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The Fray audio archives are up on the Internet Archive. These recordings from Fray Day 8 San Francisco are superb! This was the last Fray Day, held in November 2004.
Kevin Smokler’s story is very touching. Unfortunately, the recording doesn’t do Kid Beyond’s set justice.
Part 1:
Part 2:
Today I was thinking about Fray, the old-school story-telling website from back in the day. Unfortunately, they went on hiatus a couple days ago, and and have definitely been missed. It’s odd that the same day that I decided to check up on Fray is the same day that they announce the return of Fray, as a printed quarterly publication! Submissions are being accepted until October 1, so get busy!
I hope they resurrect the Fray Day events as well. We went to Fray Day 7 in SF and got to hear Armistead Maupin read and Noe Venable sing. It was magic.
Update: OK, it’s not odd that Fray picked today to relaunch; today is their 11th anniversary. But it is weird that I picked today to randomly start think about Fray.. hmm…
Copyright issues are so technical and complex that it makes talking about copyright in a public forum very hard. Who wants to listen to me talk about “changes to traditional contours of copyright protection”? Nobody! Not even me, and I *love* listening to myself talk!
Well, here are four posts about copyright that hopefully won’t bore you to death.
1. Rick Falkvinge and the Pirate Party of Sweden
I got to hear Rick speak when he came to visit the Internet Archive, and he blew me away. Due to lobbying by the (mostly US-based) entertainment industry, broader copyright protection laws are enacted around the world every year. These expanding copyright laws threaten privacy and other civil liberties. In response to this, Rick founded the Piratpartiet in Sweden. They are now the 10th largest political party in Sweden, and are starting to influence real policy change. Rick does a great job about explaining problems with complex copyright laws to the general public. Check out his Google tech talk:
2. Antigua, Online Gambling, the WTO, and Hollywood
The WTO has ruled that the US ban on offshore internet gambling is illegal. The US disagrees, and refuses to lift the ban. Antigua argues that the ban has cost the country $3.4 billion in damages, and has asked the WTO for permission to violate copyright law and distribute US movies and music as a form of compensation.
3. SQLite, the public domain, Germany, and submarine patents
sqlite is an awesome, free, open-source filesystem-based database engine that is in the public domain, which means anyone can use it for any purpose they want. Almost every large technology company embeds sqlite into one of their products.
In Germany, the public domain doesn’t exist as it does in the US. In Germany, authors can’t dedicate a work into the public domain, and thus can’t contribute to sqlite!
Also, due to patent concerns, sqlite uses 17-year old technology, exclusively.. Crazy stuff!
4. A big victory: Golan v. Gonzales
Remember when Kahle vs Gonzales was heard in the 9th Circuit? Well, that went poorly. However, in the case of Golan v. Gonzales, the 10th Circuit has voted unanimously that First Amendment review clause in Eldred has been triggered, and the case has been remanded to the district court. This bodes well for a Supreme Court review of Kahle vs. Gonzales as well.
Web 2.0 companies lined up for a mass start at the Facebook F8 Launch this past Thursday. Facebook has 24 million users, set to have more than MySpace’s 150 million users by the end of the year, and an unprecedented empty application market. Just a few days after launch the dust has yet to settle, but iLike is clearly the shot heard around the Facebook. Less than 72 hours after launch of the F8 platform, iLike has over 200,000 users, almost 1% of the Facebook user base and ten times higher than the second place contender picnik, a Flash-based photo editing widget.
Apparently Facebook users like them some music.
Link to iLike Application on Facebook
Results of the Speakeasy bandwidth test, 60Mbit down/1Mbit up:
Can you imagine how different the net would be if everyone had this kind of bandwidth at home, and it was symmetric? I think the market for desktop apps would collapse overnight, and owners licensers of broadcast spectrum would pass laws to cripple YouTube bitrates.
One of the perks of working as a programmer for a non-profit is that you get to collaborate with some top-notch hackers. The other day, I needed to find out the return values of the rm command, so of course I type ‘man rm’ on the Ubuntu command line. The manual page for rm didn’t list the return values, but it did list the authors. One of the names in the Authors section seemed vaugley familiar. “Hmmmm…”, I thought, “isn’t that the guy upstairs?” We ran upstairs and caught him off guard. “Um… that was a long time ago…” he told us. We suggested that he add a return values section to the man page, and then ran back downstairs, giggling like schoolkids. He probably thought we were nuts :)
I made a movie, encrypted it with a ZIP password, and put it online on my website and so only paying customers can view it. Paying customers can download it from here and watch it.
However, it appears that Disney has published the key needed to decrypt this movie on their website! In fact, a quick google search shows that every web page on disney.com contains this key!!
Does anyone have any advice on how get Disney to cease and desist their copyright circumvention???
I saw this banner while surfing the web:
Here, I’ll save you $1300:
Best Practices for AJAX content development, rule #1: When developing AJAX web apps, don’t waste your time trying to work around Safari’s many DOM/Javascript/Canvas bugs. Instead, force your mac users to upgrade to Firefox*.
*Corollary to rule #1: At least force them to upgrade to a nightly build of WebKit, but even then, you’re walking into a very buggy minefield.
I would have saved a few weeks of development time if I had followed rule #1 sooner.
