Here it is friends and neighbors, the introduction of a new internet word that you’ll soon grow to hate, iPhlogging.

Yes, you guessed it, its blogging on an iPhone. (Although in this case it is viewing a blog.)

Disclaimer: This isn’t a picture of my iPhone since I don’t have one. This is a picture from one of the adoring fans of my blog.

Disclaimer Two: No, my Mom didn’t buy an iPhone either. I actually have real fans.

Disclaimer Three: Fine, it is actually from the best man from my wedding who bought it and I made him take a picture. I’m still going to count him as a fan though.

Disclaimer Four: Alright, I didn’t even come up with the term iPhlogging, that was his wife. So, essentially, I brought very little to the table. But I did take the time to post this, that ought to count for something.

Update One/Disclaimer Five: After the initial post I got this email from my friend disclaiming Disclaimer Four.


I forgot to check the sending account on mail. That one should have come from me. I'm also the originator of iPhlog. The world deserves the truth.

Sent from my iPhone


So you may not have heard, but the iPhone is being released on Friday. Although if you haven’t heard, that is a big old rock you’ve been living under. Or you’ve been on Mars. I do hear it’s lovely there this time of year.

I guess that there is a running pool here about who will be the first Seapine person to get one. Apparently I’m in the top two along with Rick. If I were a betting man (which I am) I would not wage heavily on me though. Don’t get me wrong, I still would love to get one but I just don’t see that happening immediately.

It isn’t for lack of trying, I’ve even taken a two pronged approach to it. I figured that while I would try to convince my wife to use our money I would also try to talk Seapine into using its money. Given the amazing similarity of the responses from both sides I’m beginning to think that they’ve unionized against me.

And all this was before a tree in my yard fell down last night in the storm. Now my wife has to decide if she wants to spend money on a tree service to haul it away or green light me getting a chain saw. There’s a proverbial no win situation, although at least one of those options doesn’t involve me accidentally cutting a leg off. The lesson here is now there’s a “Looks like we have to use the iPhone money for something else” situation rearing its head. Stupid tree.

But enough about my sorry state of affairs. I’m sure the iPhone madness, insanity, and all around general bizarreness will be over soon. At the very least the current media storm will switch to a new media storm when the AT&T network belches, rolls over, and starts making crazy animal noises due to the crush of new users with unlimited data plans.

Hey wait, I just got an idea. I wonder if I can convince someone that an iPhone can somehow be used as a crude downed tree removal tool? The reviews say it doesn’t scratch, although acting as a handsaw probably isn’t what they had in mind. Regardless, I’ve got a new angle baby, I’m back in the game.

Earlier this week it was announced internally that I am leaving the development organization. After a decade of coding in general and five years spent on two different Seapine products it was time for a change.

What’s the change you say? I’m glad you asked.

I’m now officially a member of our Corporate Strategy group with the somewhat silly title of Technology Evangelist. What this really means is that I’m going to be involved in a lot of content creation and messaging as well as strategic planning. Essentially, it will be marketing and analysis.

To be honest it is a bit of a weird feeling to be starting something completely new. I’ve changed jobs before but it was always linked to day to day coding. I’m still going to get the opportunity to program, probably for Seapine Labs, but not being on any kind of product development schedule is a tad unnerving. Thankfully the good natured grief I’ve been taking is at least dying down a bit and I’ve finally gotten all my junk moved to the right floor.

Why are you making the move? Again, I’m glad you asked.

One of the development managers here once said something to me that kind of went like this:

“You’re not really a Computer Science major, you’re an English major that got lost.”

What he meant by it was that even though my degree was in CS and I was actively working as a developer, I didn’t live and die by the code. I could be happy enough doing it, but at the same time I would also be happy doing other things. Some developers are defined by being developers, that is who they are and what they are meant to do. That’s never really been me.

Tangent: Did you know that I didn’t start college as a Computer Science major? It wasn’t even my second one. Or my third for that matter. Had I not suddenly come to the realization that I needed to graduate it might not have been my fourth either. (The others? Criminal justice, Electronic Media, Public Relations. Ironically, English is the one I skipped for Computer Science.)

So we’ll see how this grand adventure goes. It is always strange to leave a comfort zone for a new challenge, even in the same company. I’m not worried though. If worse comes to worse I can always find a sidewalk and cardboard sign that says: “Will code (or evangelize) for food.”

Ah a new day is a here. It is nothing but blue skies and nice weather here in the Cincinnati area, which pretty much means I’ve doomed us to a snowstorm or something tonight.

Yeah, sorry about that.

