ITWire and excessive content paging

ITWire is a pretty good news service. It often covers news with limited popular coverage. However they have been reducing the amount of content they show per page, in what I assume is an attempt to increase page/banner views, to a ridiculous point. While trying to read an article on Sun's Chief Open Source Office's interview I was faced with a page with only 270 words, with the interview split into 6 pages. Clicking 6 times to read a short interview is not what I would consider a good use of time. Hopefully they see the problem they are causing for their users and advertisers and put a stop to this madness and really rescue the usability of an otherwise pretty good site.

Don't waste the first hours of the day

I have been following my new routine of waking up very early in the morning. This is more-or-less the second week I have following that routine and I have no reached the stage where I am now waking up around 1 AM. Originally I intended to move to around 2 AM gradually, however I purchased a Sleeptracker last week and found that by using it to wake up between 1 and 2 AM I can do so without feeling extremely drowsy. A Google search for Sleeptracker will turn up many results if you are interested in finding out about how it works.

Just waking up at 1 AM is not really enough to really improve my quality of life if I am dead tired all through out the day, so I incorporated some polyphasic sleeping pattern ideas into the routine. Polyphasic sleep basically theorizes that you only need REM sleep to survive and that your body will adjust to any lack of REM sleep by inducing it quicker and longer at every opportunity until you get your daily requirements met. Therefore quick naps are enough to fill up on REM sleep, which is what I do around 3:30 AM, 5 AM, and 5:30 PM.

The naps are a huge energy boost in an otherwise unsustainable sleeping routine. Basically the nap times are chosen based on what I intend to do. At 3:30 AM I nap until 4 AM so that I can be fresh for my work out with kettlebells. Then at 5 AM I semi-nap, as I am not really that tired, to ensure that I am as fresh as possible for my day at work. After coming home from work I take my afternoon nap so that I have energy for my family and friends. The day can then end around 9 or 10 PM depending on my commitments.

Overall I am still getting around 5.5 hours of sleep and I have way more stamina throughout the day than when I was sleeping for 8 to 9 hours. This means that the time I am dedicating to my personal projects in the morning for about 2 hours each work day does not impact my regular routine at all. It also feels great to know that just an hour after the day starts I am awake and making the most of it. When you think about it most people waste over the first five hours of their day being asleep.

The side effects of success and fame

Michael Arrington's reflective post on the personal challenges he faces as the head of a highly visible and influential startup blog was quite a sad read. In a most recent event Arrington got spat on by some convention attendee in Germany, and he recalls a period in his life where he felt his own life as well as those of his employees in danger from some threatening psycho. It is a brutally honest account of what happens when one finally makes it into the spotlight as all sorts of people start paying attention to you and what you do.

While I think some people will think what he experienced as a small price to pay for success I can fully sympathise with his feeling of fatigue and burnout at the situation. Hopefully Arrington comes to terms with just how much his work means to him and decides whether the costs are worth it.

President Bush's lessons for everyone

The Washington Post has an interesting article on what Obama can learn from Bush's terms as president. However it seems that we can all learn about what not to do in life by observing Bush. Some of the lessons are:

Presidents set the tone. Don't be passive or tolerate virulent divisions.
For most people this is highly useful advice. Often we will get caught up in our jobs and everything that everybody else wants us to do and forget about focusing on the "tone" of our lives, that is, what we really want to do and where we really want to be. When we are presented with conflict in our lives we must resolve it instead of tolerate it. Only then can we live distraction free to achieve our goals.

A president must do the homework to master the fundamental ideas and concepts behind his policies.
Research, research, research. All throughout university the thought is drilled into students through a ton of research projects that give little room for personal input. The reason for this is often not clear to the student until they graduate. The key lesson is not to give you a channel to rant but to help you understand how to learn first then create an argument or course of action second. If you fail to do the first the results of what you do second will very much be negatively impacted by unexpected outcomes.

Presidents must tell the public the hard truth, even if that means delivering very bad news.
For pretty much everyone dealing with hard truths is very difficult. We basically have entire industries (drugs, alcohol) that allow people to defer or escape the troubles in their life. I call them escapes because they do nothing productive in resolving your problems. The first step of finding a solution is identifying your problem. It is often quite easy to forget.

