Made in the USA

Posted in Random thoughts by dave on August 2, 2010 No Comments yet

Recently, I ordered a new chair. After sitting in one in a customer’s newly-outfitted conference room, and noticing how run-down my current office-superstore-brand task chair was becoming, I decided to upgrade. This afternoon, my new coding throne arrived courtesy of UPS, and I eagerly unboxed and set it up. Two 13mm bolts later, I carried the chair into my office and gave it its maiden sit.

But something wasn’t right. My specimen of this particular chair didn’t feel quite the same as those ringing the conference room table. After 5 minutes, I realized the difference – the lumbar “support” piece – a D-shaped springy plastic affair upon which the chair’s poly-mesh back rested – felt like a yardstick pressed into my vertebrae. Far from the super-adjustable high-end version of the chair I’d first experienced, I realized I had purchased a much more basic model on which this lumbar support was fixed. And held in place by a T30 bolt.

Which is how I found myself at Sears an hour-or-so later, in search of a new set of Torx drivers. In order to remove the offending lumbar support piece, I’d need to remove the bolt through an opening too-small for my interchangeable-bit screwdriver. And as I surveyed the options in the “six-sided fastener-adjusting tools” section, I noticed a selection of various hex-key sets. Ever since my loose 5mm hex key – an essential tool for bicycle maintenance – went missing, I’d been meaning to remedy its absence. This is how men shop.

Hoping to avoid the loss of another loose 5mm key, I opted for a fold-up style set. I had two options: a SAE/metric pair from Allen brand (“The Original!” exclaimed the packaging) for $9.99, or the same array of sizes with Craftsman branding for $25.99. Both carried lifetime warranties. Both seemed durable enough. Both had ball-style ends. Both even had little accessory tabs that could be used to hang the tool from a pegboard. The difference? The former was made in China, and the later in Estes, Illinois.

I set down the set of Torx wrenches and picked up both of the hex-key contenders, realizing that this was fast becoming a “practice what you preach” moment. As far as “things we buy” go, there aren’t that many things sold that are still manufactured domestically. Our government has made it all-but-impossible to do business profitably in this country, and what roadblocks they haven’t put up, labor unions have. So when the issue of buying American-made goods comes up, I enthusiastically advocate for it – and even more so for “buying local” if one can. And now I had a simple choice: pay more or compromise.

I hung the Allen-brand wrench set back on its hook and headed to the checkout counter. The total bill for 10 American-made hand tools was $69.84. Just under $7 per tool, or under $3 each if you count each key on the folding sets individually. And while I realize that my purchase doesn’t affect much of anything on a global scale, it does amount to a single ballot in a very large game of vote-with-your-wallet.

And that new chair? Turns out it was made in Zeeland, Michigan.

Deacon: Musings on Starting an Open-Source Project

Posted in Random thoughts by dave on July 26, 2010 2 Comments

I’ve been using open-source software since the late-nineties – I can still remember the intrigued excitement I felt when my friend Seth first told me about a free system called “Linux”, and showed me the LRP box humming along in his attic. In April, nearly two college degrees, countless thousands of lines of code, and over a decade later, I felt that same excitement when I decided to launch my own open-source project. “Deacon” (short for Droid+Beacon) was on its way to becoming a library for Android developers who wished to add push-notification capability to their Android applications. The Deacon library would avoid requiring the use of any third-party server for push delivery, affording complete autonomy for app developers – and embodying the spirit of freedom and choice that the Android platform represents.

In my years as a member of the free software community, I’ve seen plenty of projects come and go, and even witnessed the rise and fall of an empire or two (yes, Gentoo was my daily-driver for a while). But I never really considered just what the creation of a community around a piece of software would entail. As I tend to do, I oversimplified the concept – just “hang out your shingle” (virtually, of course) and the magic of the Internet will unleash a throng of developers and users at your doorstep. Teamwork would flourish, bright people would contribute inspired code, and all would be right with the world.

In the first week of the Deacon Project’s existence, I pulled some late nights and scraped together everything that – in my experience – I felt an open-source project ought to have. I started with a WordPress-powered web site (deaconproject.org), a hosted repository and project wiki on GitHub, and a mailing list. The blog’s first post painted a picture of the project’s inception, and offered a simple vision for how the Deacon push library would take shape. Within hours, I had my first contributor – my good friend and fellow grad-student, Spencer. A few days later, I received an out-of-the-blue email with another offer to contribute – this time, from Toronto-area software engineer, Android-enthusiast and entrepreneur Faisal Abid. The library began to take shape, with plenty of commits and frequent new blog entries.

