Moving Time - From Squarespace to Wordpress

I've been blogging here, hosted by Squarespace, for about 2 years now, and it is time to move on. I really like the Wordpress software, and actually prefer it to Squarespace, but the real reason is that Wordpress is FREE and I'm getting tired of paying $17 a month for what is a volunteer activity! I don't want to make my site ugly with ads, etc.

I have tons of comments with my posts, and especially with the technical help ones, I am going to try to move everything over. But account information may get lost, so sorry for that.

This month I will be doing this move, so stay tuned.

Anyway, check out the new version of blog and please update your bookmarks and RSS.

iPhone-Power to the People

Just how deeply is the iPhone settling into mainstream technology consciousness?

Better than I ever imagined.

Last summer my father-in-law asked me many questions about the 3G iPhone, more so, I thought, than was normal. As it turned out, he was planning to give one to his wife, my not-so-proverbial mother-in-law.

I strongly discouraged it.

My mother-in-law, you see, has probably logged less than a few hours on a computer, and I doubt any of it was unsupervised. She won't boot up a computer, and for reasons that are clearer to her generation than mine, seems to think nothing good could come from the explorative use of a web browser, MS Office, email, etc.

Aside from that, I explained patiently to my father-in-law that the iPhone was a inherently a mobile device for tech-savvy people on-the-go who didn't mind a number of concessions to using a tiny screen and virtual keyboard without a mouse. It was simply not designed as a sort of bridge to technology that you might expect, say, from an OLPC.

In-laws being in-laws, he ignored my advice and bought her one anyway.

She's had the device for several months, and it has "taken" with her quite well. She uses it regularly for all the common things she's never done in the past--email, web surfing, and texting. To my surprise, she even knows how to add photos to contacts, email photos, and watch YouTube videos. I also showed her how to use the App Store, which she asked me about.

Beyond her understanding of these features, I'm most impressed that she uses the iPhone on a regular basis and isn't [too] intimidated to use it.  She didn't just tell me she knows how to watch YouTube; she told me she enjoys watching Frank Sinatra and many others.

I'm thrilled to see someone previously in this "bottom 25%" of technology adopters use and love the device. She may not even understand that what she's doing in is "on the internet" since it is now so revelant and that the iPhone simply delivers the content she wants.

So is she all set, now that she has the iPhone? Not really. Now that she has a taste for what she wants, she admits the screen is a bit small for her eyes. My father-in-law tells me she has her eye on the new MacBook.

Kudos again to Apple, for building such a versatile device that continues to be so many things to so many people.

Windows Vista--Worse than Software Bloat?

About a year ago I was chasing an obscure problem at work involving an error with a .DLL file. This was in a Windows XP system, and the .DLL was a Microsoft file, not from 3rd party software. Despite my best efforts at Googling the specific file name, I couldn't find any information...nothing.

It got me thinking about some of the most complicated enterprise software applications I've worked on, and how smallish development groups deal with maintaining and enhancing large applications. By and large, they don't, not if they can help it! There is definitely a fear-factor in altering code that is so entrenched (a technical term, of course!) that no one really knows exactly what it is does or who may have written it in the first place. Rare is an application that is so well documented that refactoring an object or changing an interface wouldn't result in a shoulder-shrugging regression test in which anything could be expected.

Now, imagine Windows XP, with 35 million lines of code, and moving to Windows Vista, with 50 million lines. Do you think Microsoft really knows, fully manages, all those lines of code? Or could it be, that like my mystery DLL, there are back alleys and boxes stacked up on dimly-lit shipping docks of code functionality that simply get folded into Windows, because the entire group that wrote them was eliminated 6 years ago! How many obsolete hardware or protocol-related lines of code still exist, since they aren't triggering further inspection? 

I don't have any insider knowledge of Microsoft, but I suspect that this sort of thing happens constantly, and that the ever-growing size of Windows isn't so much feature bloat as legacy bloat. I hope this is not the case, but it should be noted that the "momentum" of legacy code into new code would be a tough thing for Microsoft to avoid.

iPhone 2.2--Good Enough to Write Home About

The iPhone 3G, or at least running post-App Store firmware, was not the most bug-free experience for iPhone users. Seemed to me I was rebooting at least daily, and actually wishing that Apple would add a "Slide to Reboot" option to save a step.

This all changed with 2.2. I seldom think of re-booting, and app crashes rarely pull down the whole OS.

The reason I'm posting about it is that you usually don't think of OS software when it is working well, and kudos to Apple for accomplishing this fairly quickly. Think about it: a new device, with new sensors including a GPS chip; an upgraded 3G network, and 10,000 apps that can exist in any version and any combination. This is by far the most complex system and infrastructure for smart phones today, and Apple is doing it with good reliability.

I'd say that this 2.2 is a "classic" release, well done!

RIP, "Real" Optical Disc Players

I remember my second DVD player well. The first time I went to open the disc tray, nothing happened. Then, a few seconds later, as if "thinking" about it, it slid open.

Although I didn't understand it at the time, there has been a huge shift in the way DVD players, HD-DVD players [now obsolete], and Blu-Ray players are made. You won't like it.

You see, there is now a computer in these boxes. It generally runs a special version of Linux, and it must boot up even before the disc tray is opened. There's even a little fan in the back. Manufacturers love it, because the chips are now just generic parts of, basically, a computer, and if there is a problem a new software update can fix it. Consumers and reviewers, though, despise this "innovation" (even if they don't know what it is), because it is leading to unacceptable time lags.

My old Toshiba HD-DVD player, for example, took 43 seconds to open the disc tray from the off position. This was something I started to plan around, like brewing the proverbial cup of coffee. Where it got ugly was when a disc stopped playing due to a scratch or dirt, and the open/clean/reload sequence was a 5-minute ordeal. It's also dreadful when you have guests over and want to demo a few discs to show this "great" new technology.

Apparently, with Blu-Ray it is getting worse. Some titles, with some players, are taking an excess of 4 minutes to start the movie from a "cold" player.

Here's what is standing in your way to watching the credits roll:

• Boot up a computer operating system (Linux)
• Start up Java-based software
• Establish a "handshake" via HDMI to ensure that HDCP copy-protection has sanctioned your viewing experience
• Open the tray, close the tray
• Identify the optical disc (which one of the 20 logos, from CD to Blu-Ray, is the disc?)
• Load the movie preview and copy protection spamware imbedded by the studio
• Load a useless and time-consuming animated menu system
• After user selects the correct (and often obscurred) "play" button, run the feature

Kind of makes you miss your 1980's CD player, doesn't it?

What to do about it? The PS3 is actually a good option as of the writing of this post. Because the PS3 basically IS a computer, it can handle the software-intensive process of booting and loading in generally under a minute. The downside is that it really isn't an ideal home theater component, it has a rather noisy fan and is power-hungry.

If the PS3 is out of the question (and really you should have at least some use for it for games, to make it a viable option), simply read the reviews carefully for notes on startup and loading times. I hope this post is obsolete within a year, but I fear that the days of latency-free, chipset-based optical players are gone forever.