* $15 for 200MB per month
* $25 for 2GB per month

I checked my usage and I’ve been below 200MB for my 3G data usage in 5 out of the last 6 months.  The one month I went over 200MB (only to about 480MB) was when I was traveling to Florida.

I like the idea of saving a few bucks a month, but I also like the safety net of having the current unlimited plan.  Not that I’ve used it much, but I’ve also installed iProxy so that I can tether my MacBook Pro to my iPhone (wirelessly!) for free.  The built-in tethering would be a lot more convenient, of course, but I cannot fathom why AT&T is charging another $20 for it now that their plans have data caps.  Personally, if they increased the data cap to 4GB with the $20 tethering charge, I’d be all over it.

One nice thing is that if you choose the 200MB plan, AT&T will let you switch to the 2GB plan (for just the month) should you go over your allocation.  You’ll have to do it manually, of course, but that is a much better deal than letting them automatically bill you another $15 for another measly 200MB of data.

But for now, I’ll be sticking with the $30 unlimited plan while I wait and see what changes iPhone OS 4.0 and the next iPhone bring.  I’m expecting the phone to be announced at WWDC next week, but I don’t expect availability until July.  And I’m not eligible for a new phone until December anyway.

As a test of my data usage, for the month of June I’ve disabled wifi on my iPhone and will strictly use 3G.  This won’t be too much of a hardship as the AT&T coverage here in coastal Maine is excellent.  I’m almost always at 5 bars and my data rates are always very good: 2394kbps down, 180kps up.

This ought to give me a good idea of what my high water mark for data consumption will be.

Tables

First, all my tables are named in singular using mixed case. So a table containing all the teams in my kids Little League would be called Team.

Whether you specify it or not, SQLite assigns a rowid column to every table you create. The rowid is a unique ID for each row. I don’t like to rely on rowid, particularly because older versions of SQLite would change the rowid values on tables that had deleted rows when you VACUUMed a database.

So I give all my tables their own artificial key and I call it simply ID. So for the above Team table, it would have its first column defined as:

ID INTEGER PRIMARY KEY AUTOINCREMENT

My columns are always named using mixed case, except for short acronyms (such as ID). So if I add team name and coach name columns they would be called Name and CoachName. I never, ever user the underscore (_) in any of my names.

Views

In my world, views use the same naming convention as tables.

Indexing

For column indexes, I always add Index to the column name (or names). So if I had put an index on the Team.Name column, it’s index would be called NameIndex. If it’s a unique index then I would use UniqueIndex.

Triggers

For table triggers, I use a mixed case name (usually containing a verb) describing what the trigger does.

Foreign Keys

I like all my foreign key values to consist of the table name followed by ID. A player table that has a column to track the team that a player is on would be defined as:

TeamID INTEGER
FOREIGN KEY(TeamID) REFERENCES Team(ID)

This makes it very easy to figure out what the related table is without having to actually look at the table definition. When joining, I will quickly know that Player.TeamID = Team.ID.

Remember that foreign key support is only available in SQLite 3.6.19 or later and you have to issue a Pragma (each time you connect to the database) in order to enable it:

PRAGMA foreign_keys = ON;

Data Types

SQLite doesn’t really use data typing like nearly every other database on the planet. The data types are just there for convenience. And in fact, there are only 4 defined data types: INTEGER, REAL, TEXT, BLOB. That’s it. There’s no DATE or BOOLEAN. SQLite maps unknown type names to one of its “affinities”. This means you could certainly use a type of DATE or BOOLEAN so that you know what to expect in the column and I tend to do that. So the type names that I use are:

• INTEGER
• REAL
• TEXT
• BLOB
• DATE
• DATETIME
• BOOLEAN

SQL Syntax

When writing SQL statements, I always put SQL commands and keywords in all caps. For table and column names, I use their actual mixed case names:

SELECT Name, CoachName FROM Team WHERE Name LIKE '%Bob%';

But I also go one step further and break the line after each significant section:

SELECT Name, CoachName
  FROM Team
 WHERE Name LIKE '%Bob%';

This makes it much easier to back later to modify the command.

