Posts

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I’d only buy the software if…

This is a common line I read all the time in reference to software products I see on the web; most recently with Parallels. I’m not sure if consumers really understand that software developers aren’t catering to one person (in most cases). I fell into this trap with my NotifyMail program where I implemented every feature request that came in. This was counter productive for a number of reasons. Mostly, the people that wanted the features had already bought it and it wasn’t going to get them to buy more and the more obscure features I added, the harder it was to maintain and document. In the case of Parallels, people seem to say that if XYZ USB device doesn’t work, they’re not going to buy it. While USB support is important, the product does so much else that it is easy to justify the $40 (pre-order price). These people that are buying Parallels have easily spent $1500 on a system and are complaining about a $40 product that doesn’t do everything. While I like to see lots of my pet features in products, it won’t prevent me from buying the software. I purchase a few products a month and send in features requests on occasion. There will always be features that I want that aren’t in a product, but it doesn’t mean that everyone else wants the same feature.

People need to judge a product in if it does a job even if it doesn’t meet 100% of the requirements. Unless someone writes a product himself, it is unlikely that any product will do 100% of the things that he wants it to do. That’s reality.

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Is it time to retire WirelessModem?

Four years ago, I wrote a program called WirelessModem which let me use my Treo 180 as a modem for my PowerBook. This was, in my opinion, needed as the Treo replaced my Motorola StarTac and while I didn’t use it often, I could use my StarTac as a modem (it wasn’t pretty with a USB to serial adapter and a bunch of cable). Over the years, I’ve tried to keep WirelessModem working with the newer Treos, but have had mixed success (USB is more voodoo than it is programming and each device seems to have a mind of its own). Some people still seem to get it to work, but many can’t and I don’t have the time or motivation to touch it. I stopped using a Treo a few years back for a number of factors (they’ve improved tremendously, but I still don’t want to have the option of getting my email all the time…it’s too tempting and increases stress).

Now that Palm has released the Treo 700p, it looks like they finally added the ability to use the phone as a modem via both USB and Bluetooth (Bluetooth support was in there for some of the 650s). So, WirelessModem is no longer needed for the Treo series. In my opinion, it is about time. I’ve always thought it should be built into the OS as every cell phone I’ve had could be used as a modem out of the box, except for the Treos even though they cost more than most phones. When I was at Qualcomm and worked on the pDQ phone (first Palm OS based smartphone), having the phone work as a modem was a requirement. When Kyocera went forward with the 6035 and 7135, they kept this ability. Furthermore, with the 7135, the phone registered on USB as a Communications Device Class (CDC) modem, which meant that no drivers at all were required on the Mac (and other OSes). Not to mention, WirelessModem won’t work on MacBooks and MacBook Pros.

People still buy WirelessModem despite me not being able to support it. Do I completely remove it from my website or keep it? I’m definitely not making a fortune off it and it has served me well over the last few years. I think it has outlived its usefulness.

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Short attention span

I think I’ve determined why I like Legos. The ones I like are designed for 5-12 year olds; since it appears that I have the attention span of a 5 year old, it is perfect for me! Seriously, my attention span for things that aren’t work related is very short (I probably have some form of ADD) and my mind wanders a lot onto many different topics and things to do. This is a blessing and a curse; I’ve packed a ton of knowledge in my head, but I’m always thinking which can make it hard to sleep and relax.

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Web standards

It seems that I keep visiting technologies or parts of projects I’ve worked on in the past. Recently, I had to deal with web sites and HTML. At one point in my past, I wrote a web server and learned a bit about HTML and how all that worked. While I was still in college, I learned HTML and hand coded my website (no more of that…too many other things to do and it is far too complicated for me). My recent project caused me to look at websites and run them through the W3C Validator. The results are kind of scary; most of the sites I looked at failed validation. What does this mean? It means that web browsers (and other tool that look at websites), have to work extra hard to handle non-standards based sites. This is prone to errors and causes the software to not work well. Then the user blames the web browser or other software instead of putting the blame squarely where it belongs, on the website author. Every Tom, Dick, or Harry can put up a website. It sure doesn’t mean that he has a clue of what he is doing. Even I have to periodically check my site to make sure it is valid; unfortunately for me, I’m still used to things 10 years ago which are no longer valid which means I make a lot of mistakes. Someday I’ll try to learn the right way to do things. By using blogging software and a web authoring tool, I don’t have to deal with it much. However, there are a few things I shove in that seem to cause problems, such as aligning text/graphics, setting borders on pictures, and using the target tag in links which are no longer valid.

I don’t have an answer on how to solve this, but it gives me a new found respect for the non-leading web browser. For the leading web browser, web designers make it work with that and some say tough luck to the others even if their sites aren’t valid.

