Trimbo

Pentaho won't launch on MacOS X

2012-01-30T11:35:00.000-08:00

Download Pentaho, unpack it. You double click "Data Integration 64-bit" and nothing happens.

When you try it on the commandline, it gives you:

LSOpenURLsWithRole() failed with error -10810 for the file /Users/trimbo/Downloads/data-integration/Data Integration 64-bit.app.

The solution is to give the JavaApplicationStub file execution permission.

chmod +x ~/Downloads/data-integration/Data Integration 64-bit.app/Contents/MacOS/JavaApplicationStub

Now you can double click the icon and it will launch.

Hopefully this helps someone.

Why I didn't go work on Facebook games

2012-01-14T18:16:00.000-08:00

Many people were surprised when I left the games industry last year and moved over to a completely different kind of ecommerce engineering position.

Some background. I started out of college working on computer graphics (CG) for commercials. This was in 1995, and a lot of money was made doing this. Most commercials with any kind of CG in them would cost $500K, and commercials that were entirely CG would be $1MM plus. These numbers are obscene today, right? And I *loved* doing commercial work. Commercials were fun, 4-8 week projects that you could just rip through and move on.

Dreamworks had an arm that did commercials, believe it or not -- and I asked Jeffrey Katzenberg if he would invest in the business more. This was in 2000 or so and were doing very well with some spots for Intel and Visa, earning a good profit. But shortly after I left that company, he killed the whole division. He made the right decision in retrospect though it was growing at the time. The reality is that those margins began to drop, fast. By 2002, when I left commercials for good, you started to see home PCs capable of doing real time editing of standard def video. Within a few more years, HD could be edited on a home PC. The whole idea was commoditized.

Reflecting on that over many years it became apparent to me that I needed to always watch for industries becoming commoditized. This is what Katzenberg saw happening in commercials and in film effects. I did another gig in film effects, but the next opportunities were all overseas (ruh-roh, again). So I moved into video games. And now games are doing that. Here's why.

Let's start with Facebook games.

First of all, Facebook games are almost never games. They are designed to be obligations, like Tamagotchi or SeaMan or Animal Crossing. One of the best essays ever written about Farmville is this one, which outlines theories on what defines a game, and why Farmville is not one. But let's pretend they're actually fun, entertaining, escapist games at the moment, and they're just freemium in business model.

How do you make a freemium Facebook game successful? You must reach as many people as possible. Ok, how do you do that? You make people enlist their friends into the game. Ok, how do you do that?

To make people enlist their friends in the game, you must optimize on revenue by way of cross-promotion. Right, that means optimized towards either spamming friends or paying instead. This takes game design and turns it on its ear. In my book, there is no such thing as game design once you are revenue driven in game mechanic itself.

Few people I know want to be a "game maker" in that environment, myself included. It's no small wonder that so many people I've talked to who have worked on those titles didn't like it. It's probably because they're not actually designing fun games there, they're making design decisions based on analytics. Those two concepts are nearly orthogonal. Starcraft wouldn't exist if it was designed to be freemium, and Farmville wouldn't be the money machine it is if it wasn't run that way.

Anyway, that's all fine and dandy because maybe some people like making obligation games armed with Tableau and Vertica, good for them. But this leads into the next stage: creating content for these platforms must be commoditized in order to survive long term. Not every customer of one game will want to play the next title. So you must offer more and more choices as time goes on and customers specialize to unique experiences in their mind.

Do the math. There are 20 friends playing Farmville. One pays for virtual junk, the others do not -- this is the rate (<5%) that Zynga has disclosed to the SEC. Now let's assume there's a 50% churn of customers per month. That is, a 50% chance that one user who pays will not be playing a title in a month. That's the rate I've found reported on the interwebs for social games.

To stay revenue neutral, you will need to migrate your entire customer base to a new game every 2 months.

And the chances are low that you'll interest the same customers in the next game. Maybe one Farmville player migrated to Cityville, and one migrated to Castleville. Over time, you'll need more and more titles to keep the interest and bring in more people to the spam loop. This is the only way they can achieve revenue optimization across a large audience of unpaid customers in freemium games.

As a result, making these games must become a commodity to the extreme. They will become cheaper and of less quality because many more of them need to be made to satisfy growth in light of the facts that there is extreme churn and 95% of Zynga's audience pays nothing at all.

If you don't believe me, you can see this in action right now. Sims Social dominated 2011 for the most part, but EA overall is losing customers while Zynga stays somewhat steady. EA had nowhere to put customers and their friends once they lost interest in Sims Social.

The business plan of "I'm going to make a facebook game" just won't work for very long. I worked for a short time at a company that dropped several million taking their top line game franchise and converting it into a Facebook game. I realized the tough position of Facebook enterprises while I was at that company.. even if that had been successful, you can see what happened with EA. Overall your revenues decline unless you have somewhere to put customers immediately when they lose interest.

Zynga has been able to escape this fate for years because they had the luck of growing as Facebook grew. But now that Facebook itself is leveling out (and shrinking here in the US), Zynga needs to expand production significantly. Spending less on more titles and hoping that the customer churn goes into itself, rather than someone else's games or to another distraction.

In my next part, I'll take on "Why I didn't go work on mobile games (well, actually I did, but then quit in one month)"

SaaS that has ASPX in the URL? Run away.

2011-12-17T09:38:00.000-08:00

This is not a Windows bashing post. I worked on Windows exclusively for about 10 years and it's what we run in our house. Developing for Windows is a great experience, with Visual Studio, C#, the .NET framework, Microsoft has made it so. That said...

Heard of SaaS? It's all the hotness after software vendors figured out that selling software for businesses to run on their own computers wasn't going to work anymore. Thanks to the fast-paced American business market and pointy-haired CIO types, we no longer have funds for local IT folks to deploy and operate machinery. So we'll pay 3x as much for a "hosted" solution. That's where SaaS comes in to ~~rip us off~~ offer a solution.

In any case, two of the most appalling SaaS products I've seen in the past year has been from vendors who based their stack all on Microsoft technology. For one of them, when you take a look at their product, it takes about 10 seconds to figure out this is a mishmash of ASP.NET 1.0, 1.1, 2.0 (and so on), components. Overall, It has the old and truly busted behavior of a Microsoft "web application" that uses Viewstate and iframes. God help you if you refresh or hit the back button. The other vendor didn't even support non-IE for the first 3 months of us being on their platform. How our people ever decided to use this, since we almost all work on Macs, I'll never know, but it's absolutely outrageous in 2011 if your website doesn't support Safari, Chrome and Firefox.

