...more recent posts
Here's a list of email to SMS gateways that I will probably need some day:
AT&T:Stolen wholesale from the wireless weblog.
AreaCode+Mobile@mobile.att.net
Verizon:
AreaCode+Mobile@vtext.com
Nextel:
AreaCode+Mobile@page.nextel.com
T-Mobile:
AreaCode+Mobile@tmomail.com
Sprint:
AreaCode+Mobile@messaging.sprintpcs.com
Cingular:
1+AreaCode+Mobile@mobile.mycingular.com
AFP548 is a site I just found geared toward Mac OS X Server administrators. The forums are amazingly good.
More annoying Mac boosterism, this time from Paul Graham. Of course I don't find it annoying, and what's more, he's right :-)
All the best hackers I know are gradually switching to Macs. My friend Robert said his whole research group at MIT recently bought themselves Powerbooks. These guys are not the graphic designers and grandmas who were buying Macs at Apple's low point in the mid 1990s. They're about as hardcore OS hackers as you can get....
...If you want to know what ordinary people will be doing with computers in ten years, just walk around the CS department at a good university. Whatever they're doing, you'll be doing.
In the matter of "platforms" this tendency is even more pronounced, because novel software originates with great hackers, and they tend to write it first for whatever computer they personally use. And software sells hardware. Many if not most of the initial sales of the Apple II came from people who bought one to run VisiCalc. And why did Bricklin and Frankston write VisiCalc for the Apple II? Because they personally liked it. They could have chosen any machine to make into a star.
If you want to attract hackers to write software that will sell your hardware, you have to make it something that they themselves use. It's not enough to make it "open." It has to be open and good.
And open and good is what Macs are again, finally.
But this has been clear for a while in terms of Apple. Lately I've noticed that Yahoo! is also beginning to attract a different (although somewhat overlapping) crowd of alpha geek web developers through the same method: being open and good. I wonder if their fortunes will follow similarly?
Drunkenblog interview with Jonathan 'The Wolf' Rentzsch, uber 1337 OS X programmer. Pretty technical but really interesting.
I just love the way really good programmers express themselves. It seems like it is almost always the case that the best of the best are also the most humble.
John Carmack, father of Quake, and the most well known graphics programmer in the world, has a few thoughts on writing games in java for cellphones. I always find it interesting to read what he has to say. Short version: games on cellphones pretty much suck (but it's a little more interesting than that.)
I'm still waiting to jump on EV-DO and already we are seeing signs of the new new thing: HSDPA (High Speed Download Packet Access.) Here's an HSDPA handset built by LG for Cingular. According to Engadget:
The LG people were crazy tight-lipped about this one, but the phone was listed as having a maximum download speed of 1.8Mbps (384Kbps up), a built-in multimedia player that can handle all sorts of audio and video formats (H.263, H.264, MPEG4, WMV, MP3, AAC, AAC+, WMA), and support for video and music on demand. Cingular is already testing HSDPA in a few places right now, and from what we're hearing they’re probably going to commence their nationwide rollout right around the end of the year, with more and more cities to be added throughout 2006.Mmmm. 1.8 Mb/s. Now that is some serious speed. And from what I understand HSDPA can go even faster than that although, yeah, we'll see when they actually roll out the networks. I'll be surprised if anything actually happens by the end of this year. Still it's nice to know the future is happening somewhere.
Yahoo! 360 is Yahoo!'s soon to be released blogging / social network tool. Marc Canter has a little more info (since there is none at the first link.)
Presumably the rumored Flickr purchase will fit in here as well.
Google search cheat sheet. Nice. I didn't know about 'date:'. That's something I have really been wanting.
Jon Udell has been making posts in a new style he is calling a screencast. He does it with flash, which I like to bash, but this is a very nice use of the technology. Basically he just talks about something web related and you hear his voice while watching a flash movie of his screen. Here is his most recent screencast which he describes as "a whirlwind tour of del.icio.us from my own perspective as a power user."
Check it out. Screencasts are a great way to explain web related technology, and del.icio.us is an important addition to the blog world that deserves a wider understanding.
Comvu has a Windows Mobile solution for streaming video from your (Windows Mobile) video phone. Here's a slightly more technical page.
I wonder if Quicktime broadcaster will ever run on a phone? Apple seems dangerously shut out of the cellular game. Maybe something like a mobile iSight plus Quicktime broadcaster plus wifi could work, but that would be an extremely niche product compared to a cellphone.
I think streaming video from your phone will be a more compelling app than watching some prepackaged video content on your phone. But we need one of the cellular companies to knock the walls around their garden down a bit. I want to stream to *my* server.
Mr. Technorati, Dave Sifry, has posted a new State of the Blogosphere report compiled from their huge mine of blog data:
Technorati is now tracking over 7.8 million weblogs, and 937 million links. That's just about double the number of weblogs tracked in October 2004. In fact, the blogosphere is doubling in size about once every 5 months. It has already done so at this pace four times, which means that in the last 20 months, the blogosphere has increased in size by over 16 times.Lots more interesting numbers and graphs at the link above.
Things don't appear to be letting up either....
Samsung a970 EVDO swivel 2-megapixel cameraphone. Or should it be called a camcorderphone?
Very very nice. No release date, but it is coming to the U.S.
New whitepaper from the honeynet project: "Know your Enemy: Tracking Botnets"
Honeypots are a well known technique for discovering the tools, tactics, and motives of attackers. In this paper we look at a special kind of threat: the individuals and organizations who run botnets. A botnet is a network of compromised machines that can be remotely controlled by an attacker. Due to their immense size (tens of thousands of systems can be linked together), they pose a severe threat to the community. With the help of honeynets we can observe the people who run botnets - a task that is difficult using other techniques. Due to the wealth of data logged, it is possible to reconstruct the actions of attackers, the tools they use, and study them in detail. In this paper we take a closer look at botnets, common attack techniques, and the individuals involved.
