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August 16, 2009
One Of Those Things Everyone Should Have
When we were moving into our current house, my lovely wife suggested what turned out to be the most practical solution to figuring out where our furniture would go. We took measurements of the house, measured our furniture, drew it all on graph paper to scale, and cut-out the furniture, so we could slide it around the rooms 'till we liked the way it looked.
Being the sort of packratspeople we are, I knew we had those graph sheets and furniture cut-outs around here somewhere, and it only took me a few minutes to lay my hands on them.
Continue reading "One Of Those Things Everyone Should Have"
Posted by dberger at 8:02 PM | Comments (1)
August 13, 2009
Antother Few Days with an iphone
A few more tidbits.
The feature set in ActiveSync pales in comparison to the rules-based filtering/forwarding control provided by the BlackBerry server. You can't not sync your inbox, so if you get a lot of mail, your options are to flood your device, or setup enough rules to move everything out of your inbox. Neither is a good solution.
The Mail UI on the iphone is pretty marginal - why do I need to navigate my entire folder structure, without an option to pick favorites, or collapse unused portions of the tree?
The lack of rules-based anything on the device takes a lot of the "smart" out of "smart phone." I've been through several attempts to get alerting working in a way that's similar enough to the BlackBerry setup to be a real replacement, but I'm concluding it's just not possible - at least not without running a jail-break only app. iBlacklist and mCleaner both look promising, but I can't propose that we jail-break all the phones around the office.
I had a conversation with a really smart friend of mine who is, shall we say, close to Apple, and his best suggestion was "do the filtering server side" - which sounds good 'till you actually think about it.
I want (need) messages, be they push, SMS, or whatever, from a system in trouble to wake me up at two in the morning, but I absolutely do not want my drunk friend to wake me up 'cause he has the sudden urge to sing Hava Nagila (you know who you are).
There's no server that can make that decision - only the device can. Only the iphone can't. Seems "there's no app for that."
After a bit of reading it turns out that making push work on the phone requires that you activate it (via iTunes) with a SIM from the carrier locked carrier. Once that's done (and some magic handshake/key exchange happens with the Apple push servers, I suspect), push works just fine, but the architecture still seems retarded.
The "background apps kill battery life" argument against background apps seems pretty lame, too - my BlackBerry does just fine - and a well written app (using select(3), or other event driven API) consumes no CPU - and hence no battery - while it's waiting.
Of course it would be possible to write a badly behaved application, but if Apple is rejecting apps for the occasional bad word, surely they can include a test of "in the background" behavior and reject poorly behaving apps, too.
Apple's hard-on for controlling every aspect of the experience seems like it's seriously limiting the ability of developers on their platform to innovate and provide customer value.
Let's see how that continues to work for them.
Posted by dberger at 8:58 AM | Comments (1)
August 12, 2009
Get Educated Before You Get Passionate
The thing that annoys me the most about the ongoing health care "debate" raging in the media, in town halls, and on the inter-tubes is the amount of misinformation being flung by both sides.
I haven't made time to read the the house bill, which clocks in at nearly 1200 pages, and from the random crap being vomited up by pundits and the populace, it seems generous to suggest that they haven't either.
I'm not sure that you can call what's going on "vigorous debate" - it's FUD and sensationalism.
Be passionate, take an active role in your governance, but please, be skeptical, don't regurgitate what your favorite commentator on your favorite news source said just 'cause they said it and you agree with it.
That's not democracy, and it doesn't benefit anyone but the power-brokers.
Posted by dberger at 7:26 AM
August 10, 2009
72 Hours with an iPhone
We had some sort of Exchange melt-down last week - database corruption, blah, blah, blah. It screwed up mail for a bunch of people (me included) for a day, and as of Friday those of us affected by the problem who have a BlackBerry still couldn't get mail on the device.
We had a "suspect" iphone 3g sitting around the office (suspect 'cause it was flaky for the original owner) so I borrowed it from IT to see if I could get mail service restored while they tried to sort out the problem with the Blackberry server.
Continue reading "72 Hours with an iPhone"
Posted by dberger at 8:38 AM
August 9, 2009
Feasting On Asphalt - The River Run
Perhaps not by accident, about the time I started thinking about selling the motorcycles, I also decided to crack open the copy of Feasting On Asphalt - The River Run that had been sitting by my bed-side since Dawnise gifted it to me some months back.
As a book, it's far from the best travelogue I've read. As a cookbook, the recipes aren't likely to end up on my table. But the combination ended up actually being pretty compelling.
It could have used a bit more, I dunno, "everything" - but let's be honest - if I could convince someone to pay me to ride my motorcycle around the country eating, I don't think I'd worry too much about what to say in the book either.
Posted by dberger at 9:42 PM
August 4, 2009
Implied Spaces
Just finished Walter Jon Williams' Implied Spaces - which I'd say was much better than the last Williams' book I read.
The pacing was good, the story and characters interesting, and the universe(s) worth further exploration. And I both like and am terrified by the idea of a nearly omniscient cat.
Posted by dberger at 9:57 PM