House hunting with a smart phone

My week long stay in Georgia is coming to a close, and I'd like to share my experiences.

First, the "gear": HP TC4200 tablet PC, Palm Pre(Sprint), Google Voice, Gmail, a hotel with wi-fi and ethernet in every room.

I started out optimistic, "I'll just surf craigslist for a while, call on some of the sweet looking houses, and I'll be done in a few days, piece of cake."

I quickly ran into a few snags, first, craigslist sucks for finding rentals. Specifically, single family detached homes. There is no good way to map them (even using the mashup sites), and craigslist doesn't have enough data, if "2 car garage" isn't in the title, the craigslist search box doesn't find it. Second problem with craigslist, many of the ads are missing stuff like addresses, and contact info! A few others go to email harvesting sites, and many people just never reply, or call back.

The next thing I tried was to only look at ads with addresses, and just go out to the property unannounced to snoop around. After I get a good look, I also canvas the neighborhood to see if I like it, and I can also dig up other rentals this way. If the house and neighborhood check out, I'll call the number on the sign or in the ad. But many were property management offices that were closed on the weekend, and I had just got really rolling on friday, so that hurt things a bit.

So, I'm gonna end up plugging realtors.com I can search for rentals and for sale properties, have searches with meaningful filters, and even dig into MLS numbers, and find out when a property was last sold and for how much.

So, once I clued in on this site, it was time to put rubber to the road and check these places out, I'd compose an email of addresses, send it to myself, and bring that up on the phone. Then I'd use copy-paste and flip between email and Sprint Navigation app on my palm pre. Multitasking!

Then I'd listen to it's directions, and hopefully arrive at the destination.

Some problems: Sprint Nav is a resource hog. the pre became very sluggish with just nav and email open, it would also set brightness to full, and chewed through the battery. I have a car adapter, but it's a cheap piece of shit, and must not always make a good connection, because I can seemingly drain the battery faster than I can recharge it while using Sprint Nav, email, and pandora. For those of you saying 'use google maps then', I'd like to remind them that it does NOT provide spoken instructions, nor will it advance the instructions to the next waypoint after hitting said waypoint.

Once I did reach a destination, I was able to fire up the camera app, and snap some photos for the places I like for reference later. The photos are geotagged, so I should be able to put these on the map in case I forget which photo goes with what address.

While there were no "GPS Drives me into a lake" incidents, it did send me down the wrong road a few times. Out here, there are some roads with "NW", or 'SW' designation on them and I think that confused it. In one instance, It kept sending me to Hickory Hills Trail, instead of Drive, and in another, it was convinced a road connected between two subdivisions, where it was really covered over with trees, and barely navigable by foot.

For the most part though, a GPS navigation app is a great thing, if I had to look up rentals in a paper, call people, and look on a paper map, I would have got about 1, maybe 2, houses a day.

I did bring the laptop with me one day, but ended up not using it. I figured I might want to hop onto realtors.com to snoop out more houses while out in the field, but it turns out that doing all that in advance while on the hotel ethernet is a better idea.

Realtors.com can just barely render on my Pre, it takes a while to come up, and while functional, is pretty darn slow. I certainly couldn't do any real hardcore searches on there yet.

Overall, data coverage here is great. I think I had one bar and slow poke data in one spot, and that was in a valley with trees all around.

I tried out google voice on this trip, and it would have been more fruitful had I set it up properly. I figured it would be more acceptable to people if I left a 404 area code number, instead of a 408 number. While my google voice number IS in 404, I didn't set up the forwarding right, so during 'working hours' GV went straight to voicemail, instead of ringing my phone! I didn't figure this out till friday afternoon, about the time where it no longer mattered. The moral of the story: Make sure to update any forwarding schedules while away from your normal routine.

GV does a half decent job with the transcriptions, which is great, because it will text me its best guess at a message, which lets me decide weather to fire up the GV webpage, give them a call back, or just sit on it until I'm back at the laptop. The mobile version of GV is shared betewen pre and iphone, and seems to work OK enough. For some reason, the gDialPro Pre app stopped working this week, (invalid password errors), though perhaps the GV API changed?

CDMA's limitation of data OR voice burned me once or twice. But at least I could be on a call and use the non-internet apps. (like jotting down info into a Memo), and other times I lucked out and had the laptop on the ethernet as the call came in. Still, this sucks, and I hope 4G networks are all VOIP.

The conclusion I came to for all this, is that it all felt like 'work', and while I got some 'work' done with the smartphone by itself, this particular task still requires that 'home base' mentality with the laptop as the main internet gateway, and the smartphone doing things very inefficiently.

