Matt Croydon::Postneo

Author: Matt Croydon

  • Pycon 2005 Preliminary Program Announced!

    This gem showed up in my inbox tonight:

    You will be happy to know that the PyCon Program Committee, after lengthy deliberations, has now finalized the program for PyCon DC 2005. I can tell you that the decision-making was very difficult, as the standard of submissions was even higher than last year.

    The preliminary schedule is online.

    It looks like a great collection of stuff this year. I’m going to do my best to make it there and will try to organize a Python for Series 60 BoF or open session. I hope to see everyone there this year!

  • Apple Dropped the Ball on the iPod Shuffle

    On Monday after work I headed over to my local CompUSA to look for a new CPU fan for one of my boxes. After finding what I was looking for, I did the customary sweep around the store. CompUSA tends to be a bit behind the curve when it comes to new Apple products, so after a quick glance at the Aplle corner I moved on.

    I passed by the mp3 player section and was shocked when I walked around the corner and saw three little green boxes on the shelf.

    CompUSA had the iPod Shuffle in stock! That was quick. They didn’t have a display for it, but if you knew what an iPod shuffle was, there were three of them sitting on the shelf.

    That’s what bothered me so much when I found myself in the Apple Store at Tysons Corner, Virginia yesterday. I was expecting to see a small display of iPod Shuffle’s even if they didn’t have any in stock. I also expected to see a Mac mini or two on display, even though they won’t be available for purchase until Saturday.

    But they had neither.

    How long has it been since Steve’s keynote? Nine, ten days? There’s just no excuse for the Apple Store to still have “give an iPod” plastered all over the store. The holidays are over. Steve has made a pretty big bet that the Shuffle and the mini are going to be the next Big Things. Where would you expect to find that Apple product that was announced last week that will be out next week? The Apple Store, right? I mean isn’t that the whole point of having Apple stores? A sort of exclusivity and one stop shopping that you can’t find anywhere else.

    In that case, Apple has dropped the ball completely.

    Really.

    Of all the places on the planet I expected to be able to play with an iPod shuffle this week, I thought it would be the Apple Store. If I wanted to pick one up, the first place I would check would be an Apple Store.

    But aparently I was wrong.

  • All Your OpenOffice Base are Belong to Us

    Speaking of OpenOffice.org, I recently checked out a pre-2.0 snapshot and was suprised to see something called “Base” show up in my OOo menu.

    After scratching my head for a few minutes, I concluded that Base 2.0 must be the Access workalike that will debut in OOo 2.0. Sure enough, it is. Reading though the Base 2.0 page is quite fasinating. It looks like there were some licensing issues at first, but I’m really glad to see HSQLDB powering an open source database for the masses.

    I’ve got to admit that I was completely unaware of Base 1.0. It looks like it is more of a database access library to be used within OOo than a standalone application. I’ve only poked around Base 2.0 a little bit, but from what I can tell it’s an ample Access workalike at the very least, and hopefully will be a platform that do much more. In the future I would love Base 2.0 to support other database backends, though the reasoning for going with HSQLDB makes sense.

    My hat is off to the OpenOffice.org team!

  • Why OS X Needs a Native OpenOffice Port

    MacMerc pointed to a status update on the native OSX port of OpenOffice.org:

    It’s been over a year and a half since this page was last updated, and as of recent memory, all engineering for OpenOffice.org Mac OS X has been focused on X11 graphics, that is, OpenOffice.org Mac OS X (X11). Without significant contributions of time and talent this will most likely remain the case.

    No engineering work has been performed on Quartz or Aqua development within the OpenOffice.org project since mid 2003. For the last year and a half all engineering work focusing on a native Mac OS X OpenOffice.org version has been concentrated in the NeoOffice/J project, using a combination of Java and Carbon technologies to replace X11.

    This is a bit of a bummer for Mac OS X users. I can’t tell you how valuable it is to have a clean and solid office suite with good data interchange that runs on Win32, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, and Mac (using X11). The problem with requiring OS X users to have X11 installed is that most don’t. Of course the hardcore geeky OS X users know of Apple’s X11, XonX, and fink. Unfortunately the people that should really see this amazing suite: the non-technical masses, aren’t going to see it en masse until it’s a point and click native install.

