Rhonabwy

Looks like I had my own Mail crash on the iPhone. Interesting tidbits. I especially liked the version number in the plist:

<key>os_version</key>
<string>OS X 1.0 (1A543a)</string>

I tried to use the the network speed test setup at SpeakEasy, but it didn’t seem to want to find that site. I suspect the flash is screwing it up. Ryan Rawson said in an email he was getting 115Kbps over the Edge. I don’t think I’m getting that good from my house - and I need to figure out why it’s not talking over my local WiFi (that’s a little frustrating).

In general, the WiFi is working fine - I had it happily talking WiFi at the Online Coffee Company where I spent the morning working…

Interesting tidbit that I didn’t expect. After taking a few photos with the iPhone, I came home and plugged it into the laptop. iPhoto immediately came active and sync’d down the photo’s from the phone. I knew I could sync from iPhoto to the phone, but for some reason I just didn’t expect the reverse.

I’m willing to be a IM client won’t happen any time soon on an iPhone. The reason? AT&T is charging that nice little extra texting fee for SMS messages. It will be interesting to see how that all plays out - I always thought the extra charges for texting was sort of stupid when you’ve got an “unlimited data” plan - but hey, it’s the carriers trying to suck as much out as they can. It’s worked pretty well for them so far - but I don’t see that its sustainable.

As I sit playing with the phone, listening to some tunes, calling my friends, I’ve got to say its working really well. WiFi isn’t picking up well at my home, but I also have a really old wifi base station (one of the original flying saucer ones from Apple). One thing I noticed is that the phone automatically switches over to Edge when the local WiFi isn’t happening - and it’s pretty smooth. Of course if you’re on a phone call, the Edge data is screwed - you’re SOL. I couldn’t both talk Edge and surf to a web page at the same time. Seems like if Apple made the “phone” component into VOIP, then you could - but the voice quality would likely degrade.

I’m reading updates and notes from all over, seeing what other folks are talking about. Gruber’s crash log from the mail app on the phone is one of the most interesting… kind of a chance to look under the covers as it were.

Activation wasn’t a problem for me, but it’s been horrific for some. Chris has been running with an “iBrick” for something like 10 hours now. Knowing how that kind of software is put together, I’ve got to imagine that there’s some clogged queue in the messaging pipelines somewhere, or someone restarted a service when they were slammed and Chris’ activation has been cooked by some lost messaging or something.

Yep, I got one. I haven’t opened the package yet - catching up from missing the day while waiting in line…

Brian Dorsey has just launched a really interesting site - NoonHat. It’s apparently written in Django (yeah!!!), and the first lunches set up with it happened today. It’s basically a “blind lunch” - you and up to 5 other people that are just tossed together by signing up on the site and indicating a region where you’d like to eat lunch.

I haven’t heard how the initial lunches turned out, but the concept is really interesting and I think I’ll have to sign up for a lunch or two in the future when I’m not feeling so drained of the ability to be an extrovert.

From an article at boston.com on Games and AI that popped up in the ACM daily news bites:

“A lot of the most interesting work in artificial intelligence is being done by game developers,” says Bruce Blumberg, senior scientist at Blue Fang Games in Waltham, and formerly a professor at MIT’s Media Lab. “You have really bright kids who are dealing with problems they don’t realize are insoluble. They’re very motivated.” 

Makes me think that maybe we should consider more of these interesting problems a little less onsoluble… I don’t know what Blue Fang is actually up to, but I’ve also held this opinion for a few years. I rather mourn the loss of the Synthetic Characters Group that Bruce was running. Maybe “loss” is the wrong word - but I miss being able to read up on their research and what they were doing. I recall one of that team going to work for Microsoft (Bungie, actually) just prior to them getting into gear for Halo 2. I’ve often wondered if the research flowed a bit from there into the AI for the aliens in Halo 2.

Andy Oram published his own short research/survey on why people write free documentation. It’s an interesting read, and I kind of wish I’d seen the survey ongoing when it was live, as I’m one of those people.

I started off doing it because it made my life easier. Back at MU (in the dark ages), I started in computing on the night shift the Help Desk (student computing support). At that point, we had a few handouts that we could toss to folks and say “read this” - nothing more than a glorified FAQ for the most common questions we received.

Since then, I’ve kept involved in some fashion or another. For a while, it was part of a teaching process. I just get a kick out of teaching, but it doesn’t pay worth a damn. So I do it on the side periodically. Or as a side-note in my current position. Most recently, it was simply to be a part of the community. I’ve kicked in some to the Django project - more than anything else because it was desperately needed (at least in some areas), and I didn’t really feel like I had the time to commit to doing development work on the framework. Too much to learn and keep track of with everything else I was involved with.

I guess that amounts to me doing it “for the community” - although to be honest that seems like a very vague bucket of reasons. I’ve done similar snippets for Grinder and Maven, although those results tended to be focused inward to a company instead of outward to the community at large. The truth of it all is that it’s actually rather difficult to get involved in the documentation side of a project and make it work. Although a lot of projects espouse wanting the help, figuring out how to submit and work docs into the project is pretty darn time consuming, and it usually ends up being easier just to post notes to the web (like in a blog…) and figure that Google will hook things up at some point. Shoot - it’s how I often find the most useful tidbits.

And I think the piece of “documentation” that slipped by Andy’s net is interaction in the mailing lists. Malcolm, for example, is the every-present answerer of questions for Django. I swear he answers damn near every otherwise-unanswered question on the mailing list. I’ve even taken his posts on the mailing list and converted them (roughly) into patches to the official Django docs.

I got to see the Indigo Girls in concert tonight - it was the opening night of ZooTunes at the Seattle Zoo. It was a good concert, with a lot of tunes that I hadn’t heard (I haven’t exactly been a loyal fan, pretty much not paying attention to them over the past few years), and a few that I recalled very well.

We’ll be heading to some later concerts in the series as well - hopefully the weather will be a tad better. The show I’m really looking forward to is Bela Fleck and the Flecktones.

While it didn’t really stop anything, there was a slight seattle misting over the concert. It wasn’t bad, but it definitely could have been better.

Anyways, I’m glad I got a chance to see them play. They were fun.

On a lark, Karen and I stopped by one of the new places on Queen Anne - Julias. There’s a few of them around Seattle, but the Queen Anne location just opened four days ago. I hadn’t been there, but a few friends have commented about the really high quality of food. (Funny enough, the new Queen Anne location isn’t even listed on the contact page on their web site, but there’s a page about the specific location)

They serve breakfast until 1pm on Saturday (thank god, because I was moving slow today…), so I tried their Eggs Benedict - and I’ve got to say it’s best I’ve had in Seattle. Beats the Blue Star Cafe in Wallingford hands down. Not too much lemon, the yolks were good, messy and meshed the flavors together beautifully. I’m glad not too many people were there yet - I have a sneaking suspicion that they’ll be having LONG lines later this summer as word gets out. Competition to rival the 5 Spot for crazy morning crowds.