Ever since I got my Treo 650. i've been absolutely (unhealthily) attached to the darn thing. Meetings aren't entirely boring anymore...just pull out the Palm and plan some meetings or handle some email. Heck. even send a text message to the presenter while he's talking (it's been done many times!). I can check my email anytime. anywhere...and that's something of a comfort to me when i'm "unplugged" all day long.

But something was missing.

Sure. I could always sync back up with my desktop and that was great and all. But it became more and more of a problem to share what I was up to with the "key players". Simply put. all I ever wanted from my Treo was to be able to sync it with Google Calendar.

Now I can. and all is (for now) well with the world. I'll post updates as I start to use it more...but for now. i'm really excited!

It does reverse engineering too. I installed it this morning just to check it out and will have to work with it some more before I really lose it. but for now i'm totally impressed.

Open source DB modeling (and editing) tool:

http://www.fabforce.net/dbdesigner4/

I've only tried it with MySQL so far. but itlooks like it supports just about anything we'd use!

I think we can all say that we've scraped crapware. adware. and spyware off computers (none of which are owned by us) too many times to count.

I saw this blog post today. Kinda took me back...

The last time I had to fix my mom's computer. I made them agree to never put any of that "music theft" software on the computer again. If they did. I immediately earned my lifetime "you don't have to fix this computer again" card. It's been very effective!

Aside from that. I did make a few sofware changes to the computer to keep it stable:

• Firefox! I removed the IE icon from the desktop and start menu
• Windows Update. Auto download and install
• Antivirus. I paid for this one and set it to autoupdate and scan as well

So combine the sofware changes and social changes and the box has been rock solid for a year now. Point taken!

Thanks to Sean Corfield. i've got a working OS X development machine! JRun 4. CF7. and MySQL are all up and happily running. I put Eclipse on there a few weeks ago too. Sean. your instructions were perfect! Not a single problem. Last time I tried I did not succeed. but that was because the machine really needed an OS upgrade to function properly.

Now to move one of my apps off my ThinkPad and onto that machine and see how well things work. Clearly i'll have to get Apache configured as well. but at least for now we're one step closer to having a backup development box.

Also coming this week: 1) Summer programming intern! 2) New Dell workstation/server! 3) Completion of one of our 6 July projects!

And a lovely day it is outside too.

Reasons why I love my Treo (part 15):

I took a picture of my mom with her diploma and instantly emailed it to my brothers so they could experience at least a small part of the graduation ceremony.

It was nice to be able to keep up on my email during the slower parts of the ceremony. I was a bit like a little kid. busily playing with a little gadget while the speakers did their thing.

The Treo isn't feeling so good right now...it got knocked out of my hands twice this weekend. Now it reboots every time I try to send an email. Not good...

On another note. I shot a lot of pictures with my regular film camera too. Uploaded all of those on Friday afternoon to Flickr and shared them with the world. (note to family: http://www.flickr.com/photos/34612171@N00/ )

Does anyone remember the days when you had to wait 3 days just to get prints done? Now I can get a photo CD and double prints in an hour. upload to Flickr in 10 minutes. and involve people in just about everything going on around me in seconds. Once the cellular network scales up to decent bandwidth. we should be able to send realtime video (Flash Communication Server?) out at all times.

I love technology!

I started today by recording my presentation for CFUNITED. It took a little over an hour to complete a 49 minute recording. mostly due to a couple false starts.

To do the recording I used an open source piece of software called Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net). Coupled with Lame. I was able to crunch a 256MB WAV file into a 46MB MP3 with absolutely no trouble. Last time I tried to make an MP3 it was a pain in the rear!

The recording is available here. The corresponding PPT is there too. but there is no recording of the live parts (the admin and code overviews) that I did. You have to come to my session for that!

BTW. the next discount for CFUNITED expires on Saturday so get yourself signed up ASAP!

Looks like another blogger is doing an 18 part series on "Six Blind Men and the Offshoring Elephant"

Parts 1 and 2 are up now...i'd add the RSS feed to your feed reader of choice and keep an eye on it!

http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/bi/entrepreneur/archives/003957.asp http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/bi/entrepreneur/archives/003980.asp

The writing is more substantial than most blog posts (mine especially included) but I think there's a lot of value here.

