Over the past 14 days I’ve had arguably the worst cold I’ve ever had in my life. Granted, it was a cold nothing life threatening nor terribly serious but I simply can’t recall being that suppressed by a cold. It started two weeks ago after two of my kids had gotten what now seems like a rather mild version of the same thing cough fever etc. The first few days were tough with coughing and aches from head to toe. That eventually switched to near migraine nasal pressure (I can’t say I’ve ever had a migraine but I can imagine now what it must be like) which continued relentlessly for days. I lost 6.5lbs, had fluid in my lungs and a pretty wicked cough and on the ninth day I started antibiotics.

Now, 15 days later and I’m feeling much better and getting back into the swing of things. I missed more days of work two weeks ago than I’d missed in 15 years at Borland! Anyway, I’m anxious to get back to the weight room and restore some of the muscle mass that disappeared.

[Updated: March 31] Fix typos.

nd no, not about me. I know a lot of people who read my blog have followed me from the Delphi community and I thought it might be fun to brag a bit about a co-worker of my who is another familiar name in Delphi-land, Adam Markowitz. Now, if you don’t know Adam, who in some circles is known as "Sparky", he did really great work on Delphi particularly related to productivity. I was fortunate enough to work closely with him while at Borland as we both had a passion for cool code editor related features and we collaborated on numerous occasions.

However, I’m not here to brag about his Delphi work, which is brag-worthy in it’s own right, but rather his ASP.NET work for Falafel over the past 7-8 months. He’s been 100% focused, and if you know Adam that’s serious business, on a product developed in house by Falafel Software called ActiveFocus. ActiveFocus is a Web 2.0 Project Management application written in ASP.NET. What’s amazing is that prior to joining Falafel (roughly a year ago) Adam had no, and I mean zero, web, JavaScript or ASP.NET experience and if you take a look at this demo I think you’ll understand why I wrote this post acknowledging a lot of long hours and hard work by a colleague and good friend.

In the demo:

1. Login (the credentials are on the logo and yes, there’s an "!" after 2008)
   
2. Click on the "Web 3.0 Wiki Project"
   
3. Click on Requirements (bottom right) then scroll around and play with the app
   

You should see the bulk of the sample data and can really appreciate how this app works and hopefully why I feel it’s worth bragging about.

Anyway, I just want to say kudos Adam, great job dude!

I’ve been playing around with Nikon Capture tweaking some of the photos I took in the desert and noticed a substantial difference in the quality of exported JPG images as compared to Google’s Picasa. Using the default settings you can see that the Picasa version is very washed out and dull whereas the Capture version is much brighter with more detail. (see update below where I screwed up)

Exported using Google’s Picasa	Exported using Nikon Capture

Last year I used several exported photos from Picasa of the kids to make up our holiday greeting card and we weren’t very happy with the final results as they were dull just didn’t look good at all. This year I used Capture and the results were much better. Lesson learned.

[UPDATE: Dec 11, 2007] I screwed up. I guess that's what you get when you post at 12:30am. The original Nikon image I posted had Auto Contrast turned on. I've since updated the image which is now a straight export of the Nikon NEF file from Capture with the only tweak being a resize. Thanks to people's comments I went back and double checked.

Xavier Pacheco yet another colleague of mine here at Falafel has started a blog.

He has a wealth of knowledge to bring into the conversation and he’s off to a great start with a post regarding "five quick tips to help you effectively screen vendors" when looking to outsource your software development.

Welcome X!

Lino Tadros, Falafel Software’s CEO has joined the blogoshere and he’s using dasBlog too. Welcome Lino!

He just posted a great article about small consulting firms working with small clients.

If you've been reading my blog then you LAUNCHcastRadio.aspx">already know I'm a big fan of Yahoo's LAUNCHcast radio and today, June 26, 2007 Yahoo! Music Goes Radio Silent in protest of the the outrageous rates recently set by the Copyright Royalty Board in Washington, D.C..

If you're a Digg user be sure to digg Yahoo's blog post.

Back in December I blogged about the Motorola KRZR's GPS features which far exceeded my expectations. Recently, I picked up a 1GB SD Micro card so as to be able to start using the MP3 features. After a little over three weeks I can safely say I need to find a better use for this SD card. The KRZR's MP3 functionality is way off the mark. I suppose it doesn't help that I have a 4G iPod that I'm used to.

Having read Joel Spolesky's blog post on a Sprint cell phone/MP3 player it sounds like perhaps Motorola has licensed the same MP3 technology as Sprint. While the UI is different and perhaps slightly better based on Joel's description many of the same fatal flaws of exist. For example:

• The player never remembers where you were in a song/podcast, it always starts from the beginning.
• Nearly one quarter of the cramped screen is dedicated to glyphs rather than displaying three more genres, artists, albums or songs.
• It's too easy to bump the touch sensitive areas on the outside of the clam shell and either jump to the next track or the beginning of the current track and given the first bullet above this is a major pain.
• You can't use the keypad to jump 15 minutes into a podcast. In fact, you can't use the keypad for anything MP3 related it simply doesn't respond!
• The fast forward/rewind buttons on the outside of the clam shell only display a progress bar without total or elasped time so you have to guess based on an unmarked progress bar where you are. You can however, get that information if you flip open the phone which defeats the buttons on the exterior IMO.
• The phone requires a separate dongle for use with a standard set of stereo headphones.
• You can't charge the phone and listen to the headphones at the same time because of the dongle.

