And I Hope it Stays That Way, Too...

So the quite a few people are saying that nobody cares about Google+, and that it's a ghost town compared to the big boy on the block, Facebook.

Good. Keep saying that as far as I'm concerned.

Quite frankly, I don't want Google+ to be as popular as Facebook.  Facebook feels like I'm watching a bad Reality TV show with all the pointless drama and bullshit that comes with it, mixed in with the social networking equivalent of chain letters as my friend share and re-share stupid posts in some idiotic attempt to bring themselves good luck or point out some personal belief I couldn't give a damn about.

Google+ might have a tiny user base, but the quality of the conversations there have been far and away superior than anything I've ever encountered on Facebook.  So the longer it's able to maintain that quality the better I say.

It's certainly not perfect -- Google should be doing more to move the social networking space forward, not trying to chase Facebook, for one thing -- but I'll take it for now.

The Times They Are A-Changin'

"Apple reports record revenue, profit for fiscal first quarter."

It's hard to believe it, but this month marks the 15th Anniversary of Steve Jobs' official return to Apple following his ouster in 1985.  At the time he was just considered an adviser to CEO Gil Amelio, but it wasn't too long before he was back in control of the company that he and Woz founded.

In that 15 years, Apple has gone from being in such dire straights that it struck a deal with Microsoft to stay afloat, to being the single most profitable technology company in the world.

That has to be the single most impressive accomplishment ever for a CEO to achieve.

"We have done the impossible, and that makes us mighty."

PIPA Support collapses.

Congressmen Begin to Abandon SOPA Ship.

Score one for the Geeks.

Kindle Fire

I was given a Kindle Fire by the wife and kids this past Christmas, and I've spent the past few weeks playing around with it reading some books, running apps and whatnot.  I haven't fully exercised all the capabilities of the device - I've just been going about my normal day-to-day activities with tablet in tow. So, this isn't a very thorough evaluation.

It's not an iPad
I won't even waste time doing a comparison - the iPad is still far and away a better general-purpose tablet than the Kindle Fire - no question about it.  And after working with the Fire for a while, I'm pretty sure that these two devices aren't really intended to compete directly with each other, anyway.  The Fire feels more like a souped up eReader than it does a full-fledged tablet.

That being said, I do think the Kindle Fire is better than the iPad in one respect...

Form Factor
While the late Steve Jobs may have felt that the iPad display size was what everyone wanted, I personally find the smaller size of the Kindle Fire to be better.  The device feels like something I want carry around wherever I go, and more like something that augments my daily life (like carrying a day planner, for example), where the iPad feels closer to carrying around a small-ish laptop.  The Fire easily fits in the pockets of several of my coats and doesn't feel uncomfortable carrying around that way, either.  Even with a thick case over it, the Kindle Fire feels like a natural fit for carrying around wherever I go.

The Carousel Sucks
Rather than the typical home screen and launcher you see on most Android devices, the Carousel is what greets you the moment you power on the Kindle Fire.  It's a Cover Flow-like interface that shows you the most recent books/apps/whatever you've been using and allows you to quickly page through and open them.  It's a cross between the standard launcher and app switcher (long-pressing the home button) that most Android phones have.

I'm personally finding the Carousel more of a nuisance than anything.  While it seems to work OK if you find yourself going back and forth between a couple of books/apps/whatever, if you're someone that might constantly switch through a large number of items on the device it starts to get a bit cumbersome to use.  I've found it easier to just select the category tab at the top and go right to what I want rather than sit there paging through the Carousel.

The Carousel UI also seems a bit buggy: It doesn't always pick up when you're trying to select the item being viewed and will sometimes rotate to the next item.  Rather annoying.

Amazon Integration
The Kindle Fire's greatest strength is its integration with the Amazon store: Once you've signed in to your Amazon account, the device basically becomes a direct link to Amazon.com (assuming your WiFi connection is active, anyway), allowing you to browse and buy new apps, books, or even non-Kindle items quickly and easily.  The experience is pretty seamless - it's almost scary how easy it is to buy stuff through the Kindle Fire.

It's pretty clear to me that this is Amazon's big reason for making the device - it's an extension of the Amazon shopping experience.  And if it's true that Amazon is selling the Kindle Fire at a loss, I can totally understand why they would chose to do that: The increased revenue they'll have from reducing the barriers to the Amazon shopping experience more than makes up for any loss they might take from selling these things below the cost of manufacture.  It is very well done.

