Can anyone out there recommend a reliable java hosting company? My requirements are as follows.

• Must support tomcat 5.5
• Must allow me to restart tomcat without putting in a ticket
• Must have IMAP email
• Need enough diskspace that I don't have to delete email constantly
• Must allow mysql access

My requirements are pretty simple I think. Did I miss anything?

First off Steve, I highly doubt this was a decision made recently. My guess is that this twist was in the playbook a while back, probably pre iPhone release.

With that being said, this is brilliant marketing. By lowering the price by 1/3 or $200(really $100 since my argument is that the overcharged on purpose knowing this was coming), Apple expands the target base of potential iPhone owners. The $100 Apple Credit to early adopters takes those that were already enamored by Apple and it's products to a new level. I know several folks with an iPhone and I haven't heard a single one of them complain about the price after they purchased it. By giving these fanatical people a free $100 credit(in their mind), they will likely be sold on Apple and their products for a lot more than just the iPhone. Think of all the people that are PC users that bought iPhone at $599. The Mac Mini price point of $599 might be a good option for those in the market for a new computer with a $100 credit. Assume that this occurs and some small percentage of people buy a Mac Mini and eventually join the cult. This is the gift that keeps on giving.

Now, what was the risk in pulling this off? The only thing I see is less iPhone sales during the launch due to the inflated price. Since Apple has a cult like following, this risk is lower than it would be for the average company. In other words, some people will buy Apple products because of their brand loyalty without regard to price or competitive pricing logic. The functional quality and head turning beauty of the iPhone was bound seal the deal for another large chunk of the risk factor audience. Finally, if all else failed, Apple certainly had the media hype going and could have triggered this price reduction early on to salvage any hit that they took.

Since I'm not a marketing guy, tell me where I'm wrong...

Here is the link to the document that inspired this late night post.
An open letter to iPhone owners from Steve Jobs

The first couple weeks that I had my iPhone, I was using POP3 to retrieve my mail from google. I have my domain setup through Google's hosted service. To make a long story short, this didn't work so well. If you want the details just google and you will find plenty of gripes about gmail and the iphone. The bottom line is that if you have more than one place that you read mail, you need a better solution than POP3.

This is where I embarked on my journey to find a free IMAP provider. With IMAP, I would be able to read my mail on the iphone and when I got home, my Macbook pro would show it marked as read. I basically had two views into the same email system. After doing some searches, I found out that AOL offered free IMAP email accounts. Since AOL is a pretty substantial name, I assumed the service would be decent so I decided to go this route. My setup was as follows. Inside of gmail, I setup the forwarding to forward all mail to this AOL IMAP account. I also set gmail up to archive the mails once they were forwarded. On my iphone, I added the new IMAP provider using the "Other" option when setting up email. The special thing that I did was input the gmail smtp server instead of the IMAP server. Why? Well because I don't want people knowing that I'm using AOL for email. I want them to see all mail come from my domain so I don't end up with more email addresses to maintain. Let me just say this has worked very well. I'm able to deal with each mail once and I didn't have to complicate my friends lives by offering them yet another email address. I have lived with this setup for the last 2 weeks or so.

This weekend I added another tweak. One of the issues I was running into was that all my mailing list mail was showing up on my iPhone. Not exactly the place I wanted it. I prefer to read mailing list email online through a browser. I generally use it for searching anyway. Very seldom to I read every message. I usually browse it like you would browse merchandise at the local mall when you have no intent to buy anything. I came up with a solution to solve this as well without upsetting the current infrastructure(IMAP AOL incoming, SMTP Google outgoing). Instead of doing the global forward inside gmail, I do the following. I turn off global forwarding. I enable all of my filters that tag each mailing list email. I think add a final filter that looks for where the subject of the email does not have the mailing list subject tokens and isn't from mailing list address and forwards this on to the AOL account. One other thing I have gmail do is skip the inbox and archive these messages right away. I also have it tag these messages with a tag called imap so I know they made it over. This means the only thing I have in my inbox is mailing list emails. Everything else that makes it through to the iphone is either good mail or a spam message here and there. Now I have the best of all worlds. I have mailing list email in my browser inbox, personal email goes to both my iPhone and laptop, and best of all I don't have to read and delete mail more than once since I'm using IMAP.

If you have a better way to handle mail, I'm all ears. Obviously, if Google opened up IMAP to the public all this noise would be a non-issue. This would be my preference. Either that or pay for my mail to be hosted. If I run into any further wrinkles, this may be my next option. As for right now, everything is working very well.

NOTE: One odd thing that is happing on my iPhone is that I sometimes see the same message twice. Like it lives in IMAP twice. When I look at AOL's email through the browser or through Apple Mail on my Macbook pro, I only see it once. I'm wondering if this is a product of having a weak connection where the mail downloads but doesn't notify the IMAP server that it actually got the mail. This was happening before this weekend so it has nothing to do with the new filters. Since it's specific to the iPhone only and very easy to fix, I'm not too worried about this. Nevertheless, if someone out there knows why this is happening, please comment.

