Why so rabid a user base? You have me at that one – I’m hooked and have no clue why.

Well, carry on then.

After my initial experimentations with personal aggregation basically failed I’ve decided to take another stab at it, but this time with a DIY bent. I registered metaspark.net and am working a complicated series of Wordpress plugins to attempt to create the functionality I want.

Unfortunately it’s not entirely baked yet, but keep your eye on that domain – once I get a few RSS aggregation, twitter update, and posting date issues sorted out it should be ready to go fully live, and with style no less.

Stay tuned!

This somewhat bittersweet news. Obviously being laid off is never a great thing, but in this case it may actually end up being the a good thing for me long term. Of late I’ve been rather frustrated with the speed and direction of my group so I guess this is the kick in the ass I needed to do something about it and find a position where I can exercise my passion for technology in a more direct fashion, and perhaps have a more direct impact on bringing about the coming technological singularity.

That being said – if you, my reader need a technologically passionate problem solver let me know!

This start contrast (combined with the weary weight of too many hours put into work and Traskpro) is leaving me depleted – worried about the future I strive so hard to bring about. My vision of the future seems at times so within my grasp – mere years away if everything goes right. Then I realize that nothing is going right: the world is a glacially slowly moving monstrosity. While technology continues to evolve in leaps and bounds it’s the rest of the world that’s too slow to adapt to it and seemingly unwilling embrace its change.

So what is the point? If the world won’t embrace the change technology offers is it worth the effort to produce the technology? Should radical technologists like myself simply give up? Should we all go back to farming goats and continue our tried and true biological ways?

What makes Traskpro so great? What do I do with it?

• Manage projects at work
• Keep track of all the little details
• Brainstorm ideas
• Create shopping lists
• Plan maintenance projects around my condo
• Capture ideas for creative photography
• Track car maintenance needs
• Know who has borrowed one of my DVD’s
• List my goals the next 1, 2, 5 and 10 years
• Maintain a list of expenses for reimbursement

Amazing ehh – give it a whirl or check out the Traskpro blog – you can do all these things and more! With Traskpro’s flexible design you can track almost any kind of information – all for free!

Now what would a big Traskpro advert like this be without a few power user tips? Traskpro uses the URL to determine what tag you are viewing – this means that you can bookmark frequently used tags for quick access. I am able to use this feature by setting my internet home page to my “work” tag at work, my “personal” tag at home, and the high priority view on my iPhone – whenever I open a browser I immediately see a highly contextual view of tasks related to my current environment.

Further to URL bookmarking when setting a sort preference the sort preference is added to the next page view URL. This allows you to bookmark not only a specific tag, but also to make it so whenever visiting the bookmark the sorting options can be left intact – useful for power users looking to really take control of a large list of tasks.

So far I’ve actually made good progress. I made it up to Broadway to pick up some Gear Live branded business cards for CES, have done 5 loads of laundry, packed most of my stuff, and cleaned up. I still have a little work to do, but over all I’m feeling much better about leaving – thanks to Traskpro

Amazingly with all the CES stuff I did today I even found time to do a few usability tweaks to Traskpro. Now tags can be entered separated by spaces, commas, or semicolons, and tags can be marked as high or low priority by tagging them ‘high’ or ‘low’. I got some great user feedback from two of my users and hopefully this will make entry more intuitive for new users by sticking to the arching design goal of flexibility.

Not too sure if I’ll be doing much personal blogging from CES – I will be pretty busy this year between doing video production and writing up the sights and sounds of CES. Check out the Gear Live coverage of CES, or you can click to see Gear Live filtered to only my content.

I can configure the number of tweets to display – how many do readers find useful? If I just put a single one it shows real-time context without visually overpowering the main content column. On the other hand more gives a better context of what I’m doing, but adds a huge block of text to the sidebar.

Most notably I took a lot of hacky if loops to select SQL queries and moved them into a net-new function which builds the queries based in inputs so the code is both easier to read and easier to maintain long term. I also moved a lot of in-line functionality to within functions which has made long term maintainability and new feature development a breeze.

Not only does this re-factoring provide more readable code, but having everything generalized into functions made adding a few new features a breeze. For instance I just added a capture feature to Traskpro for capturing more than one task (and tag array) at once. This makes capturing action items in a meeting brain dead simple and removes the need for a round trip to the server between each individual addition. Because of the functions for adding/editings tasks, or adding tags to tasks this new feature was developed in a far more efficient fashion – rather than building from scratch I could re-use code.