Firefox: It sucks, but it sucks much less.
firefox is the only browser that doesn’t cause me to lose my hair. it sometimes causes my computer to crash…but that’s better than me losing hair!
Remember the previous bubble?
Remember how we used to go out every day of the week?
Remember dancing all night and watching the sunrise? On a Wednesday? Remember the Best Tuesdays Ever?
Remember how much beer we drank? Remember how much beer we drank at work?
What happened? Now we all work too much. And type to much. We’re old and sober, with hurty wrists.
Rules for the new bubble:
i have a feeling this is for mr. peliom. nonetheless, it all sounds good to me :-)
Bring it on! I’ll be there soon to make sure you follow the rules!!!
I just got the strangest email.. It came from pandemicrawfrankfurters at yourhippyfriendskilledaroosterbyblowingtoomuchsmokeinitsbeak.com
I don’t know what you are selling, dude, but I want in. Just let me know where to bury the shoebox full of money.
BREAKING NEWS – BREAKING NEWS – BREAKING NEWS – BREAKING NEWS
Pushy Architects Unveil Groundbreaking Technology For Teen Titans, Brush Aside Conspiracy Theorists Claims of Failure*
BUTTE, MT – NOVEMBER 31, 2008 –
In a remarkable discovery by Scientists who know things of importance, Banned substances composed of gold, freeze-dried tomatoes, bunions, cold frankfurters and extremely wet paste made in Peru have been combined in an innovative fashion to reveal what man has always feared: granite no longer weighs as much as it did in the Stone Age.
Against all odds and despite incredible circumstances of little merit, these Scientists determined this astounding fact while testing 5-year-old Beowulfs infected with the passive-aggressive DNA of long-extinct wooly mammoths.
During the initial testing phase of this mouth-watering experiment, Scientists were surprised to realize the 5-year-old Beowulfs responded with extreme vim and vigor to granite containing the aforementioned banned substances, adamantly licking the granite for days on end with little concern for their surroundings. Eventually, these Scientists came to the conclusion that their test subjects were drawn to the granite because the highly toxic DNA injections created an additional saliva gland completely obsessed with granite. The obsessive licking stripped the granite of its mineral exoskeleton, which proved to be the majority of granite weight.
“It’s a startling discovery, one for the ages. I suspect this will alter the future of man for days to come,” exclaimed Dr. Waz, one of the lead Scientists assigned to the project by his lazy neighbor, Jo-Jo. “I enjoy making things that people look at with their eyes, not their ears. This will eventually cure leprosy, we believe. If Lazarus were alive today, he’d be shooting arrows into the ground.”
Because this information is just now being released to the general public, there are fears of rampant rationing of atrophied orangutan livers, especially among sonar enthusiasts. But Jordan Jordanian, co-director of the experiment, dismisses these fears as short-sighted superstition.
“Spaghetti and meatballs will never be quite the same, as long as I have anything to say about it,” whispered Mr. Jordanian while sipping a bowl of spinach. “We stand by our findings. The results speak for themselves.”
The results quickly added, “Why can’t we save all the rhinoplasty victims, for God’s sake? Man wasn’t placed here to erect large monuments. We were placed here to erect social and sexual mores for the needy. What more needs to be said?”
What happens next, only the future knows. And the future isn’t talking in a loud voice anymore.
“Bacon will always be better than pork chops, that’s one thing you can count on,” echoed the future from a previous interview edited for television.
Yet, there are some who believe the Scientists need to conduct further tests before releasing these findings to the public.
“As a pushy architect with a zest for killing wild boars on partly cloudy days, I fear for the safety of teen titans from sea to shining sea,” brayed dr. P. P. timmmii, founder of the Swiss Foundation for Found Founders. “It’s still OK to prefer pavement. Granite is for the weak and ill-fitted. But I will say this – those stupid jackoffs who go to Burning Man every year will finally be able to ride faster, once we replace the granite. Gravity isn’t pretty.”For more information regarding this important discovery by the Scientists, contact your local Notary and ask for more peanuts. Zygotes not included without written permission from your kidnapper. For less information, please
visit:
http://yourhippyfriendskilledaroosterbyblowingtoomuchsmokeinitsbeak.com/
Today my AVR USBKey dev board finally came and I’m on my way to making an open source clone of my beloved TouchStream keyboard. I’m using the Cypress CapSense parts for the multitouch sensing and AVR parts for doing the processing and communication. The first prototypes will have most the processing done in software, actually, and then I’ll decide between AVR and ARM7 later.
Here is the roadmap:
oh wow, can’t wait to see!
Hi rajbot I find this article very interesting and I would like to contact you. I am sorry I don’t see any contact information here at TikiRobot. Is there any institutional mail I can send my mail whith my contact information?. Thanks lot. Kind regards. Jose.
PS: If anyone knows a site mail plese tell me so i can send my contact request email.
I’ll send Jose an email..
I would love to hear about any progress that you make in this endeavor…the cable in my touchstream is fraying, and replacements are ridiculously expensive on eBay, so any alternatives would be much appreciated!
You can replace the TouchStream ribbon connector very cheaply. A bit of soldering is involved. Here are the instructions and the part ordering information:
I’ve been spending many hours criss-crossing the city on public transit lately, and I’ve decided I don’t like those MUNI buses shrinkwrapped in gigantic ad banners. They’re like billboards on wheels, except even larger, and somehow even more lame.
