Author: Matt Croydon

I’m sitting here in the lobby slurping free Wi-Fi.  Ewan is across the table IRCing from his Netbook.  Russ is upstairs working on his tutorial for tomorrow.

I’ve been moblogging quite a bit, feel free to check it out.

Greetings from BWI! I’m currently sitting outside my gate and leeching internet access from the t-mobile hotspot in the United Red Carpet Club. I’m not a member, but luckily wireless signals travel through walls.

I really like that t-mobile tweaks their hotspot pages for certain situations. As you can see above, they’ve put a lot of United-specific information right at my fingertips just seconds after I logged it.

Thanks t-mobile and United!

I’m heading out to San Diego in the morning, and therefore have to charge up all of my gadgets.  Clockwise from the top left are a SPOT watch, AAAs for my DSC-U20 digital camera, my 3650, and my 9290.  Below is my ze4430us laptop, also charging.

In case a computer goes down at the house or if I loose connectivity, I’ll probably end up blogging at my backup blog.  If you don’t see lots of stuff from me in the next day or so, look for me over there.

I plan to keep notes here on the blog, so check back.

See y’all on the left coast.

Via Doc, it looks like there might be a helluva party at the emer3g1ng L0ft on Tuesday night.

I tend to do most of my online reading ahead of the Slashdot curve, but today I took some time to catch up with El Dot.  I’ve found that the most interesting bits rarely make it to the front page.  Here are the links that I looked at this evening:

• 10 Technologies That Refuse to Die.  Go Fortran!
• Broadband Reports has notes on tinkering with your WRT54G, which is really just a linux box in a funky blue dress.
• MozillaZine: Nvu 0.1 is out.  This project is backed by Lindows and released under a tri MPL/GPL/LGPL license.
• Bochs 2.1 is out.  It can now emulate AMD64 along with the classics.

I’ve started to get stuff together for the trip on Sunday out to San Diego for the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference.  Here’s a quick roundup of pre-Etech news and info:

• Danny O’Brien is going to be crashing at the Em3rg1ng L0ft, which should be the San Diego equivalent of Emerging Man.  If you’re still looking for a floor to crash on, look no further.
• Edd will be talking about BlueFOAF.
• Doug Kaye‘s IT Conversations will be covering the Digital Democracy Teach-In.
• Trevor Smith has remixed the session grid to an easy to grok At-A-Glance.  They make good desktop images, too.

Via Jeremy Hylton, Aikido is a new scripting language from Sun.  It is currently available for Solaris, Linux, and Mac OS X.

Cory announces on Boing Boing that Eastern Standard Tribe, his latest novel, is available for download and should be on store shelves in the next day or two.  The full text is available free of charge under a Creative Commons license, but don’t let that stop you from buying the book!

Mobilewhack points to a LinuxDevices article about Lycoris releasing a distro for PDAs called DL-PPC.  I wonder if I’ll be able to get it to run on my URThere @migo.

Here are some links for Monday:

• DevChannel has part two of their tutorial on web services with Axis.
• TheServerSide points to Zamples, which offers live code examples for the JDK 1.5 API.
• phpExifRW “is a pure PHP class to read, write, and transfer EXIF information that most digital cameras produce.”
• Via Newsforge, gnulinux.net reviews SuSE Enterprise Server 8.
• Werner Vogels helped finalize the lineup for Usenix 2004 over the weekend.
• CNet: the OMA released specs for DRM of mobile content.
• TechTV (via Gizmodo) reviews some of the top convertible Tablet PCs.  I still file them under cool but too expensive.  There’s a huge difference between sub-$1000/$1000ish and $2000ish.
• Anthony wants his mobile content.  Welcome to Mobitopia!
• CNet: TiVo is cutting prices on Series 2 hardware.

I’m tend to lurk a lot and talk a little in #joiito.  I also spend a fair amount of time on IRC, and have on and off since I was a kid.  I know that bots in IRC channels can be quite useful, but the bot feedback level is pretty high in #joiito today:

***laszlo [~laszlo@YahooBB219196000010.bbtec.net] has joined #joiito

<jibot>laszlo is a Tokyo-based journalist – http://www.issho.org/LaszloBlog and http://www.issho.org/PolyglotBang

<laszlo>chomp: http://www.issho.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1186 | IsshoNews (en): Professionals don’t steal

<shorten>laszlo’s url is at http://xrl.us/bemh

-surly:#joiito–  from laszlo 🙂      http://redirx.com/?xjg

<chomp>laszlo: URL posted.

Jibot is quite useful when in herald mode.  It makes mapping IRC nicks to people and blogs much easier.  We use a modified Chump bot in #mobitopia to keep track of and discuss links, and I don’t know if I could function well without it.  I’m not a huge fan of the url shortening services in IRC channels.  I could probably deal with one, but two seems a bit excessive.

