Notice I said device, not “tablet computer” or “tablet PC.” That’s because most of these devices, while technically computers, are not suitable for most of the things people (and by people, I mean me; YMMV) use computers to do. I’ve experimented with these things before; taking one off a friend’s hand for a few minutes; and have always been unimpressed.  Not because I didn’t like them, but because for $500+ they weren’t worth it. My estimation of tablets to date has been “meh.”

Because: they are toys. Their usefulness is limited to doing things toys do. Yes, Apple iPad users, I think your tablet is a toy, too.

And that’s okay. There is nothing wrong with buying, owning, and using (playing with) toys. But let’s not be pretentious about them (*cough* Apple *cough*). And when it comes to toys, I don’t feel the need to get the first ones, especially when they cost too much.

Yesterday I opened a Kindle Fire. Tablets are ready for prime time.

This thing is great. And I figured out why: it’s not pretentious. The Fire doesn’t pretend to be something it’s not. It doesn’t bother to tell you what kind of processor its running, though you can find out if you care. It doesn’t have a camera because there is no reason to put a piece of junk light sensor on a tablet when we all know you already have a piece of junk light sensor on your cell phone. It doesn’t have a GPS because your tablet doesn’t need one. It doesn’t have 3G because you really don’t need it since you can download your books and a movie or two and you will probably have access to free WiFi where you are anyway. It only has 8 GB of on-device storage because that is enough and more costs more. It has a rubberized back because this isn’t a device made to be beholden; this is a utilitarian device made to be, well, utilized.

The people who made the Fire know I am not going to try to use this to do work, so they didn’t waste time and hardware putting things in there to make me think it might be useful for work. Instead, they made a solid device with which I can read books, browse some websites, check (but not really much else, unless you like to torture yourself with a non-keyboard) email, check facebook, listen to music, etc. And it does all these things well, while being the perfect size.

I’m not going to give an in-depth review because there are already a thousand reviews out there. But I will say this: The Kindle Fire is “worth it.” They got it right. It’s $200 and while it’s not an iPad, the fact that it is not an iPad is a good thing for me. If I wanted an iPad I would have bought one already. I didn’t, and I’m glad I waited for the Fire.

PS: thanks to my wife for not objecting to wrapping an empty box so I could use the Fire she got me as a gift.

Been busy.

SwordSearcher Bible Software version 6 is now available. 2010 marks the 15th anniversary of SwordSearcher.

I love my job!

Lots of details here and here. Also got a video of some of the new features here.

I’ve recently created a SwordSearcher fan page on Facebook, too.

The ExactFile web site has been updated with lots of details about the software, including a list of checksum methods currently implemented.

ExactFile is a file integrity verification system I have developed, which works much like md5sum / sha1sum / sfv / fsum / etc., replacing my old program FileCheckMD5. It’s no longer just a MD5 checker. It supports a variety of checksum (hash) algorithms, including MD5, SHA1, CRC32, and others; is multi-threaded; and Unicode complaint. It also includes a simple method for “stamping” your CD-ROM and DVD-ROM deployment folders so that they can be tested (validated) by an end-user just by double-clicking a file on the CD.

I decided it was time to create some videos for SwordSearcher Bible Software. I bought a license for Instant Demo, and I’m glad I did.  After a few days of work, I’ve got three videos done.  They aren’t Hollywood productions, but they look and sound good, and give people who don’t like reading manuals or web sites an alternative to learning about my software.  The learning curve for Instant Demo is not very steep, and there are excellent tools for all of the things good software videos need, like highlighting hotspots, tweaking and refining mouse movements and clicks, adjusting delays, and adding audio narration.

Well, nothing has changed with regard to development — I won’t be resuming work on the Mac version of SwordSearcher in the foreseeable future as all of the reasons I suspended work on that project still stand – but I received an email from a long-time SwordSearcher user who wanted to share his success at using SwordSearcher on his Mac with Crossover.  Here’s an excerpt:

“And I’m pleased to announce it WORKS! And it actually integrates so well, I wouldn’t even know I was using a mixed setup of Windows and Apple, they BOTH seem native mode in operation, and I use them at the same time.”