I'm sure we've all had to deal with bad programmers before. Fact of life in any business. really...there are those who suck and those who rule and a whole bunch in between. Whether those in between know the difference is still up for debate.

I had to do a small integration project last week that didn't go too well. When you're dealing with Foxpro. pretty much anything is possible. Or. in this case. absolutely nothing.

I established an ODBC connection just fine through Windows to this remote database (different server. same network). Went into ColdFusion and set up the ODBC socket connection to that DB connection. All good. until I went to write a record. Or read a record. Or even look at the damn table. No dice. CF complains it can't find the database table.

My best guess was that there exists some sort of permission problem between the servers - probably the account that one process runs under blah blah blah. After a few hours of trying to figure it out (ending at 2AM) I gave up and did a "workaround" the details of which I will not be sharing with you today. Or ever ;-)

Anyway. the point of this story:

Designer of said Foxpro database has been adding fields every now and then. His latest addition. made mere hours after my job was done. was created as a NON NULLABLE FIELD. I mean. seriously. you fool! Of COURSE this breaks two other programs! He didn't test. didn't inform. didn't do anything to validate that this was a good idea. Where did he get his direction? From a non-technical General Manager! And then left the "testing" to this same General Manager! Couldn't believe it.

I bet the company lost some business over the weekend due to this. Weekends are a high-traffic period for their website.

But they have no way of knowing for sure. The ASP code that inserts into this table isn't wrapped in error-checking of any type. Zip. Zero. None.

How did I know he made a change? My code. interfacing with this table for a different purpose. contained a simple error check - if anything failed on the sql execution. I got an email. Simple. 3 lines. no big deal. That's ALL IT TAKES. And yes. mind you. this was in "classic" ASP. a language I know very little about (other than it sucks) and using code samples that weren't commented at all.

This is what happens when you take a dinosaur. let him write code in a language that is not the standard on your server (everything else is in CF). use a database platform that makes it very difficult to interface with (ok. so it's only SLIGHTLY worse than Access). and then have no overarching guidelines for informing the other programmers of your changes.

Change management. project management. consistent standards and some minimum level of software development best practice experience would have been helpful. God help this guy if his server goes belly up! I can't imagine the recovery effort being pleasant at all.

To summarize before I begin: home audio is constantly evolving and at a rather rapid clip. While once it may have seemed odd to hook up a computer to your home stereo. among my friends at least it's expected. Why isn't car audio nearly as cool?

I had a long talk with one of my oldest friends (literally...happy 30th. Mark!) tonight and got to talking about portable audio. what the iPod got "right" and nobody else did. and ultimately into "why can't I do this with my car."

I want to be able to pull my car into my garage at night and have the onboard audio system sync with my home media server. I want my car stereo to work as simply as my iPod and be as intelligent as one too. Car stereo makers are still full of themselves over being able to read CD-TEXT info off a CD. That's practically ancient!

C'mon. guys. let's join the digital revolution already! Start putting onboard storage (or at least SD/CF card readers) in the car and read those MP3/WMA/AAC files for not only the music. but the ID3 info as well. Let me listen to my digital music without ripping to CD format first.

I can get a whole lot more music in the car when it's not stored on a silver platter. cripes. I have a 1GB Lexar flash drive on my keychain - you can read off that too!

Is it too much to ask to get your car stereo to be a bit more useful?

stay tuned for the second part of this rant - how General Motors crippled what could have been an awesome entertainment system in my Saab 9-3. Just think of what could have been possible with the fiber optic bus if the software in the "brains" of the unit were done properly and the "supporting staff" of one more box to do the SD/CF/Flash interface existed. *sigh* Halfway there...too bad ColdFusion can't come to the rescue for this one :-)

I bought myself a new toy for work (yeah right) - a Treo 650.

So far. it's awesome :-) Thing is. I said that when i got the HP iPaq 2215 a couple years ago. That device became essentially useless when I got the iPod 'cause I really didn't want to carry more than 2 devices on me when i travel. Unfortunately. i'm tethered to my cell phone. So now i've replaced the iPaq and cell phone with a Treo. Boo yah!

I'm working on a project that is targeted for deployment on the smallscreen. Of course. I can't share it with anybody just yet. So if anyone asks. I got the Treo for testing purposes. Yeah. that's right...testing purposes....

:-)