Abstract Photo

My son loves playing with our camera and takes lots of pictures. Most of the pictures are blurry and we delete them. However, sometimes he takes a picture that looks pretty good. He was playing in my office a few months ago and took a picture of the mouse pad (a funky HP one; it was the largest one I could find with a smooth surface).

Click on the picture on the left to see a larger version.

Open source is not always the answer

I've been a huge fan of open source software for years and have contributed back to a few projects including the Palm OS Emulator and pilot-link. I've used a number of open source projects in my own applications and, of course, follow the license for attribution (I don't touch GPL code). Years ago when I was a lot greener, I used open source thinking that it must be perfect and treated the code at black boxes. This bit me on at least one project where we had to fix the code for years due to assumptions by the developer.

Now that I have more years under my belt and have done some of my own open source, I take a different view of open source. When I incorporate open source into my projects (with a few exceptions such as Sparkle that has been thoroughly tested), I closely examine the code and make sure I understand it. This takes time, but makes it less likely that I'll get bitten. I've seen a number of projects where developers find open source, shove it in an app, and call it a day without understanding what it does. I found one piece of code that completely went against what Apple has said to do in determining if a feature exists on a device; in another application, I found extremely complex networking code that may have been unnecessary (networking code is hard and the more complex it is, the harder it is to debug).

The main thing to realize with open source is that it was written by humans that can make mistakes and do! I have a large collection of open source code on my machine for reference (someday I'll catalog all that I've found) and use it to save time. I'm not saying that developers should reinvent the wheel for every piece of code, but they should be cautious when shoving code in their applications.

XPAL Power and the MacBook Pro

Last year I wrote about hooking up my XPAL Power XP 18000 to my MacBook Pro. My method was a bit wacky, but worked fine. As I was surfing the web the other day, I found that XPAL now offered a connector to the MacBook Pro. Very interesting, I thought, so I looked at it. As Apple has a patent on the MagSafe connector, no company has been able to create a knock off cable. What did Energizer do? Well, they created a cable that connected the battery to a female connector that you then use the Apple airline adapter with MagSafe connector. Very clever, but an added expense.

In my case, I already had the adapter, so I used my free tips for life and for $4, I got the connector. The connector works fine and is a bit cleaner than my solution. However, there is a slight difference between my cable and the XPAL Power solution. The Apple airline adapter doesn't charge the computer when connected (the MagSafe connector has electronics in it to indicate if it should charge the computer). The cables that I used were regular charger cables, so they charge the computer when the battery is connected. In my case, the battery heated up quickly as it was charging the computer. With the XPAL Power solution, my computer didn't charge, but the battery stayed cool.

So, having said all that, I think that the XPAL Power solution is better than my solution as I'm seeing better battery life. As I compile code a lot, my main battery only lasts about 90 minutes, so if I can get another 1.5-2 hours out of the external battery, I'm quite happy. I believe that the XPAL Power is now going to give me that (before I maybe got an extra 1 hour to 1.25 hours.

Rollover minutes - great gimmick

When I signed up with AT&T for my iPhone, I got the lowest number of minutes I could get, 450 per month as I don't talk on the phone much. AT&T has rollover minutes which will let me rollover the minutes I don't use until the next month and they add up for a year. Well, most people have pretty consistent phone usage, so if they get a plan that has more minutes than they need, the rollover minutes start adding up and will never be used.

I'm about half way through my billing cycle and I've used 23 any time minutes. At this rate, I'll use maybe 50. If I keep this up for 12 months, I'll have almost 5000 rollover minutes. For someone that doesn't make voice calls all that often, what am I going to do with that many minutes? Effectively I'll never go over my minutes. Too bad I can't cash them in at the end of the year for a prize or a discount!

Rollover minutes sound great in commercials, but serve very little practical purpose. Yes, I realize that there are some people that may have unexpected phone calls one month and it will help, but for those people that are always way under their minutes, it's useless.