March 1st, 2010
I have been a hardcore supporter of Firefox since it was officially release about 5 years ago. I have been using Firefox since 1.0 and every iteration even occasionally stepping off into the beta versions of the product. It used to be a super speedy beast and loaded everything quickly and beautifully. However, version after version Firefox has gained new great features with plugins, faster javascript, etc. I think it’s finally hit its wall. For a while I used Firefox 3.5 with a few occasional crashes on OS X. Finally Firefox 3.6 came out, I welcomed it with open arms with the idea that since its a small point release it must be mainly bug fixes; no more crashes! Oh, how wrong I was.. I experienced at least 5 crashes, reporting each to Mozilla like a good user. That was it, I had finally had enough and it was time to find a new browser.
Google had released Chrome not too much earlier. I saw there was a beta version for OS X so I decided to give it a shot. Anything would be better than crashing 4 times in an hour. At first I was skeptical, with its different layout it was a little intimidating at first. Where was the google search frame that I had become to accustomed to in Firefox? Where were all the plugins? Truth be told, I didn’t really ever use any plugins for Firefox, and I quickly became used to searching within the address bar. Not only does it boot up much faster, but it also has individual processes for each tab. I’ve had Chrome crash on me a couple times throughout the month or so that I have used it, but I was easily able to close out just the tab, re-open it, and continue my internet browsing experience with ease. My favorite thing on Chrome that I know Safari has had for a while was the landing page when you open a new tab. It shows my eight most visited websites and has a list of the most recently closed tabs in case I closed one by accident and want to reopen it.
Now Google has implemented plugins into Chrome and it is still running as a beta on OS X, but I’ve found it to be leaps and bounds better than Firefox in most aspects. Sometimes the address bar in Chrome still isn’t as great as Firefox’s Awesome Bar, but generally it gets the job done. I’m sorry Firefox; we had a great affair, but all good things must come to an end. Maybe if you slim down and put on a new prettier face we can see each other again. Every once in a while when Chrome won’t do the things I want in bed, (NBC Olympics Streaming Video Coverage) I’ll come back to you in a brief moment of need. Until then Chrome is my new default browser.
Tags: browser, chrome, firefox, google, mozilla
Posted in tech | No Comments »
February 23rd, 2010
Well I’ve started to reach out beyond iPhone in my development skill set. In December of last year I started learning how to develop in Android. Now I’m doing research on the Palm Pre and Blackberry. I’m guessing ‘Mobile Development Guru’ will be my next job title.
So far my Android development experience has been a positive one. The initial environment doesn’t give you as much of the pretty as Apple provides out of the box, but it is all very functional. With a little bit of customization you can make things look nicer very quickly. It also is very easily customizable with its use of styles. This is probably my favorite part of Android at the moment. If there was one thing I wish iPhone had; it would be a built in easy style sheet implementation. Having originally come from a Java background, I’ve found Android development has been pretty easy to pick up. In addition, my iPhone development experience has helped me somewhat pick up how to design applications for the Android mobile experience, both architecturally and visually. My only fear with the number of Android devices coming out is that it will fall victim to J2ME’s fate. With all different manufacturers pumping out their own Android brand phone, we can only hope they think of the developers. The pain and agony I felt just trying to get a single J2ME application I developed to run properly on my Razr V3xx alone was enough to drive me away from the platform. Here’s hoping Android continues to improve and be compatible with all phones without any special cases to look out for.
My research into Palm Pre and Blackberry apps is still young, but I’ll be sure to talk more about my experiences with these SDKs in the future. For now, I’ll just mention that I wish the Blackberry SDK has a Mac OSX version supported. There are a few open source work arounds, but if one stumbles upon issues in those there is a lack of support. My office is predominately an Apple company with everyone running on OSX minus a few outdated Windows laptops; so it makes it a little tougher for me to get started.
Lots of fun work in the pipeline, I’ll announce it on here as it is released.
