NPike.net - Like nailing jelly to the wall.

As I hinted at in the preceding blog post, I am now the proud owner of a 16gb iPod Touch.

So what do I think of this device?  I think it is possibly the most amazing wifi-enabled internet device you could purchase… almost.  The Touch supports 802.11A/B/G - and comes with a “full” web browser, the mobile version of Apple’s Safari WebKit based browser.

The browser on the device handles wonderfully - but it does tend to crash from time to time.

So why isn’t it the best wifi-enabled internet device?  It’s a closed system.

Developers have had much luck with hacking the iPhone to allow creation and installation  of third party apps (only a handful actually useful) — but as of yet they have had no significant luck doing the same for the Touch.

Yes, they both run the same operating system - but the Touch runs OSX Mobile 1.1 - that extra dot revision comes packed with a newly encrypted file system, and a different sort of communication with iTunes.  These factors make it invulnerable to the already existing “jailbreak” approach for the iPhone that allows 3rd party communication with the device.

Once the Touch has been torn open - and useful 3rd party apps like Instant Messaging and email applications can sneak in… then it will be the ultimate wifi-enabled internet device.

In the mean time, I worry for the iPhone users out there - you will be getting version 1.1 of OSX for your iPhone in the near future - my word of caution:  Don’t get too attached to your useful (or gimmicky) 3rd party applications.

FIrst post from my brand spanking new ipod touch. :)

Pictures to follow.

Joel Spolsky (joelonsoftware.com) has an interesting article today about history repeating itself in the software industry.  If he’s correct ( and I have a feeling he is ), the web will have a few large waves coming…

I still remember the days of DOS programming (I caught the tail end of it) - don’t do anything extravagant, because it will be dog slow - the same goes for today in web development, “Don’t do anything super extravagant with AJAX/DHTML/Javascript because browsers don’t perform well when pushed” - so folks tend to lay off the “cool” features in favor of a better user experience (performance wise) for those running IE6 still.

Below is the setup for Joel’s article,  if you manage to get through that, a link to the complete article follows.  Its a good read, and highly recommended if your in the industry.

IBM just released an open-source office suite called IBM Lotus Symphony. Sounds like Yet Another StarOffice distribution. But I suspect they’re probably trying to wipe out the memory of the original Lotus Symphony, which had been hyped as the Second Coming and which fell totally flat. It was the software equivalent of Gigli.

In the late 80s, Lotus was trying very hard to figure out what to do next with their flagship spreadsheet and graphics product, Lotus 1-2-3. There two obvious ideas: first, they could add more features. Word processing, say. This product was called Symphony. Another idea which seemed obvious was to make a 3-D spreadsheet. That became 1-2-3 version 3.0.

Both ideas ran head-first into a serious problem: the old DOS 640K memory limitation. IBM was starting to ship a few computers with 80286 chips, which could address more memory, but Lotus didn’t think there was a big enough market for software that needed a $10,000 computer to run. So they squeezed and squeezed. They spent 18 months cramming 1-2-3 for DOS into 640K, and eventually, after a lot of wasted time, had to give up the 3D feature to get it to fit. In the case of Symphony, they just chopped features left and right.

Neither strategy was right. By the time 123 3.0 was shipping, everybody had 80386s with 2M or 4M of RAM. And Symphony had an inadequate spreadsheet, an inadequate word processor, and some other inadequate bits.

“That’s nice, old man,” you say. “Who gives a fart about some old character mode software?”

Humor me for a minute, because history is repeating itself, in three different ways, and the smart strategy is to bet on the same results.

Continue Reading

CodingHorror.com has an interesting post today about Gigabyte: Decimal vs. Binary, basically the question everyone asks them selfs after they walk home from Best Buy with a 500GB harddrive, only to find that Windows says its 465GB.

When you buy a “500 Gigabyte” hard drive, the vendor defines it using the decimal powers of ten definition of the “Giga” prefix.

