It's a bit rude, but I have a saying: "show me a person consistently working more than than 40 hours a week in IT, and I'll show you a person who's probably chosen the wrong career field".
While I understand that there are occurrences where people are working for companies that are understaffed, and there might be other reasons behind the hours, that doesn't change the fact that in the last 20ish years in the IT field the majority of people I've known who worked like that were just not very good at their jobs. Even more consistently I've found that they didn't understand automation, which is odd considering that's their job!
I'll give you an example: in my old position the environment I managed was made up of a group of Citrix Xenapp servers. Critical as this environment was to our bottom line, every server had a backup so we could fail over quickly. Here's the thing: previously, "quickly" was about 3-4 hours. Now, it's bad enough that in a critical situation it took 3-4 hours to cut over to the backup server. But, upgrades required a cutover and cutback! Upgrading 30 servers and their backups would take WEEKS. I got in there, tweaked the process a bit, wrote some scripts to do some of the work and got the whole thing down to 15 minutes.
Actually, in all honesty, I could've scripted the whole thing to run in 15 SECONDS, but I needed to justify my pay somewhat.
The whole point of IT is to make a company more efficient, to allow it to do more with less staff. In some cases, a single server could replace thousands of employees. Sure, there are downsides to that, but those aren't part of this discussion. If you can't automate some of the repetitive tasks you do on a daily basis, or even an infrequent basis, how do you justify working in a field whose purpose is to automate out repetitive tasks for others?
Two plus years ago, I got myself an iPhone. I've talked about my leaving that platform, and I'd like to share one of the reasons why. I'd been hearing about this interesting little hack available for Android called Tasker on Lifehacker for some time and was enthralled. I'll be honest, Tasker was about 90% of the reason I moved to Android. And, why? It automates your phone!
The iPhone gets a lot of static for being just a fanboi platform, but Apple deserves a lot of credit for putting out a paradigm changer. It's not a PDA, it's not a phone...it's a portable computer that allows you to make calls and have ubiquitous Internet access.
But, you're locked in with it. I'm not just talking about the Apple Store or iTunes, but simple day-to-day tasks. Take something as simple as your browser. You can get plenty of replacement browser apps in the Store, but none can be made your default. If you click a link in your e-mail, it launches Safari. If you click a link in another app, it opens Safari. No matter what you do, you're stuck with Safari. The only time your browser of choice opens is when you tap the icon for it.
The kind of limited thinking that produces such a half-assed solution just isn't what went into Android and as a result we get something like Tasker. It's a tool that allows you to automate your phone to do things you never thought possible. I play around with it a little every day and I still manage to find some new use for it.
Using it couldn't be easier. You start with a context under which you'd like Tasker to respond. This could be location (using GPS), phone state (plugged in, headset plugged in) or date/time, etc. Once you've defined the conditions you'd like it to respond to, you can then define the task it will then take. So much of the basic phone is available to automate, and authors of other software can produce plugins or links to allow you to automate their stuff, too. This all might sound confusing at first, and that's because despite its simplicity, Tasker brings a LOT of power to the table. Examples work best, I think. Let's start with a typical 24 hour period. I'll start with my getting home from work at around 10:30pm (I work the late shift):
- As I get within 1km of my house, Tasker turns on my phone's wifi. As soon as I connect to wifi, either at my house or any place else, it turns off the mobile network radio to conserve battery. I've got wifi, why leave them on? I also have it setup to turn on wifi when close to other folk's houses where I use their wifi, and the same happens there.
- At 11:00pm, Tasker automatically silences my phone. It mutes all of the volumes, however it's setup so that if my wife calls or texts, I will get an audible notification.
- Typically I go to bed a little after 11 and plug the phone into the charger before doing so. Tasker responds by first seeing I'm plugged in. It also checks to see if I'm connected to my home wifi. With these two conditions being met, it starts backing up my phone. It launches SMS Backup+ which backs up all of my SMS conversations and call logs to my gMail account. Each entry shows up as an e-mail within a label with can then be accessed however I would normally access gMail. Mount Manager is a utility that allows my to mount CIFS shares to my phone. I haven't purchased the full version yet, but that comes with a Tasker plugin so I could have it then mount my desktop PC's drive and backup my entire phone in one shot while I sleep.
- At 8:00am, Tasker reenables the audible notifications.
- When I leave the house, and disconnect from my wifi, Tasker turns the mobile networks back on. When I've gone more than 1km away, it turns off the wifi to conserve battery and prevent me being annoyed by the constant "I found a wifi network! I found a wifi network!" notifications.
