Month: November 2003

Netcraft has posted an interesting analysis of ultra cheap “commodity” web hosting.  Go Daddy is introducing hosting for as little as $3.95.  More info can be found on the Go Daddy hosting page.  $3.95 gets you 25 megs of space and a gig of transfer a month.  Of course there are many places that you can get a whole lot more for an extra couple of bucks a month, but for some people $3.95 will be a quite attractive price point.

There is a new download at Forum Nokia today: Developer Platform 2.0 for Series 90: Designing XHTML/HTML Content v1.0.  It supercedes a previous pdf file entitled Developer Platform 2.0 for Series 90: Designing Web Services.  The 7700 ships with a customized version of Opera 6.  The browser itself is designed to reasonably handle HTML 4.1, XHTML 1.0 and 1.1, WML, XHTML Mobile Profile and others.

The phone will render a normal web page as best as it can in 640×320 or less pixels, but markup written in XHTML-MP and designed for a mobile phone would probably be ideal.  Of course, not all HTML-MP phones are created equal.  In order to deliver the best user experience, it might be best to sniff user agents and send 3650/6600/Series 60 users to one page and Series 90 users to another.

This could get complex and out of hand quickly, but in many cases it could be worthwhile.  Of course you could also target a Series 90 specific site and write the XHTML-MP code optimized for the screen layout.  A mobile site tailored to 7700 users for instance, could easily go for a 7700 specific layout.  Keep in mind that your users might be coming in at 640×320 in fullscreen mode, or they might have as little as 480×217 free if they are browsing with both the command bar and toolbar shown.  I have a feeling that many users will spend a good bit of their time surfing in 480×217 mode or similar, as long as the site permits.  This way they have easy access to navigation buttons and it will also keep them in familiar gound with the surrounding UI.  Also note that you loose another 20 pixels if there is a scrollbar involved.

So far XHTML-MP has not been covered very thoroughly in the blogosphere, technosphere, or the book world.  In the near future I hope to address some of that with some musings on XHTML-MP.

Newsforge covers the Nokia 7700:

Nokia, the world’s largest mobile telephone maker, is getting awfully close to bringing a handheld, Internet-connected television to the consumer market. The Finland-based megacorporation has launched a new category of handheld product — called mobile media devices — which feature Nokia’s largest, most colorful display: a 640×320 touch-sensitive screen that renders as many as 65,536 colors. Nokia says these new devices, to hit the market in Q2 of 2004, offer plenty of new opportunity for Symbian, Java, and C++ developers and is now making SDKs available for free download.

I’m really exited about the platform, so of course any good press is A Good Thing.  Since the story is on NewsForge, there is an open source/free beer spin to the story.  They mention the free (beer) SDKs that are available and note that Nokia is looking for more developers for the platform.

I’m so there, but the more the merrier.

CERT CA-2003-28 points out a “Buffer Overflow in Windows Workstation Service.”

Windows Update popped up in my taskbar earlier this evening.

Time to reboot.

From the Sarasota Herald-Tribune:

A lot of neighborhoods don’t allow the owners to park Boeing 707s outside their homes, which is why actor John Travolta moved to Jumbolair, near Ocala.

Nice digs.  I’ve been to Ocala before, which is probably the only reason that I am posting this.  The house/airport has some nice specs.

According to our local NBC affiliate, two packages that were “built to look like a bomb” were discovered in Aspen Hill, Maryland this afternoon.  That’s all of about 3-4 miles from where I’m typing right now.

Hoorah!

If you had asked me six months ago what mobile OS would rule the world, I would have told you Symbian hands down, no questions.  Today the picture is a bit murkier.

There are a ton of tiny and cheap CMDA phones that are coming on the market.  Sure, they can’t do what a 3650 or a P900 can do, but their feature lists are getting better and better.  On even the more modest phones you can usually expect downloadable ringers, wallpaper, and possibly even BREW/J2ME.  It may not be enough for me, but it’s sure enough for a lot of people.

Another contender out there are the Smartphones of the Windows Mobile variety.  They rarely support Bluetooth and other things that I think of as essential, but the interface is slick!  I have a PocketPC 2002 device and having played around with the Motorola Smartphone, I can honestly say that the Windows Mobile interface is cleaner and easier to use than PocketPC.  It behaves as expected, and you’ve got your little pocket version of your favorite Windows apps.  Everything is there.  It feels familiar, yet it’s a phone.

Do you remember Alice?  This is a song about Alice.

So here’s the dirt on my bet on the Symbian horse.

I bought myself a book this evening: Symbian OS C++ for Mobile Phones.  I stopped by my local Borders on the way to class and thumbed through the Hello World chapter.  It seemed to fill in a lot of the “huh?” gaps that the Series 90 Hello World.  It leans a bit toward developing for UIQ, but points out the differences and how you could change the code to develop for non-UIQ devices.  Instead of “this is how it is” the book tries to go in to “this is how it is, and why.”  There is definitely some funky embedded highly optimized C++ going on there, but too easy is no fun.

I will definitely post the things that I am learning as I am learning them.

With MIDP 2.0 in the wild, as well as extensions that allow access to the Bluetooth stack and multimedia/messaging components of the hardware, we are going to see some richer J2ME apps down the line.  We’re going to see them for Symbian and non-Symbian devices.  I still believe that the killer apps for Symbian platforms are going to come in native C++ form.  I believe that Series 90 is going to kick some butt and give the other Smartphones a run for their money.  The screen size is right, the user interface is slick, the possibilities are endless.

So hopefully with kick butt J2ME apps, a revival of OPL, and some of the best native apps that you can sort of stick in your pocket, my money is on Symbian and Series 90.

This is awesome:

toshiba 2805 computer laptop for sale:

The keys have all been torn out. The monitor has been shattered after experiencing my fists and a several foot stomps; The laptop upon impact, after being thrown to the ground, permanently ejected the dvd/cd player . The dvd/cd player also disassmbled after the ejection. Several other unidentified pieces of the laptop parted during this incident. The harddrive crashed prior to this incident–However, I am keeping that in case I can retrieve the data.

I am also offering a white trash bag as a free carrying case.

(to the tune of Real Men of Genius)…We salute you, Mr. anon-19090957@craigslist.org, for saying what others dared not say…

Anil might be on to something.

Leona Naess was awesome at the 9:30 club last night.  She played 4-5 songs from her new new cd and also played a few of the more popular songs from her other two albums (that I know of).  Badly Drawn Boy rocked too.

I took the picture above with a Fuji disposable camera and scanned it on a Nikon Super Coolscan 8000ED for Edd.

I had not seen a price mentioned on the 7700 before, but in a piece by Reuters, I saw this:

Nokia unveiled the 7700 model last week, a space-age looking device with a large touch-screen display that gives users the possibility to watch TV. The $572 device is due to hit the shops in the second quarter of next year.

The piece is actually worth reading, as it deals with the neccesity of having a right to view television license in some countries.  $572 is actually less than I was expecting to see the 7700 debut at.  I’ve been looking into Series 90/7700 development and might be picking one of these up as soon as they are available.  It could be so much more painful.

Has anyone seen confirmation of this general price range?