Twelve Black Code Monkeys

No, I don’t mean Palm’s software development kit, named “Mojo.”

There’s been lots of discussion lately about the Pre syncing with iTunes despite the fact that iTunes is an Apple product meant to only work with Apple products (iPods and iPhones).

However, there’s a new post over at Pre Central about how the thousands of applications (really web pages made to look like applications, called “web apps”) that were developed for the iPhone during the whole year between the first generation iPhones and the release of 3rd party applications via Apple’s App Store.  These applications work fine on the Pre because the browser on it and on the iPhone use the same core code.

Many Apple fanb… er, fans, are calling the iTunes sync a unsportsmanlike piggyback ride, or worse, “stealing”!  Of course, iTunes is an Apple product and it can do whatever it wants with it, but it cannot do anything about the thousands of web apps that exist for the iPhone since these are made by third parties.  I suppose it could prevent the Pre’s browser from accessing the online catalog of these apps, but doing so I think would probably make them look even more closed and vindictive in this age of greater platform openness - heck Palm just released the source code for their WebOS operating system!  Oh, and a hack to the browser could easily work around said blockage.

It’s a testament to Apple that so far we haven’t seen them react more forcefully, beligerently, against Palm.  Then again, I think, or at least hope, that the growing sense that people should be able to use the software and the tools in the way they want despite whatever the almost-never-read EULA states, means that companies are less likely to attempt blatent blockages for fear of bad press/bad online buzz.

What do you think, is Palm a scrappy company that is doing everything (even breaking a few rules) to compete against the 50,000 lb goliath, or is it just stealing Apple’s IP?

Last Saturday I was one of the first group of consumers to buy a Palm Pre, the new smartphone by Palm that has gotten a lot of buzz lately.  A lot of that buzz is positive, but inevitably in the majority of articles about it, the Apple iPhone is mentioned.  That makes sense, since the iPhone has become one of if not the most popular smartphone.  Also the guy who designed the Pre, Jon Rubinstein (who also just became Palm’s CEO), was a big part of the iPod’s success when he worked at Apple.

Still, I think the comparisons are a little unfair even if they have to be uttered, especially when it comes to the Palm Pre’s App Catalog.  The catalog was launched with only 18 applications and now has 30.  Almost doubling the number of apps in a week isn’t too bad, but this compared against Apple’s current App Store of 50,000 applications makes the Pre’s selection look pathetic.

The problem is that the comparison is between a phone that has just come out, and one that’s had time to mature.  Of course that IS what the choices are right now, but I guess what I don’t understand is why Palm is expected to have as mature a marketplace (or anything even close) as the iPhone’s on it’s first week out the door.  Here are a few points to this end that I think the current press is ignoring about the Pre:

1. The iPhone had no app catalog period (not 18 apps or 30) for the first year of its existence.
2. The shear number of applications for a phone doesn’t mean all that much.  To be sure, the App Store has a great selection of useful applications, but if half or more of these apps are iFarts, how useful is that total number?
3. If you were a developer, is it a “no brainer,” as Leo Laporte said, to develop for the iPhone vs the Palm Pre?  Well, in one sense you might think it would be - you have a proven platform and an established marketplace for your product.  On the other hand, you have 49,999 other apps to compete with.  For those with the resources, the obvious choice will be to develop for both platforms, but for those who don’t, wouldn’t you be much more noticed in a smaller collection of apps?
4. So many of the articles that I take issue with are trying to couch the Pre and the iPhone as being in some kind of mortal death match where only one company can win.  According to these articles, Palm needs to be as good as or better than the iPhone in every way in order to prove itself and go head to head with the iPhon in order to “survive.”  But is that really true?  I don’t think so.  All they really need to do to survive is to produce a successful product - one that sells well, generates increasing interest over time, and slowly grows in marketshare.  Whether a future Pre will ever get close to the iPhone in sales numbers is doubtful, but why is this necessary?

The Smartphone market is growing every year, and they still take up a relatively small percentage of total phones sold, which means plenty of room for all manufacturers to grow.  It’s actually better for consumers to have more choices.  Some authers seem to think that having more than a couple of platforms of phone OS will lead to chaos and confusion.  Yet on the PC side we have Apple, Windows, and Linux.  In the automibile industry there are lots of different “platforms” - SUV’s, compacts, minivans, motorcycles, sports cars, etc.  No one is confused, rather people are happy to have more choices, not fewer.  Competition makes these companies work harder to make better products for all of us.

