Year: 2004

Nokia’s Lifeblog site has gone live.  Christian Lindholm confirms that the 7610 will be out Q204 (as I reported earlier).  A trial of Lifeblog will be included on the CD that comes with the 7610, and should also be available for download near the official 7610 launch.

I wrote up the announcement of the 7610 on Mobitopia today.  It looks like an interesting little Series 60 device.

I’m such a dork.

I am now the proud owner of a remote controlled boat a little bigger than a standard issue Matchbox car.

I’ve been eyeing it at my local Discovery Channel Store for a few weeks, and it is finally mine!  It looks like it behaves similarly to the Zip Zap cars: charge the capacitor for a little bit, and you get several minutes of fun.

Rinse.  Lather.  Repeat.

I’m stoked that cool fun technology like this itty bitty motorboat have made the right price point.  My little boat cost $19.95.  Not too shabby at all.

I’m just worried about a cat coming out of nowhere, pulling a Godzilla, and capsizing the poor thing.

I really wish I knew what conversations were happening at connecting.nokia.com and blogs.labs.mot.com, and why they were linking to my blog.  Does anyone care to share?

What I wouldn’t give to subscribe to some feeds on blogs.labs.mot.com and know what they’re talking about at Nokia…

I’m getting ready to do my taxes tonight.  Well, not really, I’m getting ready to let a wizard do my taxes for me.  I’ll probably do a sanity check on paper, but I’m so good at making stupid math mistakes that I’ll trust some software.  Scary.

Anyway, somtimes dialogs amuse me.  The above informs me that I am about to install Maryland.  Which is weird as I look around and find myself in the state of Maryland.

This is a reminder to myself and others that the biggest local DC-MD-VA Hamfest is coming to the Timonium fairgrounds March 27 and 28.  I’ll try to hit the Hamfest on Sunday.  Hopefully I’ll be able to pick up some cool and obscure hardware for next to nothing.

I don’t hold a ham radio license, though I have thought about it in the past.  I lack the funds and free time for another semi-expensive hobby though.

A discussion on the Atom Wiki should make it possible for clients that lack PUT and DELETE to fully implement the Atom API.  If folded in to the next revision of the API, this enhancement will make J2ME Atom API clients a possibility.  As Russ pointed out previously, J2ME does not include support for PUT or DELETE.  But why get rid of SOAP?

I don’t want to make things too hard on Atom API server implementers.  At the same time, I love the flexibility of being able to choose between coding a client with GET and POST (and hopefully PUT and DELETE) or SOAP.  Sometimes the former makes more sense.  Other times it’s the latter.

If I wanted to whip together a quick client demo to impress my friends, I would probably point WSDL2Java or Visual Studio .NET at a WSDL file.  Then I could whip together a working Atom API client in just a few minutes in front of their eyes.  They would get bored while I implemented things on the HTTP level.  I’m sure that Mark or Sam could whip something together at that level in a few minutes, but not I.  (On a side note, check out this post in Sam’s blog and this sample C# client on atomenabled.org)

To demo things, I could easily point my client at Blogger or Typepad, two services with significant user bases, and both with SOAP implementations of the Atom API.  It’s times like this that SOAP shines.

So why do we have to get rid of it?

It seems that many people are against having SOAP in the spec at all.  I can understand where they are coming from.  On some platforms, it would be fairly easy to implement SOAP on the server side.  On the other hand, if your chosen platform does not have a SOAP toolkit that you can use, implementing it from scratch is non-trivial.

Here’s what I think: SOAP should stay.  It adds more flexibility for consumers.  In an ideal world all clients would interact with the API using GET, POST, PUT and DELETE.  Ideally, clients that lack PUT and DELETE would interact with the API using GET and POST possibly as outlined on the wiki.  Alternatively, I would like clients to have the option of using SOAP to interact with the API.  SOAP support SHOULD be implemented on the server side, but should be no means be neccesary.  It would be cumbersome to make SOAP support a MUST, but there would be fewer SOAP implementations if support is listed as MAY.  If several of the big players continue their SOAP support, writing a SOAP client will still be rewarding.

I was listening to Marketplace on NPR on the way to class today, as I’m known to do.  I was amazed to hear that over 40% of Disney shareholders opposed the re-election of Eisner to the board.  That’s an insanely huge number, and will probably result in some sort of changeup in the company.

I like the fact that Roy Disney and Stanley Gold were given a chance to air their grievences.  The pair left the board a few months ago.  Disney and Gold are threatening to oust Eisner.  Roy Disney pretty much installed Eisner in the first place.