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Reliving my childhood

As part of reliving my childhood, I’ve started to collect Legos as I had to give mine up in one of our moves. The Lego sets these days seem so much more sophisticated than what I remember. The Lego City series look neat (OK, maybe I never grew up), so I’ve bought a few of the pieces. During the assembly process (it is so much easier to put these together after going through high school and college :-)), I’ve noticed a number of things about Legos that most people probably wouldn’t notice. For instance, the scale of some of the pieces is totally out of whack. One of the pieces I have is a police dog that is about half the size of the police officer (this is the dog’s body, not head), so that’s a pretty big dog. In the rescue helicopter I put together, it has wheels. I’ve been on a rescue helicopter; it has skids. Maybe some helicopters have wheels, but I don’t think it is common. I know I’m over analyzing things, but I can’t help myself.I also noticed that the rescue collection uses the Star of Life logo which is a registered trademark of the US Department of Transportation. Do I think that Lego has permission to use this logo? I really don’t think so. The trademark for the symbol says: THE CERTIFICATION MARK IS USED BY PERSONS AUTHORIZED BY APPLICANT TO CERTIFY THAT EMERGENCY MEDICAL CARE VEHICLES MEET U.S. DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION STANDARDS (CLASS A), THE EMERGENCY MEDICAL CARE PERSONNEL OPERATING THE VEHICLE HAVE BEEN TRAINED TO MEET U.S. DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION STANDARDS (CLASS B), OR BOTH. Do the Lego toys meet this requirement? Are the little EMTs in the set well trained? Does the ambulance meet the DOT standards? It doesn’t make any noise (unless I try to sound like an ambulance), so I know it doesn’t have a siren. In any case, I’m having a good time assembling my kits. I just need to find a place to put my new toy collection.

Lego Helicopter

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Losing your car in the parking lot

I know at times, we’ve all lost our car in a parking lot. Even for me as someone who always has a clue where my car is parked, I’ve lost my car in the Horton Plaza parking garage. If you’ve never been there, they have fruit and vegetable levels. The problem is that there are 2 concentric ramps, so if you enter the garage from the mall on a vegetable level, you can only get to your car if it is also on a vegetable level and vice versa for a fruit level.

My dad, however, has a funnier story about losing his car at the marathon, yesterday:

I searched the parking lot for my car for about 45 minutes and couldn’t find it. Ah-ha! The Garmin was in my pocket and the last location in its memory was the car location. So I turned it on, set the last location as a waypoint, opened the antenna, and said Route To! It said 200 feet SE. I turned and looked and there it was on the other side of a fence.

I don’t remember the fence being there when I parked. It was a temporary type and I think it was put up to form the exit route after the event.

Good thing, he had his Garmin iQue 3600 with him. Knowing him, he’ll start adding waypoints when he gets out of his car.

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To be a kid again

Last weekend, my wife and I went up to Downtown Disney in Anaheim to have dinner with her parents. While we were there, we stopped into the Lego store. I was a big fan of Legos when I was young, but in one of our family moves, I had to give them up. As I started looking around the store, I was in heaven with all the Legos there; I’m particularly fond of the City collections as I used to build my own little cities before they really had the themes. The prices of the Legos were not all the unreasonable to a working professional, but when I was young, Legos almost seemed out of reach due to not having a job. If I could be a kid again earning a nice living, that would be cool as I could buy all the Legos I wanted!

While I can’t be a kid again, I can at least try to re-live my childhood by building up a Lego collection again.

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Social experiment

My wife and I went shopping for a piano last week and as a little experiment, I decided to see if the salesman would really talk to us. I wore shorts and had on my Teva sandals. My wife and I look pretty young, so we’re usually ignored or get poor service. When we walked into the store, we went over to one of the least expensive pianos and started looking. The first salesman asked if we needed help, we said we were just looking. The second salesman that came over to us not only didn’t ignore us, but spent a lot of time talking to us and telling us about the pianos. In addition, he took us to more expensive pianos! I was pretty shocked, but pleased with the service. I wish more places (including restaurants) were age-blind and treated us like we should be treated.

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I did it!

Today I ran and finished the Rock ‘N’ Roll Marathon. I knew in my heart that by training for it, I could run a marathon, but I proved it to myself (and to my family). Luckily I had my whole family cheering me on. I managed to do, what I consider, a reasonable time of 4:14:54, but my goal was to just finish.

Scott RunningMedal FrontMedal Back

There were times on the course where I was hurting pretty bad, but I just kept telling myself I had to finish. My Garmin Forerunner 305 kept me up-to-date and performed flawlessly, unlike one of the guys next to me at the starting line that was quite annoyed when his unit didn’t turn on. I slowed down considerably in the last half of the race, but finished with a pace of about what I normally did on long runs. All the gory details are over on MotionBased, but please don’t laugh! I managed to cross the finish line on my own power and wasn’t carted off in an ambulance. Overall, it was a good day. I’m sure I’ll be hurting for a few more days. I think the jury is still out on if I’m going to put myself through this torture next year.

Marathon on MotionBased
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Sucks to be a non-partisan voter

When of the disadvantages of being a non-partisan voter near a primary election is that both parties spam you with crap. I’m getting phone calls (luckily they go straight to voicemail) and printed material from both Republicans and Democrats. I’d love to call both parties and tell them that I really don’t care. I said to my wife yesterday that for $5000, they can have my vote. Yes, I know buying my vote is illegal. However, with these candidates for whatever office they’re running for, I frankly don’t care. I’m so disinterested in politics, I’d be happy with Mickey Mouse for governor/secretary of state/senator/whatever. Only a few more days until this election is over.