Tim Hibbard

Sprint launches email client

PCSIntel and PhoneScoop report that Sprint has released an email client for their Java enabled handsets.  The client will be able to connect to AOL, Yahoo, Live and any POP3 or IMAP server.

Now Kyle won't have mobile email envy and he will stop stealing my PPC-6700.

posted @ Thursday, November 30, 2006 5:24 PM | Feedback (2) | Filed Under [ Mobile ]

Working from home

The roads are disgusting today, so I am working from home.  It's nice to get laundry done and have Cold Pizza on in the background, but I miss my monitors.

I've been with EnGraph for 3.5 years now.  The last nine months we've had an office.  For a year, we worked out of Kyle's basement, and the rest of the time, I was working from home.  I love having an actual office.  Mostly because it provides a needed separation between personal and professional life.  I found that I had a hard time shutting down when I worked from home.  I would sit down to do something fun on the computer (like Internet Backgammon which is sadly missing from Vista) and would end up working because I was sitting in my work environment.  I am much more productive now that we have an office.  It allows me to go 100% between 8 and 6, and actually relax when I am at home.

EnGraph has also matured as a company since we procured an office.  When employees work side-by-side, stuff just gets done.  It is too easy to put a project defined by an IM or email conversation into the "I'll do it later" box.  When you are right there, bouncing ideas off each other, productivity just happens.  As a small company, it was hard to justify the cost of office space since we were all working from home.  There isn't a financial figure that can be placed on face time, and I think it was the right move for our company.

posted @ Thursday, November 30, 2006 12:01 PM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ EnGraph ]

We're certified!

We finally got everything straightened out with our certification process.  Apparently we had assigned the wrong competencies to the wrong assessments or something.  An hour and a half on the phone took care of it.  The lady that helped me was really nice and explained things well.  But more importantly, EnGraph is finally an official certified partner of Microsoft.

Team Foundation Server, here I come.

posted @ Wednesday, November 29, 2006 3:48 PM | Feedback (2) | Filed Under [ EnGraph .NET ]

It's snowing!!

Actually, it's raining ice :)  But it's better than nothing.  I miss Minnesota where we had real snow all winter and it actually stuck.  Here in Kansas, we get a little bit of snow and then it is gone tomorrow.  Note the fantastic GeeksWithBlogs.net sticker on the Saturn.

posted @ Wednesday, November 29, 2006 11:53 AM | Feedback (5) |

KU crushes Dartmouth

Yesterday, Phog Blog (a blog dedicated to Kansas University sports) posted Dartmouth: Bad At Basketball talking about how statistically awful Dartmouth is.  The main blogger there posted a comment predicting a 90 - 37 victory.   He wasn't far off, the final score was 83 - 32.

Interestingly enough, Florida (who was #1 and was beaten by Kansas on Saturday) also crushed their opponent yesterday by a score of 83 - 27.  After the fantastic matchup last Saturday, I get the feeling that KU will be compared to Florida all year.  I look forward to a rematch on April 2, 2007 in Atlanta.

KUSports has a review of yesterday's game.  Unfortunately, all their multimedia is still in quicktime.

posted @ Wednesday, November 29, 2006 8:30 AM | Feedback (1) | Filed Under [ Sports ]

Events are easier in VB

It is so much easier to create, raise and handle events in VB.net than C#.  In VB, it is simple: 
Public Event MyEvent()
RaiseEvent MyEvent()
Private Sub MyEventHandler() Handles MyObject.MyEvent

In C#, I have delegates and protected voids all over the place!  Thankfully, VS takes care of the code creation for handling the events, otherwise I would pull my hair out trying to match method signatures.

I'm sure there is a good reason for making this so difficult.  I know that it is possible to fire events over remoting channels in C#.  Maybe Dusty will be nice enough to educate me like he did on my last C# question.

