Bagel Belly Blog

PDA perfection?

For some time now, I've been struggling with the curse of every geek: too many devices to carry around, too many devices to choose from. Over the last decade I've tried a myriad of mobile computing, telecom and organiser devices, and not one does everything I need.

Life was much simpler back when all I had was my filofax. You can't argue with a bit of paper and a pen. Other than the fact that if someone nicked it or you lost it, you were stuffed.

Things were pretty good when I had my Pilot 5000. As handy as a filofax, and I could make a copy of the information on my desktop computer. It was a great device.

When I added a mobile phone to the mix things started getting complicated. Do I keep my phone numbers on the phone, or the PDA? The phone I had at the time didn't have an infrared port, so there was no easy way to synchronise the numbers between the two. I opted for transferring all details from the filofax to the PDA, since at least the PDA could be backed-up onto my desktop computer.

A year or so later, I got my first laptop. This added another factor to the mix - store numbers on the desktop computer, the phone, the pda or the laptop? Syncing between laptop and PDA worked fine, so the laptop and PDA became my repository of contact and schedule information. Most of the telephone numbers I rang I could remember, anyway.

Not long after, I got a Palm Vx through work. This was slicker and faster than my old Pilot 5000, but the new design called for new interfaces - the various gadgets I'd bought for my P5000 were no use! That really annoyed me. I couldn't even use my old P500 cradle at home as a spare.

I then upgraded my mobile phone to the wonderful Nokia 7110. Through the magic of infrared I could now sync all three devices! Unfortunately, as a linux user, I couldn't synchronise my phone directly with the laptop, but I could go via my PDA and the wonderful GSMTool.

Life was good, but I was running short on space in my pockets. Carrying a PDA and a phone was a little cumbersome, especially with a heavy laptop on my shoulder too. Syncing my phone to my PDA, my PDA to my laptop, and then my PDA to my phone again was a pain. I decided to get a keyboard for the Palm Vx, so I could leave the laptop behind. No chance! Because Palm in their wisdom changed the interface design on the new generation of Palms for the second time (the m500 series), add-ons like keyboards for the Vx are now difficult to come by and far too expensive. I swore I'd never buy another Palm.

The [Sony Ericcson T68i/Nokia 6610/Nokia 3650] seemed likely to solve all my problems, with built-in calendaring and contacts as well as infrared. Unfortunately, syncing them to a linux laptop didn't work very well. So now my phone is the sole repository of contact information again.

Which brings us to the present, where Handspring have brought out the Trio 600. It looks good, and it represents the best of both worlds - a mobile phone and a PalmOS pda, and a keyboard.

Unfortunately, I don't like Palm (who own Handspring), for exactly the same reasons as Andrew Oliver. And I doubt the future of Palm for the same reasons as Russell Beattie.

Argh. What to do?

Patents revisited

After lengthy debate, the votes are in on the EU software patent debacle, and opinion is divided over just how good or bad the result is. The legislation got through, but so did many of the limiting amendments proposed by the Free Software community. Time will tell, but on the whole I think it could have been a lot worse.

Steven suggests: this should be countered through open source licenses, i.e. by adding clauses which disallow companies that abuse patent law for their own good to use a given open source project.

Unfortunately this is not an option - if you did this, you wouldn't be releasing free/libre open source software. All of the open source definitions have a "non-discriminatory" clause in them - for the FSFE, it's clause 4. The OSI is a little more specific with clause 5.

The idea of non-discriminatory open source makes a lot of sense. Once you start disallowing usage of your software, it's difficult to know where to stop. Do you disallow companies that abuse patent law? The companies that support them? Companies that use their software? Let's prove we're better than them by not stooping to their level!

Going North

Vodafone have just announced an exclusive deal with Eidos, giving them rights to distribute three Tomb Raider games on mobile phones, as well as ring tones, screensavers and wallpapers.

This has been a good month for Vodafone, with their shares climbing 9%. Unfortunately for them, there's been even better growth for MM02, who have caught up and now overtaken - this month alone they've gone up 15%.

Disclaimer: I know bugger all about the stock market. Don't take what I say as financial advice. I think both Vodafone and O2 suck.

