I bought my iPhone as much as anything because I was sick of having RAZRs die on me, and I missed having a smart phone that let me easily access my e-mail on the go. I’m finding that I actually enjoy my iPhone a lot more than I thought I expected. It really is a very useful piece of communications equipment, aside from just the phone and e-mail capabilities.
The iTunes App Store really takes the phone to a whole other level. In fact, part of the reason that I decided to get the iPhone was seeing David Pogue’s review (video) of the iPhone and App Store. While I think that some of the most useful iPhone applications have yet to be written, there are already several killer apps available. And they’re free which is even better.
Pandora Radio has an iPhone application that lets you listen to Pandora streaming stations on the iPhone. The sound quality is good and when you are connected via wifi it upgrades to stereo.
There is also a free Shazam application. The Shazam service has been around for some time, but I can’t say that I’ve ever used it prior to having an iPhone. Their free application is wonderful and easy to use. It allows you to “tag” music that is playing. You press the “tag now” button and it listens for a few seconds, uploads the sample to their service, and then tells you what song you’re listening to as well as linking to the iTunes Music Store to purchase it and a video of the song on YouTube if one exists. It saves the tag history which is great because there are so many times where I’ll hear a song on the radio while I’m driving and not be able to remember what it was later. Now I don’t have to worry about that any more.
Although I am not as active in the social networking scene as I once was, Facebook has a great application for the iPhone. It presents the information feed from the service in a format that is perfect for consumption on the iPhone. It also includes a wonderful interface to viewing photos from the site that is very similar to the photo viewer that’s built into the device for viewing local photos. Overall the application has a great interface design.
I’ve been through a number of cell phones in the past few months, and when my most recent Motorola RAZR gave up the ghost earlier this week, I decided it was time to move on to something different. That something different is the iPhone 3G.
There’s a lot to say about the iPhone. It really is a fantastic piece of communications equipment. I’ve had Blackberrys, I’ve used Windows Mobile phones. But the iPhone really is something else entirely. It’s in a class of its own.
However, I was having problems getting my Google Contacts to sync properly. After much fruitless searching online and bashing my head against the wall, I’ve solved the problem so I thought I would share it publicly in case others have similar issues.
With the latest release of iTunes, it’s possible to sync the iPhone with Google Contacts. As many others have noted, you cannot specify a specific set of contacts - it’s all or nothing. But that didn’t bother me. I have not used Google contacts before, so I set about cleaning up and organizing all of the contacts in my Google account and adding in entries for everyone I had on my previous cell phone. Luckily I had made a back up in Mobile Phone Tools, but it was a bit of tedious copying and pasting into Google.
I did my first sync and everything seemed to work as expected. I tried updating some contacts in Google and sure enough, they synched to the iPhone. However, when I would edit certain contacts on the iPhone the changes would not sync back to Google. I searched all of the iPhone forums, the Apple support site, reviewed the Apple Knowledge Base, but all to no avail. My contacts seemed to be syncing in only one direction.
It turns out that the reason for this is that Google uses the e-mail address as the primary key for its database. So it determines that a contact has changed based upon the e-mail address. Unfortunately I didn’t have e-mail addresses entered for many of my previous cell phone contacts. Either I didn’t have their e-mail address, or in many cases I did have it but I had neglected to enter it into the Google Contacts system.
For those contacts where I did have their e-mail address, I went back into Google and updated the contacts to include an e-mail address. After doing this, my sync is working as expected bidirectionally. For those contacts who do not have e-mail addresses, I’ll just have to keep on top of the changes manually and review my Google Contacts list to ensure that changes are updating appropriately and that I am not creating duplicate entries in my syncing. Since the number of people who I know without e-mail addresses is fairly low, that does not pose a major inconvenience for me.
The moral of the story is: whatever other information you enter into Google Contacts about a person, don’t leave out their e-mail address!
After a lot of behind the scenes work, Communications Tool & Die is now up and running. We’ve launched our web site and are taking our first clients. Exciting times, but also a ton of work. I’ve never been one to mind a ton of work though.
I think there’s a great opportunity to differentiate ourselves in the greater pantheon of web development service providers, as we are positioned to provide custom web applications work for small to medium sized businesses at a price that is affordable but with a quality that has previously been reserved for very large companies and dot-com startups.
Of course we don’t mind doing traditional static sites, business graphics work, logos, business cards, and other traditional design and development work as well. So if you’re in the market to re-evaluate your corporate communications needs, check us out!
There’s a fun television show on the Fine Living television network. It’s called I Want That! and it’s probably not a TiVo season pass pick for anti-consumerism activists. The show is pretty much explained by its title - they showcase a lot of “cool stuff”. I thought I’d post some recent items I saw on the show that appealed to me. Enjoy.
GeoChron is a wall map of the world that actually functions as a clock. It updates the view of the world showing current daylight and takes into account the rotation of the Earth on its axis and other factors that impact the “terminator” on the globe. At the top of the map it shows the current time in each time zone across the world. It’s quite pricey and there are free software programs that provide equivalent functionality. But I like the idea of having a “wall map” clock that doesn’t take up screen real estate. I do work and interact with people all over the world and keeping track of global timezones in my head can be a pain, especially with daylight savings time in the Northern and Southern hemispheres being opposite. I don’t see myself buying one any time soon, but if I had an extra $1800 that I had to spend, I’d consider it.
Reversica makes a hardware mount for cabinetry that allows you to have a cabinet rotate 180 degrees on its axis so that you can hide, for example, a plasma television with bookshelves on the opposite side. When I build my super hero hideout I’ll be sure to get one. But since I currently rent I don’t think I’m investing $3,000 in custom cabinetry hardware to hide a plasma TV I don’t have. But once I do finally buy a place I may re-evaluate.
