Year: 2004

I caught a great story on Kuro5hin this morning about Total Anihilation.  The game was way ahead of its time and over the years I have lost countless time to it.  A year or two ago Roger and I dusted TA off for a quick game.  Many hours later I decided that I was getting too old to stay up all night and I headed home to bed.

The evening reminded me of the days when TA first came out.  We would all discuss strategy at work during the day and try to kick each others butts at night.  Sometimes a Krogoth would be sent in to cause damage, other times it would be so many airborne units that the computer slowed to a crawl.  There was always something different to try.

Whenever someone mentions TA, a little geeky tear forms in the corner of my eye.  Thank you for all the years of entertainment.

The Nokia 6600 gets top billing in Cellular, a movie also starring Kim Basinger, Chris Evans, Jason Statham, and William H. Macy.  It opens in theaters September 17.  The plot seems a little thin, but there are lots of excuses for gratuitous car chases, gun battles, low battery warnings, and typical uses of mobiles with cameras.

The best line in the trailer is by far: “This is the single greatest phone ever made.  Hold on a second, I’m emailing this video to myself.”

Does it feel a bit like the mobile phone equivalent of a BMW Film?  The movie does look like a lot of fun and should be pretty entertaining.

I don’t know if they’ll honor my request, but I’ve asked that the Nokia 6600 be added to the credits:

There has been quite a bit of shuffling around in the latest edition of the Top 500 supercomputers in the world.  The full list has been published along with a press release covering the changes to the top 10.  For a play by play report, check the highlights.  Of note are the presence of two new IBM clusters in the top 10.

The Earth Simulator is still number one, though both IBM and HP have quite an impressive showing near the top.  California Digital has put together an impressive cluster at #2.  Missing from the list is the G5 cluster at Virginia Tech, which was offline during this survey for a hardware upgrade.  Hopefully it’ll pop back on the charts next time.

Rick Klau:

Well guess what? TiVo announced today that Home Media Option is now bundled with the service, at no additional cost. For either $12.95/month or $299 lifetime, you get all of the normal TiVo functionality, along with the ability to stream MP3s over your home network (stored on your computer, played through your stereo), display digital photos on your TV (my kids’ favorite thing to do), schedule recordings over the web, and watch recordings in different rooms (with multiple TiVos in the house).

Whoa!  Combine this with plummeting costs in hardware, and TiVo starts to look quite tempting to people who might otherwise not consider it.

Yesterday Gizmodo mentioned Pocketster, a program for Pocket PCs that among other things implements Rendezvous (Zeroconf).  It sounds like Simedia, the company behind the product, is also working on a newer version that should iron out a few weirdnesses of the current program.

It’s a shame that there’s not more Rendezvous/Zeroconf love on the PC side.  It’s an amazing thing, really, when things “just work.”  Take the new Airport Express.  It’s absolutely wicked!

My hat is off to Simedia and everyone else trying to spread the Rendezvous love throughout the world.

Foo

• Nokia rejoins WiMax.
• Wi-Fi on Amtrak could be useful.  $9.99 for a trip is quite reasonable.  It’s probably a better deal than my pay-as-you-go T-Mobile hotspot account at $6/hr.
• Gizmodo and others linked to a way to boost the power on you Garmin iTrip to roll your own pirate radio.
• Moto buys embedded computing company Force Computers.
• Intel has delayed Centrino 2 until 2005.  By then you’ll be ordering a jumble of things called a Centrino 2 with a Pentium M 775 and Intel Pro Wireless 2400 with Bluetooth.  I can’t imagine how that can make any sense to a non-techie customer.
• Engadget covers details uncovered from the FCC about the new HP iPAQ h6300 with GSM/GPRS, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth.
• Sleepycat ships Berkeley DB Java Edition.
• OSNews announces that Gnomefiles.org aims to be your one stop Gnome shop.
• CNet: tablets take their time.  They’re still too damned expensive.  Scoble: how can we get Tablet PC prices down?  I really want to be able to afford one.
• US mobile carriers only get 3% of their revenue from data services.  I’m trying to boost that figure personally, but so far no luck.  A lot more than 3% of my monthly bill goes to paying for data and SMSes.
• Broadcom is buying 3G chipmaker Zyray Wireless.
• Rome 0.2 is out.
• WASTE 1.5 beta 1 is out.  Three cheers for the GPL!
• ASP.NET on Linux using Mono sounds sadistic but fun.
• Slackware 10.0-RC1 is making the rounds.

Mobiletracker reports that Verizon is excited about their new international text messaging.  AT&T joined the transatlantic SMS party a few months ago, so it looks like this officially puts Verizon at the end of the line of carriers that “get it.”  My advice to any carrier that does not support international SMS: quietly add the capability and pretend that you’ve been doing it for years.

I have to dump links from the tabs in Firefox, because Firefox 0.9 (One Tree Hill) is out!

• A new release of Feather Linux (a compact Knoppix remaster) is out.
• Via OSNews, FreeBSD is in stealth growth mode.
• Joi has a new 7610 and spoke at some press conference yesterday.
• Scott Hanselman on the brilliance of Apple’s new AirPort Express.
• I’m putting XP SP2 RC2 on the laptop this morning (thanks Scoble)
• Rootprompt links to a story about TKCluster that I’ll have to look at later.  I’m a die hard OpenMosix guy on the clustering side.
• Infoworld reports on the troubled relationship between Vodafone and Verizon.
• Tom Hume points to a Symbian Bluetooth Virus.

