Punctuating The Silence

“Come, come, now, Scotty. Young minds, fresh ideas.”
“Aye, and if my grandmother had wheels, she’d be a wagon.”

Kirk, Scotty; Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
(line order reversed deliberately)

The new Star Trek movie by J.J. Abrams was always intended to be a so-called reboot of the franchise, an opportunity to take the Star Trek universe in a direction that would allow for new ideas in a familiar setting. I went into this movie really excited at the potential of this, but came out pretty disappointed: as a long-time, details-oriented fan, there were too many changes for me to accept, and for reasons I can’t yet put my finger on, it didn’t quite *feel* like a Trek movie.

I grew up watching the original Star Trek series (in reruns: I’m not quite *that* old!), and from there, moved into the novels which fleshed out the characters, and especially their pasts (many of the novels in my collection deal with the time before the 5-year mission). From there came the first 4 movies (Star Trek V? I’m pretty sure they didn’t make that one…), and then it started: The Next Generation (TNG). At first I was skeptical: “that’s not really Star Trek”. But it grew on me, and they did a pretty good job of referencing things that had come before. I watched (and re-watched) every TNG episode. When Deep Space Nine started, I was watching, and liked what they did with it, but I don’t think I saw much of the last season. Then came Voyager, and I watched some episodes, mostly in the first season. While they had a great concept, the execution didn’t really hold up for me. I saw even fewer episodes of Enterprise (a show I really wanted to like), mostly because they started to take liberties with what had come before.

What has to be understood is that there isn’t just the shows, the movies and the novels. People invested into this universe in a big way (geek alert!): there were time-lines, technical manuals, and lots of meta-information that either pulled from canon (the accepted authoritative body of work), or became so. At that point, for the people who were paying attention, there was an enormously detailed universe available. Of course, that can be a curse too: there were inconsistencies, and it becomes increasingly difficult to write well in such a universe.

So while one might not blame Mr. Abrams for not wanting to bring along all this baggage, the trade-off is throwing out 40 years of world-building, and throw it out he did. Interestingly, the one thing that would have saved this movie for me (and I honestly sat through more than half the movie hoping this would happen) was if they had employed the classic Trek (and others!) device of a reset of the original time-line once the major plot-point was resolved. Of course, that would preclude sequels using the world that was built for this movie.

As for the film-making itself, I went in prepared for the shaky camera and the lens flares. The shaky camera I didn’t really notice, but the lens flares were way over-done, and became annoying after the first few minutes. I think they (overly-) contributed to portraying a bright, shiny future, but the movie failed to capture the traditional, idyllic Utopian setting which characterizes early Trek. (Oh, and Mr. Abrams? With all of those easter-eggs/references/in-jokes you put in there, to have *that* many pipes in engineering, and *not* label any of them “GNDN” was just a major oversight!)

One quick note about the characters: even accepting that this is a new Trek universe we’re dealing with, and there will be changes to the familiar characters, I really didn’t like the new histories of Kirk and Spock, especially Kirk - something just felt wrong, even if it did serve to explain later motivation, and trying to reconcile this with the fact that these were supposed to be familiar was … jarring.

This movie is an opportunity for a new generation of fans to experience Star Trek, and that’s not a bad thing. I do feel sorry for them if they then want to go back to experience the last 40 years: they’re going to be a little confused. For me, when they make the sequel (and that’s pretty inevitable), I won’t be going to see it, and I’m not at all happy about that. I wanted to like this movie, wanted to have an excuse to get back into Star Trek. But I can’t help wondering, was this movie really necessary? I think about all of the wonderful, unexplored science fiction material out there, begging to be transformed into other mediums, and wonder if the money put into this film wouldn’t have been better spent bringing something new.

I just read that NetApp (a company that makes file servers that I have used and administrated for over 10 years, and really like) is yanking their current Graphic User Interface (GUI, which is web-based, and therefore usable on a wide variety of platforms), and replacing it with a “more modern interface”: a Windows application. This would normally be the point where you’d be expecting me to rail on Windows, but I’m not going to this time. The point here could have been made if they’d picked MacOS or something else: in going with a single platform (yes, ok, given the corporate norm, a platform representing the vast majority of NetApp admins), they went from allowing everyone to play, to making it inconvenient at best for people like me to use the interface.

Of course, the *real* point here is that I don’t use GUIs (assuming an alternative), so I will continue to administrate my filer the old-fashioned way, via a command line and config files, annoyed at NetApp’s decision, but unaffected by it.

