Categories
iPhone app

iPhone backup photo extract and online photo backup

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I learned the “iPhone photo backup lesson” the hard way a few years ago. At the time I was leaving the company (planned exit) and I need to turn in the company iPhone 4s, I did iTunes backup (encrypted, more on this later) on my PC, as well as on iCloud (paid $20 for 10gb extra space, the free one is 5gb). But where do I get the photos back? At the time I did not know there are software to extract photos out of the iTunes backup. So 6 months later, I bought a new iPhone 5s partly to get my photos back (restore the backup from iCloud to the new iPhone). Btw, this approach is a way described in this osxdaily article. A bit pricy option though.

Until today I need to restore some photos from an iPhone 3g backup, and I tried both the picturescue app (Mac only, $10), and the more pricy option of iPhone Backup Extractor ($30 for home, and $70 for Pro). The difference is the former only extract photos, the latter extracts contacts, SMS, etc. Also the Pro version works with the encrypted iTunes backup.

Online photo storage
My last tip is about online storage of photos. In the past I tried iCloud (paid), Dropbox (free), Google photo (15gb limit for free), Amazon (prime membership, for Fire Phone), and last but not least Microsoft OneDrive. I found OneDrive to be good as I got free space (115gb , among them 100gb is Bing bonus expires on 2/9/2017). So in other words Microsoft is consistent with Google on free space (15gb). I also used Google Photo (google drive) for backup on iPhone too (after returning 4s to employer). But on Google I have 17gb free space. Both Goolge and Microsoft offers $2 ($1.99) a month for 100gb extra space. So this comes at $24 a year. Better than Apple iCloud a few years ago. I don’t like iCloud because it’s not as intuitive as Goolge Photo or OneDrive. And I get to see/browse the photos online via desktop. I think I will stick with OneDrive for a while. One trivia on OneDrive, at one time I tried to back up Apple iPhotos files to OneDrive (about 35gb), it did not work out. One reason being the slow network speed. But I think there might be software related issues too.

PS
One may ask why I resort to the iTunes backup for the photos, and why not directly get it out from the phone. Good question. In this particular case, the iPhone 3g w/ iOS 3.1.2 appears too old for Windows 7 and other OS to recognize as a digital camera. I tried 4, 5 computers (2 Macs and 3 PCs) to this phone and none worked. But the iTunes still works with the iPhone, that’s why I backed up the phone via iTunes and tried this route. So in a word, the photos jumped through the following hoop.

iPhone via iTunes back up => Mac picturescue => photos on Mac => USB stick => Windows PC => OneDrive

The USB stick part is optional, as OneDrive app exists on Mac. I did it because my Mac has smaller disk space than PC.

Categories
Shanghai Composite

Chinese stock market, Robinhood trade referral

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Note I have not talked about Chinese stock market for a long time (this is last time I talked, 2007 when I spent 6 months in China). It gets interesting lately because of its big drop and swing. Keep it a bit in perspective, the Chinese stock index Shanghai composite did not do well in last 5 or 10 years, compared to S&P 500 or Neikei. But last year it did very well, then followed by a big drop lately. I think a lot people just looked at the big drop, while forget about the 12 month or 5/10 year chart.

Robinhood, the free trade platform on smartphone, is giving some new invitations . Here is the Link, if you use it to sign up, you get $5 and I will get $5 too. So it’s a win win 🙂

1-year chart (Shanghai Composite vs. Nikkei vs. S&P 500)
SSE_NIKKEI_SNP500_1_year

5-year chart (Shanghai Composite vs. Nikkei vs. S&P 500)
SSE_NIKKEI_SNP_5_years

10-year chart (Shanghai Composite vs. Nikkei vs. S&P 500)
SSE_NIKKEI_SNP500_10_year

Categories
advice and tips finance

Fuel Rewards Network, eBates

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Fuel Rewards Network offers about 1% for shopping online, e.g., I bought $36 worth of clothes from Load and Taylor via their shopping mall, it gave me 10 cent. The calculation goes like this: $36 * 3 / 1000 = $0.108 rounded down to $0.10 which is 10 cent per gallon gas discount. If I buy 10 gallon of gas, that’s $1.00 discount. $1 divide by $36 which comes out by 3%. Note typically shopping mall earning rate is 1 instead of 3, so in the example above, I will earn 3.6 cent per gallon gas discount, instead of 10 cent.