- Now, I like anime. As a result, I might have some kind of an anime-themed wallpaper on my phone. As those who are familiar with the genre can tell you, oftentimes in anime, women are a bit...scantily clad and their body features are absurdly pronounced. Let's just say the wallpapers, while not porn, would definitely be considered NSFW. So, as soon as I get within 1km of my work place, Tasker will load a random wallpaper from a folder entitled "SFW". Phew! That was close! As I finish the work day and leave that radius, it'll put up a random wallpaper from my entire collection.
And, the process repeats. Now, I might come off as lazy by telling you about the above. But, again, isn't automation what computing's all about? Why should I manually do all of those things? I can have a phone that, depending on where I am and what I'm doing, morphs itself into whatever I need at that moment. When I plug in my headphones, it pops up a menu of all of the applications I might want to use them with. Others have setup "where's my phone" type tasks that allow them to send a text to the phone and it responds with regular GPS coordinates of its location.
Did I mention that I have it setup to tie into my Homeseer-based X-10 so that when I connect to my wifi, if it's late and past the time when my outside lights are on, the lights will come on as I hit the driveway. How cool is that?
All of this and I still have only scratched the surface of what it can do. Seriously, if you've got an Android phone, it's the best $6 you'll spend on an app (buy it from the author's site listed above, though. He gets a bigger cut if you do it that way). If you're still on an iPhone...sorry, you'll never be able to do anything this cool. ;-)
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Monday, January 17, 2011
Has it really been that long?
Geez, December 1st is the last time I posted something to this? Tsk, tsk...
There are many drawbacks to doing TEDxRochester in November. First and foremost is right afterward you run face first into the holiday season with all of the fun and excitement that brings. You spend an entire year building up for that one, single day and then it happens and you let out a deep sigh that doesn't stop for two weeks. Then next thing you know, you're cooking a turkey, rushing out for those last minute gifts, rushing out of town for the holidays...oh, my!
"But", you say, "the holidays have been over for weeks?" Sure, but I work for a payroll company and it's year end. We've got W-2s that need to go out by the end of this month, which means we're pushing our already stressed systems passed their limits and stuff's in need of the kind of situational leadership my group brings to the table. Top all of that with a heavy dose of snow causing 14 of our branch locations to close and...well, I've been a busy puppy!
I've got quite a few articles started, but just haven't had time to finish them up. This article's primary purpose is to get those writing juices flowing again as I have some serious catching up to do on other projects as well. Coming up: more Ubuntu Linux stuff and a whole lot of stuff on my new love: Android!
There are many drawbacks to doing TEDxRochester in November. First and foremost is right afterward you run face first into the holiday season with all of the fun and excitement that brings. You spend an entire year building up for that one, single day and then it happens and you let out a deep sigh that doesn't stop for two weeks. Then next thing you know, you're cooking a turkey, rushing out for those last minute gifts, rushing out of town for the holidays...oh, my!
"But", you say, "the holidays have been over for weeks?" Sure, but I work for a payroll company and it's year end. We've got W-2s that need to go out by the end of this month, which means we're pushing our already stressed systems passed their limits and stuff's in need of the kind of situational leadership my group brings to the table. Top all of that with a heavy dose of snow causing 14 of our branch locations to close and...well, I've been a busy puppy!
I've got quite a few articles started, but just haven't had time to finish them up. This article's primary purpose is to get those writing juices flowing again as I have some serious catching up to do on other projects as well. Coming up: more Ubuntu Linux stuff and a whole lot of stuff on my new love: Android!
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
The end of an iEra
About four years ago, my company did something stupid: they opened up access to company-provided smartphones to everyone. A number of folks noticed this and it wasn't long before it seemed like every single person in IT was sporting a shiny, new Palm Treo. Unfortunately, I only found out about the open availability AFTER the company had closed the option. Apparently, it wasn't very long before someone in Finance noticed how much data plans were for the now thousands of Treos running around.
Grand.
So, I missed my opportunity and ended up being the only person in my group to not have a smartphone. To add insult to injury, when it came time to renew my phone, they gave me this crappy LG that was a PHONE...nothing else. I didn't even have the crappy 8-bit like games that used to keep me occupied in the men's room anymore. Sigh...but, I persevered and kept pushing my boss to get me one.
After two years of this, I eventually came to the realization that all of the promises of "oh, yeah, I'll look into that" were as empty as my phone. So, I decided it was time for me to get my own. My wife & I had recently had a child, so it was a bit of a stretch, but when we compared the cost of our one cell phone and digital home service, there really wasn't that much of a difference between that and getting two iPhone 3Gs (lower-case "s" indicating plural, not upper case "S" indicating 3GS). So, we killed both of those and transferred their numbers to our new hotness.