The article presents many other points with overlapping themes. Nonetheless, I found the article to be a very good introspective read and has helped remind me of the various life lessons that I need to employ on a day to day basis that have been forgotten.

David Pogue's twitter tips

Having used Twitter for a few days I found it to be mildly interesting. David Pogue has an article that goes into greater detail about Twitter and provides a power user's view of how it can be utilized. For example, when you have real followers that are able to act as a resource that can answer random questions you have it becomes a tool that is more context aware then a search engine.

Asus finally brining product lines and inventory under control

I have noticed for a while that the large retails here in Australia are no longer stocking new makes and models of netbooks. My theory is that they are simply being released too fast for the retailers to clear inventory as well as giving the retailers too much uncertainty about products with a better netbook being released every month.

A Taipei Times article reaffirms my beliefs and goes even further in explaining the problems as Asus. From over investment in LCD monitors, too great a focus on the American market, as well as all the excess inventory left from their shift from 8.9 inch to 10 inch models. While it is easy to fault Asus for many of these decisions a lot of them do appear to be sound in a growing economy.

Being a pioneer in the industry takes a lot of money. Asus presents a pioneer in low price computing that does have a liberating effect. Their position presents a lot of profitability challenges that premium brands such as Apple have less of an issue with. It will be interesting to observe how Asus strategically resolves these issues.

Trojans for Mac pirates

The latest copy of a pirated iWork '09 shows just how much work malicious software vendors have to go to set up on an end user's PC. Instead of exploiting a bug in the operating system to do a stealth install the vendor has to create a custom iWork '09 installer that got user permission to modify system files, which in this case is installing a start up service, then install the pirated version of iWork as usual.

I am sure this approach will be used more and more as Mac's gain larger market share. The worse news for me though is the possibilty of a thriving anti-virus segment in the Mac market as I see anti-virus software as ineffective resource hogs that really should be avoided at all costs.

Why it is important to have a smart leader that can read and learn

I find that often, after someone has been in a leadership position for a while, would become accustomed to being an authority on everything. While this is helpful in presenting an image of unwavering certainty about decisions the long term affect of it appears to be a fear of uncertainty.

President Barack Obama, a new leader in the world, is showing refreshing openness to learning and leveraging people he has access to. By consulting Sun Microsystem's Scott McNealy, Obama is learning about open source software from an industry veteran on a key sector of the I.T. industry.

Unfortunately McNealy's response was less informative and more evangelical, nonetheless I am sure Obama will enquire other great minds in the I.T. industry to get an accurate view of what open source means for his government and country.

Blogs now featuring full page ads just like old media

I was quite surprised today to find that Gizmodo had a full page ad for an education company. Personally the ad did not appeal to me however I do find it interesting that blogs are landing ads that are basically the equivalent of a full page ad in news papers or magazines. I see this as a welcomed development for new media companies as it gives them an alternative revenue stream that should be more reliable then advertising network context ads.

I have also noticed that News.com.au have been experimenting with more and more attention grabbing ads that feature low quality flash video as well as flash ads that expand on hover. For me these ads bring back memories of literally flashing banner ads of the 90s. I am pretty sure that for the intended demographic these ads work well but they simply annoy the rest of us. The evolution of online advertising is still going on as people have become accustomed to text ads it seems these intrusive ads are back in vogue.

New York Times' glowing preview of Windows 7

It seems like every day another writer gushes about Windows 7. I have already expressed my opinion on Windows 7 in other posts and it just comes down to me agreeing with them but with far less enthusiasm. The New York Times article takes a different approach to most reviews and instead outlines the most irritating things about Vista and how Windows 7 intends to rectify the problem.

David Pogue's list of things that will be fixed are:

1. It’s naggy and intrusive.
   
2. It’s slow.
   
3. It’s a resource hog.
   
4. It’s incompatible.
   
5. It’s confusing.
   
6. The editions are bewildering.
   

While I can't say I am convinced that all of them are fixed. It is nonetheless good to see Microsoft making improvements to those areas. Because, really, as good as XP is, it is time PC users to be able to enjoy features that Apple has provided on Macs for at least 5 years.

