I did it. I moved to San Francisco, and so far the experience has been quite overwhelming in some aspects, while not in so many others. It really helps to know people out here, and I honestly think it was a good thing coming here without having a full-time office job. I have time to explore the city and look for jobs and apartments during the day. The job search is going decently. I was contacted by one company at the end of last week, but it ends up they are looking for someone with more “design” experience. That isn’t me. Even though I have an incredible eye for -good- design, I’m a developer at heart, an engineer if I may. I can develop interesting user-centered admin interfaces, web-applications, or create programing interfaces between a data-source and an application, but I am by no means someone who can design a whole public facing website. I guess I lack the “designer” gene, and I’m cool with that.

The hunt continues. The exploration continues. The experience continues.

Jason and I are still hunting for apartments. Yesterday I looked at one that was simply amazing. Jason will be going with me tonight so that he can see it in person. House hunting is pretty grim here. I couldn’t imagine getting a job offer in the city without already having housing. The company that I mentioned above seemed to be very happy that I was already here in the city. I guess I “one-up” anyone who would need to relocate at this point. Though, working for Apple or Google might be a little different since housing isn’t so rough just south of San Francisco.

Speaking of Apple, I just wanted to let the company know that I’m head-over-heals in love with them. So please don’t ignore my late-night calls, or my loving gaze in your direction. I mean well, I really do.

Last year, each week that a new episode of The Office aired, I would purchase a copy from the iTunes store. Yes, I had cable then, but being a student at the time, it was usually impossible for me to watch the shows when they aired. I could have pirated it, I could have stole it from basically anywhere, but because iTunes was incredibly convenient for me, I purchased the product.

Apple just announced that they will no longer be selling TV shows from NBC through iTunes. This is because NBC requested that episodes be sold at $4.99 instead of the previous $1.99. A simple $1 increase in price may have been acceptable, but a $4 increase is borderline insane.

Is there any other convenient way for me to purchase episodes of my favourite show? None that I am aware of. At least not the most recent episodes. Do I currently have cable? No, and I don’t plan to have cable for the rest of my life. Unless, of course, I start a family and they insist. It is not economically viable for me to pay for cable. I would watch maybe 2 or 3 shows a week, and pay, what, $60/month for it? No way.

I will no longer purchase episodes of The Office, because I can’t. I will get them elsewhere, someone less convenient. And guess who loses? NBC, because they will no longer be getting my money.

Was NBC somehow losing money by selling an electronic product through iTunes? Maybe their research told them they were. But I’m willing to bet that if they look back, $1 from iTunes is greater than $0 from iTunes. They are basically losing a revenue stream. Sounds pretty greedy if you ask me.

Update [9/3/2007]: John Gruber provides an interesting take on the outrageous price that NBC wants to distribute shows via iTunes verses physical box sets. Needless to say, this play on NBC’s part is childish.

Source: Apple.com, Market Watch

Media Temple has been nothing short of wonderful since I signed up for their (dv) dedicated virtual server five months ago. What I love most about the (dv) and MT is that it’s a managed virtual sever that I can do basically whatever I want with (within reason), their super-quck response to low-prority tickets, and –most importantly– the incredible uptime I’ve gotten. By “uptime”, I’m not simply talking about server uptime, but server and network accessibility.

Five months ago, just after setting up my (dv), I signed up with Mon.itor.us, which monitors network and server availability from a remote location. Just today, I received the first ever critical warning that my server was unreachable between 12:16pm and 12:52pm EST. This is good news, as I was starting to think that Mon.itor.us was just a gimmick. I was aware that there would be the possibility of some downtime, thanks to MT sending me a “Scheduled Maintenance” email with a maintenance schedule attached. Since moving to MT, I have had no prior down-time before today [that I am aware of].

I’m in no way affiliated with MT, but do I want to say that these guys are incredible. If you’re looking for an awesome, and incredibly reliable web-host, look no further than Media Temple and their (dv) plans.