500 * 109 bytes = 500,000,000,000 = 500 Gigabytes

But the operating system determines the size of the drive using the computer’s binary powers of two definition of the “Giga” prefix:

465 * 230 bytes = 499,289,948,160 = 465 Gigabytes

It’s absolutely horrible - but nothing you can do about it, just shoot for the “1.3TB harddrives” to get your full 1TB capacity.

An Innocent Game of Xbox Live: UNO Gone So Terribly Wrong

The UNO game between Jason, Billy, a computer opponent, and myself seemingly lasted for hours (more like only 45 minutes).   House Rules:  Draw until you get a card to play.  First person to hit 250 points is the loser, and at this time the person with the lowest game score wins.

As you can see, I (mavr1kwest) racked up a total of 418 points in one game, over 200 in that single round.  I think Billy (Billiard84) actually won the hand, but Jason (JComboBox) had the lower over all points - and I of course broke the 250 point limit by a smidgen.

No more UNO for me, for atleast a few days.

How To Destroy a Jeep

So I spent some time reverse engineering Google Reader to discover their underyling API to pull feeds, stories, and subscription information in XML format.  Google has not made this API public yet, but it exists.

Then I started the ground work on an iPhone web app:  a “prettier” Google Reader.  Google Reader on the iPhone is dog slow, and the mobile version is just plain ugly.

As you can see to the right, I got pretty far - locally.  Unfortunately Safari on Windows, and Safari on the iPhone implement the “same domain security policy“.  Namely, the browser will not make XML requests to sites outside the domain of the currently loaded page. So the iphone app, hosted on staging.npike.net, can not make requests to www.google.com for needed XML data.

With out this, a web app for this purpose is not possible.  There are of course a few work-arounds, but I will investigate them at a later time, because they will be too time consuming to waste any time of my Friday.

I am very disappointed, and extremely angry at Apple for taking this approach for 3rd party development of the iPhone.

Here’s to a frustrating Friday….  :-/

So Apple had their iPod conference yesterday 1PM EDT. (Why is it labeled EDT now instead of EST?) And they announced changes to the whole iPod lineup.

• New colors for the shuffles
• New “fatty” nano with video support
• iPod “Classic” 160gb
• iPod Touch

Obviously the only one I really care about is the iPod Touch (pictured on the side). When the iPhone was announced, I said I would but it if it didn’t have the phone crap. Well now its here, well almost - won’t be available until the 24 of September 2007.

They also announced that the 4gb iPhone would be discontinued, and that the 8gb iPhone would drop $200 in price to a much more palatable $399 sticker.

I spent the rest of the afternoon feeding Jenn the right words to increase her interest in buying one. Which she did. And its awesome.

Pictures below, until she kills me and has them removed.

Jenn moving contacts from her old phone onto the iPhone while I rustle up some burgers on the BBQ.

Activation of the new iPhone

Jenn playing with the display iPhone at the AT&T store in market view.

(Click here if your using a feed reader and cant see the video)

(Yes, its Webb, not Web)

You can also subscribe to my Google Reader Shared items by clicking this link

This weekend I helped Jenn with a mini-shopping spree at Walmart for various needed items in her house, one of them being the BBQ below that I constructed and then cooked 15 or so hamburgers on last night :D

My ‘95 Jeep Cherokee is in the shop today,  my crank sensor is completely shot.  (Follow the link if you have no idea what a crank sensor is).  $300 to buy a new crank sensor, and the mechanic had no estimate on the labor required to replace it.  He said he would put the Jeep up immediately, replace the part, and give me a call.

No call yet (1:19PM)

He also wanted to do a tune up for $169 - which I passed on, as well as replace my fuses for  $129 a pop.  Again, I passed on this.

So this could be rather pricey after labor, I just want them to replace the crank sensor so the Jeep runs.  My mom is going to mail me the title to the Jeep so that I can look into trading it in.

Check out this Jeep:

Almost 60k miles, 2001, tow package, nice tires, soft top (would need a hard top), AM/FM/CD, and its only $13,000.  I am hoping to pop over after I pick up my Jeep to give it an inspection.