Free iPhone Blogger bloging software review 1: LifeCast

I have been trying to find some good software to post to Blogger from my iPhone. Unfortunately the amount of quality out there is limited. So I decided to be the lab rat and try out as many free blogging tools that support Blogger as possible. The first one that I tried is LifeCast.

I was quite excited to give LifeCast a try. The interface was polished and the program appeared to be quite simple. The first step after installing LifeCast is setting up your blog, and I did so using the configuration screen below:

After LifeCast is configured you can see it in your blogs list:


The blog list was quite cool to see, since I have two blogs that I post to regularly. The next thing I did was type a message, to do this press the bottom left button (see the 2nd screen shot down). When typing, a simple notepad that is reminiscent of Windows Notepad is shown that allows you to type. As you can see I typed that post a long time ago.


After you type your blog post you can see it all ready to be uploaded.


LifeCast is meant to upload your blog posts for you in the background but I never found it to work at all. So the two posts I wrote are still stuck there on my iPhone. The lack of an export option makes it all the more difficult to overcome problems with LifeCast. There is a photo upload option as well but I decided not to test that since the most basic writing functionality was not functional.

In conclusion I would not really recommend LifeCast. If you do decide to try it do a test post first before putting in any real energy to write a proper post. Please note that at the time of writing there was a version available that was not compatible with my version 1 iPhone using 2.2 firmware so maybe that one works as expected. Nonetheless I do not see LifeCast as having enough features to make me want to use it instead of typing my post in Mobile Mail and sending it to my Blogger address.

Love Steve Jobs and Apple? Try this office decor

Pretty funny prank.

Windows 7 too good to be true?

Slashdot has been discussing the hype surrounding Windows 7 and how it could possibly be setting it up for failure. While my personal experience with the beta has made me very enthusiastic as well I would say that no one is expecting too great things from this OS. Vista has set the bar very low and in comparison Windows 7 is indeed leaps and bounds better. However the main difference should be that instead of paying for downgrades to their default Vista installs most people should be happy keeping Windows 7 on their machines.

Micro-blogging on identi.ca

I am still trying to grasp the concept of micro-blogging. I have signed up with the website identi.ca after reading about it on Slashdot today as a Twitter alternative; Slashdot users were predicting Twitter's demise this year. Instead of asking "What are you doing" like Twitter does identi.ca asks "What's up". And really the differences between the two services do appear just that minor from an end user perspective.

My current limited use of the service, three posts so far, is somewhat enjoyable. The 140 character limit is quite freeing in a way because you can't over think your posts. At the same time I do not wish to post things that are too mundane. The whole exercise when viewed with all posts from other people is very reminiscent of IRC channels where anything goes. As the public front page feed is the only place to interact with new users.

Whether micro-blogging is a fad is yet to be seen, but so far I would say it will probably live on longer than Second Life.

Kogan Agora - Always seemed too good to be true

When news about the Kogan Agora first broke it seemed like another vaporware product. Now it appears to be true. While the concept of an Australian directed, Chinese manufactured phone based on Google's Android mobile OS appeared to be quite an accomplishment the low price of between $400 and $500 AUD made me suspicious.

While it is true that the Australian company would not have the overhead of a large multinational such as Nokia, Sony, etc. and feature rich Chinese phones have been available to Australians for quite some time through eBay at similar prices, the likelihood of such an effort succeeding was at best 50/50.

The company's reason for pulling the product at the last minute was that future versions of Andriod would create too many compatibility issues with the phone's designed screen resolution. Something that makes sense however it does not seem like a good enough reason to stop shipping the product. Those that pre-ordered the product would have had had the product they knew they were getting and should the phone prove to be popular enough developers will create versions to accommodate the limited hardware.

As the iPhone has proven a phone manufacturer can do it alone. There is no reason why lower resolution devices should not exist given Android's goal of being an open operating system that lets phone manufacturers mold it into whatever they need it to be.

Making time by giving yourself time first

I have often read about the financial practice of paying yourself first whereby you take some money out of your pay packet and put it into your savings account before you do anything else. In trying to manage my own job, personal life, and personal projects I was not having success allocating time for all three. However what I was sure of was that doing my personal projects was a key goal that I needed to achieve to feel good about my life.

