I don’t have time to figure this out completely so I’m just gonna post a link. I’ve been wanting to tether my Blackberry to my Mac (or is it the Mac to the Blackberry?) to access the net but I can’t seem to get a straight answer. According to a pro on the Sprint forums you need your NAI? The phone is company owned so I don’t know how to get this info. But I’d sure like to try. Once again, shamelessly inlining:

To use a Mac with Phone As Modem support, you will need specific information to use the handset as a modem device. Among this criteria is the number to connect to the Sprint Network, and a username / password.

Your username (as provided in the Internet Connection settings through OS X) is your NAI. Your NAI is your Sprint email address for your phone. This is typically username123@sprintpcs.com.

You can find your NAI by going through the settings on your handset. The typical menu path on your Sprint handset to get your NAI is:

1. Settings > Phone Info > My Phone Number (View) > User Name — When selecting User Name, you will be given your NAI. It will follow the name pattern above (usernameXXX@sprintpcs.com) where XXX is a number.

2. You will need the Phone number to connect to. To access the Sprint Network, you will use #777 for the phone number on your phone.

PLEASE NOTE: If you do not have an applicable data plan, you will be charged data usage, so ensure you have an appropriate data plan for your type of use. Also, depending on your market (EVDO, vs Non-EVDO) connections speeds will vary. Instructions for pairing your handset via Bluetooth will be provided in this thread as well. In a situation with a handset like the RAZR2, where a data cable is NOT provided, you can pair wirelessly with your Mac using Bluetooth, eliminating the need for a cable. Bluetooth is standard on all MacBook, Macbook Pro, and the MacBook air laptop. It is also standard on all Intel based Mac Minis and the iMac. The Bluetooth pairing will allow you to not only use the handset as a Phone as modem, but also use iSync to link your Calendars and Contacts with you handset provided you have the appropriate iSync plug-in for your phone.

I mentioned my new Jabra toy a while back and I’ve been meaning to include a follow up post on it. Ya’ see I’ve had this company issued Blackberry for a minute now. And I bought one of those SD mini cards, the kind that holds about 1GB but is smaller than the tip of your finger. It was the only way I knew (at the time) to put my jamz on my 8830. I’ve been rapping about MOP for a while I figured it’d be a good idea to hear some M.O.P. once and a while… without teaching my little girls bad words. So that’s where the 8010 comes in. I can put this little trinket on my right ear and stream “Downtown Swinga” while my left ear is tuned to the kids… making sure they are well behaved. The device does more than that. It pairs with multiple devices so I can use it to record audio over my screencasts on my Mac. I can also stream audio from iTunes (though for some reason Bluetooth audio from the MacBook sounds like it uses voice audio encoding which makes everything sound like it’s played over the phone… something I’m still trying to figure out….) and take a phone call right in the middle of K.R.S. 1’s “The Bridge is Over” without missing a beat. Well I might miss a few bars because iTunes will continue during my phone call but when paired to Blackberry music automatically pauses for phone calls. Speaking of calls I love the vibrate alert on incoming calls. It takes some getting used to and still makes me jump out my skin on occasion but what an un-ignorable way to announce a call! If you’re too jumpy, like I am, you can disable vibra-alert and save face in public places. (Nothing says “I’m need a straight jacket” louder than a guy paying for a gallon of Clorox Bleach and some M&Ms who suddenly decides to pull his head into his torso “Ninja Turtle” style while jamming both shoulders in his head while some indecipherable blue text appears on his right ear.)

I’ve read that the 8010 includes noise reduction but I don’t know because I’m on the noisy end. I believe my calls come through more clear but I’ve yet heard someone take notice. I don’t make many phone calls anyhow and when I do I’m almost always in one of those Sprint spotty coverage areas. I’ve also heard that it has caller id which is one of the dumbest features I could imagine on such a device. Unless you can fold your face down the center and peek at your ear from one eye I don’t understand how caller id can do anything for you. I still don’t know if mine works. Maybe if you had a girl friend or a wife with an ear fetish you’d have a clue who’s buzzing you but then again, what if you decided to cheat on Mrs. I-Love-your-ear?

The thing I like most about the 8010 is how it plays stereo with the optional attached secondary ear piece. You can stream audio in mono with just one piece but everything sounds so much better in stereo. Even phone calls come through in stereo. You get that in the machine feeling when you favorite song is cranked way up then you get a call which comes through in surround sound. Tap the button to pick up the call, tap again to end the call, then tap mode then the main button again to resume Reggae ‘94.