For my own personal bookmarking purposes, this is where I read how to implement C# event handling.  If there is a better source, please let me know.

posted @ Tuesday, November 28, 2006 3:01 PM | Feedback (3) | Filed Under [ .NET Remoting ]

Vista license plate

Kyle is heading to Philly today.  He has been helping them set up a transit company from the ground up.  Literally.  They didn't have office space two weeks ago.  He talks a bit about it on his blog.  Anyways, he is heading to the airport now and sent me this picture.

posted @ Tuesday, November 28, 2006 9:28 AM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ EnGraph Vista ]

All about UAC

UAC (User Account Control) is the new security model for Vista.  Basically, it tries to run everything with the least expected permissions, even if you are running as an admin.  Based on file type, file name and other parameters, it tries to figure out what permissions the application is going to need.  If it thinks the application will need extended permissions, it will ask to continue (if you are an admin) and attach administrative permissions to the application.

Daniel Moth has posted a collection of links that explains UAC to the point of saturation.  It helped clarify some things for me. 

posted @ Tuesday, November 28, 2006 7:54 AM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ Vista ]

Welcome French readers

A couple French websites talked about Where's Tim today.  After translating them to English, I was a bit surprised to read the negative/paranoid connotation of the comments.  Maybe the intent was lost in translation, but one guy mentioned radio controlled missiles and burglary.  Translations here, here and here to see comments.

I have not been to France or hung out with anyone that has spent an extended time in France.  That being said, I wonder if something about the French culture or government spawns a worst-case-scenario mindset. 

Generally, an American's reaction to Where's Tim is "hey, that's cool" or "I could use GPS like..." or "You could really make some money using GPS like..."  I never really thought about it before, but a reaction to new technology might be a type of cultural indicator.  As an American, I am always looking for the next thing to impress me, or a new profitable opportunity.  That is why I read Digg and all the smart geeks here on GeeksWithBlogs.

Am I completely off base here?  Like I said, I don't know anything about the French culture and I would be very interested to hear from anyone that knows more about France or has an observation about cultural reactions to new technology.

If you want to see other people comments, I generate a RSS feed for all the cool people that link to Where's Tim.

posted @ Monday, November 27, 2006 8:58 PM | Feedback (4) | Filed Under [ GPS Where's Tim ]

C# Conversion Conundrum

I decided at HDC 2006 that it was time to make the switch from VB.net to C#.  Not because it is better, but because all the presentations I go to are in C#.  I hate having to convert languages in my head and since I give presentations every now and then, it's not fair to my audience to make them convert in their head.

I've come to my first road block in migrating to C#.  I really like the My. namespace that VB provides and C# doesn't have anything like it.  I need to access the My.Computer.Network.IsAvailable and .Ping functions in my current project.

I know that I can add a reference to Microsoft.VisualBasic and access the Devices.Network namespace, but for some reason that makes me feel dirty. 

So the question I pose to you C# purists, is there a comparable C# function that will provide network status and ping functionality?  If not, should I reference the Microsoft.VisualBasic.dll?  If not, do I create a separate VB assembly that exposes the functionality that I need?

posted @ Monday, November 27, 2006 4:26 PM | Feedback (4) | Filed Under [ .NET ]

Access 2007 Security Settings

As an update to this post, this is how you enable Access 2007 to work with your Access applications that require extended security.

1) Open "Customize Quick Access Toolbar" menu to the right of the office button
2) Select "More Commands"
3) Click "Trust Center" menu button on sidebar
4) Click "Trust Center Settings" button on main pane
5) Click "Macro Settings" menu button on sidebar
6) Select "Enable all macros"
7) Click "OK" to close Trust Center
8) Click "OK" to close Access Options

posted @ Monday, November 27, 2006 11:58 AM | Feedback (2) | Filed Under [ MS Office ]

Wrong tiles in Google Maps

Google Maps works by asynchronously downloading tiles of map/satellite data as you navigate around the map.  Lately, I've noticed that it has been rendering the wrong tiles in Where's Tim occasionally.  I've only noticed this in FireFox though.