Who knows what the long term outcome of this no confidence vote will be.  In my fantasy CEO league, I’d love to see Steve Jobs behind the helm at Disney.  I don’t think that reality agrees though.

I stumbled across a CD by Katy Rose today while picking up some cords and connectors at Target.  I’ve listened to the samples, and I might just pick it up tomorrow.  The site is no admission without Flash though.

She could be the next Avril.  Or not.  I like what I’ve heard so far though.

OSNews points to Minimo, a Mozilla project designed to bring the Mozilla browser to embedded and mobile Linux distros that have 32-64MB available to them.  Check out the screenshots of Minimo running Familiar Linux on on iPAQ.

Forum Nokia has some documentation about the Nokia 9500 and Series 80 in addition to the SDKs and emulators.  The Series 80 UI Style Guide is designed for programmers, but sheds quite a bit of light on the inner workings on the newly revamed Series 80.  There is quite a bit of information about how native apps behave.

There is also an IPv6 guide for hardcore Symbian C++ programmers.

The most up to date information can be found at the Forum Nokia Series 80 page.  If you have not already, check out my Nokia 9500 roundup and my look at the Nokia 9500 emulator.

Washington Post (free reg required as of a couple of weeks ago.  There goes one of the last newspaper free reg BS holdouts):

Frank Herzog, the longtime play-by-play voice of the Washington Redskins, was bounced from one of the NFL’s most popular local radio announcing teams yesterday. Sonny Jurgensen and Sam Huff will remain as team broadcasters, but Herzog will be replaced by veteran broadcaster Larry Michael.

This is really sad for Redskins fans.  When I was growing up, it was standard practice to turn the TV to whichever station had the Redskins broadcast and then tune the radio to WMAL, the oldskool home of Sonny, Sam, and Frank.  Frank’s play-by-play was always better than the TV coverage.

Years later I found myself doing the same thing: turning on the TV and immediately muting it.  I had to tune the radio to WJFK (the new home of Redskins Radio), but on the other end of the dial was the same old Sonny, Sam and Frank of my childhood.

Frank is still on staff at WUSA 9, but I for one am going to miss him over the audible air waves.

CNet:

In another sign of LCD progress, shipments of color LCD screens for mobile phones will outstrip those of monochrome LCD screens this year, research firm iSuppli/Stanford Resources predicted Wednesday.

Wow.  I had forgotten that cel phones with monochrome screens were still being made.  Sure, I still have a couple of phones kicking around with monochrome screens, but they’re left over from my years of Sprint.  At wireless stores the monochrome phones tend to get hidden in the corner, while the color ones are showcased.  Except for those tiny Siemens phones, and the requisite oldskool Nokia.  Those will be around forever.

I took a trip down to my local Micro Center today.  One of the gems of the trip was finding out the Gigabit networking is finally affordable.  Card prices have been dropping considerably, gigabit has been in Macs for years now.  The thing that had been holding everything back was the switching hardware.  Hubs or switches with even one gigabit port were outrageously expensive.  Hubs/switches with ports that were all 10/100/1000 were extremely expensive (read: hundreds of dollars) and not ont he retail shelves.

That was then.

Today I saw on the shelf a Hawking Tech HGA32T: a gigabit PCI card with about the same footprint as any generic Realtek-style card.  You know, the ones that you buy on sale for $5-10 just so that you have an extra laying around.  The beautiful part about this gigabit card is the price: $20 bucks.  That’s all well and good, you’ve been able to find gigabit cards in the $40-50 range for quite some time if you found them on sale.  Switches are going to be a problem still.  Right?

Wrong.

I tried to search out a gigabit switch (mostly so that I could prove my point to a friend that they were still too expensive), and found one.  Enter the Hawking Tech H-GS8T.  8 ports of full-on 10/100/1000 autosensing, full-duplex goodness.  The price? $130.  Holy crap, this stuff is finally affordable!

Of course this Hawking tech gear is good but not top of the line.  The switch does not have a huge buffer and you’re probably never going to see the theoretical maximum throughput, but who cares, it’s cheap!  I’ll bet that you can see and feel an improvement over 10/100 at the very least.

So hey, someday I might even migrate to gigabit.

Via the Daily Python URL, Georg Bauer talks about programming by contract with web services in Python.  The next version of the Toolserver Framework for Python will have support for the concept, which itself has been around for quite some time.

I think that a lot of people would love to program by contract using web services, but I don’t think that we’re there yet.