The update went well.  The new default theme is a little more sparse than the old one, but I think it’s growing on me.  I also like the rotating dots above each tab when they reload.  The rotating dots definitely give a consistent experience going between Thunderbird and Firebird.  Everything seems pretty zippy.

On to the post-update links:

• Confluence 1.1 has been released.
• pywi-fi “is a Python library that provides access to information about a W-Lan card’s capabilities, like the wireless extensions written in C.”
• Chris Heilman has fifteen pictures about fifteen pictures.  I’ve never seen so much glass labware used in the development processes.
• Coverage of the new Nokia phones has reached the mainstream.  It’s dumbed down blurbs from here on out.
• EPOC/Cabir.A is definitely a “proof of concept” virus for Symbian phones with Bluetooth as the transport mechanism.  It is hardly a “threat” if you have to say yes to the installation.  It could be a harbinger of things to come though.  More coverage at The Guardian and others.
• The installation of XP SP2 RC2 seems to have gone smoothly.  I don’t notice anything different, but I’ve been running a beta of SP2 for a month or so.  I will have to say that wireless networking rocks in SP2.

Even more links from just before bed:

• Infoworld: HP adds Lustre to cluster offerings.  Lustre.org has more information about the cluster file system.
• OSNews: PearPC 0.2.0 released.  Networking works in Windows now!
• PyPI notes a beta release of Zope 3.
• BoingBoing brings news of a 5.2 quake in San Diego.  No major damage is reported.
• Richard Elling talks about NFS clusters such as Sun Cluster.
• The O’Reilly Mac Dev Center introduces linking geolocation with photos using GPS and EXIF.
• Miguel shows a teaser screenshot of Cocoa# on OSX.
• Wi-Fi Networking News announces the Community Wireless Summit to be held in Illinois August 20-22.
• Mono Beta 3 is out the door.
• Aparently MS Smartphones can read RSS too.

I’m up for the Nokia press conference.  Yes, it’s 9am in Helsinki, but it’s 2am in DC.  I already know what they’re going to talk about, but I want to hear what they have to say and see the phones.

With some URL hacking, we have found some pics before the press conference started.  The press conferences has just started and we’re reviewing the entire presentation.

And some more from thenewsmarket (I’m still waiting to view the full-size videos):

Last week Reuters ran a story about there being “no buzz” about the announcement of a few new phones from some company from Finland that nobody cares about anymore.  I’ve seen the lineup, and I think that there’s going to be a ton of buzz.  Nokia has pushed the rez on their Series 60 phones, embraced WCDMA, VPNs, Push-to-Talk, embraced the flip phone and low-end market, and they plan to have all of this on the streets by Q3 and Q4 2004.

That’s not to say all is well and good in the Nokia camp.  A lot of analysts have all but given up on the company, citing a slide in market share while the “other guys” pick up the slack.  If Nokia can ship enough units quickly, get the pricing on the 2600/2650 right, stay agile, focused and balanced, we could be looking at the Nokia Renaissance unfolding before our very eyes.

Oh yeah.  Russ and I broke the story tonight a few minutes before Reuters and others.  The clock on my server is a few minutes fast, but my story was online a few minutes before Russ’ which we clocked at 7:53:45PDT.  Take that!

On a whim, I thought I’d take a look at the Nokia press site to see if there would be a webcast for the new phones.  Lo and behold there is already information up about them:

• Nokia 6630: Tiny 3G
• Series 60
• WCDMA, EDGE, or old-skool
• About 500 Euros (no contract) in Q4 2004
• 74 megs of memory
• 1.23 megapixel camera
• 1.27 grams, 110x60x20.6mm 
• Could this be Charlie?  Yep.
• Nokia 6260: Series 60 Flippy
  • VPN
  • Push-to-Talk
  • Supports the new Nokia Wireless (Bluetooth) Keyboard
  • About 400 Euros (no contract) in Q3 2004
• Nokia 6170: Flippy Series 40 
  • EDGE
  • XHTML, MMS, 65k colors
  • About 250 Euros (no contract) in Q4 2004
• Nokia Wireless Keyboard
  • Bluetooth
  • Only works on newer phones (7610, 6630, 6260)
• Nokia 2650: Cheap flippy that looks really good 
  • MMS, Java, XHTML browser
  • 97 grams
  • Q3 2004 for 120 Euros (no contract)
• Nokia 2600: Cheap but classic
  • Polyphonic ringtones
  • Spreadsheet
  • 94.5 grams
  • 100 Euros (no contract)

Also of note:

• Series 60 gets a major facelift: WCDMA, higher rez, IPSec, VPN, QWERTY input, 3D graphics, and more
• Information about mobile SSL VPN
• Mobile SIP
• Nokia expects 2 billion mobile phone users by 2007.  Will one in three humans on planet Earth have a mobile phone?

I love it when random stories about hotspots like this one at netstumbler are local for me:

The state of Maryland is launching “hot spots” at two of its welcome centers on Interstate 95 so motorists can access the Internet wirelessly.

More information can be found at Baltimore Bizjournals.  I’ll be sure to have live coverage via my laptop the next time I’m able to stop by the rest stop.