Summer Endeavors
So how about an update what is going on for me this summer?
My startup has moved offices into Lyndhurst which are much much more comfortable than our previous place. There is central air conditioning, a second room for relaxing when you aren’t coding, and enough room for everyone to not get that cramped stuffy feeling. We were able to complete the move across about three days, the first was for minor equipment, second for some other minor trinkets, and the last for the major furniture. All in all it was probably the smoothest move that I have ever done thus far. The town is great too, and I think I’ll be looking towards moving there in December maybe.
We have been working full steam ahead on many projects. Kenny has finished the teacher’s publishing website, and we’re gearing up to launch next week hopefully. It has an amazing design, great feel, and is really easy to use. So if you’re a teacher looking for a way to publish notes, homework, or just reminders to your students we’re offering it at a very cheap price per year (under $25). There has been an interest in obtaining a sales staff to sell this product en masse to some school districts, and we have people working on that in New Jersey and Pennsylvania now as well.
Dan and JC have been working on jollyroger almost non-stop since the beginning of March and have made amazing progress. We have a meeting with some school academics next week to give them our presentation, ask for a little support to test it on their Linux lab, and mainly to hear some critique about our pitch. We are hoping by the end of the summer that we’ll be able to pull ourselves on full-time to work on making this an actual web application, but until then there are a myriad of smaller projects we have our hands in.
JC and I spent the better part of ten hours yesterday in a deep coding session working on a new website idea that we pulled from dating websites. We are hoping to have this project to a point where it can be launched by the end of the month (the progress we made in one night was amazing) but it may require some more research regarding legalities, cost of maintaining, publishing, etc. But bringing an idea from merely inception to basic implementation in a single night was awesome. Being comfortable in the new office definitely gave us much more leeway for staying there nearly all night.
Finally, I have been working on a amateur writing website called typealoud.com now for about two years, and I have just begun the initial stages of development. The idea is to allow for people to write stories, have them peer edited, and eventually publish them online in story arcs easily. The goal is to compile enough stories to begin a small publication of stories each week, month, quarter, etc. This has been a goal of mine for awhile now and I have told myself that I am going to get it done this summer.
I have been toying around with the idea of podcasting for years and I think I may try again. But recently I have been at a crossroads for what I want to do it on. The geeky half of me is screaming about technology and programming, while the creative half of me is screaming about reading, writing, and movies. Because I get enough programming in my day to day activities I am leaning towards merely talking about anything that comes up. I know that JC is interested in doing one about technology but I’m not sure he’d want to talk about the creative end. So if anyone in this little blog writing chain is interested let me know. I’m looking to begin recording in a couple of weeks.
Well that’s about it. Considering it is the fourth of July and I have yet to get out of bed (laptops are amazing) I should probably get going and ready up for the day’s festivities. Tomorrow will be diving head first into statistics most of the day, and finishing up on Monday with another healthy dose of it. I’m sure during all of that I’ll end up dropping into a terminal and doing some coding. Until then, au revoir.
Meaningless [Juneish] Meanderings
I have been contemplating writing a daily journal to collect my thoughts, ambitions, ideas, and inhibitions into a single book that would be admissible in court documents if I ever was declared clinically insane. There are a countless number of dirty disgusting dastardly daring one-dimensionally delusional deliberations which I spend far too much time delicately crafting only to delve deeper into the dark bottomless caverns of my mind.
One of my problems, I think, is that I spend far too much time thinking about the details and not enough time taking into consideration the act itself; sometimes planning too far ahead just makes a problem more complex than it originally needed to be. The more my mind wanders on a walkabout the less work I actually get done. At the end of the day I am doing so much thinking that I generally fall asleep quickly, but I have this overwhelming feeling that I am not actually completing anything.
I am a firm believer that your life only has the meaning that you define, but I also do not believe in any sort of afterlife. For me, the here-now is the only period in time that I am going to exist. I would love to be wrong, more than anything, but even if I am there would be no way to know. Even if there is reincarnation I would never be functionally aware that I existed in a past life as a fire breather in a road carnival, the guy loading a cannon ball during the civil war, or the poor jackass who drowned attempting to clean the soap scum off a pirate ship in the Caribbean.
Just a thought. Time for some sleep.
Jawbone Prime Woes
I have been using bluetooth headsets long before they were required to talk on cellular phones while driving motor vehicles, but I have never been completely satisfied with a headset. In fact I never thought I would ever be close to having full satisfaction until I purchased a Jawbone Prime from Best Buy a couple of days ago. I have a couple of pep-peeves and one major issue that I’m going to detail.
