I’ve been a “beta” tester of the new Translink card payment system for San Francisco public transport for a while now, but am amazed at the credit card payment process for these cards. As you can tell from the video below it appears to still use a dial-up process to authenticate and process credit card payments. So while you’re on your way to somewhere important, and realize you need to add value to your card you have to wait for a modem to dial up a credit card auth. I sure hope they speed up this process before it gets popular! Given, there are better ways to refill your card such as online or via the automatic enrollment. But this system is really supposed to be better than the old, and using a card to add value is now apparently two steps backwards.

I just downloaded the new swype beta for android and its absolutely fantastic. So much so that i decided I should write this entry for from my nexus one phone, something I wouldn’t have really been too encouraged to do before. In part because the default android keyboard doesn’t really work out that well for me leaving me with a lot of typos and frustration. The swype keyboard even in its beta does an amazing job at identifying long and not very precise input, a far superior input method. And I’ve only been using out for a few hours now!

I do need to get faster at correcting the typoes I do make, and I feel the suggestion menu is a little obtrusive. The keyboard, however looks fantastic. If you’re running an android phone I would default keep your eye’s out for this one.

I decided that a video camera would be the perfect addition to my ski and cycling adventures.  After a very brief survey of the available options the CountourHD 1080p seemed to be the best choice for it’s simplicity of use, size, and quality.  Here’s how the pro’s and con’s break down.

Pro:

• Extremely small profile for recording activities such as skiing, cycling, etc.
• Simple design with large start/stop recording button.
• High quality video
• A camera specifically designed for this purpose.
• It’s got lasers! (used for initially aligning the camera when it’s on your head).
• Simple USB disk access and charging.

Con:

• Simple design and use means little control over configuration when away from computer.
• No way to preview videos without computer connection.
• MicroSD card means limited to 16G and an extremely tiny card that’s difficult to switch out while in an outdoor/harsh environment.
• Poor mount designs.

The mounting options are pretty poorly constructed in my opinion, and don’t offer a stable/secure base for the types of activities it’s intended to record.  For example, one of the mounting options is to the strap of a ski goggle.  While this option offers flexibility and ease of use the camera still tends to wiggle back and forth on difficult terrain as seen in the sample video below.  The vented helmet strap is also not ideal as I don’t trust the latches that hold it in place, and it’s problematic to get it in the correct position to record, however it does seem to be much more steady once it’s in place, time will tell if my concerns about it coming loose are justified.  For skiing, I think a solid mount to a helmet is the way to go, it’ll offer a much more stable platform to record from… oh and i should be wearing one anyways I’ve been told.

(click for full size video)

MicroSD cards, while are an ideal size for small form factors such as this, I find the limited capacity and switching them out to be a major concern.  The maximum size supported is 16GB and even if you have spares switching these out on a hill or outside isn’t an ideal option unless you’re fine with dropping a days worth of video into a snow bank or a storm drain.  However, you’re likely to run out of battery before you use up a 16GB card (the unit only comes with 2GB, but I’ve replaced it with a 4GB card I had laying around).  A spare battery is one of the first things I purchased, and I’ll likely upgrade the MicroSD card to 16GB as well.  2GB will probably give you about 30 minutes of total video time.  This being said, you can get a good set of videos recorded on the included battery and SD, but if you’re going to be out all day I think a spare battery and a storage upgrade are in order.  It’ll mean less worrying about what to record when.

While the audio isn’t always the best (it’s difficult to hear others far away, and the sound of air rushing past consumes the majority of the audio tracks), the video is fantastic.  The viewing angle is perfect for sports and quality is just what I was hoping for.  I’ll need to adjust some of the various contrast/brightness settings to get a better night filming, as well as bringing out more contrast and texture in the snow.  This is tedious as you can only configure this from a computer, but the configuration software does allow you to save pre-configured setups for easy switching between pre-determined settings.

So I dropped my iphone today, and cracked it’s screen all up, tragic I know.  <moment of silence please>….

But it’s still working for the time being, so that’s both good, and a sign of ok quality hardware despite the entire screen looking like a minor traffic accident.  So it’s time to shop for a phone again in order to prepare for this phones ultimate demise.  I heard AT&T has refurbed iphones for a steep discount, but the pricing is a little interesting for existing customers (who don’t get the really steep discount till their contract expires of course… don’t even get me started on that rant):

Note that for $150 in addition to the normal iphone 3GS 16GB Black price, you can get a refurbished iphone 3GS 16GB Black…. Such a deal, those refurbished phones must be in such high demand they are driving the price up above a brand new iphone.

Playing chess with Lucas at all hands meetings, while Karel looks on... (maybe I should bring back my stripe)

Go Girl! (what really powers Facebook)

November 2nd, 2009 will be my last official day as an employee at Facebook, and the 23rd will be my last day in the office.  It has, without a doubt, been one of the most amazing work experiences I’ve ever had.   My first hours of work was attending our 5 million user party in 2005, what a great introduction to Facebook work ethic.    The first year or two was masochistic, 24×7 constant cycles of wake-up, write code, push code, fix code till 4am, fall asleep spooning laptop, repeat…  <advertisement>But Go Girl!, the Sugar Free Energy Drink, kept me going through it all!</advertisement>   I started working on APC out of necessity, mostly to keep the panicked “If we don’t do *something* in the next hour, the site will be down!” from happening on a daily basis.  It grew into a full-time job managing the PHP/Apache stack, something that’s been a real challenge and I’ve really enjoyed. Throughout my time here our growth rate has always been astounding, even today I’m amazed at our trajectory and I think a huge portion of it corresponds to the creative energy embodied in it’s employees.  But alas, I feel my time here has come to a close, it’s time for me to relax a bit, re-focus, and figure out what I want to do next. I’m looking forward to seeing Facebook continue it’s upward trajectory and accomplish great things, and eager to discover whatever might be next, but only after a little R&R…

I recently did an interview with Zoltan Radnai from Prezi and it’s now available on Prezi’s blog. This grew out of a communication I had with Zoltan after some twitter activity around my talk at the Tokyo PHP Conference.   I believe Prezi has a great product, and the team looks like it’s really pro-active.  If this keeps up they’ll have an amazing product, and I’m eager to see what future releases have in store.  Hmmm, all this Prezi chatter has me wanting to work on a new projects and new talk content….

