alexbrie . com

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PS. I haven’t forgotten about my promise to blog about my trip – but I can’t find the time to do this, ass there are so many things to see around here.

Oh, how tiring these last days have been.
The Lufthansa flight from Bucharest to Singapore via Frankfurt was, well.. the longest flight we’ve ever had so far. It started with a 45-50 minutes delay in Bucharest, a 2.5 hour flight, then with us running through Frankfurt airport to make sure we don’t miss our flight to Singapore. We had the middle and isle seats, with the passenger at the window being a somewhat overweight Singaporean, bare-footed, with a half-emptied whiskey bottle in his hands, which he managed to finish during the flight(when he wasn’t staggering on his way to the bathroom – at one moment he actually fell over our seats – but we were luckily standing in the isle, waiting for him to find his place). Oh, and he was snoring and talking/shouting in his sleep. But he was cute, in a clumsy bear kind of way. The tipping point of the trip was when I (irony, indeed) managed to spill half a glass of water on my pants, his pants and the small bag where I kept the passports, iPad, Kindle and iPhone. Phew! Luckily, one heart-attack later, I learned that they had survived the incident.

Now, Singapore. The most modern and civilized city I ever laid eyes on. With Changi being the best airport in the world (according to airports awards it has got). We were nervous at first about entering the country, having read all those warnings concerning fines, jail time and even death penalty for various crimes, minor or major – but apparently there was nothing to be afraid of. Everyone was great, airport staff extremely friendly, signs aplenty, etc.
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For the next few weeks I probably will blog a bit more, but not about technology, apps, Apple or iOS development. Instead, I’ll switch to personal/travel blogging mode, trying to narrate as much and as well as possible my vacation.
Because in a couple of hours from now, me and my dear wife are starting yet another backpacking adventure in South East Asia(long term readers might remember our one month in Thailand from two years ago).
This time we’re trying an experiment even more difficult. We’re planning on spending a comparable amount of time(26 days, give or take) in Singapore and Indonesia – actually a couple of days in Singapore, followed by a few weeks in Indonesia, in the Bali and Lombok islands, to be exact.
Why the more difficult experiment?
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Updated: I totally forgot to mention Flash capability in the browser – it’s great. Sure, I would have liked Flash to be a thing of the past, but it’s not and having it working properly on a tablet is neat. I tested it with vplay.ro (sort of a youtube/hulu pirate clone) and trilulilu.ro (also a youtube/spotify clone) and it worked fine. Now back to the story.

Last summer I had played with Android development, coding a small free quiz app. Since Google is too lazy or unwilling to let Romanian developers distribute paid apps in the Android Market, that app could only be monetized by Admob – and has brought, therefore, a total revenue of 35 US cents in over 7 months.
Back in February I learned about BlackBerry’s awesome marketing gimmick – to give a free PlayBook to each developer who submitted a PlayBook app to BlackBerry’s app store, before a deadline. It was the second take of a similar previous offer of theirs, only this time with a twist – because of the Android Player built in the new PlayBook OS 2.0, one could actually submit existing Android apps.
Porting my quiz app to PlayBook and submitting it to AppWorld took around 5 hours, including testing it in the provided PlayBook simulator, changing the UI to make it more visually appealing and creating the marketing material.
The tablet arrived a few weeks later, delivered to my door by FedEx, all expenses paid. I’ve been playing with it occasionally for the past 3 weeks, whenever my new iPad was otherwise busy. It’s now time for a review.
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Because I am still working hard recoding one of my most important apps, and hoping I’ll be ready in a week or two, I won’t do a iOS development post just yet. Instead, I am going to take my turn reviewing the new iPad, in the shortest manner possible:

When did I get it?
As promised by Apple, on the 23rd of March. It was a shock for everyone that Apple really kept their word on the international release date – unlike their previous device launches, there were indeed enough iPads in stock to make sure early risers could get one.

How much did it cost?
Although there is no official Apple store in this small part of Europe, prices at authorized Apple sellers had been set up by Apple – the 16GB Wifi cost 2199 RON, which is 501 Euros, which is 668 USD. Significantly more than in the US, but a comparable price with the rest of EU prices (12euros more, probably due to VAT difference). This is the first time Apple does this, and I hope it won’t be the last – I’m sick and tired of Romanian prices for Apple products being 30-50% more than elsewhere.