Oh, my iPhone that first year or so. How I loved it! I added app after app, played with it constantly...I even got a gig writing reviews for iPhoneTunes.net (still one of the best iPhone sites out there, IMHO). A couple of months after I got it, I started to read about some of the cool features available if you jailbroke your device and I mustered enough courage to give it a try. In those "early days" there wasn't much out there, but what was there was cool: xGPS, the FIRST turn-by-turn navigation app for the iPhone. Did I mention it was free? iRealSMS, a paid addition that really made SMS usable on the iPhone and CategoriesSB which added the much-needed, but stupidly overlooked by Apple for four versions of the OS, folders for applications!
With these modifications in place, I was happy with my iPhone. Until it crashed. Never really figured out what caused it to start acting loopy, but it was so bad I had to restore. What a chore, especially since I was jailbroken and wanted to get back to where I was before it went South. A day and a half later I was working, but also feeling fairly disenchanted with my little tech love. The functionality I added wasn't all that much. In fact, it was functionality that should've been included with the damn phone to begin with, but Apple's only good at the initial paradigm shift. Once they've captured the market's attention, they never follow through with anything better. Don't believe me? What's the big differences between a first-gen iPhone and an iPhone 4? Slightly bigger screen? Faster with more memory? More storage?
Snooze. Wake me when you get to the upgrades that are comparable to upgrading to an iPhone 3G from an LG LX3000. What's worse, Apple's made it clear since day one that THEY get to decide what apps can go on YOUR phone...not you. At first, it's not a big deal. It's a phone, you want it to work. But, you also want to be able to install whatever you want, even if it will make it stop working. That's MY choice, not Apple's. Yeah, I get it, it's their "brand" at stake. So sick of hearing how concerned everyone is about their brand. As far as I'm concerned, the worst thing happening to Apple's brand is Apple.
But, I'm going to avoid the rant for now...where was I? Oh, yes, I was going to discuss iTunes....
Which I can't do without ranting. Since the instant my credit card was charged for those phones, iTunes was always one of the top reasons I knew I would move away from the platform. Granted, in the early days I never thought I would, but I had a feeling it would involve iTunes in some way. Lousy, slow, ugly pig. Ugh, more ranting. Must change subject.
As the end of my contract with AT&T was looming near*, I started looking at the Android offerings. Now, I'm not a huge Google fan, either. Yeah, I use gMail, primarily because I've run my own mail server and it was a PITA that I was glad to get rid of. That being said, the lineup of Android phones was pretty impressive. Not only that, they were generally innovative, too! It was the Samsung Halo with its built-in pico projector that really captured my imagination. But, in the end, it was an application that was the final nail in the coffin for the iPhone: Tasker. I'm a tech guy who loves to automate stuff, and from the first time I read about it on Lifehacker I knew I would have an Android.
Fast forward to last Friday, Black Friday. My wife and I had fully decided that we were going to move to new phones and away from the iPhone forever. Radio Shack had a great online offering of the HTC EVO 4G for half price and I jumped on it. They arrived yesterday and activated this morning. We did get to play around with them before they activated using the Wifi and I gotta tell you: it was love at first sight all over again. Fast, beautiful, easy to use...I can already see how much better than an iPhone this thing really is!
But, I'm going to reserve a full review until after I've had a chance to use it, test out the coverage of Sprint (as we head out of town to visit the folks for the holidays, it'll get a great torture test) and really put it through its paces. My feeling for it might just be the newness, I'll admit that. However, after just a few hours, I already feel at home with it and enjoy some of the subtle differences so much better.
* Let me just say this about AT&T: I honestly never had a problem with them. I can count on two fingers the number of times I had calls drop on me, and both times I was standing in my old cube at the office which was a reception black hole. Their pricing was a bit high, but I could deal with it.
Grand.
So, I missed my opportunity and ended up being the only person in my group to not have a smartphone. To add insult to injury, when it came time to renew my phone, they gave me this crappy LG that was a PHONE...nothing else. I didn't even have the crappy 8-bit like games that used to keep me occupied in the men's room anymore. Sigh...but, I persevered and kept pushing my boss to get me one.
After two years of this, I eventually came to the realization that all of the promises of "oh, yeah, I'll look into that" were as empty as my phone. So, I decided it was time for me to get my own. My wife & I had recently had a child, so it was a bit of a stretch, but when we compared the cost of our one cell phone and digital home service, there really wasn't that much of a difference between that and getting two iPhone 3Gs (lower-case "s" indicating plural, not upper case "S" indicating 3GS). So, we killed both of those and transferred their numbers to our new hotness.
Oh, my iPhone that first year or so. How I loved it! I added app after app, played with it constantly...I even got a gig writing reviews for iPhoneTunes.net (still one of the best iPhone sites out there, IMHO). A couple of months after I got it, I started to read about some of the cool features available if you jailbroke your device and I mustered enough courage to give it a try. In those "early days" there wasn't much out there, but what was there was cool: xGPS, the FIRST turn-by-turn navigation app for the iPhone. Did I mention it was free? iRealSMS, a paid addition that really made SMS usable on the iPhone and CategoriesSB which added the much-needed, but stupidly overlooked by Apple for four versions of the OS, folders for applications!
