So, Google made a big announcement about how they're now supporting OpenID from Gmail. Except it turns out that they're really not. They're using an extra-special Googleplex fork of OpenID, incompatible with the standard. It's not OpenID, it's GopenID, or GoogleID, or Andro-ID, but whatever it is, it's not what they claim it to be.
I know the folks at Google aren't stupid, and I'm unable to understand what it is about actually working with a community--one that isn't contained within the Googleplex, anyway--that they find so scary. They did it with Android (and then spent the better part of a year publicly running down mainstream mobile open source development as "not good enough", "too desktop oriented", etc.) and now they've gone and done it again with OpenID.
Let me try to explain this to you, guys: a standard only has value when everyone uses the same one. If you decide to have your own version of a standard, it's not a standard any more, it's just pointless fragmentation.
Google's pretty good at things that simply involve writing a check, like the Summer of Code, like sponsoring GUADEC (and then not showing up), like joining the GNOME Foundation Advisory Board (and I certainly hope someone's planning on showing up for that), like Android. They're consistently terrible at actually getting out into the community and simply working with people and projects that don't happen to be Google-driven.
I don't get it. Or if I'm feeling especially cynical, maybe I do. Like we used to say at Apple, if you think you're too cynical, you're not cynical enough.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Friday, October 24, 2008
My Hopefully-No-Longer-Ongoing Vista Ultimate Upgrade Nightmare
Yes, I use Vista. I'm sorry if that troubles you, but in fairness, I use pretty much every OS known to humankind at one point or another.
The reason I use Vista is that I use Illustrator, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and the rest of the CS3 Web Suite for a bunch of things and—after having used them on a Mac, with an external Wacom tablet for several years—I succumbed to the allure of the generally-despised Tablet PC, especially one which used the Wacom technology. There's nothing like "painting" directly on the screen with a stylus, and a pressure-sensitive stylus is even better.
So, for a couple of years, I had a Lenovo X41 Tablet on which I ran CS2, and with which I was quite happy. I decided I needed a new system earlier this year and ended up getting another Lenovo, an X61 Tablet this time. The Lenovo's are small, (relatively) light, travel well, and generally seem to work nicely for me; in addition to the X61, I've got an X60 (non-Tablet) on which I run Ubuntu 8.04 at the moment (and on which I've been spending way too much time looking at Android sources, but that's a story for another day...)
Anyway, the X61 came with Vista Business installed, and it worked just fine. Except for one thing: Vista Business doesn't let you do Japanese input, you need Vista Ultimate for that. There isn't a single other feature in Ultimate that I think I care about, and it's worth noting that Japanese support on XP was free, the upgrade kit for Ultimate cost me $220 at Circuit City.
Okay, fine. I can really use it, and while it used to be free (and is free on Linux), I'd put down two Benjamins for good Japanese support. So, I get my official Windows Vista Ultimate disk, and get to installing.
First off, this is a process which takes a whole large number of hours, I haven't managed to stay awake through it so far, but it's got to be nine or ten hours. Having done that, I discovered that the keyboard and "Trackpoint" joystick no longer functioned. Thankfully, the stylus did, and an external mouse and keyboard did, but I ended up spending an hour or two on the phone with Microsoft Tech Support, removing devices from the registry, re-scanning, searching for new drivers, etc., before everything was finally working again.
Then, some overnight automatic update or other killed the Trackpoint again. Luckily, I knew what to do, and I got that sorted out.
So, everything was fine until I went away to Singapore and Tokyo at the beginning of the month, and took the Linux laptop with me. When I got back, the first thing the X61 did was download a whole new bunch of updates, which somehow had the net effect of persuading the system that it was no longer a Tablet. No stylus response, no input panel, when tablet-specific software was started up, it denied that there was any tablet hardware in evidence.
