Here’s a map of my travels last week:

Click the map to see it at full size.

I started last Sunday in Tampa, flew back to Toronto, where I hung out at the airport for about four hours until I caught another flight for Calgary.

While the Tampa trip (which took place the previous week) was about seeing the Special Lady (and getting work done remotely during the day), the Calgary trip was all about business. I was there to do an assessment of the current mobile device setup for an energy company, which involved going there, doing a series of 15 or so hour-long interviews with the company’s various business units, looking at their wireless, server and application infrastructure, and doing all manner of suit-meets-geek things.

We’d start our days early with a good breakfast…

…then make our way over to the client’s building…

…where they very generously set us up in a corner office with a great view of Eau Claire and the Bow River Valley. Unfortunately, we spend the lion’s share of our time in a conference room rather than our swanky corner office, but it was still a nice place to decompress between meetings and interviews, as well as to catch up on email and other administrivia.

We also spent some time at the Calgary office of Rogers, our partners in a number of projects. As you can see in the photo, we started our days fairly early during this trip.

Our earliest day was Thursday, when we caught a 6 a.m. flight…

…to Christina Lake, where we got to see the client’s operation in action. As you can see, the “tarmac” and runway aren’t paved — that’s just flat-packed dirt:

Here’s the terminal building:

And here’s the runway:

A short bus ride down a dirt road later, we arrived at the client’s production site, where we interviewed the field people and talked about their mobile infrastructure:

With our interviews complete, we caught the last flight out of Christina Lake back to Calgary…

…where we had a precious little bit of downtime before heading back to hotel and compiling our data. A busy techie’s got to have at least a little downtime, after all!

I’m heading back to Calgary to see our client, report on our findings, give them one of those whiz-bang presentations that are my stock in trade, present them with a whole lot of recommendations and a technology roadmap, and if all goes well, earn a fair profit for my efforts. It’s a lot of work, but I rather like this job.

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

Modern Android Takes Over

Click the graph to see the source article.

To the great annoyance of many a developer, Android 2.3 (a.k.a. “Gingerbread”), which was originally released at the end of 2010, has been the most common version of Android in the wild. Even until late last year, the general word was that accounted for half of all Android operating systems in the market.

Here’s some good news: according to Engadget, who are going by Google’s cleaned-up metrics (which are supposed to better reflect the number of active users), modern versions of Android — that is, 4.0 and higher (“Ice Cream Sandwich” and “Jellybean”) — now account for more than half the active Android installations. I think it’s safe to say that this is being driven by big sellers like the Samsung Galaxy S3 and Galaxy Note II, and should continue with the release of the S4 and HTC One.

Who Sold How Many Tablets in 1Q13?

Click the graph to see the source article.

IDC’s report on the worldwide tablet market for the first quarter of 2013 came out yesterday, and I’ve turned their numbers into the chart above. Some numbers of note:

• Total tablet shipments for 1Q13 were 49.2 million units — that’s more than were shipped in the first half of 2012.
• The year-over-year growth in tablet shipments in 1Q13 is a healthy 142%.
• Apple’s performance — selling 19.5 tablets in 1Q13 — outperformed IDC’s projected 18.7 million.
• ASUS is now the third biggest seller of tablets, thanks to its Nexus 7 tablet.
• The combined sales of Surface RT and Surface Pro tablets make up 900,000 units in 1Q13.

iOS Users Still Way More Active

Click the graph to see the source article.

You’ve probably seen a couple of articles on how iOS users account for more online activity than Android users even though there are more Android units out there, such as GoGo: in-flight Internet use 84 percent iOS, 16 Android and Time’s iOS vs. Android article. Here’s another data point: NetMarketShare’s latest web usage share data for various mobile operating systems, which shows iOS accounting for nearly 60% of web usage, more than double Android’s share.

Click to see the Twitter search for #ThorstenTips.

Wow — Karen Geier is killing it on Twitter with her “Thorsten Tips”, a bunch of silly predictions inspired by Blackberry CEO Thorsten Heins’ crazy predictions that in five years, no one will care about tablets and that Blackberry will be the undisputed leader in mobile tech. They’re tagged with #ThorstenTips, and you should get in on the fun!

I’ve posted some of my favourites below:

in 5 years, you will have fax machines in every room of your house (even the bathroom) #thorstentips

— Karen Geier (@karengeier) April 30, 2013

in 5 years, everyone’s “playlists” will be put on a “cassette” and put into a “walkman.” Sony will be a giant. #thorstentips

— Karen Geier (@karengeier) April 30, 2013

in 5 years, no one’s going to be drinking coca-cola. it’s all going to be about elk milk #thorstentips

— Karen Geier (@karengeier) April 30, 2013

Thorsten Heins, CEO of BlackBerry, made two crazy “five years from now” predictions in an interview with Bloomberg:

• “In five years I don’t think there’ll be a reason to have a tablet anymore. Maybe a big screen in your workspace, but not a tablet as such. Tablets themselves are not a good business model.” And yes, if you’re going solely by BlackBerry’s disastrous experience with the Playbook, then yes. However, with Apple and Samsung tying up the supply chains, Apple selling the iPad mini at lower-than-usual margins and Amazon selling Kindle devices at a loss, a new entrant in the tablet market would either have to have a killer price or killer features. BlackBerry are prepared to deliver neither.
• “In five years, I see BlackBerry to be the absolute leader in mobile computing — that’s what we’re aiming for. I want to gain as much market share as I can, but not by being a copycat.” Shooting for the top is what a company is supposed to aim for, and that’s exactly what he’s supposed to say. The more realistic goal isn’t so inspiring: “In five years, I want us to be in not-so-distant third place. Maybe if we’re extremely lucky, almost tied for second.”

