My question is, why would you ignore an obvious, growing sector of the mobile market?  Yes, I understand that right now, Apple has the store that has on numerous occasions made people millions for simple applications.  However, that doesn’t mean that the Android Marketplace or Windows Phone 7 Marketplace will not make you any money.

We have developers who are making it a public point to not write applications for non-iPhone devices.  Which to mean, from a business standpoint is a poor decision.  I have no problems with writing the iPhone app first and getting it to market.  People think iPhone when they think mobile app, so I get that you have to have an iPhone app to have mobile exposure.  I understand this, I really do.  But to say, well I see this other mobile OS (Android) is gaining market share, but I’m going to ignore it and only focus on the iPhone.

The only time that people seem to look at mobile application alternatives is when their app gets dumped from the iPhone App Store.  You see it all the time, “Our app was removed for no reason” and while Steve Jobs has recently made it a point to say why most apps are removed, rejected from the store, we all know there are apps that shouldn’t have been rejected (Google Voice App anyone?).  But again, this is the only time that people start looking at alternative avenues for mobile development.  Wouldn’t a smart business plan be to have your app on as many platforms as possible?  I know that I’d want to maximize my revenue streams, but some people seem to be okay with ignoring anything that isn’t the iPhone.

What are your thoughts on this?  I’d really like to hear why some are choosing to ignore Android and Windows Phone 7 for their apps.  Because to me it just seems like poor business.  But hey, I could be wrong.

It’s Twitter, it’s Facebook, it’s BOTH

The first thing I noticed when I fired up Seesmic for the first time was that it handled Twitter and Facebook.  Initial thoughts included “well if this can do Facebook too, well I might be able to move Facebook off my front screen too” and while the Facebook implementation isn’t 100 percent, it is definitely good enough that I can use it 98% of the time.

Seesmic for iPhone also handles Twitter searches and lists.  It has a nice interface that allows for separation of the various lists and networks that doesn’t come off as cluttered (the way TweetDeck for iPhone did for me).  With Seesmic, I’m able to switch between my Twitter timeline, Facebook news feed, and various lists/searches.

Navigation

One of the cooler things I like about Seesmic is that to navigate between Twitter, Facebook, Ping.FM, and various Twitter lists and searches is that I simply have to swipe left/right depending on where I am in my “tabs” (or tiles).  However this means that the Twitter for iPhone feature that allows you to swipe a tweet is gone (this was one of my favorite features of Twitter for iPhone).  Even though it means I lose a feature, this one feature makes Seesmic extremely efficient.  I can jump between accounts and lists with the greatest of ease.  When I pick up my iPhone to check Twitter, I’m almost always going to check Facebook too, now I can do it in one app and with just a small swipe of the finger.

I have to say though that I do find myself missing the Twitter for iPhone tweet swipe shortcut for replying and favoriting tweets.  On Seesmic this is at least 2 screen presses, and while that might not seem like much, coming from the official Twitter app it just feels clunky.  However, I understand the reason this can’t be done in Seesmic and do not overly fault them for it.  They mad an UI decision and theirs works and is quite efficient, just in a different way and for a different purpose.

Overall

Overall, I think I’ll probably keep Seesmic on my front screen for a good while longer than originally anticipated.  That’s saying something because I’ve tried a lot of iPhone Twitter apps and not a single one was able to dethrone Tweetie (as it was known at the time).  I still thing Twitter for iPhone is a fantastic product and if you’re looking for a good Twitter app, you’d be hard pressed to find one better.  I wouldn’t say that, in the end, Seesmic is better than Twitter for iPhone but it does have certain features for a “power user” that can clear some icons off the front screen.  If you use both Twitter and Facebook with extreme regularity then you need to be taking a hard look at Seesmic for iPhone.

Yes it’s Fragmentation

In the strictest definition of the word, the Android world is fragmented.  You have a lot of devices all running different versions of the Android OS.  Though Google and the OEMs have worked hard to lower the amount of fragmentation, it’s still there.  If you want your app to cover as many devices as possible, you have to (currently) code for Android 1.6.  With the recent announcement of 2.2, this seems like a poor call.  Newer versions of Android have new functionality that would be beneficial to older phones.  Specifically the ability to save apps onto the microSD card and keep it out of the onboard memory.

There is something to be said about the fact that Android is being developed at a fast rate that it’s hard for manufacturers to keep up.  Not only is the underlying Android OS being developed at a rapid pace, but each manufacturer has it’s own variation of the OS.  HTC has their Sense UI, Motorola has their MotoBLUR technology, and so on.  Due to this, it takes longer for these manufacturers to release the updated OS versions because they have to put their own touches on the new version before they can push it out.  In some cases they’ve decided not to do this.

The other issue is that a lot of the older Android 1.x devices had limited onboard ROM spaces, which makes updating to the newer OS even more complicated.  So while this kind of fragmentation exists and it could be viewed as a bad thing, it’s not always.

No, it’s Not Fragmentation

Why is it not a bad thing?  Because it’s constant improvement of the underlying operating system of the phone.  Sure you might be on an older device that can’t update, but that means that they next Android phone you get is going to be better than the one you currently have.  Before iPhone and Android, such a thing was unheard of.  Mobile phone makers didn’t really worry about updating their mobile OS too much, because they didn’t have too.  Now with Android, their finding that they need to stay bleeding edge to compete because people are starting to understand the game better.

