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January 2, 2011

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Digital Lifestyle

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Droooooooid!

Okay, so I’m not rocking a Moto Droid, but I am now rocking an HTC Desire Z.  The wifey helped to make this happen so thanks go out to her.

It’s currently 2:47AM so this will be short to begin with; I’ll have to come back later to flesh out this post a little more.

First impressions:

  • I will not be rocking CM6.1 or CM7 (?) on this device.  As it turns out, HTC Sense is cooler than I thought, and it’s a more polished experience than standard Android.  Yes, I realize that this places me at the mercy of HTC/Bell to feed any potential update craving that may arise in the future, but for now I’m willing to live with that
  • The screen is beautfil.  Nuff said.
  • Hinge isn’t the snappiest but I can definitely live with it.
  • It’s really nice to have a phone that actually hangs up when I tell it to (and not a few seconds later – Touch Pro, here’s looking at you kid)
  • It’s a little weird going into so many apps and just… leaving them to go elsewhere.  I could do this with the Touch Pro as well, but given the speed of that device it wasn’t often that I’d go into 6-7 apps in one sitting.  Perhaps it’s the new-car-small of the Z that’s got me bouncing around in apps (particularly as I’m still trying to get the thing setup to my liking).  However, I will say that some apps do seem to restart when you go back to them, and that’s definitely weird coming from WinMo, which would leave apps open until memory constraints forced them closed.  I don’t think I’ve hit any memory issues on the Z yet, so it may just be that Android is a little more aggressive in the task management department.
  • Battery life isn’t as good as the Touch Pro.  Again I’ll say that I’m using the device extensively in order to get it setup, and I have a feeling that two mail apps were trying to IMAP IDLE on my mail account – a consequence of not having my mail setup correctly yet.
  • I never thought I’d say this, but I like that I can link my local contacts to my Facebook contacts.  Having this integration – provided by HTC Sense – is nice, although I’m still adamant that I wouldn’t go so far as Windows Phone 7’s penchant for throwing Facebook photos into your local photo gallery.
  • L-O-V-E the way that the notification bar works.  Very cool to finally be able to see what a notification is  about without having to make any overt gestures or load the relevant app.
  • Maps on Android is AWESOME.  Especially Maps 5.0.  Check it out if you’re rocking an Android phone.

I’m sure there’s more, and they’ll come when I follow-up on this post.  It may be possible that many of these enhancements could be had on the WinMo platform, particularly considering that HTC Sense is available (indeed, was conceived) on Windows Mobile.  Still, the speed of my Touch Pro can’t compare with the Z, not to mention the screen resolution, vibrancy and size.  I will say that for now I prefer the layout of the hardware keyboard on the Touch Pro, but that could be a case of a year’s worth of familiarity with said keyboard.

One negative I noticed today – and I hope that this is was an isolated occurence – was trouble staying connected to the Bluetooth kit in the car.  I had problems like that on WinMo, where Bluetooth on the phone would actually turn off.  My solution was to write a native program and some Mortscript to force Bluetooth on whenever it inexplicably turned off.  Well, it seems that the Z’s Bluetooth is staying on, but the connection is dropping.  Will investigate more later.

Off to bed now.

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December 15, 2010

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Software Development

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Is it really that easy?

My last post may have started a trend… based on a conversation I had recently I’ve started thinking about more areas that could benefit from some forward progress.

My Whole Home Automation project is based in ASP Classic at present, with VBScript the language of choice on the backend.  This has necessarily meant some familiarity with (D)HTML, Javascript, and obviously VBScript itself – not to mention SQL for the DBMS interface.  I’ve never blinked an eyelash at the level of know-how required to get all of this stuff done.  If anything, I figured that it must be trivial in light of the move to ASP.Net and what I perceived to be a marked increase in code complexity to go along with the marked increase in features.

And perhaps I was half on the mark and half off of it.  Sure the code itself can be more complex than VBScript, what with inheritance and classes and all the other good stuff you get with an OO-capable language (C#).  But getting down and dirty to the point of making something functional?  Oh, that only requires that you’re good with a mouse.

It’s all down to the IDE, the Integrated Development Environment.  And I’m here watching an intro video on the asp.net site where it took something like 2-3 clicks to make a DBMS-linked table, complete with end-user editing functions.  It’s so easy, a monkey could do it.  So surely this code-warrior could too, right?

To be honest, I’m dismayed.  Though I shouldn’t be surprised.  A recent article in Wired talked about making programmers out of everybody – that having a good idea but no programming skills shouldn’t keep your idea from seeing the light of day.  The article seemed to suggest that the real innovation today is with the developers who are making these drop-dead-easy design tools a reality.

I suppose it’s just how this industry works.  What’s complex and out-of-reach for the masses today becomes a commodity in short order.  Just look at the Kinect and all of the functionality it has afforded, which was once the realm of big money and big brains.

