A quick recap on the last 2.9 years

• After speaking at OSCON 2009, I moved to Silicon Valley for a job at mobile gaming startup OpenFeint
• I worked on another iPhone games development book, Beginning iPhone Games Development
• I freelanced as an iPhone/Rails developer for a few Silicon Valley companies
• For the last year, I have been working as an iOS developer for a high tech orchard in Cupertino
• I fell in love and got engaged

The move to Silicon Valley has been great for me in terms of employment and quality of life. I’m working in a great, growing field, and loving it. I love all the diversity in the SF Bay area. And I love northern CA weather.

During this time I have kept increasingly busy with work. When I was a freelancer, my spare time between projects was spent trying to get new customers. As any freelancer will tell you, acquiring new projects and customers is as much a full-time effort as working on the projects you get.

Now that I’m working full-time with an established company, I don’t have to worry about where my next gig is going to come from. So this focuses my work efforts between 9 am to 6 pm most weeks. This leaves me a bit of leisure time in between work and spending time with my fiancée and friends.

Which brings me to the main topic of this blog entry: what I will be doing different in what’s left of 2012 and the years ahead.

Games

I’ve always wanted to work in video games, ever since I was a teenager learning programming on a family computer in the mid-80s. So starting with this blog entry, I will put more focus into releasing my first mobile game.

People much busier than I have gotten games and apps published. I’m single, have no kids, my job is not all consuming. I have no excuse. I simply let distractions occupy my time. Things like TV, leisure reading, social networking.

I actually have wanted to make a mobile game for over three years. I have several ideas always in the back burner. I haven’t accomplished it because I haven’t put in the time and effort it needs. Part of it is because I’ve been busy, but part of it is setting the goal and getting it done. Simple as that. This needs to go from “want” to “goal”.

Goals

If you’ve watched the movie “City Slickers”, you are probably familiar with the character named Curly, played by Jack Palance. In one scene, Curly tells Mitch (played by Billie Crystal) “Do you know what the secret to life is?” The answer is “One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and the rest don’t mean shit.” The problem is in figuring out what your “one thing” is.

The problem with me and goals is that I’m too easily distracted by a very curious mind and way too many different interests. So the key to my achieving goals is to really focus. Just having the time available or making time isn’t enough.

I’ve done this before, when I worked on the two iOS game development books. It took 90% of my effort just to focus. The other 10% was the actual writing.

So with that, I finish this blog post and I’m going to enjoy my Friday night. It’s my fiancée’s birthday today, so we are going out to dinner. No game hacking tonight. But there’s the rest of the weekend and next week.

As I make progress, I’ll be posting details of how things are going.

Onward with the geekiness!

Note: I meant to publish this a few weeks ago but got caught up doing different things and didn’t publish. Except for my fiancée’s birthday, which is on the day this was published, the other events and decisions documented here are already a couple weeks old and in progress.

In other news, I have been geeking out with both the iPhone SDK and the Android SDK, and I believe I have a little something special going here. I hope to have it ready for release, on both platforms, sometime in January. Development continues.

I will need beta testers soon. Any T-Mobile G1 users interested in helping out, you can email me at dreadpiratepj [at] gmail [dot] com

Speaking of Android, I started playing with it now that the source code to the whole thing has been released. I managed to get Android booting on a Palm TX, but it still needs a lot of work. It boots, but it doesn’t do crap once it boots.

I get all the way to the “Press the MENU key to unlock” screen, but none of the keys do anything. Neither does touching the screen. It’s an issue with the Linux kernel drivers and device configuration. It just wasn’t made to run on a Palm TX without proper tweaking of the source. I just don’t know what the proper tweaking is.

I need to look in my bag of loot for a Palm serial cable (I’m sure I have one somewhere) and hopefully I can get a serial console from which to poke around inside Android.

I do have Android running successfully on my Sprint Touch (my parents, my sister and I have a family plan on Sprint.) Credit for that goes to Dr. Martin Johnson in New Zeland. I just use his release on my phone (before you ask, no, his release doesn’t work on the Palm TX. It’s the first thing I tried.

And the asshat spammer is still trying to beat Akismet, with 428 more comment spam since the original 376, for a total of 704 between 9 am on March 16 and now, 8:28 pm on Thursday March 22. He is losing, because even if he makes it through Akismet (which he is not, not in the slightest), he is going to end up in my moderation queue, and I’ll flag his trash as spam.

As a famous Texan governor asshat already said earlier this decade: Bring it on!

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Thanks to the Akismet guys, for a job well done!

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Be advised svn.pjtrix.com and trac.pjtrix.com are AWOL because of DNS propagation issues. I’m pretty confident they will become available once the DNS records are synchronized across the whole ‘Net. I tested the shared host install and content of trac.pjtrix.com on a dummy domain, and it ran fine.

