Number two and the language you speak

This story involves a washroom. If that doesn’t suit your fancy, hit the back button. I don’t mind.

Android Perspective from the iOS Camp

So I had the opportunity to try out a Samsung Galaxy S Vibrant on Bell Mobility. Try before you buy is almost unheard of in the electronics world (mostly for the amateur blogger). So I thought I would do the world, and myself, a favour and flesh out the pros and cons of Android vs. iOS from a long-time iOS user’s perspective.

Keep in mind that I don’t have complete knowledge of everything on this phone. These are observations I’ve had over one week. I’m also being as open minded as possible. So all you Apple haters/Android fanboys who want to attack me personally, your comments will be deleted. Same with the Apple fanboys/Android haters. If you want to correct me on something, I’m more than willing to say I’m wrong. Just don’t be an ass about it.

Now that that unpleasantness is out of the way, on to the Pros.

First and foremost the android software is completely customizable. At first glance, I thought that there were 3 ringtone settings. One for voice calls, one for video calls and one for notifications. Notifications being SMS, MMS, Email, and any other app that serves notifications (like Twitter, Facebook, IM, etc.). Truth is, almost every app that I used has a ringtone option within it that will override the global notification ringtone. Very nice.

The idea of wallpaper is taken to a whole new level. With still images, it will move you along the image slower than your multiple home screens to give it a Super Nintendo-style Foreground/Background 3d-ish effect. With motion backgrounds, many of them will change perspective on the background, which I can only assume uses some sort of 3d rendering hardware. Uber cool.

The apps may not be as plentiful, but there is a bigger variety of functionality because of the lack of it needing to be in an app store. If Google doesn’t want it in the Android store, throw it on your website. You can download apps from anywhere. Some people think Apple’s app store protects you from malware, and that’s probably true; however, if you don’t care about your phone or if it’s not critical to your personal life/business (or it’s a second phone), just reinstall the OS and you’re set.

I’m unsure as to whether this is a universal Android feature, but the Vibrant has a wireless access point built in. Which means you save on not having to buy a MiFi to use your laptop, not having to have extra cables on the go, or complicated software installed on your laptop (which may or may not work with you laptop’s OS). And no extra data plan for something like an iPad.

Program management is pretty cool, too. Uninstalling may take a little longer, but it is done from one place (a la Windows Control Panel -> Programs). Have too many apps open? Just want to start fresh? Hit the “End All” button and all the apps are killed.

Gmail integration is built in (well duh, Google, hello!) with a separate app. This is good for me because my personal mail is Gmail based and my work email is Exchange based. They’re in separate apps. Which means separate notification sounds. So I put Worf saying “Captain, incoming message” on my personal accounts, and the Murloc Aggro from World of Warcraft as my work account. I’ll let you digest that for a second.

Some other miscellaneous pros:

1. See how much system resources are being used in a nice bar graph format
2. Access to the file system, without “rooting” or “jailbreaking”
3. Notifications are always visible in the header bar, not just when you are on the right home screen
4. Charges when powered off (or at least doesn’t power on the phone when you plug it in) – but this could be model specific.

There are some features that I find are the same.

1. It has decent Exchange integration, which is a feature that should be included if it were to ever be considered a business phone. Blackberry got it right first, eventually the iPhone got it too. 
2. Syncs contacts and calendars from Gmail and Exchange (I’ll get into that a little more in a minute.
3. Android also Pushes email from Exchange 2007 and above (I believe that’s the criteria for push to work).

Now, on to the cons.

The built in keyboards are absolutely atrocious. The only auto-correction I’ve come across is double tapping space to get a period. On the standard keyboard there is no auto apostrophe or spell correction. And before you say it, I tried the “XT9″ that comes with the Vibrant, and it’s worse. It puts whole words if I’m trying to type short forms. For example: if I type im for I’m, it types in important instead. Very frustrating. It will also type whole words after hitting space. If you’ve typed that word you just typed with another word together before, it tries to finish your sentences.

There’s also a keyboard called Swype. The idea behind Swype is that you glide your finger on the keyboard to spell words and it figures out what word you’re trying to type by what path you take.  A great concept, but I find that the act of raising my fingers gives my brain enough time to figure out where the next key is.

