Cloud Computing, Life

What if there was a job where at least one time a week, and most weeks, many times, you had to do some activity where you would be openly judged either a "success" or "failure". And that process repeated every week of every year. Would you do that job? I'm a technical person who works with sales people. The product my company sells is complex and most sales people don't have the background or context to answer all the technical questions that come up during the sales process. So that is where people like me fill in. We have different titles: Sales Engineer Pre-Sales Engineer Systems Engineer Sales Architect Sales Analyst and others.... The most common short hand way to say "Sales Engineer" is to say "SE" or "SA". Most of my co-workers and friends that do this job say "SE". THE HARDEST DAY EVER (at work that is) As a SE I do many things. One of those things is delivering the product demo. Most of the time...

It has been a while since I've been able to look at this blog. Mostly because of the posts regarding my pets. "Stormy" my first greyhound dying, then when "Sizzle" my second greyhound died, I couldn't really look at my old posts regarding my dogs, and I couldn't bring myself to delete them. So, I stopped looking. Shortly after Sizzle passed away, my other best friend in the world "Buddy" (the Coatimundi) also passed away from old age. He was 11. I still can't watch any dog/pet related movies, TV shows, etc. In our house we still have "Nilla" (the Papillon), she is also 10+, but doing fine. Anyway, time to move forward.

Ok, I have to admit that I created the iPhone app called 'SizzleTEXT'. Use it to access internet based information using SMS short codes instead of using your browser or an app. Update Twitter, check your bank account balance, get a weather forecast, look up a stock quote, using only SMS Text messages. For example text "pizza 97208" to 466452 to find a pizza place in your zip code. Sometimes I'm in a low connectivity environment and want a simple and fast way to do some common things. That is why I created this app, to give me "options" when I'm traveling. SMS messages will often work even when you can't get a data connection to work on your mobile device. One of my friends pointed out that for newer iPhone users, they have capped data plans, so being able to use SMS instead of your data allotment might get you out of a jam every now and then. There is a very large pool of short codes you can draw from to request common information that you acces...

Out of all the gadgets at CES the one that really stood out for me was the Motorola Atrix. It is basically a full featured smartphone that can be docked into a laptop-netbook shell. When docked into the shell, the smart phone helps power a full size netbook screen and traditional netbook keyboard. In the near future, why would you need a powerful smartphone, and a separ ate laptop which has its own CPU, memory, and disk? Why can’t it be just the same device where the laptop shell acts like a UI extension to the phone? All of your data would just be on one device, no data sync needed. When docked into the laptop shell, the device would still be able to leverage wireless networks with all the same connectivity benefits of a traditional laptop. The docked smartphone would simply become the main CPU, memory, and disk for the laptop shell.That is what I see when I look at the Motorola Atrix. The same concept would also work for a tablet user experience. You would take your s...

On the heels of the recent iPhone 4 debacle, "Don't hold it like that!" (antenna-gate) we have another PR problem in the works for T-Mobile with the release of the much anticipated G2. It appears there is much confusion between customers and T-Mobile support regarding the specs of the handset that was sent to pre-order customers. The official launch date was supposed to be this week, but existing customers were allowed to pre-order the handset, and those actually were delivered on Friday 10/1/10. Even this seems to be a point of confusion since new owners have been calling into T-Mobile customer support, and some are reporting that the support folks were not expecting any handsets to be delivered until the official launch day, which hasn't happened yet. Owners who have received the handsets (including myself) are reporting two problems. First the slide out keyboard seems to have weak springs. If you horizontally hold the top part of the handset containing the LCD, bu...

Stormy passed away Tuesday morning. Over the last month he was slowly deteriorating, and we finally learned he had a form of cancer that couldn't be treated. He was still "functioning", but he was no longer eating, and he didn't have much strength left. So we decided it was best to do the right thing before he experienced a lot of pain, or could no longer stand or walk. This is one of the recent pictures I took of him with my mobile phone a few weeks ago. He was sick, but his natural easy-going self still did shine through. This is how I want to remember him. I could write a book about him and Greyhound behavior, but for now, I just want to recount two days in the time he was with us. The first day we brought Stormy home, the realization of what it meant to have a Greyhound became apparent. Stormy went from the race track, to the Greyhound shelter kennel, to our home. He had never been in a house before! He didn't even understand what it meant to walk up a small s...

This picture about sums it all up. Taken from the top of Cape Kiwanda in Pacific City, Oregon. Nothing more needs to be said.

