I have been hard at work for a number of months now on a new project, Paw Apps. This is a company started by my brother, Tyler, and I to get into the App market. Right now we are hard at work developing our first app which will hopefully be released sometime in September.
There won’t be too many posts on here, my personal blog, regarding announcements for the company, we have a separate blog over on http://www.pawapps.com for that. This is just a quick note out to let the great Internet know what I’ve been up to lately. Obviously you can see that in the past year or so the regularity of posts on pwlk.net has drastically decreased. It’s ok though. I have no plans of stopping this blog, but for the time being, most of my efforts are being spent elsewhere.
So check out http://www.pawapps.com for all the latest and greatest from Paw Apps LLC. Look forward to seeing you there!
Now I am no expert in leadership. My leadership journey, specifically as an Officer in the US Navy is really just at its beginnings. But one thing that I have to keep reminding myself of, sometimes daily, is that there is no one key, no cookie cutter example of the perfect leader.
Today, I attended the Change of Command and retirement ceremony for my Commanding Officer, a Captain that has honorably served in the US Navy for 26 years. He is retiring with a long list of achievements and accomplishments. My new Commanding Officer, a Captain that has served in the US Navy for 23 years has a very different personality than the departing CO, and naturally, a very different leadership style. But you know what? That’s ok.
So often, I find myself trying to fit the mold I see of other Officers. This never works completely, though. It is because I am different. My personality, my life experiences, my whole self… is different. But, lucky for me there is a difference between the quality of leadership and personality type. Just because two people have similar personalities does not mean that their ability to lead is the same. But this common sense fact seems to escape me a lot when I look at someone I would consider a quality Navy (or Military in general) Officer and see how different we are.
“Wow, his Sailors really respect him.” or…
“Look at the way she is able to interact with her Sailors, very friendly but professional.” or…
“Those Sailors are really doing their best to help their Division Officer succeed.”
I see a situation like that and then feel lost at how I can earn that same respect with the Sailors I lead because I am not as outgoing as her or I am not as intelligent as him. But that mindset is wrong! I have to remind myself (and this is the point to this post if you haven’t already figured it out) that sure I can and should learn from the example of other leaders, I should learn the good and the bad, but learning from and emulating is completely different.
If you completely emulate someone else you are being fake and you really can’t be fake with your Sailors. They are too smart for that. But just like my new Skipper told the Wardroom today (and I loosely quote), “Sure they have to salute you, but they don’t have to like it. They should be proud to call you their Division Officer or Department Head.” While the Captain was stating this with reference to Integrity, it is really a statement that can be taken into all aspects of leadership. A salute is really just a courtesy. A monkey can salute and there wouldn’t be any meaning behind it. Restating what the Captain was saying is that as a Navy Officer you should aim to make that salute go beyond a courtesy and to be a sign of respect.
Bringing this back to the original point of leadership styles, my take away from not just today, but from watching other Officers successfully lead Sailors every day is making sure your Sailors know that you are really there as a Navy Officer for only one reason, them. It really doesn’t matter who the leader is, whether they are boisterous or bashful, giving respect is the best way to receive it. We could argue the details, but it really comes down to the phrase that every Navy Officer hears over and over and over again…
“Take care of your Sailors and they will take care of you.”
Should be simple, right? Well I just made a cookie cutter statement about how to lead. How you go about taking care of your Sailors is the part specific to you and your personality. And yes, we just made full circle…
Congrats to the outgoing CO and welcome to the new CO. Let the journey continue!
Upgrading to OS X Lion has been an awful experience. So many things have gone against the phrase I have always used in reference to Apple, “It just works!”
I wanted to put together a quick post of issues I have had with the update and the way the issues have been fixed in case anyone else is getting the same headaches that I’ve been getting.
First, I do believe it is relevant to give some details on my MacBook because it is getting up there in age … I guess. Things are starting to slow down. No comparison to the days of having to reformat Windows at least once a year, but things are starting to slow down.
13-inch Late 2007 Processor 2.2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Memory 2 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM Graphics Intel GMA X3100 144 MB Software Mac OS X Lion 10.7 (11A511)
Desktop Freezes after logging in
I downloaded Lion from the app store just fine, ran the installer just fine, it took about an hour for the full install. Upon reboot, I log in at the fancy new login screen and my Desktop shows just fine. But that’s it… I quickly realize the seconds on my clock are no longer ticking and I can’t click on anything. The cursor still moves around, but nothing is responsive. Strange… I rebooted. Same issue. I do some searches online and come up with nothing. It is about 11pm so calling Apple support is not an option at this point in the evening. Finally I decide why not and reboot again. Magic of all magic it works! I know this isn’t the fix you were hoping to hear … but I have rebooted a few times since and I have not had the issue with the frozen Desktop since.