Here’s the interview in which Heins talked about these predictions:

Heins says that he’s going after the hard-working “crazy multitaskers”, but the problem is that they’re digital omnivores — people who have a laptop, a smartphone and a tablet, and they like using all three. In fact, according to Deloitte’s recent “State of the Media Democracy” survey, these people make about 26% of the U.S. population.

Sure, he sounds delusional, but he’s saying what he has to say. If you really want delusional, you have to go back in time to 2010, at the “funeral” held for Android and iOS when Windows Phone went golden master. I was still working at Microsoft at the time — as a Windows Phone Champ, no less — and I was embarrassed.

The question they always ask at Toronto-based Unspace, the local heroes behind such get-togethers as Toronto’s Rails Pub Nite, RubyFringe, FutureRuby and Throne of .js is “Is there a better way to do this?” Their quest for better ways to do things extends to finding better development tools, which led to their early adoption of Ruby on Rails, and more recently, JavaScript-based frameworks (hence their Throne of .js conference last summer). Having been to several Rails Pub Nites, RubyFringe and FutureRuby, I can also say that they also do developer gatherings better than most.

Embergarten!

Unspace have announced their next developer get-together: Embergarten, a workshop where beginner and intermediate Ember developers can learn how to use Ember.js, the JavaScript framework whose site describes it as “a framework for creating ambitious web applications” and which developer Joachim Haagen Skeie (author of the upcoming book Ember.js in Action) describes as “web applications done right”.

The event will take place over two days, with the Beginner day taking place on Saturday, May 18 and the Intermediate day happening on Sunday, May 19. Unspace will be working with the development/consulting/training shop Tilde, Jeff “Coding Horror” Atwood’s excellent discussion forum Discourse, and the wonderful coworking space Foundery to make Embergarten a top-notch learning experience. Here’s their proposed syllabus:

• Beginner – Day 1 (Saturday, May 18)
  • Basic app structure, routing and (of course) conventions
  • Ember’s object model
  • Ember MVC
  • Simple debugging
• Intermediate – Day 2 (Sunday, May 19)
  • Managing data and persistence
  • Performance strategies
  • UI modelling
  • Testing

The sessions will come with pre-training packages and take-home materials, and there will be on-site mentors to help you as you build your first Ember.js application. If past history is any indicator, it will be fun, and there may even be some take-home swag.

The registration fee for each day is $400, or $700 if you want to attend both. If you’re serious about attending, register soon — Unspace events are popular and have a tendency to fill up rather quickly.

The Afterparty!

Ain’t no party like an Unspace party!
Photo by Andrew Louis. Click to see the original.

It wouldn’t be an Unspace event without a party, and this is no exception. Whether you’re attending Embergarten or not, you can RSVP for the Embergarten Afterparty taking place at 6:30 p.m. on Saturday, May 18 on Unspace’s lovely rooftop patio, and it’s free-as-in-beer. Sign up quickly, as these slots are likely to vanish!

Getting Started with Ember.js

If you’re curious about Ember.js, here are some resources to get you started:

• The Ember.js site: The first place you should go. Download Ember, read the docs, take it for a spin!
• Emberwatch: A continually-updated listing of Ember.js resources.
• Ember.js – Web Applications Done Right: An InfoQ article that walks you through the building of a photo album app in Ember.
• Getting into Ember.js: Rey Bango’s tutorial.
• Ember.js in Action: An upcoming book on Ember. You can get a regularly-updated advance copy via Manning’s MEAP program.
• Why Discourse Uses Ember.js: Discourse developer Robin Ward — who’ll be one of the teachers at Embergarten — explains all.

Software development is one of those fields that’s classified as “professional”, yet doesn’t have strict educational requirements as other fields, such as medicine, engineering and law do. Some of the biggest names in software come without academic credentials: consider Jobs, Gates and Zuckerberg, as well as some lesser-known-among-laypeople ones including Anders Hejlberg (creator of Turbo Pascal, chief architect of Delphi and later C#), John Carmack (lead programmer of Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake and other id software games), David Karp (Tumblr; and he doesn’t even have a high school degree), and Jamie “jwz” Zawinski (Netscape and XScreenSaver), just to name a few off the top of my head. Sooner or later, in a group of developers, you’ll hear some kind of debate as to whether a formal computer science education is truly necessary.

The debate is even more applicable for game development. Most universities have a game development course or two in their computer science offerings, but full game development academic programs seem to be offered mostly by what we in Canada call “colleges” (“community colleges” in the U.S.) or post-secondary vocational colleges like triOS. WIth relatively few avenues for formal training in game development, is there any value in being certified?