Looking through my blog’s archive, I never did blog about my getting started with Facebook, but I’m blaming, er, crediting the 2008 O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON). They had put up a note that Facebook was to be the social network of choice for that year. Previously, I had been avoiding Facebook, but with that final nudge, I relented and created the account. And Facebook has been great for reconnecting with people, and glimpsing little bits of peoples’ lives you wouldn’t necessarily see.

There’s a new social networking concept that I’ve dabbled with, but never really got into, called “microblogging”. This is where you make short posts, usually only a sentence or two, or a link. The site that’s been around the longest and is the most successful is Twitter, and no, I do not have an account there. Yet.

I just finished reading an interesting entry on the TED Blog called “How To Talk While People are Twittering“, and it discusses an article on how, as a speaker, being aware of the backchannel communication of your audience can benefit both the audience and you. The point for me is that I’ve been going to OSCON for several years now, and it was only a few years ago that I discovered the traditional OSCON backchannel: IRC.  From that, many of the points this article enumerates, I know first-hand to be true.
So, going to the 2009 OSCON site, seeing that the very first icon in the list of social networks and media to be used this year is Twitter, I have very little doubt that in addition to IRC, Twitter is going to be heavily used and will be another great source of commentary and information (we *are* talking about a group of notorious early adopters).

I know I can easily follow the twittering without an account: there are lots of aggregators out there, but I’m guessing that I’ll create an account for 2 reasons: the first is to be able to participate in the discussion, and the second is that I’ve been saying for the last few years that I’ll blog the conference, and while last year I did ok, I don’t have the greatest track record. Twitter might not be great, in-depth prose, but it will be (micro) blogging, and it will provide a trail that will serve as a memory aid should I then go back and write real blog posts.

Look for me on Twitter. Coming Soon. Summer of ‘09. Maybe before.

Well, I’ve had my iPhone 3G a little over 2 weeks now, so I figured it was time for an update. There’s a few specific areas I’ll talk about, and finish with my fairly-short list of gripes.

Battery Life I’m going to go with the fact that my old devices were getting so bad, both in battery life and functionally, that a lot of the criticisms that people have about battery performance is not impacting me a whole lot. Yes, I have to plug it in daily, but one, I was already doing that for both my Blackberry and Palm, and two, I have power in my car, and I usually have it plugged into my laptop at my desk during the day, so that’s not usually an issue.

3G In addition to being in a pretty well-blanketed 3G area between New York and Philadelphia, my experience is that 95% of the time, I’m near a friendly access point, so the phone usually spends it’s time on 802.11g, rather than 3G. I’ve used EDGE only to test, and that was today (yup, I used EDGE for the first time today). The small amount of time I *have* been on 3G, the performance was adequate that I didn’t really notice a problem.

Typing I’ve already talked about this one in my last post, but I will say that I’m getting better, and it’s mostly alright.

Ok, I have to say (again) I’m really happy with this device, and am using it a lot. But nothing’s perfect, and here are a few of my major gripes. Cut-and-Paste is still the top of my list: I have needed this more often than I thought (but you usually notice absent things more, right?), and this really, really needs to be in the next update. Please? I’ve seen some great concepts for this.

I’m really not a fan of the newly-upgraded apps “forgetting” where the icon was, and putting it in the first available slot once the install finishes. Upgrading several apps at a time means spending the next little bit re-arranging everything again. Oh, and yes I know there are work-arounds, but there has to be a more efficient way to perform the backup when your syncing, right? I think my phone takes about 1/2 an hour to perform the backup.

For location-aware apps that provide a handy button to locate you on the map, why is there no hook in the Maps App to be told by what app is was called, and provide a “return to calling-app” button? Or if there is a hook, can that be documented so developers can start using it? I have several apps that suffer from this, and it’s kind of annoying.

One small thing, which kind of surprises me that either Apple or someone else hasn’t written: why is there no app that displays a summary: date/time, next appointment (or all remaining for the day), unread email/SMS message count, weather, etc? Even better would be to make it options for the lock screen. I’d love to see something like that.