Part of the reason for Android’s fast growth is Google’s understanding that they had to play catch up a little.  I’m not one-sided here, when Android 1.0 came out it paled compared to the recently released iPhone OS 2.0.  But Google didn’t rest and quickly pushed out new versions.  Apple releases their iPhone OS once a year, currently Android is on 2 releases a year.  They surpasses Apple this year (sorry fanboys, but it’s true).  Android has had multitasking from day 1, we have over the air updates, and now over the air syncing.  Also, the latest Android OS ran circles around both the iPad and the iPhone (with javascript no less, so it wasn’t even a native app).  Most of what’s in iPhone OS 4.0 has been in Android for a while (heck even the multi-tasking is done in a similar manner).

One important thing to not overlook (again) is that Google is making manufacturers think about things like future software updates, and companies like HTC and Motorola are starting to get hip to the game of continual updates of the operating system.  They might be slow on the delivery now, but with time we’ll see more releases and less lag.  Before Apple and Android, this was unheard of.  Manufacturers ignored the mobile OS because most people would just buy a new phone.  Google is making manufacturers think about the mobile OS in the same way that Apple made the carriers think about data.  After the iPhone data plans became something of a commodity, you got unlimited data at a set price.  Now equipment makers are going to have think about their devices as something that last longer than that 2 year contract interval.  Sure the geeks are still going to upgrade regularly, but the average joe isn’t going to care (they might not care about OS updates, but if their phone tells them there’s an update to install they’ll probably install it).

Google has said that they will eventually slow down the rate of Android releases in fight to alleviate the fragmentation.  They understand it’s an issue, but they also know they need to keep improving their OS in order to hold the lead they now have over Apple.

The Current State of Things

The image below was posted on the Android Police website back in January (I tried to find a new infographic but was unable to do so).

Click to Enlarge

As you can see, the fragmentation is slowly dissipating.  Many of the older 1.5 phones don’t have enough onboard memory to hold the new 2.x versions of Android.  This is a hardware issue, not a software issue.  Many of the remaining phones have seem recent announcements about upgrades to 2.x versions.  By the end of the year, I predict that we’ll start seeing less phones that are not able to update to newer versions.

Also, there is an active community of Android developers who are working to get the newer versions of the operating system to be loadable on older phones.  Of course this isn’t for the faint of heart and does require some hackery.  But the ability is there.

Things to Consider

The issue of fragmentation is a two sided problem.  It’s not just Google’s rapid development of the Android operating system but the manufacturers struggling to keep up.  Some would argue (rightfully so) that this is where Apple’s success comes from.  They couple their hardware and software so tightly together that they can really hone in on the perfection side of things.  However, this is partially what has caused them to be surpassed by Android in both functionality soon number of available devices.

I’m not going to argue that the iPhone is subpar, it’s not.  The iPhone is a superb device in a many aspects.  Android has some nice devices out as well (see the Nexus One or the HTC EVO).  But Apple isn’t the only game in the market anymore and Android, regardless of it’s fragmentation, is proving to be a good competitor.  And competition is good.  But I feel that we lose site of the advantages of the rapid development cycle, because there are advantages.  Apple fanboys would like us to forget those however (and the Google fanboys would like to forget that Apple really does have a tendency to bring its “A” game).

All in all, the competition is a good thing.  We’ll be seeing things improve on both ends and I truly believe that Android device makers will shorten the lag between new OS announcements and getting the updates to the phones.  They’ll have to if they want to remain competitive.

About a month and half back, I purchased a netbook.  Being my first netbook purchase I did a lot of research before deciding on what to get.  In the end, I went with the ASUS Eee PC 1005PE-PU27 (amazon affiliate link) model.  The reason I chose this model was because of it’s highly rated battery life (14 hours).  Now, I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to get the full 14 hours, but I figured if I could get between 8 and 10 hours then I was doing good.

The iPad Elephant

I bought this netbook instead of getting an iPad.  Why?  Well for one thing, my primary use case for the netbook was programming related conferences (Houston Open Spaces, Austin Code Camp, and Houston Techfest).  The idea was to have a computer that I could

1. Something that I could actually code on should the situation call for it
2. Take notes nicely on.  I have enough experience with the iPad touch screen to know that if I was taking notes on it, it’d get messy.

Since the main use case for buying this machine was to use it at programming conferences, the ability to actually code on it was paramount.  The iPad has a nice screen and some nice apps, but a full computing replacement it is not.  And while the netbook isn’t exactly a desktop (or even laptop) replacement, for my primary use case it was the more preferable option.

Initial Impressions and Hardware Overview

First off, the box this thing came in was small (or smaller than I expected).  After getting it out and plugging it in (I usually ignore the whole “fully charge before use”), I booted it up.  This particular model came with Windows 7 Starter edition (it was the first thing to go).  Using Windows 7 Starter on this netbook seemed be fairly smooth.  However I wasn’t doing anything overly intensive so your mileage may vary.  And I only used Windows 7 Starter to update the system’s BIOS in preparation for installing Ubuntu Netbook Remix.

