Russell Beattie’s Weblog

My office mates and I had a company team building thing yesterday where we took and hour or so and walked up to that big-ass satellite dish behind Stanford. It was quite the trek - I'm so out of shape that the hills about killed me and I stupidly wore new sneakers and got a blister. But it was a nice little trip. In theory it'd be a great thing to start doing often as I work just down the road from there and the trail is really nice - great views!

And yes, my hair is getting grey to the point of being white, especially in the sun. I would have smiled in the pic, but my foot hurt.

:-)

-Russ

Wow, almost a week has gone by without me posting... I really need to stop using Twitter so much and write my thoughts here instead.

Random thoughts:

* I made beef stew last night for the first time in my life. Just your basic ingredients: beef, celery, carrots, onion, potatoes. It was really good - probably the best beef stew I've had in a long time and better yet, the munchkin liked it as well, which was great.

* I'm looking for a new house in Menlo Park now that I have a salary again. I like how cheap my current place is but that's about it - it's not a place I would have chosen if I had my druthers. I've always been a person who's gotten the best apartment they can afford, rather than the opposite. Yes you save money if you live in a cave or some hole and then you can put a down payment on a mortgage later. But life is way too short for that. I'd rather rent a nice place instead - and in fact have almost always done that. I'm pretty sick of hearing neighbors thumping around all the time - I need a house.

* I was in line yesterday and the cutest thing happened. Some older (okay, "old" full stop) people in front of me were chatting away and started talking about their age. "I'm 90" says one, and another couple says "We're 80!" and then out of nowhere, one of the couple busts out a Barack Obama pin and shows it to me! "You like him?" Yes, I do! I replied with a big smile. "Good!" she said, and then her husband (the other octogenarian) chimed in about the past 8 disastrous years, etc. It made my day.

* I now have a Wii again and a Wii Fit - the We Ski game is pretty fun, though it's really short. I wish I could use the balance board on the XBox 360 with Amped 3, *that* would be fun. I'm definitely going to have to use some of my enlarged European-style vacation days this year to head out to the mountains and take my son Skiing for the first time.

Ahh, that felt good! Got to get back in the blogging habit again!

-Russ

I attended the Churchill Club last night as Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, the CEO of Nokia, was there to sit down with Rich Karlgaad, the publisher of Forbes for a chat (it was supposed to be with Walt Mossberg, but he bailed because of bronchitis). I got to sit up front at a reserved Nokia table (w00t). The picture above is of OPK (as he's called) on the left, and you'll notice a couple of E71s on the table in front of me jammed into the sugar packet holders videoing the whole thing. (That reminds me I need to get an 8 gigger microSDHC card for mine!)

Obviously I'm not going to review the talk with any sort of actual criticism, as I like the salary I'm currently earning as an employee of NOK, but I will say a few things I found interesting.

First is that like any good CEO, OPK was quite happy to talk around certain subjects and not dive in too deeply - but others he nailed head on. What I found he answered most directly is his thoughts about and respect for Nokia's newest competition. This is a good thing in my opinion. Just a few years ago, Nokia was mainly considered a competitor of other communications and mobile phone manufacturers, but now is directly in the path of major US technology companies such as Apple, Google and Microsoft. It's nice to know that the head of Nokia fully aware of this, and understands the challenges posed by these guys, and wants to compete head on.

The other thing of note to me was OPK's commitment to Symbian. He explained that he's the one that had to pull the trigger on a half-billion dollar purchase, and then turn around and tell the investors that he was then going to give it all away as Open Source, so I understand his continuing support of the platform. Me personally, however, I gave up on Symbian a few years ago, and am still not convinced that it's a viable platform for the future. That said, the CEO's commitment to making Symbian "bigger, bettter, stronger" (I think that was the quote) seems quite genuine, so I'm going to be a bit more open-minded about it. I'm not ready to drink the kool-aide just yet, but maybe Symbian might have a future after all.

The cheesecake desert rocked last night as well. I was ready to find a box and load up the extras to take home, but figured that'd look bad.

:-)

-Russ

Is that blogging is hit or miss. It's a numbers game - at least it is for me. I spew excess mental activity here, and then once in a while some of it turns out to be useful or significant. The times when I sit down to write the Great American Blog Post, I generally fail miserably and no one cares. The times I sit down and bang out something from the gut, without much filtering or "forced analysis" is when I create something worth reading.

