Addendum to OSX apps I use

Adium: Tabbed chatting, custom backgrounds, what's not to love? Oooohhh that's right, ichat still holds the edge in tele/video conferencing, as well as screen sharing. For straight up text chatting however, Adium is the bees knees.

Parallels: It's a toss up between Parellels and VMWare, both are good. I can run my bootcamp partition as a virtual machine from within OSX, which is nifty, and Coherence mode tries to make it appear that the Windows apps are running natively in OSX.

Google Notifier: I use gmail and google calendar to organize my life. I figure iCal and Mail.app have gotta be slick, but I can't think of a reason to force myself to use either. iCal+Mail has a smart text functionality, where it can parse your emails for contact info, dates, etc., and makes those actionable items. However, I can send an sms to my gmail account, and I can sms a new entry to my google calendar, which is extremely nifty. Perhaps with Apple's new mobileme service they might be comparable to Google Apps, but seeing as Google Apps is free..... I dunno. Google Apps still wins with me.

NTFS-3G: I WOULD be using this every day if I could get it to work properly. I'm not a *nix noob, I'm perfectly fine with manually mounting and unmounting volumes, but I think having my NTFS formatted drive mounted while I installed ntfs-3g is causing me to have problems. So it's either reinstall ntfs-3g, or reformat my external drive.

I heart my mac

I always made fun of maczealots, poked at the linux people, and stuck my nose in the air at people who only knew windows. However, I now have to eat all the words I ever said against apple fanboys. If it wasn't for games, I'd never leave OSX. Not only is OSX all shiny and slick, but all the things I thought were just eye candy actually end up increasing my productivity. Coverflow for folder browsing, Expose as an app switcher, tagged files searchable through Spotlight, Multitouch for touchpad interaction, not to mention a fantastic screen and great keyboard. Here's a quick list of the apps that I have come to use on a near daily basis.

MS Office 2008 - yes yes yes, I know. As a converted macdude, I'm supposed to hate everything made by M$ (or whatever the cool kids call em nowadays). Word and Excel still can't be beat. And I still hold Visual Studio for .NET as a shining example of what a modern IDE should be.
iWork - I haven't found a need for Keynote yet, but I do use Pages on occasion. Pages isn't as full featured as Word is, but it is much much easier to write a pretty document in Pages. Case in point: I made my newest resume using Pages, and exported it into a *.doc.
Eclipse - Not as good as Visual Studio, but getting closer.
Terminal - OSX's terminal does all the good things that terminal apps other *nix os's do, tabbed sessions, etc. Not to mention all my familiar *nix commands which I can run. Indeed, I manage all the application servers at the office from Terminal.
Safari - not as good as firefox, but I need my Multitouch, which only works on Cocoa apps. No firefox extensions makes me a sad panda.
Omnigraffle - WOW. Just as full featured as Visio, and extremely well put together. I use Omnigraffle for mind mapping, especially when I have to learn new things.
Omnifocus - double WOW. I've read all about the GTD (Getting Things Done) fad, I thought it was just for people who don't know how to use post-it notes or a text editor. While I don't have to eat my words again.... I may have to nibble them.... just a little.
iTunes - Meh. I liked using Media Center in Vista better. Media Center's "album view" is just as pretty as Cover Flow, and lets me see more albums at once.
VLC - Oh yeah!
TrueCrypt - This app is a must. Seriously. The entire world should be using this.

Google Android

I figure it's about time to give some love to our Google Android team, Android Connect! We've kinda kept it under the radar for a long time, but since we've already submitted our project to google for Phase 1 of their Android coding competition, I figure it's ok to talk about it now.

Our idea was to use the GPS functionality built into Android to allow phones to sense and track proximity to each other. The analogy we used in development was an infection spreading through a population. Not the most user friendly analogy, so the one we submitted under was a smile passed from person to person =). We have a webservice which accepts updates from any device running our Android Connect application, which will then track location, and infection. One of the portions that I'm working on at the moment is building an emulator to simulate a bunch of Android Connect devices roaming around downtown Honolulu. That way when a new user joins up and gives their GPS updates, if they're in downtown Honolulu, they can see their infection spread across the simulated devices in real time.

If you want to check out our Android Connect project, you please visit this website: Android Connect

MacBook Pro - Pros and Cons

Cons:
* Cost - There is no doubt that buying high end Apple hardware has a high sticker shock. The only way I could justify it to myself is that as a computer professional with delusions of grandeur and an overinflated sense of self worth, I deserve a high end machine =P
* Weight - The MacBook Pro is a heavy laptop. But that's ok, I think of myself as physically stronger than your average geek.
* Crappy Driver support for Win XP - For such a powerful machine with dual boot capability, Apple has some Win XP graphics drivers that are far behind the times. I mean, why can't they roll Nvidia's latest drivers into their bootcamp driver package?
* OSX Quirks - Yes yes yes, OSX is pretty cool, but it does have some annoyances. Luckily all of the ones that have bothered me so far are solved with some nifty 3rd party addons. I mean really...... who at Apple decided that Apple+Tab will bring an application to the forefront, but not give focus to the last window.... really...

