Syntactically Correct

Wow. 35. This age comes with some serious what-am-I-doing-with-my-life kind of thoughts. Being unemployed, single and living with a cat at that age is hardly normative (at least in Israel) and despite being very content with the current situation it’s hard not to ponder other life choices.

In any case, it’s time for the yearly look back:

A year ago I left my job to start a new venture with a friend. We since grew to a 3-person team and by now we have a very early version of our product, while we’re still tweaking the requirements for the first release. Hopefully in a few months we’ll have something to show for. This is probably the year in which we’ll know for sure whether this project is destined to take off or not.

Being unemployed (and having no income) for so long is my biggest worry for the upcoming year. I was very willing to spend some of my savings on this project, but I was hoping it will be in a better place by now. Other than that, I don’t think there’s a lot to say about entrepreneurship that hasn’t been said before. The joys and sorrows of this road are well documented in countless articles. I’m otherwise happy with my life, something I wished myself a year ago on my birthday post.

Travelling: I was abroad twice – France/Germany and Switzerland. Both trips were great. Having already booked one trip for this year – to The Prodigy’s 3rd Warrior’s Dance Festival – I already made sure that I’ll keep “exploring the world” this year as well. Travelling has become one of my favorite things.

Side projects: I updated Dindy a few times in the past couple of weeks, hoping to address issues users have been experiencing for a while. I don’t plan to add any new features to Dindy – this was just to prevent it from rotting in the Android market. Unfortunately it hadn’t gained any new users for a long time now, yet it remains with a relatively high user score (4.2 out of 5.)

Another side project is my online will idea from nearly 3 years ago. I already have an almost fully functional version of it running on Google App Engine, but there’s still a long way to go as it lacks visual design (if you’d like to help me with that – let me know) and there’s still quite a lot of code to write.

Workouts: Having suffered some injuries I’m working out (running) only twice a week now. I’m not happy about it, but I’m still in pretty good shape so it’s not that bad. I hope my injuries will subside and that I’ll be able to get back to my 3-workouts-a-week routine at some point.

That’s about it, I guess. I hope you’re happy too.

A week after the previous update, I started getting crash reports on the Android developer dashboard. The core reason for the crashes was that I started building Dindy against a newer Android platform version. As a result, a compatibility hack related to how services are started stopped doing its work and Dindy started crashing.

To those of you who are interested, the difference is that Service.startService() started returning START_STICKY instead of START_STICKY_COMPATIBILITY.

I consider this very poor backward compatibility support on Android’s side. It also forced me to deal with Dindy’s service being killed by the Android platform at any given time. The solution wasn’t a trivial one – I had to add a new table to the database to save Dindy’s runtime state.

At least now hopefully (and excluding other bugs) Dindy will work on most phones, even those where the service is being killed for no reason.

Two good things have happened in the past week, music-wise:

1. The Prodigy have announced their 3rd Warrior’s Dance Festival to be held in Belgrade, Serbia September 15th. I already booked a VIP ticket to the show. Woohoo! If you want to come along, let me know :)
2. The Mars Volta announced their 6th studio album, Noctourniquet, to be out March 27th. The Mars Volta has been my favorite Rock band in the past several years and a new album from them is bound to be something I’ve never heard before.

So as my 35th birthday is approaching it appears this year is going to be exciting, at least on the music front.

Not a bad start.

After a year of not updating Dindy and mainly apologizing to users from time to time because Dindy doesn’t work on their phones, I finally updated Dindy. The trigger was a change made in Locale, which Dindy supports. Sadly enough, I’m pretty sure it will still won’t work on many phones.

I still haven’t managed to get my hands on a phone, on which Dindy doesn’t work, long enough to hook it up to my computer and figure out what the problem is. But since it works well on all base (“Nexus”) versions of Android and also on many other devices – I blame the changes made to the OS by phone manufacturers.