Anybody else seeing this?

posted @ Monday, November 27, 2006 10:27 AM | Feedback (3) | Filed Under [ Mapping Where's Tim ]

What is a reflexive pronoun?

I would say that I have fairly decent grammar. I'm not a good speller, but I try not to leave too many prepositions dangling.

So, I'm working along on an article, and all of the sudden, MS Word 2007 throws this little guy at me:

I've never even heard of a Reflexive Pronoun.  It sounds like it hurts.  Needless to say, I was humbled tonight by my computer.

posted @ Sunday, November 26, 2006 6:42 PM | Feedback (4) | Filed Under [ MS Office ]

Looking for proofreaders

I'm working on an article for a special personal tracking issue of a magazine.  It's due next Monday and I would like some other people to look it over before I submit it.  If you have some spare time this Thanksgiving weekend, send me an email and I'll send you a copy to proofread.  Warning, it's mostly about Where's Tim and Social Geocoding, so if you're tired of reading about that on this blog, you're probably not going to want to read this :)

posted @ Wednesday, November 22, 2006 7:29 PM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ Mapping Where's Tim Social Geocoding ]

A plea to Lawrence Journal World

All the audio and video clips on LJWorld.com and KUSports.com are in quicktime format.  To Jeff Croft, Matt Croydon and all the other developers over there, please give us another format.  Haven't you read that people hate quicktime?

Their office is four blocks from EnGraph headquarters.  Maybe I'll bribe the development team with a free lunch.  Pepperjax for the LJWorld geeks if you let me watch Julian Wright clips in a format other than quicktime.

posted @ Wednesday, November 22, 2006 11:04 AM | Feedback (4) |

Grrr...Sprint blocked my SMTP server

When you send me a text message on Where's Tim, I just send an email to my cell phone at myphonenumber@messaging.sprintpcs.com.  Turns out that Sprint didn't like that and block messages that came from my mail server.  So I switched it to send through a different server. 

I wonder why they cared?  I guess they saw a lot of traffic coming from the same SMTP server and assumed it was spam. 

[Update here]

posted @ Tuesday, November 21, 2006 9:48 AM | Feedback (1) | Filed Under [ GPS Where's Tim Mobile ]

NavXS

You're going to be hearing a lot more about the Social Geocoding service, NavXS.  It's MySpace meets Where's Tim.

These guys do it right.  They have a Windows Mobile client, a Java client, Google Maps interface and a rock solid permissions model.

They also have a blog here.

posted @ Tuesday, November 21, 2006 1:17 AM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ .NET GPS Mapping Where's Tim Social Geocoding ]

So close

I can almost taste it.

posted @ Thursday, November 16, 2006 4:59 PM | Feedback (1) | Filed Under [ Vista ]

Kansas University GIS Day 2006 Wrapup

Matt Dunbar & Co. did a fantastic job putting together GIS day at Kansas University.  My favorite part of the day was judging the student competition.  Seven students gave ten minute presentations on unique uses of GIS.  They showed everything from a geographic boundary of where grits are consumed (apparently South Carolina is the capital of all that is grits) to a traffic analysis of SW Douglas Country in Kansas.  The winner was Lincoln Lewis.  He showed how to make GIS data pretty using a suite of software programs.  The end result was an .avi file that showed a urban strategy for rebuilding New Orleans.

New Orleans was a hot topic.  Several presenters showed data from post-Katrina.

Google Earth was mentioned or used in almost every presentation.  It is fantastic how Google is contributing to the geo-geek world.

My talk went well.  I talked about Where's Tim and Social Geocoding.  I didn't have time to get into Life Management or online shopping lists or location based target advertising, but hopefully they will invite me back next year and I can talk more about potential consumer business models using real time GPS.  The audience asked good questions and they were kind enough to laugh at a couple of my jokes!  My slide deck is here, and they should have the video of my presentation on their website soon.

