The Long Dark Tech-Time of the Soul

Apple's premium iPad memory

2010-03-12T09:44:00.001-08:00

I'm an Apple user of 18 months but not an Apple fanboy, and I have a long history of Linux, Windows and Unix use before that. I've found that the two things i dislike most about Apple are Apple the company, which is largely a manifestation of Steve Jobs, and the Apple fanboys that enable Apple.

What other company could get away charging a $200 premium for an extra 48G of memory? Unless this is some especially fast or one chip memory I just can believe that premium price. But Apple do it because they can, and Apple fans will pay because they just do. Elsewhere a 32GB memory stick sells for about $70 and thats retail. I can't beleive the extra memory costs Apple more than $50 extra, that's a nice little earner.

And of course any other company would have built a product with a USB port or two AND an SD-memory slot but no, if you want memory you're gonna have to pay for it, and if you want to put photos or content on your ipad you're going to need another computer to upload from.

All i can say is "Boo!" I'm not going to buy your iPad or and iPhone and i never will. I might, just might get a new Macbook Pro if they ever get upgraded, just at this point I'm just as likely to get a laptop and stick Ubuntu on it.

I wish Apple luck - i have a feeling the ipad will be popular with people who are not computer users (young kids and old people) but the jury is out on whether most computer using households will find this a useful item to drop some serious $$ on.

Napster - still not cutting it

2010-03-07T18:32:00.000-08:00

I dumped the first commercial version of Napster a couple of years ago after the horrendous difficulties integrating Napster content with my already substantial library of content I had purchased. It was just too difficult to keep all that straight over multiple computers - home, work, mobile, etc. Plus the DRM was just a huge pain in the neck, and twice as bad when you tried to get it onto your MP3 player - it was hardly surprising Microsoft eventually dropped "Plays for sure" or as I called it "Plays for sure (maybe)". I loved the unlimited streaming of pretty much everything, it was ahead of its time but just didn't cut it. Youngsters who don't actually own any content might have done okay with it, but not me.

Anyway, it looks like Napster, now owned by Best Buy, is taking a second whack at it. I gamely signed up again but it took me only about 5 minutes to realize this is no great improvement - can't download to anything but a Windows machine. Mac may not have the majority of user on the desk/laptop but don't they know all the cool kids are using Mac's these days? (and for the record I don't count myself among the cool kids, but I know some who are, and yes they use Macs). I'd love to see the user numbers among the teens to 30-year old demographic but I really think Napster is missing out here.

Also they don't have anything great going on in the mobile space - no universal Android client, not even support for the iPhone, doh!

Napster, if you're listening (sure, you're probably not), if you want a great model to go after try what LaLa did - a great combo of Pandora, Last.fm and awesome integration of users existing content. I love it (okay no Android support there yet and perhaps never will have thanks to their acquisition by Apple :-( ). In the mean time get yourself some great mobile clients and desktop integration for Mac.

UPDATE: Mad props to Napster for having someone reply to this post the same day - I guess they use Google alerts for posts about their software just like I do at work. If you get Mac support and Android client I'll definitely check it out again. $5 a month is cheap - cheap enough that you could supplant my Pandora subscription (never have been a huge fan of random radio). I prefer the "play my stuff and let me discover when I feel like it" and not have to bother with hitting next track all the time.

It's a great night

2010-03-07T18:20:00.000-08:00

It's a great night for Netflix to go down... I'm guessing they did plan extra resources for Oscar night, but clearly there was some epic fail involved here. I look forward to hearing the explanation...

It's the end of this blog as we know it

2010-03-07T18:09:00.001-08:00

I know I haven't posted here in a long time but that's been more about a lack of time than lack of interest. However I have recently been notified by Google that they are ceasing support of the FTP blog publishing I'm using so as of May 1st there will be no more updates ever. I may take that opportunity to archive and shut down the blog completely, haven't decided yet (hey a domain takes $10 a year and Google Ads is not that good to me unless I keep posting).

In the mean time I'll continue to investigate good alternatives for low overhead blog posting with or without FTP.

Apple FAIL, or why friends shouldn't let friends use iPhones or AT&T

2009-07-29T23:22:00.000-07:00

Even though I've been using Apple kit in the form of a MacBook Pro for the last year (almost) without complaint I've always resisted the lure of the iPhone. I was estatic that the Google Android powered G1 materialized as an option exactly as the iPhone appeared to be my logical destiny (about 90% or more of my co-workers use the iPhone). Appart from the obvious limitations of the iPhone at the time (no background processes, closed application environment, no compass, no focusing camera, no keyboard) and the complimentary advantages of the G1 the real killer, if I could ever discount all the aforementioned problems, was that the iPhone is married to AT&T in the USA and clearly Apple and AT&T were in deep together.

So it seems now that relationship, and the limitations of it, has come home to roost now that Apple has been caught red-handed doing the bidding of AT&T to kill the Google Voice application on the iPhone (not to mention Google Latitude although that probably had less to do with AT&T and more Apple). Because I have not been blogging here for some while you will not have heard my thoughts on Google Voice - but being lucky enough to have scored a GV account in recent weeks I can tell you Goggle Voice is quite simply "telephony done right".

Now I know that Google scored the GV technology from another party in this case (Grand Central), just as they scored Google Earth technology from a 3rd party (Keyhole). But believe me Google is making it even better and in bringing it to the masses (or at least trying to) they are poised to revolutionize telephony just as Google Maps and Google Earth have revolutionized mapping. So I guess we should hardly be surprised that AT&T executives are (no doubt) screaming bloody murder and peeing their pants as SMS, call revenue, massive profits and lets be honest all they really care about - executive bonuses - look to be ready to fly out of the window. But boo to Apple for ever chaining themselves to such anti-revolutionary forces for the sake of some guaranteed kickbacks. No matter how lucrative they were, and no matter how convenient, don't such cozy arrangements just fly right in the face of that whole Apple "were just an amiable little guy, not a big dumb PC" persona they keep trying to project. Believe me Apple, if people love to hate any company more than Microsoft it is usually their cellphone carrier so chaining yourself to AT&T wasn't such a smart move.

Now my own theory is that Apple will find this as a convenient PR disaster to ride the back of as they decline to renew their AT&T exclusive next year. And yet at the same time make it conveniently known that they are no-carriers bitch - and yes they will be open to Google Voice and any other legacy communications company killer technology that cares to come to the iPhone, including their own probably. Indeed if there is any conspiracy theory more likely it is that Apple just doesn't want Google to get a free boost to dominance before Apple has a chance to launch their own carrier-killer-telphony solution.