Which model did I buy?
I had initially wanted to get a 4G one with a larger capacity, aiming to turn it into my main mobile device. But eventually I chickened out and went for the cheapest version I could get, justifying the purchase as an investment – I do need the latest iOS devices at hand, if I am to develop apps for them. I also hope that future versions will add better battery life on top of the extraordinary screen.
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This post is dedicated to Tibi, my parent's godson, who asked me the above question, in a somewhat different form. A bright student now in his 2nd year of high school, he loves computers and sometimes feels that he should be taking advantage more of the opportunities that his generation takes for granted(you know, everyone having computers, internet, access to information). To be honest, his question was actually how can I earn some money after school. I twisted it around trying to cover a more useful area.

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I had heard about TinyLetter from some online sources(Daring Fireball, among others), and it looked interesting enough to worth a look today: a free newsletter manager software, capable of sending thousands of emails at once, so interesting that it got purchased by Mailchimp. Being the curious early adopter that I am, I created an account and started playing with it.

I didn’t really want to create a newsletter, I just wanted to see how it manages a longer list of contacts. So I figured I could import the  contacts from my Gmail account.

Big mistake. Big. Huge.

It imported the contacts, that’s for sure. But it also, without asking me first, without asking confirmation, without even warning me, sent out an “Thanks for subscribing to my newsletter” email to all the people I had ever contacted on Gmail: ex-boses, ex-girlfriends, business partners, teachers, friends, unknown others.

Shit.

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Title says it all – I’m looking for the best value for price iPhone headphones(that is with volume control and button), preferably ones that are also available in Romanian shops What are your suggestions?

The same way XMas eve is about sending texts and ecards with holiday wishes, the day before any major Apple launch is about making forecasts about what it will be.

Mine are more modest(since I prefer things to exceed my expectations, I keep mine rather low). I don’t know if there will be any retina display. Could be, because the technology exists, but I wouldn’t bet more than a couple of $ on it.

I think that the “We have something you need to see” in the invite was more about Apple TV(as confirmed by rumors about Apple TV shortages in stores). This would be the explanation for the long delay in launching iOS 5.1 – it was supposed to come out in November but obviously got delayed, and I think deep Apple TV integration is the reason. The part about “and touch” in the invite was obviously about iPad, but the lack on emphasis to it would point towards an incremental, rather than revolutionary, update.

So: iOS 5.1, a revolutionary Apple TV that we will actually want to get, and a better iPad that at first sight might disappoint us, just like iPad 2 did before it and iPad 1 before that.

PS. yes, I know, I’m being influenced by Gruber . C’est la vie

Once a year or so, I get the urge to change something  major. You might remember my similar attempts to refresh my blog(s) in the past, so this shouldn’t come as a too big surprise for you:

Here it is:

I am from now on merging my existing blogs into the same one. Let it be “alexbrie.com”. So, from now on (and until the domain registration expires), alexbrie.net and brie.ro will both redirect to alexbrie.com . I might continue to use brie.ro as a url shortener service, but that’s about it.

Also, both blog feeds(http://feeds.feedburner.com/alexbrie and http://feeds.feedburner.com/alexbriecom) will point to the same source; I would actually prefer that you unsubscribed from the later and subscribe to the first one(the one without the com suffix).

Why the change?

I initially started alexbrie.net back in 2004 to continue my blogger.com blog and become my online identity. A couple of years later, domain squatters registered alexbrie.com trying to profit from the incoming google traffic. So, when I got alexbrie.com, I decided to hold onto it and turn it into my programmer’s blog, written in English for my international readers.

Fast forward a couple of years, and I discover that blogging, a daily pleasure a few years back, has become a chore for me. After lots of pondering and self analyzing, I came to the conclusion that one of the reasons for this was the artificial separation between Romanian and English posts, between casual blogging and specialized(programming) one.

Hence the solution you see before you: I am now merging all these into a single blog, just as it should be. Just like @alexbrie has become my main Twitter identity, alexbrie.com will become my online one. I probably should have chosen alexbrie.net for this, but I want the domain name  change to reflect the language change as well:

From now on, I’ll try to only blog in English.

Yep, English. Not because I wouldn’t care for my native tongue, Romanian, but because of my belief that we are all children of the same planet and we should try to use the most popular language to understand each other. Easy as that.

Is this all?

Not exactly. I also intend to change the blogging platform and move away from WordPress. I have been toying with nanoc, a static website generator, in the past half year and would love to start using it instead of the php+mysql WordPress. I want, however, to take a bit of time with it and migrate as many of the previous existing posts to it before making any more radical changes.

Also, I will be blogging a lot more often, and not only programming-related stuff. I will blog about what I like, what I think is interesting and worth visiting on the web, about my opinions(political, technological or personal) and overall turn this blog into what it should had always been: the place for my online scribbles.