I know there are keyboards that you can download from the Android App Store, but I think a a good keyboard should be built in to the OS, and that’s something I shouldn’t have to pay extra for.

Speaking of paying extra – and I know that this is no fault of the phone – but with an upgrade to a new phone means new accessories. New cradle for the car, new chargers, new docks. I have two docks, a phone cradle/charger for the car and a multitude of cables that I could charge my iPhone. I figure to get the level of functionality that I have with my iPhone, I’d be spending anywhere from $100 – $200 extra for the accessories. This, however, would not be an issue for someone geting a new phone (or had some extra cash to burn around upgrade time).

And some miscellaneous cons:

1. Calendar to email integration missing add to calendar options (no accept button in either the email or calendar apps)
2. System Battery indicator isn’t an accurate representation of battery level.
3. Voice control not easily accessible from universal headset (or even installed)

I tried to take this from a pure user experience rather than a political point of view. We’ve all heard the arguments from both camps. So I’ve stayed away from that.

And after all that, the three cons that tipped the scale back to iOS are:

1. Keyboard – My iPhone already knows how I type. I don’t want to have to teach a new phone how/what I type for another month
2. Exchange Calendar/Email integration – no matter how much I complained about having sent multiple acceptances from multiple devices, at least I could accept a calendar request on my iPhone. (This is one thing I have a funny feeling I missed. If there is a solution, please let me know in comments.)
3. Voice control – I’m not on the road a lot, but it seems that’s when I do the most calling out. If I can’t only press one button to make a call, dialing or calling out a name with my voice, I’m breaking the law. And I’ve already gotten a ticket recently (for something completely unrelated).

So the final verdict is: I’m sticking with the iPhone. Sorry Eric.

A Xserve Newbie Install

Ok, so I’m not a complete newbie. I’ve played around with Linux servers, WAMP, MAMP and other server technologies. But by no means do I consider myself an IT professional.

My office in the last couple months has invested in not one, but two Xserves. I was extremely excited about getting the first. We use it as a web server, and it helped me learn a lot about web server technology without having to learn all the complex command-line calls all at once.

Then, I needed to upgrade PHP, because some Open Source web apps didn’t like the version that came with Snow Leopard. Google-fu to the rescue. Here’s what I turned up in that search.

http://www.entropy.ch/software/macosx/

http://www.gen-x-design.com/archives/recompiling-php-5-3-on-snow-leopard-with-freetype-support/

http://www.afp548.com/article.php?story=20040726020639560

Recompiling PHP was an exciting and stressful experience, to say the least. The nice thing was that this was not on a production server (at the time). So I had a little bit of wiggle room, and if I had to, I could wipe the OS and start fresh (as a last resort, of course). So that server is now humming along, barely scratching 10% CPU usage, cool as an ice cube in the wickedly air-conditioned server room at my work.

And of course, having money to spend, they decided to buy another one. With the low CPU usage on the existing one, I thought I should plan another usage for the new Xserve.

The idea? Storage. We do a lot of video work at my office, and video takes up gabs of storage. But with the 6TB limit (and non-redundancy) of the Xserve, I needed a revised plan.

Enter the DroboPro. I’ve heard many good things about the consumer versions, and having the VMware seal of approval, it’s got to be good. At least as good as the hard drives attached to it.

Because we have an IT department where I work, this idea was not so well received.”That’s IT’s job.” That seemed to be the whole argument. The problem is, when we ask for high capacity storage, they gave us a virtual machine with 4TB of (tape) backed-up storage. That thing goes down, it’s down for days.

The head of the IT department met with me and advised that as long as it wasn’t for production (ie, for serving to the general public) that the DroboPro would be a good solution, and that it would last us the year. I hope he meant that the storage capacity would last us for the year, because I think that the folks at Data Robotics would almost be insulted if an IT head thought their products would die after a year.

Two Xserves are under my power. And they even talk to each other for authentication (that was an ordeal in itself). I’d love to hear from you. Leave me a comment!

