One month with Windows 7

Posted 2010/01/25 by miroadamy
Categories: Windows

It has been one month now that I started to use Windows 7 based Dell Vostro 1320 notebook on daily basis. The hardware parameters of this little thing are: Core 2 Duo 2.26, 500 GB HDD, 8 GB of RAM, 13″ screen, Windows 7 Professional (64 bit of course, how else with all that RAM). All this with 3 year next business day warranty for about $1400 CAD – not bad deal at all.

Reason of going bi-OS was need to run different configurations of ATG suite, consisting of 3-4 instances of JBoss (each with 1-2 GB of RAM) and the database server at the same time. The database server is quite often SQL Server which as we know does not really run on anything else but Windows. The performance penalty of using VM on notebook is too large so I had to go native. Alternative arrangement – Bootcamp on new Macbook Pro would be way too expensive – just price of additional RAM and Windows would be about $800, all  this with sharing 500 GB between 2 OS-es, so I took the chance to use Windows on PC grade hardware.

First impression on OS front: I like it. It is definitely the least annoying OS made in Redmond. Ever.

Microsoft picked good features to copy from OS-X – the dock is finally something that works. I really like the “compatibility mode” – it has saved me few times already when installing software either too old or too paranoid to go ahead without detecting XP. Combination of explicit and implicit restore points also worked very well for me: it is nice relief after years in running installers with the feeling “if this  fails, I am screwed and nothing but completely reinstall will get registry back to same state again”.

What also works much better than any windows is waking up and jumping networks. Wifi is quite reliable and security zones make sense. Kudos to Microsoft for getting it (finally) right.

All these observations are made while I am using Windows 7 in parallel with Snow Leopard. I have expected it to be much more annoying and uncomfortable going back and forth. The only thing that still drives me crazy is  the Ctrl-versus-Command key schizophrenia. I really wish there was a way how to make this be consistent.

On hardware side, I am less enthusiastic. The form factor and portability of beefed up notebook is the best thing I am really happy about. The rest is OK. Keyboard is OK, but not great. The trackpad drives me crazy with being much smaller that it could be and not allowing multi-finger scrolls. Screen is OK but not as great as the MBP equivalent. DVD drive often does not close and the convenient buttons for media  play should provide some form of tactile feedback.

I found that ideal mode of using the Vostro is to switch it on, put is somewhere within reach of WiFi network and access the desktop using remote desktop client from a Mac. This way I have access to really good keyboard and trackpad as well as the option of using all the Mac only software I need in addition to Windows: like Things,  TextMate, OmniGraffle. The cloud based services (Google Docs, DropBox, Evernote) take care of keeping things that need to be in sync in sync. Best of both worlds.

Comments: 2 Comments

Unintended coincidence

Posted 2010/01/24 by miroadamy
Categories: Uncategorized

To be fair, the book is to appear in March 2010, so most likely the cover image is not ready yet. But I found lack of images for book whose main point is to make explanation illustrated quite ironical :-) .

Comments: 1 Comment

Cure for crashing FourSquare and RunKeeper on iPhone

Posted 2010/01/11 by miroadamy
Categories: Uncategorized

Few weeks ago, first Foursquare application and then my favorite RunKeeper app started to fail. The symptoms were simple:

1) attempt to start

2) wait for for 2-10 seconds

3) exit

Analysis of the crash logs did not reveal anything obvious (see ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/MobileDevice/NAME:


Process:         foursquare [374]
Path:            /var/mobile/Applications/7F37347B-......1663AA5/foursquare.app/foursquare
Identifier:      foursquare
Version:         ??? (???)
Code Type:       ARM (Native)
Parent Process:  launchd [1]

Date/Time:       2009-12-22 12:39:11.260 -0500
OS Version:      iPhone OS 3.1.2 (7D11)
Report Version:  104

Exception Type:  EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV)
Exception Codes: KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at 0x20294628
Crashed Thread:  0

Thread 0 Crashed:
0   libobjc.A.dylib                   0x32668ecc 0x32665000 + 16076
1   CoreFoundation                    0x32d83d6a 0x32d4d000 + 224618
2   CoreFoundation                    0x32d4fc28 0x32d4d000 + 11304

What helped was to delete both applications from the phone, including data and let the iTunes install it back. No data is lost, because both services are cloud based – only minor inconvenience was to re-enter login information.