We’re doomed to live with both billboard and advertising-wrapped buses, right? Well, maybe not.
What if San Francisco banned billboards, like some other communities do? The cost of putting giant ads on the side of a bus would go up, and MUNI would get more money, and maybe they would use the extra money to make their service suck less. And we would have no billboards, expect the ones on wheels. What do you think?
Note that in real life, I don’t think banning stuff is a good idea, even if the stuff is lame, like billboards. I also don’t think MUNI would actually use the extra money to help me get around the city any faster.
Billboards are illegal in Alaska, a decision made in the 50′s, and no one up there seems to miss them!
While marketing informs us about what’s available in the marketplace, advertising is the attempt to try to get us to buy it. Billboards and advertising on public spaces (and if we can see them, aren’t they all public in a way?) probably doesn’t make our life any better.
So, I’m an anarchist, but I don’t think advertising on public property (like buses) help us out any.
So, I wish I could give you guys a run down of last week at SXSW, but my brain is still a little fried from it all, so I can only say I had an awesome time and met lots of super interesting people, one of whom gave me this funny business-card-sticker and whose name i totally forgot so I googled the only word on it today and voila!…I find that he’s an artist and video-podcaster for Make magazine and has a blog called “I Make Things.” Anyways, SXSW was full of moments like these where almost everyone I met was working on something neat and there was no shortage of interesting conversations.
Also, I know you guys are skeptical but Austin is a totally fun place! I mean how can you not love a town that’s the birthplace and headquarters for Whole Foods as well as a major center for artery-clogging-all-you-can-eat-big-ass-barbecue!!
And did I mention there were robots?!
oh and check out arena’s sketch of Henry Jenkins! it made it into SF Gate yesterday!
Hehe… Bre rocks! He lives in NYC now. Went to his housewarming :)
Even though I never used the SourceForge compile farm, reading about its recent demise made me sad for some reason. It also made me think about the important role SourceForge plays in the Open Source world.
When SourceForge started in 1999, they provided a unique service that helped start thousands of open source projects, both large and small. Today, however, the core functionality of SF project hosting is easy to replicate by simply installing Subversion and Trac on a hosted server. A few competitors such as Google and Savannah have also sprung up. The services that SourceForge provides are no longer unique, but that’s not what makes it so important.
When software authors use a version control system like Subversion to write software, they preserve the history of all their changes. Although it is possible to preserve a log of edits in other mediums, most authors, musicians, painters, sculptors, or other “content creators” (ugh) do not save this kind of detailed history of their work.
Imagine being able to take your favorite book and roll back every change the author made, one edit at a time, so you could see the author’s thought process, and learn how a bunch of words were arranged to create something beautiful. It would be a huge learning experience for new authors. This is something that new software authors can do easily with open source software. Being able to explore fine-grain history makes software a unique kind of content. Future generations would find this information hugely valuable, just like we would find having Shakespeare’s first, second, third, fourth, and fifth drafts hugely valuable.
Open source software is worth preserving, both for its utility, and for the history it provides. Open source projects start and die out all the time, but hosting the project on SourceForge means that even if an author stops developing it, the world will still have access to it. Others would be able to look at the source code, view its history, and even incorporate the code into their own Open Source software.
SourceForge is owned by VA Software, a company that provides a great service to the Open Source world. But it is a company that can be bought by someone who might not understand the value of long-term preservation of open source software. Companies in general aren’t concerned with doing anything on a long-term scale. As far as I know, there is no one thinking about how to preserve software repositories for 100 or 1000 years. This stuff is important. How are we going to preserve it?
Wow, that is sad about the compile farm, and certainly doesn’t send a positive message about VA’s ability to continue supporting sourceforge.
The compile farm adds *huge* value to the OS community because it allows developers with very little resources (e.g. college students) to get their software to at least compile on a machine/system they don’t own. They someone who has that system (who may not be a developer) can test it.
I totally agree with you about preserving open source projects. In 99 years all this stuff is going to be an anthropologist’s wet dream.
I would be curious to know what the cost structure is like for Sourceforge. But whatever the cost, I’m sure it is well within the means of say, Wikipedia. They like to save things and they can raise tons of money in a jiffy. Of course archive.org would be a sensible place as well ;-)
What I think is interesting is that as time goes on, the ratio of hardware power to source code is going up up up. We are controlling these huge behemouth machines with tiny text files of source code.
Someone made this 1999… How did we share video in a time before YouTube?? Hotline servers? ICQ?? The Forum That Shall Not Be Named????
Sweet. Thanks guys!
Until 1989, a published work had to contain a valid copyright notice to receive protection under the copyright laws. But this requirement is no longer in force — works first published after March 1, 1989 need not include a copyright notice to gain protection under the law. –fairuse.stanford.edu
Under the current copyright regime, every scribble and doodle published on TikiRobot is automatically granted copyright protection. This is not a good thing. We want people to use our scribbles and doodles to make wonderful things.
What do to??? We could license our blog under one of the many Creative Commons licenses. While this would help support the Creative Commons, and a machine-readable CC-license helps artistic robots find our work, choosing the right CC license is difficult, and I’m now getting bored of contemplating the many choices.
We are all geeks and nerds here, so the GNU Free Documentation License might be appropriate, but it is very long, with eleven sections and an addendum, and I never finished reading it.