I think this whole task of house hunting still hasn't become all it could be. For example, there is no way to have realtors.com send their map to my phone, nor was there any way to efficiently plot a course through all the selected houses. I had to look up everything separately, and sorta eyeball their placement in the email I'd send to myself, which was the guessed at order I should visit houses in. Also, the photos available for perusing are really poor. With the cornucopia of cheap digital cameras, I still don't understand why only 2-3 photos of a place exist.

If I had more time, It would have been cool to have a database ready to go, and I could have whipped out the tablet PC and entered notes and attached photos as I went along (and outward facing camera on the tablet would be cool), but something like that is a pretty involved piece of software.

in the end, I think I've got 2-3 houses that are good candidates, I just have to go through the application process, and write some checks on the winner.

Google suite of web apps

I have gmail, google voice, and wave. I now have notifiers for all of them in Chrome via the new extensions, which is great, since I don't need to have 'a email app open' or, have a gmail tab open.

Any time they light up or signal me, I hit one, and bam, I get a small preview, and I can just hit the button and go right to that new content.

The other cool thing everyone should try is using google docs with shared permissions. A friend and I were banging out ideas in a spreadsheet (extrapolating Moores law to 2030), and its a very compelling thing to see cells fill in real time, or have your own formulas corrected. Then, to discuss the results of the spreadsheet. Each person is at their own computer, without having to share a screen or keyboard.

Another great use for googledocs is resume proofing. Another friend of mine was worried about his resume, so he shared it on docs. I was able to fix spelling errors and add comments containing questions to him to mull over later. They recently added MS Word compatibility as well.

I used the Tablet today

Yes, the tablet, you know the one.

It was full of apps, it had a cool webkit based browser. It has wifi. I could turn it and get 4 different orientations of the screen.

It has 1 gig of ram.

The battery can be removed, which is a nice change.

It's great to turn it to portrait mode and read stuff like comic books or websites.

It does have a home button still.

It's really easy to develop for.

It has a pressure sensitive display, with a stylus, which is great for sketches. It can recognize hand writing really well. Better than any PDA could.

It also has a touch sensitive surface, if you don't want to get the stylus out.

I can press a button and talk to it, either to dictate text, or to issue commands. It does a decent job of recognizing my voice, with little training.

Naturally, it can multitask.

Here's where it gets strange:

It only cost me $300, no subsidies.

it has a full keyboard.

Its x86, not ARM based.

I've been using it for over a year now, but it was manufactured in 2006.

It's made by HP.

It's a TC4200 tablet PC running windows XP.

Oh, you thought all this was a brand new product that hasn't existed until today? Sorry, wrong again.

Chrome is now my default browser.

While it is a bit of a memory hog, Chrome starts the fastest, runs the fastest, and is on the bleeding edge of HTML5. The developer tools are quite usable now (Chrome 1 was terrible in this regard), so it now dominates my web browsing. I target chrome first when making my little web apps.

I recommend y'all switch over to Chrome.

California beef recall

Granted, I normally talk about some sorta gadget, my plane, or op-amps here on my blog, but this sorta thing really pisses me off:

E. Coli Recall: 864,000 Pounds Of Ground Beef

http://consumerist.com/2010/01/e-coli-recall-864000-pounds-of-beef.html

No, I'm not a vegetarian, what pisses me off is that these infections are only due to industrial farming techniques. These cows are packed in together, fed corn (corn is NOT a natural feedstock for cows), and they even 'supplement' their diet with guess what, cow byproducts, which is where the mad-cow disease comes from. (Cows eating cow brains)

Go watch Food Inc, then do what I do, only eat beef from grass-fed local sources, and free-range chicken.

Die Flash Die

Sorry Flash, HTML5 ate your lunch.

Flash used to be a good idea, long long ago, it was a good way of compressing interesting content back in the days when the web was dull and on 56k modems.

Nowdays, the layout/text effects, vector art, audio, (and almost the video) can be done with the DOM, javascript, and fancier stuff with HTML5/CSS3.

I know, I know, "HTML5 doesn't have the timeline/animation controls of flash", ok, fine, but is flash used this way any more? Seems like most 'flash' I see is just a container for H.264 video.

Your iphone sucks, and the apple tablet is vaporware

All I'm gonna say about 'the apple tablet', is that it doesn't exist, and even if it did. it will suck just as much as your iphone does.

Some people may say 'My iphone doesn't suck!', and they'd be wrong, but whatever. Droves of idiots lined up to buy an iphone at launch for $600. Seriously, $600??