Way way back in the year of 2006 when Apple released the news that they were working on the iPhone, I didn't really blink an eye. My wife, on the other hand, was immediately interested. First let me say that she is not the typical business user. My wife manages a restaurant that we own. Needless to say, she appreciates technology but isn't driven by it like I am. The consumer oriented features of the iPhone were right up her alley. She loved the email and iPhoto integration. The ability to sync her small collection of mp3's was great since she doesn't have an iPod. And last but not least, browsing the web with a real internet experience would be perfect for slow moments at the restaurant. After reading the ads and talking to her about the iPhone, I was a skeptic. Basically, I was convinced that it would be mostly hype. I have always been skeptical of PDA type phones since there focus was usually not on the phone features but instead on features like stylus integration and voice recording. My desire has always been to have a device that was a phone first and a pda second. In the likes of being simple, input functions were always optional to me. I would have been happy with a pda phone that did phone functions well along with read only display of pda data (calendar, email, office docs, etc.

Back in December 2006, I became a BlackBerry Pearl user after a friend of mine from work gave me a demo of his new toy. I was immediately blown away by the close attention to detail that the BlackBerry had. To date, it was the best looking cell phone that I'd come across and had a very intuitive and simple interface. Being a longtime Apple user, the Blackberry's close attention to detail was immediately obvious and intrigued me. Within a week or so, I joined him and purchased the Pearl at full retail price. That's right, I wasn't even up for contract renewal. I think the grand total was $300 out of pocket. I never blinked an eye at the amount since I had very good intentions of productivity gains. The pearl's productivity functions were worth every penny. Specifically, push email and the plethora of 3rd party apps allowed me to make use of this device virtually anywhere. I was able to email, read rss feeds(newsgator), and get sports scores. You know, all the important data retrieval categories.

Now let's fast forward to the release of the iPhone. The Sunday after the device was released, my son and I were at the mall walking around aimlessly killing time. We sometimes head there when its raining or we have nothing to do. He is two so he has lots of energy and likes to truck around the mall on idle sundays. Anyway, we made the infamous, and usually expensive, trip into the Apple Store. After looking at the monumental device, I decided to ask if they had any in stock. The sales person said they did indeed have one and actually had many more than that. In an effort to be a good husband, I decided to contemplate buying one for her. A few moments later a caffeinated idea charged through my brain and my impulse to buy was satisfied. I chose the 8 GB model since it was only $100 more. I mean, if you are okay with spending $500 for a phone, why not $600 to double the capacity :)

I'll just say that she was pretty happy when I gave it to her. I was happy too since I would be able to play with it a bit too. Once she opened it and I played with it for a few minutes, I was very interested. Interested enough that I played with it every night after work for a week or more. She had to pry it out of my hands on a couple occasions just to make a call. My obsessive nature inspired her to pick up a second one for me. Her motivating factor was to facilitate her gaining control of her own phone. I was very grateful and switched over to the iPhone almost immediately. After using the device full time for a couple days, I was totally sold on the technology. I began to trust the typing suggestions and learned many ways to use the device and get the most of out it. The biggest perk was the ability to have a real web browser in hand. Other honorable mentions include, google maps, youtube, and the ability to sync iLife apps without buying a third party app. See Missing Sync for BlackBerry Released for details.

Since then, I have been using the iPhone for a month or so. Overall, I'm pretty impressed by the device. It is very similar to my Blackberry Pearl with respect to its close attention to detail. In my mind, the BlackBerry is the I Ching of messaging devices over the last 5 years. In my opinion, the iPhone doesn't displace the BlackBerry as the prototypical business users messaging tool of choice. The BlackBerry models are all very durable and suited for hard core business use. They have services that go through your companies intranet and allow you to get internal MS Exchange email remotely. Calendar syncing and meeting notices can all be managed remotely. At this time, the iPhone doesn't allow some of these features without accommodations from your companies IT staff. There are ways to do some of it but in order to have a seamless experience, you will need IT support.

Low and behold, my patient wife(she has to be since her husband is anything but patient) decided to remedy her situation by purchasing me matching 8GB iPhone. Since then, I have been quick to pull it out at lunch, play with it over dinner, and even during golf outings. I absolutely love this device. It's amazing to see the number of times that I really use the web browsing. I always avoided this with the BlackBerry Pearl. Even though the pearl was a step ahead of ordinary cell phones, it doesn't even compare to Apple's offering. I'm flabbergasted at how much I like the iPhone. I do everything on it from setting up tasks on Remember The Milk, reading RSS feeds using newsgator, and last but not least buying concert tickets from ticketmaster in the car driving to chicago. No other cell phone that I know of provides all the features that the iPhone does with the beauty of the Apple experience. With that being said, there is room for improvement. Specifically, listed below is my wish list.

