Matt Croydon::Postneo

Year: 2004

  • Bluetooth Enhanced Data Rate

    Gizmodo mentions Bluetooth EDR, or Enhanced Data Rate.  It is supposed to be faster than but backward compatible with plain old Bluetooth (or is it Bluetooth Classic now?).

    I’m glad that it’s going to be backwards compatible with oldskool Bluetooth, though honestly I’ve never had an issue with the speed of it.  Sure, I’ll have to wait if I’m transfering a multi-meg file to or from my phone.  For most things Bluetooth seems to be fast enough.  I’m sure that for more advanced uses more bandwidth would be great, but it’s not a deal breaker for me.

    I would use a slower Bluetooth device if it connected more reliably and didn’t do the random weird things that Bluetooth devices seem to do at one time or another.

    Bluetooth EDR Roundup:

  • Morning Links

  • Back to Reality

    Things are finally starting to settle down after a few hectic days.  We’re almost done with leftovers and are finally starting to get back to our regular schedules.  Thanks again to the guys, Martin, Eric and his parents for mobilizing the champagne.

    In other news, we ramped up the wireless infrastructure with a Linksys WRT54G on sale for $69 before rebates and $59 after.  That’s about $40 off what I’d expect to pay normally, $30 off the normal “sale” price, and below my “buy it” threshold.  I know that Linksys is pushing the SpeedBooster versions of their hardware, but 802.11g/b is faster than my internet pipes, and if I need to transfer anything faster, I’ll plug the thing in.  You know, with wires.  (Grandpa, tell us about when computers had wires!)

    I picked the WRT54G because of an array of flashable Linux distros that I can put on it.  I’m going to run the stock firmware for a bit until I get things sorted out, but I’ll be shopping around for the best firmware for it.

    I’m still way behind on my aggregating.  I should have a linkdump ready in the morning.

  • Mobile Wedding Technology

    Special thanks to the mobitopians who sent along a bottle of chapagne.  You guys rock!  Yes, Erik, my parents are ecstatic.

  • Premarital Links

    All the little details have been filled in and everything is set for tomorrow.  Until then, here are some links for you.  Hopefully I’ll have a chance to read them in depth during the week.

  • I’m Getting Married!

    Expect things to be rather slow around these parts over the next few days.  I’m getting married on Sunday.  I will however do my best to moblog over the weekend, probably until someone confiscates the cameraphone from me.

  • Jodd

    JSurfer earlier today noted that a new release of Jodd out.  Jodd is a general purpose Java library.  If you’re thinking about reinventing the wheel, it’s probably already been done in Jodd.  Browse through the javadocs for an idea of what you can do with it.  Jodd is distributed under a license that looks like a modified BSD one, so it should be suitable for incorporation to projects with lots of different license types.

  • EV-DV Sooner than you Think

    Phone Scoop brings news that EV-DV chips are slowly inching down the pipeline:

    STMicroelectronics (ST) and Texas Instruments (TI) today announced the delivery of sample CDMA 1xEV-DV chipsets to device manufacturers. In collaboration with Nokia, Korean carrier LG Telecom is testing the solution for its planned deployment of 1xEV-DV technology.

    We should start seeing EV-DV tech hitting sometime during 2005, with a more widespread rollout 2006ish.  This seems to be in line with what I learned about EV-DV at ETech.  That’s the “slow” Rev C though.  It can only pull down about 3 megabits.  The uplink isn’t that fast, but the downlink is what you’re really worried about anyway.  The uplink speed will be fixed when Rev D comes out.

    EV-DV is definitely a tech to keep an eye out for, and might hit some top 10 lists in 2005 or 2006.

  • Link ’em

  • Windows Mobile 2003: What Comes Next?

    Wei-Meng at the O’Reilly Widnows DevCenter has a great roundup of what is new in Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition.  It looks like there are some new display sizes: VGA for the Pocket PC (640×480), QVGA (320×240) for the Smartphone, and a new square 240×240 or 480×480 screen size that could be fun.

  • The Clie has Left the Building

    Gizmodo is the first in my aggregator covering the story:

    Ill tidings for the Palm world as Sony announces they will be withdrawing the Clie line from the US at least throughout the end of the year.

  • G4TechTV Update

    I updated my comment from yesterday about G4TechTV.

  • Pythonic SSH: paramiko

    PyPI listed this little gem this evening: paramiko.  What is paramiko?  It is an SSH2 implementation in Python.  Here’s some more information from PyPI:

    This is a library for making SSH2 connections (client or server). Emphasis is on using SSH2 as an alternative to SSL for making secure connections between python scripts. All major ciphers and hash methods are supported.

    SFTP client mode is now supported too.

    paramiko relies on PyCrypt, which is like a Pythonic Bouncy Castle.

  • G4TechTV: So Sad

    Wow.  I didn’t realize that the G4TechTV “content” was going to be this bad.  I hope that for the last few hours I’ve been seeing G4 drek, and that somewhere in all of this mess there still is some TechTV.