    I totally understand the arcitectural decision for the mainstream OOo release to rely on X11. It’s solid, it’s standard, it’s tested, and it’s going to be around until the end of time. At the same time, Mac users really need a native, sexy port of their own. I’m hoping that NeoOffice/J, with its GPL license and associated political issues, can fill the void. They’re using Java and some other fancy bits to get around the need for an X server. They also seem to be very early in their release cycle, but I’m hoping that NeoOffice matures quickly and becomes that native free office suite that I know that OS X users need.

    Of course right now you’re thinking that with iWork who needs anything else? I guess that’s right as long as you don’t need a spreadsheet or if you don’t have $79 to shell out for iWork, or if you’d rather use an open source product.

  • WHFS 99.1: May You Rest in Peace

    The Washington Post:

    WHFS-FM, the Washington area radio station that was a pioneering purveyor of alternative rock to generations of young music fans, did a programming U-turn yesterday by ditching the genre for a Spanish-language, pop-music format that transforms it into the largest Spanish-language station on the local dial.

    Wow.

    I don’t know what to say.

    Just like that, my radio station of choice when I was younger goes off the air.

    WHFS has had a long history and has changed from a free-form throw it against the wall and see if it sticks format to a much more corporate and competitive format. They got picked up by Infinity Broadcasting somewhere along the way. Even when they had to change to the Clear Channel format to stay competitive, music director Pat Ferrise who has always had an ear for hits has kept things as fresh as possible in the monotinous neometal everything-sounds-the-same world of modern rock.

    I mean honestly, the only place I’ve ever heard anything from The Streets on mainstream radio in the US is when Pat played it during a segment on the latest HFS morning show. Speaking of the morning show, I used to listen to Aq and Kath and then later Lou Brutus. Every once in awhile on weekends I’d catch some random up and coming electronica on Trancemissions.

    Ever since I could remember, HFS has been the underdog station. They were always a little smaller and a little less popular than DC101, the “big” rock station in town. I’ve still got the ticket stubs to HFSTivals of years past that I camped out for, back when it was the big show of the summer. I didn’t realize that their numbers were so bad that it required a complete 180 degree format switch.

    It’s not that HFS didn’t suck. Of course they did. Radio in general in this city (and from what I can tell nationally) sucks. Stations must stick to an extremely tight playlist aimed specifically at their demographic, and under no circumstances shall they deviate at all. You can figure out the programming on any station in the DC area by listening to it for 20 minutes or so.

    Then there’s the Clear Channel factor. They own the “big” rock station, DC101, which sucks too. Not that I don’t listen to Elliot from time to time. But their programming tends to suck just about as much as any major radio station in the area.

    The sad thing is that this format change happened yesterday at noon and I only realized it because it was front page news on the Post. Why’s that? Because I tend not to listen to commercial radio much anymore. I’ve switched from well-tuned morning shows aimed directly at my demographic to listening to WAMU, my local NPR station and CDs while on my way to and from work. I tend to listen to Morning Edition on my commute in and The World or All Things Considered on my way home. I usually listen to CDs or listen to the radio in the mid-afternoon if I’m out and about. Of course that’s contingent on finding a song that doesn’t suck that I haven’t heard a million times.

    I digress.

    I guess that there are a couple of things to be learned from this format change:

    • “Independent” (and by independent I mean non-Clear Channel) radio is dying.
    • Spanish pop is The Next Big Thing. 99.1 El Zol is nudged between two big CC stations: 98.7 WMZQ and “Hot” 99.5. That’s prime time dial space in the DC area.
    • Radio conglomerates like Clear Channel and Infinity Broadcasting will do anything it takes to make a buck and exploit untapped markets.

    I’ll stop rambling now. Now I understand what my father must have felt like when Eddie Gallagher and WWDC/WGAY AM1260 was replaced by “business talk” and later “sports talk” 1260.

    I’ll probably point my HFS button on my car stereo to WRNR, a low powered station with awesome eclectic programming run by some of the old old school WHFS staff. WHFS, may you rest in peace.