Paired with an 8830 you get the added benefit of voice dialing. I’ve been in a few situations where I need to join a conference call while driving down Route 30 and not wanting or able to pull to the side. One tap then speak, “call meeting place” give me a friendly voice prompt, “Did you say call Meat and Place?” to which I reply, “Hell no!” The follow up prompt, “Did you say call Me-Jing Prace?” eventually connects me to our conference room (the Text To Speech on the 8830 has some minor pronunciation issue that you learn to appreciate over time). That’s all for now, it’s past my bed time and I need to rest up. If you’ve had some fun with Bluetooth drop a line. I’d love to hear ’bout it.

So I download Anacron because I’m sick of manually launching Mac Janitor to run daily, weekly, and monthly stuff right? Ever since then I start having all kinds of crazy issues. I loose settings and preferences left and right. It started with Quicksilver spontaneously quitting and forgetting what it was supposed to look like when it reopened. Then I noticed Parallels started looking elsewhere for my WinXP VM install. (I have it under ~/Library/Parallels which may or may not be the default.) All of the sudden RDC can’t remember the defaults for talking to my Dell. It’s crazy and it all started when I installed Anacron. The bad thing is I don’t know how to uninstall software on a Mac yet. In windows you have add/remove programs, in Mepis/Ubuntu I could always rely on Synaptic, on a Mac you’re supposed to be able to just delete the .app folder but what about software that installs via an installer? Has anyone else had similar issues with Anacron? Is it just me???

We, as humans, are a strange species. We buy scented toilet paper. We tour places with tall buildings, climb these building only to put money into telescopes so that we can see the ground close up. We report power outages over television broadcasts hoping to reach that one person running a generator out of his garage so that he can scramble and notify the rest of the neighborhood. We impose death penalties for murderers to teach that killing is wrong. Then during the lethal injection we sterilize the needle and swab the area with alcohol to prevent germs from spreading. We sometimes invent things or come up with ideas only for the sake of creativity. For example, there are braille dots on the keypads of drive up ATM machines. Then there’s that torch setting on the toaster which will transmogrify a slice of bread, no matter how thick, into dust as the timer expires. (Who thought that was a novel feature?) Today I got to thinking about what motivates us to do some of the things we do. More specifically, what motivates us to approach problems a certain way?

Here at Can’t see nothing but the source code the focus is on software engineering. Writing software is all about converting people’s thoughts and ideas into a barrage of ones and zeros so some electronic device can execute them. Most engineers obsess over the details of:

1. Their favorite… *cough* Groovy… *cough cough*… programming language
2. Their favorite intellij I mean intelligent IDE
3. Their favorite platform
4. Their deep understanding of some algorithm

There are, no doubt, other things they obsess over but these are by far the most popular. In fact, you can’t be a qualified engineer unless you have a touch of Aspergers syndrome and/or are obsessed over something that normally people take for granite. So is it a wonder why software engineers have such a hard time with product management? Is it a surprise that any time you get any two half way decent software guys in a room they will argue over something as time-wasting as an Integer vs. a short? The more qualified the engineers the longer the argument ensues. You want that kind of argument. You may not want it to go on forever but you do need to entertain some of these dumb discussions. It’s healthy for the project and while it feels like it makes your deadlines slip it’s healthy for project management. If you don’t entertain two tech guys entertaining themselves over why SWT is way more betterish than Swing then you’ll end up with competition and divergent ideas. It’s important to encourage these debates but not let them run on mindlessly.

We’ve all run into our share of horror code. Y’know the complicated backward counting loop that always skips the second to last index, or the complex multi-line boolean expression that when simplified turns out to be a constant if true=false. No matter how often you see this stuff isn’t your first reaction, “why in [insert explitive expression referring to bowel movement, sexual encounter or home of brimstone] would some bonehead do it that way?” If you expound on the motivation you will most certainly find a developer under the gun to figure out a problem for which there was no proper decomposition when the code was originally written. The lack of decomposition comes from the author’s (not necessarily the guy that wrote the hack) obsession over a deep understanding of some particular domain problem. It goes like this. The product owner says, “we need a quarterly break out of our gross profit margin and these reports only give year end totals.” The original developer says or thinks, “Oh, I’ve tackled cross tab queries at my last job and I came up with the Oracle flavored secret sauce to make them perform like lightning. Alls yuh haff tuh do is…” then the code is written. Days later when the original author is in Florida on his second honey moon and junior developer Sam, who happened to be filling the coffee pot the same day Mr. Guru went off on his cross tab rant, is assigned to go fix the off by .001% bug you end up with the bone headed hack we described above.