This morning while showing someone where I would be living in San Francisco, I realized that Google added a small, yet very useful tool, to their Maps application. Looking at this screenshot you’ll notice there is a new code snippet when you click “Link to this page.” This new bit of HTML allows you to easily embed a map on your website or blog. Clicking, “Customize and preview…” you are given the option to customize the size of the embedded map. I bet the people over at Google are saying to themselves, “why didn’t we think of this before?”

August 16th 2007 will be forever remembered as, “the day Skype went dark.” What happened exactly, and how will Skype prevent something like this from happening again? Considering they cater to –pretty much– a global market, Skype has been an incredibly reliable Voice Over IP (VoIP) service. Skype says, “We are very proud that over the four years of its operation, Skype has provided a technically resilient communications tool to millions of people worldwide.”

What did happen on this day? According to Skype, it actually had to do with the overwhelming number of users rebooting their Windows machines. When this many people rebooted and then tried to login [at the same time], the Skype network was simply overwhelmed with login requests. This flood then “prompted a chain reaction that had a critical impact.”

In the end, I truly believe this issue will only make Skype stronger, better, and more agile in the future. I tip my hat to the awesome people over at Skype for a job well done.

Miguel Carrasco wrote a great article entitled, “Software Development in the Real world: How to Rate a Software Developer.” He has a lot of really good points, and some interesting information in there; I really recommend you read it. However, I do somewhat disagree with one of his bullet points: Point #12, “Dress’s professionally every day”, states that a good software developer always dresses “for success!” He goes on to explain that a “great developer dresses in great business cloths Monday to Friday.” I see exactly where he is coming from, and completely understand what he means by “dressing professionally”. As a developer, there will always be times where you need to dress in a suit or dress pants and a shirt, but I believe that having to wear cloths like this every day can be a drag on your productivity. As a fellow developer, I find it frustrating to sit at a computer, code all day, and wear dress clothes. It’s silly and uncomfortable. Go ahead and try it. Put on some dress cloths and sit at your computer for 8 hours and see how uncomfortable it becomes.

Don’t get me wrong, there are times where developers should “dress for success”, but it doesn’t have to be all-the-time. Your manager should realize this, and a good manager probably will. If you’re not selling a product to someone, what’s the point with being in dress clothes every day? Still not convinced? Read, “Why I don’t Wear a Suit and Can’t Figure Out Why Anyone Does!“

Developers all over the web are obsessing over making their websites leaner than ever. And with good reason, these developers are people who use the web every day, and are becoming tired of slow-moving sites. So lets see what we can do to help improve speed on the client’s end. Continue reading »

A few weeks ago I needed to sort a dictionary in Python, so I did a quick search to see if there was a “right” way to go about this. I came up with a few hits, but none of them seemed to do exactly what I was after. The sort method must be able to sort dictionaries with non-numeric keys and must be able to sort the key/value pair together. So I wrote a simple function that returns the newly sorted dictionary in alphabetic order. See the code after the jump. Continue reading »

For the past week I have been hand coding the CSS and HTML for what you see here. I’m finally happy with what I have. And this time around I can honestly say it’s all my own work. So without further ado, Welcome to the new corykrug.com.

I had a few goals when I started brainstorming for a new layout. First and foremost I wanted to keep it simple. Second it had to focus on text and not graphical design. What else is a blog for, but to publish my words? That’s exactly how I tailored the site itself: around text and readability. Fonts are big enough for you to read without having to put your face up to your monitor. And the layout itself is super simple, which makes your mind focus on the real content of the site. Continue reading »

I’m sure some of you noticed that rogue post title “Sorting Dictionaries in Python.” Yea sorry about that. It seems that Wordpress now takes whatever I type [code, paragraphs, you know, multiple lines of text], and crams it all into one simple paragraph tag. Example: <p>allmyfriggentextarebelongtoyou</p>. Needless to say I’m not too happy about this. If this is some new feature of the latest-and-greatest WP update, I don’t want it. Though, it could be an error on my part. I’ll set some time aside this weekend to figure out what is going on and, at the same time, roll out my new layout.