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Apr
1
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This is Part 2 (of 3) of my notes from O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, 2007 in San Diego. (see Part 1)
Day two (Tuesday) was supposed to start with Kathy Sierra - but she was forced to cancel due to her online death-threat incident. That was a shame in many ways and means I still haven't had the pleasure of listening to Kathy Sierra talk. Instead of Kathy, Jeff Jonas was back talking about data and how to get the most out of it. A bit of a repeat but he did go into a little more detail.
Next up was Werner Vogels who talked about Amazon Web Services. This was really interesting - Amazon seem to be really leading the way in delivering a web platform vision. It's taken them a decade and $2 billion - if you were thinking of trying this at home. Their goals are to turn huge, fixed costs into lower variable costs, provide unlimited scalability all with datacenter reliability.
Rightscaling is the term Werner used to describe the cost-efective scaling - I heard an example of a startup laying down just $85 for their first 3 months of IT operations; yet could easily dip into the (virtually unlimited) pool to scale up as demand required.
Werner really only talked about the infrastructure layers, which (if you're not familiar with AWS) consists of EC2 (Elastic Computing Cloud), Messaging (Simple Queuing Service) and Storage (S3 - Simple Storage Service) - they use metered pricing for everything - eg. $0.15/Gb/Month for storage or $0.10/Instance/Hour for EC2).
The way they do provisioning for EC2 was pretty neat - you basically assign an AMI (Amazon Machine Image) to the physical units you want to provision; the AMI defines the OS and software you want installed (ie. you might choose Fedora, Apache and PHP or Fedora and Ruby on Rails). The AMIs are stored on S3 and you can either define your own or use pre-configured images.
The deployments can be tiered (for security) in the same way you might in your own DC - ie. only the Web or Proxy tier would be exposed to the public internet; whereas the database tier would be completely inaccessible.
I had to skip the rest of the morning due to a couple of meetings but Phil Windley has some great coverage of Jane McGonigal's talk on Creating Alternate Realities.
In the afternoon there was a pretty good demo from Apple showing how easy it is manipulate pictures and video. All you need is a moderately powered super-computer - ie. like the one you're reading this text on.
Jeff Hawkins (inventor of the Palm Pilot and Treo) talked about Hierarchical Temporal Memory - the idea of HTM is to replicate some of the human brains congnitive functions - they learn from exposure to sensory data, discover cause and make predictions based on the sensory data and inferences. Some of this seemed a bit far-fetched - but hey, this is Jeff Hawkins (the inventor of the Palm Pilot and Treo).
Note to self - I must give "On Intelligence" another try - I wasn't sufficiently motivated to get past the first hour.
Much later in the day I attended a couple of (related) BoFs. The first was lead by Joe Gregorio covering APP (Atom Publishing Protocol) - I was interested in knowing where APP was in terms of adoption - it seems there's a bit of a chicken and egg situation - there won't be many clients supporting APP until there are some services and the services won't support APP without clients. Apparently APP (even before the RFC is final). There was some interesting side-chat about APP / Atom / RSS over Jabber / XMPI - apparently IM services aren't censored any where near as much as HTTP and VOIP - so it may well be the only truly universal transport.
Matt Mullenweg of WordPress claimed that WordPress would be supporting APP real soon - so hopefuly the cycle will be broken and the Web will get it's universal publish button. Anyone know when Roller will support APP ?
Next (in the same room) was the Microformats BoF run by Kevin Marks; who, significantly, works at Google. Most of the people in the room (me included) were merely there to learn a bit more but there was one guy (sorry I'm lousy with names) who was using rel-tag extensively. There was some discussion about how well microformats fit with APP; how microformats could deliver some of the power that Metaweb promises. This is another area I need to investigate a little more.
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Jan
9
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I recently wrote that my once treasured Treo650 is looking a bit dated compared to smart-phones from Blackberry and Nokia. Well compared to the iPhone from renamed Apple Inc. - my Treo looks positively mundane. Others agree. Hopefully Apple will learn from Palm - consumer devices should never crash or require complex, error prone patching. And never, should they require you to take the back off and do a warm reset once a day. Never.
It will be interesting to see if Apple will open up their business for third party applications (that's one thing Palm did right) - I hope so. Perhaps I'll be ready for a new toy when they launch in the US 
Oh, and if anyone from Apple wants to buy a good blog review - I'm completely for sale !
