Planet Geek

A KDE Gripe - Spellcheck needs to go.

It's no secret I'm a huge booster of KDE, and specifically Konqueror, the built-in web browser. It's fast, powerful, standards compliant, and just plain works.

But please, KDE folks, ferchrissake, fix the damned spell checker.

When editing things in TEXTAREA fields in Konqueror, occasionally you'll get the red text of a misspelled word (or one that is simply not in the dictionary). That's fine, no problems. In the Gnome world (and the variants such as those used in Thunderbird, my other most-used app, you can right click on the misspelled word, and it'll happily give you a list of alternate spellings.

But no, not in KDE. The right click menu has no context for the misspelled word. It simply gives you the option of 'check spelling', which pulls up a dialog that spell checks the entire textarea, from beginning to end. Every time.

That means I get prompted for 'href' and 'png' and 'img' and 'valign' and all the other fun things that I type into my blog postings, long before I get to the current word.

Dear KDE. Please fix this behaviour. Make a context-sensitive spell checker. Luv, me

One more nail in the coffin of Palm

JVM download for Palm OS® devices no longer available from Palm

As of January 12, 2008, Palm no longer has rights to distribute the IBM WebSphere Micro Environment Java Virtual Machine (JVM) to our customers. JVM allows users to install and run Java applications and games on Palm OS® devices.

Palm is not able to offer the JVM download or version upgrades. We will continue to support existing installations of JVM on our website.

Opera Mini
We have advised Opera support that the Palm OS JVM is no longer available. There is no alternate Java Virtual Machine that we are aware of for Palm OS. We know of no way to run Opera Mini on Palm OS if you do not already possess the JVM. We regret the inconvenience.

Sigh. I wish the iPhone SDK licensing didn't suck so much (which is also preventing the release of a JVM for the iPhone). Or that the Android phones had some hope of being more than vaporware in the near future.

My Treo 650 won't last forever. And I refuse to run Windows on my phone. What's a geek to do? As noted on the Palm Blog, the Centro seems to be the only thing left in the lineup to move to (of course Verizon doesn't support it), but it's still the same ancient platform, with no new features except coming in a nicer package. I want wifi, I want bluetooth that doesn't suck, I want a web browser that doesn't suck. I fear I am destined to be disappointed.

Go go gadget Greylisting!

Our spam levels here at Chez Geek are, shall we say, astronomical. About a year ago, we installed and configured SQLGrey, a tool for Postfix that enables Greylisting on inbound mail. Initially, it had a great impact, but somewhere along the lines, our configuration got modified in a way that stopped the greylist from working.

Last week, the spam levels got to be too much, and I checked into the greylisting configuration on our main server. It wasn't enabled! Somehow our postfix entries had gotten removed (we're guessing an overzealous edit with an RCS checkout overwriting things).

Anyway, after restarting, I've had a few days to see what impact there is. The spam dropoff has been ridiculously dramatic, as my spam reporter shows:

Breakdown by day: (10172 posts, average of 1453.1 posts per day.)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
	 Apr 20 | Apr 19 | Apr 18 | Apr 17 | Apr 16 | Apr 15 | Apr 14 
	   130  |   143  |   136  |   1393  |   3038  |   2417  |   2915

This is showing only mail that comes into my inbox, and has been tagged as spam by Amavis. This doesn't show how much mail is being rejected, but it's pretty obvious since I enabled greylisting (middle of the day on Apr 17th), things have... fallen off to something like 5% of the original level.

Now that's good stuff.

Linux vs Windows XP Bootup Speed

I got into a conversation on IRC today about relative performance between Linux and Windows XP machines. A true blue dyed in the wool fellow was falling all over himself about how much faster WIndows XP was, and how sluggish Linux was, and he couldn't see how anyone would use Linux because it was such a performance hog.

I have on my desk two machines that are relatively equal in use configuration. They are both development machines, configured with MySQL, Apache, various editors and other environments, including chat clients and a variety of daemons. In general terms, they're equivelent.

So I decided to boot each machine from scratch, starting a timer at the end of POST, when the first part of the OS loads. Stop-timer was when CPU usage went down to 'idle'. Windows XP meant the Task Manager CPU usage indicator was hovering around 6%, and on my Linux box, when my load manager showed the job queue was basically empty.

Machine 1 : yawl (Kubuntu Linux, Pentium 4 2.26gig, 2 gig memory):
Time to startup: 2 minutes, 0 seconds.

Machine 2 : clipper (Windows XP, Dual core 2.16gig, 2 gig memory):
Time to startup: 2 minutes, 53 seconds.

The XP machine was slower, but it shouldn't have been. It is a dual core machine. While that doesn't translate immediately to 2x the performance, it should at least show an improvement over the older, slower single core machine. Apparently not.

Lets try some other bits.

yawl: Time to start up eclipse: 22 seconds.

clipper: Time to start up eclipse: 34 seconds.

I don't know what other benchmarks I can run here. XP is a slower OS than Linux.

I'll caveat something though. There are tools for XP that are optimized for it. Some GUI apps are far faster under XP than they are under Linux. But to my mind that shows that things can be made to run faster on an XP box. But for folks who make blanket statements about XP being faster / less bloated / whatever than Linux, think a little more about what you're using as a basis for that statement.

Coconut gets a facelift

Ever since I first wrote Coconut, the web interface to CONGO, I've been using the same stylesheet. It was really my first foray into stylesheet-driven design and layout, and while it was a good first try, it was ugly as sin.

Last night I finally sat down to rewrite the stylesheet into something reasonably attractive. I got rid of the dark background and greytones, and the 'All Caps' font styles, and used more pastels.

I'm pretty happy with the result, but for the hundred or so folks who are used to the old look and feel, it'll be a dramatic change!

Oh Apple, you guys crack me up!

Those crazy guys at Apple. Look at this wonderful April Fools joke they did.

So. So. Check this out. They modified their Apple Updater on Windows machines to pop up a window, and... I swear, I can't stop laughing... even though I don't even HAVE Safari or iTunes installed, they've put them on the updater list (as a "Software Update" *BWAH*), and automatically CHECKED them! Not only that, the highlighted button on the dialog is to "Install 3 Items", so anyone could easily come along, see the update window "Oh yes, I need the Quicktime update" and... and... BANG! They have another 88 megs of software installed that they probably don't even want!

I tell you, those guys have the best designs, the best platforms, and they make some great stuff, but it's the little tweaks like this, the little jokes, that just crack me up. I mean, cmon. An updater that tried to trick you into installing software you don't have. Hee hee hee!

Thanks Apple, for making my week!

Apache sneakiness.

This is a story about system administration. It's about a system, and it's administration. In particular, it's about configuring up Apache to do some magical rewriting of URLs so that a site we're working on can translate /foo/bar into /foo.php?item=bar . Ready to journey with me? Let's go...

