Skype For iPhone Is Full Of WIN!

/ joeygibson / 3 Comments

We’re on vacation in Colonial Williamsburg, and the AT&T signal in and around our hotel sucks! This seems to be a common theme for me. At home, I have next to no AT&T signal. I swear, if it weren’t for the iPhone being such a loverly machine, I would never have gone with AT&T. Anyway, so we’re here in Williamsburg, and in the hotel, there is no cellular signal at all. But there is free, and fast, WiFi. So I fired up the Skype program on my iPhone and would you believe it worked a treat? It did. I have now made two calls with it. One to a restaurant in town, and the other to my brother-in-law back in GA to check on our dog. Both calls were crystal clear, with no lag or dropouts. I only have a 1G iPhone, so I can’t test it over the cellular network, but over WiFi, it was darn near perfect. I have a Skype unlimited subscription, so these calls were essnetially free. In any event, it was better than paying the $0.75 the hotel would have charged me for each call, plus whatever rate the local phone company charged. But beyond the cost, it was just plain cool!

I’ve been a fan of Skype for several years and we use it extensively where I work. I call into meetings and conference calls using it all the time, and I only very rarely have problems. I am now equally impressed with Skype for iPhone. Great job, guys! Keep up the great work.

Smiley

The Danger Of Living In the Cloud: No Backups

/ joeygibson / 5 Comments

Yesterday about 4:30 I tried to check my email, but got nothing more than a string of 502 errors from the server. My mail server is a Google Domain Apps account, which means my MX record points to Google, and they handle the rest. I was about to leave the office, so I figured I would just check later when I got home. I checked from my iPhone a few times on the way, but it was still borked. About two hours after the problem began, it cleared up again, and is still working fine.

During the outage, I started thinking about this situation. I have 916 megabytes of email stored in my Gmail account. That’s a lot, though it is only 12% of my quota. That’s three years of email that I don’t want to lose. And I’m completely at the mercy of “the cloud” with respect to my email. There is no way for me to back that email up and Google makes no guarantees about data retention. They give us 7G+ of space, but they don’t claim to do any backups or that they can get your email back if it goes away. Is this just a cost of living in the cloud? I wouldn’t trade my Gmail account for anything, so I guess I just have to live with the danger, right? Is there anything a Gmail user can do to ensure their email has some sort of protection? I know that I could open another gmail account and have every incoming email forward to that other account, but is that really the only choice? Google does offer a plan that is $50/email address/year, and while it does have a 99.9% uptime guarantee, it doesn’t say anything about backups.

What would be nice is an interface from Gmail to Mozy or Carbonite or some other online backup service. Each Gmail user could then decide if he wanted to contract with one of those third-party services for backups, or just take his chances.

w00t! Latest Wii System Update Addresses Storage Issues

/ joeygibson

I complained before about the abysmal storage situation on our Wii. Well, our troubles are lessened, if not necessarily over. On March 25, Nintendo released the latest version of the Wii OS. I only got it three days ago, because our Wii has been acting up, hardware-wise, and I’ve had it turned off. IGN has the full skinny on the update.

Basically, it makes much better use of your SD card, allowing you to keep things on the SD card, and automatically swapping them to the system memory when you need them. I bought two SD cards Monday night, and have moved all our lesser-used channels we want to keep to one card, and setup the other as my Rock Band 2 downloadable content card. I now have nearly 900 free “blocks” on the internal storage, which should mean I won’t run out when downloading RB2 songs again.

For those of you who saw my tweets about losing all my Rock Band 2 data, here’s the full story. A couple of weeks ago, I was buying songs from the RB2 store when I ran out of space on the internal storage. I figured I’d just try again later, so I went to play a song. After playing a song, the game complained that it couldn’t save my progress. I exited the game and restarted, only to be asked if I wanted to create a new save file (uh oh). I said “no” and it said that since I didn’t create a new file, my progress couldn’t be saved. I exited and restarted, this time saying “yes” to create the file. Of course, it created a new one, and all my data was lost. Actually, it was already lost, but this was the final nail in the coffin. I’ve reconnected the new save file to my online account, but all of my character and band data are gone forever. That really sucks, because I’d unlocked tons of songs, cities and venues. Now I have to start over from scratch. 😦 At least with the new OS upgrade, I shouldn’t lose my data again because of space issues.

As for the hardware issues I mentioned, the disc drive has been getting extremely noisy and, lately, flaky. Basically, the drive makes lots of noise and sometimes stops spinning altogether. Once it stops spinning, the game chokes and dies and you have to reboot. Based on some things I’ve read on the web, booting the Wii without a disc in the drive helps, and that’s what I’m seeing, too. I really don’t want to have to buy a new Wii, but we may have to before long.

Today’s Plinky: My Somewhat Lame Claims To Fame

/ joeygibson

I don’t know that I’d say I’m truly famous, but I am somewhat well-known, in certain circles. I am co-author of the book “Ant Developer’s Handbook”, published by SAMS in 2002. It sold moderately well. I have been published in Java Developer’s Journal twice, in 2002 and 2003.

I am also the creator of MiddleClickClose, a Safari plugin that enables the closing of tabs by clicking your middle mouse button, and for ExportToArchive, a plugin for iPhoto that allows exporting of photos to Zip and other compressed formats.

Some of my friends know that I was an uncredited extra in the box office flop, “Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers”, from way back in 1988. For three days in 1988 I sat around an abandoned YMCA camp in Waco, GA, waiting to be called to the set. I eventually made it into one scene.