Yesterday, me and my family went to the Obama pre-inaugural concert on the Mall in Washington DC.  We live just a half hour or so from downtown, so we just had to hop on the metro and we were there in no time.  The concert was great, even from a half-mile away.  Just being near huge numbers of incredibly enthusiastic people was heart-warming and exciting.  And the music was pretty good too!

The one thing that didn’t turn out as well as expected was my phone’s data capabilities.  In the scheme of things this is of course a very minor annoyance, but for those of us who are gadget and technology-obsessed, I thought it was still an interesting tidbit to write about.  My phone in general was not working well.  It said I had a data connection but when I tried to browse to a web site or even retrieve email, it would sit there just trying to connect.  I did manage to make one phone call early on, but when my wife tried later in the concert, she had no luck.  Even my text message I sent in the middle of the concert didn’t go through!

I had originally wanted to post some pictures “live” on facebook, and maybe even some videos to my qik.com group.  But the phone problems thwarted me and my phone became basically a $300 pocket-watch for most of the concert.

Later it dawned on me (ok, so I’m a little slow!) that the reason for all these problems was undoubtedly because the cell towers around the Mall were overwhelmed by the hundreds of thousands of people, most of whom at cell phones and probably half of whom were trying to text, email, send pictures, browse to their facebook or twitter accounts, etc., etc.  I’d never really thought about how population density needs to be taken into consideration when deciding where to place cell towers and how many to place.  Obviously these towers have a limit to how many connections they can handle, and hundreds of thousands is well above that limit!  What’s interesting is actually dealing with these temporary surges in population density.  These surges are not very often and they don’t happen (predictably) except for in a few places, like the Washington DC Mall and other large public squares. I would think that for such events, the carriers would be able to set up temporary mobile towers in order to handle such increased bandwidth, and for all I know they did, but even so, it didn’t seem to help much.

I wonder if the new 4G technologies of Wimax and LTE will have higher bandwidth per tower, because they certainly are tauting their longer range (and thus the ability to serve larger areas with just one tower) as part of their advantage.  So, hopefully if the bandwidth remains the same for these, they won’t be using these longer-range capabilities as an excuse to remove towers in order to save money, or we all may be experiencing the types of outages I did yesterday on a regular basis!

Update:  I just saw this article on the NY Times which is about just this issue.  According to the article, carriers have been preparing for this and are adding radios to cell towers.  Maybe these radios had not yet been turned on by yesterday, but if they had, then our experience at least shows that they are woefully inadequate to account for the increase in bandwidth.  At least, that is, for our carrier, Sprint…

Those of you who have been here before may have noticed a small change in the appearance of this blog. Ok, a large change. For about five years, almost since I started blogging, I’ve been using a blogging host provider called Blog City. BC has served me very well over the years, but it was time I moved on.

I originally chose BC when there weren’t any really mature blogging platforms, and BC had just as many if not more features than many of its competitors. Also the idea of setting up my own blogging software and having to tweak it at that time, while not a big deal, seemed like enough of a nuisance to at least be a factor in my decision.

Over the years, BC came out with new functionality, new widgets, and whole new administrative platforms. The amount of personal attention was also great. They are still a good choice for a segment of the blogging or potentially-blogging community.

Still, there are a few things that have motivated me to move to Wordpress, and I finally made the jump, after lots of prep work on the back end over the last month or so. I am still a relative newbie at Wordpress and will be continuing to add new content and functionality, tweaking the look of things, etc., etc., over the next few weeks or even months. But I believe with this new blogging software will help motivate me to get back into the rhythm of blogging, even if it’s just to post a link and a short paragraph here and there as I come across something interesting and want to share my thoughts.

For those of you who don’t know much about blogging, Wordpress is an open-source application that one can install on a huge number of hosts out there. You can easily take your entire blog, save it to your local computer, then reimport all that content on a new host if you decide to go from one to another. The software stays the same. The software is also very easy to use, with lots of customization via “plugins” and “themes” to change the look and add functionality. There are lots of these available for free, plus you can program your own if you are so inclined, or just tweak the ones that are available. Some of these plugins are extremely powerful, adding very significant new functionality. Since the software is open-source, it will never go away due to a company going out of business or switching tactics, and becuase it is so popular, your data is in a format that can be imported into many other software platforms if you ever choose a different one. And if it isn’t now, chances are that some developer will create a migration tool for such a huge market.

