Has anyone else noticed that searching for video on the iPhone through YouTube just sucks? You find a LOT more data and results (i.e. you get some) when you use the web interface. Here’s an example:
Search for “yegge” in YouTube (I was hoping to find a cross post of the OSCON presentation he gave – but it’s in BlipTV as it turns out). You get zero results on the iPhone. Through the web interface on my desktop I see 8. What’s up with that?
I’ve got a lot more to post about, so this won’t be the last post from it, but OSCON is wrapped up for the year. The iPhone has been incredible for being at the conference. I took the laptop a couple of times, but I didn’t feel like I really needed it all that much unless I was really downloading code or hacking on a project. Checking email or looking things up on the web were always in the pocket. That’s just a hell of an advantage! There were a couple of times when it even failed over to using the edge network – which at least kept the data flowing even when the wifi network would crap out.
As an aside, doing networking for a conference has to be about the most thankless job with completely pathological use cases that I can imagine. There was even the slides in the keynotes asking folks not to stream video or torrents… which means that someone was doing it and eating what limited bandwidth was available.
Even posting to this blog has been pretty good from the iphone, although I’m not a super speedy finger typist.
I seem to have automagically posted this to my old blog originally, so I’m reposting it correctly this morning:
One of the things that changed the way I look at a system was included on the OLPC keyboard. I’m afraid you can’t male it out too well in the picture, but one of the key sets across the top row changed the “view”. In eclipse IDE terms, that might be a perspective. It had three ranges – the active application, what was actively running on the laptop, and the nearby network.
I know others have had a network browser/bonjour/rendezvous/network places entry … but this put it mentally close by being something explicit on the keyboard. The guys there explained that it would show all the nearby network systems by range, which just riled within me as a great network effect. Plus it really jibed with my own sense of a network neighborhood and the distributed nature of so much upcoming technology. I’m not even sure that I can really articulate this out. I just know when I saw that function I thought “wow… That’s going to really change things.”
Im really jazzed to go get the recent release of SOLR and try it out. I attended the talk on it (completely packed room) today and I’m fully convinced on the functionality. I really want to stress it a bit now and see how it holds up. The default distro comes with a jetty servlet container, and most intriguing was the ability to request JSON packaged results – I’m thinking of Ajax style search with this critter. The notes from the talk are due to be posted on http://webdevradio.com/ in the near future.
I’ll be heading into the talk on hadoop when I get back there shortly.
One of the things that I like about this convention is how open and diverse it is. That has its drawbacks too- there are several sessions that I see today that I wish I could be in at the same time. I ate lunch yesterday with several folks from Norway, and there is a noticable number of woman here. Not just wives or the like, but people involved in the community for their own. Its still skewed heavily towards men, but after having come a number of years I think its a growing percentage.
One of the strangest bits about this convention is the accumulation of different communities. In other places its all one group, but this has many groups together – with some overlap – but still very distinct. Perl, python, rails, php, mysql, sun, java, apache, mozilla, django, … I’m sure the list goes on much further. The cross polination is pretty darn effective. It can also be overwhelming with the diversity of groups and interests too.
I’m trying to post a few pictures from OSCON (taken with my not-so-hot-but-okay iPhone camera) – but hey, they’re not too bad. You’re welcome to take a gander at my Flickr feed.
Day 1 of OSCON 2007 is done, and we’re working into Day 2 at this point. The afternoon tutorial “Django Master Class” was excellent, and the details of the talk are conveniently available on Jacob’s web site. Jeremy, Jacob, and Simon did a terrific job of it, and there was a lot of great tidbits in there that I hadn’t seen earlier. Since when did the testing framework get so tremendously improved?! It’s really impressive!
I also got a chance to meet Paul Bissex, who wrote briefly about the first day of OSCO. He’s in the Python WSGI session with me now.
Speaking of which, I’ve now learned about FAPWS from William (downloads) which was one of the WSGI servers mentioned, and apparently tested with Paul’s simple wiki code. It uses PyEvent under the covers, and apparently achieves some very nice performance characteristics.
When it comes to public (and mass) transit systems, I adore Portland. They’ve done a great job, and like some other Seattle-ites, I growl periodically when I think about how short sighted this city was when thinking about its future some 10+ years ago and we had the relevant vote.
But as I’m getting set to head to Portland on Sunday for OSCON, I can’t help but think they missed a link. I know I’m rare in this, but I’m taking the train down… and the Amtrack station is 5 blocks from the nearest light-rail link in Portland. The light rail goes right out to the airport – so they definitely hit the more used choice, but I still like rail transit, so I use it. And while it’s not impossible to drag the luggage through five blocks of Portland’s downtown area, it is a pain in the butt.
Ah, well. I’m looking forward to OSCON and catching up a few folks, seeing some fellow Django-nista’s there, and generally taking it in. Here’s to hoping that we avoid record breaking temperatures this year… last year was kinda hellish. Especially when the hotels couldn’t keep their AC running.
Well that’s just stupid. You can’t restore the iPhone back to a working setup without the AT&T activation system working – and I didn’t learn that it was down until AFTER I’d done the restore. Now I’ve got to wait with a non-functioning phone until tomorrow around Noon (3pm EST) for the AT&T crew to get their shit back working again.
To be fair, it makes sense that you’d need to activate the phone again from a fresh restore – but it’s damned annoying that they didn’t even warn me and now my phone is completely out. Damnit.
Update:
With the activation system back online, the restore process works faultlessly. Unfortunately, I’ve also come to rely on that phone for a lot more – amazing how fast that happens – and missed a few rather important points over the past 12 hours. Ouch. My fault, obviously, for missing on my own calendar – but damn that sucks.
Well, I’m downloading the restore image and hoping that’ll resolve this. I’ve managed to wedge an email in the outbox that the iPhone can’t send (the mail gateway rightfully complains that it’s not a legitimate “from” address) and I can’t seem to get at the thing any other way.
I was goofing with moving mail around, and took a received message, managed to push it into drafts, and from there “send it”. That’s left it in the unmarked, unavailable “outbox” queue where I can’t get my little mitts on it to delete it. Ah well, interesting experiment.
I did try replacing the email sync with data from the computer, but that apparently didn’t nuke the outgoing queue. I’ve got everything sync’d down from the phone (except for notes – but then I don’t use them since I can’t sync them) – so I guess I’m good. The restore image is 91.2MB and coming down the pipe slowly tonight.
In general, the phone was incredible while traveling in LA last week. I wore down the battery the most during the flights (watching some movies that I ripped from DVD) and a few hour long conference calls – light duty otherwise. (The heavy days took it to 50% charge). It’s really held up well. I just hope the battery continues to keep up the good work.