The problem with using extensive Microsoft libraries like this is that you are bound to what they implement. The web will improve. Compare the HTML and Javascript used in 2000 to that of a website today. When you're depending on Microsoft's "webforms" and such to generate that code, you are at their whims for your user's experience. Then when Microsoft decides to upgrade that experience, you'll need to upgrade, but oftentimes that legacy code won't be easy to upgrade. Consider the state of the art in .NET web tech from 2002 until now: porting all of that UX from Webforms 1.0 to ASP.MVC ... that's just not easy.

In general, I would run away from Microsoft tech for building a SaaS unless there are circumstances that require it. One is integration with other services on the Windows platform. Then it makes a lot of sense. Let's say your SaaS specifically helps people manage IIS instances for their own websites, and those customers want to use IIS. Fine, whatever.

On my last Windows project, I did the math on how much we'd save in software licenses by moving to Linux. It was only around $250K... not enough to justify the move. But having been removed from Windows for work for a year now, I'm fairly convinced that when you're building a service, you should go for Linux and FOSS, and it has nothing to do with up front cost. You just don't control your own destiny otherwise. Problem with MSVC? Bitch to Microsoft on their issue voting system and hope they fix it. Problem with GCC? Patch that shit. And being a customer of SaaS, I'm just not going to trust vendors that don't understand this.

No, you don't know C/C++ [Resume/Interview Rants, Part 2]

2011-11-23T20:45:00.000-08:00

Part 1 is here.

Probably more than 50% of the resumes I see -- maybe even 75% -- have a "languages" section. For those not familiar, a resume will look like this:

Joe Coder
1313 Mockingbird Lane, Sunnyvale, CA

Objective: To be a Great Programmer
Languages: C/C++, Java, PHP, HTML, XML, CSS, Javascript, ASP.NET, T-SQL
Prior Work Experience: PHP Web Company, Inc. 2009-Present

See what he did there? There's a "languages" line that just lists off a bunch of random stuff. Recruiters, and not to mention LinkedIn, will tell you that this is how you get your resume found online -- by putting in a lot of keywords that people are looking for. Some resumes I've seen are so chock full of keywords that a person 2 years out of school has a 3 page resume. I think my resume finally passed 1 page last year... that's, um, 17 years since I've started working full time and 25 years since my first job.

And oftentimes this works out. Consulting is one area where it does. People want to hire consultants with a particular skill that they don't have. So if I was looking for a C programmer and didn't know the first thing about it, I'd probably look at Joe's resume and be interested. When I interviewed him, he would probably be able to show enough savvy to make it through the interview, and I would hire him.

When he arrived to do the work, he would be cramming to make it through the day to do the work in C. Googling frantically, asking questions on StackOverflow, etc. But since the client really doesn't know how to write code himself, and Joe is a resourceful guy, chances are the project will go along fine. The project will be delivered, albeit in likely hacky code, and everyone is happy.

It absolutely does not work this way when you're looking for full time software engineering gigs.

And here are some pro tips on what I'm looking at. My hope here is that over time, everyone will save a lot of time by following these tips.

First thing's first: I'm suspicious because you put HTML, XML, CSS, and ASP.NET under "languages".

This is the first red flag. When you're interviewing for a software engineering gig, markup languages don't count. I expect to be able to hand any decent software engineer any crazy-ass markup language and have them understand it. I would say that a blanket classification for listing a language in this section is it has to be Turing Complete, but, unfortunately, HTML+CSS is Turing Complete. So I just have to say "markup languages don't count."

ASP.NET is not a language at all. It's a library. This is like saying that stdlib is a language I know. Yet ASP.NET is in these lists all the time, along with Spring, Hibernate, Struts, etc.

And damn you Ohloh for listing many of these under "languages". How is XML any more a language than a CSV file?

Don't list it if it's just a hobby language

Unless you've undertaken some serious hobby work, that is, and feel as prepared as you would with your work.

I had a candidate who was doing fairly well in the interview, telling me about his last job. At some point I noted he listed Ruby and Rails on his resume. I said, "Hey, what have you done in Ruby?" He said it was hobby work. I asked what it is that he's created, family website, something else? He admitted he had bought the book and never really read it.

Let's repeat that: He put on his resume a language for which he had bought a book and never read. O...M...G.

Don't be that guy. Please.

If you list it, be prepared to answer questions about it.

This is an extension of the first point in part 1. Red flag number two: you just spent 2-3 years at a PHP company, doing PHP work. Yet PHP is the third listed language on your resume? Shouldn't it be #1? Your best language should be what you're working with right now, right?

If you have "C/C++" on your resume's "languages" section first, to me that means that either that's your main interest or your main expertise. When I ask you questions, that's where I'm going to go. If you don't want questions about a subject, do not include it on your resume.

The other thing is, I do not properly introduce myself. I'll tell you my name, but not what I do. So you have no idea if I'm a PHB or a neckbeard (answer: 50% of each, well maybe 75% PHB these days... *cries*). This is a trap. If my introductory batting-practice questions lead you into making yourself out to be an expert in something, I may just drill you hard on that later.

Thing is, I won't ask you about stuff you say you don't know

If you come to me saying all you know is PHP, I'm not going to ask you about C++. If you know a language I don't know, and explain it well, I will take that all at face value.

Most importantly (and subject of post): if you put C/C++, it makes me sad

They're not the same! If you write C++ that looks like C, you're doing it wrong. If you write C that looks like C++, your coworkers will likely make fun of you. But if you lump them together as one language on your resume, I'll be sad. If you say that "C/C++" is a language, verbally, in the interview (this has happened), I'll just go ahead, take the blue pill and end it all now.

So the first thing I'm going to ask you is "which is it, C or C++? What's the difference anyway?" If you can't answer this, and you've led me to think you should know, then it's a hard spot to recover from. I don't even think of myself as a good C or C++ programmer given the genius co-workers I've had over the years, so if you've set yourself up as one and can't answer my easy questions... that's just a problem.

Bottom line: if you have to have a "languages" section on your resume, for whatever reason:

List it in the order of languages you know best
If you want to work in a particular language, you're taking a risk listing it first if you don't know it well. But, I don't blame you for trying.
Don't list stuff you don't know.
Don't list XML, HTML, CSS unless you're a designer, and call them skills or markup or something other than bulking them with C++ and Java, please.
For the love of god, don't lump C and C++ together.

Full disclosure, my languages line from my very first resume coming from college (1994):

C, C++, Renderman Shading Language, perl, csh, sh.

