...more recent posts
New Apple Powerbooks released today. Still G4. Very small bump in processor speed (to 1.5 and 1.67 Ghz.) 512 megs RAM now standard using 1 DIMM, so going to 1 Gig is only $150 more from Apple (probably a little less if you buy yourself.) It's about time they stopped with the 256 meg nonesense. Slightly faster hard drives (5400 RPM.) And slightly bigger video card with the option of adding a 128 meg ATI with dual-link DVI support for driving the 30 inch Cinema Display (I can dream!)
The trackpad now supports scrolling (horizontal and vertical) through an interesting sounding interface - touch the pad with two fingers at once and it then acts as a scroll wheel type surface (drag up and down and the page moves up and down.)
Nothing to get too excited about, but lots of nice little things and the prices drop a bit too.
Looks like Cingular, following in Verizon's footsteps, will also disable the Bluetooth DUN profile on the Treo 650. (DUN stands for 'Dial Up Networking' and is the part of the bluetooth stack that lets a bluetooth equipped computer use a bluetooth cellphone as a modem.) Jerks. Why not just charge by the bit and let us do what we want?
Again, I don't mind paying! But at least offer me what I want to pay for. Do they not like profits? We are talking about telecoms, so judging by their recent performance the answer might actually be yes.
The Motorola E815 looks really nice. Due 2nd quarter 2005. Presumably on Verizon since it's EV-DO. But will they (Verizon) let the bluetooth do file transfer? And what about (even less likely,) acting as a modem? With EV-DO speeds this would be very reasonable. So far Verizon wants you to buy the PC Card version if you want to use EV-DO for your computer's data connection. This is silly. Look, I don't mind paying more, so why not give me the option of using my phone for both? I don't want to pay $x/month for my EV-DO phone plus $100/month for my EV-DO data access, especially when I don't need voice and data at the same time (I barely need voice at all.) Why not offer a single package in the form of a cellphone/modem?
Still, until Cingular rolls out UMTS, Verizon is the only way to go for high speed cellular in the U.S. So I guess they can be jerks if they want.
Jerks.
John Perry Barlow's The Intimate Planet is a funny blog about meeting random people through Skype.
The bottom line is this: they reached at random out into the Datacloud and found a real friend. And I feel like I have been graced with a real friend in both of them. Given the fact that I've been getting interesting messages from distant strangers since 1985, why do I think the big deal? Why is this different? Because these strangers have voices. There's a lot more emotional bandwidth in the human voice. I'm always surprised by the Meatspace version of someone I've only encountered in ASCII. I'm rarely surprised by someone I've only met on the phone. But one doesn't get random phone calls from Viet Nam or China, or at least one never could before.Skype changes all that. Now anybody can talk to anybody, anywhere. At zero cost. This changes everything. When we can talk, really talk, to one another, we can connect at the heart.His use of the word "intimate" reminds me of Joi Ito's formulation: "full time intimate community". This is the big picture version of why I am interested in all this technology.
The potential of establishing a real emotional connection is exponentially advantaged.....
....Anyway, I feel as if the Global Village became real to me that night, and, indeed, it has become the Global Dinner Party. All at once. The small world has become the intimate world.
I'm beginning to think this Internet thing may turn out to be emotionally important after all.
Google finally has a plan to deal with comment spam! And all the big players are on board. Great. The idea is simple: hyperlinks tagged with rel="nofollow" don't confer any google juice, thus hopefully taking away the reason for the spam in the first place.
I would install this feature here right away except for one thing. We already strip out *all* HTML from anonymous comments. Links are not in any way possible. And we still get comment spam! Still, maybe if everyone does this it will help. Clearly the situation is out of control and it is worth trying something.
Tim Bray is noticing what everyone else who runs a weblog is noticing: A Referrer Spamstorm.
PHP is getting SSH. That is an ability I have wanted for some time. This would finally let me write the file uploading scripts I want (at least for people running unix which is a lot of us here.) Using form field uploading from the client browser is fine for getting images onto the server. But for bigger things like music and video I've been having people use FTP. Those few extra steps are kind of a drag though. FTP is easy enough, but it's so inelegant. Way too close to the metal for what an end user should have to deal with.