I'm running XAMPP on clipper - it's a very nice 'prepackaged' solution for developing LAMP-like applications on Windows. It includes MySQL, Apache, PHP, and a handful of other tools, and it makes building and testing apps under PHP quite tolerable under Windows.

What we were doing sounded like a fairly simple application of mod_rewrite. The specific function was whipped up by Tim, and I SVNupped it to clipper - and it didn't work. I was getting something that basically said "you're running this script without initializing it properly".

It got more and more bizarre, as I realized that in fact, mod_rewrite wasn't even loaded in my Apache install, but it was obviously doing some bizarre bit of rewriting. hits to http://localhost/foo/bar/baz would not give a 404, but would attempt to run the script 'foo.php', passing in parameters.

I spent a good 2 hours S'ingTFW on issues with XAMPP, PHP5, Apache, mod_rewrite - grepping through a few dozen configuration files (oh, sorry, 'find'ing - windows equivelent of grep. Which, incidentally, sucks.). Nothing was coming together.

Eventually I fell to the #apache channel on FreeNode, and sang my tale of woe to them. I stumped several of the more knowledgeable folks there for a good half hour ("it's a mod_rewrite, but you don't even have the module loaded. Huh"), when, just like a good mysterious western, a previously silent voice in the back piped up, and uttered one word.

"Multiviews"

It was the word that was to haunt me for... 15 minutes. This is an option that I've seen countless times in configuration files, but really had no idea what exactly it did. I metaphorically dragged out the Apache 2 reference docs, and, blowing the dust of the pages, read about Multiviews:

The effect of MultiViews is as follows: if the server receives a request for /some/dir/foo, if /some/dir has MultiViews enabled, and /some/dir/foo does not exist, then the server reads the directory looking for files named foo.*, and effectively fakes up a type map which names all those files, assigning them the same media types and content-encodings it would have if the client had asked for one of them by name. It then chooses the best match to the client's requirements.

I was stunned. This option, as Tim put it, had the equivalent effect of... "the server closes its eyes and THROWS DARTS AT THE FILESYSTEM until it finds something that looks good."

Naturally, my vhost had it enabled in it's Options line. Taking out Multiviews, hupping the server, and lo, no more magical mystery rewriting!

I've been administering Apache installs since before it was called Apache, and I've never hit this problem before. Let's hear it for learning experiences! :-/

How a bigger battery changed my life.

Okay, that may be a bit more grandiose than is appropriate, but it does put a finger on how I feel about getting a new laptop battery for clipper, my work laptop.

Previously, I had been getting a around an hour of usage on it on the internal battery. When thinking about places to park and work, having a power outlet nearby was an absolute necessity for anything approaching real work. Sure, on the old battery I could fire it up, check email, do some quick surfing, but it put a hard limit in my head on what I could accomplish. I knew that I'd have to stop within a short window and move or shut down or whatever.

Recently I went from the 6 cell Li-Ion battery (56 watt-hour) to the 9 cell battery (85 watt-hour). The first improvement came from just having a new battery (Dell laptop batteries are notorious for losing their 'oomph' after a few years of use), but the other boost was getting a 40% increase in capacity. This drove my work time from a smidge over an hour up to over 3 hours of off-outlet use.

Now, that may not seem like a huge change ("just another 2 hours or so") but in my work-pattern, it's enormous. It means I can spend the 1/2 hour after just sitting down checking mail, getting settled, starting up what I need to do, and organizing my brain a bit, and then get into my work groove... without immediately needing to be interrupted by a power-fiddle.

I'm comfortable parking myself in a random restaurant booth and settling in for a good hack session without thinking about how to manage power outlets and cords, or even firing things up while sitting in my car waiting to pick up my son from school.

Yay technology.

Thank you Google! Or thank you KDE! Whatever!

Onward and forward on my quest to avoid using Mozilla-based products on my desktop. I've been frustrated by having to load Firefox to get to my Google Calendars and Google Maps. For some reason Konqueror had been refusing to render these sites, and since I've started using things like GooSync, I really do need to get into Google Calendar without jumping through hoops.

Last week, on a whim, I tried Google Maps, and then Google Calendar. Lo! They loaded! Cleanly and quickly! Obviously something had changed (one of the drawbacks of 'web sites as services' is that you don't necessarily know when they change things). But whatever happened, I can now view and update my Google calendar via Konqueror, and can GMaps with the best of them.

There are a few small twitches. Streetview is not working in Konqueror, and occasionally there are rendering ghosts, but I can look up, scroll, and even print directions without a problem. Calendar, oddly, is even more stable - I haven't had a problem yet with it.

Thanks whomever!

"Worlds Most Powerful Air Vortex Cannon" ?

Remember those little air popper things you can use in offices to make smoke rings and foomph folks at a distance? The guys at Erbert and Gerberts (a midwest sandwich shop chain) decided to build a mighty big one.

Check it out on Candlecannon.com (embedded youtube video)

(Thanks to GeeksAreSexy)

Join our BOINC team! Again!

I suppose it's okay to mention every two years or so that I have a BOINC team that is collectively pooling all idle computing power and using those idle cycles for scientific research and analysis. Since 2 years ago, the number of projects that use the BOINC software has increased and diversified widely, though the core projects (SETI@Home, Folding@home, etc) are still extremely active.

If you have a machine that's frequently idle, why not consider installing the BOINC client on it, and signing up to join our team? I've recently re-started many of my idle clients in an effort to shore up some of the sliding numbers (many of our long time computing partners have stopped submitting updates, due to job changes or just disinterest.)

At our best, we were ranked # 662 about a year ago. Currently we ranked #935 in the world (out of 71,588 teams), according to our page on Boincstats.com.

If you'd like to join, our SETI@Home project page has signup information, though we also have teams at Rosetta and Predictor, both great projects.

Dear Jboss. QA yer damned site.

Why is it so hard for any organization, from opensource on up, to understand it's a good idea to give the users information they want, in a form that's useable?

I zipped over to JBoss.org to see if there was an update to the 4.2 server I've been using for the last year. Sure enough, there's a 4.2.2 release that came out in October. Great, I wonder what changed?

Well, the downloads page has the new release on it, and a link to the release notes. Which, you'll note, is completely illegible because the lines are not wrapping. (I tested this in Firefox under Linux and Windows, Konqueror, and under IE6 in Windows. None of them make that page useable.)

Was it so hard for the JBoss release engineer to click on links and check if they worked? Apparently that capacity is beyond them. Sad.

Animation with GIMP, and a new icon

I've been thinking about learning how to make animated GIFs. They're super-popular on Livejournal and other forums, so why not figure out how to put it all together?