Consistency

As with any set of naming standards, it doesn’t much matter what you choose for your standards. What does matter is that you use your standards consistently. Don’t have one table called Team and other called players. Don’t have some columns called CoachName and others called First_Name.

You’ll appreciate it when you look at your code later.

In the years since, we’ve been working with SQLite a lot. Most of our consulting work is creating database applications. And a great many use SQLite as their database.

There are a few SQLite database tools that are available for OS X, but not many that I’ve liked a whole lot. In the past, I’ve primarily used Base and SQLite Manager.

But now, I’m using SQLite Studio, which I’m pleased to announce as our latest product. SQLite Studio is our take on an IDE for SQLite developers. It has tabs, which any good IDE needs to have. More importantly, it allows you to open any number of things at the same time. You can have tabs open for each table in your database if you want. And you can have multiple tabs for any number of SQL Editors. This makes it very fast and easy to jump between whatever it is you are working with.

For this first version of SQLite Studio we followed 37signals Getting Real philosophy of cutting features so that we could ship. We have big plans for additions to SQLite Studio and I suspect you’ll start seeing many of them pretty quickly because we also want the features. After all, we use SQLite Studio on many of our projects.

You can read more about SQLite Studio and download a 15-day trial from here:

http://www.logicalvue.com/products/sqlite-studio/

Getting Real

Rework

Both of these are by 37Signals. I had previously read Getting Real (you can read it free online). I liked its premise and decided I need a hard-copy to keep on my bookshelf. Rework is very similar to Getting Real (some of the short essays are almost exactly the same). But Rework is more focused on business topics and Getting Real is more focused on software design and development. I also recommend you listen to the interview with Jason Fried by the Startup Success Podcat (done by Bob Walsh, friend to all small software businesses)

Linchpin, Seth Godin

I enjoy Seth’s blog but this is the first book of his that I own. I really liked this book a lot. Read it to learn how your “lizard brain” may be hampering you!

Thrive!

Million Dollar Consulting, 4th Edition

Both of these books are by Alan Weiss. I already owned an earlier edition of Million Dollar Consulting and this new edition is well worth it. Alan has a lot of advice and guidelines that I’ve found quite helpful while building my consulting business. Thrive! is a great book that is along the lines of Linchpin: Do something! Ship! Make a difference!

Press Release

SQLite Migrator Web Site

Best Movie: Star Trek

I only saw two movies in the theatre in 2009: Star Trek and Transformers 2 (both in IMAX because I only see IMAX movies in the theatre nowadays). But I did watch lots of movies on DVD (I have Netflix). Out of all of these, my favorite movie of 2009 was Star Trek. I’ve always been a Star Trek fan and this film did a great job of modernizing the classic.

2nd Place: District 9

Best Album: Green Day – 21st Century Breakdown

Eagerly anticipated by many, Green Day didn’t disappoint with their new album. It might even be better than American Idiot.

2nd place: Halestorm

Best Song: Shinedown – Sound of Madness

Shinedown’s Sound of Madness was my best album of 2008. And now their single “Sound of Madness” became my favorite and most played song of 2008.

2nd Place: Green Day – Restless Heart Syndrome

Best TV Show: Lost

This didn’t win in 2008, but I have high hopes that it also wins in 2010. Other contenders include Battlestar Galactica, Dollhouse, Fringe and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

2nd Place: Dollhouse

Best Video Game: Super Mario Galaxy (Wii)

I actually finished the game (by beating Bowser to save the princess), but I haven’t yet finished all the levels.

2nd Place: Zuma’s Revenge

My Best Blog Post: Dead MacBook Pro Displays series

In September, the display on my MacBook Pro died. It turned out to be due to a defective NVIDIA chip, which Apple fixed for free. These series of posts proved quite popular and hopefully helped others who also had the problem.

2nd Place: Installing Windows 7 x64 on a MacBook Pro Using Bootcamp

Best Gadget: iPhone 3GS

I finally became a proud iPhone owner in July. The iPhone 3GS is the coolest gadget I have ever owned, bar none.