Unfortunately getting this running is a bit over my head at the moment. Hopefully I will be able to find some documentation I can understand. Or maybe this is something that could just show up as a built in function in the next release of PHP? That would be the best for me.
Computers are strange in that you can do really powerful things with them, but you have to know exactly what to say in order to get the desired result. Or maybe that's not so strange.
Anyway, like most servers, mine has PHP installed as an apache module. That means I can't invoke PHP, or a PHP script, from the command line (to the best of my knowledge.)
But like most problems, it's just a matter of finding the right way to ask:
lynx -dump http://www.digitalmediatree.com/somephpscript.php
does exactly what I want, although through a mechanism I would have never thought to use. Lynx is a text based web browser that can be used from the command line. The -dump argument just suppresses all output from lynx. And the URL given is the page for lynx to open. Of course that page is a PHP scirpt, so the result is that somephpscript.php gets run from the command line. Genius.
This means I can now invoke PHP scripts using procmail. Very nice. Before this I was calling Perl scripts that would then use HTTP::Request::Common and LWP::UserAgent to make a request to the PHP script.
That was a lot of work that is now unnecessary since I discovered the little lynx trick.
Wow. Joel Johnson, the gizmodo guy, somehow got a big interview with Bill Gates out at CES. In part four he asks gates about the 'IP rights people are communists' comment and gets into a pretty good talk with him about DRM. It's one thing to complain about it on some obscure blog, and it's quite another to sit down with Bill Gates and ask him some pretty tough questions to his face. No way would a mainstream reporter have asked some of these things.
Gizmodo: What seems to me - what hurts my feelings - I feel like I, as a customer, want Microsoft to be totally on my side. In that, as far as the people that are producing things, that might want more DRM and might make it inconvenient, I don't understand what it necessarily benefits you to help them.Nice. And he does pretty well for a while as Gates tries to derail him with a bunch of bullshit. But Joel keeps coming back. Not rude, but persistent.
Unfortunately in the end he misses going for the kill (or maybe he chose not to.) Gates confused him with the "but what about medical records? Don't you want those to be protected?" argument. It almost seemed valid to me at first too, but of course the answer is "of course I want my medical records protected. But I want to hold the key! You're building into the platform the ability for *other* people to hold keys to the bits on *my* computer. Why are you doing that? Shouldn't you be for me?"
It's not very long. Really worth reading since you never see Gates have to answer anyone talking to him like this.
Unmediated.org: "tracking the tools that decentralize the media".
Technorati Tags. Damn they are chruning out so much cool stuff. Thanks to Tom for pushing me to get us hooked up with Technorati more closely. It's coming. And I'm very interested in these tags.
This is one example of the larger debate raging in the metadata world (what? you didn't know?) pitting folksonomies against controlled vocabularies. Back in the day I used to go on and on about 'controlled vocabularies', although I didn't call them that at the time (I'm thinking of all the semantic web future XML stuff I used to talk about.) But now I'm firmly in the folksonomies camp (although I'm not so sold on the name itself.)
The basic debate is about how to add descriptions to the information blurbs we are constantly posting to the web. Flickr and Del.icio.us got it right, I think, in that these metadata descriptions - or 'tags' - need to emerge from the bottom up. That is, you don't start with a controlled vocabulary of allowed tags, you just let people use any words they want for tags.
In short: the downside of this uncontrolled tagging is that some people will choose 'NYC' while other people will choose 'New York City' for what should be the same tag (the goal is to facilitate grouping similar posts by searching for similar tags.) The upside is that if you let people just choose whatever tag they think is best they seem to actually add the metadata!
Or, in other words, controlled vocabularies make sense in a theoretical way, but they don't actually work in practice because people always find the controlled vocabulary to be too rigid. Anyone have a counter example?
Verizon is turning on the fiber in Tampa. Here is a quick overview of the Verizon FIOS service. Ridiculous ridiculous speeds. Finally the U.S. is joining the rest of the developed world.
5 Mbps down / 2 Mbps up for $34.99 a month
15 Mbps down / 2 Mbps up for $44.99 a month
Yum. We'll see this in the NYC area this year, but maybe not inside the city until next (Nassau and Westchester first it looks like.)
