Author: Matt Croydon

Lots of releases are due out in the next few weeks:

• OpenBSD 3.5 is scheduled to be released May 1.  Roll out the CARP!  Listen to the release song too if you get a chance.
• Tribes and Tribes 2 will be released for free at fileplanet on May 4.  According to the Vivendi Universal press release it will also hit newsstands on a DVD attached to Computer Gaming Word on that same day.  I played the crap out of Tribes, but never got around to picking up Tribes 2.  I’m looking forward to playing Tribes 2 for free, and I’m also psyched about Tribes: Vengeance due out Q4 2004.
• SUSE Linux 9.1 Professional and Personal should be available for purchase May 6.

I’m reading though the dead tree version of the May issue of Business 2.0.  There is a great article on Creative Commons licensing starting on page 112.  It leads off by highlighting the experience of Allan Vilhan, aka Cargo Cult.  Allan has put his music online at Magnatune under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.  He has since been contacted by a game developer and a design firm and licensed his work for over $1000.  He’s really good.  I’m listening to Alchemy right now and it rocks.

Magnatune has something going here.  Any artists music can be downloaded for free, but they make purchasing high quality copies of the music (WAV, Ogg, FLAC, MP3 etc) inexpensive and easy.  Listeners can elect to pay anywhere from $5 to $18 for an album, with half of that money going directly to the artist.  The website also makes it extremely easy to inquire about licensing music for commercial use.

Back to the article, there is also a good interview with Lessig about Creative Commons, copyrights, and court decisions that went “the other way.”  It’s definitely read worthy.

Wow.  I thought this was never going to happen.  T-Mobile US is stocking the 6600 for $399.  I might have to look in to extending my contract if that price drops any time in the near future.  I love my 3650 to death, but the poor thing just doesn’t have enough memory to deal with the abuse I give it.

Thanks to Russ for mentioning it on #mobitopia.

Russ just pointed out that a new marketing firm, Mobilopia has set up shop at Mobilopia.com.  As far as names go, Mobitopia wins hands down.

What does Mobilopia mean?  Are the markets near sighted about mobile technology?  Or was that far sighted?  I can never remember.

I wasn’t able to FTP updates for a few days, but I think that’s sorted now.

In searching for information on JSR-179, the Location API for J2ME, I stumbled across a great article at Sun that shows just how easy geolocating yourself in J2ME can be:

...

/* Set criteria for selecting a location provider:
   accurate to 500 meters horizontally */
Criteria cr= new Criteria();
cr.setHorizontalAccuracy(500);

/* Get an instance of the provider */
LocationProvider lp= LocationProvider.getInstance(cr);

/* Request the location, setting a one-minute timeout */
Location l = lp.getLocation(60);
Coordinates c = l.getQualifiedCoordinates();

if(c != null ) {
  /* Use coordinate information */
  double lat = c.getLatitude();
  double lon = c.getLongitude();
}
...

Does it get any better than that?  It’s simple, easy to use, and now in just a few lines of code you’ve got your latitude and longitude.  Of course if you were grabbing your location in a real-world app, you’d put non-blocking code in a new thread and run it in the background.

I received an email from the Amazon Web Services team this morning.  As of April 16, they will be deprecating version 1.0 of their web services.  For SOAP developers, this should just mean parsing the newest WSDL.  XML over HTTP authors will have to change the URL that they call and might have to update their calls to conform with the latest version of the services.

After seeing some pictures of a supposed N-Gage 2 prototype, Jim and Ewan have posted their wish list.  I’m personally curious to see if the N-Gage 2 ships with EDGE capability.  EDGE could be a huge requirement for more interactive online gaming.  Don’t get me wrong, downloading data and shadow racing is cool and all, but massive multiplayer games, and multiplayer shoot ’em ups are going to require much fatter pipes.

If the N-Gage 2 ships with EDGE, might we see a wave of online games that were just waiting for the infrastructure to be in place?  I sure hope so.  Another thing to think about is that depending on the street price of an NG2 without contract, it could become an attractive low priced EDGE phone.

