Matthew Bass

I was initially quite irritated with Apple for choosing to charge existing iPod Touch users like myself a $20 bill to get a hold of their January update. I’m still a bit ticked since it seems quite unfair to punish the early adopters like this, but by last Tuesday I had decided to push past my annoyance and plunk down the $20 for the update.

Now I can’t seem to purchase it for some reason.

When I visit the iTunes store or Apple’s web site and click on the link to buy the update, I get sent to a page with information about the update and a single OK button. I click OK and get sent back to the iTunes store home page. Every. Single. Time.

I’ve called Apple a couple of times on this. They say it’s a bug on their end and that they’re working on it, but they can’t seem to give me an estimated resolution time. Apparently, this problem is only being experienced by a few lucky people, like myself.

Has Apple lost a sale? Possibly. I want to give them my $20, but they just don’t seem to want it that badly. I may opt to use the 1.1.3 jailbreak instead (when it becomes available for the Touch).

And I was really looking forward to using the “official” apps…

Watch the inimitable David Pogue for a nice demo. OLPC’s $100 laptop debuts in the U.S. during a two-week window in November. It’s a buy one, get one deal. $400 sends one laptop to a poor kid in a third world country, and one laptop to you.

Am I getting in on this deal? You betcha. Consider the hackability factor here. Pogue already snuck in a reference to Python in his video. Imagine the cool things that can be done with this device once Ruby is running on it. Not to mention the fact that it’s pretty indestructible.

An extra $200 to send one to a needy child? What a deal. Count me in. What about you?

I’ll be speaking about chaotic agility at the Agile RTP meetup in August.

Chaotic agility is a phrase describing why I believe agility works: the science behind it models an amazingly accurate picture of a typical development project. Most of us will agree that agile teams produce better software on time and for less money. But few of us question why agility works. By better understanding the science behind agility, we will stop trying to manufacture and control software and instead allow it to emerge on its own.

Note that August’s meetup won’t be at Frankie’s. We’re trying out a new location at Misys Healthcare on Six Forks Road. Visit the meetup site for directions and a more detailed overview of the talk. See you there!

Creating mesh networks sounds like a really cool idea. The free software released by CUWiN is supposed to make it easy to do just that. Theoretically, if enough people were doing this, I could drop my Road Runner service. I wonder how long it will take for wireless networking to become so ubiquitous that we no longer need to use ISPs?

Hmm. Probably quite a while, come to think of it!

I admit it: I’ve been rather slow getting on the social networking bandwagon. When it comes to things that other people like, I just don’t care. If someone in my circle of friends or colleagues recommends something (through the joy that is Soapadoo, for example) then I’ll take notice, but advice from total strangers just doesn’t strike me as being very trustworthy.

That being said, I discovered de.licio.us and BlinkList over the weekend and was immediately hooked. On BlinkList, that is. Why not de.liciou.us?

1. Multi-word tags aren’t supported.
2. It’s drop-dead ugly.
3. Typing the URL is torturous.

I imported my existing bookmarks (about a bazillion of ‘em) into BlinkList on Monday. I’ve been shocked at how useful the service has been since then.

• Pages can be bookmarked instantly. Whenever I see a page I want to keep, I hit my “Blink It!” button, type in a few tags, hit submit, and I’m back to the original page and surfing away. The entry barrier for creating a bookmark just got a lot lower for me. (I haven’t yet decided if this is good or bad.)
  
  
• Bookmarks can be tagged. This allows me to esentially store bookmarks in multiple folders. This makes sense because any given bookmark can’t be narrowed down into a single category.
  
  
• I can exchange bookmarks with my friends. Odds are that if one of my friends has a site bookmarked, I’ll probably want that site bookmarked too. One click and it’s done.
  
  
• I can access my bookmarks anywhere. Whether I’m hanging upside down off a cliff in New Zealand or fleeing a grizzly bear in the Canadian Rockies (not that I’ve ever done either of those things)… I can still view and edit my bookmarks.

Want to see BlinkList in action? Check out my bookmarks. If you’re a stranger then I can’t promise they’ll be interesting, but at least you’ll be able to check your stocks before you lose your grip on that cliff edge.

Some of my co-workers were chatting at lunch yesterday about the highest audible frequencies that can be heard by people of various ages. Apparently, teens these days are programming their cell phones to use high frequency ring tones while in class. The frequencies are so high that adults can’t hear them, only teens can. One of my co-workers located a web site that has links to sounds at various frequencies. What’s the highest frequency you can hear? I got up to 18k using my headphones, but only 17k on my speakers. Anything higher than that makes me physically uncomfortable even though I can’t hear anything.

No Fluff, Just Stuff (NFJS for short) is a symposium / conference / geekfest that began touring a few years ago. This year, an NFJS Anthology containing articles from many of the top speakers is being published by the Prag Prog guys. A couple of sample articles have been published as free PDFs.

The first article is by Stuart Halloway and covers how Spring uses Dependency Injection and Aspect Oriented Programming in a delightful marriage of DRY-bashing goodness.

The second article is by Glenn Vanderburg and is called “Buried Treasure.” Why is the software development field going backwards? Glenn explains why in this excellent treatise on why old is not bad.

I highly recommend reading both of these samplers because they contain a lot of useful information in their own right. Not having reviewed the entire Anthology yet I can’t vouch for the other articles, but given some of the names listed here (Eitan Suez, Venkat Subramaniam, Neal Ford, Jared Richardson) there probably isn’t much of a question over whether it’s good material or not!

Noticed this digg today and immediately thought of a software parallel. The saw constantly monitors its electrical state for changes and shuts down when one is detected. Isn’t this just like Continuous Integration?

A friend pointed me to Clearwire a couple of days ago. They currently offer wireless broadband for much of the West Coast and a few other areas of the United States, but what excited me was that they plan to start offering service in Greensboro sometime this year. I wonder when Raleigh might get coverage?

Clearwire uses cell towers to provide Internet service to devices throughout metropolitan areas. This sounds very similar to what Nextel tried a year or so ago. Does anyone else have news on other wireless service providers who may be setting up camp in North Carolina soon?

I saw an EDS ad in Forbes today which had what I thought was an interesting tagline:

You can talk about it.
You can think about it.
You can hope for it.
But if you actually want to cut a bolt, use a bolt cutter.

This is so true. Yet as a software developer, this is something I tend to forget. I can blog all day about how wonderful Ruby is, but if I really want to prove its worth I should be willing to do something with it. Likewise, if I haven’t actually created something in C#, I have no basis for commenting on the language, either negatively or positively. Experience breeds credibility and authority.

Don’t just talk about cutting a bolt. Get out that bolt cutter and use it!