diego's weblog

As we wait with baited breath for the next move in the Microsoft/Yahoo saga, Marc just posted a must-read entry on what happens if microsoft goes fully hostile. Meanwhile techcrunch has some speculation.

Another interesting question is what exactly is Microsoft buying with this, given that many people would leave, many have already left, and there's nearly complete overlap on their technologies and products (see here) and in most cases full integration (rather than an orderly migration) would be a nightmare that anyone in their right mind would avoid. The easiest would be to just point yahoo.com to live.com, automatically migrate accounts, and you're done. Well, of course, not really, but you get what I'm saying.

If so, this would be the most expensive domain name acquisition ever. Business.com for $7.5 million during the bubble? Peanuts, I say. :)

Nothing like some breaking news to awake you from a blog slumber. Russ announced on his blog the end of Mowser.

Sad news, and I sympathize. Russ and Mike are buddies so I've followed the travails of Mowser closer than, well, almost anybody, so this also is a bit more personal for me. I've been there. My previous startup, clevercactus, also ran out of money after having put everything I had into it, and I experienced something similar (although a bit less drastic) in terms of financial impact. A lot of us are used to abundance and generally have absolutely no idea how stressful it is (to put it mildly) to have to choose what food to buy to avoid breaking the bank.

The good news in all this is that failure is a HUGE learning opportunity, something that isn't said enough. Throughout the process you're consumed by trying to make it work, but once it's done you can look back and find a lot of things to do differently in the future. Yes, in the future -- I don't believe that you can really say that you'd 'do things differently' since generally we make the best decisions we can with the information we have available at the time. Additionally, the next step (after a period of recovery) after having put everything into something that didn't work can actually be very refreshing and lead to amazing opportunities, like it did with me.

There is also some solace to be found in the online response. When you work with a team of a few people or more you can help each other, but when you work on your own or with a partner it's a harder situation, and the online response helps a lot. In the case of mowser, it's been at the top of techmeme for a while now and it's been covered and discussed all over the place, in part because of Russ' statement that 'the mobile web is dead.' (More on that later), but also due to comments of support.

As for Mowser, it's online for the time being and as Mike says they're looking to sell the site or code, which is in my mind a very possible outcome. It would be cool to see it live on in some form.

You wanted to hire Mike, didn't you? Well, too late! He's joined Mowser. Awesome! Btw, I took that picture. I demand royalties. Royalties, I say! Ok, maybe I didn't take the picture but I take credit anyway since it's in my house. :)

In celebration of this momentous occasion, I've added a link to the Mowser-powered mobile version of my blog to the left column. And there was much rejoicing.

Paraphrasing Kent Brockman: I, for one, welcome our new mobile overlords.

Mike is leaving AdMob, which means he's looking for the next cool mobile thing to do. Emphasis on cool. And mobile. In both cases, he knows what he's talking about. Just call him up. But hurry, there's only one of him! :-)

Okay, after some more time with the device, here's a few more thoughts (Prompted by Kyle, who started asking questions on IM. So it's really his fault :)). Again, in no particular order...

• The navigation buttons are really really well positioned. It's very natural to use one side or the other to navigate forward and back, even if when you first look at it (and even when you first use it) you think "this ain't gonna work." It does work. Very cool
• Newspapers are not good for the Kindle yet. Three big problems:
  1. Each day's edition shows up as a new "Book" in the main tab, which sounds great at first, but after the first week half the screen is New York Times editions. Then you have to go into the content manager and start deleting... not great. They should automatically go away, otherwise it's a pain.
  2. Another problem (less worrisome than the other one) is that with a lot of small articles you have to use the navigation more, which is less than ideal--and there's a dearth of pictures, which makes the newspaper be a little less interesting.
  3. Finally, the updates. It gets updated with the actual contents of the printed edition. At the beginning of the day. After that, no more updates. Come on! What's the point of the always-on EVDO if you don't get daily updates for the newspapers? Newspapers are real-time these days. This bad mix of digital and meatspace is not great.
  So, the newspaper subscription is not going to work, I may try it again in the future. On the plus side, you get a 14-day trial, so I can cancel it without harm done to my bank account. :)
• Magazines. Two types here: image-heavy, like Time, which don't really work given the screen and the fact that, well, there are almost no images in the "Kindle edition", and those like The Atlantic which have long articles and few images, which are perfect for the device. The Economist (if it was available) would be another great choice methinks.
• Blogs. No, I didn't even try subscribing to a blog. I will though, just to see what the UI is, but I'm not paying $2 a month to read rants. Sorry. 20 cents a month? Maybe. $2 is too much.
• Power. A final interesting point is that I normally, as I do with the Sony reader, I'd leave this on all the time, since the screen draws no power. However, Amazon has decided to put in a screensaver on the thing, so if you leave it on it does suck the amps, few as they may be. I suppose that it's inevitable given the always-on wireless, but a screensaver? Probably one of those things where you have to pretend that you have a screensaver to avoid support calls from people worried that the display would be "burned" with the current image (not possible with eInk). Anyway. As a result of the screensaver I find myself turning it on and off, which is a bit unnecessary. I haven't charged it in a week, and it still has about half the charge :).

