my so-called blog (redux)

In brush-up training for Windows Server 2003. Few key notes:

* Internet access through the cell phone is awesome, as this location doesn’t have Ethernet or wireless. Go T-mo!
* WS2003 has a neat shadow copy feature that provides some simple versioning support. Not horribly extensive but nice to have.

For what it’s worth, the Foxconn board I bought was DOA.

I’ve been reading an article here about the earlier transgressions of currnet cheap-ass computer component manufacturer ECS (neé PC Chips/Albatron/etc.): it goes mostly over 10-year-old 486 boards that were sold with relabeled chipsets and fake cache SRAM on the boards. The thing I found the most interesting about them was that, when I saw the board pictured early on in the article, I realized that I had several of them in my apartment.. I’ve had one ECS board since - a K7S5A - and it was actually pretty decent but they’re not a manufacturer I’d use again. (On that note, I hope Foxconn isn’t part of ECS since I just bought a Socket 478 Foxconn board.)

quick things: I have changed my background to just a plain grey, which makes my weblog look a lot cooler. I am currently avoiding work. car’s in the shop for brake service (yay being able to stop) and then will be again for a tuneup (yay lack of flashy red lights). I have furthermore decided to return the iPaq on the basis that it sucks - sound quality is great from my end and horrible from everyone else’s, and the ability to plug the thing into the car isn’t much more than a gimmick. I also have 4 CDs on the way.. expanding music collections rock.

for what it’s worth, pocketmac seems to be a ton faster on my Mac mini than on my powerbook. don’t understand why but there it is.

so I’m giving the whole “information appliance convergence” thing and have thusly bought one of these (the h6315 to be exact). after playing with it for a few days I’m left with an overwhelming uncaring feeling about the whole idea - it’s great that I can sync it with my computer and have real data on the screen that’s easier to get to than it is on a standard cell phone, but on the other hand I keep hitting the start menu and firing up things if I talk on it without the headset. the iPaq has a great hand presence (better than my Axim x50, even) but it’s just too goddamned big for a cellphone. I’ll do a better writeup on it once I get a little more time with it. I have two weeks to screw with it.

basically, in the day I’ve had it, I do really like the always-on internet connectivity. when wifi is not present it’ll fall back to GPRS. and, as far as it goes, it’s pretty fast - the processor on it is a TI OMAP 168MHz model, which pales in comparison to the 520MHz XScale in my Axim, but I really can’t tell the difference. IE is slower. sync (through PocketMac, not Active Sync - don’t have a PC right now to try it with) is ungodly slow but that may just be pocketmac. (for some reason it’s way faster over BT.) connectivity rocks, as it has GSM/GPRS, 802.11b and bluetooth 1 built in. the thumboard is nice but the keys are chicklet-style and hard to type with as there are very noticeable gaps in between. it’s hard to dial using the touchscreen. I love being able to hook it into the tape adapter in my car (which I usually use for my iPod) and being able to field calls through my car stereo. sound quality is awesome - it’s the first time I’ve had a headset that I could understand the other person on fully, and I finally have a GSM phone that beats the CDMA Cellular South free phones I’ve had. that said, I bought it yesterday, and I’m resetting it and exchanging it today since the wifi doesn’t work at home (which uses 40-bit WEP - mainly to keep casual people out, natch, and not for security). I’m, however, still up in the air about full-sized PDA phones, and am not convinced yet that they’re a good idea. I need to check the return policy at expansys and see if I can try out some i-mate models (the i-mate Jam PDA phone and i-mate SP3 smartphone) and maybe the Symbian-based Sendo X. the Jam lacks 802.11 but it does have an SDIO slot, and it’s evidently quite a bit smaller than the iPaq (around the size of the Motorola MPx220, which is somewhat bigger but not amazingly so than my V180 that I hate with a passion). (FWIW, built-in wifi is a pain in the ass when it’s on, you’re driving, and you’re trying to make a call - every few seconds it wants to know which of the myriad wifi networks that are around you at any given point in time connect to the internet. and no, the h6315 doesn’t have that cool dial-by-voice-command feature the i-mate PDA2K/audiovox somethingorother has.)

as an aside, a few cool things about OS X: Cmd+Ctrl+D while you hover over a word brings up a dictionary panel for quick lookups of definitions (found through Daring Fireball). I like right-click spell check/google/dictionarying and being able to click icons in the Task Switcher thing (Cmd+Tab). also, car repairs are expensive.