The problem is that if you start to slack off, like I have been lately, the chances of creating that great post that you can point to proudly in years to come as being intelligent, insightful or prescient start to approach zero. Rather than having a good post a week, or a month... you start to have one a year.

So I need to start posting more. This is a post about posting to get me moving... Feel free to ignore it.

:-)

-Russ

I have to say how insanely jealous I am of Twitter's success.

I had written apps like it a few times using SMS as a base - simple and short posts to channels sorts of apps - like a more dynamic Upoc. But I didn't ever stumble on the right combo of features that Twitter did to make it interesting/viral/compelling. In fact, I had a meeting about Twitter years ago at Yahoo! where I remember explicitly saying that I thought it was a great service (as I had done something similar), but that it obviously needed some sort of channels or groups or something to cut out the noise. I was wrong, and would have screwed it up if I was in charge - look at how empty Jaiku's channels are to see what I mean.

That said, I *wanted* to do something just like Twitter. I could see the value, and knew in my gut it could be great. Even more years ago, I was shopping for a laptop while using Wireless IRC on my then shiny new Nokia 7650 and was amazed at how useful it was to be in contact with groups of people where ever you went. Out and about, or back at your desk having that IRC channel running all the time in the background, there to share links or thoughts with. The idea of that group of friends in the sky is super compelling. I knew it back then, I knew it when Twitter launched, but I'm just bummed I wasn't able to tap into it myself.

THEN, a few weeks ago, I tweaked the Twitter Search stuff so that you could interact with Twitter based on search or tag-based channels and created Roomatic. I thought it was super useful and a few others as well, but it didn't seem to attract any notice. And then last night Twitter launches their Elections microsite and it's exactly the same, except focused just on presidential keywords. Cool!

Hey, I didn't create the Summize search engine, nor their API, nor invent anything super-new, but I could see the value in the whole system enough to know where it was going. I never thought Roomatic was going to be anything huge, but the fact that the Twitter Elections is so much like it proves I was right in my thinking, which is great. People are raving about the Twitter elections site, and I agree. I love watching the flow of opinions. I was trying to tell people about Roomatic saying, "Look! You can view all these posts about a topic from everyone! I saw the Sarah Palin 'little known facts' meme arriving in real time as it was happening!" It's nice that I don't feel like such a nut job any more. :-)

Anyways, I think it's very cool that Twitter is having so much success and is now breaking out into the general popular culture. Fer chrisake, Al Gore is stopping by their offices, and CNN is using them in shows... it's a phenomenon. I think if there was one startup that I wish I had done, it would've been them.

JEALOUS! :-)

-Russ

Here's a few quick bits about some new apps I'm using now that I have full time job again.

First, I'm back on a Mac. This was mostly because my coworkers are ex-Apple and/or use a Mac, so I went with the flow. This is not without pain, however. Specifically, I hate, hate, hate the Dock. I've been using a Task Bar since Windows 95, and that's a *long* time - I even set up my Ubuntu box I now use regularly to mimic a standard Windows desktop still. The Task Bar paradigm is just more useful and a better user experience. If you think otherwise, you're just a raving Apple zealot - read this for 9 reasons the dock sucks to get a clue.

Happily though, I've found a great little app for Macs called FanTASKtik which creates a little task bar on the bottom of the Mac interface. It's great! No more hidden windows, and I can use my *mouse* (imagine that!) to switch to exactly the window I'm looking for, and not having to alt-tab in circles like a nutjob, or try to figure out which one of the blurry, randomly placed, Expose windows is the one I want.

The other couple apps I'm now using are on my server. We've got a pretty nasty firewall at work that only opens a few ports, so my personal email and IM accounts for the first week were unavailable.

First, rather than forward my email through another service since I can't have a local client access it, I'm now using RoundCube Webmail on my server, and it's great! It's written in PHP, and super-easy to set up and get working with my current IMAP account. I'm not sure how it compares to other email systems like SquirrelMail - it may not be as full-featured - but it's so clean and easy to set up that I'm very happy with it. Definitely try it out if you're looking for decent webmail access to your email.

