hello, typepad

Which is the worst of the iApps?

Tim O' Reilly: iPhoto
Cory Doctorow: iCal
David Jacobs: iSync

iSync is terribly broken.

iSync 1.5 is the worst thing Apple's released in 5 years. 1.1 worked well, 1.2 introduced some quirks, and 1.5 is a disaster.

Here are the worst bugs:

• Half the time, iSync doesn't close it's open bluetooth connection to the 3650, you have to shut down and restart your phone.


• Addresses are often duplicated. It's not clear why, but it happens every sync. Raking through my address book is like hitting the hitting plastic alligators with a mallet.


• Companys that aren't marked with the (new) "this is a company" are automatically merged with the alphabetically adjacent contact with a name. If a few cards like this are adjacent (or are duplicated, you end up with three mangled address cards.


• Twice now my iSync "internal database" has been corrupted, which means you have to rollback to your last backup and reconstruct your new contacts.


• Sync, and then sync again right away, you'll find there is often one more modification to make. I can not identify what it is.


• The 3650 and iCal treat repeating dates differently, so there are "conflicts" to resolve at every sync.


• Syncing a 3650 with multiple computers (same .Mac account) causes all appointments synced to the phone to duplicate. There is no way to roll this back.


• Calendars that are hosted on .Mac are often duplicated (with the same name!) totally arbitrarily.


• It's very difficult to delete contacts, and often deleted contacts come back double!


• A few of my contacts had the mysterious note "0" in their address book entry. These contacts didn't sync.

What's especially frustrating about some of these bugs is that they're inconsistent, which makes me think something is very wrong with the basic program. For now, I continue to use iSync because i remember when it worked near perfectly, and also because it acts as a Zen exercise during my day. For now, I've turned off syncing calendars.

There is a new "relationship" field which offers some promise, and perhaps a hint of the Address Book / Buddy List to service conversion that Tim O'Reilly suggests. I'm hoping that these hiccups are obstacles long the road to a more ambitious technology.

Many G5s.

O' Reilly's Mac Dev Center and Mac Slash are hosting detailed summaries of the talk Virginia Tech super-cluster architect Dr. Srinidhi Varadarajan gave today at Macworld Expo. Imagine getting to buy 1100 G5s on-line at the Apple Store! Processing power is growing at such a mind boggling rate, in 10 years every permutation of Chess may have been played and analyzed. "Like Skynet," my co worker Paul says.

That was fast!

Frustrated at sparsity of laundromats downtown, Kathryn is flummoxed. A message flashes across my screen.

i could always just keep buying more clothing.

A New Yorker is born!

Elizabeth Smart

Vain man that I am, I was browsing my referer logs, and I came upon the Amanda's excellent blog hammer and peg. I've been silently fuming over the sensationalist coverage of the Elizabeth Smart case and worse, the coverage of the coverage of the case. After reading Amanda's rant on the topic, I'm happy I'm not alone.

hello, google #2

Google engineers and executives don't give many interviews, they're a quiet company. This will be convenient since they'll soon enter their "quiet period", during which time we'll no doubt accuse them of everything under the sun for no other reason than that they're wildly successful and nearly all powerful. Anyway, VP of Engineering Wayne Rosen recently gave a great interview to David Brown from the ACM. They talk about a lot of topics ranging from hardware to software to the creative working environment in Google. The closing quote is revealing about Google's thoughts on the semantic web:

The day will come when Google won't be a search engine anymore, because everything will be searchable. So, instead, we'll have to algorithmically find you the good stuff. It will be an up-leveling of our ranking function, if you will, from what's the best document to what's the best, most well-formed knowledge on the subject.

I basically came to Google because it struck me what an incredibly neat thing this was to spend a large fraction of my remaining work years on.

New Opera

Opera 6.1 for Series 60 phones is out. It no longer requires more memory than the 3650 had available by default, which is good.

update: Rael has a nice breakdown of the phone's installation process. One piece of advice - associate .sis files with the Bluetooth File Exchange so it goes straight to your phone.

Opera is clearly a look at the future of Series 60 applications (or Series 90, whichever ends up more widely adopted). It's clean and fast, and I don't mind that it takes up a lot of memory. I assume Nokia phones will soon ship with 256 MB of memory out of the box. I used it to peak at ymdi.org, a relatively complicated XHTML/CSS complaiant web page. It rendered multiple CSS files perfectly and handled my cookies and registration without a hiccup.

