Category: Web Services

The gadget at the top of this Gizmodo report reminds me a lot of my Nokia 9290.  The $200 Pocketsurfer allows you to surf the web in 640 pixels wide, but I’m not convinced that it is 480 pixels tall.  If it is 480 pixels tall, that is going to make for some tiny text in such a rectangular screen.  My 9290 is 640×320, which is quite passable for most things, but surfing is just too slow to be usable ona  daily basis.  The Pocketsurfer allows you to connect to the internet from your mobile phone via Bluetooth.

I’m not sure if it is worth $200, but the Pocketsurfer is a cool gadget indeed.  I would most likely spend a hundred or so more to get a PDA with bluetooth and perhaps Wi-Fi expandability.

I’m still holding out for those inexpensive internet tablets that everyone promised me during the dot-com boom.  I stopped holding my breath though.

SFGate:

Under the terms of a plea bargain entered in U.S. District Court in New York City, Lamo faces a recommended sentence of six to 12 months in prison or another form of detention. His sentencing is scheduled for April 8.

Six to twelve months in prison is much more than everyone seems to have been expecting.  The consensus was that Lamo would face up to six months of home detention.

We’ll see how this plays out, but it doesn’t look good.

Via Ingo Rammer, Mindreef’s SOAPScope turns 3.0.  SOAPScope is designed to save your sanity while debugging web services.  SOAPScope rocked even before its first public release.  I give it high marks.

For those of you on a budget, I’d suggest TCPTrace by Simon Fell, which is free as in beer.  SOAPScope is worth every penny though.

It’s old news by now, but the 2.6.1. kernel is out.  The changelog indicates lots of bugfixes and updates.

This article by Sean Reifschneider at ONLamp got me to thinking: us pocket warriors need more utilities like UUCP and NNTP to be available from our mobile phone/mobile device.  It is fairly impractical to transfer the command line UNIX toolbox to mobile phones, but I think we need some more support for some of the various protocols out there.

I searched Handango for both UUCP and NNTP and came up with zero results for any of the mobile platforms (save for some NNTP readers for Palm and Windows CE).  Of course there might be some obscure open source project out there, but it’s sure as hell not in the channel.

While I’m at it, another thing that mobile phones could use is rsync.  Yes, of course we already have SyncML for most mobile phone platforms, but as Frank points out, it is not used widely, and even when it is, there are some issues that must be dealt with.

Rsync or a similar solution could really help me keep my sanity.  On a typical computing day, I might find myself needing similar or identical information/data/files on my home dekstop, my laptop, a work desktop, my 3650 or my 9290.  Currently one of the easiest ways to bridge my desktops and mobiles is via email.  Each phone has its own email address (useful for sending programs) and I also have a generic mobile email address that is shared between the phones.  I tend to use IMAP over POP everywhere, because that way the information is stored server-side and I can access it whenever needed.  I would probably use LDAP to sync my contacts, but I haven’t bothered to set up an LDAP server yet.

Several things could satisfy my need to sync files, data, information, and other stuff.  SyncML might do it, but most current SyncML implementations seem to be written to sync mobile data to a server and possibly retreive the data with a desktop.  I would ideally like to access a particular subset of my data from any of the many access methods I find myself using.  I have not looked in to it thoroughly, but rsync might just do the trick.  All I need now is a mobile client.  A lightweight approximation of Groove, iDisk, or iSync might do it, but alas, I am currently stuck in the world of OS9.x on the mac side.  It would be an extra bonus to reuse an existing technology or protocol, so that I could leverage existing software or frameworks.  I keep thinking that rsync would be ideal because there are already good clients for Linux, Windows, and Mac.  The only thing lacking right now seems to be on the mobile side.

I think I read on more than one list that 2004 is going to be a major year for device convergence and synchronization of data.  I’m ready for that to happen.

Yahoo/AP:

SAN FRANCISCO – A few hundred thousand lines of computer code could revolutionize the way people interact with computers, say its unlikely inventor and his backers.

