john.blog

Since most of my job deals with developing GUI that can work with both a mouse and a finger, I thought I would share my current views on this subject. Most people know me as a very pro-Microsoft person, which is mostly true, I will admit that. My huge problem with all modern “desktop” operating systems is that the primary method of interfacing with the system is still a keyboard and mouse. All popular desktop web browsers are a total pain to use with a finger. Most of the desktop shells and file managers are worse. While Windows 7 and OS X Snow Leopard did bring some improvements to using a touch driven UI, they are still remarkably horrible to use. I am going to add Tablet PC’s into the mix as well, as using a stylus/pen is about as good as using your finger.

Now to the point where i’m not a complete Microsoft worshiper. I currently own a Google Android Phone (DROID) and an iPod Touch (Current Revision 32 GB) and really really like both devices. These two devices, while small, have had one common goal from the beginning…a touch screen interface that is in every way meant to be used by a finger or fingers. Every application on both of these devices is meant to be used by touch.

So the work I do, which fixes only part of the problem, fixes application launching and window management(we use 3rd party here, but i’m working on replacing this with out own solution). This aggravates me because i feel like our solution is a good solution, but is not the total solution to making a touch screen desktop/laptop really usable with just a finger.

Here is our new website which is still being updated but you can kinda see what I do everyday. Take a look around and let me know what you think or if you have any ideas on this subject.

http://www.thinix.com

So Skye and I were in Sioux falls for yet another dr apt yesterday so after we were done we went to best buy cause I wanted to get an iPod touch. I decided to go with the new 32 gb version. So for those of you that have them, what apps do you have on them that make it a great overall device to use. Post you favorite apps on the comments.

Wow, I think this last week was one of the longest and one most tiring of my life.
Monday around noon Skye decided she couldn’t handle the pain she has been in for the few days prior and goes to the hospital. After work I picked up our 5 year old and went up to see her in the ER. Still in lots of pain, and a cat scan and some other stuff later, they decide to admit her. Skye’s Mom was nice enough to take our 5 year old and feed her and get her ready for bed so i could stay with Skye as long as I could. I left the ER at about 8:30 and pick up our 5 year old and return home to get her in bed and get myself in bed.

Tuesday 6am, I wake up early because I have to get the 5 year old to daycare and go up to spirit lake to sign a consent form for the surgeons to put a scope down into Skye’s stomach to see what was causing the pain. After wards I head to work. After work I picked up all 3 kids and took them up to see Skye. They were all happy to see her and very concerned about her. Since it was about 6:30 and i needed to get the kids fed, i ran through McDonalds and got them all some chicken nuggets since they were very good at the hospital. Got home, got the kids fed and got them up to bed. Talked to Skye a little bit before going to bed myself.

Wednesday am, I wake up early again since i have to get myself and all 3 kids ready to head out the door. So about 7 i start getting the kids up only to have our oldest saying her tummy hurts. i feel her forehead, she’s a little warm, but I take them all to daycare any ways. Upon dropping the off to daycare, i check to make sure they have my phone number in case she is still sick after she gets something to eat. 8:36 am, i get a phone call from daycare, she’s running a fever and I have to go pick her up. So I go pick her up and have Skye’s Mom pick me up some children’s Tylenol so i could try and get her fever down. So i am at home working all day. 5:35ish, Skye is discharged and home, not sure why cause she was still in lots of pain. Skye’s Mom had picked up our youngest and our middle had a home visit until 6:30, so i got our little one fed and went and picked up our 3 year old. Our oldest had gone though temp going down and then going back up all day. About 7:45 pm we check her temp and its over 102, so skye and i decided that she needed to go to the ER. So i head up with her to the ER. She had to have an IV put in, which she was really scared, and it hurt a lot. Then the doctor ordered a cat scan for her to see why her tummy was hurting. She had enlarged lymph nodes in her intestines which is usually an indication of a virral infection. So they pumped some IV fluid and an antibiotic through her, and also gave her an cortical steriod to try and reduce the fever. 2:35 am, her iv fluids are done and we leave the er and return home.