Louis v. Google

Louis Vuitton is suing Google for selling texts ads that bear his name. We've already considered whether or not Google violates the Creative Commons license with adsense. On a much broader scale, does it violate copyright by making money off any copyrighted or patented proeprties? I know the CNN graphic artists don't usually pull out all the stops for the "biztech" section, but I really think they could have a field day with this one!

Hamptons Film Festival 2003

I'll be at the Hampton's Film Festival for work this weekend. Kibra is moderating a panel discussing youth media and its impact.

I'll post my pictures in the sidebar.

Raelity Bites

Rael's cellphone page has a lot of the links I've been storing on stickies.

Ari's Street Art Album

Ari's new street art album is beautiful.

I've also taken a few photos of street art:
Boy Butter (Taken only so that Lia would refrain from ripping it off it's rightful perch on the subway entrance)
Take Care of the Little Ones (thumbnailed above)
Pretty Pumpkins
Something about Revolutions and Love
I can't tell if it's MJ or Prince
Stop Staring at My Tits (My all time favorite subway graffiti.)
Crispin

Overheard This Morning

How does it feel when I am hovering over you, and you know that I am about to give you the worst tickling of your life? Do you see the fingers wiggling? Do you fear them coming closer and closer and closer?

Surrender!

With Quicktime 6.4's release, you should have less trouble watch .3gpp files such as our own surrender.

The 3660

The heir apparent to the 3650, the 3660 (3620 in the US), has been announced. Good news: nicer screen. Bad news: They're losing the round keypad I love so dear.

Creating Commons

On the legal front: David Galbraith wondered out loud whether Google was breaching Creative Commons' licenses by generating revenue off of weblog content. Kottke remaindered the link, and an interesting back and forth ensued between Galbraith and Cory Doctorow over the role of copyright in the weblogging world going forward.

On the technology front: Creative Commons has outlined nine applications they'd like technologists to develop to help make the semantic web and creative commons work better together. Currently, there are only six sites and applications listed on the "ccapps" page, and I'm really proud that YMDi is one of them. In a year, I bet there will be sixty, and if some of those nine tools get built it could easily be six hundred. CC's developer documentation is a good place to start if you're interested but still a little confused.

I Red Sox NY

Someone put this on a t-shirt!

poof

I'm wondering if Nokia's lack of concern for the consumer and this "maximum power-consumption mode" business might have something to do with the exploding battery problem, adding an explosive deterrent for those who don't wish to pay $17 for "security" features that they don't need.

With Nokia phones exploding left and right, Jason Kottke wonders if it's because of crippled hardware.

Mail on the 3650.

Nathan Torkington got a new 3650 and wrote a detailed note on setting up the mail application. He had success using MMS which is surprising - it has only ever worked for me via T-zones, although I'm using IMAP, which relies on a consistent connection moreso than POP does (I think).

But whatever protocol or connection type you use, it's going to be slow in most consumer devices for the forseeable future. There's a need for a good integrated mail/RSS browser.

15" Powerbook on Ars Technica

John Siracusa purchashed the nearly same Powerbook I did and has written up a review at Ars Technica.

John (and many others) have had the same "latch problem" I did, but doesn't want to send it for repairs:

I don't want my brand new PowerBook opened up and diddled with unnecessarily. And I have my doubts that a repair person would be doing anything other than diddling. At this point, no one knows the exact cause of my particular latch problem. The last thing I need is for my PowerBook to be disassembled and reassembled repeatedly while the repair technician tries to figure it out. I also don't think I'd get a replacement. Instead, I think the technician would eventually figure out the "firm closure" trick and declare the problem "fixed."

He also had one dead pixel and the "bright spots" problem, exactly like I did. Send it in, right away. DHL picked up my computer on a Wednesday afternoon and it was on my desk Friday morning at 10 am, with a perfect screen and a working latch.

What is moblogging?

Johnny 13: How does moblogging work?

Kathryn: moblogging:

1. dj and friends are hanging out
2. friends beg dj not to take photo
3. dj takes it anyway
4. dj posts it to hello.typepad.com from phone
5. dj gets mad at typepad's confirmation message

It's really, really addictive, in case you couldn't tell by that monster sidebar.

Red Sox highlights: Game 1: Red Sox fans at the Cafe Riviera in the Eighth and Ninth innings. Game 3: At the Riviera again in the Ninth and Tenth innings. Game 5: Jude in the eighth and ninth innings.