• The display is clearly better than the one on the Sony Reader PRS-500 (first gen): faster refresh, better contrast. I imagine it is on par with that of the PRS-505.
• The navigation metaphor is really interesting, and quite unique. There's this metallic-looking strip on the side that identifies lines/paragraphs/sections (depending on context) and that provides visual feedback of operations that take time. In particular, it seems to draw the eye's attention while the page is "flipping" which as I mentioned before is slightly distracting at first (but then is not noticeable). The strip is probably quartz-based (like the liquid crystal in digital watches) since it updates too fast to be an eink variant.
• Specifically, the navigation metaphor mixes the physical with the virtual in a strange, but appealing way. There's the idea of "moving" this almost physical marker (in the form of the metallic strip) to select what you want and then click or press enter to "activate" it depending on context. This is in contrast to the navigation Sony did in their reader, which uses the ink itself to mark selection and is clunky and slow. I don't know yet if the Kindle's navigation is genius or folly yet, but it's definitely original, and it's worked well so far.
• The purchase system is so simple, it's evil. :) Just click, click, and you're done. The book is there in seconds and you've spent the money (they do have a link in the final page that lets you back out of the transaction if you want, which is great). Between this, the auto-configuration (the device came pre-configured with my account out of the box) and wireless connectivity included and working out of the box, Kindle sets a new bar for out-of-the-box experience, even going beyond iPod (and I don't say that lightly). Great job guys!
• Speaking of out-of-the-box experience -- Mike was wondering what happens if you buy the device for someone else. Well, by default it's tied to your account, but as soon as you buy it you get access to a page that lets you "unlink" the device and then you'd have to "link it" to the other Amazon account (not sure if "linking" and "unlinking" are the terms Amazon uses, I don't think so :)).
• Also cool is that you can link more than one Kindle to a single Amazon account, in effect sharing books across them, say for the whole family.
• Web navigation is decent, if limited. Russ came over and we geeked out with the device for a bit, looking at the user agent (Mozilla-Compatible, NetFront) and other headers it was sending. Amazon is proxying the content, which isn't a surprise. Net access is fairly fast (and free!), and Mowser works great on it! Faster even though in effect it's going through two proxies (Amazon, then Mowser).
• In Default Mode, the browser ignores CSS/styles, and it behaves more like a limited-capabilities mobile browser. But turning on Advanced Mode enables them. Oh, and you can turn on Javascript support too! (off by default).
• Emailing content in works really well: just send an email to your chosen email address for the kindle with an attachment that is the document/images you want to send, and after a few minutes it shows up in the device. It's also available, properly transcoded, in your Amazon online library. Really well done. There's a $0.10 (10 cent) charge to do that, but you can also do the transcoding for free and upload the file manually through USB.
• USB mode is simple: just plug it in, and it shows up as a disk, disabling any other functions in the device. You can dump PRC, MOBI, TXT, and Amazon's own AZW files (whatever those are). As a quick test I downloaded the PRC version of Cory Doctorow's "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" put it in the documents folder, and presto, there it was.
• You can also download the AZW files from Amazon's digital library to your PC and then manage them from there, adding them/removing them to the device through USB. Very interesting. Amazon is acting as a sort of automatic backup, but in theory you could do away with Amazon completely.
• Oh, and yeah, some of the navigation keys in the border tend to be pressed a bit too often by mistake. Probably something I'll snap out of, but if it was me, I'd make them not go all the way out to the edge, which exposes them more.