And I'd say I totally overestimated my experience with Renderman Shading Language (shouldn't have listed it) and underestimated my experience with Perl (I didn't realize at the time I was more of an expert than I knew).

[Edit]

Heh. I've done the "C/C++" misnomer myself on this very blog. In my defense, I was mostly programming in C# in 2008, so my brain was fairly warped.

Space: it's just not our thing

2011-07-24T23:29:00.001-07:00

I saw a very nice and sentimental video of the Space Shuttle launches.

Really nice, nicely done.

Let me give you my perspective on the Space Shuttle. I love NASA and what they have done with the Shuttle and Apollo before it. However, the time for those has passed and we should not replace them with anything that takes humans into space. Ever.

Space is simply not a human thing. We are far too fragile to survive out there for any meaningful duration, and I think the space shuttle proved that fact. Over the last 30 years, we've accomplished launching a telescope, several satellites and some erector sets from the Shuttle. Furthermore, the Shuttle has enjoyed a 1 in 25 chance of death -- meaning you are 365,000x more likely to die on a Shuttle than a commercial flight.

I'm not trying to diminish the accomplishment, I think putting humans in space is hard. What I am trying to ridicule is the idea that we should keep doing it. It really is too expensive for where it gets us. We cannot do much with the limited opportunity we're given to be in space, and to give us more would be cost prohibitive and risk too many lives.

No, something else needs to take space from here. Either it will be artificial intelligence or some sort of engineered organism that can do it. We're the first species in the history of the world that can create a being that can explore for us. It's time we start focusing on that. Automata will get us to the next level, not more Shuttle-like stuff.

Apple is now Microsoft

2011-07-04T17:38:00.000-07:00

You know why? Because I've become a Mac person. That would be impossible if they weren't now Microsoft.

The Mac is the path of least resistance. It comes with software that gets the job done (iPhoto, iMovie). It's rare to worry about drivers. You won't worry about support. Apple is ubiquitous. There's an Apple store near every major city. Your iPhone works with it. Your iPod works with it. It has iTunes. It connects to all of your Windows stuff. It's supported by everything you pretty much will care about except some games.

And, having just gone to Best Buy to look over the competition, Apple has the best hardware for the buck. I thought for sure we'd walk out with a PC for my mother-in-law. Instead we walked out planning to buy a Mac. PC laptop makers have completely lost the plot. They've gone from making reasonably priced good hardware to making crap that, while it appears cheap, is actually expensive for what it is. The most egregious problem is the crazily offset trackpad. Whoever thought that laptop users needed a number pad starting at 15" is an idiot. Protip for PC laptop makers: JUST COPY WHAT APPLE DOES. It's not that hard.

You won't find $300 wonders from Apple, but you also won't have computers that die after 6 months. I already learned that lesson by buying my in-laws a netbook. First the wi-fi driver was busted. Then wi-fi died. Then the whole thing died after 13 months. I'm now recommending they get a Macbook Pro 13", and will be ordering them one here shortly.

Maybe I've changed my tune on this because I don't work on software that targets the desktop anymore. I can't possibly fathom making a case for having a Windows laptop at work, where my actual work is on Linux. A Mac is a seriously imperfect solution because it's not Linux, but least with a Mac I can reasonably do my work and still have a desktop experience with commercial applications -- without virtualization.

Or maybe I've changed my tune because the desktop is just that irrelevant. But at the same time, I'm about ready to start recommending to normal people that the buy an iPhone instead of Android.

Or maybe it's just because I'd rather be a normal person, than jumping through hoops to get stuff to work just to save a couple hundred bucks.

Anyway, bottom line: Apple is now Microsoft. They control the consumer market. I think they're making inroads into the enterprise simply because most of the enterprise has started running on the web. I think Apple still has a problem with sunsetting OSes too quickly, but that will eventually change as they reach deeper into Microsoftdom.

The new premature optimization: lines of code

2011-03-06T01:00:00.000-08:00

In the last 10 years, the number of widely available programming languages has exploded and, thanks to client-agnostic technology such as the web browser, HTML and HTTP, the ability of engineers to choose their language has increased. As such, you can't find a thread about languages where lines of code aren't compared. Lines of code are compared in both number of lines required to do something and elegance/style. Because, after all, when we choose a language to use, we then have to stare at it all day. So it's worth seeing how good or bad it looks.

Take, for example, this tidbit on the front page of the Haskell website:

3.1 Quicksort in Haskell

qsort [] = [] qsort (x:xs) = qsort (filter (< x) xs) ++ [x] ++ qsort (filter (>= x) xs)

3.2 Quicksort in C

True quicksort in C sorts in-place:
// To sort array a[] of size n: qsort(a,0,n-1) void qsort(int a[], int lo, int hi) { int h, l, p, t; if (lo < l =" lo;" h =" hi;" p =" a[hi];" l =" l+1;"> l) && (a[h] >= p)) h = h-1; if (l < t =" a[l];">

My copy of their HTML is broken here, but the gist is this: Haskell allows you to do a quicksort in just 2 lines of code, and C is 28 lines. Conclusion: Haskell must be that much more fun and expressive to work in.

You'll find examples like this for every language that's out there except for C, C++ and Java, because those are considered the old and busted languages that require too much cumbersome code. The new hotness.... Ruby, Python, Erlang, Haskell, Scala... they'll all have examples like this.

Meanwhile, while we're comparing lines of code, performance is going to crap. I saw someone make the point today that Ruby 1.8.x provides just 2% .... TWO PERCENT .... of the performance of C. And it's true -- backed up by the language shootout.

Furthermore, many dynamic languages allow you to write elegant code like this, but it's also unchecked. It requires far more unit testing in a dynamic languages to get the same assurances that one can get from using a statically typed or type-inferred language. So, long term, you are putting the onus on yourself to do checking that would otherwise be done by a robust compiler. (Haskell doesn't have this problem, of course).

Could it be that the new form of "premature optimization" is in the form of lines of code? In the case of Ruby or Python, we're prematurely trading off compile time checking and performance to have what we consider more elegant code? This is not new, it's been going on for years -- a C programmer will tell you that C++ was similar, and a C++ programmer will tell you the same of Java.

And I know someone is going to tell me that if they hadn't written in Python or Ruby, they never would have shipped it quick enough. I don't know how this claim can be proven valid or invalid. There are lots of websites out there written in Java that are successful and timely.

