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iPhone GPS Shootout: TomTom vs Navigon vs Roadmate (Update 1/14)

I’m a GPS nut, have been for a long time. Way back in the Palm IIIx era I loved Mapopolis. I’ve gone through 3 or 4 hardware devices and at least three times that in Palm, WinMo, and iPhone apps.

All of the major GPS vendors have launched some sort of iPhone or Android GPS and new names abound (Motion X, Skrobbler, ALK, not to mention Google). For us iPhone users there are a variety of options at a variety of price points. Generally those price points align with two categories of GPS: those that download the maps on the fly as you travel, and those that store all of the map data on the device. The ’store on the device’ kind are more analgous to the standalone GPSes of yore and excel in reliability and speed regardless of signal or data plan. On the other hand the download-as-you-drive kind are generally less feature-full but often have more up to date maps and are less expensive.

Today I’m going to look at the big three maps-on-the-device apps. The download and drive apps are cheap enough that can you can try them out on your own without much pain and if you’re only interested in getting from here to there, the built-in google maps app or turn-by-turn mapquest apps will get you there for free. The map-on-device apps all hover in the $50 range though so picking up all three isn’t much of an option.

The apps in review today are:

TomTom v3.2
Navigon v1.8.2
Roadmate v2.2

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All About The NAS

We have a lot of data. Our picture archives alone takes up almost 100gb and that doesn’t include the photography business’ images. We have just over a terrabyte-and-a-half of movies and tv shows. Backups were a pain, shuffling internal drives and external enclosures was a pain, and sprinkling music, movies, images, and documents across 3 to 5 computers and a dozen shares was a pain. Now, it’s all in one beautiful box.
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UAC Permission Problems in Visual Studio? Try a Restart…

I’m working on software that alters startup modes and starts and stops a bunch of services. Of course, since Vista there’s now all of this UAC ‘are you sure you wanna do that’ prompt crap. In order to get that prompt and the permission that come along with it, the easy method was to to create an application manifest and set the ‘requestedExecutionLevel’ to something higher than ‘asInvoker’. That’s all well and good however during debugging I was getting no prompt and definitely was not getting permission to affect a service or execute WMI calls. Oddly, after a complete machine reboot (not just restarting VS2010), upon entering debug I now get prompted to restart Visual Studio with elevated permissions and everything runs dandy. Still feels like there may be an app.manifest bug or two to be ironed out in VS2010 or Windows 7. Until then, follow standard MS troubleshooting practices; turn it off and back on again.

iPhone 4 + Froyo = End of the Phone Wars

You read it here first. Phones are dead…

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Review: Insanity 60 Day Total Body Training Program

I’m not a little dude (the domain name is sarcastic). I was looking for two things from Insanity; first, I wanted to lose weight. Second, I wanted to improve endurance and speed for hockey and tennis. This 60 day workout was remarkably successful on one account and marginally successful on the other.

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Arcade Cabinet Project (updated 1/20)

Catchy title, I know. Anyway… “It has begun!”

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The Differences Between X++ (Dynamics AX) and C#

A twitter of a forward of an email of a blog post with links to two MSDN articles on the subject of X++ vs C# made it’s way from my computer screen onto the back of my eyeballs this morning. While the read was somewhat interesting it was more of a “here’s some nice things about one of our languages, and here’s a nice thing about another’ type of read. While highlighting the fairly minor syntactical differences between the two may be a valuable exercise to those completely unfamiliar with object oriented programming in general it’s $3 short of useless to the C# programmer ready to get his ERP on or the AX developer dipping his toes in the waters of one of the most popular programming languages on the face of the planet.

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Fitting Non-Dimensional Inventory into Dynamics AX’s Dimensional Inventory Model

In this article I chronicle the business and technical decisions and hurdles encountered in fitting a product that doesn’t fit a finite dimensional model (in this case steel pipe and tube) into Microsoft Dynamics AX’s dimension-driven inventory model. We’ll start off with a quick overview of the Dynamics AX item/dimension model, go into a bit of an overview of pipe and tube manufacturing and stocking and why this material doesn’t fit base AX (or likely any other out-of-the-box ERP) due to a need for ‘variable’ or non-exclusive item dimensions, and finish with the solutions successfully implemented in the marketplace. There will be a mix of business and technical jargon but none of it should be out of reach to a programmer, implementer, or analyst at any level.

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Funny From ./: Toothpick Eye

>> Xcode is free if you’ve got a Mac. Otherwise it costs 1 Macintosh worth of dollars.

>You can develop directly on your windows mobile pda.
>You can also develop for windows mobile pda under linux.

You can remove your appendix using a toothpick sticked into your left eye…

EARLib: Zero Config ORM Tool for php/MySQL

Well, I originally was going to write a php script that examined the mysql database and produced php classes with crud functionality for the tables but then I got to working on it and realized I can go one step further. Why write the classes to file when you can just dynamically load everything at run time (and cache it once it’s loaded). So here it is, an ORM for php/MySQL that requires no configuration (apart from mysql connection information), and provides most of the features of the more heavy-weight ORM libraries. It’s page is here.