We ordered up our phones yesterday, a Nokia 6682 for me and a Motorola v551 for her. I kept leaning towards the Nokia 6102 for my wife but kept coming back to the fact that it lacked Bluetooth. As a bonus the v551 is also quad-band so if we find outselves in the UK I’ll have to go back to my 3650 or taco while she can keep using her normal phone.
The phones should be in Wednesday evening; I can’t wait!
DistroWatch notes that Rocks Cluster 4.1 (beta) is out the door. Rocks was one of several cluster computing Linux distributions that caught my eye while I was working on my research paper on open source clusters. According to the release announcement they have rolled BitTorrent in to the installer which should make for some amazingly fast compute node installations.
I always love to see progress being made in Linux-based clustering technology. Congrats to the Rocks team for getting this (beta) release out the door.
Breezy Badger has been treating me quite well for the past few weeks. We’ve had our moments, like the other day a software update left me X-less (that was fixed by apt-get dist-upgrade --fix-missing), but all in all I’ve been quite happy.
Today I was greeted with a note letting me know that my laptop would be running a little warmer and faster than usual after a kernel update. I’m guessing that later today or tomorrow another fix will come out calming things down again. If not, I’ll file a ticket. Things have been amazingly stable considering the sheer quantity of updates that I’ve been applying almost daily.
The Badger Rules!
Update: Just as I thought, the kernel update I applied this evening fixed the issue and I’m speed steppin’ again.
Real Soon Now we’re going to switch over to Cingular so I can buy a 6682 on contract. So far the front runner for a phone for my wife has been the Motorola v551. It’s cheap (free), quad band (nice!), has bluetooth and just generally is the best bang for the buck in the cheap clamshells. She currently has a C650 which is a cute little phone but is a bit too tiny to actually use and has been having reception issues lately.
With the droppage of the 6102, also free after rebates at Let’s Talk, we’ve got something else to look at. The phone looks like a 6230 in a clamshell package with an up to date S40 UI, VGA camera and a decent external display. I’m really quite bummed that it doesn’t have Bluetooth (a feature that probably makes the v551 the front runner) but the 6102 is definitely worth considering. I’m not going to officially recommend it until I play with it, but it sounds like a capable little device that just lacks a few high end features.
Darla is on the ball as usual, and had the launch scoop this morning:
09:31 < DarlaM> matt, the 6682 was launched?
Yes. Yes it was. The phone is available now at Cingular.com or available for $99 after rebates and 2 year activation at Let’s Talk. It looks like Amazon’s superfantastic deal expired before the 6682 was actually released and it still doesn’t look like they have any.
I’ll be snagging mine as soon as I can so leave one on the virtual shelves for me!
The PyCon 2006 Call for Proposals is out. In addition to the regular sessions and less formal lightning talks, PyCon 2006 will feature longer tutorial sessions on February 23. I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to make it this year, but PyCon is a total blast. Last year it was great to map faces to names and to learn about so many new developments and projects. It’s time to get writing so that there is an excellent and diverse selection of talks again this year!
For as long as Tablet PCs have been on the market, I’ve been lamentinting that they’re a very cool idea. They just cost too much. At first they were in the stratosphere. Eventually you were only paying a $1000 premium over a standard laptop. Now the differential seems to be down even more, but it’s still in the range of a couple of hundred bucks.
I was flipping through the latest HP catalog and opened it up to the page showing their range of business laptops. It starts at $663 for their low end model up to $1663 for (you guessed it) their Tablet PC. To be fair, it looks like the price difference is lower than I’ve ever seen it. The next model down is a nc8230 with a Pentium M 740 and a 15.4 inch widescreen at $1463. The Tablet PC (tc4200) has the same processor, memory, and hard drive, but comes in a smaller lighter package (12.1 inch screen).
So really, there is no apple to apple comparison of Tablet PCs and laptops. A laptop isn’t a Tablet PC and a Tablet PC isn’t a straight laptop.