The screen screen on this thing is nice, bright, and quite shiny.  It lights up well and is viewable in just about every situation I’ve encountered thus far.  The chiclet keyboard (separated keys, like a MacBook or Sony laptop) is perfect and my hands rarely feel cramped on keyboard.  It took some time to get used to this new keyboard, but it wasn’t long before I was typing at above average speeds.  Some people have noted that the right handed SHIFT key is smaller,  this is a non-issue for me as I have a habit of using the left handed SHIFT key in about 99.9999% of my typing.

The trackpad supports some limited multitouch activities but I didn’t get a chance to use them under Windows 7 and they don’t appear to work on Linux (if they do I haven’t figured it out just yet and it hasn’t been high priority).  The only issue with the trackpad is the same as it is with most trackpads, if it doesn’t turn off while typing you can start typing in random places (sometimes without realizing it).  Not huge issue but it can be annoying.

Speedwise, this thing works well for what I need.  No, it’s not a powerhouse, and I didn’t buy it to be a portable desktop (or a laptop replacement).  My primary concern was battery life, and that is what the Atom processors are mainly built to help with (energy consumption).  I should note, that you won’t be watching any HD video on this thing.  At least not without skipping in the video.  But for my DVD rips, it works just fine.

Ubuntu Netbook Remix

After doing the previously mentioned BIOS update, I quickly installed Ubuntu Netbook Remix 10.04 (in beta at the time).  The installation went off without a hitch and I was able to get most of my usual apps installed without too much issue.  Most things worked out of the box (excepted the previously mentioned multi-touch on the trackpad).  Skype did take some figuring out, but there are instructions to get it working flawlessly.

The overall experience with Ubuntu Netbook Remix has been favorable.  I was able to do 2 presentations using my netbook at the Alt.NET Houston Open Spaces conference without a hiccup and many people seemed to be happy with the overall look and feel it as I was giving the presentations.

When it comes to battery life, I have not seen the 14 hours that this thing advertises, however I’m averaging around 8-10 depending on usage and how it’s being used.  So I’m quite happy since the idea was to get as close to 8-ish hours of use as possible.  I should note that those hours are using Ubuntu with some minor modifications to the power management.  Since I didn’t use the Windows 7 install I can’t comment on it’s battery performance.

Final Thoughts

In the end, I’m quite happy with my purchase.  The purpose of the device was to get some computing power with extended battery life.    The device has handled itself well through multiple usage scenarios (my wife used it at the hospital while she was there with our son for almost 5 weeks).  While you won’t be doing any hardcore gaming on this machine is perfect for casual coding, document editing, web browsing, and chatting.  Plus the thing is light enough that its easy to transport around all day and not feel that I’m gonna throw my back out.

As I was listening and occasionally watching the Google I/O Keynote for today, where the focus was on Android and the newly announced Google TV, I realized that Google is eventually going to beat Apple when it comes to innovating.   I saw on Twitter where someone said “Apple is getting Microsoft-ed by Google” and there’s a lot of truth in that statement.

Be Open and Push Open

One thing that was repeated over and over at both keynotes for Google I/O was “we’re opening this up to you” or “we’re releasing this as an open source project” and other similar quotes.  Google is all about doing their work in the open, this brings in people that can build things and build upon their work.  You never know what your users will do if you let them and in many cases they will surprise you if given half a chance.  Google’s message has been about being open, allowing more people to work on and build on their work to the betterment of the product.

Apple is the exact opposite.  They tightly lock their software and hardware together to create computing appliances.  They ensure you can only develop a certain way and only develop certain things for their products.  If they don’t like your work, they reject it.  Sometimes they do it without giving you a reason.  This is not always a bad thing though, Apple products have  a tendency to “just work” in a way that other computer companies would love.  But it is widely known that Apple and Google have different ideas on computing and openness.

Moving Things Forward

When Apple TV came out people liked it.  It was the first product to bring downloaded content to a TV screen without a lot of hacking or trial and error.  However as many geeks will tell you, it is severely lacking.  You can’t bring in your own media, and watching stuff that falls outside the iTunes wall is pretty much impossible.

Google announced Google TV which brings the web to your television.  Instead of dumbing down the web for TV, you are given a full internet experience.  Built on the Android platform Google TV can use Android apps, which means that developers can write applications that target Google TV.  Meaning that Google TV is expandable and customizable, all while giving you a nice mixture of the web and TV.  While the initial demo of Google TV doesn’t look overly impressive, I have little doubt that Google will maintain their “release early, update often” methodology on it and in time we’ll see Google TV grow into something awesome.

GoogleTV is the perfect example of how Google is innovating.  They’re working on bringing to the TV what Apple tried to do but in a way that is more open and customizable.  If you look at the most recent Apple product, the iPad, you might notice that it’s basically a larger iPod Touch.  Google TV is what Apple TV wishes it could be and that says a lot about the kind of work Google is doing.