Another example, I shopped at gap via FRN, bought $50 apparel. It gave me 10 cent also (2x earning rate instead of 3x at L&T). This is lower than the gap rebate one can get from ebates right now (typically 2%, now at 8%). I mean 3% or 2% vs. 8%. So the bottom line is we can use this calculation to maximize the cash back (rebate).

Btw, FRN is free to join, and as a minimum it offers 3 cent discount for gas purchase, so in other words about 1% in addition to whatever the credit card offers (in my case, I use Sams Club mastercard or the Pentagon Reward visa, both offer 5% cash/points back).

Back to the topic, I think it’s worth to join FRN since we already spend money on shopping or dining, and those activities adds up to gas savings, in addition to the regular credit card cashback/points we get. Don’t spend to get the points though 🙂

(Update 09-20-15) Other two ways I got discount for gas purchase. I use both Sam’s Club MasterCard and PenFed Rewards visa card, both gives 5% cash (points) back, which is unlike some of those rotational 5% reward cards (e.g., Chase Freedom, Discover Cash Bonus). Sometimes it’s hard to keep track of those quarterly rotational promotion. This is also higher than 3% cashback from Amex Costco Card. PenFed also offers 3% for supermarket and grocery shopping. And Sam’s Club MasterCard offers 3% on restaurant purchase.

Categories
Software development

Work around for Excel lose leading and trailing zeros when importing csv data

Reading Time: < 1 minute

This is from reddit. “…open a blank workbook in excel, then from the Data tab, under the “Get External Data” setting, choose “from text” and point it to your file. This will open the text import wizard. On the first step, choose “delimeted” and then “Next.” On the second, select the checkbox next to “Comma” then click “Next.” Now in the third step, the field should be shown, along with Excel’s best guess as to the data type. You’ll see that your numbered fields are shown as “General.” Click the column containing the numbers and change that field to “text.” Do this for all applicable fields that you want to save leading zeros for, then click “Finish.” (Excel truncates leading zeros if it thinks a field is a number. Leaving it as text will preserve the zeros.)…

My workaround is to stick an apostrophe (tick mark) for the numbers I want to keep the zeros. In other words that essentially make it a text by adding the tick mark.

Categories
iPhone app

iPhone 6 and 6+ models for use in China

Reading Time: < 1 minute

Refer to Apple, and redmondpie.

It’s slightly cheaper to buy iPhone from US and use it in China. The trick is to figure out which one to buy, because not all models can be used smoothly in China. Some of the models are designed towards the US carriers (e.g. the T-mobile version). Here are the recommended models.

Short version
Go for the SIM free version:

iPhone 6 (model A1586)
iPhone 6 Plus (model A1524)

Long version
China has 3 main carrier, China Mobile (biggest), China Unicom and China Telecom. China Mobile has its own standard for 3G/4G implementation (those bands starts with TD), and it’s not compatible with the rest of the world.

Here is more details from redmondpie:

The SIM-free variant of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus is the one which is tailored to be used pretty much anywhere in the world, with compatibility for 4G LTE capable carriers in various nations.

This model also works on China’s advanced TD-LTE and TD-SCDMA networks, so you can rest assured that all the necessary bands are there when you get hold of the device.

The SIM-free iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus may not offer full compatibility with carriers in the United States, therefore you might be restricted to 2G or 3G on some popular networks.

