Rhonabwy

Hello, my name is Joe… and I am an iPhone addict.

That’s how it starts, right?

The phone has been a great success for me. I’ve “played with” other, older smart phones (the iPaq with WIFI and CDMA - I had *such* hopes for it…) and none of them really suited what I wanted. Of course, one of the things I really wanted was for it work with my Mac, which most didn’t do without some interesting, 3rd party gymnastics.

So the iPhone does that - it syncs nicely. Because it’s also my phone, I have it with me all the time. In response, I’m listening to podcasts again. Just that would be a nice value-add - something to do while I’m transiting around on the bus.

Now add email and safari - man, you’ve got me hooked. Yeah, the “EDGE” network is a slow piece of crap, but it’s mostly functional - and it works pretty much anywhere around Seattle. There are a few dark “holes” in coverage on the back side of Queen Anne and the like, but really it is finally that ubiquitous data coverage that I figured/hoped would one day exist.

Mostly, it was checking my person mail - maybe browsing a bit on the bus. But with use, as you might imagine, its now expanded. Karen and I were eating at Icon Grill the other evening on a lark. A couple of tourists were asking the waiter about good coffee… the man was expressing some frustration that he wasn’t finding the earth-shattering experience he’d be able to find some ten years back. I popped out the iPhone and found Cafe Vita, and its nearest address. Then I put it away… and as we left, I stopped by their table and mentioned the place and location to them so they could find the incredible coffee that Seattle has to offer.

So maybe I’m not a always-data-all-the-time junkie. That shouldn’t surprise anyone who knows me - I’ve always been a bit of an information junkie. But its only getting better (or worse, depending on your point of view). Now that you can install some custom, interesting apps without much problem or issue, it’s really moving along.

So what’s next on this cheese plate? I’m not even sure, but I’m looking forward to it…

When Gus created Acorn, he also included a plugin mechanism - using Python. Now there’s an excellent writeup at Enigmata on exactly how to go about that scripting and extending Acorn to do your whimsical bidding.

It’s a really great write-up - even if you’re not using Acorn - on how you can get external scripting integrated and running.

Let me start by admitting that this whole thing, to me, is a little silly. Still, silly or not, I couldn’t help coming over to bellevue this evening to see what this thing is all about.

At the moment there’s a dude with a megaphone extorting the crowd to “stay in line”, more or less bribing the mob they creating with halo schwag. “Microsoft has plenty of free stuff… Seems to be the current refrain. The whole place actually has an air of being sort or barely contained. Some lady walked to the corner of the line with a bunch of posters to give out. It was amazing how fast she was mobbed with open hands waving about like strange tentacles.

The feel of the crowd is weird to me too. A mix of folks in clumps who’ve had waaay to much mt dew and are just constantly screaming mixed with others who are more or less exuding “putting in our time” to get this game at midnight something.

The setup has the end of the line way back in the dark, where not even megaphone man is really paying any attention. At 10pm, the line doesn’t seem to be growing. I don’t have any interest in standing it. Shoot - you’d miss all the spectacle of this without roaming around and seeing whats going on closer to the front of the line.

OK, so it’s not really - but that’s how I view it. Google Documents released their presentation goodies so you can now do that whole “create slide presentations” (of course, I wanted to call it a “deck” or “powerpoint” - how kleenex…). I rather expect to see a lot of those at future conventions and such.

The reason it is and isn’t a full on attack of MS Office is that it doesn’t do nearly as much as Office does in any area. But is it good enough? The price is certainly low enough that I’m not sure you’d really need to purchase office if you didn’t have to interact with BigCorp america. Of course the big win is that the platform neutralizer web browser is all you need to make it go.

So now Mac has it’s own suite, Google has it’s thing, there’s Open Office, and of course ye olde Microsoft I-can’t-think-of-anything-else-they-need-so-fuck-wth-now-classic-menu-metaphor Office. So where will it go? Mac is “make it pretty”. Open Office is run anywhere, as is Google. Some folks fear the Google. Probably with reason. Office is innovating in its UI and fucking up corporate productivity across the world. Not that I have an opinion there.

I’ve personally moved to using Excel for it’s analytics functions more and more. There’s not much of a substitute for the pivot-chart backed by a database lookup. Cheaper than a lot of tools by far, and a hell of a lot faster than rewriting SQL queries a dozen times over. Where’s Open Office, Google, and our fledging wonder “Numbers” on the Mac? I expect it’ll be coming. But that may be niche enough that it always costs money. Makes sense - it’s a relatively narrow focus that I’ve got with that stuff.

Oh - by the way? I don’t recommend getting Office 2007 on Windows. The phrase I caught recently was “two steps forward and one step back is still one step back…” - and it stays with me on this one.

Some very cool news - Django now has a public build site up (http://buildbot.djangoproject.com/)and running, matching the trunk and one of the branches against an assortment of versions of python and databases. Matt Croydon and I are going to be working together to work out the kinks and continue to drive the build environment forward.

All props to Matt for the initial deployment and use during the current sprint. There’s still some bugs and kinks to work out of the system - and we’re going to be hammering those out as soon as the sprint it complete. Since Matt got it functional for the sprint, we didn’t want to mess with the configurations and start throwing false alarms while there was such dedicated forward progress going on.

Right now, we’ve got some base builds and tests running against Python 2.4 and 2.5 with Postgres and SQLite to pretty good effect. Still remaining are stable runs against MySQL, anything with Python 2.3 support, and more effective implementations to make it easier for us to support remote build slaves (Oracle? Windows? anyone?) and enable branches to get built a little more easily.