Simple stuff I know, but not developing for a living really does give me appreciation for elegant, maintainable, and readable code.

Aside from the car life has been good. Traskpro has his a solid and stable 0.9 (and graduated from alpha to beta) and is rocking my task list right and left. I even have acquired a few other heavy users which is oddly gratifying. I’ve still got 31 remaining features/tweaks to make, but those can happen gradually over the next few weeks as I continue to ramp up on JavaScript.

Also in the world of good things Scott came over last night. He hadn’t experienced a proper viewing of Pirates of the Caribbean: At Worlds End so we did dinner and a showing of that. As silly and overly-Disney as the film is I really do enjoy watching it. I really do hope that big budget swashbucklers never die – they are just so much fun to experience.

Right – back to work now. I have to finish up a ton of stuff today and tomorrow to be ready to take off a few days to be home for Christmas!

This has been quite the productive and exciting weekend: I’ve seen Alissa’s play again (this time with Jesse and Brenda), taken interesting makeup photos with Jessie (see above), learned bucket loads about SQL, and released an early alpha of Traskpro.

I’m feeling surprisingly good given that I didn’t have much downtime this weekend. Having a personal project like Traskpro has re-energized me. I’d forgotten how fun coding can be – particularly with tons of small rewarding features to work on. I feel like I’m using agile with a 2 hour sprint!

Traskpro is finally feature-complete enough to stand up to day to day use. I still have a TON of work left to do on it, but that can happen over the next few weeks. Go in and check it out – updates from now on will be pretty much transparent to the users. The temporary production location is at Traskpro.com – I’ll be getting a more official URL for it shortly.

Update: Changed the URL above to the actual production URL. No more temporary URL’s for me baby!

I have spent the last couple of days analyzing and designing my user scenarios and figuring out exactly how best to implement a task tracking solution so that it’s as flexible as possible and requires the fewest number of actions to operate. The Traskpro specification is now complete for version 0.1 and I started to dive into coding tonight. Having spent my first few days planning is making a huge difference – coding is easier this way and I suspect the end result will be a lot cleaner.

I’ve started my development with MAMP (PHP/MySQL on the Mac), but am toying with switching over to Ruby on Rails at some point. For now I’d rather stick to a language I’m more comfortable with given that I have a big learning curve ahead for SQL which I haven’t touched in ages.

More to come – I need to get a few more of my classes built out and then get to bed. I have two more days of ‘day job’ ahead before the much needed weekend arrives.

I’ve allowed my obsession with Smart Playlists in iTunes to get a little out of hand. After spending the last month combing through my media collection, tweaking ID3 tags, and rating as I go I’m learning how to create personalized radio experiences from my library that are easy to manage and sync/update automatically with my iPhone. By making a series of smart playlists with size limits limited by least recently played I can keep both my iPhone and my Apple TV stocked to the brim with a great music selection that gradually changes as I listen to it.

While the Smart Playlists feature is amazingly powerful I have unfortunately discovered a few pieces of highly useful metadata that are not exposed as options for the creation of iTunes Smart Playlists. These all seem like simple things to add, and would enable some really cool Smart Playlist scenarios. Here are the things I think iTunes is missing on this one:

• A purchased flag – a simple true/false bit to indicate if the track was purchased from the iTunes store or imported from media (CD or HDD).
• An iTunes Plus flag – again a true/false bit to indicate if the track is an iTunes Plus track or not. This flag could easily be combined with the purchased flag as a dropdown.
• A kind field – a field to select the kind of media from video; audio booklet, music, podcast, etc. Adding this field would make it much easier to keep iTunes TV shows and podcasts from leaking into music-only playlists.
• Ringtone flag – another true/false bit to indicate if the track is eligible for creating ringtones from.

If anyone at Apple is listening please, PLEASE get these added to the next version of iTunes! They all look reasonably simple to implement and would make me one happy iTunes geek!

Overall not much has changed but just in case let me know if you see anything broken on the site and I’ll be glad to take a look at it – you can just leave some information about what you saw and what browser you are using as a comment.

Backpacks genius lies in its simple interface to import email, notes, lists, and documents and allow the user to organize them into meaningful groups and pages. Entering information can be done through the AJAX powered web interface, or emailed to unique email addresses per page you create.

