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The universe works on supply and demand. Which means it’s all yours for the taking. — Danielle LaPorte

I’ve been looking to write an iPhone app just for the fun of it, but after I got far enough the yellow brick road, all that glittered was not gold. I was WAY to complex for slow me to deal with. Chalk it up to instant gratification complex, but I wanted something I could see/use right away. So, I looked into writing web apps… so far so good. Then there was all the hassles of screen dimensions, CSS formatting, etc. etc. WHERE WAS THE FUN??

I was an early user of Ext-JS framework, as it married nicely with OpenLaszlo. To my surprise, Ext-JS became Sencha, and has opened up the mobile web for me. If you are a web developer and want the results without hassles, it’s worth a look.

The new App Builder for Android looks cool, but as I watched the intro video I thought… hmm, where have I seen this “block” oriented programming model? I know.. Scratch, and even the Lego RCX/NXT systems. This block-oriented stuff isn’t new, but the App Builder blocks even LOOK like the ones from Scratch. Do they have something like this for my iPhone… I wait, probably not… that would empower developers too much. *groan* I like the iPhone (well until iOS 4 totally slowed down my phone performance), and the iPad, I just hate the lockdown for the developers.

Ryan and I had a great time at our second year attending the ImagineRIT event at Rochester Institute of Technology.This is a technology expo of sorts that seems to be growing each year. It was at this event last year that Ryan found out about the RoboWeekend workshop we attended last June. There are a lot of RIT-affiliated groups there, so it seems to be an open house of sorts, but there seems to be more external groups presenting there as well.

As I sit here typing on my aging G4 Powerbook, listening for my iPhone to “ding” with a txt message for me, I have been thinking a lot about my next computer and if it will be a Mac or not. I *really* like my Mac laptop, both my older personal one and my newer MacBook Pro for work. However, it seems that Apple is becoming what they always wanted to differentiate themselves from: Microsoft. They touted the tagline “think different” for so long, perhaps the meaning behind this has somehow rung hollow as their coffers have been lined with gold from the relationships with big [old] media (iTunes) and the telcos (iPhone). It seems that the close, and profitable, relationship with these entities has rubbed off on them.

I have read all the buzz on the iPad, and a lot of it seems just that — buzz. The device is nice, more eco-friendly than many devices, but still brings with it the shackles on creativity that made people hate Sony, Microsoft, and other with such passion over DRM rules. It’s funny how the press latched onto Metallica’s fight against unlicensed music content. What they don’t publicize is how little the actual musicians get from selling their souls content to the big music conglomerates — who also have strong control over the content/media outlets that allow the [paying] pubic access to the content.

Cory Doctorow wrote up a great article on why he isn’t interested in an iPad. I may stick with a Mac laptop and OSX, but all this gives me serious pause in considering my next purchase. Further, a cheaper PC-based laptop with a stable version Linux, with the right UI, may give me what I was really looking for in the first place.

In fact, a University of London study done for Hewlett-Packard found that “infomania” — a term connected with addiction to email and texting — can lower your IQ by twice as much as smoking marijuana. Moreover, email can raise the levels of noradrenaline and dopamine in your brain by constantly introducing new stimuli into your day. When those levels get too high, complex thinking becomes more difficult, making it harder to make decisions and solve problems — key roles for all managers.

http://www.bnet.com/2403-13242_23-383397.html?tag=content;col1

I was recently asked by my friend Melissa to provide some input on ITIL Problem Management. Her question to me was “What are 5 tips you would give to an organization to improve the use of proactive Problem Management?” Here are my thoughts in no particular priority order…

1. Don’t try to make it perfect the first time
When you first try to implement Problem Management, understand that it cannot and will not be perfect the first time. Further, for each individual Problem you are working to remediate, use the 80/20 rule to start out with. If you can work the issue to a relative 80 percent solution, take it. The time, energy, and lost opportunities for improving other areas may be lost while while you are trying to squeeze out that last 20-5% to make a solution “perfect”.

