Year: 2004

I failed to post about this last night, and since then Reiter and Erik have posted about it.  I’m not really worried about it, as pretty much all of the cameras that they have made within the last several years have been pretty crappy.  They were nothing to write home about to begin with, and they tend to break much more than other brands.

I can’t say that I am truly enthusiastic about their digital offerings either.  They are admittedly focusing on the non-techie part of the market.  They have EZ-Share docking stations, and image quality is measure in “stars.” As a technical user, I find them quite frustrating and extremely limiting.  Some less-technical users seem to get the hang of it, but I know of many people who are not happy with theirs.

I hold Kodak the legacy and institution in high regard, but Kodak the company have blundered a whole lot in the last several years and beyond.  They tend to discontinue some of their higher quality and more popular films (Royal Gold recently), produce crap (anything marked MAX), and generally do the opposite of the right move almost all the time.

This is more of a local news story, but WTOP covers a huge tanker wreck on I-95 south of Baltimore.  There will be many a painful commute tonight:

An accident involving a tanker truck started a fire that’s burning along Interstate 95 south of Baltimore. The State Highway Administration says I-95 is closed in both directions.

All About N-Gage has the press release for “The Sims Bustin’ Out,” the upcoming EA title for the N-Gage.  If EA plays “mobile connected gaming” right, it could be a huge platform-making title.  I would love to see the title take advantage of GPRS connectivity as well as Bluetooth.  This way you could play online with thousands of people and/or connect with your buddies locally.

I see a picture of a group of kids sitting on the playground glued to their N-Gages…

unixpunx.org pointed to a couple of useful things yesterday.  First off, the CodeCon 2004 program is out.  Secondly, when they posted a story about an apartment encased in aluminum foil, I was thinking “poor man’s Faraday cage.”  It’s not though.

Here are a few quick links before I head out the door:

• BBC: The MER is on six wheels and ready to roll down exit #2.  Woohoo!  Did it make that transformer noise?
• NewsForge: Knoppix gets full-on NTFS support.
• NewsForge: people are hacking away on an iTunes Linux server.
• There’s just too much going on at CES to keep track of.
• Gizmodo: Two new entry level phones from Seimens.
• Nelson is speaking at ETech.
• Slashdot brings the sad news that Lego is discountinuing Mindstorms.

I’m back for a few and have a few more links to add:

• Christoph Cemper is writing an article for JDJ.  Congrats!
• Christoph also points to TimeCore, a free time management app for Windows.
• Via Matt, for $29.95/year subscription, SourceBeat looks like it might be a good deal for those ever volatile tech books.

The gadget at the top of this Gizmodo report reminds me a lot of my Nokia 9290.  The $200 Pocketsurfer allows you to surf the web in 640 pixels wide, but I’m not convinced that it is 480 pixels tall.  If it is 480 pixels tall, that is going to make for some tiny text in such a rectangular screen.  My 9290 is 640×320, which is quite passable for most things, but surfing is just too slow to be usable ona  daily basis.  The Pocketsurfer allows you to connect to the internet from your mobile phone via Bluetooth.

I’m not sure if it is worth $200, but the Pocketsurfer is a cool gadget indeed.  I would most likely spend a hundred or so more to get a PDA with bluetooth and perhaps Wi-Fi expandability.

I’m still holding out for those inexpensive internet tablets that everyone promised me during the dot-com boom.  I stopped holding my breath though.

SFGate:

Under the terms of a plea bargain entered in U.S. District Court in New York City, Lamo faces a recommended sentence of six to 12 months in prison or another form of detention. His sentencing is scheduled for April 8.

Six to twelve months in prison is much more than everyone seems to have been expecting.  The consensus was that Lamo would face up to six months of home detention.

We’ll see how this plays out, but it doesn’t look good.

Via Ingo Rammer, Mindreef’s SOAPScope turns 3.0.  SOAPScope is designed to save your sanity while debugging web services.  SOAPScope rocked even before its first public release.  I give it high marks.

For those of you on a budget, I’d suggest TCPTrace by Simon Fell, which is free as in beer.  SOAPScope is worth every penny though.

It’s old news by now, but the 2.6.1. kernel is out.  The changelog indicates lots of bugfixes and updates.

This article by Sean Reifschneider at ONLamp got me to thinking: us pocket warriors need more utilities like UUCP and NNTP to be available from our mobile phone/mobile device.  It is fairly impractical to transfer the command line UNIX toolbox to mobile phones, but I think we need some more support for some of the various protocols out there.

