A Tablet By Any Other Name...

Apple released its long-awaited tablet device today. The iPad, as it is unfortunately named, will probably satisfy some market niche that I can't quite comprehend at the moment, but that's not why I'm mentioning it. I first became acquainted with the concept behind this device at a Providence Geeks dinner in the spring of last year when a guy whom I had never seen before and haven't seen since pitched me his idea for an iPad-based multimedia book reader application. His idea and his pitch didn't inspire much confidence, especially since at the time, I had no idea such a device was even rumored to be in development. A cursory internet search later that evening revealed that his idea at least had some basis in reality. Still, I can't get over the fact that he was calling this device the iPad back then, and that he was right. I thought that Apple surely would have found a better name for this thing than any of the silly names that were being tossed around on the Apple gossip blogs.

Cover Story

Today's Providence Journal ran a story about Rhode Island's quest to grow its knowledge-based economy and included a photo of yours truly from last week's Providence Geeks meeting on the front page. This marks the second time that my picture has shown up in a geeks-related news story. So far, I've managed to avoid letting all of this fame go to my head, but I can't guarantee that I won't turn into an insufferable prima donna if this keeps up.

Flirting with Disaster

This is a really old story, but I heard about it for the first time at tonight's geek night and thought it was interesting. It's about how young Saudi's use bluetooth discovery on their mobile devices to flirt without running afoul of the religious police. Yet another example of how technologies get used in ways their creators never dreamed of.

WTF?

As anyone who still has a job is probably aware of by now, companies are trying to minimize the costs of doing business during these lean times. I got an e-mail from management at my job last week outlining a number of cost-cutting initiatives that have recently been put into effect. The one that caught my eye was an admonishment for employees with company-provided mobile phones (a club that I am not a member of) to stop texting so much. I've always wondered why texting is so expensive. After all, a single text message is at most a couple hundred bytes worth of data. A voice call is at least thousands of bytes per second. Based on the five minutes of research I just did, it appears that it's because texting is such a cash cow for wireless carriers. By charging ridiculously high rates for text messages, carriers basically force anyone who wants to use text messaging on regular basis to buy an unlimited plan, guaranteeing them an extra $5-10/month per customer over the life of their contract. Carriers can charge whatever the market will bear, of course, but any business that is built on constantly ripping off its customers is setting itself up for fall when someone comes in and challenges the status quo. At the very least, once Internet-connected mobile devices achieve critical mass, text messaging is going to go the way of the CB radio unless the pricing model is rationalized.

Postscript:
I've been sitting on this post for a couple of days and wouldn't you know it - Google has gone ahead and added SMS text messaging to Gmail. I don't this is going to put an end to extortionate text messaging rates, but I'm still holding out hope that Google/Android is going to finally force some sense into the US cellular phone market.

LRU For Dummies

I needed a Least Recently Used data structure for some work I was doing so I went out to see what I could find in the open source world. I have used the LRUMap from Commons Collections before, but I was hoping to find one that makes use of generics. I checked out Google Collections, but they don't have any LRU data structures (yet). Fortunately, I check out the JavaDocs for LinkedHashMap on a hunch and was happy to discover that Sun already implemented an LRU algorithm in LinkedHashMap that can be enabled by setting a constructor parameter. They even provided a protected method that can be overriden in a subclass to create a fixed-size LRU map in fewer than 10 lines of code. The JavaDocs explain it all if you're interested.

Wi-Infidelity

How's this for irony? I've spent most of this week in the high technology capitol of the world at what is probably one of the largest software developer conferences in the world and today is the first day I've had reliable access to the Internet. Did I miss anything good? I could have found a coffee shop or, *gasp*, actually paid for WiFi access at my hotel, of course, but those things involve work and/or money. I can understand how 15,000 software developers and their arsenal of wireless devices could overwhelm the wireless network at a convention center, but you'd think that if any place could handle that kind of load, the premier destination for high-technology conferences could.

