Rhonabwy

It was a good week in LA this week, but I’m really glad to be back home. I’m also rather happy that I missed that nasty heat wave last week, although I got my own taste of it today in LA - it popped up to 96 while I was roaming about North Hollywood, Burbank, and Glendale office hopping.

The house is still warm, but the fans are in the windows and we’re pulling cool air tonight (better than the previous couple I understand), so it ought to get back to something reasonable by tomorrow morning.

Since I’m relatively disconnected from my usual mail reading tools, I’m watching and processing a lot of mail on my iPhone. For the most part, it’s working pretty well. I’m getting good at switching into “Edit” mode and deleting emails that I can easily tell are spam (I don’t have good spam filtering on all my email accounts). One of the elegant pieces of UI is that to delete a piece of mail while in that “headers listing” view, you tap on the left of the message and then you have to tap on the right to finish the delete. Enough to make the process intentional while not adding a bazillion taps, drags, or whatever to accomplish the task.

One thing I’ve noticed is that it’s NOT easy to undelete. In fact, I haven’t found a way to do it at all with the iPhone. The best solution I’ve found to date is to log into .Mac mail (the web client), and then I can drive down to the trash, find the email that I accidently put there, and move it back to the inbox.

Working strictly on the EDGE network makes this all a little more painful - but just waiting to get the little 2-line preview in the headers view of the mail is worth it. It’s quick to tell what’s useful and not with it.

Ars Technica has a link up for a speed test on the iPhone (via DSL Reports) as well as talks about what they’ve been seeing
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I’m in LA this week, so I’m living “on the EDGE” with my iPhone - this will be the definitive workout. The latency sucks - minimum of 600ms, and spanning up to 1.8 seconds for the small requests. No wonder it takes forever to get email. That initial connect is going to be exceptionally crappy I think. I wonder if we’re actually doing a little “modem” work in the background while on the edge that contributes to that terrible initial latency time?

The speed that I recorded a few seconds ago was 85kbps and then a few minutes later 51kbps. If Cingular/AT&T upgraded their network - then I’m damn glad they did. And I think they ought to consider doing a little more there too…

I do rather wish the office here had an open, just-public-internet WIFI linkage.

I found the project Kamaelia a few weeks ago while looking for an alternative to stackless python in “regular” python. After doing a lot of digging, reading, and trying to get through my thick skull the differences between asynchronous processing and concurrent processing, I finally stumbled into the “in front of your face” option of Kamaelia.

I had a hard time sort of “getting it” - the project itself is very focused on media, so when I first saw it - that actually kind of turned me off of it. Not because I don’t like media, but just because I didn’t see quite what it was doing under the covers to solve the problems I was interested in.

Turns out one of (I think) the best technical overviews of Kamaelia is the BBC White Paper (pdf) entitled Kamaelia: highly concurrent and network systems tamed. The pieces that I’m really interested in are the lower level bits - Axon and some of the utility pieces.

I’m still groping about for a way to interact between a stateless system interface (aka “the Web”) and a system that is inherently maintaining state. Doing actions in the background from, say, a web application written in Django. Verifying that under a reasonably high load you don’t run smack into race conditions can be a real pain in the butt. I don’t know if I’m going to find some of the answer in using Axon or not, but it’ll be an interesting experiment at the very least.

(for the record, the folks on #kamaelia were exceptionally helpful in pointing me towards resources as well)

I was sitting in El Diablo this evening, waiting for some friends to arrive, and I started surfing a bit with safari on the iPhone while listening to tunes. To my surprise, I had the music stop when I reloaded a page in Safari three separate times. I couldn’t get it to reliably repeat, but something wasn’t quite working correctly.

I looked for crash logs, but didn’t spot any this time through. Not sure what that was about, but I thought it was darned annoying.

And to my surprise, one of the things I learned is that I wasn’t sure how to forward through a song or even get an indicator of how far through a given song I was… Something missing, or maybe I’m just being dense.