Turns out The Gimp has a very simple mechanism for making animations. Just open multiple images in layers, and then save it as a GIF. When you go to save, it'll pop up a dialog "This has multiple layers, and you're saving as a GIF. Do you want to animate all the layers as frames?"

And that's it! So, naturally, I had to try it out. I needed an icon for gaming, and this seemed easy to put together. It's 27 frames, took me about an hour to draw the pieces, and then another hour of fiddling with GIMP to get the timing and assembly correct. Mad props to blk for figuring out that if you re-open an exported GIF, you can edit the timing on the frames just by altering the name of the layer (which is TOTALLY screwy in my book, but whatever).

Folks are welcome to scarf it and use it as much as they like. A pointer back to the blog here would be nice, but not required. :)

Decorated laptops?

That's the third time I've had a comment about my laptop this week. I guess it's unusual enough to have a Flying Spaghetti Monster plaque on the machine, but the addition of a large "for SCIENCE!" black bumper sticker just made it that much more comment worthy.

Though, spending a few minutes trying to explain both to an obviously clueless panera-patron really wasn't on the schedule.

The Spam, it burns!

Just in case you were curious about the levels of spam I have to deal with daily. I have a filter running on my inbox that tracks how much mail I get each day, how much of that is list traffic, and how much of it is spam. Each night, the program (which is available here) generates a report that lets me see how things have been going.

I have many spam defenses running on boomer, and it does an admirable job of filtering out the spam. This week I've noticed a fair amount of the 3 line plain text spam getting through to me (which Thunderbird does catch). This spam is notoriously hard to filter due to it's simplicity. I was sort of curious how much spam actually -was- getting caught.

Here's my last 7 days of total mail I'm receiving:

Breakdown by day: (17606 posts, average of 2515.1 posts per day.)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
	
	 Feb 10 | Feb  9 | Feb  8 | Feb  7 | Feb  6 | Feb  5 | Feb  4 
	   1983  |   1619  |   2636  |   2878  |   3020  |   2985  |   2485

That is the total mail received addressed to me on perhaps half a dozen domains. They all funnel to the same mailbox. How much of that is spam? Lets look:

Breakdown by day: (12676 posts, average of 1810.9 posts per day.)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
	
	 Feb 10 | Feb  9 | Feb  8 | Feb  7 | Feb  6 | Feb  5 | Feb  4 
	   1656  |   1216  |   1918  |   1990  |   2135  |   2101  |   1660

An average of 1810 spams received each day. By one mailbox.

The spam report is showing 'caught spam'. I get very few false positives (mail caught as spam and misfiled), so I have my filters set fairly liberal. Thunderbird is probably catching another 200 spam messages a day. The rest of my mail is list traffic (I'm on a dozen or so mailing lists). And what's left? Legitimate mail, probably 25 messages a day.

One out of every hundred messages I receive, only one is something I need to pay immediate attention to.

Email is broken. It's time to look at a radical paradigm change. I'll be posting some more about this as I move ahead, but I constantly worry about situations where important mail may be missed, and it's become abundantly clear that the current email situation has to change in order for net communication via electronic mail is to continue being a viable medium.

Grrr du jour, KDE + Flash = FAIL!

Well doesn't that just frost your fingernails.

This morning an update came down the pike from the Ubuntu distribution that updated the Adobe Flash (nonfree) plugin, a plugin I use primarily in Konqueror. While it's nice that Adobe is actively supporting the Linux community, this morning's screwup makes me grit my teeth and take another long look at the rabbithole.

The new flash player is incompatible with the the Gutsy Gibbon (aka Ubuntu 7.10, aka 'stable') version of Konqueror. When you try to view any flash content, it the plugin crashes with a SIGSEGV fault.

Some whining on the #KDE support channel pointed me to a workaround using the KMPlayer tool, but after attempting a build under Gutsy, I realized that this patch will only work on Hardy Heron (the next 'unstable' release of Ubuntu).

Which I'm not running.

So, as it stands now, I have no flash player under Konqueror. I can start Firefox and use that, but I've been avoiding that as much as possible. So in some ways, yeah, I -can- view flash content. But I don't like it.

As far as I know, there is no fix for this problem, at least until Hardy Heron goes into wide release.

I am grumpy.

UPDATE 2/11/2008 - The folks at Ubuntu have been redeemed! A patch was released that updated much of KDE, and included a fix for the embedded flash player in Konqueror. We're back to using the Netscape plugin properly. Hooray!

Useful Firefox Plugin du jour

This one's been nagging me for a while. When doing work on CONGO, I spend a lot of time editing templates and stylesheets within <textarea> blocks. This is all fine and dandy, except Firefox (and most other web browsers) consider the 'tab' key to mean "move to the next input field". Makes it very hard to edit XML or HTML in a textarea when you can't actually indent the text.

So I was mighty happy to find tabinta, a Firefox plugin that simply allows the tab key to type a 'tab' when editing a textarea. Nothing fancy, nothing major, but ZOMG what a difference when editing content.

Wanted: Real Bluetooth Audio Management

Okay folks, I'm looking for help here.

I'm looking for the Right Bluetooth Setup. It consists of two setups:

• Bluetooth Headphones
  I had a set of Blueant X5 headphones for a while, trying to get them working with my Treo 650. While that experiment failed, it set the tone for what I was trying to do. So, first, I need a good set of BT headphones + unobtrusive mic. Stereo headphones with A2DP support to talk to whatever streaming device I have. Which brings me to:
• Bluetooth source devices
  I'd like the headphones to be able to take multiple BT sources. For instance, allow me to listen to music streaming from my iPod, but interrupt the music stream to answer my cell phone call, listen to that, then go back to streaming from the ipod. If that's not possible, I've come up with a sort of hybrid arrangement, that has a number of very strong advantages...
• Bluetooth HFP for Laptops
  If I can't necessarily switch between Bluetooth feeds, why can't I have my laptop act as a 'Bluetooth Audio Manager'? Install a bluetooth HFP profile into the bluetooth stack on the laptop, so the mic and headphones I attach to the laptop become my wireless headphones for my cell phone. Now, before you laugh too hard about this, think. When I'm sitting in Starbucks working away, listening to Radio Paradise via my laptop, what happens when my cell phone rings? A lot of times, I miss the call - even with vibrate. But if I do get a call, I have to take off my headphones, answer the phone, and try to be heard over the general clatter of the coffeehouse. Why not have the laptop pop up a "A call is coming in", and then I tap [Answer], and the mic in my headset (or on the laptop) goes active, my audiostream switches to the phone call, and the music pauses. I can have my conversation, then 'hang up', and RadioParadise returns.

I've STFW'ed for this, and apparently there is no HFP profile for Windows or for Linux. I'm sorely tempted to finally break down and buy a Nokia N810, which has quite capable bluetooth support, and see about rigging up an HFP profile for it. Listening to music from the Nokia, and having it switch over to handle my phone calls, then switch back at the end of the call, would be just about perfect. In that case, I wouldn't need the wireless headphones at all, the N810 would act as my 'communications client' to my audio devices.