Last night after the kid went to sleep I got a chance to watch the actual WWDC Keynote. While not as good as being there it is a heck of a lot better than “watching” it by reading a macrumorslive text feed. Here are some more in-depth things that I took away from it.

1. 1. New Desktop (i.e. Dock) and Finder

Both good things, both things that should have happened a while ago. For me these were the only truly new Leopard announcements thanks to my access to the Leopard seeds and my attendance at WWDC last year. I like the new Finder UI, although I’m not sure of the use of Cover Flow.

My daughter however adores Cover Flow and uses it extensively to browse the iTunes collection at home. It is important to note, however, that she is only two years old and can’t really read. Thus we can assume that Finder Cover Flow will be HUGE with the preschool crowd.

2. 2. Quick Look

This could be interesting, and word from my people on the street in SF says that is fun to use. From what I could see in the Keynote it was working well which is quite an improvement from the last time I saw it. (Last time “working” meant grabbing onto your screen and then never going away.)

3. 3. Time Machine

After my adventure with hard drives recently this alone is worth the $129. An interesting new piece to this is that you can plug a USB drive into a Airport and then backup wirelessly. That is very cool.

4. 4. Spaces

What’s old is new again on this one. It was useful on Linux and Unix back in the olden days when dinosaurs still walked the earth, it will be useful today.

5. 5. iCal

I use iCal all the darn time for my scheduling but the corporate scheduling is done using Outlook/Exchange. This means a manual step and a real pain for me when accepting appointments and a trip to Outlook Web (bleech) to create a new meeting. I had high hopes that the new iCal would play nicer with Exchange but that doesn’t appear to the case. Boo.

On the flip side the Active Directory integration with Open Directory seems to be improved. Unfortunately improved seems to mean lobotomizing Open Directory and turning it into a pass through sock puppet of Active Directory. I guess if it gets the job done going all Charlie McCarthy isn’t that bad.

6. 6. Xcode, Interface Builder, Dashcode, Xray

Doesn’t seem to be a lot of new stuff here since last year but all are good updates. Xray alone will ultimately make life better. It will be very interesting to see how well C++ is supported in the released version of Xcode. Clearly Apple wants everyone to go Obj-C all the time but there are just some certain realities in the world that they need to acknowledge. For instance, the tons and tons of legacy C++ out there and the complete lack of ability to do Obj-C/Cocoa cross-platform in any meaningful way.

(Don’t even suggest GNUStep. Seriously, if you were, it is time to sit down an examine your life.)

7. 7. UNIX improvements

One of the things I’ve never understood about Mac OS X is how when they first released it they tore out large chunks of its BSD system. (i.e. lots of missing system calls, like dlopen) This made porting stuff that had been written for another Unix more of a task than it should have been. Rumor on the street suggests that this will be much improved.

Plus, apparently they are making things like Ruby and Python first class citizens with Cocoa bridges and AppleEvent bindings and everything. Thumbs up there.

8. 8. Safari for Windows

I got a chance to download and play with it and it’s, well, Safari running on Windows. I will freely admit that I still don’t entirely get the reasoning behind this one. That’s fine though, there are lots of things I don’t get in the world so this will just be one more.

This announcement has been super fun to annoy the QA Wizard Pro guys with though. They seem to love it when you ask, “When are you going to support Safari on Windows?”

9. 9. The iPhone “SDK”

Ok, now for a retraction of the reaction from yesterday. From the previous post I said:

…depending on your definition of an iPhone SDK. So Cocoa is no, Web 2.0 is yes, I can live with that. Now I just need to get one of the darn things.

It turns out I was working on some bad information from A.) Not being able to physically see the Keynote and B.) Getting real bad information from Yan on the ground in California. When he called me right after the Keynote one of the things I specifically asked was if you had to run your app through Safari using a bookmark or if it would show up as an individual icon on the iPhone’s main screen.

Now what I heard from him was the latter, which means either I couldn’t understand him over the cell phone connection as walked down the streets of San Francisco (who knows maybe he was dodging out of the way of a trolly car) or he’s crazy.

Either way it turns out that your “app” for the iPhone is little more than a website hosted on your webserver that is designed for a little screen. Sorry Apple, but that rates a Boo * 10.

I still want to get one though.

All this being said I talked to Yan one more time late last night and he said it would be hard for him to go back to Tiger now after using Leopard all day. He said it was too much fun. Take from that what you will but keep in mind, he may be crazy.