This is a minor thing, but when you need it, and it fails, it fails badly: there are several instances where an app will display a list of stuff with a little round, blue icon with a white right-arrow in it. Two notable examples of this: the phone’s call list, and YouTube’s search results. The gripe is this: the target area for that button is *so* small, you’re almost always going to trigger the main function which, for the above two examples are “call the number”, and “play” respectively. Not great if you’re say, creating a new contact from your call list at 7am, or looking to simply bookmark a video slitting in a quiet auditorium (see my major rant about sound next). This target area really needs to be enlarged: I mean, how bad can it be to do so? The *entire rest of the line* is the trigger for the call/play function…

And now for my biggest gripe: sound. My Palm Pilot had different sound categories an app could be in, and when you pressed the speaker icon, you got a mixer that would allow you to individually control the volumes of each category, including a mute button for each one, and a master mute. As I’ve experienced, there does seem to be different categories for things that make sounds: the ringer/alerts (including SMS and mail), games/3rd party apps, YouTube, and the iPod. So why is it that when I switch the “ring/silent” switch (yes, I do realize it’s the “ringer” switch) to “silent”, it doesn’t mute everything? Expecting that, I was annoyed to hear a YouTube video make sound when I didn’t expect it to. Oh, and both the iPod and YouTube don’t even seem to remember the previously running volume state, resetting to 95% of full. I wonder if it would be possible for a developer to write a mixer app that covers the various sound-making apps.

The last thing I’ll mention has nothing to do with the hardware, but rather providers. Volumes have already been written on this subject, including the guy who got hit with a multi-thousand dollar data roaming bill, but why is roaming (and in this case, I’m limiting myself to traveling from the US to Canada, where I’m going next week) so expensive? I did a small test, whereby I put the phone on the EDGE network only, reset the usage counter, and for 10 minutes, used it “normally”: a couple of emails came in, I answered a couple, I used the Facebook app to update my status (which downloads my friends’ statuses as well), I used the Maps with GPS for a bit (including looking at some satellite imagery), I took a picture and uploaded it to my Flickr account, and there was probably some web access in there too. At the end of that, I checked the usage counter, and calculated, based on the “preferential” rate for roaming in Canada at $0.015/Kb, that that would have cost me $45. Excuse me? That basically makes the thing useless on my trip, and the “Enable 3G” and “Data Roaming” sliders will be firmly remaining in the “Off” position. Nice device, too bad I can’t use a lot of it traveling…

So that’s it: 2 weeks in, and I’m hooked: I’ve been playing with some quality free apps, the overall performance of the device is good, and even the most major of my gripes can be fixed in software, and not even necessarily from Apple. Oh, and not having to carry four devices is *wonderful*.

One final, amusing note: I tried to call AT&T today to inquire about international roaming. I tried several numbers (two 800 numbers and 611 from my phone). Each time, I navigated to a different part of their menu tree, and every time I got to an option to speak to a human, there would be a pause, some clicking, following by the “number not in service” tri-tone. I could not find a way to actually speak to a human there, and it would seem that the telco couldn’t configure their phone systems properly. Ah, who am I kidding - it was probably deliberate.

Well, after what seemed like a long wait (see my post a month and a bit ago), I’m holding an iPhone 3G in my hot little hands. Appropriately enough, this post is being written on the device itself!
Let me say right off, I love this thing, and a day after I got it, I can say it is everything I was expecting. That’s not to say it’s not without its annoyances, but so far nothing I didn’t already know about.

So a bit of background: I’ve had a palm pilot of one sort of another for almost a decade, but the technology in that space hasn’t really gone anywhere that I wanted to go. So first and foremost, I was looking to the iPhone to fill that slot. This is the primary reason I didn’t get the first version - the lack of apps. I’m happy to say that after downloading a bunch of free apps (and whittling them down), and making my first purchase, I’m 90% of the way to having everything I need - and the other 10% isn’t anything major.
The second major point for me was shedding some of the gadgetry I usually carry with me, which was the old phone (yup, I’m coming from a Blackberry), the afore-mentioned palm pilot, a compact digital camera, and an older iPod. The iPhone doesn’t have the same capacity as the iPhone my iPod, so it’s just going to be for podcasts and a few favorite albums, the phone’s camera won’t replace a real one. Despite that, going from four devices to two is still a big win.

After a couple days of use, I’m very happy with this, and look forward to the coming updates that will hopefully add a few things like cut-and-paste (I’m in agreement with a lot of folks on this one: I’ve already needed it a bunch of times), better home screen handling (including icon placement of an app after an update), and better IMAP folder organization would be great. I also hope some of the minor stability issues get addresses.