American Idol Switcheroo on iTunes

/ joeygibson / 1 Comment

If you watched Idol last week, you were treated to a bunch of mediocre renditions of classic Motown songs, plus a stunningly beautiful re-imagining of Smokey Robinson’s “Tracks of My Tears.” Adam Lambert is the one who pulled off that coup. He sang with an acoustic guitar, upright bass and slapboard-drum-type-thing, and it was so tender and gorgeous and moving. If he continues with performances like that and his brilliant reworking of “Ring of Fire,” he’s going to go all the way.

Ryan Seacrest makes a point of saying that you can buy recordings of the contestants’ performances on iTunes, so I tried to do just that last Thursday. Unfortunately, last week’s performances weren’t available yet. I tried again this morning and they were. But what they are selling is not what you heard on the show. I went directly to the link for Adam’s “Tracks Of My Tears” and when I previewed it… WTF?!? Gone is the simple rhythm section and Adam’s tender vocals. Instead, you get Adam doing karaoke vocals over the original recording’s instrumentals. That is not what I wanted in the song, and given the comments from 587 other fans, not what most people want. Idol pulled this same switcheroo last year with Jason Castro‘s performance of Brudda Iz‘s “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” In Jason’s case, however, the tenderness of his singing and his ukulele playing were left intact and you couldn’t really tell it was not the same performance that you saw on the show.

The people who are really upset are those who prepaid for the song. I know I would be too. This should serve as a cautionary tale to anyone who is thinking of preordering any Idol performances in the future. There’s no way I’d pay in advance for anything from Idol now.

By the way, if you’re technically inclined, you can buy the video of his performance that was so beautiful and then rip the audio track into its own mp3 file. That’s what I’m going to do. But you shouldn’t have to do this. Idol should be selling what we heard on the show, not a studio do-over. I don’t have a problem with them also selling the studio do-over, but what people want and expect to get is what they heard on the show.

Help Me With iPhone Dev Graphics Question, Please

/ joeygibson

Usually when I learn a new programming language or framework, I am plagued by the fact that I can’t think of anything to build with it, or I can only think of things that are too difficult. With iPhone development, I have two ideas for apps, both of which should be fairly easy to write. I’ve gotten a good start on the first app, but now I’ve hit a roadblock, and I’ve been stuck here for a while. I thought I’d ask for help.

Obviously I can’t disclose too much of what the app does, since I do eventually want to sell it in the App Store. Essentially, it allows for a very specific type of photo manipulation. I’ve got the basic UI built, and I’ve hooked into the camera framework, so you can either take a new photo, or use one you already took. I am displaying the photo in the main window, currently scaled to fit, but I will eventually add zoom and pan. I have the code written that allows the user to define a region of the photo to work on, by drawing a rectangle or ellipse. I draw the shape using Quartz 2D, which results in a red rectangle or ellipe drawn on top of the photo. So far, so good.

This is where I’m stuck. I need to do “something” to the bits in the photo in the region defined by the rectangle or ellipse and, at some point, a freehand shape. (Obviously I can’t reveal what the “something” is.) So, I have looked through the Quartz 2D docs and am trying to figure out how I can

  1. get the bits in the region defined by the user’s drawing
  2. swizzle the bits with my secret sauce to produce the desired effect
  3. get the swizzled bits back into the photo for display to the user

And here I sit. I have never done anything with graphics before, so this is all completely foreign to me. I can’t see how to do any of those three steps.

The next question, then, is should I be using OpenGL ES instead of Quartz 2D? The iPhone dev book I have taught a little bit of both, and the OpenGL stuff looked far more complicated than Quartz, which seemed like overkill for my situation. I don’t know.

I think I can accomplish what I want by creating an image mask, applying that to my original image, and then displaying the new image, but the mask creation function, CGImageMaskCreate, has me confused. I get most of the parameters, but I don’t understand the CGDataProviderRef parameter. Can anyone offer any sort of pointers to get me moving again? Are there any really in-depth Quartz 2D tutorials? The Apple docs on Quartz that I’ve read are very basic, and don’t really give examples.

Thanks for any help or pointers. I know I haven’t given you much to work with.

ExportToArchive *Does* Work With iPhoto ’09

/ joeygibson / 2 Comments

I just installed the iLife ’09 suite, which includes version 8.0 of iPhoto. While I haven’t had time to try out any of the new features, I did check to see if my ExportToArchive plugin still worked. I’m happy to report that it does still work. If you already had it installed, you don’t have to do anything; it will just work. If you don’t have it installed, the installer works with the latest version of iPhoto just fine.

If you encounter any problems using ExportToArchive with iPhoto ’09, please let me know.

My favorite line from ‘They Live’

/ joeygibson / 1 Comment

This is a horribly cheesy, yet oddly fun movie starring the wrestler Roddy Piper. It boasts one of the longest, most tedious, fight scenes *ever* in a film. My favorite line features Roddy walking into a bank full of concealed aliens. He walks in and to get everyone's attention, he utters this classic line:

I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass… and I'm all out of bubblegum.

Thomas Interviews Me Using Our New Flip HD Camcorder

/ joeygibson

We got a new Flip Video MinoHD Camcorder yesterday from Amazon. It’s a very neat little device. It records in HD and holds up to 60 minutes of video on its solid state storage. It attaches to your computer, Mac or PC, using a built-in USB connection, and the first time you attach it to a machine, it installs its software. The above video was shot by Thomas about an hour after we opened the box. I imported the video into iMovie and poked around until I figured out how to add the title cards. Not an Oscar-worthy production, to be sure! Still, it was fun making it. I look awful in it, so please be kind with your comments. 🙂