Tags: android, blackberry, development, iphone, palm pre, sdk
Posted in tech | No Comments »
January 2nd, 2010
The year 2009 involved lots of memorable times with friends and family, some of those times involved a nice bottle of vino. Here I’d like to note some of the most memorable wines/wineries.
Nalle
I went wine tasting with one of my buddies about 2 months back. It was a pick-up trip for him stopping by all the wineries he belonged to. For our last winery of the day, my friend Nic took me to Nalle. We walked into a small barn where it looked like all the production occurred. Nic was a pretty big fan of these guys. We were able to meet the head wine makers and he even signed a couple bottles and sent us off with a poster. I’m sure Nic probably has this hanging in his cellar somewhere. Great wine, great people. We both ended up leaving this winery with multiple bottles of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. Both wines were very easy to drink and tasted great. You could easily drink a bottle with a friend and wonder where it went.
Robert Young
I was fortunate enough to do a one for one trade with a friend of mine’s father. I traded him one of my Nalles for the 2006 Alexander Valley Private Reserve Chardonnay. I shared it with a couple friends and enjoyed it thoroughly. I find this is one of those wines that packs some punch once you first pour it, even whites need a little time breath. Lots of good oak and malolactic on this particular wine, which I am known for loving in my Chardonnays. Definitely worth trying if you are a Chardonnay fanatic, but it’ll be a bit pricey (usually retails for $50) and will be hard to find as they only made 2 barrels.
Benziger / Imagery
Let it be known this family makes some amazing wine. Benziger follows the typical Napa/Sonoma big Pinots / Cabs / Chard line of wines you see all over the Northern California wine country, a few organic/biodynamic. All are wonderful wines and recommend doing a Pinot tasting if you ever make it out to the winery. Joe Benziger decided to branch out and make wine that wasn’t as prominent in Sonoma. Imagery pushes out White Burgundy, Viognier, Malbec, Tempranillo, Sangiovese among many many others. The big push is that each bottle and vintage carries its own signature piece of art. Each piece contains a likeness of the Parthenon replica on the Benziger Estate. If you sign up for one wine club, the other winery will take good care of you as well, and you’ll have a hard time convincing yourself not to be a member at both.
J. Lohr
J. Lohr is a Paso Robles based winery. I was able to visit this winery earlier last year going out on a wine trip amongst friends. However, I’m recommending this winery because you are more likely to find this brand in stores (see BevMo!) in the California area. Most of the wines are above average, but I felt the newly released 2007 Chardonnay really shined. It should be reasonably priced at about 15-20 bucks a bottle.
Tags: 2009, benziger, imagery, j. lohr, nalle, robert young, wine
Posted in wine | No Comments »
December 22nd, 2009
In my spare time I’ve taken up DJing. I’m primarily interested in mixing Trance at the moment, but I’ve played around with some other types of music as well. I found myself playing with a few demo versions of different types of software, but it all felt too controlled. It all sounded and worked great, but I felt like I was cheating. I knew I wouldn’t find myself into the vinyl scene as it’s very expensive to acquire turntables all the music I would want. Instead I opted to check out the CDJs from Pioneer. I ended up getting a great deal on a set of CDJ-800 MKIIs. Although at first one of the decks was busted and I had to return it. In addition to my decks I’m running a Numark DXM09 Mixer with a pair of classic Sony MDR-7506 Headphones. I had contemplated getting the cheaper MKI, but in the end I decided the MP3 capability with the MKIIs was a must.
CDJ-800 MKII
The setup is very cool and I find myself playing with them a good bit, but I’m finding I still need to practice more to get all the transitions down. I’m also discovering I need to know all the songs in my set very well in order to setup all my cue points and make everything sound awesome. Not sure if its a good thing or a bad thing (my wallet!), but I find myself spending a lot of time at Beatport checking out the latest tunes lately. I spend the most time there after taking a listen to my two favorite trance shows, A State of Trance with Armin Van Buuren and Trance Around the World with Above and Beyond. I’m having a good time with them and I am pleased with my purchase. Don’t expect to see me in any clubs anytime soon, it’s just for fun at home. On a side note, if anyone is planning on attending the upcoming Winter Music Conference in Miami please let me know. I’ll be around and would love to hear about other people’s experiences for a later write-up.