Shooting yourself in the foot

Did I mention I hate the record industry?

I was just wandering around Amazon, updating my wishlist (inspired by one of my contemporaries - born on the same day as me), when I noticed the new Dido album is out at the end of this month. Fantastic! I'm a big fan of Dido, and I've been looking forward to the new album.

And then this: This CD includes anti-copying technology that is intended to prevent unlawful copying of the CD with a PC. This may affect playability of the CD on certain computer devices such as PCs and gaming platforms.

If I buy a CD, it rarely makes it onto my hifi. It's more usually copied onto my laptop and played at home, work, on the train or wherever else I feel like it. Does the record industry really think that by restricting usage they are going to stamp out piracy and file sharing? Fools! All they are doing is shooting themselves in the foot by alienating their customers.

I now know exactly how Frank feels. This is one CD I will not be buying. See also this nice cartoon on a related note.

Unspun

This rant about Philip Greenspun amused me: Phil seems to be nothing more than a somewhat articulate Slashdot monkey. Ouch.

I used to think quite a lot of Philip - some of the principles he employed at Ars Digita made a lot of sense, and some of the concepts we intend to cheerfully copy and improve on.

But then I read things like: The crowding seems to be irritating the people who live in the UK. Buildings and parks are festooned with signs asking people not to do this or that.. This seems like a particularly rude attitude to take as a guest in a foreign country, especially when your own country is not exactly known for lack of restrictions.

So while I think senile old has-been is a bit harsh, I did have a bit of a chuckle...

To switch or not to switch...

So we're looking to shuffle around the company hardware a little, as David's Vaio is somewhat long in the tooth and my laptop (pictured top right) is just too damned heavy to travel far with.

I got the chance to play with the new Sony (pictured bottom right), and it's really small and really light, but I'm just not sure 900mhz is fast enough. Still, up to 5.5 hours of battery life - that's enough for the train to London and back again! I'm not sure how well linux would run on it, though.

Of course, there's always the powerbooks. There's finally a 15 inch one, and the thing I really like about the powerbooks is that suspend and resume just works. Let's leave to one side the fact that buying two powerbooks would cost £1500 more than two roughly equivalent Intel machines. Tim seems to think it's the right choice:

...if you're a person who spends a lot of time doing server-side work on boxes where the OS's name ends in "x", well it's a no-brainer, you'd be nuts not to get a Mac.

Thom reassures me that Debian runs just fine on the powerbooks, and because the suspend/resume is done by the hardware, it still just works.

I've always been worried that a Mac would get in my way, but so many people I know have switched - Thom, Paul, Stefano, Steven, Matthew, the list goes on. Maybe it's worth a try. I think I need to borrow David's iBook for a week or two, and see if I can get along without a sane number of mouse buttons.

For the record...

I'm glad we got that straight. I'm off to be a gardener now.

Cocoon GetTogether

Bookings are still flooding in for the Cocoon GetTogether. It should be a great event - I was sorry to miss out on the first one last year as I was returning from USA when it started. I'm looking forward to returning to Ghent and to meeting loads more Cocooners - and finding out which countries they all come from. 12 different nationalities are listed so far - I know people from UK, France, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland and Italy ... but I don't know where the others are from.

Last time I was there was in February for the inaugural meeting of Orixo, and I thoroughly enjoyed my visit. Pictured on the right in OuterThought's meeting room are Massimo, Gianugo, Sylvain, Marc and a whiteboard of rejected alliance names.

Belgium seems like a pretty nice place, and Ghent won me over by selling Leffe Blond at a sane price. It's one of my favourite pints, but costs more than £3 in my local!

Road warrior wireless woes

Today I decided I'd had enough of the slow download speeds I get with my mobile phone and GPRS, so I thought it would be an interesting time to try out the various wireless internet access options out there. This was partly prompted by the news that Norwich train station is now, uh, wired for wireless.

Connecting to BT Openzone at Norwich was painless technically, but painful financially - I opted for the £15 for 24 hours service, since I figured it would be useful later today. The only disappointment was as the train left the station and I went out of range of the hotspot.

