Mobile Broadband

I’m pretty sure mobile broadband is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. I’m on CalTrain, riding down the Peninsula at 80+ MPH, and online! My speed test showed 296 kbps downstream and 105 kbps upstream, with a 265 ms ping to LA. Pretty sweet. I can’t wait for WiMax and true 3G to start showing up in the marketplace.

A Boy and His Blackberry

I don’t think I’ve ever liked a phone this much. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever liked nearly any gadget I’ve owned this much. Only my iPod is in the race. I recently (off of Craigslist) bought a Blackberry 8830 on Sprint. It has 3G (EVDO), it’s a CDMA phone in the states, and has unlocked GSM capabilities when you take it overseas. Did I mention it has GPS? And Sprint lets you thether for free?

The interface isn’t pretty, but it works so well that who cares about pretty. All my messages (text, email, Google Talk IMs, voicemails, missed calls) are integrated in to one messages view. The phone application keeps a history of who I talked to. The browser is great (okay, it’s no Safari, but still it works really well). Plus, there are a ton of 3rd party applications that can be downloaded to the phone that work with the same UI model, so they feel consistent across the RIM made and 3rd party made apps.

I’m a Blackberry convert. After using the Moto Q, a RAZR, a Sony Erickson set of phones, Samsung phones, Audiovox SMT, even a NeoPlanet smartphone, this is hands down the best phone I’ve owned. Only the Sony Erickson comes close in how it “felt” to use, that I enjoyed using the phone, and didn’t find it a chore.

Burma and the Internet

Let’s start with this from the NYT:

Myanmar has just two Internet service providers, and shutting them down was not complicated, said David Mathieson, an expert on Myanmar with Human Rights Watch. Along with the Internet, the junta cut off most telephone access to the outside world. Soldiers on the streets confiscated cameras and video-recording cellphones.

Ouch. These last two weeks, following the news in Burma/Myanmar have shown how powerful the internet can be as a tool for communication and the freedoms of speech that we value. Reading the articles, it’s amazing that mobile phones, blogs, text messaging, and all these modern technologies are being used to help the outside world understand the insanity. But when it’s so easy to cut off, it’s saddening that the voices of the people who live in Burma can be so easily silenced. It also speaks to the fact that we have grown to expect things like connectivity, redundancy, and resilience in our communication systems. When they’re this fragile, we feel exposed and alone. For those in China after the Taiwan earthquake in 2006, you have a good idea how it feels to go from connected to cut off.

Images like these are what we won’t be seeing any more (also from the NYT article):

Goodbye meebo, Hello Pidgin

For all accounts except for Windows Live Messenger, I’ve been using meebo as my primary IM client. It was convenient, useful and generally pretty fast, especially when I switched over to using Firefox as my primary browser. While generally a good product, my computer started to bog down with Firefox eating 500+ megs of memory regularly. Running Facebook, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, and meebo all at the same time just made Firefox consume resources like there was no end in sight, and meebo was the primary consumer (as far as I could tell).

Thus last night, I downloaded and installed Pidgin (aka GAIM). It’s the first time I’ve given this open source IM client a try since 2000, when it destroyed my AIM buddy last (I have yet to find all the screennames I lost from that fiasco). Now, seven years later, the product is pretty amazing. It works with all the major IM services (I’m connecting to Yahoo, Windows Live, Google, and AIM), the UI is clean and unobtrusive, it supports features like file transfer, status updates and email notifications and best of all, it’s fast and light (only 17 megs of memory consumed).

While I love some Web 2.0 replacements for my desktop applications (e.g. Yahoo Mail and Windows Live Mail vs Outlook/Thunderbird), I think they have a way to go until they reach the level that I don’t get frustrated. In this instance, the desktop application is quicker, faster, and lighter than the web app. Until the web apps bridge that void I think desktop apps have a long life yet.

Facebook News Feed

I love the new feed. I heart it, with a lot of hearts. It solves a lot of problems in social networks, including problems I didn’t know existed before. But I’m frustrated with it. Why? Well, it shows me a lot of information from friends I don’t really care about (sorry guys). I know they filter stuff semi-intelligently but it seems like it doesn’t chose which friends to show more about super well.

The other, and more frustrating issue, is that things appear out of order on the feed and at random times. First example, status updates. On the right bar where the little status bar module is, I have to look there to see what my friends are statusing, since the news feed doesn’t always show them. Second example, if two friends are having a wall conversation I’ve seen it more than once put the older one higher in the feed than the old one and the conversation becomes unparsable.

The feed is incredibly useful. I just wish it made the leap to become indispensable.

