Stuff of Interest

Well, wrong is a strong word, but I know he's subscribed to an RSS feed of his name and, having read his blog for years, I know that posts that go against the flow and tell him he's wrong are the posts he actually enjoys reading. So this will probably get his attention and I hope he finds it interesting.

I use Twitter and follow a limited number of other people. I used to follow Robert but as I posted just before unfollowing him, it was too much volume.

Robert follows over 16,600 people. He writes, "@PurpleCar it also gets to why people complain that I'm spamming Twitter. Those people don't have enough friends so their experience isn't as good." That's where I think he's wrong. I have a great Twitter experience. Following more people certainly alters your experience, but I don't think following more people particularly makes it a better experience.

If I'm following someone on Twitter it's because I want to hear what they have to say. When I had Robert on my list, his posts would fast drown out what other people were saying. He told me, "@MBoffin if I'm drowning out your other people, you should get better tools. I'm following 16,000 and no one is drowning anyone else out." Of course that's not true. He doesn't read every post by every person he follows. I do. He does read every post by every one of those 16,000 people when he's signed onto Google Talk but even by his own words, that's only about 5% of the time.

Robert argues that you get a better experience the more people you follow. I argue that you simply get a different experience. His experience is a firehose of information that gives him a valuable "finger on the pulse of the community" so to speak. He feels trends and waves moving through Twitter in a way that I will never experience. He's more like the Hari Seldon of the Twitter universe. Conversely, I'm getting a totally different experience out of Twitter, but just as valuable. I read every post from every person I follow, not just when I happen to have TwitBin or Google Talk open. If I check in after a little bit and the last twenty posts are from one person, they've effectively flooded off anything anyone else had to say. So from my perspective, it's now gone from signal to noise.

Social media is still a space that's finding its own. Robert is at one end of the extreme of its use, and I suppose you could say I'm at the other. We're both early adopters and both getting a valuable, worthwhile experience. Our experiences are polar in nature, not quality.

Well, that was pretty meta. Back to our regularly scheduled millweed-esque silence.

David Bisset pointed to a great article on the iPhone SDK limitations. Basically they are submitting the problems/limitations they see as bugs. It's a great article that runs through a lot of the key limitations of the iPhone SDK. (And for those who are wondering if they are being jerks/trolls about submitting these things as "bugs", know that this is the way Apple wants feedback of this kind to be submitted to them. Apple is requesting this kind of feedback.)

So here's the quick list of what they cover. Check the full article for all the details on each one.

• Allow applications to be installed at the user’s discretion, not Apple’s
• Allow applications to run in background on iPhone
• Allow access to root user on iPhone
• A MediaPicker API for accessing the iPod music files is needed
• Add option to allow iPhone applications to access entire filesystem
• Allow iPhone applications to access the host computer when docking
• Permit Voice over IP on the cellular network
• Allow iPhone applications to access the docking port

Frankly, I can't say I disagree with any of the points they lay out. I mean, hey, you can do all of the above with Windows Mobile already. Then again, this is Apple and they are not a company known for making concessions to others doing much of anything with hardware they create and sell.

I have no doubt that the iPhone will see a major surge in popularity due to the SDK, but I think the popularity of the iPhone would be an unstoppable juggernaut of titanic proportions if they conceded to even just the items listed above.

I read the liveblogging from a couple of different sites. The scope of the SDK is the one thing I was waiting for before either deciding to consider an iPhone or write it off as not something I'll ever get. So here are the questions I still have about it...

• They say it has access to "all the same APIs" that Apple uses to make apps. Does that mean it can access the Bluetooth stack? I can't figure that out. If not, that's a deal-breaker.
  
  
• Apple says the App Store (via iTunes) will be the "exclusive" way to get apps for the iPhone. Does that mean I need to shell out $99 to be on the Developer Program so I can give away a free app? Or is the $99 only for developers who want to sell their app?
  
  
• Will apps have access to the Internet via the EDGE network?

