Every Tuesday for the past four weeks, I’ve written up some super-geeky browser trivia on Google+. If upcoming jQuery releases and Opera are your thing, you should follow along! The posts are public, you don’t need a G+ account or anything.

I think I’m going to keep this up for the foreseeable future. The research-and-report format is surprisingly fun, and it’s filling in all kinds of gaps in my browser history knowledge. I have no idea if anyone is reading the trivia, let alone enjoying it, but sometimes you just have to do something because you want to do it, you know?

Well, so am I. I lost the post.

Apparently leaving WordPress’ New Post tab open between browser sessions is not a good idea. WordPress won’t tell you this is not a good idea. It won’t tell you it’s not auto-saving your draft. It won’t tell you why Preview doesn’t work, and it certainly won’t tell you that clicking Save Draft will show an error message on a different screen, telling you that the draft wasn’t saved and leaving you no way to recover it.

Thanks, WordPress. Not like I spent hours carefully wording that post so that I don’t sound completely arrogant, so that it doesn’t reek of flamebait, and so that all of my facts are carefully backed up with links I didn’t think I needed to bookmark.

So, the post will be up later this week if I can find the time to rewrite it, and next Monday otherwise.

Computers, eh?

It’s no secret that Canada is one of the most expensive places in the world to own a smartphone. That’s why, when my iPhone 3G broke down not long ago, my first thought was: “Great. How much is this going to cost me to replace?”

Well, by my calculations, $2836.98.

The up-front cost for a 16GB iPhone 4S, on contract, is $219.22. $159 for the phone + $35 activation fee + applicable taxes. (I’m doing all these calculations with Rogers, but the numbers vary only slightly with the other iOS-friendly Canadian carriers.)

The monthly plans are the real killers. Unless you think you can get by on 100MB of data per month, you’re looking at a base price of $52.35. That nets you 500MB (not great, but enough for my needs) with 200 minutes, and unlimited SMS. However, that doesn’t include such luxuries as caller ID and voicemail.

These features are sold as add-ons, either à la carte, or through “value packs”. The only sensible option through Rogers is their iPhone Value Pack, which adds:

• call display,
• name display, (how are those separate things?)
• visual voicemail,
• and ringbacks. (A fluff feature nobody uses.)

This will run an additional $12/month, bringing our monthly bill to a total of $72.72 after tax. Add that up over the course of the three-year contract, and we hit a total of $2617.76. With the initial phone costs, we’re back up to $2836.98.

This is outrageous! Keep in mind that that’s a very low-end plan (500MB data, 200 minutes). There’s no way I’m going to commit to that. I have a mortgage.

Enter Wind

Wind Mobile is a new(ish) carrier in Canada. They offer much better packages at much cheaper rates than the big carriers. The tradeoff here is that they have much less network coverage; their network only exists in five Canadian cities. (I’m fortunate enough to live in one of them.)

They have a 12-month contract promotion on right now for their Oh Canada plan. Unlimited voice, SMS, and data, for $29/month. Yes, you read that right, and yes, it includes caller ID. (Voicemail is an extra, to the tune of $5/month.)

After tax, that’s a monthly bill of $38.42. Over three years, that’s a grand total of $1383.12. (This assumes I can find a similar promotion when this one ends, or dial back my plan to keep roughly the same costs — easy, since this promotion’s features far exceed my needs.)

This is great, but Wind uses a fancy new network protocol that isn’t compatible with the iPhone. In fact, they only sell Blackberry and Android devices, which I just can’t seem to like.

What’s a geek to do?

Enter Windows Phone

I’d used a Windows Phone before, and it was one of those fish-to-water things (more on that in part two). When I was in Vegas for MIX, my workplace was kind enough to loan me an LG Optimus 7. The OS offers much of the polish that BB/Android lacks, the kind of polish you can’t give up after 44 months of iOS.

The features are close enough for my needs. It’s an easy transition.

Unfortunately, not very many Windows Phones are compatible with Wind’s network, and they’re hard to find in Canada. It turned out my only options were the Dell Venture Pro and the HTC HD7. The HD7 is a newer model, and we had one at work that I could try out for a week, so that became my target.

The only Canadian carrier to have ever sold the HD7 was Bell. Bell and Wind use completely different networking technology, so even if I could track one down, I’d still be stuck with unreasonably expensive plans.

I needed the version of the HD7 sold by T-Mobile, and American carrier whose network is compatible with Wind’s.

I found a seller on eBay with a new, still-in-the-box HD7. He would only ship to the US. Not a deal breaker, but definitely an added cost.

Including the price of the auction, the fee to unlock the phone from T-Mobile, the conversion from USD to CAD, the pick-up fee at the American UPS store, tax coming back into Canada, and the toll booth in between, my new phone cost me $366.64.

