Calling you man

It's steadily increasing how many times it's been a PITA for Laura and I both not to have a mobile phone. It's annoying, it's harder to co-ordinate or meet up. It's really starting to tick me off. I've been lightly shopping for a new phone for Laura because if there's someone who actually needs a smart phone of the 2 of us, it's her. She usually carries a cell, pager, palm pilot (old school, not wireless, not a phone) - and she actually uses them. It's not a toy for her, it's a tool.

Me on the other hand, it would very much just be a toy. A nice, shiny toy. Do I need a smart phone? No. Do I want one? Of course. But, like most things, I just don't want to pay for one. I think that the simplest (and cheapest) thing that would solve my current frustration would be to add a text messaging plan to our pay-as-you-go phone and for me to carry that one.

I'm excited for Laura because this summer it sounds like both the palm pre and goggle (android) phones are being released, in addition to the iphone and blackberries already on the market.

If I was going to choose one based solely on what I know now, I'd probably get the android based HTC Magic. Looks pretty, has all the google stuff built in (which I use a lot), is somewhat hackable with being able to write java apps for it. It looks like you can even use maven and eclipse for building apps, all you need in a one time 25 $ output to put things into the market. That's the phone I want to play with.

What phone do I think Laura should get? Unfortunately for the apps that she'll probably need, I doubt that they would have an android version right now. (Laura, remind me if you read this to give me a list of the apps you use so I can write the companies asking / requesting android versions). We'll see what kinds of mid-summer deals the carriers will come out with.

Wax on / Wax off

Since we have the brand new car we were hoping to keep it nice for as long as possible. I don't want it to rust out like the focus. So, in order to make it stay shiny and new I spent a good part of the day washing and waxing it. I've never waxed a car I own before. I probably have not waxed a car or anything since I was 10.

After I washed it I left it to dry a bit. When I went to go wax it, the weather has just started to spit. So, in the garage and time for the work. It took a while, but it looks great. I think that I've spent more time cleaning a car today than I have in the last 10 years total. Crazy.

One thing that I should have realized but didn't is that dirt is a Bad Thing. When your car is dirty, moisture, oils, etc stick to the car, eat away at the paint and allows rust (apparently). Clean car == not too rusty car. So we're going to do our best to keep the car clean and have it last as long as possible.

Getting it done

One of the things that I'm coming to realize is that sometimes it's much more important to get things done than waiting until you have time to "do it right". Sub-optimal, but done, is better than not done, but with plans on doing it totally "right". Of course this sub-optimal solution has to be weighed against not doing anything at all. You don't want your half-assed solution to actually cause more work.

Examples work best for me. For one of the COTS apps that I help take care of, it comes with logging configured to create a new file each day and never clears out the old logs. And it logs a lot - somewhere in the range of 1 G + / week. The "right" solution would be to look into changing the logging level and how the files are created. The sub-optimal solution I did was write a cron that finds all files older than the last 5 days and delete them. Not ideal, but it's done.

Done half-assed is better than done no-assed, as I always say. Well, that was the first time, but I'm sure that I'll say it some other time too...

<del>Stuff under my stuff</del> Junk in my Trunk

We just picked up our first new car the other day - a 2009 vw rabbit. Very excited about something so new and shiny. This is the first car that I don't end explaining what car I have with the phrase "... that's all that I could afford that I also fit in". It's quite peppy and corners awesome, I'm just going to have to watch so I don't speed because there is no roar / shake at speeds.

There are many different things that I'm sure that I'm going to be excited about the new car, but I really like the storage underneath the area in the trunk. It's actually useful compared to every other car I've driven. In the back of my other cars, it's difficult to get to the spare tire, and when you do there really isn't any places for anything else. In the rabbit (and many other cars I looked at), it's easy to get to the tire and there is all these spaces for tools or junk.

In the last car I had bungee cords, rope, air compressor, etc all bouncing around in the trunk. That meant that they were always in a tangled ball. In the new car there are these little sections that I can fit all these things in nice rolled up sections. I'm carrying around stuff that I feel is useful, but the trunk looks empty.

I don't know if it's a getting old thing or what, but I really appreciate and enjoy good packaging and when things are "smartly" built. It just shows that there has been some focus on the details, and I find the quality of the details is one of the best indication of overall quality.

Normal Eclipse plugins

Sometimes I end up searching my blog for eclipse plugins, but I have a hard time finding them. Here's a quick list of what I have installed or plan to install.

• EclEmma - coverage tool
• Clover - commercial coverage tool
• Checkstyle
• SpringIDE - spring tools
• JBoss tools

As for maven integration, I'm divided if I should do m2eclipse or Eclipse IAM (formally Q4E) since both are now hosted on eclipse.org and look like they both have the potential of being moved into eclipse proper.

Advice is tricky

One of the things that I've just seemed to realize that when people provide advice, it's usually the same course of action that they have already taken. I'm not sure if it's just "I went through it, and this was the right choice so I did it" or if it's "I made a choice (right or wrong), and now cognitive dissonance is kicking in". Maybe it's just the brain tricking itself thinking a random choice was logically thought out (aside: I wish I could find the study that talks about that. I don't think that Magic and the Brain is it, but it's good reading anyways).

What I find more interesting is when people advise you to do something that they did not do. I think that there potentially more useful information in that decision and the discussion that follows. It's like the more valuable things to know on an assignment are the things that you got wrong, rather than correct.

I don't know how to express my anger at the use of flash

I get so freaking frustrated when sites provide content in flash. At best it's clunklier than html, at worse it's unusable. If you're providing data in tables, paragraphs, etc how much more difficult is it to provide it in html??? It means that your tables are so squished because of the data jammed into them I can't make out what value belongs to which column. I can't open features in new tabs, and how sections of their site seem to just hang.

I'm looking at you mazda.

There are places were it's great to use flash (360 degree views), but just because you've got a hammer doesn't mean that everything is a nail. :-(

It would be wonderful if every public facing website had to go through usability testing, and you know, heed the advice. For every flash developer, they should also be made to use their own app on a 28.8 connection while blindfolded and being gnawed on by wild badgers. The last part serves no technical advantage, I just hate the flash that has spewed across the intertubes and feel that someone should incur my wrath.