So, I've spent pretty much all week on the phone, alternatively, with Lenovo support and with Microsoft support. Lenovo won't send me an Ultimate recovery disk, so they say, because their policy is to only send recovery disks for the OS with which the system originally shipped. Microsoft insisted the whole thing was so vendor-specific that getting help from Lenovo was really what was needed (a position with which I basically agree).
All in all, Microsoft tried harder to be helpful, calling me back multiple times and spending several hours on the phone looking at options. Where we finally wound up is that, late yesterday afternoon, I uninstalled Norton 360 (there seems to be no way to turn it off), turned off a whole pile of startup programs and services using msconfig, and did a fresh upgrade.
And got exactly the same results as the first time: tablet functionality was back, but no keyboard, no TrackPoint. Luckily, all of the previous experience gave me a notion of what to do. I let Vista install the 24 additional upgrades it wanted to, then I ran Lenovo's updater, and installed all the updates it found. Still no keyboard or TrackPoint, but the stylus, etc., still work.
I went to the Device Manager, and saw that neither the "Tablet PC Keyboard and Button" nor the "PS/2 TrackPoint" were running. So, I searched for an updated driver for the "Tablet PC Keyboard and found one. Next, I downloaded the latest TrackPoint driver installer from Lenovo and ran that. After a reboot, everything worked.
I took a system restore point called "Everything Works Here". At least I have a fallback now, but what a pain in the ass. Now, I've got about two dozen "optional updates" from Microsoft which I'll have to go through, one by one, ready to back them out individually if the cause new trouble.
And what a circus from, in particular, Lenovo support. They were never able to give me any explanation of what someone who wanted to upgrade to Ultimate was supposed to do, and they made moronic suggestions that I'd voided my warranty with them by doing so.
And people say Linux is hard to install!
The reason I use Vista is that I use Illustrator, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and the rest of the CS3 Web Suite for a bunch of things and—after having used them on a Mac, with an external Wacom tablet for several years—I succumbed to the allure of the generally-despised Tablet PC, especially one which used the Wacom technology. There's nothing like "painting" directly on the screen with a stylus, and a pressure-sensitive stylus is even better.
So, for a couple of years, I had a Lenovo X41 Tablet on which I ran CS2, and with which I was quite happy. I decided I needed a new system earlier this year and ended up getting another Lenovo, an X61 Tablet this time. The Lenovo's are small, (relatively) light, travel well, and generally seem to work nicely for me; in addition to the X61, I've got an X60 (non-Tablet) on which I run Ubuntu 8.04 at the moment (and on which I've been spending way too much time looking at Android sources, but that's a story for another day...)
Anyway, the X61 came with Vista Business installed, and it worked just fine. Except for one thing: Vista Business doesn't let you do Japanese input, you need Vista Ultimate for that. There isn't a single other feature in Ultimate that I think I care about, and it's worth noting that Japanese support on XP was free, the upgrade kit for Ultimate cost me $220 at Circuit City.
Okay, fine. I can really use it, and while it used to be free (and is free on Linux), I'd put down two Benjamins for good Japanese support. So, I get my official Windows Vista Ultimate disk, and get to installing.
First off, this is a process which takes a whole large number of hours, I haven't managed to stay awake through it so far, but it's got to be nine or ten hours. Having done that, I discovered that the keyboard and "Trackpoint" joystick no longer functioned. Thankfully, the stylus did, and an external mouse and keyboard did, but I ended up spending an hour or two on the phone with Microsoft Tech Support, removing devices from the registry, re-scanning, searching for new drivers, etc., before everything was finally working again.
Then, some overnight automatic update or other killed the Trackpoint again. Luckily, I knew what to do, and I got that sorted out.
So, everything was fine until I went away to Singapore and Tokyo at the beginning of the month, and took the Linux laptop with me. When I got back, the first thing the X61 did was download a whole new bunch of updates, which somehow had the net effect of persuading the system that it was no longer a Tablet. No stylus response, no input panel, when tablet-specific software was started up, it denied that there was any tablet hardware in evidence.