Come to think of it, I probaby wouldn’t buy a Tablet PC unless I could install Ubuntu on it. It’s been well over a year since I had Windows as my primary boot partition on my aging HP ze4430us. I keep Windows around on a small partition for those times that you need to work with software that only runs on Windows or those freaking websites that you really need to use that only support (and only work in) Internet Explorer. Aside from a monthly or bi-monthly boot in to Windows, my primary laptop has been run by warthogs, hedgehogs, and badgers for the past year and was run by red hats, green lizards and a cast of others before them.
I’ve finally completed backups and have successfully installed Breezy Badger, (the October Ubuntu Linux release) on my laptop.
I ran Hoary (the current release) for serveral months before it was out and overall it was rock stable for me. I had some issues with early preview releases of Breezy, but so far everything looks great. I’m installing a tonne of updates and after that I’m going to take a look around and see what there is to see. Here are some things I am going to be looking at/getting up and running:
It’s official. Christian Lindholm has joined Yahoo!
After 10 fantastic years at Nokia I have decided to quit. As of September 12th I will join Yahoo! as VP of Global Mobile Product first based in London and then moving to California late in 2006.
Congrats are in order to both Christian and to Yahoo! I have no doubt that he will keep things headed in the right direction while exploring new sides of the mobile internet that we haven’t even thought to look for yet.
Kiko is very ajaxy. It’s getting tons of buzz. Is it just me, or is kiko completely unusable? It’s definitely cutting edge 2.0 ajaxy stuff, but could you actually plan your day or life with it?
I don’t mean to pick on kiko. It’s obvious that they’ve put a lot of time in to the project. I just think that we’re falling in to some kind of dot-com trap where we’re using Ajax for anything and everything, weather it’s appropriate or not. Projects and products are being judged on how well they make stuff appear and dissapear on screen rather than their actual usefulness.
At the same time there’s a huge list of apps that are better apps because of their use of Ajax. I love Backpack, Google Maps, and many other Ajax-enhanced apps that I use throughout the day. I’m constantly amazed at what is being done by keeping an eye on The Ajaxian Weblog, Signal vs. Noise, the Ruby on Rails weblog and the myriad of other sites that I see Ajax mentioned and taken to the next level throughout the day.
I really like it when existing apps with solid backends get an Ajax boost. I flipped out when I saw the screencast for an Ajaxified Hula. The great thing is that Hula kicked butt even before Ajax was applied but rocks even more after.
I’m fascinated with the idea of single-url-as-webapp. Ajax gives me goosebumps (in a good way). But please, please, let’s not think of presentation first, usefulness later.
I’ve been keeping up with the efforts and citizen reporting of a team of datacenter employees on the 10th floor of a building in New Orleans for the past few days. While I was catching up today, I had the pleasure of watching some 23 busses on their way to the Superdome and convention center. I thought I’d share this high moment with you, though there’s a lot of dispair to go around.
If Apple really does have a line of Apple-branded phones ready to rock, they might just have something. If all they’ve got is the Motorola E790, we’ve got trouble right here in River City.
In all seriousness I hope there’s something else — there must be. The E790 should be one of those phones that just never makes it to market. The itunes-style interface part of it looks halfway decent but the rest of the phone is dogged by Moto’s standard (ugly) UI.
If UIQ 3 weren’t running so far behind I would think that UIQ3 + Apple customization would be a perfect combination. From what I’ve seen, UIQ 3’s one-handed configuration should rock and be very intuitive. Apple’s UI engineers could surely tweak and customize an iTunes interface on top of that for the music stuff.
If Apple were really smart they’d team up with HTC or another company that will churn out devices to spec for a device with that “in-house” polish.
I’ll be watching my aggregator closely on September 7th. Unless Apple has something really big up their sleeves, the Walkman phones are probably going to remain your best bet for some time to come. I’m really excited about the Nokia N91 too, but I worry that whatever PC interface it ships with is going to be too painful for most to use.
To be honest, an N91-like device with the iTunes store hookup would probably slaughter the music/cellphone crossover market.
I had completely missed this, but aparently the Nokia 770 was approved by the FCC on Friday. Thanks for the heads up, Koen! Everyone in #maemo is drooling right about now.