With these modifications in place, I was happy with my iPhone. Until it crashed. Never really figured out what caused it to start acting loopy, but it was so bad I had to restore. What a chore, especially since I was jailbroken and wanted to get back to where I was before it went South. A day and a half later I was working, but also feeling fairly disenchanted with my little tech love. The functionality I added wasn't all that much. In fact, it was functionality that should've been included with the damn phone to begin with, but Apple's only good at the initial paradigm shift. Once they've captured the market's attention, they never follow through with anything better. Don't believe me? What's the big differences between a first-gen iPhone and an iPhone 4? Slightly bigger screen? Faster with more memory? More storage?
Snooze. Wake me when you get to the upgrades that are comparable to upgrading to an iPhone 3G from an LG LX3000. What's worse, Apple's made it clear since day one that THEY get to decide what apps can go on YOUR phone...not you. At first, it's not a big deal. It's a phone, you want it to work. But, you also want to be able to install whatever you want, even if it will make it stop working. That's MY choice, not Apple's. Yeah, I get it, it's their "brand" at stake. So sick of hearing how concerned everyone is about their brand. As far as I'm concerned, the worst thing happening to Apple's brand is Apple.
But, I'm going to avoid the rant for now...where was I? Oh, yes, I was going to discuss iTunes....
Which I can't do without ranting. Since the instant my credit card was charged for those phones, iTunes was always one of the top reasons I knew I would move away from the platform. Granted, in the early days I never thought I would, but I had a feeling it would involve iTunes in some way. Lousy, slow, ugly pig. Ugh, more ranting. Must change subject.
As the end of my contract with AT&T was looming near*, I started looking at the Android offerings. Now, I'm not a huge Google fan, either. Yeah, I use gMail, primarily because I've run my own mail server and it was a PITA that I was glad to get rid of. That being said, the lineup of Android phones was pretty impressive. Not only that, they were generally innovative, too! It was the Samsung Halo with its built-in pico projector that really captured my imagination. But, in the end, it was an application that was the final nail in the coffin for the iPhone: Tasker. I'm a tech guy who loves to automate stuff, and from the first time I read about it on Lifehacker I knew I would have an Android.
Fast forward to last Friday, Black Friday. My wife and I had fully decided that we were going to move to new phones and away from the iPhone forever. Radio Shack had a great online offering of the HTC EVO 4G for half price and I jumped on it. They arrived yesterday and activated this morning. We did get to play around with them before they activated using the Wifi and I gotta tell you: it was love at first sight all over again. Fast, beautiful, easy to use...I can already see how much better than an iPhone this thing really is!
But, I'm going to reserve a full review until after I've had a chance to use it, test out the coverage of Sprint (as we head out of town to visit the folks for the holidays, it'll get a great torture test) and really put it through its paces. My feeling for it might just be the newness, I'll admit that. However, after just a few hours, I already feel at home with it and enjoy some of the subtle differences so much better.
* Let me just say this about AT&T: I honestly never had a problem with them. I can count on two fingers the number of times I had calls drop on me, and both times I was standing in my old cube at the office which was a reception black hole. Their pricing was a bit high, but I could deal with it.
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
The decimation of language
This video is awesome, but not just in the creativity (you really have to stick around until the very end to see it's full awesomeness). The phenomenal Steven Fry's point about the intractable disdain some people have for failures in grammar and expression is provoking at a fundamental level for me.
I admit it, I still bristle when I see a sign saying "thank's for your support". And, seeing pictures like this still causes me to guffaw a bit:
But, as someone who studied Linguistics during his brief college career, I also must acknowledge that language is about communication. Grammar, spelling and punctuation rules are nothing more than arbitrary conventions created for the sole purpose of greasing society's linguistic needs. They don't do a whole lot to convey meaning in and of themselves. As Steven points out, we all still know what "10 items or less" means, even if it's proper to say "10 items or fewer". Frankly, how many of us even knew that "10 items or less" was wrong before watching this? I confess I didn't.
Funny as it is, "We out of meet" still conveys the message intended. It did so with a humorous flourish, I won't dismiss, but meaning was still conveyed. Only those who choose to be scrungent, when faced with a grammatically incorrect but symantically valid sentence, will fail to understand...
No, I'm wrong. They'll FEIGN ignorance while fully grasping the concepts presented, but bemoan loudly to everyone trying to ignore their rants that they just don't understand "how someone could be lacking in the becoming acquainted with?"
