Cool Updates

A few really cool things of note:

BFlex/BFusion 2008 – This was a GREAT conference. The second year for this conference, held again at Indiana University in Bloomington, IN, was a HUGE success from my point-of-view. Matt Boles, THE original trainer for ColdFusion, was the main instructor for courses I attended at the conference, but he was not the only one doing courses. Bob Flynn, and his band of incredible volunteers, was again able to get a bunch of us together for (this time) two-days of FREE training by industry experts. If not for my car breaking down on the way home (just south of Lafayette, IN on I-65), it would have been a perfect weekend of training and networking. If they decide to do this a third time, do not hesitate to sign up-last year had 80 people for one day of training and this year had 200 people each day for two days of training! Lunch was provided for both days, as was a bunch of swag and, of course, VALUABLE TRAINING FOR FREE! HUGE KUDOS TO BOB AND THE GANG AT INDIANA UNIVERSITY FOR THIS EVENT!!! (Was that noticeable enough? If not, reread those words in all caps a few more times).

Adobe gets Kudos from me for CS4 finally getting a formal release-if you have not played with this yet, give it a look. My students will be learning on CS3 still for the specific course I am teaching, but I expect that CS4 will now get merged into the course (as it just “released” this last week). I hope that we will also be able to use Flexbuilder in the course, but the progress of the students will determine whether or not this will be possible to do.

Microsoft has finally released version 2 of SilverLight after it being in beta for what seemed like forever. I hope that they soon add more WPF elements into the “SilverLight Realm,” as I am beginning to enjoy working with WPF. Did I really just type “enjoy working with WPF?????!?!?!?”

I am liking Twhirl as a desktop-based tweeting tool. Twitterberry seems to be decent for the CrackBerry, but it is not as “nice” to use as Twhirl. (If the term “tweet” is one with which you are unfamiliar, google twitter.com. Live it. Love it. Learn it.)

Why are RIM (Research In Motion) and Apple both not allowing Flash and SilverLight onto their devices? Get into the 1990’s, guys (esp. since it is now 2008). Heck, even Sony has it on the PS3 these days…

Some neato things

I meandered into the local WalMart yesterday for a quickie ice cream fix and found one of the neatest new ways to enjoy Hagen Daaz and Ben & Jerry’s Ice creams-single serve containers. Before you say “but wait, Jon, they have _always_ been single-serve containers,” these are about the size of one scoop of ice cream instead of an entire pint, otherwise known to me as “just enough to hit my need for an ice cream fix” when one has neither of these brands available on cones locally. Just the right size to consume, and not too big to require me to finish the ice cream before ice crystals start to form inside of the container. Both brands include a “spoon” of sorts in the package as well, but the Ben & Jerry’s one was made better between the two spoons (but, of course, the Hagen Daaz had better mouth feel and flavor when comparing the remainder of the package contents). Bravo & kudos for hitting on this idea!!

I survived the iPhone hype with my Crackberry intact-I’m still not sold on the iPhone, which seems to have little to add to my life feature-wise that my crackberry has not already given to me, all without the pain of having to use AT&T for the phone service–heck, VZW FINALLY got their “VCast” coverage to reach out into these parts after years of selling it to the local yocals–I wonder how long it will be before AT&T gets 3G out here… My Crackberry has decent Edge coverage here, so all could be worse (I travel to areas at times where Edge still has yet to arrive-the Crackberry shows GSM –in caps– when there).

Speaking of Crackberry, the Opera browser about which I previously wrote sucks; in particular, the UI is awkward for me still. I will play with it a bit more before I decide to get rid of it or not, but it is presently not looking too good for keeping it installed. I’ll keep you posted if this changes.

Also on crack, a decent app for rss is called Viigo-I make decent use of this almost daily to catch up on headlines, etc. And for those of you (like me) who enjoy Twitter, Twitterberry is a neat application. I wish that it kept up more with live links to my Twitter account so that Tweets appear automagically though (maybe for the next revision??? Please?).

And for those of you who like to know where police are taking radar, I recommend Trapster. It is a mash-up of Google Maps and a database of user-reported police radar locations. This is a neato idea, esp. for those who are into knowing this sort of information.