As if to underscore that the move to Dreamhost was a good decision, I originally thought the svn.pjtrix.com and trac.pjtrix.com unavailability was a misconfiguration issue on Dreamhost’s part. I fired up a support request, and would you believe they got back to me in less than 30 minutes, and with the correct answer?

Let’s see the dumbass tech support folks at GoDaddy beat that! The best GoDaddy tech support can do on a first try is quote their unhelpful help pages, which they’re too dumb to understand anyhow, and they take many hours to reply! I guess it takes them that long to find which of their unhelpful help pages is more vaguely related to my problem.

Dreamhost tech support is leaps and bounds over GoDaddy’s. I never felt so confident about something as mundane and commonplace as web hosting. But as with everything else in life, there are dumbasses and grumpy saboteurs everywhere, ready to take your cash and trust and treat it without care. You need to be careful and find someone worthy of your cash and trust.

I’m glad to see first hand that Dreamhost lives up to its good reputation. And I’ve learned first hand that GoDaddy lives up to theirs.

Well, that was not working out. LightTPD is a different beast from Apache, and I couldn’t get Drupal and some other software installed properly. Luckily, VPSLink has a 30-day money back guarantee, so I didn’t waste any money.

I had heard many good things about Dreamhost from many friends and through the web, so I decided to have a look see. And as luck would have it, I found a coupon code where I could get Dreamhost hosting for $29.40 USD for the whole year! With a 97-day money back guarantee, I also had nothing to lose. (I’ll share a coupon code later, so that you too can get a year of Dreamhost hosting for $29.40 USD.)

Dreamhost is a shared hosting company, whereas I had virtual private hosting with GoDaddy and VPSLink. That means I’m not free to install anything I want, in any way I want. But to be honest, I’m not doing anything out of the ordinary with pjtrix.com and my other domains. What I’ve been doing on my VPS host can be setup with a bit extra work on a shared host. Apache is quite flexible, and Dreamhost allows quite a bit of Apache reconfiguration through htaccess.

So far, the move to Dreamhost has been going well. I’ll be moving pjtrix.com tonight. My next weblog post will signal a successful move.

Hi there, readers!

I have been busy for the last week, looking for new gigs, and sending out article proposals for a few sites and print magazines. I’ve also been toying with making screencasts, using my camcorder, and operating iMovie, for a not-so-secret pjtrix project from the summer. And then there’s another two projects, but they are secret for now. All this fun left me with little time for pjtrix posts.

Among other news, this here weblog finally got approved for PayPerPost.com and ReviewMe.com. Let’s see if I find something you and I might be interested in. First thoughts: … meh …

I continue to cover living expenses with the odd gig here and there. I have to find a way out of the hole into better gigs, though. The secret and not-so-secret projects should help, as well as the writing. We’ll see. I remain hopeful for the near future.

iCal to GCal Sync

I started this open source project in December, but I’ve actually made little progress in all of January. The learning curve is a little steeper than expected. Drawing a Mac OS GUI is super easy with Interface Builder, but making it work in a foolproof manner isn’t.

Then there’s the added complexity that all the Mac OS specific documentation is in Objective-C, a language I haven’t used or even looked at until now, and very different from the PHP, Python, Ruby, C++ and Java I know. And then I have to convert from the Objective-C examples to the Ruby-Cocoa construct I need to write my application. It’s not difficult, it’s just I haven’t yet internalized all the “bastard C-like object-oriented language from hell” newness.

From what I have gathered, Mac OS X Leopard is going to come with built-in Python and Ruby bindings to Objective-C. Maybe Apple will add some helpful documentation to their developer site that will help with this kind of conversion. I have half a mind to write a little GUI tool to convert short Objective-C snippets to their Ruby-Cocoa equivalents.

Spam, SPAM, Spam, SPAM, Spam, SPAM, Spam, SPAM

It’s not a pirate movie, and it’s not quite as good as the The Princess Bride, but Robin Hood: Men in Tights gets a good quote now and then in my emails and chats with my old college buds. And the Spam song always makes me laugh. So without much further ado, here is the monthly Akismet comment spam report.

In the month of January, Akismet reports I received 57 spam comments! This is compared to 74 for the entire year 2006. I remember not having any spam comments for quite a while, until some time in August 2006. I don’t remember the exact amount of spam comments I received in December, but I think it was less than 30, and November 2006 had about 20. So it seems that as I become more prolific in my posting, the spammers turn up their attempts. Or whatever.

Joined the Amazon affiliate program

I’ve applied for an Amazon affiliate account. Among the different content on pjtrix in 2007, I plan to post book reviews on different subjects, but mostly about technology and software development, as that is what I know best and what I typically buy. I will only post about books I have actually read.

These posts will not be sponsored in the typical sense, in that no one will be offering to pay me to write the post. But the post will have an Amazon link to the book. I will earn an affiliate fee from any purchase made from that link. I will have a disclosure paragraph at the top of such posts, the titles will begin with “Book Review:”, and I will tag them book.review. It’s up to you whether you want to read the reviews. It is up to you whether you follow the link to Amazon and buy something.

