Posts
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February MobileMonday
I just posted info about the February 7th 2005 MobileMonday meeting. We have a stunning lineup of speakers this time around, I’m really excited about this.
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Series 60 Python
In preparation for the mobile geekout tonight I finally got around to installing and mucking around with Python for the Series 60. I haven’t had time to really explore the boundaries yet, but what I have played with has been fantastic. Check out the Python for Series 60 wiki page for more info. I took the Bluetooth GPS example there to fool around with. I put up a version of the code with indentation preserved. I’ll post more about it as I play around some. Like some info about the remote console over Bluetooth. In my estimation this beats their halfassed C++ environment and simulator. That simulator just keeps pissing me off. Every time I think I have it working something else goes wrong.
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Feedster Upgrades
As is probably abundantly obvious from the front page at Feedster. We originally expected that the downtime would be Friday afternoon, but there were some snags (I would point you to Scott Johnson’s post, but apparently it’s on the servers that are currently down, d’oh!). So this is a planned upgrade, not some crash or hack we have to deal with. The rapid growth in the number of new feeds appearing on the Internet, and the effort that Ray has made to get all of them to parse and to get more of them added to the index faster, ended up overwhelming the servers. When the site comes back up hopefully it’ll be snappier and more robust, thanks in no small part to the work that Nick Heyman has done since recently joining (Nick, you need a blog so that I have something to point to when I talk about you).
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Link Management
I ran into Tantek last night at Russ’s birthday party, and talking with him reminded me that I never updated my blog to include XFN info. Wordpress includes a nice simple XFN generator for the links section, so I decided to use that. I had originally populated the links with an import of the OPML from Bloglines, so adding the relationship info was a snap. Then I started thinking about keeping the info up to date, and synced in the different places it needs to live. Since Wordpress manages the XFN info for me, and publishes it, I figured using Wordpress as the authoritative source would be a good idea.
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Bringing Great Open Source Ideas to Market
I went to a presentation at Stanford VLAB titled “Bringing Great Open Source Ideas to Market” earlier this week. There were some interesting comments made, and I’ll get some of those down here. First I want to mention the overall message however: “2005 will be the breakout year for open source”. Good message, the spirit is right, but I don’t agree. I’m not at all an expert in terms of business predictions and industry tracking, but I have been writing open source since 1992 so I am familiar with parts of it. In particular I am familiar with this part of it. And as someone working within that community I can assure you that every year since about 1996 has been predicted as “the breakout year for open source”. The predictions are always made by people already working on or with open source, and every year something generally described as “business concerns” keeps it from happening. So although I’m always happy to hear it, I’m no longer moved by the prediction. What is happening, and what will continue to happen, is the accelerating adoption of open source. It might look something like a breakout to people within the particular industries that have picked up open source. However open source is already exploding on the market. Has exploded on the market even. It might seem like something new if you normally work with application servers and middleware, but go ask someone in embedded systems about Linux. It’s out there already. It’s just moving from lower levels like the kernel to higher levels like web service infrastructure (much as I’ve moved from embedded systems programming to working at Feedster, the parallel is not coincidental). What’s evolving is the business model to go along with it, which is exactly what Marc Fleury was talking about. So certainly kudos to him on that one.
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New Wordpress Install
I upgraded my Wordpress install today. I’ve been getting a ton of comment spam, and instead of hacking my aging install to deal with it I want to hack a new install. Wordpress has served me really well, and I love the features, so instead of being a punter and just downloading the latest release, I installed the version from CVS instead. Matt said there are all kinds of antispam things that seem to be working, so I’ll give them a try. And hack if I have issues.
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Steve Case at the Computer History Museum
I went to see Steve Case give an interview at the Computer History Museum tonight. It was actually kinda boring, but some points were made. Here are some notes from me, heavily editorialized by me, only vaguely based on what they were talking about on stage.
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Flickr Uploads Working from the 6600
I was having trouble uploading to both Flickr and Buzznet, so I thought maybe something really funky had happened to my phone. But I emailed Flickr and Buzznet both anyway, and now Flickr has responded saying they fixed a bug in their code. Behold, it works!! That was really odd, that both started failing when I went out to my parents. Because I hadn’t changed any settings at all, I figured something might be up other than user error. Taking a look at it from the other side however, I know users always say, “I didn’t change anything, and it just stopped working”. So I wasn’t sure how serious my requests were going to get looked at. Apparently seriously enough. I do think it some odd issue with the way that the 6600 formats emails send via SMTP. So if you have a Nokia 6600 and have been having some issues, Flickr at least seems to be working again. By the way, both seemed to work when I sent via MMS. On TMobile at least, you can send MMS to an email address and their system relays the message out to the Internet. However, I get charged MMS prices for that, and I get charged nothing extra to send an email thanks to my flat rate data plan. So if you’re seeing the same kinds of things, MMS might be a workaround.
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iShouldn't Even Bother
As Elle has already mentioned, we were less than impressed with the ease of use and fluid experience that is the crippled MP3 player called the iPod Shuffle. Everything about this device seems to scream out “access denied”. They should have a little loop of Job trying to escape the simulation at the end of Lawnmower Man preloaded, so that at least you’ll have SOME audio content to accompany the blinking lights. Cause Apple doesn’t really seem to be interested in letting you put your own on there.
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VJ / AV Battles
There’s an interesting event up in San Francisco Thursday night. Dimension7 is hosting a VJ Battle. The event starts at 9:30, and they’re going to be using SMS based voting to determine the winner. I wasn’t able to go to the last event they did, this one I’m definitely not going to miss. When we set up for Mobile Monday yesterday Grant was playing with a tuntable hooked up to a projector, and he was manipulating the video and audio stream with it. This should be good.
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