no sleep for you!

For once, I'm not talking about my own lack of sleep. I'm talking about my iPhone...

I am in the process of writing a native jabber client for the iPhone. I use jabber for work, and it's about the only thing that keeps me from using the iPhone instead of my MacBook Pro for walkaround communications.

It turns out the the iPhone SDK is pretty darned good. It didn't take a great deal of effort to get it installed, provision my iPhone as a development device, and load working code onto my own phone. But there is a problem.

The SDK doesn't allow me to background tasks.

This means that I can only use my iPhone as a jabber client if I'm actively using the client software. If the phone goes to sleep, or I get an SMS message, or a phone call, the jabber client turns off.

I find this limitation annoying, and it's probably the reason no one else has developed a native IM client to date.

developing for the iPhone

It's been awhile since I've written anything complicated. The last bit of real programming I did was to write a test tool for exercising windows applications through Win32 API calls rather than normal screen positioning and click events.. it was a pretty slick piece of work, but there are 3rd party apps available now that are much better than what I wrote, and I've finally reached the point in my career where it is generally more cost effective to buy rather than write.

That might be a topic for another article.. the progression of software aquiry practice along the career path of the technologist.

Anyway, I've had the iPhone 3G for a bit now, and the only thing that I find it lacking (other than cut & paste...) is a native jabber client.

My workplace uses jabber for internal communications. The jabber server is local to our LAN and inaccessible to the outside world. This is good practice for security. None of our data leak out accidentally this way. However, it means that I can't use a webapp for IM to get to my internal jabber server without some tricky tunneling, and those types of tunnels kinda defeat the purpose of securing the jabber box in the first place.

So, I decided I'd have to write something myself again.

The iPhone developer program is really pretty slick. There are hours of video intros and the tools look pretty easy to use. I suppose I'll see how easy in the coming weeks as I try to get this thing off the ground.

iPhone 3G

It's the bees knees.

is your happiness threshold fixed?

I'm too busy to breathe lately, but I read a disturbing lead to a story off Google News last night while logging in to EVE to change skills being trained.

It seems someone just completed a study that says each individual has a certain default happiness level that doesn't change throughout his life. You can do some things to temporarily go above or below it, but in general it remains fixed for life.

Depressing, isn't it?

the importance of importance

I love to employ cyclical redundancy for effect. You have the redundant, wait for the cyclical..

While I've recently been hurled into a position of authority over not one, but TWO distinct groups of engineers, I've come to the grim determination that I'm not important enough to be important yet. This isn't the first time, or even the more interesting time this has happened, but it is _a_ time, and it will serve to illustrate my grievance as well as any other.

- late edit..
This is a post that I started months ago and never finished. It's been turned on its head a bit since then, but the gist remains. Reshaping your image from within a framework of familiarity is difficult at best. I'm making daily progress, but it's a long road. I had no idea how firmly entrenched I was.

is piracy dead?

Of course not, but the rules of engagement have definitely changed a bit.

There are tons of EVE piracy related blogs out there. Hell, I even started one myself, though I'm nowhere near able to yarr effectively alone. If you read any of them, you've probably noticed the same thing that I have over the course of the past two weeks.

They've gone awfully quiet...

Factional Warfare in EVE has brought hordes of empire and 0.0 pilots into low-sec. You'd think that the pirates would be salivating at this, and initially, I'm sure they were. However, pirates are opportunists and danger freaks. They like to live on the edge, but at the same time, they try to stack the deck in their own favor whenever they can. It's a whole different ballgame when you are flashy red to everyone in the sector and there are 25 people in local instead of 5.

Gangs and proper fleets are invading these spaces and when they run out of enemy faction ships to blow up, they tend to go marauding. Anyone flashy red gets popped.

End result. I can go into low-sec again.

Also end result (and not quite so good for me) my horribly expensive shuttles aren't selling anymore since the pirates aren't hanging out in the red pockets waiting for people anymore.

I might have to find a more lucrative sideline. Perhaps I'll start selling 'second-best' named gear in contested systems..

nobody tells me nothing!

Sometimes I wonder if the reason why Marshal Ney was so stupendously ineffective at Waterloo despite having a brilliant, almost meteoric career of successes prior to that might be because he didn't have the right piece of information in time for it to make a difference.

Now, I don't intend to compare myself with Michel Ney. Any successes I have had pale by comparison and my decisions are nowhere near the same caliber. No one will ever die as a result of a bad decision of mine. Yet, I think I must know something of how he felt.

If I'd had all of the information I needed, I'd not be digging myself, my team, and my project out of the mud right now.

Worse, it's not as if I made a bad assumption. I was misled.

This company sucks.