This is one of those times.

I will make it super brief and will desperately try not to let it happen again.

A certain someone I work with finished up their employment this week after having found a nicer job closer to home. This person was super-smart, super-sharp and super-sarcastic. Exactly what I like. It’s a shame they are gone. It made work bearable quite a bit more enjoyable at times.

Two very important points to make about this:

1. Judging by their past performance, I predict they will do well at whatever they do.
2. They are dead to me.

FatBooth is an app that takes a head-on photo of a person’s face and adds.. oh.. maybe 200 pounds. It’s dead simple to use and generates surprisingly good results.

Using the app goes something like this:

Step 1: Start the app and press the button to bring up the camera.

Step 2: Line up the person’s shot (face-on photos only.. zoom with your feet to fill the outline overlaid on the camera) and snap the photo.

Step 3: It will do some facial feature detection, but then you have to simply tweak the eyes, mouth and chin locations. This is dead simple to do.

Step 4: Press the button and let it do it’s thang.

A few things to note:

1. Perhaps it’s more of a statement about how body-conscious our society is, but getting your wife or girlfriend to let you try this thing out may be very difficult.

2. Note that there is a delete button available once you view the results. Respect your photo subjects, offer to delete the photo if they want you to. Don’t be a dick.

3. You also have the opportunity to save the photo (either before and/or after photos) to your gallery. Once again, don’t be a dick.

Oh.. Since the Internet Forgets Nothing (tm) I am not posting any before/after photos of myself.. however as if all this magic wasn’t enough, I can also confirm that IT WORKED ON MY CAT!

Sorry Midge. I had to post it.

Episode 44 of Jonathan Nadeau’s Frostcast podcast series is up and features an interview with yours truly. I think it went fairly well with some discussion about free software, design and some other things. No doubt there will be some criticism about the quality of the guest. After all Jonathan’s been busy interviewing actually important people who run projects and communities. Hopefully I didn’t pull down his batting average too much.

The episode page can be found here: http://frostbitemedia.libsyn.com/frostcast-episode-44

Thanks Jonathan!

Let’s say we come up with a killer soft top sports car tailored to the 55 year old. It handles well, it’s a little easier to get into and out of than a typical low-slung sports jobbie, and it has a windscreen specifically designed to protect that combover at highway speeds.

Now, how would you feel about the following:

1. Weld on a hardtop, making sure to add about 10” more head room.
2. Soften the suspension.
3. Add another pair of rear doors.
4. Expand the rear to carry several unassembled items from Ikea along with a stroller and about 115pack of diapers - or two extra rows of removable seating.

How do you think that would affect our original design? Would the 55 year old be pleased with the result?

I’ve been hopeful that Ubuntu was heading down a design path where they were becoming more focused on who they wanted to design for. And make no mistake, I don’t think I’m in that group, but still I wanted them to stick to their guns, ignore the naysayers (even if I’m one of them) and plug on with their plan.

By the sounds of this post from Jono Bacon though, it sounds as though they’d like to hedge their bets. It sounds like:
Hey, we’re still designing the best dang product for group A, but hey all you guys in the entirely opposite Group B.. don’t go anywhere. We will add stuff for you guys too!

Now with Ubuntu I suppose the inverse of my initial analogy is more apt. They’re aiming to build the best damn vehicle for new fathers, but hey all you sports car drivers.. we’ll add alloy rims and a spoiler, stiffen the springs a bit and put in some oil pressure guages for you!

That results in a crappier minivan. And a crappier sports car.
I’m not sure how you could see it in any other way. But by all means, I’m completely open to enlightenment.

ps. I didn’t mention that it’s a significant conundrum when the Group B guys are supposed to be the guys actually building the product for Group A.

pps. I could be wrong about this whole idea:

I had done a little bit of Android graphical work a while back for the ILF App which consisted of coming up with some background images and an icon. This was a little big more involved in that I needed to create the launcher icon, tab icons and promo images for the Android market.

As usual I learned a few things along the way:

1. Eclipse can seem like a mystery inside an enigma wrapped in a straitjacket to the non-developer like me. I jumped through my fair share of hoops to get updated resources to show up properly in the emulator. This mobile development thing is not something you come at likely. Full respect to those who do it well.
2. Guidelines for the creation of Android launcher icons can be found here.
3. Guidelines for the creation of Android tab icons can be found here.
4. Likewise, a good description of the promo image requirements (as well as other graphic requirements) is over here. And lastly,
5. Daniel Frey (the creator of OpenSchedule) is one patient bastard. I peppered him with a stream of newbie questions related to point #1 and he didn’t flinch. - Thanks Dan!