Google Will Beat Apple (Eventually)

I think that long term (in other words, not in the immediate future but probably 7-10 years from now), Google will have replaced Apple as the most innovative tech company.  I realize that I’m saying this as Apple’s own developer conference (WWDC) is weeks away, but Google really brought their A game over the last few days.  Even with the demo failures they showed that they are interested in moving things forward and changing the way we think about technology.  Their dedication to being open, using open standards, and creating new open products is proof in the pudding.  Apple may have it’s fan boys, but I’ll stick with Google.

What Does This Mean

Well mainly it means that someone with deep pockets is backing an open source, royalty free video codec.  Meaning that if that patent pool is going to go after someone, they’ll definitely go where the money is first (in this case Google).  But to assume that Google just opened itself up to patent infringement lawsuits is to not do them justice.  Everyone knows that the people who work at Google are mainly smart individuals and to assume they didn’t do the proper legal due diligence would be to not give them proper credit.

What this means is that there is a good chance that Google could help some of those patents be revoked.  I’m not saying it will happen, I’m just saying that it could.  But in the end, it means that we should finally get answers on exactly what the H.264 patents contain and what can be done in a free, open way.

It’s About Open Standards

The thing here is that while Apple and Steve Jobs can talk about “supporting open standards” and how they give back to that community, but like I said before Steve Jobs is talking about an open web but he’s pushing a codec that could require royalty payments in the future and that’s dangerous.  Google on the other hand is furthering open standards by releasing quality codecs and putting their deep pockets behind them to defend them in court.

The WebM project uses the VP8 video codec (open sourced with the WebM announcement), the Vorbis audio codec (Ogg) which is open source and royalty free, and uses the open source Matroska as the container (what allows both the audio and video files to be in 1 outputted file for easy playing).  When open standards and open source is used to integrate, everyone wins.  Because anyone developing something new has access to the same things as someone who’s larger and has more funding.  In the end it allows the better application to truly win.  And this is what Google is pushing for.

An open web where developers don’t have to potentially pay royalties is a good thing.  Keeping things open and free when it comes to ensuring that everyone has the same thing on the web is important when you’re developing web applications.  Knowing that everyone is going to have the same components, the same codecs, and the same fonts make the web a constant experience regardless of browser choice.

When you connect to a public wireless network, especially one that is unprotected (read unencrypted), anything you send and receive is viewable by anyone with the proper tools and/or software.  This means that anyone, be it a person or an business entity can see what you’re sending across the open network. This is why when you do connect to such networks, it is a good idea to not do anything like connect to your bank or do anything you wouldn’t want others to potentially know about.  It doesn’t mean that someone is definitely watching your data fly across their screen, but you should act like someone is.

As users, it is our responsibility to ensure your data’s protected, not anyone else’s.  We are the one’s that must take the precautions, because once it’s on the network it’s out there for others to see.  You don’t want someone seeing your private conversations over an open wireless network?  Encrypt the conversation, there are plenty of tools that help you to encrypt your data.  There are ways to set up virtual private networks (VPN) at your home so you can connect securely to that and then do what you’d like because it’s all coming through your encrypted connection to your home’s network.  There are tools for encrypting your email (Thunderbird comes with the plugin installed by default).

Again, as user’s it is our responsibility to ensure our data is protected.  So the privacy groups need to stop pointing fingers and instead work on educating the end user about this.  If the privacy groups spent as much time educating as they did finger pointing, people would be more aware of the situation and know what steps they can take to protect their data both at home and abroad.

To begin, lets rehash what makes a strong password.  A strong password has all the following:

• Upper and lower case letters
• At least one number
• At least one special character (!,@,#,$,%,^,&*,(,), “,<,>)
• Absolutely nothing to do with you or someone close to your.

That last one is kind of important.  You want to avoid things like names, birthdays, anniversaries, and so on.  Children and pets’ names are also a huge no-no.  The more random the password and the less it has to do with you as a person, the better it is.

To test your password’s strength, you can look at this Javascript Password Strength Meter.  This meter gives you a score and tells you how secure your password is.  If you have anything less than mediocre, you should probably reconsider your password and create a new one.  On the same page there are tips on creating a secure password and even a link to a password generating application (and browser plugin).

Using a secure password is extremely important in a world where we have several passwords for many different services.  If you need help remembering your passwords, you should look into something like LastPass or KeePass.  Both are a type of “password safe” in that you can store passwords for different sites and only have to remember a single password to the password safe application.  Both of them also have built in password generators that you can utilize to create secure passwords for each site that you use that might require a password.

So again, I urge you dear readers to start using more secure passwords (if you’re not already).  It can save you a lot of heartache in the end.

The way that the buttons work should be fairly obvious but just in case, I’ll run through the basics real quick.

• Facebook Like: The “Like” button, when clicked will add an item to your Facebook profile that says you “liked” the article and will include a link back to the original article.  (see example below).

• Retweet:  This button will allow you to log into Twitter and retweet the article to your followers ( it will look like “RT @mkoby TITLE link”).

The thing about editors like Emacs or Vim (VI Improved) is that they are completely cross platform.  There is a version of both that runs on all operating systems (Windows, Mac, Linux, etc).  In fact, VI is part of the Unix standard and any version of Unix doesn’t actually qualify as Unix without VI being installed.