So, I've spent pretty much all week on the phone, alternatively, with Lenovo support and with Microsoft support. Lenovo won't send me an Ultimate recovery disk, so they say, because their policy is to only send recovery disks for the OS with which the system originally shipped. Microsoft insisted the whole thing was so vendor-specific that getting help from Lenovo was really what was needed (a position with which I basically agree).
All in all, Microsoft tried harder to be helpful, calling me back multiple times and spending several hours on the phone looking at options. Where we finally wound up is that, late yesterday afternoon, I uninstalled Norton 360 (there seems to be no way to turn it off), turned off a whole pile of startup programs and services using msconfig, and did a fresh upgrade.
And got exactly the same results as the first time: tablet functionality was back, but no keyboard, no TrackPoint. Luckily, all of the previous experience gave me a notion of what to do. I let Vista install the 24 additional upgrades it wanted to, then I ran Lenovo's updater, and installed all the updates it found. Still no keyboard or TrackPoint, but the stylus, etc., still work.
I went to the Device Manager, and saw that neither the "Tablet PC Keyboard and Button" nor the "PS/2 TrackPoint" were running. So, I searched for an updated driver for the "Tablet PC Keyboard and found one. Next, I downloaded the latest TrackPoint driver installer from Lenovo and ran that. After a reboot, everything worked.
I took a system restore point called "Everything Works Here". At least I have a fallback now, but what a pain in the ass. Now, I've got about two dozen "optional updates" from Microsoft which I'll have to go through, one by one, ready to back them out individually if the cause new trouble.
And what a circus from, in particular, Lenovo support. They were never able to give me any explanation of what someone who wanted to upgrade to Ultimate was supposed to do, and they made moronic suggestions that I'd voided my warranty with them by doing so.
And people say Linux is hard to install!
Monday, September 29, 2008
Oh, yeah.
 |
| From Berlin |
A geotagging update:
After a number of false starts, fruitless efforts, software installation, software removal, uploading, re-uploading, etc., I finally worked out the geotagging magic.
I've got two galleries of shots from my Berlin trip, pretty much all geotagged and mapped, on Flickr and on Picasa. I used a GisTeq PhotoTrackr, with the (horrible, confusing, designed by aliens) GisTeq software used to (finally) associate the correct time/location with the correct photo. That took several tries.
Next, it turns out that there's not one, but two checkboxes you have to click on to get location data uploaded to Flickr. First, you have to share EXIF information. Then, you have to save any location data provided. Flickr is another example (at least in configuration) of non-intuitive design...
In between the inability to get Flickr working, I pulled down IrfanView (to verify that the location data was getting correctly stuffed into the EXIF), and the latest version of Picasa (which allowed me to verify that, if I had location data, it was possible to upload it someplace and take a look at it...)
Anyway, it works. I'm going to have to look for alternatives to the GisTeq software, at least for anything other than pulling the tracking data off the device (which is likewise horrific); anyone know of any projects working on this, e.g. associating NMEA datalogs with photographs, especially graphically...?
Not Getting It at Techcrunch
Dan Kimmerling, over on TechCrunch, advises would-be iPhone developers to sit down, shut up, and learn to live with Apple's rules. In doing so, he manages to completely miss the main point that people have been complaining about.
Writing software is work. Sure, people do it for fun, but people split logs for fun, too. In any case, people do this sort of thing expecting a return on their investment of time and effort. The problem that Apple has created is that developers are in the position of having to make the entirety of their investment up front--thinking up and developing an application--and only then can they submit it to the iTunes Apps Store and find out whether they're going to be allowed to sell it or not.
The problem here is the complete lack of anything like a free marketplace. Apple not only owns the grocery store here, they own your pots, pans, sink, refrigerator and kitchen stove, and you can only use the recipes they've pre-approved. If you can't sell your application on the Apps Store, you simply can't sell your application. You could try to market it to the owners of "jailbroken" phones, but those are getting fewer and farther between; Apple keeps making efforts, with every software update, to close those opportunities as well.
