Blowing off steam

AT&T Customer Service is horrible

Lou Vega — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 21:34:08 GMT

<rant>

AT&T Customer Service sucks. AT&T Customer Service is horrible. AT&T Customer Service is nearly the worst I've ever experienced. If you have AT&T consider dropping them before you run into the unfortunate event of having to deal with their horrible customer service. If you're shopping for a cell phone provider, wireless provider, etc., don't consider AT&T because it's just not worth it.

I'll explain more later. Right now just trust me on this. That is all.

</rant>

5 Reasons Why my Windows Mobile powered Tilt is better than the new Iphone 3G

Lou Vega — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 15:20:34 GMT

I'm pretty tired of hearing about how "great" the Iphone 3G is. So here's a short tribute to my trusty Windows Mobile powered Tilt.

My Tilt already had GPS, Bluetooth, and 3G capability when I bought it. I didn't have to wait hours overnight for a sales clerk to tell me "here's your phone, it doesn't work all the way, but good luck activating it at home!"
My Tilt has MMS capability - Granted I don't use it as much as others do, but for such a "great" phone you'd think Apple would have included such a basic feature.
Sorry Iphone users - apparently another basic feature such as Copy/Paste was left out. Seems that's a basic part of my Windows Mobile 6 powered phone's core OS.
My Tilt's camera capabilities (still photo and video) are better - wait, oh yeah, Iphone doesn't have a video camera.
I was able to develop software for my Windows Mobile powered Tilt the day I brought it home from the store...didn't have to wait for the vendor to "decide" to offer 3rd party app support.

Dropping off the radar for a while...

Lou Vega — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 01:56:29 GMT

As some of you may know having seen me @ Code Camps, or other events in the past 6 months or so know, my life's been pretty hectic. Starting back in February and continuing up to this very night, my son has been in and out of the hospital so many times it's sickening to think that I know so much about the inner workings of a place nobody should have to visit that often. He was last discharged Tuesday, and then at 3:30 this morning (Monday) he was re-admitted. Each time they get a little closer to understanding what's going on and a little closer to getting him all better but it's gotten to where I can't handle that and all the extra stuff in my life any more.

Some of you also know in the middle of this back in May I had a pretty bad car wreck that landed me in and out of the ER for a while due to a concussion. My car was totalled, I'm supposed to go to traffic court yet can't remember much at all about the wreck, and this is all going on while my son's been in and out of the hospital.

When my son gets out of the hospital each time there's a rough period of adjustment where he's venting due to the trauma and loss of control he feels when he's in the hospital. He's going to be 3 on June 19th and yet he's spent more time in the hospital than I have in my 35 years. The medical bills too from all this are starting to really mount up too...just another thing to deal with since insurance companies don't look out for people.

All said and done, I just can't deal with it all anymore...there's a ton more behind the scene's that's gone on since November but in the end I just have to drop out of this aspect of my life for a while unless something really good happens really soon.

Thanks to all my friends online and offline who've supported me through all this and especially those close few who I'm sure will continue to support me through the coming months. I hope to catch you all at a code camp or other event some time in the future when this is all a distant memory.

Taking back control of your mobile phone...

Lou Vega — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 17:46:44 GMT

I just posted the article I wrote up describing the project I created where I'm creatively blocking calls to my Windows Mobile device. Posted it on my VB.NET Mobile Blog. Enjoy!

Taking back control of my mobile phone - a home brewed automatic call blocker.

Lou Vega — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 20:25:26 GMT

One thing I've found increasingly annoying is telemarketing calls to my mobile phone. When I glance down and see that 800 number calling I usually press the "Ignore" softkey and go about my business. I figure if it's really something important they'll know alternate ways to contact me...but I got to thinking that I didn't want to have to spend the time to look at the number and press ignore...and since it's my phone and it's got Windows Mobile 6 on it, I can do something about it.

So I put together a quick little hack using the State and Notifications broker to detect the incoming call, determine if it's an 800 number and if it is, I programmatically route my call to a mysterious void whereby I never have to know about it. So it worked pretty neat on the emulator and I've been testing it on my actual phone the past couple days...it's nice! I don't even know that the call was there except for every now and again I see a notification of a missed call..but the interception is quick enough that I don't notice it happening at the time.