Shuttle skimping on the hardware

2009-05-07T01:23:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I looked at anything Shuttle did. I briefly got excited when I saw they had a nice petite Atom-dual-core micro-PC system. Unfortunately my excitation died when I noticed they had completely skimped on the graphics and omitted an e-SATA connector. Come on guys, if this had X4500 and an e-SATA port it would be a killer system, as is it is a looking like an overpriced shiny toy. If I really want a low-power server I can do much better - and if I want high power small form factor Intel has a mini-ITX board that has way better specs taking regular dual and quad-core parts. Sigh.

Life begins at 141, RIP Twitter!

2009-02-23T22:53:00.000-08:00

As part of my day job I get to brainstorm on how to brain storm about making our website "go viral", and participating in spreading the word about it on all the various "social networking" websites. Naturally "Twitter" is often a part of the daily conversation but I have to say so far I just don't get it and as the raucous noise of tweets and twits rises to a cacophony I'm more and more convinced that Twitter is getting close to jumping the shark, if it hasn't already and reading this Alternet article did nothing to diminish that feeling. So as just another blogger it costs me nothing to stick my neck out and make a big prediction - Twitter is the Emperor with no clothes on, it has no merit beyond its 6 million users (and how many of those are active we have no idea) which is a tiny fraction of any dozens of other web properties.

Lets get this straight, Twitter's 140 characters limit was copied directly from text messaging limits, but text messaging is popular inspite of its technology imposed limitations, and because it was the cheapest and only alternative to expensive per minute fees for making a phone call. Now Twitter seems to sing the praise of this limit like it was some wonderful feature, meanwhile corporate America is scratching its head and trying to figure out get around the limitation to share URLs, advertising and other verbose messages. Lets face it, Twitter is just a glorified blogging service for the short of words, and a pain in the ass constriction for the rest of us that we're better off without.

There, I've said it.

'Nuff said... but you notice it took more than 140 characters!

Google Latitude info hints at Android system update "soon"

2009-02-04T09:35:00.000-08:00

UPDATE: I discovered today that T-Mobile had already started rolling out the new G1 firmware - without any announcement that is - but people had already noticed it arriving on their phones and posting on the T-Mobile forum. T-Mobile moderators then confirmed the push and gave some details, which include the Latitude feature in Google Maps. Hopefully I'll get my update sooner rather than later - last time I think it took about two to three weeks!

After following a TechCrunch link to the new Google Latitude "track your friends" feature (that seems to be the kind of bad news Loopt isn't going to want just now) I tried to send my phone an SMS to get this on my Android powered T-Mobile G1 . Unfortunately, and somewhat expectedly, it just took me to a mobile web page on the Android browser that said "Coming soon". Obviously something like this is an ideal app for the Android platform and G1 with its integral GPS - having on the G1 is a no-brainer.

Going back to Google I then followed a "Find out more" link that took me to a Google help page which in no uncertain terms states:

Google Latitude is available on the following mobile devices wherever Google Maps for mobile v3.0 and above is supported:

- Android-powered devices with Maps v3.0 and above. G1 users in the US will be receiving Maps v3.0 in a system update soon.
- Most color BlackBerry devices
- Most Windows Mobile 5.0 and above devices. Note: Some Windows Mobile devices don't support cell-ID location detection.
- Most Symbian S60 devices

Now I know there was a huge rumor storm and fuss about "Cupcake", the supposed new Android release that would be made available to G1 users in January - but never arrived and then was dismissed by Google and T-Mobile as "not happening". However this seems like the first official word that really there will be system update soon... I guess there might be the option to update just the Maps app, but it definitely says "System Update" and not Maps update.

However if prior experience is anything to go on I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for it...

Google Contacts why doth thee suck so badly?

2008-12-29T17:27:00.000-08:00

It has to be said the #1 worst part of using Google for all my PIM (Personal Information Management) needs is their contacts functionality. Right from the web UI to the lack of attributes to the lack of integration with external source (like Outlook) it is just the weakest, even substandard part of their PIM offering. When I got my G1 Android based phone I finally had to abandon Outlook which I'd been hanging onto for its contacts/addressbook functionality. Hands down Outlook has the best address book I've used and that's why I reluctantly hung onto it.

Migrating my 200+ contacts to Google was painful and lost a lot of meta-information that I had to dump into "notes" for each contact, perhaps in the hope that one day Google will support things like anniversaries, birthdays, and relationships between contacts. And now I've migrated to Google contacts the worst part is that to maintain it I have to deal with the crappy web interface they have tacked onto Google Mail, so tacked on that its kind of an afterthought, not only difficult to use but also just plain ugly. In fact its so bad that I actually tend to do this stuff from my phone if possible - at least it is easy to find there! Yes, yes, I know all this stuff is free so I shouldn't complain but really since Yahoo and Microsoft managed to do so much better why should Google be happy with coming a distant third? And lets not forget that there really is no such thing as a free lunch - Google actually provides all this for a reason and that's to establish brand loyalty and keep users on its web site, using its apps and seeing its customers adverts.

Given that Google is trying to push into the social networking world with its OpenSocial API you'd think that by now they would have created some kick-ass addressbook-on-steroids that left Facebook and others in the dust. If you think about it my interaction with email, chat, groups and other apps that are inherently social apps should begin and revolve around my contacts - not be some lackluster add-on feature that time (apparently) forgot. Lets just say I'm still waiting for something kick-ass in this department but not holding my breath. Maybe in 2009 Google? Are you listening? Please? Pretty please? Thanks!!!

G1 Episode 3

2008-12-04T01:57:00.001-08:00

I just returned from a few days in the United Kingdom where I can report my G1 worked just fine using a UK T-Mobile Pay-as-you-Go SIM but most importantly it required no unlock code. I was pretty happy about that because my unlock code ordered on the Saturday before I left did not show up until 10 days later, just as I returned. It would also seem that since the T-Mobile UK SIM never triggered a request for the unlock password I don't yet have a way to enter it.