2. Track and follow up
You can only improve upon the thing you track. Reinforce with your team the use of Problem Management tickets (or whatever it’s called in your tool of choice) and follow up. Leadership attention to the use of Problem Management to work the “noise” out of the system will demonstrate you are serious about using the principles and processes.

3. Triage the problems
When you use Problem Management, you will start developing a list, perhaps a long one, of Problems to work on. Before just taking them on first come first serve, triage the list. If you are going to have your organization adopt, use, and internalize the concepts you will want to show them positive feedback on the outset. Again, using the 80/20 rule see what 20 percent of the Problems you can work that will address 80 of the issues you are seeing. Once resolved, you can use the reclaimed “churn” time to address other less pressing or time consuming issues.

4. Consistent training and communications
Ensure your teams have a common understanding, vocabulary, and documentation of the process and terminology. Also have a clear (and repeated) message as to why your organization is using Problem Management, emphasizing the benefits. Reinforce this by highlighting the positive progress as noted in item 2 above.

5. Consistent use of tools
No process or tool is of any use if it sits idle. If you have tools, be sure your teams are using them. This is part of the “tracking” piece that management must assume responsibility for. Consistent use of the tools will allow you and the teams to see long term trends and progress that would otherwise be missed in the day-to-day issues.

For those in South Florida, you can catch Melissa at HDI South Florida on April 8th, 2010.

Despite the diminishing marketshare, Yahoo can created some pretty useful tool for web developers and business user, like the Pipes application. However, I honestly missed the Yahoo Query Language (YQL) in the flood of “cool new things” that hits the web on a weekly basis. In looking for other things I came across this great article outlining an simple application of YQL to turn data in an Excel spreadsheet into a web service.

One the family traditions I have tried to continue was making up stories for the kids. Not sure if this is part of my Irish yarn-spinning heritage, but it seems to sit well with entertaining the kids at bedtime. When Ryan was about 4, we started making up stories about the characters “Patrick O’Dell”and his friend “Jack Woodson”. After awhile the stories just became centered around Patrick O’Dell. The longest of the stories was about Patrick O’Dell meeting the Dwarves.

Ryan had a class project to write a story, and he chose to recreate the ‘Dwarves story. We have had plans for some time to write the story down, and it seems that Ryan has a good start. Here it is below (which he got an “A” for)…

Once there was a farmer boy named Patrick O’Dell. Every day he would go to the same fields, pick the same vegetables, milked the same cows, and sheared the same sheep. Patrick wished just once, something amazing and extraordinary would happen, and one day — it did. On a beautiful summer afternoon, Patrick was digging in his special hill. Where Patrick lived, there was a rumor that in the olden days, dwarves walked the streets and mined deep underground. To get into the mines there special dirt mounds with a door on each side. Each door had a special key that was hidden in a secret place that only the dwarves knew about. One day the dwarves never came out, so the townspeople buried the doors with soil. Years later they forgot all about the doors and the dwarves. The dirt mounds are still there, but people thought the doors were a myth, or are they? While Patrick was digging he hit something hard, and it sounded like wood. He dug a little more and saw something shining in the ground. He cleared away some loose dirt and saw it was a doorknob. He cleared the rest away and saw it was a door with a little keyhole. Patrick rushed inside, went up to his room, got the key his mother had given him for his birthday, rushed back outside and stopped right in front of the door. He carefully put the key in the hole and turned the key until he heard a click. He turned the doorknob and surprisingly the door opened. The opening was small, small enough for a dwarf. He put his ear to the opening and heard banging, hammering, and yelling. Patrick knew right away that he had found a dwarf door. A special door, a door — to another world…

I’m hoping Ryan and I can collaborate on the next chapter to the story, so we can finish it in time for his younger brother to enjoy it.

There are a lot of reviews of individual pieces of software that make up the suite of apps that someone needs to run a business, but rarely do you get to see a real-world example of a complete “solution”, especially with open source tools. Check out the great post on the Makezine blog about how Adafruit Industries runs things.