After receiving an offer from the Japan PHP Users group to speak at their conference this past month I decided it would be a good chance to speak, meet some fellow  engineers in Japan, and to take some time off from work at the same time.   I’m sorry this post is a little late, as I just returned to San Francisco, and didn’t spend too much time on the computer till now.   I had a wonderful time, and met a number of really great people there.   We started with a presentation on APC at the PHP Japan Conference.

The talks where streamed live and you can view part of it below:

My Prezi presentation is now available as well:

This was my first presentation being given with a translator (who was very helpful). Unfortunately I was a little too concerned about time and ended a little too early, but I got to hear a lot of good questions from the audience which was great. (I even got a question via Twitter! Perhaps future Q&A should be done this way!)

Lucas and I then ran off to Hokkaido in search of cool weather and Onsen, we found plenty of both! I found Hokkaido very enjoyable, but I think I’d like to come back for a skiing trip sometime soon. We traveled via overnight train to Hakodate, then Noboribetsu, and Sapporo. Then to Otaru and Sounkyu and back to Tokyo via domestic airlines AirDo. An excellent trip to the northern part of Japan.

Upon return to Japan some conference organizers and others at Rakuten had setup a tour of their building and a brief talk and discussion about scalability. After a marathon run through the stairways at Rakuten we sat down for a quick Prezi presentation and discussion, slides for this are available online:

It was a great opportunity to get to talk with Rakuten and learn more about their company and what a Japanese web company is like and how their challenges may or may not differ from those I see in the valley.

I spent the rest of the trip meeting up with really cool people from Gree, Rakuten, Mixi, Nico Video, and others. Oh and lots of clothes shopping and Anime/Manga! Thanks to everyone who took time to visit with me on the trip and organize the talk, conferences, and social events!

I just finished giving my talk on High Performance APC at OSCON.  I was lucky enough to have Graham Kelly, currently the primary contributor to the PHP Optimizer project, speak with me about the optimizer and the work he has going on there.  You can view the slides online via prezi.com, or you can download the zip file (~11MB) to view offline on your Windows or Mac OS.  Enjoy, please contact Graham or myself if you have any questions or suggestions!  Also, thanks to those of you who where present and participated.

http://prezi.com/135715/

OSCON09_HighPerformanceAPC.zip

I finished up my presentation at PHP|Tek 2009 this past week, and while I didn’t get to invest as much time making it beautiful as I had hoped it was a good first use of Prezi.  Despite Prezi missing a lot of much needed features it enabled me to qucikly get my ideas down in a format that was presentable, and I felt that the presentation flowed smoothly and conveyed the technical ideas well.

Responses from the audience seemed good, stating that the “zooming” affect of Prezi really helped hone in on important or detailed aspects of the presentation.  I think this is especially useful for technical presentations where there may be a significant amount of data, as well as code that isn’t always easily visible to the audience.  This years presentation contained some basic information from last year but I steered clear of the dreary INI configuration and instead tried to focus more on optimization, special usage, and work that’s currently in development for APC including lazy loading, no-copy usage of shared memory, and the GSoC project that may open some more doors for APC and other extensions.

I wish I had more time to spend at PHP|Tek this year, it was a good conference as usual and I was happy with the projectors here that enabled me to get something other than your typical low resolution display.   Unfortunately I had to rush back for a tennis tournament here in SF so I had to punch out early and fly home just in time to loose both my matches in the first round and get sick (some sort of pig flu or something I suppose?).   Anyways, I’m on the mend and looking forward to upcoming projects and other speaking engagements this and next year!

Prezi slides can be viewed interactively online or via an application download compatible with either Mac or Windows (Sorry Linux, check out the online vension).

Online: http://prezi.com/84786/view/

Download: http://tekrat.com/talks_files/phptek2009.zip

I’ve gone through several iterations with my to-do list.  I usually have a pretty large list of things that need to be done either as long term goals or short term by the hour or day tasks.  I’ve found that a lot of people use plain text files to track their lists or notes,  I did this for a while but found that I really wanted hierarchical formatting to better organize my thoughts and text files don’t necessarily offer the best feature set or visual display of this type of information.  For a long time I was using OmniOutliner for this purprose but this was a bit heavy handed (feature and price wise) and not really it’s intended purpose.  Edgies is another great application for this sort of thing, and my good friend uses these, but I didn’t find that they suited me for really long lists of tasks that I may not actually get to until a year from now.

I’ve finally landed on TaskPaper, it’s my ideal tool for tracking tasks, goals, notes, and most other things.  It works like a plain text editor, but understands special formatting like a ‘-’ character to start a bullet point or a ‘:’ following a word to signify a project, as well as proper indenting to show a hierachy.  It also supports marking tasks as done, arhiving, searching, and tagging.  All very necessary features.   I do have a few complaints such as the ability to drop photos or other files.  I also find it’s not really feasible to paste a large block of code or text like an email.  Despite this however, I’ve been very satisfied and definitely recommend it.  Now I just need to actually complete some items…<sigh>