I'm also happy to report that T-Mobile UK no longer charges for SIMs - you just have to purchase a minimum of GBP 10.00 of minutes (about $15 right now) - its a good deal for travellers. They also come with 5 days of free web browsing which I didn't discover until after I'd added another 5 to my plan for GBP 2.50. The big problem with Pay-as-you-Go SIMs is that the credits expire after 6-months so if you do not use them the go away and the SIM is deactivated so you'll also lose the phone number. The only away to avoid this is to make a call with the SIM but doing so will probably eat up your minutes as most plans have an upfront or minimum per-day fee.

Finally I was also able to use 3G networking in the UK although it was not as fast as in the Bay Area where I get 800kbps on a regular basis, instead it came in at more like 200kbps down and 25k up - but given that T-Mobile doesn't offer EDGE in the UK it was a lot better than GPRS speeds. I did get the impression that my G1 was eating up more battery than at home even with 3G off, but I couldn't be sure.

G1 Episode 2.5 - SNAFU

2008-10-29T21:54:00.001-07:00

What, you may ask, happened to episode 2? Well I was in the process of writing up my reflections on a week of T-Mobile G1 ownership but didn't finished before my G1 started experiencing loss of web browser connectivity. I first noticed it this morning but figured it was something to do with me being in the middle of the San Francisco Bay which is a little odd because I had plenty of bars of signal and to all intents and purposes email seemed to be working just fine. I was very busy at work today so didn't have time to play with my phone but on the way home noticed the same problem again - all I would get was a hung browser followed by a "cannot connect with server" message.

After a couple of turn-off, turn-on cycles, some experimentation with WiFi connectivity I eventually decided it must have been something I installed on the phone that did this (which should really be impossible since 3rd party apps are all Java and supposedly can't trash the phone). So reluctantly decided to do a factory reset - if anything it would prove that I could really recover all my email and contacts easily. Fingers crossed.

So I did it... I was surprised how little resistance it put up in the way of warnings - one warning and then I had to put in my visual "join-the-dots" password. After that it took just a few seconds and it was all over, my phone was back to out of the box state.

Unfortunately this did not cure my problem. Although emails started showing up on the phone pretty quickly as it resynchronized with my online account pulling up the browser had no effect, I was still getting the failed to connect error. So I decided to dial 611 and called T-Mobile support. Even though it was 9:45pm Pacific time I was soon talking to a real person and I noticed I had been connected straight to Blackberry and PDA support which hopefully meant I'd skipped up a few levels on the food chain. I was quickly able to relay the nature of the problem and indicate that I'd done a factory rest at which point I was told this was a "known problem" and that "a lot" of pre-purchase users were experiencing this issue. Hmmmmph!

So I asked about the various firmware updates that were available and if I could get one sooner since I was having problems. No such luck, the support person said they were unable to control distrubtion of the updates. I then asked if my lack of web browsing connection might mean I would not get the update - no answer, but a good question she admitted. She then had me check my phone's data connection configuration (APN) and it was the correct one. Since I had already done a factory reset there was nothing else she could suggest for me to try other than wait for their engineers to try and fix the problem.

As it happens about a half hour after I got off the phone with T-Mobile while I was checking to see if my contacts had be synced yet (they hadn't) I discovered the web browser connection was working again. Hmmm - coincidence or did I get a secret helping hand from T-Mobile after I was off the phone?

Oh well, now I have to go off and recustomize the phone all over again which is mostly re-downloading a whole bunch of apps from the market. Grrrrr.

UPDATED: I found out from the T-Mobile G1 forum that this is indeed a known problem - so known that they should have been able to tell me on the phone that it was caused by my account being misconfigured with a trail 7-day only data plan that just expired. I guess while I was on the phone they fixed that without telling me. There is also some discussion that this could be caused by using an existing SIM instead of a new one. As far as I can tell I didn't get a new SIM with my phone so it wasn't my fault.

G1 Episode I - The Android Attack Begins

2008-09-23T12:59:00.000-07:00

Well I did it, I finally cemented my status as a Google fanboy by dropping $179 to pre-order a brand spanking new Android powered "G1" phone. It took a while to fight through the T-Mobile website issues - it seems they either completely screwed up launching the pre-ordering web pages or were suffering from horrendous website overload. Either way by 12:30p, several hours after the press-release event in New York was over I was finally able to go all the way through the ordering process and make the commitment. But that was after a couple of hours of trying - it took so long that I almost changed my mind at the last minute having learned there is a decent list of "obnoxious flaws" in the product.

I have to say that the lack of stereo bluetooth audio (A2DP) strikes me as seriously obnoxious. I have taken to using my existing 3 year old Windows Mobile phone (also by HTC) in my car with my Motorola bluetooth handsfree speaker phone, it plays tunes nicely and satisfies the California handsfree requirement. But now without stereo audio my G1 will be a pretty poor mono-audio player. I'd have to get a second FM transmitter or radio with an audio in jack (not possible in one of my cars that has a Bose factory radio I can't really replace). But I've tried to rationalize that A2DP must be in the hardware and a future software upgrade must surely support it especially given that Amazon is now the music store of choice for the G1 - anything that hampers the phone being a great music player has to be fixed.

Other obnoxious flaws bother me less lie lack of a video player other than YouTube at the moment (I'm going to assume you can play embedded video on a web page though) because I seldom do anything with video on my phone now and expect that there will be decent 3rd party apps later.

The lack of a standard headphone jack requiring a USB adapter which is not even supplied is a pain but I hardly, if ever use plugin headphones with my phone now - but given the lack of stereo bluetooth audio this becomes more important - I'll need that output to connect to an FM transmitter in my car. Then again my current WinMo phone has a non-standard 2.5mm jack that requires an adapter for most headphones so its not really a step backward - but they really could have done better. My guess is headphone jacks eat up a lot of internal space and cause issues with dirt and RF intrusion.

Lack of multi-touch is surprising but I've lived without multi-touch all my life and I'm sure I can continue to do so. Lack of an on-screen keyboard seems surprising - I don't much like them and have big fingers that usually require me to use a stylus with my WinMo device but sometimes its handy to have as a fall back. I don't much care for the iPhone on-screen keyboard BTW - the letters are still too small for me so perhaps there wasn't much chance I would have been happy with one anyway. Since this device has a real keyboard which I very much desire in a smartphone I think I'll be pretty much happy with input methods.