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Dec
31
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I started this last year and though I'd do it again.
Best Moment
Last year it was a toss up between Jack learning to use the potty and England qualifying for the World Cup. This year - the kids win again - this year (over the course of a long weekend) - my five year old daughter Lilly learned to ride her bike without training-wheels. Watching her cycling off into the distance made me feel very proud. If anyone needs advice on teaching kids to loose the training-wheels - leave a comment.
Worst Moment
Watching England's performance in the World Cup and realizing we were going to blow it.
Best Blog
I still read many of Sun's bloggers but the one blog I have read consistently is Seth Godin's.
Best Gadget
Last year it was my (very inexpensive) GPS receiver for my Treo - something I still use a lot of the time - and something I find invaluable when travelling. This year it's pretty tricky. The two contenders are my home SunRay (something I use every day and I still think it's one of those game-changing products that way too few people are aware of); the second is the Logitech Harmony 880 Universal Remote (a Christmas present) - five remote controls was driving my wife crazy - harmony has been restored. I think the Harmony wins.
Worst Gadget
I had to think hard about this one. This is tough - it's my beloved Treo650 that I've ranted about over the last couple of years. Here's why. I recently had to replace my Treo (having dropped it too often) - before I shelled out $300 I looked at a couple of other smartphones and they all make the Treo650 look really dated. The reason I stuck with the Treo is that I have 3 or 4 applciations I use a lot that aren't all available on other (newer) models and makes. Unless Palm gets their act together - it's probably the last Palm I'll buy - the competition looks too good. My initial infatuation with the Treo meant I tollerated the crashes and out of memory errors - not any more.
Best Book
Last year this was easy - this year I'm struggling between Blink and Freakonomics - looking at my Audible library - I gave Freakonomics 5 stars vs. 4 for Blink - so Freakonomics gets the prize this year.
Best Film
No films really stood out this year - though I've enjoyed watching TLOTR trilogy again - now in HD (OK - upconverted DVD). I'm going to break the rules a bit and vote for Lost - over the Autumn we watched the entire Season 1 & 2 on DVD (via NetFlix) and season 3 on HBO - I can't wait for it to restart in February.
Worst Film
Da Vinci Code - I enjoyed the book and decided to get the DVD as my wife hadn't read it. Great story, great actors - what happened ?
Best Application
I've been using Google calendar for the last six months and have completely given up the various other calendars I'd been maintaining. It almost rocks and I have high hopes for it continuing to improve. I just hope Google doesn't become big and evil - I'd hate to have to look for place to park my appointments.
Biggest Disappointment
World Cup 2006 (Soccer / Footie). England had some of the most hyped and over-paid players in the game and played like a bunch of guys who hadn't played together before. Overall - the tournament was great - and England's part was pretty minor.
Have a great new year, Rich.
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Oct
16
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I just installed and had a quick play with Google maps on my Treo; for a first release it's pretty good; but it's along way from being a replacement for TomTom navigator - ie. no GPS link and the maps are a little slow to download. One neat feature is the (presumably) live traffic updates - though I'm not sure it will route around traffic hotspots like TomTom does.
It's a shame mobile browsers aren't more capable - downloading a native app. for every neato AJAX-heavy application isn't really the answer IMO.
That said, I'll definitely take another look in the future.
Technorati Tags: ajax, google map, treo|
Sep
22
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Looks like I got Schwartzed. I guess now I'll have to leave my Laptop at home ! Re-reading my post - it's interesting that my motivations for lugging a laptop were : "catch up with Tivo", "maybe do some work", (and adding a third) make phone calls with Skype*. Maybe that is the PC's salvation - high-end portable entertainment for travelling executives. Anyway, I'll try and blog my experiences.
*also intersting is that I keep a Windows partition on my Ubuntu laptop just so I can make cheap calls with Skype !