(One of the coders whose app was rejected by Apple "for duplication iTunes functionality" found a backdoor through a mechanism used to distribute beta versions; Apple quickly slammed that door shut, too.)
That's a lot to ask of a developer: "make your investment up front, and we'll let you know after you're done whether the last six months were a complete waste of your time." That's a very bad proposition. When you add the limitations of the SDK in terms of what you're not allowed to do, and then you add the truly draconian terms of the NDA associated with the SDK, it starts to look like something which won't really incent the development world to put in major effort.
What organization is going to commit to a 10,000-man-hour project for the iPhone when they'll have no idea whether they'll actually be able to sell the fruits of their labors? Dan is right in this: Apple is certainly entitled to run their business as they please, but I hope they're not counting too much on the notion that their position is unassailable (although, based on my experience working there, I'm pretty certain they are counting on exactly that notion). The same thing will happen to the iPhone as happened to the Macintosh in the mid-90s.
Early adopters are fickle people. As soon as there's something else they can adopt earlier that seems shinier than what they have now, they're off like a shot. That--and hubris--is what took Apple's market share from 22% down to 2% ten or fourteen years ago.
Apple's setting themselves up to see exactly the same thing happen again.
Writing software is work. Sure, people do it for fun, but people split logs for fun, too. In any case, people do this sort of thing expecting a return on their investment of time and effort. The problem that Apple has created is that developers are in the position of having to make the entirety of their investment up front--thinking up and developing an application--and only then can they submit it to the iTunes Apps Store and find out whether they're going to be allowed to sell it or not.
The problem here is the complete lack of anything like a free marketplace. Apple not only owns the grocery store here, they own your pots, pans, sink, refrigerator and kitchen stove, and you can only use the recipes they've pre-approved. If you can't sell your application on the Apps Store, you simply can't sell your application. You could try to market it to the owners of "jailbroken" phones, but those are getting fewer and farther between; Apple keeps making efforts, with every software update, to close those opportunities as well.
(One of the coders whose app was rejected by Apple "for duplication iTunes functionality" found a backdoor through a mechanism used to distribute beta versions; Apple quickly slammed that door shut, too.)
That's a lot to ask of a developer: "make your investment up front, and we'll let you know after you're done whether the last six months were a complete waste of your time." That's a very bad proposition. When you add the limitations of the SDK in terms of what you're not allowed to do, and then you add the truly draconian terms of the NDA associated with the SDK, it starts to look like something which won't really incent the development world to put in major effort.
What organization is going to commit to a 10,000-man-hour project for the iPhone when they'll have no idea whether they'll actually be able to sell the fruits of their labors? Dan is right in this: Apple is certainly entitled to run their business as they please, but I hope they're not counting too much on the notion that their position is unassailable (although, based on my experience working there, I'm pretty certain they are counting on exactly that notion). The same thing will happen to the iPhone as happened to the Macintosh in the mid-90s.
Early adopters are fickle people. As soon as there's something else they can adopt earlier that seems shinier than what they have now, they're off like a shot. That--and hubris--is what took Apple's market share from 22% down to 2% ten or fourteen years ago.
Apple's setting themselves up to see exactly the same thing happen again.
Monday, September 22, 2008
Going Less Proprietary with Multimedia...
Up until now, I've kept my CDs on an iPod, and carted along a DVD drive and a case of DVDs with me when I travelled, playing them back on my laptop. I had a really interesting experience on my flight from San Francisco to New York last week, which (along with some other fortuitous timing) has encouraged me to replace the iPod.
I managed to snag a seat in business class, and discovered that United has been playing around with the Archos 7xx line: they're handing them out, preloaded with a couple of dozen movies, to folks sitting in business for the duration of the flight. Aside from some minor screen calibration problems (it was difficult to fast-forward reliably using the movie's timeline), I thought it was an excellent experience.