Any suggestions? I just gotta geek more!

Dear FOSS Developers

I'm speaking specifically to FOSS developers who are involved GUI / Human Interface type development and design.

There's apparently a percentage of ya'll who seem to think that the proper way to execute a program represented by an icon is to just click on it.

Once.

I have one thing to say to that. Or. Several things. With the same message...

NO NO NO! WRONG WRONG WRONG! BAD BAD BAD!

Every once in a while someone seems to think that it's proper to make it so if you click on, say, a Firefox icon, it means 'Start Firefox RIGHT NOW'. This is ridiculously, painfully WRONG. A desktop contains objects. If you touch something, it doesn't mean "EXECUTE THIS RIGHT NOW, NO MATTER WHAT IT IS".

Imagine if this were taken on in the real world. Your car would start whenever you touched your keyring. If you touched the handle on your sink faucet, water would come gushing out immediately.

This pattern has been cropping up in KDE on occasion, though I'm assured it will not be the case in KDE4. Gnome is rife with it. And Puppy Linux, an OS that can run via LiveCD, will happily start up a 60meg program (Firefox) if you happen to touch the Firefox icon on the desktop. Just touch it. A process that can take 4-5 minutes in LiveCD mode.

So, in conclusion. No. For the love of all that is sane, do not do perpetuate this bad design.

Warm regards, me.

Rockin in the Workshop

So there's this house we're calling Interlude. It's a rental, we're living in it since we sold Homeport and is our home until Mosaic is ready for us, sometime late next year.

It has a usable basement, with a high ceiling and dry floors. Not particularly warm in the winter, but usable.

I've moved my workbench, my tool chest, all my tools and parts and other debris into a nice little work area, and have been slowly working on various projects (such as the Mame cabinet - see that post for a picture of my workshop space).

But something was missing.

This past weekend, I finally gathered together all the pieces of the Roku Soundbridge M500 I won from Radio Paradise two and a half years ago. Not long after I got the Roku, it broke in a funky way - part of the LCD display went blank. I contacted Roku about getting it repaired, they said to send it in and they'd look at it, but I never got around to doing so. Ah well.

This past weekend I powered it up again, just to see if I could get it useable in the workshop. Oddly, it came up fine, even connected to our wireless network. With 3" of the left side of the LCD out of action, I had a hard time navigating the menus until I found the 'brightness' function, cranked all the way up, gave a sort of 'shadow' on the LCD where the text was. A few updates later, and I was up and running with RadioParadise, listening through the old stereo I had installed a while back.

Ahhhhhh.

I really wish these devices (that stream audio either via wireless or network) were less expensive or easy to put together by hand. I could totally see having a bunch of these for Mosaic for public spaces around the community. "I'll be out in the workshop, I'll run up RP there."

Apple continues to lose my respect.

Update 15:23pm.. - THIS BLOG ENTRY IS REFERRING TO A FAKE POST ON THE FAKE STEVE JOBS BLOG. I was duped, hook line and sinker. I'm annoyed at being deliberately mislead, but relieved that my rabid furniture-chewing has no real basis. I'll leave the post here as an example of my own duplicity.

It's been a hard fight for me.

I'm completely taken by Apple's designs, platform, and technology. They're the only company to take Unix seriously enough to put a front end on it that WORKS. Their hardware is sexy as all git out, and for the most part, works very well.

I have considered seriously going the Apple route more than once. Ditching this Linux thing and embracing Cupertino.

There's always been this nagging, though. Apple is very lawyer-heavy. They tolerate no smack-talk from the little guy, and have a tendency to go all Corleone on anyone who even HINTS at revealing their deep dark secrets.

But now I think they've overstepped their bounds.

In the past, when Apple threatens a writer or publisher, the contents of the negotiations are kept secret. A site disappears, the negotiations are private, and we assume they reached some amicable settlement.

One fellow isn't going quietly into the night. Daniel Lyons, the author of the "Fake Steve Jobs" blog, which has been a satirical poke at the head of Apple, is being attacked by a pack of rabid lawyers. While there may be a small bit that they disagree with, Daniel has gone the unusual route of publishing exactly what the lawyers are saying to him. The most recent exchange has said lawyers saying, in essence, "You should play nice with us. Here's a list of your assets you own. Here's where your family and your home are. Would be a shame if something were to, like, you know, happen to any of them....

And then, I swear to friggin God, there's a list of my assets with an estimated value for each and I suppose the implied threat that I stand to lose them. Which kinda scares the living shit out of me, to be honest, since they've got a pretty thorough list, which means they've been doing some research on this and the offer didn't just come out of thin air. Their lists includes my home address, most recent assessed value of my house and all the information about my mortgage; a rental property that we own; my bank accounts and investment accounts, including the college funds for our kids, whose names are used; and our boat and two cars.

This is disgusting. The Fake Steve Jobs site is satire. It's amusing, entertaining, and does nothing to harm Apple. But Apple is coming down on Lyons like a pack of wild dogs, and no ethical, moral, or financial boundary will stop them from destroying Lyons.

This is not a company I can, with any real conscience, support.

XO Laptop environment - Try it yourself!

I can't help it, I'm too impatient. While waiting for my Zach's XO laptop to arrive, I wanted to get a feel for what the environment was going to be like.

The XO uses a modified version of Redhat's Fedora operating system, with a custom written 'desktop' called Sugar. Coupled with Sugar are several tools, including a music editor, video application, several programming tools, a web browser, etc etc. The environment had to be built in a way that non-english-speaking children could pick it up easily, and if the early reports are true, the team has done a great job at this.

But I wanted a chance to work with the environment before the laptop arrived. Fortunately, there's a great series of pages on the OLPC Laptop wiki that describes how to set up an emulator, and run the laptop OS on your desktop machine.

After a little fiddling, I got it up and running, and was able to play around with the environment for a while.

First note - the emulator runs things -slower- than the laptop itself does, so I had to take into account I was seeing things at about half the speed a typical user would. But even with that, I was able to get a good feel for what the user experience was like.

I recommend anyone interested in this system to follow the emulator steps and take a look at it. I'm of the opinion that with several million of these going out to kids all over the world, the environment and tools are going have a major impact on the net at large. Opensource code (all written in Python, very good visual programming tools (like the Logo environment pictured here) - all will contribute to a new digital landscape over the next few years.

Dear Intarweb...

Somewhere, back in the mists of UI design, some bright light came up with the idea of making options in an application or desktop environment selectable by using a mouse to point at a menu along the top of a work area, clicking on the menu, and having it present more options.