I wouldn’t consider EDGE a given yet though.  If Nokia is going to ship the NG2 with a T-Mobile SIM, there’s little motivation to add in EDGE capability.  To my knowledge, T-Mobile (in the US at least) has no plans or announcements for EDGE in the near to medium term.  Might we see AT&T or Cingular SIMs in the NG2?  Who knows.

Right now I’d consider the possibility of the NG2 having EDGE to be 50/50.  I’d love to see it happen, and it would make a lot of sense, however the current partnership with T-Mobile makes me think that it’s not a big possibility.  I guess it all depends on if they stole the guts of a 6600 or a 6620 when putting together the NG2.

It may not happen, but I’d sure like it to.

PalmInfoCenter announces the release of a new family of processors for mobile devices.  The new PXA270 line of XScale processors include “Intel Wireless MMX” technology, which has little to do with wireless and everything to do with 3d graphics and video.  Also on the chip is “Wireless Intel SpeedStep” technology, which will hopefully prolong battery life by underclocking the chip when more horsepower is not needed.  There is also a fair amount of on-chip security and cryptography.  Expect this new line of processors to scale from about 300 to over 600 MHz.

To compliment the new line of processors is the 2700G “Mobile Multimedia Accelerator” with lots of codecs and up to 1280×1024 resoltuion.

It looks like according to Bill Humphries and others, Wonderfalls has been cancelled.  It’s a shame.  I think that Wonderfalls was one of the best shows to come out of Fox in quite some time.  I freaked out and figured that it had been cancelled after fox.com/wonderfalls redirected me to their home page.  This comment and this post (look at all the comments!) by Tim Minear, one of the producers, sheds some more light on the situation.

I always thought that Friday night was the absolute wrong night for the show, and I’m really saddedned to see Fox botch yet another perfectly good show.  What really burns me is that there are more episodes (which becomes obvious if you watch the video for the title song on the now non-existant Wonderfalls page on Fox).  I guess I’ll fire off an email or two to register my level of piss-offedness.

Sadly, the guys in #mobitopia pretty much called this cancellation in advance.  Fox is that predicatble aparently.  Zap2it has a hopeful article about the possibility of Wonderfalls moving networks.  And yes, I have signed the petition.

Now back to your regularly scheduled techblog…

I had to restart the installation process after it hung at 24%.  Aparenlty the installer needs me to turn off the firewall at this point, but had timed out by the time I got around to taking care of it.  I restarted the installation with my firewall off and it installed perfectly.  I’m not sure if the installer said anything before I started the install process (I rarely pay attention to such things), but that’s something that should be made clear before the process begins.

One of the promises of Java Studio Creator is tight (loosely coupled) web services integration.  Sun does a great job of including a bunch of useful services under Samples.  You can tinker with google, ebay, get the time, get a quote, get the weather, etc.  This is great.  I’m glad to see web services shoved in front of developers faces like that.  Let’s not argue about the religious implications of implementing web services, let’s just use them.

I was so excited about having web services at my fingertips that I decided to add a new one.  I googled and found the wonderful (unofficial) Homeland Security Threat Level service.  I right clicked on Web Services in the Server Navigator and selected Add WebService.  I pointed the Visual Studio .NET style interface at the service’s WSDL.  Java Studio Creator promptly threw an error message:

04/09/2004 05:09:36: Error Parsing WSDL. Please see the log file for details. Exception = modeler error: unsupported schema type: "{http://xml.apache.org/xml-soap}Map"

Bummer.  It’s an early access release, but I was kind of hoping that stuff like this would “Just Work” for me.  VS.NET 2003 allows me to Add Web Reference.  The online version of Mindreef’s awesome SOAPscope handles the WSDL fine and allows me to call the web service with a successful result (currently Elevated).  Hopefully Sun will fix problems such as these before a final release.  In the web services world, interop is key.