How did we do overall?

Setting my new HD7 up on Wind was relatively painless, though there is a one-time $25 fee for the SIM card. All in all, the phone, setup charges, and plan for three years totals $1749.76.

That’s a savings of $1087.22 over the iPhone package outlined above.

I like Apple’s devices. The hardware is well-designed, iOS is beautiful, and I was very, very happy all those years with my 3G. But to me, there is no way that an iPhone is worth nearly $1100 more than a Windows Phone.

§

Stay tuned for part two, where I discuss why it felt like the right time to leave iOS.

§

P.S. If anyone’s looking for CES coverage, here’s what I’ve got:

The big news of the day is that RIM announced a new version of its Playbook OS. Looks good. Coming in Feburary.

I was led to believe (along with half the rest of the internet) that Microsoft would announce a new XBox at their keynote. Apparently this did not occur. And apparently Ballmer’s final keynote was a bit of a let down. Still, the Metro update was neat.

There are also a ton of cool-looking devices being thrown around. Nokia and Samsung did pretty well, and I’ve heard a lot of buzz about Vizio.

Finally, here are some interesting people to follow if you’re looking for CES news for the rest of the week:

On Twitter, I’d recommend @miguelcarrasco for steady updates, and Mashable’s @film_girl if you want to completely drown in techie minutiae.

If Google+ is more your thing, you should circle +Mohamed Mansour for a whole bunch of reasons, useful CES highlights notwithstanding. Also, +David Bates is on location, and I’ve been enjoying his coverage thus far.

That’s it! Time to head back to the rink.

The hardest thing I’ve ever tried to learn is Calculus. Specifically, it was calculus as taught in a horrific course I was forced to take in University called Calculus 2 for Engineers.

The marking was brutal. Here’s how it worked:

There were three midterms and a final exam. Each midterm was worth 15% of the final grade, the other 45% was the exam. No assignments, no labs, just midterms and an exam. And were those midterms ever vicious! Each one had only seven questions, and they were multiple choice. It was common to have pages of formulae and calculations for any given answer, and if you made even one tiny mistake — a flipped minus sign, a minor addition error, etc — then BAM! There goes 2% of your final grade.

It was awful, and probably the most feared course in all of Engineering at U of O.

One of the most vivid memories I have of University is sitting in class after getting our second midterm back. I failed it, just like I failed the first one.

The guy next to me, a friend of mine, was in the same situation. He turned to me, and he said:

“Dan, we can pass this course. All we have to do is one hour of calculus every day for the rest of the semester. It’ll work. I’m sure of it.”

I probably said I’d “totally do it”, and I might have even stuck with it for the first week or two. But I didn’t follow through, and much to my disappointment (but hardly a surprise), I failed the third midterm, and the exam.

This is the only course I’ve ever failed.

That friend of mine stuck with his plan. He did one hour of calculus every day for the rest of the semester, and passed Calculus 2 for Engineers with a B+. Not bad, considering he failed the first third of the course.

So if you want to learn anything, whether it’s calculus, how to juggle, or how to speak Italian, all you need is discipline. You don’t need to be smart, you don’t need fancy tools or textbooks or courses, you don’t even need a teacher or mentor. All you need is discipline.

Do it for an hour a day.

What are you going to learn?

“Sometimes I wish mechanical engineering companies were more like software companies.”

All through school, and even in the workplace, I’ve heard software engineering compared to traditional engineering.

“You don’t build half a bridge, then change your mind about how it’s going to look.”

“It’s a green-field project.”

“Well, the way they estimate construction projects is like this…”

I’ve always thought other engineering disciplines had all these lessons we could learn in software, given that building software wasn’t recognized as engineering until about 1960*. It’s never once occurred to me that what we do in software could help the guys building cars, or skyscrapers, or in Marc’s case, bomb suits.

This begs the question:

What do we want other industries to say about software engineering?

If you could teach one lesson you’ve learned in software to another discipline, what would it be? What would be the top, absolutely most-important anecdote you could recite? Or inscribe on a statue of a programming icon?

Marc said it was how people are managed. The offices, the lax environment, the 20% time.

I think it’s how we integrate teams. I love working closely with designers, and I bet other engineering fields could really benefit from the software designer/developer relationship, and how it has evolved over the past decade.

Your turn.

What should the software industry be known for?

It’s about how we’ve reached a point with mobile Safari where different versions have different functionality. Is this a problem? What can we do about it?

Find out on the Macadamian blog!

We talked about mobile websites, and went over the basics for businesses looking to get into the mobile web space.