Also, when challenged, sometimes the rebuttal to this concern is that "you can always extend your [Ruby/Python/Perl] using C." That's true, you can. But if the requirements of your project have some aspect of performance or using APIs or libraries that aren't supported by [some language here], then aren't we falling into the pit of premature optimization, just in terms of what we perceive as a better way to work? Why are we disregarding requirements just to fulfill the dream of reducing lines of code?

I'm not saying these languages are bad. I'm saying that requirements or realities of the project/world are being disregarded to use them. So let's call it what it is: premature optimization.

Windows Phone 7: Dead on Arrival

2010-09-27T22:13:00.001-07:00

You know, usually I don't count Microsoft out of any game. A friend of mine once said, rightly, that "you can always count on Microsoft to compete against you." If they're interested in a market, they do a nice job of trying to compete in that market. Key word is "try."

As such, they're trying to revive the Windows Mobile franchise with Windows Phone 7. I don't think anything is wrong with Windows Phone 7 from a consumer standpoint.... it might be a fine user experience. But from a developer's standpoint, or as a platform to develop to, they chose a painful road by forcing the platform to be managed C#.

If you read posts by Paul Thurrott, he wrote this one discussing WP7's huge advantage for developers because they use Silverlight. Paul brought out the "developers, developers, developers" mantra. This mantra works well for businesses who develop internal tools. C# is a very convenient language if you're already programming on Windows and in the Microsoft fold. I know that I just arrived at a decision at work because it is much easier to use Visual Studio a lot of the time. But I don't think it will make a difference for WP7.

The smartphone market is now a consumer market. Businesses don't give a shit about them for anything other than email and calendars. The market for "apps" is decidedly one of consumers -- and this is where developers will be focused.

WP7's decision to force managed-only code is about 4 years too late -- the ship sailed on the mobile market and now you must support native code. It's like trying to use C# to ship a desktop Windows app. Know of many? I don't. Almost all desktop apps people use are in C++. The platform was established to be compiled native C code a long time ago, and that's what made sense.

And now we're in the same boat. Apple has successfully appealed to developers and their platform is native. Even though they're no longer #2 in the US (Android took that spot), the mindshare being put into iPhone OS is still huge. Android lags behind on games... why? Because their native API is limited and a pain to use. I mean, come on... NDK developers suggest using JNI to access functions that aren't exposed in the native SDK. Orly? So to play some audio I should have my C++ call Java which calls C? Efficient!

The developers on iPhone now have (if they were smart) lots of C++ libraries they could potentially reuse on other platforms (Objective-C libraries if they were dumb). What does Microsoft propose they do with all of this logic? Throw that all out and start writing C#. Fat chance. If I was a developer like Ngcomo, I'd tell Microsoft to get 20% marketshare first, then I'll get right on that port.

Many people probably think it's early in the mobile phone wars. It's really not. It's been 3 more than years since the iPhone launched and tech moves at a much faster rate than it did with the early PC. The number of devices shipped with these OSes already is mindboggling. 200K Android devices per day... new activations? Only 17 million Commodore 64s EVER SOLD. Android is on a pace to sell 75 MM IN THE NEXT YEAR. They cannot be compared, as Paul did in his article.

At least Google already has an NDK that's working. All they need to do is expose more to it. If Microsoft doesn't have a plan in store for allowing people to develop native code, I just think they're a dead duck on this one.

Things you should "never" do (i.e. should do)

2010-09-19T18:59:00.001-07:00

One oft-quoted blog piece on the internet is Spolsky's "Things You Should Never Do" post, wherein he explains that Netscape made a major mistake because they rewrote their browser from scratch. [Ten years later, the ultimate result of that rewrite is debatable because Firefox is a great product and the result of that rewrite (I think).]

Either way..

It's not the rewrite that's the problem. That's fine when warranted, and often is as codebases go through decades of writhing around with different technologies, figuring out user requirements ad hoc. Many companies have pulled off the rewrite successfully and for the better. Windows is a very good example. NT was a ground up rewrite. It took about 10 years, but Microsoft successfully moved the world's largest installed base of software over to a complete rewrite. Anyone want to argue that getting off DOS wasn't worth it?

How'd they do it? Good technical management, good product management. Overall, just "good management" of the process.

So why does Spolsky call out the rewrite as being something you should never do? The answer is one of visibility.

A startup with poor management--or even a new product at a large company--does not have the same visibility as the rewrite of an already successful product. A poorly managed rewrite of a successful product has visibility towards success and failure... mostly failure. If the rewrite is successful, no one talks much about it (when's the last time anyone brought up migrating Windows from DOS to NT? 2001?).

This is how people like Spolsky can make statements like "never rewrite" and people believe them. Empirically, it seems like rewrites are prone to failure because we see them.

The problem is, it's not a matter of causation.... rewrites do not evoke failure, or even make failure more likely. It just so happens that those are the most notable failures, and seem to make Spolsky's case (Digg is a recent example that brought this topic up again). Meanwhile, many startups with poor management and poor technical choices are currently sinking, unnoticed, as I write this.

The Genius of Naggum

2010-07-01T21:33:00.000-07:00

Long, but worth a read:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/4563e504dba92253

Ubuntu 10.04

2010-05-31T22:54:00.000-07:00

I use Windows 7 on all of my PCs, but I always keep a Linux install handy at home. It's great to have when I'm either configuring VMs to be used at work, or just when I was to try something out that isn't normally easy to install on Windows (like, most open source stuff).

So just installed Ubuntu 10.04 in VMWare. Wow, what a slick release! This being X11, there's no possible way I could get past a simple input configuration problem. So I had to deal with that. But otherwise, it's a pretty enjoyable distro.

Love the boot speed.
IM client built in, plus kinda interesting social network integration with this "me menu"
Improvements to the UI shell -- it looks slightly this side of crap. The file explorer is meh, but the overall layout they've made for the shell is cleaner than in the past. As much as I like Windows 7, I am still to this day, not sold on the "dock" interface.
I might be dreaming, but the fonts look better.

Biggest downside so far is that it ships with Firefox. I had to fix that quick. Although, I was just playing this Chemical Brothers video at 720P using HTML5 and it was using half of my VM's CPU. Can't have it all.

Well, off to play with Clang now.

Don't use Picasa

2010-02-20T08:44:00.000-08:00

Picasa is a piece of shit.

Not only was it not downloading videos from my wife's camera, it has APPEARED to be downloading them because it grabbed the thumbnails from said videos. And it deleted them all off the drive transparently even though it didn't download them.

Gee -- let's delete .MOV files that haven't been downloaded without any kind of warning. Genius.