Lightning Quick Impressions

• The Packaging is cool, very Apple-like. It's like a book! Nicely done.
• The device has charge out of the box. Boot it up, and it already knows my name. Yes, some corner of my mind says that there's privacy concerns in there somewhere, but there's something incredibly cool about opening a box, turning on a device and having it know who you are. I'm sure I'll recover and think it's creepy later. Or maybe not.
• Flip pages. There's seemingly two dozen "next" and "previous" buttons and ways of navigating. I wonder if I'll be hitting them by mistake all the time. That's definitely very much not like Apple.
• A couple of excerpts and the NYT, which I had configured yesterday, are already in the device, synced. Nice.
• Finally, I go to the "Experimental" menu (the menu bar selector is weird, but cool!) and choose Basic Web Browser. Enter my blog's address. It loads it. Holy moly. Fast. No configuration. Nothing. I have to collect my jaw from the floor. There's something to be said for seamless, and this rivals apple.

More later after I play with it some more! In the meantime, check out the unboxing photos in a slideshow, including the browser pointed at this blog -- powered by a Ning Network i just created. :)

Russ continues in his vein of reviewing products that he hasn't used based on reviews that others have done and photos from the web :-)), and explains that eink-based ebook readers like the Sony PRS-500 series haven't taken off because they're not pure black text on white background.

Well.

As it happens, I own -and use although less than I want to, for reasons I'll explain later- a PRS-500 (the first generation, the photo that Russ has in his post is of the PRS-505).

Here's a photo of the PRS-500 next to a paperback book under natural light that I just took a few minutes ago (sorry for the quality, but image sharpness is not the goal here).

Is the paperback black-on-white? No.
Is the eink display darker than the book? Yes.
But is the difference enough to "turn me off" from reading? Absolutely not.

Keep in mind this is a first-gen device, a year old (it was first shown publicly at CES on January 2006, and released in the Fall), and that the new PRS-505 has more levels of grayscale (8, vs. 4 in the original) and even higher contrast.

The difference is, in fact, negligible. Under direct light, which is how most of us read, there is basically no difference at all. In any case, books are not Black on white -- the best background is a brownish-light-gray and if you pick up any book and look at the background you'll see that they rarely have pure white background (tech and academic books being the main exception).

Another red herring that people that "use" the device for 30 seconds at a store mention is how you can see the screen "flipping" the page, which is definitely a little disconcerting at first. When you're actually reading for extended periods, this becomes completely a non-issue.

So, if not because of the screen, why haven't these readers taken off yet?

First, choice -- there aren't many products like this. There's basically the Sony Reader and I think one more random manufacturer selling one (I seem to remember seeing it, but can't really say for sure, which means I probably made it up). This means there's no competition in the market, and in particular lower volumes for a new technology like eInk which keep component prices high.

Second, price. $300-400 is nothing to sneeze at, but crucially the price of books for these devices is just ridiculous. They cost the same as the physical versions and they come with DRM which limits where you can use them. The book publishers are facing the same problem as the music companies and movie studios and they're reacting the same way, trying to fight digital instead of embracing it (and the lower distribution costs it entails) instead plunging their heads in the sand and hoping that the storm will pass. Yeah, that's not gonna work.

Finally, uploading arbitrary text content sucks. This one is a bit more subtle and in my mind perhaps the one that gets to be close to a "deal breaker". Say I have a PDF of something that I'd like to throw into the device to read. I have to fight with the software, which in the case of Sony is a pathetic iTunes knock-off that looks as if it was put together by a bunch of 5-year olds with crayons (yeah, it's that bad, also Windows-only), but more importantly, the reader is not smart enough to do the right thing with arbitrary PDF. It scales the PDF down until the whole page is visible, margins and all, which means, in 99% of the cases, that a PDF created for letter-sized paper gets shrunk down to paperback. Not very usable. Exporting the thing as text and then uploading that works marginally better, but you end up with sentences broken in the wrong places as well as a lot of extraneous content such as page headers showing up in the middle of a page (lots of Project Gutenberg files are like this). Similarly, converting webpages, etc, is a massive pain. Ideally I'd just take web content and drop it on the device for reading later, but that's not how it works, and it completely gets in the way of me using it more often. (As an aside, being able to take notes is something I find myself wanting to do all the time, I do that with post-its on real books, so a solution for that would be nice as well).

If books where cheaper, and I mean significantly, than they are today, and if taking web/other content to the device was a no-brainer, then we'd be much closer to seeing these portable readers become accepted and used by many more users.

I've mentioned before that I don't have cable anymore -- just AppleTV -- and as a result I've also organized my digital library much better to have access to it in remote mode (through the iTunes on the MacPro).