Technorati Tags: treo, ubuntu, schwartz, skype
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Sep
21
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Tim Bray asks whether the mobile / PDA / Crackbery / Palm is the future. Having come from Europe where mobile technology has been better utilized for much longer (reasons available on demand) - the answer is clearly No - it's not the future - it's the now for many people. But I'm a relative laggard, I've been a laptop wielding road-warrior for much of my working life but only very recently do I feel comfortable leaving my laptop at home (it hasn't left my Wifi radius in about six months). If I know I'm only travelling to Sun offices then this is all I need :
That said I'll often lug a laptop around if I know a) I'm going to be on a long flight - I can catch up on some Tivo or do some work; b) I'll be catching up with work at night in my hotel room; c) will have little or no access to a SunRay.
I'm travelling next week - and seriously considering whether to lug my laptop (and associated paraphenalia). If planes and hotels deployed some secure thin client technology with a decent internet connection then I'd be happy.
If you are stuck with your laptop - it's hard to let go - a Treo / Blackberry isn't a complete replacement - but it satisifies a whole different set of use cases. A more interesting question (I often ask myself) is - if I had to take just one gadget with me - which would it be ? - in my case - my Treo is the only possible answer.
Technorati Tags: treo, crackberry, sunray
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May
5
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treo-mail
Originally uploaded by sharps.
For better or worse I can now get work mail on my "thing that used to be a phone" (aka Teo650).
My mail account was recently migrated to sun's Edgemail - meaning I don't have to be inside the firewall to get my mail. I can't say the migration wasn't without it's problems (mainly due to detritus left over from previous migrations) but all seems to be working now.
Anyway, one of the benefits is that I can get my sun.com mail on my Treo - it was trivial to set up (but be sure to check the "receive headers only").
I doubt I'll use it much but it will be invaluable when I'm on the road (eg. JavaOne) - no more lugging my laptop :)
Now I just need EdgeCal.
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Jan
2
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Best Moment
That's a tough one - between England qualifying for the 2006 Word Cup, winning the ashes;) and watching my kids grow up - I'd have to go with my kids. Specifically - my 18 month old son Jack doing number ones on the potty (he's been doing it for a while for his Mum but did the honours for me over the Christmas break too) - you have to have kids to understand this one.
Worst Moment
The July bombings in London.
Best Blog
Just scanning through my subscriptions (in Google reader - reminder - must find a better blog reader) - I've decided that there isn't a single blog I read that religiously, however I have subscriptions to at least 8 Sun bloggers and read many others. So the award goes to to Sun bloggers - all of them.
Best Gadget
It was a good year for gadgets. By far my favourite was the personal fabricator I saw at Robo Nexus - but cost-wise it's a little out of my league. So for me it was the GlobalSat Bluetooth GPS receiver I bought in September - which I use from my Treo650 (running TomTom) - I've used it a great deal already (in 3 US states) both cycling, driving and walking. I look forward to some more location aware applications in the future.
Worst Gadget
I got a free WiFi detector freebee from some show (can't remember which). I just don't understand how these things are useful. If I know I really must be connected when I'm out of the office and away from home I go somewhere where they have an internet connection that I can use (Airport Lounge, Coffee Shop, Hotel, etc.) - I don't wander around the streets with my little Wi-Fi detector. For one thing it can't differentiate between a secure network, a P2P network and a freely accessible base station.
Best Book
This one is easy, despite having read (listened to) some really good books this year - it has to be Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (which I reviewed back in January 2005). As well as achieving an unprecedented 5 stars on my blog it also won a Hugo award and a clutch of others so it can't be all that bad.
Best Film
Pretty Tough - just scanning back through my Netlifx ratings - there were 3 or 4 films that I gave five stars but I think I'd have to go with the Bourne Supremecy (released in 2004).
Worst Film
Easy. Ocean's Twelve. I'm sure they enjoyed making it but it was almost painful to watch.
Best Talk
In December, I had the pleasure of listening to Michael Raynor (co author of the "Innovator's Solution" and all round smart, interesting guy) - great content and perfect delivery and as a bonus he only really used a couple of slides.
Best Application
This is tricky - Flickr started the year as the main contender but I've been a little bit disappointed with progress since the Yahoo acquisition (it hasn't gotten worse and I still think it's great but it hasn't really improved much either). So I think it's going to have to be Firefox (I'm currently on 1.5) - an application that I use every day, rarely encounter problems.