This was called a 'Pull down menu'

Handy! Picks were readily available when needed, and stayed out of the way until requested.

I'm fairly sure the original designers of menuing systems never said to themselves, "Hey guys, I think it would be a good idea to SHOW A PULLDOWN MENU JUST BECAUSE YOUR MOUSE HAPPENED TO ROLL ACROSS IT ON ITS WAY TO PAUSE YOUR MUSIC!

I'm flabbergasted that the 'popup menu' has become de rigeur in web pages. It's a terrible UI design, and consistently gets in the way when trying to do other things. There's no other menuing system on the planet that does this. Menus should show up when you ASK for them, not because you happen to TOUCH it. That's what the little button the mouse is for. See? Clicky clicky. Now you try it.

Not that I expect this to change anytime in the near future. There's a revolution going on in UI design now, with AJAX services redefining what it means to write a UI. Unfortunately, I have yet to see any AJAX application that comes near the functionality of existing systems. It appears programmers are going back to 1985 and starting over, thus jettisoning all the lessons learned in the last 20 years.

Google Sketchup - Okay, this is cool

I've been having fun playing with Sketchup, Google's 3d modelling system. At first I avoided it because there was no native Linux version, even going as far as to get it to run under Wine (a process that... well, didn't fail completely, but did result in a tool that's unuseable - invisible menus, etc).

After biting the bullet and installing it on clipper, I set about learning what it could do. The project I had in mind was to model Mosaic's building site in Berlin, MA, so folks could have a feeling for what it would be like walking

There was certainly a period of mental adjustment. After all, it's not easy trying to model a 3d object using a 2 dimensional input and display method. But after a while, the keyboard shortcuts began to come naturally, and I found myself enjoying manipulating objects in this non-existent space.

I'm probably halfway through things so far. I'm regularly updating the drawing in 3dWarehouse, Google's sharing service for Sketchup. If you have the tool, feel free to download the drawing so far...

I'll let folks know when I'm done. But Google. Please? Make a Linux native version. You've already got Windows and Mac. This can't be that hard.

Linksys router upgrade

Nothing like a nice quiet thanksgiving weekend to take it easy around the house, enjoy some quiet time with the family, and... UPGRADE YOUR ROUTER!

Our Linksys WRT54g has been happily managing our net connection for about 2 years now. I've been noticing some twitchy problems with it off and on (about once a month it stops handing out DHCP addresses, we have to reboot it), and it has shown other small problems. The final straw came about 6 months ago when I realized I had lost the administration password. This meant I couldn't even log INTO the router to find out what was wrong with it. Something had to be done!

(6 months later)

Okay, time to fix it! I reset the router (holding in the reset button for 10 seconds does this) which resets it to factory defaults. The default password on Linksys routers is just 'admin' in the password field (surfing the neighborhood? See an SSID of 'linksys'? Hit 192.168.1.1, and try 'admin' in the password field. Welcome to someone's router! - some versions of the linksys may require admin in the username field as well).

The first thing I did was confirm that I could log into the router and that default configurations worked with our Comcast cable modem (they did). After resetting the password and the SSID, I took the opportunity to upgrade the firmware in the router. And I'm super-happy I did.

The firmware I was using was v 1.00.02. The current version is 1.02.2. The number of 'fixes' between those versions? somewhere around a bazillion. On the one hand, I do appreciate that Linksys is actively updating their firmware. On the other hand, that's a lot of bugfixes for a router that's only 18 months old.

I'm seriously considering checking out DD-WRT, the opensource firmware for the WRT54G. It has a truly impressive feature list, including native OpenVPN client and server support. Unfortunately, my router is a Version 6, which only has 2mb of flash in it. That means I can't run fit a larger firmware image onto the device. Alas. Maybe I'll eBay an older revision that has 16meg in it.

For now, I'm back up and running, and hopefully won't have my roomies having to fight with constant connection drops and router resets.

Can't go flying? How about the next best thing.

I have a strong attraction to flight, in all it's forms, but I feel the strongest attraction to things that are the closest to free flight... it's one of the reasons I'm very interested in soaring - it's as close as I can get without actually growing wings.

But, what if you can't fly yourself... How about flying models? Okay, that's fun, but you can't actually get IN the plane and fly it around.

Or can you?

This was linked from all over the place, but today's reminder of it came from Hackaday.

Photo Managers - Digikam rocks

Today I am full of Mad Love for DigiKam, the photo manager distributed with KDE. I've been using it off and on for a few years, and for one reason or another, I would stray away and use manual file copies for a while.

As of about a year ago though, I've moved to using it full time for managing the (sometimes hundreds) of pictures I take in a given session. There's a whole slew of wonderful functions in it, but the ones that made me finally stick with it can be summed up as follows:

• Automatic directory creation and sorting when importing from the camera. Directories can be created according to the date the picture was taken (importing 250 pictures from my camera may make 4 directories, if I was shooting over several days)
  
• Direct support for my Canon 400D. When I plug in the USB, KDE prompts me to start Digikam, and everything is imported.
  
• Full support for Exif data, including image orientaton, etc. Exif data is never removed or 'flushed' from the images.
  
• Excellent export functionality to either Flickr or to a series of HTML files and thumbnails.
  
• Very good gallery organization, sorting, and previewing. I can work with thousands of images and sort them into appropriate directories.
  
• Tagging allows sorting and categorizing of images without reordering the directories. Searching for tags, dates, or other data generates a new view based on the tag criteria.
  
• Easy calling of external programs such as The Gimp for post-processing.
  

Thank you Sun and Ubuntu!

... and the cast of thousands that made installing a Sun JDK onto Linux as simple as:

root@endor:~# apt-get install sun-java6-jdk
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
gcc-3.3-base java-common libstdc++5 odbcinst1debian1 sun-java6-bin sun-java6-jre unixodbc
Suggested packages:
equivs binfmt-support sun-java6-demo sun-java6-doc sun-java6-source sun-java6-plugin ia32-sun-java6-plugin sun-java6-fonts
ttf-baekmuk ttf-unfonts ttf-unfonts-core ttf-kochi-mincho ttf-sazanami-mincho ttf-arphic-uming libmyodbc odbc-postgresql
libct1
Recommended packages:
libxp6 libnss-mdns gsfonts-x11
The following NEW packages will be installed:
gcc-3.3-base java-common libstdc++5 odbcinst1debian1 sun-java6-bin sun-java6-jdk sun-java6-jre unixodbc
0 upgraded, 8 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 42.3MB/43.1MB of archives.
After unpacking 128MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?

Up until recently, getting Java onto a Linux box was, well, not difficult, but certainly not trivial. I'm happy to say it's gotten as easy as installing any other package, which, with current package managers, means it's a breeze.

Yay progress.

Of Systems and Services, Mame and Madmen...

