In response to the article on Slashdot:

Patents aggravate me sometimes, especially when it comes to software. I just hope they (Apple) are doing it from preventing other companies like Creative from coming up with the patent first and suing Apple (even I thought that was dumb of Creative to patent the iPod-like interface and sue Apple, who came up with it relatively first. I have since then banned from ever buying a Creative product again) . But if they’re in the hopes of suing other companies instead of making the software open to others, then consider my investment in Apple to be no longer

South by Southwest Interactive has been amusing, fun, and strange….all wrapped into a tight little package. Actually, maybe not so little…but it’s definitely been a huge experience.

I’ve been to a few conferences, AjaxWorld being one of them (which in a way could have been a complete waste of time if it weren’t for the networking aspect of it). Don’t get me wrong, a few of the panels at AjaxWorld were very good, but not $1500 worth. Not to mention, I saw alot of the same panels weeks before online. The best way I like to look at it is, if you’re a developer….don’t go to AjaxWorld! You live and you learn I guess.

But I digress, back to SxSWi. So the entry fee was very reasonable in comparison to what I’ve been paying before for other conferences, but it made sense as I walked amongst many of the attendants. Everybody was in a startup, or had been in a startup. I’ve never had the pleasure of being where most of these people were, and I envy that. Big adventure, struggles, working together on something new….its exciting stuff. And here’s little old me trying to find out about the latest and greatest in web tech so I can jazz up our company site, while everybody else is trying to understand the pitfalls and bottlenecks of a starving company. I don’t think I’m ready for that (plus I don’t think I can survive financially at this point in my life), but it’s a dream to be there sometime in the future.

The conference touched on everything imaginable related to the web tech industry: developers, designers, bloggers, artists, venture capitalists…you name it, they were there. And to see big names like Adobe, Sun Microsystems, and Microsoft amongst all these little guys, and the way they were there to help the community, rather than take over, made it that much better. I had just learned that AOL finally decided to make AIM open source….which is just great! I knew they had API’s available to the public, but to actually go out and release the code, finally gave me the nerve to respect them (just a little bit at least). [I haven't actually gone out and looked at the code yet, so this statement could change, fyi].

Onto the parties. The parties were great (except for the Facebook parties, don’t go to them unless you like boozhee, shiny shirt, and god-wannabe door people). Yeah, sure, BT was there, but it just seemed too much like a commercial party. Which brings me to how the 16-bit party was….lame!! Too many dam people, no free drinks (apparently the check didn’t clear?), a line from hell (luckily we got there early), aggravated people (as my friend Andy likes to say: it’s like the many components packed into a notebook with a crappy heatsink). If there were a 32-bit party, no possible way am I recommending that to anybody.

Anyway, the Pure Volume Ranch parties were awesome! The Gametap party was even better (the food they had was amazing!). The Frog Design venue was nuttz. The 16-bit party should have used that venue instead of the Scoot Inn. The Digg party (at pure volume ranch) was pretty good as well, apparently Mark Cuban was there (cool I guess, but the Rockets are winning the championship this year). Midway through, I got a text from a friend about Moby being at the Mohawk, so we headed out there. That venue is AMAZING! Not just because I know some people, that know people, who know people that are affiliated with the place (yeah, I’m practically just a normal citizen at that point huh?), but from what it looked like a year ago in comparison to today….all I have to say is WOW.

Anyway, I’m not the biggest fan of Moby, but he did rock it that night, and the crowd responded very well which is always good to see. He did make an appearance at the Digg party afterward as well, so I’m sure they were thrilled to see him (better than just Mark Cuban….Ha, just kidding).

-

You can find out about the adventure in Eugene Hsu’s post on Ungerground Online’s website. More pics of the Moby event are available there as well.

So now that the Interactive conference is done, the music portion of SxSW has started, and I’m attending a few events here and there for that. I’ve got a few videos, and photos up, but I’ll save that for another post (maybe).

Been gone for awhile, and figure it was time for an update

In my trip to Dubai, UAE (pix); I purchased the Nokia 6120 (something I cannot find here in the states), and am loving it!