Working with WSDL that parses properly is painless and simple though.  I ran through the web services tuturoial [pdf] and was impressed.  It’s the first time that Visual Studio .NET has a real Java competitor to stupid simple web services access in the IDE.  VS.NET has been doing that for a few years at this point.

Overall, I’m quite impressed.  I haven’t had the chance to do much more than tinker with it, but it has lots of potential.  Beyond the rough edges (which I can shrug off, it’s early access) there’s a lot there.  With the installation comes a J2EE app server, simple but powerful database access, web services integration, and drag and drop ease that seems to generate some pretty clean code.

I’m hooked.

Update: Jon Mountjoy sent an email letting me know that you’ve been able to use web services in the stupid simple manner described above in Weblogic Workshop for quite some time.  I’ve never worked with the Weblogic stuff, so it wasn’t on my radar.  I’ll check it out as soon as I can.

Well, not “wrong” per se, but the way things work with iDEN development seems a bit backwards to me.  It’s definitely not hobbyist/shareware developer friendly.  After hearing Russ talk about it, I decided to check out the developer tools for the i730.

I started at the Nextel Developer Program page where there was a huge link on the left hand side for the i730 SDK.  I clicked on it.  I was then prompted to sign in.  I took a few minutes, created an an account, and prodded on.  I was then presented with the sign in page for Motorola’s iDEN developer program.

WTF?

I tried logging in with the username/password that was associated with my brand new Nextel developer account.  No dice.  I tried resetting my password.  Nada.  The iDEN developer sign in page isn’t very helpful.  Quite the oppsite, actually.  My options seemed to be login, request new password, or reset my password.  Since I didn’t have an account with them, none of those options did me any good.  Luckily the developer home has a link to their registration page.

I registered and tapped my feet while I waited for a confirmation email to arrive.  It might take up to 24 hours.  Luckily it didn’t, and I was rolling along in just a few mintes.  I found my way to the i730 SDK (requires login) and downloaded.

For all of my complaining, it’s an amazingly capable java phone.  The SDK is different than your standard WTK/Nokia tools, but is quite usable.  I ended up setting things up in Eclipse using EclipseME and ALT-Tabing over to the Moto SDK to build and execute the emulator.  I jar’d and added the Moto-specific libs to my Eclipse project so that it would know what was going on.

It’s a cool little phone.  The Location API that I first heard about in Sue and Tom’s excellent LBS article are really that easy to use.  It’s incredible how many extensions and APIs that Moto have managed to pack in to this amazingly inexpensive and relatively non-“smart” phone.

Meanwhile back at the ranch, I was talking about what I think is wrong (or just not quite right) with iDEN development.

Take a look at the iDEN Publisher Program (what you get when you click on “About the Program” in the iDEN Developer Community).  Here are the steps in the program:

1. Register.  It’s not very easy and not very obvious, but I’ll get over that.
2. Submit your application idea and title to Publisher.  I guess this is sort of like shopping around a screenplay.  Here’s my bit, would you like to give me money?  Do they ever say “Hey, that’s a great idea, do that in house”? 
3. Carrier Approval. Lots of time passes.  The publishers shop the idea to carriers.  The carriers take lots of time to mull over the idea, conduct surveys, ponder if the idea can be done in house, etc.  If the carrier likes the idea, you will submit the completed app to the publisher, who will pass it on to the carrier.  More time passes.
4. Submit you application to the Publisher.  Lots and lots of testing.  Strict compliance with the style guide (which has some quirks) is required.
5. Payment.  The revenue split is 80/20, with you on on the 20% end of the deal.  I can’t fault the publisher, but the whole system is starting to feel a lot like the music industry.

I’m sure that the process makes sense for everyone involved (well almost everyone), but it sure seems unfriendly to shareware developers, single developers, and maybe even small development houses.  It’s all very different than the Symbian community that I’m used to dealing with.

While I’m not thrilled with the way things work, the i730 is extremely impressive, and I’d love to work with it more.  A simultaneous “hooray” and a “ho hum” are in order for Motorola.  I’m simultaneously impressed, excited, amazed, and bewildered about the iDEN ecosystem.