I started back on Emacs because that’s what I had spent the most time in back in the day (as they say).  But lately I’ve been reading that some colleagues and other programmers that I follow (blogs, twitter, etc) are using Vim these days.  Even going so far as to attempt to do their .NET programming in it, so I started looking at that again.  What follows below are some resources that might help you learn about these editors.  Learning either Emacs or Vim will allow you to have an editor that is available on all systems and thus you can truly learn one editor and use it the rest of your life regardless of operating system.

Emacs Resources:

• Peep Code – Meet Emacs ($9): This is a nice one hour screencast that covers many of the basics of using Emacs. It covers navigation, buffers, plugins, and other general use topics.
• Emacs Starter Kit (my personal fork): This is a nice pre-configured emacs.d folder. This comes with several plugins, modes, and other useful things for making Emacs a joy to work with, especially when it comes to dynamic languages. My personal fork includes the color schemes, and yasnippets.
• FOSSCasts Emacs: Some more (free) screencasts for learning Emacs.
• Emacs Wiki: Many useful pages with lots of nice info about using and setting up various features in Emacs.

Vim Resources:

• Derek Wyatt’s Vim Tutorial Videos: This awesome set of videos is designed to take you from novice to beyond novice with using Vim. Derek is energetic enough that you almost never get bored and the videos are informative.
• VimCasts: While not so much for “beginners” there are lots of good screencasts here for Vim users.

There you go. Hopefully these will get you on your way to using an open source cross platform editor. Do try and ignore the holy wars around these two editors, each one serves different people differently and as such what works for you might not work for someone else. Find the one you like and use it.

All video codecs are covered by patents. A patent pool is being assembled to go after Theora and other “open source” codecs now. Unfortunately, just because something is open source, it doesn’t mean or guarantee that it doesn’t infringe on others patents. An open standard is different from being royalty free or open source.

You’ll notice that Steve Jobs says that all video codecs are covered by patents.  However this is just not true.  Theora is patent free and was designed as such.  The Theora codec is similar to the Vorbis codec for audio in that it is designed and written to be patent & royalty free.  Anyone can implement it and use it without having to pay some governing body.

The thing about H.264 is that, while it might be an open standard (in otherwords anyone can write an implementation based on the published standard) it is not in fact royalty free.  The governing body (MPEG LA) has said that H.264 will remain royalty free for web video through 2015.  This means that come January 1, 2016, they could start asking for cash.  And not everyone is going to be able to pay for the right to use it.

Video Codecs, What are They?

Before I go further I want to spend a few lines talking about video codecs. What a video codec is, is an algorithm for encoding a video signal. Different video codecs exist and serve different purposes. The thing about H.264 is that it allows someone to encode higher quality video at smaller file sizes (which is a very good thing). Apple has adopted H.264 as its video codec of choice, also Blu-Ray uses H.264 as it’s codec for encoding movies to the platform. So H.264 is a really good codec and has been adopted by the those in industries who use video, and understandably so. The idea of any codec is to get the highest possible quality into the smallest file.

The argument for which video codec to use for HTML5 is between H.264 and Theora. Theora is a video encoding codec that is free, open source, and royalty free (no one has to pay to use it or implement it). The argument that Steve Jobs is making is that even though Theora is open source and royalty free, it infringes on patents held by others.

The Issue of Software Patents

Lets get this out of the way.  Patents are, at their core, a good idea.  A company invents something, they patent it.  In return for making the idea public knowledge they get exclusive use of the idea for a pre-determined period of time.  During that time anyone using the invention has to license it from the company that holds the patent.  This is a good thing as it makes ideas public and still allows the company to retain some exclusive use of it.  It shows other people what can be done and to some degree encourages innovation, because if you can see how someone did something it might lead to other ideas.

Software patents however are a horrible idea.  The idea that you can patent a way to do something is a little more confining and limits innovation.  If I need to write an algorithm that takes two numbers and returns to me the largest of the 2 numbers, I might do something like

    int ReturnLargerNumber(int a, int b) {
        if(a > b )
            return a;

        return b;
    }

Now, someone later might come along and do something different but similar (as there aren’t a ton of ways to write this kind of code). If I had a patent on returning a larger number then I could sue anyone who implements it, no matter how similar or different. Keep in mind that this is a really lame example but it should demonstrate the idea that patenting an implementation is a bad idea. This is the heart of the software patent issue. If someone came along and had a better way to return the larger of two numbers, I could sue them thus holding back a better solution to the problem.

This all comes down to the idea that there is more than one way to do something.  What Steve Jobs would like us to believe is that there is no possible way that Theora could achieve the same level of compression and quality as H.264 unless it infringes on the patents involved in H.264, thus doing things exactly the same way.  Again, such a argument is good for his business but doesn’t exactly promote an “open web” that he seems to be so vocal about.

When it comes to writing software there is almost always more than one way to achieve the same goal. You can give 5 programmers the same problem and the same tools to solve it and chances are you’ll get 5 different solutions. You might get a couple that are similar but they’ll still be different. So when while Theora might serve the same purpose as H.264, it doesn’t mean they achieve their goals in the same way.

I feel that I should also note that, in most cases where a company has accused an open source project of infringing on patents, the company making the accusations has been unable to prove so in court. In most cases (read: almost all) the accusing company was making false claims in hopes of spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt (or FUD).