Thursday 6 am, hit the snooze 2x times and eventually got up at 6:45, got the 2 non sick kids up and got them ready to go to daycare, took them to daycare and went to work to get a little work done before going home to tend to my sick kid and wife. 10:25 i head home only to find our oldest, appearing to be fine, and my wife still in lots of pain. I let them be, insisting that our 5 year old still needed to rest and i went into my office to work. 5:00 pm, i go pick up the other 2 kids from daycare and get supper ready for them all to eat. So i get them all fed, get them showered and get them all ready and in bed. So i headed to bed around 10:30 to try and get some sleep. 12:20ish, my wife send me a text saying she needs to go back to the ER. Big problem, since we have 3 kids home, I cant take her, so we decided that we did not want to wake up her Mom to take her so she called the emergency line and the local rescue unit arrived very quickly to check on her and get all the info, about 5 min later the ambulance shows and picks her up and takes her to the ER. 3 am: Skye calls me from the er saying they are sending her home and needs to be picked up. She wanted me to call her mom to come over and be in the house for the kids and me pick her up, well that wasn’t going to happen since i had taken some ny-quil to try and get some sleep since i have been trying to get over a nasty cold for a while now. So instead, i called her mom and told her what was going on and asked her if she would go pick her up, she said yes, and i went and unlocked the door to our house so they could get in and went to bed.

6 am Friday, i get up and get myself ready for work, and our oldest is spiking a fever again, so I get the other 2 ready for daycare and take them and go to work. Call for a dr apt and get her in at 1:30, so i left work at 1 to pick her up and take her up to her dr apt. The dr sees her and said her fever spiking is normal and to continue with the children’s Tylenol to keep the fever under control and let her infection run its course. So i bring her back home and get to work from home in my office. Now this is where it gets real interesting, the other 2 kids were at a home visit until 7:15, my boss calls me up at 5 and says we have a client with 2 machines that were having problems, and im trying to get supper on the table for Skye and our oldest. 6:39, i get almost finished up with work besides our client testing to ensure the fix worked, and get supper rolling. 7:00, i got supper done, had a chance to eat myself, and verified that the fix worked and signed off from that project and headed off to pick up the other 2 kids. Got the kids home, got them ready for bed and got them all to bed. Saturday, i relaxed quite a bit with my family and did the bare essentials.

If you get down to this part, great, if you didn’t, that’s ok too. I just have a little bit left to say. While this week was a very busy, stressful, and tiring week, it was also a personal discovery week for me. While I did have help at times from Skye’s Mom(thank god, i don’t know how i would have done it all without her) I for the most part stepped up to the plate in a big way and did what needed to be done for my family, as well as trying to keep my boss as happy as possible trying to get some work done as well.

So this weekend, Skye and I decided that since we only had one of the 3 for the weekend, we would remove the old carpet that was in one of the upstairs rooms in our house. This is one in a many series of carpet removals after which the hardwood floor that is below will be refinished. Since we have already had the pleasure of removing the carpet from our staircase, we kinda thought we knew what we were getting into. I did say kinda. We knew there was carpet and old linoleum under that, but what we didn’t know was that they used very old carpet as the padding for the old shag carpet they had put in that room. So we ended up pulling up 2 layers of carpet and a layer of linoleum. So, since this room was completely clean after we got done removing the carpet/carpet/linoleum, i was able to take some pictures.

Enjoy!

So…Two years have gone by since Skye and I got married. It has been two pretty good years. So I decided to take my wife out for dinner this evening. We went to Minerva’s and had the all you can eat pasta bar, it was sooo good. Then, since we were very full, we decided to go to DQ and just get some ice cream comes. This last year, we bought a house, became licensed foster/adoptive parents, took in 3 foster children, started some work on the new house, did some landscaping outside the house(see previous post), and some more stuff i can’t remember. Looking forward to this next year when we put in a bath tub in our bathroom, hopefully getting the floors on the main floor of our house re-done.

So a few weekends ago, it was finally a weekend where it wasnt raining, so we finally got to work on Skye’s rock garden that she wanted in the front yard. It’s not finished yet, but here is what we have done so far.

