Ares' Soap Box

As noted in a previous blog entry here, I got my first iPhone app published for sale in the App Store a little under 3 weeks ago. Now that the first calendar month is complete (albeit not a full month), I'd like to share the results of the month's worth of endeavor.

According to the iTunes Connect site, iCoach has sold 28 copies in 19 days. Not bad considering I only used the app as an exercise towards learning the programming environment. In addition, in an effort to promote the application, I gave away 1045 copies of it.

Now for the breakdown:

Montana City Requires Workers' Internet Accounts - justinlindh writes "Bozeman, Montana is now requiring all applicants for city jobs to furnish Internet account information for 'background checking.' A portion of the application reads, "Please list any and all, current personal or business websites, web pages or memberships on any Internet-based chat rooms, social clubs or forums, to include, but not limited to: Facebook, Google, Yahoo, YouTube.com, MySpace, etc.' The article goes on to mention, 'There are then three lines where applicants can list the Web sites, their user names and log-in information and their passwords.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[Slashdot. News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters]

This will likely be my shortest blog post ever on this site.

What

The

Fuck

???

:: Checks clock to see if its April 1st ::

That is all.

Kids Score 40 Percent Higher When They Get Paid For Grades - A large number of schools participating in a pay-for-grades program have seen test scores in reading and math go up by almost 40 percentage points. The Sparks program will pay seventh-graders up to $500 and fourth-graders as much as $250 for good performance on 10 assessment tests. About two-thirds of the 59 schools in the program improved their scores by margins above the citywide average. "It's an ego booster in terms of self-worth. When they get the checks, there's that competitiveness -- 'Oh, I'm going to get more money than you next time' -- so it's something that excites them," said Rose Marie Mills, principal at MS 343 in Mott Haven. Critics, who are unaware that most college students don't become liberal arts majors, argue that paying kids corrupts the notion of learning for education's sake alone.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Back in September 2008, my wife decided it was time for her to get an iPhone. Being a software developer, I welcomed the decision. Earlier that summer, Apple introduced the iTunes App Store and along with it, the opportunity for a little bit of supplemental income. I figured the iPhone would be a write-off on our taxes, as would the Mac I'd need in order to do the development.

One of the guys I used to work with, who runs Open Stack, Inc., had been earning a couple of hundred dollars a day on his slow days. That was a nice incentive for me. Knowing what he developed (and actually paying for it), I know that it is going to take a lot of apps to make that kind of money for myself but even if I can earn 10 or 20 bucks a day, I'd be money ahead; my internet connection and cell phone bill would be covered. Fortunately, my wife is a geniue when it comes to marketing and she could probably sell snow to a polar bear. She's got a lot of great ideas for apps which, when I put them together, may produce a decent income stream for us.

Thus, it was decided. We formed an LLC for our activities, at a cost of $160 in Minnesota. We paid Apple the mandatory $105.69 after sales tax for a developer account. I spent $7 on a domain name, 3dogsandacatsoftware.com. I already had a server running Apache, and installing Drupal on it for content was no big deal. I bought a used Mac off of eBay for $350 or so with Leopard already on it. All in all, for under $1000, we got the business side of things off the ground. If I manage to make 10 bucks a day, that venture capital from myself will be paid back in a little over 3 months. It would certainly be nice to turn a profit this year.

The Learning Curve

Every now and then, something pops up on my favorite tech news site that just makes me scratch my head and want to sound off about it. This is one of those items:

iPhone App Pricing Limits Developers - HardYakka writes "According to this post in the Fortune blog, the iTunes app store has been a boon for users but some developers are saying the number of free and 99 cent apps make it difficult for developers to create complex, higher priced apps. Craig Hockenberry of Iconfactory says the iPhone may never get its killer app like the spreadsheet was for the Mac. If Apple does not do something, the store will be left with only ring tones and simple games. Some are suggesting that overpaid developers are the problem and the recession will soon lower the wages and costs for complex apps."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[Slashdot. News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters]

Yes, you read the title correctly. Qwest is in the process of upgrading their DSL network to fiber, in order to support their new super whiz-bang 12 and 20mbps DSL service, which they're calling Qwest Connect Titanium and Qwest Connect Quantum respectively. These services are sold in addition to their existing 256kbps, 1.5mbps, and 3-7mbps services, respectively called Qwest Connect Silver, Qwest Connect Gold, and Qwest Connect Platinum.