It's been a challenging few days here at Chez Geek. In true journal fashion, here are the highlights, because I know my devoted readers are sitting on the edge of their seats, waiting for every geeky installment of my daily encounters with recalcitrant hardware, misconfigured servers, and twitchy environments.

Ahem.

Of Mame...
On Friday night I finished wiring the console. I'm short a half dozen buttons, so some functionality is missing, but I really wanted coin drop buttons. I picked up a couple small single-throw pushbuttons I had lying around, and wired them in with duct tape, so now I can 'drop coins' to get credits just by pushing a button on the console. Looks like ass, but it does work. I've ordered the new buttons, and they'll arrive in a couple days, and I wanted to play games NOW.

There's a whole post about things I'm learning regarding building a Mame cabinet, but that can wait. For now, I'm using deathstar, my MythTV box, as my 'mame front end'. MythGame is "okay" as far as interfaces. Mostly it's "okay" because it's actually working correctly, and works with the controller. I'm hoping to haul the entire setup to Ubercon this coming weekend, so minimizing fuss is a big win.

Of Stonekeep and Conventions...
Next weekend I'll be down at Ubercon in New Jersey. This of course means I need to get most of the CONGO system up and running to run badges. Unfortunately, endor is not behaving. After almost 4 years of constantly apt-getting and updating packages on it (Starting from a Debian 'woody' install), a series of packages failed miserably during an upgrade (I haven't really worked on it in about a year), and has left it in an unuseable state. I've backed the data off it, and reloaded Ubuntu Feisty Fawn on it. There's a bunch of configuration that still needs to be done, and that's making me nervous so close to an event. At least the install seems to have completed cleanly.

Those are the two primary things on my mind these days. Oh, and in the background is ongoing Java work and the slow moving ahead of Mosaic Commons, but that's sort of the 'steady noise' bits. I'm just covering the highlights right now.

Audacity Ate my Konqueror

I've been having a problem in KDE for the last 6 months or so (perhaps longer, I'm not sure). On the face of it, it seemed like a standard file association problem, but it was pervasive.

Recently I switched to using Konqueror as my primary web browser. With the advances in plugin support for things like Flash and Shockwave, the actual browser platform has become less important. Since I switched away from Firefox, I've been using Konqueror and, for the most part, things have been pretty good.

Except for one annoying bit.

Because I'm a developer, I have to, on occasion, do the 'View Source' thing from inside my browser to see how the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in a page I'm working with is put together. For some bizarre reason, Konqueror had decided that when I selected View Source, it would try and open the source in... Audacity.

Now, I'm all for great programs like Audacity. It's a fantastic multi-track audio editor. But in no way, shape, or form is it a source code viewer.

This afternoon I finally sat down to try and figure out what the heck was wrong. Konqueror has a great tool for associating various file types with helper applications (something old time users of Mozilla are very familiar with), but the sheer number of associations is staggering. And since I didn't know what type was that was causing the external app to be launched, I didn't know which one to look for.

I got my first clue when I noticed that Konqueror had associated .py (Python) files with Audacity. "Aha!" sez I, "That's not right!" - I started to change the association, then went "Wait, I don't want Audacity started ever. Just remove the helper." Which confronted me with the dialog box stating that Audacity had been attached to text/plain and could not be removed.

Another clue! Navigated to text/plain, saw Audacity listed in the helpers, and promptly moved it down to the bottom of the list (Okay, maybe someday I'll want to use Audacity. Allow me my foibles.) Clicking Apply and then trying a view source finally got me... the source!

Note that this entire problem was solved inside KDE without resorting to editing configuration files, typing cryptic commands, or knowing esoteric and mystical Linux incantations. It was a misconfigured browser, nothing more. In the good old days this would have required said gyrations to fix, but I'm constantly impressed at how far environments like KDE have come, making problem solving like this a lot more intuitive.

My Gibbons Runneth Over

Now there's a topic that won't make much sense unless you're in the Linux community.

This week saw the release of Ubuntu 7.10, aka 'Gutsy Gibbon'. I've been firmly in the "Stick with the stable releases" Linux camp for quite a while, even when Debian was pushing 2 years behind on their 'stable' release.

I've been running Ubuntu 7.04 (aka 'Feisty Fawn') on yawl for the last year or so, and have had nothing but good things to say about it. It's been stable, useable, and lets me do my work. Excellent.

Yesterday I ran the update process and told the system to update itself to 7.10. The total processing time would be about 2.5 hours, due to a gig and change of data that needed to be downloaded (okay, I have a lot of packages), so I decided to go to lunch.

Upon returning, I answered 2 questions about local files I had modified, let the installation finish, and, with a small dose of trepidation, rebooted.

It came back fine.

In fact, everything came back fine. I have seen not the tiniest indication of a problem. Ubuntu just upgraded something like 1100 packages on this machine to newer versions, and everything Just Plain Works. All my basic tools are fine, if upgraded and showing some new bells and whistles. The traditional boondoggles of Linux system maintenance never even flinched. Sound, network, accelerated graphics (I have an nVidia card) - all came back up flawlessly, even with my desktop back as it looked before.

There are some noteable changes in the new release. The file manager has been replaced with 'Dolphin', which I have to say the jury is still out on. Initially I was very nervous about replacing my beloved Konqueror file system browser with something new, but my initial impressions of Dolphin are good. Everything seems there, if a little heavy on the big icons. I'll play with it a while and see if it will cut the mustard.

This is how computers are supposed to work. No license hassles, no nightmare changes from one revision to another, no "Burn it to bedrock and reinstall from scratch" problems with upgrades, or problems with "This app worked with my old OS, but doesn't work with the new one!" - one big distribution contributed to by everyone, with everything updated at once and confirmed to work together.

Yay Ubuntu!

The XO Laptop - OLPC comes true.

I rarely get involved in rallying folks to humanitarian causes or try to entice people to donate time any money to charities. When I do, it's generally about something I feel quite strongly about.

About 2 years ago the faculty members at the MIT Media lab launched a project called One Laptop Per Child, the idea being that if a laptop could be built for $100, millions could be produced and distributed all through the developing nations through donations, government support, and other forms of philanthropy. The driving force is to try and make a direct impact on the socio-technological gap that is so apparent across the worlds population.

The result of this project is the XO Laptop, a machine designed by the OLPC team to address the specific challenges that will be encountered by children using the machine where there are no power outlets, or no internet, and where conditions may not be as squeaky clean as they are in your typical home office. The laptop itself, by modern standards, is underpowered, but the design is so open, so green, and so sturdy, you can't help but be impressed.

This is a laptop designed for children to carry around with them, anywhere, anytime. It is waterproof, dirt proof, the battery lasts many many hours, it can network itself to other laptops arond it (a 'mesh'), and it can run off a $10 solar panel (and recharge from it too).