So I ended up creating this launcher icon:

And for the Event, Schedule, and Venue Tabs, the following icons (selected and unselected versions as per guidelines):

And once that was all out of the way, Dan pointed out that there were some optional promo/feature graphics. These show up when you see the app’s market page on your phone and what you see on the web market page as well. Again, sticking to their requirements, I came up with the following two versions:

180px x 120px version:

and a 1024px x 500px version:

All in all a very enjoyable little project.  Thanks for the opportunity Dan.

If you want to try out the app, you can get it here, or hit the QR code below with your Android phone:

But it was not meant to be. And so I lost my Mongoose and had to compromise once again. The day I lost it is the day I once again donned the chains and shackles, signed up with The Man, and walked out with the shiny black Samsung Galaxy S you see below.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. I’ve had the Samsung for about two months now. It’s been a bit of a rollercoaster ride. The phone is both enticing and aggravating. There are times I miss the N1, and yet I’m not sure which phone I’d use if it reappeared on my doorstep tomorrow. I don’t necessarily have a detailed laundry list of items, but there are good and bad things which have stuck out more than others:

Quality and Heft

The N1 felt substantial. That slightly grippy finish around the back and curved shape gave it a bit of that polished river rock feel. The Galaxy S, while very shiny, doesn’t have the same heft. The plastics gleam but looking at them you know it can’t last. And the phone is thin and light. Thin to the point of feeling slightly fragile. Being a featherweight doesn’t do anything to fight off that feeling either. After about two weeks I decided to get a faux carbon fibre snap on case that covers the back and sides. It doesn’t cover any of the screen, and makes it much easier to grip. A nice side benefit of this is the added weight. The phone now feels much more substantial fully clothed.

Display

This is one area in which there is very little argument to be made. The Samsung display is significantly brighter, sharper and easier to read than the Nexus One. Nevermind the fact that it’s slightly larger too. And don’t get me wrong, I loved the N1 screen, but this Amoled thing is significantly better.

Storage

If there’s one thing that always nagged at me with the N1, it had to be the alotted storage for applications. There was never enough. I was constantly weighing options on what app “had to go” whenever I wanted to try something new. The Samsung came with 16GB of onboard storage as well as a slot for a microSD card (I have a little 4 GB card in there right now). I’m now the kid in the candy store when it comes to trying out apps.

Speed and Stability

The Samsung is noticeably faster than the Nexus One. But it’s also been significantly less stable. I probably restarted the Nexus One four or five times due to problems while I had it. I’ve pulled the battery out of the Samsung at least 4 times to cold boot it, force restarted it probably 10 times and it’s even restarted a couple of times on its own. Now I’m not sure if this is all due to using Launcher Pro as my launcher of choice (I used it on my Nexus One as well). But it’ll sure take more than the odd stability problem to force me into using Samsung’s TouchWiz UI. The video playback is great. I’ve seen no jitters or stutters and my daughter quite likes using it for watching videos in the car.

TouchWiz - aka Insta-hate

I probably gave the standard TouchWiz UI about 10 minutes before I downloaded and installed Launcher Pro. Maybe 10 is generous - probably more like 6 or 7. I found it horrible. Compared to Launcher Pro on the N1, this was like getting out of a Lotus Elise and into a Ford Tempo. And of course as I’ve previously speculated, maybe LPro is the cause of some of my stability issues. But I can’t bear to use the stock UI long enough to really tell. I’m willing to suffer on.

Swype

I’m a big Swype fan. I got in on the beta when I had the Nexus One and always preferred it to anything else including the stock keyboard. I did however go searching for alternatives at one point when they hadn’t put the microphone key on the board and Google had launched it’s Voice Actions. But shortly after the little mike appeared and all was good. Moving to the Samsung, I was happy knowing that Swype came pre-installed. However the microphone isn’t there. And I don’t think it will be in the near future. As some comfort, I keep the Google widget - which has the microphone button - close at hand.

Bluetooth

This is a biggie. The N1’s bluetooth was solid. I got in my car, paired it once and enjoyed bliss thereafter. It played all my podcasts over the stereo without issue and handled calls flawlessly. I do a lot of driving (about 60-70,000 km a year). My commute is my solace. Having to wrestle with Bluetooth is something I don’t want to do. Initially, the Samsung paired without issue. But keeping it paired and playing podcasts and music via bluetooth was problematic. One thing that helped was changing my contacts display settings to only show “My Contacts”. For some reason the Samsung’s default setup included my entire Google contact list including anybody who had ever emailed me (including mailing list addresses etc.). This pared it down from roughly 1200 to about 200. I think this sped up the address book transfer and significantly smoothed things out. It’s still not perfect and every once in a while I have to restart the bluetooth on the phone. Not a deal breaker now, but a significant downgrade from the N1 for sure.