  • Mac Mini Peer Pressure

    The Mac mini is a gateway drug. Everybody’s doing it.

  • Meet the Mac Mini

    Here is a collection of links with more information about the Mac Mini:

  • Keynote Frenzy

    So begins a tradition that I usually spend either at Apple’s Reston, VA office [pdf] or online at #mobitopia watching the quicktime stream. This year I’ll be madly refreshing the dozen or so sites I mentioned the other day and I’ll also be lurking in #mercworld on irc.slashnet.org with the hopes that someone at the keynote has batteries long enough for “one more thing”

    What I expect

    • iTunes Flash – 1GB coming in at $149ish (which would be a great place to be: less than the mini butmore in cost and value than a 256 or 512 meg player for $100)
    • A solid ship date for Tiger (and various demos) and mention of iWork.
    • Talk of (and demos of) the Moto-Apple phone which is really just a mobile phone that can consume iTunes store stuff.
    • Minor speed bumps in Powermacs, Powerbooks, iBooks, the 80gb iPod, and general shuffling of the iPod line.
    • I expect Steve Jobs to say something along the lines of “Over the years we’ve brought you some of the best products on the planet. In 2005, we’re going to bring them to everyone else.”
    • one more thing… the cheapmac. I hope the price point will hit $499 but I wouldn’t be suprised to see it higher.

    What I don’t expect

    • The G5 powerbook
    • A tablet ibook
    • Newton 2.0
    • A major unrumored announcement

    I’ll be updating this post throughout the day as information comes in, so stay tuned.

    10:26AM EST: MacNN’s barebones Macworld coverage page is up.

    10:29AM EST: Mac OS Rumors has a dedicated page for coverage.

    10:50AM EST: MacMerc has gone Lite.

    11:31AM EST: Erik points out ipod-shuffle.com, though it’s not registered to Apple.

    11:44AM EST: This iPod Micro story is a fake..

    12:15PM EST: Steve was a little late but the show has begun.

    So far there’s been an hour of WWDC wrapup, the mac mini, and the ipod shuffle (“great for podcasts.”

    I could have easily skipped the first hour, especially with my only feed being IRC channels and websites. I am extremely impressed with the form factor on the mac mini and on the price point of the ipod shuffle.

    The Unofficial Apple Weblog has excellent coverage of iWork ’05. I’d love to see it in action.

  • Keynote Delayed by 9 Hours

    The Mac Observer notes that Steve’s MacWorld keynote will (hopefully) be available around 9pm tomorrow evening, almost 9 hours after the actual webcast. In other news, Mac Rumors has a good wrapup of the rumors that are out there. It looks like the flash-based iPod is going to happen according to some detective work done by MacCityNet.it.

    I’m still holding my wallet for the cheap mac…

  • Preparing for a Keynote Without a Webcast

    I’ve made peace with the fact that there will be no live webcast tomorrow Tuesday. Instead, I’ve prepared a collection of bookmarks to ‘open in tabs’ and refresh as neccesary during the keynote. Here’s what I’ve armed myself with so far:

    I’d love to know if anyone that will be there plans to be on IRC during the keynote (until their phone battery dies anyway), or if I’m missing any crucial sites that I should be watching tomorrow.

    Update: Thanks to Jonathan Greene for pointing out that MacMerc will have live coverage at #mercworld on irc.slashnet.org. I’ll be there!

  • What Ubuntu Needs

    I love Ubuntu. It takes some of the best parts of Debian (god bless you apt-get) and fuses it with a good philosophy and some leading edge (but stable enough) Gnome technology. The thing that got me to try Ubuntu was that they were the first distro with Gnome 2.8. I just had to check it out, so I installed it on some tesbed hardware. I was immediately impressed at the clean lines and the improvements in Gnome 2.8.

    After awhile I got busy and the testbed got reappropriated to some other task. I went back to using my trusty Celery 600 (with lots of ram) Debian-testing desktop nearly fulltime again.