The pros (and there are alot):

• super small (pocket friendly)
• 3.5G quadband
• very nice QVGA screen
• dual cameras
• a real loud loudspeaker
• latest symbian available
• usable and coherent mp3 player (unlike LG’s)
• super fast browser (based on apple/safari’s webkit)
• j2me love (i’ve got a ton of apps already installed and all work flawlessly)
  - gmail
  - yahoo go
  - google maps
  - opera mini
  - shozu
• all the great things about nokia that i’ve always loved (gui design, profiles, contact lists, groups)
• new blackberry/winmobile like front menu (list of favorite apps to show)
• mac connectivity (got my stuff sync’d and working no problem)

Cons:

• haven’t figured out the application limitations on the phone yet, but it seems like i can’t run more than 3 or 4 j2me apps at the same time (especially if all of them are trying to use the network)
• camera is great during the day…sucks at night and flash seems to make everything blue
• no good FREE all inclusive (aim, msn, yahoo, jabber) client. so far i’ve tried out
  trutap (no jabber)
  gizmo (no jabber)
  fring (ugly and missing some features)
  eqo mobile (nice, but i don’t like how every time i send a message it states what application i’m using and telling the other person to download it)
  palringo (can only get on jabber; aim, yahoo and msn dont seem to work)
  ebuddy (probably one of the best looking, but missing jabber…although it has gtalk, but i don’t use gtalk…and i can only log into one screen name per service at a time)
  nimbuzz (another good one that i probably use the most, but it randomly shuts down on me with no warning)
• would love sms threading (tired of having to go through txts from 2 or 3 days ago)
• i think thats it…

I’ll update with anything else I do find.

all i have to say is…about damn time. thanks google

Google Blog Post

933 days up and running, with no errors or downtime
i’d love to see proof of a windows server to even run 1/10th of that. then i’ll keep my mouth shut

This was a good presentation (informative and funny!).
One of my favorite quotes:
“If a man speaks his mind in a forest, and no woman hears him…is he still wrong?”

Worth checking out if you have time to kill.

Digitally Imported along with several other internet radio stations will not play any music on June 26, 2007. This a protest move to help make users aware of the new royalty fees being implemented on July 15th.

If you love internet radio, make sure you write your Congress Men/Women. You can c/p what i had posted to my Congress People:

As a fan of Internet radio, I was alarmed to learn that music royalty
rates were recently determined by the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) which,
if enacted, would certainly silence most or all of my favorite online
listening services. For most webcasters, this royalty rate represents more
than 100% of their total revenues!

The shuttering of the webcasting industry would be a loss for not only
independent business owners, but also for musical artists, for copyright
owners, and for listeners like me who enjoy the wide variety of choices
available via Internet radio.

I respectfully request that Congress look into this matter and initiate
action to prevent it. As the CRB rate decision is retroactive to January
1, 2006, please understand that time is of the essence — as the immediate
impact of this decision could silence many free Internet radio stations
forever.

DI.fm: Digitally Imported Blog Archive

so in my spare time i’ve been sitting in on the mootools (a javascript library) IRC room…and have been in on a bit of conversations here and there.

There are several times where i’m just oblivious to alot of what they’re talking about…mostly because this group has advanced so far into the development of the project, its a bit hard to catch up for a noob. i’m sure some can, but i havent been so lucky, i think mostly because i’m just not familiar with javascript completely anyway. i’ve dabbled alot and restructured js code to work the way i want…but that doesn’t mean i know javascript.

So i’ve decided to do my own toolkit, framework, library or whatever you want to call it. I’m in no way trying to compete with other toolkits, so please don’t bash on what i’m doing…although constructive criticism is always welcome. This is totally for learning purposes, and i’m just making it available to anybody else who could find it useful.

It’s still a work in progress, and all i’ve got so far is a set of tools for divElements, ie innerHTML, border, background, etc.

grab the source using svn:

svn co http://dev.jadecell.org/jadecellScript

or directly here

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

(To the Xangans, just a warning, this post is geek related)

A co-worker sent me a link that revealed a new technology that to alot of people i’ve talked to, all have said the same thing: “Wow, it’s like minority report.” Pretty close, as this is leading us right into that direction.

I didn’t have a favorite to this technology, but if i had to pick one, it would probably have to be either the Map/Globe, or the layered flying lights.

Here’s the link
TED Talks: Jeff Han

So I got this phone a couple months ago. It was a toss up between this and the sidekick 3. The needs i wanted to fullfill were
1) QWERTY keyboard
2) Full Web Browser (not just WAP)
3) Email (IMAP specifically)
4) Camera
5) EDGE speed
6) Instant Messaging
The cingular 8125 seemed to fit the bill, and I was happy with cingular already so I decided to stay (plus a friend who works for cingular was able to hook it up).