Hence the Class Warfare panel being hosted at the University of Toronto’s Bahen Centre for Information Technology (40 St. George Street) taking place this Thursday, April 25th at 7:00 p.m.. Moderated by Sheridan College’s Avrim Katzman, coordinator of their Bachelor of Game Design program, the panel will feature (listed in alphabetical order of their surnamesP:

• Dan Cox, Ubisoft Toronto / Seneca College
• Ryan Creighton, Untold Entertainment
• Steve Engels, University of Toronto
• Michael Todd, Michael Todd Games
• Emma Westecott, OCAD University

In the discussion, the panelists plan to “address the current state of post-secondary game design programs and their value in equipping the next generation with the right tools to succeed in the industry.” The event will be followed by the Hand Eye Society’s (that’s Toronto’s videogame arts organization) at the nearby pub Molly Bloom’s (191 College Street) for their monthly social.

This sounds interesting to me, and I think I’ll catch this one.

From Oleg Gelfand, found via Stanislav Platonov.

I found this picture in my Google+ stream earlier today, and it made me chuckle. “GNU/Linux on the desktop” or “Most GNU/Linux User Interfaces” would’ve been more apt captions, as TEH LUNIX is pretty sweet as a server or embedded OS, but hey, brevity is the soul of wit. Still, this image goes very well with my favourite occasional outburst for annoying Free Software and Open Source zealots or coping with poorly-documented or -interfaced FOSS applications: “Free as in CRAP!”

A few weeks back, Holger Schulze put out the call on his Information Security group on LinkedIn for respondents to a survey on BYOD and mobile security practices. Of the group’s approximately 160,000 members, 1,650 took the survey. He’s since tallied the results and published them online:

BYOD Adoption in Organizations: Still a Long Way to Go

60% of the organizations represented in the survey have not yet adopted BYOD, but are considering it. 24% are working on the policies and practices to implement a program, and about 10% of the people who haven’t yet adopted BYOD haven’t do so because they’re forbidding it outright.

It’s always a tricky thing to ask people to quantify a “gut feeling” with questions like “How would you rate your readiness for full enterprise BYOD adoption, in percent, where 100% is completely ready?” What’s the difference between 20% ready and 30% ready? Or 70% ready and 80% ready? Still, the fact that most of the organizations represented in the survey say that they’re less than 50% ready to adopt BYOD says that there’s a lot of uncertainty about their ability to set up a BYOD program.

In the meantime, here’s what the organizations are doing right now:

Note that in the chart above, both “Privately-owned devices are in very limited use” and “Privately-owned devices are widely in use, but not supported by the organization” are the 3rd and 4th most popular categories, each accounting for more than 20% of the respondents. That’s a good chunk of people who are accessing corporate resources with any policies or technologies to manage them; in some cases, IT would probably be completely unaware of how widespread the practice would be. We like to call this practice SYOD — “Smuggle Your Own Device”; others like to simply put it under the larger blanket term “Shadow IT”; either way, it has the potential to cause you great trouble.

Simply put: most organizations still have a long way to go before they’re truly ready to support employees bringing their own devices for work.

Whether you’re new to iOS programming or a long-timer, RayWenderlich.com is a valuable resource for the iOS developer. They regularly publish tutorials, tips, tricks and other goodies that you’d be crazy to do without if you’re serious about writing apps for iDevices. In addition to articles on the site, they go deeper with their books, which are excellent.

RayWenderlich.com recently published an article titled AFNetworking Crash Course, which covers how to write networking apps using AFNetworking, a library created by the folks at Gowalla that simplifies iOS network programming. In this tutorial, you build a weather app that uses AFNetworking to get its data from the World Weather Online service. Check it out; AFNetworking’s useful, and the tutorial’s pretty nice.

In order to reach the widest possible audience, the tutorial was written for iOS 5 and earlier versions of Xcode. If you’re developing with the current version of Xcode and for iOS 6 (which accounted for 83% of all iOS traffic in North America in February), you might want to make a few changes to the code in the tutorial. I’ve listed the changes below:

Use Modern Array Notation

Here’s the old way to get at the element of an array whose index is theIndex in Objective-C:

element = [theArray objectAtIndex:theIndex];

It’s a little clunky, and as I wrote in an earlier article, Objective-C’s New NSNumber, NSArray and NSDictionary Syntaxes Mean Less “Yak Shaving” for iOS and OS X Developers, there’s a much nicer way to do it:

element = theArray[theIndex];

In AFNetworking Crash Course, where you see code like this:

daysWeather = [upcomingWeather objectAtIndex:indexPath.row];

path = [[paths objectAtIndex:0] stringByAppendingPathComponent:@"WeatherHTTPClientImages/"];

change it to this:

daysWeather = upcomingWeather[indexPath.row];

path = [paths[0] stringByAppendingPathComponent:@"WeatherHTTPClientImages/"];

Use Modern Dictionary Notation

Here’s the old way to get at the item in a dictionary whose key is theKey:

item = [theDictionary objectForKey:theKey];

Again: it’s clunky. Also again, in my earlier article, I showed the modern way to access dictionary items:

item = theDictionary[theKey];

Setting items for a dictionary used to be like this:

[theDictionary setObject:theObject forKey:theKey];

Now, it’s like this:

theDictionary[theKey] = theObject;

So, in the places where you see code like:

*array = [self.xmlWeather objectForKey:@"weather";];

change it to:

*array = xmlWeather[@"weather"];

…and where you see code like:

[self.xmlWeather setObject:array forKey:@"weather"];

change it to:

self.xmlWeather[@"weather"] = array;

Update the Deprecated Location Manager Delegate Method

If you use the code as-is with iOS 6, you’ll get an error message that looks like this:

Deprecated in iOS 6.0
locationManager:didUpdateToLocation:fromLocation:
Tells the delegate that a new location value is available. (Deprecated in iOS 6.0. Use locationManager:didUpdateLocations: instead.)