You ever start a new job and hit a wall when someone says, “we have a strict policy and we absolutely don’t do X” and X is something absolutely critical to software development, like “do regression testing”, “use and IDE”, “compile our code”, or “use the internet”? Many times the issue lies in nomenclature. The company actually does “thing X” but does it in such a round about way that they have completely renamed and reinvented it’s intention. I worked at a company on a Java project where the nightly build was a series of make files that recursed through folders compiling folder by folder and took hours to complete. I also worked at another job where the build and release process could not be automated because the possibility of error so it made sense to have a person run each step so that it could be confirmed and validated without issue. (Translation, management needed someone to blame/harass/terminate instead of some process.) I’ve worked with people who swore every possible piece of functionality could be implemented or belonged in a DBMS table. I’ve also worked with people who thought reading books on programming was an optional practice and completely unnecessary barring you had enough experience dealing with real rather than text book issues. In all I’ve seen my share of craziness.

Nothing tops this
In all my years of software development I’ve never seen anything difficult to understand than this one guy. He deployed a special servlet to a production box that would accept hot deployments of a product that was being developed internally. He didn’t write the servlet but for some reason he was so obsessed with the thought of being the servlet’s to bypass certain security restrictions that had been plaguing him since the beginning, that it became sensible to try out this functionality on the release day of the product. Now considering all normalcy of common sense one would typically refrain from a such an idea as it:

1. involves production hardware
2. is the release day of a highly visible product
3. had not been ok’ed by management
4. involved practices that were frowned on in the company

But this guy’s motivation was outside the realms of common sense. Motivation for stoopidity comes, in the tech field, from obsession. Whether it’s obsession over how much heat your thermal component can emit, obsession to make money or obsession over a development philosophy it’s always rooted in obsession. Some people obsess over sandwiches, while others obsess over anything from bunnies, to marbles, to motorcycles. In many ways it can be a good thing mostly when controlled. Seeing these obsessions as the root of all stoopidity takes talent, and insight.

Have you been there? Have you been the victim or the catalyst of some form of motivation? Have you or a loved one been hurt by someone else’s motivation? Speak on it people….

Tonight was the open space discussion meeting on technology at MapQuest. I’ve never been to one of these before. I didn’t know how to act. I was one of the facilitators there and as such I was expected to speak intelligently on any technologies, topics of interest to the overall group. I have a crazy love/fear of public speaking. Basically I suck at it. I’m a shy person in general and not a good conversationalist. I suck at conversation. I’m terrible at on the fly thinking but yet I love to thrust myself into situations where I have no choice but to come up with material on the fly because I love being the center of attention but I hate planning. So tonight was another one of those situations, only I did do a fair amount of planning. You can’t plan for the unexpected so whatever planning I thought I did was in vain.

At my company I happen to work with some of the top developers in the state. These are likely the top developers in America and like in top in the world, some of them. Those developers who know their stuff know who they are. We got a lot of great guys who are much better at things like organization, public speaking, and engaging the audience. I wish I were as cool as them. Tonight wasn’t too bad, though. I met an old friend and made some new friends. I spoke as smartly as I couldn’t on things that are still brand new to me. I held my tongue on topics that were considered company hush hush. And I gave an overall marginal speech on Java mobile technology. Of course I focused heavily on software development life cycle which lead into discussion on how we use Maven.

What I’ve learned is that I tend to present too technical to people who would otherwise be interested in the high level ideas above the frameworks. As a gear head (and I am the most hardcore gear head you’ll ever meet, if you ever actually meet me… most of you know me solely from my blabbering on this site) I can’t help but obsess over the nuts and bolts behind the thing that people care most about. but enough about me because I don’t know what I’m talking about. Mobile is still new to me and I learn new things each day.

I want to speak on some cool cats in my company. One guy in particular really had me engaged in another recent developer gathering we had about a week ago. He conducted an open find-the-bug detective thing where we as a group were all invited to go through an exercise of tracking down a thread deadlock condition on a Java server application. (Simplified, a deadlock is when the computer is trying to do “thing A” and “thing B” at the same time but “thing A” is waiting for “thing B” to complete while “thing B” is actually waiting for “thing A”. It’s kinda like those awkward moments on the news where the anchor man starts to speak over the interviewee phoned in over satellite but pauses because of the delay while the interviewee interrupts his speech to let the anchor man finish talking, or even better described in this uncomfortable dance situation.) The concept was brilliant, the presentation was engaging, and the guy really knows his stuff. As a result I want to lay out what I think is essential for a good presentation or tech talk.