Kudos to AT&T, though, for their great coverage of the Lollapaloozer fest (I’m not a Perry Farrel, er douchebag, fan-sorry, but admittedly Janes Addiction was good at one time), which allowed me to “be there” while sitting on my couch in air conditioning while working on a few projects last weekend. Big letdown for me was Love & Rockets, who seemed at times to have not picked-up their instruments since recording the songs they performed. Big cheer for me was Jamie Lidell-damn cool!!! I could have watched this entertainer play for another hour easily. Another big cheer for Flogging Molly-impressive! I missed Gogol Bordello on the coverage, though (bummer), as I’d like to see them play a whole show sometime (I’ve only seen them play on Letterman).

I also just received a free training session from AppDev. It was the most difficult thing for me to install, which was finally (and frustratingly) found to be due to some weird conflict in Windows Media Player’s DRM settings. It was a bummer to have to go through all of the trouble to make it work, but the App Dev tech Zachary walked through a number of things to get this working. I’ll let you know soon what I think of the training DVD, as soon as I have time to go through it. Here’s a hint to anyone who is making one of these types of products–DRM is awful, and did not allow this licensed user access to the product for at least two days while troubleshooting why: if you’ve already verified a user’s credentials/license, please do not also make the content also go through a DRM-credentials-needing step.

Let me know what YOU think of these, and also what YOU think is neato…

Want some Opera with your Crack? Trying to get “the BIG ‘O’…”

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” – Henry Ford

After overhearing a number of people discussing smartphones and browsers over the past year or so (both online and off-line, and also due to the iPhone, whose “hype cycle” is about to go into overdrive due to the forthcoming device release, bragging about being able to “surf the web”), plus the recommendation of the geekier (in a “positive” way) sales rep at my phone provider’s kiosk (not to also mention my OWN sometimes geeky leanings, of which I will not say whether these are positives or negatives at this time), I recently decided to load a different browser onto my trusty(?) dusty Crackberry.

Round 1-DING!
Just point your browser at the Opera website. AAAAAAAAH! Is there not a script (or something) here that allows a phone browser to degrade to a better experience? After finding the link for “Opera Mini” (eventually), I had to go through several menu options to figure _where_ to download, after which it looked like an easy enough task to perform; my, oh my, how mistaken I was. POW-I am down on the mat.

Round 2-DING!
“Send a link to your phone via SMS to download” sounds easy enough; I regularly have decent experiences doing this sort of activity on other telephones to get games, sounds, and other miscellaneous crap onto telephones that are not made to be user-friendly for this sort of activity. In other words, if you use Verizon Wireless or US Cellular for your mobile service in the US, and/or if you own a telephone that has no memory card or USB-ish type of synch cable, you can probably relate to this, regardless of phone provider. Selecting this SMS option, I selected my country (United States of America) and keyed in my telephone number without a “country code” (which is a “1″ for those of you who never dial international calls via telephone systems); so far, so good. The SMS message arrived right away with a working link; I selected the link using the Crackberry’s Trackball (which was a WONDERFUL addition, might I add, to this device, and helped to “seal the deal” for me to buy one of these) and clicked the link. Said link seemed to take me back to the SAME page I have recently visited, which again wanted me to select a phone model, a country, and to give my telephone number to receive a SMS message with a download link. JAB-I am again on the mat.

Round 3-DING!
“There HAS to be a better way to do this,” I am thinking as I fumble through the plethora of links and crap to relocate the original link to download this browser via the Crackberry-included’s software web browser. OOOOOOOOH! I can download directly to my phone!! (“Now _why_ didn’t I just do this in the _first_ place, no?” I ask myself.) Seems easy enough. Click the link, download to the device. Or so I thought; the link is to a zipped archive, which my Crackberry cannot un-archive. THWACK-I’m on the mat yet again.

Rounds 4-15 (or maybe 21, or 33, or more: after several weeks and occasional attempts to do this as time permitted, I tried this again)-Repeated DINGS!

I repeated Rounds 1-3 just in case I had forgotten something/overlooked something over the next few weeks, as time permitted, resulting i my continual disappointment as I am again dropped to the mat by a somewhat formidable foe. UGH–am I this close to being knocked-out? Yet, I again stagger back to my feet for more pummeling.

Round “(((Some positive integer evenly dividable by 3) > 33 and not <33) +1)”-DING!