Finally, I want to address two of the biggest complaints: battery life and the keyboard. I haven’t found the battery to be too horrible, as it gets me through a day of pretty heavy use (my wifi, 3G, and Bluetooth are always on). Of course, I’m coming from a pile of old devices that needed to be recharged if you used them at all, so maybe I’m not the best judge. Secondly, the keyboard: I’m definitly getting better, but it does take some getting used to. I’ve stopped fighting the predictive text, and it helps quite a bit. My biggest problem is where my thumbs actually come in contact with the screen, resulting in off-by-one errors. These are mostly caught by the predictive text, but when you’re typing a ‘v’ or a ‘b’ for a space, your words run together, defeating the thing that’s trying to help you. Guess I just need to slow down

Well, the WWDC keynote is over, and the only announcement made was the new 3G iPhone (although that included the SDK and other news for developers, the App Store, the new firmware, and the rebranded .mac (which looks to be fairly tightly-coupled with the iPhone)).  Most of the obvious rumours were true, which made the overall announcement somewhat underwhelming.

The two major positives were the battery life and the new low price ($199 for the 8G, $299 for the 16G).  The fact that it’s thinner and has GPS was a nice addition.  Proving again that I am not the typical user, there’s no 32G version, presumably to keep the price down, although would it have killed them to offer a 32G version of $399 or even $499 (I was prepared to pay that anyway)?

So now I have some decisions to make.  Oh, I’m over 95% positive I’m getting one, but it’s not going to be replacing my iPod any time soon, and it would appear that the specs on the camera didn’t change at all (the Apple Store’s iPhone 3G page lists the camera’s sensor at 2MP), so I’m definitely not giving up the camera.

The one positive in this is that they trotted some developers on stage to talk about their apps.  Most of these demoed apps that will be around the $10 mark, but a number of really good, clever and useful apps were also shown that are going to be free.  That gives me hope that using this as a PDA is going to be a no-brainer.  In fact, I will go so far as to say that because of the reach this new device is going to have, I see an extension of the so-called “Web 2.0″ business model to release, for free, a companion app for the iPhone.  And given that I can do most of what I want in a PDA on a collection of Web 2.0 sites these days, I’d say my problem will quickly be solved.  What will be nice about that is you won’t need to worry about installing yet another sync conduit - your data will just be there whether you access it from your iPhone or any other web browser.

The biggest disappointment in all of this of course, is that the new iPhone won’t be available until July 11th (I betcha those over-enthusiastic people who started lining up in front of Apple stores a couple of weeks ago are feeling a little foolish right now!).  An interesting move on the part of a company that wants to move millions of these things this year, especially considering the previous-generation iPhone has been out of stock for over a week.  Oh, well, I’ve waited a year, I can wait another month.  More time to get more detail on this device, it’s new OS, and what kind of software will be available.  If I get buyer’s remorse on this one, it’ll be my own fault.

It’s the morning before the big Steve Jobs keynote at WWDC, and I’m looking forward to it. Oh, not really in the Apple fan-boy kind of way (ok, maybe a little), but after paying close attention to the rumour mill for the last few weeks, I’m looking forward to seeing the feature list of the new iPhone. Because I’m going to buy one. And yes, you could point out that being an “early adopter” doesn’t pay, but here’s the thing: I look at it as those in the last year who bought the first version of the iPhone were the early adopters. And don’t get me wrong: I would have loved to have been one of them, but the first version of the iPhone wouldn’t have suited me. And now, a year later, if half of the rumours that are currently frenetically whipping around the ‘net are true, then this version will.

I carry on me every day 4 devices: my aging, and almost dead, Blackberry (cell phone, email and rudimentary internet access), my aging Palm (a Sony Clie clamshell, my PDA), my aging 60G iPod (which carries my entire music and audio collection), and my getting-older-but still-ok Canon digital camera. Of these, I need a replacement for the following functions: web access (I’ve always needed this - GPRS just doesn’t cut it for data, and the Blackberry’s web browser is barely worthy of the classification), and PDA functions including calendar, ebook reader, note-taking, and various odds-and-ends utilities. The phone works ok for me, thanks to bluetooth, where I usually don’t have to touch the actual phone, and while my iPod could go at any time, it does exactly what I need it to do.