Feedback

If any of my recent writing about ReviewMe.com, PayPerPost.com, Google AdSense, and now Amazon.com affiliate stuff bothers you, don’t forget to speak up in the comments! Or if you have anything else to say about it, don’t hesitate to let me know what you think.

I will not be seeing any money from these programs for some months. But I hope to recoup what I’ve spent so far on hosting. I will put any moneys earned into paying for my hosting expenses.

I’m certainly not going to be making a living, much less striking it rich from Google AdSense, Amazon affiliate fees, and getting paid to blog about stuff. My intention is to keep the site running, and to keep writing about things I care about, in the hopes others can benefit from it.

… rejecting one of my article proposals, because it is similar in subject to an article they had published recently (whoops!) I’m starting to like the idea of seeing my name online as a tech writer (ha ha!) So I’ll try to pitch this article idea at other sites. If nobody else wants to pay me to write it, I’ll just post it here.

PayPerPost.com, ReviewMe.com, Google AdSense

As Dave Slusher says, “forewarned is forearmed.” In order to pay for my hosting in 2007, I have signed up with Google AdSense (they’ll be in the sidebar), PayPerPost.com and ReviewMe.com. And I thought I’d let you know in advance.

I could care less about the controversy around the “paid blogging” sites. I was raised to believe that any job is dignifying when done with pride and honesty. And I’m not going to turn down $20 USD or $30 USD dollars each month, in exchange for very few hours of effort, just because some particular people might sneer at me. $20 USD or $30 USD per month will cover my hosting expenses at the moment, and that’s what I’m concerned about.

So over the next few months, I will write PayPerPost and ReviewMe sponsored articles. I’ll try to pick PayPerPost articles that I find personally interesting and are tech or web development related. Hopefully, ReviewMe patrons will make offers about tech products or about web development. I’ll do no more than three per month and I’ll space them out as best I can. I won’t spam you.

I will tag these with payperpost or reviewme, as the case may be. I’ll prefix the post title with “PPP:” or “RM:”. The first paragraph of these posts will say “Disclaimer: this is a sponsored post” or something like that. I mention this so that you can decide whether you care to read the post or not when you see the tag, the title prefix, or the disclosure paragraph.

If you don’t care about the sponsored content and really wish you could remove it, you can, after a fashion. Most feed readers today feature smart feeds, with filtering. There are also online sites that can filter another online site’s feeds. There are browsers extensions that can block Google AdSense.

It’s all up to you, really.

Server hosting changes coming

pjtrix’s server account with GoDaddy expires March 1st. Their new virtual dedicated server accounts have Fedora Core 4. And guess what? Fedora Core 4 is unsupported since exactly one month ago. Just like FC2, it’s SOL. (LOL, I like that product classification.)

I have been a customer of GoDaddy for these last two years, and they always screwed up the initial install of the account (I created new accounts each year because they had upgraded the OS.) There’s no reason what I payed for should not work from the get-go and need support to get it working. That is inexcusable, specially since it happened twice. That just shows it wasn’t a mere fluke, but instead showed me broken initial installs are the status quo.

But at least this was the only issue I had with them. I have heard horror stories about other established providers, and even of horror stories about GoDaddy itself. Maybe I was one of the lucky ones, but I’d like to give credit where it’s due: I never had any problems except for the initial install screw ups. Availability was supperb, and I’m confident I got what I paid for.

GoDaddy’s customer service was decent, for what little I used it (the initial install screw ups mentioned above.) 50 % of the time, I got someone that sent me to the very “help” pages that didn’t help. What I did was to ask the question again in a slightly different way. Then I’d reach someone that was actually helpful. Go figure.

So, because of their inexcusable initial account screw ups, and because of their iffy customer support, I’m not going to be using GoDaddy servers after the end of February. I found a few virtual private hosting companies which charge between $15 USD and $25 USD per month with no setup fee and no contract. This is less than what GoDaddy wants for the same service. Some of these other providers will even let me choose an up-to-date, supported, Linux distribution of my choice.

After some Googling for complains and reviews about the VPS hosting companies I found, I’ve settled on VPSLink hosting, and their Fedora Core 5 + MySQL + Rails + LightTPD package. I like that they pre-configure the server for Rails. LightTPD also runs about 30% faster and uses 90% less RAM than Apache, any day.

LightTPD supports most open source-based web applications without issue. I should be able to get WordPress and Trac running just fine. For the next few weeks, pjtrix stuff will continue running where it’s at right now, on the GoDaddy server. Meanwhile, I’ll be running WordPress, Subversion, Trac, and Gallery2 tests on the new VPSLink server. I’ll be making sure I can move my and my friends’ content over without problems.

Once I’m satisfied, I’ll make a backup of everything, copy it over, configure things properly, and finally, switch the name servers over to the new hosting provider. This will probably happen mid-February.