The Archos 7xx are pretty big units, though. Happily, Archos is just releasing the new Archos 5 line, which comes in at about the size of a 3x5 card and only half an inch thick. I ordered one from Amazon, with a 250 GB hard disk yesterday, I expect to receive it within the next month.
I also started playing around with solutions for converting DVDs to MP4, and was pleased to discover that AnyDVD from Slysoft will not only allow me to get past the flavor-of-the-week copy protection they slap on DVDs (and it's worked in every single case except one), but it also gets around the regionality of the DVD drive so I can now use non-region-1 DVDs without the driver complaining.
I'm using Nero 8 recode to do the conversion. Movies take a little less than real-time to convert, but the size (for cinema quality) is excellent: they seem to come in at around 3/4 of a gig, or less.
With the 250 GB on the Archos, that means I get get my entire CD and podcast collection, as well as a selection of as many as a hundred or so movies at any given time, onto the Archos (once I've managed to convert that many, of course.) Frequent-flying-horror-movie-enthusiast heaven!
While a 3x5 screen sounds small, holding an actual 3x5 card (well, a Moleskine notebook, which happens to have almost exactly the same form factor as the Archos) up at arms length completely covers the 32-inch monitor in my living room, and then some, so that winds up being effectively a larger screen than the one I watch at home.
And, oh yeah: the Archos runs Linux (Qtopia, to be specific). Not that it does me much good--you can hack the older Archos devices (at a cost of some loss of functionality, something Archos should help the community to correct, if they're wise), but not this one so far.
So, adios, Apple. My last G4 Cube blew up a while back (necessitating a significant amount of inconvenience in reconstructing my MP3 collection, which I had to back-synch from the iPod), and now it looks as though the iPod's days are numbered, too...
I managed to snag a seat in business class, and discovered that United has been playing around with the Archos 7xx line: they're handing them out, preloaded with a couple of dozen movies, to folks sitting in business for the duration of the flight. Aside from some minor screen calibration problems (it was difficult to fast-forward reliably using the movie's timeline), I thought it was an excellent experience.
The Archos 7xx are pretty big units, though. Happily, Archos is just releasing the new Archos 5 line, which comes in at about the size of a 3x5 card and only half an inch thick. I ordered one from Amazon, with a 250 GB hard disk yesterday, I expect to receive it within the next month.
I also started playing around with solutions for converting DVDs to MP4, and was pleased to discover that AnyDVD from Slysoft will not only allow me to get past the flavor-of-the-week copy protection they slap on DVDs (and it's worked in every single case except one), but it also gets around the regionality of the DVD drive so I can now use non-region-1 DVDs without the driver complaining.
I'm using Nero 8 recode to do the conversion. Movies take a little less than real-time to convert, but the size (for cinema quality) is excellent: they seem to come in at around 3/4 of a gig, or less.
With the 250 GB on the Archos, that means I get get my entire CD and podcast collection, as well as a selection of as many as a hundred or so movies at any given time, onto the Archos (once I've managed to convert that many, of course.) Frequent-flying-horror-movie-enthusiast heaven!
While a 3x5 screen sounds small, holding an actual 3x5 card (well, a Moleskine notebook, which happens to have almost exactly the same form factor as the Archos) up at arms length completely covers the 32-inch monitor in my living room, and then some, so that winds up being effectively a larger screen than the one I watch at home.
And, oh yeah: the Archos runs Linux (Qtopia, to be specific). Not that it does me much good--you can hack the older Archos devices (at a cost of some loss of functionality, something Archos should help the community to correct, if they're wise), but not this one so far.
So, adios, Apple. My last G4 Cube blew up a while back (necessitating a significant amount of inconvenience in reconstructing my MP3 collection, which I had to back-synch from the iPod), and now it looks as though the iPod's days are numbered, too...
Friday, September 12, 2008
Sigh.
This is terrible. It's been more than a month since I've posted anything here.
One of the reasons is that I've been busy, busy, busy. On currently in New York City for the weekend, on my way to one of the things I've been busy with, the Open Source in Mobile conference, which is taking place in Berlin next week.