There is plenty to go, and we’re just getting kicking. I’m sure you’ll hear more as we get things nailed down and continue moving forward.

Gus released Acorn earlier this week, which I was incredibly glad to see released into the wild. For one thing, I think Gus was starting to seriously loose it - talking to himself and even interviewing himself…

But seriously, I’ve been beta testing this critter for quite a while now, and love it. It’s been great for a lot of the little image editing needs I’ve had, and frankly it seems like Adobe doesn’t give a shit about Photoshop Elements, so I’ve been stuck running PSE 2.0 under the emulator on my intel macs for months. Now I’ve got a solution that does pretty much everything I need in one shot, intel native, and I can support a friend to boot. Gus really tagged it in his interview at TUAW - I don’t even use half of Photoshop Elements. I just want to lightly tweak and crop some images and get on with my life.

I’d tell you some of the horror stories of the UI development with this app, but really that’s for Gus to share or not as he will. Let’s just say that it went through a lot of thought, changes, and experiments - and I really like the single “tool” window concept that he landed on.

And since I’m otherwise being glowingly enthusiastic, let me finish with telling you what it doesn’t have that I wish it did - free rotate. I’ve got a few pictures that I took that aren’t quite square for what I want, and I’d like to spin the image a bit. Just a bit though, not 90 degrees or something. Eh - something for the feature request list anyway.

It seems strangely coincidental that last night I spent reading this and that about economics.

Mike’s article was about a variety of topics, but he managed to keep some sort of “Adam Smith’ central theme to his current ravings. I’ve got to wonder what poor fool broke his car windshield though… The other was far less physical, but none the less real. Eve Online (one of those online games) has gone to the trouble of actually hiring an economist and he wrote about the completely non-physical, but very real economy of the game
. Then again, maybe that’s an essential definition of an economy - something that doesn’t have a tangible existence, but is real none the less. Kind of the imaginary numbers that I used in the past to calculate the effects of waves in transistors and such. Shoot - I’m probably blowing that metaphor simply due to the time since I last did any real math regarding transistors.

When I was forced to temper my engineering degree with some amount of “non-engineering-something”, I took the track of economics. It seemed like it might be useful some day, and it looked exquisitely less painful than languages courses (english or otherwise). The end result was that I got something out of it, but really not enough stuck in my skull to apply other than the basic rules that you’d expect from a 3 page booklet outlining the law of supply and demand. Actually *applying* economic theories seems to require either more data than is feasible to gather short of industrial espionage or experiments that any normal business person would blanch at. Who knows if the economics of Eve match real world models, but I’ve got to imagine that some of it might fit close enough to be actually useful.
Eve is one of those games that discourages the interface with real money (although everyone knows it happens) - and is itself an interesting viewpoint/experiment of unfettered capitalism. Blowing someone up and taking their stuff is completely legit in the game - and “the law” only exists in a core section of the universe today. Thank god it exists at all, or a newbie (which I class myself as in that game) wouldn’t find much of interest there. There’s even a few good old fashion scams (including a high profile ponzi scam).

While out perusing bookmarks and randomly following links, I stumbled across a nice “from the beginning” Django tutorial that includes a little bit of Ajax with the Dojo Toolkit. There’s also a Part 2 to the example, and I think it’s particularly cool that the author went to the trouble of saving the steps as specific revisions within google code so you can “follow along” by checking out revisions.

Of course, this is assuming you’ve got a decent handle on how to check out a specific revision from Subversion. I’m not sure that always applies to folks looking for a from-the-start tutorial, but the idea is really cool.

The article at Ars Technica about a supercapacitor battery really caught my eye. Storing electrical energy is one of those age-old problems that ti seems we’re looking for answers to in both large and small systems.

According to Wikipedia, a supercapacitor isn’t a battery at all - although when you get down to “what’s it do” definitions I think it’s pretty close - it stores a electrical energy and lets you discharge it again. It just doesn’t do it with some electro chemical reaction (which is what I think of as a battery). There’s mechanical systems that do these things too - flywheels and such. They get to fight with gravity and friction to reduce efficiencies though - which apparently makes them a tad inefficient at the smaller scale of things.

I don’t know what all the choices are with storing electrical energy, but I do know what some of the failure modes can look like. A few early experiments with fast-charging rechargeable batteries and overloading capacitors made that pretty clear. I don’t know how susceptible these super-capacitors are to my style of stupid experiments that induce large exothermic results, but hopefully fairly minimal. I’m looking forward to something in this realm coming to market and getting more details on it.

I was listening to a podcast from NPR the other day - one of the “Science Friday” episodes where they talked about camping and reviewed a book called Camp Out!: The Ultimate Kids’ Guide.

The book sounds fun (I’m thinking about various nephews and nieces there), but I think the real gem of that conversation was a listener’s comment about the site Heaves Above. Of course www.heavensabove.com had to be a spam/link site (dirt sucking scum with no value generated it, no doubt) - so it took a little Google help to find the right site - with a hyphen in between the names.

It’s a cool site that collects and manages a whole bunch of data about what you can see in the sky. Astronomy and more - all available. For example, the result of finding Seattle on that site includes links on the astronomy, predictions for when you can see satellites, and even cooler - what iridium flares will be showing up (and where) in the new 24 hours or 7 days. In short, it’s a really cool site.