The software is called No Boundaries Or Rules, or NBOR for short.  Denny Jaeger has been working on it for over 10 years.  I tend to be skeptical about anything that claims to be revolutionary, even more so after the hype and letdown of the Segway.  Don’t get me wrong, I think the Segway totally rocks, but outside of the StupidRich, it’s not practical.  The Segway isn’t exactly changing the way we do things as it was supposed to.

NBOR and its main application, Blackspace does have a lot going for it.  The full version is $299, which is quite reasonable if it is as revolutionary as the claims make it out to be.  The developers are also releasing a free as in beer trial version.  They also get props from me for a program that runs on Windows 2000/XP, Mac AND Linux.  It looks like the Windows version will ship first, followed by the Linux port and then the Mac version.

It appears that NBOR/Blackspace is hard to explain.

The NBOR site is running extremely slowly, and I don’t think that it has been slashdotted yet.  The developer in me really wants to know about what is under the hood of this program, but for now I’ll have to live with hype, PR, and news coverage.  It appears that the entire program takes up only about 8 megs of space.

The free demo will be out January 15.  I’ll be there.

This may not be big news to the world, but it’s huge here in the DC area:

High-level Redskins sources told SportsLine.com that Washington Redskins great Joe Gibbs has accepted a deal to become the Redskins new head coach. Terms of the deal were not immediately available, but the sources said he accepted late Tuesday.

This is easily the best news in the last decade of Redskins football (the kind we play in the US).  They must have made him an absurd offer, because since leaving the NFL for NASCAR, he has constantly been asked about coming back, and until today the answer has always been “no.”

It looks like we’re picking up an excellent defensive coordinator too.

It’s cold in DC today, but we’re all doing a happy dance.

• Mini iPod: way too expensive.
• G5 cluster: cool!
• Garage Band: neat.  John Mayer rocks too.
• The rest of iLife is cool and all.  $49 for the bundle is a good deal.
• Drink more Pepsi.  One in three gets an iTune.
• Office:Mac has some new features that are in Office 2003 for Windows, plus some other neat Mac-only stuff.
• Transitions are ugly no matter how you slice it.

Overall I was underwhelmed.  The stuff is cool and all, we just got our hearts set on a mini-iPod at the $99 price point.  We didn’t get it.  $249 is way too high.  You can get 15 gigs for $299 or 4 gigs for $249.  Do the math.

I was also a bit dissapointed by Akamai, which handled the stream.  I got a ‘not enough bandwidth’ error several times throughout the keynote, and I’m not alone.  It looked fine for most people.  Rael even watched the whole thing over GPRS.

I’ve been following the news from Mars this morning.  Everything looks good, but the rover won’t be heading out for another 7-9 days.  You’ve got to power up and check out the skateboard, after all.  Here are the links that I have been using to keep myself informed:

• Mars Exploration Rover Mission at JPL
• SPACE.com: Mars Rover Special Report.
• NASA TV (Real Player link)
• Maestro is a java-based program for viewing data from the rover.  You can currently download it and play around with data from the test/sim environment.  You should be able to feed it real data within the next day or so.  #maestro on irc.freenode.net can keep you up to date.
• Press release images from JPL’s MERM site. (these are smaller images)
• NASA Planetary Photojournal: Mars has larger TIFF files from the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) and Mars Global Surveyor (MGS)
• Another JPL MER site has links to photos and news updates.
• Raw images from Spirit.
• Via Joi Ito, animations by Maas Digital are quite amazing.  I had seen the EDL part before, but there is some awesome animated footage of the rover coming to life and moving about.  Tres cool stuff.

The MER is sceduled to wheel around mars for 90 days, but scientists hope that the rover will last longer than that.  Sojurner was designed to last 30 days and lasted around 90 IIRC.  Another rover will be attempting bounce-down in less than a month in a different location.  Hopefully we can decrease the near 2/3 failure rate of Martian probes.