I whole-heartedly recommend Windows Live Photo Gallery. Not only is it generally better, but it doesn't lose your data transparently. And it can plug into Smugmug, Facebook and any other service you want to upload to.

The "What are you doing?" wars!

2010-02-09T19:52:00.000-08:00

Remember the cola wars? Many were left dead and maimed, neither side victorious after nearly a decade of intense fighting over the hearts and minds of consumers' love for ~~sugar~~ high fructose corn syrup water.

Well, 20 years later the wars companies are waging are the ever-so-lucrative "what are you doing?" wars.

We have 165 inane ways to tell our friends and the rest of humanity what we're currently doing. Today Google Buzz was announced (wasn't there already Yahoo Buzz?). And of course we've got Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, FriendFeed, Flickr, Yammer, Linked In added it not too long ago, Bebo.

But wait, there's more! Now you can constantly stream your location as well with Google Latitude. Using FourSquare, you can be the mayor of the BK Lounge!

I have no real point to this post other than finding this whole thing ridiculous. Is Twitter so lucrative that there have to be 85 different ripoffs of this idea?

Trimbo’s Interview and Resume Guide

2010-01-31T14:55:00.001-08:00

Now that I just got through interviewing a bunch of candidates and hiring one (finally!) I have some tips for those who are interviewing that I didn't want to give away before.

Never Ever EVER mention something you aren't prepared to answer a question about.

This seems so simple, right? Answering questions about stuff you have on your resume.

And these are not hard questions. Don't tell me that you "know" C++ and C# and not be prepared to compare and contrast the two. If you're just graduating from college, don't tell me about a physics class you enjoyed and then be surprised when I ask you for the standard acceleration of gravity. If you've told me you've programmed object oriented Python, be prepared to tell me the name of the constructor of a Python object.

These are pretty basic questions if you've done the work on these topics. It's forgivable if someone forgets something over time, of course. Just be prepared. In the case of languages, it's best to leave a language off your resume if it's either something you don't want to do or don't want to answer questions about. I leave PERL off my resume because I never, ever want to code PERL again.

I realize that to get through the gauntlet of non-technical recruiters, you often need a bunch of keywords on your resume that they can match up with a job description. Still, be very, very careful about what you decide to put there, even if it helps you get through the first line of recruiters, it could sabotage an interview.

Don't put personal details on your resume

Your marital status and number of kids are protected topics for equal opportunity employment in the United States. Employers can't ask you these questions, so don't offer them up, especially before someone talks to you (i.e. on your resume).

Don’t put an expected salary on the resume

Seriously, don’t. You limit your negotiation abilities before you even walk in the door.

Don't list an objective on your resume

It's stupid. I don't know where it started, and it wastes space that could otherwise tell me about what you've done and what you know.

List your academic work and curriculum like you would work experience

A lot of resumes will look like this for someone just coming out of college:

Education: University of Illinois, B.S. Electrical and Computer Engineering 2010 (expected)

Work Experience:

Sales Representative, Meijer Produce Department

Sales Representative, Green Street Hot Wingz

Customer Service Representative, Springfield Shell Gas and Wash

I don't usually look at transcripts, and even if I did, I don’t know what your projects were. So I don't even know where to start with a resume like this.

Taking the same amount of paper space (these days: screen space), here's what I'd rather see:

Education: University of Illinois, B.S. Electrical and Computer Engineering 2010 (expected)

CS 362: Compiler Design. Built my own language and MIPS assembler. Grade: A+

Math 375: Differential Equations. Grade: A+

CS 319: Advanced Graphics. Wrote a raytracer in COBOL. Grade: A+

Work Experience: Part-time jobs at Meijer, various gas stations and restuarants.

I don’t know where this idea started that work experience >>> education, but I remember doing something like this myself when I was graduating from college. Take my advice now: the people who tell you the first example is better (to emphasize irrelevant work experience) are idiots. You did not go to college just to get a single line on your resume saying you got a bachelor’s degree.

Sections to include on your resume

Contact info, References
Education
Work Experience
Novel idea: “Side projects”
(maybe) “Skills”… only if novel and not illustrated by the above three (e.g. “can break a man in half like Chuck Norris”)

What I don’t want is a list of software taking up a third of the page. Make it part of the education, work experience or side projects sections. All that matters is what you’ve done with Maya, not that you have “Maya” under your skills section. I’m more than happy to read about a project you did on your own. It doesn’t have to be a business.

Don’t use stupid fonts and logos on your resume

Some guy sent in a resume with using the chiller font. Don’t do this, it’s just distracting . They waste space. They’re hard to read. Just use one of the templates in Word and follow my advice above about sections to include.

If you want to get creative, make a nice, clean layout for your resume. It should be easy to read and clear. Design your own crisp font if you want. Send your portfolio or reel along with the resume to show how creative you are.

I don’t ask brainteasers and you shouldn’t tolerate them.

They waste time that could be spent showing your relevant problem solving techniques, or writing kick ass code at the white board. If a company is going to ask me brainteasers, chances are I’m not going to work there. Brainteaser believers: show me that correctly solving brainteasers in interviews correlates to exceptional value as an employee. A candidate who hears brainteasers are asked at such-and-such a company will study up on them ahead of time… proving nothing.

What I do ask are the relevant, basic questions about whatever it is you might have on your resume. Got Python? I might ask you to just define a Python class or a method that takes keyword arguments.

Reel Tips

Got a demo reel? Great.

Put it on YouTube or Vimeo. I don’t want to have problems looking at your website that has some Quicktime window that doesn’t work, or a broken link. Some people think it’s a good idea to have their high def reel on their website. Only if you have the bandwidth. If it takes 30 minutes to download a 200 megabyte quicktime movie, I will not watch your reel. I refuse. Sorry. And forget about sending DVDs to people. These days, a demo reel is on Youtube or Vimeo not at all.
Put your most recent stuff first. If your most recent stuff sucks, leave it off and put on your second most recent stuff. Continue on until you eventually get your best stuff first and leave off the rest. I don’t want to have to watch 5 minutes to see something good, and I don’t want to have to watch sucky stuff at any point.
Skip making a flashy montage or including music. I’m guilty of this and it does nothing unless you’re selling yourself to people who are not technical (i.e. ad agency folks).
Always have a detailed list, shot by shot, of what you did right next to the video on YouTube or Vimeo.
Did I mention don’t use Quicktime? If your online demo reel has an MOV extension, then it would be Quicktime.

Respect your academics—find out what you need to be learning

What you did at the last job isn’t always what people want to know about you. Sometimes you’re going to have to reach back to college to answer a question.