Cut to Liverpool Street station, a few hours later. Due to some late-running trains and overrunning meetings, I'm stranded here until 6.45pm, when I can get the cheap train home. Great, time to use up the remaining openzone hours. No chance! This station has no hotspots (and appears to be about the only one in London without a hotspot). The nearest hotspot is a Starbucks round the corner.

Again, connection was fine, but I got stung for a further £5 for one hour of access from T-Mobile. Argh!

So, several complaints that I'll be emailing to the hotspot providers:

• Better advertising. The openzone sign in Norwich is too small to see, and it was only through checking the Anglia Railways website that I knew about it at all. Wondering where all the wireless road warriors are? They are probably too busy searching for hotspots to get connected.
• Better tariffs. If I'm at a train station, am I really likely to be hanging around for a fixed amount of time like 1 hour? No. Why not charge by connection time, or by amount of data transferred?Joined-up service provision. Why do I need to be signed up to and paying two or more providers? I just want to get online! Someone, please come up with the wireless passport that Matthew mentioned!

Enough rant for now. I have to sprint for a train.

Happy memories

Steven mentions El Coto wines. Another case of Cocooners' shared neurons?

I fell in love with Coto de Imaz Red Reserva 98 whilst on holiday in Menorca last year, particularly for the hint of vanilla in it. Unfortunately none of the shops in the UK seem to stock it.

If they have it in Belgium, I'll have to pick up a case when I'm over there for the GetTogether next month.

RIAA rant

So, I've been watching the whole RIAA story unfold (in which the Recording Industry Association of America sued 261 people for swapping and sharing music).

It's funny how things have changed in the digital age. In my teenage years, it was common for my friends and I to swap tapes of music, or to make compilation tapes for each other, or to tape music off the radio and think nothing of it.

Nowadays computers make this much easier with the ability to make digital copies of CDs, to make your own CDs, and peer-to-peer file swapping programs like Napster, Kazaa, Limewire and so on, which let you effortlessly share your digital copies.

I think the problem facing the music industry is threefold:

• Firstly, the audio quality of swapped music is near-perfect, so the urge to go out and buy an original because the tape recording is bad has diminished. The record companies want your usage of the music you buy to fit within very narrow confines: a CD played on your stereo, and that's it. Thom and I had a big argument with a record company lawyer once on the issue of making digital copies of CDs for personal use. For example, I'd like all my music on my laptop hard drive so I can listen to it at home, at work, or on the road - without carrying a stack of shiny CDs around with me. If the recording industry could copy-protect CDs, they would. They don't believe you can make personal copies and not share them.


• Secondly, the whole world is now your peer - rather than swapping music with your mates, you can now download albums from someone on the other side of the world that you've never met, often before they are even released. You can also get albums that are not released in your own country, rather than paying the hefty markup often charged for imports.


• Finally, the music industry has used up all the good will it could ever have had with money-grabbing racketeering and price-fixing. Given behaviour like that, and now suing 12year olds, is it no wonder people don't want to buy music from them any more?

I think this cartoon nicely sums up most people's opinions on the matter.

Google rocks

This just in from Matthew, and it's way too cool so I'm going to repeat his post.

If you type 3kg + 4lbs (or similar) into Google, it works out the results for you...

Sobig's dead

According to the Register and others, the Sobig virus that's been causing so much trouble has finally come to an end.

I'm glad I blocked it. If I'd been on the road for a couple of weeks, that virus would have cost me in excess of £1400. The financial cost of the time wasted would be double that. Multiply by the number of people using email ....

Movable Type Take 2

More plugins ... this time, macro support and a code beautifier. What's it do? It makes pasted code look better. Let's see if it works!

Better? Almost. Can't get rid of the annoying <br /> tags :-(

Update: I've turned off "convert line endings" ... hopefully it'll behave but I may need to go back and insert <p> tags.

Movable Type

One of the things I like about the blogging software I use (Movable Type) is the fact that you can add new features to it as easily as copying a file into the plugins directory.

I've just added blogtimes (that thing just below the calendar on the left). Seems like a nice idea ...