one of the things I think that was really glossed over at WWDC was Xcode 2.1. the really cool thing about it (besides the Universal Binaries thing) was the inclusion of WebObjects with the download - WO is now a free download with Xcode, and OS X Server now includes a deployment license for the product as well. (this makes deploying on platforms other than Mac OS X somewhat questionable, but, then again, I haven’t looked at it much.) thanks to will for the heads up on this one.

so, prompted by a (breif) discussion I had with a customer while I was extolling the wonders and benefits of .Mac, I gave a cursory glance at Plaxo. if memory serves, Plaxo made the rounds a few years ago when it was new. the idea is pretty simple - you install a plugin into your mail client (currently, Outlook or Outlook Express) and you use their servers to keep your contact data up-to-date. the twist is that your contacts are actually prompted to update it themselves. the idea is clever, since having your contacts manage the data about themselves minimizes errors. the problem is it only works with Outlook and Outlook Express, and only on Windows. (just like the problem with .Mac is that it only works on a Mac and with iCal and Address Book unless you get something like PocketMac.) there are some other problems with it too that may not actually be problems - problems like what format is the data stored in and how do I get at it beyond their web interface and Outlook (things I can’t check since I don’t have a running PC anymore).

so, what really needs to happen is that someone needs to implement a similar service that works with open standards. why not move data back and forth using vCal and vCard formats - pretty much everyone who matters supports them. bonus points if you make a plugin for Outlook (et. al), Entourage, iCal/Address Book/iSync, and Mozilla Thunderbird/Sunbird.

while we’re talking about calendaring, let me just say that iCal in the enterprise (or even in the I-need-to-coordinate-multiple-people-prise) sucks. iCal is great at what it does as long as you’re just scheduling yourself. once you get past that it’s less good - sure, there’s the capabilities (in iCal 2) to invite people (which involves sending everyone a nice vCal file - which in and of itself isn’t a bad idea) and to publish your calendar (which unfortunately is a read-only thing) but there’s not much else besides that. if I have a calendar published and someone else on my project needs to update it, they need to schedule it on their iCal and then send me an invite so I can put it on the “official” calendar. there should be a way to have a server (it can even be based on WebDAV) to do this - just have a folder that represents the calendar itself and then vCal files for each event. you’d still have the generate-event-invite-maintainer model for people who you don’t want to give calendar access to but everyone else should just be able to publish it to the server and everyone updates. speaking of I wonder how hard it is to write plugins for iCal..

fwiw I don’t much like this background but it’ll do for now.

both images (the header and the background) were found via Pixel Perfect Digital which provides royalty-free (for most applications) digital photographs and backgrounds - some really cool stuff there, and it’s all free and available for use in your projects and all that.

and now I have a personal weblog too. still kinda experimenting with the whole “not writing your own weblog software” idea - it’s a weird idea. one I’m not at all accustomed to, since my last two weblogs (which were really just one I suppose, just with different styling later on) ran on code I wrote. yay for recursive functions.

so now we have a new venue for me to rant about odd things (though, to be honest, I’ll probably just forget to update this like I do everything else). my plate is full as ever; I have two real live commercial jobs, one contract, and one “hey let’s go do something cool!” project going on. in addition I have my own stuff running - latest is something called “randoblog”, which I (amazingly) bought the dot-com for last night. that’s going to be a blogroll for the lazy; basically a link you click on to be transported to a random weblog on the internets, with the added side benefit of being able to get to a big categorized list of weblogs. it’s actually coming along. I haven’t succumbed to puffy-tail syndrome on it yet and am therefore amazed.

one thing that’s really awesome is that I’m actually starting to get excited about technology again - I’ve been looking at ruby on rails a bit, and exploring all the neat stuff that Mac OS X 10.4 does now and getting really interested in how easy and useful most of this stuff is. Ajax is veddy interesting as well. good stuff all around.

speaking of computers, I’m damned near 100% mac now.. my PC died so now I have a Mac mini to replace it and am looking into getting an older titanium PowerBook G4. everything just seems to work better. and I finally got a new Apple keyboard that I don’t hate. but then I’ve only had it for a few hours. we’ll see how badly it works in a month.