To me, even worse are those who still can't grok that meanings change. Anyone who has read ANY Shakespeare knows that between Bill's time and ours our language has evolved slightly. They manufacture* extensive artificial* complaints about how awful* the latest generation's understanding is. If they're feeling brave* enough, they'll tell* you to your face how you're an example of our declining civilization. Yet, I have to wonder how they would read THIS paragraph, seeing as I chose a few common words whose meaning has become quite different from its original intent. I wonder, too, if they'd read the title of this article to mean "the utter destruction of language"?**
Perhaps they're just nice***?
There are currently two major wars in effect, not to mention a few minor border skirmishes and disputes and a couple of completely insane dictators who seem to think they own the world. The economy's collapsed, and while it shows some signs of rebound the fact is it's only going to continue to get a lot worse overall since people keep voting in the same dimwits who created the messes in the first place. The Earth's climate's being forced to change in new and terrible ways. A billion people in the world don't have access to clean drinkable water or a consistent source of food...and yet there's still a large percentage of people who will read this paragraph and complain about my excessive use of ellipses and/or commas.
Seriously, it's time to worry about more important things, don't you think?
* Manufacture: to make by hand. You thus can't "manufacture" an argument. Artificial: full of skill. Awful: wonderful, amazing. You know...full of awe. Brave: cowardly. No, really. Google it. Tell: to count. Now you know why they're called "tellers" at the bank.
** Decimation: a form of military discipline used by officers in the Roman army for punishment. After conquering a country or town then would line up all of the people who lived there. They would then kill every tenth person; man, woman or child. Just enough to make a point without, ahem, decimating the resources of the Roman Empire.
*** Nice: In Latin it meant "not to know". A nice person was an ignorant one. Hmmm..
**** Bonus: scrungent's my word. I made it up. :)
I admit it, I still bristle when I see a sign saying "thank's for your support". And, seeing pictures like this still causes me to guffaw a bit:
But, as someone who studied Linguistics during his brief college career, I also must acknowledge that language is about communication. Grammar, spelling and punctuation rules are nothing more than arbitrary conventions created for the sole purpose of greasing society's linguistic needs. They don't do a whole lot to convey meaning in and of themselves. As Steven points out, we all still know what "10 items or less" means, even if it's proper to say "10 items or fewer". Frankly, how many of us even knew that "10 items or less" was wrong before watching this? I confess I didn't.
Funny as it is, "We out of meet" still conveys the message intended. It did so with a humorous flourish, I won't dismiss, but meaning was still conveyed. Only those who choose to be scrungent, when faced with a grammatically incorrect but symantically valid sentence, will fail to understand...
No, I'm wrong. They'll FEIGN ignorance while fully grasping the concepts presented, but bemoan loudly to everyone trying to ignore their rants that they just don't understand "how someone could be lacking in the becoming acquainted with?"
To me, even worse are those who still can't grok that meanings change. Anyone who has read ANY Shakespeare knows that between Bill's time and ours our language has evolved slightly. They manufacture* extensive artificial* complaints about how awful* the latest generation's understanding is. If they're feeling brave* enough, they'll tell* you to your face how you're an example of our declining civilization. Yet, I have to wonder how they would read THIS paragraph, seeing as I chose a few common words whose meaning has become quite different from its original intent. I wonder, too, if they'd read the title of this article to mean "the utter destruction of language"?**
Perhaps they're just nice***?
There are currently two major wars in effect, not to mention a few minor border skirmishes and disputes and a couple of completely insane dictators who seem to think they own the world. The economy's collapsed, and while it shows some signs of rebound the fact is it's only going to continue to get a lot worse overall since people keep voting in the same dimwits who created the messes in the first place. The Earth's climate's being forced to change in new and terrible ways. A billion people in the world don't have access to clean drinkable water or a consistent source of food...and yet there's still a large percentage of people who will read this paragraph and complain about my excessive use of ellipses and/or commas.
Seriously, it's time to worry about more important things, don't you think?
* Manufacture: to make by hand. You thus can't "manufacture" an argument. Artificial: full of skill. Awful: wonderful, amazing. You know...full of awe. Brave: cowardly. No, really. Google it. Tell: to count. Now you know why they're called "tellers" at the bank.
** Decimation: a form of military discipline used by officers in the Roman army for punishment. After conquering a country or town then would line up all of the people who lived there. They would then kill every tenth person; man, woman or child. Just enough to make a point without, ahem, decimating the resources of the Roman Empire.
*** Nice: In Latin it meant "not to know". A nice person was an ignorant one. Hmmm..
**** Bonus: scrungent's my word. I made it up. :)
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Thankful? Me? Duh!
Of course I'm thankful! How could I not be? First, I've got the greatest wife in the world. She really is magnificent. She's brilliant, she's talented, she's funny and she loves me (for whatever reason). That's not to mention that she's also drop dead gorgeous and a fantastic mom to our beautiful, intelligent and hilarious daughter..