Complete details have been posted on the SwordSearcher Mac website.

Additional thought: do software compatibility layers like Crossover for Mac and WINE for Linux make native development irrelevant?

Well, certainly not irrelevant in every case.  But in my case, it certainly reduces the need to expend development energy targeting multiple platforms when Linux and Mac already have excellent “emulation” alternatives. (And yes, I know WINE is not an emulator!)  A single developer like myself, on a project as complex as SwordSearcher, is better off focusing on doing the best on Windows — where almost all the customers are — rather than trying to spend time writing multiple versions of the software, or worse, using cross-platform development tools that invariably result in a “lowest common denominator” feel for the application. And with WINE and Crossover Mac, a viable solution already exists that allows me to continue to focus my efforts on one platform.

I got her a Western Digital drive, so I figured I’d try using their utility to do the transfer. The Western Digital Data Lifeguard boot CD-ROM utility failed to copy the old partition to the new drive with an unspecified error. (Come on! Cryptic errors are better than nothing!)

So I tried using the GParted LiveCD. It took a long time just to get something visible on the screen, mucking around in interactive boot mode. Finally, I got it to copy the partition to the new disc and resize it. Or so it told me. It took an hour but the target drive was not bootable. I checked all the partition flags and even booted the Windows install CD in recovery mode to rewrite the boot sector (FIXBOOT), and when that didn’t work, the MBR (FIXMBR) and boot sector. It just wouldn’t boot — and no error messages from the BIOS either (how nice).

Finally, I downloaded Acronis Migrate Easy 7.0.

This program is awesome. It is what all low level utilities should be. It just works. I was hesitant to try anything that didn’t run off a boot disc, assuming that I was asking for trouble running a program in Windows to copy the boot partition to a new drive. But it was easy and clear, and apparently Acronis really knows how to make Windows do low-level stuff the right way. It re-booted the system into the UI mode that I’ve only seen chkdsk run in and copied the partition to the new drive, then told me it was done and I could remove the old drive and reconfigure the system to boot from the new drive. And it just worked.

I copied a partition from an 80 gigabyte parallel ATA drive to a 250 gigabyte serial ATA (SATA) drive. The partition was automatically expanded to fill the new space, and I didn’t need to defrag afterwards even though the source drive was pretty fragmented — apparently it does more than just a blind copy of the clusters.

Anyway, this program is awesome and worked perfectly. I just wanted to sing its praises and hope this might help someone else avoid the hassle I went through learning about it.

1. Stay on the cusp of search engine manipulation. Keep one step ahead of Google so that you can have well-ranking web pages that customers will blunder on to, only to have to click an AdWord link to get to what they were looking for in the first place. Or,

2. Work steadily to create legitimately useful content, and hope the search engines will eventually notice its value and send users your way.

After looking around for a while, it seems that all of the keyword research tools available cater to the get-rich-quick school of thought (number 1 above). The “Keyword this-and-that” programs have mile-long web pages full of infomercial style sales pitches, promising that once you buy their software you’ll be an instant internet mogul. They make my skin crawl just scrolling down the pages.

I can’t seem to find much for those of us in group #2.

My main goal in web marketing is to help my customers find me.  I know they are out there. The trick is writing articles and pages that word their problems in the same ways they do, so they’ll find them.

I’ve decided that I should develop my own keyword research software. I have some very specific needs in mind that I don’t see being filled by these programs.

What about you?  If your work includes web marketing, have you ever thought “hey, I need something that does X?” Let me know.

“Even with the cut-rate fees for students and the government, Microsoft will still collect an estimated $700 million in revenue from China in 2007. That amounts to only about 1.5% of Microsoft’s total revenue worldwide, but the battle for mind share has been won. Windows now has roughly 90% market share in China. There are currently 120 million PCs in China, but that number is expected by grow exponentially in the coming decades, and Microsoft is in a great position to reap the benefits.”

