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)

Back in January, I made a comment on my blog about Mark/Space releasing Missing Sync for Blackberry.  A week or two back, they came through and I have to say it was worth the wait.  Anyone still using PocketMac should stop what they are doing, uninstall that poor excuse for an application,  and download Mark/Space's far superior product.  It does everything pocketmac claims to do, it does more, and it does everything well.  If you are looking for a list of features, they can be found here.  While I'm a huge fan of Blackberry, this application makes a good thing even better.

Also, I'd like to thank Eric Ullman, Director of Marketing at Mark/Space, for sending me a free copy of Missing Sync for Blackberry for my participation in the beta cycle.  I was happy to help.  I'd also like to say thanks to the technical staff.  Their product exceeded my expectations. 

On Friday I had the pleasure of entering the No Spin Zone in downtown St. Louis. Bill O'Reilly was attending a function in St. Louis and 97.1 FM Talk put on a lunch at the Hilton St. Louis at the Ballpark that Bill hosted. Even though he was only on stage for 50 minutes or so, it was really exciting to hear him speak in person. Outside of a few negative comments about our left leaning newspaper, he had many good things to say about St. Louis.

Here are some photos that I took.

Bill O'Reilly

This is my call for Mark/Space to hurry up and release Missing Sync for BlackBerry. While I love my new BlackBerry Pearl, it is easy to tell why PocketMac is free. Besides crashing all the time, it also has a tendency to duplicate data and not pick up changes. I've seen many posts about people losing data so I worry every time I click that green button. On top of it not working correctly, it has two major deficiencies. First, you cannot sync documents. If you create a memo on your blackberry, it syncs to Stickies. I don't know about you but this seems like a pretty worthless feature. I've been a mac user since the System 7 days and I've never thought stickies were worth the disk space the app consumed. The other major annoyance is its lack of file transfer capability. I have a MicroSD card but the only way to move anything to it is by mounting the card as a external hard drive. Unfortunately, I see no way to copy pdf docs or other known formats and open the docs up using the phone software. Another weird thing is that the disk only has folders for pictures and audio. I'm a standard ring tone kinda guy. I think a phone should sound like, well a phone. I rarely take pictures with me so that feature isn't being utilized either. What I'd really like to do is grab the latest technical PDF with me and read it while waiting to get my hair cut or while standing in line somewhere. Hopefully the Mark/Space notebook will solve this problem for me. Right now, I'm forced to email the docs to myself and access them that way.