For the mildly OCD and scatterbrained professional like me it’s a perfect information dump solution. Previously I had accomplished this task with a mixture of desktop search technologies (Spotlight and Windows Desktop Search) and text files. Backpack allows for the capture of my stream of consciousness and later triage and sort information into tasks, savable bits, and ideas.

A web based solution is the perfect answer to my multi-computer, multi-platform lifestyle – all of the power of text files on OS X, OneNote on Windows, and accessible from any browser at the drop of a hat. Each page also has a unique email address making it possible to send notes and todo’s from any email capable device for quick entry on the go.

Backpack tops off it’s powerful information management technology with a well implemented developer API, SMS or email based reminders, and basic calendaring and calendar sharing functionality. I’m hooked on the Exchange/Outlook calendaring solution at work, but were I not chained to the evil empire the calendar looks well enough implemented to live out of.

Ta-Da Lists is likely enough for most people, and is entirely free. Ta-Da offers a maximum of 10 concurrent lists, and a very slick iPhone specific interface for those iPhone owners dying for a task/list solution. Backpack is very iPhone friendly, but lacks an iPhone specific interface which does make it slightly less useful on the iPhone, but Backpack’s power-user interface and abilities to go beyond simple lists into key-worded pages full of lists, notes, images, documents, and emails makes it an easy sell.

Backpack offers a free version which is likely sufficent enough for most users, but for a small monthly fee they will increase the number of pages you can create as well as increase the amount of storage available for you.

Check it out – it’s free for basic use and if you manage information anything like I do you will be instantly hooked.

Now that I’ve spent a full week with the iPhone I wanted to put pen to paper (or should that be fingers to keys) and write a more in depth review than my initial impressions. Needless to say Apple generated a lot of hype with the iPhone and many feared it would flop in the face of near impossible levels of pre-release fanaticism. Thankfully I am glad that after a full weeks usage I can attest: Apple actually pulled it off. They lived up to or exceeded every single promise they made about the iPhone.

My impressions are obviously quite favorable over all, but the iPhone does have a few flaws. Regardless of it’s flaws I think this will be an industry-changing phone and will raise the bars for Microsoft, Symbian, Motorola, HTC, Samsung, and other competitors in the mobile marketplace to produce better phones featuring integration, ease of use, and stability all orders of magnitude ahead of what they now offer.

Things Apple got right with the iPhone:
The experience
Using the iPhone is just plain fun. Apple has managed to take something fairly common like a phone and completely revolutionize it. From the simple fades and transitions between modes to the delete animations the whole device feels very modern and high-tech. It’s a thin and highly attractive device that attracts attention and feels a little like something from a few years in the future – particularly compared to the industrial design of its main competitors. It’s a simple interface to learn (more so than any previous OS I’ve used before – mobile or desktop) and has playful feel that just begs to be explored.

The iPhone provides a fun to use and mostly consistent experience end to end. In all previous smart-phones each different feature had a different experience: you could use it as a phone, or as a browser, or as an email client but each different application and experience has a very different feel to it. With the iPhone you don’t use a phone, browser, or email client – you use the iPhone. Everything feels very well integrated, and intermeshed. It does have a bit of a learning curve for the device as a whole, but once you learn it you can have any of it’s features at your fingertips. The closest competitor they have in this space is the consumer-oriented Sidekick from Danger, but the iPhone puts even that to shame.

The screen
The screen on the iPhone is crystal clear and very high resolution. It features a 480×320 screen (more than twice the resolution of your standard 320×240 screen), but at a very high DPI so text, images, and video looks stunningly crisp. The screen has an ambient light sensor so it’s always the perfect brightness for your environment. The brightest setting is stunning and makes the iPhone’s screen completely visible outdoors in bright sunlight – a feat most phones (smart or otherwise) can’t lay a finger on.

The browser
The Safari browser on the iPhone is simply stunning. Not only can it properly render websites that previously been completely impossible to view on mobile phones, but the intelligent zooming, rotating, JavaScript/AJAX support makes the Safari browser the pinnacle of the iPhone’s applications. While viewing a web page simply rotating the iPhone to either side rotates and re-zooms the section you are viewing. A quick double tap on any section of a web page (for instance a column, image, or form) zooms to that section for readability, and then you can either scroll to other sections or double tap again to go back to seeing the entire website. The Safari browser included in the iPhone even has a multi-window feature allowing you to browse multiple websites at the same time, or handle popups if a site requires them (and it blocks the popups you don’t want).