It almost makes me reluctant to go the ASP.Net route, if only because it seems that it makes things *too* easy.  But it’s hard to argue with the notion of concentrating on ideas->reality rather than ideas->how?->reality.

Perhaps there’s hope for me in the Perl and/or PHP arena.  Ahh, LAMP, embrace me in your searing glow.

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December 8, 2010

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Digital Lifestyle, Home Automation

Fateful decisions

Fear not, there will be no dark foreboding here 🙂

I’ve made a couple of game-changing decisions recently.  One, is that Android is definitely in my smartphone future.  Two, is that UPnP is in my Home Automation future.

We’ll look at each decision in order.

Android

My PDA/Smartphone history started with Palm and has been mostly devoted to Windows Mobile.  Then, Microsoft decided that its mobile future lay in Windows Phone 7, thereby rendering Windows Mobile 6.x a parent-less drifter.  This isn’t entirely true, as they’ve pledged to support 6.x in the enterprise space; but for consumers, Windows Phone 7 rang the official death knell for WinMo 6.x.

I honestly can’t recall the timing, but around this time last year I decided that my TyTN wasn’t cutting it anymore and I sourced a used HTC Touch Pro, which I promptly upgraded with a WinMo 6.5 build.  It was never my intention to use this device for Many Years To Come(tm), but I think I was looking to get maybe two years out of the thing.

And, if push came to shove, I probably could deal with the software limitations.  But I’ve been getting increasingly frustrated of late over touch sensitivity, system lockups, speed… the gamut of issues that people typically cite when thumbing their noses at Windows Mobile.  Add to that the GPS that I’ve all but abandoned, since it seems almost impossible to get a lock these days.

It’s a crying shame, to be honest.  I don’t have money to be throwing around on phones, and I never want/wanted to be one of thoese people who buys a new phone every year.  I was either blindsided by Windows Phone 7, or didn’t take the threat seriously, but when that OS was announced and devices actually started shipping – well, my 2-year investment dead-ended rather quickly.

The larger problem is the dearth of development activity.  No reputable company is releasing WinMo apps anymore.  It goes without saying that iOS and Android are occupying the hearts and minds of mobile developers across the globe.  More accurately, Windows Mobile is on nary a developer’s lips.  So the gist is that I’m stuck with buggy/slow versions of mildly interesting software (Facebook, Twitter), and staples – like my software keyboard and UI shell – are frozen in time, bugs and all, and I’ve got to deal with said bugs every single day.

Don’t get me wrong.  When the software is running smoothly, it’s All Good(tm).  Unfortunately, I get hair-pullingly frustrated even after 2 or 3 soft resets in one day.  Nobody should have to reset their phone 2 or 3 times a day.  And then there’s the one thing, the most intrusive and dasterdly demon of them all – the resistive touchscreen.

Sure, pinch-to-zoom would be nice.  I can live without it – for now – but what I can’t live without is accurate touch response.  I’m sick and tired of trying to scroll but selecting an item instead, or trying to select an item but scrolling instead.  And this isn’t the sort of thing that happens, oh, once or twice a day.  It’s a regular occurence!  It’s so annoying that I toyed with the idea of writing a touch driver to smooth out inputs, but that’s a large undertaking whose value is severely lessened by the diminished attractiveness of the platform as a whole.

My recent foray into tablet research opened my eyes to the wondrous world that is a modern mobile OS.  Even Shelly’s Nokia E71 has outshined my Touch Pro since the moment her phone came into our house.  She has jokingly said to me – on more than one occasion – “It’s okay Deryk, you can have my phone”, as a result of my penchant for Getting Things Done(tm) on her phone quickly and easily.  The problem with her phone is that it’s not a touch device, and it’s not a slider.  Those things aside, she has nothing to be ashamed of for wielding that thing.

Although, she’s pined for an Android device herself.  I think she’s been starstruck by the touch experience in general, with all the whiz-bang animations and such.  But she’ll also put on her Practicality hat, and realize that nothing beats a hardware keyboard and numeric keypad when it comes to calling people and texting/emailing.  I can even navigate faster in Opera Mobile on her phone, with the D-Pad, than I can on my phone using touch or the D-Pad.

But I digress.  Being somebody who values functional technology, rather than having the latest and greatest (witness my T1i when the T2i was already out), I was rather impressed at how easy it is to get things done when using a modern mobile OS.  And there are two pieces to that particular puzzle: a capacitive screen and properly-tuned touch driver, and native apps that are constantly refined under the banner of getting things done easily and accurately.  My Touch Pro has neither of these things going for it, and it shows.

This culminated quite nicely (and shockingly) the other day when I realized that I don’t want to have to tweak my mobile phone anymore.  It should just do what I want, period.  I’ve never been big on custom wallpapers and ringtones – everything I’ve tweaked on my Touch Pro has been to make it useable, not to make it fancy.  I decided that I want my device to be useable from Day One(tm), and I want somebody out there working to make it useable throughout its useful life.