    I decided to take a look at Ubuntu again when Edd mentioned it in his weblog in late September. I decided to pop it on the linux space of my dual PIII 733 box. I keep most of the drive space on this box dedicated to Windows, because there are still just some things that can’t be done with the penguin. I switched back over to Ubuntu for everyday tasks for awhile: mail, web, irc, etc. It’s really pretty, really clean, and extremely repsonsive. I used the Synaptic package manager for the first time and was extremely impresed. I installed an SMP kernel. I installed Python and other apps that I had been missing.

    Eventually though I went back to my slow and steady Debian box. At the time I wasn’t sure why, but now I think I’ve figured it out. With Ubuntu, you can install a program in no time with Synaptic or with apt-get install. It’s really braindead-simple. Unfortunately when you install a program on Ubuntu you get the program and not an associated start menu entry. This gets really annoying quickly. After I install the program I then have to either manually add a shortcut to the programs menu or (more frequently) have to guess the name of the executable and run it from the ‘run program’ prompt or from a shell. This gets old really fast, as often the binary does not carry the same name as the package.

    From what I’ve come to understand from lurking in #ubuntu on Freenode and from poking around various wikis and documentation is that not adding programs to any menu is a philisophical decision. I’ve got to disagree. I really think that what Ubuntu lacks most is an ‘Ubuntu’ or ‘Extras’ menu that newly installed programs get shoved in to. Yes, it gets crowded. There’s really no way to avoid it, but if you put it in its own menu you keep the ‘clean’ looks of the everyday tasks like Internet, Office, etc. I really think that such a menu would add value to the Ubuntu distribution and would definitely make it easier to use various programs that have been installed but have faded from view.

    What do you think?

  • Comeon Steve, We Need Our Feed

    For the past several years I’ve tried to follow the big MacWorld keynotes by Steve Jobs. I’ve sometimes watched the Quicktime stream from home, other times watched it from a satellite viewing location such as Apple’s campus in Northern Virginia. In the leadup to MWSF05 I’ve been getting a little nervous that they haven’t announced satellite coordinates, viewing locations, or a stream location. AppleInsider may have an explanation.

    They cite a memo exerpted at MacInTouch:

    Apple will not be making satellite coordinates available. Although the keynote WILL be available on our web site – it will NOT be available until sometime AFTER the keynote is over. They do NOT have a time determined, so it may not be immediately after the keynote is over.

    Wow, that really sucks. I’m sure that Steve is pissed at the thunder-stealing that the rumors sites tend to do before keynotes. (Hint: don’t sick the laywers on them until after the keynote, it’s a dead giveaway.) Couple that with BillG’s miserable keynote the other day and Steve might just be a little spooked.

    Seriously tho, I’m reather bummed about this. Watching the stream and drooling over tech I can’t afford has become a semi-annual tradition for me. Especially if they are indeed rolling out a Mac in my price range, I want to see it in real time.

    This move could really backfire on Apple, as they’re going to instantly piss off a ton of geeks who might be thinking about that $500 price point. Then again, Apple might just be heroes if they reinstate the feed at the last second…

    Update: In the past when I’ve not been able to plunk down in front of a Quicktime stream I have found that MacNN tends to have very good realtime coverage of MacWorld. In the past they have updated their live coverage every few minutes during the keynote. As always, Frank is on top of this news too.

  • Win32 Wget

    I use wget on my linux boxed on what seems like a daily basis. This morning I got fed up with using browsers to download stuff on a particular Win32 box and went in search of wget binaries for Win32. Google led me to Heiko Herold’s windows wget spot, has a wonderful binary of wget 1.9.1 with SSL support.

    I’ve got it installed, in my path, and it’s rocking my world.

    As an aside, if you’re looking for a more complete Unixish environment under Windows, you might want to check out Cygwin.

  • Stable Before It\’s Stable

    Debian stable tends to be ancient. With Debian “sarge” just around the corner, the “testing” disto has become even more solid than it usually is. For production systems, a traditional (but aging) “stable” distribution is great. Only proven and rock solid components can be found in “stable.” The problem with “stable” is that it gets stale. It’s been almost three years since “woody” (the current “stable” release) came out. “Woody” is just getting tired. Apache 1.3.x and other tried and true packages just don’t do it for me anymore.