The advanced Javascript and CSS/DOM included in the Safari browser make some amazing applications possible. People have already written browser based interfaces for SSH, IRC, and other chat programs. Obviously a web application can never be quite as integrated as a thick client can be, but this browser proves it’s a fairly minor distinction at this point. I expect to see a large crop of iPhone web applications springing up in the next few months as developers hone their iPhone web development skills.

Mapping by google, interface by Apple
Apple’s much vaunted Google Maps application delivers as promised. The pinch and zoom features are well implemented, although it’s usefulness is limited without some sort of geo-location feature, be it actual GPS or based on cell towers/Wifi access points. One of the ‘hidden gems’ of the Google Maps application is it’s traffic feature – on the way down to my car every morning a quick click into the iPhone’s mapping experience and I can see which of the freeways has the least congestion for my morning commute.

Talking about talking
When it comes to being an actual phone the iPhone delivers above expectations. Sure, I’ve used better ‘dumb’ phones in terms of signal strength or voice quality, but as smart phones goes this is well implemented and very usable as a voice communications device. Conversations are easy to hear for both parties and the interface for dialing is very slick looking. While you can’t type out someone’s name to call them the scroll by letter feature is well implemented and you can set as many contacts as you want to be favorites and show up on a short list of people to call. Since I use my phone to make and receive calls so infrequently I’ve not found this to be a problem.

Messaging
Further on the topic of the iPhone as a phone the new Visual Voicemail feature is stunning. Rather than having to call up my provider and navigate through Byzantine phone menues with a dial-pad AT&T sends the voicemail to my phone using the data network, and I can browse, play, replay, call-back, and delete all without calling my voicemail. The Visual Voicemail feature brings more of an email paradigm to voicemail and makes someone like me who usually HATES voicemail find it pleasant to use and entirely tolerable.

In addition to making voicemail a pleasant experience Apple chose some highly tasteful alerts. When an SMS, calendar alarm, or missed call occurs the lock screen displays a visual history since last unlock on translucent blue pads. Sadly emails (and their subject lines) are not privy to the same unlock screen notifications and must be accessed via the email application.

The mail client is a well implemented piece of software. While it’s still not perfect. It’s better than all mobile email solutions I’ve seen, and a good number of desktop mail clients. It lacks true push capabilities with most email servers making the iPhone not the ideal solution for many enterprise customers, but it more than makes up for it in my book with near perfect IMAP support. I can have it check my inbox regularly (every 15, 30, 90, or 120 minutes) as well as browse my entire IMAP hierarchy and browse my last 10 years of mail, pulling down emails and attachments from the server on demand.

Many of the initial nay-sayers of the iPhone were focusing on it’s virtual keyboard. Having come from several years of QWERTY phones I myself was more than a little worried about this. Luckily Apple pulled it off and I’ve found that after a few days of getting the virtual keyboard into my head I actually like it as much as a physical keyboard. While it lacks tactile feedback it does offer the ability to change the keyboard depending on the task (adding a .com button to the keyboard while in the browser for instance), and it’s predictive text corrects pretty much every ‘fat finger’ mistake I’ve thrown at it. After a while you learn to just trust they keyboard and grind away at typing as fast as you can and magically what you meant to appear on screen does – just be prepared for a couple of days of re-learning the skill of typing on QWERTY thumb boards.

The iPhone as an iPod
The iPod portion of the iPhone is extremely well implemented. It’s more intuitive than even the 5.5G iPods which preceded it. While I barely use Coverflow at home in iTunes I’ve found it to be a very natural way to browse the 20 or so albums that I have selected to bring with me. There are other nice touch based interface tweaks which make selecting music easier, and allows for a ton of eye candy. I have a few minor complaints about the iPod interface, but I’ll leave those for the ‘what Apple missed’ section later in the article.

There are a lot of nice audio touches like slowly fading the music when a call comes in, and pausing the music entirely when you accept the call. When you hang up the music un-pauses and gracefully fades back in. Most alert sounds (new email or a calendar event for instance) are accompanied by the music fading down just slightly to make sure you hear the alert but without jarring you out of your music listening experience. These touches make using the iPhone in a car with an auxiliary input or iPod integration fun and far less jarring or complicated than dealing with a separate iPod and phone.