To solve this problem I decided to take the paying yourself first approach to time management. Normally I wake up around 4:30 to 6:00 am and do my normal routine which is already stretching the limit of the amount of time available before work, and when I get home I become too tired to work on my own projects. By paying myself first I woke up at 3:30 am today and managed to get a good hour's work done on my Passbook project and do some casual reading as well. When 4:30 am came around I resumed my normal routine without problems.

My goal now is to tweak my wake up time between 2 am and 3 am. I am unsure which one will allow me to stay up until a reasonable time at night. Unfortunately a lot of social activity in our current society still revolves around night time activities and it appears that morning people are a minority; at least in my age group. However, for the first day of an experiment it has turned out rather well. I am able to continue my day as normal while starting the day doing something I really enjoy.

So try waking up an hour early and doing something that you truly enjoy and see if it makes your day better. For night owls I would suggest sleeping in late, something that is probably a lot easier to achieve, although the morning after may become more rushed if you do not wake up on time. But based on my experience if you are doing something with your allocated time that you really like doing then it won't add to the mental strain nor contribute to your level of fatigue built up throughout the day.

Steve Jobs' health

It appears that everyone is writing about Steve Jobs; health and its impact on Apple. The New York Times article is probably the most informative and provides a good focus on the impact it has on the company rather than speculate on the state of Jobs himself. A key indicator of how this news is being received is the fact that the stock price of APPL went down by 10% at the announcement.

Personally I believe that the company will be fine. There are some stars from the company that will continue to shine, assuming they are allowed to, and their talents will not go to waste. While Steve was definately a big influence at Apple, his strategy for digitizing the lives of people has basically been set and proven. By continuing on that path Apple should do fine in the coming months and years.

Always being a few steps ahead

Today I had a thought, those that are good at what they do are often described as being "a few steps ahead of the rest", and realized that what if we could also do that in our own lives. Would our productivity improve? I decided to try it this morning.

Normally when I wake up I do my work out and then afterwards is a fair router procedure of showering, making breakfast, eating, reading some news sites, preparing for my ride to work, and then leaving home. This normally takes me about 45 minutes, however lately it has taken more for reasons I were not fully aware of. A probable cause is me not being mindful enough about the things I do thereby spending more time than necessary on each task.

Since the tasks are mundane I could quite easily take a shower while thinking about what I would do after I got out, such as: taking which items out of the fridge that I would need for making breakfast. When I was preparing breakfast I would think about taking supplements while the food was cooking and getting the coffee machine running. I went on like this for pretty much all of my tasks. Even when I sat down to eat I thought about the sequence of events that followed such as washing up and getting dressed for my ride.

The end result was I managed to take about 35 minutes to do all of my normal morning routine. A great improvement in time. Furthermore I did not feel very rushed going out the door although I still managed to leave with great efficiency. I also managed to take care of things I forgot really fast. The mental list in my head simply shifted down and allowed room for quickly completing the unexpected; such as writing a shopping list.

The lesson here, I believe, is that by planning ahead in an almost micro-management kind of way we can stop ourselves lingering on tasks that do not really matter and really fly through boring activities so that we have more time to do what we really want.

Living to work, or working to live?

Jonathan Fields, the author of Career Renegade, has written an article analysing just how poorly the emotional states of most workers in the U.S. are. What is most surprising are the three largest statistics he cites: 85% did not feel strongly energized by their work, 70% were not inspired by their employers, and 42% were burned out. The statistics were collected in 2005, which was not too bad a year. The economy in the U.S. was coming back after the shock of September 11, 2001, and easy credit lead to the global boom that later became the infamous bust we are currently in.

Fields attributes the poor attitudes to people's obsession with accumulating, through buying, excessive amounts of material goods that offer them a temporary high in the form of imagined belief that the new item in their life will make them happier than before, only to find out that their life have not really changed at all. The theory makes sense and Fields' recommendations of focusing on what is important in life is very similar to the suggestions made in the Thriving on Less ebook.

I believe that the main problem is excessive focus on work instead of life. If people put in more time into hobbies that they actually enjoy, that inspires them to be the best that they can be, and energizes them for all other aspects of their life they would not need to seek such things from their employer. Furthermore independence from work, or bank balance statements, being the sole source of one's feeling of accomplishment will naturally take one's anxiety away from work related issues thereby improving quality of life as well.