Several months ago I wrote about using my personal Mediawiki as a Document Management System. I am writing to follow up on my experience with that. It’s actually working out wonderfully. I am always tempted to make things more complicated than they need to be, but for my needs using a wiki for document management works perfectly.
I have uploaded various documents of personal interest, such as time sheets, offer letters, tax information, etc. and I have access to these bits of information from any web browser. Much more efficient than trying to look through my filing system at home, consisting of an underused file drawer and a highly used system of “piles of mail spread around”.
When I started at my current place of employment, we were just transitioning support of a medium sized UNIX environment from another company which had been supporting the installation previously. Unfortunately there was no system automation in place and all changes and updates had to be done manually.
Having been a UNIX systems engineer for a long time, I’m not a fan of manual configuration. It’s time intensive and error prone. So I set about configuring a cfengine installation using Subversion for revision control of the configuration files. My team mates were not familiar with cfengine or Subversion, so I documented their use on our internal wiki.
I’ve had occaision to set up fresh cfengine configurations at several contracting clients now, and it occurs to me that while cfengine is incredibly powerful and useful it can be a bit overwhelming for new users even if they are experienced UNIX administrators.
In my copious free time (yeah, right!) I should start a consulting business around system process automation using cfengine with revision control for more managable and scalable infrastructures.
Still alive. Still busy. Still no time to make much progress on the super cool projects I want to work on. Story of my life.
The job is going well, although I am completely swamped from the moment I walk in to the moment I go home. Sometimes I have 15 minutes to go to the drive-thru for lunch. That’s not a bad thing, it just means that I’m pretty drained after work and haven’t made much progress on keeping this site updated, my People Keeper, etc.
My friend Nicole and I are working on starting a web design/marketing company which has been taking up whatever minimal free time I might otherwise have had. Hopefully that will get off the ground. I’m hoping she can take the lead on it, as my schedule is just so packed.
I did take break last weekend and went camping with some friends at Prince William Forest Park in Triangle, VA. It was a good time. I’m not much for camping, but there’s something to be said for having zero cell phone reception for two days.
For the past few years I have used speakeasy as an ISP. Although they are pricier than other DSL options, I don’t mind paying a premium for the excellent support and service they provide. A week or two ago my DSL went out. That almost never happens. I called Speakeasy’s 24 hour support line, but it was after hours and so there was a short wait until I could speak with someone.
Instead of making me wait on hold for 10 minutes, their call management system asked if I would like to keep my place in line and receive a call back when they could assist me. I have not had experience with that option before, but it sounded like a great idea so I pressed the button to do that. Sure enough, all I had to do was enter in my phone number and in a few minutes their system called me back and connected me to a support person who resolved my technical issue. For those who are curious, it turned out that some setting in the PVC had become mysteriously mismatched.
While I would rather not have to wait at all when calling customer support numbers, if I have to wait I’d much prefer to have the system call me back than to sit around listening to hold music. I hope many other businesses upgrade their call center telephony applications to support this feature.
On a side note, while I have been a happy speakeasy customer, Verizon FiOS is finally available in my neighborhood so I suspect I will be switching from DSL to fibre in the near future. I’m sure I will miss the speakeasy support, but the faster speed and lower cost of fibre is hard to resist.
I’ve started my new position doing HP-UX systems engineering for a large defense contract. Normally I shy away from government contracting as it tends to be more politics and less work. But in this case, I’m really enjoying the position. The people are great and there actually is plenty of interesting technical work to do. My background is more with Solaris and Linux so it’s great to have an opportunity to get up to speed on HP-UX. I have used HP UNIX in the past, but it’s been a few years and I’ve never worked in an exclusively HP shop.
In other news, I bought a new car. I had been driving a 1990 Lincoln Town Car, but alas I was driving over to pick up a friend a week ago Saturday, April 26, and a woman driving a PT Cruiser crashed into me and destroyed it. That made me sad. I was thinking of picking up another $500 car on craigslist, but instead I decided to take the plunge and get a car loan.
I have avoided driving new cars for the past number of years, as I got stuck with a high interest new car loan back in 1998 that was an albatross for five years. This time I was a bit savvier and so far am very happy with my decsision. I’m now driving a new 2008 Hyundai Sonata Limited. The 2009 cars were available but much better deals were to be had on the 2008 cars and the difference between the two model years was not sufficient to matter to me.
It’s been a long time since I’ve had a new car and I’m enjoying it. I went with the 6 cylinder engine which is quite sporty. Much sportier than what I really need, but I didn’t want an underpowered car. Although my gas mileage won’t be as fantastic as it would have been with the 4 cylinder, it’s still a big improvement over the Lincoln.
I saw this article in CIO Insight and I thought it was worth reading. The article is an interview with Anthony Williams, co-author of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. I enjoyed the book and I was interested in his thoughts on the subject.
A lot of “CIO type” interviews and articles are long on theory and short on practical reference. This article does include some concrete references to real projects under way. Notably the intelligence community’s answer to Wikipedia, Intellipedia. Also mentioned are Politicopia, a Utah project to create a wiki community where citizens can voice their opinions about pending legislature.
The article mainly discusses theory and a few wiki examples, so I’m not sure that it lives up to it’s “Web 2.0″ claim as many other “Web 2.0″ technologies are ignored. Still, it’s worth skimming. Not so much to learn anything groundbreaking but to get the cognitive juices flowing.