Instead of using the deprecated locationManager:didUpdateToLocation:fromLocation: method, use the current locationManager:didUpdateLocations: method instead:

- (void)locationManager:(CLLocationManager *)manager didUpdateLocations:(NSArray *)locations
{
    // locations is an array of locations where the device has recently been
    // starting with the least recent and ending with the most recent.
    CLLocation *lastLocation = (CLLocation *)[locations lastObject];

    // Fetch the weather only if the last location is less than 5 minutes old
    if ([lastLocation.timestamp timeIntervalSinceNow] < 300) {
        [self.locationManager stopUpdatingLocation];
        WeatherHTTPClient *client = [WeatherHTTPClient sharedWeatherHTTPClient];
        client.delegate = self;
        [client updateWeatherAtLocation:lastLocation forNumberOfDays:5];
    }
}

A New Book: BYOD for You

Most BYOD guides we’ve seen cover BYOD from management’s or the IT department’s point of view; BYOD for You is the first we’ve seen that covers it from the rank-and-file employee’s angle. Written by Daniel Lohrmann, who blogs at Government Technology and has a site at BYOD4U.com, this Kindle ebook is a quick read that helps you determine an organizations BYOD maturity level, secure your BYOD mobile device and maximize its benefits, and how to cope with the way personal mobile devices are handled where you work.

BYOD for You is an easy lunchtime read; it’s divided into eight chapters, most of them about a half-dozen pages long, which cover these topics:

1. Categorizing your BYOD enivronment: Gold, Silver or Bronze?
2. Your workplace’s BYOD program, or the lack thereof
3. Security: How to safely use your mobile device at work and home
4. MDM
5. Privacy and other legal considerations
6. Maximizing the financial benefits of BYOD
7. Ethical dilemmas and proving you deserve your mobile device
8. Building a personalized BYOD plan that outlives your device

Each of the chapters end with a section that provides suggestions on how to handle its topic depending on the BYOD maturity level of your organization. Lohrmann’s model for BYOD maturity has three levels, which are explained below:

• Bronze: An organization operating at the Bronze BYOD level has employees who bring their own devices to work, but doesn’t have an official BYOD policy. It’s unclear about what happens when company information security policies and personal devices collide, if employees’ personal data will remain private, or if their work-related activities on personal devices will get them in trouble. Employees also bear all costs of using the device, even for work-related purposes. MDM is practically or completely non-existent.
• Silver: In organizations operating at the Silver BYOD level, there is a basic BYOD policy that spells out how its data can be accessed, as well as issues of security and privacy, and there is tacit permission for employees to access their work email from their devices. Employees can choose between all-expenses-paid COPE devices or BYOD devices without any reimbursement for operating costs. MDM is limited; it’s often something basic, like what’s provided by Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync.
• Gold: At the Gold level of BYOD, there’s a full BYOD policy, and employees are fully reimbursed for all device costs. All devices are under full MDM.

Even though it’s written for end users at a workplace, it’s a useful guide for managers who are new to the idea of BYOD and want to get a grasp of the major issues that can arise when employees bring their own devices to work. I expect that we’ll be using this in our consulting work and recommending it to our customers.

There’s a special deal if you buy it today (Wednesday, April 17, 2013): it’s selling at a dollar off — a mere CAD$3.03 at Amazon.ca, and USD$2.99 at Amazon.com.

BYOL: Bring Your Own Liabilities

Mobile technologies bring new capabilities, but new complications as well. The CIO article BYOL: Bring Your Own Liabilities points out that the dual nature of BYOD devices — owned by the employee, but used part of the time on behalf of the company (and possibly subsidized) — present some new potential legal issues, whether or not your organization has a formal BYOD program. The article lists a number of ways you can reduce the risk of legal exposure in your BYOD program; the article goes into more detail, and we’ve summarized the main points below:

