Programming My Life

If you value your time and access your hard drive more than once per day (if you follow this blog, I can almost guarantee that you do), you should get a Solid State Drive (SSD).  For convincing arguments see here and here and here.  For more in depth analysis of SSDs see anandtach.com’s SSD Anthology and Relapse.  In my scientific tests (not scientific at all), I have found that everything from starting a game to starting Unity to starting Windows is about twice as fast with an SSD.  My laptop is also significantly quieter and uses less power thanks to the lack of moving parts in the SSD versus a traditional hard drive.

On top of the time and power saving, I’ve noticed  that Windows 7 has no problems hibernating and waking anymore.  Previously, hibernating could take up to a few minutes (which I don’t always have when leaving the office to catch the bus).  More frustrating are times when I thought the laptop had shut down or hibernated properly only to find out upon restarting/waking that it had crashed while doing so.  With the improved times for the SSD, I haven’t experienced these problems yet.

Now that you’ve bought the drive, you presumably want to put your current backup onto it right?  You do have a backup don’t you?  Even though I had a backup, I found that restoring that backup was a lot more work than I anticipated (in fact, I gave up and went with a new install).  After doing some reading on the problems I was having, it looks like the problem comes from the size of the old HDD being larger than the SDD (see here).  I can’t say for sure if the solutions offered there work as my HDD has an additional wrinkle:  It has 15GB of unallocated space at the front of the drive.  I tried every way I could think of to get the drive to fit onto my new SSD (120GB), but I couldn’t.

This got me thinking ‘What if I wasn’t moving to a SSD, but my HDD failed and I needed to get back up and running?’  I realized there are two problems that need to be addressed in that situation:

1.  Do I have  a back up that I can quickly and easily restore?

2.  If not, what about that data that I just can’t afford to lose?

For question 1, I am now working on getting all of the important programs that I need installed so that I can make a reasonably sized back up with the programs I absolutely need to get back up and running.  For question 2, my solution is Dropbox, which I’ve written about before.  I’m not saying that using Dropbox is necessary, but you should seriously consider what happens to that data in the worst circumstances.  If you are simply using an external hard drive, what happens if both get destroyed (fire, theft, etc.)?  There are plenty of other cloud based file systems to choose from, and I recommend using one of them for your most important files.

In my previous post, I recounted the frustrating experience of having to redo some of my own work due to a lack of foresight in my file management.  Luckily, in all but world ending scenarios, my data should be recoverable from at least one location so that even if my backup doesn’t restore and my hard drive fails, I will lose, at most, a few hours from reinstalling Windows and some programs.

My recommendations for the day:

1.  If you access your hard drive frequently (if you use a laptop, edit images, open files in Visual Studio or another IDE, etc.), you should get a SSD.  They have been going on sale recently and the new updates due out early this year should lower prices as they are based on a more efficient process.

2.  Make sure you have not only a backup, but one that can be easily restored.  Check your Hard Drive for any unallocated space on the drive (you can do this with Linux System Rescue).

3.  In case something does go wrong with your backup or restoration, ensure that your most important files are backed up some other way, preferably with an automated system like Dropbox.

Last week, I decided to jump on board the Android bus and bought the HTC Droid Incredible. I haven’t had it long enough to give a full review, but I’d like to give a review of my first experiences with my own smart phone (I have played with other smart phones, but having one all the time for a few days is a different experience than playing with one even for an extended period).

Technically, my first smart phone was the LG Vu. I returned it within the 30 day return period because 1. I couldn’t justify the extra expense of the data plan 2. The internet and phone in general were sluggish and 3. The apps that currently make smart phones much more enticing were nearly nonexistent. The Vu was mostly just a touchscreen version of the LG Shine (which is the phone I ended up going with).

The Incredible’s 1 GHz Snapdragon processor along with the relative maturity of the Android App Marketplace take care of the latter two concerns. I have not yet felt as though the phone was slow to do anything. Snapping through the home screens and getting into apps are a breeze thanks to the processor. So far, most of the apps seem interesting, but I haven’t had reasons to use them naturally. I’ve opened them up and looked around, but I haven’t wanted movie times because I was going to a movie or looked for a specific youtube video using the app for example. I’ll get around to discussing those things when I’ve had a better chance to interact with those apps organically.

What I have had much more interaction with thus far are the widgets. These alone have nearly justified my purchase. The home screen widget from HTC gives me a large display of the time and the weather, which I would hardly ever check before I had this phone. I also have a habit of not checking my Google Calendar nearly as much as I’d like to remember important dates and events. I have been checking it more often now that it is more easily accessible, and I think I will be using my it more often now that I don’t have to go out of my way to see it.

The Scoreboard widget has also helped me out already. Friday night I had a bit of time to kill before leaving to meet some friends, and the widget reminded me that a hockey game was on that I wanted to see. Without that, I would have likely forgot and done something else. It is a quick and convenient place to check when my favorite teams are playing next.  It also send notifications for score updates for my favorite teams.

