire afternoon reading about the Tacoma Narrows Bridge or the frictional density of osmium, as Wikipedia would be glad to instruct you about.

StackOverflow is quickly becoming a programming/development specific source like that. There are already 12,000+ questions on the site, some with hundreds of answers. It’s a mass collaboration of those who share a like profession (and sometimes, mindset), and their collective knowledge of whatever subject is being discussed. Not only are you drawn into the site to find some question to answer your problem, but you also feel drawn to help others find the answer to their problems via the information that you know. A great deal of the time, there is no clear answer, and the questioner is left to decide for his/herself what the best and most plausible answer is.

I’m not particularly inclined to seek out questioners who I think can benefit from my answers, but I don’t deny that there is a good feeling when a question/answer is well-liked by the community. With a community that appears to be as talented and professional well developed as StackOverlow seems, that kind of rapport helps to keep one from feeling totally isolated, as is often a common consequence of solo developers.

Unsuprisingly, there are not that many question regarding Coldfusion, as Jeff and Joel’s audience tends to be more .NET/PHP developers. Not that it bothers me that much anyway, as I don’t consider myself to be a totally Coldfusion developer. I attempt to remain fluent in as many languages as possible, though some of the core ideas of some of the languages keep this possibility from being easier than it is.

That said, I have thus far found StackOverflow to be a better source than simple Googling in many of the less definitive questions, ones that warrant discussion by the members. This is particularly interesting, in that one of the stated purposes of the site is to become a definitive, searchable source of information, much like a wiki, where one can take their searchable problem.

So, a word to the wise…stay away from StackOverlow. Keep doing your job or learning about other things, not on the Internet. Keep me and the other information addicts safely away, lest you get sucked in yourself.

Well, if you haven’t been able to tell from talking to me lately (those of you that do), I am been EXTREMELY busy with life in general lately. Work has been incredibly busy this summer, and with a giant product demo to complete by next Thursday morning, my life in that regard is kicking into high gear. I’ve been staying up late trying to get motivated to get that completed before the very last second, but it would appear that is not going to happen. The last time that we had a product demo for that company, I ended up working about 30 hours in 3 days, and not sleeping the last 2 days before the meeting. I drank a whole liter of coffee before the meeting, did the demo, and then fought off sleep during the other 2 meetings that we had with that company the rest of the day. So you can understand why I don’t want to do that again. Plus, my family is coming into town this weekend, so I can’t really do something like that again anyway.

It’s also my mom’s birthday. 50th. And we’ve got some specials plans for it that will require my time, and have already required some of my time. So that’s another iron on the fire.

My grandma went into the hospital for an appendectomy. I’ve been cleaning my house for guests. Main email server has crashed with an I/O kernel 2 times in 4 days. Our main webserver at work suffered a SQL injection attack for a high profile client. There went 2 days of my very limited time. We’re getting bids for projects constantly at work. It’s absolutely non-stop. I take advantage of every break that I get, and absolutely don’t take for granted the motivating times that I can really get work done.

On a lighter note, I ran across a post somewhere else on the Internet where someone posted a picture of a windows box uptime of 716 days, and most of the posters claimed Photoshop. I know that you are supposed to apply patches to Windows machines religiously, but I don’t count that as one of the routines in my systems administration experience. I tend to leave them alone if they are working.The main webserver (the one that houses this website and about 200 others) has been up and running for 1016 days at the time of this post. That’s 33 months and 12 days. That’s just a few months shy of 3 years. And the amazing thing about it all? One of the developers who doesn’t work for the company anymore started an endless loop in Coldfusion that triggered the last reboot of that machine, at which point it had been up for almost 2 years. So, 1 reboot in just about 5 years. On a Windows machine.

Now, being somewhat a Linux evangelist, I’m not going to try and defend Windows, because frankly, it does suck a lot of the time. But there’s a testament to how solid that server environment can be if you are careful and run appropriate loads and tools on it.Below is a 100% un-altered(besides removing some key information) image of the uptime of the server this evening. Pretty impressive, eh?

Today, after returning from lunch, there was a man (presumably) in a bald eagle costume and an Uncle Sam hat carrying Obama signs and trying to get honks from people passing by. There are nearly always 4 lanes of traffic going in both directions at the intersection outside my building (pretty busy), and thus, his campaign for honks (and thus, again, Obama), was, needless to say, very successful. So much so that I was very tempted to get in my car and run him over.

I’ve been doing lots of reading lately about crafting a development environment in which you can excel. My job depends a lot on being very flexible and agile. Stuff comes at you hard and fast, and it’s up to you to solve problems that can be solved quickly as quickly as possible, and to prioritize correctly the rest of the tasks that might take a bit longer. Typically, I have intermittent projects where I need to concentrate hard through the duration of the project, because new thoughts and techniques are having to be developed (versus a copy-and-paste with mods or something of that nature). So, you can imagine my frustration at having incessant honking about every 5 seconds, with people leaning their heads out the window and shouting praises of the candidate of their choosing. Between the phone ringing, co-workers talking, people asking me questions, friends on IM, clients on email (pulled every 5 minutes), it’s a wonder that I can get even 90 seconds of clear thinking together.