I tried my best to not look and sound completely starstruck. I’ve been reading Chris’s blog since 2008, and for those of you that aren’t (a little too) obsessed with blogging, he’s kind of a big deal.

It was a lot of fun, and surprisingly easy to set up. I think I might do a bit more video-stuff in 2012. What do you think?

Have a good weekend!

It uses a scheduling algorithm, of course. Some little process inside your operating system looks at all the applications you’re running, and decides when to spend some time processing each one.

There are all kinds of different algorithms, optimized for qualities like overhead (how much time the scheduler spends making decisions) and response time (how long an application waits before getting its “turn” on the CPU). Whatever device you’re using right now probably has a very fancy algorithm that has been perfected for over a decade.

Let’s compare this to how we as people manage our time.

It’s very similar, right? We generally have multiple tasks on the go, and we often need to prioritize them and decide where to spend our time.

I clocked some overhead thinking about this the other day, and I realized that if my brain is even using a scheduling algorithm at all, it’s due for a firmware update. I have a serious problem with starvation.

In the digital world, a process is starved when it is given a low priority and there are too many other, high-priority processes stealing all the CPU-cycles. So many important things are happening that this poor, less-critical process is constantly ignored.

Most scheduling algorithms account for this by gradually boosting the priority of tasks that have been waiting for a long time. Eventually our forgotten process gets its chance to shine.

My brain struggles with the boosting.

I’m going to cut myself some slack and rationalize that I’ve been especially busy lately. I was in Europe, then speaking at a conference in Texas, then refinishing a basement, and somewhere in there work got kind of crazy. During that time, I let a lot of things slip through.

“I’ll get to that soon. I just have to wrap up [some feu-du-jour].”

The trouble is, there have been a lot of fires, and the tasks that are still really important and I really want to do them but they’re just not quite urgent enough to ever grab enough of my attention at once have been stagnant for far too long.

They’re famished.

So here’s what I’m going to do: Once a week (for the next little while) I’m going to spend an hour or two feeding some poor, starving task(s) in my to-do list. I can work on anything I want as long as it’s:

• Not due anytime soon (if at all).
• Something productive that I legitimately want to do.

Now instead of trying to prioritize some hapless, someday-task, I’m prioritizing the FIGHT STARVATION task. This level of abstraction will (hopefully) stop me from writing off those non-urgent-but-way-awesome tasks as things I can do when I’m less busy — a sun that never seems to rise.

I’m very curious to know how you deal with this. Do you find yourself with starving tasks every now and then? Do you have some clever (or super-obvious) way of feeding them?

I’m not smart. Anyone who watched me struggle through university can tell you that. Smart kids get scholarships. Smart kids ace exams. Smart kids get good grades. I’m not smart.

But in grade six, I was still doing alright in school, and people still thought I was smart. Especially my teacher, Mrs. Mainwood.

Every time I would hand in an assignment, or show her my homework, or answer a question, she would compliment me on how well I did. It was nice. When I gave a speech in front of the whole class one time, she asked if I would come back next year and present it again so that future students could see how it’s done. Nice.

Finally one day, something strange happened.

Mrs. Mainwood came to my desk to talk about some written assignment I’d handed in. She pointed at a bulleted list I had written. It looked like this:

• some sentence about the assignment
• another sentence
• and another

The content was fine, and the rest of the assignment was fine, but she was really upset about this bulleted list. Why?

Because it had no capitalization or punctuation.

That was it. And apparently it was very important. She was furious! She went on a rant that I’m sure the rest of the class could easily hear. I still remember the exact words that ended her tirade: “You know better than that.”

I didn’t understand what she meant at the time; I probably just apologized and fixed my mistake. (I’m an apologetically easy-going guy). But I understand now. It was a big deal.

It looked stupid.

It was an eyesore on an otherwise flawless page. And you know what? Mrs. Mainwood was right. I did know better. My list looked careless, but I cared about what I was saying. See the problem?

I’m sick of seeing tweets and Facebook posts written in all lower-case letters. Questions that don’t end with question marks. Paragraphs where every thought is laid out between mangled ellipsis instead of real sentences.

I’m not talking about imperfect grammar. English is a messy language, I get that. Plurals and spelling are often non-obvious, especially for non-native speakers, and even native speakers break the rules sometimes. We’re forgiven.

But everyone — everyone — knows that sentences start with a capital letter, and end with some sort of symbol. No fancy rules, no special cases. It’s one of the first things we learn while becoming literate.

So if you’re one of those people who’s social network feed is devoid of periods, capital letters, and apostrophes, please do better. I know you have it in you. Your lack of basic grammar is distracting from your message, and it’s driving people like me and Mrs. Mainwood crazy.

You don’t have to be smart to get this right.

You know better than that.