Even the best Hello World programs have nothing on this version. Everyone, meet Sam West. Right now he's in China but we hope to bring him home before Christmas.
I've been using Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) since January 19 when my Wi-Fi only Xoom received an update from Motorola. On February 25 I upgraded from a Motorola DROID X to a Samsung Galaxy Nexus and since then all my mobile devices have been on ICS. So I've had a fair amount of time to test drive the OS in both tablet form and phone form and it is a very nice update. Here are a few of things I like in Ice Cream Sandwich followed by some short bullets of things I think could be better.
The following video was shared with me last night. It was a bit gut wrenching, horrific, and immensely sad all at the same time. I've seen similar videos like this before but rarely has a group of people stepped up and actually done something about it. I was impressed and felt challenged. So I'm getting involved. Please take 30 minutes to watch this video and if you're moved as I was get involved too. It doesn't require much time, effort, or money and your help would make a big difference.
KONY 2012 from INVISIBLE CHILDREN on Vimeo.
The Verge ran a story earlier about Canonical creating a docking station that provided Ubuntu desktop access for your smartphone.
I called this at least two years ago. Not the specific instance of Canonical releasing a desktop dock for Android device plug-in, but the idea of how this will change computing. If you discount some of the newest quad-core and 8-core systems out there, the latest mobile phones aren't too far behind laptops in their power. Certainly they don't have the graphics horsepower but I don't see that as an issue.
I imagine a new computing setup where your main - and perhaps only - device is your mobile device. Think Galaxy Note here. You're at the office and instead of using a desktop computer or laptop you use your mobile device alongside a docking station with dedicated horsepower and graphical capability. You essentially "side load" additional processors, RAM, and even disk storage (or you access cloud storage such as DropBox, Amazon S3/Cloud, or the newer Bitcasa). When connected to this system you're able to do most normal things you would do on your computer. And when you're done you disconnect, grab your device and head home.
The thing I haven't worked out is the software aspect. What if you're a huge Adobe Photoshop user. Are you going to have a version of this on Android or does your connection to the docking station bring about connections to typically laptop/desktop-only software? I think this will be worked out in the next 2-3 years and in 5 years we may all be using a setup like this.
For those reading this that do not know, I'm the CTO of Nashville-based startup Dataium, LLC. Dataium is the largest aggregator of Internet automotive shopping activity, and I'm looking to hire a Database Administrator and a Senior Software Engineer. Both of these positions are critical to the success and technical direction of Dataium and each will join our already amazing team of engineers, systems administrators, and business analysts.
If you're interested in learning more about the DBA position, please click here to download the full job description (PDF).
If you're interested in learning more about the Senior Software Engineer position, please click here to download the full job description (PDF).
Please note: Interested and qualified people should show their interest by emailing their resume to gethired AT dataium DOT com.
I'm a platform pedal kind of guy except for a short stint riding my brothers Cannondale racing bike during my high school days. Clip-in pedals have always scared me for some reason and wearing clip-in shoes isn't my style nor are they very versatile. Given I've been riding hard core MTB for a year now I decided to invest in a set of platform pedals and new mountain bike specific shoes.
I drove to Columbia (south of Nashville) yesterday to participate in a Trek demo day. This is where biking enthusiasts can test ride the latest Trek bikes in the woods and on the street.
One of the worst things you can ever say as a developer/programmer is "It's working for me." Unless of course that is immediately followed by "..but let's dig in and figure out why it isn't working for you." This type of thinking is a cancer within development teams and certainly isn't customer focused. Software breaks, apps don't work properly, and if you're a developer it's your responsibility to do whatever it takes to resolve your customer issues. A few years ago one of my dev teams was having tremendous difficulty replicating a customer-reported issue. One of the developers started the whole "It's working for me" thing and my manager heard it. He jumped in and quickly asked my developer if he was going to package up his computer and ship it to the customer. What a great response.
When you're up against tough issues, try not to think about how hard or how long it might take you to resolve the issue, but resolve to fix it no matter what it takes. Then, and as early as possible, assure your customer that you will do whatever it takes.
We redesigned our business cards at Dataium and the new ones came in today. It's embarrassing how long it took us to decide on a design and I bet people wonder why when they see the result. We wanted to go the super simple and clean route and the final result is quite nice even if anticlimatic.
I thought it was pretty cool big sites (and in some cases competitors) like Google.com and Amazon.com posted tributes to Steve Jobs on their home page. I looked around to see which other sites were doing this and have posted some screenshots after the break. If you know of others please let me know in the comments.
For those interested in watches I just published a set of photos on Flickr of my Omega Seamaster Planet Ocean. There's a lot of amazing tech that goes into an Omega dive watch and the Planet Ocean is no exception. It features a decompression system that allows the watch casing to off-gas helium after the watch has been in a pressure chamber for a long time. Also on board are Omega's own self-winding Caliber 2500 automatic movement (or the Caliber 9300 if you have the new 2011 edition) with a 48 hour power reserve, an anti-reflective, scratch-resistant sapphire crystal, and a self-locking screw-in crown. All of this in a watch that can go as deep as 600 meters (2,000 feet). View the photos here or watch a slideshow of the photos here.
I decided to take some time today to clean up old sprint branches that have been resting in Git unused. Some for well over a year. I had two goals I wanted to accomplish when trying to come up with a workflow. First, I wanted the list of branches that display with the command git branch -a (which I have conveniently aliased to just gb) to be shortened. Second, I didn't want to lose any of the commits part of old branches. Sure the commits were already merged into the master branch, but I didn't want to lose commit chain that was stored as branches.
My solution was to archive each branch as a tag then remove the branches from Git on my local machine as well as the Git origin server.
I received an e-mail this morning from Seth, who was having difficulty getting his initial Time Machine backup completed. Seth graciously agreed to having his question posted here in another edition of Aaron Answers. Below is his question and after the break is my response.
Hi Aaron,I really appreciate your blog, and wonder if you'd be willing to answer a Time Machine question i've run into. My old backup HD failed, so I bought a new 2T Iomega eGo desktop HD. Partitioned it into 3 partitions, including a 1.1T partition for my time machine backup. All seems to be working fine, except that the backup is too slow to get done unless I leave the computer running for 3-4 days, which I can't do as it's a laptop and I use it all the time. After the first night (8 hours of so) it had only done 20 Gb (out of my 400 Gb). After the second night, it did about 120 Gb. i don't know if I just need to find a 4-day window when I can leave my laptop backing up or if something is wrong with the software. I'm using the new USB2 cord, and it works nice and fast for manually backing up video files etc to other partitions in the drive. The drive seems to work quite fast. If you're able to offer any advice, that would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks, Seth
© 2013 Aaron West. All rights reserved.