It’s been four months since I founded and announced the Deacon project, and the team and I have learned a few lessons about open source projects along the way. The project is admittedly still a fledgling, but if you’re interested in hearing a few impressions from our work so far, feel free to hit the jump

More…

Attention amateur advertising producers…

Posted in Random thoughts by dave on July 23, 2010 No Comments yet

Want to create a catchy, trendy, and most-importantly motivating ad for something you like? With a budget of … zero? This is how you do it:

Ubuntu from Keith Kenniff on Vimeo.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve watched Linux advertisement competitions – such as the annual contest from the Linux Foundation – with interest. And every year, I’m hugely disappointed. The videos submitted are generally poorly-produced, based on obscure concepts or just downright cheesy. But this one – while it’s a little dated (Ubuntu 10.04 is out now, and we’re just a few months from 10.10) and not quite up to ad-agency quality – I think it’s the most competent thing we’ve seen in a long time. Of course, if you want to see what happens when the heavy-hitters take out their wallets, take a look at these legends:

July’s best meme mashup in 5 words…

Posted in Random thoughts by dave on July 5, 2010 No Comments yet

“The antennas are now diamonds!”

iPhone 4 Diamond Edition: white, unlocked, and $20k

He’s BACK!

Posted in Random thoughts by dave on July 5, 2010 No Comments yet

Maintaining a blog isn’t always easy or cheap, so it’s understandable that sometimes people leave the blogging scene for a while… But as of this week, one of the blogosphere’s greats (at least in my world) has triumphantly returned! Be sure to visit:

Welcome back, Andy!

AndSpot private beta goes live

Posted in Random thoughts by dave on June 10, 2010 No Comments yet

Logo for Andspot Android app marketReleases can be busy, exciting and sometimes-scary times for software engineers – you’re about to take your creation from the warm comfort of the incubator and expose it to the rigors of new users, new systems and new conditions. It’s also a hopeful time, as I’m sure my friend (and software engineering colleague) Faisal is finding right now as he launches the private beta of his own market for Android mobile apps, called “Andspot”. Even though Facebook, MySpace and even Google are now tech behemoths, they all at one point did exactly what he is doing now.

From what I know of Andspot, it holds a lot of promise for Android users and app developers alike, improving the way we find and buy apps for our mobile devices. If you want to learn more, you can sign up for the private Beta test at http://www.andspot.com/ (there’s an invite code on his blog to streamline the process).

Update: Andspot has been featured on Wired Magazine’s Gadget Lab blog: Independent App Stores Take On Google’s Android Market

Goings-on…

Posted in Random thoughts by dave on June 6, 2010 No Comments yet

Yes…so my feeble attempt at Project 52 is completely hosed, though it doesn’t appear I’m alone having fallen off the wagon, watching it disappear on the horizon. While it doesn’t make my epic one-post-a-week failure any more acceptable, there has been a lot going on.

Today is the last day of RIT‘s academic break between Spring and Summer quarters, and Kelly and I spent a good chunk of that break exploring Vermont with our friends Jason and Alicia. From the photo below, which show’s Kelly’s car loaded and ready, you can probably guess the theme for the trip…

Yes, that's 7 bikes

We spent 5 phenomenal days venturing between Bennington, Burlington, Waterbury and Burke – the last of which found us back on the nothing-short-of-glorious Kingdom Trails. Good riding, good food, good beer and good times were had by all!

Since returning home, Kelly and I have more-or-less laid low. Surprisingly, there’s been plenty that’s blogworthy, but little motivation to sit down and type it out. I suspect part of that has a lot to do with the dearth of physical activity that’s accompanied “laying low”, so I’m hoping that getting out for an off-road ride tonight will help bring the spark back…

Side note: New project announcement

Posted in Geek Stuff, Random thoughts by dave on April 16, 2010 No Comments yet

File under “Just wanted to mention…”

Chances are most people have never noticed – and likely don’t care – that the Android mobile phone platform doesn’t have a native way to do Push Notifications. You know, something happens somewhere, and your phone buzzes and lets you know about it. You’d be surprised how much goes into making that happen – it’s a little more complicated than just shooting off a text message.

The folks over at Xtify have created a nice Push framework for Android, but (as a developer) you have to use their servers to push out your messages. I can just hear you asking now: Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a way for Android developers to push-enable their apps without depending on an outside server? You weren’t asking that? Well, just stick with me here.

Never mind. Long story short? I decided to plug this gap by creating a new open-source project aimed at bringing push notifications to Android developers. It uses the Meteor web server as a back-end – effectively, it’ll just be a pure-Java implementation of a Meteor client. Maybe it’ll take off, maybe it wont – but I hope it can benefit someone at some point! You can read more about it at The Deacon Project.

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