Locking to T-Mobile I wont care too much about until I need to go to Europe which I do at least once a year - I haven't seen any information about whether the phone supports the world GSM frequencies, given who makes it I'd be very surprised if it didn't although I know its probably not going to be compatible with most other 3G service frequencies. My experience is that T-Mobile is very good about unlocking phones for its current customers and since they are imposing a $200 contract break fee (how long can that last legally?) I would really hope that the G1 will be no exception. If not I'll be unhappy and have to bust out my WinMo phone - kind of defeats the point though... I wonder what AT&T iPhone customers do anyway - do they just suck it up and pay those usuary international roaming fees?

Being able to tether the G1 to my laptop would be nice - I can do it with my WinMo phone right now but again on reflection almost never actually do it. Part of the idea with a phone like the G1 is that its web and online experience is so good that you don't actually need to use a laptop 99% of the time unless it is for work. In which case your employer should be busting out a WWAN card for you to use. In the last year I've found this to be true and do much of my email reading and sending from my current phone - that should be much, much easier from the G1 especially as I've become far more Google-centric with use of calendaring and such in the last year.

I also realize that the lack of tethering has enabled T-Mobile to offer that $25 "unlimited" (I've read elsewhere its not actually unlimited - after 1GB of transfer in a month they reserve the right to dial down your bandwidth) data plan which is only $5 more than I pay right now. And that data is much faster than my current Edge service so it will be far more useful to me. Given that the $25 a month plan includes 400 text messages it will actually save me money since my current plan doesn't include any and costs me $.20 a pop - so 400 would cost a fortune. I couldn't really see me getting through more than 400 messages given the G1's enhanced email and chat facilities. The whole point is email more text less...

Lack of multiple Google account support as I do have a number of Google hosted domains each with its own Google account. But 95% of what I do now goes to a single Google account and I have webmail available for the others - there is after all the Google online web access too. Basically Google doesn't have a very compelling story for accessing multiple accounts anywhere, let alone on the phone - you still have to log out and in again and often times it doesn't get that right. I'm expecting when they do find a decent solution it will come to the G1.

If T-Mobile drags its heals over getting software updates to the G1 I'll be very upset, it took them a long time to release the widely available firmware updates for my WinMo phone. Eventually they declined to release the WinMo 6.0 upgrade for it, presumably to encourage people to upgrade to the virtually identical replacement phone they had for it. However I can't believe that Google would let them get away with that - lets hope the upgrades are relatively painless!

One final thing I really, really want to see is caching of maps with the mapping/GPS application. I travel out of cell reception pretty frequently and T-Mobiles network is pretty sparse anyway. So if all that GPS and mapping goodness is useless without a network connection it will be a serious drag. I experience this with Google Maps on my WinMo phone and it is the one thing that starts me thinking about buying a dedicated GPS - something I shouldn't need to do. With the amount of storage you can add to a G1 via a memory card you should be able to pre-load or pre-cache huge amounts of map data and then travel all over. I know that's not how Google Maps is designed to work but it is a must have for making the G1 an extremely useful utility that actually saves you money by not buying other devices. With Google's traffic and search facilities it will always be far and away more powerful than simple GPS - while you have the network connection that is!

Overall pretty much everything can be fixed in software so I really hope it happens. If I was to make my top 3 must have software upgrades for the first firmware rev it would be:

1. A2DP stereo bluetooth
2. Map and POI caching for Google Maps
3. Multi-account support

Mostly for me the "G1" is not about being a fanboy - its more of a technical investigation and I'll also use it as a development platform for apps. If it turns out to suck I will either wait for the next device which I guess will be the "G2" or end up selling it or moving onto some other platform such as a Symbian Linux tablet or the next big WinMo device (the latest HTC sliders are real sweet but way to expensive if purchased unlocked - and T-Mobile just doesn't get the cream of the crop, they always go to AT&T). Lets hope Google and T-Mobile got it right though, and they will continue to improve the device after the launch just as Apple and other have always done.

UPDATE: Apparently after howls of protest across the inter-webs T-Mobile has relented on their 1GB per month cap and promised to come out with a revised usage policy based on fuzzy "don't harm the network or other people's use of it" criteria.

Web 3.0 /= Web 2.0++

2008-09-01T23:46:00.000-07:00

A couple of years ago when Web 2.0 was really getting going I told some people that I thought Web 2.0 was pretty much the end of the line for web applications. Web 3.0, I said, would actually be a trend back to desktop applications using the Internet for data delivery. Think more like virtual machine based apps like good old Java applets that never really went anywhere back in the early days of Java.

Lets just say I got some incredulous stares back then, like I might have been from a different planet and next thing I would be predicting $5 a gallon gas or something crazy like that.

My rationale was that JavaScript in an of itself was the major vehicle for web applications these days, at least portable ones that is. But it seemed clear to me that JavaScript is just not a good language for delivery for major application functionality. While its a powerful dynamic language it has many issues and is distinctly married to the web browser. As applications get bigger and bigger large volumes of JavaScript get harder and harder to manage. While there were some promising movements towards standardized JavaScript libraries for app development they were too big and too slow for efficient delivery of an application in a standard web page.

Hence I saw that there would ultimately arise a class of standalone applications, probably still delivered via a web browser initially, that would get their data via standard Internet HTTP protocols, perhaps incorporating JavaScript, perhaps not and they would run either connected or disconnected. Stuff like AJAX would be utilized to deliver application and data updates on the fly. All in all we'd see application logic migrate more and more to the client side and due to the bifurcation of client platforms into Windows, Mac, mobile devices (Windows, Symbian and other) and also eventually Linux that would necessitate some cross platform operating environment on those clients - something like a virtual machine or cross platform sandbox seemed an obvious requirement.

So I guess I feel somewhat vindicated now that we have a burgeoning set of development platforms like Adobe AIR, Google Gears, and now even an "application centric" new browser from Google called Chrome. Not to mention other efforts by Microsoft (Silverlight) and Sun (JavaFX) that have yet to see significan't uptake for client side application development.

So if Web 3.0 really is a revolutionary take on the web and certainly more than an incremental twist on web 2.0 then what might web 4.0 be? I'm afraid I don't have any early insights on that, but trust me I'm trying to get my head around it even as I type.

Blu-ray for G33 chipset motherboards under XP

2008-09-01T17:16:00.000-07:00

I've just finished getting Blu-ray playback working on my Intel G33 chipset based motherboard running under Windows XP (SP3). I initially thought this would be a slam dunk - add blu-ray drive, install PowerDVD, slam in a Blu-ray disk and off we go. I knew I wasn't going to be getting digital high def audio (24 bit/192khz) from my system - this much I uncovered while investigating HTPC for a friend. That prompted him to go off an buy a blu-ray player instead of the HTPC route - even though he didn't even have HDMI audio on his high end Cambridge Audio amp.