Content
Make sure the meat of what you say is applicable, relevant to things your audience deals with or needs to deal with, and full of good information. I screwed this up on a Maven talk I gave where I focused sooo heavily on live demos and pretty slideshows with razzle dazzle that I lost focus of giving out meaningful information.

Forget Razzle Dazzle
It’s cool to have text fly in from the lower left with a slight spiral using PowerPoint or key note but what it takes away from the actual content (see above) actually hurts the overall presentation. Unless your presenting a stellar new UI framework, interior decoration idea, art project, or other visual product where razzle in the key ingredient leave this crap out of your slideshows. Your audience will appreciate it and it will leave you more time to focus on content (see above).

Delivery
I don’t care how chock full of goodness your content is if your delivery suffers (as mine always does due to nervousness caused by not being prepared) then your message wil never get across. Delivery is actually more important than content because even a presentation with no relevant content will be received well and entice return vistors when delivered correctly. Delivery has nothing to do with razzle dazzle and special effects. you can have vanilla all white slides with black text but deliver it in such a way that the audience will swear that you used every eye candy feature in Power Point. Delivery is how you speak to the audience and how well you get them engaged.

Eye contact
Speaks to delivery. If you maintain eye contact with not just one but every member of the audience your message will be well received. Don’t make the mistake I always make of having a friend in the audience and focusing your message to the one person that appears engaged. The rest of the audience will feel ignored and that friend will feel singled out or stared at. If your eyes dance from one audience member to another everyone will feel included even if they aren’t interested.

Listen
As a presenter you have to be able to listen to your audience. Allow questions to interrupt but be careful not to get distracted by too many interim questions. the classic “hold all questions to the end” makes your audience (especially programmers like myself who love to ask what they believe are tough thought-provoking questions but are actually carefully self-crafted to make themselves sound more intelligent than the presenter) feel less a part of the overall presentation. Allow 1-3 interim questions whith brief answers while leaving the full elaboration for the end. Something like, “is it hard to target different types of phones?” can be quickly answered with, “we do face a number of challenges” while continuing with the current topic. At the end you can reflect with, “now someone asked about porting. Here’s some specifics that do do to ease our pain…” that shows both that you considered the questioneer and that you thought their concern was relevant enough to remember at the conclusion.

Fonts And amount of text
Use big and non-fancy fonts in any of your slides. Your audience needs to read your content. Sans serif works best and 24 point should be the smallest unless you have a small room full of people already familiar with the material. Also pay attention that your slides include only general topics and not full stories. Paragraphs are for word processors and people don’t come to your presentation to learn to speed read. The less text you put up the better.

These are tips that apply to any presentation that you give. They are coming from a person who has yet to give what I feel to be an adequate or above average presentation to take it with a grain of salt (and a sip of beer). One of these days I’ll actually follow some of the advice I give to others, but until then you are all stuck being my guinea pigs. Hit me up party people.

Not only is it funny, it’ll teach you a thing or two about yourself. Head over here to get well authored instructions on how to suck at nearly everything you do. Discover how to dance with a stranger or pound your head into your nightstand all with such perfection others will swear you’ve been sucking at life for, well, for your entire life!

I’ve been doing a lot of interesting stuff at work, causing trouble, fixing trouble, and just having fun. There’s one little nugget I’ve been dying to share with y’all but I don’t know if it’s cool to talk about. Y’see way back in December is when the nonsense began. What started as an innocent precursor to the holiday season turned into a couple of dumb ideas which kinda have been crreping their way into our product by my overactive imagination. Let the story begin.

We (myself and a couple of my buddies at work) were looking to decorate the tree for ol’ St. Nick when someone noticed there wasn’t a star on top. So then we (myself and these two “cool as steel” buddies of mine) decided to use our company’s logo for the tree topping. What a better idea than the MapQuest star, right? Well my coworkers were at a loss because for some dumb reason we couldn’t find any replication of the star outside of the little icon from the home page that got distorted when you blew it up. So I whips out my favorite graphics toy, Xara, and I goes to work. I’m no graphic artist, far from it. But that’s the beauty with this toy. You don’t hafta know nothing about graphics design. It’s dirt simple to use and makes even the night time janitor look like Picasso. So exactly 15 minutes later (my manager had allocated exactly 15 minutes for this non-sprint emergent task) we had s rough replication of the company logo. It was far from exact and off by a certain order of magnitude but it looked good for a fifteen minute effort.