Biggest Disappointment
Sadly, I have to say it was the long awaited release of The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy (on DVD). It wasn't really a bad film and in some ways was probably a little better than the 80's TV series. I guess it was a reasonable film of one of the best stories ever so I guess that makes it above par. It'll be interesting to see if they adapt the other books in the series. NB. I'm more than a little tainted having grown up with Douglas Adam's work - listened to the radio show, read (all) the books several times, watched the TV series, played the game, etc.Have a great new year, Rich.
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Nov
2
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As much as I like my Treo650 (see previous posts here and here) and use it for pretty much everything - navigation (via BlueTooth GPS), listening to audiobooks, music and podcasts, email, news alerts, checking the weather, browsing, general organizing and occasionally making phone calls; it's not quite the 'one gadget to rule them all' - but it does come pretty close. I'm constantly thinking ways that tighter integration of the features would really add value above and beyond the value of the individual features.
Here's a couple of examples, the latest version of the TomTom nav. software I use has a couple of neat features :
1. TomTom allows you to get real-time traffic information for the route you currently have planned - I have used this feature and can confirm it works - I've even used it to re-route around an accident. Neat but no good enough - the majority of hold ups I encounter are just your run-of-the-mill high traffic density delays - and TomTom doesn't really provide much detail about those - presumably because there's no sensor grid covering all the freeways in the US to give accurate traffic flow information. But hold on - what if every GPS system had the ability to share local information - ie. could share speed / route telemetry with a central server that could build up an accurate real-time picture of the traffic flow - ie. drivers ahead of you on US 101 could essentially help you avoid the slow jam they were in. That would be neat - share local information to everyone's benefit.
2. TomTom has a nice feature in it's directory lookup - eg. mid route, you can lookup the nearest gas station, kids park, store or restaurant - it even gives you the opportunity to phone them (eg. if you wanted to check they were open). Again, pretty good - but not good enough - TomTom hs it's own internal and fairly limited database - what I really want is to be able to quickly do a search (ala Google) with some implied search terms related to my current location and future destination. So when I'm driving back from Soccer - I can simply ask to be routed to the nearest Taco joint or more likely in my case the nearest chiropractor ;). This would be an especially useful feature when you're travelling - eg. in a foreign city (where asking directions is often a challenge).
3. Here's another idea - now that I have added location to my identity - how can I share it ? Just as I share my photos and thoughts on the web - in certain cases, I'd actually like to share my location - especially with friends and co-workers - if you've travelled you've probably had that call @ 3am in the morning on your cell phone from one of your office neighbours to see if you want to go for a coffee (they didn't know you were in a different time-zone). Another example - when I'm at a conference - I'd like to know if some of my contacts on my social-network are around - it would be nice to meet in person. Clearly - I want to control who I share my location information with because I don't want to start getting smart-location-aware-spam !!
If you work for Palm (or other gadget vendor) and want more ideas - I'd be happy to share in return for toys !!
Technorati Tags : Treo650, Mashup, Location, Web2.0, Phone2.0
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Sep
26
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About six months ago I bought TomTom Navigator for my Palm Tungsten (see my previous blog entry) and more recently upgraded my Palm to a Treo650 (blog entry). The GPS receiver for the TomTom was the serial cable type which doesn't support the Treo650 (different physical connector) so I've been looking to upgrade to a Bluetooth GPS receiver so I can sell the Palm Tungsten and wired GPS receiver on ebay and just use the one device. TomTom doesn't sell just the wireless receiver so I had to take a bit of a risk and buy one from elsewere. As it happens my concerns were unfounded; after a little research I bought the GlobalSat BT308 Bluetooth GPS receiver which I also believe is called the iTreck M3. I'd originally envisaged connectivity or compatibility problems but the device was detected immediately (and having added it to my Treo650's trusted device list - connects quickly whenever the two devices are close enough).
The GPS receiver is very compact - about the size of a very small cell phone; and very light. It has a couple of LEDs (indicating power, satellite acquisition and bluetooth activity) and a power button - very simple. It can apparently handle up to 20 satellites (but TomTom Navigator only display 14 and I've only seen 8 acquired) and the battery lasts up to 17 hours (yet to test this). It has a good auto-power off feature - so you can throw the device in your glove-compartment or bag and forget about it - when it fails to find a bluetooth device for a while it'll turn off and save your battery.