Anyway during investigation I found that for about $150 I could get a Pioneer BDC-202 blu-ray drive offering 4X read-ony blu-ray plus standard DVD/CD read/write. That was below my previous $200 threshold where upgrading to blu-ray seemed to be "no-brainer". So off I went and ordered one from Newegg along with a copy of Blade Runner "The Final Cut" a five disk blu-ray extravaganza. I also stuck the first disk of "Planet Earth" on our NetFlix queue. Well that was the easy bit...

So when the drive arrives I install it with not much ado, and happily remove the last clunky IDE cable from my motherboard (the new drive is SATA 2.0) and disabling IDE support in the BIOS as I go. Then I go to download the Cyberlink PowerDVD trial but as I'm reading on the download page I notice it says under a section called "Not supported" G33 video playback. But my Gigabyte GA-G33M-S2H motherboard is based on the Intel G33 chipset which is supposed to support HDCP HDMI output, MPEG2 acceleration and even has a Realtek ALC-889A D/A chip with a protected audio path (PAP) that Cyberlink were about to add support for (to give analog conversion of the high-def audio streams). I download their handy app that tells you if your system is blu-ray ready and sure enough it is flagging my graphics drivers as not blu-ray ready.

Further investigation on AVS Forum leads me to conclude that I'm pretty much screwed unless I upgrade to Windows Vista or get a discret video card. For some reason the HDCP support in my video drivers is noew good enough for NetFlix video HDCP playback but Intel pretty much refuses to bring out G33 drivers that support blu-ray under Windows XP. Grrr.

So I start looking at Vista which I've staunchly avoided for a couple of years now because I just didn't need it and all my other systems are XP and they didn't need it. Eventually I really don't want to install Vista just to get blu-ray.

So then I look at video cards which doesn't make me happy because when I bought my system I deliberate picked one with integrated graphics so I wouldn't need discreet video. I don't do gaming on it and I don't need the extra 30W or so of power consumption even when the system is idle - let alone all the heat and noise when its not. But the good news is there are some fanless sub-$50 video cards, something like an nVidia 8400 or 8600 based card which will give full high-def video acceleration and come with nvidia drivers that support HDCP/blu-ray. At that price I figure I can get it, wait out Intel for G33 drivers or whatever happens next (maybe I upgrade to G45 or the next round of Nehalem or post Nehalem motherboards after that).

As I explore the AVS Forum a bit more I start to see people say that PowerDVD just doesn't do blu-ray under XP period. Then I see people saying it does, or that if you use ArcSoft Total Media Theater (TMT) you can have blu-ray under XP - its not an XP limitation. So just for giggles and kicks I download TMT and try it out but bizarrely it doesn't even read the Planet Earth disk, its as if it isn't there. I start to wonder if the drive is fried but find that it works fine with DVD or CD. So I start to wonder if its a firmware issue and upgrade the Pioneer drive to the latest 1.07 firmware - still no change. Then I experiment with all kinds of BIOS settings, moving the drive to a different SATA port, turning on IDE emulation mode etc. etc. Still no joy - put blu-ray disk in and it just doesn't show up. Some people on AVS Forum suggest that maybe the disk is dead - it does look a little strange so I resolve to wait for my Blade Runner disks to show up.

Blade Runner shows up and I stick one of the disks in and low and behold TMT fires up and starts playing the disk. Yay I think and promptly declare the system working without stopping to think how practically impossible it is that the system really is playing a blu-ray disk. Nonetheless I plonk in the Planet Earth disk in the drive and it doesn't play, just like before, so I happily declare it a bad disk, put it back into its NetFlix envelope and send it on its way.

Well it didn't take me long to try another disk from the Blade Runner pack and hmmm, seems to be a problem - it isn't playing. I switch to the other disk - fine. Then it dawns on me - the disk that plays is actually a DVD - two of the disks in the five pack are actually DVDs, not blu-ray. Doh! So realizing I've probably just put a perfectly good disk back in the mail to NetFlix I get back on the case of the unplayable disk.

Some more posts on AVS Forum lead me to the conclusion that even if the graphics drivers are bad, even if the player software doesn't like my system the files on the blu-ray disk should show up on the filesystem but that is not what I'm seeing, I'm seeing nothing, I mean nuttin! I boot up my system under Linux and see the same problem - DVD good, Blu-ray bad. But under Linux I'm able to peruse the system log and get some error information that the file system on the blu-ray disk is not supported. After reading more Linx posts (Linux posts - for a Windows problem???) I discover that blu-ray uses UDF 2.5 file system and this is only supported under Windows Vista, not Windows XP - strike #2 against XP I guess. Funny how nothing that came with my shing new Pioneer drive mentioned this...

I wonder if there are drivers for UDF 2.5 that work with XP and eventually find out from the Digital Digest website that there are drivers out there on the grey market of downloads from obscure places. They were ripped from the Xbox 360 software that supported HD-DVD which also required UDF 2.5 support. Somewhat sceptically I download the files, unpack them and install - after rebooting my system (essential) I stick a drive in and go explore the drive. Lo and behold it worked, I can now see files on the drive even with blu-ray.

I fire up TMT again and it starts doing something - I hear audio but get a black screen where the video should be. I then install WinDVD but that doesn't work at all (in fact it doesn't even install barfing at the point it needs to load some C runtime libraries). I go back to trying PowerDVD (this is the third reinstall of that software) but on trying to play the disk it just tells me my hardware is incompatible and stops. Back to square one, well maybe square one and a half - at least I now know my drive is just fine and almost certainly the Planet Earth disk was not faulty at all.

So I post again on AVS Forum (about my tenth post on the subject by this time) and quite by chance someone says it sounds like all I need now are "Japanese beta video drivers" for TMT. Huh? No more information than that but its enough to get going so after many forum searches and Google searches I finally find a thread that mentions yes there is some beta version of TMT from 2007 that apparently worked with the G33 chipset and its GMA 3100 graphics processor. More searching leads me another AVS Forum post that has a link to a download that contains two magical driver files which I duely copy into the appropriate TMT program directory. One more reboot, fire up TMT, fingers crossed and boom - Houston we have blu-ray! Glorious high def Blade Runner playing right there on my XP machine with the supposedly unsupported chipset.