Then IM - port 443 is open, but it's a pain because though it's good for AIM/iChat or a Jabber server with SSL like Ovi.com or GTalk, Yahoo! IM doesn't work and my personal Jabber server wasn't set up for SSL connections. After a couple days of trying to get jabberd working with SSL (which up until now has been great - easy to setup and stable as hell), I finally gave up and loaded up OpenFire, a Java-based Jabber server which is *awesome*. It's probably way too much for just one person using it - but now that I'm not hosting my web business on that server, it has plenty of cycles to spare. It supported SSL "out of the box" and also has a bunch of IM transports built in as well through a set of plugins. Such a great project! So now I'm able to use Adium to connect through the port as per normal, and have IM as well.

So there you go. As I discover new interesting stuff, I'll post it as well.

-Russ

Just a week ago, I subscribed to Pinch Media's Recently Added iPhone Apps feed, which updates with new apps as they appear on iTunes. I'm not exactly sure how they get that data, as the iTunes XML data is encrypted I think, so it's actually quite an interesting hack they've done. I figured it'd be a good way of keeping tabs on some interesting iPhone apps. To my astonishment I've seen updates pass through my reader for over 450 apps in just 7 days.

Ho-ly. Shit.

That's a lot of apps. And you know what? From the descriptions of most of them, I'd say there's a ton of unmitigated crud flowing into the App Store right now. You don't read about it because the iPhone is all shiny and new, but with all those apps arriving daily the quality has to be really varied. Really, really varied. And with a few of the App developers making BANK to the tun of a quarter million in like two months, it's just going to get worse. The sort of press those successes generate may not be good for Apple at all in the long run, as it appears the land-rush is on, and the scammers, spammers and other dregs of online society are closing in fast and I have serious doubts if the iTunes Store is really made to keep up.

You know, I didn't realize there were that many freakin' Objective C programmers out there, honestly. 65 new apps a day, for 7 days straight? Fuck me.

(It reminds me of the deluge of Java Games we saw a few years ago, which I posted about then, with accompanying screens shots, so I figured I'd do the same here with the app icons. There were too many to fit in one post though, so I ended up taking a screenshot instead. Insane.)

How this is all going to work out, I'm not sure - but it's definitely interesting to watch. Will we see the equivalent of Atari's E.T. game before too long, decimating the entire market, or will Apple keep the crap at bay? And not just Apple - Google is stepping into it next with their Android app store on the G1. Wow. We're going to need some pretty high wading boots I think before we see the end of this.

I read some complaints about social-networking apps for "throwing sheep" the other day... How about an iPhone "compass" app that just shows a *picture* of a compass, with instructions to look for the sun, and use your finger as a fucking sundial? I kid you not. Call John Doerr, I'm not sure they're funded yet.

Yeah, I see pain coming for all involved.

:-)

-Russ

I got a demo today of Nokia's NFC phone the 6212 working with some sample devices which support it, and was absolutely blown away. I honestly hadn't been paying much attention to the technology because I thought it was some sort of random new Bluetooth-like communications thing that I was just going to wait and see. But it's not like that at all...

Ever pair Bluetooth devices in an office or area where there's lots of them around? It's a pain - first you have to discover your device, which may arrive after a dozen or so other devices in your list of potential pairings, then you have to do the passcode dance, which may or may not be obvious to do.

This is what NFC does - well from the demo I saw - it simply facilitates these Bluetooth pairings. (It can also pass other data like a business card or URL, etc. but the gadget-to-gadget stuff is the shiny bit). The data is still transferred via Bluetooth, but the pairing is done by actually touching the devices together. At first it seems like a step backwards, I know, but when you see it happen in front of your eyes, quick as anything, an ah-ha moment happens, trust me. I was given a demo of the Nokia 6212 working with a few devices, like another phone (for passing info, or playing games) or pairing with a headset, and it's amazingly simple and clean. Especially if you experienced how hard it is to pair a device using the normal handshake/passcode method.

It's so cool - you take the phone, tap it what you're pairing with, and it's done. The magic comes from the fact that the NFC stuff simply holds and passes the Bluetooth ID of the device you're trying to communicate with. Want to print a picture, just tap the phone to the printer. Want to pass your business card? Just tap your phone with someone else's. Easy peasy.

Seeing is believing. If you haven't paid attention to the technology or the acronym before, you should definitely do it now, because it's cool as hell. Check out Nokia's NFC page and this article on Nearfield.org for more info on it, it's really quite something.

It needs a better name,though. Like how Zeroconf is called Bonjour by Apple... Seriously a branded version of the tech called "TouchMe" or anything else would be better than what it is now... I mean, don't "fields" give you cancer or something? It's just a horrible name. But a COOOOL-ass tech.

-Russ