Maybe this is common knowledge, but I just figured it out at the coffee shop this afternoon. If you point the iPhone to an RSS feed, then Safari will redirect it through reader.mac.com to generate an HTML layout for the iPhone.

I’ve got to admit, that’s going to make me tweak up my bookmark set now - at least so I can scan news on the iPhone a little better. Given a choice, I’d like to see what Brent would make for the iPhone as an RSS reader, but I expect that’ll have to wait until Apple opens the API/SDK a bit (i.e. at all).

I’m sure it’ll be making the rounds on blogs and the such, but I’ll join in anyway: Apple has released information and details on designing web pages for the iPhone.

Most interesting to me is the tag, which integrates into the telephone functionality. Maps appears to hijack a normal http request. TO get mail integration, use the mailto: tag, and the ever popular works completely as you’d expect.

No apparent other deep integration than link functionality like this (i.e. nothing in the javascript object model to get ahold of and shake).

Interesting in what the iPhone doesn’t support:

• window.showModalDialog()
• Mouse-over events
• Hover styles
• Tool tips
• Java applets
• Flash
• Plug-in installation
• Custom x.509 certificates

Flash I knew about, and plugins I expected. I never really though about tool tips, mouse-over, and hover styles though, although in reflection for how the UI works, that makes sense. It’s akin to the concept of ‘drag and drop’ - it really doesn’t have an equivalent in the iPhone Safari/webkit space.

The whole setup for forms has been really intriguing - especially the way the iPhone safari displays the choices for a pulldown list. Damn, but that’s even easier to use than most desktops… But there’s definitely limits to what you can see while you’re working on filling in a field of the form on iPhone.

Ultimately, the “how much space?” question is also fairly directly answered. Quoting from their online page (emphasis mine):

Therefore, you should design your content to fit within 320 x 356 pixels in portrait mode. If the keyboard is displayed, the available area is 320 x 140 pixels.

Not a whole hell of a lot of space - but it’ll be interesting to see what we can do with it. Apple also makes available some control over the scale that immediately renders as well - so you can really tweak out a page to fit precisely.

Today Gus announced that he was making FlyGesture free for use. I thought the interface was neat, but I didn’t find much use for it since I mostly work from a keyboard and trackpad - and I just never quite got into using gestures, no matter how cool it was. I guess where I could have used gestures, I just sort of migrated into using QuickSilver and the keyboard shortcut hackery.

Anyway, it’s a neat program - and now free. Give it a spin!

Today was Mindcamp 4 - The shortest mind camp to date (12 hours), and in a new venue (Tukwilla Community Center). It was a really nice venue, and the shortened venue worked out reasonably well. I’m sort of glad we’ll be moving back to a 24 hour format with the next mind camp (january-ish) - just because I like the very-late-night social aspects.

One of the neat tidbits I brought home was a copy of Scott Berkun’s The Myths of Innovation, which I’ve been wanting to read.

I was one of maybe 12 iPhone owners there, and you can be sure that fiddling with, and babbling about, the iPhone was a fairly common event and topic. Although I’ve got to say, the best session for me was put on by Federated Media. The guys apparently flew up from Frisco and gave a really excellent high-level “state of the union” for making money with your site from advertising.

I think the worst session for me was the very first one of the day, entitled “Where is web 2.0 going”. Seemed like a bunch of folks talking past each other, and I just couldn’t quite get engaged in anything anyone was talking about (or apparently trying to talk about).

I missed a session on Go (the game), but otherwise I’m very happy with what I was able to see and get involved with. One of the “hey, follow up with that” concepts was Saturday House, which looks enticing - although I’ll have to figure out time to make that work with my current schedule. I love the concept though. Seems like a whole pile of pythonista’s are lurking about in that group, although its really nothing about python. One of Lion Kimbro’s ideas just gone a bit rampant and apparently reasonably effective.