• Policy: The article says that a policy defining your organization’s BYOD program is most important element of any BYOD strategy, and we’re inclined to agree. Such a policy should clearly define how your BYOD program will operate, specify the risks and responsibilities of the organization, employees and third parties, and define acceptable technologies and acceptable use. Most of it shouldn’t have to address legal issues, but having such a policy will help reduce your legal exposure. (By the bye, we’re pretty good about crafting mobile device policies, and we even have a guidebook to help you build your own.)
• Liability issues: Figure out whether your organization or your employees are liable in certain cases, such as: Who’s responsible for misplaced or stolen devices? Who’s responsible in the event of a malware attack? Who pays for support?
• Licensing: Are the apps on mobile devices — both company- and employee-owned — properly licensed?
• Insurance: Will your organization’s insurance policy cover devices that it doesn’t directly own or lease?
• Data security: As the article says: “Two topics generally colour the legal framework in the context of data security; these are confidential information and litigation obligations, both of which are concerns for any mobility based system.”
• Confidentiality: We take our mobile devices (especially our smartphones) everywhere, and sooner or later, they’ll get lost or stolen. You need to consider the implications of missing mobile devices, from the loss of your organization’s sensitive information, to inadvertent breaches of confidentiality agreements with other parties, to remote wipes, to the consequences of remotely wiping an employee’s personal data. Along with the issues that come with confidential or sensitive data on the device, there’s also the issue of such data off the device, stored with third-party cloud services like Dropbox.
• Discovery obligations: Data stored on mobile devices used for work may be subject to electronic discovery, the pre-trial phase in litigation where each party can get evidence from the opposing party. You may need to take measures to keep work and personal data separate, keeping in mind that your organization can’t object to producing some information in the discovery process simply because it has some personal employee information mixed in.
• Privacy: One reason to try to keep work and personal data separate is to preserve employee privacy, especially when backing up information. Ideally, you want to back up only the work-related information and store no personal employee information (such as their address book or photos) on your organization’s backup system.
• Surveillance and tracking: The ability to remotely track a device is a useful thing to have when it’s lost or misplaced, but it can be a cause for concern about its use for tracking employees. The article recommends the use of a data surveillance policy that clearly spells out how devices will be tracked, and if your organization will record information stored or transmitted by the device.

BYOD and Shadow IT

From an earlier article:

Shadow IT sounds like some kind of future slang that [William] Gibson would’ve coined, but it’s an office term referring to the set of applications and systems that are used in organizations without that organization’s approval, and especially without the approval of the IT department. It’s usually the result of one or a handful of employees discovering an application, service or system that solves a problem in a way that seems more effective, expedient, and more free of red tape than if it were solved by IT. Shadow IT usually starts off as an ad hoc solution, but if it becomes popular within an organization, its use can become standard practice, even without the approval or oversight of the IT department.

When people talk about shadow IT, they usually talk about the security issues. Mike Foremen in Huffington Post UK writes about another equally important issue: the creation of data silos, where information vital to the business lives in places where it can’t be found.

Over on my personal blog, The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century, I’ve posted a layperson-friendly article titled How to Mine Bitcoins for Fun and (Probably Very Little) Profit. It provides a description of what Bitcoins are and how they’re mined that should be comprehensible by non-techies, some easy-peasy instructions for turning any old Windows machine into a Bitcoin mining rig, and a quick guide to figuring out how much (or how little) money you’ll make on your mining venture.

With the North American debut of Samsung’s new flagship phone — the Galaxy S4 — coming soon, the advertisements can’t be far off. Stefan Constantinescu has been continually searching YouTube for any Galaxy S4 promos and found some in Samsung’s official YouTube channel for the Netherlands; he links to them over at Android Beat, and I’ve posted them below.

Each of three videos he found focus on one Samsung-specific software feature:

• Sound shot: a feature that lets you record the surrounding sounds as you take a photo, so you can do things like take a photo of a busy downtown square and include the sounds of the traffic and people.
• S Translator: lets you speak one language into the Galaxy S4, hit a button, and have the S4 repeat what you said in another language. It reminds me of the idea behind the “Mandarax” in Kurt Vonnegut’s Galápagos.
• Group Play: links together several S4s so that they play the same song, in sync. I’m not sure how useful this is, but I can see some potentially interesting uses for flash mobs or group activities.

There are a couple of notable things about these ads:

• There’s no mention of or poking fun at the iPhone or its dedicated fanbase. Keep in mind that these ads are “international” ones; they may yet go with the iOS-bashing tack with the ads for North America.
• These ads show people enjoying the Galaxy S4 user experience. Each ad basically says “Hey, look at this feature: here’s what it does, and here’s how people are enjoying it”. Rather than simply listing features or showing off specs (which are useful to most people), the ads tell a story.

Here are the ads:

Sound Shot

S Translator

Group Play

Meanwhile, Android Central has uploaded this ad to their YouTube channel. This one does a lot of ooh-ing and aah-ing over the hardware:

Galaxy S4 Teaser

Found via Matt McDougall.

SharePoint: When 24GB and the Fastest i7 Won’t Cut It

For some people, there’s no thing as having too much hardware. I know a few guitar players who’d salivate at the chance to get their mitts on this beast:

12-necked guitar created by Yoshihiko Satoh.
Click the photo to see the full story.

It may be the same case if you’re a SharePoint developer. Here’s an excerpt from an article written by Sahil Malik titled Upped My Main Dev Machine, where a developer talks about what he did to speed up some painfully long build times (with some formatting and emphasis added by me):

Last Friday, I was busy compiling a big project in my consulting life. I realized, it takes a good 5-10 minutes for the project to compile and deploy.

On my main desktop, I was pimping 24G of RAM and a Core i7 930 processor.

The problem wasn’t those 5-10 minutes, the problem was, I got distracted, started watching funny dog videos on youtube, and well – lost time, lost track of what I was doing. Quite unproductive.

…

So, I got in my car, drove to a local hardware store, and bought new computer parts. 3 hours later, I have my new rig running.

I now have a gigabyte x79 up4 motherboard, Corei7 3930K processor, and 64G of RAM.