Blog Till You Drop

You may have heard that three prominent bloggers have recently suffered heart attacks; two of which proved to be fatal. While the tone of this article strikes me as a little bit alarmist, it's an interesting look into the lives of these and other online journalists. I say journalists instead of bloggers because the people that were profiled in the story sound more like journalists than bloggers to me. In my mind, anyone who is spending most of their time chasing down leads over the phone and/or in person in an attempt to scoop their competition is more of a journalist than a blogger. A blogger is more of a metajournalist, someone who distills the content produced by journalists into analysis, humor, opinion, or some combination of all three.

All of the blogs mentioned in this article cover the technology industry. I don't really read any of the technology industry blogs so I may not know what I'm talking about, but I suspect that because the technology industry gets so little coverage in mainstream media, anyone who wants to blog about technology really needs to be more of a journalist than a blogger because there's not enough technology content out there for bloggers to collect and assimilate into their blogs.

Timeliness is important in all writing, but I think that anyone who is sweating the milliseconds is more of an online journalist than a blogger. I may be in the minority, but I've always felt that the real value that blogs add to the media landscape is not their ability to cover breaking news in real time, rather it's their ability to offer insightful analysis in near real time and the way they are able to build a relationship between the blogger and the audience. When I want to hear about breaking news, I go to a news outlet. After I've digested the news, I generally head over to my favorite bloggers to hear their take on things. Sometimes, it's even nice to read someone's take on things after the dust has settled a little bit but before it's completely fallen off the front page and that's something that blogs do very well.

I don't think that the unfortunate passing of a couple of bloggers is indicative of a nationwide epidemic, but I would encourage the mothers of bloggers across the country to make sure to go downstairs at least once a week to make sure your sons (and daughters?) haven't dropped dead.

Almost Famous

Today's Boston Globe had a story about Rhode Island's nascent high technology economy. There's not a lot of new information in this article, but it was nice to see the Providence Geeks get plenty of mentions. As I type, the picture on the front page of the Globe's technology section, which was taken at last week's geek dinner, features a nice view of my midsection (I'm wearing a blue shirt and holding a 16oz can of 'Gansett in my right hand).

NeoOffice

I've been using OpenOffice for a number of years to handle what little MS Word and Excel document editing and creation I've had to do at home. I installed it when I switched to Mac just over a year ago, and while the applications work fine, they aren't native Mac applications so they don't have the standard Mac OS look & feel and don't work with standard Mac OS keyboard shortcuts. I recently heard rumors that OpenOffice had finally been ported to Mac OS, but I found no evidence of this on OpenOffice's somewhat confusing website. I did, however, find another open source project called NeoOffice that delivers on this promise. I've been using NeoOffice for a month or so. I'm by no means an MS Office power user, but NeoOffice has done everything I've needed it to do and it's so much nicer to use than OpenOffice since it feels like a native Mac application. If you're a Mac user whose frustrated with the current selection of commercially available office suites, you should check it out.

Bug Off

Open source software is a concept that people have start getting familiar with over the past few years. Open source hardware is admittedly a more difficult proposition, but I've recently come across a couple of groups that are doing things with computer hardware that captures the spirit of open source software. The first is a local company called Modern Device Company, the brainchild of a RISD professor. They provide a simple and cheap microcontroller and development environment. I was unable to attend the recent Providence Geeks dinner where this technology was demoed, so I don't know much more about it. There's a short interview with the creator here as well as some links to related projects.

I read about a start-up called Bug Labs in the latest issue of Technology Review. They are doing a very similar thing, albeit in a more polished (and expensive) form. Their vision is a world where people are free to create their own purpose-built high-tech gadgets by stacking together a set of components and wiring them up using their software tools or by writing their own code.

It's all pretty interesting stuff. I don't have any insights to offer into what the first open source hardware killer app might by, but I think that this is something that is going to get bigger and I wouldn't be surprised if some forward-thinking gadget manufacturers start releasing versions of their products over the next few years that allow for end-user customization via a mixture of open source hardware and software components.