...more recent posts
Samsung is kicking ass. The soon to be released i730 mobile has everything: huge QVGA display, slide out QWERTY keyboard, 1.3 megapixel camera, Wi-Fi, bluetooth, and it works on the EV-DO high speed cellular network. This is what the Treo could have been. But it runs Windows Mobile 2003 2nd Edition. Still, I might have to surrender. Somebody stop me.
Very thorough academic analysis of BitTorrent.
I'm still working on the post where I vent my disappointment with Palm. Sure the Treo 650 is better than the 600, and I loved that mobile. But the times are a changin', and Palm just isn't moving fast enough. I'm starting to doubt they can bring their OS into the 21st century. No, scratch that, I'm in full doubt mode already.
But where does that leave us? It leaves us with Symbian (Nokias, Sony/Ericcson, etc.) and Microsoft (Pocket PC) at the moment. I guess I will have to take a look at these. Of course I am extremely prejudiced against Microsoft (maybe that is silly, but I need to have some beliefs) but their OS seems to be on the best mobile offerings here in the U.S. at the moment.
Witness the new mobile from Verizon: the XV6600. Damn. This is the first phone available on Verizon's EV-DO high speed network (previously they have only been selling wireless PC Cards for notebook data access on this network.) In short, if you live in a place that has EV-DO coverage (NYC, check) this is what you want. And the XV6600 looks to be very powerful. No camera (I guess that is too unbusiness-like,) but everything else makes me jealous. I wish I could play with one for a few days to get a feel for how the Microsoft OS stacks up.
Just stumbled upon this new to me Google service: Google Local. You tell it 'What' (e.g. coffee shops) and "Where" (e.g. Poughkeepsie, N.Y.) and it returns location information. Is this new?
The FCC approved the Sony Ericsson S710a. This will probably be on Cingular, and should be available soon. As far as I know this is the best cameraphone you can get in the U.S. at the moment. Absolutely huge gorgeous screen. And runs on the semi-high speed EDGE network. I'm still waiting, but this one is for sure in the running.
I've been watching this thread over at Treo Central develop with some skepticism. The rather enthusiastic hackers there have been trying to get WiFi to work on the Treo 650. Palms choice to not include WiFi (probably to appease cellular carriers who presumably want you to use their network and not some free WiFi hotspot to send your data, but possibly in an effort to not undermine sales of their Tungsten WiFi PDAs) is one of the great disappointments with the 650. I had thought this quest would not be successful, but it's never very smart to underestimate the resources of a bunch of software engineers with too much time on their hands. And damn, it looks like they have done it. The .prc file you need is hosted here (I have it already if that goes down.)
Just two days ago the lead hacker, Shadowmite, posted:
It's just looking pretty bad... It works, but it's completely unstable and almost impossible to keep it working. We really need to completely re-write the network layers to make this happen, and thus the source code is needed.And then yesterday at 8:00 pm, after much shooting in the dark, he hit it:
I'm not giving up, but it's going to be slow, if any progress at all is made now...
GUYS HOLY FRICKING HECK OF MOTHER BLEH BLEH BLEH! I'M STREAMING SHOUTCAST OVER WIFI!!!!!! WOOOOOOOOHOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!1 yOU ALL OWE ME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1111 GFPOIHPOGIHR3O[GIRWHOGIRWHGO42IHF42Of course, there are some problems
oK, INSANITY OVER...
It takes over the network connection/library... COMPLETELY! Once installed, you can not access vision UNTIL you hard reset and get it off the phone... Maybe with some more time we can find a way around that... But I wanted to mention it...So wow. Whether this becomes a big thing or is limited to the serious geek set will be determined by how well they can work out the remaining problems with the net.lib and needing to do a hard reset every time you go back and forth between WiFi and Vision (Vision is Sprint's 1xRTT cellular data service.) But still, seriously good show!
Jon Udell article on mobile webcasting. Lots of technical details in the middle, but some big picture stuff at the beginning and the end:
What would be a compelling reason? Imagine the following scenario. It's 2007, and a major political rally is happening in Philadelphia. The downtown has been a WiFi zone for over a year. Bloggers are walking around with camcorders that do what my camera-equipped laptops can do today: encode video and send it via WiFi to a streaming server. Not everyone's blog server also runs a streaming media server, but there are enough of them to spread the load.I am looking forward to experimenting with streaming audio and video after our next server upgrade even though I'm a little skeptical about how practical it will be.
Here's the payoff: bloggers will democratize video reporting of the <<live>> event in the same way they've already leveled the playing field for conventional reporting. The TV networks will still score most of the big interviews, but the collective eyes and ears of the videobloggers will supply a wealth of otherwise missing viewpoints. And their <<archived>> videoblog posts will be stirred in to the blogosphere's bubbling cauldron of links, commentary, and aggregation.
Google Suggest beta. Just like Google search, except it "suggests" search terms as you type, sort of like auto-complete of URLs in the location field of most browsers. This is similar also to what Google did with the gmail UI. This completely blows my mind. How can they do that with HTML and javascript? I don't understand. Are they holding a connection open to the server? And doing a round trip after every character you type? Amazing. I know a little bit about this stuff and it seems like magic to me. (via kottke)
The 100 oldest still registered .com domain names.
Most fiendishly clever security hack of all time:
Ken Thompson's 1983 Turing Award lecture to the ACM revealed the existence of a back door in early Unix versions that may have qualified as the most fiendishly clever security hack of all time. The C compiler contained code that would recognise when the "login" command was being recompiled and insert some code recognizing a password chosen by Thompson, giving him entry to the system whether or not an account had been created for him.
Normally such a back door could be removed by removing it from the source code for the compiler and recompiling the compiler. But to recompile the compiler, you have to *use* the compiler - so Thompson also arranged that the compiler would *recognise when it was compiling a version of itself*, and insert into the recompiled compiler the code to insert into the recompiled "login" the code to allow Thompson entry - and, of course, the code to recognise itself and do the whole thing again the next time around! And having done this once, he was then able to recompile the compiler from the original sources; the hack perpetuated itself invisibly, leaving the back door in place and active but with no trace in the sources.