One of the problems of iTunes video importing is the information on the files. iTunes uses pretty much the same set of fields for music and videos, which is kind of insane, and especially insane in the case of TV shows. So instead of having a field for the Season of a show, aTV has to use the "Album" field, in a particular format ("24, Season 3") to be recognized. Not great.

What's even zanier is that if you happen to take a particular DVD collection you have for a TV show and rip it to see on aTV, and then import it into iTunes, the episodes show up... in the Movies section. Ok, so that's the default. Now suppose you save the files (pristine aTV-friendly-encoded MP4s) somewhere else and want to reimport them into iTunes... all the metadata is kept, as it should... except for the "TV Show" setting which reverts back to movie.

Frustrating to say the least. :-)

To fix this there's some options. There's Parsley is Atomically Delicious which will do the job, but the tool I use the most is Set Video Kind of Selected from Doug's Applescripts (who also has a bunch of other useful stuff). This works great, although it seemed to create a tendency to crash iTunes when running in the middle of an aTV sync, but I'll blame iTunes for that one. :)

Recommended!

So today I got new monitors, and I'm experimenting with a new setup, above (note: the picture is terrible, I'll update it tomorrow). The two on the left are 30" monitors--note the size of the keyboard in comparison, it's one of those huge MS natural keyboards--, the one on the left in portrait mode is 24". All of this is supported by the Mac Pro, which has two nVidia cards and four (!) DVI ports.

This is mirrored by a three-screen setup at home, but with 20-24-20 inch monitors, to save some space. :)

The biggest advantage is of course the sheer amount of information that you can have up there to support all that messy thinking. My previous setup was one 24" and one 20". I have the main work area in the center and communication (both asynchronous and real-time) to the sides. On the left is iChat (which, connected through Jabber gets me through to all the different transports, but that's a topic for another post) as well as the various chat windows open with ongoing conversations. Speaking of iChat: it sorely lacks window-blinking behavior. It's hard to tell which window has been activated when you've got a message waiting for you when you have that many open :).

I am still not sure if I'll keep this setup or try just with two 30". Believe it or not, I think I feel a little dizzy looking at so much stuff at once.

A few weeks ago I went down to my local Comcast office and returned my Motorola DVR/cable box. I had been planning on doing it for some time now and finally I found the brief window I needed to make the trip. :) No more cable for me!

Why did I take such a drastic step you ask? The answer is, largely, cost, along with incredibly annoying little things that degraded whatever was left of the "experience" down to continuous suffering. That, and an AppleTV finally providing a good alternative to cable, as I detail below...

A book that came out a week or so ago was Managing Humans: Biting and Humurous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager, written by Michael Lopp, aka Rands. Here's Rands' entry announcing on the book.

I've met Michael and read Rands, and they're both wonderful people :). I ordered the book as soon as it came out. I will confess that my schedule this week has prevented me from reading more than a couple of chapters but I know what's in there, and it's great (a lot of the book is based on entries from Rands in Repose). This one's a must-read, especially if you share with us that strange, high-speed, high-adrenaline, manic, fun space otherwise known as the internet/software industry.

One thing that is not in the book is the world renowned :) Rands Vegas System. So, that, you'll have to read on the weblog, and you should, because it's a riot.

Anyway, back to the book: go get it!

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about my macbook crashing (or rather, freezing) constantly. Sometimes it would freeze right after booting, sometimes later, sometimes when you left it alone for a while, sometimes when waking up from sleep.

At that point I reinstalled OS X from scratch and hoped that was it. Alas, it wasn't. Very soon afterwards the Mac started freezing again, with a vengeance. In fact, the next day after the fix (a Monday) my Mac Pro at the office also went out to lunch and the 10.4.8 update had to be reinstalled from scratch through SSH. I thought I was cursed!

Then the Mac Pro came to life and I continued with the Mac entertainment at home. The poor thing would lock up like there was no tomorrow. I started to be paranoid about saving files again, something I hadn't done since switching over from Windows a few months ago, and I was also getting more than annoyed.

Then it hit me: the Mac was only freezing at home. At the office, it had never frozen. Not once. It was only at home that this was happening.

I had already ruled out software: the Mac Pro had exactly the same config, and the freezes happened also on a different Macbook with the same disk. Disk checks showed the disk was fine.

So it had to be environmental.