Nintendo Wii and 50 Inch Plasmas

We played Wii over at my friend’s place last night, who had just bought a 50″ Samsung plasma TV. The Wii only sends out 480i/p, which really shows up as a problem when it’s on a 16:9 ratio at 50″. There’s a setting on the Wii that enables a widescreen mode so that it compensates for the 4:3 to 16:9 change, but it only helped marginally. We were playing with old school cables (not component) which made it force to 480i. Hopefully if played with 480p it’d be a lot better, but it’s still only in the 480 range. The modern games were a lot less fun to play with the poor video quality, so we ended up playing a lot of Street Fighter II.

Fixing Total Tracks and Removing Album Artist in iTunes

iTunes seems to have a bug if you edit the album artists on an album, it blows away the total number of tracks for a song. I had a bunch of songs that had album artists for half the tracks in the album but not the others, which cased all sorts of havoc when trying to play an album since iTunes can’t figure out the order to play them in any more.

I wrote up a little script to remove the Album Arist and also to fix up any places where the total number of tracks for a song is incorrect. It looks at the other tracks for the album to find what the correct total should be, so it’s only useful if at least one track in the album has the correct total.

I put the script up on Pastie, http://pastie.caboo.se/72537, and also below. It’s not the fastest thing, but it works (for me). Use at your own risk, I’m not responsible, yadda yadda yadda.

var   iTunesApp = WScript.CreateObject("iTunes.Application");
var   mainLibrary = iTunesApp.LibraryPlaylist;
var   tracks = mainLibrary.Tracks;
var   i;
var allAlbumsToArtist = new Array();
var allAlbumsToTrackCount = new Array();
 

for (i = 1; i <= tracks.Count; i++)
{

        var   currTrack = tracks.Item(i);
        allAlbumsToArtist[currTrack.Album] = currTrack.Artist;

        if(currTrack.TrackCount > 0)
        {
                allAlbumsToTrackCount[currTrack.Album] = currTrack.TrackCount;
        }

}

for (i = 1; i <= tracks.Count; i++)
{
        var currTrack = tracks.Item(i);
        WScript.Echo ("removing album aritst for  " + currTrack.Name);
        currTrack.AlbumArtist = "";
}

for (i = 1; i <= tracks.Count; i++)
{
        var   currTrack = tracks.Item(i);
        if(!(currTrack.TrackCount > 0))
        {
                var totalTracks = allAlbumsToTrackCount[currTrack.Album];
                if(totalTracks > 0)
                {
                        WScript.Echo ("changing  " + currTrack.Name + " to total tracks " + totalTracks);                
                        currTrack.TrackCount = totalTracks;
                }
        }
}

My Three Week Flirtation with the Motorola Q

Being back in SF and wanting to be part of the hip and cool crowd, I went out and purchased a Blackberry-esque phone, the Motorola Q on Sprint. I can’t actually get a Blackberry since Microsoft’s mail system does not run a Blackberry Enterprise Server, which is required to have them work with Exchange email (and running the desktop client breaks company policy of having company data pushed outside the org).

At first, I was overjoyed to have my email, my calendar and contacts all on phone at all times. Having the Calendar was fantastic, it let me keep myself up to date with my life and update things as I needed to. I use my Calendar religiously to keep track of my work and personal lives so having it with me was very valuable. After about the first hour of using the phone, the joy wore off and reality sunk in. The phone barley works.

The list of the problems is too many to enumerate, but I’ll give the highlights. The buttons would stop responding. I would click something, the UI would flash that it received the press and then it did nothing. Clicking “Home” would at times do nothing. I could type faster than the screen could draw. It would send 200 text messages when I wanted to send one. The right thumb scroller just doesn’t work. Pushing the “Talk” button to pick up the phone would hang up on the caller half the time. The battery didn’t charge half the time. I would leave it in the charger overnight only to find it give me an a battery empty alert within minutes. The UI for Windows Mobile 5 is inconsistent, unreliable and non-predictable. Each part of it would act in a different way. It was never able to coordinate the vibrate and ring function (e.g. it would start vibrating a full 5 seconds before the ringer started). I could keep going ad infinitum.

End of the story is I returned it this weekend and I’m back to a non-smart, very-dumb, but at least it works Samsung flip phone.

Craigslist + RSS + Outlook Search Folders

The search function on Craigslist is a bit hard to use and not that powerful if you’re looking in multiple neighbourhoods. Since I’m looking for an apartment in SF in multiple locations, I got an RSS feed out of Craigslist for my maximum price and minimum bedroom requirement and imported that in to Outlook.

At first, I was just using that Outlook to browse the feed, which wasn’t that helpful since I got all the results of place I didn’t care to live in. So I created a search folder with the critera of contains:(“pacific heights” OR “hayes valley” OR “pac heights” OR “nob hill” OR “lower pac” OR “SOMA” OR “south beach”). Bingo bango, all the places I want, in my price range in my neighbourhoods updated automatically from Craigslist directly in my Outlook. Can’t beat that.