30 Days of Geek #7: Preferred smartphone platform. And which do you use?

I’ve decided to partake in Jethro Carr’s 30 Days of Geek challenge, so I’ll be writing a post a day on my geekiness for an entire month! You can find all the posts in one spot here.

My preferred smartphone platform is Windows Mobile (now renamed Windows Phone to avoid the whole ‘Cell phone’ / ‘Mobile phone’ naming debacle). There are a few reasons for my choice (mostly illogical):

  • It’s an open platform. What I mean for this is that anybody can develop an application for the phone without having to prostrate themselves before Steve Jobs. Note that just because you can write an application, doesn’t mean that anybody does, which is slightly disappointing.
  • The operating system doesn’t treat you as if you’re 6. Every setting imaginable is open for the tinkering. Again, doesn’t mean you should.
  • It crashes occasionally, usually while trying to make a call. No computer would be complete without crashing or misbehaving at an inconvenient time.

My old phone was an HTC Touch Pro2, which I reviewed here. It was an awesome phone. At the time I bought it, it had the highest resolution of any mobile out there (as far as I’m aware), a QWERTY keyboard, 3G, WiFi, GPS, basically every feature under the sun. Unfortunately it cost a fair bit, and once I realised I never actually took advantage of all these features, I sold it and bought an entire high-end desktop computer. Which brings me to my current phone…

I currently use a Nokia C5. And what can I say about it? It’s a Nokia. It works, it makes calls and does text messaging, and I can check Facebook if I’m bored on the bus. And that’s what I’ve realised. A mobile phone is still, essentially, a phone. Maybe I’m getting old (I hope not), but maybe it just doesn’t matter so much any more.

30 Days of Geek #6: Primary geek fuel (snacks/drinks)

I’ve decided to partake in Jethro Carr’s 30 Days of Geek challenge, so I’ll be writing a post a day on my geekiness for an entire month! You can find all the posts in one spot here.

My ‘normal’ geek food:

The food and drink I consume in the course of my daily life is much like any normal, healthy adult. I drink tea:

A cup of tea in my NCSS mug!
A cup of tea in my NCSS mug!

The food I eat is whatever happens to be around. I eat quite a few peanut butter and jam (and sometimes brown sugar and sultanas as well) sandwiches. These are good energy food. In another life I probably would have been a pastry chef, so I make quite a lot of these biscuits and other cakes:

Peanut Butter biscuits on a cooling tray.
Peanut Butter & Choc-chip Biscuits

I also eat fruit, but nowhere near as much as I should.

My ‘I need to be awake’ geek food:

When the going gets tough, I get out my twin food addictions: Coca-Cola and chocolate. Specifically, 600mL bottles of Coke and packs of Nestle Crunch that I buy in vending machines at university:

Nestle Crunch (Flickr: wizetux)
Nestle Crunch (Flickr: wizetux)

30 Days of Geek #5: Quick nifty hacks you’re proud of.

I’ve decided to partake in Jethro Carr’s 30 Days of Geek challenge, so I’ll be writing a post a day on my geekiness for an entire month! You can find all the posts in one spot here.

Today’s post is in a very similar vein to yesterday’s post, so I’ll keep it short and sweet:

  • The very short C program that I wrote to remove all the spaces out of one of my teacher’s spreadsheets and turn them into tabs. I think I probably saved her hours of tedium.
  • The script I wrote that stored all my Microsoft product keys within itself. The bash script would accept a search pattern for a product name, and spit out a product key. Much easier than going looking for a physical box.
  • The numerous abuses of iproute2 I’ve made in the last few months, in the quest to make computer networking make sense. My favourite networking hack is this one (in /etc/network/interfaces):

    iface lo:0 inet static
    address 172.24.16.1
    netmask 255.255.255.255

    What it does is add in a second loopback address, not within the 127.0.0.0/8 block. Not original perhaps, but very useful for BGP routing.

30 Days of Geek #4: Greatest application written to date.

I’ve decided to partake in Jethro Carr’s 30 Days of Geek challenge, so I’ll be writing a post a day on my geekiness for an entire month! You can find all the posts in one spot here.

Unfortunately, since I don’t really consider myself a programmer, and I don’t really do any programming, it’s a bit hard for me to say what my greatest application is. I can however tell you of some of the programming achievements I’ve made in my past.

Way back in high school I started out programming using a programming language called BlitzBasic. Over the couple of years I used this language I wrote a number of games, most of them pretty awful. But two games did go somewhere. The first was a side-scrolling platform game I called RollingBall (the main character was a yellow ball). It’s where I first learned about game physics (albeit very primitively) and about how not to write a program (i.e. GOTO = bad). The second was a top-down RPG game in a similar style to the Pokemon games. Although both of these games suffered from a bad case of programmer artwork, they were pretty fun to play (or my deluded variety of fun, anyway).

The greatest achievement I’ve made though was the moment I finally got an operating system kernel that I had written entirely from scratch working on my home computer. It did nothing more than print ‘H’ in the top-left hand corner of the screen… but that’s all it needed to do. Knowing that the code you’ve written is the only code running on a computer system is a pretty awesome feeling.

30 Days of Geek #3: What does your day job involve?

I’ve decided to partake in Jethro Carr’s 30 Days of Geek challenge, so I’ll be writing a post a day on my geekiness for an entire month! You can find all the posts in one spot here.

I’ll answer this question in two different ways.

My “job” is working as a computer technician for a computer shop based in Hobart, Tasmania. I only work on Saturdays (at the moment, it used to be full-time), so that leaves me quite a bit of the week free for other pursuits. My work involves three main parts:

  • Fixing dead computer hardware. 90% of the time it’s a dead power supply, which is an easy fix, but occasionally there are some amazing problems that just shouldn’t happen. And those are a good fun learning experience.
  • Fixing broken Windows installations. 90% of the time it’s a virus, which is an easy fix, but occasionally there are some amazing problems that just shouldn’t happen. And those are a bastard. Most non-Microsoft application developers are stupid and lazy, it seems.
  • Dealing with customers on the phone. This is both the best and worst part of my job.

I’m fairly lucky with my work, in that I get paid to learn. 🙂

The activity that I spend most of my week doing is system administration. I don’t get paid much for this (not yet, anyway), but I’m continually learning and one day I’m going to have 1337-h4x0r skills (no, really). I have the feeling that system administration is where I will probably end up in my career.