I can understand needing that kind of setup for computationally intensive work — weather simulations, AI, protein folding, controlling the flight of SpaceX ships — but for compiling  Sharepoint applications? We’re not talking about multidimensional matrix math, Fourier transforms, or Watson-style artificial reasoning, but building the sort of applications that SharePoint was meant to host: web applications and sites, document sharing, blogs and forums, and list management.

Requiring such big iron to build relatively mundane applications is like requiring all the architecture, engineering and construction teams behind the Burj Khalifa in Dubai to renovate your kitchen.

It shouldn’t be surprising that many people have started looking for alternatives:

Click the photo to see it at full size.

Why I Don’t Develop for Windows Phone

Since I was once a Microsoft developer evangelist specializing in Windows Phone and a designated Windows Phone Champ, I’m occasionally asked why I don’t do Windows Phone development anymore.

One of the reasons is quite simple: I can’t. I’d need new hardware. Even more so than SharePoint developer Sahil Malik. At worst, he has to wait ten minutes for each build. I can’t even do that.

Here’s my best Windows machine at the moment: a late 2008-era Dell Latitude E6500 with 8 gigs of RAM, with a Core 2 Duo P8700 running at 2.5 GHz. It’s hardly top-of-the-line, but when it was used as a developer demo machine at Microsoft, it had no problem building Windows desktop apps, web applications with ASP.NET MVC or Windows Phone 7 apps. Later, after it was given to me as a fabulous parting gift, it proved to be a fine machine for building PHP, Rails and CoffeeScript apps under both Windows and Ubuntu. Even though it’s not my main development machine, it still performs yeoman service at my home office.

My other Windows machine is my living room entertainment/casual hacking box, a 2009-era HP IQ526 TouchSmart touchscreen all-in-one with 4 gigs of RAM, powered by a Core 2 Duo T6600 processor. I used a similar machine at Microsoft to demo Windows Phone 7 app and Android app development.

Both of these machines are powered by processors that don’t support SLAT — Second Level Address Translation. The current version of Windows’ Hyper-V virtual machine, on which the Windows Phone 8 emulator runs, requires SLAT. i3, i5 and i7 processors have SLAT, but not the older Core 2s. My Windows machines may not be new, but they do a fine job running 64-bit Windows 8, the current edition of Microsoft Office, Adobe CS6 applications and more. Oddly enough, I can develop Windows 8 desktop and tablet apps with them; I can even develop Android and BlackBerry apps. I just can’t use them to develop Windows Phone apps. And I’m not the only one in this boat.

Beside my HP Touchsmart is this 20″ iMac that’s even older — it’s from mid-2007 and sports a Core 2 Duo T7300 processor. I’ve maxed out its RAM beyond the advertised 4 gigs; it turns out that you can take it up to 6:

This machine came out almost six years ago. That’s around the same time as the original iPhone and three years before the iPad. In spite of its “age”, it runs the current version of MacOS (10.8, a.k.a. “Mountain Lion”) as well as Xcode and JetBrains’ AppCode — simultaneously (that’s AppCode 2 you’re seeing on the screen right now). Along with being a fine Rails, Django, and all-those-crazy-JS-frameworks dev machine, it does a fine job of building iOS apps for present-day devices, whether via Xcode, Xcode + AppCode, Appcelerator Titanium, RubyMotion or what-have-you. It’s also a nice Android development machine.

And Then There’s the Market

If my hardware problem wasn’t a big enough barrier, there’s also Windows Phone’s standing in the market. Here’s a chart that was published yesterday in a Splat F article, Microsoft’s Mobile Comeback Isn’t Happening:

Click the graph to see it at full size.

In spite of the fact that Windows Phone is outselling the iPhone in Elbonia, there just isn’t enough demand, either in terms of quantity or quality. Windows RT’s prospects are even worse.

I’ve decided that the best mobile development self-education approach for me is: teach myself iOS development first, Android development eventually, perhaps Appcelerator, and barring any dramatic changes in circumstance, don’t bother with anything else. I’d love to learn how to develop for all the mobile platforms, but I just haven’t got the time.

Update: I added the graph from Splat F, which David Janes pointed me to. Thanks, David!

Click to see the photo at full size.

Whether you’re an agile developer or a backseat driver, this vehicle’s got your name on it.

Sometimes, when I read stuff on the web, it makes me want to do this.

I’ve seen technology make some great leaps over the past three decades. As for some technologists, they’ve remained stuck in the stone age.

“She’s Only Here Because of Her Tits”

Here’s the start of game developer Andy Moore’s most recent blog post:

Last night was the end of an amazing GDC trip. A handful of remaining friends and I made a journey out to JapanTown and we had an amazing meal. It was a great way to end the trip.

One of my friends, and a fellow game developer, was there for dinner.  Her trip to GDC was planned last-minute, thanks to someone obtaining her a (very expensive!) all-access pass.

When recounting this chain of events, a male game developer at the table said that she only got the GDC pass “because of her tits.”

The table largely responded with aghast looks and silence. It was brought up that perhaps her ticket was thanks to being an award-winning game developer.

The same male responded with the ever-classy “sure, award winning tits.”

Ah, the “fake geek girl” accusation, just in slightly different form. As this Atlantic article puts it, it’s not really about female duplicity, but male insecurity.

For even more jack-assery, read the post and check out the comments. Zoe, the female game developer who got the pass and was the target of the dickish remark, tells the story from her perspective, and another game developer named Phil — who at least in the beginning seems to have good intentions — effectively tells her to “man up”.