So, Nael – I am back in the game and cannot wait to claim back mayorships for all places I have been ousted :-)

Comments: 1 Comment

Attention is new currency

Posted 2010/01/05 by miroadamy
Categories: Uncategorized
Tags:

Some companies just do not get it.

It starts with an email, like this one:

By coincidence, you are on project that has the CRM component so you decide to check it out and click on link. After all, it is free, right, so why wouldn’t you ?

The catch is that it is not free at all. Without realizing it, you have already made your first payment, by doing the sender a favor: as we know, clicking on a link in email is definitely not a good idea and recommended behaviour, unless you know the sender and trust the sender. Which – in this case – you have absolutely no reason to.

The link that promises to lead to the free whitepaper, ends up here:

So the “free whitepaper” is not quite free and you  just continue paying – with most precious currency: your time. First you need to spend the 10-15 minutes to fill out the lengthy form. Then another chunk of your time to actually read what you downloaded, just to find out that (in 9 out of 10 cases) it is useless, fluffy marketing material. If you pay attention to fine print below, you’ll find out that you have just subscribed to unknown number of similar spammy mailing lists and will be receiving many more offers for “free” stuff. Add more payments: time spent on weeding them out from Inbox for the rest of the email address’ lifetime … because majority of Unsubscribe links are (similar to unicorns) purely mythical constructs.

This behaviour is so much last century and comes from today completely invalid assumption: that information is something precious, valuable that needs to be protected, guarded and given only for exchange for your privacy. In today’s world, there is abundance of information that competes for readers attention. Rather then asking for anything upfront just to gain access, the authors should be happy and honored that in the world of so many options, somebody actually wants to invest time and effort to get more familiar with their product or service or whatever are they selling. Because they are selling – the only reason for the form-guarded “free” stuff is to sell, either by using the content in question or by following up. After all, they have all information to reach you …

I am not against selling or marketing – I just want the sellers to be honest about it. If you really want to collect any information for follow up, how about at minimum provide at least a preview of what the information is about. All respected sellers of eBooks do that – give you at minimum free chapter and TOC as free (I mean *really* free) download. This seems to be such easy and obvious thing, that I am surprised that even respectable companies (such as Citrix in this case) go for this ineffective trickery just to squeeze out contact information from possible audience. It is so easy to create disposable email or use services like http://10minutemail.com/ …

But much easier than using self-destroying email is simply click on next search result link. Why would one expect to gain anything useful from whitepaper produced by company that does not get the basics ?

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Here we go again

Posted 2009/12/30 by miroadamy
Categories: Uncategorized

This is reloaded version of my previous blog - or continuation of the fork.

First thing to start is to explain why did I do something quite contra-productive as relocate the blog and loose all the audience – however small it could have been.

It would seem that I like restarts and things reloaded. I did pick a new country to become new home for me and my family (if emigration is not a restart, what else is ?).  Back in 2004 we have started Thinknostic to be “Montage Reloaded” – a new incarnation of the company I worked for before and liked it a lot. The same story repeats with blogging.

When I started blogging back in 2006, it was Thinknostic second year and we started to really grow:  we got our own space beyond small sales office in downtown we have had before, built some serious hardware infrastructure, employee numbers started to go into two digit territory and we landed our first 1 M$+ project. My blog at http://thinkwrap.wordpress.com/ was our unofficial presence in the social space. In 2006 I picked the login and account name “thinkwrap”, because it was – at that time – a word that kind-of expressed the approach we were using: something between methodology, best practices and a toolset.

In the three years, the same word ThinkWrap was selected as the new brand when Thinknostic in Ottawa and Pentura Solutions in Toronto (both “second life” companies of Montage origin) merged.  Now suddenly, with “thinkwrap” in URL,  my blog became whole lot more company-bound that I wanted. As everybody can see on dropping rate of contributions, I found pretty hard to post. I was never quite sure whether I really want to present my personal opinion to appear under ThinkWrap brand as something that the company would be saying. Even worse, now we were several times the size as before, with headcount of about 50 – who was I to speak for all these people, when there were so many smarter, more talented and more experienced than myself ?

As result, the whole blog thing came to a big halt – no posts for over 6 months. The only solution I could come up with was restart. Thus, a new, real corporate blog was created that is way more than single guy’s opinion. I am one of the contributors, meaning that you will find posts by myself but also by Nael, Milos, Mike and few more great and talented guys we are happy to have as part of the ThinkWrap. And more will certainly come. See for yourself at http://blog.thinkwrap.com/.