Internet Explorer as the Psycho Girlfriend

This is adapted from a friend of mine, Brad Taunt. I changed just a little, to make a little bit more defined differences. Enjoy.

Internet Explorer is the scum of the internet. Now before you rant and rave about “hackers” and “trolls” let me explain why almost, well hopefully all, web designers HATE Microsoft’s devil child.

Now for all you non-tech savvy kids out there, let me use the perfect analogy to show just how much IE sucks. Let’s look at all popular web browsers as if they were girlfriends.

Mozilla Firefox, if it were a girlfriend, would be the pretty-yet-geeky, university graduate who everybody knows. She would dress nice no matter the circumstance, be polite and courteous and always try to improve herself, and help out the charitable organizations.

Safari 5.0+ would be gorgeous, very intelligent and also decently popular with the family. She would have one of the best fashion senses, would be very quick witted and could take criticism extremely well. Like that girl from Glee. If you’re into that sort of thing.

Google Chrome would most likely be the best catch of them all. Drop dead gorgeous, polite, constantly learning new things, able to teach other girlfriends how to be as perfect and dress amazing all the time. But the family would be suspicious of her, and not take to her too well.

Now we come down to it…

Internet Explorer. Dear Lord. This one would look like she fell out of the ugly tree and hit every single branch on the way down, then got spit on. She’d be dumb as a post and more stubborn than a cock-eyed donkey when it came to change and dress like a dead homeless person. But WHY is she still around? Because for some unexplainable reason, more than half the internet’s users STILL use her as if she was a free prostitute(which isn’t far from the truth). Why? Why, why, why??

I’ll tell you why; people are lazy and scared to find a different girlfriend. “I’m use to her”, “There’s no way there’s anything better”, “I’m stupid” – all of these common excuses. Well stupid people of the internet, I have news for you: There are other fish in the sea.

p.s. if anyone is reading this in Internet Explorer…I hate you.

What I Learned While Pair Programming with a Software Engineer

I’ve had the pleasure of knowing another Matt for just over a year now who is a student at UOIT, where I work. I’ve known for a while that he is a very good programmer and that he has the ego to go along with it.

It has only been recently that I’ve gotten to see his genius first hand, pair programming with him on a web app that needed to be updated (read: models and controllers completely rewritten, thankfully the views were mostly reused).

Here is a couple things I learned and/or observed during my time with him.

Object Oriented Programming is really what makes code poetry
I have learned a little bit of OOP in my long years of off-and-on programming. Visual Basic, JavaScript, ActionScript and PHP are all of the languages I’ve learned over the years. But the only reason I’ve used OOP is mostly out of necessity (with a few exceptions).

With this app (we’ll call it “Sillybizer” so as not to get my employer upset with Google getting my site instead of theirs), we didn’t have to code it OOP, but looking back it would have been complete insanity not to. Each big piece of data has it’s own object, complete with getters, setters and methods that pertain to that piece of data. It really is a true thing of beauty to behold as a programmer, knowing that you don’t have to go through either a 10,000 line function file or copy the same code over and over in different pages – you just go to the class file, and only look through a handful of methods to find the right method/function to use.

If Jesus was a programmer, he would have used MVC
MVC is just one way to write an application (be it web or otherwise), but it seems to me to be the most logical use of OOP. Having the model (or types of data to be manipulated), view (or the user interface) and controller (where the users input gets used to call manipulation methods) seems not only easier to write, but also better for future maintenance.

Singletons are a good lot
The singleton pattern in programming allows you the ability to call an objects method without having to think if you’ve instantiated your object yet. So the object’s reference is actually held by the object. The only downfall being you can only call one object at a time – but in web programming, where data persistence is virtually non-existent, this is a very helpful concept.

It’s ok to be janky, as long as it’s only a few lines of code
Sometimes, you just need to get something done.

“We really should have put that in the object,” one of us says.
“I know, but it’s only this one line of code. And it’s only in this controller, nowhere else,” says the other.
“Just do it.”

I think that was uttered in one way or another at least 3 times in those six weeks. Sometimes, you just need to get it done. It usually consisted of some weird logic that we needed to comment the crap out of. Wait… I think we forgot to comment that…