First of all the sound quality is superb. It is precisely what I have looked for in a bluetooth headset for years and I know that I made the right purchase as soon as I turned the device on and paired it with my iPhone. It sounds better than my iPhone does. I find that to be amazing and I thought I had a quality product until I ran into a couple of hiccups.
First of all whomever designed the ear loops to not lock into place is a jackass and it only exists this way because they want to see you a $10 ear loop off of their website. Which honestly, works, because I bought a fucking ear loop after losing the premium one somewhere in my car. I was not going to spend the time searching my car to find a small piece of plastic that should have a locking mechanism so that you cannot pull the ear loop out of the device while it is on your ear. This is ridiculous. Strike one.
Secondly the ear bud situation is quite absurd; after fussing with the ear loops and swapping out ear buds I found one that sort of works as well as I’d like, but the damn jawbone still falls out of my ear occasionally. If I was outside it would have fell in the middle of the sidewalk, road or store. But luckily it was in my car and it only hit my shoulder and rolled into the back seat. But that’s enough to piss me off. Strike two.
Lastly, I don’t even know what the hell their proclaimed Noise Assassin is because whenever I hit the button nothing actually changed on the device. This morning when I attempted to pair the device with my MacBook to see how a Skype call would go I noticed that the noise assassin button apparently does not work on my device. I cannot put it into pairing mode. Broke device, Strike three.
I have heard great things about the Jawbone products and vastly horrible things… all of which tend to resonate from the exact issues that I am having. But for a “brand new” $129 product you would expect the device to work out of the box, not fall out of your ear and actually not apparently be broken. Why did I spend $129 and then another $30 on ear buds and ear loop replacements to get a fucking broken device. I am really ticked off right now. Every time I have ever bought a bluetooth headset I have been burned.
So I put a support request in with The Jawbone Support team and I am hoping to actually get this piece of junk replaced for something that works. I guess its back to using my tried and true Motorola. Its a good thing that someone knows how to make a product that works.
iPhone Programming Nuisances
I have been programming on the iPhone for the past couple of months now but recently I have just started actually working on a meaningful application. There are some things that I actually dig about the Cocoa touch framework that Apple has put out, but there are really a lot of things that are a big pain in the ass that greatly outweigh the nice things.
What I do like about the iPhone SDK is that I can find nearly anything I want online. The community is so vast I am quickly able to either go into an IRC chatroom to ask a question or find an article through Google. Another great thing is that the Cocoa touch framework uses the Model View Controller pattern for developing software; after first working with this type of pattern in PHP and C++ I was happy to see Apple’s implementation. It is not only intuitive but promotes great coding habits.
Interface Builder is pretty darn good. Honestly, there are only a couple of things that I would like to change. The one thing that I hate about it is that I have to control+click in order to connect a controller to a view, etc. Seriously? The second, as a programmer, that I have to take my hand off my keyboard means that someone, somewhere, did something wrong. With the Apple set of IDE software I find myself doing that much more often than anything else I have ever used… which brings me on to my next topic.
Now on to the things that I hate about the iPhone SDK. Objective-C is a pile of steaming horse manure. As with everything else that is Apple you can tell that the only reason we are using it on this phone is because of the arrogance of some designer sitting in a room that has absolutely no idea how to code. I do not understand how anyone could think this is easier than either Java or C++, but it is really irritating. I think that Apple may be the only large corporation that actually employs Objective-C programmers, but unfortunately this is a language that will never die due to Apple (Objective-C on the Mac, and now the iPhone).
The xCode IDE is a garbage as well. Someone at Apple thinks that in order to maintain synergy in the world they must undock all of the windows so that they can easily be lost behind other windows. I stand by my statements that Microsoft Visual Studio is the best IDE I have ever used, hands down. All of my C/C++/PHP/Python code is written using Emacs and anything I work with in Java is usually either NetBeans or Eclipse.
Along with the whole IDE being garbage the debugger itself is confusing as hell. It is obvious that they are using a wrapper around GDB (as you can tell by the status bar saying that GDB is running) but it would be nice if all the pretty little buttons actually seemed like they worked. I don’t know who in their right mind actually wants to look at PPC assembly code in the debugger; even Emacs will point you to the line of code in the stack.
I could go on for much longer but I have other things that need to be done this week; including an iPhone application that needs to be finished. I just hope that I am able to get around my gripes about the IDE and Objective-C long enough to actually get something working.