For my personal stuff, I have exported and reimported the content into different WordPress blog and hooked it under domain that clearly indicates that it is my personal blog and personal opinion. Occasionally, I may decide to crosspost some to corporate blog as well, but most of my opinions, suggestions, rants, jokes, book recommendations and crazy ideas will not go beyond this ones :-) .

So, I have now new place that completes my virtual existence. You can also find me on Twitter and Facebook (albeit I try hard to keep my Facebook friends to be subset of people I did meet in real life).

Have a good rest of the year and – as my German speaking friends would say:  “Einen guten Rutsch”

Comments: 1 Comment

Facebook domain type-in hack

Posted 2009/07/24 by miroadamy
Categories: security

You know the drill: open browser, new tab, type ‘www.facebook.com’ and in moment you can see who of your online buddies is up to something interesting. This is exactly what I did. Only I did not end up in well known Facebook page, but on something really fishy:

Picture 3

This is definitely NOT facebook. How come I ended up on ‘quiz.us’ site when I typed in www.facebook.com. Or did I ? Let’s do it again:

Picture 2

Do you see the problem ? It is the URL. Unlike real www.facebook.com, it is www.facebok.com. Easy to overlook. Modern browsers make our life easier by suggesting domain named. And ‘facebok’ comes in alphabet before ‘facebook’. Which is more than enough to catch many lazy users, like myself.

These guys – quiz.us – were obviously not Facebook related and judging by their pages behaviour, their were up to no good.

After clicking on ‘Skip this offer’ it opened up another window, did several redirects and reloads.

Picture 4

The new window tried really hard not to allowed to be closed easily. Annoying pop-ups, deliberate language to confuse OK and Cancel, more pop-ups.

Picture 7

Picture 5

The “company” is registered in Florida, US, as the Who Is told, it is Named “Moniker Online Services” with technical contact ‘Moniker Privacy Services’. Not sure what they really are, but certainly what their pages tries to achieve is a disservice to anybody’s privacy.

Lesson learned: use trusted bookmarks, do not click on combo box suggestions.

At least not until there are so many kinds of filthy internet vermin around. Facebook atracts so many new users that are not very experienced in dirty tricks the spammers, phishers and hackers use. Spread the word and help your friends to avoid pages and companies in business of phishing and deception.

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Forget me not, Web2.0 edition

Posted 2009/05/23 by miroadamy
Categories: lifehacks, Web 2.0

I stumbled upon this pretty nice little application or service – depends how you see it. It is called reQall (obviously would have been recall, but recall.com as every good domain is taken.

What it does is that allows you to set a reminder in the future to do something – at given time and date: buy X, call Y, do Z. Nothing to earth-shattering about that.

What is neat is the way how you do it. Actually, many ways:

1) old fashioned: use web site, enter reminder. Just type text and reQall will extract both activity (buy / call etc) as well as date and place it in appropriate category. And when time comes you will be notified: either via email, or via SMS or even by some of the IM services. Currently supported are Yahoo, Google Talk, Jabber and AIM.

2) modern: use iPhone app to type in reminder. Same goodies as wit web, only – unlike Web – you have the phone with you available quickly at the moment when you actually need to remember something.

3) modern AND cool: use the same iPhone app, and speak up to 30 second message. It will be converted to text and then analyzed same way as typed text. I am not sure whether it is automated translation or some poor fellas in third world country and listening and typing it in. The understanding is VERY good. It even handles non-native speakers of English with strong accents (like myself) with surprising success rate. I had occasionally some question marks indicating that Person’s name or local place was not understood. For this occasion, you can always listen to your own audio ;-)

You can also subscribe to daily jots that sums up your upcoming events.

Best of all: it is a free service. There is a pro version for $2.99 a month which adds some nice features. I am seriously considering to go for Pro just to make sure they can survive – as long as I find that I use  it more than 1-2 times a week, I am in.

Give it a try, it may be worth one small chai latte a month.

Comments: 1 Comment

Book recommendation: Outliers by Malcolm Caldwell

Posted 2009/05/20 by miroadamy
Categories: books

From the author that wrote Tipping point (on my reading list) as well as Blink – which I listened to but found rather controversial. I was very curious what will this one be about.

