Dev::Blog

Found via the TorCamp Google Group, here’s an awesome summary of mobile data costs in Canada vs the USA, which included this gem in the comments:

Now Rogers and Telus are offering unlimited music downloads, as in the “Load up your 4GB MP3 phone” for $20/month ads. If you were to pay their regular data rate of 5 cents/kb for this (hey, it’s all 1’s and 0’s), the cost would be:

$209,715.20

Let’s see, buy a home or fill up my phone with data… Or get functionally the same thing for $20 if I just download music…

Of course, that’s not technically true - Rogers, for instance, charges a flat 50 cents per music download to your phone (on top of the subscription for unlimited access), which, for the average song size of (say) 3.5 megs, would be considerably cheaper (though still over a thousand dollars, by my somewhat broken math). Still, it hits a lot of the issues surrounding wireless data squarely on the head.

That said, I’m not so sure price is the only problem anymore. Since getting my nifty new E61, the number of times I use WiFi on the phone is rapidly curving to the zero line in the chart. If I were to enable my EVDO-equipped ThinkPad, however, I imagine it’d be a different story, but not by much - the reality is that my life is set up so that 93% of the time, I’m within reach of a networked device, and the other 7% I’m typically very happy to be unplugged. I’m still searching for the killer app, and email isn’t it.

Technorati Tags: mobile data, wireless data

I finally beat my inbox into submission and got back into that state of flow where, as per the GTD principles, my inbox is just a landing pad for items that I can file accordingly.

In the past, I tried doing this with a series of @Review, @Today, etc folders in Thunderbird, but I found that I wasn’t particularly good at remembering to look in those folders on a regular basis. The inbox is simply burned into my brain as the be all and end all of folders in my mail program, with everything else delegated as archival.

The solution (which seems to be working so far) is to use Backpack for my @… folders. I just forward the mails to my Backpack account (each page in Backpack has its own email address) and include a brief mention of where I filed the email in case I need the original again. Just like how I put work stuff into a FogBugz system, it’s like filing the messages to a to do list that I can check on later, but the big deal, for me, anyway, is that the work items are as far from the email program as I can get them. This leaves my email system to serve the two functions it does well - accept and archive.

Technorati Tags: GTD, Backpack, email

“A clear inbox, being caught up on RSS feeds, and regular blog posts: pick two.”

I just read that SourceGear was starting a new magazine ad campaign consisting of full page comic book stories. I was kinda hoping that the ads would be copies of the Hostess snack foods ads from the 70’s, but it so far it doesn’t look like the hero’s going to throw copies of version control software at the bad guys and cart them off to prison while they’re engrossed in effective software development. Sigh…

Technorati Tags: SourceGear, Advertising

This is as close as I’m ever going to get to having a Law named after me, so let’s just roll with it:

Jason’s Law of copy input:

If you make a typo on a project, odds are pretty good it’ll be the client’s name.

Well, that’s how it seems to work for me, anyway… Seriously, I need to get some of that Google “did you mean” code and put it in a VS2005 plugin that will find me all the words that look kinda like a word of my choosing. It’d be like a spell checker for pessimists. I should throw the idea onto RentaCoder and see what happens.