Joel on Software (a very popular blog about the facets of software development) wrote a memorable post in the past about how important it is for companies and developers to work together to find space and time for devs to reach that critical state of concentration, where true innovation and productivity are at their apex. Some advocate a closed office (where the door is closed), others advocate headphones, cutting off visual stimulation, etc. I personally find that outside stimulations are about as equally distracting as the internal thought process, where indirect thinking takes place.

This concept is difficult for a lot of people to understand, because the exterior behavior is essentially the same as a typical action, but there are a wealth of other things going on in the background. For me, personally, I have such an insatiable need for information, that for me to begin to enter my concentrative state, I have to engage that information addiction for at least a while, at regular intervals, or face a near impossibility of productivity, due to my background brain constantly wondering about new happenings, etc. So, to the regular boss/co-worker, who finds me reading Digg/Slashdot/random techsite, they would think that I am slacking to avoid work or some other reason. And while this behavior is ideally not neccessary, and indeed frowned upon in a lot of circles, it is in truth necessary for me to function.

So, back to the issue at hand…the eagle. I likened the situation in a remark to my co-worker about how it felt like the situation in “Harrison Bergeron”, where smart persons are handicapped by loud, distracting noises at regular intervals to make them equal with average persons. I am not so much making a statement about my personal feelings about my relative intellect, as much as grimly marking my observance of what those characters in that dystopian universe might feel like. They can’t concentrate on their own lives because of their distractive implants or general stupidity, and I can’t get any thoughts put together because every 6 seconds there is a loud series of honks. If this is what Obama is bringing to Indiana, and to my workplace, then I say, to heck with politics and his campaign.

In all fairness, I lamented greatly last week at the expense of the Clinton campaign due to another productivity-killing incident. I was directly in front of the entrance to the Marriott hotel in downtown South Bend when state police set up roadblocks directly in front of the traffic that I was a part of. All of the sudden, the morning commute came a screeching halt, less than 200 yards from my destination. I was perturbed to say the least, and felt that sentiment increasing all the more as time trudged on, marking 15-20 minutes solid of waiting to be released from that line. I couldn’t understand why the Clinton camp had to get with police to block off the street for so long, especially considering that traffic was still flowing very near the spot where she would be departing the hotel, from a perpendicular direction.

After about 20 minutes, I noticed a gap behind me, as some of the cars directly behind me had managed to move into other lanes and the like. I abruptly turned my car around and made my way down the wrong way on a one-way street for about 100 feet before turning on a green light onto a road running perpendicular to the previous entrapment. I made 3 right hand turns around the city, hoping to get to my building, which had sadly been just one light away. I got stuck in traffic again as Hilary’s camp actually departed and the police moved the roadblocks to the intersection that I was waiting at. This time, my building was less than 100 yards away. I re-enacted the scene from Office Space in my car, where the cursing doesn’t make sense, but the anger is totally a reality.

Finally, nearly 40 minutes later, I pulled into the parking lot of my building. 40 minutes later than I had wanted to be, and 40 minutes less time to complete my work that day. I saw good riddance to both of them. I know that not everyone is directly responsible for the actions of their constituents, but they must be forced to take responsibility for ruining nearly 7 good hours of my life so far. Is Indiana and its people really worth the price of these distractions? Instead of even listening to their BS about fixing the economy or lowering gas prices, I’m sitting in my car, idling, wasting economic opportunity and productive time.

Tommorow will bring about the end to this needless conflict, and though it’s a bit exciting for Indiana to have a role in the election for the first time in a very long time, I for one am ready for it to all be over.

After shamelessly pimping the endless, redeeming qualities of Firefox Beta (now beta 5), I have grown frustrated with this current iteration’s locking up with javascript heavy websites (which would be any web 2.0 website). The frustration is that the browser momentarily locks up totally, rendering the application unusable for about 10 seconds every time that a particular instance is triggered. There doesn’t seem to much in common, except that heavy javascript or ajax action is taking place.

Facebook in particular seems to blow it up, though. Going through recently posted photos was an exercise in frustration, as sometimes the problem with restoring device context to the application took 10 seconds on consecutive frames. I noticed some small problems of this type with Facebook’s photo apps in the past anyhow, and suspect that their usage of pre-emptive image caching likely has something to do with it.

I typically use uTorrent for my torrent downloading purposes, and stopped pdating it a while back with the advent of uTorrent’s acquisition by BitTorrent, Inc. But, with Comcast doing hardcore packet resets for torrent traffic of all types, I was major problems using torrents (especially with DHT). My upload rates sucked and I was never able to login to DHT trackers. At all.