I've been a customer with a Qwest DSL circuit for about 10 years now, starting out at 640kbps/256kbps. 1.5mbps/896kbps and currently 7mbps/896kbps. As each higher speed became available to me, I jumped on the opportunity for higher speeds, most recently the 7mbps speed, in March 2008. It had been available on my remote terminal since about November 2007, at least that's when I started receiving advertising for it.

The 3-7mbps speeds have been available on the Qwest network in the Twin Cities for quite a while, long before they were available off of the RT we're connected to. When they were finally available, I jumped at the opportunity to upgrade my speed. This was in March or April 2008.

On November 1, 2008, I received a letter from Qwest:

October 17, 2008

IMPORTANT INFORMATION REGARDING YOUR QWEST HIGH-SPEED INTERNET SERVICE

Dear Jason Michaelson:

Our goal at Qwest is to offer products that meet your communications needs and to provide timely information regarding changes or events that will affect your service.

I am the webmaster of the Cooler Crew web site, and have been ever since sometime in 2002 or 2003. During that time, the site has migrated from the collection of basically static pages it was when I took it over (and that was somewhere around 170 pages) to a pseudo-Content Management System that I'd put together, to a Drupal based site much like this one. It makes my job easier when it comes to keeping the place running. I've got thick skin. You can't be a webmaster and not; its simply impossible to please everyone. But when someone lashes out at you based solely on lies, a response is not only called for, but is obligatory.

Naturally whenever you make massive changes to the underlying architecture of a web site, mistakes can happen and content doesn't always make it over into the new site. Such is the story of what's happened here. Since I still catch heat from certain people (Jake, you know who you are) about this situation, I feel it necessary to debunk the whole works right here...

A couple out of New York City, one of whom has ties to Minnesota, came to the Twin Cities during the 2001 hunt, and lasting through the 2003 hunt, producing a documentary about the treasure hunt. We've always been very amicable, so imagine my surprise when I was thumbing through the official Pioneer Press discussion boards for the hunt and came across this post:

30% of Americans Want "Balanced" Blogging - Cutie Pi writes "In a recent Rasmussen poll looking at the public's attitudes toward a possible revival of the fairness doctrine by the Democrats, a surprisingly large percentage of those polled seek fairness doctrine mandates (originally intended for public airwaves) to cover the Internet as well. It is encouraging that a minority of people feel that way, but Democrats say 'hands-off the Internet ... by a far smaller margin than Republicans and unaffiliated voters. Democrats oppose government-mandated balance on the Internet by a 48% to 37% margin. Sixty-one percent (61%) of Republicans reject government involvement in Internet content along with 67% of unaffiliated voters.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Say what??? From TFA, "Fifty-seven percent (57%) say the government should not require websites and blog sites that offer political commentary to present opposing viewpoints. But 31% believe the Internet sites should be forced to balance their commentary". The remaining 12% aren't sure.

Thirty-one percent??? Wow. In other words, those 31% are in essence saying to me, "Ares, you've got your own blog out there. It is privately run, owned and operated. If you discuss something of a political nature, you must present an opposing view point."

So I'm reading Slashdot this afternoon when I come across this quote in someone's signature: "KB? SI units are meant to be computationally convenient, not arbitrarily assigned." This got me wonderng. Apart from the differences between units and prefixes, where's the boundary between computationally convenient and arbitrarily assigned?

As long as the metric system has been around, they've had the "computationally convenient" notion attached to them. Ten was a natural choice for a multiplier because its something we humans can easily deal with. All you have to do to move from a measurement with one prefix to a measurement with another is move the decimal point.

Then computers came along, with a new unit, albeit a non-SI unit, for defining storage capacity, a pseudo-volume if you will. Along with computers came the byte, or octet, depending on your language of choice. Unlike humans, computers deal with powers of 2 far easier than they handle powers of 10. As memory capacity expanded, the computing industry needed better units for larger quantities of memory; no one wants to say "I've got 1,048,576" bytes of memory in my computer. It sounds ridiculous. Conveniently the metric system had a suitable set of prefix, and the kilo-, mega-, and gigayte were born, meaning 2^10, 2^20, and 2^30, instead of 10^3, 10^6, and 10^9 as they do when applied to SI units.