And what was the only difference between home and the office? That's right the router. In February or so I got a Linksys WRT-350N to use 802.11n, which even if it's not "official" sounded (from reading the IEEE proceedings of meetings -- yeah, I do that sometimes, I'm that crazy) like it was not going to experience major changes and so was a relatively safe bet. I had been using 802.11n and all was well.

But that was the only difference with the office -- I've been using the same encryption, WPA-PSK, so that wasn't it. It had to be 802.11n.

But could a wireless protocol, however badly implemented or incompatible, irreparably hang the machine?

Apparently, yes.

To test the theory, last Sunday I changed the configuration of my router to 802.11g, and since then I've been running the Mac at home with no problems whatsoever, making it sleep, not sleep, disable the display after a while, and so on, with no problems at all.

Turn on Mixed mode in the router (802.11n+g) and the thing locks up again so fast it makes your head spin. Turn on pure 802.11n and OS X seems to whitstand it better, although I had one weird situation with it that I attribute to that as well.

OS X doesn't really let you choose the wireless protocol you're using, at least not in the base options that I've seen. So the Macbook must be going bananas when trying to decide what to do in Mixed Mode, as well as sometimes in pure 802.11n mode (perhaps, I have to confirm this fully).

Anyway, if you have a Macbook or Mac with 802.11n (and the software update for it installed) and you're experiencing weird lockups, take a look at your wireless router and see if it's on Mixed mode. That may be the source of the problems.

Phew!

Ok, ok. So I was gushing in my previous post about the iPhone. Fine. I wasn't trying specifically to be a fanboy (although it ended up sounding like that) but the reality is that I don't have gripes about the phone.

Well, except for one.

If you connect it over Bluetooth to the Mac, it pairs, and they both see each other. But you can't do anything over BT. Nada. Not sync, not send files, not use it as a modem.

Which is funny if you think that the Mac syncs with a good amount of other phones with no problems.

So now I just carry around an iPod sync cable that I had floating out there to sync the phone with my Macbook a couple of times a day. No, it's not a huge deal, but it's cumbersome to have to whip out cables to get the latest calendar updates.

As usual, this has been discussed in various other places. The expectation is that this will work with Leopard. Along with Notes and .Mac sync. An iPhone software update will probably be necessary as well and may address some of these things on its own.

Anyway, there you have it. My one iPhone gripe.:)

PS: the lack of Copy/Paste, which I expected to be a problem, hasn't shown up once. I think it will, but who knows. The fact that the portrait mode doesn't yet work for emails is just slightly weird, but it hasn't gotten in the way so far.

What better way to restart the blog than to drool about a new piece of tech?

I didn't get an iPhone the first day. I didn't get it in the first week. But last Saturday iCaved and went down to the Palo Alto Apple store and got one.

As context, I've been using data services on Cingular (well, AT&T) for a while now, on Windows Mobile phones. I first switched to an HP 6915 last year from a RAZR. The RAZR, of course, is only good to make phone calls and do SMS. The 6915 was great, and it had built-in GPS. Tiny problem: the microphone died. Dead as in not working. No amount of reflashing the thing would fix it. So eventually I got an HTC TyTN which, though bulky, was pretty good. It had UMTS (3G) and when that was on it was great to use mobile IE. The problem was that email, my primary function for the thing, failed to do SMTP transactions while on UMTS, and I never had enough time to figure out why. So I used it mostly as a read-only email device, which is nutty. Additionally, I had to figure out how to sync stuff from the Mac. The Missing Sync for Windows Mobile on OS X solved that problem.

But then...

Then it turns out that the more I used it, the worse it was. Microsoft has crammed UIs basically designed for PCs into tiny screens and processors, and it's terrible. Almost painful to use regularly. And eventually, slow. Really slow.

Enter iPhone. When I got it, I synced it for the first time with my Mac, and it synced my calendars and email accounts from Mail.app. Activation took a few minutes (for me at least, lots of people had been having issues with that). Perfect! Then add some photos and songs, and video, and I was set.

I've gotta say, this last week I've been happy as a clam with the thing. It works well. It's fast. It's beautiful. I am using it all the time to check email, calendar, and listen to music. No need to carry around an iPod anymore. And Safari works like a charm as well.

Speaking of Safari -- check out Mowser's iPhone feeds. They're a must-bookmark! Here's Russ's post describing how he did it.

Anyway, the iPhone makes me smile. I gotta snap out of it! :)

In the meantime, kudos to Apple. They've done it again.