While searching for an appropriate license, I was reminded of a strange work I read long ago, The Principia Discordia, a manuscript of great wisdom and eloquence, which was released under a unique and strange license. The publishers of the book reversed the rites, and dedicated the book to Kallisti, The Prettiest One, and encouraged readers to reprint what they liked.
This is a great license. Five words long. No need to be complicated. Better than putting the blog in the public domain because the Discordian License contains a cool unicode character, Ⓚ, also machine-searchable by robots. We should use this for our blog!
San Francisco Ⓚ All Rites Reversed
Ⓚ2007, Planet Earth – All Rites Reversed – Reprint what you like
Scanned copies of the Principa Discordia available at fnord
fnord!
Hi Tiki
Thanks for the shout out on my nutrition seminar! Note that I deleted the FAQs page of my web site that you linked to and instead added TONS of info to my blog (I suggest linking to that instead), where I am now daily answering people’s questions. Is is possible to link directly to your post on my seminar on my blog? I know how to link to your blog, but your post on my seminar will presumably go into archives soon. Take care, and keep the pineapple juice flowing!
Clyde
Hi Clyde,
Thanks for letting us know about your blog! I’m reading the caffeine & coffee post now!
You can link directly to the seminar post by using this permalink URL:
http://www.tikirobot.net/wp/2007/03/08/clyde-wilsons-totally-kickass-nutrition-philosophy
Last year Business 2.0 published a new yearly listing called “The Next Net 25″. As corny as that sounds it’s a nice list to be on … last year’s list included Digg, Trulia, Technorati, JotSpot, Writely and …… YouTube.
I am reproducing the list here with my comments because apparently Business 2.0 doesn’t know how to use the UL tag.
It’s getting crowded on the Web 2.0 frontier, but there are still some startups that truly stand out. Business 2.0 Magazine identifies the ones most likely to strike gold in 2007.
- SOCIAL
- stumbleupon.com (the next boingboing?)
- slide.com
- bebo.com (These guys are the next myspace, seriously)
- meebo.com
- wikia.com
- VIDEO
- joost.com (the skype guys do napster for video)
- dabble.com
- metacafe.com
- revision3.com
- blip.tv
- MOBILE
- fon.com
- loopt.com
- mobio
- tinypictures.com (will also be built into the Sidekick soon)
- soonr.com
- ADVERTISING
- turn.com
- adify.com
- admob.com
- spotrunner.com
- vitrue.com
- “ENTERPRISE”
- successfactors.com
- janrain.com
- logoworks.com
- reardencommerce.com
- simulscribe.com
Link to The Next Net 25 on Business 2.0
I never understood what pair programming was until now. Glad someone drew a picture for me. (found on Pivotal blabs).
Zara and I are always pair programming in front of the fireplace.
Zara: You forgot to obsessively check the internet! Someone might have posted something somewhere!
Raj: I’ll get right on it right after I type this semicolon!
When in reality, pair programming is where one guy sits there and makes Rajbot do all the work.
The weird thing about knowing lots of different languages is that you get to the end of a line and you’re like “semicolon… or not?”
The answer of course, is that I need a kitty or a rajbot.
yeah i didn’t get this until someone told me there are no semicolons in ruby :-)
I gave a short and silly opendork presentation at about TikiGraffiti last night. Here is a photo that Scott Beale of Laughing Squid took of me in front of Jonathan Moore’s and David Fine’s External Combustion Engine, an awesome machine made for monochrom’s Roböxotica festival.
Last night was awesome.. Dorkbot, monocrom, SRL, Electrum, Tamale Lady, Mooninites, Laughing Squid, robots that make music and robots that make tiki drinks…. Sometimes I love San Francisco!
Karen has a bunch of pictures, including a bunch from my opendork. Thanks to Karen Marcelo and Michael Shiloh for organizing, and thanks to all the awesome presenters :)
really great idea, thanx for the open dork statement!
btw: monochrom and shifz.org are organizing roboexotica, those great folks should not be forgotten!
Thanks for the info… hopefully we will be in Vienna for the next roboexotica!
if we stopped drinking for a week, we might be sober enough to build a robot of our own!
I got sick of our SecureImage captcha. I couldn’t type in the correct code a third of the time, and it looked ugly. So I wrote a new hacked up our existing captcha plugin to show pictures of graffiti and street art instead of computer-generated text!
Please help me test it out by leaving a comment with a link to a picture of street art. I found some great ones in this Flickr set by Trois Tetes. You can also use Flickr Creative Commons search to “find content to modify, adapt, or build upon”. Please make sure that the image has a CC license!
I’ll add attribution for the images and then post the code if no one finds a bug!
Update: Get it here!
If you are logged in, remember to log out to see the captcha image.
wow, this is cool! i’m gonna leave more comments from now on! :-)
beautiful
A side benefit of this plugin is that I get to look at a lot of art!
Yay this makes me want to keep on commenting!!
This is fun!
cassidy curtis takes lots of great pics of street art and has a good list of links over here.
Thanks! I was also looking for his folk typography group!
LIke any dues-paying hipster I love graffiti from the cold war era
you pay dues for being a hipster??!! i’m glad i’m a geek cuz that’s free :-)
keep these stickers in your car’s glove compartment and use accordingly…
This nifty health solution was brought to you by the guys at Skinny Corp, makers of Threadless and other neat projects. They gave an awesome talk on saturday at the community next conference which had a great line up of speakers. We got to present our work too and got lots of good feedback so that was nice.