So yes, it can be done but it took me virtually a whole day of trial and error - install, uninstall, reboot, search, re-search, tearing out of hair. swearing, pounding of keyboard, and frustration. So now I have this whacky Frankenstein blu-ray system with unsupported drivers from an xbox-360 and Japanese beta graphics drivers - but it works with no Vista and no extra video card.

I have a feeling that anyone with a G35 based system with XP can probably use the same combination of hacks, just follow the links above. Hopefully G45 users will find things a lot easier since Intel is supposed to be supporting HDCP blu-ray even for XP, and maybe eventually they will go back and fix their G33 and G35 drivers - now other have shown them it is possible (apparently). My two remaining questions are:

1) Why the heck don't all blu-ray drive manufacturers provide drivers for UDF 2.5 under XP just like USB devices come with drivers for pre-XP versions of Windows. And why the heck hasn't Microsoft produced official drivers for download?

2) If I buy the official TMT product will it work without driver hacks? Or will it perhaps break a some point with the drivers I have already? By all accounts a bunch of people are also using these Japanese drivers so ArcSoft should really be sorting this problem out. I guess I'll find out when I purchase TMT since there are no other alternatives for G33/XP/blu-ray at the moment.

Development ate my OTA broadcasts!

2008-08-08T10:06:00.000-07:00

For a couple of years now (at least) I have been enjoying glorious high definition TV completely for free thanks to "over the air" (OTA) which will in 2009, as most of you should know by now, completely replace the old interference ridden low-res analog transmissions. At the time I set this up I was somewhat surprised it worked at all since I live in a concrete building that is by necessity filled with iron rebar - exactly the kind of stuff that will block a TV signal, or pretty much any radio signal - hence poor cellphone reception and room to room WiFi reception inside concrete buildings. However with a modest indoor directional antenna mounted inside my unit near the ceiling everything seemed to work out - the only thing I couldn't get reliably was the KTEH PBS station that is transmitted from a location 90-degrees from where my antenna is pointing. Since I already get KQED that hasn't been a big problem for me.

Unfortunately in the past few months a new condo and parking garage have risen from the dust right between my home and the where the TV signal is coming from. Both being concrete buildings and full of rebar it seems that they have knocked the signal strength of some of my channels below the acceptable limit for my tuner. If I'm lucky I get audio with interrupted video, if I'm not I get nothing at all. While access to the sun is protected in California for solar installations access to free OTA transmissions is not. Just when analog transmissions are going away I'll find myself cut off and looking at having to resort to cable. Basically I wont do this - I've survived significant portions of my life with no TV at all.

I could petition my building to install a big-ass TV antenna on the roof, it will be hard to do, cost a lot and probably wouldn't be that effective (because of the long cable run required). Considering 22 out of the 24 units already have cable I won't hold my breath waiting for that. Or I could install a much bigger antenna in my unit - its feasible but not exactly attractive, they really aren't designed to look nice. Right now I have a DB2 bowtie with 11.4 dBi gain combined with some low-loss coax which is probably the most compact and highest gain option there is, the next step up provides a couple of extra dB (not quite double the signal strength) but is twice the size and too big for indoor use IMHO. I can always think about using an amplifier - but I'd rather not since they can also amplify out of band interference and make things worse.

My solution for now is to get a new ATSC HDTV tuner card - one of these bad boys from DVICO: Fusion HDTV7 dual-express. Many of those using it have commented it has significantly better sensitivity in the receiver which will hopefully bring my weak channels back to within acceptable limits. Fingers crossed...

Firefox Download day? What download day?

2008-06-17T08:24:00.000-07:00

Today is supposedly "Download Day" for Firefox 3.0 and they are trying to set a record for the number of downloads of a software product in one day. So this morning before work I fire up Firefox and tell it to check for updates - no dice, it thinks it is up to date. Well I do have one of the release candidates installed so perhaps it doesn't think the official release is any different from what I have.

So then I go to the SpreadFirefox.com download site to do my bit and low and behold I get some Drupal default installation page. I figure their site must be so overloaded with downloaders it has crashed. I start searching Digg, SlashDot and others thinking there will be a story about it but there isn't. So then I go to Mozilla.com and low and behold it is still proudly proclaiming Firefox 2 as the latest and greatest. On the right hand side there is a little "Firefox 3 Sneak Peak link" but that is it.

So I surf over to SpreadFirefox.com again and this time the page loads with normal content, perhaps last time I just got bounced to a new machine in a cluster that hadn't yet been set up properly. But the site looks just like it did yesterday still asking me to pledge to download. There is a download button which I click and it takes me to a Firefox 2 download page. At this point I figure 95% of people who came here to download Firefox 3 on "Download Day" will give up - they don't need FF2.0 and they don't need a wild goose chase trying to find FF3.0. And even if they do download something it really looks like it may not count for the record (there's no count of "Downloads Today" either).

One possibility remains - they changed the date on me. It's not actually obvious from the website when download day is - they don't have a countdown or even the date in a big font right up there. But I eventually find that by clicking on the "Pledge Now" button it takes me to a page that clearly says

"The official date for the launch of Firefox 3 is June 17, 2008. Join our community and this effort by pledging today."

I then actually go through the pledge process and there is never any mention of a time, either local or UTC based - I would have assumed I could have started at 00:01 June 17th local time, or maybe UTC time. Finally I double check the date on my computer... June 17th.

Sorry but my guess is download day will probably fail to live up to expectations at this point since by anyone's calculations June 17th is pretty much over for most of the world and a huge percentage of the pledged downloaders. It may be 8:30am here in Pacific Time but over in Europe its already getting into evening and Asia is now into night. I wish them luck but I don't think I'm going to be wasting much of my time at work trying to chase down FF3.0 - I'll probably get it tomorrow or whenever it prompts me to download now.

It seems like as America wakes up and goes to work (at least on the West Coast) someone really wasn't ready on the infrastructure side. Trust me we'll hear more about this... Plus I really question the wisdom of basing a WorldWide product release with so much fanfare on Pacific Time!

Update 9:00am: I've since found a story on Digg by someone who says they found a note saying they wont be ready until 10:00am Pacific Time. But I don't see that anywhere. Plus now when I go back to SpreadFirefox.com I'm getting more and more connection errors and Drupal database errors which doesn't bode well.