I also like a pure experience.  And it may surprise you to learn that, if I did get an Android phone, I’d either want to flash a stock, non-branded ROM – or install a credible custom ROM like CyanogenMod 6.1.  But really, that’s as far as I’d want to take it.  I thought I’d be able to do the same sort of thing with the Touch Pro and the Energy series of ROMs, but again – people are moving away from WinMo, certainly from the TouchPro.  Regardless, you can’t tweak away a resistive screen, or the other things that probably could be nailed down in time by the ROM developer but which won’t be nailed down by the ROM developer since nobody wants to develop for the platform anymore.

So why Android?  I played with a Windows Phone 7 device in the stores, but from the first set of leaked videos it was apparent to me that Windows Phone 7 would not be in my future.  I’m a developer at heart – and I have a very strong feeling that Android is the closest you can get to development/tinkering nirvana.  Windows Phone 7 is getting a very glossy treatment as a social, consumer device – just look at the supporting ads that are airing, citing the ability to get in and get out quickly.  But it’s a guided experience that I don’t care for.  I’m quite content to run a Facebook app when I want to see what’s going on on Facebook.  I would not be at all content to have Facebook’s crap smeared all over my phone in every nook and cranny.

And iPhone?  You should know how (un)impressed with the whole walled-garden approach in general.

Really, I probably would have skipped the Touch Pro and gone straight for a Milestone if not for a few reasons:

  • holding out for carrier promotional pricing (the Milestone never showed up on Rogers)
  • a preference for HTC hardware vs. Motorola hardware
  • wanting to see how dominant the Android platform became

Let’s face it though – what I’m really talking about is obsolescence.  And it’s true that every piece of consumer electronics out there is obsolete as soon as it hits the store shelves.  Wouldn’t it be the case that anything I got now – Android-based or otherwise – would suffer the same fate, and I’d find myself back here in a year?

I’m not entirely convinced of that.  I pride myself on having a particular set of criteria, and not compromising on that core set.  I’m not trying to chase the latest and greatest, I’m simply trying to get something that works for me.  I never believed that the Touch Pro would be my main phone for the forseeable future; rather, it is/was a stopgap since the TyTN couldn’t get my basic needs accomplished anymore.

Well as it happens, the Touch Pro now has certain limitations – some of which are inherent, like the finicky GPS and crappy camera – and others which only became apparent after trying to make the device do what I had envisioned it doing.  My expectation of the Touch Pro is that it’s finger-friendly, as this was one of the primary reasons why I sought to replace the TyTN.  And while the Touch Pro is more finger-friendly than the TyTN, it has become apparent – after a year of using it in a manner that the TyTN could not support – that a resistive touchscreen simply cannot get the job done.  This is not something I would have known implicitely from using the TyTN in this capacity, as the TyTN had other problems which restricted its finger-friendly usefulness.

Basically, the software and hardware of the Touch Pro was never designed for a seamless touch experience.  Even the latest versions of WinMo cannot make this claim, as the shell itself simply is not designed appropriately.  However, even a device like the HTC G1 – with a capacitive screen – has a leg up, despite its age.  And yes, you can flash CM6.1 to a G1 and have the latest Android kernel on your old device (well, the latest up to a few days ago, when 2.3 was released).  The hardware wouldn’t be as svelte as a G2, the camera not as nice, the processor not as speedy – but assuming you could live with those things, the fact of the matter is that you would not be left behind in the software world.

Yes, you have to consider things like available memory, and that’s something that you can never beat without investing in new hardware.  But for comparison, here it is that I’ve installed all my apps to the Touch Pro’s internal memory and I haven’t really had any memory issues to speak of.  I think it’s the case that most modern smartphones have way more memory available than you actually need – particularly somebody like me who is very adverse to storing media on my phone.

Ultimately, the undeniable truth here is that it’s time for me to switch platforms.  And I have to tell you, the prospect is exciting, if only because it means learning something new – and if you know me, you know that I like to learn.  I don’t often do an “out with the old, in with the new” paradigm shift, but when it happens it does make me quite giddy at the prospect of building a whole new suite of solutions that I simply could not do before.

Android is now mature, in my mind, and the hardware is at that point that I believe it could serve me adequately for the next three years.

UPnP

This is another doozy.  I’ve spent the last, what, 3-4 years (longer?) designing this Home Audio system and making incremental updates to the interface and backend. I had visions of a very dynamic interface with DHTML transitions galore and loads of AJAX.  And that’s admirable, but it’s time for more.

Again, this was partially spurred by my tablet research, and a major dislike of placing media – music, photos, videos – on any one particular device.  My belief is that those things should be “in the cloud” and accessed on demand.  Not the Google cloud, not the Amazon cloud – rather, my own personal cloud.

My approach has always been network-centric, where devices are simply clients to my network.  The Home Audio interface is an example of a project that encompasses both the network – the DBMS, the filesystem – and the client – the physical zones and SHOUTcast servers.  But it’s still closed in that you can’t take full advantage of the network unless you pass through the web interface first.