One thing I noticed about almost all the projects at the conference is that they stemmed from a deep interest or need by the founder(s) so the subsequent community of users were people the founders could easily identify with. (i.e. the dogster guys love dogs and attract a community of dog lovers etc.) But what if you’ve come up with something and the people you thought would use it aren’t, BUT for some reason, you attract a big following among people you didn’t initially expect, identify with, or know that much about?? I don’t think things are quite as simple as just “following your passion.” Or maybe they are. I don’t know yet.
Anyways, Scott Beale has a good write-up and some pics over here.
Thanks for the good words. Glad it resonated.
Thought I’d chime in any try to answer your question. You see, though we like dogs at Dogster, it’s not a secret that none of the founders have one. My wife and I finally got the landlord to agree we can have one, but, in the end the average user of Dogster is not all that like me.
Early on I had no idea who would be attracted to Dogster. Fortunately many more people then I ever imagined were interested in it. So I did all I could to know why they enjoyed it and what more they wanted to.
What I’ve learned is that though it’s helpful to be right in the middle of your community, if you can understand what your community wants, empathize with their concerns and wishes and do everything you can to make their dreams come true, that can be good enough.
In a way I always thought it was better I didn’t have a dog. That way i could put all our member dogs’ first, as if I was their uncle and not first among many.
Hopefully I don’t blow once we do get our dog. The SPCA called us back for a second meeting tomorrow. Keep your paws crossed for us!
Thanks for the input! that helps a lot :-) good luck with the SPCA and maybe we’ll see you on bernal hill with your new pup!
Our paws are crossed!!
Totally agree about the intention of a lot of the CEOS. Thanks for the write up and hope you had an awesome time!
I accidentally put myself in a bizarre cell phone situation. I’ve been trying to get a new phone that I like, but between the iPhone announcement and trying to figure out if I should sign up with Cingular, I’ve been thrown off course. My existing phone is about as old school as it gets (except for Mike, who still buys OG Motorola StarTacs from eBay): The LG VX1. I actually like this phone a lot, call quality is great and I know the inside an out. But I want a calendar and stuff. So I went to Amazon and got the BlackBerry Pearl with T-Mobile.
It’s a great phone, I had a good time with it. But then the iPhone announcement came out and I thought maybe getting on the Cingular train early would be a good idea. So I returned the T-Mobile Pearl and got a Cingular Pearl. Still with me? So that was going pretty well until I read the fine print: it was going to cost me $250 to port my existing cell phone number (which I have had for 5 years) over to Cingular. What’s up with that? So then I was thinking maybe I’ll stick with Verizon until the iPhone comes out …. I ordered the LG EnV, it looks like a good and somewhat smart phone.
And it is, in terms of form factor, and the keyboard is pretty cool. But the the software is crap, I could tell that within about 8 seconds. And who wants a phone that is going to annoy them every time the click a button? The LG EnV is terrible, don’t even bother.
On Sunday I decided I would just suck it up and get an SK3 to hold me over until iPhone time. I thought it would be too big but it’s only a bit bigger than the LG EnV. And it has SSH. And it has that little notepad app that sync’s over the web. And it’s got “real web browsing” just like in TWIL’s video. I don’t understand why anyone would even try to surf the ‘net on a freakin’ cell phone but whatever.
So at this point I am carrying three devices, the VX1, the EnV, and the Cingular Pearl, all of which have to be returned except for my good old VX1, and this is the best part … None Of Them Work Right Now! In my infinite wisdom I gave T-Mobile my cell number for number portability, and they did it already, before I even have my SK3!!!! It’s a good thing I have very low expectations about T-Mobile customer experience. My SK3 is in a UPS facility in Oakland right now so hopefully I will get it soon.
I like the fact that you can play these carriers off of each other and see if you really like the tech before you commit to it. In all I’ve played with about $800 worth of gear and 3 separate 2 year cell phone contracts that each would cost over $200 each to break, but they all have a 30 day return period so everything has been free. As my friend Tom says “Sometimes capitalism works” :-) Amazon is the best experience I have ever had with cell phone purchase, I highly recommend it. It is sooooo much better than dealing with retail at a cell phone store, and I think the Amazon website is also way better for web shopping than any of the other carriers’ websites. Sadly the SK3 is not available on Amazon, I had to suck it up and log in to the T-Mobile website. And I actually had to pay money for the Sidekick. What’s up with that ?!?!? :-) Cell phones are essentially free when you buy from Amazon, they give you a $250 instant rebate and a bunch of other kickbacks.
Link to T-Mobile BlackBerry Pearl
Link to Cingular BlackBerry Pearl
Link to Verizon Wireless LG EnV
Link to T-Mobile Sidekick 3
Just be careful with the Amazon mail in rebates. They returned mine (supposed to be $150) with a vague “what you sent didn’t show what we wanted” and I was SOL.
Yeah, we got screwed by the Amazon rebate too, for $250 IIRC. And the LG phone that we was maybe the worst phone ever made.. it dropped every call longer than a few minutes!
I’m getting a Sidekick 3 from that contest…are they any good? I have the Motorola Q at the moment.
