MBoffin.com

As I develop Earth Bridge, and once it starts alpha and beta testing, I need a way to keep track of bugs, feedback, and so forth. I'm taking a cue from Stack Overflow and using a service called UserVoice. It's a really excellent feedback/bug/feature tracking site. Here is Earth Bridge's site:

http://EarthBridge.UserVoice.com - Earth Bridge Feedback Forum

I've seeded the page with an example feature request. Well, it's a real feature, but just so you can see how it works. There are a lot of new, planned features so I'm sure many of the ones that get posted right off are already being worked on, but the site will give me a good idea of what people think about those features, and how popular those features might be.

Today's Woot is a two-pack of RC helicopters. If you happen to be reading this before they are sold out, go get a pack!! These are amazing amounts of fun if you can find a good place to fly them. Armen bought me one for Christmas and it's really fun to fly. Rowan loves flying it too, so one of the one's I bought from Woot today will go to him (after an appropriate number of jobs done, of course).

Being a guy and a geek, I love all things RC. I think the coolest thing I've seen in years is the guy who mounted a head tracking video camera onto the cockpit area of an RC place and had the video feed going into a VR goggle setup that was tracking his head movements. He essentially had a live, free-looking view from the cockpit of his RC place. Seriously, folks, it's hard to imagine anything cooler. I tried to find the video on Google Video, but it seems to be gone.

What I want to do is something like that, but I don't have the cajones (or budget) to do it with an RC plane. Instead I'm going to try to do it with an RC car instead. It will still be fun to be racing around with my view being from the car itself, but with the ability to free-look around me while driving.

I've been coding away on version 2.0 of Earth Bridge. I've gotten some really great (and fast) help over at Stack Overflow.

Having been subscribed to many usability blogs for the past several years is definitely paying off. I will reserve judgment on whether the interface I'm creating is "good" or not until other people have seen it, but I definitely like it much better than the old interface.

Regarding the interface, this is an especially tough application to create. First off, I'm not a UI designer. I'm a developer. (If you don't know why that's a problem, go read this.) What is trying to get out of my head is something like this. It's taking all my effort to prevent that kind of atrocity from happening. Unfortunately, the nature of this application is such that it only actually does one thing. However, there are about 200 ways of configuring how it does that one thing. So when it comes down to it, the whole UI of the application is just a glorified interface to a config file. So I really mean it when I say it's tough to create the interface. I'm doing my darnedest to keep from unleashing a UI atrocity on the users.

While I haven't been updating this site very often (read: at all), it doesn't mean I haven't been updating other sites. Here are a few other places where you can see what I'm up to:

• YouTube
• Twitter
• Facebook
• Google Reader Shared Items
• FriendFeed
• Flickr

I posted quite a while back about keeping my data on a USB key for easy access and portability. I later posted about using TrueCrypt for securing a section of that USB key for sensitive files.

Well, time went on and things changed a bit. First of all, I noticed that having a USB stick in my laptop all the time was draining my battery quite a bit faster than I could live with. This was to be expected, but it wasn't something I was happy with. Second of all, I found that when it came down to it, I really hardly ever used another computer where I needed to bring all my docs and apps over with me. Usually the only time I needed to bring all those files and apps over to another system was when I was either moving to a new laptop entirely, or I was formatting my system and needed to get back up and running again.

Due to the second reason, I changed the size of my TrueCrypt volume to just barely bigger than a standard CD could hold (see Peter's Evil Overlord List item #99) and kept all my sensitive files and all my portable apps in that one TrueCrypt volume. I then just kept that volume on my hard drive and mounted it as needed. (Which, truthfully, was all the time, since it had my browser in that volume.)

Then it came time to format my system and install Windows Vista Ultimate. Vista Ultimate (and the Business version as well) comes with a feature called BitLocker, which is basically whole-disk encryption. Your entire hard drive is encrypted, which means that if your laptop is stolen, you are safe. They can take the hard drive out of your laptop and hook it up to another computer and they still won't be able to get to your files. Well, alas, my laptop does not have the "Trusted Platform Module" chip inside that makes BitLocker work.

But then I remembered that TrueCrypt also has whole-disk encryption built in. So I figured I might as well try it, since everything was being wiped anyway. If it didn't work, I could just re-wipe and go back to what I was doing before.

Long story short, it works amazingly well. The process is extremely easy to encrypt your entire hard drive. TrueCrypt will not even perform the encryption unless it can read in your CD drive a correctly burned recovery disk. This means that you really have to screw up to lock yourself out of your own computer.

It's a very comforting thing to know that my entire hard drive is encrypted. If you own a laptop, I wholeheartedly recommend you do some sort of whole-disk encryption, either through BitLocker (Vista), FileVault (OS X), PGP, or TrueCrypt. (I personally would recommend TrueCrypt because aside from being free, it's also open source. This means that its algorithms and code are subject to peer review.)

If you know me well, you know I just love GPS stuff. I wrote Earth Bridge and Earth Stumbler almost (wow!) three years ago. Several times I tried to get back into coding Earth Bridge v2.0 and each time I kept getting pulled off onto other things and never making it far into the next version.

No more.

I've set up a new Subversion source code repository, installed Visual Studio 2008, and I am coding away. Since the program really needed a major re-architecture of the back-end and the front-end code, I'm basically starting from scratch. I figure it shouldn't take too long to get back up to where version 1 was in functionality, since I coded the original version of the program in only a matter of weeks.