WiFi
WiFi-only works well for me since I'm almost always within reach of a WiFi hot-spot these days.  That being said it will be interesting to see what kind of sales Amazon gets for a 3G/4G version of the Fire: Having a device so tightly integrated with the Amazon store that's accessible anywhere would be a huge boon for Amazon.

Just imagine: Customers walking through the local mall checking out products, only to whip out their Kindle Fire 2 (or whatever it's called), punch up the product (or take a picture with the built-in camera, maybe?)  and buy directly from Amazon instead.  Brick-and-mortar stores won't stand a chance in this kind of environment.  It'll be interesting to see what happens.

eReader/Books
Prior to the Kindle Fire, I've never owned an eReader: I came close to buying one of the original Kindle models a few years back, but unlike most people I wasn't particularly fond of the E Ink display (it looks really good, but I just wasn't happy with it when I saw it).  I'm likely one of the few people that actually prefers a bright, back-lit screen like the Fire has over the ones on the original Kindles (it's probably all those years as a developer constantly reading on a computer screen that has warped my preference that way).

After reading a few books on the device, I can say that, for the most part, I'm happy with the eReader on the Fire.  The only exception would be the one technical/programming -related book that I've looked at so far: I have noticed some elements - code samples in particular - aren't formatted properly and can be hard to follow.  I'm not sure if this is necessarily the Fire's fault or just the eBook in question not being formatted well for the device, but it is a slight annoyance.

Viewing PDFs (I've accumulated quite a few PDF-formatted eBooks over the years) on the Fire isn't particularly great: The built in viewer seems to work well enough, but many of the PDFs I have require adjusting the zoom level in order to read properly (which is really the fault of the PDF creator), and the built-in viewer doesn't seem to provide a way to pin the zoom level while paging through a document, so I'm constantly doing: "zoom, read, change page, zoom, read".  It's possible that a third-party app might work better for these files, but I haven't explored that just yet.

Web
Web browsing is pretty good on the Fire: With one exception, I've not run into any serious issues browsing whatever I want on the device and the Silk browser doesn't seems to have any real issues with any sites that I've hit so far, and overall the browser is very responsive.

My only issue has been that I can't seem to access my Safari Books Online account worth a damn on the Fire through the web browser: I've been greeted with glitched behavior and poor visibility of books, which has made the Fire all but useless for one of my most important resources online.  This is more than likely something that O'reilly has to fix on their end since it's likely their website that is causing the issue, but it is a real downside for me currently as I make use of the site a lot for reference and it would be really nice to access that on the Fire rather than constantly switching between windows on my PC.

Apps
I admit I haven't really exercised this part of the device much, but I've found the Kindle Fire runs most of the apps I've looked at pretty well.  The Amazon App Store has a pretty solid selection to chose from, although it still feels a little sparse compared to the Android Market.  I've checked out a few free games and they all run well (better than on my Android phone) and I haven't encountered any issues with any apps I've run so far.

Also, despite being locked out of Android Market it is possible to side-load apps if you wish: It's a little cumbersome to do, but it's not really difficult at all.  I have yet to try to side-load anything, so beyond knowing it's possible I'm not sure what kind of issues there might be.

As a developer, I would like the ability to either unlock or otherwise have a way that makes it easy for me to load and test my own apps on the Kindle Fire.  This seems like something that Amazon should have available, particularly if they want to encourage developers to release their apps on their app store.

Data Cable
My single biggest gripe with the Kindle Fire is that Amazon chose not to provide a data cable for transferring files to/from a PC.  This is likely because they are expecting people to make use of their cloud services (and they do provide a convenient way to push documents to the device via a custom email address to send documents to), but for people with a large number of files to move it's much easier to just plug the device into a PC and move things that way.

Fortunately I already had a data cable available to me thanks to the combination charger/data cable that was provided with my cell phone, but seriously Amazon...give us a damn data cable.

Conclusion
Overall, I'm happy with the Kindle Fire.  It's a solid device with a capable eReader, web browser, and the integration with Amazon makes it a pretty compelling device to use.  It's no iPad, for sure, but I think it's more than capable of fulling the needs of someone who can't afford to shell out the money for Apple's tablet.