Jerome Dobson gave a presentation after mine talking about geoslavery and the potential social implications of real time GPS.  His main argument wasn't that GPS was bad, but that there needs to be awareness of the potential abuses.  I agree that awareness needs to exist, but more importantly, there needs to be consumer expectations that software developers respect.  As software developers writing applications that consume GPS data, we have to allow the person that is sharing their location full control over when their location is shared and to whom it is shared with.  If we do that, we can earn consumer trust and write all kinds of great location based applications that save people time and money in their everyday life (and get paid handsomely for doing so).

After his talk, Jerome shared with me that his location is very personal to him and that if somebody asks him to call them when he gets home from a trip, he tells them no.  It is important for him to keep his location private and I completely respect that.  I hope that someday he finds a niche use for a location based service (hopefully provided by EnGraph) and he trusts that we will use his location only as he intends it to be consumed.

It was a day well spent.  I usually go to presentations about .NET and WPF and all that is computer geek.  It was cool to see geo-geeks shine in their own limelight.  I look forward to next years event!

posted @ Thursday, November 16, 2006 12:24 PM | Feedback (2) | Filed Under [ EnGraph .NET GPS Mapping Where's Tim Social Geocoding ]

Google Desktop quick tips

I'm loving Google Desktop these days.  The first couple of versions they came out with were garbage, but they have really cleaned up the performance of the indexing engine.  If you uninstalled Google Desktop like me because it was pegging out your CPU, try it again now.  It's much better.  Here are some shortcuts that I use on a daily basis:

1) Pressing Ctrl twice on your keyboard will bring up a search box.  From there you can type in your search phrase and it will search your desktop and google.com.

2) In that search box, you can also type in \\servername or \\serverIP and it will open that computer in Windows Explorer.

posted @ Thursday, November 16, 2006 9:02 AM | Feedback (0) |

Google Map of GIS day participants

The people putting on GIS Day at Kansas University tomorrow built a Google Maps mashup showing where are the presenters and attendees are located.  That's a lot of people.  I hope they like listening to a .NET geek ramble on about GPS :) 

They are going to video record each session, so if you don't get a chance to make it (Kyle), you'll still be able to join in on the fun.  They will also be posting the slide deck from each session.

posted @ Tuesday, November 14, 2006 7:20 PM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ .NET GPS Mapping ]

Social Geocoding

You heard it here first.  Social Geocoding is a social network with a layer of location awareness.  A million little Where's Tim's running around interacting with each other with "friends list" based permissions.  NavXS, Dodgeball and Loopt are all examples.  Come listen to my talk at KU tomorrow if you want to learn more.

posted @ Tuesday, November 14, 2006 1:04 PM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ GPS Mapping Where's Tim Mobile Social Geocoding ]

Crimson Tide

The Alabama women's basketball team is staying at the same hotel as me here in Jonesboro, AR.

As Kyle so philosophically said, "Roll Tide"

posted @ Sunday, November 12, 2006 9:53 PM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ Sports ]

Where's Tim in Business Week

Rachael King from Business Week writes about Where's Tim:

Meet Tim Hibbard. It's 11:45 p.m. on a Wednesday night and Hibbard is currently near the intersection of Jacob and Ranch Streets in Lawrence, Kan. It's a cool 50 degrees outside. He's not moving around now, but he's traveled a total of 28.42 miles today. And no, I'm not stalking him.

Very cool.  She also talked with John Musser of ProgrammableWeb (THE place for web API's).  He talks about the article on his blog.

posted @ Sunday, November 12, 2006 6:05 PM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ EnGraph GPS Where's Tim ]

Driving to Arkansas

I'm driving to Jonesboro, AR today to install ParaPlan for our newest client, EAAAA.  I'll be driving through Clinton, MO.  You might remember that we stopped there on our SC Code Camp trip.  It's also Jeff Julian's hometown.