Other recent highlights: LES Softball, Ben (creaky) imagines a restaurant in our garden, cute graffiti on the Manhattan bridge, amazing veggie dim sum and Ben talks into a sock.

At creaky: Alaina and I after running 1 of 13.1 miles, Me on the trapeze at Circus Sports and Jude and Murakami.

Bonus! The 3650 also takes video with sound in 10 second bits. Inspired by World New York's karaoke post, here's Ben singing surrender with a chorus of myself, Irene, Cielo, Eric and Becca.

Double Bonus! At 1:00 pm, Jude is still asleep. Adriana has a fever and her computer just started smoking. (that's bad).

Red Sox Bonus! The Kevin Millar/Bruce Springsteen video.

Squeezing the Elderly for Profits

Cedar Point (and other related parks) are eliminating their discounts for senior citizens.

"That would be the same as taking away your bread at our age," said John Schmitt, 72, adding that the couple's two season passes would cost almost twice as much next year.

Cedar Point is easily the greatest amusement park in the world, but this seems ridiculous.

Just Wondering

KABLOG

What is the difference between a chit and a chad?

Red Sox Village

Last night a few of us headed out to Red Sox fan haven Riviera Cafe & Sports Bar to root on the Red Sox against the Athletics. Three summers ago no Yankees fans were around on a Sunday afternoon and so a few Red Sox fans asked if their game could be on the big TV. The vibe was great and so the next night they invited some friends, and among that group was a writer for the Boston Weekly, who wrote that a 'safe space' for Red Sox fans had been created in NYC. The rest is history.

Tyler, a bartender from Atlanta who roots for the Braves and against the Yankees (so usually for the Red Sox) told me it was the busiest night in the bar's history. I can only imagine it was also the loudest and near the latest (although once a Bruins game there went to 3:30AM). The staff generously kept the bar open until the game's amazing conclusion, Ramón Hernandez's game winning suicide squeeze with the bases loaded. The noise in the bar dropped from a defeaning roar to utter silence as everyone quickly filed out.

My photos start in the sixth inning, click previous to move through the evening. Their's a nice radio program about the Riviera over at the ironically named onlyagame.org, featuring the quote: "It's like the Boston Tea Party, but in New York."

Insert Long Dock Joke Here

Kottke is the new Metafilter, except only he gets to post. It's great. In response to the What's on Your Dock? article, Jason's asked that we comment with links to our docks. The verdict: Mac users move the dock around the screen but have more or less the same stuff in it (except Adriana). Mine is anchored in the corner and has the "shadowy" icons for hidden applications thanks to TinkerTool. I have magnification set to be very slight.

The Applescript on the end sends what iTunes is playing into my iChat away message.

In other Apple news:

I finally got my new Powerbook last Friday (after two weeks of Hurricane/DHL Airborne delays), but it's already been sent for repairs since it came with dead pixels and the infamous 'latch problem.' The packaging is indeed beautiful, but I wonder how much it costs to develop and produce. I would rather have $20 and an ugly box on top of my bookshelf collecting dust than just a beautiful box on top of my bookshelf collecting dust. Of course, that $20 could also go towards a QA person to make sure they don't ship broken Powerbooks!

Here's my take on some of the other Powerbook issues, briefly covered at Macintouch.

• My laptop, running at maximum performance for a few hours, never got loud or hot. The 12"s in the Apple Store, though, are still scorching.


• The Battery length was great. I used up only 60% of my battery with three hours of use and one hour of sleep. Airport, Bluetooth and the "Energy Saver" maximum performance settings were all on.


• I've migrated from mac to mac a few times at home and work, and I can't believe how easy it is in OS X. I just drag over Applications, Documents, and mailboxes.


• iSync works nearly perfectly, all the time. If you use Macs and home and work, this alone is worth the price of .Mac.

I like the look of iBlog, which I got for free from .Mac. It's the first OS X blog publishing software that feels like a desktop application, not a desktop application trying to be a web page. The default template is a blatant rip-off of the MT 2.x white, gold and blue, which is sad. It's funny that MT's old default layout is what many people associate with "the look of blog." I can't wait until iBlog speaks Atom.

Lastly, here's Adriana's first "on-the-go" playlist:

ballade de melody nelson
bonnie and clyde
ballad of cable (calexico)
painted from memory (cassandra wilson)
a summer song (chad and jeremy)
lose yourself (eminem)
halleluyah (jeff buckley)
my bionic eyes (liz phair)
jolene (white stripe's dolly parton cover)