"Stormy" (retired Greyhound) is middle aged in dog years, but I can see that he is slowing down at little. As a retired Greyhound, he still likes to run and play, but the little things are what I notice. Our main vehicle for carrying the whole family is a SUV, so he has to "jump up" to get in. That part is no problem, but jumping down to get out is several feet. He is a big Greyhound at 85+ pounds, not fat, just tall, but a couple of times recently he seems gimpy after making the jump down from our truck. I think it is too much stress on his front legs and back. Recently, I've been carrying him out of the truck instead of making him jump. He doesn't seem to mind if I put my arms around his chest and lift him out, but I'm a big guy. What I really need is like a short "ramp" that can go from the floor of the truck down to the ground. Then he would just have to hop from the top of the seat to the top of the ramp to get out. I've never seen any...

We have a retired racing Greyhound. His dog name is "Stormy", his racing name was "Village Luigi". Even though many Greyhounds are now being adopted, many people still haven't seen them up close. When I have Stormy with me, I get a lot of questions about what it is like to have a Greyhound living in your house. I will attempt to answer some of those questions. Of course there will always be exceptions depending on the individual animal, but these are my experiences. First Contact: Almost all Greyhounds that people have in their private homes came from a racing program. Racing is an industry, and the dogs literally drove it. You don't see ads in the local newspaper saying "Greyhound puppies for sale". Greyhounds are pure breed animals and the breeding process is tightly controlled . The ones that people adopt are animals that have left the active racing program. You might get a dog that raced dozens of times, or you might get a dog that only raced ...

Most of us probably have the same "mental image" of what it means to do mobile testing. We envision a person sitting at their workstation holding a mobile phone in their hands and pecking out the sequence of steps needed to exercise some function of a mobile application or service. On their desk we see a whole bunch of different handsets laid out in a row. When you finish all the test cases on one handset, you set it down, pick up the next handset and repeat. A more advanced variation of this approach is where you "rent time" to access a particular handset in a hosted service model. It is still testing using a real handset, you are just accessing it remotely. Testing with real handsets allows you to verify that what is shown on the LCD of the device "looks cosmetically correct" for each step of the test case. The downside of this approach is that you have limited access to any type of diagnostic information other than what is shown on the LCD of the real h...

All of us have probably heard of the saying "Five Nines" which means 99.999% system availability and is the mythical reliability target often quoted as a goal to achieve when running a computer system or service. There is a larger debate on what the number means, if it is only the "network" or if it should include applications, servers, etc. I'm not going down that debate path today other than to state the obvious that the "more nines" the better. Instead I would like to use the standard availability table to describe one of the hidden realities that currently exists with mobile services. So first let's start with the table: 99.999% is 5 minutes of downtime per year, and 90% is 36.5 days of downtime per year. So now the question is: Would it be acceptable for a production mobile service to only be available 90% of the time? My company has seen examples of this low level of service from even the most well known of companies. One of the most problema...

When you send "HELP" to a sms short code, you are supposed to get back a message telling you what keyword options are available to use. The "HELP" keyword should work on all short codes. The other night while watching "Dancing With The Stars", I tried to send "HELP" to the short code for one of the couples and was expecting to get some generic message back. Instead I got back this: "Thank you for your vote.....normal text charges will apply...." Wait, "HELP" was not a vote, it was a request for information. Zillions of dollars are generated by the promotions, yet it doesn't look like any of that is invested in testing the quality and features of the service. One thing interesting about the current crop of top SMS aggregators is that there isn't any information that a subscriber of their service can use to compare one aggregator to another. Which one is the fastest? Which is the most reliable? There is no benchmark to c...

Mid December I was fortunate enough to get a Seesmic invitation. After logging in, at first I didn't understand what was happening, but after watching what was going on for a while it finally clicked. Seesmic in simplest terms is a way to post video clips like a video blog. Everyone posts their clips one at a time, and they are all listed in a sequential time line. It is "Alpha" so there aren't advanced features like threaded conversations, but that will come. Right now it is one continuous time line of posts and many conversations take place in that time line, in many ways similar to Twitter. In order to sort out the chaos, as a general rule almost everyone participates in whatever is the current set of "topics". When the discussion of the current topic trickles off, the next topic pops up and everyone starts posting on the new topic. There is overlap of several discussions going on at once, and in general there are about 6 different topics that are "c...

The Apple philosophy of showing screen fonts in a way consistent with printing is opposite of the Windows way of displaying screen fonts for readability. This issue has been discussed at length in the past, but because of the recent surge in popularity of Apple laptops and desktops, I wonder if this issue will resurface as more ex-Windows users switch to the Mac and find out that the fonts might look very different to them. I am a "dual mode" user. I have a XP machine I have to use at work, and at home I have a Mac. Since I was a Windows users for a long time before I started using the Mac, my brain is "wired" to think that the Windows way of showing the fonts looks best. My XP machine is a Thinkpad X60. The Thinkpads have always had really great laptop displays that are really clear and easy to read. Because of this, I run Windows with no font smoothing. To me it looks "pixel perfect" and I can stare at the screen all day with absolutely no eye strain. W...