Flash forward to the actual Christmas holiday when everyone else was jingle belling I started playing with TTS (that’s Text To Speech or the funny audio word reader software that people like to play with on the Mac from time to time) in an effort to demonstrate Test Driven Design and the Maven build system all at once. I put together a speach component that I later would embed in a web application (still available today as an Easter egg on the company domain but I’m not giving the address). I had too much fun over the Christmas holiday.

These two ideas grew mature in a short period of time and will eventually merge in my pea brain as I bring you yet the most non-productive waste of time to ever hit “the internets” in the near future. More on that idea in the future. Today both crazy ventures have found a place in our software. I wanna demo the first idea but it’s still kinda early. I’m not quite sure how I’ll put it out but when I do you’ll know. It’s a few months early but keep checking back and you might see my new buddy show up.

Over there! I asked you all politely to visit my man Rory. The very next day as I looked for a flatline my stats increase by a whopping 3 visits! (when your spot’s as lightly traveled as mine you’d notice if a squirrel got too close to the building hosting your HTML/CSS.) Now I’ll ask those extra 3 visitors to round up the other 12 people and head over here. This guy needs the traffic way more than I do. Man, I try to do a good deed and look what happens!

Lot of talk about video editing lately. Rory’s been giving shots out to me (I have nothing to do with video editing) his homie Clint Rutkas (who may be in the same league as me with video editing) and pointing out another site by Astrid. I’m just starting to read pocketsized and it’s pretty cool. The stuff posted on her home page is off da’ hook. Maybe it’s because I don’t know nothing about filmeotography and cameras and stuff and it’s just as easy to impress me with a Kodak M753 taking mpegs at Hershey Park after hours with poor lighting and calling it a moonlight effect. At any rate the home page looks pretty professional to me. Once again that’s not much of a compliment. (Why do I pretend to give credit while quickly rescinding? It must be that bit of Indian in my family somehow influencing my giving habits and no that doesn’t make sense because it wasn’t the Indians that did the Indian giving analogy I was trying to run with rather the Europeans that quickly took back what they gave to the Indians… I think sometime shortly after the holiday they called Thanksgiving so they could be all like, “thanks for giving me your land you Indian” over a hundred years later and then make jokes with the word “Indian” in it when it should really be like, “You filthy European giver… Gimme that back!” but nobody really thinks about the specifics unless they’re either smoked out, drunk, or bored in the middle of the night after baking cupcakes and looking at tiled mapping code which has nothing to do with the topic up above but I digress…) It’s funny because I’ve been looking to do a little video tinkering of my own as a hush-hush project that I would spring at the party people I work with… Ssshhh… don’t tell noone ’bout this ok?

The point is video editing is a cool thing to do. It lowers your cholesterol and provides much needed anti oxidants. Say no to drugs and yes to video tinkering. For more details on how to edit your baby’s first steps send a self addressed stamped envelope (with signed blank check tucked inside) to:

Emporer Cliff
2404 Killamanjaror Ave.
Slaughtersville, PA 19101

Your (check will be cashed and your) request will be forwarded to a qualified professional. Please allow 3-4 weeks for processing. All rights (to torture) reserved. Copywright (plagiarism wrong) 2007-2010.

I posted a while back about the listings in my blogroll. I stand by them however there are a couple in there that I have not yet read much of. Shortly after posting about my blogroll I started throwing a couple of sites on it that looked interesting. It’s nothing personal if your site is there and I haven’t read much of it. It’s just that my eyes only move left to right so fast and there are only so many hours in a day. While I do read the many of the links listed there I plan on becoming familiar with all of them. With that I’d like to list a couple of other interesting sites that have caught my eye. Rory links specifically which makes them more intriguing. There’s this Astrid place with a pocket-sized cinnamontog… cimanym…tog… synonymtograf… aww bust it! It’s this gal that does filmy type stuff. I love video and graphic stuff so I might be checking it out. Then there’s Massif. I’ve seen his comments repeatedly on Neopoleon.com but I didn’t make the connection to the creation story until recently. Somehow he ended up as a god in the story so there must be something up there. Finally there’s this Yuvi cat that Rory mentioned at least once or twice so I got to peep his stuff. there were plenty others on the Neopoleon linked in list but these are the few that caught my eye. If you got John Blaze stuff but I ain’t recognizin’ let me know. Like I said I can’t list and read everything but I will list the things that I pay attention. Also, if you’re into the tech programming stuff like I am then it’s well worth your while to check out Juxie. I listed this spot a while back and recently I’ve been catching up with it. Lots of good things there. And always keep an eye on my main peeps Meryln and Tiago. as well as the others listed on my roll.