I've been particularly busy coming up with fiendish questions for the ACCESS-sponsored Open Source in Mobile Pub Quiz, which is shaping up to be quite an event! We going to be having ten (!) teams, beer, and questions galore, hosted by yours truly.
I think it's going to be a lot of fun.
On a not-really-related note, I'm taking along my GiSTEQ GPS data logger to Berlin, so I should be able to do some experimenting with geotagging photos. On another, my friend John Kreuzer has a video posted of me demoing some Netfront widget stuff at Linuxworld...
I'm also reading quite a good book now, which offers some interesting explanations of why "feature checklists" are wrong and how companies fail to grapple with what their customers actual needs and experiences are: Subject to Change by Peter Merholz, Brandon Schauer, David Verba and Todd Wilkens (O'Reilly)...
One of the reasons is that I've been busy, busy, busy. On currently in New York City for the weekend, on my way to one of the things I've been busy with, the Open Source in Mobile conference, which is taking place in Berlin next week.
I've been particularly busy coming up with fiendish questions for the ACCESS-sponsored Open Source in Mobile Pub Quiz, which is shaping up to be quite an event! We going to be having ten (!) teams, beer, and questions galore, hosted by yours truly.
I think it's going to be a lot of fun.
On a not-really-related note, I'm taking along my GiSTEQ GPS data logger to Berlin, so I should be able to do some experimenting with geotagging photos. On another, my friend John Kreuzer has a video posted of me demoing some Netfront widget stuff at Linuxworld...
I'm also reading quite a good book now, which offers some interesting explanations of why "feature checklists" are wrong and how companies fail to grapple with what their customers actual needs and experiences are: Subject to Change by Peter Merholz, Brandon Schauer, David Verba and Todd Wilkens (O'Reilly)...
Monday, August 4, 2008
Back from Amsterdam, Usability, and Silliy iPhone Nano Rumors...
I made it back from Amsterdam Saturday night, unfortunately with a bit of a cold. I'm working on shaking that now, since I need to be up in San Francisco for Linuxworld tomorrow (I'm on the "Golden Penguin Bowl" Mobile team!) and Wednesday...
Matthew Paul Thomas has expanded his six-year-old piece on the usability problems in free software, why they're there, and what we might do about them. This is a really important discussion for the community to be taking up as we move forward toward more free and open source software in mobile applications. As the iPhone has demonstrated, usability can trump features; features that are usable are, of course, even better...
Speaking of the iPhone, the blog-o-sphere is filled with stories about a supposed "iPhone Nano" that Apple's ostensibly going to be bringing out by Christmas. It's idiotic, but I hope they do it. In that form factor, battery life will be about forty minutes. The only thing I'd enjoy more would be an "iPhone Shuffle": no screen, one button, and when you press it, it dials a random contact in your address book...
If you're going to be at Linuxworld, please stop by the ACCESS booth (not hard to spot) and say "Hi!" And don't forget to come for the Golden Penguin Bowl, at 4:30 tomorrow in the Keynote room!
Matthew Paul Thomas has expanded his six-year-old piece on the usability problems in free software, why they're there, and what we might do about them. This is a really important discussion for the community to be taking up as we move forward toward more free and open source software in mobile applications. As the iPhone has demonstrated, usability can trump features; features that are usable are, of course, even better...
Speaking of the iPhone, the blog-o-sphere is filled with stories about a supposed "iPhone Nano" that Apple's ostensibly going to be bringing out by Christmas. It's idiotic, but I hope they do it. In that form factor, battery life will be about forty minutes. The only thing I'd enjoy more would be an "iPhone Shuffle": no screen, one button, and when you press it, it dials a random contact in your address book...
If you're going to be at Linuxworld, please stop by the ACCESS booth (not hard to spot) and say "Hi!" And don't forget to come for the Golden Penguin Bowl, at 4:30 tomorrow in the Keynote room!
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