So I know some folks are wondering - "Where's the source?"...calm down, I'm writing up the blog example and going to post the source code to my VB Mobile blog soon enough...especially now that I can do so without being interrupted by calls I don't want :)

Minor Annoyance - Windows Mobile SDK Tool

Lou Vega — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 17:19:13 GMT

I've noticed a minor annoyance with one of the tools included with the Windows Mobile, the Cellular Emulator. Once you launch it and then close it, the app's behavior is to minimize to the notification area of your Windows Task Bar. That's cool because I'll often leave it running in the background while working on things and it's unobtrusive. My minor annoyance is that when you right click on it (say accidentally) the context menu doesn't go away. Ever. See the screen shots below to get a better idea of what I'm talking about.

There we have it minimized nicely - thanks Cellular Emulator!

Here I've activated the context menu - oops, didn't mean to.

OK - I really didn't want to activate you...so go away. Really.

Geesh - even stays on top of my active application (only 1 guess which app is active there!)

The only way to get rid of it is to either click "Open" and then minimize it again, or click exit and banish it until you need it again.

FYI - I'm running this on Windows XP w/SP2 - maybe the behavior is different on another OS but I haven't had a chance to see.

Is anyone else experiencing this? If so, do you have a fix?

Slickin' the presentation laptop for the new year...

Lou Vega — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 03:14:12 GMT

Since there was so much that went on with my presentation laptop last year (.NET 3.0 beta, then later VS 2008 Beta, a bunch of Java testing, and so on) I figured I'll start the new year with a clean build of it and so I slicked it yesterday (used DBAN) and started fresh...my goodness I forgot how long it takes to get even XP w/SP2 fully patched and ready to go.

There's over 100 updates on Windows Update for that box after putting a clean install of XP/SP2. Then I also forgot how long (really long) it takes to install Visual Studio 2005 SP1...I've finally got it ready though and I've imaged it along the way so I don't have to go through that pain again in the near future if I decide to do something different. Kept the images small enough this time to fit on a DVD so I can offload them from my external drive.

A side note that bummed me out - one of my memory modules in that box is going bad so I'll have to replace it soon so I don't get bogged down too much...it had first gone out on me ironically enough during my Dynamic Code Analysis presentation at Twin Cities Code Camp - I had noticed it while waiting for one of my intentionally slow code demos to run!

For those wondering - I decided against Vista for this box...the box scores just about as low as you can go. Perhaps later this year I can spring for a new laptop to be my presentation machine!

Android First Impressions - not impressed

Lou Vega — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 20:17:28 GMT

So I put together a dev box for Android last night and spent some time earlier today getting the Java SDK, Android SDK and Eclipse installed. Went ahead and installed the Eclipse plugin for Android as well - and after all that...well so far I haven't been impressed. Part of it may be because I was used to NetBeans for Java development, or maybe there's something else....in either case I'm not ready to give up yet...perhaps I'll try it with NetBeans later today.

I can certainly say that even when I first discovered the .NET Compact Framework it was far easier to get a basic app created and deployed to my device than it's been to get one created and running here in the Android emulator...which may be another minor sore point...so far there's no deployment options...you have to run your stuff in the emulator.

Can you say "Code Reviews"?

Lou Vega — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 15:10:37 GMT

Odd story I just came across about a Microsoft "Santa" bot that spit out some responses they hadn't planned on...well ok, the news media can buy that story but somewhere a developer had planned this response and IMHO it should have been caught by a code review and handled differently for such a huge public project which you just *know* is going to be scrutinized by everyone wanting to make Microsoft look bad.

See the full story here:

http://www.citynews.ca/news/news_17427.aspx

EDIT: further link - more here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/03/santa_filth_outrage/

Eating my agile cake

Lou Vega — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 00:40:00 GMT

I’ve always been a fan of agile methodologies – just as I’ve always dreaded process heavy projects…mostly that fear has come with good reason, i.e., the project I’m on right now that is a waterfall project in scrum clothing ;)

Well I found myself briefly thinking “Grrrrr – why did *this* have to change” today when I found out a nice chunk of work I’ve done for the current sprint I’m on will need to be re-worked because there were some rather significant database changes, i.e., adding 4 more tables with lots of new relationships. So for a brief moment I lost my mind and though “I wish this had been designed up front” only to realize later that – no, if it were designed up front, 1) they would still want to change it and 2) design up front would have meant even more time spent in design meetings than I already had…in fact in light of some major requirements changing we’re now spending a good portion of the rest of the week re-estimating the rest of the project.

So what do I do? Embrace the change – that’s the spirit of an Agile process…embrace the change and work with it…so excuse me while I eat my agile cake.