1. Air Display – turns your iPad into a secondary monitor.
2. Angry Birds – a fun game, great way to pass time. The other Angry Birds games are also recommended.
3. Calorie Tracker (LiveStrong.com) – tracks calories. I also like FitDay.com (just a web site but excellent and free!)
4. Dragon Dictation – it does a good job, although I don’t use it often. There is a service called Jott that I like much better, but it is now a paid service.
5. DropBox – great for sharing files between computers and people.
6. Evernote – note taking application; notes are shared shared between computers.
7. Find My iPhone – Apple provides a free MobileMe account to find your iDevice – it works, too!
8. Friendly Plus for Facebook – an easy to use Facebook interface.
9. GarageBand – to get your creative juices flowing.
10. GoodReader – a very good PDF reader.
11. Glympse – allows friends/SO to track your whereabouts on a map for a brief period of time (if you have the GPS version). Probably better on the iPhone, but still deserves to be on this list.
12. Google Search – better on the iPhone but features voice-based search and other niceties.
13. Instapaper – mark items to read later and then can read them here. Kind of like a scrapbook.
14. iSSH – my preferred method of command line access to Internet-connected machines.
15. iTap RDP – RDP connectivity to a Windows PC (Remote Desktop).
16. iThoughtsHD – my personal favorite mind-mapping tool on the iPad.
17. KeyNote – for when you want to create and/or display (with a connector) presentations.
18. Kindle – allows you to read your Amazon Kindle content on the iPad.
19. A Monster Ate My Homework – fun, and free, game.
20. NASA App HD – interesting content from NASA.
21. Netflix – a must if you subscribe to the service.
22. NewsRack – my favorite RSS news reader. Simple and clean and easy and fast!
23. Pandora – this is so good I am considering signing up for a paid account.
24. Parallels Mobile – if you run Parallels on a Mac, this gives you access to the virtual machines.
25. Scrabble HD – if you are a scrabble fan than this is a must.
26. Star Walk for iPad – lights up the night sky and provides useful content.
27. Tap Tap Radiation – another fun game.
28. TweetDesk for iPad – very good Twitter application – I prefer it for creating content for multiple systems (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.).
29. Twitter – I’m torn between this app and TweetDesk for access to Twitter. I prefer TweetDeck for posting to multiple accounts and Twitter to read status updates.
30. TWITpad – free audio/video access to lots of great content from Leo Laporte.
31. VNC Viewer – I use this to access my VNC-enabled computers.
32. WeatherBug – my weather application of choice.
33. WeatherStation – a nice display of weather information.
34. WolframAlpha – because it is just cool. Lots of great information in there. Of course, you can always use the free, web version.
35. WordPress – helps to maintain my WordPress blog when I am away from my computer.
36. Zillow Real Estate – satisfies my real estate curiosities.
37. Zite – news “magazine” started with information from your Twitter and/or RSS feeds.

Turns out my son has found something about Angry Birds that I have not seen anyone else find. Most (if not all) people think when you tap the screen while the red bird is airborne, nothing will happen. That is not entirely correct. The red bird makes a sound similar to “peee-kaaaaa!”

The moral is the obvious one – don’t dismiss an idea because of the messenger or because you think you may know better.

Write a routine, in your favorite language or even a mock language, without using an intrinsic function to solve the problem for you, to reverse the contents of a string. The routine should take an input of a string and output a string. For example, if the input is “hello” the output should be “olleh”.

I inform the candidate that it is a simple problem and invite them to talk through their logic as they write their solution on the whiteboard. I let them know it does not have to be syntactically correct; I am more interested in their approach.

It is enlightening, to say the least, to watch interviewees attack this problem. I’ve actually had so many people fail that I’ve been questioned if my “test” was too difficult. I understand there are abnormal pressures in play due to the setting but employees should ultimately perform decently under some pressure.

Silently I watch and listen to the candidate attempt to solve the problem. When the candidate is finished I usually ask, with good reason, are you certain this solution is correct? The response is often a “yes.” This usually gives us ample opportunity to talk about different strategies and try to understand why it was coded in a particular method.

I notice lots of issues that should not occur; for example, the candidate:

• does not understand the chosen language or it’s string libraries.
• has issues with zero-based arrays depending on chosen language.
• overly complicates the approach and never sits back to re-evaluate.
• can not come up with a solution.
• chooses a complicated approach involving math and gets the math wrong.
• uses too many variables.
• writes unnecessary code that essentially does nothing.
• can not validate the output of the routine they wrote correctly.
• writes more than ten lines of code to solve the problem.
• does not know how to swap values in to variables properly.
• … and many more.

I’d appreciate others offering this simple test and sharing your results with me and everyone else. I’d also like to know your thoughts the validity of this test and how you would let the results affect your view of the candidate.

Before reading on to see my solution, try it for yourself. Let me know how you do.

Here is my solution:
static string reverse(string s)
{
string r = "";

for (int i = s.Length - 1; i >= 0; i--)
r += s[i];

return r;
}

Can it be more simple? Let me know?

Being a new father to twins and often pondering the potential cost of education has guided my thoughts on this podcast. We desperately need a shift in the education paradigm; I’m not sure I’ll be able to offer a decent education for my children considering the current college trends. I imagine removing the walls of the learning institutions and replacing them with social networks. And as technology removes the language and distance barriers, social networking can be the driving force behind sharing knowledge – there are so many bright people all over the world.

I also thought about the Borg (Star Trek’s Next Generation version of a highly functional social network) and how a primary goal is to get smarter though collective thinking. Social networking can be used as the medium to add brainpower to solve problems. I would hope in the years to come that the focus of social networking is to share information allowing us all to get smarter.

I’m often seen reverting to a Cygwin prompt (typically in an XTerm Window – another technology that has made a reappearance in the shape of AJAX) to get stuff done. Repeatable. Reusable. Reliable. Command line: It’s the new black. (The last sentence borrowed from the Information Week article).

One of the many benefits I’ve received through marriage to my lovely wife is the opportunity to form an intimate relationship with fabulous people I would most likely not have met otherwise. One such person is Oma – my wife’s grandmother who also is a valued source of inspiration.

Every time I talk with her (thank goodness for Skype and email as she lives in the Netherlands) I am truly amazed and inspired. She is a 96 year old woman who is more active and vibrant that I am at times. In spite of the recent challenges she has had recently, she has remained focused, determined, and passionate about achieving her goals and has been successful. Her powerful examples are truly inspiring and have given me hope: not in the sense that life can be rewarding and invigorating no matter what age, but what is possible to achieve in spite of certain limitations.

Oma is obviously limited by her age but her process works well. She defines the desire, contemplates the process, determines the ability based on current factors and executes successfully, with fallback plans and flexibility. She lives outside the city limits of Amsterdam but regularly goes into the city to attend exhibitions and generally partake of the city life. Today we chatted about her visit to a Turkish exhibit at an old cathedral on the Dam and then she was describing her plans to visit a Sotheby’s Modern Art Charity Auction. Recently (in terms of a few months) she was asked to be in a Dutch TV movie called “Oma and Her Scooter.” (BTW, she doesn’t need one nor any other walking device!)

Oma, you inspire me.