Currently I write more JavaScript then anything else and I love it. It’s a crazy language but the possibilities are endless, that is as long as you have a decent set of documentation to use. Usually Google is a great source but most of the time this points you back to W3Schools. While W3S is a great place to start it just doesn’t offer the amount of detail that developers come to expect. Take a look at MSDN or any Java Documentation and then pull up a W3S JavaScript page and prepare to be disappointed.
This week was the 7th and final season premier of Rescue Me on FX. While I didn’t start following the show back in 2004 when it premiered I got hooked after watching just a few episodes (from the 5th season) while channel surfing. I quickly realized that I needed the rest of the back story and added the first 5 seasons to my Amazon wish list and slowly started picking them off. There are many TV show’s out there that I have wasted my time playing catch up just to be let down in the next season but the cast, and writers, of Rescue Me set the bar during season 1 and just kept rasing it.
On one hand you have the crazy, funny, and usually raunchy humor of Dennis Leary who not only stars in the show but writes in a majority of the episodes. While this may turn off some viewers let me be clear, it’s not a hour long showcase of Leary and his comedy. There is a genuinely great story line to this show that has sprinkles of Leary’s standup comedy style all throughout the show.
After watching the season premier I can’t wait to see what they have in store for the viewers in this final season.
Time for another personal project plug. A update to Flashlight finally got approved and published to the Ovi Store. You can see the changes in my GitHub repo but the gist of it I added a power button and the ability to “dim” the screen. Unfortunately there is no way to do a straight update of the app on the phone so if it is installed you need to uninstall it and then re-download it from Ovi Store.
In less then a month in the Ovi Store Flashlight has over 29,000 downloads which really blows my mind considering that those downloads were based off of version 1.0.0 and there was almost no functionality there.
The last shuttle mission launched last Friday and what a shot this was. Photo taken from Robert Scobel’s Flickr Stream
A couple weeks ago BGR posted a letter from a RIM senior level employee. While it was not total shock to see the content it was interesting to see someone within RIM step up and admit they were in trouble. It was not long ago that Stephen Elop, CEO of Nokia, stepped up and admitted that Nokia was on a burning platform and that something had to change. While most people were running away from Nokia the leadership stepped up and came up with a plan to turn the company around. While we can see Nokia’s plan in action no one can see anything but scared executives in the RIM camp.
RIM was the heavyweight in the smartphone business. The only possible competitor’s they had were Palm OS and Windows Mobile, both of which were no where near the quality of BlackBerry OS. But then in 2007 Apple changed the entire smartphone business with the release of the iPhone and since then every other smartphone manufacture and platform has been playing catch up, except for RIM. They seemed to think that the enterprise crowd, which they had locked up for years, would keep their company afloat and just seemed to ignore the consumer market. The one thing that RIM and BlackBerry user’s kept holding on to was BlackBerry Messenger, or BBM, but now with Apple’s iOS5 and it’s iMessage feature it’s just about time for RIM to throw in the towel.
RIM has never been able to match Android in feature set or Apple in product design. Even if they make a killer piece of hardware I can’t see consumer’s leaving their Droid’s or iPhone’s for the RIM platform.