It’s beta (of course!), but Google has just announced walking directions as an option on Google Maps. Great timing: I’m in Portland, OR for OSCON 2008, and just yesterday I was wishing I could get walking directions to a restaurant, and today I have it! Well done, Google!
By the way, the warning message is great: “Walking directions are in beta. Use caution when walking in unfamiliar areas.”
Day one at OSCON is always a laid-back affair: there aren’t nearly the number of people here for the two days of tutorials, so crowds aren’t an issue (well, only in the sense that I’ve never failed to be taken aback at mass for the break after the first keynote (not everyone wakes up for that), or in the opening of the exhibit hall!). The main long hallway upstairs by the ballrooms has maybe a dozen people, all poking at laptops, quietly waiting for breakfast to arrive (although I didn’t go down there, having registered the night before, I suspect that there’s a little bit more activity in the downstairs registration area).
My first tutorial (there are two a day) was “Python in 3 Hours”, which I thought would be a great intro to a language that I knew was incredibly powerful, but had avoided it because “why would I need to know yet another language”? I came away from the talk still wondering why I needed to know another language, but having an appreciation for some of the intricacies and power of Python. Some of the stuff had my brain hurting, seeing that you could do such powerful stuff in very little code. That’s not always good, and my problem here is that some very hard-to-read code could easily be written, making either debugging, or simply trying to follow flow, hard. That said, Perl suffers from the same issue, but the obfuscators like to use strings of incomprehensible symbols, and I don’t get the impression that Python is like that. The presentation was really good, though - the presenter was excellent and even though there wasn’t enough time (is there ever?), there was enough communicated to make the tutorial worth-while. My take-away is that once I find a good language reference book and real problem I need to solve, I’ll bite the bullet.
My second tutorial today is “Effective A/B Testing”. The one thing I’ve noticed going to these is that my job has very little in the way of the rigour businesses require. The requirement, of course, comes from the fact that mistakes cost money, whereas in academia, it costs time and annoys the users, if they even notice. One of these is the A/B test, something I sort of knew about, but never really explored in any detail. This tutorial did a great job of diving right into the meat of the topic, covering not just the “why”, but the “how”, scary flashback memories of university statistics and all. What wasn’t covered (and wouldn’t have been practical in the 3 hours) was how to deploy these tests (hardware, server configs, etc), which is the one thing I should be able to do well in my environment: with the use of our load balancer, it should to fairly easy to implement. Of course, finding a problem that could be solved with such testing is another matter.
The day concluded with a great dinner at Henry’s Tavern, then back to the conference center for a BoF: “Open Source in Churches and Missions”. I was able to take away from that a few pointers to some interesting-looking resources, which was good, but the BoF itself didn’t last very long. I was expecting more of the people there to be volunteers like me, cobbling together support apps and websites with the proverbial duct tape and chewing gum, but most people there seemed to be employed by larger organizations, with resources.
In all, a great start to the conference this year, and I’m looking forward not only to the tutorials tomorrow, but especially the main conference the rest of the week.
Another year, another OSCON! Looking forward to this one - it’s their 10th anniversary, and I’m expecting great things from O’Reilly, despite the weird vibes of last year. I’ve said this in previous years, with less than steller results, but I plan on blogging as much of the conference this year as I can. It has a better chance of happening, as I’m writing this post in the airport, and using IMified. I’m hoping the tools like this will help me get over the inertia.
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!
I’ve been slow to jump on the social networking bandwagon, but one that I’ve been enjoying great success with is LinkedIn. I’ve been able to reconnect with people I haven’t had contact with for years. One person in particular I’ve been trying to find for several years. They’re the sort to keep a low profile - unlisted phone number, nothing returned when Googling them, etc - so when I did my periodic search on LinkedIn, I was excited to see their name pop up. The only problem, though, is that while we’ve been friends since high school, we share no post-secondary educational institutions, and we’ve never worked together. Of the remaining catagories in LinkedIn’s “Invite this person to your network”, they require an email address. I understand why they do this (I don’t like spam as much as the next person), but now I seem to be stuck.
Almost, anyway. I have a free LinkedIn account, so to send messages within their system, I either need to upgrade to a paid account (the cheapest is $20.00 per month), or order an “InMail” a la carte, at $10 per message. So yesterday I paid my $10, and sent my message. Totally worth it, and will be even more so when he responds!
Update: I just got email from him, so I’m calling this unqualified success! Money well spent.
With the recent release of WordPress version 2.5, I decided it was time to upgrade, and along with that, I decided to change the name of the blog. I’ve been considering this for some time, and finally found the excuse to do it with the upgrade. The old name was a bit of a play on the opening of every Max Headroom episode (the text would come on the screen just after the opening credits: “20 minutes into the future…”). Geeky and slightly obscure, sure, but the new title speaks a little better to the frequency with which I tend (not) to update this blog.
As I previously posted, I was having an issue with Native Instruments’ Kore 2 not being able to operate the way I needed it to, and the way I specifically asked about before purchasing the product. Native Instruments has acknowledged the bug, but this post isn’t about that, even though the ordeal is almost over (by Monday I should be able to move on, keeping in mind that Monday marks the end of the *second month* of trying to get this resolved!). This post is about the amazingly bad way I was treated by my Guitar Center sales rep during our last conversation.
It used to be that companies needed every customer they could get, and would do whatever they could to keep their customers satisfied and coming back. Now, maybe there are companies out there that are so big, and do so much business that individual customers don’t actually matter, and maybe in a slight twist of irony, the negative word-of-mouth that can be spread so easily via the Internet (say, via blogs) is obviated, or at least offset, by the increased business a company can do on the ‘Net, creating this situation in the first place. In any case, I’m sure these guys still work on commission, and whatever they’d like to think looking at their weekly or monthly pay checks, their customers *are* important.
So if you’re one of these, here’s a little tip: don’t tell your customer that he’s not important (actual quote: “sorry I forgot about this, but I see 200 customers a day”), don’t blame your customers or call them difficult (”I tried to work with you, and you changed your mind”), and don’t put your vendor sales reps in a bad light (”I just talked with him, and he said you weren’t interested in working with them, you just wanted to return the product” - this one especially got me, as I spent a *month* waiting for their tech support to eventually acknowledge a bug I knew was there from the first day I used the software). Oh, and I’m not just dumping on the sales reps - the store’s general manager and the district manger (whom I spoke to directly at one point) were both involved in this debacle as well. So after Monday (or whenever this is resolved), I plan never to set foot, or spend another dime, in a Guitar Center store (or website) again. I can’t (and won’t) tell you to do the same, but the next time you do, remember that you’re likely just a number to them, and hope that you don’t need to take anything back. And if you do, I hope you’re treated better than I was.
Keywords: Native Instruments Kore 2 2.0.1 MIDI bug
As part of the story relating to my experience with Kore 2, I wanted to have a separate entry warning potential purchasers of Native Instruments’ Kore 2 Product. Although it would seem that there aren’t very many people buying Kore for the reason I had, this might be useful to someone in making a decision. I purchased Kore 2 with the intent to use it as a host, and specifically to be able to send MIDI program changes to external gear when switching to a new “song” (my terminology, not Native Instruments’). Although Native Instruments claimed version 2.0.1 could do this, my experience was different, and after a month, Native Instruments technical support acknowledged that there was indeed a bug in this functionality. The original Kore product (and indeed, Kore 2.0.0 as well) was completely inward-focused as a host: it could not communicate with external gear. The apparently-too-quickly-added functions to allow this in 2.0.1 were not well-tested and I’m recommending anyone with external gear to control look elsewhere for a host solution until Native Instruments fixes the bugs.
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