And for physical zones, this is fine.  For consuming media on tablets, not so fine.  But I don’t want to just throw a media server on my network and let it have at my filesystem.  One – that’s not very challenging.  Two – it sidesteps years of development work on my part, and it doesn’t allow any future development.

I realized the other day that my approach to my Home Audio setup may have been the Right One(tm).  It’s all HTTP-based.  It’s all database-driven.  A new media server would have to catalog my filesystem in its own native database in order to function.  Well, why reinvent the wheel?  Why throw away design and useability decisions that I’ve made?

In this modern age of standards, there’s no reason why I can’t take the work I’ve done and evolve it to support different types of clients.

That’s where UPnP comes in.

So my current design goals are to add UPnP support to my Home Audio system.  And by extension, this will actually allow my media to be consumed by a UPnP client device.  I can finally rip my movies to disk and play them on a wide array of devices.  I’m getting a little ahead of myself here, but even without a single UPnP client on my network today I can say that I firmly believe that this is the correct direction to go in.

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December 3, 2010

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Digital Lifestyle

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Tablets – ready for (my) primetime? [updated 01/27/12]

I’ve heard a yearning for a tablet for a long time.  I made a (misguided) foray into the world of pen computers, scoring a used device on eBay some number of years ago.  Suffice it to say that that particular puppy hasn’t seen the light of day in some time.

The iPad is now all the rage.  And while I understand the allure of the device, and the particular niche it fulfills, the more I look at the iPad for my intended purpose the more I’m realizing that there are way too many shortcomings to even consider dropping $600+ on the thing.  And unfortunately, the same goes for the Samsung Galaxy Tab, the current champ in the non-Apple tablet world.

Here’s the thing.  I’m not looking for a device to carry around with me.  That’s what a smartphone is for.  Which isn’t to say that I wouldn’t want to travel with the tablet; rather, it would tend to “live” mostly at home.  So I’m not particularly adverse to the 10″ form factor; weight may be an issue, but if we’re talking solely about “portability” then there’s nothing wrong with 10″.

Now, I decided a long time ago that every portable device deserves a wireless connection.  I didn’t spend long with my Compaq iPAQ 3630 before an expansion sleeve and PCMCIA WiFi card were ordered.  Fortunately, any modern computing device worth its silicon has a myriad of wireless connectivity options – one of which is “3G”.  The carriers love to push this, as more 3G-toting users means more revenue.  But again, given that my intended use for a tablet is for home use, I’m pretty sure I can get by with WiFi – and tether to my smartphone whenever truly mobile connectivity is needed.

So what of these shortcomings?  I’m getting to that.  And in order to get to that, I have to talk about the fact that these devices are actually quite capable little devices.  The Tab, in particular, feels very powerful to me.  It screams “computer” much more than the iPad, and that’s not a bad thing.  It does its job so well, in fact, that I’m chomping at the bit to cram an Android smartphone into a pant pocket.  As a mobile platform, I must say that Android is getting it done quite nicely.

The iPad, on the other hand, still comes off as a large toy.  I just can’t shake the feeling.  Sure, you can run cool apps, but I’m not looking to run cool apps at home.  My home needs for a tablet are quite modest – surf the web, control my home automation systems, check email.  It really doesn’t have to get more complex than that.

And in that vein, the Tab also falls short.  Every time I pick up a Tab I feel like I should be putting it in my pocket and carrying it around with me for the entire day.  This is not a feeling I want to get from a device that’s supposed to live on the living room table.  I think that Samsung is intending the tab to be a mobile, portable device – but that’s not the niche that I want it to fill.

Then there are more tangible shortcomings – like the complete and utter lack of multi-user support.  Some of the coolest things you can do with the iPad and Tab come from using the native apps, which are the most pure reflections of what the manufacturer intended you to use the device for.  And some apps, like email, are very personal in nature – do I want some house guest to pick up my tablet and start reading my email?

And so… I’m conflicted.  On a few fronts.  I don’t like Apple’s walled garden, but I think I do like the 10″ form factor.  I like Android’s utility, but I don’t want/need my tablet to be that powerful.  So what am I saying, really?

One, is that none of the tablets on the market now are going to get the job done for me.  I mean, I’d take either one if I won it (though I’d probably sell the iPad), but there’s no way I’m paying $600+.

Two, is that I know what I need:

  • multi-touch interface
  • capacitive touchscreen
  • tabbed browser with Flash support

I think I’d like a capable built-in media player, but I do not want to store media on the device.  Not even pictures.  Any media should be streamed over the network  – perhaps using UPnP or DLNA.  And while I’m not adverse to accessing a marketplace and running other native/3rd-party apps, I think that this capability must go hand-in-hand with the some sort of fast-user-switching ala Windows XP Home.

Until these criteria are met, I may find myself sitting on the sidelines of the tablet game.

