Ado’s Neighborhood

How time has flied! It has been a year since I joined ThoughtWorks. In the last 12 months, I've:

Despite podcasts being on the interweb for at least 7 years, many of my friends (some are tech savvy, some not) are still not utilizing this really useful medium. Even for those who listen to podcasts, they only have around 1 or 2 in their iTunes podcast subscriptions list. Am I the only person in my social group who listen to more than 2 podcasts?

Show us the book you're reading right now.
Submitted by Strive2Be.

The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century

Thomas L. Friedman

★★★★★

What question do you hate being asked?

"Say something in Chinese!"

One of the cool thing about working with ThoughtWorks is that there are always something I can get involve with outside of the day-to-day consulting work. Not only I help out the recruitment department in NY with code review, phone interviews, and office interviews, recently I've also started helping out with ThoughtWorks podcasts (iTunes). So far I've edited one series of podcasts, "Web 2.0", which is divided into three parts. The first two parts have been available for download for a while now and the reason I haven't blogged about it until now is that I want to wait until I got the acknowledgment in part 3 from Michael, the producer. Otherwise, no one is going to believe me! Fast forward to 25:25 towards the end and you can hear the proof :D

I've been using the iPhone SDK since its original release way back in March. Many frustrating moment in the beginning but the recent beta 7 and beta 8 release proved to be ready for prime time. Apple has added many helper classes or helper methods to classes to make it far easier to work with the UI components, which is by far the most frustrating things I encountered. I am still having problem wrapping my head around the idea of Interface Builder but since the apps that I am building do not involve very complex UI, I just hand coded all the UI instead.

To illustrate, the original iPhone app idea I had that I started developing using the original SDK is a mobile application for Mingle. The application would consist of a series of table views showing projects, cards, and card details, along with some network code to talk to the Mingle server through REST API. At that time, progress was slow because of many factors. First, learning Cocoa/Cocoa Touch API and Xcode at the same time was tough. Second, the Cocoa Touch API was a bit 'primitive' in the beginning. What I mean is that while the API provides all the necessary hooks for developers to create an iPhone app it does not provide many pre-build components, making it difficult and required lots more work from developers to re-create the look and feel of the built-in iPhone apps.

I was so put off by the initial experience that I skipped beta 4-6 and did not open up Xcode until last weekend. And what a refreshing change with beta 7! Now it is straightforward to make an app that looks and feels just like an Apple's one. I was so fired up that last Sunday evening I decided that I would try to create an app for an idea that one of my fellow ThoughtWorker suggested to me. Instead of days of tearing my hair out and got no where, I was able to create a almost features completed app within hours, using beta 8.

So what is this app? It checks the build status on the CruiseControl server. Just like CCTray (Windows) or CCMenu (OS X), it allows users to monitor their software build status. Following the convention, I am calling it CCPhone. The app isn't more complex than the Mingle app but the fact that I was able to almost match the productivity I normally get on my Windows development environment means that I was excited about working on the app rather than dreading it.

Now here are couple of screen shots:

To-do:

• Fix the build time being 1 hours off (probably day time saving bug)
• Better status icons
• Create application icon (currently it uses icon from CCMenu)
• Finish coding the 'Force Build' functionality
• Add startup screen bitmap (so it won't be just a black screen)
• Add auto detect of CruiseControl server (Java, .Net, or Ruby)

One of my friend reached out to me last week for help. The photographer she hired for her wedding had gone bankrupted. Since she has not gotten the album now she can't even get her wedding photos in either prints or digital form. All she has access to is the photographer's web site where the people can order prints from. She was hoping that I can somehow retrieve all the photos (~1220) from the site so that at least she would have digital copies of her wedding photos.

I met Brian Donahue at ALT.NET in Seattle a couple of months back, and earlier this evening he tweeted that he was curious how well code in PDF would display on the Kindle. So I replied and told him I'll try it out and show him the result.

The process of converting a PDF to Kindle format is very simple. Since I am at my computer I don't need to send the PDF to my Kindle wirelessly, so I emailed the PDF (5.6MB) to my 'free' Kindle email address: alexhung@free.kindle.com. I received back the converted .azw file (2.6MB) from Amazon within a couple of minutes. I copied it to my SD card, popped it into the Kindle, switched it on, and there it was right at the front page. 

So here's a screenshot of the original PDF taken from Preview.app:

Original PDF

And here are how the roughly same page looks on the Kindle:

Tech book on Kindle - 1

Tech book on Kindle - 2

As you can see the colouring and the code font are gone, obviously, the line-break is off and the download links are gone too but these are to be expected. But overall, I am impressed by the quality of the conversion. The text is properly converted, i.e. not being displayed as a bitmap image. Even the table of content is navigable (it doesn't show up as in the Kindle menu though).

Despite the good quality, I am still not completely convinced the Kindle is a good way to read tech book. Simply because there is always a lot of flipping back and forth when I read tech book, especially reference books, and the Kindle page by page flipping is way too slow. But for regular PDF book, I think the Kindle works just fine.

(Note that I took the photos indoor with flash, at ISO 1600 handheld. Even with image stablizer on, there are still some handshakes.)