Installing Xcode
This really rubbed me the wrong way. They released Xcode 4 for Snow Leopard and charge $5 for it. Then when Lion comes out they just open it up for anyone to download for free? What?!?! I’m all for free, but what the heck, Apple? Why charge $5 if you are just going to open it up for free a few months later? Ugh…
Anyways… So I try and run Xcode as one of the first things after installing Lion and get that message about needing to update Xcode because my current version is not compatible with Lion. Ok, fine … where is the update? Maybe it should have been intuitive that the new Xcode was a new app in the App Store, but since I already bought Xcode from the App Store I would have thought that it would have updated in app or at least been in the updated apps section of the App Store. But neither was the case. I did find it in the App Store as a brand new app and started the download. I then kicked off the installation and got the “To continue installation please quit: iTunes”. I had seen this issue in the ratings of Xcode and wasn’t too surprised when I saw it popped up. So I went into Activity monitor and killed the iTunes Helper process. Nothing changed. I had left the install to work overnight so who knows how many hours it had been sitting on the quit iTunes prompt, so I decided to kill the installer and reboot. I re-kicked the Xcode installation again (#2) and went about my business. I made it all the way to “waiting for other installations to complete” and got stuck again…
Well, thanks to an article on TUAW, I deleted the lock file and rebooted:
First, hop into Terminal and change directories over to /private/var/db/mds/system. Then remove the mds.install.lock file (you’ll need to sudo rm, so be prepared to authenticate as root). Finally, reboot your system (sudo reboot).
I thought that the install had completed and tried to launch Xcode but was greeted with this popup:
When will it stop?!?!?!
Ok, fine. I re-kicked of the Xcode installation again (#3). Keep in mind that this installation is not a short process… it keeps dying at the end.
This time around I have made it all the way to the Updating Files… screen and it has been sitting there the entire time I’ve been writing this post. I was hoping it would complete so I could finish off this post with a happy ending, but it doesn’t look like it is going to be the case.
I’m very frustrated with this entire process. I haven’t spent much time in Lion yet, but I am yet to see anything on the surface that is a real big improvement over Snow Leopard. If anything, the computer is slower and choppier. Maybe I’m just in a bad Apple mood right now, but I don’t see why so many issues have come to light. If it has to do with my late 2007 MacBook … well that is a shame and rather unnacceptable. Ok, I’ll give my end rant tag </rant> and get back to work at trying to figure out what the heck is happening to my computer.
Best of luck in your upgrade to “the world’s most advanced desktop operating system” … eh
*Update: Xcode problem solved
I did a big no no in the world of problem solving. I consciously changed more than just one variable and then repeated the test, so I really am not completely sure which was the cause, but they might even be related.
There is a pdf /Developer/About Xcode.pdf that I opened up and started reading to see if any helpful hints could be found. It mentioned that the entire /Developer directory was created with an Xcode install. So I decided to rename the current /Developer directory and give it another go, hopefully starting from fresh.
But I also…
I also decided to look more into the previously mentioned TUAW tip and tried it again. I removed the lock, but this time after rebooting the OS, I checked to make sure that the lock file was still gone. To my surprise it was not! mds.install.lock had been retouched at a timestamp of when the computer was restarted. I don’t know exactly what mds does, and someone please correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe it deals with indexing in Spotlight. And I did notice that spotlight was still indexing (pulsing dot in the magnifying glass or click the magnifying glass to see the status). I decided to wait until Spotlight was done indexing before kicking off the Xcode installation once again. I didn’t have to way all too long. When the indexing was complete I checked for the .lock and it was still there. I did a quick remove but this time did not reboot. I went straight into Xcode installation (#4).
Slow slow slow … but eventually, I heard the nice tone that for some reason Apple decided to double as installation complete and iPhone message tone. Installation complete!
What I took away from this process was that Xcode installation is finicky. And the best way to go about it is with a clean slate. Reboot your machine right before attempting to install. Make sure no other applications are running while you try and install. And if something does go wrong… try and wipe everything (sudo mv /Developer /Developer-old). Thankfully, that seemed to work for me. Yay for getting back to code!
Today my computer was running hot all day, fans buzzing wildly. Honestly I didn’t think too much of it since I was working with the iPhone simulator and just assumed that that was the cause.