Also, during dinner Friday night I was able to use the internet to come up with some trivia my friends and I were debating (did you know John Milius directed Conan?).

The Facebook widget hasn’t really done much to change how I view Facebook. It scrolls through some of the most recent status updates, but if I really want to check Facebook, I will always open the full app to scroll faster.  The same goes for Twitter.

Another big upside to having a smart phone with a data plan is being able to take advantage of Google Voice.  One way to justify the extra expense of the data plan is using Google Voice to manage text messages.  While you can’t send to multiple recipients or send MMS messages, all regular texts are free and get sent to the Google Voice app.  The only difference between checking a regular text and one through Google Voice is which button you click to open the message.  Depending how much you pay for texts each month, this alone could justify the price of the data plan.  Additionally, I can’t stand that carriers see fit to charge for texts with a data plan.  There is nothing special about the data in a text.  It is simply a packet of data of predefined size that your wireless carrier charges you a special rate for because they can.  There are other advantages to Google Voice, but sticking it to the man is the one that matters most to me.

So while I am still getting used to having a phone capable of all this (as well as getting used to a touchscreen keyboard), I can’t see myself going back to a ‘dumbphone’.  I’ll get into any problems I run into with the phone in a post in the near future, but for now, I can’t come up with anything negative about this phone: it’s just too incredible.

Ray Ozzie seems to think that developers have the desire to port their mobile apps to every platform available.  He is quoted as saying:

All the apps that count will be ported to every one of them [referring to mobile OSes]

Tell that to Gabe Newell who has discussed his dislike for developing for the PS3 on multiple occasions.  Whether it is unique hardware making a port difficult or requiring too many hurdles for developers, it is wrong to assume that a developer will create applications for every platform available in mobile phones, video game consoles, or anything else.

While a console game is generally a larger undertaking than a mobile app, there are still barriers of entry to porting.  Why should Ozzie assume that a developer will just port every app to every platform?

Let’s look at this from a developer’s perspective.  If I have created an app that I charge $1 for, why would I port it to a mobile service with a small number of users likely to purchase my app?  This problem is compounded if there is something I don’t like about the service.  Maybe the percentage they take is too high, or the standards too rigid.  In any case, I am going to consider how much work it is going to take to port it and how much money I stand to make.  I will then compare that to what else I could spend my time on and how much money that could make me.  Perhaps I calculate that building another feature into the app on the service I am already on will net me  the same sales as porting it to the other service.  Why would I want to port it to a service I dislike?

It is becoming easier to port to multiple mobile services with one company even offering to do it for developers.  However, it is still clear that not all apps are created equal.  Robert Scoble prefers the iPhone to the Droid simply because the Facebook and Twitter apps on the iPhone are better.  While these apps may catch up on the Droid quickly, why should they if developers aren’t excited about the platform?

To build a successful mobile platform, developers need to want to develop for it. This is fundamental because software sells hardware.  There is no reason to own a PS3, Wii, Xbox360, iPhone, Droid, etc. if it doesn’t have the applications the user wants.  What good is the best hardware in the industry if it doesn’t provide functionality?

Moore’s Law states that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every 24 months.  Clearly, with ever increasing transistor counts the consumer can expect increasing performance.  The performance increases seen up until the early 2000′s allowed software (from games to, more recently, web applications) to increase in complexity as well to take advantage of the boosted performance of new hardware.  But in the last few years, most software has reached a point where the increases in hardware performance just don’t affect their day-to-day use.  This has given rise to a new category of laptops, dubbed netbooks, which forgo the ultimate in performance for cheap, low power parts.

Netbooks were originally created for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, which allowed less fortunate children around the world to gain access to laptops for simple tasks, such as word processing and accessing the internet.  Around the time the first netbooks were coming to market, manufacturers and consumers alike seemed to reach an epiphany that ‘hey, there is a significant portion of the laptop market (read: me, in the consumer’s case) that only needs to be able to access the internet and do some word processing.’  Thus, instead of one market for laptops, we now have market segments for gaming laptops and power users, as well as netbooks and lower end laptops that are either much cheaper or much smaller than their desktop replacement counterparts.

A similar trend has been seen in gaming in recent years.  With the previous generation of consoles, most games were delivered in the form of disks.  Nearly every game was made to take advantage of as much of the processing power as was possible on a given console, take up all of the space available on the disk it was delivered on, and arrive at market for full price.  However, with the proliferation of  smart phones and digital systems for delivering games, companies small and large have begun reverting back to retro style games that focus more on intuitive, fun gameplay mechanics rather than the most in depth physics or graphics simulations.  Now, in addition to the blockbuster games, we see segments for all types of smaller games across the range of platforms.

In both instances, consumers have increased options because someone decided to move laterally rather than forward.  Perhaps this is just forward in a different direction.