I haven't really 'test driven' the combo yet - the latest version (5.0) of TomTom Navigator provides new route setting features for pedestrians / cyclists and over the weekend I did try that out (whilst trying to get Jack to sleep) - though next week I should get to try it out in the urban canyons of San Francisco as I'll be attending the Web2.0 conference. To me this is the ideal trip for a portable GPS - driving to a place you don't know well (and having to deal with roadblocks and grid-locks) then parking and having to navigate at street level.
It'll be interesting how the combo deals will cell phone calls (using a BT headset) whilst navigating - I don't know if the Treo650 (or BT in general) handles multiple concurrent device sessions - I'll let you know when I find out.
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Jul
26
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I've been putting off buying a Treo for a while but recent circumstances involving a bottle of baby's formula* and my wife's Motorola necessitated me to rethink that. OK, 'necessitated' is the wrong word - what's the English word for 'provided a weak excuse, enforcing an underlying urge' ? You get the picture - I like gadgets; I just need a lame excuse and my wife just needs a phone that works - everyone's happy.
Anway, browsing some of the Treo650 forums, it seems that many of the reported instabilities have been resolved and the price of a Treo650 is now more reasonable so I took the plunge. The most immediate results of taking the plunge is that I now have less stuff to lug around with me. The following picture is the pre-consolidation state - Tungsten C - used mainly for Calendar, Notes, E-Mail land TomTom GPS; cell phone - use for making calls, telling the time and occasionally taking pictures of the kids; i-River MP3 player (512Mb) - use for listening to tunes, ITConverstations and AudioBooks; the most fricking awesome Shure E2c earbuds** (for listening); Motorola Bluetooth headset (making / taking calls). Clearly this doesn't include all the cords, wall warts, adapters and other essential paraphenalia - but the consolidation didn't have much impact on that problem; more's the pity.
The next picture is post consolidation - I find the Teo650 more than adequate for listening to poor quality audio books and 'pod casts' - in fact it is very convenient for listening to AudibleBooks because the Audible player for palm is very neat; though for better quality music I would still use my MP3 player - it's also more suitable for running / biking (being extremely light). The phone / PDA integration is pretty good - and certainly saves me time in managing contacts - it also ensures my numbers are backed up - I think this is probably the first time in 8 years that I know my cell phone numbers are actuaklly backed-up. Everything else on the Treo650 works the same as the Palm Tungsten - I have installed the latest versions of my existing apps - TomTom Navigator, DictionaryToGo, WorldMate. The web browser on the Treo650 (Blazer) seems to be more reliable and feature rich than the original on the Tungsten.
When I initially moved from the Tugsten to the Treo - I simply synched usnig the same profile - this copied over all the apps. and existing data. This was intended to be a time-saver but the versions of the installed apps. caused a fair amount of instability. The Treo650 is pretty fussy about which versions of apps you use and any problems are likely yo manifest theselves in different areas making it tricky to isolate and resolve the issue. After trawling the forums I decided it would be easier to un-install the apps and re-install the new versions. Once I had done that the instability (soft resets) seem to have stopped; in fact I don't think I have experienced a soft reset since.
So what am I missing ? Well I've still to get a Bluetooth GPS (that works with TomTom) and the lack of WiFi is a pain (for Synching and surfing when in range of a WiFi access point). At some point I'm going to try and use the Treo for my Sun email account as well - that will be the acid test - I think with some server-side filtering it should be mangeable. I'll post an update on these in the future. Those details aside - I'm pretty happy - until someone comes out with the next "the one gadget" at which point I'll be looking for another excuse.
* This was the second time my Wife's phone had been completel immersed in liquid - the first time was in water and I manged to quickly disasemble it and dry it- resulting in a mostly working phone.
** I can't speak highly enough of the headphones - they almost double as 'noise cancelling' headphones - if you are unfortunate enough to sit on airplanes a lot and they are the only headphones I've owned that stay in my ears when I run. Oh, and the sound quality will literally blow your socks off.
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Oct
12
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OK, maybe if I use a decent tool I might find time to blog more - I took a look at w.bloggar a while back but ran into known problems with our previous version of roller. Now we have upgraded roller I thought I'd give it another spin; this was posted using w.bloggar v3.03 - if you see this post then it looks like things are working better.
... at least for now, but I really need something that supports Linux and Palm OS 5. I'll give w.bloggar a spin and post a mini review here - any other recommendations would be gratefuly accepted.