Watch me here.

posted @ Sunday, November 12, 2006 9:22 AM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ EnGraph Where's Tim ]

100% Code Coverage

A very cool thing just happened.  One of my classes has a 100% next to it in NCoverExplorer.  Granted it's pretty much just a data store for now, but it's still 100%!  Heck yes, I'm agile.

If you haven't downloaded TestDriven.net, go get it now.  You can right click in Visual Studio and run NUnit, debug your tests and get code coverage statistics.

posted @ Thursday, November 09, 2006 4:42 PM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ EnGraph .NET ]

Carrie on Lame Duck Hunt

My sister, who I saw a couple weeks ago, has been invited to be a blogger on Lame Duck Hunt, a political blog ran by very smart people.  So smart in fact that they decided they needed the expert environmental whisleblower enabler that is my sister.  Go Carrie!  Her first post is here.

She works for an agency in Washington DC called PEER that protects government employees who report irresponsible environmental behavior by the entity that employs them.  They work with the employees so that "agencies must confront the message, rather than the messenger".  They have a website, and a blog. 

posted @ Thursday, November 09, 2006 9:52 AM | Feedback (0) |

Measuring time in Google satellite images

This bus has been parked by our office for so long, that it shows up in satellite view on Google Maps.

posted @ Tuesday, November 07, 2006 3:47 PM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ Mapping ]

411Sync - Search song lyrics by Phone

Manish Lachwani from 411Sync sent me an email this morning about his new service that allows you to send a text message to 411Sync with a couple of lyrics from a song and they will send you a text back with the artist and title of the song.

For example, send a text message to 415-676-8397 with "getlyric stranger flowers yet" and it will return 8:16 AM by 311. "getlyric should have done something but i've done it enough" to get Blue and Yellow by The Used.  I can see being useful when listening to the radio in my car.

Manish also has a keyword for Where's Tim.  Send a text message to 415-676-8397 with "timslocation" and it will return a string of my location.  SMS isn't the only way to access 411Sync data, more information here.

posted @ Tuesday, November 07, 2006 10:49 AM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ Where's Tim Mobile ]

Bloated AJAX hits

In CNN's article about .NET 3.0 RTM, they quote Ben Noonan from Burton Snowboards:

Now that our pages are enabled with Atlas, we've seen nearly double the traffic.

That is a misleading statement.  By nature, adding AJAX elements to your site is going to increase traffic.  Every page that loads asynchronously (where the initial page load is just the structure and then the data loads in front of your eyes) is charging many more hits to the server.

For example, on Where's Tim, I initially load the map and the buttons, then everything else is loaded asynchronously.  My actual location, miles traveled, list of cool people that link here, weather, traffic.  All those charge a hit to the server, so every time Where's Tim is loaded, it's at least 5 hits to the server.  And if you are viewing flickr pictures close to my location, I go out to the server every time the maps moves to collect the pictures in that area.  So when I say that Where's Tim gets 4 million hits per month, that really doesn't mean much.  The number of visits is what really counts, and that's about 8000 per month (35,000 on a dugg month).

We need to rethink our benchmarking statistics for web traffic.  Hits mean nothing in Web 2.0.  Let's talk number of visits, or better yet visits per user.  That is a stat that should go up.  AJAX doesn't increase your traffic, it brings people back because the page responds better and feels like a desktop application.

posted @ Tuesday, November 07, 2006 8:04 AM | Feedback (1) | Filed Under [ Where's Tim ]

Cheaper car insurance, geoslavery or geosavings?

Tim from GPS Review revisits the idea of submitting a GPS tracklog to your insurance company to prove you are a good driver in exchange for better rates.  This particular program is in the UK called "Pay as you Drive".  David Starr talked about a similar program in Canada a couple months ago.

I still think this is a good idea.  In order for GPS to be profitable in the consumer market, the end person being tracked must be in full control.  In both of these cases, participation is voluntary and the consumer is in full control over who sees their data.