I, like you, have forgotten a crapload of stuff that I learned in college. That said, it could be worth brushing up on relevant topics before you go into an interview. In my most recent case, I was interviewing people about a character TD position. Chances are, I might ask a question about linear algebra.

On another note, I also asked every candidate “What’s the last math class you took?” I was surprised to often hear it was Algebra II. This tip has advice for those who are in college or soon going to college: choose your college wisely. There are many shyster schools like Academy of Art in San Francisco that will very expensively try to sell you the dream of being in film or video games. They’ll teach you how to use Maya and shove you out in the world with $100K in debt.

Find out what you need to know at a rudimentary level and go the school that teaches that best. Want to be an animator? Cal Arts is a really good school. Ringling is a really good school. Can’t get into those? Maybe you should re-think animation as a career choice… because without a good school under your belt, you are probably counting on luck more than you should be in order to be gainfully employed in your career of choice.

Hand Grenade vs. Droid

2010-01-18T11:28:00.000-08:00

A friend recently said something along the lines of "modern phone batteries pack about the same power as a hand grenade."

I did some quick math... 3.7volts * 1400 milliamphours = 18648 joules. A handgrenade is about 700,000 joules. So... not even close.

Now my laptop battery has 7200 mAh @ 7.2 V... almost 100K joules. Now we're getting in the ballpark.

No one cares to vote for your Crunchie

2010-01-05T18:45:00.000-08:00

Quite possibly the stupidest time of year is when everyone I know who's in any way related to a Dot Bomb starts spamming me to vote for their "Crunchie". If it's not in my mailbox, it's on my mailing lists, and if it's not there, it's coming to me through Twitter or Google Reader. Services that are nice and usually leave me alone suddenly spam me (I'm looking at you Backblaze -- both spammed my reader and my mailbox).

What's a Crunchie? I feel sad having to explain this. It's an award that Tech Crunch gives out to startups in whatever category. It's completely retarded.

In fact, all awards except the Purple Heart are retarded. All awards are a popularity contest except that one. Nobel Prize? So what. Paul Krugman won a Nobel Prize. Oscars? Please. At least with the Purple Heart there's a real measure of deserving the award -- you got your ass shot in the line of duty.

Stop spamming us, we don't care.

(App Store) Size Doesn't Matter

2010-01-03T00:02:00.000-08:00

Every article about iPhone has to contain something about the size of the app store. I've decided it's irrelevant to the strength of the platform.

It's not irrelevant because people don't want apps, or because of the "quality vs. quantity" argument. People want to buy apps, and they will buy crappy apps just as well as they'll buy quality apps.

The reason it doesn't matter is because people don't care about the investment they've made in any app on their iPhone. Chances are someone who loses their iPhone won't even bother restocking the apps they've bought.

People have bought apps on phones for years. The first "VCast" phone I had on Verizon was the Motorola T720 in 2002. A piece of shit, to be sure, but one that offered apps (BREW, to be specific). It had some kind of yellow pages thing, weather radar, a bunch of games, etc. I think I even bought Snood on it, one of my all time favorite games (thanks to Skip and Ken from Ogilvy for pointing the game out to me).

Do you think anyone gives a rat's ass about throwing away their "app" purchases in order to get a new phone? Hells no... they want the cool new phone. I ditched my T720 like a hot potato for a VX6000, then Samsung, then RAZR, then iPhone, now Droid. Along the way I've probably lost access to dozens of apps that I've paid for.

Even on game consoles, where people invest considerably more in software and peripherals, they're more likely than not to buy another console in the future that is completely incompatible with what they've bought.

No one cares about these apps. It's not like they dropped $150 on Microsoft Word or $600 on Photoshop and then decided to switch to a Mac. There's no training involved. There's no legacy to work within or some kind of value-add. We're talking $5 purchases of stuff that's either self-contained, a minor distraction, or just a front end to a server.

On the iPhone (or Android), a huge percentage of the apps that actually do anything remotely interesting have some kind of "cloud" component. Twitter? Facebook? It doesn't matter what you do on your phone -- the phone apps are just portals into what the server offers. They mean nothing.

So let's stop talking about app store size, or even app stores in general. It's completely irrelevant. Let me know when someone comes up with the equivalent of PageMaker or Photoshop that only works on iPhone, then it will be something worth talking about.

Until then, enjoy your I am T-Pain apps. They're fun, sure, but nothing that would keep someone on the platform ad infinitum.

The Projectionist

2009-12-30T07:58:00.001-08:00

I hadn't seen the news before, but the legendary projectionist of the Catlow Theater in Barrington, IL, Jim Hollister, died a couple months ago. A nice story about him and his obituary.

"The Man Who Wasn't There" was the last time I saw a movie at the Catlow and it was probably the most perfectly focused and weave-less projected film I had seen in 10 years -- and that includes Pixar and Dreamworks premieres I've been to.

Being a projectionist is a lost art in the modern era. Typically the local movieplex's acne-faced teen goes up there and flips the switch to start the platter system and the movie. They don't care. I'm not sure they even look at what they're projecting. Soon, film won't be distributed--movies will be digitally projected--and there will be even less manual intervention to get the film going. The film will probably start on a timer, the focus "automatic".

RIP Jim Hollister, I really appreciated the work you did at the Catlow for so many years, even before I knew anything about the technical nature of projecting film. Thanks.

Droid

2009-12-20T11:18:00.001-08:00

I've had the Droid for 6 weeks, it's time for a full review.

The Droid is the most awesome "always connected" device I've ever used. Every self-respecting gadget geek should have one.

IMO, there are only two reasons to not have one:

Most of what you want to do with your phone is mostly play games, and listen to music. You don't do any kind of multitasking and you're not interested in sophistication at the user level (like having to manage backgrounded apps). In this case, the iPhone is for you -- and this is a LOT of people.
Most of what you want to do is type emails. In this case, the Blackberry's zen-like physical keyboard experience is for you. Again -- LOT of people.

Other than that, nothing bridges the gap between phone, internet, multitasking app device and media device like the Droid. It's the must-have device for someone who wants and needs it all.

The hardware is great. Coming from the iPhone, I was worried about build quality and thickness. Both are fantastic. After using it for a month, the only way I'd rate the iPhone better hardware than Droid is if it had a physical keyboard. A physical keyboard is a level-up multiplier for these devices, and the fact that Droid fits one in in roughly the same thickness as the iPhone is a pure win.

IMO, Motorola is not getting enough recognition for making a fantastic piece of hardware. Most of the recognition is going to Google for the OS. So, kudos to Motorola. I find this device infinitely more compelling than anything you've done since the StarTAC.