I have to believe had they handed this phone to any iPod user prior to it's release they would have stumbled into all these problems and possibly more within 15 minutes or less.

With Apple's attention to detail it's no surprise they've had such great and continued success with the iPod. With the announcement of the iPhone it seems they may have the right approach (read people/engineers) to turn the cell phone market on it's head. Granted, the new iPhone isn't out yet but if it lives up to it's announced feature set it will be fun to watch. I have several friends who have set aside money for one.

Anyway, if you're looking for a phone with good MP3 player functionality you may want to consider an alternative.

Is your phone a good MP3 player?

I'm headed out for a bit of desert camping in Red Rock Canyon State Park which I've never done before so I'm really looking forward to it. I'm going with a bunch of guys from Yahoo so I feel a little guilty about posting a Google Map link but I tried for several minutes to get a good link on maps.yahoo.com but one search on Google was all it took so there you go. See ya next week!

I've been playing a lot lately with Google maps working on a little side project that my wife got me interested in. They've done some really interesting things recently that I'll be looking to leverage in the new application I'm working on (not work related).

First, there is the new My Maps feature which has been added to Google Maps where you can create customized maps and share/publish them via the Google Maps Index. Next, they added the ability to make Google Spreadsheet data which is one of the things I'd been working on myself so I may have to re-think things a bit.

If you're interested in map at all you might want to subscribe to the Google Maps blog feed (atom).

Once again the University of Maine (my alma mater) Black Bears are back in the NCAA Frozen Four Hockey Tournament. I grew up in Maine and for me, playing hockey was just part of being a kid. Fortunately, I was lucky enough to live 3 miles from campus and some of the best college hockey in the country. Since I moved to California I've been to a few San Jose Sharks games and, nothing against the Sharks, but I just don't enjoy the NHL like I do good college hockey.

Fill the steins to dear old Maine.
Shout till the rafters ring!
Stand and drink a toast once again!
Let every loyal Maine man sing.
Drink to all the happy hours,
Drink to the careless days.
Drink to Maine, our Alma Mater,
The college of our hearts always.
(what's that?)

Go Black Bears!

Hey Dan, where's them Badgers anyway?

Since I began hosting my own blog back in Oct '06 I've posted 128 times over 168 days. I'm now taking a bit of a break after we've signed off Delphi 2007. In this past 168 days here are a few of the things that have happened:

• Manged to accumulate nearly 700 subscribers to my RSS feed, thanks btw
• Travelled to North Carolina
• While CodeGear was announced
• Met the CEO
• Met the CMO (whom I mistakenly called VP in that post)
• Talked a lot about Zombie
• Posted my first online videos
• Fixed a bunch of bugs
• Celebrated a birthday
  
• Landed on the CodeGear home page (thanks Lisa, Ben, Irene)
• Watched CodeRage
• Got up and running on Vista
• and last but not least helped ship Delphi 2007 (buy now)

I think that about sums it up. I've got two kids I'm now going to spoil the rest of this week. I've written one technical entry which I'll post immediately following this one but that will be it until next week (aside from any guest appearances). Catch you next week!

Lately, I've been considering buying a new bike that I could ride to work and I've been looking for recommendations and it suddenly dawned on me that this might be a good place to ask. I live roughly four, relatively flat, miles (6.5km) from my office here in Scotts Valley and I have an old dead Diamondback bike mountain bike I'm afraid to ride for fear of the rusted spokes killing me. I'd like to replace it with something similar but geared towards comfortable rode riding as I'd prefer not to arrive at work in a complete sweat. I heavily (pun intened) favor lifting weights to aerobic excersize and figure a bike would be a great way continue avoiding the treadmill. Lastly, I'd rather not spend a lot of money which I suppose is the real kicker. Does such a bike exist? If so, what would it be?

Oh, btw, I'm slighly over 6 feet (184cm) tall.

Thanks!

I've been in crunch mode at work for awhile now ng to get Delphi 2007 to RTM and my wife decided to take the kids and head to her parents house for the weekend since I was working. So, with it being so quiet around the house at night I decided to once again it was time for a theme change.

A few noteworthy items:

• I'd like to thank BittBox for the beginnings of the banner I used above (I did the lettering and the swoosh) using Inkscape.
• Over the weekend my site was added to the main page of CodeGear.com so I thought it was time to tidy up a bit. Thanks CodeGear!
• Lastly, this particular theme has relatively minor tweaks to the actual layout, it's mostly color changes, which took about an hour all thanks to CSS

I've been tagged by Nick Hodges and Dan Miser so I guess it's my turn...

1. I'm the only Delphi R&D team member into weight lifting. I work out at Dave Draper's World Gym here in Scott's Valley.
2. I wound up on the University of Maine track team after one of the coaches approached me while I was fooling around dunking a basketball in the field house one day. I came within 1/4" of the UMaine high jump record (at the time) of 6' 10 1/4".
3. I grew up in Maine in the snow yet I've never been downhill skiing. Instead, I played hockey. Go Black Bears!
4. I gave blood for the first time last year through the Stanford Blood Center, something I now plan to do regularly. My blood type is A negative.
5. I come from a family of five, four of whom are left handed including me.

I think pretty much everyone I know at who blogs has either already written a similar post or has been tagged so I guess I'm going to break the chain.