Wow.  It looks like NASA’s latest rover managed to touch down after a Rube Goldberg-like landing sequence.  There was a lot that could go wrong in those crazy six minutes.  I’m glad everything went as planned.

It’s going to be several days of diagnostics and power-ups.  Release the skateboard!

Yep, windows and tabs have been accumulating again.  It’s time to clear them out:

• UMLet 2 ” is an open-source lightweight Java tool for rapidly drawing UML diagrams, with a focus on a sound and pop-up-free user interface.”
• Edd has quite a conference lineup this year.
• The 8bitpeoples have some awesome retro-fun mp3 albums, including some excellent Christmas interpretations.
• It looks like Groovy is filling out quite nicely.
• I need to set up an account on Mobile RSS so I can keep track of things on the go.
• PDAPortal.us currently lists 463 PDA-friendly sites.  It looks like Opera on a mobile phone would rock with some of these sites.
• Russ lists the apps on his 6600 that he uses all the time.  I need to compile a similar list for my 9290, retro as it is.
• Best. Panoramic of Times Square. Evar!
• OPL Wiki: Dialogs.  They’re currently in the 1.0 release for Nokia Communicators, and should be arriving on S60 in the next few months.  I can’t wait.
• As pointed out on #mobitopia, WiGLE.net is a place to dump and search your raw wi-fi stumbling data.
• Todays Get Fuzzy is funny… and not.  So true.  Right now I’m getting double doses of Get Fuzzy every morning… one in my aggregator and another on the ‘Scratch a Day’ desk calendar.

*Whew*  The buffer has been cleared and culled.  I hope that everyone is doing well in the new year.

Wi-Fi Free Spot is a listing of commercial but free (as in beer) Wi-Fi hotspots.  See also the Wi-Fi Free Spot Weblog.  They seem to have the obvious things listed in my area.  YMMV, of course.

Yep, it’s a few hours belated in GMT-5, but happy new year to all!

Via PCLinuxOnline, Linuxbeginner points to RetroBox.  RetroBox is a website that sells old computer gear for amazingly reasonable prices.  And by amazingly reasonable prices, I’m talking about $25 or so for a solid PII with some RAM and a decent hard drive.  It’s definitely enough to run a fairly modern Linux system on.

They also have amazing prices on used Sparc and UltraSparc systems.  For just under or just over a hundred bucks, you can pick up a solid UltraSparc system.

The only drawback is shipping costs.  I wonder how much gear one would have to buy to make a field trip to Columbus worthwhile…

Jason Bell’s new P900 has arrived.

*drool*

Leo Laporte is now going to be the tech guy for KFI 640AM  in LA.  His new gig from 12-3 on Saturday and Sunday make for a 7 day work week, but what work it is!  It’s wonderful that technology is to the point where someone can do a three hour radio broadcast from their home most of the time.

Speaking of tech, their live stream works just fine from across the country.

Fool.com:

Though the holidays and their emphasis on packages are almost behind us, FedEx (NYSE: FDX) is still in a buying mood. Today, the company announced that it is shelling out $2.4 billion in cash to buy privately held business services provider Kinko’s. The deal is set to close in the first quarter of 2004.

Wow, that’s kinda cool and kinda scary.  I tend to feel pretty ripped off every time I leave a Kinko’s.  This is probably a good move by FedEx.  It will allow them to compete with all of the Mail Boxes, Etc. that are now UPS Stores.

Overall it has been a quiet weekend, but I have managed to post two things over at Mobitopia this weekend:

• Motorola V300 in short supply… wait for the V600? (posted Saturday, updated Sunday)
• Used N-Gage games trickle in

Via James Robertson (who in turn found it through ISerializable), Dropload allows you to drop off files to be picked up by someone else.  Files expire after 48 hours.  Very cool!

Wow, has it been 10 years already?  I don’t think I was around at its inception, but I’m pretty sure that I started dropping by a year or so after photo.net went online.  I’m glad to still see a picture of George on the photo.net index page today, just like I remember it years ago.

Thanks, Phillip.