Update 10:30am: All my efforts to reach spreadfirefox.com are now resulting in connection timeout errors - not Drupal or other server side errors, it is just plain not responding.

Update 2:30pm: Finally able to get to the SpreadFirefox.com website (on the second browser reload - it is still getting connection errors sporadically). The site is still looking like it did yesterday but the download link at least takes you to a 3.0 download. The Mozilla.com home page is dedicated to 3.0 download. Also when I did an update on my Ubuntu box it also found the 3.0 package in the repositories - so I've kicked off two downloads, one for Windows and one for Ubuntu.

Airlines missing the obvious way to save weight on planes?

2008-06-10T16:08:00.000-07:00

It seems that airlines are taking heroic measures to save weight on their planes - from lighter seats, less water in bathrooms to sharing manuals between pilots. The NYTimes articles quotes one airline as saying every 25 lbs saved on their planes saves $440,000 per year in fuel costs - which I assume is across their entire fleet, not per plane.

But it seems to me that they are missing, or at least keeping quiet about the most obvious way to reduce the weight of their planes - reduce the passenger load they are carrying. Baggage surcharges are unpopular and unless uniform a point of competition between airlines, however attempts to charge over sized passengers for two seats are controversial - just how do you define over sized without forcing a passenger onto scales, something about as unpopular as trying to back scatter x-ray them for security. So maybe passenger load could apply to just bags - we all know the people who carry the max just because they can - and usually have bags full of stuff they just don't need, even for a short trip. Carry on bags are often a source of abuse because they seldom get weighed (I've never seen a weight check on them, just size) and people always manage to loadup with extra laptop bags, baby bags or handbags stuffed the brim with junk.

How about the full price assumes you take maximum baggage weight, say 50lbs, but if your combined carry-on (everything but you) plus checked baggage weighs less than that weight then you get a discount - and as always an overage in the baggage department still attracts a surcharge. This will at least incentivize customers to reduce their baggage weight and pass on fuel savings to them.

Another way would be for planes to have a greater variety of seat sizes and spacings with appropriate pricing - but not such a difference as between coach and business which get an additional level of service too. Passengers would then naturally pick the appropriate seat that they are comfortable with and pay a small premium accordingly. Some airlines already have premium seats with extra legroom, but extra width and legroom might be even more attractive - if you can figure out how to arrange seats to accommodate that (maybe a diagonal isle?).

Yes, all crazy ideas I know, but it seems like airlines are looking for crazy ideas!

Highway planners gone wild - or have they?

2008-04-10T01:03:00.000-07:00

The Onion reports that the Department of Transport was spending $270 billion on lanes for reckless drivers - it turns out that was all a big joke, the reality is instead they decided to just send all those crappy drivers to my home town Oakland, California. Seriously, does anyone else think their town has the world's worst drivers, or is it just me? My partner noticed that I've now taken to driving with my thumbs on the horn buttons of my steering wheel. It's not defensive driving - only once in my 24 years of driving have I been able to use a horn defensively and it didn't work (the SUV still backed right into me) - I just figure if someone runs a red light, stop sign or does something crazy in front of me I'm going to let them know because I'm sick of people pretending they are driving just fine. I'll admit that I'm not a perfect driver but if someone honks me when I've done something wrong I'll admit it - embarrassed by my mistake I'll even take the finger or whatever they throw at me (although living Oakland I'd rather it was not fast moving lead from a Glock).

Never mind gas prices, here come the ATM fee hikes!

2008-04-04T15:36:00.000-07:00

Folks, never mind federal investigations into the price of gas, how about an investigation into the outrageous prices banks charge for using someone else's ATM? It was bad enough at $2.00 but now Wells Fargo is apparently leading the charge with a hike to $2.50 - expect all the other banks to follow in short order. Basically this is easy money for them, like $0.20 per text message for the phone companies. They could make it $5.00 and people would still be paying it because when you absolutely have to have cash what alternative is there?

I'm sure banks look at cash as a competitor to credit cards so whatever percentage they get for a credit card transaction should guide their pricing on cash withdrawals. If fees are too low they will canabilize their credit card fee income - which as we all know is at least 2% and probable more like 3 or 4%. So if the average person sucks out $100 per ATM withdrawal then they need to charge $2, $3 or more per transaction to avoid hurting their credit card fees.

But this is really just BS, why are there no federal investigations into how banks can justify these fees? Their usual excuse is "well we have to cover the fees other banks charge us" but guess what those fees are just made up, one bank just charges other banks what they charge them. It doesn't reflect anywhere against the actual cost of providing ATMs. In fact it is well known that ATMs save banks money because they allow them to have fewer branches and fewer staff. We know this for a fact because it is is why banks have checking accounts that are cheaper if you don't use branches to do your transactions.

Carbon Dioxide Sequestration Gone Wrong

2008-04-02T01:12:00.000-07:00

I'm sorry but I can't help thinking that pumping liquefied carbon dioxide into the ground is a bad idea waiting to go horribly, horribly wrong. From reading about the idea it sounds like the only problem with the CO2 leaking to the surface is a carbon credit lost, but what happens when 100,000 tons of denser than air CO2 reaches the surface, perhaps catastrophically one day? I really don't want to be around to find out because its gonna hang around near the ground and start killing people. If you think this is far fetched you should read about Lake Nyos, the "bad lake" where more than 1,700 people died from CO2 poisoning. The CO2 came from underground sources - and rolled out over a 10 mile radius killing all it encountered. Now does that sound familiar?

Windmills gone wild!

2008-02-26T23:18:00.000-08:00

Ouch! This video of a wind turbine self destructing will be about as explosive as photos of Obama in a turban [no pun intended].

I'm pretty sure they will end up blaming it on a bird strike, or terrorists, or the oil companies.

Just say No to pay TV

2008-02-17T11:07:00.000-08:00

I beg to differ with the story in Wired News that says end of analog TV broadcasts in 2009 will cause US households to switch to cable instead of buying a converter box or a new TV. I actually think the net effect will be fewer cable subscribers.

My reasoning is that people still using old analog TVs are looking for cheapest way to receive TV and as such wont want to pay at least $50 a month just to receive the local programming they can get over the air anyway. Plus switching to cable means you'll have to install cable outlets in all rooms that means a lot of expense putting in wires and outlets - and splitting cable is notoriously problematic because cable companies often provide a marginal signal to households that isn't strong enough to split (as any multi-family dwelling cable user can attest).