However, the rumours of the new iPhone suggests that I might be able to replace 2, if not all 4 of these devices. Not to say I believe the rumours - I have a dedicated shaker set aside just for these things (and I do love to use it)! The more credible of these (coupled with stuff Apple has said officially) suggests that as a mobile computing platform (which is what my requirements basically boil down to), this is going to fit the bill nicely: the phone is a given - the first iPhone did this well enough for me already, as it did for email. The new firmware and the announcement of the App Store means that it looks like it will suit for those odds-and-ends utilities (without, hopefully, the need to jailbreak it. BTW, one of the apps I’m most interested in is the Palm emulator - there are a few apps on the Palm I don’t see replacements for yet.). The almost-certain 3G capability, coupled with WiFi, will provide the network access I require. As for music and audio, even if the rumoured increase in storage capacity to 32G is true, it’s still going to be half of what I need (and I’d need that just for music - forget about adding apps!), so I’m either going to still have to carry around the old iPod, or change my expectations. I’m guessing that I’ll figure out a happy medium, carrying around what I need (a rotating selection of favorites and podcasts), and the rest of the storage will be file space for other things. Finally the camera: I don’t see my giving up all of the functionality of a real camera for a cell-phone camera, no matter how much they’ve souped it up, but even so, that makes only two devices to carry (and the camera is one of the smaller ones that was available when I bought it), and that will be nice. Still, the prospect of having an adequate (some rumours say the chip used is capable of up to 5MP) sensor, with (rumoured) automatic, GPS-based geolocation tagging, and (almost obvious) automatic uploading to services like Flickr nudges it toward useful.

There was a certain amount of disdain for the “fan-boys” who stood in line for days to be among the first to own an iPhone. I won’t be standing in any lines, but I will order one this week if they are made available. The difference is, as far as I’m concerned, that I’ve already been waiting a year. Now I just have to wait a few hours more.

A while back, my wife Michelle had made me a cross stitch of a frame of the opening sequence to the really funny British comedy “The IT Crowd”. She had worked out the pattern herself from a still, made it, and got it framed for me. It now adorns the wall of my office. Of course, I had taken a picture, and posted it to my flickr account.

Last week I got email from the owner of the GeekCrafts blog saying that her work was featured in an article: 9 Works in Cross Stitch. Very cool!

Well, I’m not entirely sure why there were all these lineups at Apple stores, waiting for 6pm. I had ordered a copy of Leopard the day before (around mid-day, even), and was a little surprised to see that it said “arrives by October 26″. Sure enough, the FedEx guy arrived the next *morning*, carrying the box. By early afternoon, Eastern time, I had upgraded my MacBook Pro. My impressions? Find the review (which is more than one, really) that says “nothing earth-shattering/not going to change your life/evolutionary, not revolutionary” and “a whole bunch of little things that make things tighter and faster”, and you’ll be where I am.

Things I Like:

• Spotlight’s overall improvments
• Finder’s new sidebar (especially with the shared section, and the fact that it takes less space)
• Cleanup of the Preferences panel and options - especially the new networking panel.
• The new interface for FrontRow (well, new to me anyway - I don’t have an AppleTV box). I especially love it for navigating shared content - an amazing improvement!
• Most non-Apple applications “just worked” after the reboot

Non-Apple Things that “Just Worked”:

• VMWare (upgraded to the latest beta, which was for Leopard)
• Firefox, Thunderbird (although I’m giving Safari and Mail another go)
• Skype, Adium, Colloquy (I would have been surprised if these didn’t work)
• Audacity
• Growl
• DropCopy

Things that Didn’t Work:

• synergy, the daemon for sharing a keyboard and mouse from one system across many (I use this at work across 4 machines), crashes (the client - I run the server elsewhere) when run.
• My favorite screensaver, Fenetres Volantes, doesn’t run (although the new “Word of the Day” is nice!)
• Very Little!
  

Things I Miss:

• The ability to name desktops in “Spaces”, and optional transitions (just eye-candy, no big deal).
• The hack of dragging your “Home” folder to the dock, and, when clicking on it, getting the menu-like way of navigating your directory structure.

Overall, it’s a nice update, and one I feel will make non-power users and new users feel more at home. I’ve read that as more apps go 64 bit, along with some of the tweaks in the behind-the-scenes code found here, things should be generally faster. While I’d like to say I’ve seen that, I don’t think I’ve used the system enough yet to say if that’s true.

Update: found a couple more things that need fixing: VLC no longer recognizes the Apple remote, and SMC fan control doesn’t seem to be working(even after trying to re-pair it).

Update #2: Updated SMCfancontrol to v 2.1.2, and that fixed the issue.

I’m writing this post (after another lengthy hiatus, I realize) from a new service that a colleague told me about. Called IMified, this service allows access to a number of services and tools conveniently through your IM client. This first post will serve as a test to see how well it works, but this seems very useful, especially for quick posts. In addition to the blogging module, I also have access to my Backpack account , as well as other note, reminder and network tools. They also have widgets for calendars, other blogging tools, and various social networks. Looks very cool, and I’m interested to see how useful this becomes to me!

More is coming - there’s been a lot going on lately, in our lives, and, of course, the geeky stuff too.