I’ve been quiet on the blog for the past few weeks, but inordinately busy at the same time. My nephew (Sam) just left after visiting here for a couple of weeks - and since then it’s been a ‘get the house back in order…” sort of week preparing for a bit more travel. I’m heading to North Hollywood, CA the end of this week and the prep for that has been actually pretty big. I get back, we’ve got a week here in town, and then we’re heading down to Oregon for Labor Day weekend, after which Karen heads off to her alma mater (Grinnell College) for a speaking engagement. Busy busy busy.
Some time in all of this, I’ve been getting progress made on the Seattle Bus updates, but it’s slow going right now. I haven’t even knocked out my “get the data from Apple” script that I’ve been meaning to do.
I imagine that sounds like a very strange statement, but it’s one that has been occurring to me more frequently lately. Apple was fairly slow off the gate to provide any sales/trend information about how my application was doing, and it was frustrating as hell. I would get the periodic “support” email from someone who had clearly purchased the application, but I had no idea who I was selling to let alone how much…
I’m very glad that Apple has put together a sales trends setup for iPhone developers deploying their applications. Not surprisingly, I wish it was a little better - in particular, I’d love to have an API where I could get that data programmatically. I’m more than happy to store it and do whatever additional analytics I like - but right now getting it out of the system is a very manual process. I think I’m going to set aside some time to knock out a script with twill or mechanize that will do this work for me and automate it.
I suppose in a sense, it does not matter “who” for any individual customer. But frankly, that bugs the crap out of me! I’m a big believer in the potential power and influence of the individual, so knowing my “customer” is a philosophical imperative. When I look across the road at my Mac developer compatriots who know with fair detail who their customers are. It’s an aspect of working through the iTunes AppStore that I never considered, and now find frustrating.
I would love to be able to contact my customers. I’d like to send an email to everyone who’s purchased my application, let them know about updates that are available and proactively ask for feedback. Craig Hockenberry talked to this a bit in his blog post Listeners found this review helpful. The closest the AppStore provides are the reviews - very much a one-way street. In a very sense, I feel I’m barred from communicating with them outside of the application that I produce. I could put something in the application description on the store itself “Would like feedback, please email me” but that seems rather lame and very impersonal. Likewise I don’t want to bind in a “feedback” link in the application itself - getting me feedback is not something I think the application should be focused on. I’m very certain that I want the application to be laser-focused on it’s particular task. I don’t want to trip that up with extraneous bells and whistles, and a “feedback” link seems like exactly that.
I’m incredibly grateful for folks who have written into my “support” email address to date. I’ve received some great feedback and been able to help a number of folks. I wish and hope that Apple will come up with something to solve this frustration of mine, but frankly I kind of doubt it. I think some (someone) within Apple perceives it’s in Apple’s best interests to “own the relationship” with the customer. They do at least pass along a link to our websites and an email address, but I don’t expect that to change. I fully expect we (iPhone developers) will continue to be at “arms length” from our customers.
According to a handy-dandy flight tracker (with ads, of course), Karen and Sam have just passed Sioux Falls, South Dakota as I write this. Sam’s coming out to visit for the next two weeks - the first alone with us (HAHAHAHA!) and then his Dad is coming out to join us for another week. I’m looking forward to seeing Sam quite a bit - and looking forward to when more of the kids can come out to “visit” some time in the future. No plans there yet, just sort of an abstract “that would be neat!” sort of thing. Of Course, maybe this week will cure me of that idea… I kind of doubt it though.
We’ve got all sorts of plans - or more appropriately I should say Karen has all sorts of plans for Sam (and Dan) while they’re out here. I’m not entirely an innocent bystander, but I’m not into the planning thing as much - I’d be just as happy with randomly dragging them off into directions unknown and seeing what we can find and see. I think we’ve got at least one long weekend in the works with a trip over to the Peninsula.
Last time we took Sam over that way, he ended up dropping his butt into the 50 degree surf at Dungeness Bay (yeah, same place where they get those crabs). I recall that he learned that drying saltwater itches terribly and that he didn’t seem terribly phased by the fact that 50 degree saltwater is damn cold. Of course we didn’t think to have a change of clothes on hand for him… so we also learned where the nearest Walmart was in that area. Take that as a starter, see what you think he’ll end up learning this time. 
For the week that he’s here without Dan, Karen’s enrolled him in ZooCamp. It’s a day camp up at Woodland Park Zoo and the course is titled “Animal Olympians”. Hopefully it’s the kind of thing that Sam will really enjoy. Anyway, I expect that’ll keep him at least somewhat busy during the day while I’m at work. Well, I’m off to play a video game with some significant violence in it for a while now - it’ll likely be a while before I can do that again…
I knew about iPhoneDevCamp - one in Denver and one in Frisco - but I didn’t know that Seattle had one too - at least until this evening. I’m afraid I’ve already got quite a bit of time commitments this weekend, or I’d be going myself.
It’s being held this weekend at the Fremont Adobe Offices, kicking off at 9am and going pretty much all day both Saturday and Sunday. There’s a proposed schedule on their wiki, and although the Seattle attendee list doesn’t look too long I suspect it would be fun to go check out and hack around in.
I just received notification that the SeattleBus 1.0.2 update has been reviewed and is now available on the iTunes Store. Hopefully everyone will be seeing it as an available update within the next 24 hours.