Has anyone bought a phone from Amazon only to find out they had to choose between rebate and number portability? Or found out after they bought that it would cost more to port their existing number? I know they do this with Cingular plans. Any others?
oooh, check out this phone! it’s not out yet but it looks like it’ll be awesome. sort of like an iphone w/ a slideout keyboard or an adult sidekick :-) also samsung is known for doing really nice phone UIs.
a sidekick what a kiddie phone omfg lmao.
Why? Because that way I could refer to any email I have sent or received when I am writing notes into a text file.
I’ve been playing with my new Blackberry Pearl and it’s inspired a bunch of very exciting research into topics of Calendar, Task, Email, and Memo. (little joke there on the exciting part). Whenever I think about this stuff, I’m amazed that we are well into the 21st century and still these “smart” phones are about as easy to use for notes as a 3 foot pencil on a piece of sheetrock. Nevertheless, being able to email digital notes and blips around can be very handy if one is able to come up with a workflow that isn’t totally annoying.
A case in point is the bug db system Trac. This has nothing to do with smart phones except I have been using it at work to organize my work items. The good part: it’s free, doesn’t crash, doesn’t corrupt data, and has a feature-set that allows for tracking tasks (in my case, I’m not really using it for software bugs at all). The Bad? It takes an ungodly number of mouse clicks and/or keyboard entry to create a new task and/or file an existing task.
Imagine I grab a sheet of paper and a pen and I write “buy bananas” on it. If I’m set up right that’s going to take 2 moderate hand movements and then some minor hand movements to write the text. And boom, I’ve got a piece of technology that will help me remember to buy bananas.
Consider the requirements to achieve the same result in Trac. I need to find and click the image button labeled “New Ticket” (this may require scrolling to the top of the page I am currently on). I need type “buy bananas” as the title. Trac also requires I type a description. I don’t like the defaults for the “Component”, “Assign To” and “Milestone” fields, and there is no way for me to change the default values. (I’m using Trac in a shared environment, and someone else manages those defaults). So that is several mouse clicks to set each of those fields using a pull down menu. Not all of the Trac “New Ticket” page fits on my 1024×800 pixel screen (vertically), so I have to scroll down, and click “Submit Ticket.”
Still with me? Yeah, I know, it’s a lot of operations. And that is only half the story! Now I have to generate some kind of report and print it out, because chances are Trac is not going to be with me when I am in a good position to “buy bananas.”
I’m not trying to bag on Trac, it’s a great system and I would much rather use Trac here at work than any other bug DB I’ve seen. And obviously I am trying to Trac in a problem domain that is way outside the bounds of expected usage. But I was just noticing these things as I was thinking about how to replace my Hipster PDA with a smart phone. Suffice to say the Blackberry Pearl has a bunch of neat features, but I find that using the features requires a bunch of awkward button clicks and trackball movement that I would rather not do. Unfortunately there is no easy way to configure and change the behavior of the application menus or UI elements.
Still, this Pearl thing is growing on me, the benefits will likely outweigh the annoyances for me, and I’ll post more later.
So back to this email thing. Filing these Trac issues for myself, for a lot of the tasks the “Next Action” is to email somebody and ask them for help or tell them something is ready to go. It would be very hand to paste in a reference to that email so I don’t have to dig through my old emails when coming back to the task. And it turns out I can do this … with a minor hack. First prerequisite is having Squirrelmail set up. Probably other web-based mail readers could work as well. The problem is that Squirrelmail refers to email messages using an integer whose value is relative to the other messages in the folder. So their program works, but it would be helpful and more extensible if they were pointing to the unique identifier for the email message. So here’s the other prequesite: this will only work if you use the Empty Inbox philosophy. I started doing the Empty Inbox thing last year and it changed my life (for the better). So I highly recommend it anyway.
So here you go, you are using the Empty Inbox. This means (for me anyway) that you have a non-inbox folder with all of your old mail in it. I call mine “__Archive.” Because the integer indexes that Squirrelmail uses are monitonically increasing, the URL for it will stay valid (as long as you don’t delete old email!!!!). Here is an example (fake) Squirrelmail URL for an email message. The HTTPS URL keeps the message from prying eyes, which is a bug or a feature depending on whether you want people that are not you to be able to read this particular message.
https://mail.foobar.com/src/read_body.php?mailbox=__Archive&passed_id=32311&startMessage=1
Phew … now I can paste references to email discussions into my Trac bugs and um … keep track of everything. It’s pretty ghetto though, hopefully in a year or two something more solid will crop up. Or (more likely) one of you lovely readers will leave an informative comment explaining how out of the loop I am and I should just use package BlahBlahBlah for email URLs :-)
Link to a review of the Blackberry Pearl
Link to Empty Inbox on 43 Folders
hmm, you might actually like the touchscreen on my phone then b/c it lets you scribble things in your own handwriting (i can show you later…it actually works pretty well).
if only it didn’t require you to do *really* dumb things (like clear the browser cache regularly so it doesn’t run out of memory and crash)… that’s what was causing me to lose my hair!
Step Right Up Folks! That’s right, a dozen bananas for the first person to figure out cron script that will clean house on her *cell phone* :-)
That’s pretty funny. There are quirks to the Pearl as well. It’s a Java phone. My cell phone has a “spinny wheel of death” just like Mac OS X. Except it’s not as pretty on the Java phone.