    I joke with my fellow geeks that Debian “testing” (and often even “unstable”) is more stable for desktop use than many other distros. I tend to keep a “testing” desktop, as it seems to hold a good balance between the bleeding edge and stagnation. But “testing” just isn’t always good enough for production environments. For this, we need something more stable.

    I’m just getting ready to commission a Debian box for semi-production use, and I’ve decided to replace my normal “stable” or “testing” entries in /etc/apt/sources.list with “sarge.” My reasoning is that for now it’s somewhere between “testing” and “stable” (we’re in release candidate territory here), but once it becomes “stable” it will remain fresh enough for my tastes for quite some time. I’ll be happy with Apache2+Dav+Subversion+other goodies that I’ve come to rely on from “testing.” At the same time, it will stabalize in the very near future and allow me to keep it in production as a “stable” box.

    This is just something for people getting ready to deploy Debian-based servers in the near future to think about. If you reference “sarge” in place of “stable,” “testing,” or “unstable,” you can have the best of both worlds. You’re running “stable” before it’s “stable.”

  • Debunking Dave: McDonalds and Wi-Fi

    I’m not going to venture a guess on most of Dave Winer’s 2005 predictions. I agree with some and disagree with others. I am however going to debunk his prediction #12:

    12. There will be a wifi signal at the top of the Empire State Building and in every truck stop in the US. Also in every Best Buy. McDonald’s won’t embrace the Internet.

    I had Wi-Fi in a Palo Alto McDonalds over a year ago. It was during their initial launch period, so I didn’t even pay for it, they handed me a coupon for free access when I inquired how much the service was and how I could pay for it and log on.

    Of course this McDonalds is across the street from the original Frys in the heart of Silicon Valley. Maybe that was a bad example.

    Let’s look at the big picture then. McDonalds Wireless Site is down for maintenece right now “to help you find Wi-Fi enabled McDonald’s more quickly and easily.” I intepret that to mean that they just can’t keep up with the addition of new locations and need to revamp their site. The original site was just a bit map of the US with little blips in Chicago, New York, and a few other cities.

    If you head on over to the Wayport locations page, you’ll count some 40 or so states that have Wi-Fi McDonalds locations. I did a quick check on Maryland and found 13 locations with Wi-Fi statewide. There are 3 in Baltimore. The one down the street has wireless. There are 9 other Wi-Fi McDonalds locations throughout the state, though they are mostly in urban and suburban areas. What about other states? Texas has over 100. California has more than I’m willing to count.

    I think it’s a little too late to say that McDonalds won’t embrace Wi-Fi and the wireless internet. They already have.

  • Plesk Coming to Debian

    While I was loitering in the requirements section of SWsoft’s Plesk website I noticed a curious thing:

    Standard configuration of Debian 3.1 (coming out in the end of December)

    Hey, check that out! I’m assuming that once Debian 3.1 is final Plesk is planning to launch support for the platform. Traditionally Plesk has only supported RPM-based distros (first Red Hat and now RHEL, Fedora, SUSE, and more). I also notice that they’re planning to roll out support for Mandrake and FreeBSD.

    While it’s obviously running a bit behind, this move further underscores the move away from legacy Red Hat, expensive Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and bloated/slow Fedora Core and towards other systems. I think it also adds to the viability of Debian as a replacement for traditional Red Hat systems. I’ve already seen anecdotal evidence of Debian being rolled out in traditionally Red Hat shops, but I’m always glad to see more evidence.

    Now that I’ve babbled a bit, allow me to explain what Plesk is for those of you who don’t know. Plesk is a web-based control panel similar to Ensim, CPanel, and even (sorta) Webmin. It’s commercial glue on top of a LAMP architecture that allows colo customers and web hosting providers to sell and resell their services. I didn’t originally have a particular affinity towards Plesk but ended up deploying it on one of my servers. It requires a little bit of maintenence and updates of course but in general it’s a very good fire-and-forget platform manager.

    I might just have to upgrade to Plesk 7.5 reloaded when I can redeploy it on a Debian box.