The buzz over Palm Pre

Having owned Palm devices since the late 90s I have always found them to be manufacturers of good simple products that did the job well. I have checked out their Palm OS development kits back in the day and found it to be quite clean. However I never got into it as Java was all the rage then and learning C was not a priority. It has been quite disappointing to see Palm lose direction over the years as it sold off its operating system division and then allowing the Treo to fade into obscurity by not keeping up with the leaps and bounds made by the iPhone.

Now Palm finally has an answer to the iPhone. The Palm Pre. It is not a very good looking device however it seems like the device is overall smaller than the iPhone with just as many features. Taking many ideas from recent developments in desktop UI enhancements the Palm Pre takes the mobile OS experience to the next level by once again giving users the ability to switch between applications as well as making sure that their API supports normal web technologies such as HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Thereby making coding for the Palm just as easy as creating a Dashboard widget in OS X.

It is good to see Palm being in the spotlight again with expectations high, contrasting to Apple's uninspiring MacWorld performance, one hopes that they can once again make way in the mobile devices market and push all other vendors to give their users more to work with and make the mobile experience more pleasant.

Oprah offering Suze Orman's ebook for free for a limited time

Download Suze Orman's 2009 Action Plan until January 15 for free on Oprah's website. I have downloaded the book already and look forward to seeing what is on it. I saw a bit of her recent segment on Oprah on telling people just what they can and cannot afford. A key point in that program was her insistence that people should have higher standards when determining affordability especially when it comes to home loans and to be aware of the maintenance costs associated with home ownership. I look forward to seeing what she has to say in her book and posting my findings.

Gmail and Blogger don't mix

With my other blog, 24 Hour Apps, I tried to write a post and submit it to Blogger using Gmail. The unfortunate thing was Blogger did not receive the email. The other unfortunately thing was Gmail's over zealous linking of everything resembling either an email address or a website address. Normally this is not a problem however I was writing a guide on postfix mail server configuration that had a lot of code spliced in. Also it seems that Google's HTML rendering uses a ton of DIV tags for all line breaks that made it impossible to edit. I guess this is just another reminder of the need to test everything before doing something for real.

Retro chic with the Eee Keyboard

The Eee Keyboard is a new concept/product announced by Asus, it features Apple-hardware-esc keys and a touch panel on the right hand side for use as a mouse as well as a mini-display. There are no specs right now but it is looking very much like a modernized Commodore 64 with all the pricing benefits of miniaturized computer components, cheap displays, and touch pads.

The computer is designed to be carried around the home and have its wireless HDMI connection make use of any compatible television set around your house and turn it into a temporary monitor. The idea is very good however the main selling point for me is the small size of the thing and the amount of cables it kills compared to an Eee top or other thin-client-ish Atom towers, which makes me very much look forward to seeing more technical specs as well as pricing.

On another note it appears that Asus has done it again by becoming a real innovator among the PC space. Whereas MacWorld 09 was a rather non-event Asus has managed to out-do Apple by coming out with intriguing products that are not currently in the marketplace.

The Onion presents the new MacBook Wheel

Just in time for Mac World 09, the Onion has released information on the brand new MacBook. It uses a revolutionary control mechanism that totally reduces the number of unnecessary buttons on those pesky "keyboards".

MSI takes on the mini 12

The Dell Mini 12 have been a facination for me for some time. Offering a comfortably large screen that is 3" larger than my previous HP Mini-note 2133 it appears to be the netbook to buy until one reads about its poor CPU performance and Vista only support. Price wise it was also a bit on the high side. While I paid about $800 AUD for the Mini-note to be imported from the U.S. netbooks no longer seem to worth that much given my reduced need for a laptop.

Engadget Chinese Edition is now showing preview shots of MSI's X-Slim 320 laptop that is not just bigger than the Mini 12 but also appears to bear a even greater resemblance to the MacBook Air. While the MacBook Air has always been a stunning machine I must say the white on black contrast of the X-Slim appears to look even better. Furthermore the $800 USD price (should be about $1,000 to $1,200 AUD when it gets here) makes its about half the cost of a MacBook Air; however still far to expensive for anything with only an Atom in it.