The long tail:
The most interesting statistic however, was that while the top 10 searches were thousands of times more popular than the average search, these top-10 searches represented only 3% of our total volume. 97% of our traffic came from the “long tail” – queries asked a little over once a day....
You know the real reason Excite went out of business? We couldn’t figure out how to make money from 97% of our traffic. We couldn’t figure out how to make money from the long tail - from those queries asked only once a day.
The site feels a little spammy, but this guy has been around for a while and I think he's legit. And he is now selling a dual EV-DO wireless solution that he claims will get 256 kb/s up and 3.2 mb/s down. Takes two PC card slots, and he has to saw the antenna off the bottom card. It's ridiculously expensive, but this is the bleeding edge.
After living joyfully without fear of pop up ads for quite some time now (between Safari and Firefox's excellent pop up killing powers,) I have been dismayed recently to see these ads appear again. Although I guess they are more 'pop under' than 'pop up'. The trick they have found to beat the blockers is to spawn the new windows using our old (*cough*) friend Flash. Ah, isn't Flash wonderful?
I don't know if Macromedia (Flash's parent company) is going to do anything about this. Or, it would be nice if the browser makers would let you keep Flash installed, but toggled off, and then let you activate it if you really want for a specific site through a menu item (I hear Omniweb can do this.) But until someone does something to fix this problem you will either have to live with some pop under ads once again, or, and I admit I am severely tempted, uninstall Flash. Thanks to Macromedia for at least providing these uninstaller programs (for all platforms.)
Completely bizarre. Sony Ericsson launches the ROB1, a bluetooth wireless roving robot camera you can control from your bluetooth cell phone:
The ROB1 has a range of up to 50 meters (165') and streams what it sees back to your mobile phone so that you can control it properly. The ROB1 should be quite maneuverable, able to move forwards and backwards, and turn on a dime - literally. The ROB1's camera can be pivoted up to 70 degrees up or as far as 20 degrees down, so that you can frame the shot just perfectly. There is even an assist light up front to light up your way as you navigate.Here's a flash demo from the Sony Ericsson site.
Ping-o-matic is a meta pinging tool for notifying multiple sites that keep track of recently updated weblogs. I'm trying to get the XML-RPC interface to work from our posting script here. It is responding as if it is working, but I'm not seeing myself show up in anybodies 'recently updated' lists. I'll get it eventually though.
Rogers Cadenhead has a free PHP class that does all the heavy lifting.
is an RSS/Atom aggregator with a difference: It allows you to keep track of your feeds through e-mail - you create an OPML file listing your feeds and Newspipe will collect them, convert them to e-mail messages and send them to your mailbox.Obviously this would be a great way to read RSS/Atom feeds on your mobile device. For Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows; requires python 2.3 or above and access to an SMTP server.
This means you can read, organize and archive news feeds using your current mail client (or even webmail), without needing to use a separate program. Newspipe can send you news items as plaintext or HTML mail, both as single items or grouped in a digest.
For my personal security efforts: Tunneling your email traffic over SSH on OS X.
is a tool to make programming websites using the Ajax framework — also known as XMLHTTPRequest or remote scripting — as easy as possible. Sajax makes it easy to call PHP functions from your webpages via JavaScript without performing a browser refresh. The toolkit does 99% of the work for you so you have no excuse to not use it.AJAX is the latest web development buzzword. Stands for Asynchronous Javascript and XML. This is the technology that Google is using to create all the amazing UI interactivity in it's recent web application offerings.
Jesse James Garrett has a great overview article explaining this technology.
Sexy Motorola PEBL V6 cellphone. Edge capable (Edge is Cingular's high speed network offering - not quite as fast as EV-DO but still nice.) Includes Bluetooth, and an MPEG4 VGA video camera, plus POP3 and IMAP-compatible email app, and MP3 ringtone support. Strangely I'm not lusting after this one, but I think it will be very popular. Clearly a very nice phone. Sort of surprising to see Motorola making some nice design decisions lately (remember way back when their Startac was king?)
Sprint released an EV-DO laptop PC Card even though they have made no announcement concerning their anticipated EV-DO network roll out. The card release is reasonably leading people to think it will be soon.
EV-DO is the 3G cellular data technology that Verizon has had out for many months in a lot of major US markets (including NYC.) Very high connection speeds, but with a tiny bit of latency (like all cellular networks - really only a factor if you are playing on line games,) and a growing (but unconfirmed on my part) reputation for not working so well through lots of walls.
AccessTunes: stream your iTunes library across the internet. $15, although it will let you stream 50 songs before requiring you to pay up. Supposedly the web based interface is a little slow, and remote browsing is not as slick as it is in the iTunes interface, but still this is pretty interesting.
I was severely tempted by the Sony/Ericsson K700a which just went on sale. Probably the best cameraphone you can buy at the moment. Unfortunately they priced it insanely high. $450 *with* a two year contract. That's more than a freaking Treo 650!
Anyway, my problem was just solved by the announcement of the K750i, a replacement for the K700 that should be available "this quarter". No word on pricing yet, and it's disappointing that it is only a GRPS device (won't work on 3G networks,) but otherwise this is the phone I have been waiting for. 2.0 megapixels, and more importantly a real auto-focus mechanism. Very slick.
Pics on page 2 of the link above, plus a couple more shots at the bottom of this page.