Oh wait-maybe my foe has a weakness I have yet to exploit. Hmmmmmmmmmm. A-HA! “Download to PC” BINGO! How stupid of me to not have tried this earlier after my repeated face-plants to the mat. Hop onto the somewhat trusty lappy, launch browser of choice (Mozilla Firefox v2.somethingoranother instead of the current v3.somethingoranother). Go to Opera.com, get assaulted by a splash screen for some version of Opera 9.somethingoranother that made me think “Windows 95″ for some reason. Stupid, Stupid, Stupid, Stupid, Stupid, Stupid, Stupid. Stupid. (Had to say that again). Oh, whew-a “click to continue to website” button; must be my “left-hook?” Refreshing-an easy to navigate website (so far). Information is easy to find (so far) via headings with “disappearing” menus under them. Clicking on one of the menu headings (for download) takes me to a place to get their current PC browser-oops, when “hooking” the opponent slipped in a jab to my left. Clicking on “Download other versions” takes me to a page with links for Linux, MacOS, etc. and no link for mobile of mini; a second jab from the opponent and I again return to the mat for yet another taste (serves me right to think that someone might desire to get a different platform or browser than the “Big 3″ by clicking “Download other versions”–go figure).

Round “(((Some positive integer evenly dividable by 3) > 33 and not <33) +2)”-DING!
Wait Wait Wait–there is a menu that appears when hovering over “Download” which allows me to select “Opera Mini” or “Opera Mobile” if I do not want plain-old Opera (I will take my Opera with subtitles, please, to enhance my presently-limited comprehension of the Italian language. Cue the laugh track. Now then, laugh with me; you _know_ that I _had_ to “go there” sometime in this review, right? Or better yet, cry, as many Operas seem to end sadly, this one included). After clicking the “Mini” link and downloading fairly painlessly to my desktop, unzipping the archive, and adding this application to my now-tethered Crackberry (which is an experience — grrrrrrrrrrr, scowl, grimace, turn-red-with-anger, , etc. — I will critique at some later date, in the interest of brevity here). Time to Surf! Or not. Launching by selecting the big “O” (and not a reference to a famous TV performer, nor to an online store, nor to the other “big ‘O’” to which women frequently refer) brings up a long list of Terms, Conditions, and miscellaneous crap to read before continuing; thankfully the programmers added a tutorial before the “load of crap and leagalese” on how to use the browser, yet they did NOT add a “click to continue” button, which I was seeking due to their instructions to “Read this page and select ‘Continue’ at the end of the license agreement” (or something to that effect). With a bit of frustration, and a “gee, I wonder what happens when I push _this_ button” curiosity, I clicked on the Crackberry’s Menu button and was _then_ given the opportunity to “Accept” and/or “continue”; sigh. Done. Finally, but badly bruised, beaten, and lacking a desire to do this ever again. TKO by knockout goes to Opera. This sucks.

Fight Recap

After many rounds (the number of which are mostly evenly divisible by the integer “3″) of pummeling the opponent, the winner by TKO is Opera. The loser is the end user.

Color Commentary Conclusions/Observations

With this installation experience, I am _guessing_ that this browser must be the buggiest piece of software one can use. If I were Opera, I would not expect to get many users after this sort of experience; I would consider _my_ experience to be tolerant, and of significantly higher patience-level than that of a typical “end user.” If this were 1988, I would expect this level of frustration in trying to get and install software, but seeing that this is 2008, this sort of experience is _inexcusable_ for an end user in this day and age except for “waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay-pre-alpha development release” software, of which this supposedly is not. Shame on you, Opera.

(Before I decide to delete this “big ‘O’” from my Crackberry, I will try to surf and use it for a while. Maybe. Check back and see.)

Edited on 11July2008 11:30 a.m. Chicago time to fix my equations-I forgot one open parenthesis in it.-jw

Me on Twitter!

I am having a few problems getting my Tweets from Twitter (http://twitter.com/WeberJon) to show up on this blog; does anyone know how to get them to show here?

20081018 – Edit:
I have now added my feed via RSS in the sidebar. It is uglier than I would like it to be, but it is now here nonetheless. I have been informed that WordPress doesn’t like us to link Twitter on their hosted blogs, so this is a stopgap method to use for now until other options present themselves. When more free time permits, I will look more into getting it to be prettier, if possible (prettier == nicer looking display and not better quality tweets… LOL )