Translation by Google:
请参阅苹果和redmondpie。

这是稍便宜，从美国购买iPhone，并用它在中国。关键是要找出哪些人来买，因为不是所有型号都可以顺利地在中国使用。有些机型都对美国运营商设计的（如T-Mobile的版本）。以下是推荐的机型。

短版
去SIM卡免费版本：

iPhone 6（型号A1586）
iPhone 6加号（型号A1524）

长版
中国有3个主要运营商，中国移动（最大），中国联通和中国电信。中国移动有自己的标准，3G / 4G的实现（这些频段开始TD），它不是与世界其他国家相兼容。

下面是从redmondpie更多详细信息：

在iPhone 6和iPhone 6加的SIM卡免费变种是是专为使用几乎在世界任何地方，用在不同国家的4G LTE能够兼容运营商之一。

这种模式也适用于中国的先进的TD-LTE和TD-SCDMA网络，所以你可以放心，所有必要的乐队在那里，当你弄个设备。

该SIM卡免费iPhone 6和iPhone 6加可能无法提供与美国运营商的完全兼容，因此你可能会限制到2G或3G上一些流行的网络。

Categories
Software development

Sustainable software development II : rewrite and star performer

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Rewrite
Developers usually like new project, sometimes called green field project, in the sense developers have more freedom to create (think of a white paper). In the same token, from time to time people will start a “full rewrite” project as the old project (code base) is “so messed up” and beyond repair. Is that real? A very high profile “rewrite” failure is the Netscape rewrite (see Joel Spolsky’s post here). And recently yours truly was involved in such “rewrite effort” as well. The result is also similar. I think not just developers, some managers also like the “rewrite” as well, due to various reasons. Some are valid, and some are not. Software (if it’s true software) usually lasts longer than people thought. In 2002, I visited my former workplace, a manufacturing place in Shanghai, and surprised to found they are still running my Foxbase/Foxpro based report generator, the the OS is Windows 3.1. At the time I worked on this (1994/1995), it saved 2 accounts, a few days of work (type calculators), each month. I bet they still used it for sometime after 2002, but I really doubt that will last till today, and the printer (Epison pin based) may not find punched hole printing papers 🙂

Star Performer
I thought this problem for a while. I happened to listen to one podcast from “this agile life“, and read this article The surprising danger of being good at your job from yahoo/business insider, both helped me think more about this problem.

I think in software development world, it’s a very common phenomena, like @codinghorror said in this post “two types of progammers“, basically he is saying there 20% of developers are passionate about software development, 80% of them are there to get a pay check. But the star’s power and magic needs to be balanced or controlled, so that the teammates can also thrive and together the team can deliver something truly good.

Another related phenomena, is Lebron James in NBA. A few months ago we witnessed his heroics again. But Cavs did not win eventually. One reason I think is they are one man team. While their opponent Warriors are a real team.

Side note
Last week I received an email from my former boss asking me about a “magic number” I put in the code. I had to admit I messed up 🙂

Categories
advice and tips Fun

Parenting

Reading Time: < 1 minute

From Facebook

Categories
401k and Personal Finance

Some observations of 401k in last 10 years

Reading Time: < 1 minute

New job also means 401k investment election time. Here are my choices. Large cap: value 10%, index 30%, growth 20%, small cap: value 15%, index 15%, growth 15%. All US stocks 🙂

I took a look at my #Siemens 401k 5 year performance, stock funds did better than all other, international stock was weak compared to US 🙁 The good thing is I keep all (98%) in stock funds.

Ideally we should look at 10 year or longer horizon for 401k, so I looked at as well, international stock was weak in last 10 years too 🙁

The reason why international stock did not do well in last 10 years (note by international I mean mostly Japan and Europe), is the economy in both places grew very slowly, much slower than the US rate of about 3%. Japan may have negative growth rate.

Categories
Software development

New job, offense and defense in software world

Reading Time: 3 minutes

I changed job again recently, to be more precise, I made the change at beginning of the month. So today marks the conclusion of first 3 weeks.

I felt fairly good so far, both in terms of environment and the work. It’s a bit different from what I did in last few years, as I engaged more in product support (still software world). I consider this to be more defense type of work, esp. the part of trying to keep application up and running, vs. the development work I did in the past (more like offense). Both are important. Some new tasks include handling customer requests (technical, second or third level if we look it from level of support). We can say this is a bit like defense too, because sometime people literally threw problems or questions at you (or me).