Best Book: Prey – Michael Crighton

I decided to read more fiction this year, so over the summer I read every Michael Crichton book, none of which were actually released in 2009 but that’s OK. I still need to read Pirate Latitudes, which was released in the fall.

2nd Place: The Lost Symbol – Dan Brown

Best Restaurant: Famous Dave’s

I love BBQ! Famous Dave’s has now passed Beale Streeet Barbeque as my favorite restaurant.

2nd Place: Wild Willy’s

One friend just bought a netbook because she wanted a small, portable computer to do some light internet surfing, email and general writing. I tried to talk her into a Mac, but even used ones were more than she wanted to spend.

After the iPad announcement, she said “I’m returning my netbook and buying and iPad. It’s exactly what I want.”

Another friend owns a hair salon and was looking to get a laptop to keep in the salon to look up customer info and do slideshows related to “color profiles” (whatever that is). Anyway, she also said “When are these iPads coming out? It’s exactly what I need for the salon!”

Both of these folks already have an iPhone. Anecdotal, for sure. But I think Apple has something big here.

And how did my friends know about the iPad announcement? I didn’t tell them: our local paper put it on the front page the day after it was announced. How’s that for free publicity?

As for me, I had owned an Asus netbook for a while, but after I had my iPhone for about a month I realized that I wasn’t using the netbook any more. So I sold it on Craigslist. Netbooks are popular, not because they are useful mini-laptops, but because they are a cheap and inexpensive way for someone to be able to surf the internet and send email. Sure, a few heavy travelers love them and maybe a few geeks. But I bet dollars to donuts that most netbook sales are to people who have little computer experience. For these people, I suspect that everything they do on their netbook will also be doable on an iPad.

I really liked Dan Moren’s latest iPad article at MacWorld. I think he nailed it. As much as some of us hate to admit, computers are still for too difficult for most people to use. Sure, most people can learn and memorize a few things, but they don’t like it and get confused as soon as something “unexpected” happens. The iPad aims to change that.

Last month, Mac OS X Hints published a hint about using an ExpressCard SSD in a MacBook Pro. Then early this month, Rob Griffiths of Macworld (and the Mac OS X Hints guy) posted both an article and video on how he bought and set one up with his MacBook Pro. The speed improvement seemed pretty impressive, so I ordered one myself (from TigerDirect). Specifically, I ordered the FileMate SolidGo 48GB ExpressCard Ultra SSD.

I usually order tech gear like this from NewEgg, but TigerDirect had a better price ($140 vs. $170) so I thought I’d give them a try. I had no problems with them and it arrived quickly. Unfortunately, it appears that TigerDirect is now out of stock.

The packaging and the ExpressCard itself are quite tiny. I’d never used an ExpressCard before so I’m happy to be able to take advantage of this MacBook Pro feature (at least on my 2008 model).

Setup was simple. I plugged the card in (it sits flush with the case) and partitioned it using Disk Utility using GUID Partition Table. I then popped in my Snow Leopard DVD and started the installer. A short while later, Snow Leopard was up and running and I was able to boot from the ExpressCard. This is amazingly fast!

I then changed by user account to point to the user account on my internal hard drive. You do this by right-clicking on your name in the Accounts preference panel and selecting “Advanced Options” There you change the Home directory value to point to the folder on the internal hard drive. After changing this and rebooting, I could easily access all my documents and settings.

I then reinstalled a few commonly used apps onto the ExpressCard so that they would launch faster. Other apps that I don’t use as often I keep on the internal drive and simply run them from there. I use Overflow to run most of my apps, but I could have just as easily created Aliases on the ExpressCard to the apps on the internal drive.

All in all, I’m quite pleased. The performance is pretty amazing. Apps start in just one bounce, the system boots incredibly fast and overall everything just seems “snappier” to use a Mac cliché.

The Mac itself doesn’t seem to run any hotter (at least according to iStat Menus), but the case does feel a lot hotter, particularly near the upper left corner (around the ESC and F1 keys). This doesn’t affect me since it’s usually just sitting in its stand anyway.