Updates

Well, it took me about a week before I gathered the gumption to upgrade the OS from 2.1 (which it came with) to 2.2. I had been spoiled with the N1, and expecting to get any sort of OTA upgrade from Samsung for this phone sounds like a pipe dream. So I wimped out and ran the upgrade on my Windows machine at work. It was not simple. It took several attempts to get the phone recognized by their software. A typical windows proprietary software mess. Not unexpected in hindsight but definitely a disappointment over the nice OTA upgrade to Froyo I had with the Nexus One. And let’s not forget that technically speaking the N1 *should* get further upgrades before many other phones. The Samsung Galaxy? Umm. Nope.

Camera

This Samsung is called the “Fascinate” by Telus. But apparently this is actually the “Captivate” on Verizon - or something like that. In any case, this phone does NOT have a flash. Now I’m not big on LED flashes, but there are times when it was useful for work peering into some relatively low light situation and reappearing with a usable photo. Not having the flash seems like a big tradeoff. I pondered it for about 10 minutes when buying the phone. In the end I figured that if I had taken any keepers with the N1, they were almost always naturally lit shots anyway. The Samsung camera app is more feature filled than the Nexus One app. It also has tap-to-focus which helps. Overall photo quality? I haven’t done any detailed comparisons, but I’d likely say the N1 camera shots are slightly nicer than the Galaxy S shots. There seems to be slightly less artifacting and they seem slightly sharper. But they’re camera phones. I have a Canon 7D if I want higher quality shots.

Miscellany

A small but not unimportant point. I was never a huge fan of the Nexus One trackball. I used it, but never found it to be a glorious experience. But Joni Mitchell was dead right. I miss that little round thing. The froyo upgrade (I think) brought the light blue editing cursor, but it’s fiddly. Sure the ball was fiddly too, but an order of magnitude less fiddly.
The Galaxy S also has a nice TV out feature. I had a cable that came with my Kodak Zi8 camera (1/8th plug to RGB) that I plugged into the headphone jack of the phone and into my TV. With the TV-Out display option checked I get a nice mirrored display right on the TV. We used this to watch movies on the hotel TV on more than one occasion. Definitely a nice little perk.

And There You Have It

No final scores, no rating. Just my thoughts. Would I take the Nexus One back if it magically reappeared? I’m not sure. Had I not got the bluetooth issues largely sorted, I’d say definitely yes. But after two months it’s significantly less annoying. Tallying up the speed and storage increase along with the improved display and I’d be hard pressed to choose the Nexus One.

So I’d actually take the CCM over the Mongoose. The compromise has been worth it I guess (aside from the 3 year lock-in with The Man). But then again, if I was offered a Kuwahara or a GT it might be a completely different story.

Note: My age grants me the luxury and license to quote or mis-quote BMX bike brands from the 80’s.

Bikeshedding is one of those words I just looked up. I’ve read it several times and have probably even used it. But for some reason, this morning I just had to look it up. Most people would have first heard of the term in a FreeBSD mailing list post from back in 1999. The post however centres around a circa 1957 argument from C. Northcote Parkinson dubbed the Law of Triviality. It’s his depiction of this concept that caught my attention (emphasis my own):

Parkinson dramatizes his Law of Triviality with a committee’s deliberations on a nuclear power plant, contrasting it to deliberation on a bicycle shed. A nuclear reactor is used because it is so vastly expensive and complicated that an average person cannot understand it, so they assume that those working on it understand it. Even those with strong opinions often withhold them for fear of being shown to be insufficiently informed. On the other hand, everyone understands a bicycle shed (or thinks he or she does), so building one can result in endless discussions because everyone involved wants to add his or her touch and show that they have contributed. While discussing the bikeshed, debate emerges over whether the best choice of roofing is aluminium, asbestos, or galvanized iron, rather than whether the shed is a good idea or not.

That last phrase is how I feel about both GnomeShell and Unity. We get so caught up in the gee-whiz and kewl-ness of it all that we forget to step back and ask:

1. Why are we doing these things?
2. What is the end goal?
3. Is this really the best use of our time and attention?

I’d feel a lot better about the current state of Gnome and Ubuntu if I had seen clear answers to those, or had seen some evidence of those questions even being asked. I haven’t. Yet.