Also I believe that once people discover that ATSC (digital transmission) provides interference free reception and many more channels than they ever received before they will actually start dropping basic cable packages for the free over the air programming. As low end TVs increase in capabilities the ability to view 720p and 1080i high definition programming (in particular sports) will also be a big draw. In a recession people are always looking to save money and cutting the cable is an easy fix.

Alternative headlines

2008-02-12T00:01:00.000-08:00

The headline for Yahoo's latest news reads "Yahoo rejects Microsoft, report says it may buy AOL" but I'm amazed no one is saying "Yahoo looks gift horse in mouth, shoots self in foot".

Seriously, could there be a dumber move? Has AOL done anyone any good in years - indeed during this century? Have they got money to burn buried in the Yahoo basement? Don't have enough of their own employees to fire so go buy someone elses and fire them as well? Or is Yahoo just doing a bit of dirty work for Microsoft for them before the acquisition really happens? Come to think of it why not scoop up Ask while you're at it? Or does someone at Yahoo have friends in AOL they want to make rich first?

Any way you look at it, every day of delay is another day of dimminshing advertising earnings for Yahoo that has little else to count on to justify their value. Hence they should have countered and wrapped it all up in double-quick time.

I'm kind of sad about all this because Yahoo was the first search site I ever used, when it was still just a directory, and the first online email account I ever had - hence I have a five letter @Yahoo.com email with no digits even if I haven't used it in years because of all the spam. I would have hoped Yang and Filo would have been smarter. It is never too late for them to pack it in and move on to something new.

Interesting developments in traffic monitoring

2008-02-09T01:13:00.000-08:00

About a couple of years ago I had a conversation with someone who did a bunch of contract work on traffic monitoring systems - he was networking all the traffic cameras and radar together and providing a nice web interface with Traffic 511 like monitoring of congestion data. The added bonus was you could actually get a live feed of traffic on your favorite streets - his system was for Alameda county and hence monitored mostly city streets, not freeways. During the meeting he talked about how much cheaper his implementation was than the tens of millions CalTrans spent on their system which used data read from FasTrak transponders in people's cars. When he mentioned the trip time data that Traffic 511 was providing (and is now shown on electronic signs by the freeway) I asked him if they were doing the dumb thing of quoting actual measured journey times - it turns out that was how they do it.

I say it is dumb because if you are in Oakland (say) and trying to get to San Francisco and there is a wreck then you wont know about it from estimated journey times until someone has completed the entire trip - which could be a long time. And as each person arrives at the destination their data is as old as their complete journey time. Now a way around this is to break journeys into much smaller segments and integrate along the path continuously but apparently they weren't doing that either, except perhaps at very gross city to city levels.

Ideally as soon as there is a change in traffic flow past a point, as measured by velocity and number of cars at that point you should be able to feed that information into a model, combined with everything else you know about traffic on the roads and generate a new estimate very quickly - without waiting for cars to drive an entire segment. As a physicist by training that just seems like basic fluid dynamics to me... And you can feed in other information about known changes to the configuration of "pipes", ie. the roads. So when CHP calls in that they will shut down a freeway for 15 minutes to bring a medivac, or take it down to 2 lanes while they sweep debris, or open up Hwy 580 to trucks for a while then you should be able to feed that data in an make travel time prediction adjustments immediately. Thus the effect of a wreck in Oakland can instantaneously be feed back to someone in Milpitas traveling to Berkeley and allow them to choose an alternate route.

Anyway two years ago most of the clever stuff you could do really depended on having a lot of data about where cars were which either meant outfitting a lot of cars with telemetry systems or getting access to the FasTrak transponder data. Well of course two years on we have an increasing number of gadgets flying up and down freeways that already have GPS and data links built-in - they are called phones. So I kick myself for not thinking about what Nokia is doing in a trial where they are using standard N95 GPS equipped phones to see if they can predict traffic flow information - not just travel times, but predict information like I suggested. Plus the benefit is this system can be extremely cheap to set up since people like participating in such "social" applications (cf. Seti@Home and Folding@Home), even more so if they are actually of benefit to themselves. I think it will only be a matter of months before some open source project, quite likely sponsored by Google (and running on Android) will produce an app and centralized traffic monitoring/prediction services to the masses.

The only issue is that do really great prediction actually requires more than simply measurement - for this reason I think the initial data provided will be just the same level as Traffic 511, just measuring speeds on the freeway. To do really smart stuff requires complicated routing calculations and someone like Google (say) with access to that, and smart people to crunch the numbers and build models will be needed to build the software. All good stuff to build into Google Maps right and make it even more of a killer app - especially when mobile.

Two and a half years on someone finally decides to sue over unwanted text messages

2008-02-02T01:55:00.000-08:00

I have to admit I was pleasently surprised (for once) to read about a new class action suit. This one was being filed over T-Mobile's practice of refusing to block text messages and then charging customers for receiving them. This is something that I blogged about two and a half years ago when T-Mobile told my partner (whose bill I pay) that it was impossible to block unwanted text messages from someone she didn't know. These were being sent by some kid who was crank texting her (or just had the wrong number).

I was, how shall I put it, "gobsmacked" that they could claim it was impossible to block those texts and her only recourse was to change her phone number. I mean what kind of P.O.S. network were they running that such a request was not possible. There really was only one answer - it was a deliberate ploy to extract the most text fees from all their customers. As anyone knows texts are expensive and getting more expensive and yet the underlying cost to networks is essentially zero because they are sent on a control channel that is otherwise unused and if there is ever any conflict texts are just not delivered (although I'd happen to guess customers still get billed!).

In general I'm not a particular fan of class action suits - but in this case I see that it was basically the only way to force a corporation to drop a practice it was clearly pursuing to maximize profit. In the USA since the 1919 Supreme Court case Dodge v. Ford Motor Co corporations have been legally obliged to persue profit over customer interests until such time as it is no longer profitable to ignore those interests. And since almost no individual has money to make a case against a carrier stronger than moving their business elsewhere, then a class action suit and associated punitive damages is basically the only effective way for them to get such a result, especially since such behavior seems to be endemic in the cellular industry.

Hence I would actually encourage you to contact the lawyers involved (see the linked article) if you believe you are entitled to join the class. Ironically I actually contacted a legal firm that specializes in class actions back in 2005, but they never bothered to follow through. I bet they are wishing they had now!