  • Apache2 and PHP5 in Less than 10 Minutes

    This weeks Debian Weekly News featured a link to some unofficial debs of PHP5. I’ve been meaning to tinker with PHP5 for some time now and jumped on the opportunity to do so.

    I took a fresh and minimal Debian Testing install (updated from a tiny stable install) and added the following line to my /etc/apt/sources.list:

    deb http://people.debian.org/~dexter php5 sid

    After an apt-get update I used apt-get install to install the following packages:

    • apache2-mpm-prefork
    • libapache2-mod-php5
    • Many of the standard Apache2 modules
    • Many of the standard PHP5 modules listed here
    • A few suggested and recommended packages.

    I ran the install command with -s a few times to see what would be installed, but zero to working Apache2 + PHP5 took me less than 10 minutes. Of course this is running unofficial stuff on a Testing system (though if you ask nice enough you should be able to pull this off on an otherwise Stable distro, but why would you do that?), so use it at your own risk. I’d suggest that you not try this on a production system. Until we see PHP5 incorporated into the various distros, this might be the quickest way to give it a go.

    I’m excited to tinker with the new OOPness features in PHP5. I’ve also got my eye on a particular MVC framework called Mojavi.

    Update (1/12/2005): As some have noticed it looks like there has been some moving and shaking in this unofficial unstable php5 build. After an apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade a few days ago, I lost the ability to use DomDocument. I checked the dists directory and changed my sources.list to reflect sid-old.

    I changed my sources.list back to sid after noticing that there were fresh new (5.0.3-0.3) pakages dated this morning at 4am. The new packages are excellent!

    Let me say again, don’t use this on a production system. But do look around, have some fun, and get a feel for php5. Special thanks to Piotr Roszatycki (dexter) for generating these packages.

  • Mobile Data Conundrum

    I’m between a rock and a hard place.

    T-Mobile is my mobile service provider. I love them to death. Their customer support can’t be beat, the people in the retail stores are actually plesant, they actually honor the warranty on phones, and they just generally rule.

    But man, their data plans are killing me.

    Here’s a bit of history for you. I’ve had T-Mobile service for almost two years now (eff Sprint) and love them. When I activated the service on my 3650 through Amazon I added their $9.99/mo T-Zones Pro plan. That got me unlimited on-phone data (plain old http port 80, WAP/WAP 2.0, IRC, etc) and even allowed me to surf via a bluetooth connection on my laptop even though I wasn’t supposed to be able to. For awhile I upgraded to the $19.99/mo unlimited GPRS plan because I was traveling and wanted full access to everything via GPRS over Bluetooth. After a few months I went back to the $9.99 plan because I just wasn’t using GPRS often enough (think T-Mobile hotspots).

    All was fine and well for a long time. I used email (outgoing) all the time, hopped on IRC via WirelessIRC when I was out and about, and was generally happy. Somewhere along the line I picked up a used taco for $60 at Gamestop and swapped my main T-Mobile SIM back and forth, using Opera on the taco and WirelessIRC, Services, and mail on the 3650.

    Then things came to a grinding halt. All of a sudden I couldn’t use WirelssIRC any more. That’s a big bummer, as WirelssIRC is probably my personal Series 60 killer app. It’s frugal on data usage, communication is instant, and I can talk to my online mobitopian family anytime anywhere.

    It turns out that I should have been paying $19.99 for access to anything other than web and email ports the whole time, on phone and off. T-Mobile realized this some time back in November/December and silently started blocking ports.

    This brings me to my conundrum. What’s a geek supposed to do in a situation like this? Did I mention how painfully slow a GPRS connection is in a Wi-Fi, EDGE, and 3G world? It’s pretty pathetic actually. It’s like when I was still using my 1200bps modem when all the cool kids had 9600’s. GPRS is slow, but it’s been very useful over the years. Until I couldn’t do something basic like hop on IRC from the phone for any less than $19.99 a month I was quite happy with it.

    I just can’t justify $20 a month for a slow connection that I’m just going to use to connect to IRC a few times a month. That’s just absurd. So I started looking at my options.

