Technology Burner Technology Burner

Since all the cool kids are doing it, here’s what I get for each letter of the alphabet when I type it in my browser’s location bar:

Since it doesn’t seem to have been published yet on the Wikis4SE site, I figured I’d post a copy here for anyone interested in reading it.  It talks a little about how we run MDC, how administration of the site is handled, and why we switched from MediaWiki to MindTouch Deki.

The paper was well received when I presented it, despite a few rough edges on my presentation.  Interestingly, because most of the people in attendance seemed to be researchers and academics, rather than wiki administrators, my perspective was one that turned out to be quite interesting to a number of people, and I found my input requested on a variety of topics.

It’s time to admit that we need to keep the Space Shuttle flying for a few more years. We simply can’t give up our only access to space (and the space station) for multiple years until Constellation is ready to fly.

Over the last few days, I’ve been experimenting more with iPhone programming. It’s an interesting experience. The tools are almost but not quite extremely elegant; there are a few kinks to work out yet.

However, I was able to toss together a simple UIWevView based browser in about 20 minutes, including back/forward, refresh, and stop buttons.

That’s pretty good.

Now I want to write a more complex app. I have one in mind and am reading up on the stuff I need to know to make it happen. As is usually the case when learning new coding technologies, there’s a tendency for my enthusiasm to write something “real” to outpace my skill level.

Note to self: when finished upgrading WordPress, check to be sure you re-enable the spam filters. Oops.

Got my iPhone on Friday morning, and it’s very nice. I’ve got a number of apps installed on it, and have weeded out a few I don’t care for already. The Scrabble and Texas Hold’em games are awesome, although Scrabble is a little bit crashy for me right now.

I’ve finally figured out why you see so many dweebs wandering around with their Bluetooth headsets on. It’s not that they want to look important… it’s that the hear is the safest place to store it when it’s not in use!

Sarah took only two days to decide she doesn’t care for her Pantech Duo, so it’s been returned, and an iPhone 3G (8GB) is on order for her. Hopefully we’ll have it by the end of the week.

Friday morning I plan to head over to the local AT&T store at around 6 AM to get in line to pick up an iPhone for me and a red Pantech Duo for Sarah. My instructions are to get her nothing if they don’t have that exact phone (red Pantech Duo) in stock.

I look forward to checking out the app store and seeing what kinds of stuff is available at launch time.

Once I have the iPhone, I have a number of auctions to start, including for my iPod touch. I’m debating whether or not it makes sense to upgrade it to iPhone OS 2.0 before I sell it, or to just leave it as-is.

I’ll bring my Treo along to the waiting in line so I have some communication availability. Might bring my laptop as well. We’ll see.

I’ll definitely be attending WikiSym 2008 this September 8-10 in Portugal. I’m quite looking forward to it. It’s the first time in a while that I’ve gone to a conference particularly focused to my areas of expertise and interest. I look forward to interacting with others whose professional lives revolve so heavily around wikis the way mine does.

While the deadline for papers for the conference has passed, they’re still accepting papers for the Wikis for Software Engineering workshop, so I’m going to write one up about what we do at Mozilla and submit that. I’m quite eager to participate in any way I can.

In the past year, we’ve blown through four routers. They keep failing on us, usually right around the same time we have a cluster of outages with our cable modem service provider.

Is it possible that the cable modem is somehow damaging the routers plugged into it? I have no idea, but it seems hard to believe that so many routers — each a different brand — would be defective.

This is totally awesome:

Just got off the phone with AT&T. The reason I can’t get DSL here is that they’ve already got customers using all the bandwidth they have at our CO. Epic fail.

As soon as Sarah gets off her currently ongoing phone call, I’m going to call AT&T and see if I can get DSL service here. Their web site tells me that I can’t, but I have neighbors that have it, so I’m hoping that it’s just a glitch in their system.

Charter has gone offline four times in the past week, for as long as 15 hours. I’m fed up with it.

I sure hope AT&T can hook us up. I’m getting tired of having to deal with outages when I’m trying to get work done.

My cable modem service failed last night around midnight and is still not back up. Frustrating, to say the least. Right now I’m trying to work at my mother-in-law’s house, where there’s Internet access that works.

I’m starting to wonder if the fact that I keep having trouble with Charter is because searching Google for “hate Charter” finds this blog as the top hit…

In more directly Mozilla related news, I hope to have the new MDC stuff into version control so that localizers can work on the skin. I have detailed instructions for how to go about doing it, which I’ll post prominently once the SVN access is ready.

Woot!

July 11th. I have to wait until July 11th to get my new iPhone. Oh, the humanity!