I was mostly disappointed, when i setup my new account, with the price of the plans. Cingular offered unlimited data for 39.99 (more than most other places, especially for the sidekick at $20), and then the minute plans at 39.99 for 450 minutes (what happened to 600 minutes??). Would have liked more, but I don’t even use my 450 minutes every month, and i always have a ton of rollover to spare.

So like any person with a new phone, I played with it for a few days to get a good feeling for how it worked. Here are my bits for the different applications and functions of the phone:

1. Camera worked pretty well (for a camera phone) except for in dark rooms. They do have a function for this, but it uses aloooot of memory and actually slows down the phone (it’s even hung on me for 20 minutes until i finally just took the battery out and restarted the phone).
2. Web Browser I was not too thrilled about using internet explorer and decided to go with Opera, but I stuck with IE because Opera wanted some extra cash to have it run. Opera was indeed faster, but i was not ready to spend the money just yet. The internet speed was definitely NOT up to what the EDGE technology claims to specify and i was getting really upset at that. I thought maybe this was just due to my location, and didnt seek a remedy until later which i will mention later on.
3. Taskbar With Windows Mobile 5, the act of closing an application is actually not true, it leaves the application open, but not visible to you. So if you open up several applications (especially on accident) your system (phone) starts to lag because everything is still loaded up. So I went to seek a remedy for this. I found Magic Button which makes somewhat of a taskbar, and lets you physically close the application out of memory. This became very handy, and am glad it was free!
4. QWERTY keyboard is not bad, but i found that i can type faster on the number pad (which this phone doesnt really have) without T9. It works, but i’m not exactly fond of how it works.
5. Instant messaging No instant messaging client came with the phone so i went on to search for one. The free one that i found was Agile messenger which lets you log in to AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Google (which i have banned, see last post), Jabber/XMPP, and more. I had planned to keep this open all the time, but since the network was sooo flaky, it became more of a pain to have to physically reconnect everytime, and i was not receiving all the messages. so i dropped it and found iMov Messenger. This one was ok, but only let you connect to a Jabber server. this is when i discovered that you can log into a Jabber/XMPP server and add functions to connect to AIM, Yahoo, MSN, etc, but you need to physically do it on the server through another client (on gnome/linux i found one called Gajim). Another thing was to find a Jabber server that would actually let you add these networks to your account which took me about 2-3 days just to find. So alot of work was put into this which i finally completed, but in the end was not happy with the iMov client. Random noises would spring up, it was inconsistent with logins, and i just found it to be annoying after awhile. So i dropped it and said to hell with messaging.
6. ActiveSync I don’t use windows, so to do any kind of Sync was just not possible unless i wanted to spend extra money for a client on the Mac (none were available at all for linux). I declined to do this and just said screw syncing my phone with my computer. Also cingular has some proprietary email client that is supposed to be very good, but only works with windows and activesync. So in my opinion, this is not very good and have declined to use it.
7. Email/Text I set myself up an email account made for me to check on my phone. Thankfully the phone supported IMAP and this is one thing that it does, and does pretty well. I’m not a huge fan of POP/POP3, which this phone also supports, but could be handy one day. Also Text messaging works pretty well, saves my outgoing messages as well as my incoming, which alot of my phones in the past didnt do a very good job of.
8. The case that came with the phone eventually got on my nerves due to its bulkiness and the fact that it sat the phone sideways on your belt instead of longways. So I ended up just putting the phone in my pocket and i’ve found it to be more safe there than in that damn case.
9. EDGE suxx!! well, thats what i thought originally. Turns out that Cingular by default connects to its own DNS servers, which is very poor. This is in fact the reason why, if anybody has used this phone and has complained, the internet is slow. I changed over the DNS servers to OpenDNS (the link sends to you to the instructions of how to change over the DNS servers on any windows mobile 5 palm or phone), and now the connection is solid. Now Agile Messenger works alot better, but i’m having issues with XMPP, or atleast my jabber server is not allowing me to connect to it through my phone, but AIM, Yahoo, and MSN are working nicely.

A coworker purchased a sprint phone and was able to connect his macbook via bluetooth to the internet, and was able to get pings at about 20-80ms, I did the same with mine, and was able to get them at about 100-300ms, which is ‘alright’, but if i ever do need to connect to the internet in a hurry when theres no wifi available, i’m all set.

Some other useful things for the Cingular 8125:

• pRSSreader a free RSS reader for WM5.
• Agile Messenger a free multiplatform Instant Messenger
• StreamCenter a site that is WAP viewable to search and play your favorite Radio Stream
• HowardForums a specific link to some handy tools and customizations for the 8125