I feel pretty bad about neglecting this program for so long. I love using it and have just about as much want for new features as everyone else. I will post updates on my progress as I go, and hopefully I can start alpha testing and then beta testing. (Real alpha and beta tests, though. Not an extended/forever Google-style beta test.)

I'm thinking of buying an Asus EEE PC for doing mobile testing of Earth Bridge, but it's still up in the air. I have other GPS stuff I want to do to, and a little micro-laptop would be great to have. Especially one that's robust enough to run Google Earth.

I have several other "mobile" GPS apps I'd love to start working on, but I need to get Earth Bridge moving first. I'll blog about the other apps I'm thinking of as I get to them. I personally think the market of location-aware apps is enormous and the number of apps filling that need is microscopic compared to what it should be. The new iPhone is starting to help that, but I think we're only at the very beginning of a whole new genre of applications. (As I said before, I love this subject.)

So, again, sorry to all of you who use Earth Bridge and have been waiting for an update. It is coming. I have kept a list of all wanted features and am going to be rolling out as many of them as I can as fast as I can.

It's been quite some time since I've used my own web site for anything like regular updates. Kind of sad, really. You'd think my own web site would be where you could keep up to date with what I've been up to. No so for the past couple of years. Sorry, folks.

Instead of dwelling on what kept me from here, how about I just start posting? Whoa, what a novel idea.

*cracks knuckles*

Here we go!

Well, wrong is a strong word, but I know he's subscribed to an RSS feed of his name and, having read his blog for years, I know that posts that go against the flow and tell him he's wrong are the posts he actually enjoys reading. So this will probably get his attention and I hope he finds it interesting.

I use Twitter and follow a limited number of other people. I used to follow Robert but as I posted just before unfollowing him, it was too much volume.

Robert follows over 16,600 people. He writes, "@PurpleCar it also gets to why people complain that I'm spamming Twitter. Those people don't have enough friends so their experience isn't as good." That's where I think he's wrong. I have a great Twitter experience. Following more people certainly alters your experience, but I don't think following more people particularly makes it a better experience.

If I'm following someone on Twitter it's because I want to hear what they have to say. When I had Robert on my list, his posts would fast drown out what other people were saying. He told me, "@MBoffin if I'm drowning out your other people, you should get better tools. I'm following 16,000 and no one is drowning anyone else out." Of course that's not true. He doesn't read every post by every person he follows. I do. He does read every post by every one of those 16,000 people when he's signed onto Google Talk but even by his own words, that's only about 5% of the time.

Robert argues that you get a better experience the more people you follow. I argue that you simply get a different experience. His experience is a firehose of information that gives him a valuable "finger on the pulse of the community" so to speak. He feels trends and waves moving through Twitter in a way that I will never experience. He's more like the Hari Seldon of the Twitter universe. Conversely, I'm getting a totally different experience out of Twitter, but just as valuable. I read every post from every person I follow, not just when I happen to have TwitBin or Google Talk open. If I check in after a little bit and the last twenty posts are from one person, they've effectively flooded off anything anyone else had to say. So from my perspective, it's now gone from signal to noise.

Social media is still a space that's finding its own. Robert is at one end of the extreme of its use, and I suppose you could say I'm at the other. We're both early adopters and both getting a valuable, worthwhile experience. Our experiences are polar in nature, not quality.

Well, that was pretty meta. Back to our regularly scheduled millweed-esque silence.

David Bisset pointed to a great article on the iPhone SDK limitations. Basically they are submitting the problems/limitations they see as bugs. It's a great article that runs through a lot of the key limitations of the iPhone SDK. (And for those who are wondering if they are being jerks/trolls about submitting these things as "bugs", know that this is the way Apple wants feedback of this kind to be submitted to them. Apple is requesting this kind of feedback.)

So here's the quick list of what they cover. Check the full article for all the details on each one.

• Allow applications to be installed at the user’s discretion, not Apple’s
• Allow applications to run in background on iPhone
• Allow access to root user on iPhone
• A MediaPicker API for accessing the iPod music files is needed
• Add option to allow iPhone applications to access entire filesystem
• Allow iPhone applications to access the host computer when docking
• Permit Voice over IP on the cellular network
• Allow iPhone applications to access the docking port

Frankly, I can't say I disagree with any of the points they lay out. I mean, hey, you can do all of the above with Windows Mobile already. Then again, this is Apple and they are not a company known for making concessions to others doing much of anything with hardware they create and sell.

I have no doubt that the iPhone will see a major surge in popularity due to the SDK, but I think the popularity of the iPhone would be an unstoppable juggernaut of titanic proportions if they conceded to even just the items listed above.

I read the liveblogging from a couple of different sites. The scope of the SDK is the one thing I was waiting for before either deciding to consider an iPhone or write it off as not something I'll ever get. So here are the questions I still have about it...

• They say it has access to "all the same APIs" that Apple uses to make apps. Does that mean it can access the Bluetooth stack? I can't figure that out. If not, that's a deal-breaker.
  
  
• Apple says the App Store (via iTunes) will be the "exclusive" way to get apps for the iPhone. Does that mean I need to shell out $99 to be on the Developer Program so I can give away a free app? Or is the $99 only for developers who want to sell their app?
  
  
• Will apps have access to the Internet via the EDGE network?

That's all for now. But they are deal-breaker questions for me.