Twelve Black Code Monkeys

Well, it’s been yet another year or so since the last time I posted here.  One of the odd things that Twitter does to you is to take away motivation to post much of anything in a longer format.  Since you can get everything out in short bursts, as the thought hits you, why instead take the hour or more to carefully craft your thoughts into a coherent essay?

Ok, so there’s the benefit of actually processing the swimming bits of thoughts roaming in your head and realizing that some of them aren’t relevant, and then putting them together to find that the conclusion wasn’t actually what you had in mind in the first place.  Oh, yeah, and then there’s the ability to wax poetic when given the space, etc., etc.

Given my overall sense of lack of time (probably in part due to the compulsion to keep up to date in the my Twitter and Facebook feeds), the idea of sitting down to write something in long form was a bit daunting, and yet here I am.  (hint – it’s probably due to my procrastinating on doing something else I need to do!)

So, let’s see, some quick highlights:

• After two years on the webOS (Palm, now HP) bandwagon, it looks like I’m finally moving on, at least in terms of phones and for the time being.  More on this in hopefully a soonish future post.
• Professionally, I’ve been doing a variety of things in the last couple of years.  Almost a year ago I switched companies and started doing web development (e-Learning) on a government contract.  Along the way I finally started using jQuery, which is a great tool that I’m hoping to keep working with.  The contract ended recently but I continue to work for the company (which by the way has a great SaaS offering for e-Learning providers) doing both web and application development and am just finishing up my first .Net (C#) application that I developed from scratch.  I still have a lot to learn in this area, but it’s great to know that I can build something from scratch that functions at a somewhat complex level.
• I’ve also been busy helping a friend of mine with his start-up mobile web app, but so far just with work on their website.

There’s probably a lot more I could write about, but I’m going to stop there for fear that I give myself the impression that I have to write the massive entries that I used to so many times in the past!  Perhaps a medium-sized entry like this one, without a dozen links and images (not to mention pages and pages of long-winded text!), will go a long way in getting this blog back up to something approaching regularity!

Evernote lets you save all the interesting things you see online into a single place. Access all those saved pages from your computer, phone or the web. Sign up now or learn more. It's free!

 

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.

Evernote lets you save all the interesting things you see online into a single place. Access all those saved pages from your computer, phone or the web. Sign up now or learn more. It's free!

 

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…

Evernote lets you save all the interesting things you see online into a single place. Access all those saved pages from your computer, phone or the web. Sign up now or learn more. It's free!

 

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.

Evernote lets you save all the interesting things you see online into a single place. Access all those saved pages from your computer, phone or the web. Sign up now or learn more. It's free!

 

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?

Evernote lets you save all the interesting things you see online into a single place. Access all those saved pages from your computer, phone or the web. Sign up now or learn more. It's free!