[...]

“The fact that Red Flag Linux failed to gain a major foothold in China is yet another blow to desktop Linux. After nearly eight years of being on the verge of a breakthrough, Linux seems more destined than ever to be a force in the server room but little more than a narrow niche and an anomaly on the desktop.”

[Insert obligatory Vista-was-supposed-to-come-out-in-2004 joke here.]

Of interest to me: The next Windows will be 32 and 64 bit. Some people have erroneously concluded that the next major release of Windows will be 64-bit only. It’s good that won’t be the case, because a 64-bit environment instantly “breaks” thousands of device drivers that will probably never be updated. Hardly anyone really needs a 64-bit OS now anyway.

As to this three year thing: obviously, that won’t happen.  Microsoft isn’t meeting its OS release schedules. And should it happen in only three years? No. Aside from a few techno-whiners, nobody in the real world cared that Windows XP was Microsoft’s consumer OS for six years. Well, maybe the whiners and the Microsoft shareholders itching for a new bump in sales.

I do not have any desire to upgrade my OS every three years. Stability on the desktop is a good thing for users and especially for developers. Five years seems like a reasonable time-frame to me.

The limitations of Blogger:

Blogger isn’t a bad blog tool, but it’s simply not advanced enough to run a large, optimized website. I was using Blogger with a custom template to publish via SFTP to brandonstaggs.com. It worked alright, this setup was missing key features:

• Categories. I wanted categories, and Blogger couldn’t do that for me.
• On-site installation. I couldn’t run Blogger with PHP and mySQL on my own server for maximum control.
• Content management. Blogger can’t be used to manage an entire website unless the entire website is just blog posts. This forced me to use a combination of Dreamweaver and custom templates with Blogger, and it was always a pain to update content.

The advantages of WordPress

Besides Blogger not doing enough, WordPress gives me more stuff I want:

• Content management. WordPress can be used to run an entire website including pages that are not necessarily blog posts.
• Permalink control.
• Plugins. WordPress has lots of plugins that appear to be quite useful. I’m already using the All-in-one Search Engine Optimization Pack plugin to fix what I view as deficiencies in WordPress page titles, etc.
• More options in templates. Yuep, I’m a programmer. I like options. Give me enough rope to hang myself and I’ll see how long I can hold my breath.

Moving from Blogger to WordPress is a pain

At least it was for me. Here were my major problems:

• Existing site with a boatload of individual pages that aren’t part of a CMS.
• Blog posts on blogger with no titles. I had over 240 blog entries on Blogger. For whatever reason, be it templates or whatever, I never had the option of adding titles to my posts.
• Blogger posts were published to website with SFTP, not a Blogspot page. WordPress offers no import function for Blogger entries that aren’t on Blogspot.
• Blogger posts were only archived by month, not individual post.

What I did

• Uploaded WordPress to my server in a test subdirectory so as not to disturb my existing site while doing the stuff.
• Switched Blogger to post on Blogspot.
• Tried to import. This bombed. As it turns out, WordPress imports by post. So it imported one huge post for each month because I still had Blogger set to archive by month only.
• After much gnashing of teeth, wondering why my 240 posts imported to just under 50, I deleted my WordPress tables and started over. This time, I had Blogger post individual posts to Blogspot instead of only archiving by month. This worked.
• Spent a day going through four years of blog posts to 1. Give them titles, 2. categorize them, and 3. Delete really embarrassing ones.
• Manually “imported” my various non-blog pages (and I’m still not done) into WordPress.
• Edited the .htaccess WordPress made to add a ton of redirects, so people coming to old page URLs would get forwarded to the new locations. Still not done with this — I need to forward all the old monthly archive pages to the new WordPress monthly archive pages. Oh fun!

So far, so good.