Traveler's Manifesto

When I check in to a hotel, there are few simple (cheap) things I'm looking for:

• A desk with power outlets on the desk (e.g. in the lamp) for my laptop and cell phone
• Decent lighting, especially near the desk
• A shower I can stand up in
• A shower head that is high enough to get my hair wet
• A bed at least close to the same length as me (e.g. King only)

I just checked into a pretty new Hyatt Place "suite" that looks flashy with its 42" HDTV, media center, couch with ottoman, and granite wet bar, but it manages to fail at all of the first three items. I thought business hotels had figured this out by now.

Spot the Terrorist

There are many definitions for "terrorist." I like this one: "one who utilizes the systematic use of violence and intimidation to achieve political objectives." But who's using intimidation and violence in these scenarios:

1. The dictator or the president who lies about the dictator's plans and invades his country resulting in over a million deaths
   
   
2. The student wearing a circuit board, or the police who threatened to kill her
   
   
3. The people calling for peace or the people saying that terrorists will win
   
   
4. The people placing advertisements or the people who think they're bombs

If you are scared all the time, even when people aren't trying to hurt you, then you are letting the terrorists win. Instead, hold the American ideals above all and refuse to give in to the terrorists and fear mongers. Don't elect candidates who run on a platform of fear.

Those Who Sacrifice Liberty For Security Deserve Neither. --- Benjamin Franklin

How to make sure I don't buy your product

1. Promise to sue anybody who reveals flaws in it. HID Global has done this with their RFID-based proximity cards. Knowing about vulnerabilities in your access control devices would be a real bummer. Blissful ignorance would surely be preferable (not). HID's catchphrase is "HID -- The Trusted Brand". I guess in the absence of facts, your customers will just have to trust you.
   
   
2. When asked if you support platform X, tell me I should use a "real OS". BMC is an enterprise software company that brought some sales engineers on site just to tell me that. That was around 1996 and the OS was Linux. On their website today, Linux is the third item on their "Featured Technologies" list. Ironically, "Mainframe Management", their historical focus, is number four. I'm glad they've caught on, but I think I'll look for software from a company with "real vision".
   

Handheld AJAX

For those of us trying to provide network application services to mobile PDAs and Smart Phones these days, we have a few options for how to write and structure apps:

1. Platform-specific client-server (BlackBerry, Palm, Windows, Symbio, etc.)
2. Synchronous browser
3. Synchronous remote display (e.g. VNC)
   
4. Java Client-server (J2ME Midlets)
5. Asynchronous browser (AJAX)

Platform-specific apps (#1) are a show-stopper for me --- there are too many platforms and they're too different. A plain browser (#2) is ubiquitous, but the high latency and low bandwidth of a lot of mobile networks makes it pretty painful to use. A remote display technology like VNC (#3) would suffer even more from network issues.

J2ME (#4) is a pretty nice technology --- although I don't think a lot of the VM implementations are designed to run multiple non-game applications in a user-friendly way. No offense to Java, but the world seems to like AJAX apps (#5) better, so for mobile e-mail, I'm going to try out Claros Mini.

The other tie-breaker is that options #1 and #4 require local storage and enable offline operation. Option #5 can optionally do that using technology like Google Gears, or it can work in a purely stateless mode to the client.

Windows Mobile Redux

I finally broke down and bought a T-Mobile Dash (a branded HTC s620) running Windows Mobile. It has WiFi, GPRS/EDGE, 4 bands, Bluetooth 2.0, a QWERTY keyboard, QVGA screen, Micro SD, 1.3MP camera, stereo, etc. This device is better than the Palm I tried a few months ago and better than the Window Mobile iPaq I bought at work some time ago. But there is still plenty of work to do:

For Microsoft:

• Upgrading the OS from 5.0 to 6.0 erases all of the files. What kind of lame OS upgrade is that?
• There is no built-in functionality to backup to SD card (see above)
• I can route laptops via a Bluetooth Personal Area Network (PAN) using the "Internet Sharing" app, but I have to poke that app each time I bring up my laptop --- and it only supports one laptop at a time. Better yet, I would like to bring-up the Dash's WiFi in AP mode and skip Bluetooth altogether.
• The "ClearVue" Microsoft Office viewer apps are only viewers. I can't even make a simple spreadsheet. They're copyright Westtek, LLC. If Microsoft can't even write editors for MS office docs, it's definitely time to switch to OpenOffice.

For T-Mobile:

• T-mobile doesn't expose the upgrade download to the phone's browser -- only to full-blown browsers.
• T-mobile still wants to sell you SMS service in addition to Internet, so they want you to use their IM client that routes all messages over SMS. It's a good use of SMS, except that you have to pay separately for it. AOL is all too happy to fuel this business model, so they don't advertise any mobile IM clients. I'll take my IM over the Internet, thank you very much. OctroTalk is a free Jabber client with support for transports for AIM, etc. and works quite nicely. I don't know how T-Mobile expects you to IM if you're in a location served only by WiFi.
• T-mobile really wants to capitalize on their HotSpot business unit, so they really want you to pay $10/mo extra for HotSpot access. You have to work hard to get a plan without it.

For other software authors:

• The Java VM that comes on the Dash (Jeodek by Esmertec AG) only runs one app at a time and doesn't let you permanently allow an app to use the network without being prompted.
• Google provides a nice Java client for Gmail, but it doesn't alert me when I have new messages or let me download attachments. The built-in POP/IMAP client might be nice, but Gmail doesn't support IMAP and POP would get me out of sync. Help, Google!
• Minimo, the Firefox variant for mobiles, doesn't even successfully start for me, although others report better luck on the same device.
  

The best news is that vendors are getting better about providing "over-the-air (OTA)" software installs rather than just installers for a Windows PC that is supposed to then sync the app to the mobile. And T-Mobile EDGE service is giving me just shy of 200kb/s, which isn't too shabby for this sort of device --- broadband for my 486 with 1024x768 screen was 128kb/s ISDN. Although round-trip latency averages 900ms (ranges between 400ms and 2600ms), which hurts TCP and makes tty apps difficult.

The Green Grid

Marketplace had a story on a tech consortium called The Green Grid, which is creating standards for measuring and improving server-room efficiency. The accompanying figure, which occurs in their white paper The Green Grid Opportunity, shows how 35% of the electricity used by a server can be lost to power and head conversions. Another rule of thumb says that cooling the machine room may double your electricity costs.

And kudos to Marketplace for providing text transcripts, as well as audio, of their segments.

Wikanalysis

While channel surfing this weekend, I stumbled onto the documentary Press for Truth, which is based in large part on the 9/11 timeline that has been built at cooperativeresearch.org. The timeline is entirely based on open-source literature and every bit has a citation (usually multiple citations). I found it more useful than PBS's America Rebuilds.