Tags: cdj800, dj, mixing, music, pioneer, trance
Posted in music | No Comments »
December 16th, 2009
I was planning on staggering my updates over the next few weeks, but I figured I would try and get this article out in time for the holidays. The wonderful fellows over at Crushpad have recently launched Brixr. Brixr is a great new innovative product from Crushpad that brings wine tasting to you. They ship you a box with 4 50ml vials that you use for tastings. In addition, they have videos with wine connoisseurs posted for people to taste along with.
While the whole idea of tasting along with someone online was originally brought to my attention by Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV, Brixr brings it to a whole new level with the advanced web technologies on their site. As you go through the videos the web site will follow along with it, highlighting each wine so you know exactly where you are in the tasting. Each wine listed on the side also features additional details that open/close with ease. On the way you can add bottles to your order when you find a wine you like. The web site is still in beta, but a cool feature I’d like to see in the future would be a text box somewhere for each bottle that I can make my own tasting notes.
The main reason for making this post early is that the cutoff for arrival by Christmas is this Saturday at midnight. The tasting kits make wonderful gifts, and you can even purchase a bottle in the form of a coupon along with it. They can taste the wine, choose the bottle they enjoyed the most and order it directly from the site. I think the future for this product is very bright and look forward to more wine offerings from different wineries from around the country. Gary V, if you’re listening, jump on with these guys in future if you aren’t on board already!
Links: Brixr
Tags: brixr, Christmas, crushpad, Gary V, gifts, tiny bottles, wine, wine library tv
Posted in wine | No Comments »
December 14th, 2009
Since my return from Argentina I’ve been overrun with various projects I’ve been working on in my spare time in addition to my full-time job. I began working at mFoundry in March of this year as an iPhone developer. mFoundry produces a lot of financial applications including mobile banking and gift card applications. Now that my general life load has lightened a bit my attention was drawn to my abandoned blog. So now I’m taking a shot at jump starting and bringing it back to life. I’ll be highlighting different things that I’ve taken an interest in the past year over a series of posts, each concentrating on a different topic. My first topic will be regarding the Starbucks Mobile Card Application!
Starbucks Mobile Card
This project as a great learning experience for me. I developed iPhone client side of the application. I was given an initial design and went to town on getting it implemented. There were quite a few redesigns in the process of getting it put together in addition to some API changes that needed to be made on the Starbucks side in the process. I ran into some design issues having to work around Apple’s UIKit limitations in order to get the results that I wanted for some rounded corners among other things. I won’t go into too many details, but I may post topics in the future regarding development road blocks and how I got around them in the future. However those posts will be limited to side projects I’m working on in order to protect company IP. All in all, I consider this particular application to be the most fun (albeit tough) project I’ve worked on to date.
In September, mFoundry and Starbucks officially launched the Starbucks Mobile Card Application. There was a lot of buzz coming from it’s release. A lot of people were enjoying using it, and it was a bit of fun to check out the blogs too. I even got some really excited looks from some old friends in USF’s computer science dept. when I told them I helped create it.
You can find more information and a link to the app at the Starbucks website.
You can also read about the app making #1 on the BTN Top 10 Companies and Technologies of 2009.
Tags: iphone, jumpstart, mfoundry, starbucks
Posted in tech | No Comments »
January 13th, 2009
Currently I’m down in Argentina for the month of January. The first thing I did when I came down here was shoot straight for the wine store and buy a couple Malbecs. If you’re looking to expand your palate and try a bunch of different wines for fairly cheap, Argentina is a great place to start. Argentina is even a great place for new comers to wine to explore and begin to find what they like. That being said, you may not find the cheapest 90+ point wines down here as you might expect, but you will be getting 80+ wines for under 20 pesos (~6 USD) each.
