TECH-fidel

Yes, I admit it. I hand a pair of Mobile Pants. I carried a handspring visor in them. Strangely, the add for them still exists: http://www.dockers.com/mobilesitelet/flash/mobilePantFrame.html even though the product does not appear to. This web ghost site must be about 7 years old.

Anyway, I think the mobile pant is needed again and also the mobile shirt. Have you seen a UMPC? They really are NOT ultra mobile. They range from a Samsung Q1 to the Nokia N800. The Nokia is less than a quarter the size (easier to use, too). Even so, neither fit in a shirt pocket. And that's the problem.

If you carry the UMPC or the PDA in your pocket, you will scratch the screen with your keys. Shirt pockets are not deep enough. If in your jacket, you will leave it behind when you need it. Every now and then Motorola tries fashion and helps make mp3 sunglasses or such for a ridiculous price. Perhaps the vendors could get hip and team up with a young company to make real clothing so that real people could actually carry the devices they hope you to use.

This is not a joke. If you cannot easily carry and access a UMPC, you won't use one. The whole point of them is for use on the go (powered by wimax, of course, not that inferior nomadic cousin called wifi)- "always on". Let's keep the whole picture of the user in mind when developing products and make them really usable.

Posted by Erich Izdepski at 11:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

You think this would have been written 10 years ago. It probably was, but the airline industry missed it. I went on three trips in the past 3 weeks. On each trip, the flight back to my home city was delayed. Nothing really bad- 3 hours or so on average.

So why gripe? I didn't even sleep in an airport. The airlines (culprits, in this case) were United and Spirit. When asked about the flight delays, the gate agents did not know how long the delays were for. The Spirit folks didn't even know if the plane that was supposed to arrive and then pick me up had left the ground or not. This was pathetic. The clerk blamed his computer system, but I blamed his brain. Don't these people have phones? Don't they have a secret number to call and ask if flight 171 from Laguardia has taken off or not? This was assinine.

Meanwhile, my cell phone did have all the missing info. Orbitz was sending me SMS updates about the delayed United flight. I had the news over an hour before the gate agent. For the Spirit flight, some guy with an iPhone connected to the free wifi at Ft. Lauderdale International and was watching an icon of the plane flying over North Carolina. Why didn't the airlines have a backup system?

Since the airlines were ignorant and would not do their job, the passengers filled in. Should we just get rid of useless gate agents? Probably. Should we have electronic signs connected to real networks that give useful data to people? Definitely. This could be done with wifi, cellular, or wimax technology. And it could apply to much more than the airlines.

Posted by Erich Izdepski at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I made a video of myself building a giant retro-style lego robot. I put it on YouTube and to get more people to see it, I looked for a good group to join so I could add the video to the group. This worked fine except for one major problem- there are over 350 lego groups on YouTube and about 90% (brace yourself) have only 1 member and are redundant to several other groups. This fragmentation makes the uncontrolled group creation model YouTube uses a failure. They should show some leadership and consolidate groups to help strenghten them. If the users don't like it, they can leave. Actually, they already have left which is why the groups are really just a ghost town and have few to one member and very few, if any, videos. How can YouTube allow a video group to exist for months or a year with no videos? Why won't people just join a group that already exists? Because they didn't create it themselves. This is a quirk of human nature, related to the not invented here syndrome.

Now that you see how stupid and silly this is even for trivial things like lego groups on YouTube, let's look at technology, where real damage can be done.

J2ME is fragmented and has been since it move beyond one or two phone models 5-6 years ago. Today, the industry is still claiming to want to solve the problem, yet here are the new "groups" that will cause it to live on.  In 2008, we might get MIDP 3.0 (from motorola), A CDC-OSGI hybrid called Titan from Sun which claims backwards compatibility with MIDP 2.0. (given this is where the worst of the fragmentation is, I doubt that will work very well.) Also from Sun is JavaFX Mobile. Next year will be the dawn of Android, too, which is Java (but not MIDP) on Linux. Who knows what Qualcomm is doing. And we still have a ton of MIDP 2.0 phones.

So which group will you join? Which one will get your application to the most people? Will your code work across all of these? No way in hell. My hypothesis is that as handsets get more powerful, the java environment will fragment even more, since the workarounds to get your code running cross-platform will be even more challenging to identify and create (if they exist at all). To test my hypothesis, just go to a java conference and sit in on a panel discussion with heads of development companies talking (the game companies are a good test). I think, like every year, their number one complaint will be fragmentation and how much money that costs them.

Posted by Erich Izdepski at 11:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The most amazing skill people have is recognizing something or someone from incomplete information. How do you recognize someone from behind at a distance? How do we read words in fonts with missing pieces?

Even more initeresting is when we see a pattern or recognize something that DOES NOT exist. Is it coincidence or conspiracy? Serendipity or by design? Different people cross the line in different places. Take for example, Nostradamus. So many people willing to see something, while others see nothing at all.

I find this affect when putting music to video. It is real easy to get lucky when you have several minutes of footage. There is bound to be some interesting alignment that occurs and that I or others see as 'by design', even when just serendipity. My own videos are prime examples, since I never try to line things up, but routinely get cool results as if I planned it. So the secret is out.

Do you patterns in this video between the music and the footage? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfyYp79sHqM

Posted by Erich Izdepski at 05:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It's good to think about someone everyday. That's what I do with my brother, Bob, my wife, my kids. It gives strength and helps put your life in perspective.

Bob's memorial service was one of a kind and wonderful. Inviting people to come up and speak was a masterstroke, and people did talk for about 90 minutes. Everyone learned new things about Robert Izdepski and was able to see him through the eyes of many others. 

Posted by Erich Izdepski at 05:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)