Whom I'm also thankful for! Holy crap, I had always thought being a parent would be a lot of hard work and sleepless nights. Hmmm, maybe that's more true for my wife. After all, I was mostly in it for the spankings. But, Maeby's really made me realize how awesome it is to be a parent. Granted, I think we were really lucky and got a really good kid. I'm sure my mother would have plenty to say about the ease of raising one like me. I'm thankful her curse of "I hope you have a kid who's just like you" appears to have not taken hold. In general, that kid of mine is pretty laid back and usually listens when you tell her to do something. Usually.
I'm also grateful for my family, as annoying and wacky as they can be. They certainly add a whole lot of "color", and I'm not just talking about my father's side...
And then there's my friends, some of whom we're spending the day with tomorrow gobbling down a gobbler. But, there's some new and truly wonderful friends I've met as a result of TEDxRochester...which I'm also thankful for, but only when it's over. :)
All in all, I consider myself a very lucky guy.
Whom I'm also thankful for! Holy crap, I had always thought being a parent would be a lot of hard work and sleepless nights. Hmmm, maybe that's more true for my wife. After all, I was mostly in it for the spankings. But, Maeby's really made me realize how awesome it is to be a parent. Granted, I think we were really lucky and got a really good kid. I'm sure my mother would have plenty to say about the ease of raising one like me. I'm thankful her curse of "I hope you have a kid who's just like you" appears to have not taken hold. In general, that kid of mine is pretty laid back and usually listens when you tell her to do something. Usually.
I'm also grateful for my family, as annoying and wacky as they can be. They certainly add a whole lot of "color", and I'm not just talking about my father's side...
And then there's my friends, some of whom we're spending the day with tomorrow gobbling down a gobbler. But, there's some new and truly wonderful friends I've met as a result of TEDxRochester...which I'm also thankful for, but only when it's over. :)
All in all, I consider myself a very lucky guy.
Monday, November 22, 2010
Dropbox: spreadin' the love, gettin' the space
Today a couple of odd posts showed up on my Facebook and Twitter pages about my favorite online service, Dropbox. (Note: the previous link is a referral link to Dropbox. More on this in a bit.) This is because Dropbox recently put up a page where folks could get up to an extra 768M of space by doing some simple social media connection stuff.
I've talked about Dropbox before, but it still never ceases to amaze me how many times I find new uses for it. Let's look at a few of the ones I've been using:
- There's a folder called "Torrents" in my Dropbox. I've also installed Dropbox on the server I have at my house running uTorrent. uTorrent monitors this folder and when new torrents show up there, it starts downloading them. So, I just download a torrent into that folder from any machine I'm logged in to and I'm good to go!
- If I need to get a file into my new EC2-hosted Ubuntu box, no worries. I've got the text-based install on it and I just drop them into there. Also, if I need to do major edits on config files, I can get them to my desktop quickly.
- Thanks to some of Dropbox' partners, I essentially have an extra 4G on my iPhone now. More and more mobile apps are using Dropbox for back end storage because it's easily accessed and ubiquitous. I've held off until now, but I'm finally upgrading to iOS 4 simply to give Picbox a try. But for now...
- When I have a quiet moment at the office, I plug my iPhone into my laptop and dump all current photos from the phone into my Dropbox folder so they're ready to be organized when I get home.
- Still in the works: I've got Portable Firefox out there. I've put in a master password, so my passwords are encrypted and thus protected from prying eyes @ Dropbox. I'm in the process of setting up the instance of Firefox on my laptop to use the profile directory that's in the Dropbox folder so I have one universal Firefox profile across machines.
- When I first started my new job, I had some coding work that they needed me to do for my old team. Unfortunately, I didn't get Visual Studio with my new machine and didn't have rights to install it. So, I used an online service to take control of my home machine's desktop and did my changes there. Once the code was compiled, I plopped the executable into my Dropbox and was able to get it back to my team.
- My wife doesn't have a lot of data she keeps on her machine. In fact, almost all of it fits within her 2G of space, so I have her keep all of her files in the Dropbox folder on her machine. Tada! All of her files are backed up as soon as they're created!
- Dropbox also keeps old versions of files. There's been a couple of times where I saved a file and overwrote an original I didn't want to change. No biggie, find the file on the website and click "Previous versions" to get the older instance back. Lifesaver!
I'm sure you can find plenty of other uses yourself or at least find dozens of solutions other folks have come up with. I've looked at some of the other services that are out there, but I just keep coming back to Dropbox for its ease of use and ubiquity. Here's a quick start guide to get you up and running with tons of space as quickly as possible:
1. Hit Dropbox' site. That link is a referral which will give both you and I an extra 250M of space in our accounts once you've installed the software.