The iPhone features a standard headset jack so you can theoretically use it with any headphones, not just the manufacturer provided ones like so many phone manufacturers force you to by using a non-standard jack. This let’s the audiophiles of the world ditch the built in earbuds for some high end headphones. Doing this loses out on the built in microphone, but gains a lot of quality. So far the audio quality has been fantastic and even when hooked up to my high-end home stereo system the output sounds great! See the ‘what Apple missed’ section below for some more comments on the headphone jack.

Connectivity
The network for the iPhone is both a good thing and a bad thing. The inclusion of EDGE data (it’s faster than dial up was way back in the day – but not by that much) for getting the internet from ATT&T was a surprise, and makes browsing out on the road somewhat painful. Luckily Apple made up for this by adding a great WiFi implementation. The handoff between WiFi and EDGE is seamless if you have previously approved a wireless access point, and the WiFi power consumption actually appears lower than EDGE to me.

As much as some might gripe about the EDGE data connection it’s obvious that they did it for battery life. 3G networks like AT&T’s HSDPA network use far more power than EDGE modems do and would have significantly reduced the fantastic battery life the iPhone offers. On my old AT&T 8525 (an HTC Hermes) I was lucky to get 12 hours of use out of my phone between the occasional phone call, some web browsing, and a few hundred emails. The iPhone makes it through all that (and a lot more web browsing because the experience is so much better) and still has 40-50% of it’s battery life left at the end of the day. Apple quotes 8 hours of talk time and over 24 hours of music playback – very impressive numbers for any phone.

The camera
The 2 megapixel camera included with the iPhone is definitely a camera phone and can’t hold a finger to a dedicated camera device it still takes some impressive photos. Like all digital cameras it does best in bright, evenly light scenes, but even in unevenly lit scenes (like the shot below) come out looking halfway decent. The iPhone camera falls flat on it’s face in dimly lit scenes though, and produces something that could be considered modern art of sorts: black canvas with slightly less black blobs hovering over it like ethereal souls from our ancestors.

YouTube is nice, although unless you are within range of a WiFi access point be prepared to both wait a long time and get very poor quality video. The fact that the videos are encoded in both EDGE and WiFi friendly versions is a nice touch, but the limited availability of the YouTube library is a bit annoying at times.

And one more thing: syncing
A final slick little touch iPhone has over previous iPods and competing media-centric smart-phones is that you can sync an iPhone to multiple computers at once. For instance I was able to sync my iPhone with a Windows PC running Microsoft Outlook to get my contacts and calendars onto the iPhone, but sync music, podcasts, and video from iTunes on my mac. This is a slick little touch and one that will make it easy for people to keep their contacts at work, and their media collection at home.

Things Apple missed with the iPhone:
No IM client
No instant messaging application. The SMS and email clients are very well implemented (chat bubbles aside in the SMS client) but with todays youth generation ditching email for IM I’m surprised to see it not included at launch. I am guessing that iChat will be one of the earlier software updates – sadly that will likely continue with the chat bubbles, and be AIM only – a tough pill to swallow for a heavy MSN Messenger network user. The good news is that various clever web guru’s are already working on hacking IM, SSH, VNC (done by my uber-geek friend Nate), and IRC onto the iPhone via web interfaces.

No 3rd party applications
No SDK for building full blown iPhone applications for 3rd parties yet. A lot can be done with a Safari web application, but there are a lot of Mac applications that I think could port fairly well to the iPhone – Adium, Ecto, and NetNewsWire to name a few. Hopefully Apple will amend this shortly and release a full blown SDK for the iPhone to the legions of hip cool Mac developers.

iPod niggles
The iPhone features a standard headset jack so you can theoretically use it with the headphones of your choice. The only problem is that the headphone jack is recessed slightly more than normal headphone jacks are so some headphones require an adapter to work properly. I was able to trim down the rubber hump on one of my headphones with a sharp knife, but for my metal tipped Grado SR225’s and Etymotic ER-6’s I’m out of luck until I get my hands on one of the adapters.