There is an excellent video review of the XO by David Pogue on the NY Times website. Even if you aren't interested in the machine directly, watch the video for an idea of what it's all about.

Now, the XO laptop didn't come in at $100. It actually came in at $183. As things ramp up, they hope to get the price down, but it's still a little more than they anticipated.

So as part of their launch, the OLPC project has a special offer.

On November 12th, you can go to XOgiving.org and enroll in the "Give one, get one" program. You pay $400, and get an XO laptop of your very own. "Wait, $400? That's twice what you said!" - Yes, it is. Because if you purchase an XO laptop for $400, a second laptop will be sent to a child in a developing nation.

My wife and I are seriously considering one of these laptops for our 8 year old son, and the added benefit of benefiting a child elsewhere is just icing on the cake.

If nothing else, watch the David Pogue video for all the details on the machine. It's a remarkably green, well designed, and rugged little machine.

A Peek Under the Covers - Windows XP Registry Keys

While working on my current Java project, I needed to better understand how the Preferences API stores data. My initial instinct was to dig around in my home directory looking for a .java/Preferences file or something similar. Perhaps under Linux, this would have been the case, but Preferences is platform agnostic, and under Windows, it uses the Windows Registry.

I've long since tried to drive out my knee-jerk reaction to the Registry. The initial implementations of it were awful, and prone to easy corruption. Navigating the registry has never been what one would call 'simple', but after a while things settled down a bit and stabilized.

In this case, I was using a simple Java command to store some values for a Webstart launched client:

prefs = Preferences.userRoot().node(nodeName);
prefs.put("ExpoLoginName",userField.getText());
prefs.put("ExpoPassword",new String(passwordField.getPassword()));

Pretty straightforward stuff. In general, the code was working as expected, but I was seeing doubling of some of my values. What I needed to be able to do was actually see the registry stored values themselves, without going through the interface, to see if I was actually storing the values properly, or things were going wrong on the way out.

This unfortunately brought me in contact with the Windows native tool 'REGEDIT'. This tool came out quite a while ago, and is the defacto standard way of editing, browsing, and searching the Windows Registry. Unfortunately, regedit hasn't seen any interface upgrades in approximately an eon. It is painfully difficult to work in, and while yes, it gets the job done, little interface quirks can flat out destroy productivity. For example. The FIND function (amazingly, bound to '^F'), does in fact let you search the registry for a key or value. But, it is a one-way search, from the current position forward. It does not wrap. It also does not RESET when you change to a new search term. So if your first search finds a match, say, at the 5th from the bottom key (by the way, the window does not scroll to show you where your match hit. You have to scroll it manually), and you decide to search for a second term, it will only search the last 5 rows in the registry.

I lost half an hour searching for keys I KNEW were in the registry, because my first search had set the pointer so low. GAARRRHHHH!

What I found most entertaining about this path was it gave me a chance to look under the thin veneer of civility that Windows brings to the operating system experience. Take for example the screen shot above. Note that the keys stored in the registry have been altered from their internal values. Some bright Windows developer back in the dark ages realized they should tell the difference between an upper case letter and a lower case letter. Rather than, say, writing that into the logic of the registry, they cleverly decided simply to preface upper case characters with a forward slash.

Ah, but that brought up a problem! You could now not store a forward slash into the registry! Not to worry, we'll just change any forward slashes in the registry to backslashes! Sounds like a great plan!

This sort of tortured logic is what you see happening in student built technology experiments, hacked together during all night jolt-driven marathons. It's not something you'd see in the largest software company in the world. Their programming practices, in theory vastly improved from the early days, wouldn't allow such awful hacks.

Would they?

Update - it appears, due to notes in the comments, that the registry values hack is due to Java's interpolation, not Windows. Java needs to specify slashed items because the backing store being used in this instance (Windows Registry) is case insensitive. If a different backing store were being used, that wouldn't be happening. My apologies to Redmond for assigning blame. On this one thing. :)

Journeying Abroad - Life without Mozilla

It's become almost a truism that if you use a Linux machine for your desktop, you must be running Firefox as your web browser, and Thunderbird as your mail client. The former is certainly more prevelant than than the latter, but even so, both of these programs are fairly common in the greater Linux community.

However, despite their popularity, they have their drawbacks. On the Firefox side, the program suffers from it's core dependance on XUL, the XML based rendering engine that is at the core of the product. While XUL is remarkably flexible, powerful, and useful, it is also a performance hog. Firefox, even on yawl, my desktop machine, which should have enough oomph to drive it, can come to a painful crawl after only a few hours of use.

The memory leaks in Firefox are well known, and to Mozilla's credit, they are being addressed in Firefox 3, currently under development.

On the Thunderbird side, I've been having some absolutely infuriating problems with sending mail. Hitting send will regularly cause a pause of 5-10 seconds in my complete desktop before the mail actually gets sent. I've checked DNS, my SMTP configuration, everything, I can't find the problem.

So why not use this opportunity to play the field?

Here there be dragons...
For the last week, I've been on a No Mozilla campaign, with an audience of one. I have on occasion needed to start Firefox (most notably to view Google Calendar), but for the most part, I've been using Konqueror, the browser within KDE, as my primary web browser.

Konqueror has been remarkably stable and useful, I will happily admit. It is noticeably faster than Firefox in almost every way, and I've seen only 1-2 websites where rendering has failed completely (noteably Google). KDE's inherent ability to allow keyboard redefinition has made the transition to Konqueror quite easy (for instance, Firefox uses ^L to jump to the address bar and edit/copy/whatever your current URL. Konqueror has ^L bound to 'clear address bar', something that was driving me bonkers for a few days, before I realized I was simply using the wrong function. A quick key redefinition, and I was happy again).

For the most part, all my plugins are working correctly as well. Konqueror adapts the Flash, Java, and Shockwave plugins as used in Firefox without any problems. In stream videos and animations work just fine.

Will I continue using Konqueror? Most likely I'll stick with it for a while. I do miss a few basic things though. For instance, I use Google Browser Sync to make sure all my bookmark folders are synced across all my machines. My Konqueror installation does not have my, er, large selection of bookmarks I've accumulated. Secondly, I've been using Sage as my RSS reader (as it syncs in with the Firefox bookmarks quite nicely). That naturally won't work with Konqueror, so I'm without a centralized RSS reader right now.

Even with these niggles, I'm finding myself using Konqueror more and more. Speed, stability, and functionality. How pleasant!

Great Dave, but what about mail?
Oh yeah, the mail. Well, this one doesn't have quite as happy a story.