The other day I wrote:

So I guess if I had to make a wager, horse racing style, I’m in for $2 on a UI update to place, $2 on an iPhone SDK to show. I could even pull an exotic and box those two on an exacta but I’d probably just be throwing away money at the point. It will be interesting to find out, just a few more days until post time, err, conference time.

Turns out the exacta would have paid out, depending on your definition of an iPhone SDK. So Cocoa is no, Web 2.0 is yes, I can live with that. Now I just need to get one of the darn things.

The Desktop/Finder updates looks promising but I won’t really know until I can drive it. The biggest announcement is also the strangest in the release of Safari for Windows. Tim has some first impressions of it but he didn’t mention the thing I like the most and that I’ve been waiting for since last WWDC…

Search highlighting.

I’ll pause and let you mumble whatever “You must be the lamest person in the history of history” joke that you want here.

Now that that is out the way, look at what I mean:

No more little blue highlighting of a word, this sucker is a giant orange rectangle-ish thingie that kind of pops onto the screen. If you can’t see this then, well, you probably never had a chance to see the old blue highlighting so you don’t know what you’re missing.

The countdown to WWDC is officially on. Actually, I suppose it’s been “on” for several months now. The countdown for when it starts is on. Hmm, well, that’s the same thing. Anyhow, the conference starts on Monday.

Unfortunately for me I won’t be able to make it this year. There was this thing I had to do with this stuff in order to be ready for that event with those guys, you get the idea. We will have a couple of engineers out there though. If you want to meet up with them look for anyone from the Xcode team that is hiding behind something. Chances are excellent our people are nearby looking for them.

For kicks and giggles today I walked around and posed asked some of the Mac folks here what they expected to be announced at WWDC. (And what that wish would be announced.) The want consensus was definitely an iPhone SDK along with a smattering of super cheap iPhones or free Macs. Ironically, given those options, the iPhone SDK looks downright plausible.

What people think will actually be announced varied a little more with things like iLife/iWorks updates, an iMac revision, and some manner of Mac OS X UI change. (CoreAnimation has to be used for something right?) I’m thinking it probably will be some manner of UI change and if Jobs really wants to bring down the house an iPhone SDK.

So I guess if I had to make a wager, horse racing style, I’m in for $2 on a UI update to place, $2 on an iPhone SDK to show. I could even pull an exotic and box those two on an exacta but I’d probably just be throwing away money at the point. It will be interesting to find out, just a few more days until post time, err, conference time.

The other day I got home from work and my wife mentioned something about our iBook running slow all day. I asked her if she had rebooted lately thinking that maybe that universal cure would speed it up.

Yeah, well, that didn’t quite work out like I had it planned.

It turns out that upon reboot the iBook wouldn’t, err, boot. We just got the gray Apple screen with the progress circle taunting us. Debugging a screwball computer isn’t my favorite thing in the world to do when I get home but I figured I would suck it up and see what was wrong.

Again, that didn’t quite work out like I had it planned.

After booting from a Tiger DVD I opened Disk Utility and was presented with this:

It was around this point that I knew I was in trouble. I wasn’t yet sure how much trouble but you can tell those situations that aren’t going to turn out that well. Kind of like that time in college when one of my roommates discovered a cache of fireworks that were probably eight years old. (Disclaimer: To you kids out there, don’t try this at home. We were largely untrained professionals. No one was hurt, unless we count that bush in the front yard that caught fire.)

Booting into target disk mode wasn’t showing the drive and upon review of my latest backup I realized I was about 5-6 weeks behind. At this point I was running out of options so I did what any self respected person desperate for the drive to work would do.

I put the iBook in the freezer for a half hour. (Disclaimer #2: This time I was a moderately more trained professional, but I wouldn’t recommend doing this unless it was under extreme circumstances.)

Thanks to some time sitting on frozen Eggos and chicken nuggets I was able to get it to boot into target disk mode. Some very quick firewire work later I had all my latest data and I could officially scrap the drive in the machine for a new one.

One more time, that didn’t quite work out like I had it planned.

Here is a small picture showing the major interior parts of my iBook:

Apparently in order to replace the hard drive nearly all of those parts need to be taken out. Somehow I don’t think out in Cupertino the same groups work on the Mac Pro as the iBook. One has hard drives that aren’t mounted with screws the other has a hard drive that is mounted with EVERY screw.

Thankfully I’m at the point in life where having a good job pays off since I can then pay someone else to bust out the tiny screwdrivers for iBook open heart surgery. The only problem now is I got to keep the dead drive and I find myself seriously tempted to run it through the industrial metal cutting laser at my Dad’s company. That desire for destruction seems familiar, like a time in college when we found some old fireworks…