The book is about success and people that managed to achieve extraordinary results. It touches several topics, I will pick three of them that I found most interesting. It starts with interesting observation – if you look at the MONTH of the birth of junior NHL hockey players, you’ll discover that over 50% of them was born between January and April. Certainly not anything like normal distribution. The point is that cutoff-date for signing up children into hockey training in Canada is January 1st. At the age when this happens (5-6 years), kid born in January has significant physical and mental advantage against kid born in November or December. As result, the early born children perform better in their category, and as result they are more likely to make the selection between the talented and perspective. Those selected get much more opportunities to play and practice, which causes them being really better players than late born ones – a kind of self fulfilling prophecy. As result – if your kids are born after August, better reconsider the NHL dreams. If you believe what M.G. is saying, I mean.

This topic leads to the second big theme that made me think really deep – the 10’000 hours rule.  M.G. claims that in order to be really good at pretty much anything, you have to spend about 10000 hour practicing.  Among many examples he mentions Bill Joy and Bill Gates with their early years almost unlimited access to the computer, Beatles during their concerts in Germany and several others. If this is really true, it has quite serious implications for our profession.

The third is very interesting comparison about how differences between eastern and western agriculture – growing rice in rice paddies vs  western farms has implications on the work ethic and math skills of the population.

He also explores many other quite interesting subjects – the ethnic theory of plane crashes (exploring how “power distance” in particular cultures impacts the communication between captain of the aircraft and first officers), why are merger and acquisition law firms pretty much of the same ethnic origin and also claims that the US schools are basically OK, it’s the parents that do not do enough for their kids education.  Hmm.

To sum it up, it was good and interesting read. Certain parts could be shorter – sometimes it unnecessarily re-iterates the same message,  but it is certainly very intellectually stimulating and thought provoking book.
Although I am a bit skeptical with respect to some of his conclusions or input data – as we know, if we properly select data set it is easy to prove pretty much anything ;-) , I am very glad I picked it – the point of view and approach presented is absolutely worth the time and money spent.

The destilled message of the book can a bit demotivating to those who believe that talent and hard work will always pay back: even if you have all the talent and put in all 10K hours, you still need to have that final ingredients of success – such as being born in January for NHL hockey player and a bit of luck. Also those who believe that the succesful people are just lucky or born with silverspoon may be disappointed that all that does not work without the really hard work and practice.

Unless you belong to one of the above groups – recommended. And if you do – you should definitely read it !

Comments: 1 Comment

Lost in the social networks

Posted 2009/05/17 by miroadamy
Categories: blog, Business

This is public answer to all who were asking why is my blog so badly neglected. Short answer is: It is because I am pretty active elsewhere and did not really find any additional time to allocate. If you are busy person, now you know, see ya later. If you are curious what elsewhere means, read on.

Last year and before, blogosphere and this blog was *only* part of the social networking space I was paying attention to. Since about 3-4 months I started to really pay attention to Facebook. I originally joined to find out what my son and couple of friends are up to and somehow I started to see value in this channel of communication. Recently, even my nephews and children of a very good friend that moved from Ottawa to Europe.  So Facebook became the “generation bridge” and channel for stuff out of workspace.

With iPhoto’09 excellent Web integration plugin it is so easy to share picture that I could not resists and uploaded couple of albums :-) – like this one.

About month ago, I fell for Twitter. I had account on Twitter for several months, but did not really get it. Actually I pretty much hated Twitter being to most discussed topic on Twit. It was actually one of our owns – Nael – that caused

me to reconsider, and I am glad I did.  Speaking of Nael – if you are interested in social networks from developer’s point of view, SEO and location based services, follow Nael on Twitter. He also runs very good blog.

Again, Twitter is excellent addition – it covers the niche that is too low level or too short lived to be Facebook Worthy. With clients like TweetDeck I can even update both Facebook and Twitter, if I decide to do so. Different people use it for different purposes, for me it is replacement for news and RSS, filtered by the people I have selected combined with (filtered) lifestream log of events and ideas.

For the stuff that is really work related, we have two additional social network and collaboration tools, that limited to the company employees. One is Yammer – a private version of Twitter with very nice UI. Second is Wiki – we use Atlassian’s excellent product Confluence. This is location for everything that is either client confidential, covered by NDA or has intellectual property value. As it happens, lots of information, e.g. related to ATG development goes through and ends up in these channels.

I have also reluctantly returned back to log on into MSN Messenger and Skype. I generally find them quite disruptive and leave them off unless I have a immediate need to communicate. Which I do. The project I am working on has contributors all over the place – Toronto, Halifax, Cape Breton, Ottawa – and MSN is the “bloodline” of the project communication.