Here’s some more information in PDF form:
A company in Cincinnati, Ohio is looking for a web developer. Check out the framework they’re using:
We are developing e-commerce sites based on Python and Django framework. Experience in Python, object oriented programming, MySql, PostgreSQL, and other web programming technologies is requested. This person would also be responsible for maintaining other scripts on various websites we maintain and host. The main focus will be on e-commerce development.
It’s great to see jobs emerging for this amazing little framework that has been public for just a month and a half. This one popped up on a feedster search for django in my aggregator. I can’t wait to see where we are a year from now.
Mike asked the question and Chrissy said yes. Congratulations you two!
I submitted a patch to Django Ticket #399 (request for a bigint field type). It still needs testing but works at a quick glance on mysql. Here’s a shot of them in action from the admin interface (the input is just too small and just too big respectively):
Update: BigIntegerField works perfectly on PostgreSQL but because it doesn’t have an unsigned integer type (that I can find), PostitiveBigIntegerField isn’t going to make it all the way up to 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 without using an arbitrary precision NUMERIC or mapping zero to -9,223,372,036,854,775,808. Both solutions are messy and it would be a shame to have the mysql and postgres backends behave so differently. As an aside, it looks like this is already the case with mysql’s IntegerFields being UNSIGNED while Postgres just checks to make sure that the integers are positive before inserting.
The best solution would probably be to employ backend-specific range checking for these monsterous numbers. That way you won’t end up out of range in PostgreSQL but you’re also not penalizing MySQL for being able to count to 18 bajillion. At this point it would be safe to drop in BigIntegerField as is (as soon as I check it out on sqlite), but PostitiveBigIntegerField still needs some pondering.
Adrian has committed the Django model syntax changes. Current models will have to be rewritten — once — but the new syntax looks a lot cleaner and I think it will reduce the learning curve for newcomers to the platform.
Be sure to check out the full documentation as well as a brief screencast highlighting the changes. I will do my best to update my CRUD Generic Views tutorial as soon as possible to reflect the syntax change.
Update: Here’s the updated tasks.py
Gizmodo notes that the 6682 is supposedly available from Cingular now, though it’s going to be a hot potato for some time. The Cingular online store has a “Maintenance In Progress” sign up, much like the Apple store “back soon” message, but oranger.
In other news, Lets Talk no longer lists the 7610 but doesn’t have the 6682 listed either. Amazon still says coming soon.
Like I said, this is going to be a hard phone to come by until stock levels improve. Good luck!
I just saw the WordPress Trackback Validator plugin fly by my aggregator and immediately installed it. I knew Dan online back in middle school, so with this endorsement, I installed it instantly:
The Computer Security Lab at Rice just released the first public version of the Trackback Validator plugin for WordPress blogs. Since I’ve been using it, I’ve had 100% classification accuracy on Trackbacks (read: every legit Trackback makes it through, not a single spam Trackback). Maybe Trackback isn’t quite so dead after all.
The system checks to make sure that the URL of the trackback links to your page. This reminds me a lot of Sam Ruby’s feedback mechanism. As a bonus, there’s a great use of sparklines in the plugin page.
So I’m cautiously optimistinc about Google Talk rocking the house. Their choice of protocols is superb. The voice stuff is very cool but is something I will probably have to do without until the chat protocol is documented and/or the fine folks ag Gaim add it to their app.
Unfortunately talk.google.com is a bit of a walled garden, though it looks like they’re going to open up gateways with a few select partners, including the I-think-they’re-cool Gizmo Project. What would be really cool though (and is not mentioned at all in the FAQs) is a Skype/Gizmo/Etc-style GoogleOut and GoogleIn service. Perhaps this could be as simple as a partnership with the Gizmo guys or as intricite as rolling their own solution.
For now anyway, talk.google.com is one of many (now seven) different IM servers I connect to every day. I had a need for a home and away AIM account before that was baked in to that service, and now I answer to both, so they’re there. I don’t actually use my jabber.com account a whole lot but the others (MSN, Yahoo!, jabber.org.uk) get enough use that I should really be connected to if I’m online.
Sure, I’d love to connect to one server and have everyone on the planet be able to reach me, but until that happens, I’ll be on all 7.