As long as rewarding volunteers doesn't turn into punishing non-volunteers, then I encourage these programs.  I can see the commercials, "Where's Tim can save you 15% or more!!"

I'm curious to hear Jerome Dobson's opinions on this.

posted @ Monday, November 06, 2006 6:58 PM | Feedback (1) | Filed Under [ GPS Where's Tim ]

Just because I can...

Sorry Dave, but your signature was the only way to describe my new office monitor setup:

posted @ Monday, November 06, 2006 8:22 AM | Feedback (2) |

.NET function to produce RSS pubDate

According to the RSS specification, the pubDate element (when the item was published) must be formatted like this : Mon, 28 May 1979 19:45:32 GMT

I've posted an article with C# / VB.NET functions that will accept a DateTime object and return a string properly formatted to meet the pubDate specification.

posted @ Sunday, November 05, 2006 1:39 PM | Feedback (1) | Filed Under [ .NET ]

Publishing ClickOnce error on Vista

Brian Noyes talks about an error that I am going to get when publishing a ClickOnce app from a machine running Vista.  When logged in to Vista as an admin, you still won't have full admin rights when running Visual Studio.  The short answer is right click on devenv.exe, select properties, select compatibility tab and check "Run this program as an administrator".  He goes into more details on the User Access Control (UAC) and when it is appropriate to run with full admin rights.

posted @ Sunday, November 05, 2006 12:53 PM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ .NET ClickOnce ]

Scrybe

Scrybe has potential.  It is a personal web based organizer that has "human nature" built in.  It looks like it was designed by somebody that has no idea how to write software or what a database looks like.  Which can be a good thing as far as user experience goes.

I tried Google's calendar for a while, but Outlook was still better because I can associate contacts with events, and sync everything automatically with my PPC-6700.  If Scrybe can add those things, I might switch.

posted @ Sunday, November 05, 2006 3:04 AM | Feedback (1) | Filed Under [ MS Office Mobile ]

Kansas University GIS Day November 15 2006

Kansas University (right here in Lawrence, KS) puts on a Geographic Information Systems day every year.  A couple months ago, Matt Dunbar contacted me and asked if I would speak about personal tracking.  My talk is titled "Big Brother is on MySpace.  How GPS will change our everyday lives (in a good way)"

After some shameless promotion of Where's Tim and EnGraph, I plan to talk about how real time GPS can add a new dimension to social networking sites like MySpace.  I also plan to talk about enhancing life management with GPS.  Like how to automate your route on your Saturday shopping trips based on sales, cheapest prices, targeted advertising and real time traffic conditions.  If there is time, I also want to touch on schedule management, event syndication and all the other ideas that Jeff and I talked about on our South Carolina roadtrip.

After my talk, Dr. Jerome Dobson (professor at KU) is giving a talk called "But, what about all those Little Brothers?  Geofencing in the Land of the free".  Obviously, he learned of my talk before titling his :)  Dr. Dobson, who was quoted in this article with me, is the President of the American Geographical Society and has coined the term geoslavery to describe the potential loss of freedom from personal tracking via GPS or RFID.

After our talks, we going to be fielding questions from the audience.  As the poster boy for geoslavery with my real time GPS web site, the discussion should be lively!!

In all honesty, I agree with the basic premise that he defines as geoslavery.  I believe that in order for GPS to penetrate the consumer market, one rule must always be in place:

The person being tracked must always have full control over who can view their location and when their location is broadcasted.

I happen to fall on the positive (or some say naive) side of the fence and believe that people are good in general and that the benefits of real time GPS will exceed the privacy implications and conspiracy theories.

I look forward to the event and hope to see some of you there.  More information on this web site.

posted @ Wednesday, November 01, 2006 4:17 PM | Feedback (4) | Filed Under [ EnGraph GPS Mapping Where's Tim ]

HDC 2006 wrapup