Another miss is that while locked in iPod mode the unlock screen fails to show a scrubber (a bar representing the track with a ball on the track to show the current play position), the length of the track, and other information so I see everything about a track without having to unlock the iPhone. It’s nice that the unlock screen shows my album art and the current time, but I’d like to get more information about the track I’m listening to than just the name.

It’s also mildly annoying that while playing audio you can have the scrubber or the rating of the song visible but not both at the same time. I have a large music collection and I’ve been working to slowly rate it all for future use – with the current iPhone music interface it takes several more ‘clicks’ than I would think necessary. These are both such minor gripes that I’m almost certain Apple will address them in a future build of the iPhone software.

More connectivity
The inclusion of slower EDGE data rather than AT&T’s high-speed HSDPA connection. AT&T ramped up their EDGE network for the iPhone at launch to 200kbps, which is 2-3 times faster than dial up, but nothing like the 700-1,000kbps connections I regularly saw with my HTC Hermes on AT&T’s network. I’m listing this as my last “thing Apple missed” because with the seamless transition to wifi, and increased power consumption of HSDPA I think Apple may have made the right decision in the short term – but keep an eye out for a 3G iPhone once the chip-sets become more power-friendly and as battery technology improves.

Conclusion:
My goodness run, don’t walk to buy an iPhone. I bought it with reservations – particularly about the EDGE data, yet everything else about the iPhone makes me feel so warm and gooey inside that I’m keeping the iPhone for sure. The iPhone will revolutionize the mobile industry and for once I’m pretty damn proud to be an early adopter and on the bleeding edge of tomorrow. I can’t wait to see some of the new phones Apples competitors will be coming up with in the next few years, and what kind of long term impact the iPhone will have on the mobile phone market as we know it – consider the bar officially raised!

The iPhone is the first phone I’ve ever used that works as advertised, offers a great mobile web browsing experience, great battery life, and is fun to use. I give it a solid 8 out of 10 Stars of Sparky, and would have given it the 10/10 Stars of Sparky had the iPhone featured a true SDK and high speed data out of the box.

For a long time software firewalls on computers have been problematic for many reasons. While they can be helpful in keeping malware and hackers out of a computer once something has breeched the firewall in even the tiniest of ways it’s possible to disable or subvert a software firewall to enable further attacks or malicious use of the machine. This is the reason most businesses put their trust in hardware firewalls – a hardware solution is much more difficult to remotely disable and can do a much better job of filtering both incoming and outgoing traffic.

While businesses with IT professionals can manage and maintain a hardware firewall with little muss or fuss it’s often beyond the average consumer. Many consumer grade routers offer firewalls and in addition offer a level of security by putting users behind NAT (Network Address Translation) which helps mask them from the Internet as a whole. These routers help, but not everyone has a router at home, and even a router can be tricky to set up.

What is needed is a smart network cable with a simple built in firewall. Imagine a cable with a “bump in the wire” which contained a small embedded OS which performed simple firewall and content filtering duties. It of course would be difficult to offer an enterprise grade solution from something this simple, but even the most basic filtering would make helping secure a computer as easy as plugging it into the wall. Because the cable would offer a hardware solution it would be far easier to not only prevent incoming attack vectors, but also if the attached computer does become compromised common outgoing ports used by malware could be blocked.

To take this kind of solution to the next level the cable could be offered as a managed service. The bump would be automatically updated by a server side component which could manage ports for their users and adapt the firewalls rules to new malware that has been identified in the wild.

Simple and transparent to the user, and yet another layer of security in this wild west we call the Internet. Am I a genius for coming up with such a simple but effective idea, or is the idea flawed in some way that’s escaping my exhausted mental state right now?

Bravo Parallels for the most polished and full feature emulation package I’ve ever seen – from installing Vista automatically for me from the DVD to providing slick OS X to Windows integration and hardware sharing features I’m impressed end to end.

Aside from recovering my health I’ve been relaxing with video games quite a bit, and doing some reading. I finally beat Super Paper Mario for my Wii, and have been getting back into Oblivion for my 360. I had managed to put down the Oblivion addiction a while back, but with the Shivering Isles expansion out I’ve found myself spending more and more time in Cyrodill. I’ve built (yet another) new character and am focusing on trying to work through not only the new expansion pack, but also all of those miscellaneous little quests that I’ve never bothered to go through – shadow over Hackdirt, Aleswell, and other little one-off quests that really add some depth to the game.