It had 12 applications, total - "but it has 50,000 now!" Thats great, really it is, yet: how many are decent apps? how many work on all versions of the iphone? Do you think that when a mystical 'tablet/slate/pad' comes out that all these apps will magically work? Not apples M.O. Look back at history, apple will screw over it's user base by nixing backwards compatibility without a second thought. They do it all the time with their hardware.

MS has had tablets for years now, I'm composing this on an HP tablet PC in fact. It's pretty cool actually, thankfully it has a full keyboard, and has an OS with millions of applications, it also has well thought out OS integration with the tablet aspect. I don't see apple magically producing a must have gadget with no experience in this field. The same applies to the iphone, which is nothing more than a glorified 'dumbphone', it didn't even do regular 'phone' stuff very well.

(ipods don't even play music well, nor do their computers run software well, but I digress)

If this POS ever comes out, I expect the same stream of BS to pour out of the apple zealots; headlines such as "Apple invents tablet computing", "Why I'm selling my car to get an iSlate", and "I named my newborn child iSlate".

I just thought of something... I stopped watching TV cuz of all the brain dead sitcoms, how do I stop hearing about shitty apple products while surfing the web?

New home, same blog

I used to run my server at home, now it's all on a VPS (virtual private server). I was using blojsom, but at some point, it decided to stop letting me log in. It gets kinda hard to run a blog when I can't log into it and add new posts. I decided not to tempt fate again, and I removed it from my new tomcat deployment. So here I am, and blogspot. Letting someone else mow the lawn.

Some things I've learned in this migration process, and over the years of hosting all my own web services, like FTP, email, DNS, and webserver:

Jerkwads abound: Spammers, and hackers. The amount of spam my domains received was getting insane. In fact, I'll be retiring my old domain just because I'm sick of managing all the spam, and wasting bandwidth. Even though its no longer 'my' bandwidth, it still annoys me. Running a blog meant that every post had 25 comments from bots trying to sell ED medications.

Trying to keep up with the spammers is a full time job. When the Bayesian spam filter "Spam Halter" became available, I plugged that in and trained it for a week or so, which dramatically reduced spam that hit my inbox. Still, some still gets through. (plus the server still downloads the whole message)

On the hacking front, I could look at my logs and see brute-force password attacks on my FTP server practically daily. I'm not even sure of other ports that may have been under attack.

Pick a version and stick to it: On a regular desktop, I always update to the latest, and usually don't get burned. However, with 'server' software this isn't always the case. Server software moves at 'internet speed', which means there are new versions constantly coming out, and "Technology of the Week", or "Yet another scripting language" is rampant. An example being and upgrade to a new web-email client means a new version of PHP, which requires an upgrade to some other component, and so on. I think this is why older versions are maintained so long.

Pick an OS version, an apache version, a tomcat version, etc. set those up, and leave it.

I still run email and web, but DNS, FTP are gone. I use apache 2.0.x, Tomcat 6, and MySQL 5.1.

The Email server will get less use as I move a few domains off my server, but I'll probably won't retire it completely for a while. The webserver gets some use, and it's fun to have a little servlet sandbox.

So yeah, about tomcat. Now that I finally grok it. I like it. They also stablized things to there wasn't a million different connectors. It's now just mod_jk, and it's simple to use.

However, I did use (and like) C# and asp.net for a while, running a windows box, I have 'native' access to the CLR (I have no idea how well mono on linux is supported, but I can't imagine it's easy to use), and SQL-express lets me set up simple databases. However, when my old 1U server died, and I moved it, nothing worked.. then SQL-Express no longer worked ("service failed to start"). I simply gave up at that point. I used the MS solution at work, and it runs like a champ, and the tools are decent but there's also a IT department in the background.

For my own stuff, I've gone back to java, and found that it's actually quite nice nowadays. TOAD let me set up my database 'playgrounds' in a snap, and once I cut through all the nonsense in the tomcat docs, found out it's really easy to deploy a servlet. The last piece being that there is a decent java IDE now, Netbeans 6.8. Last time I used java was perhaps 10 years ago, and the IDE landscape at that time was a wasteland, so I'm happy to report that it's improved.

My friend Trimbo thinks I'm insane for running my own server ,and is a big fan of ruby on rails. He has a different use case, and I'm sorta set in my ways. I like java, and banging out a servlet with netbeans is pretty easy, and I'll end up with a JIT'ed app, while I doubt RoR has a JITer.

This post has gone on long enough, so I'll end it here. But now that the blog is back, I hope to start posting more often, and with more interesting topics. Hopefully I can figure out a way to import my more interesting posts from my old blog... I think they were stored as plaintext somewhere on my hard drive...