The Case of Open and Royalty Free

In the end this whole thing comes down to the idea of an open web. Steve Jobs says he wants an open web but then says that he won’t use Theora because of possible patent issues. It would make more sense for him to put some time into ensuring Theora and Vorbis don’t infringe on any patents by releasing patches and pushing their use if he truly wanted an open web.

The H.264 video codec requires a license to use, the same way the Mp3 codec requires a license to use.  While the Theora and Vorbis codecs do not require such licenses, companies like Apple don’t like to use them because they have their hands in other codecs (H.264 or AAC in Apple’s case).  

Apple created WebKit (the rendering engine of the Safari web browser) by forking an existing open source project called KHTML and fixing the issues they saw with it. They then in turn released WebKit as an open source project. Why not do something similar with Theora and Vorbis? He’s already done it once, why not do it again. If he was really about an open web, this would be done already.

It makes sense to look into things that are open sourced and royalty free when it comes to internet standards, because not everyone can pay license fees if they want to be completely compatible. And if we rely on open standards and royalty free codecs, then everyone can enjoy the same (or at least very similar) user experience on the web. As it stands right now, only Safari and Chrome implement H.264 for HTML5. Mozilla implements Theora (open source company is always going to implement an open source solution over a licensed solution). Chrome actually includes support for both.

As long as people disagree on what to implement it is going to give web users an inconsistent experience and to me, that’s the largest part of this problem. The idea of standards is to ensure an consistent experience across implementations and if people can’t agree on what goes into a standard programmers are stuck having to do more work to ensure that consistent experience.

Steve Jobs is a Business Man

To begin with, Steve Jobs is a business man.  A very good one too.  He is the master of the keynote and an expert marketer.  He knows how to announce, release, and talk about his products and competitors.  He’s very articulate and excellent at getting his ideas across.  Because of this, a lot of what he says is taken as fact, and many don’t look at things more deeply than his word and repeat his thoughts.

Steve Jobs is also king of telling people when they need something and when they don’t.  A great example is 3G.  When the first iPhone was released someone asked him about 3G and he said “Edge is good enough, people don’t really need 3G” and then one year later, he announces the iPhone 3G with 3G connectivity.  He’s done this on more than one occasion (just on the iPhone: multi-tasking, flush earphone jack, native application development, etc).  So when Jobs says that we need to move away from Flash, people listen.  The problem is, that when you talk about his little diatribe against Flash, it’s filled with half truths on both Flash and H.264 (and competing video codecs).  You can read one flash developer’s break down of those half truths.

The point here is that Steve Jobs is going to point out things that will only help his business long term.  Flash is destructive to his iPhone app business so he’s blocking it and giving his reasons.  Now granted he is posting his reasons to the public which not every CEO would do.  And he is attacking Flash and fighting for open standards and getting people to talk about and become aware of those standards, so that is a very good thing.

Video on the Web

I agree that Flash has problems that need to be addressed.  But I will also admit that most video on the web is displayed in a flash player.  The reasons for this are mainly due to the need to lock video down and protect the stream.  The current HTML5 video implementation does not have a way for people to protect the video stream, this is why you don’t see companies like Hulu or Netflix utilizing HTML5 for their streaming videos.  Those kinds of things need some form of DRM to prevent the leeching/downloading of the stream.

Also, the issue of H.264 versus Theora when it comes to which video codec to use for online video is filled with lots of nice half truths and misinformation as well (from all sides).  But one main difference is that H.264 is not free as Mr. Jobs would like you to believe.  Also the issue of patents and that Theora infringes on others’ patents is a slippery slope that has yet to be actually proven.  For further reading on the issue of H.264 and Theora I advise reading the following articles:

• Ogg Versus The World: Don’t Fall for Open Source FUD
• I’ Been to Ubuntu: Lead OGG Dev Responds to Job’s Jabs
• Microsoft Fires Back at Critics of its HTML5 Strategy

There’s lots of things some people would like to keep from the public to push their own agendas (on both the Apple/Microsoft and Open Source sides of the argument).  So I would advise becoming educated before simply repeating what’s said by anyone.

Conclusions

I’d like to conclude by saying that I think that getting people to talk about open standards and open technologies is a good thing and for that I think Steve Jobs is doing a great thing.  However, I wish he’d not put so many half truths into his writings about doing so.  By not talking about the whole picture he’s doing more harm than good (for the general public, not his business).  In the end, H.264 will probably win the codec war for HTML5.  I’d rather Theora take the crown, but so many people are scared due to possible patent issues (which again, have yet to be proven).  The patent issues are a different argument which I’ll write about later this week.

I’d be more than happy if we could move away from the requirement of Flash to do video on the web, I’m all for moving to open standards and open protocols to get things done.  So if nothing else, Steve Jobs should be commended for taking the stand to move towards that general direction, even if some of statements aren’t 100% correct.

Here’s the problem. Twitter and Facebook have the status game nailed down. Everyone is using those two services already. The other side of this is that Foursquare is pretty much the goto site for location based “check-ins” with Gowalla not too far behind (at least in user counts). So we have two services in each of the categories that Buzz is looking to service. Basically they’re late to the game and so adoption is going to be slow and painful, and there’s a good chance that Google Buzz will never get too high off the ground as a result.

