Author: lux

Sick Blog: Cured

I just spent the last several hours recovering from the fact that for the last 2+ weeks, everything on this blog except for the homepage was returning a “500 Server Error”.

As best I can tell, on or around February 25th, something changed on the blog that did not play well with the .htaccess file on the server, which broke all the permalinks on the site. I’m not certain what — possibly the last WP patch, possibly something on our web host’s side. Possibly both.

A small edit to the main .htaccess eventually fixed it, but only after I had reinstalled a clean plugin-free version of WP, set up a new database & re-imported all the archived entries, scoured the web in search of solutions (none of which worked), and opened a trouble ticket with our web host.

Ultimately all I lost was some time, my Statpress archives of website traffic, and my old set of sidebar widgets. It wasn’t how I wanted to be spending this lovely Saturday but all’s well now.

New Photo & Random Notes

It took me a month but I finally got a few snapshots from my trip to London online. Here’s one that I had a little fun with in Lightroom and really liked how it turned out:

Barmaid

Work continues crazy-busy with no light on the horizon. I’m not at SxSWi (again) and feel a bit bummed about that. I did get down to 360|Flex for a day and a half and that was fun. I will be going home for Passover though. 🙂

Still dual-wielding the phones — I can’t break free of my dependence on a real keyboard for email. Other than that, though, the Nexus is really nice & I’ve been adding apps to it like a fiend.

I’ve been pondering a blog post taking a longer look at location-based web services to update the one I did on Google Latitude last year, especially since in the ensuing months I’ve started using Forusquare. The bottom line is I am still deeply ambivalent about them. Perhaps there’s not much more to be said on the subject than that.

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished in Tracey

A few years ago I was out doing some errands when I noticed a woman curled up in a ball at the edge of the parking lot. Concerned but unsure what to do, I called 911. A few minutes later, two police officers and an ambulance showed up to check the woman out.

That’s how things should be. But if the trend recently started in Tracey CA continues, would-be helpful bystanders will have something else to think about before they pull out their cellphones — are they willing to not only make a call when they see something wrong, but also pay for the privilege of getting help for someone?

Tracy residents will now have to pay every time they call 9-1-1 for a medical emergency.

But there are a couple of options. Residents can pay a $48 voluntary fee for the year which allows them to call 9-1-1 as many times as necessary.

Or, there’s the option of not signing up for the annual fee. Instead, they will be charged $300 if they make a call for help.

Cities everywhere are struggling to make ends meet, and new fees for services are a logical way to get the needed revenue. But 911 service? Really?

So once they start this new program, when you call 911 in Tracey, will they check your payment status and ask for a credit card number before dispatching help? What if you’re poor and can’t afford to pay?

And how may people will see something bad happen and not call, because they can’t afford to get involved?

First Day With the Google Nexus One

I’m in London this week, doing a series of team and community meetings. One of the fun things that have happen this week is the team all got brand-new Nexus One phones while we’re here.

I’m a pretty hardcore Blackberry user but when someone hands you a new, cool phone just begging to have a SIM card added to it, the Blackberry can wait. I’ve been using the Nexus for about a day now, and here’s some initial impressions:

Things I like about the Nexus One

The screen is gorgeous. The cameras is far better than the one on my Blackberry. The phone feels good when you hold it. Not too heavy, not too bulky.

Adding new apps – a breeze. There’s lots to choose from in the app store, including many popular apps like Urbanspoon, Shazam, Foursquare, and many others. I got a dozen apps onto the phone in short order. Definitely much closer to the iTunes Store experience than the pain of adding apps to my Blackberry.

And Flash Player 10.1 beta is looking pretty good. 🙂

Things I’m Not So Sure About

I’m spoiled by my Blackberry’s ability to go as much as three days without a charge, so having to charge more often is a bit of a bummer. Not a showstopper though.

The music client. I don’t see anything that will make me want to give up my iPod. (The Last.fm app is nice though)

Covering that gorgeous screen with very visible fingerprints.

The London weather hasn’t been very sunny today but even so using the screen in daylight is definitely a bit harder than using it indoors.

Given that this is is a Google product it’s probably inevitable, but the deep lock-in and integration with other Google products is annoying for those of us who are not hardcore Google users. I don’t use Picasa, gChat, or Google Contacts, for example, and if I want to really use the Nexus, they’re hard to avoid.

Things I Definitely Don’t Like

The built-in IMAP client is poor, making it tough for those of us who don’t run our email through Gmail. I expect there will be a third-party solution pretty soon though.

Comment spam in the app market reviews. Really annoying.