Its popularity as well as the open-source nature of WordPress ensures many advantages, as well as a few small burdens which other blogging platforms, especially ones that do your hosting for you as well, do not. For anyone with technical savvy, such software is a pretty obvious choice, although like I did five years ago, you might decide on a solution that avoids the added work of installing and configuring such software simply due to time constraints and a busy life. WordPress does have a fully-hosted version as well, similar to Blogger and Blog-City, and like the others it comes in both free and paid, more premium versions. If you ever want to get a feel for these different software platforms, the best place to start would be to create one of these free accounts on the various choices and play to see which one fits your style best.

My first transaction ever on eBay, back in 1997, was selling an old VCR to some guy in Texas. The guy sent me a bad check, but I didn’t quite understand how banking worked back then and after the amount showed up in my account several days later, I assumed it went through ok and sent the VCR. Then I learned it bounced and I was charged $5. He eventually sent another check which bounced as well for another $5 fee. After that he basically told me that it was my fault for sending him the VCR before the check cleared and I didn’t hear from him again.

I didn’t use eBay again for another year or two. We did trade negative feedbacks for each other, but in any case, I think it’s a little odd that if a buyer rips you off, you can’t mark them as being just as dishonest as a bad seller. Both sellers and buyers have responsibilities and you can usually tell if a seller gave a negative mark just in retaliation to a buyers if that buyer has an otherwise prestine record…

Quoting from techDirt:

eBay has been making some changes lately that aren’t sitting well with eBay sellers. First, it announced fee changes that initially were promoted as “lower fees,” but the details showed were only lower for goods that didn’t sell. The fees on sold goods were actually higher. Now, the company has banned sellers from giving “negative” feedback on buyers.

I’ve been shopping at Whole Foods (a health-oriented grocery chain with many stores across the U.S.) for a good ten years now. We’ve had them in the DC area since I came here 13 years ago. It is definitely more expensive to buy things there, but my perhaps naïve assumption was always that the things I bought were hopefully a little healthier - without the preservatives, chemicals, high-fructose corn syrup, aspartame, trans fats, and other junk that’s rife in products at mainstream supermarkets. At the very least, their hot food bars supplied me with many lunches and breakfasts throughout the years at pretty reasonable prices and offering what I thought were great and healthy options.

Perhaps it was the naïve assumption that most products in Whole Foods were healthy that made me a bit lax about looking at ingredients lists, or perhaps it was just that Whole Foods did not have ingredients listed for most of their prepared foods until recently. In any case, I’ve been reading these labels recently and have come to the conclusion that just about everything that Whole Foods makes (there prepared foods you buy for heating up at home as well as their hot-bar items) has canola oil in it! It is already very difficult to find packaged products containing an oil other than canola or a similar vegetable oil in them, but seemingly this is also the case for many non-packaged items as well.

Now, many of you may be saying “so what, isn’t it the saturated fat that’s bad, not the unsaturated stuff”? Well, not exactly. Check out Gary Taubes’ “Good Calories Bad Calories” and you will see a great outline about how this myth came to be. Even the traditionalists have disembarked from the pure “eat more unsaturated fat” to just “eat more MONO-unsaturated fat.” Monounsaturated fat (MUFA) is the type of fat that olive oil is primarily made up of and presumably the healthfulness of the Mediterranean diet is based on this. A diet high in polyunsaturated fats (PUFA’s) has been linked, albeit tenuously, to increased risk of cancer. It’s true that Canola oil does have a decent amount of MUFA (60%), but it also has a lot of PUFA (almost 40%).

There are other potential health concerns specific to Canola. Apparently processing of the oil involves a “deodorization” process which converts omega-3 fatty acids into harmful trans-fatty acids.

Of course not everyone will believe that Canola oil is unhealthful. There’s certainly no incontrovertible truth and intelligent people can still disagree about whether canola oil increases risk factors or decreases them. Still, because this oil is a bit controversial, especially among what is probably one of Whole Foods’ target audiences, my thought is it would behoove them to use an oil that is less controversial.

Olive oil is seen almost universally as, if not a perfect oil, at least one that is acceptably low in potential health risks. The advocates of the Mediterranean diet of course contend that the MUFA’s in it are exceedingly healthy, as are its low levels of saturated fatty acids (SFA’s). Those on the other side of the spectrum who believe that SFA’s are healthy while PUFA’s are not, view olive oil at worst as a neutral oil, since it’s mostly MUFA with just a tiny percentage of PUFA.