I did give it some thought before making the change. I’ve been doing software development for the most part in last 15 years (first 8 years at Siemens PLM Software formerly UGS or Unigraphics). I’ve done some customer support here or there, mostly when I was with Autodesk. Most recently I was doing development at Mercy. I still like development. But at the same time, at this stage of my career, I like to think about what I am good at and what I like to do more. I think troubleshooting, and problem solving are definitely in my comfort zone. I also need to step out my comfort zone a bit (aka customer support). And I like to learn more on production, operation, devops (the new buzz words, essentially the automation of deployment and production), and last but not least security. So here comes my rationale. I think in some of the places like google, the job is really refined and one thing I am interested is “site reliability engineering“. Another good thing about current place is it’s a decent size company and has some interesting problems: both technical and non-technical. So here comes challenges.

Let’s see how I do as time goes 🙂

PS: I heard about the news about my old company’s incoming layoff. We went through a similar exercise last year when I was there. At that time I was relatively new at the old place. And I was a bit scared. I think this expansion/shrinking is a way of IT life nowadays. Ironically, I got call from a recruiter and she told me the news I already heard. I recall last year some recruiter even sent email to my working account. Just a fact of post linkedIn world. Also another of my old company had a layoff recently too. See my post at uudaddy.

PS2: I think in software development there are also both defense and offense. Maintenance, fix bugs, and refactoring can be considered as defense. New features, bells and whistles can be considered as offense. Both are important as if we don’t refactor, or maintain, soon or later the code or the software will become unmaintainable 🙂

PS3: in the soccer (or football outside of US), we have seen players moved from middle field to defender position as they age. Similar can be said for software work, from development to support, from new development to maintenance.

PS4: did Sony release Play Station 4, really? Just kidding. Another thing I want to say is this transition does not mean “I am no longer a coder”, a more precise description is I will do more diverse things, from coding to anything else related to product support (applications, and customer), whatever it takes. In a fancy term, I will get a more holistic view of application in production. 🙂

Categories
iPhone app

Switch from iPhone 5s to Amazon Fire Phone

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I did a switch from iPhone 5s to Amazon Fire Phone about a week ago. This is not the first time I switched from iPhone to Android (Nexus 4), I did a switch for a few months in Summer 2013. It was ok, but I really missed iPhone for some of the features, and its smoothness. I think I still miss some of the things on iPhone, e.g., the “Cellular” in Settings tells me immediately how much data I used on iPhone. On Fire Phone (android), the UI is not as good. There were some rough edges esp. when switching apps, it slows down or when I tap on something, the response is not immediate sometimes (Safari). But for the most part, for a $80 phone (the price was $179, and Amazon offer a year prime membership there, which costs $99 by itself), I think it’s understandable.

I did get a Fitbit Charge from Microsoft store because Fire Phone does not come with pedometer. I didn’t intend to keep the Lumia Phone, so I sold it on Amazon right away.

By the way, since Amazon released Prime Music Players, I was fascinated by it. Essentially I don’t need Apple iTunes anymore 🙂 The Amazon app store does have some limitation compared to Google Play store, and some popular apps are not there yet, e.g., BoA and weChat apps. I read it’s possible to side load play store apps, but haven’t done so myself. Also, I still have the original iPad mini, so I can still use iOS apps there.

Some of strong points of Fire Phone
1) Large screen compared to iPhone 5s: 4.7″ vs. 4.0″, that’s meaningful.

2) Large storage room too 32 gb vs 16 gb, considering the OS and app sizes, the real usable space for phone/video/podcast is much bigger.

3) The camera is also good.

4) Some fun factor added on Fire Phone (or android), e.g. the daily changing theme (home screen background), for one.

Some migration tips
1) The contacts: I tried to put them on Gmail contacts, it syncs automatically.

2) Prime music: I installed the app (note the pre-installed music app is not Prime music app), and download the songs/album I like to have again.

3) Data usage: there is no way for Fire Phone to control the usage of cellular data per app, which iPhone does. I just turn off and on Cellular Data as time goes.

4) Fitbit: with the Fitbit on hand, the measurements of my steps are more accurate, as I did not carry iPhone 5s all the time. I do wear Fitbit all the time.

Maybe I will write a review for Fitbit charge sometime. The one thing I did (after I learned from Amazon product review) is I bought this fasteners to make sure I don’t lose it.