The Compulsive Coder

I mentioned the other day the impressive power that my Sprint Mogul (aka HTC 6800) puts at my fingertips anytime, anywhere.

This weekend provided a great example: my wife and I enjoyed a short getaway to Kansas City where we stayed at a nice hotel, did some shopping, and ate some great Indian food (don’t open this link if Firefox, it will crash your browser). But whilst walking through Banana Republic, I received an IM via Octrotalk that a server move was underway and that I needed to check in some code.

So I stood right in the middle of Banana Republic, connected to my network via VPN, remoted to my computer, and did a Subversion check-in. I then connected to the server via SSH, updated, and then IMed that everything was ready to go.

Obligatory jab: I couldn’t have done that with an iPhone.

Reality check: the demographic that needs to be able to VPN, SSH, and RDC from a mobile device is tiny. Apple would be foolish to care.

Honest truth: I sorta want an iPhone 3G. Or a Macbook Air. I just want to feel hip and informed, because that’s what owning an Apple does.

I thought that it was pretty cool that I could used my Sprint Mogul superphone as a router by installing PDANet. It brought one-click simplicity to computing whilst traveling while also allowing my to circumvrent Sprint’s silly data charges.

But WMWifiRouter makes my Mogul even cooler! It quite literally makes my Mogul into a wireless router, so any computer close enough to my phone can connect to it just as they would any other wireless network.

Netstumbler indicates I’ve got a range of about 30 feet before the signals pretty much degrades exponentially. However, that’s a heck of a lot better than having use a wire to connect the thing to my laptop, plus now multiple computers can connect.

It’s powerful applications like this that make it easy for me to overlook the shortcomings of Windows Mobile.

So in the last couple of weeks I’ve replaced a) my cellphone and b) my laptop. Trust me, I’m not one for technological gluttony; both devices were purchased almost four years ago.

Naturally they were in various states of disrepair. My phone was held together with yellow duct tape, the antennae was bent at a 90 degree angle, and if it wasn’t handled gently it would pick up its ball and power off.

The laptop wasn’t much better. The plug for the charger was so worn that the machine had to sit on a docking station to charge. The power button was broken so again, it had to be on the docking station. The final straw was when it just randomly quit connecting to the internet. I tried all the usual socket repair stuff, no dice.

I chose an HTC Mogul super phone and went with Sprint. After being an Alltel customer for four years, it had been four years too long. The Mogul is powered by Windows Mobile 6, which is pretty slick OS. They’ve come a long way since my prior PDA, a Windows Mobile 2003 powered iPAQ of some type (can you tell I’m not really that into hardware?).

Why did I not get an iPhone, you ask? Well, aside from the fact that AT&T is roughly three years behind their competition (EDGE? Still? Seriously?) after spending some time getting to know the device, I just wasn’t really that whelmed. Bottom line, it’s a fancy toy. A very shiny, slick, aggressively marketed toy, but a toy all the same.

For the laptop, I chose a Lenovo Z61m. My decision was made largely on the rave reviews that MathNerd (or HumanAbacus or whatever he’s calling himself these days) gave his Thinkpad. It’s a decent machine and was under $1,000. I could give a rip about graphics as I use my powers for money, not games, so I couldn’t even tell you what it has for video. It’s a Core Duo with a GB of RAM and a 120GB hard drive. More than enough for development work.
And it came with Vista Home Ultimate. Or something. I have to admit that I’ve heard quite a bit of bad press about Vista and…IT TOTALLY DESERVES IT!!!

Here’s an equation to help you get what Vista is all about:

XP + pretty new graphics + draconian DRM measures + twice the resource load = Vista

I’m in the process of installing Ubuntu right now. I might keep Vista, but it’s more likely that I’ll load XP Pro and dual boot with Ubuntu.

Aside from the horrid OS, the computer is slick. It has a fingerprint reader, which I figured was a silly “oh, let’s buy that one, it has a neato toy” feature, but it’s actually nice to be able to just swipe my finger to log in to my account. Necessary? Not at all. Convenient? Definitely.