2. Download and install a client on your machine. At this point, we each get our extra space. Total space: 2.25G
3. Revisit your Dropbox home page. At the top of the page, you'll see a set of tabs (Getting Started, Files, Events, Sharing, Help). That Getting Started tab is where we're headed next. Go through the steps listed and you'll get an extra 250M of space! You don't have to do all of them, I'd start with 1, 2, 3, & 5. I think those were all I needed to do to get the extra 250M. Total space: 2.5G.
4. Head to the new Free page and do each of the steps listed. Once you're done, you'll get up to an extra 768M of space for free. If you're not happy about exposing everything to Dropbox on Facebook or Twitter, simply deactivate the application's access once you're done. The free space will stay. Total space: 3.328G.
5. Get referrals. At that link, you'll find your referral link that you can give out to friends and family for more space. You can get up to an extra 10G of space this way. Please be aware of some etiquette. There are a number of sites like Lifehacker that will ban you if you post your referral link in their comments. A lot of people take advantage of their Dropbox-based posts to try and drum up some space, and the comments become useless because of it.
Also, the URLs posted to your Facebook and Twitter pages after you do step 4? All of them are referral links to your account. So, once you've done that step, you've also put out a couple of requests for referrals. How cool is that?
I've talked about Dropbox before, but it still never ceases to amaze me how many times I find new uses for it. Let's look at a few of the ones I've been using:
- There's a folder called "Torrents" in my Dropbox. I've also installed Dropbox on the server I have at my house running uTorrent. uTorrent monitors this folder and when new torrents show up there, it starts downloading them. So, I just download a torrent into that folder from any machine I'm logged in to and I'm good to go!
- If I need to get a file into my new EC2-hosted Ubuntu box, no worries. I've got the text-based install on it and I just drop them into there. Also, if I need to do major edits on config files, I can get them to my desktop quickly.
- Thanks to some of Dropbox' partners, I essentially have an extra 4G on my iPhone now. More and more mobile apps are using Dropbox for back end storage because it's easily accessed and ubiquitous. I've held off until now, but I'm finally upgrading to iOS 4 simply to give Picbox a try. But for now...
- When I have a quiet moment at the office, I plug my iPhone into my laptop and dump all current photos from the phone into my Dropbox folder so they're ready to be organized when I get home.
- Still in the works: I've got Portable Firefox out there. I've put in a master password, so my passwords are encrypted and thus protected from prying eyes @ Dropbox. I'm in the process of setting up the instance of Firefox on my laptop to use the profile directory that's in the Dropbox folder so I have one universal Firefox profile across machines.
- When I first started my new job, I had some coding work that they needed me to do for my old team. Unfortunately, I didn't get Visual Studio with my new machine and didn't have rights to install it. So, I used an online service to take control of my home machine's desktop and did my changes there. Once the code was compiled, I plopped the executable into my Dropbox and was able to get it back to my team.
- My wife doesn't have a lot of data she keeps on her machine. In fact, almost all of it fits within her 2G of space, so I have her keep all of her files in the Dropbox folder on her machine. Tada! All of her files are backed up as soon as they're created!
- Dropbox also keeps old versions of files. There's been a couple of times where I saved a file and overwrote an original I didn't want to change. No biggie, find the file on the website and click "Previous versions" to get the older instance back. Lifesaver!
I'm sure you can find plenty of other uses yourself or at least find dozens of solutions other folks have come up with. I've looked at some of the other services that are out there, but I just keep coming back to Dropbox for its ease of use and ubiquity. Here's a quick start guide to get you up and running with tons of space as quickly as possible:
1. Hit Dropbox' site. That link is a referral which will give both you and I an extra 250M of space in our accounts once you've installed the software.
2. Download and install a client on your machine. At this point, we each get our extra space. Total space: 2.25G
3. Revisit your Dropbox home page. At the top of the page, you'll see a set of tabs (Getting Started, Files, Events, Sharing, Help). That Getting Started tab is where we're headed next. Go through the steps listed and you'll get an extra 250M of space! You don't have to do all of them, I'd start with 1, 2, 3, & 5. I think those were all I needed to do to get the extra 250M. Total space: 2.5G.
4. Head to the new Free page and do each of the steps listed. Once you're done, you'll get up to an extra 768M of space for free. If you're not happy about exposing everything to Dropbox on Facebook or Twitter, simply deactivate the application's access once you're done. The free space will stay. Total space: 3.328G.
5. Get referrals. At that link, you'll find your referral link that you can give out to friends and family for more space. You can get up to an extra 10G of space this way. Please be aware of some etiquette. There are a number of sites like Lifehacker that will ban you if you post your referral link in their comments. A lot of people take advantage of their Dropbox-based posts to try and drum up some space, and the comments become useless because of it.
Also, the URLs posted to your Facebook and Twitter pages after you do step 4? All of them are referral links to your account. So, once you've done that step, you've also put out a couple of requests for referrals. How cool is that?