Luckily the bots seem content with ignoring each other, or else we’d be in for some real fun.

Yes, I do know about the /ignore command, but I tend to find myself in front of several different clients throughout the day, so managing the /ignores is just not worthwhile.

Perhaps I’m just a bit cranky because it is monday.

Via BoingBoing, 12 Myths of Mobile Device User-Interface Design will be presented by Aaron Marcus on March 10 in Chicago.

Road trip, anyone?

Please bear with me, as it looks like I’m going to be in linked list mode for the next couple of days.

• NewLC has heard that the Symbian Exposium 2004 will be held in October.  This has not yet been confirmed.  I’m sure that several Mobitopians will attend.
• The Chipotle web site sucks ass.  There’s just no other way of putting it.
• The ladies from Atomic Kitten are taking some time off.  I hope that the break is temporary.
• Wi-Fi Networking News: Wardriving is not worth a caning.
• CNet reports (in the most vague terms possible) that Lindows is distributing LindowsLive over P2P networks.  Which networks?  Why not set up a tracker and torrent your heart out?  The article doesn’t really say much.
• Leo Laporte links to news of Gateway’s $235 Million offer for eMachines.  That sounds a bit low considering how well eMachines is doing.  They’re on a roll, that’s for sure.  I’m drooling over the M6807 right now.  Is that 64 bits in your lap or, uhh…?

I’ve spent most of the day walking slowly past the computer trying to catch up.  I have not looked at the aggregator since before the sun came up.  The following are a bunch of links that I need to read and catch up on when I get home:

• Please Sir May I Have a Linker?
• The man behind CTRL-ALT-DEL retires.
• PocketPC Thoughts on yet another memory card format.  As if we didn’t have enough already.
• OSNews reports on IBM’s Linux.
• Science Blog discusses the artificial island being constructed off the coast of Dubai.  I saw something on PBS about it a few months ago.  It’s extremely expensive, but when complete will be an absolutely great place to live if you are worth millions.
• The Server Side (dot com) points out WARS as an alternative to MVC.
• Rael points to Hardware Hacking Projects for Geeks, first in a new series of Hacks books.
• Fonts for programmers via Nelson.
• CNet: Samsung is bringing always-on email access to their phones through a partnership with RIM.
• Via Slashdot, bootstrapping your own software company is worth reading.

If the Xbox really falls to $99, I’m so picking one up.

The Canon EOS-1D Mark II is a monster of a camera.  It sports a 8.2 megapixel sensor that can capture up to 8.5 frames per second, and up to 40 frames per burst in RAW mode.  The CMOS sensor is a bit bigger, which reults in a 1.3 multiplier instead of the usual 1.5 or 1.6.

It’s not going to be cheap, but man it’s gonna rock!

Expect many more announcements from Canon throughout the next couple of weeks.  It’s PMA time!

Ugh!

I saw Kill Bill Vol 1 shortly after it was released last year.  It was awesome.  I was foaming at the mouth for Vol 2 as soon as the credits started rolling.  It was okay though, because Vol 2 was coming out in February.  I could deal with that.

A few weeks ago I checked up on it.  It was still coming out in February (I’ve been foaming at the mouth for some months now), and my friend Tony and I had been speculating about DVD release strategy.  Would it be best for them to knock out a quick and dirty barebones DVD to have ready for the release of Vol 2?  Would they then release Vol 2 on DVD six months after it hit the theatre?  How long would they wait for the box set with all of the commentary and special features that Tarantino junkies require?  We had no solid theories.

Last week, I read somewhere that Vol 1 was going to be out on DVD in April.  That was a bit dissapointing, since I had wanted to rewatch Vol 1 and then see Vol 2.  But no matter, Vol 2 was going to hit in Feb, and I would just deal with it.

Except, now it’s not.

According to Yahoo! Movies, it is now slated to be released on April 16, which just happens to be right around when the DVD comes out.  The absurd part about it is that the movie has been in the can for quite some time before Vol 1 even hit the theatres.

I’m sure that this has something to do with the okay but not spectacular numbers that Vol 1 posted at the theatres.  It has managed to pull in about $70 million since it was released, which is not a bomb, but not very good either.  It quickly reached cult status among a subset of moviegoers, but it failed to hit critical mass and go mainstream like Pulp Fiction did.

I can only assume that Miramax decided to push back the opening of Vol 2 in hopes that significant buzz would be generated by the release of Vol 1 on DVD.  To whomever decided to do this: Eff you!  You’ve managed to piss off the people that saw Vol 1 and told all of their friends to see it.  We’re not happy.  We’re still going to fork over $9 to see the movie, but we’re going to come in angry.  We’re probably going to buy Vol 1 on DVD the week it comes out, Vol 2 as soon as it comes out, and eventually the boxed set, because we’ve got to have those deleted scenes, that commentary, those interviews, and that extra content.

But Miramax, you have pissed us off.