Other hardware upsides:

The SCREEN. It's amazing.
Great battery life considering what it's doing. I charge it during the day mostly out of paranoia, but have been able to go through entire days without a charge even in my workplace (which is a marginal signal area on Verizon).
Very fast. People have noted that the iPhone GS is clocked up 50mhz higher, but I find Android to be more responsive even at a lower clock rate than the iPhone GS.

The only downsides to the hardware I've found:

USB jack's in an odd spot.
I'd prefer the volume rocker on the other side.
Headphone jack and power button are too close together.

On the software side, Android 2.0 is really the first release of this OS where I considered using it full time. I'm glad I made the switch. In retrospect, there's very little about the iPhone that I miss, and Android offers so much more:

Continuity between context switching. If I click on a link in the Gmail app, it opens the browser. If i hit "back", it knows to take me back to the Gmail app. This applies for pretty much every app situation.
Notifier bar. This is much more handy than Apple's notifiers which pop up.
If you're in the Google fold with Gmail, Google Voice, Calendar, etc., the integration is of course the best you'll find on any phone.
Google Navigator.
Google voice search built right in.
Background apps? Yay, background apps. This should be a no-brainer for any smartphone maker but Apple keeps holding out on doing it. Meanwhile, my Android phone gives me background checks of Facebook and Twitter direct messages, Google Voice/SMS, Google Talk, Google Latitude and .... SIP?! Yes, it's true, I actually have my Gizmo5 phone constantly connected on my Droid and it uses almost no battery in doing so. You can do the same with Skype. Another one I use that can't be done on the iPhone: Locale.
Internet radio apps playing in the background.. it works on Android, not on iPhone. I'm one of the ten people who listen to internet radio but this is important to me.
The Android Market allows people to submit their own applications and updates as often as they like.
Speaking of backround apps and Market -- the app Market itself checks in the background to see if apps have an update available.
Free dev tools that work on Mac, Linux and Windows.
No browser crashing. Safari constantly would bomb out on me. I have very rarely had an app crash on Android. Android also gives me the "this app is not yet responding, force close?" dialog -- so at least i have a choice to wait a little longer. (The reddit app is very buggy and ends up in this situation often, but if I wait it out, it recovers).
OS updates are delivered over the air. This is incomprehensibly less annoying than using iTunes -- an app I truly hate -- to update my phone.

Missing/busted:

No voice dial over bluetooth is a serious WTF.
For some reason, some apps don't get spell checking or auto-correction (e.g. "dont" -> "don't" automatically). I'd love to know why this isn't consistent across the OS like it is on the iPhone.
Adding a ringtone for voice calls is as easy as picking an MP3 and assigning it. Yet I can't add my own ringtone for notifications in any way.
I've had to pull the battery twice because the phone locked up.
Google Wave's mobile site works great on the iPhone but not on Android? No matter what you think of Wave, this is a worthy WTF.
No good games. Just about every other app you can think of is available, but damn if there aren't any good games for Android. I imagine this is something Google is going to have to focus on in the future. They did release a native development kit though for people who want to create a more real-time application like a game.

An often pointed out missing feature is "pinch-zoom". I actually have not missed this in the least. When browsing the web, I simply double touch the DIV where I want to read and Android takes me right there. The DIV is almost always formatted properly for the screen so it then requires no scrolling and re-zooming. [Note: I am not sure if Android does this reformatting or if the website itself does it, but sites like the WSJ, Washington Post, etc., have text that generally fits perfectly into the width of my Droid's screen in portrait].

On the service: yes, Verizon Wireless does suck considerably less than AT&T. Streaming internet radio is not only doable on VZW, but works very well. I listen to internet radio pretty much every day on my commute because I can. On AT&T i would have constant disconnects.

That said, even if you don't want Verizon, something like the Droid will be available to you very soon. Motorola is using this platform for many different future handsets. Unless you fit into the categories I listed above, if you're in the smartphone market I highly recommend you look into getting Droid or something like it.

Google Wave is starting to grow on me

2009-12-17T20:05:00.000-08:00

Let me first say: without an email bridge of some sort, this thing will never take off. I highlyrecommend that Google figure out how they might like to do that bridge.

Otherwise, how is someone supposed to use Wave as their complete communication/collaboration solution if it doesn't have connectivity to... oh, I don't know... thebillion people connected via email? It's like if the mobile phone system didn't call through to landlines.

It could just be that vendors whitelist their SMTP server to connect to Wave. Bank of America, for example, should be able to hook in their email communication to Wave without extra coding on their part.

The counter argument? How many vendors now spam you via Facebook and Twitter? They didn't seem to have a problem coding up those solutions. So it probably wouldn't be too much of a stretch to have the Comcasts and BOFAs of the world start sending you Waves instead of emails.

And now... onto the review.

Everyone's first impression of Wave is pretty much the same thing: "OK, now what do I do?" It's nifty, but email and IM are far more accessible and everyone... literally everyone... is connected via these now. Sending someone a Wave might as well be like leaving a post-it note on their spare bedroom's door. They'll see the message eventually, if and when they ever log in again. It's like when someone sends you a message on Orkut? Gunna see it? Unlikely.

And my first real test of it was a long, long wave where a friend of mine and I tried using it like IM. It was very slow to use, couldn't keep up with our typing, and just generally annoying.

But I think I'm finally starting to get it.

A Wave isn't really an email or an IM. I mean, it could be, but that's not what it's most useful for. It's most useful for mini-collaboration. It's not meant for collaborating on a Word or Excel spreadsheet, but it's not supposed to be chat either. A friend of mine and I today made a Wave for collecting together 80s music we like. We can easily collaborate on the list, drop stuff in and such, but keep it nicely organized in terms of discussion and the list itself. Also, it's super-easy to drag and drop music directly into the Wave.

One of the things that's really annoying about IM is that I have it running on 3 machines at all times -- my home machine, my work machine and my Droid. An initial IM message goes to all three. However, the conversation that ensues after someone pings me only happens from one of those three. Now, Gmail tracks and saves that conversation, but that requires going back in the logs, and replying to those logs replies via email, not IM.

If you think about what Twitter and Facebook has created, it's very hard to track conversations and meta-conversations that fall out of even small blurbs. An Apple employee posts to twitter: "omglol! AT&T is the suxx0rs!". Discussion of the tiny, 160-char post ensues on twitter, blogs, private emails. How do you connect all of this conversation back to the original? Unless it was originally posted on /b/ and tracked with Encyclopedia Dramatica, it's almost impossible to find out where the original thought came from sometimes.