[update 2011/08/30]

Interesting article from Engadget, questioning the tablet’s position as a productivity device and the real necessity for a “third device”.  At this point I really wish I had scored a $99 TouchPad – not quite “taking one if I won it” that I mentioned above, but close enough.  Oh well, so it goes.  I figured I could move run an Android port on it as soon as that technical feat was accomplished.  Surely it wouldn’t be long, right?  But something strange happened when I played with a TouchPad in-store for 30 minutes or so, followed by a couple of Honeycomb tablets – I was far more impressed with WebOS than Honeycomb.  In fact, Honeycomb felt like the cross between a media device and a mobile computer that I alluded to earlier in this post, to the point that the promised functionality belied the limitations of the device (reported so well in that Engadget article).  I suppose that experience reaffirmed an earlier tweet I had made that WebOS on a tablet would be killer.  It’s unfortunate that software support will be lacking though; I did note some issues with the native web browser, and it’s very questionable how timely updates would come out (if at all) to address such issues.  If a port of Honeycomb or even Gingerbread ever surfaced for TouchPad, then certainly updates would be frequent – but again, Honeycomb felt like an entirely different beast, with WebOS wearing the tablet pants much better than Honeycomb.

So it seems that not much has changed.  My requirements still remain the same – multitouch with tabbed browsing and Flash support.  If anything, I’m now more convinced of the things that I don’t want – ie, a tablet with a complex interface.  Keep It Simple Stupid.

Even the multi-user conundrum has a workable solution on WebOS.  Firstly, I imagine that the only player who will solve this problem outright is Microsoft with Windows 8.  And I already know that such a tablet will be insanely expensive and too powerful for the light duty I’d want it to perform.  Secondly, a tablet’s increased real-estate means that visiting webpages is a very practical alternative to running the dedicated app (think Facebook, Gmail, etc).  Thirdly, I’m not of the mind that – even at $99 – it makes sense for a household to have multiple tablets for the sole purpose of casual usage; quite simply, it’s an unnecessary indulgence and a real distraction.

So how is the conundrum solved?  Whether through fast-user switching (ala Windows) or actively logging in/out, the fact is that a multi-user system requires a user to reauthenticate and “unlock” the device.  Now, if you’re working on a tablet that’s little more than a casual media consumption device, I can imagine that it’s enough to do this un/lock dance on a per-“app” basis.  And the ability to login and logout is something that every website application presents as a matter of course, but no native tablet app presents as a matter of course.  Many people are probably used to doing so within their web browsers.  So right there, the “requirement” to run the web version of your “productivity” apps – and crucially, the ability to do so on a generously-sized screen – means that you don’t have to worry about somebody sticking their nose into your private data.

But here’s where WebOS shines.  If I’ve got a video open on the family tablet, or a series of webpages – neither of which are “private” – then somebody else can pick up the tablet, stack my open apps, and open their own apps and webpages.  And so you end up with a shared user space, where each user’s resources are sitting in their own stack.  When I want to use the tablet and restore the state of my “apps”, I stack all other apps and unstack mine.  And finally, since we’re talking about a simple tablet here, I can imagine that each stack would only be a handful of cards deep – ie, very manageable for both user and system.  I certainly wouldn’t have 10-15 apps open simultaneously like I tend to do on a desktop computer.

I’ll say it – it’s unfortunate that TouchPad went from overpriced at $500 to unsupported at $100.  A happy medium may very well have been $150-200.  Here’s to hoping that WebOs lives on and that somebody picks up the hardware mantle.  Certainly everybody has seen that there’s demand for a non-iPad tablet at a lower price point?  It doesn’t have to compete with iPad; rather it just needs to fill the niche that the $99 fire-sale flushed out.

[update 2012/01/27]

Well well well…

That may change things.

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November 4, 2010

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Thoughts

Collaborating a huge honking mess

Web 2.0 is nothing new.  Sites like Facebook and Flickr would not be half the sites they are today if not for the willingness of the masses to bring some semblance of order to the chaos.  Today we think of Web 2.0 and nobody bats an eyelash.

In some way, shape or twisted form, both Facebook and Flickr – and a host of  other Web 2.0 sites – are nothing but empty shells without the mass of user content that fills them.  Granted, Flickr’s initial mission was to bring order to the masses of images already on the web.  But there’s no denying that today, both services are intimately tied to user-generated content.

And it’s not enough to just amass content.  Google owes its bloated success to the very fact that it started off with a single focus in mind – bring order to the chaos.  Google itself has no content – that’s not entirely true, but when you think of its search engine and even its AdSense program, we’re talking about algorithms that sit atop the unfathomable amount of information out there on the Interwebs.  Whatever content Google has that it can call its own pales in comparison to the content on which it has built its business – content that’s not its own.

And that’s okay, because Google is good at what it does.  I like Google.  I don’t like Facebook.