That's all for now. But they are deal-breaker questions for me.

I came across this news article via Jason Kottke's twitter stream.

This guy's name is Landocalrissan Butler. And he's 27.

You know what that means? It means his parents were probably high as a kite while watching Empire Strikes Back in the theater and named their kid NOT after Lando Calrissian (and note they spelled it WRONG), but after his little head-gear sidekick, or "butler" if you will.

Landocalrissan Butler. His parents should either be given a medal or evicted from society in general. Or both.

Here are some pictures from the kids in Mongolia who just got XO laptops from the OLPC project. A part of this deployment of laptops was made possible from the Give One Get One program, from which I bought my XO laptop.

Whatever you're doing right now, stop for a moment and go watch each of Ezra Levant's videos on YouTube. Start with the Opening Statement video. For easy clicking, here are the videos in order: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, and #6.

As much as I hate the media in general, I think how this guy handled himself in his "interrogation" was absolutely amazing and am proud as a human being that he is standing up to his government like this. He's Canadian, but the values and rights he is standing up for have nothing to do with his specific nationality and everything to do with being a free person.

Do I agree with what he did? No, I think it was disrespectful and rude. But it goes back to the old saying, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

This little laptop is SO COOL! Quinn and Rowan absolutely love this thing. It has exceeded my expectations in many ways. However, there are a few ways it fell far short of my expectations. I'll go into more detail about that later. In the meantime, the kids love it. As a first computer for Quinn to use, it's brilliant. She is getting far more out of this than any other laptop I could possibly find running OS X or Windows. The Sugar OS is amazing.

I'll write a more meaningful post later. I just thought I'd post this from the OLPC itself just for fun.

How cool. Vista comes with a command line "kill" program. (Analogous to the Linux/Unix "kill" command.) Task Manager was acting up on me and I couldn't get it open to kill a rogue Media Player process. Turns out you can use "taskkill" from the command line. I just did a "taskkill /im taskmgr.exe" and got everything back to normal.

Oh yeah, and "tasklist" will list all the running tasks.

If you haven't read about the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, you should. It has its philanthropic opponents, of course. However, the philanthropic aspect of the project aside, the technical aspect has captured me totally. I'm totally excited about this.

For years I've talked about how our currently popular windowed operating systems are only one way to do it and not the way to do it. The windowed operating systems work for us as well they do because they mimic enough of a semblance of what we see in real life that we can make connections between certain key interface behaviors. But, it's not the only way to create an operating system that many people can use easily and successfully.

The OLPC project created an entirely new operating system interface called Sugar. I suggest you go read about it. It's amazing. The part that I love is that they totally ditched long-established thought processes on how an operating system interface should work.

Start by reading the OLPC Human Interface Guidelines. It's a lot to read and take in at once, but read as much as you can. (I also urge you to skim whatever you don't get to.)

A lot of you know I have a bent toward playing with GPS technology. I would love to write some simple GPS mapping software that runs on the Sugar OS. I think it would be so cool to have kids running around mapping their villages with something like that. I know, I know... where do they get the GPS devices? I don't know. Maybe Garmin will feel charitable and work out how to get them embedded in future OLPC's.

So yeah, the OLPC's went on sale for regular consumers like me at 3:00AM. You can only buy them for another twelve days. You can't just buy one though. You have to buy two. One goes to you, and the other is donated. (And incidentally, I found out that when you buy an OLPC, you get a free year of T-Mobile HotSpot access.) I bought one as fast as my browser would let me.

This is history, folks. Just watch. This is the start of something.

The Wii has got to be the coolest game console I have ever used. A while back I had told myself I would not buy any of the current generation of consoles except for the Wii. I totally do not regret that decision. I love this thing. Oh, and the fact that I'm posting this from a gaming console? SO COOL.

Oh, and a huge indicator of how right Nintendo got this console is the fact that Kaellagh wanted to play immediately, and she totally enjoyed it. Her words after half an hour, "Oh yeah, I guess I should let you play with it too."