I’ve had no trouble with the MacBook Pro sleeping and in fact it sleeps even faster now since it can write everything to the SSD much faster than the internal HD. This was a pleasant surprise because my MacBook Pro has always been a little finicky when it comes to sleeping.

I don’t generally use the MacBook Pro on battery all that often so I haven’t had a chance to test if battery life is affected at all, not that I would notice.

SSDs are the future of storage and if you have a MacBook Pro with an ExpressCard slot, getting an ExpressCard SSD is a low-cost way to get in on the fun. And it’s a lot easier than installing an expensive 2.5 SSD as a replacement for the internal hard drive.

Snow Leopard comes with new Bootcamp drivers that support 64-bit Windows and adds a new file system driver to allow you to read your OS X files while in Windows. So I decided it was time to upgrade.

I quickly learned that I would need to to a complete reinstall. Microsoft doesn’t let you do an in-place install from a 32-bit version of Windows to a 64-bit version. Understandable. I don’t use the Windows setup for anything mission-critical, so it was not a big deal for me to wipe it.

Unfortunately, I could not get the Windows 7 x64 DVD to boot. After restarting and choosing the Windows DVD at the boot screen, the screen would blank out and just display “Select CD-ROM Boot Type” and refuse to continue.

After a little research I found out that I wasn’t alone and that someone had figured out a fix: the DVD needed to be tweaked a bit to work on the MacBook Pro I have. Apparently this MacBook Pro does not fully support 64-bit Windows. Here are the steps I used (from Sergio McFly’s blog):

(Note that you’ll need to do this from a Windows machine. I did it from a Windows Vista VM in VMware Fusion.)

1. Create 3 folders c:\efi-iso, c:\efi-exe and c:\efi-dvd
2. Download oscdimg.exe and put into c:\efi-exe
3. Unzip the Windows 7 ISO to c:\efi-dvd (7zip works great for this)
4. Open a Command window
5. Type: cd c:\efi-exe
6. Type: oscdimg -n -m -bc:\efi-dvd\boot\etfsboot.com c:\efi-dvd c:\efi-iso\win7×64.iso

You’ll now have a new iso file in c:\efi-iso. Burn this iso to a DVD (I used Toast back in OS X).

This new DVD will boot just fine. From it you can install Windows 7 on your MacBook Pro.

But it doesn’t end there! You’ll want to install the new Snow Leopard drivers, so after everything has finished, insert your Snow Leopard DVD. This is where I ran into another problem. I could not run the Setup. It would tell me that “this model Macintosh does not support 64-bit drivers”.

Again, after a little research, I found the solution. The trick is to run the Snow Leopard Driver installer in compatibility mode:

1. On the BootCamp CD open “Drivers/Apple”
2. Right click on “BootCamp64.msi” -> Properties
3. Go To “Compability” Tab, under “Compability Mode” check the box and select “Previous Versions of Windows”
4. Now doubleclick on the “BootCamp64.msi” and install normally

After doing this, the drivers all installed and everything seems to be working great.

Wednesday night (9/23) the status of my laptop changed from “On hold” to “Repaired”. And to my surprise this morning I saw that it was out on a FedEx truck for delivery to my house. Apple had shipped it overnight from their repair facility in Texas!

Upon opening the laptop, it showed two items as being repaired:

605-1791 Logic Board (No Video)

616-0261 Battery (Runtime Too Short)

I had never noticed that my battery runtime was too short, but then I don’t use the MacBook Pro on battery all that often. Considering it is a $129 part, I’m more than pleased that they replaced it. They certainly didn’t have to. Although not mentioned on the invoice it also looks like they fixed the latch which has been giving me problems ever since I replaced the hard drive.

Although it took 2 full weeks for the repair, it didn’t cost me anything (other than lost time). I have no idea if another computer manufacturer would have covered the NVIDIA chip defect for free, but I’m glad Apple does.

It’s good to have 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo goodness with 6GB RAM back. The original Core Duo CPU is much slower, especially with the tiny 2GB RAM maximum.

Related Posts

Dead MacBook Pro Displays: Update 2

Dead MacBook Pro Displays: An Update

Dead MacBook Pro Displays