Now, is it even right to put Google and Facebook in the same sentence?  One is a bonafied Web 2.0 company, the other isn’t.  And yet I believe that the answer is a resounding “YES!”, since Facebook is quite intent on becoming the most important thing to hit the Interwebs since… well, since Google.  Where Google crawls the Web and all of the loosely-connected content therein, Facebook is attempting to replace the content of the Web with the content within its own walled-garden.  Content created by the users, for the users.

Here’s the problem with Facebook.

People are not good at managing huge quantities of data.  We make spelling mistakes, we say “toMAYto” and “toMAHto” and mean the same thing, we say “bear” and “beer” and mean two different things.  One person sees a butterfly in an ink blot, another sees a unicorn.  Some of us are colorblind.  Some guys think Nicole Kidman is a knockout, others think her plastic is showing (I’ll take my N.K.  pre-“Peacemaker”, thank you very much).  20  people will watch Ali Velshi play with an iPad and record it, then post 20 different versions online of vastly differing quality and post individual links to each of their Youtube uploads.

In all of this, the single question is – who is correct?  Or, what’s the one right answer?

Who do we trust?  When Google attempts to bring order to chaos, it’s very simple – you either trust Google’s algorithm (and believe that Michelle Obama is a monkey – uh oh!) or you don’t.  It’s in Google’s best interest to keep their algorithm relevant and accurate.

Not so with Facebook.  Besides the ridiculous amount of information overload that comes with watching people try to one-up each other with the frequency of their status updates and wall posts, you also have the potential to see the same information repeated ad infinitum by a multitude of people (hello retweets!)  Logging into Facebook is like taking a trip down the rabbit hole, and getting out is harder than knocking the socks off of any Agent that the Wachowski brothers could ever dream up.

And then there’s the question of tagging.  Oh goodness, tagging.  Is that flower red, orange, or auburn?  Nuff said.

Before Web 2.0, we had IRC.  We had newsgroups.  My goodness, we even had Bulletin Board Systems.  Then we got Geocities, then MySpace, then Facebook.  I’m sure I’m missing some stuff, but that’s secondary.  Of prime importance is that the only thing that’s really changed is how much free reign we’ve given people to paint the world in their own colours and shove it on your monitor.  Then we’ve asked a million other people to comment on it, tag it, link to it – then we called it “the future” and attempted to monetize it.

I’m not sure which adage is more suitable: “Too many chefs in the kitchen”, or “An infinite number of monkeys with typewriters…”

Understand that I’m not against user-generated content.  Rather, I’m against free-form, user-directed collaboration.  I mean, if you have some data that you want classified into one of five categories, by all means let the users have at it – as long as all of the information gets classified, there are no duplicates within the data, the categories are strictly defined, and the majority wins.  Anything less is a failed experiment.

Facebook, take heed.

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September 6, 2010

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Digital Lifestyle

WinMo power hog strikes again!

Gosh darnit!

You may recall that my TyTN exhibited power-sucking tendencies once upon a time. After some consternation I successfully tracked that issue down to some misbehaving virus-infected PC’s on my carrier’s 3G network, coupled – IIRC – custom power-state changed that I had made.

Well the TyTN was retired some time last yea in favour of a used HTC Touch Pro, and wouldn’t you know it, the power vampire decided to awaken a few days ago.

I figured that perhaps I had cooked this battery, but the theory wasn’t holding up. Next, I thought that perhaps the latest Google Maps update had a power-drain issue. But after some trial and error I was also able to dismiss that theory.

As it turns out, some dasterdly application (also known as HTC’s WiFi tethering app) had set my WiFi module in max performance mode, vs. max battery. The result, in my estimation, was that the phone was never hitting suspend mode – the same sort of problem that had befallen the TyTN.

So all is once again (mostly) well in my mobile world.

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August 23, 2010

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Digital Lifestyle

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In-car USB flash drive vs. in-car A2DP

Last time I was here I talked about a custom modification that I had made to GSPlayer – an MP3 player on my WinMo smartphone – to allow limited, transparent control of a Home Audio streaming zone from within GSPlayer itself.  And it has proven quite handy.  The first trial went well, but then I was dismayed to discover that the stream was skipping.  It wasn’t happening regularly, and it would only skip for about 0.5 seconds each time… but it was enough to be noticeable.

I was beginning to wonder if perhaps this was the main reason why I had switched from GSPlayer to PocketMusic.

Perhaps I’d have to dig into the code.  But after thinking about it overnight it dawned on me that this may be a simple buffering issue.  It wasn’t behaving strictly like a buffering issue – the display wasn’t showing that the player was rebuffering, and it wouldn’t make sense that it would take 0.5 seconds to rebuffer each and every time – but what the hey, I figured it was worth a shot.

So I up’d the buffer from 128k to 1024k (1MB) and that seems to have fixed it 🙂  The prebuffer is still 32k so playback begins just as quickly as before.