Rock Garden / Pond

Ohh yea, we put the pool up the Friday before we did this. Skye didn’t think the pool was as big as it was. Still something fun for us and the kids to play in.

Saturday morning, I woke up to check my e-mail and all the latest tech info, only to notice that the “surprise” feature that Microsoft was waiting to announce was the ability to run Windows XP and applications compatible with Windows XP in a “Virtual” Environment on Windows 7.  I found this interesting, because I had previously seen a feature, for which i’m a beta tester, that offered the same type of functionality, but for enterprise users.  The application in question, is called MED-V (Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization).  The main difference that I know if is that MED-V has a server component that manages the virtual machines on the network and Windows XP Mode is aimed at being per-machine installations.

The purpose: To remove the worry about compatibility with legacy applications and get people to move to Windows 7!!

Note: “Windows XP Mode” will be available for Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate

Here are some of the links that explain it better.

http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/business/archive/2009/04/24/coming-soon-windows-xp-mode-and-windows-virtual-pc.aspx

http://www.withinwindows.com/2009/04/25/windows-xp-mode-internals-part-1-overview/

As some of you know, I haven’t had the best luck ever at trying to keep my music collection on the same hard drive for a long period of time.  The drives seem to crash, and I lose all my music.  A couple years ago, Ispent a day and backed up the then current collection to a whole bunch of DVD’s so I at least wouldn’t lose all of my music. Now, since I’m married, and my wife takes a whole lot of pictures, it becomes even more important that I don’t lose all this precious(my precious..you were thinking it, don’t deny it) data. The WHS was supposed to centralize where we store all of our data and keep it safe from failure….or so I thought.

For the past 2 weeks I have been going home for lunch to try and figure out why my 2 - 1 TB Seagate Hard drives(which I got in February) have been not showing up in WHS.  At first I thought it might be that they needed the infamous firmware update to fix them.  Upon further inspection, and the firmware update not working, the drives have the latest firmware that the problem does not effect.  So then I decided that I had better run SeaTools on the drives so I could tell Seagate support what was wrong with the drives to speed up the replacement process.  So Today at noon I managed to get this done, with one of the drives reporting 1 error and the other reporting 2 errors.  I fixed all the errors on the drives and re-plugged everything back in.  I had scheduled a Windows Checkdisk so i let that run, and it also found a few errors and fixed them.  Low and behold the thing booted up fine, sort of.  After I got it up and running, it said there was some file problems with 3 files.  I moved the files to different locations and rebooted, now everything is working fine…for now.

Next plan of action…backup all data to a drive that i know is good and put it somewhere safe in case failure of those 2 drives happens(which i think will happen, due to the current sound produced by the drives when first starting up the server).

The other thing that needs to happen is i need to put Windows XP on a hard drive so I can update the bios on the dell, since it is really really old, and i can not get it to run on WHS which is Server 2003.

I was sitting at work thinking, i should do some development for the iPhone/iPod Touch.  Then i got to thinking, i need to get an iPod Touch, a Mac, and eventually become an iPhone developer.  So the cost for any developer that doesn’t have any of the above would be, in it’s absolute cheapest form(unless you were to find a cheap intel mac on ebay)…Mac Mini - $599, 8 GB iPod Touch - $229, iPhone Developer Fee - $99…for a grand total of…$927 w/o tax, so pretty much $1000.  So next i was browsing Engadget, and i keep seeing all the stuff about Google Android, so i thought, well i don’t have $1000 at the moment, and Android Development is free, so i could do that, it would be a good learning experience and the best part, its free.  Then i was thinking, well since im pretty decent at c# development, i could possibly do some windows mobile development, and its for the most part free, since Microsoft provides an emulator for doing WinMo development.  So… I’m still undecided, anyone have any thoughts on the situation??

So….We go that snow they were talking about, a whole lot of it.  Now i only wish i had a snow blower to move all the damn snow we just got. Skye and I spent a good half an hour shoveling out our driveway and then one of our neighbors came to our rescue and blew the rest of the snow out of our driveway so i could get to work.  Also, a very good thing we got moved when we did other wise we wouldn’t have gotten moved before Christmas, and that would have been bad.