In short, there is a major disconnect between all of the forums of communication we use right now. Wave is trying to fix that. It might not work but it's worth a shot.

I actually tried embedding this post as a Wave, to show how this might work in the future. But I failed, the tech is a little broken still it seems.

Wave is significantly flawed, no doubt. It's an unbelievable resource hog of Javascript. But I am starting to see the potential of it or something like it. I'd like to try collaborating with it a bit more and even attempt to use their API to write a Robot before I pass final judgement on the thing.

Stop being Sarah Palin's enablers

2009-11-29T13:12:00.000-08:00

I just saw this blog post about Sarah Palin's Scrabble strategy and felt I had to take a minute to write an open letter about it...

To all of the Rachel Maddow-idolizing crazies who are obsessed with Sarah Palin: just stop and take a second to think about what you're doing. You're like the enabler for meth heads.

First of all, you give the "other side" a reason to embrace her further. The more you hate on her in public forums, the more she gets people on her side. You make her the victim.

Second of all, it gives the media a reason to put her on the air. What makes better "news" than someone people love? Someone people hate! We've heard more about Sarah Palin in the last month than we have Barack Obama.

Third, there is no better destination for any politician than irrelevancy. The only way to start the ball rolling is putting out the ignore buffer. Sarah Palin was able to turn the health care debate into a raging inferno with the phrase "death panel." If only we all had started the ignore buffer earlier, this probably would have fallen on deaf ears. [Note: I am against socialized medicine, and even I would prefer not to ever hear her opinion on it nor have it sway anyone to my opinion]

There you go. And this is the last time I ever mention her name, assuming she never will win any kind of public office worth mentioning on this blog.

Should I give up on PC gaming?

2009-11-17T08:04:00.001-08:00

For those of you who haven't been following the hub-bub over Modern Warfare 2 on the PC, basically they gimped the crap out of it. The PC title is now restricted to 18 people, and dedicated servers run by Infinity Ward.

I've been playing CoD 4: Modern Warfare for about 2 years on a "hardcore" server that supports 50 people. The server is local, so it has a very fast ping time for me. It's crazy and awesome. Most people probably wouldn't want to play that, but I do, and I enjoy it. I enjoy the real-life aspect of PC multiplayer. Is someone cheating or 'sploiting? Do we all care enough to ban the guy? Or do we just have fun with the everything-goes realm? This is all gone with MW2.

PC gamers will vote down on Amazon any game that looks at them wrong. Spore remains a 1 star game to this day because of its DRM solution. Modern Warfare 2 is therefore a 1.5 star game on Amazon. In this case, I would agree that this game deserves the low rating. It's not a game that appeals to a gamer into multiplayer shooters on the PC. Infinity Ward spent so little time on the port they didn't even bother to localize an error that reports you're having a problem connecting to "Xbox Live" (remember: this is the PC version).

So I just have to wonder, is this a losing battle? Am I, as an aficionado of PC multiplayer shooters, just on my way out? The PC gaming market is pretty targeted towards MMOs at this point anyway, which I have very little interest in. Should I just buy MW2 for PS3 and call it a day?

2010: Year of Linux on the desktop^H^H^H^H palmtop?

2009-11-01T09:08:00.000-08:00

5-6 years ago, who knew that Linux wouldn't break through on the desktop, but would on the "palmtop"? But it appears that's what's going to happen.

Android is, at its core, Linux. Every day, we're hearing about more devices coming out with it. There's the Motorola DROID, of course, which is getting a lot of hype. But there are handsets from HTC, Sony Ericsson and more from Motorola on the way. There's also the Nook, the new eBook device from Barnes and Noble, which uses Android. There's a gaming device with android, and there are netbooks supposedly coming with Android.

All of this Android stuff coming out has me wondering, will Linux begin a road to domination in the palmtop space in 2010? Gartner stats: http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1126812

The iPhone sold ~5m in Q209. Symbian (really, SYMBIAN?!!) dominated with 20m units. Blackberry had around 7m units. WinMo had around 3.5m. Android had only about 800k units in this sample. It seems like all of these combinations of Android, as well as what seems to be mobile carrier dedication towards making Android work for them, should start to make some serious inroads on these numbers. We shall see.

Joy Division is Genius

2009-10-07T22:36:00.001-07:00

I think this is my obligatory, once a year post that Joy Division is amazing.

If you haven't ever listened to their stuff, you should.

A co-worker told me he had watched 24 Hour Party People last weekend and it made me think to put their stuff on tonight.

Desperately Seeking Android

2009-10-06T22:16:00.000-07:00

Word is out on Engadget today of impending Verizon Android devices.

I'm so there.

A number of reasons, which I will now list in exact priority order.

AT&T sucks ASS. Now this is not due to a lack of trying to improve on their part. I admire and acknowledge the fact that they have recently increased coverage in Noe Valley, Diamond Heights and Glen Park. My iPhone now works in Safeway (sometimes), which is a vast improvement. However, present improvements cannot overcome other misdeeds. For example, the hours and hours of wait time when I rarely have to call customer service, or the dropped calls in my house with full signal, or constantly drop on 101 while dirving? I am completely convinced that AT&T employs subpar network engineers. How is it that I can get 5 bars in my house and consistently drop calls? The Verizon network is far better.
The iPhone is the buggiest phone I've ever had and I believe Google has far better engineers than Apple. If Android has even 25% less bugs, that will be a huge improvement. On the iPhone, apps crash constantly and there are new glitches all the time. iPhone 3.0 introduced possibly the most annoying bug of all time, which is that the iPhone now constantly asks for my wi-fi password at home. Today had a nice glitch where I couldn't get rid of the keyboard from the screen. Just poor programming all around. I have not yet heard of that range of problems with Android.
Google integration > Apple integration. My MobileMess subscription is running out in 4 days and I, of course, do not plan to renew. One of the problems with the iPhone is that I can only have Exchange connected to one server plus MobileMess. I'm hoping that Android will let me connect to one Exchange server as well as Google Apps, which is where all of my real data is anyway.
Real background apps, please. Kthxbye.
I would much prefer a smartphone that I have a prayer of programming. I refuse to buy a Mac just to program my iPhone, and besides, I can't upload my own apps to it anyway. No thanks. I'll take the open option that I can hack the crap out of--legally--if I so choose.
No more iTunes!

So anyway, these are some of the reasons I'll be camping out to get my Motorola Sholes or HTC Android device on Verizon as soon as they arrive.