    Update:

    In Lieu of actual programming, the wunderbrains at G4TechTV have decided to nix the re-airing of The Screen Savers at 8am.  They also replaced quality TechTV filler with Paid Programming straight through till they pick up G4 crap programming at 9am.

    I have to conclude that G4TechTV did not do any research before jumping in to all of this.  I’m usually at work when The Screen Savers is on in the evening.  I happen to be at home getting ready for work during the 8am re-airing.  I’ve been out of my usual schedule recently, but for months on end I’ve been an almost-daily viewer of the 8am show.  I can’t be alone.  I know that the DC Market was one of the stronger TechTV markets, so the viewers had to be there.

    Ahh, it’s okay.  The Screen Savers is on the schedule twice a day: at noon and at seven pm.  Of course I’m not able to catch either of those times.  In these TiVO times aparently I should be able to “deal with it.”

    I know that I mourned the loss of TechTV a few weeks ago, but I’m really sad to see it actually happen.  I can’t decode the actual content from all the ads on the G4TechTV main page.  The, uh, Screen Savers page has about a paragraph and a half of content on it, as opposed to the old feature rich page that had more info than you can shake a stick at.

    Maybe I’m growing old and bitter.  Maybe I just miss my old friend, TechTV.

  • Link Ho!

    • CNet notes that there will be several conferences this week.
    • Newsforge points to an osViews editorial, which strives to clear up some issues between SpecOps Labs and the WINE/Crossover Office communities.
    • Reuters: Nokia Adds Cheap Camera Phone to Ailing Portfolio.
    • OSDir points to an Internet News announcement of a new version of Apache Cocoon.
    • OSNews reports that Slackware is the last major distro to drop XFree86 for XOrg over licensing issues.
    • Chris Davies expands on the question are high end phones a threat to operators?  It is common knowledge in #mobitopia that smartphone users spend more per month than non-smartphone users.  Chris’ post is definitely worth a read.
    • Vladimir notes that ATI has released a new version of their Linux drivers.  Unfortunately I don’t see drivers for my mobile ATI chipset.  *Sigh*
    • Juha is a happy Nokia 6800 user and wonders if more devices will look like it in the future.  I’d personally kill for a 6800 form factor series 60 phone.
    • RootPrompt links to a Cringley article about the wicked things that can be done with a Linksys WRT54G.
    • Speaking of the WRT54G, Rasmus has a good tutorial on installing/setting up Kismet on the WRT54G.
    • Russ rants on a Newsweek article that gets mobile phone computing wrong.  Can I have one of those pictured 6600s?  He also has some Java-related posts after his recent relaunch.
    • K5 carries a story about the recent discovery of a new prime that has over 7 million digits.
    • I shall mostly abstain from the recent purple numbers meme. #
    • El BBC reports about the recently revealed secret D-Day photos.
    • This is old news, but the Pivot roadmap is the Best. Roadmap. Evar!  More recently, Pivot 1.14 beta 2 is out.
    • I must remember to use javadocs.org.
    • Wow, Nelson has some info on Unreal Engine 3.  It looks impressive.

  • Windows XP SP2 and Bluetooth

    PocketPC Thoughts links to a PDA Guy post about Bluetooth in Windows XP Service Pack 2.  I have the beta of SP2 running on my laptop, though I have not had a chance to check out RC1.  I didn’t notice anything different about bluetooth connectivity under the beta of SP2, but I was still running the stack that came with my Belkin F8T003.

    There are so many Windows Bluetooth stacks out there, and I was hoping that having One True Bluetooth Stack would make things easier, but if it does indeed not support networking, it is broken.  Of course BlueZ rocks my Bluetooth-enabled world under Linux.  It Just Works, and it rocks.

  • Java MessagePort Library

    Via freshmeat, the Java MessagePort Library implements a lot of transport methods:

    The Java MessagePort Library is a general abstraction for many different stream- or message-based APIs, including UDP, TCP, JMS, JXTA, BEEP, J2EE MessageBeans, SOAP, Mach IPC, SysV IPC, QNX4 SRR IPC, and shared memory. The available transport encodings include none, RMI, AltRMI, XML-RPC, SOAP, and JRML.

    It is released under the LGPL, whose definition as it pertains to Java code changes almost weekly.  I’ve glanced at the javadocs, and there sure are a lot of transport protocols and message types implemented.  If you’re thinking about reinventing the wheel and LGPL works for you, this looks like an excellent library to make use of.

  • Link and Run

  • Clearing the Linkcache

  • Merry Christmas: Wonderfalls on DVD

    Hoorah!  Via Keith, it looks like we’ll be getting Wonderfalls on DVD for the holidays.  I caught bootlegs of Episodes 6 and 7, and they’re doozies.  I’ll be waiting in line at midnight somewhere on this one.