September, 2006

  1. BlackBerry Bounty Results – Sort Of

    The September 30th deadline for my BlackBerry Bounty has arrived, and unfortunately I haven’t seen a working solution from any of the folks who are working on it. I have, however, been in touch quite a bit this week with Daniel Pasco. Daniel has been working feverishly to meet the bounty deadline, and I’ve used…

  2. Back Home

    My week out west was quite busy – filled with good stuff. Many thanks to all of you who took time to meet up with me while I was in town. I thoroughly enjoyed both reconnecting with old friends and meeting new and interesting people.

  3. Task Backlog

    Throughout the day when there is something I need to attend to and I don’t have time at the moment, I throw it in Tasks Pro™ so I remember to get to it later. Normally, I’m able to complete about as many tasks as I add in a given day. This all changes when I’m…

  4. Note to Self

    When staying in a hotel with an unfamiliar alarm clock and up late enough/tired enough that you decide to change the alarm time, it is a good idea to double and triple check that the little AM/PM dot is indeed set to what you think it is. That is all…

  5. BlackBerry Bounty Status

    With just 5 short days left on the deadline for my bounty for tethering a BlackBerry 8700 to a Mac as a modem (bounty currently at $610 $675, please contribute!), there are suddenly a few rumblings. Perhaps someone will claim the bounty after all! Will anyone make the Sept. 30 deadline? In the BlackBerry forums,…

  6. Around the web

    Sprint PCS and the 8700 – BlackBerryForums.com : Your Number One BlackBerry Community FastMail.FM weblog – Proactive update! Authenticated and private feeds – Tasks Proâ„¢ and Tasks feeds can use either 401 authentication or URL based authentication. . . . And, On the Other Side: The Liberal Argument At Its Most Persuasive – Nay, Seductive.…

  7. Bay Area Next Week

    I’ll be in the Bay Area next week, drop me a note if you’d like to meet up. I figured this is a good time to send in my monitor for repair, so it’s off – expected back in 7-10 working days. Kudos to DHL for same day pick-up on a Saturday.

  8. WP Themes vs. Templates

    The theme system in WordPress is one of its great strengths and something that is loved by most WP users. It’s a very good thing. However, different developers like setting up code in different ways. While the theme system works well as advertised, it doesn’t work exactly the way I like to set up my…

  9. Product and Support Pricing

    Software pricing is an interesting art. To me, one of the more interesting aspects of it is how the correct price of a product is affected not only by supply and demand and what the market will bear, but also by things like how many customers you have and the size of your company’s customer…

  10. Open Source Rocks

    I’ve been doing a little work on a proof-of-concept for a new fully WordPress driven alexking.org site. I’m working off of the current WP trunk (“trunk” is the place bugs are created in any software), so naturally I ran into a couple of minor issues. After a brief IM conversation with Ryan to make sure…

  11. Providing Support

    In discussing the support I provide for my products (and changes I can make to do it better) with Geof, he pointed out that developers can be simultaneously the best and worst people to support their products. One issue is communication – not everyone does it well. I think I do better than some, but…

  12. Big Fish URL Fishy-ness

    After reading about Are you a big fish? on Mark’s blog I dutifully went over and did my standard ego searches. The results were a little interesting. For example, ‘alexking.org’ is decidedly a little fish – a “Tiny Lil Guppy” to be precise: Certified Backlinks.Site Class:Are you a Big Fish? On the other hand, ‘www.alexking.org’…

  13. Around the web

    War’s Critics Abetting Terrorists, Cheney Says – I saw part of this interview, had to turn it off as Cheney continued to assert that there was a link between Iraq and Al-Qaeda. Long Term Contracts The Olbermann factor | Salon News – I had to look up a few of these clips… YouTube – Olbermann…

  14. SyncML = Failure

    Knowing I’m an interested party, Brett1 sent me a link to the article on LifeHacker that explains how to use ScheduleWorld as a sync hub for your PIM data. It all looks really good, including supporting over the air (OTA) sync of BlackBerry devices. I tested the sync with Google Calendar and it worked. So…

  15. Travel Tip

    I flew back from Seattle1 to Denver tonight. Late last night I tried to use online check in (like I always do), but it didn’t work. It found my itenerary just fine, but when I selected it and hit the “Check In” button, it said something like: Sorry, online check in is not allowed for…

  16. Scaffolding Tip for CakePHP

    I’m evaluating CakePHP for possible use in a project, and I had a dickens of a time getting the scaffolding working at first. I already had some code written on this particular project1, as well as a rather complex relational database schema, etc. so I was trying to fill in all the models and controllers…

  17. Signing E-mail With Initials

    When did it become the in thing to sign off your e-mails with just your initials (or even just one initial)? I’m getting more and more e-mails that end with something like (using John Doe as the name in the example): … Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet. Regards, j. or even a plain: … Lorem…

  18. Apple Lovefest

    The coverage of Apple’s announcements on the various tech sites was impressive yesterday. The two big things for me: Syncing between 2 authorized computers. Now I can buy songs (and shows if I had a video iPod) on the road from my PowerBook MacBook. The iPod shuffle. Too cool, I gotta get me one of…

  19. Mobile Carrier Pricing

    Prompted by Adam’s search, I took the time to look at the big four wireless carriers in the US. The pricing differences between them is startling. Here is the monthly cost of 900+ anytime minutes, 300+ text messages, wireless data, BlackBerry support and the ability to use the phone as a modem with unlimited data:…

  20. Tasks Pro™ 1.7 rc1 and Tasks 2.7 rc1

    Whoohoo! Release candidate 1 of Tasks Pro™ 1.7 and Tasks 2.7 is now available for download. This has a few small changes since beta 6, notably: Full documentation of new features! iCalendar and RSS links are shown on the Tags screen. Tag auto-complete works on sub-tasks that are expanded after the page is loaded. Back…

  21. Around the web

    Experiences with 3 – I’m starting to feel the same way about T-Mobile: but if their service is bad, what use are they, even if cheap? The FOUC Problem – I avoid this by doing these kind of script calls “onload”. Who Writes Wikipedia? Battle of the Work Ethics Seth’s Blog: The end of the…

  22. Docs = Procrastion

    I finally finished writing all the new docs for Tasks Pro™ 1.7 and Tasks 2.7, but I still need to take (and re-shoot) a bunch of screenshots. The first release candidates will, unfortunately, have to wait until next week. The good news is that very few issues (and no major issues) have been reported with…