Hopefully I’ll figure it out. While Dindy is pretty much a finished and abandoned project, I would still like to know that it works well for whoever is using it.

Here are USB drivers and manuals for Thomson’s cable modem and gateway products.

The manuals and driver in the zip file are for the following models:

• DCM325
• DCM425
• DCW725
• DHG520
• DHG525
• TCM420
• TCM425
• TCW710

The manuals are in these languages:

• English
• French
• Swedish
• German
• Hebrew
• Dutch (the file name is Netherlands)
• Polish
• Portuguese
• Spanish

These are all from an original old CD I got around 2005 with my TCM425.

WARNINGS:

1. Use at your own risk. I recommend first looking for official drivers for the product online or contacting your Internet service provider before trying these drivers.
2. Since you probably don’t know me – don’t trust me and check the files for viruses first.

A friend of mine wanted to start using eBay, both as a buyer and as a seller. After just a few days her account was permanently suspended, with no option to ever return to eBay. The reason appears to be some mix-up with PayPal. I’m saying “appears to be” because eBay doesn’t tell you why your account is permanently suspended. Calls to the live person support don’t help – the support people just recite a pre-written message and do not say anything else. Apparently the PayPal mix-up made someone in eBay think my friend was a criminal and that’s why she got this harsh treatment.

(On a side note: I witnessed one of these calls. It makes you feel really uncomfortable. If you want to see how criminals are treated, get your eBay account suspended and then call them to ask why. Just know that you will never be able to be an eBay user again)

My idea revolves around verifying that the person is real and “innocent.” Much like the American system of financial credit score, using a person’s email address, one service will be able to trigger an “online identity score” check with other services that user is registered to.

For example, let’s say I’m registering to eBay. During the registration process I give my Gmail address, which I also use for Facebook. With my consent, eBay will be able to query Google and Facebook and ask them about how genuine my account is, so as to verify both that I’m a real person and that my account hasn’t been hacked (both Gmail and Facebook already have fake account and anti-hacking protections.)

It’s a little bit strange to write about the 7th anniversary of my first day at the gym after not actually doing any physical activity in the past 2 weeks due to what turned out to be just an infection (which I’m finally treating with some antibiotics.) That’s why it’s also not surprising that I missed the actual date by a day. But I hope to get back to my running routine (3 times a week, 1 hour, ~11 km run) in a week or two considering that the pain is almost gone.

The big challenge over the past 8 months of workouts was running outside instead of in the gym. Running outside is considerably harder for me, especially when it’s hot, cold or raining. At some points during these months I’ve considered going back to the gym but eventually powered through. As winter is getting closer, I might reconsider.

So here’s to another workout year.

I’ve been doing the same running routine for quite a while now – 3 times a week, 11.5km. Lately I’ve been experiencing some pelvic pain that refuses to go away. In 2 days I’m going to see an orthopedic doctor but for now, after reading online about some of the possible ailments (like Osteitis Pubis), I’m taking this week off from running.

Every time I stop running because of pain I start fearing that following the rest period I won’t be able to get back to running. Even worse, I fear that I’ll regain the weight I’ve lost since I started working out nearly 7 years ago. These fears may be illogical, but I can’t help it.

Hopefully I’ll be better soon enough to go back to my running routine.

After nearly 4 years since I bought my desktop computer and after complaining about constant thrashing I finally decided it’s time to give it a little upgrade. It now sports 8GB of memory instead of just 2, and the improvement is noticeable.

The big culprits for the thrashing turned out to be Eclipse and Unity. We have pretty large projects by now, and having the main ones open together requires no less than 2GB of virtual memory and nearly 1GB of actual memory. That’s a lot, and it doesn’t include at least one running Android emulator! Unity added quite a bit to that (I don’t remember the number) but switching to Gnome helped.

I’m still happy with this Core Duo, now very old, computer. It does its job well and I expect it to last a year or two more.

Here’s what happens when I offer Ace some tuna. It’s her favorite.