It’s crazy watching applications swap RAM to “disk” on a cell phone….
I’m going to India soon, and I know a bit of Hindi, but I usually become frustrated when trying to remember a word in the middle of a conversation and switch to English. Years ago I learned a bunch of German conversation snippets that I still remember, so I’m going to try the same with Hindi. I’ll add more and get Hindi translations as soon as I can figure out unicode..
Buying things:
Vocabulary:
नक़्शा = map
दाम = price
What about the phrase “Please do not take a detour to your brother’s rug/marble/jewlery store.” ?
Another rajbot!!!!!!!
Do not stop at the rug store – कालीन की दुकान पर नहीँ रुक्ना – kaaleen kee dukaan par nahee.N ruknaa
Do not stop at the jewelry store – ज़ेवरात की दुकान पर नहीँ रुक्ना – zev.raat kee dukaan par nahee.N ruknaa
Those transliterations are kinda messy, but you can put them into HiTrans if you need to correct some of the devanagari..
DHL “released” my macbook pro box back to me today after I called and hassled them about it. Just another note in the Apple Support Saga: According to DHL, Apple’s Contract with DHL does now allow the customer (me) to sign for and pick up the laptop box from DHL dispatch if there is a missed delivery attempt. Apparently they feel this reduces theft somehow. Anyway, to avoid this annoyance, make sure Apple Support sends “The Box” to your workplace, or be prepared to stand outside your door all day waiting for the DHL guy.
So now I get to go through Apple Setup again and create my user account and go to System Preferences and change “key repeat rate” to “Fast” and change “delay until repeat” to “short” and pull out all the crap that’s in the dock and put terminal in the dock and I think you get the idea. I have to set up my mac again. Every time. I’ve done this around 40 times in 2006 alone.
Apple Setup has an option to transfer data from you old mac, but it’s pretty specific to transferring your home directory from a previous machine. There is no option to “restore you laptop to the way it was before the hard drive crapped out”.
And wouldn’t it be nice if it was simple as copying my home directory? But no, many applications install stuff into the “/Library” folder and so on, kernel extensions, registration keys. As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, the music that I purchased from the iTunes Music Store will no longer work on my macbook pro even though it is exactly the same machine with a new hard drive. Everywhere in the iTMS documentation it says you can “authorize up to 5 computers” … but really what is implemented is you can have up 5 different installations of Mac OS X authorized to play your songs at any given time. If you lose access to those installations for whatever reason you are screwed and/or have to deal with Apple Support to reset some counters. I am really curious how Apple Support handles this iTMS authorization issue but I haven’t had the energy to make the phone calls yet.
I was hoping the boot-disk-RAID-mirror would solve the problem of backup but in the end it didn’t work out due to complexity, poor documentation of Apple RAID Mirroring, and just plain not understanding what happens when there is a conflict between two mirrored disks. In one of my tests, the file with a conflict just ended up with some bogus data in it … I didn’t feel like it was worth my time to analyze what does and does not work with Apple RAID when the mirrored pairs are disconnected, modified differently, and then reconnected. There is no point to making a backup if you are unsure whether it’s even going to work.
This is a long way of saying I would love to hear about a way to back up your mac in a way that minimizes all these problems.
You and I have very different DHL experiences.
When Apple sends a DHL box at home, I call DHL with the tracking number and tell them to hold the package, since I’m not at home. Then, someone from DHL *calls me back* to confirm that they will be holding the box for me at their facility. Then I come home and find a laptop happily waiting for me on the stoop.
My MBP is still at Apple repair facility. Who knows when I’ll get it back. It’s probably been usable 50% of the time that I’ve had it.
I just bought this blackberry phone on Amazon. I think I’m going to sell my MacBook Pro and just use the blackberry … it’s got IM and ssh is installable.
Why not dd?
The reason dd (or imaging the HD with Disk Utility) doesn’t work is because in some cases one or more system files are corrupted and you want/need to re-install Mac OS X.
But perhaps that is just a pathelogical case due to bad hardware. This morning I’m getting the same HFS file corruption as I was before, even though there is a brand new Seagate drive in my MBP. Very interesting…..
I just got off the phone with AppleCare.. peliom got to hear the end part of the ridiculous phone call.
This is the third time that I’ve had to send my machine in to Apple for repair. I called to check on the status, and it was ‘on hold’. They were not repairing it because they needed some information from me. Hmmm.. Apple Repair has my MBP, what information could I give them? I eventually got connected to someone who could tell me what was going on, and she informed me that when they took the machine apart, they found it had been taking apart before! And that it was missing some screws and maybe something was cut! And this was abuse! Apple wanted to know if it was I who had taken apart and abused the laptop.
No, I said. This is the third time I’ve sent this machine to Apple for repair. Apple is the only one that has taken my machine apart. Apple abused my laptop! Yes, she says, I see you’ve sent in your machine three times this year, so I will write down it was damaged by Apple repair.
Wait, if my machine keeps breaking, and you say it is because Apple Repair has been abusing my laptop, shouldn’t you send me a new one, instead of the same broken one you keep sending me?
