Aehso’s Output

Dublin City Council have notions of building a municipal Wi-Fi network? From SiliconRepublic.com:

According to reports this morning, Dublin City Council has put out a tender for consultants to offer advice regarding technological, regulatory and financial issues if such a service was deployed.

I hope they are better at planning wireless networks than they are at planning everything else.

Another interesting snippet from that article:

A recent survey by UK telecoms regulator Ofcom revealed that Ireland has surprisingly the largest penetration of Wi-Fi hotspots per head of population in the world, with 18.3 hotspots per 1,000 people.

I for one am very surprised by that, even if there is no shortage of open Wi-Fi networks in the commercial districts of Dublin 2 & 4. This figure is probably driven by the broadband providers switching over to supplying cheap DSL/Wi-Fi routers. Maybe the Ofcom guys should broaden their survey a little, go war driving around California for a couple of days maybe…

Lots of folks playing with new Nokia N800 and it is getting surprisingly good (and some bad) reviews.  Things to definitely like are the screen, Opera browser, Skype and Gizmo Project (SIP) support, Canola, and GPS receiver integration.  Things not to like are choppy Flash playback but hopefully they can fix that with revised software.  Most important of all though is Maemo, the N800’s development platform.  This really seems to be the antithesis of the iPhones walled garden.

I am very, very tempted though I think A would kill me if I bought one this week given I only bought the Wii last week.  I will probably buy only if I can pair it with a 3G modem via bluetooth (k800i) and if my mobile operator introduces cheaper flat rate 3G data plans than the ones they showed me last week. Municipal Wi-Fi in Ireland is too patchy/non-existent to be the only way to get a device like this online when out and about (though maybe FON might eventually fix that).

The news that Adobe are discontinuing support for their SVG Viewer browser plug-in on Jan 1st 2008 is bad news for the SVG community in general, and bad for anyone who has existing SVG content on their sites. This doesn’t mean the plugin will disappear overnight but content formats that may not render on the majority of browser are very unattractive to content producers.

Internet Explorer 7 has never had SVG support and Microsoft’s current stance seems is still to tell IE users to install the Adobe SVG plugin. Meanwhile folks over at svg.org are lobbying Microsoft for native SVG support but maybe they are not listening? Firefox 2, on the other hand, does support SVG natively.

By the way, Adobe publish some useful scripts to prompt the user to install the SVG plug-in if required. However, they need some tweaking to get pages that use these scripts to let Firefix 2 just use its native SVG support. Modified versions that I created to work with both Firefox 2 and IE 6/7 are available here.

Horray, I ended up spending a significant chunk of a day off work playing my new Wii.  It really is that much fun, though I clearly have my work cut out - my Mii’s fitness age in Wii Sports is 80.  I’d work on improving that but the game only lets you train once a day.  All in all Wii Sports is just a great game, even popping up sensible suggestions to take occasional breaks, (the suggestion dialog even has a nice wind-blowing-in-an-open-window image).  Curiously, Wii Sports edged out Gears of War as Time magazines 2006 game of the year - not bad for what was probably intended to be a capabilitiy demo suite of mini-games.

That’s four of us 30+ kids who have bought Wiis and I think there are a
few more looking for one.  Apologies to all the mums and dads out there
who are still on the waiting lists, still trying to get little Johnny’s
christmas present.  My sister and her husband called around today and although they are not gamers they are apparently going to buy one when they get back to the U.S. (and probably a new LCD tv).  The little console that couldn’t is going to be a huge success for Nintendo.

That said, I am still playing Guitar Hero II , finally unlocking the Stonehenge venue.  That game is just bloody brilliant, I hope the bring out something like that for the Wii (drums anyone?)

So I was invited to a focus group hosted by one of the Irish mobile network operators last night - I’m not sure if it’s cool to name the host company so I’ll err on the side of caution for the mo. It turned out they are preparing some new products (hint - might explain why I was invited) and they wanted some feedback on some proposed new price plans to con(vince) users to sign up. Hi again if you were one of the folks behind the one way mirror!

Interesting things, focus groups, I guess they are a reflection of how profitable and mature an industry is. I can see there is a lot to be said for getting face-to-face with your customer as long as the sample rate is high enough to get reasonably balanced feedback.

The software industry, in general, just does not do enough of this type of thing, even though we all know that accurately gauging requirements on an ongoing basis is so crucial to the success of processes like Scrum…

Pros:

• Nice screen, looks cool.

