More iPhone Madness

More iPhone madness

I am on the second week of a two week vacation. There are big doings over at BMC, with the announcement of the BMC Developer Network. it has been kind of frustrating to be on vacation at this particular time, since with my Corporate Blog I have been talking about Linux and Open Source for nearly two years there. This Developer Network stuff is so cool, that I of course want to talk about it too. And I have hardly been near the Internet for two weeks.

My home is in the mountains. I of course live and work in the big city most of the year, but on vacation I go to my house. My real house. A little cabin in West Texas, tucked neatly in the caldera of a 36 million year old volcano. The lava flows were rich in iron and effectively block all the electromagnetic radiation I might otherwise use to communicate with the outside world when I am there. So I fix up the cabin instead. Probably makes me far more productive at home repair not being able to surf and blog. Certainly makes me far healthier. All that lifting and hammering and digging in volcanic soil with rocks bars and what not....

Most of the ways I have stayed in touch for the last two weeks have been the iPhone. Every time I dropped out of the caldera, and could "see" either a cell tower or an open WiFi access point (there are actually quite a number of those in the cities) I could read gmail, update twitter, surf the news web sites to see if the world was still out there, post to this weblog via email, and so on. The Macbook only came out of the bag twice so far, and this is the second time. I could have posted again from the iPhone, but I have to admit using the Macbook keyboard is nice. The iPhone has the best itty bitty "keyboard" I have ever used, but it can take a bit to tap out a post on it.

The Macbook screen does seem positively huge now though. Next week, back to the real world and Linux.

Linux on a Laptop, Twitter, and writing open source code on a Mac

Linux on a Laptop

I just received notice today that an article I wrote back in March of this year is now being published. Its in the new LiNUX+ Magazine, and is about choosing a laptop for Linux. It is kind of funny in a way: I am so used to the immediacy of weblogs and tweets that publishing in a real paper magazine just seemed to take forever.

I kind of knew that when I was writing the article in an intellectual way, and so made an effort to keep the article not specifically tied to any particular version of Linux, knowing that they would have all revved versions since I wrote it. Example: Mint 2.2 was current at that time I think, and of course I'm on 3.0 now. Emotions clearly did not know how long it was going to take. It feels like forever ago.

The topic seemed pretty germane to what I have been up to lately, what with messing with Fedora 7 on the IBM X30 laptop. My most recent post of at TalkBMC (going up later today actually) counterpoints the Fedora 7 post I did here last week, and notes a new trial I had with that.

Tweets

Anne Gentle, former colleague from TalkBMC and now Blogmaster of her new blog "just write click" has been talking about using twitter as a form of micro-blogging. I never really gave it much thought, even though whurley and Y also talk about social networking and twitter and stuff all the time.

Three things then happened:

1. I got an iPhone
2. It had an app called "Pockettweets" that let me update a twitter wherever I am and whatever I may doing
3. I found David Hewlitt (Dr. McKay) from Stargate: Atlantis is a religious twitter'er.

OK. Fine. I'm trying it out to see what it all does. http://twitter.com/stevecarl
I'll be honest: So far this seems more like a 'dear diary' thing than a micro-blog. But the iPhone makes doing it dead easy, so we'll see where it goes. It was kind of fun to look back and see the progression of events as posted that led up to this and my last TalkBMC entry. Seeing the entry about getting my new comics reminds that...

MySQL and CocoaMySQL

My wife has given up on eBay applications Over and over and over she has tried to make them do what she wants them to do, only to find the software she has paid for to be unstable, slow, behind the times, etc. She has tried and tried to get out of programming, but she finally decided that the time has come to just solve the problem by writing her own application. She is also work on an inventory management tool for some friends of ours that run "Comic Book Orphanage".

This is a brave new world for her. She has written tons of applications over the years for the MS Office suite. One tool she wrote in MS Access saved a hospital in Galveston literally millions of dollars. She knows how to code.

She has sworn off MS as anything other than a target platform. I talked to whurley a bit as he is a well known Apple hacker, and so now she is off learning how to use MySQL and CocoaMySQL. Later she'll add in Apple's Xcode, and she hopes to be able to write applications on her beloved Macbook, and just cross-compile them to MS Win. It should be very interesting. Apple does it with iTunes and Safari, so it can be done... More on that as it progresses, but it is very cool having another Open Sourcer in the house.