Argentina is the home of the Torrontés grape. While it can also be found in Chile and Spain, Argentina is the largest grower and user of the grape for wines. This wine in particular is great for new comers because it is light and usually a bit sweeter. So if you are introducing someone to wine for the first time, this should be a good wine to start with.
Since I’ve been down in Argentina I’ve had the opportunity to try 4 of the Torrontés wines for a mere 32.5 pesos (~10 USD). Below I’ll give you the list of wines I’ve tried and a little heads up on what to expect from each of them, but keep in mind different people have different palates. Dan, my partner in crime down here often differs with my opinions.
- Reservado 2008 – 8 pesos (~2.5 USD) – This wine was very simple and didn’t do anything amazing for me, but was enjoyable. The nose was sweet, crisp, and reminded me of a very tart apple sauce. The mouth was totally a box of tiny tarts just poured into my mouth. I haven’t had them since I was a kid, but I very distinctly remember that taste when my grandma bought me some in a plastic case at Disney World. It manages to stay light while giving lots of flavor. I feel like this wine would go well with some shrimp. It’s a bit tart for my taste, but perhaps some of you out there like that. 80.
- Colon 2007 – 10 pesos (~3 USD) – This wine was if anything extremely interesting. The color was a very rich for a white wine. I would almost want to describe it as a light amber. The nose was unlike anything I had ever really had before. If you just brisked your nose past the glass, you got freshly sliced apples. If you were near the top of the glass you got a baked apple pie coming from a freshly cleaned oven. Once you stuck your nose straight in it, carpet cleaner! Now after letting it breathe for a bit, it kept the same nose on top, but sticking your nose in got you some interesting tropical fruits. The taste on this was very interesting. My friend Dan absolutely couldn’t stand it. I was intrigued, for some reason I couldn’t stop smelling and drinking this wine if for nothing other than the fact that I wanted to understand how they made it. The taste itself wasn’t all that great. It reminded me a bit of papaya. Drinking it, it coated my tongue like it was wrapping it up in a silk blanket. An interested mouth feel for sure. While I’m not sure I’d pick this up again, I’ll give this wine an 81 for keeping me interested.
- Santa Julia 2008 – 14.5 pesos (~4.25 USD) – This nose was quite tight. For taste, it has a slow entrance and doesn’t come on too strong, but slowly grasps your tongue as it comes up to the mid palate. The finish lasts after the wine leaves your mouth, but doesn’t linger on for too long. Unfortunately as far as describing the flavor I can’t give you much else other than just straight citrus. 80
- Quara 2007 – 13 pesos (~4 USD) – I think these guys have a cool label. It has a little llama right on the label, but we can’t judge wines by their covers. The color isn’t much of anything worth note. The nose initially was very tight and never really opened up. The overall mouth feel was okay. It has kick right up front, then it starts to settle on your palate and tighten up a little bit. For the finish it slowly runs off your as if it were rolling down your throat trailing the rest of the wine you just drank. The end hits you with a little bit of alcohol. If you like your white wine room temperature I have a feeling this will finish a little hot for you. Overall though I feel like this wine lacks flavor. With a wine such as the Torrontés, known for its higher sugars, I feel like there should be more flavor on this. This wine is tarter than the Reservado, too tart for the level of sweetness present leaving it unbalanced. I wanted this wine to be more than what is was but unfortunately I think I’ll have to leave this wine at 75.
Perhaps there are some other wines out there that do the Torrontès better justice, but we only spent 10 dollars try 4 wines. For those of you looking to learn more about Torrontès, I highly recommend checking Gary Vaynerchuk’s Wine Library TV show on Torrontès here.
Tags: argentina, torrontes, wine
Posted in wine | 1 Comment »
January 11th, 2009
Hi I’m Matt Ketterer! I’m glad you were able to stumble upon my blog. Hopefully I can provide some useful information to you in whatever way possible. Most of what I blog about here will probably revolve around one of a few things: Development, Applications, Music, or Wine. I hope you enjoy and find useful the content I provide!
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
