Jeff Boulter's Weblog

MIME oh My

MIME headers (like Subject:, From:, etc.) are great for email and web requests, but do we really need them on receipts??

This is what I got when I rented a movie at the Yahoo Quick-E-Mart today.

My Birthday's Coming

And it's a significant one. Do you know what you're getting me?

Here's a strong suggestion and something I've been waiting for for a long time - the Treo 650!

My Treo 300 is most certainly my most-used device. Besides being my cell phone, iit's my mobile web browser, address book, email client, geocaching tool and all-around distraction device.

The new one will have a camera, bluetooth (no more fumbling with cables), a brighter, bigger screen and overall much faster experience.

You want to make me happy, right? :-)

Having too much fun with conference room names

Yahoo! has a tradition of giving its conference room names fun and creative names. Some are national parks, some are board games, others are tropical islands.

On my floor, they're all 'in' words like conceivable, sane and articulate. The idea is to trick you into saying things like 'Come here. I'm insane." Witty. Some go beyond the cute into racy like decent, adequate and continent.

But today the conference room naming went a little too far. I asked someone about where a meeting was and he said "it's in limbo". I read this quickly and assumed they hadn't decided which room it was in. I ran around at the time of the meeting and couldn't find anyone, so I went back to my desk.

Later, I was asked why I wasn't at the meeting. I didn't know what room it was in of course. Then it hit me - the conference room is actually called "Limbo" to fit a floor named for remote and mythical places like Oz, Neverland and Antartica.

Perhaps we should name the next set of conference rooms with this problem in mind. We'll call them 'tardy', 'lost' and 'absent'.

"Performant" is not a word

Well actually it is, but it's not what you think, even though it should be.

At one point I thought I invented the word 'performant' as a term to mean "performs acceptably" or "it's really fast!!" kinda like 'compliant'. But then I noticed other people I didn't know were using it too.

The only problem is that it's not a word. One dictionary defines it as "a performer" like in a play. That's clearly not what we mean, but it makes sense. There's even a company with Performant in their name, though they don't seem to have anything to do with high performance.

So what's a renegade linguist to do? Just keep on using performant. Eventually the dictionaries will catch on. Hey, if Doh can make it, surely performant should have a place.

In related news, Wired has finally decided to stop capitalizing 'internet'. Did you hear that, AP?

Bay Area Digital Maps

I'm just cruisin' the web, looking for maps, when I came across these awesome digital satellite maps of the bay area. You can even download huge versions of the files suitable for printing. If you look closely you can see waves and underwater currents in the water. Neat stuff.

SF Bay Images

THX YHOO

Spotted this grateful Benz today while out hunting this cache. Pretty funny.

iPod Thoughts

(Written on a plane a few weeks ago.)

Now that I've had my 40GB iPod for a while and had the chance to take it on some trips, I thought I'd post my thoughts on it.

First, I love my iPod. It's a great device and I love having all the music I've been collecting for the last 15 years available wherever I am - on demand by song.

However, the iPod has a number of obvoius areas for improvement which I didn't expect to find. Maybe I was brainwashed by the cult of white earbuds.

My 40GB unit came with a wired remote. That's convenient especially right now as my ipod is tucked into the seat back pocket it front of me and the remote is clipped to my seat belt. The annoying part of using the remote is that it makes the cord really long, so long that I don't know what to do with all the excess and it ends up just getting all tangled. The remote itself is very chic looking, but it's also vertically and horizonally symmetric with no tactile markers. That means you can't differentiate the volume vs. pause or skip forward vs. back buttons without looking at the remote.

The headphones are supposed to be really good, but so far I haven't found them to be anything special. They hurt my ears for one. Actually it's only my right ear and I have this problem with most ear buds, so it's not Apple's fault. I think it may have something to do with the tubes I had in my ears as a kid. In any case it really hurts after I've had them in there for a while. They also don't seem to be loud enough to block out all the noise on a plane.

This has got me thinking about investing in some good headphones to replace the series of crappy ones I've had over the years. I don't tend to like ear-covering headphones either as they tend to make my ears hot and itchy after a while. I guess I have fussy ears.

As I discussed before, it's heavier and bigger than I expected, even for one of the smallest players of its capacity on the market. The size isn't that big of a deal, but the weight is just enough to make it feel 'heavy'. It's only a couple ounces heavier than my Treo which doesn't seem heavy but those few ounces make a big difference. It seems to have too much momentum and inertia on it's own, so I don't think I'd ever take it running or some activity like that where it might fall.

The iPod mini doesn't have this problem, but it's at a cost of one tenth the capacity. Rumors are that eventually the iPod will take the mini's form factor. I wonder they'll call this one when the iPods are all mini-sized? The iPod maxi?

Battery life isn't great. I feel like I always have to recharge it. I think I'm getting only about 4 hours out of it now.

The iTrip works OK for listening to it in the car. I still wish it was integrated into the unit. The iTrip does seem to significantly decrease battery life as well. Reception is mostly ok too. 88.9 seems to work most of the time around home, but not in parts of San Francisco. The biggest problem of using the ipod in the car is setting it up. Granted, it's not much work to dig up the device, start it up and set the radio to the right station, but it's exactly zero work to just let the radio play on the station it's already on when the car starts up.

I see the same affect with the integration of LAUNCHcast into the new Yahoo! Messenger 6.0. With LAUNCHcast integrated into a critical communication tool at work and because it starts playing as soon as I log in to messenger, I find myself listening to it a lot more than before. Yes, all I had to do is click one button to start up the player before, but I just didn't remember.

I've requested that it also automatically pause when you lock your computer. Right now it's too hard to find the pause button (and wait if you're not 30 seconds into the song) so I just end up turning the volume on my speakers all the way down and wasting bandwidth when I'm away.