Last Friday was as good or bad as any other. I had planned on doing some hard drive partition juggling on my laptop in advance of getting the new 1 TB eSata/usb/firewire drive I had ordered mid-week. In fact, to my surprise it arrived in my office Friday afternoon. Being the cheeky monkey I am, I decided to boot up my laptop, fire up a GParted live CD and let it do its magic while I worked away the afternoon.

This is when things went horribly wrong.

You see, it’s always best to make sure your laptop is running on AC power when you do anything important that will run for any significant length of time. You’d have to be a few bricks short of a full load to do anything different. So when I heard the laptop on the desk behind me shut off with nary a warning beep, my heart sank. Or more accurately, it drove off a cliff.

Luckily I had backed up my laptop’s home directory a couple of nights earlier in preparation for the partitioning re-org. I did however lose my aptly named ‘/creative’ partition where I temporarily stored most of my photos and videos between periodic backups to my older USB2.0 drive. They were scattered to the wind.

However, my poor organizational habits came to my rescue in one way. I still had 25GB of photos and videos on my Canon 7D’s CF card that spanned back to just before Christmas. So I managed to pay very little for my stupidity.

Until Saturday that is.

My daughter and I pulled into the Best Buy parking lot early Saturday afternoon. I needed to see if they had a PCI or AGP video card for my Dad’s desktop (he had recently bought a 22” monitor and his existing card didn’t support the native resolution). My daughter was watching videos on my Nexus One when we parked. So I told her to shut it off and stick it in her pocket while we went in. (Why didn’t I take the phone from her?? I have no idea - this is the way stupidity works people!).

We went in, didn’t find anything other than PCI-E cards (slots which his 5 yr old PC doesn’t have) and then spent about 5 or 10 minutes looking at the DSI-XL, and various other tech toys. So 10 minutes later we’re driving out of the parking lot and I ask her for the phone. WE CAN’T FIND IT.

We did all the usual things. Searched our pockets five times over. Searched the car five times over. Looked in the store. Searched the parking lot. Re-traced our steps. Talked to the store rep who called the number while my daughter and I ran around trying to listen for a ringtone. Nada (he said it went straight to voicemail).

My daughter in tears, swimming in guilt. Me, biting back my anger, telling her (and knowing inside) it was Daddy’s stupidity. Walking back to the car in disbelief, eyes desperately darting everywhere looking for a little black neoprene case in a snowy slushy parking lot full of moving cars, the sinking realization hitting home that my beloved Nexus One was gone. Worse still, taking with it a surprising amount of photos and videos that I had only backed up about 3 months ago when I upgraded from a 4GB to an 8GB microSD card.

After getting back home, changing my gmail password, and making some fumbling attempts at figuring out how to locate it, I finally resigned myself to its loss, wishing hopefully that it had been crushed under the weight of a car tire and not in the hands of someone else. After some short deliberation, I headed back out to bite the bullet and get a new phone.

I ended up getting a Samsung Galaxy S. I’ll probably have more posts on how I’m liking (or not liking) the new phone. I’ll save those for another time. But I will leave you with a heavily abbreviated list of things I came to learn this weekend:

1. I am stupid.
2. Backup your stuff. You don’t need some streamlined system. Just backup your stuff. Somewhere.
3. Bell mobility staff (at least in the Aurora store I went to) is heavily undertrained on what they’re selling.
4. Telus mobility staff are somewhat better trained, but still surprisingly clueless about what they’re selling.
5. Think past your rage and avoid blaming a nine-year old for the stupidity of her 42 year old father.
6. Keeping most all of my graphic design work in Dropbox was about the only smart thing I’ve done through all this.
7. The Nexus One was an even more beautiful phone than I thought it was. If you have one, keep it. Cherish it. AKA you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone.
8. Plug in your laptop when you’re doing any important system work.
9. Web sync’d apps of any kind are a godsend.
10. BACK. UP. YOUR. STUFF. SOMEWHERE. ANYWHERE.
11. I am stupid.

And dang it if it wasn’t dead easy to install. Just head to your WordPress admin panel, hit ‘Add New’ under the Plugins section of the left sidebar, and search for WPTouch. Then just install and activate.

I’ve tested it from my Nexus One and it seems to work fine. By all means, if you find anything janky with it, let me know.

I’m no spring chicken, and as such I’ve got to pick my battles wisely. So for now at least I’ve hunted down a swiss-ish theme that doesn’t annoy me too much. I figured I’d plunk it up here before year’s end - scraping by here.

I will surely give it a tweak or three (I’m not 100% happy with the fonts at the moment), but for now it will suffice.

I hope everyone out there has a great and safe New Years Eve, and a great year to come.