Anyhow, everything up to this point has been a digression.  But I mentioned it all because; 1) it’s related, and (2) when taken with the real intent of this article, it serves as a nice illustration of the logical progression of this sort of project.

So… here’s what happened last Friday.

I left work, and decided to play some songs off the flash drive.  But after 5 minutes or so I decided that I would rather listen to the queued tracks on a streaming zone.  So I connected my phone to home and started playback, only to realize that music was coming out of the phone’s speaker itself…???  As it turns out, the USB drive was still plugged in under the armrest meaning the Bluetooth music gateway was not.

Well that certainly sucked.  And while it would have been physically possible to remove one and insert the other, there were two overriding thoughts which nagged me incessantly:

1) Those cables are inconvenient to reach, especially when driving

2) Why should I have to physically switch anything???

So on that Friday I decided to listen to nothing at all for the duration.  But the experience served to solidify and accelerate an idea I had from the very moment I decided to power the gateway off the USB port – which was, to split the port so I could power the gateway and leave a flash drive connected at the same time.

Normally you’ll find USB cables that wire two ports in parallel for the purposes of drawing combined current from both ports.  Only the power wires are connected together; the data wires are connected to one port only.  This allows you to connect devices that might exceed the 500mA that a single USB port can provide.

In my case, I needed a cable that could take one port and split the power to two USB devices, while again providing data connectivity to only one of those devices.  And I figured I’d be okay in the power department, since people regularly power USB hard drives off their BMW USB ports without issue; certainly a lowly flash drive and bluetooth A2DP adapter would be less power-hungry than a hard drive.

After looking around for a suitable cable it became apparent I wouldn’t find one.  I would have to make one myself.  And while I had a spare USB-to-mini-USB cable that I could hack (which would provide power to the A2DP adapter via mini-USB) I had no USB cable with a male plug on one end and a female receptacle on the other.

As luck would have it, I found just such a cable this weekend… for $2!  Perfect price.

So I spliced in my other cable and I’ve now got a 6″ USB extension with a spliced-in 2.5′ cable ending in a mini-USB connector.  I did multiple tests along the way to make sure that everything would work.  And once in the car, everything worked.

One comment I have to make – the wires inside said cables are t-i-n-y.  I had to use an X-acto knife to slice the sheathing off, and in 10 cuts I think I managed to sever one strand.  And because the wires were made up of 5 or 6 such tiny strands, I had to tin them with solder.  After twisting them together I soldered them again to solidify the splices, wrapped each splice individually in electrical tape, and then wrapped the whole shebang with more tape.

So there it is – I can play tunage off the flash drive or off the phone without having to reach under the armrest.

The particular flash drive I’m using – an 8GB Kingston C10 that I scored for $20 off Dell – is loaded with all the tracks from my “fav’s” list on the Home Audio system.  Syncing the two is fairly trivial, and in the process the system generates genre playlists since… well, I’ll explain.

Some of my tracks have “compound” genres.  For example: “R&B/Reggae”.  While the car has the ability to read these genres, the problem occurs when such a track is not listed in the R&B genre or the Reggae genre.  Personally, I’d want it to be listed in both.

The solution therefore was to gen my own playlists – which the car can read – and make sure that the track is listed in both playlists.  Done – this occurs during the syncing process.  This also allows me to group other genres – Dance, House, Techno, Electronica all get grouped as Dance – so that I can play them all while still keeping the original genres intact (and indeed, the sync will gen playlists for the original genres but name the playlist as, say, “Dance (House)” for house tracks)

So that’s cool.  But you know me, always wondering what the next step can be.

Here’s the thing – the car can control iPod’s and, apparently, certain other MP3 players.  How does this work, this “control”?  For the iPod I believe it’s a special set of code specifically designed to work with the iPod and act as an interface for the iPod.  But for all other devices, the car looks at the device as a storage container housing tracks.  Those devices can either be a Mass Storage device – so, a USB flash drive – or they can be a Media Transfer Protocol compliant device.

The difference between the two is  down to semantics, at the higher level at least.  Again, the car sees both as a storage of files.  In the case of Mass Storage, the device is a drive that the car mounts.  When you want to play a track the car opens the file and reads the data off the drive.  In the case of MTP, the car queries the device via MTP commands; when you want to play a track, the car asks the device for the data and the device sends it over.

So you can see that, to the end user, they both seem to operate the same way.  And indeed, the iPod appears to as well.  But the iPod’s interface is proprietary, and there may be more going on than I’m aware.

Actually I’m guessing about MTP as well, but it’s an educated guess.  And here’s where the magic would happen:

Unlike Mass Storage, there’s no reason why the files on an MTP device have to be on the device itself.  When the car queries for a list of tracks, or genres, or whatever, the MTP device can act as a mere proxy and query some other device for that info, then report back to the car.  When the car wants to play a track, the MTP device proxies the file from some other device and feeds the data back to the car.