Enter the pact with BitTorrent and uTorrent, working on encryption to help defeat the RST packets that Comcast is sending out. I was previously using uTorrent 1.6.1. After installing uTorrent 1.7.7, and enabling all of the outgoing encryption and DHT settings, I am immediately logged into DHT and my upload/download speeds have dramatically increased. Certain torrents whose access to trackers was totally blocked are now working just fine.

So, if you have Comcast and are having trouble with BitTorrent, give the new version of either uTorrent or BitTorrent a try. I’ll have to ignore my uneasiness about the agreement with PeerFactor in light of this new development in actually working torrent-ness.

So…

Yesterday, during a particularly bad day for things going wrong already, AT&T (whom we get business DSL services from) went down and stayed down until the early morning hours. After playing around with the settings on the router/modem, I went home (where I have comcast) and tried to get some of the critical work done. Turns out that the client we were working with, however, also lost Internet, and so their internal server couldn’t connect to webserver to synchronize databases anyway. Gr…

So after all of that, I come into work today, where the line is thankfully back up, and find out that all of that trouble (the outage extended to the entire Northwest Indiana area) was caused by the theft of copper by a single individual. Ok, now, from an economic viewpoint, copper is ridiculously easy to obtain for its value. Copper, driving most of the cable market, especially in the emerging world, is just one of the commodities that has skyrocketed in the past 12-18 months. A fairly serious amount of copper (50-100 pounds) is worth nearly $400-500. Some people, who are desperate to make money, know that a huge amount of copper lies in the wirings of the telecommunications industry( fiber and copper trunk lines).

The loss of productivity/business for local area businesses easily numbered in the millions, possibly billions, if you consider that the entire regional area for AT&T was cut, that’s nearly 400,000+ people, with businesses unable to process credit card transactions, look up account information, read email, etc. The loss of time and money goes through the roof. Aaron and I were at Jersey Mike’s (an area sub shop) went the cable was cut, and didn’t know it at the time, and thought it strange that the other customers with only credit cards weren’t able to pay for their food. Jersey Mike’s lost $50 worth of business in just the few short minutes that we were standing in line. Magnify that to a much larger area (as Jersey Mike’s is pretty small) and you can see what I mean.

Most businesses in the area don’t have much other choice besides AT&T, as AT&T is hell-bent upon recreating Ma Bell through a vast array of mergers and acquisitions. There is no other cheap DSL alternative in the area, with Comcast Business Cable being the only other major network, aside from regional carriers and Point-to-Point connections. Every single one of those lines went dead.

Researching a bit on the net about copper theft in other instances shows that it is a 3rd degree burgulary, punishable by 1-5 years in prison (doubtful that they would serve at all on 1st offense, likely a number of months for 2nd offense). So, if you or I did something that would kill the business of the entire Northwest/central Indiana business operations, you would hope that individual would be charged and punished with a lot greater than a 3-6 month sentence. I know that a lot of local businesses would to get a piece of whatever guy did that.

For those of you who use or have ever used Firefox 1 or 2, you have undoubtedly noticed the slow/slower performance of the software from the first iteration to the 2nd. While I still consider it to be better than IE7, it is only marginally so, and must be restarted during heavy web activity nearly every hour. A while back, I started using Firefox 3 Beta 1, and am now up to Firefox 3 Beta 3. This iteration is quite a bit better at memory reclamation than it’s predecessors, and it’s still in Beta. I assume that Firefox will be releasing a Release Candidate sometime in the near future, and with this release, we can probably expect most of the memory issues to be worked out. Right now, when I open and close tabs, I’m seeing about 40% of that memory being reclaimed, compared to virtually none in Firefox 2.

The only other obstacle to running a beta version of Firefox is getting your plugins and things to work with the new version. The beta versions of the browser are never supported by the plugins, since they require a certain level of assurance that things in the browser are working a certain way, and in beta, the browser is subject to change. But there is an easy way to convert the latest versions of your favorite Firefox add-ons and plugins to work with the new beta browser.

When you download the .xpi file from the Mozilla repository, this is essentially a zip file. So rename it as a zip and then extract it to the location of your choice.

After you have extracted to a folder, open up the  folder and open the file “install.rdf” in a text editor. Find the spot in the file, near the bottom, where the min and max versions that it supports are located.  Find this line:

<em:maxVersion>2.0.0.*</em:maxVersion>

and change it to something that looks like this:

<em:maxVersion>3.0.0.*</em:maxVersion>

Zip up the folder again, rename it back to .xpi, then import it directly into Firefox. It should import with no problems, since this is the only location that controls versions.

I did this so that I could use FireBug in Firefox Beta 3, and take advantage of the world’s best plugin, with a browser that takes a little better care of memory. I still end up having to restart Firefox about once a day, but this is a marked improvement over once an hour, which gets to be quite annoying. I currently have 9 tabs open, as well as Firebug, and Firefox is using 185 MB of memory. This is a little more than I would like, but much, much better than before. I am excited for the RC’s and the final release of Firefox 3.