And we wonder why the industry is such a god-damned sausage party.

Programmers Being Dicks

Andy Moore’s story would fit very well in the tumblr of similar stories called Programmers Being Dicks. It’s been around for just over a year, and you get three guesses as to what it’s all about.

Navigating the Sausage Party

Shoreditch Works has a great collection of advice on how to navigate the male-skewed tech industry and tech conferences, and even some good advice for guys from Aanand Prasad, which I’ll repeat below:

No-one is without privilege, but as a man, you’ve been dealt a truckload. It’s difficult to acknowledge it without feeling ashamed or defensive, which is probably where that ridiculous idea of the “man-hating feminist” comes from. Just remember:

Snow Crash and Sexism in Tech

And finally, here’s the full text of an entry I made earlier in my personal blog, The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century…

It’s been over twenty years since Neal Stephenson’s “cyberpunk” novel Snow Crash was first published. A young Cory Doctorow, then working at the sci-fi bookstore Bakka Books, saw me in my engineering jacket from Crazy Go Nuts University and convinced me to buy it.

As is the tradition with the best science fiction, Snow Crash is is densely packed with all sorts of interesting ideas about present-day society, somewhat disguised in the wrappings of what was then the near future. Stephenson has a gift for illustrating them, and a number stand out in my mind even years later, such as how children’s pajamas of that near future could either be fireproof or non-carcinogenic (but not both!), or how every guy under 25 secretly believes that under the right circumstances, he could’ve been the biggest badass in the world.

I first read the book in late 1992, soon after it was published. It had been only a couple of years since the killing of fourteen women at Montreal’s École Polytechnique, a couple of months since Anita Hill’s testimony at Clarence Thomas’ confirmation hearings, and Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth and Susan Faludi’s Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women were often-discussed topics on my university’s campus. All this, along with my own sense of social justice, is likely why of all the interesting ideas that Stephenson put into Snow Crash, the one that stands out most for me was how men in tech viewed women in tech. 

Here’s the excerpt, with some added formatting. Given what’s going on in the world of tech today (including the surprised reactions at the discovery that the person who runs the wildly popular I Fucking Love Science Facebook page is a woman), it’s still spot-on:

Her name is Juanita Marquez.

Hiro has known her ever since they were freshmen together at Berkeley, and they were in the same lab section in a freshman physics class. The first time he saw her, he formed an impression that did not change for many years: She was a dour, bookish, geeky type who dressed like she was interviewing for a job as an accountant at a funeral parlor. At the same time, she had a flamethrower tongue that she would turn on people at the oddest times, usually in some grandiose, earth-scorching retaliation for a slight or breach of etiquette that none of the other freshmen had even perceived.

It wasn’t until a number of years later, when they both wound up working at Black Sun Systems, Inc., that he put the other half of the equation together. At the time, both of them were working on avatars. He was working on bodies, she was working on faces.

She was the face department, because nobody thought that faces were all that important — they were just flesh-toned busts on top of the avatars. She was just in the process of proving them all desperately wrong. But at this phase, the all-male society of bit-heads that made up the power structure of Black Sun Systems said that the face problem was trivial and superficial.

It was, of course, nothing more than sexism,the especially virulent type espoused bymale techies who sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists.

Update: A Reader Responds, and Daddy Takes Him to School in the Car of Pain

Zapp Brannigan, the personification of Mosolotshane’s attitude.

In the comments, a socially developmentally-delayed reader named “Mosolotshane” replied:

Apparently, women are sensitive, delicate creatures who must be shielded from coarse language lest they abandon their dreams of becoming a software developer and seek the shelter of being a stay-at-home-mom.

Before I could reply, one of the other grown-ups, Reg Braithwaite, responded with a great essay, I am Obviously Pissed, on his site. You should read the whole thing, but here’s the meat of his response:

In the 1950s, men did whatever they wanted and women had to put up with it. They also lived according to a strict set of rules about propriety that involved wearing a suit to work, cutting their hair, and so on. And no, they couldn’t say whatever they liked. here were very strict rules about what kind of language was appropriate and what wasn’t, where you could use a word like “whore” and where you couldn’t.

Despite claims to the contrary, if you wore a tie to work you were not expected to make jokes about penises on the job. That was a blue-collar thing to do. Sexy pinups were acceptable at work, if you also wore a hard hat and/or got grease on any part of your clothing.

Now it’s 2013, and you and your kind are trying to have it both ways, you greedy fucks. You want to insult and belittle people just like they did in the 1950s, but you also want to be free to wear whatever you want and say whatever you want in the workplace and/or at conferences where people are working.

There is no free lunch, and I am here to be the adult in your stinking playpen and tell you that. Now, either you invent a time machine and go back to that halcyon time where everyone feared atomic death from the skies, or you embrace the fact that times have changed.

Well put, Reg. I salute you with a filet mignon on a flaming sword!

Thanks to my friend Peach Flambee for the Zapp Brannigan reference!