So apparently there are lots of users on Seesmic that just watch, but don't post. For some reason that creeps out a lot of people who think these "watchers" are doing something sinister. Here is my "video" response. For those that don't know, with Seesmic, you work it like a blog, except your posts are video clips. Imagine all the comments that form under a popular blog entry, instead of each person typing in an entry, they just record a video clip and post it. There are still conversations just like Twitter, they are just video messages. Some are really clever, some are really boring. Just like any other service, you get a mixed bag. I'll do a full overview on Seesmic sometime soon, I definitely see why it is so popular. In the social networking realm, this is about as personal as it gets. Everyone gets to see the "real you", and of course every little word you say and how you say it is what everyone else sees. Seesmic Post

Twitter Down. They have a big banner up saying "down for maintenance" with promise of some new features being put into production. This was the first time I was totally locked out of Twitter when I wanted to be on, so it made me think of what Twitter is all about, and why I like it. When you first try Twitter, it is confusing in that it isn't structured like so many other Internet destinations we visit. At first it is like listening to the thoughts of 1000's of people. It is all mixed together with no way to sort it out. Then as you figure out how to be a "follower" and also be "followed", you find that you can tap into a more personal understanding of the people that interest you. Instead of a carefully thought out statement, you get the real-moment-in-time happenings of the other participants. And those "real time" statements is what makes it fun. It is different than a traditional chat application in that your statements are added to w...

The virtual world and game interface will eventually become our default user interface to the internet. Second Life offers a way to "get away from it all" in a virtual sense, but it is interesting just how much the real world mirrors itself in second life. Second Life is no Utopia, and has its share of cultural and societal problems as well as positive opportunities. 1) Pick Pockets It was recently discovered that it is possible to steal someone's SL money which is called "Linden Dollars". Infected objects like videos that begin to play when a user is near can trigger the theft. So from the real world we have "CRIME" 2) Real Estate Speculation It is possible to buy raw "land" in second life which is just space that has not been populated with any virtual content. It is just "empty space". You can then create content and improve that space and then resell it to other players. It is a basic free market economy which makes up a big par...

Update: ====================================== After creating this original post I discovered the explanation of what is happening. Look here Apparently it is a Windows problem. The same results can be obtained with other strings like "Matrix can not lie". No conspiracy after all! ====================================== In Windows XP try this: 1) Open notepad.exe and create a new file 2) With no quotes type "bush hid the facts" (no quotes) 3) Save the file 4) Exit notepad 5) Re-Open notepad and open the file with the line from #2 above What is up with that? Regardless of your political beliefs, if this was done intentionally, it has got to be one of the most pathetic things I've ever seen in the technology world. Are we so divided as a country that individuals now resort to injecting their political beliefs into the most atomic actions they perform in their professional lives? What if I'm wearing something that is colored Red or Blue? Am I now a Crip or a Blo...

Fightdump.com specializes in video of clips of people of all types fighting. On MySpace you have endless pictures and videos of young people who are probably under age, drinking and partying. On YouTube people are engaging in all kinds of activities in order to create their "internet reputation". The internet never forgets, and those pictures of you looking like a fool will probably be around "forever". Hopefully those impressions won't impede your ability to get into college, or get that job you really want. "Internet Background Check", everyone will be doing it. The downside of these and other social sites is that in order to attract attention you have to do something unique. And for kids that might not have any real world skills built up yet, unique means "dumb". Of course these dumb actions seem great to the others listed as "friends" on your social profile. And of course, people doing these things don't realize that the pic...

I took the Small Wonder with me this last week end and took some videos. Included are the YouTube links. After watching the uploaded videos on my Mac, I have these comments: 1) The video looks best when there is some contrast. Taking a shot from a very long distance away is not where this device is strong. Up close shots from 3-10 feet, or shots where there is lots of color and light yields the best results. 2) The Zoom feature works well for up close shots, but far away shots that are zoomed seem to give up some clarity in the image. 3) It seems to do pretty well in low light, which is nice for such a low end device. One of the example clips is taken in my office where only a desktop lamp is turned on. As a pan across the room, you can see how well it adjusts for the low light condition. If you watch the video closely, you can see the device adjusting the light as I go from the dark objects on the desk to viewing my computer monitor. Like I said in my earlier post, this isn't a re...