Thursday, November 18, 2010
The new "paper or plastic"
A friend recently posted the question on his Facebook page "Nook or Kindle?". Some folks offered up useful advice, but just as many felt the need to chime in with "REAL BOOKS!!" Sigh...
I often wonder about people who get upset when new technologies supplant the old. Do they still have rotary phones? Hell, do they still have a land line? When Verizon stops automatic delivery of phone books, will they call to get one? It's been a decade since I've even had one of those in my house. When I come home and find them on the porch, they go right into the recycling bin. I have an iPhone, why do I need a phone book? To quote the song, I've got the whole world in my hand. These strike me as the same kind of people who would've dwelt on the "loss" to society when cars replaced horse-drawn carriages.
As someone who is a habitual pack rat, even I see the value in not holding on to the past. My comic books are stored in digital format, along with my documents, ebooks, pictures and movies. As pointed out in an earlier article, if there's a fire in my house, I won't lose a single picture of my daughter. Can the Luddites say the same?
Look, I get it. There's a certain romanticism about books. Back when I had time in my days, I used to read as well. I love to read, but the reality is, actual books are inconvenient. Electronic books and publishing is the future, so you might as well start dealing with it. The last couple of books I've purchased were both ebooks. I read them on my iPhone when I had a moment or two. There are times I feel like putting the effort into finding pirated digital copies of every book I have and ditching the paperware versions. It would certainly make my wife happy, and certainly make moving a whole lot easier when the time comes.
And since some will wonder, my response to my friend's question was: iPad. Before the "fanboi" accusations start flying in, yes, I have an iPhone. But, I won't be going back to an iOS device for my next phone, I'm going Android. The Apple platform's just gotten far too restrictive and I have no interest in dealing with it anymore. However, an iPad wouldn't be my primary device so I could live with some level of restriction there. For my friend, for just a little more than the cost of either dedicated device, he could get an iPad, install both the free Nook and Kindle apps as well as a host of other apps and get a much better experience. I've seen the iPad's book readers, they're fantastic. The iBook app is brilliant, you really feel like you're turning a page with it. Personally, I'm waiting for the second gen of the iPad (With a camera, please, Steve! Seriously, what were you thinking?), but there's no reason the first gen can' t be a primary ereader.
Nope, I know I'm a technophile and I know others are not. But, when someone's making a decision between two new technologies, they're obviously not interested in hearing that they're destroying civilization and should stick with the old stuff. Because, really, that's what these people were saying. These kids these days and their new-fangled ebooks...
I often wonder about people who get upset when new technologies supplant the old. Do they still have rotary phones? Hell, do they still have a land line? When Verizon stops automatic delivery of phone books, will they call to get one? It's been a decade since I've even had one of those in my house. When I come home and find them on the porch, they go right into the recycling bin. I have an iPhone, why do I need a phone book? To quote the song, I've got the whole world in my hand. These strike me as the same kind of people who would've dwelt on the "loss" to society when cars replaced horse-drawn carriages.
As someone who is a habitual pack rat, even I see the value in not holding on to the past. My comic books are stored in digital format, along with my documents, ebooks, pictures and movies. As pointed out in an earlier article, if there's a fire in my house, I won't lose a single picture of my daughter. Can the Luddites say the same?
Look, I get it. There's a certain romanticism about books. Back when I had time in my days, I used to read as well. I love to read, but the reality is, actual books are inconvenient. Electronic books and publishing is the future, so you might as well start dealing with it. The last couple of books I've purchased were both ebooks. I read them on my iPhone when I had a moment or two. There are times I feel like putting the effort into finding pirated digital copies of every book I have and ditching the paperware versions. It would certainly make my wife happy, and certainly make moving a whole lot easier when the time comes.
And since some will wonder, my response to my friend's question was: iPad. Before the "fanboi" accusations start flying in, yes, I have an iPhone. But, I won't be going back to an iOS device for my next phone, I'm going Android. The Apple platform's just gotten far too restrictive and I have no interest in dealing with it anymore. However, an iPad wouldn't be my primary device so I could live with some level of restriction there. For my friend, for just a little more than the cost of either dedicated device, he could get an iPad, install both the free Nook and Kindle apps as well as a host of other apps and get a much better experience. I've seen the iPad's book readers, they're fantastic. The iBook app is brilliant, you really feel like you're turning a page with it. Personally, I'm waiting for the second gen of the iPad (With a camera, please, Steve! Seriously, what were you thinking?), but there's no reason the first gen can' t be a primary ereader.
Nope, I know I'm a technophile and I know others are not. But, when someone's making a decision between two new technologies, they're obviously not interested in hearing that they're destroying civilization and should stick with the old stuff. Because, really, that's what these people were saying. These kids these days and their new-fangled ebooks...
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