Likewise, butter is a great option for many items that require fat, especially baked goods. When I’ve looked at the ingredients of baked goods at my local Whole Foods they invariably list canola and not butter, although very occasionally I will see something that doesn’t have it – for example a pound cake I picked up last night. Of course, butter is relatively high in SFA and so for the traditionalists who still believe in the diet-heart hypothesis (that SFA’s increase cholesterol levels and that increased cholesterol levels increase coronary heart disease risk factors) despite lots of evidence that refutes this theory, it isn’t acceptable. Similarly the tropical oils that used to be used a great deal in baking had their reputations tarnished (I believe wrongly) because of the whole saturated fat scare of the 80’s and 90’s. Only in the last 10 or so years are we starting to see reports about how some of the fatty acids in these oils can actually be heart-protective.

Even if we just concentrate on olive oil as the least controversial alternative, it is a lot more expensive than canola, and there’s the rub. If it wasn’t for this factor, we might be seeing a lot more olive oil in Whole Foods’ prepared foods. As it is Whole Foods charges a premium for their food, and using olive oil would probably make their food that much more expensive. At this point, though, I don’t even have the option of buying most of their prepared foods because I don’t care to consume canola oil. So Whole Foods is losing sales because they’ve made it too hard for me to buy lunch there, given the small number of options that don’t contain added canola.

Sadly, few people care enough about this stuff to be aware that there’s anything controversial about canola, and others simply won’t believe that there’s enough evidence to implicate it in health issues. I contend, though, that the people who pay a premium at Whole Foods for presumably healthy food are probably more aware of the controversy and more likely to use that as a factor when making buying decisions. Still, I think this issue needs a lot more exposure. Optimally, I should be preparing all the food I eat myself, of course, but being a busy parent this isn’t always possible, and I would like to not be so constrained in my choices when going to a store that is supposed to be carrying products that are healthful…

I’ve only had my Treo 700wx for about 4 months now, but it works very well for me. Now Palm is finally unveiling a decent successor, the Treo 800W. It has just about every enhancement I can think of outside of a multi-touch iPhone interface, and a bigger screen. The only thing I don’t see mentioned is GPS capability, but given that other Palm devices are including this and the wealth of all other features, it seems pretty likely. The only thing that I’m a little sad about is the microSD, since both my cameras and my phones have taken regular SD now for the last 2+ years. But maybe by the time I actually get this phone, the 8GB microSD will be affordable. You can now get a 16GB SD card for half the price of an 8GB microSD… Oh well, I don’t even use more than one quarter of my cheap 4GB SD card in my current phone, so I guess I should stop whining!

http://blog.treonauts.com/2008/01/more-treo-800w.html?utm_source=tnemail&utm_medium=daily

Ok, well, maybe not exactly, but more or less. At least that’s my fervent hope. As readers here may have noticed, I have not posted an entry here in over a year! That is a long time to go without blogging, especially for someone who tended to post not every day, but at least a couple times a month in most months, and often more than that.

2007 was a busy year for me personally. My daughter turned two, and rapidly demanded more attention as she became totally super-mobile as well as agile enough to climb tables, leap tall buildings, or at least cushions with a single bound, etc.

I also started a new job in 2007 where I’ve been kept very busy. Previous jobs have almost all had some serious downtimes, especially the job previous to my current one. The business at work means I’m sometimes working late and/or on the weekends. Since many of my previous jobs were for government contracts where you really couldn’t work overtime, this is definitely different!

But the blogging bug has been gnawing at me for a while. I’ve actually been keeping my writing going by participating in a number of discussion forums, and a recent reply to a message asking me if I was a professional writer (incredibly flattering to someone who’s never had a piece of writing printed other than a couple of college paper editorials!) has given me that much more motivation to get this thing back on the tracks again. I really want to put some thoughts down here and there if only in a paragraph or two. Unfortunately - or perhaps fortunately for some of my readers - the long tomes you may encounter by viewing the archives here probably will not occur again, or only on very rare occasion. I’m going to attempt, however, to at least start scribbling down a disjointed thought or two on a more regular basis - well, hell, on ANY basis – and we’ll see what happens.

I did feel like I needed to write SOME kind of intermediate message, though, explaining my absence for over a year, so here it is.