OSCON 2008 wrapped up very nicely last week. I spent friday evening lurking about Portland a bit with Karen, but to be honest we crashed out pretty early. Saturday at 8:30am we were scheduled to take the Amtrack Cascades 500 back to Seattle. It unfortunately didn’t get out of Portland until nearly 11am due to a “pedestrian being struck by a freight train” on the main lines south of Portland, and a cargo derailment north of Portland. It was a very delayed, but quite comfortable, trip home. I’ve been a hell of a lot later, and way more uncomfortable, coming home from Las Vegas…
Back to OSCON for a minute - there is now Video of the keynotes available, and many of the presentation files are also online. If you’re going to watch any of the online video, I recommend r0ml’s keynote presentation: embrace error. He’s amusing and insightful, and I really get a kick out of his sense of humor.
I think the talk that merits to biggest mention is Beyond REST? Building Data Services with XMPP PubSub. It was a great presentation, and seemed to sum up a lot of the thoughts of folks around the conference. There was a definite eye to the future of computing in regards to scaling - across cores and clouds both.
Back from Portland, Karen and I pretty much holed up for the weekend. I’m just getting back into the swing of things today, although Karen’s about to shift out again and head to Missouri. She’ll be visiting for the weekend, returning Saturday with (hopefully!) my nephew Sam to come visit and attend ZooCamp. Is the house really prepared for a 7 year old? heh… no. This’ll be something, eh? I’m really looking forward to having him out here!
It’s been a busy day, and it’s not even over! I’m scribbling this down during a break beofre the final sessions of the day kick into gear. There’s been a huge variety of sessions (as always) at OSCON - and while I’d love to say “today was about …” and then name something, I can’t even begin to do so. I think trying to characterize an event this diverse is about like the blind philosopher’s describing the elephant. Heh - but that’s not really going to stop me trying.
Two recurring themes are hitting various sessions all over the place, just reinforcement of technology trends and interest that are far more global. The first is concurrency and message passing - systems and styles of programming to take advantage of scale (an interestingly, not necessarily performance at low capacities - although it outperforms at scale) with a very clear eye towards a multi-core future. The folks working on systems today are looking forward and seeing 32 and 64 cores in their servers as a plain given. The synopsis that I heard that in an excellent talk about using XMPP as a message passing system was “Polling sucks”. Pretty much sums it up. There is quite the resurgence of interest in XMPP, by the way.
The second theme is mobile. Intel is pimping a large project called Moblin that they’d even hopped to have a developer day set up for. They cancelled the developer day - and according to this morning’s keynote it’s because they don’t have the community infrastructure they want to use fully in place. I’m waiting for the afternoon talk on Moblin, so I’m hoping to pick up a bit more about the specifics.
There were also a good half-dozen sessions that I wanted to see earlier today, but missed - so I’m hoping that I’ll catch some of the slides at least on the conference site, better maybe even the recordings of the presentations themselves.
The OReilly Open Source Convention for 2008 is underway in Portland, OR. I’ve been here since Monday, picking up a few tutorials and generally bending my brain around some new concepts.
I went to the Introduction to Seaside, which included a 30 minutes full-speed, fast-forward, all-thrusters-at-max introduction to smalltalk. I’m afraid that the details of Seaside were lost to me after my mind was reeling from that introduction. Very cool, but reeling.
The other noteworthy tutorial session I attended was An Introduction to Actors for Performance, Scalability, and Resilience by Steven Parkes. Another brain bender, the first half of the talk was going through example Actor code - translating back and forth between Ruby and Erlang. I think if I knew either of those languages it would have been better - instead I sort of ended up getting the equivalent of translations from russian to greek - able to spot the similarities, but likely missing some of the key concepts in the process. The second half of the talk was more abstract, and in many ways easier for me to grasp. I’m very interested in the overall topic of the Actor’s pattern and how it can be used to make concurrency more sane - it’ll be interesting to see how Steven and his library (dramatis) evolves.
The evenings talks were hit and miss for me. I heard a lot of people saying really positive things about Mark Shuttleworth and Damian Conway’s talk, but the only one that really had a consistently deep and amusing message at once was r0ml’s talk. Damian’s was amusing, but went on way long for me. Mark Shuttleworth’s talk didn’t stick with me at all. He listed out some goals for Ubuntu, but it didn’t really seem to come to any significant point.
Excellent news!
I’ve managed to finally upload an “accepted” copy of the SeattleBus 1.0.2 binary! That puts it into Apple’s application review queue, which means it will hopefully be available to everyone by the end of the week or early next week. Apple doesn’t provide any guarantees on review times, but I’m hopeful.
The problem did indeed turn out to be on my end. The code signing process can fail in silent and annoying ways that are damn near impossible to figure out on your own. Fortunately, I received some great help from Apple early this week and they helped me narrow down the problem.
I’ve filed a bug against Xcode for it not warning about the problem (radar 6095242). When the NDA is lifted, I’ll post more details about the specific issue, so that hopefully others will be able to find out how to resolve it
I spent some of this afternoon pitting cherries. It’s a little tedious, but relatively mindless. On the kitchen prep chores, it’s way above peeling potatoes or carrots. Plus you can pop the periodic cherry in your mouth while you’re working. The cherries in question are montmorency cherries - apparently the most popular sour cherry tree in the US. I sure like them. They’re incredibly juicy, bright red in color, and have a tart flavor - lots of it.
Some things I’ve noted about pitting cherries - they’re easier to pit when they’re cold, they’re easier to pit when they have stems on them, and warm cherries just picked from the tree are a LOT juicier than if you toss a bowl of them into the fridge overnight. The top of my stove was my workstation today - and it’s liberally covered in cherry juice now. All told, I think we have 10 quarts of cherries - 8 of them pitted now. I’m giving 2 quarts to a friend to use for making cordial, and most of the rest are getting frozen. Karen and I might make a pie or a crisp tonight, but we’ll be keeping some of these back.