My Workstation Setup
Okay, so I have been busy. At the beginning of the winter I finally got my workstation setup and my desk ready to go. I’ve been doing a lot of work from the home lately with Zinkk Inc ramping up with our projects. So I decided that I needed a pretty sweet setup and here it is. For right now all you’re going to see is the desk because I still need to purchase a comfy chair.
Desk inside of my apartment in Newark.
Some quick information about the equipment: there are two Acer 22 inch LCD monitors running both at 1680×1050 resolution. The workstation is running Linux and has virtual machines for Windows XP, Vista, 7 and Red Hat Linux. The specs are: 2×500GB hard-drives, 8GB of RAM, quad-core Intel processor @ 3.0ghz and nVIDIA 260 video card with 868MB of RAM. The MacBook I’ve had for awhile: 2ghz processor, 2GB of RAM and it can plug into the monitor on the left for the full screen if I need it to be.
Once Zinkk Inc goes big this setup will most likely be moved to our office in Belleville because I’ll be spending every waking moment there. The office in Belleville also has another monitor for vertical viewing of webpages and what not. After seeing this office I am really wanting a bigger desk and a couple of more monitors. But for now this will have to do!
Oh, and, read about the all the adventures that we go through with our startup on http://diariesofastartup.com. We are going to rework that website to include some photo streams, possible future video content and of course more postings from all of us at Zinkk.
Boycott Blizzard: Scum of America
While browsing the Internet this afternoon in between bouts of work I noticed this little tidbit on Digg.com; Blizzard is at this point in time on my shit list. I consider them the most evil company in existence right now. Because of ongoing legal battle they have used their propaganda-case against the company that created the popular WoWGlider software to essentially steal our rights away from running any piece of software we damn well fucking please on our computers. How exactly did they do this?
For those of you that do not know what the DMCA is it is basically a way for the large dick of corporations to slap you across the mouth a couple of times before they shove their cock down your throat. This law, passed by the U.S. Congress of 1998, has created nothing but trouble for patrons of the Internet. The original intent was to protect the works under copyright from, well, digital copying — but companies such as Blizzard (hence forth known as ‘Scum of the Earth’) have been abusing it for the past decade.
Blizzard ceased being a good company as soon as they decided to up and merge with the publishing powerhouse Activision. I wish that I could say the dirty scumbags of Activision tainted Blizzard, but I have a feeling it has been a mutual ass fucking. When you install World of Warcraft this piece of software that they call Warden patrols your system for software that they believe might be malicious to their online gaming network. Now what the scum have been arguing is that as soon as you decide to break any part of their End User License that you lose your license to use their software.
First of all EULA licenses in and of themselves generally fall into the category of a contract of adhesion (take it or leave it, no negotiation) which is only presented to the user after they purchase the software. Once the box has been opened and the software installed there are virtually no stores that will allow that software to be returned (hence, the catch-22).
This would basically be the same as you paying a hooker for services to perform and then she says that she only fucks bareback because she is allergic to latex; oh, but you can’t have your money back because her pimp already hit her up for it. The only difference is that there ain’t no pimp court to go complain to – you lost your fucking money.
So anyone that does not cancel their World of Warcraft accounts over this are not real Americans. We need to start somewhere and I suggest that we start with the current scum of America, Blizzard/Activision software.
Seagate’s Dirty Little Secret
There used to be a saying when I was younger. I honestly have never actually heard anyone at a place that I have worked utter it. “The customer is always right” which I think merely gets overlooked now in the IT industry because generally the customer does not know what they are talking about. But the principle still holds true: they are still your customer and they are always right.
Seagate, which has been a company that I have bought hard-drives from for awhile now, apparently did not get that memo. In fact it looks like that their customer relations department (call it customer support, marketing, etc) did not learn from the dozens of other examples out there that the best course of action is to fix your fucking product instead of try to silence your customers.
Oh yeah, the assholes went there – they decided that instead of listening to their customers that they would pull an Apple and start deleting posts on their support forum about this issue. I never understood the thought process when someone does this – Why, maybe if I just delete the post on this forum they’ll go away? Are you out of your fucking mind? The whole reason you have support forums is for people to come and bitch (well, maybe not, Apple announced recently that their support forums are another way for you to pay homage to arguably the only company that has been sent to Earth directly by God).
Scoble goes on and talks about the situation more than I plan to. I am tired of companies walking on their customers in this fashion. Many companies seem to think that warranties only come into play when a couple thousand of people start screaming into a microphone on CNN or start posting up stories that equate your product to a pile of horse manure on Digg. That is, unless, you die from their product. Then of course they are going to immediately take care of you for fear of a lawsuit and then a massive recall.