The biggest flaw I see with the iPod is that it's too fragile for an expensive device. Because of that I don't use it in particular situations as mentioned previously and I'm careful to not leave it anywhere for fear that someone will steal it.

In particular, it's too easily scratched. It seems that the stainless steel back already had some fine scratches when I took it out of the box and Apple's own case has scratched the face. I got fed up with that and invested in an iSkin eVo, supposedly the best case of its style out there right now. (I got the arctic white version; I'm not trying to make any fashion statements and how can you tell it's an iPod when it's hot pink?) It would let me protect the outside while still having access to the contols and connections for the iTrip.

The eVo does what it claims to in protecting the iPod. The plastic screen had a scratch on the inside when I got it, but I figured it would only get more scratched, so I kept it. Indeed it has and I feel better knowing that the actual iPod has no more damage than before I fit the skin over it. The eVo makes the iPod only a bit bulkier but this makes for one critical difference - the iPod no longer fits in the dock. This suprised me because I thought their website said it would work with the dock. On second glance it says that it works with the dock CONNECTOR, not the actual dock. Grrr. I liked using the dock at work because I could use the iPod at a reasonable angle on my desk while dropping it in charged it and connected the line out to my speakers. Since taking the skin on and off is no trivial task, the dock is pretty useless.

The eVo has a removable belt clip on the back. The clip feels kind of flimsy, but it hasn't shown signs of breaking. Then again I actually haven't tried using the clip. I removed it to reduce some bulk. They molded some nice feet on the four corners on the back, but unfortunely the prongs that the clip attches to slick out too much and don't allow the iPod to lie flat.

Something I've noticed since I started listening to music on the iPod is that some of the music I've collected is total crap. I listen to the same music at home with iTunes, but listening to the Ppod is a differnent experience that makes me care about the music more. For one, I hear it better because I'm listening to headphones and I'm not doing as many things so I actually notice the music. I guess it's time to to start rating stuff and deleting it later. Sigh, it's still easier to just hit the skip button. Someday I might just be in the mood for that music so I should keep it, right?

I probably won't actually start doing that until I run out of disk space and I've still got 10GB left. Some of that space is consumed by the album covers I've added using the excellent Fetch Art for iTunes. The only problem is that iTunes doesn't use them at all. Hey Apple, how about at least trying to display them in the iPod?

My #1 problem with the iPod is that's yet another device. When I go somewhere now, I have to round up my Treo, iPod, digital camera, and GPS. I can't forget to make sure all these devices are charged either or I've make sure I've got extra batteries.

What I really want is all these devices to become just one that I'll always keep with me. Based on the combined cost of all these devices, I'd pay quite a lot for one small, light and well-designed and integrated device that replaces them all. My Treo is a good start. At least I don't have a PDA, phone and pager to carry around all the time. My inevitable upgrade to a Treo 600 (or Ace) will make my little camera unncessary and an expansion slot may evevtually make iPod like storage possible. Hey if Dan Gillmor can do it, maybe I can too.

Well, that's enough ranting for now. My Treo and iPod are about to run out of juice and my plane will land soon. My thumbs have gone numb from pecking on this tiny keyboard. Oh yeah, and my ear is killing me. Damn earbuds.

Getting your daily fiber

I think I'll try this at my next meeting.

Yahoo! News - Gorilla Seeks Help Using Sign Language

They crowded around her, and Koko, who plays favorites, asked one woman wearing red to come closer. The woman handed her a business card, which Koko promptly ate.

REST is a webpage of XML

Everytime I read an article about REST interfaces, they go into this long diabtribe about what REST isn't and how it compares to SOAP and XML-RPC. None of them spend any time actually describing what REST. Maybe it's because it so simple. It's a URL that returns XML. That's it.

Like this:

http://boulter.com/rest.xml

It's just like every web page you've browsed in your life except the stuff returned is for computers, not humans. Just like regular web pages, parameters on the URL may change the data returned, possibly changing my witty comment in this example.

If the whole point of REST is to simplify things, why can't people explain it simply?

Rattlesnakes!

I've never seen a rattlesnake in the wild, but living in California it's probably inevitable that I will someday. Here's some good information on rattlesnakes and what to do if you get bit.

http://www.calpoison.org/public/rattler.html

My favorite advice:

Don't keep rattlesnakes as pets. Many bites occur when people, usually intoxicated males in your 20's, tease their "pet" rattlers.

Free Computer Recycling @ Office Depot

Got a bunch of old computers lying around the house? I sure do. My closet looks like a frickin' vintage Mac museum. I always think that I'll find some use for them someday, but I never do.

The problem is that it's illegal to just throw them away in the regular trash (all that mercury and stuff in there) and dumps will charge you $15 to recycle it. I even tried taking it to WeirdStuff, but IIsi and LCII were too old for even them.

So this weekend I brought 2 of my old Macs (you didn't think I'd get rid of all of them, did you?) down to Office Depot for their free computer recycling program running through Sept. 6. That's OfficeDepot, not OfficeMax or Staples. I can never get those straight.

Supposedly you can't drop off more than one computer, so I came with one and they directed me to put it in the corner on a dolly. That was it. Later in the day, we came back and dropped off another. I probably could have brought in a truckload and they wouldn't have noticed. By this time there was a dolly and two shopping carts full of old computers there.

It's probably a good ploy to get me to go to Office Depot since I can't remember the last time I set foot in one of those stores. I didn't even know there was one nearby. Too bad I didn't have any time to gadget gawk this weekend.

Now that I've got some closet space back, the only thing left to do is buy more computers. :-)

Solar Paint Update

It turns out I'm not the only one to think of solar paint. There's actual a local startup trying to make cheap "printed" sheets of solar cells. Check out Nanosolar. Pretty cool stuff.