After taking some time off to play with the dog, I came back to it still buzzing loudly. I checked my iStat Menu to see what processes were taking up the most resources and saw ‘cupsd’. Google told me it was related to my printer. But I couldn’t kill the process for the life of me. I tried killall, kill -9, and the activity monitor. Nothing.
In activity monitor I saw another process Inkjet9 that was taking up even more resources. And there were two of them! Google didn’t have anything to say about Inkjet9. I couldn’t killall or kill -9 this one because it didn’t show up in my ps -A. I was able to kill it in Activity monitor, but it just respawned. And to top it off, restarting my computer didn’t help either.
Uh oh … I’ve been hacked. At least that’s what my initial thought was.
What I did find with my ps -A was a few print jobs that I had sent off this morning to my wireless HP printer. Yup, and they had never printed. I was able to kill all the specific print job related tasks and that took care of the rest of the runaway processes.
It is a good thing my aging laptop didn’t fry after running hot for some 8 hours. Eh, then I could’ve bought a new one… hah.
Anyway. Since nothing showed up for my Google on Inkjet9, I wanted to write a little post incase someone else had the same random problem I did. It makes me scratch my head why Inkjet9 showed up in iStat Menu and Activity Monitor but not in ps -A. I have no idea.
I spend a lot of time thinking about the perfect app. I haven’t come up with the answer to the perfect app, but I have decided on some key criteria that the perfect app must possess.
The perfect app must…
Be social. I go back and forth on whether the social aspect of the app is mandatory for the user or not. Either way has it’s benefits. When dial up started to disappear, the thing on everyone’s minds was constant connectivity. People didn’t want to wait for beeps and blurps to hear they have mail, they wanted to open up the computer and be ready to go. That happened and the world is better because of it. Now the transition is towards smart phones where the constant connectivity extends to instant constant connectivity. Instead of opening up the computer and being ready to go, now these wonderful things called notifications let you know when things are happening. And with this instant constant connectivity, people want to stay up to date with what their virtual and real world friends are doing. Even if the social aspect of the app is not person to person, but instead analytics of all users of the app, people want to be a part of something larger than themselves.
Be fast. This one should be pretty obvious. The app needs to be fast, speedy, and be done loading before you open it is even open. Simple? eh… The best example I have of an awesome app gone askew because of load times is Smule’s Magic Piano. I love this app. I would recommend it to anyone. But the load times are terrible. Just to load the app, you sit staring at their splash screen for a while. Then to load the song list you have to sit and wait for not only the song names to show up, but also your account balance to show up. In order to play a single song, there are three separate wait times. There has been a number of times I wanted to play a quick song but decided against it because I knew I’d have to wait for the app to load.
Be quick. This piggy backs on being fast. When I say be quick I am talking about the whole user experience from loading the app to closing the app. Load screens on being fast are only a part of being quick. If I take my seat in a class, a meeting, the bathroom … wherever … I should be able to do something with the perfect app. If I have 30 seconds or 30 minutes, the app should be available for a complete and full experience in that amount of time. Now this is rather dependent on the content of the app. There are some apps where this might be difficult. A first persion shooter with long levels would be difficult to have a player get in and start destroying aliens for only 30 seconds. But this is where the developer needs to get creative and offer short levels or some mini game that would be fun being played multiple times through and can be completed very quickly. If it is a board game, the user should be able to take a turn quickly. If it is a shopping app, the user should be able to look up and item and save it for later viewing. A user that is familiar with the app should be able to start loading, use the content, and close the app within 30 seconds, one minute tops.
Be fresh. The content in the perfect app must be constantly updated. This is easy for social networking apps where the entire purpose is to see new content that is updated by your friends. But for games or shopping apps, there must be new content to keep the experienced user interested.
Be addictive. Easier said than done, right? The previous four notes tie into being addictive quite a bit. The whole addictive factor means that the user has a positive experience with the mechanics of the app and they enjoy the content. The perfect app must be addictive. When a person gets on the bus for a trip downtown, they are going to pull out their phone and the first app they think of must be yours, the perfect app.
I really don’t think there is just one perfect app, either. I look at the iOS apps that I enjoy and sure they have their similar traits that I discussed above, but their content is completely different. The keys is just finding the right balance between everything. Be available when your user wants it, but don’t be too intrusive. Have content that your user finds interesting but don’t flood them with too many new things at once.
I’ll leave you with a list of apps that I consider extremely well done, some of which I have used for a very long time, some of which are new to my arsenal. Thanks for reading.
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