Surely you see where I’m heading.  A full blown, customized implementation of this protocol would have me plug my phone into the USB port, then have an application that talks to the car via MTP on one “side” and on the other “side” it talks to my Home Audio system via VPN over 3G.  All of the constructs – albums, songs, playlists – exist on the Home Audio system.

That’s not the approach I’d take though, if only because I can just imagine what would happen trying to proxy metadata for 30,000 tracks.  Rather, you’d likely proxy metadata for a single playlist, or perhaps for the playlists only.  Something like that.

But the whole point of the exercise would be to provide a seamless way to connect back to the Home Audio system and use the car’s media system to playback songs and browse the collection.  Imagine seeing my list of fav tracks on my I-Drive screen, being pulled in realtime from my network at home.  With MTP this would be possible!

How much work is required?  Well, I can wrap my head around the concept and interaction of all the moving parts.  The good news is that we wouldn’t need to worry about decoding/encoding MP3 in the app, since we’d just be proxying song data.  The great unknown is the amount of work (or feasibility) of coding a WinMo app that can take over the USB port.

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July 24, 2009

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Thoughts

Michael Jackson: Healing the World

Just wanted to provide a link to this article I posted on Piper’s Pages back in Feb 2003 (log in as guest).

Excerpted below.

Let me be perfectly clear: I DO believe that Michael Jackson is a little “off”.

BUT – I do NOT think that he’s crazy, and I do believe that his convictions are strong and he stands by his beliefs.

Central to the controversy surrounding Michael Jackson are two issues: One, his cosmetic surgery (and the reasons for it). Two, his relationship with children, including his own.

I’ll admit – there are things about Jackson’s life and the decisions that have shaped his life that I don’t understand; or, just as importantly, I wouldn’t make myself. What comes to mind are the Berlin hotel incident, the parental obligation to his kids, and his insistence of having unrelated kids spend so much time with him. But, hearing him talk about these same incidents, I have to believe that the man simply sees life from a different perspective than I do. A different perspective, in fact, than most people.

Let’s not kid ourselves people. “Society” is as much a bane as it is a blessing. We have a world filled with rape and murder, greed and adultery, and any number of heinous things. We’ve created a society that’s supposed to benefit most people most of the time – but we all know that no one thing can truly benefit all of the people all of the time. We have differences in opinions regarding the utopian society – democratic, socialistic, communist, dictorial – such that, though we’re all human, we can still disagree on what’s what and we’re willing to bear arms in defiance.

The notion that Michael Jackson’s thinking goes against the grain, really, isn’t a cardinal sin.

Martin Bashir, the man who interviewed Michael Jackson in ABC’s 90 minute special “Life with Michael Jackson”, focused incessantly on the two things I alluded to earlier; but mostly on the issue dealing with Jackson and children. And at one point he (Bashir) said something that I had to agree with – initially. He put himself in the position of Michael Jackson and said, with an allowable degree of certainty, that no person he knows would be comfortable with the idea of him having somebody else’s kids sleeping in his bedroom.

Now let’s be honest people. Perhaps my opinion is skewed because Carribean culture is different than North American culture, but amongst a peoples who routinely make aunts and uncles of those who have no blood relation, I have to think that the line isn’t as clear as Bashir makes it. If trust weren’t a issue (and keep in mind, please, that ideally trust should NOT be an issue) then I would trust my really good, long-time friends (who would also be parents) in addition to my family with matters relating to my children – including sleeping in the same room with them. And for some people, assuming that trust weren’t an issue, even the same bed.

And that’s the crux of it: Trust. Jackson made the statement that it’s not like Jack the Ripper is in the room. All he’s seeking to do is provide an atmosphere of love and caring that this world sorely misses. And I have to agree that the world – indeed, society – isn’t the noble, just and honourable cause that Bashir seemed ready to defend. All you have to do, again, is realize that the human race still hasn’t agreed on what the best version of society is, and within societies people still clamour for certain rights (eg, gay rights), seek to aboloish certain rights (think KKK), or seek to define what’s acceptable and what isn’t in child-rearing (think of the cases involving spanking, as justified by religious beliefs).

The case that Bashir made – the wall on which he was leaning – was a shaky wall indeed.

Michael has done some wierd things, but I believe that the man is honourable, and I believe that he’s being more forward about what he honestly believes in than the vast majority of people in this world.

I also think that he’s astonishingly immature – but what is maturity? If the heart is big enough, does it matter that the brain isn’t so mature?

Really, what’s the answer?

I’m not going to talk about his cosmetic surgery, because I believe that that’s his personal choice and he doesn’t have to justify those choices to anybody but himself. Not sure why he’s lying about it (and I say that because it seems blatantly obvious to me that he’s done more than tweaked his nose a couple of times). But really, there’s nothing worthwhile there; either he’s done it or he hasn’t. Big deal.

In other matters – the ones I touched on – the man is obviously trying, and he’s leading his life by example. And it’s a shame that Trust (always) has to be an issue.