Anyway, if you are interested you can read Robert Scoble’s blog post on the matter because I am tired of talking about some asshole deciding to silence their customer’s whimpers for a product that actually works.
Note: If the company in said question is Apple then all bets are off. You must hope that Steve Jobs’ personally emails you in order to get speedy support from Apple. Of course, if you go to one of their store outlets the first thing that they are going to do is ask, “What did you do to it?”
Stinky Sweaty Untrustworthy Google
I have been attacked. After the attack I was left helpless, defeated and with nothing left to do I fell to my knees screaming in agony.
It has been several years since I was the victim of spam emails. I have been using Google Mail for most of my personal mail for the past two years now. I never had much of a problem – Google was actually the first email service that I used that not only integrated the spam filter directly into the client, but they did it damn well… fucking damn well. But that all changed last week when my first email about “an experienced mother seduces young boy”.
First of all, they got it all wrong – a better title would have been, “a young experienced mother, whom has a young boy, wants to seduce you” – because, well let’s face it, she already has a fucking kid and unless his name is Jesus we know (for the most part) your chances are already on the positive side. Sure, depending on the kid’s age you may have to bribe him with something – a rattle, some candy, ice cream or if he is a little older maybe your car keys – but that is neither here nor there.
Look what Google has done to me! I invested so much faith in them that when I saw my first sex related spam email I went all crazy. I thought that the world had ended. The first thing I did was check the date on my laptop to make sure it indeed was still 2009 and I had a couple more years until the end of the world (which, I may touch on a later post – that pesky Nostradamus guy, predicting world war, 9/11 and now a comet strike). I don’t know why we, as humans, by our own nature we know we’re always wrong, would believe anything written by another disgusting stinky sweaty bipedal primate.
Well I have already gone off topic. I think I’m going to finish on that note. I just hope that the next time Google decides to drop the ball that they will do it when my phone is off.
Do Your Job Or Quit
If you do not enjoy your job then its time to find another one. There is nothing worse than walking into a store, restaurant or any other place of business where a nasty person that hates their life is working. I am tired of being bitched and complained at because, ahem, I want to buy a fucking DVD at a consumer electronics store.
I did not walk in there to be your therapist, you are not my friend and all I am looking to do is walk out with the item that you have on sale. I understand how it is, trust me, I have worked in retail on many occasions but I never once treated a customer like an idiot. Looking at me through those black-rimmed glasses of yours, rolling your eyes at your co-workers and then explaining to me that “the computer department does not sell DVD” in that mocking tone was deserving of what I said to you.
Maybe I was the wrong person to say that to–that was probably what was running through your head at a couple thousand miles an hour when I stared you down and made you cower like a scolded puppy. Because the first person that I went to you after you was your manager, whom decided to also be condescending with me, and immediately got destroyed as well. For a person working in a, consumer electronics’ department computer repair center, you surely were an idiot.
Maybe the next time that you turn to say something smartass to a customer he wouldn’t know more about computers than you, especially when you attempt to flaunt that fact in his face as you are dismissing him. All of this happened simply because I asked you where they placed the item that was in the circular on sale. The correct answer was that you didn’t know, because you obviously do not care about your job enough to help a customer out or call someone from another department.
The next time that I go to that store I’ll be sure to say hello again.
My Programming Projects
On my other blog which resides on my university’s servers I usually talk about any technical programming type stuff. The reason is because this blog tends to be read by most of my friends and family that probably don’t want to locking GTK inside of separate thread but nevertheless I should probably mention it here.
I have been working on a project for awhile that (at first) involved creating a large data set viewer of CSV information. This would be able to pan through gigabytes of data without the need of having a machine with, well, gigabytes of memory. At the time I didn’t have a machine capable of doing so so it was more of an interest. The project slowly turned into something to propel me into learning GTK+ development and eventually turned into a modular application for modifying workbooks. The application itself is pretty simple: it loads up a GTKSheet widget (think Excel), menu and performs some basic plugin management. Most of the magic happens outside of the application in extensions. One such extension was turning into my large data set viewer, but I have been working lately on a realtime extension that I just got working this morning.
I am involved with a couple of other projects related to my startup as well as some personal projects that I am hoping to launch before I go back to college. Once I finally get some time (see: this weekend) to sit down and begin coding I am hoping to have a working example to show off. But the gist is that I am trying to create a community around writers (since that is one of my hobbies).
First things first: where am I drinking tonight?
