Author: Matt Croydon

I can’t tell you how good it is to hear from Brian Buck. I can’t tell you how long I’ve been reading his blog, but to me it feels like we go way back. Hang in there man!

All About N-Gage have the dirt on a game that looks like it has a lot of potential: Asphalt: Urban GT. I can’t say that I’ve played much more than some FIFA and other random stuff on the N-Gage, but a good racer can add a lot of value to a gaming platform.  Of course I’m still waiting to see if Call of Duty rocks as much as it should.

In addition to picking up a book for the fall semester, I ordered The Design of Sites (subtitle: Patterns, Principles, and Processes for Crafting a Customer-Centered Web Experience) from Bookpool last week. I’m still reading through the first chapter in my spare time, but this looks like a good read. Common sense seems to be a major component of a lot of the observations so far, but they’re definitely on the right track. This could definitely be a textbook for an upper level college class on usability and site design.  I guess I’ll take that as a good sign.

I apologize for the light updates this month, August seems to be pretty much a wash. I’m getting organized for the new semester and should hopefully be able to bring this weblog back in to the workflow. I’ve also been suffering without a news aggregator for the past few weeks. That is something I need to fix immediately before I go insane.

Back to work!

I had MTV on in the background this morning as obscure Olympic coverage on Bravo and MSNBC was a bit lacking. Among the videos that flew by was an Ashlee Simpson video, which I’m sure isn’t new but it was new to me. I kept thinking one thing over and over while listening to the video for “Pieces of Me”: Jill Sobule.

Jill Sobule is an obscure almost-mainstream pop/folk girl whose big hit was “I kissed a girl” and also sung “Supermodel” on the Clueless soundtrack. She’s a pretty amazing artist and the stuff that has never hit the airwaves is so much better. I’ve got all but one of her albums and have seen her a few times at little coffee houses and college campuses.

I haven’t heard Ashlee Simpson’s entire album, but a few snippets remind me a lot of Sobule, while overall she’s got a sound quite her own.

If Tim O’Reilly is doing it, you can be sure that it’s probably a few years ahead of its time. In that case, in a few years I should expect that most of not all college professors will be rolling their own textbooks from a vast catalogue of content.

I’m a college student, and I’ve had to pay for my fair share of really expensive textbooks that have either sucked beyond repair or that I’ve just not used. That said, I hope that someday my textbook comes from SafariU.

The full article at Business 2.0 is going to be behind the paying subscriber firewall for another month or so, but it’s an excellent read. (When I subscribed it cost me all of a buck an issue.)

When in doubt, follow the alpha geeks.

Amazon has unveiled a beta version of their web servies.  The beta allows access to more categories, boasts improved search capabilities, and a lot more.  I don’t see anything earth shattering here, but there are a lot of little improvements all over the place.  Feel free to sign up for the beta and play around.

I can tell you from personal experience that Hurricane Charlie is causing all kinds of problems with our air travel system.  Flights to a better part of Florida are bein delayed or canceled, and the effects of that can be felt on the other side of the country.  Needless to say it’s going to be a late night at the airport tonight.

Slashdot brings news that Ebay has picked up a stake in Craigslist.  I really hope that this doesn’t impact the awesome atmosphere at Craigslist.  I’ve snagged quite a few deals from Craigslist over the past year or so and am quite greatful for it.  I hope that it continues on in its community-friendly rocking classified ad form.

Yesterday Russ unveiled his mOlympics site yesterday.  I wish that I had been able to dedicate more time to help Russ out, though I’m glad that he was able to stay up late and pound out the code.  Spreat the word!  mOlympics is a great site to catch up on news from the Olympics.  I’ve found myself checking it out quite a bit over the past day or so in my downtime.  It’s a great shift from my usual poke around the BBC News WAP site (which can get stale if I visit it too much).

So go check it out (especially on a modern mobile), I think you’ll like it.

PhoneScoop has some play time at MotoSummer 2004.  They took a look at the A780 and I think they see as much potential in it as I do.  The A780 isn’t the sexy RAZR V3, but it’s the smartest of a new crop of phones from them.  I that that is has the serious potential to be the next really big thing.

One of the things that I like about the design is that it’s both a one-handed and a two-handed phone.  It’s sort of like an oldschool Treo but small enough to actually fit in your pocket.  It’s one handed when all you need is a phone.  It’s a candybar phone actually when used one-handed.  When you need some smarter features, pop open the flip and you’ve got a QVGA touch screen ready to rock.

I have a feeling that Moto is going to cripple developers and only allow them access to the phone through MIDP 2.0 with a bunch of extra JSRs and APIs.  That is dissapointing, but it’s the “safe” decision that probably makes carriers and Moto themselves a lot less nervous.  I can hear the tech support call now: “what does core dump mean?”

I hope that Moto puts up some developer info or releases an SDK at Motocoder pretty soon.  I’m pretty sure that there are a bunch of developers out there who are chomping at the bit to code for and learn about this phone.

• Russ was up late last night talking about MMS sucking and possible, powerful, popular, and practical at 3am.
• O’Reilly Make is a new magazine about geeky do it yourself.
• Via Hack the Planet, TiVO has filed with the FCC [pdf] for access to broadcast-flagged content.  Happy. Joy. Scary. Run!
• Here is the full text of Kerry’s speech last night.
• Via Nelson: Francis Crick, of the famous duo Watson and Crick, died last night.  May he rest in peace.
• What is on Tim O’Reilly’s radar?  Follow the alpha geeks.
• Mobiletracker notes that the Sidekick 2 is mentioned in Newsweek for $229.  Not too shabby at all.

Here’s an afternoon update for you:

• Netcraft reports on the well-priced entry of MySQL AB to the shared hosting market.  Their servers live at Rackspace and they’re priced quite competitively but at the same time are not at bargain basement prices.  Hopefully this will be a good move for them.  Bang/buck is high here.
• Novell is readying SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9.
• A Bluetooth iPod would rule, but so would the second coming of the Newton.  I’m not sure which one to expect first.
• Daily Wireless has some great coverage of OSCON.
• I stumbled upon an awesome GSM/GPRS AT command guide [pdf] this afternoon.

After reading a few articles about the new Motorola A780, the only thing I can think of is the potential to be the killer phone.  It runs Linux and most apps run on top of a virtual machine using Java.  I really like the form factor, which is saying a lot from a guy who is firmly in the candy bar phone camp.

I’m not going to drill down in to specs, but it has them: EDGE, Bluetooth, MIDP 2.0, Opera 7, document viewers, a 1.3 megapixel camera, and some whacky TransFlash memory module (as if the world needed yet another memory form factor).  It seems more functional than the flashy RAZR.  Something about this phone has grabbed the Series 60 power user inside me and has it very interested.  You can bet that I’ll be keeping a close eye on this one.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.  It looks like Erik was trying to work a few bugs out.

via LifeBlogger