Trying to do the two-thumb typing I am used to on a real keyboard is really frustrating. My error rate is close to 100% when I try it on the Nexus. To be fair, though, this isn’t specific to the Nexus; I felt the same trying to use my iPod Touch’s keyboard as well. I’ve simply spent a lot of years using various Palm / Blackberry devices with real keyboards and it’s going to be very, very hard for me to let go of needing to feel real keys under my fingers and relearn how to type on a handheld. Typing with one finger, aided by the very nice auto complete feature, is much less painful. It’s just not very fast.

Things I Haven’t Figured Out Yet

The best way to synch data (contacts, etc) off either my desktop or my Blackberry. I need to research this some more. Being able to sync data from Facbook is interesting. Ideally I’d like to get my work info on it too, but Exchange support is a bit shaky so far.

All In All

I like the Nexus a lot more than I thought I would. I am not sure if I will be able to adjust to the lack of a real keyboard and I don’t love the Google-lock in, but other than that I’m pretty impressed.

And did I mention how nice the beta of Flash 10.1 looks on it? :p

Dear Apple – 1984 Called, They Want Their Video Back

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Image via Wikipedia

I suppose I should start out by noting that I, like a very significant number of my colleagues at Adobe, am a big fan of OS X and Apple products. I am typing this on the Macbook Pro I purchased for personal use. The MBP for work is sitting on a table nearby. There’s two iPods and an iPod Touch in this room as well. The only thing I use Windows for is some HR stuff that doesn’t run well on the Mac. In short, I love OS X and I hope to keep using it for a long time.

So from the point of view of someone who’s a fan of both the Apple and Adobe platforms, it’s hard for me to wrap my brain around the vitriol lobbed against Flash by my fellow Mac users. And if you read the blogosphere these days, you might come away thinking Adobe is on the verge of a massive route, driven into irrelevance by a horde of iPad-wielding HTML5 developers. And some in the media, who always love a good “X is going to kill Y” story line, are following suit.

The reality is somewhat different.

One thing that frequently (but not always) goes overlooked is that as much as this is a technology battle, it’s also a business one. Pushing as much content through the App Store as possible is great business for Apple; and honestly, I don’t blame them for wanting to build their App Store into a massive (and massively profitable) content juggernaut. It’s far friendlier to their margins than the hardware business, even with their premium pricing, so why not go for a platform play?

Where I take exception — and developers should too — is with Apple’s “my way or the highway” approach to development. Adobe’s Flash is a very high-profile victim of this approach right now, but we’re not the first nor are we the only one. And I really don’t understand how a bunch of developers committed to embracing the “open web” can turn right around and accept the massively closed structure that is the Apple ecosystem. Is it cognitive dissonance, or just Stockholm Syndrome? Is this really the same company who so famously embraced the image of shattering Big Brother’s image? How did Apple lose its way?

When I think about why all this matters, I think about my 10 year old niece. She doesn’t know (or care) what Flash is. All she knows is that she loves playing Webkinz, and every time I come over to visit, she wants to play it with me on my laptop. If I handed her an iPad, she’d want to play it there too, and she wouldn’t understand why she couldn’t. Yes, of course, I can buy her a bunch of other games on the App Store, but that’s not the same thing to her, and anyone who says that it is has clearly never withstood the wrath of a pre-teen. 🙂

Apple needs a reality check. Once you get outside the San Francisco to San Jose corridor, you’ll find very few people who know or care what HTML5 is. Most people who don’t do technology for a living find our high-geek holy wars incomprehensible and boring. They don’t want to be locked out of content, and they don’t want to be told they should spend money in the App Store just to conform to Apple’s vision of the internet. They just want to use the sites, view the videos, and play the games they’re used to.

Oh, and 90% of them do not run OS X.

Go back and watch that famous “1984” video again — because it seems to me that Apple has become the very thing they were fighting against back then.

Inventing the Future

Adobe had an all-hands meeting today and I was privileged enough to hear Adobe’s founders speak as part of the event. I was very much struck by John Warnock’s closing exhortation to us. Urging us not to be afraid of competition, he said:

“The future is yours. Invent it.”

It’s hard to write about that now, though, when as I type this images of devastation in Haiti are rolling across my TV screen. I’ve been through a couple of earthquakes since moving to California, though nothing as big as a 7.0. I can only dimly imagine the terror of living though one that bad, much less to live through it in a land where there is no real infrastructure nor strong building codes.

We here in the US are very privileged in so many ways. In times like this we need to remember how good we have it and help the ones who are in need. There are a huge number of charities and NGOs collecting funds to help aid Haiti right now. Please pick one (or more) and make a donation if you can possibly do so. We have.

Haiti will need to invent its own future now. We all need to help.