So if you want to keep in touch, do not rely solely on blog. You can see me on Facebook (search for Miro Adamy). If somebody I never heard of sends me a friend request I often ignore it, but if you mention blog, I will not. Or you can follow me on Twitter – the nick is miroadamy. For that you do not even need permission :-) .

The only way how to follow me on Yammer, you must join ThinkWrap Solutions :-) . The good news is that we may be needing just somebody like you – there are couple of really interesting projects starting soon, and besides, we are always looking for great people. Send resume to careers at thinkwrap dot com and you will hear back from us.

Please note – no overseas or teleworking and no agencies – you must be legally able to work in Canada and live either in Ottawa or Toronto (Mississauga).

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Microsoft Office 2008 vs NeoOffice vs iWorks'08

Posted 2009/04/28 by miroadamy
Categories: Apple, Mac, Windows

I was happy user of the iWork Suite 08 since I moved to OS-X. It somehow better matches the way I am thinking and does much better job than Office to get me from idea to acceptable looking rendering of that idea in the form of document, spreadsheet or presentation.

In past two month I was involved much more interaction with the requirements, business analysis and project management part of the process. Which inevitably means much higher exposure to documents creation, collaboration and exchange. iWork gives you reasonably good compatibility with Office document formats, which means that you can easily import almost every Office document modify it and export it back so that Windows user will see almost all of your changes. Almost everything will be just fine. Unfortunately, almost is not the same as everything: it often breaks fine details of formatting, reviewer comments and does not really work for more complicated Excel spreadsheets. Especially those spreadsheets which project manager-ish people so love to create.

I tried to use OpenOffice/NeoOffice which suffers from the same malady. It spoils different set of features than iWorks, quite often works well, but it cannot be trusted. On top of that, it just does not feel right and is kinda ugly.

So I had to take a deep breath and installed Office 2008. After few weeks, here is my impression and very brief comparison of all three mentioned suites.

With Office 2008, I was not having very high expectations regarding user experience on Mac and I have to report that Microsoft did not disappoint. I indeed was not too great experience, starting with installation.

Office 2008 contains 4 products. I absolutely wanted Word and Excel, was not quite sure about Powerpoint (because Keynote is sooo much better),  and certainly had zero interest in Entourage and Microsoft Messenger.
Guess what: Microsoft installer, as many times before, knew better what I want and did not give me a chance.  All questions asked were related to what Microsoft needs to know (serial number), with little regard for users interest.  It also installed whole bunch of fonts, which I did not really want – but I guess to provide 100 % compatibility with Windows, it may be a good idea to include same set of fonts as Windows office has.

After installation, Office 2008 works reasonably well. Minor annoyance is start taking forever – I guess it is because (unlike under XP/Vista) OS-X does not preload shared components (and does not eat up memory just to make Office appear start snappier).  As soon as any Office application is running, I have occasionally seen weird behaviour when switching between windows (note lowercase ‘w’) and does not play nice with Spaces. Sometimes scrolling forgets to redraw screen in word and you have to minimize/restore to get back to readable text. And it is generally quite slow even on very fast and powerful machine.

With respect to the main motivation for getting Office – seamless document compatibility – that problem appears to be solved. So far I have not seen anything that would be distorted or deleted just because I touched the file on the Mac.  Only exception is Excel – Office 2008 does not support VBA macros, so your mileage with more advanced spreadsheets may vary.

Should I mark my experience with Office 2008 using school grades, it would be:
- installation: C
- user experience: B-
- compatibility with Windows Office: B+
- price/performance ratio: D
- overall: B-

For iWorks’08 it would be:
- installation: B (if I recall correctly, it was OK, but required installer).
- user experience: B+
- compatibility with Windows Office: C
- price/performance ratio: A-
- overall: B

For NeoOffice:
- installation: C-
- user experience: C-
- compatibility with Windows Office: C+
- price/performance ratio: A
- overall: C+

Recommendation:

If you are working on Mac as part of a team that collaborates using Office documents, you most likely need Office 2008. Unfortunately the only office package that comes very close to be compatible with Office 2003 and Office 2007 is Office 2008.

If you value user experience, aesthetics and are OK with mostly one-way conversions between Windows Office, you will find iWork provides excellent value and will make you feel at home. If you never have to exchange documents with Windows world, enjoy it – we all who have to do it daily are green with envy.

If you for economic or ideological reasons refuse to pay for software (or only for software made by certain companies ;-) ) – or if you require compatibility with Linux based office, you have no other choice than NeoOffice or OpenOffice. The first one looks considerably better on OS-X – although still not quite right.

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