In my journey away from Thunderbird, the first choice was naturally KMail, the mail component of the Kontact system in KDE. I'd used KMail on and off several times over the year, and I'm sad to say, it really hasn't improved at the pace other applications have. In many ways it's quite pleasant to work with, snappy rendering, good layout and feel, complete and workable dialogs, but it still suffers from a Linux 'half complete' feel. The keyboard bindings for mail navigation are obtuse and, oddly, impossible to reassign (I even have a bug open on it - it's still not fixed). The thread model in KMail is abysmal - making it very easy to freeze the entire interface on very large mailboxes, etc etc.

So KMail was okay for a bit, but wasn't cutting the mustard for regular use. The next natural check was of course Evolution, the Gnome mail client.

I've used Evolution off and on a lot over the years, and in general, it's okay. I don't particularly like GTK based apps (I find them overly hungry for screen real estate, and a bad combination of eye candy and ham-handed attempts at UI design), and Evolution shows many of these traits. However, even with those faults, it's not a bad client. I got it up and running without any problems, and it's working fine.

So why am I gripey?

I miss Thunderbirds spam filtering. I get a LOT of spam. My monitors regularly log 500-700 spam messages a day into my inbox. boomer does an awesome job of catching the lions share of the spam (about 80%), but the rest shows up in my inbox. Thunderbird was catching perhaps 90% of -that- spam, and tagging it for me. I could review what was tagged, agree with whatever it set, hit "purge", and it would all go away.

Evolution has very rudimentary junk filtering, and it's not catching much of this spam. I'm finding myself spending much of my time just deleting spam messages, and growling.

Conclusions
Will I stick with Konqueror for a while? Yes, I think so. I have to rethink my RSS aggregation and viewing. I'm not keen on a locally managed RSS list (because I change machines so often), but I'm also not excited about a remote 'web' based system (Web 2.0 can bite me, and old sk00l type applications are not fast enough for my reading habits). So that need is still missing.

Will I stick with Evolution? Perhaps, if I can fix the spam filtering problem. Evolutions handling of multiple accounts is FAR better than Thunderbirds (have a bug open on that one too), and the UI is one I can deal with, if if if...

I'm just never satisfied I guess.

Oh why must they taunt me so?!

This evening saw me visiting the New and Improved [tm] [reg us pat off] Natick Mall here in sunny Natick, MA. There's been a major rebuilding going on over there, and seeing as this thing is only about a mile from me, and the fact that I had an evening free, I felt it was time to go take a look.

First, the original mall was of average size and layout. Natick Mall has always been slightly 'upscale' compared to others, but with the other biggies nearby like the Burlington Mall renovating and upscaling, some developer it was time to upgrade the Natick mall

And boy howdy did they.

I don't want to get into a review of malls, but did you know that there are Wikipedia entries on malls? Weird, eh? But the entry for the Natick Mall does have pictures of the inside of the renovated space. According to the article:

This expansion project includes the renovation of approximately 100 new stores and the addition of two new anchors, (Nordstrom and Neiman Marcus), making Natick Collection the twelfth largest in the country, fourth largest on the East Coast, and the largest in New England.

Now, in this vast space, you'd think I could find something interesting.

Think again.

The newly expanded space has nothing of interest in it. It is huge, to be sure, well decorated, elegant to a fault, and simply drips of sophistication. It is, however, populated with... clothing stores, perfume stores, and luggage and pocketbook offerings. Many were outlet names, but it was simply store upon store upon store of clothing. A vast wasteland of chrome, steel, glass, and fashion manikins.

Until... in the midst of all this rampant hoity toity consumerism, I see one beacon of elegance that does not involve silk, tweed, or leather.

Apple has opened a store within this vast new space. Yes, it is similar to all the other stores, with the genius bar, young hip store attendees, and ranks of elegant hardware, but now they've gone and done it. They've put this store in my back yard.

So, naturally, I went in.

Those who have been in an Apple store need not hear the details of what the store was like. It had by far the most customers I'd seen in that entire bleak landscape for the mall, but wasn't crowded, and it only took me a moment to find a free iPhone and start playing with it.

This was the second time I had touched an iPhone, and while there were no clear revelations from my first exposure, I was again impressed by the design, elegance, clarity of purpose, and all around "rightness" of this device. I left the store after a brief chat with one of the employees, and went in search of food, visions of well designed hardware and software systems dancing in my head.

I chanced by a Verizon store and had a chat with the folks there. My aging Treo 650 is on a Verizon plan, and I had recently heard about a possible offering for 'tethered mode' modem operation for $15/month. That might be handy, thought I, and went to ask them about it.

Oh no, not so fast. Sure it's $15 a month. On top of an 'unlimited' data service plan ($49/mo). Oh, and it won't work with the Treo 650, you'll need to upgrade to a Treo 700p. "Oh, that should be fine. I'm within my upgrade window now, I should get a big discount" *flipflipflip* "Yep, you are, you'll get a $150 discount on a new phone." "So, if I wanted to upgrade from my 650 to a 700p, how much would it be?"

The sales person actually walked around and started referencing various displays, and said "$450, minus the $150 credit you'll get.". I glanced down at the display for the 700p there, and a brand new service, with the 700p, would run me $345. "But that sign says $350 if I buy a Treo 700p now, why don't I just apply the $150 to that?" "Ah, that's just for new subscribers."

I'm really really really done with Verizon.

It looks like AT&T's plans have FAR better data services, as well as a platform I'm interested in supporting. (The Verizon droid basically said I should ditch the Palm platform and use a Windows device. Not in my game plan, thanks)

There are only a few things stopping me from running pell-mell for iPhone land...

• Initial cost is high. Even with the $200 price reduction, we're still talking $400 out of my pocket (I'd get the 8gig version. Just makes sense). I don't have that sort of cash right now, not to mention the new service activation with AT&T. My phone number SHOULD port. Will it?
• Bluetooth limits. The iPhone is not a full bluetooth device. It supports only the Hands Free Profile (HFP) and the Headset Profile (HSP). No support for data access, OBX, A2DP, any of the cool things that Bluetooth can do. My biggest whine would be the lack of bluetooth keyboard support. I can get a mobile bluetooth keyboard that's quite functional, and about the size of my Treo. But I couldn't use it with the iPhone. Will Apple update this? A huge unknown.
• The jump to Apple. I've avoided purchasing Apple products for me personally. It's a slippery slope, but I cannot ignore that Apple's designs are fantastic, and their support policies are the best in the business (see a recent post by a self-avowed Windows adherant). Should I make my first real foray into Apple land an iPhone?
• Last but not least, do I really need it? In all honesty, the answer here is no. My 650 is working fine for me for now, though it's aging, the Palm platform is most likely dying, and it's twice the size and heft of the iPhone. I don't need to change devices now.

So, I haven't bought an iPhone yet. But durn Apple for putting a store right in my back yard. It's a plot I tell ya.

Today's GeekSquee

I have much geek-joy this morning. Yesterday was a banner day in playing with all the little toys I have, and build