Aside from gaming my reading has been quite interesting. I picked up a copy of Inside the Machine, and illustrated introduction to microprocessors and computer architecture by Jon Stokes. It’s an interesting read and offers a nuts and bolts view of how a computer works from the ground up. I’m about half way through and am simply fascinated by the view it’s giving me into the “world of the machine” that so often slips under the average computer user. Modern computers, operating systems, and programming languages have done a beautiful job of abstracting hardware from software, but the hardware still exists, and knowing how it operates has given me some insight as to why some weird things in the more abstracted levels “work the way they work”.

So far I like Scrum, and will be interested to see how things turn out. It seems much more focused on getting rapid results than waterfall and suits my personality better. I like being able to work through issues in real time (so to speak) and focusing on delivering features rather than documentation. I’ll be interested to see what my take away lessons from Scrum are after we have gone through a few sprints and I feel more confident and educated about the process.

Luckily the week is over half over. Last weekend I didn’t get much ‘me’ time between visiting my grandpa and getting my car taken care of so I’m really looking forward to spending some quality time with my couch this coming Saturday and Sunday.

All this scripting paid off via the side benefit of making the rebuild almost entirely painless. It look less than an hour to reinstall OS X 10.4.1 from the DVDs that came with Marbles and then run software update to get it upgraded to 10.4.9. Once that was done I hooked into the gigabit network, copied over a few applications, ran my update script and Marbles was back in action.

I remember back in my Windows days how rebuilding a machine and moving data over could be a day long saga – no more of that for me though – an hour and some Unix hackery is all you need now!

Now I just have to keep my fingers crossed that rebuilding fixed whatever system corruption I had that was causing the system hangs to begin with.

The images now scale when someone has a small browser window, and the whole site has a minimum and maximum width to improve rendering. I also did some small tweaks to the typography that help improve the readability of the site as a whole. If you like or don’t like the new theme tweaks, or if it somehow breaks in your browser add a comment to this post to let me know.

Finally I have another shot of my antibiotics to add to the site. I’m not feeling well yet so the idea of leaving the house to go shooting is not very appealing. I really like how this one came out – it was a macro experiment with the Lensbaby 3G macro lens.

“Biotic lensbaby” by sparktography

Counterize does a great job of giving some high level stats, and as well puts a row into a MySQL table for each visitor with some basic information about what is being requested and such for statistical analysis. I broke out the PHP and had some fun.

Now up until now I had assumed I had about 10 readers. Some close friends, perhaps a few random strangers, and of course my mom. I guess I was wrong – I have had over 11,000 page views in three months from 1,827 unique visitors (not including known bots). These figures do not include viewers who view my site entirely via RSS and never visit the blog directly. Given my sometimes blathering rantings I’m actually rather surprised.

Now for the statporn: The highest pageview days are Thursday, Friday, and Saturday by a good margin. Tuesday’s on average get about 23% of the page views of a Friday. The last week in any month has about 10% more page views than any other week. About half of my page-views come either between 8-9am PST or between 2-4pm PST.

I have no idea why this would be, but for some reason I have visitors who only seem to visit me during certain parts of the month. I can see later in the week being more popular because some people are looking for minute little escapes from their jobs on Friday’s, and weekends being popular because people have a chance to “catch up” on their web browsing.

My most popular two entries are about my encounter with Ambien, the saga I went through to get my sweet Oblivion, and an example of my hatred/fear of company parties.

Technorati Tags: blog, ego, FOSS, math, OSS, stat, statistics

That’s all for now folks! Keep up the linky love that I might keep my own name in cyberspace! Remember: a vote for Sparky is a vote for progress!

It’s funny how this entire side of the software development process is so opaque to developers. I remember back in my dev days being handed a spec and really not knowing where it came from or what the process was to create it. Heck – it never even occurred to me that there was a process, I guess I just sort of assumed it magically appeared. Now that I’m on the other side of the house I’m getting my eyes opened to the how and why of the software development lifecycle and the reasons for strong methodologies and planning. Now it seems obvious that a multi-million dollar project can’t just be run by a bunch of teenage developers, but at the time that seemed like the best plan.

Ahh the things one learns as one gets older and wiser. With my quarter century mark looming ever closer I have to stop focusing on the older and start focusing on the wiser though – older happens regardless of intent, wiser takes effort and experiences to draw on.