Infographic of the Day: BYOD by the Numbers

Today’s BYOD infographic is brought to you by ReadWrite and Intel and includes some interesting figures:

Here are the figures from the infographic:

• 38% of US CIOs were expected to support BYOD by the end of 2012.
• 82% of surveyed companies in 2013 allow some or all workers to use employee-owned devices.
• 74% of IT leaders believe “BYOD can help our employees be more productive”.
• 57% minutes: The average amount of time reclaimed per worker per day in an Intel BYOD program.
• Less than 1/4 of all IT managers view cost savings as a key benefit of BYOD programs.
• “Employees Satisfaction” and “Productivity” are the prime benefits to 58% of surveyed employees.
• 49% of U.S. IT managers “Strongly Agree that BYOD Improves Worker Productivity”.
• BYOD boosts mobile: “BYOD could also expand the total number of mobile users substantially — by 50% or more” (Gartner).
• Security is biggest BYOD objection worldwide: it’s viewed as the #1 BYOD concern in the USA, Germany, South Korea and Australia.
• 1/3 of IT Managers list “Lack of compatibility with our IT infrastructure” as a key reason for outlawing BYOD, but concerns vary by country and platform.

BYOD in the Big Apple

Creative Commons photo by Ed Sweeney. Click to see the original.

The New York Post (yeah, not the best of papers, but they’re quoting Cisco’s BYOD Insights 2013 report) posted a quick report on New Yorkers’ use of mobile phones for work, which includes these figures:

• 91% of Gothamites surveyed say they use their mobile phones for work.
• Only 11% of the surveyed receive a stipend for their BYOD devices.
• 18% of New York employees bringing their own devices to work will be reimbursed by their employers for a lost or damaged phone.
• 70% of NYC employees who use their smartphones for work are expected to read emails after working hours.
• Across the United States, the professions with the highest rates of personal smartphone use at work are in education (95%) and tech (90%). The profession with the lowest rate is retail.

Creative Commons photo by Miguel Pires da Rosa. Click to see the original.

Other findings from Cisco’s BYOD survey:

• 9 in 10 Americans use their smartphones for work.
• 40% don’t password-protect their smartphones.
• 51% connect to unsecured wireless networks with their smartphone.
• 52% disable their smartphone’s “Bluetooth discoverable” mode.

Cisco’s report, BYOD Insights 2013, which you can download for free, concludes with this final thought:

The number of Americans with smartphones is steadily increasing. Adults who reported owning a device they classified as a smartphone jumped 12 percent in 2012 according to the Pew Center. As that number grows and more Americans return to the workforce in the recovery from this Recession, BYOD will cause security breakdowns and cost companies money.

Knowing some of your employees’ smartphone habits can help you prepare to mitigate the impact of those events.

Dell: Half of Firms with BYOD Policies Have Had a Security Breach

Creative Commons photo by Nick Carter. Click to see the original.

Dell’s Executive Director of End User Computing, Margaret Franco, reports that half of their customers whose BYOD policies allowed users to bring in any mobile device they want to work experienced a security breach. That’s hardly a surprise; at my consultancy, I recommend specifying a set of supported BYOD platforms and devices and matching them with the appropriate apps, utilities and practices. You can’t go “anything goes” with BYOD; that’s just asking to give your IT department — if not the whole company — a big bag of hurt.

A popular implement for a common type of quarterbacking.

In the wake of the PyCon 2013 “Dongle” incident and the ensuing fallout, the emails — but notably, no tweets, Facebook comments or any sort of messages delivered in the open  – have been trickling in, asking what my thoughts on the matter were, given that:

• I’ve been a developer evangelist for about a decade, and
• My reputation for having a ribald sense of humour.

My answer: wait.

With the intersection of a lot of “hot button” issues: privacy, privilege, sexism, racism, back-and-forth accusations of misogyny and misandry and conflicting visions of justice, there’s been far too much bile being passed back and forth for listening and civil discourse to take place.

(If you really must read something on the topic, Amanda Blum’s take on it in her blog most closely aligns with my own point of view.)

I’d like my contribution to the discussion to be one that benefits rather than harms, and you can’t do that by “shooting from the hip”. That will take time and thought, care and consideration.

In the meantime, since the incident has caused more than a few people to ask “What is a developer evangelist, anyway?” Here are some links you may find useful:

• Company Man (or: The New Job) (October 2008)
• Evangelist, Immigrant and Shaman (May 2009)
• Developer Evangelist. Toronto Area. Now Hiring. Maybe You? (October 2010)
• The New Job: Technical Evangelist at Shopify (April 2011)
• A Day in the Life of a Developer Evangelist (June 2012)

…and here’s an article about how well I evangelized evangelism.

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

Found via Catsmob.com

Given the trend towards skinny notebooks like the MacBook Air and lookalike “ultrabooks” as our main axes, many of us have to work with a measly one or two USB ports. The colour-coding’s also helpful. I’d love to see more stacking USB cables like this.

There’s anything really wrong with using your personal technology to suit your needs, even if those needs are “selfies” (self-photographs, or as the folks on Tumblr say, GPOY — Gratuitious Photos Of Yourself). It is an interesting observation on how technology changes drive usage changes, what with the difference between bulky 1960s film cameras and today’s portable networked pocket computers that just happen to take photos. If Neil Armstrong had a modern day phone or camera and better than 50-50 odds of making it back to Earth alive (they asked William Safire to write a speech for President Nixon to use should the astronauts be stranded on the moon), he might’ve taken more pics. Probably would’ve shot some video, too.