Nevertheless I am still waiting for my dream netbook with at 12"+ display, 3+ hour battery life, and a $600ish AUD price. I think I may be waiting for a long time.

Perl adopts GIT Version Control

Perl is a programming language that brings back many memories for me. It is my first scripting language and I was quite fond of it for a while. I remember when first trying it out after many years of Java schooling to be surprised and excited that everything was so easy. There was no compiling, the syntax was fast to type, text parsing was a breeze, and the camel book was the perfect introduction in showing off just what could be accomplished in a short amount of time.

Now that Perl has adopted git I am tempted once more to take a look at git and see if there is anything of value in adopting it. Currently I am a Bazaar Version Control (bzr) kind of guy and I find it's ease of use and 5 minute starter guide very user friendly and more than adequate for all my personal and work projects. Git appears to have the benefit of being the product of Linus Travolds for the use on the Linux kernel while Bzr is used more extensively on Ubuntu.

While Git and Bzr appear to have both made strides in their development I find no need at this time to switch. I guess after the paradigm shift from centralized to decentralized version control systems the minor details come down to personal taste. However if you are still stuck on Subversion or CVS you should really invest the time in learning and adopting a distributed system for new projects as the time savings will be more than made up once the system is in use.

Someone is always optimistic

Just like the doubters that seemed to be saying unlikely things an economic crash during the economic boom of 2007 there are now those that say the current economic downturn will not last so long after all. A mid-2009 bounce back is predicted with more cautious among the optimists predicting a late 2009 come back.

Personally I do believe that late 2009 is a reasonable time frame for the economic policies currently being implemented to take effect at lower levels of the economy. The problem though is how low level the money will flow. With the sub-prime bubble a lot of mortgage brokers made money and even in Australia many mortgage brokering firms popped up and appeared to last with their fleet of heavily stickered company cars and moderately well furnished offices.

 

The bursting of the credit bubble have made a lot of those brokers disappear as well as a lot of paper wealth. Governments are now trying to resuscitate their economies by inflating their economies with cash piles they hope the banks will distribute. While banks are not doing that they they eventually will as people's short memories kick in and they start lending again to the benefit of the economy.

The question I have though is not when will we recover but when we recover will governments have the hindsight to do what they have not done in the past and control inflation and the excesses of previous cycle.

Site moved

I have now migrated my blog from Site5 to Blogger hosting with custom domain. The move is very painless but I am still waiting to see whether my email forwards will be affected.

Update: The email forwards was not set up correctly. I reall should remember to update my postfix hash file. After re-generating the hash everything was great.

New years resolution success rate

The New York Times have published an article discussing how most people fail to attain their new years goals. Using Oprah as exhibit A, who is once again trying to lose weight after yo-yoing between weights many times, the article cites research that says 80% of all people will fail their new years resolution by Valentines day. The article goes on to suggest that the best way to ensure that resolutions are maintained is to focus on big goals but also make sure that the goal has small accomplish-able steps that allow you to quickly get into a positive feedback mode.

The advice in the article on how to accomplish goals is really quite similar to the programming process. When setting out on a big project the first steps I take is to start with an easy obvious feature and build on that. Whenever I decide forgo caution and implement a big or complicated piece of functionality without intermediate testing I am quickly plagued by hard to discover bugs hidden in the many lines of untested code that was just typed.

For daily life the same restrictions apply. People are not perfect and the way we implement solutions is even less so. Without setting smaller goals that lead to a big picture change we won't know how well we are doing and whether we need to revise our strategy to keep progressing towards our end goal. Conversely if we only set small goals the whole self improvement process can seem trivial and pointless as the end result becomes no real change at all.

The Google iPhone application, so cool yet so useless

Trying out the Google iPhone application was quite the disappointment today. While the much publicized voice search function worked far better than I expected the actual applications list turned out to just be a list of links to iPhone supporting Google web applications that opened in Safari instead of running on the iPhone's operating system. I would have hoped for fewer applications that was coded specifically for the iPhone that are of similar quality to their Symbian S60 Gmail application. Therefore, in all likelihood the Google Mobile application will get unintsalled soon.

The 2009 new year has begun

Yes, the new year is here. 2009 is meant to be full of unemployment, economic hardship, political milestones, and much more. I certainly look forward to it.