I searched Handango for both UUCP and NNTP and came up with zero results for any of the mobile platforms (save for some NNTP readers for Palm and Windows CE).  Of course there might be some obscure open source project out there, but it’s sure as hell not in the channel.

While I’m at it, another thing that mobile phones could use is rsync.  Yes, of course we already have SyncML for most mobile phone platforms, but as Frank points out, it is not used widely, and even when it is, there are some issues that must be dealt with.

Rsync or a similar solution could really help me keep my sanity.  On a typical computing day, I might find myself needing similar or identical information/data/files on my home dekstop, my laptop, a work desktop, my 3650 or my 9290.  Currently one of the easiest ways to bridge my desktops and mobiles is via email.  Each phone has its own email address (useful for sending programs) and I also have a generic mobile email address that is shared between the phones.  I tend to use IMAP over POP everywhere, because that way the information is stored server-side and I can access it whenever needed.  I would probably use LDAP to sync my contacts, but I haven’t bothered to set up an LDAP server yet.

Several things could satisfy my need to sync files, data, information, and other stuff.  SyncML might do it, but most current SyncML implementations seem to be written to sync mobile data to a server and possibly retreive the data with a desktop.  I would ideally like to access a particular subset of my data from any of the many access methods I find myself using.  I have not looked in to it thoroughly, but rsync might just do the trick.  All I need now is a mobile client.  A lightweight approximation of Groove, iDisk, or iSync might do it, but alas, I am currently stuck in the world of OS9.x on the mac side.  It would be an extra bonus to reuse an existing technology or protocol, so that I could leverage existing software or frameworks.  I keep thinking that rsync would be ideal because there are already good clients for Linux, Windows, and Mac.  The only thing lacking right now seems to be on the mobile side.

I think I read on more than one list that 2004 is going to be a major year for device convergence and synchronization of data.  I’m ready for that to happen.

Yahoo/AP:

SAN FRANCISCO – A few hundred thousand lines of computer code could revolutionize the way people interact with computers, say its unlikely inventor and his backers.

The software is called No Boundaries Or Rules, or NBOR for short.  Denny Jaeger has been working on it for over 10 years.  I tend to be skeptical about anything that claims to be revolutionary, even more so after the hype and letdown of the Segway.  Don’t get me wrong, I think the Segway totally rocks, but outside of the StupidRich, it’s not practical.  The Segway isn’t exactly changing the way we do things as it was supposed to.

NBOR and its main application, Blackspace does have a lot going for it.  The full version is $299, which is quite reasonable if it is as revolutionary as the claims make it out to be.  The developers are also releasing a free as in beer trial version.  They also get props from me for a program that runs on Windows 2000/XP, Mac AND Linux.  It looks like the Windows version will ship first, followed by the Linux port and then the Mac version.

It appears that NBOR/Blackspace is hard to explain.

The NBOR site is running extremely slowly, and I don’t think that it has been slashdotted yet.  The developer in me really wants to know about what is under the hood of this program, but for now I’ll have to live with hype, PR, and news coverage.  It appears that the entire program takes up only about 8 megs of space.

The free demo will be out January 15.  I’ll be there.

This may not be big news to the world, but it’s huge here in the DC area:

High-level Redskins sources told SportsLine.com that Washington Redskins great Joe Gibbs has accepted a deal to become the Redskins new head coach. Terms of the deal were not immediately available, but the sources said he accepted late Tuesday.

This is easily the best news in the last decade of Redskins football (the kind we play in the US).  They must have made him an absurd offer, because since leaving the NFL for NASCAR, he has constantly been asked about coming back, and until today the answer has always been “no.”

It looks like we’re picking up an excellent defensive coordinator too.

It’s cold in DC today, but we’re all doing a happy dance.

• Mini iPod: way too expensive.
• G5 cluster: cool!
• Garage Band: neat.  John Mayer rocks too.
• The rest of iLife is cool and all.  $49 for the bundle is a good deal.
• Drink more Pepsi.  One in three gets an iTune.
• Office:Mac has some new features that are in Office 2003 for Windows, plus some other neat Mac-only stuff.
• Transitions are ugly no matter how you slice it.

Overall I was underwhelmed.  The stuff is cool and all, we just got our hearts set on a mini-iPod at the $99 price point.  We didn’t get it.  $249 is way too high.  You can get 15 gigs for $299 or 4 gigs for $249.  Do the math.

I was also a bit dissapointed by Akamai, which handled the stream.  I got a ‘not enough bandwidth’ error several times throughout the keynote, and I’m not alone.  It looked fine for most people.  Rael even watched the whole thing over GPRS.