I'm giving RSS another shot. It's obviously superior for browsing lots of sites, but there is something about ripping all content out of it's web page context that I don't like. So I doubt I'll drop the browser all together, but I expect to continue with RSS for a lot of sites that aren't my absolute favorites but that I want to keep track of anyway.
I'm using the very good and very free NetNewsWire Lite (the free lite version is at the bottom of that page.)
And speaking of RSS, CNN has a ton of new RSS feeds.
Well they did it. Yesterday Apple introduced the Mac Mini. Starting at $499. For that price you get a 1.2 Ghz G4, 40 Gig hard drive, and combo DVD player / CD burner. Slightly faster processor, bigger hard drive, and DVD burner are all options. As are keyboard and mouse which don't come with the machine (nor monitor, of course.)
It is absolutely tiny at 6.5'' x 6.5'' x 2''. Aluminum sides with a white plastic top which sort of splits the difference between their pro aluminum look (used on PowerMacs, PowerBooks, and the Cinema displays,) and the white plastic consumer look (iMacs, iBooks, iPods.) It's nice I think, and certainly the smallest PC on the market. Remember the Apple Cube? The Mini fits in the small air space underneath that machine! It's really pretty ridiculous.
Not including a monitor, keyboard, and mouse helps cut costs, and answers long time requests from potential customers who already have these items left over from their last machines (macs can use standard PC components.) The eMac, for instance, has been pretty cheap for a while (around $800,) but a lot of that cost is for the built in CRT monitor which is wasted on a lot of people who already have a decent monitor, but just want a new machine. The Mini Mac now gives people a chance to try out a Mac for a price that might cross into some people's impulse buy range.
The other not so obvious advantage to not including a keyboard is the small size this allows the packaging to be. Check out the box. Cute, no? Classic Apple. I'll bet they'll be stacked up next to the cash registers in the stores. Just grab one and go. About the same price as buying a Kate Spade bag.
Performance should be fine. It will lose in benchmarks to the latest PCs, but that is all theoretical. For email, web surfing, iTunes, a little photo editing, home video editing, etc., the Mini is more than powerful enough. It's not going to run the latest 3D video games that well, but that's not really what it is for. Everything else will be fine. I would bump the RAM to 512 megs for an extra $75, otherwise the base specs look good.
I think the only possible criticism is the use of 2.5 inch notebook hard drives. They obviously needed to do this to achieve the small form factor. But a lot of geeks will probably moan that they would rather have it be slightly bigger, and use faster 3.5 inch drives. I have to admit that I am in this camp, since with a 3.5 inch 7200 RPM drive the Mini looks like a very cheap OS X server. But again, that's not the market they are going for. For home use (or even business use) the smaller drives are fine.
Here is a fantastic primer (geeky but plenty comprehensible) on Smart Antennas. This technology holds the key to faster wireless data connections.
One specific way people talk about this is with the acronym 'MIMO' which stands for "Multiple In - Multiple Out". What this means is that
devices can now use multiple antennas on both the handset and base station to grow the data rates linearly. It was thought that adding antennas would need exponentially more power to get linearly higher data rates, but they've worked around those problems and now MIMO is being pushed in all upcoming wireless standards.
Gee [Rittenhouse, Lucent Technologies] talked about how Lucent has been driving around a New Jersey suburb where Bell Labs is located, testing the connections and are getting reliable 35-44 bits per second per hertz, as opposed to the half to 1 bit per second per hertz on current cellular networks. Where we can see 1 megabit per second in 1.25Mhz of spectrum (like a CDMA2000 channel), we can soon expect to see 30 megabits per second in that same type of spectrum. I can imagine that WCDMA which uses a broad 5Mhz wide band would see massive gains as well.
It's CES time (yearly consumer electronics show in Las Vegas,) which accounts for all the geek gadget news.
Anyway, Kodak introduced something very cool (can you believe?) The Easy Share One is a 4 megapixel, 3x optical zoom digital camera with the option to add a WiFi card to upload photos directly to the web.
Nikon did this on a high end camera back in 2003, but the Kodak is (almost) reasonably priced at $599 (WiFi will be another $100 or so.)
I've been keyed in so much on phones getting better cameras that I forgot about the opposite trend: cameras getting wireless connectivity. I don't really want to talk on my cell phone anyway, I just want mobile internet access. And if my camera can give it to me then maybe that's okay.