Need to talk to someone else… wait on hold… new guy says nope. This is decided on a case-by-case basis. So you aren’t going to replace my macbook that was abused by people at applecare? Nope! So how many times do I have to send it in before it qualifies for a replacement. “Sometimes five… sometimes eight.. it depends”. Well, I’ve had five different problems, with five different case numbers. “No sir. Maybe if you have to send it in again”.
“So, to clarify, Apple will not replace a MacBook Pro that has been abused by other Apple technicians who previously repaired the laptop.”
“That is correct.”
Merry Christmas from Apple!!
2/17 purchase
5/23 first mail-in
6/06 second mail-in (they sent it back with a 100GB drive that only formated to 30GB, which was the problem I complained about. They replaced the logic board, though.)
7/11 battery ballooned up and would no longer fit
11/3 power supply melted
12/19 sent in. Apple says that they found screws missing and physical damage from a previous repair. Classifies this as abuse, but won’t replace laptop.
They still have the laptop, and the repair status is still ‘on hold’. Who knows when I’ll get it back, but they aren’t trying to repair it. Maybe tomorrow they will start…
dd_rescue might be of some use for peliom..
Copying this partition with normal Un*x tools like cat or dd will fail, as those tools abort on error. dd_rescue instead will try to read and if it fails, it will go on with the next sectors. The output file naturally will have holes in it, of course. You can write a log file, to see, where all these errors are located.
oh what a nightmare :-( they really *REALLY* should send you a new machine.
I did a technorati search for ‘applecare’ and this popped up. I think I get it now.
AppleCare Support Step 1: “That’s not a hardware problem. That’s definitely a software problem.”
AppleCare Support Step 2: “OK, that’s a hardware problem, but you have been abusing your machine! Your warranty is now void.”
Can you believe I’m on the phone with AppleCare again? My repair is still on hold, waiting for a “re-quote”. I was on the phone for an hour yesterday, and gave them a re-quote, but they can’t find it. Unbelievable…
My update today: It looks like the culprit is bad RAM from crucial. After figuring this out it took three phone calls to crucial to get an RMA number, and they won’t ship the good RAM until they either receive mine or I pay for new RAM. If I were a normal person my laptop would be out of commission for two weeks, but I’ve got an extra 1GB SODIMM around here somewhere.
Lesson Learned: after installing new RAM, always run Apple Hardware Test (by inserting the restore CD and holding down the “D” key). It also seems like a good idea to run AHT when you get random filesystem corruption. I thought it was the hard drive but in fact I think what happened was HFS blocks were read into RAM, got corrupted, and then written back out to disk….
I called again, and after a lot of waiting on the phone the woman from AppleCare said she would remove the hold on the repair. I just checked and the repair is still on hold. How many more hours do I have to spend on the phone to get my machine back?
Happy Saturday!!!! This morning I had the joy of spending 77 minutes on the phone with Apple Support. After the trip to Texas my MBP is now making “a noise” … yes, a noise … something like the fan is hitting something or something. I got to describe in detail the noise until the poor support dude handed me off to a “hardware specialist.” The specialist said “unfortunately, you know the drill” … and set me up with “The Box” … This time I had them the box the work so I don’t have to deal with DHL weirdness.
As a sidenote, the Contact Apple Support page has a place where you can type in your mac serial number to find out if your machine is covered. For kicks I typed in my MBP serial number and they had the purchase date wrong and said it wasn’t covered! It took another 20 minutes on the phone to get that fixed…..
There is no lolipop, no free software, no replacement machine, no free upgrade, no even coupons for music from the stupid iTunes Music Store … just a promise that in *two weeks* I will have my machine back again without this stupid and highly annoying broken fan noise.
I like to giggle and think about what Steve Jobs would do if this kind of thing happened to his Mac Book Pro. I can’t even begin to describe it … this is a family website :-) Suffice to say he would be really, really, really mad.
The reason AppleCare is so horrid is probably because Steve has never had to use it. I wrote earlier about how Apple Engineers should use AppleCare instead of OnSite support. Things won’t change until then.
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Spam Bucket 3:12 pm on May 3, 2007 Permalink |
Call a lawyer. Don’t take legal advice from random unlicensed strangers who post crap on your blog.
Q 3:44 pm on May 3, 2007 Permalink |
I have three words for you: “Cease and Desist.” I think that you need to invoke the DMCA to put a stop to this blatant thievery.
Cool video by the way.
PS the Graffiti thing isn’t here right now.
Daniel Cormier 2:48 pm on May 4, 2007 Permalink |
Try changing the password to something other than “disney”…
Q 12:14 pm on May 8, 2007 Permalink |
This site will give you your own personal integer for all of your encryption needs. As a bonus, according to AACS, you apparently will now OWN this number and can sue anyone else who mentions it. Math is fun!
rajbot 2:56 pm on May 8, 2007 Permalink |
Yup. Any 16-character name is potentially infringing on an illegal 128-bit number.
Disney’s corporate name, The Walt Disney Company, and be shortented to sixteen characters by abbriviating “Company” as “Co.”, and then removing spaces.
TheWaltDisneyCo. = 54 68 65 57 61 6c 74 44 69 73 6e 65 79 43 6f 2e
Sony’s website is illegally circumventing my copyright protection mechanism as well:
SonyPictures.com = 53 6f 6e 79 50 69 63 74 75 72 65 73 2e 63 6f 6d
It doesn’t take much work to see that every company backing AACS is operating an illegal website.