Government Work

Last week I came across the Confessions of a $600 Hammer on Slashdot.  As a former member of the Overpriced Tools of the Federal Government Club, I couldn't help but nod in agreement with a lot in that post.  All the same, I think it doesn't necessarily paint a complete picture of the situation when it comes to government contracting, or government IT in general.

It's definitely true that incentives are completely out of whack when it comes to the bill rate/pay rate disparity for contractors, but this isn't a problem unique to the U.S. Government, either.  In fact, it's prevalent in the private sector as well:  I once worked with someone whose previous job was working for a large, well-known tech company as an on-site tech servicing many of their customers, and while the pay rate this individual received was pretty damn good, it paled in comparison to the billing rate that this company charged their customers, and makes the disparity commonly seen in Federal contracts look quaint by comparison -- and mind you this individual wasn't working on Federal contracts at the time.

Nevertheless, this doesn't really excuse the situation: It's a travesty that the U.S. Government (or more appropriately, U.S. Taxpayers) will get overcharged to such a high degree, and doubly so when the contracting companies turn around and either hire sub-standard labor to fill the positions (the most common approach, based on my experience), or force out anyone competent enough to do the job by refusing to pay whatever the going rate is for the work being done (in which case they simply leave for greener pastures), thereby guaranteeing that any work done will be sub-par at best.

But the flip side of this is that you have plenty of individuals on the government side of the equation that have no business being paid for doing same kind of work the contractors do, either.  Many of them are paid considerably more than the contractors (albeit less than the bill rate of the contracting companies).  In fact, while the work the contractors do might be sub-par, sometimes it's leaps and bounds better than what the people on the government side are even capable of.

I have personally witnessed individuals -- government employees -- who were supposed to be Software Developers yet were unable to understand basic logic, could not solve problems at all, and couldn't write a simple "Hello World" program even if you gave them the code to type into the editor.  I once waited months for a single "database developer" to code up one simple stored procedure to save a record to the database (I wasn't permitted to do it myself because I wasn't classified as a "Database Developer"...but that's a whole other story...); The individual barely understood how a database even worked.  Thankfully there was someone else -- a contractor -- that was able to complete the work and thereby allowed me to get my own work done.

Even in the cases where people on the government side actually knew what they were doing, their experience was woefully outdated:  In my time as a contractor, there were people on the government side having fits about getting rid of ColdFusion....in 2007!  I've had to spend far too much time having to convince people to use tried-and-tested technologies that were already years past their prime just to try to drag them into the 21st-century way of developing software...many times failing in the process.

I'm certainly not trying to paint all government employees as incompetent (they most certainly are not), but only trying to illuminate some of the other issues around government contracting that people don't think about:  When people hear how the badly the Federal Government gets overcharged for contracting work, they cry foul (as they should), but they never see that taxpayers might be getting overcharged on the government side as well -- through over-paid and under-qualified workers who really have no business doing the work they do, or through deliberate internal politics...not just the contractor-in-the-back-pocket-of-the-politicians kind.

Of course, I haven't even gotten into the internal politics part of the equation...but that's a story for another day...

Changes

I finally broke down and set up a custom domain for the blog, and as a result the name of the blog has changed.

Welcome to my wonderful new/old blog!

I didn't really have a problem with the blog being under the original Blogger domain, but it felt like I needed a kick in the pants to get myself posting again and this seemed like a good way to do it (and I wasn't particularly happy with the original blog name, either.  That's what I get for not putting much thought into it, I guess...)

I thought about moving off of the Blogger platform altogether, but decided to stick with it -- it's about the simplest platform to use and it's served me well over the years...and I'm patiently awaiting the integration with Google+, which will make things more interesting I think.

At any rate, the updates should get more frequent now that I'm getting things situated.

Bye Steve

Steve Jobs had already secured his place in the annals of computer history long ago with his initial founding and stewardship of Apple Computer and essentially creating an industry from scratch by bringing the Personal Computer to the masses, then pushing that nascent industry even farther with the creation of the Macintosh at a time when things were just getting started.

It was just icing on the cake that he was provided the opportunity to do it all again in the modern world of mobile computing.

Steve Jobs wasn't a superhero, or a god. He was just a guy with a vision, strength and willingness to bring us all along on his journey towards the realization of his ideas...whether we liked it or not.  Even those that have not used a single Apple product in their lives have been touched by that vision in some way or another.

Not many people get the opportunity to have that kind of impact on the world.

I truly wish we could have seen some more of those insanely great ideas.

Damn.