The nice thing about Google Buzz is that is that it gives me the ability to only go to one place to post both location and status. Sure I can use the FourSquare or Gowalla apps, but if I want to get the most out of both services, I have to check in using both services. If I want to ensure everyone gets my status update I have to ensure it posts to both Twitter and Facebook, which requires some extra work. Buzz gives us that “1 stop shop” for both kinds of services.

Some people are using Buzz in interesting ways, Tim O’Reilly is using it to “host” conversations on ideas originally posted to Twitter. So he’s using as an extension on Twitter. I’m curious as to how Buzz is going play out in the long term. While I don’t think it will kill Twitter, I’m curious to see if it could make a nice play in the location space. Only time is going to tell though and since Google Buzz is still young I think we’ll see plenty come out of it over time.

First off, the United States has some of the best health care (doctors, nurses, hospitals, etc) in the world. People all over the world are told to come here to get their treatments. So when it comes to actual health care, the United States is pretty high up there on the list. Secondly, everyone in this country can be treated for whatever ails them. They can simply go to the emergency room and get treated. The doctors are required, by law, to treat regardless of ability to pay. In fact, in my recent ER experiences (for my son), treatment and payment were handled by two completely different teams at two completely different times.

What Obama is striving for is to ensure that as many Americans have health insurance. The bill eventually will ensure that a large percentage of the currently uninsured will be insured, and the government will help pay for the insurance if someone can’t afford it. So really, what we’re seeing is health insurance reform, not health care reform. I think some of the problem has come from the name the politicians and media have used (“Health Care Reform”) and this has caused lots of confusion.

This year, Alt.NET Houston will be hosting it’s 2nd Open Spaces Conference.  Last years was such a success that many wanted us to do it again.

The What and When

This year the conference will be held from Friday, April 30th – Sunday, May 2nd. We’re adding Friday (starting at noon) for workshops. We will have 2 concurrent 4 hour workshops that you can attend if you like. The topic for these workshops is still to be determined but will be announced closer to the time of the conference.

Friday evening we will hold the planning session, where we will all gather and suggest topics that we either want to present/convene, or that we’d like to hear about. This is an important part of the event. Your satisfaction with the conference is completely in your hands. If you want to suggest a session, it’s important that you are there Friday evening.

The Where

The conference will be held at the Houston Microsoft office, located on the west side of town. You can find a map here.

How Much

This year the price of admission is $20. This is being done for 2 reasons. First and foremost, it gives us some money to supply food, snacks, and beverages. Secondly, it ensures that people will be less likely to sign up and not attend. We are making an exception for students though, so if you are a college student interested in attending, please contact Ben Scheirman before registering.

Registration

You can register at the Alt.NET Houston website. Here is a direct link.

The first thing you have to do is add the git remote for the other user’s code.

git remote add my_new_remote git@github.com:mypartner/OurProject.git

This adds a git remote, with the name “my_new_remote” and that is pointed at my partner’s fork of our project.

Next you’ll want to fetch the remote repository (as usual, with git this will include the entire change log, and all files).

git fetch my_new_remote

After you have the remote, you can create a new local branch that points at the newly fetched code. Below I create a branch called “partner_dev” and point it at my_new_remote/dev (assuming that there is a branch called dev in my partner’s repository)

git checkout -b partner_dev my_new_remote/dev

Now you can look at the changes made to the repository but keep it separate from your work. This is a nice way to mess around with other people’s work without having to bring it into your own. I’ve been using this method to checkout the UI template changes my partner has been committing every few days.

The main issue I had with many people’s opinions was that they were all targeted at explaining to managers, c-level folks, and others about why craftsmanship was important.  They also focused heavily on how to explain to those people why they should hire someone that is a craftsman over someone that would (in most cases) be cheaper.  I felt this was the wrong approach because it was outward rather than inward in it’s direction.  How can you explain to a manager why hiring a craftsman is important when we personally don’t know what a craftsman is or why being one is important.  I heard very little discussion about what a craftsman is or why you’d want to become one.

So today, I’m going to talk a little bit about what I feel being a craftsman is and how that idea can be applied to the development/creation of software.  And to do that, we have to start at the beginning and define what a craftsman is.

What is a Craftsman

If we look up craftsman in the dictionary, we see something like this

A person who practices a trade or handicraft

So by definition, a craftsman practices a trade.  Our trade is that of software development.  When people think of the word “craftsman” they generally think in terms of woodworking.  A craftsman takes a piece of wood and turns it into something beautiful.  This kind of thing generally takes lots of practice and time.  Time spent messing up, cutting a piece too short, splitting a piece of wood, and so on.  You have to do a lot of things wrong in order to learn how to do them correctly.  Eventually you become a skilled craftsman.  You learn a lot of things to not do.  In generally becoming a craftsman is more about learning what not to do than it is about learning what the right way is.  But the main point here is that the craftsman spends time on his craft.  He works at it daily.  Looking for ways to improve and build a better whatever.  Over time the craft is perfected, at least as much as it can be.