Cons

• Ergonomics: Two potential barriers here.  First, I’m really not sure about having to use both hands (one to hold, one to point) to use a cell phone.  Seems like a step backwards in HCI to me.  My mum uses two hands to type SMS messages (makes me smile) but ten years of thumb based typing is a tough habit for me to break.  Second, the absence of tactile feedback means unsighted use will be difficult.  No more reaching into your pocket to mute, texting ‘y’ or ‘n’ replies under the table in meetings or at dinner etc. And then there are those folks with poor sight who much rather depend on tactile feedback rather than go looking for there glasses every time they want to use their phone.
• The battery.  If it is sealed into the casing heavy users will not be able to swap a drained battery for a spare charged one.  Now, if I’m on a trans-atlantic flight I don’t want to arrive in the U.S. with a dead phone just because I was catching up on podcasts (and video content) on the way over.  The second concern with the battery relates to OS X.  How efficient is a recently ported OS X kernel at running on embedded hardware, compared to purpose built mobile operating systems like Symbian? 
• The iHandcuffs.  This is a problem I have with Apple’s whole approach to managing media creation and consumption on their hardware.  (Also see Apple TV vs Mac mini for a related discussion that brings further context to what Apple are trying to achieve)
• No Java support and only ‘maybe’ Flash support in an internet browser?  Someone think of the YouTubers!  And what about all those useful J2ME apps?
• OS X but no third party applications.  Sorry, I don’t buy the justifications given.  Sounds like Apple either couldn’t be bothered publishing a polished SDK or actually want to build higher walls around that garden.
• The true cost - €1000+.  Those example estimates are based on network plans that include flat rate data access (which does not exist in Ireland yet).
• No 3G.  Just when the European mobile operators are ramping up their 3G access.  Plans to deliver 3G at sometime in the future but why not now?
• The screen.  My phone goes into my pockets and backpacks along with keys, sand and other scratchy things.  How durable will the screen surface be?  Can it be replaced after a year of wear?
• The iPhone trademark issue.  Bad news, pissing off Cisco like that and it all smells of pots calling kettles black given Apple’s history of protecting.  No doubt this will hurt Apple in the long term.
• The native screen resolution of 480×320.  Transcoding video to natively fit odd resolutions like this (shared by the recent iPods) is a pain in the ass.
• 2 megapixel cameras with no flash really are useless, they shouldn’t have bothered.

I’ve no doubt that the iPhone is a major kick up the arse for the big mobile handset manufacturers (Nokia/SE/Motorola) but remember even if Apple sell 10million+ iPhones that is still only around 1% of the total mobile phone market.  There is still lots of time for the big three to react. 

It’ll also be interesting to see how Apple fare in their dealings with the large European and Asian mobile network operators.  Cingular, with their 58million subscribers are small fish in comparison.

I suspect I’ll be sticking with my K800i or one of it’s successors.

I can’t describe how disturbing this is, one wonders what the bullshit justification for this will be - stupidity, stress, orders?

The situation in Iraq is unacceptable to the American people — and it is unacceptable to me. Our troops in Iraq have fought bravely. They have done everything we have asked them to do. Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me.

- An excerpt from President Bush’s speech on Jan 10th, 2007. Responsibility, anyone?

The front page of yesterdays Irish Times carried a story about an international expert on online paedophile activity who is suggesting that the Government should provide email addresses to every pupil in Irish schools to help verify their age when signing up to internet communities.

The international expert who suggested this is one Dr Rachel O’Connell, Bebo’s Chief Safety Officer. It is amazing that someone holding such an important position in one of the companies hosting these online communities would propose such a technically deficient policy. Users of social websites can sign up using any email address they own, not just one that a government might allocate.

The technical managers at Bebo would do well to vet these statements in future. They reflect very badly on the percieved competence of the company’s management team as a whole.

Happy New Year to your all and a belated Happy Christmas to those I didn’t get to share festive pints with! I should be back blogging a bit more frequently now - prior to the festive break I had my head down getting the Cape Clear 7 Studio Beta release (What’s New) out the door on time so it’s been a bit quiet around here. Kudos to our team for producing such a polished beta release in such a short period of time!

So now we are in sync with the Callisto train, that opens up more than a few possibilities, some of which we are already working on. Thanks are also due to the folks at Eclipse.org, they have been great at dealing with the bugs we logged while migrating from WTP 0.7 to WTP 1.5 and through our use Eclipse, PDEBuild, TPTP, BIRT and various other pieces in our build and test harnesses. In one instance I think I can remember a patch being committed within an hour of the original bug report being received!

Onward and upward, time to catch up on what has been happing in the technology world for the past month