Emil's Wicked Cool Blog

I constantly struggle with the concept of connected vs. unconnected operation. One thing I hate when traveling is that I don't have access to many common applications (the system I am responsible for at work, our bug tracking system, many, many random web sites, etc.). However, I also do not like the idea of installing all kinds of applications on my notebook and syncronizing all the time.

For applications, I'm starting to come down on the side of building interfaces based on the client. If your clients are all Windows, it probably makes sense to go with a .NET ClickOnce application with SQL Everywhere as a local data store (of course, you get to have fun building in all the syncronization). If your clients are not all Windows-based, then go with a web application, and if the costs justify the it, build the click once app as well for convenience.

Similarly (and possibly a more complex problem), what to do about email? Do you send that large attachment out? If you do, your coworkers/friends/whatever will not be able to edit the document and easily keep track of changes - you end up merging by hand constantly. If you don't, your recipients do not have offline access and may have a difficult time finding the document again. I don't have a good answer for that, but I suspect that a really good answer would be worth money to someone...

Well, the trucks have rolled through the neighborhood laying down fiber optic cable through the streets. While I don't have FIOS yet, it will be installed May 5th. For the uninitiated, the service is high speed brodband Internet access provided by Fiber Optic cable directly to the house. Instead of a cable or DSL modem, what gets installed in your house is an ethernet jack. I like the service for the following reasons:

1. It's fast (15Mb/sec, which is triple the speed of cable service here)
2. It's fast (2Mb/sec upload speed, which is 6 times the speed of cable service here). Why do I care about upload speed? When working from home, talking on Vonage (over the Internet) and sharing applications in Netmeeting becomes painful.
3. It's priced well. For $1 less than my already-discounted broadband cable service, I get the 15Mb/2Mb package. If I were even cheaper than I already am, I could have 5Mb/2Mb service for $10 less. That would give me roughly the same service I have now, but would vastly improve my upload speed.

I may have splurged a bit on the 15Mb package...not sure I'll use all the download speed. But guaranteed, it will be nice.

As an aside, the power of marketing and brand recognition is really evident in this space. I could pay 3x as much with Comcast (or Verizon) for the same service I get from Vonage. Verizon FIOS is very new, so they are priced so well that there's just no reason to switch. Either you get better service for the same price (like me), or you save $10/month. With 1 month free and a 30 day money back guarantee, there is no customer switching costs. It will be interesting to see how Comcast reacts to the competitive threat when FIOS starts getting mindshare...

There's been much ado about gas prices lately. I've seen a lot of irresponsible (or just plain ignorant) reporting on the matter. Headlines like "Chevron Earnings Soar 49 Percent to $4B" and "Exxon Mobil 1Q Profit Up 7 Pct. to $8.4B" provides very little context, and if you actually read the report, you'll notice a lot of dollar figures. I have not seen (or heard on the news) a single non-financial report of gas industry profit that even mentions margin. I might be picking on AP a little here, because both my examples were AP, but they are one of the most read news sources, so they have a greater responsibility to get things right. Anyway, the whole thing reminds me of deficit headlines that don't compare deficit as a percentage of GDP.

This post is about bad reporting, but I'll mention that my opinion on the gas thing is that gas is a commodity and that as such, the oil companies are price takers, not price makers, and so they have very little control over these things. An 11% (Chevron)/16% (ExxonMobil) operating margin is pretty-freaking far from "windfall profits", and appears in line with other commodity industries like steel.

Hmm...so Smartphone 2003 (a.k.a. Windows Mobile 2003 a.k.a. Windows CE 4.21) doesn't come with a version of notepad for short notes.

Problem now solved. I wrote a quick notepad application. Curiously, Smartphone 2003 doesn't have a standard control for navigating the file system. The guys at OpenNetCF have some great extensions, and although I can't find it right now, there is are File Dialogs to help you open and save documents.

I also decided to write a stopwatch application. The application has standard start/stop/reset/lap functions, but also adds logging to a file (no, you can't change it). It also has a unique feature that helps explain why I built it: It will time contractions (and display the last hour's average frequency and duration), show you the last 5 frequency and durations of the contractions, and tell you when it's time to go to the hospital. I expect it to be quite handy around the end of June...

As mentioned in a previous post, I had some significant issues getting Yahoo! Mail up and running. The issue is now resolved. For the record, I believe that the issue stemmed from the fact that I established my Yahoo! ID back in 1995 (or thereabouts) and did not sign up for mail service on the ID at the time. I did not really want to establish a new ID for the test. Anyway, here's the scoop:

• February 25th: Original ticket submitted
• February 27th: Stock answer that the problem is temporary, and maybe I should click refresh on my browser. Not sure why it took two days for what an autoresponder could have done, but whatever. Responded that I tried IE and Firefox, logged out, logged in, etc., etc.
  
• February 28th: Received response that they are looking into the issue.
• March 5th: Responded to Yahoo! asking for an update. Received response that they're still working on it.
  
• March 22nd: Responded to Yahoo! asking for an update.
  
• March 29th: After a full week, I received a message saying "the issue may have been transient and appears to be resolved now". My conclusion at this point - Yahoo! did not actually look into the issue over the entire month. I'm basically back at "please hit refresh".
• April 1st: Hadn't checked into my email, so I read the March 29th message and responded with "This is not yet resolved."
• April 2nd: Finally I seem to get someone's attention. They ask me for a bunch of account details (not sure why they need this, but they're finally looking at my account setup rather than assuming I'm reporting a general server outage).
• April 3rd: Respond with account details
• April 3rd: Yahoo! replies to my response asking for account details. After a month of back and forth blaming me for not hitting refresh, now they prove they can't even read.
• April 4th: I send my reply "I already did. Please see original message below"
• April 6th: Michelle replies to me stating a definitive, "We have completed our investigation of the issue you reported, and were able to identify the cause and take corrective mesaures to address it...". This sounds positive!
• April 7th: I verify that I now have a Yahoo! mail account and can log in. I send a "It's resolved - thank you!".

The entire time I had hoped to actually call them so I could convince someone on the phone that this is an account issue, not a server issue, but alas, no support phone numbers were to be found. I actually considered walking to their offices near Kelly's work either to explain the situation, strangle someone, or both.

Anyway, in a record 7 weeks, Yahoo! was able to fix my problem. One good thing in all this is that Yahoo! sent me a survey after nearly every response. I sent some very strong messages in both the scores and the write in comments. I hope they read them.