Still, if it's WiFi and not cellular it means it's not going to work in too many places. I'd love to think we (the people) are going to blanket the world with grassroots free open WiFi networks, but I'm coming around to Russell Beattie's position. If I can get 200 Kb/s of nationwide cellular data coverage for some reasonable price ($50 a month for Verizon EV-DO service on 3G phones,) why would I mess with WiFi?
But in any case, this Kodak camera is cool, and I hope more manufacturers follow suit.
Of course I love this headline: "Samsung Unveils Unprecedented Line Up of Wireless Phones for U.S. Consumers. More Breathtaking Product Designs and Capabilities in Store for 2005." Sounds like some breathless marketing speak, but check out the list:
Damn. I'd say that qualifies as "unprecedented". Speech to text? I hadn't even thought of that. I'm skeptical it would work very well, but it wouldn't even have to be that great to solve a bunch of problems with mobile phones as computer platform. And 5 megapixel camera phone with 3x zoom??? OMFG! I wasn't joking last week when I said Samsung is kicking ass.
- The world's first speech-to-text dictation phone, allowing consumers to speak their message and have the phone convert the words to text.
- The U.S.'s first multi-mega pixel camera phone line up, including a two mega pixel and a five mega pixel camera with 3X optical zoom capabilities.
- The U.S.'s first two mega pixel camera phone with QVGA screen resolution and TF-R external memory card, which allows for extensive video clip recording space and crisp, vibrant viewing of pictures and video taken with the phone.
- The U.S.'s first line up of phones to operate on the next-generation high-speed wireless networks known as EVDO, allowing consumers to send and receive pictures, video and data at speeds comparable to cable modem or DSL connectivity.
- Video-on-demand (VOD) devices that allow consumers to wirelessly stream videos onto the handset from the network or download and store the videos on the handset for convenient playback.
- Music-on-demand (MOD) devices that give consumers instant access to digital music, allowing them to download or stream popular tunes directly to their handset.
- Phones with Bluetooth wireless connectivity capabilities that will make transferring pictures, music and data files from computers to wireless devices quick and seamless.
- Phones with integrated Wi-Fi technology allowing users to roam onto corporate networks from their wireless device while away from the office, at the airport, cafe or hotel.
- Phones with integrated BlackBerry push-email capabilities that allow consumers and business users to send and receive emails from anywhere.
You can now query Technorati for advanced search terms such as tsunami AND ("red cross" OR "red crescent") and it will give you all of the blog posts in order by how long ago they were posted that include the word "tsunami" and either "red cross" or "red crescent". You can then click "Make this a Watchlist" and create an RSS feed so you can track all new posts that match that query in your news reader.That part about the custom RSS feeds blows my mind. Again: simple, clever.
In light of my massive world domination plans for 2005 I have joined Apple's streaming server mailing list. After a few days my impression is that streaming video, especially to mobile handsets, is still in it's infancy. If it's even that advanced. I guess I haven't missed the boat yet.
Here are a couple google searches that return open webcams: 1, 2. You might suspect there is something interesting in there, although my quick look through the results was pretty uninteresting. Finding unusual key words to plug into google searches is very interesting though. The result of having the entire internet indexed is difficult to predict.
These searches work, obviously, because webcams create similarly constructed URLs for their feeds, so searching on the non unique portions of those URLs using the inurl: advanced search technique finds lots of webcams, whether their owners wanted this or not. Simple. Clever.
(Already forgot where I saw this.)
Six Apart to buy Live Journal? Wow. A lot of people are saying this isn't true, so I wouldn't count it as a done deal just yet. Six Apart is the company behind Movable Type blogging software and the TypePad blog hosting service. Live Journal is a *huge* blog community with 5,655,452 users (2,443,264 of whom actively post.) This would create a very large blog entity which could, as Om points out in the first link above, have "a very fighting chance against Google’s Blogger and Microsoft’s MSN Spaces."
Still, for all the wow factor of a big merger like this, I'm not sure what difference it will make to anyone. For instance, it is not at all clear that blog hosting is ever going to make anyone any money. And technorati already mines all the data, so having your own big stable of blogs doesn't get you any secret use data that might have value. Sort of seems like a big headache to me. MIght be a classic dot com era business play:
1. Get a lot of users
2. ???
3. Profit!