Pros:
* Build Quality - This laptop is the most well constructed laptop that I have sampled, and while I didn't take the time to look at any Asus or Acer laptops, the MacBook Pro clearly *feels* better constructed than a Dell XPS or Latitude, or Sony Vaio.
* Keyboard - This is the best laptop that I have typed on yet. Keyboards are like mice, every person has their preferences. For me, the keys feel solid, with just the right amount of *springiness* and response. Typing is crisp.
* Looks - There is no doubt that when considered from all angles, the MacBook Pro is better looking than all other laptops in its price range. Lately, I've been more into minimalist designs in the things I buy, and Apple's current designs tickle me.
* High End Components - 2.6ghz proc with 6mb cache, 2gb ram (soon to be 4gb), 250gb hd, 802.11n, 512mb graphics card, LED screen.
* OSX - I consider OSX to be a selling point. To me, it feels that OSX took the GUI usability of Windows XP, included functionality from the *nix world (like multiple desktops), and added a heaping spoonful of eye candy. So far, it's seemed well put together.
* Nifty Things - Little things that make me go "hey, that's pretty cool". Examples are the magnet power connector, the backlit keyboard, the autodimming screen, the good keyboard, etc.
* Multitouch - I so thought that multitouch was just a gimmick. When I added a 3rd party addon called Multiclutch, it put multitouch firmly in the category of a must have. I know that Firefox has addons that do gestures, but you still need to click and drag. Multitouch is faster. Now only if firefox can have the appropriate Cocoa "hooks" so that I can have my multitouch AND firefox extensions, I will be in web browsing nirvana. Seriously, I only use safari because I can extend the multitouch functionality with the multiclutch addon.

Laptops only

My personal computing life has taken a change recently. I have moved from a homebuilt desktop only kinda guy, to a laptop-everywhere-I-go kinda guy. It all started when my graphics card died on my desktop, and I realized that in order to fix my pc I would need to rebuild it from scratch as my components were 2-3 generations old. So I figure I'll try a laptop. I originally bought a Gateway MT3422 from Best Buy, and I firmly believe that as of today, it is the most laptop that you can buy for the money.


Then came a lan party. I haven't been to one of those things in years, and indeed it had been about 2 years since I had played a pc game. Holy crap I forgot how much fun gaming is! So since my trusty gateway had only integrated graphics, I decided I needed an even better newer laptop. I began looking around at the flagship laptops from Apple, Dell, Lenovo and Sony. Do you know what the interesting thing is? When you spec out a Sony, Dell, or Lenovo to equivalent specs of a MacBook pro, they end up being about the same price! With that in mind, and the fact that you can use bootcamp to dual boot WinXP/Vista with OSX, I figure... why not. So I splurged and bought the high end 15" MacBook Pro. 



I've had my MacBook pro for about a week now, and I can honestly say that it is tied with my first homebuilt pc as the finest piece of computing hardware that I have ever owned. It is totally worth the money that you pay.

Learning Struts

I've decided that I need to broaden my skillset, so I've decided to try and learn struts. I've always preferred back-end applications development, so web applications have never held an interest to me, but seeing trends in programming has led me to suck it up and try it out.

The different frameworks that I've looked at were Ruby on Rails, PHP, and JSP. I decided on JSP/struts, since it seems to have built some momentum among my peers from UHM (I read your blogs once in awhile, even if ya'll don't remember me), and I figure if it's good enough for them, I should at least give it a shot.

So far, this is what I've accomplished:
* Installed jre and jdk se on my ubuntu server dev box
* Installed ant and tomcat
* Got a sample webapp from tomcat.apache.org running (Hello World!)

My next steps are to write my own simple webapps as a stepping stone to my overall goal, which is still a secret!

The last time I wrote a webapp was waaaay back in the .NET 1.0 days. Web technology has progressed since then, I have a lot of catching up to do.

Management Archetypes

Over the course of my young career as a programmer in the dynamic field of healthcare IT, I've been exposed to many, many managers and executives, both those that have managed myself, and those that have managed my colleagues and friends. Lately, I've been trying to think of ways to classify my experiences into a few brief stereotypes.

The Shogun: This stereotype leads from behind the scenes, as if playing a game of chess. This is good in that running a moderate to large organization is a nightmare of taskings to keep track of, contracts to manage, fires to put out, and work to chase, so secluding yourself in a castle and letting your sargeants handle the day to day issues allows you time to be a forward thinker. However, this is bad in that your soldiers are not loyal to you, since they never see the shogun. Instead, they are loyal to the sargeants who have lead them through the trenches. Paying your soldiers well helps, but ultimately human beings are social animals, and by removing yourself from the social circle, you are removing yourself from one of the most effective ways to command loyalty.

Alexander the Great: This stereotype leads from the front lines, and is often times the first into battle. Alexander the Great fought where his soldiers fought, slept in the dirt, and ate what his soldiers ate. His soldiers followed him to the end of the known world, and together they created one of the greatest empires in human history. This is good in that your soldiers love you, and will stick with you in thick and thin, through good pay and bad, crap work and good work. Being an Alexander the Great is bad in that you are just one person, and there are only 24 hours in a day. By spending so much time in the trenches, there is a tendency to neglect the day to day running of your organization, and often your next in commands have to pick up the pieces left in your wake. So while your soldiers love you, your generals may resent you for shunting so much work onto their shoulders.

These are my thoughts so far. And if any of my current or former managers happens to read this, my comments are not about any one person in particular. Rather, this is a combination of all the managers I have known in my life, and indeed I included what I think I would be like as a manager. For the record, I think I would be more of an Alexander the Great (obviously you can tell that my comments above are biased towards Alexander =P).