    My only real option (being a GSM guy that likes his phones to work places other than the US) was to look at the giant behemoth that is ATT+Cingular. Before being snatched, AT&T Wireless seemed like the wireless carrier with the best strategy for mobile data. EDGE is rolled out nationwide and true 3G service is available in several metropolitan areas. Before the merger, going with AT&T would be a no-brainer.

    The thing that scares the crap out of me is that Cingular appears to be so stupid when it comes to mobile data. Russ has been urging me to go out right now and pick up an EDGE or UMTS phone at an AT&T Wireless store (you know, the ones with the Cingular banners over the AT&T logo) before they go away. Why’s that you ask? Because Cingular is stupid about mobile data. Russ has an unlimited EDGE data plan tacked on to his AT&T Wireless account for $24.95 a month. Now we’re talking. EDGE is significantly faster and would be quite usable via a Bluetooth teather. If I were on an EDGE plan I could skip the hunt for a starbucks and just connect my laptop to the internet anywhere anytime. I’ve done so via vanilla GPRS and it’s just not a happy thing.

    Why am I not running out right now and picking up an AT&T phone right now? Well, because Cingular is stupid about data. The other reason that I am cautious about switching to etiher carrier right now is that they’re in the process of merging their billing systems, accounting systems, support, and infrastructure. I’d like to avoid that potential mess if I can.

    Why is Cingular so stupid about data? Take a look at their web site and look at their data plans. $30 for 10 megs, unlimited for $80? No thank you. I’d much prefer unlimited EDGE for $25, thank you. I looked at addons for their voice plans and didn’t see anything intelligent there either. Actually, I saw more stupidity. A 2MB GPRS addon called “MEdia Net” for $9.99 a month. Wow, that’s lame.

    That brings me back to my conundrum. I’ve got several options, but they all seem to suck in one way or another.

    Option 1 is to stay with T-Mobile even though they’re not going to get serious about 3G until at least 2007 and they’ve made absolutely no mention of EDGE. They’re also going to be way behind the pack of ATT/Cingular, Verizon, and Sprint/Nextel. I don’t know how long I can stick with option 1 even though I love T-Mobile.

    Option 2 would be to wait for the ATT/Cingular merger to settle down a bit and switch to Cingular once the billing kinks get worked out and all that. The problem with option 2 is that Cingular is dumb about data, and I honestly don’t think that any of their data plans come even close to fitting me or my budget.

    Option 3 is to run to my local AT&T Wireless store, pick up a Nokia 6620, and get on an unlimited EDGE plan while it’s still available. The thing that worries me most about option 3 is that I’m setting myself up to get screwed. At least there’s a lot of potential for me to get screwed. What happens if my only option in 6 months is to go on one of Cingular’s stupid data plans? What if Cingular screws up the momentum on EDGE and 3G that AT&T has been building up for years? There are a lot of questions that have not yet been answered.

    I’ve been thinking about my options for some time now and just haven’t been able to come up with a good answer. What should I do? What would you do?

  • Python for Series 60 Wiki

    It has been mentioned other places but not here. Several people have been keeping track of links, news, and information about Python for Series 60 on the Python for Series 60 Wiki. It’s running on the same semi-old MoinMoin install that houses the official LOAF wiki.

  • Delorme Bluelogger: Bluetooth GPS for $149?

    Earlier today Christopher Schmidt was looking for a cheap Bluetooth GPS receiver on #mobitopia. I think he stumbled upon a hidden gem: the Delorme Bluerunner. It looks like a no-frills but useful and usable receiver that would be perfect for GPS applications on mobile phones and PDAs. The truly best part about it is the price point: $149.

    There are tons of GPS units out there. There are tons of cheap but good GPS units out there. However, I think this is the first case of a good cheap GPS unit that also works over Bluetooth. Here’s a roundup of information about the Delorme Bluelogger:

    I’m pretty sure that this is a fairly new product, but I’m suprised that a compact inexpensive bluetooth GPS reciever such as this seems to be flying under the rader. A quick check of Technorati and Feedster comes up pretty short. I would have thought that people would be all over this. Am I missing something? Is this too good to be true? $149 seems to be a new price point for a decent Bluetooth GPS receiver.