1. Faster Network, EDGE doesn't cut it unless you are doing RSS. Remember I said I'm impatient
2. Copy/Paste
3. Multimedia Messaging. If you send me a picture message, I get a text message that directs me to download the image from a website where I have to enter two cryptic strings to find my picture. Since bullet 2 doesn't exist, this is something I'll never do since it would require me writing down the info or flipping back and forth between safari and the SMS app. Instead, I'll ignore the pic message.
4. Ability to use the landscape keyboard in all apps, not just safari
5. iChat
6. Greater Capacity so I can chuck my iPod
7. Normal headphone jack so I don't need an adapter
8. More Mail features(filters, rules, SMIME, faster rendering, etc)
9. ToDo Application to fulfill my GTD interest
10. User defined gestures
11. Ability to access file system to store files
12. Ability to sync notes

For the past week and half, I have been interviewing for a Senior Programmer/Analyst contract position at work.  Out of 35 or so resumes, only 5 were from local candidates in St. Louis.  The rest were submitting by consulting companies based on online test scores.  Hmm, I wonder if cheating is possible in this paradigm...  Let's just say that the answer to this question is a resounding YES!    The fun begins with my first "phone interview".  According to his account manager, this particular candidate did very well on his tech screen so he should be a good fit for my group.  We set up a 3 way call and once connected I proceeded to ask questions and inquire about his past experience.  Every single question I asked him, he repeated the question out loud and then paused for 10 seconds or so.  After the pause, he began to spew back the answer in a very incoherent way and only with about 20% accuracy.  My guess is that he either had someone next to him attempting to provide the answers or he was using google.  Either way, could this really work?  How long would it take for your potential peers to find out that the only thing you know about java is drinking it.   Anyone else have similar experiences?

Of the few senior level candidates I was able to interview in person, only two have been able to explain how .equals and hashcode work with respect to the collections api.  Maybe I should have listed Effective Java as a prerequisite for the interview.  When asked how a collection deems an item a duplicated, I've received answers stating that those details are not exposed without going through source code and also that only hashmaps are capable of dealing with duplicates since they have a key.  The latter answer was the best because I quickly responded with, "How do you know if the key is a duplicate of one that already exists".  I got a blank stare and the candidate immediately changed the subject and asked out the culture.  I find this one question a good litmus test for determining if someone might be a good java programmer or not.   What are your go to questions when facing a potential candidate to hire?  Am I being too hard?  Is expecting the person to back up the details stated on the resume considered harsh? 

Another humorous exchange that I had was about web frameworks.  I told the candidate that they would be leading a project with a couple junior programmers and that they needed to pick a web framework.  I told them there was no right or wrong answer but I wanted to know which frameworks they would consider and why.  This particular candidate told me that they would pick JSF and they were pretty firm about it.  I didn't remember seeing JSF on their resume so I quickly glanced over it again and sure enough, it wasn't there.  I dug a bit further and asked why and the candidate told me that it was the web framework that listed most frequently on dice.com so it must be good.  I then allowed the candidate to verify that they had no experience with it and also didn't have any friends or colleagues using it.  I summarized with a statement similar to, "So you would pick a web framework that you don't know and also don't know anyone using it because of it's popularity on dice.com".  After that the candidate got pretty quiet and the interview shortly ended. 

Needless to say, the req has still not been filled and it appears that it might be open for a while.  The only thing worse than being short  handed is having people that need babysitting and slowing down already productive staff members. 

For those of you looking, Joel has a good read on resumes and the interviewing process.

A month or so ago, I got the keen idea that I wanted to replace a 19" boat anchor of a monitor with something flat panel to gain some desk space.  This altruistic goal was accomplished after a 20" Samsung wide screen display showed up on my doorstep for less than $200.  I was happy since I reclaimed a nice big corner of my desk.  Even though I accomplished my original goal, the printer sitting on the end of the desk irked me too.  Unlike the monitor, I'm not able to replace my printer with a smaller model.  At least not one that would be significantly smaller.  The best I could do was find a better location where it wasn't taking up a square foot of desktop space.  My decision was to put it in the desk where two linux boxes resided.  One of the linux boxes runs this site, a personal wiki, and cvs repository.  The other sits mostly idle as a large backup file server.  In order to maintain my current setup, I would need a new smaller computer to do these lightweight tasks.  Mac Mini to the rescue!  I picked up a refurbished Mac Mini from Apple for less than $500.  It's a duo core 1.5ghz which is probably 8 times faster than the linux box it replaced.  The good news is that it is also 10 times smaller and looks fantastic sitting out in the open.  In addition to relocating the printer in the tower compartment, I also moved the spare paper, DSL modem,  and various other office items.  My desk looks fantastic now.  Don't quit reading yet, there is a point to this entry and it has nothing to do with the neatness of my desk. 

Instead of installing CVS on the new Mac Mini, I decided that I would migrate to subversion.  This was not as easy of a task as I thought it would be.  As I sought to find a decent tutorial online, I came up short time and time again.  I never did end up finding anything that I could follow step by step and get to where I had a subversion repository front ended by Apache, using Apache authentication running on OS X.  Instead I used bits and pieces of  content from a half dozen sites to get everything to work.  For those of you that are in search of something similar or have run into this same brick wall, the following tutorial is for you.  I did my best to document every step along the way.  If you run into something that is ambiguous or needs updating, please let me know.  I intend to keep this up to date. 

HOWTO: Installing Subversion(1.4.3) and Apache(2.0.59) on OS X(10.4.9)