A Software Craftsman

When it comes to software, there are a lot of ways to do things.  You can test, you can design, you can encapsulate, inherit, override, and continuously integrate.  You can spend hours refactoring, changing bits of code until they’re just so tight that on occasion you can’t understand it anymore.  All new software developers start out simply by trying to make the computer do something.  Sometimes it’s just about getting it to show text on a screen.  Eventually they graduate to automating tasks, very functionally (do this, then do that, then to something else) and without very little thought to re-usability.  Then someone shows them how to make methods of common tasks, and then eventually how to break those methods into classes (if their doing object oriented programming).  But it’s a slow process, some of these things can take years to master, many times they learn how to be better from someone else.

The general idea is the same though.  To become a good programmer, you can’t just do it in a nine to five fashion.  You have to practice it at home, spend time working on learning new things, finding those new ways to not do something.  You’re not going to learn everything by doing it at a job day in and day out.  The person learning to build furniture is going to learn how not to make chair by making the chair wrong a few times and so the same goes for someone looking to build software.  They will go through a lot of wrong solutions before they start understanding why the correct one is, in fact, correct.  Sure, someone could tell them, but then they haven’t experienced something for themselves and they don’t understand for themselves why it’s the right way.  They only know it’s the right way because someone told them so.

Driving to be Better

Really it all boils down to a personal choice.  Are you going to work to be better at your trade/craft or are you going to linger and stay in that little space that you are so comfortable in.  Why is software craftsmanship important to you?  Why should your manager care if you don’t?  Why should anyone care if you don’t?  In the end being a craftsman (in anything) isn’t about anything other than being the best you can be at your craft.  If you are developing software then you will strive to create better software regardless of who it’s for.  In the end, you’ll do the things that make you a better craftsman because they are why they make you better.  Not because someone told you to do it that way.  In the end, we all want to be the best at whatever we do.  That to me is the sign of a craftsman.  Someone who as a constant drive to be better at whatever it is they do.

This was my first Open Spaces conference (I missed the one held in Houston last year due to the recent birth of my son), and I have to say I quite enjoyed the format.  There didn’t seem to be quite as many breakout sessions at this one as I’ve heard Open Spaces can be known for, but maybe they happened and I missed them.  The people doing the talks did a great job and the open atmosphere was great.  I was in one session where the speaker had someone take over his laptop to give a demonstration on some areas of the topic he wasn’t too familiar with and it was great.

A wiki was set up for the conference, and people were uploading session notes, links, and even recordings of some of the sessions, so check out that wiki at http://pablosfiesta.pbworks.com/

Having attended this conference, I’m now even more excited about the Open Spaces that the Housotn Alt.NET group is working to put together for the first weekend in May.  The fact that there are so many people that are willing to share their experiences and knowledge with others is great and hopefully I continue to surround myself with these kinds of people.  So bring on the Houston Open Spaces conference.

So if you’re looking for some nice gEdit color themes, check out mig’s repository.

Click for full size

Now, I’m the first to advocate privacy.  I think that you should never enter into something without understanding its impacts on your and information.  That being said, I’m also an avid user of social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Gowalla, and so on.  But I understand the implications on my privacy and look at how it’s handled once I’ve opened an account.  Google Buzz was no different.  They announced that you would automatically follow those you contact most via Gmail, it says so on the Google Buzz page.  So right off the bat, you know what’s going to happen.

That hasn’t stopped some people from having issues though.  Take this example here from the Fugitivus blog (warning: explicit language contained in post).  The person here was using Google Reader, a RSS subscription reader application from Google.  This is the part I want to focus mostly on for my point.

That point is, if you’re using an internet service, do not do something you wouldn’t want potentially shared with the world.  I think we can all agree, the internet is a mostly public forum.  Yes, there are walled services (like Facebook), but things happen, passwords get hacked, and companies make mistakes and privacy is destroyed (even if it’s only temporary).  Yes, one’s Google Reader sharing/notes/whatever should only go to those it’s intended.  But at the same time, caution must be maintained when doing something.  You wouldn’t send a questionable email out, because you never know where it might end up.  So why would you do something on a web application that you didn’t want seen by the public at large?  If you are going to use the internet, you have to accept some breakdown in privacy.  There is no such thing as a “PRIVATE INTERNET”.  My approach to internet privacy is this: “Don’t do anything you wouldn’t want seen by the public at large” – that’s it, no more or less.  If I don’t want the public knowing about it or fear that it might eventually see the light of day, well then I just simply don’t do it.

Now, before someone blankets me with a ton of statements about the blog post I linked to, let me note that I believe that the person has every right to be angry with Google, and I agree that Google Buzz needs to address many of its privacy concerns.  There are some issues that definitely need to be ironed out and I think Google will get it all sorted out.  In fact, Google has already announced some changes to Buzz’s privacy controls (it’s not a lot, but it’s a start).  Google released Buzz early and it is still very much a new product, but Google is good about the “release early, release often” (or at least they have been lately) so I think most of the major privacy issues will be resolved.

But let me just reiterate, it’s a public internet.  Even the walled sites eventually have cracks that let data out.  It’s going to happen.  So if your interested in keeping something under wraps, the internet is not the place to discuss it.