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Apple Stores And Lynch Mobs
I talked to an Apple employee at the local Apple store today. I was chatting with him about the Apple TV YouTube experience and how I was disappointed that I couldn't find the Mute Math "Typical" video on there. He said they were converting 10,000 videos every week to to the QuickTime format for use on Apple TV and iPhones, I think. What a waste, because we really want Flash on Safari anyways, you silly Apple idealists!
Anyways, he asked me if I was going to be there on Friday. I told him no, thinking about giving an excuse but deciding to leave it at that. I replied with, "Well, I suppose you - and all the other employees - are going to be here." He nodded in agreement and said he didn't yet completely know his work schedule for this weekend yet because they hadn't scheduled it yet. As he was walking away, I told him to have a fun time, to which he responded, "Yeah, well, watch the news and see if any of us get killed."
Well, at least they seem to be ready for the worst, I guess.
Apple iPhone Crazyness Continues
I wish I wasn't busy this Friday night so that I could watch the Apple fanboys go wild over at the Mall of America. Ohh, well, who cares about that. There's still a lot of new stuff to talk about:
- Walt Mossberg gives the device a rather glowing review, but doesn't like the fact that it uses AT&T's rather slow data network.
- Mossberg says that he had a tough couple first days with the iPhone's virtual keyboard, but after about 5 days he had the hang of it. To further alleviate your fears, Apple gave us a video of how it works.
- The OS and all its programs take of 700 MB of the 4 GB (or 8 GB) on the phone. I bet that by the end of the year, it's going to be more like 1 GB. They should change the ads to 3 GB or 7 GB of storage now.
- Service plans start at $59/month after a $36 activation fee. The cash gets you 450 minutes, 5000 night and weekend minutes, unlimited web and e-mail usage, and 200 text messages. For existing AT&T customers, they can just add $20/month to their current plan to gain unlimited data usage.
- Apparently there's no way to cut, copy, or paste text around the phone. That'd sure be helpful for some of these applications....
- Through iTunes, it can sync with Outlook on your Windows machine. Mossberg also claims that it does support IMAP and Exchange, although very little details are given.
- You can view documents such as Word files, Excel files, and PDFs. But you can't edit them. And you can't view Flash webpages.
- And yes, just what productivity persons didn't want: you can watch YouTube on your iPhone. Talk about a colossal waste of time.
- Signup with AT&T and activation of the phone is done on your home computer inside iTunes. Now that's kinda slick, because who likes doing that on the phone?
- Like iPods, after 300-400 charges your phone's battery will start crapping out. Sounds like you get to pay them a wad of cash to replace it. That sucks. Apparently the amount you can do on one charge is pretty spectacular, though.
- The webiste iPhoneApplicationList.com already has dozens of little apps, although the iPhone doesn't come out for two days. Since they're browser-based applications, you can try them right there, so that's kinda fun.
Sure, the Apple iPhone is cool. I'm at least waiting until version 2, and that's about it. (Special thanks to Engadget and Apple Phone Show for the information.)
Review: eEye's Blink Security Suite
A couple weeks ago, I listened to an episode of Security Now! that was an interview with Mark Maiffret of eEye. In this show, he talked about his company, which specializes in security research. eEye is one of those handful of companies that work hard to find software vulnerabilities in software and often find and report security issues to Microsoft and other companies. eEye's clients include high-security areas of the government and many other security-conscious persons.
He talked about the functionality of their software, which includes not only an Internet Firewall, but a System Firewall and an Application Firewall. These increased levels of security make sure malware and spyware cannot do their job and that no applications can easily modify core Windows settings. Maiffret also talked about how their Internet-updated systems protect specifically against known vulnerabilities, including the ones they have found but have not yet fully released to the public. He also noted that the system is locked down with their software so well that almost any new vulnerability is blocked on a number of levels throughout the system.
Sounds great, but it's probably only available to high-paying users, right? Not true. eEye, in an effort to serve their enterprise customers a bit more, decided to give a personal, home version for free for a whole year. I've tried out their Blink product for a couple weeks, and it was nice. I did have some issues with installation and keeping Blink running, because a couple times I had to restart my computer. Overall, it notified you just as much as a firewall but protected you so much more.
In the end, I uninstalled it. Software such as Joost and GTA: San Andreas, apparently, have some compatibility problems with eEye's Blink. Plus, I found a bit of a performance slowdown when the software was running. Still, I think that if you're looking for a high-grade security implementation that includes firewall, anti-virus, and so much more, go get your free year for home users. (Even after that it's comparable to Symantec, I think.) It's great if you use the usual MS Office, Internet, and such applications, but will probably have some issues with games and other cutting-edge applications that want to do sneaky things in Windows to get better performance. This is the program for the ultimate security freak or just the cautious web user.
A Wireless Close Call
I was wondering things like, "Who's music library is that?" Somebody said, "Probably a neighbor's." I said, "But our Internet is supposed to be secured by an encrypted password."
To my horror, I found that the main wireless access point/router on the 2nd floor had been somehow reset. It was named "linksys" and available for all the world to use. What a shame! Even worse, it would've been easy for someone connected to it to wreak havoc over the network and lock us out for a while until we could reset everything.
I pretty quickly patched up the holes and got it working. Now, we can share our music among just us, we can be sure that no neighbors are using our bandwidth, and, if we wanted to, we could start networking the printers. That would rock.
Drupal To Save The World?
Jeff Robbins of Lullabot has a vision. He sees a world where anyone in the world has a tool to make websites. Here's his vision:
I can foresee a time when a small village in Nigeria will be able to open their $100 laptop, connect to the $100 server they have set up in their town hall, click "make a website" and effortlessly put the pieces together to communicate with the world and with each other. Or a third grade teacher in Indiana, working right in front of her students, will be able to plug Drupal modules into the school website that allow her class to exchange messages with a third grade class in India.
Of course, read the rest of his article to get the full story. I think it's a great idea but it will take a lot of work for everyone. And hey, if you're looking to getting into websites, jump in and learn a bit about Drupal and WordPress. If you feel you can't write some code to enhance the system, by all means, please contribute to documentation and managing of the Drupal systems in any way possible.
Why The Apple iPhone Needs Native Applications
For the past three years, I've had a Samsung i500. I love it. It packs most of the Palm functionality of those Treo smartphones into a usable phone form factor. In other words, it looks like a phone, but it has everything a smartphone has: Palm OS, internet connection, a stylus, etc. I've always had a flip phone, and I can't figure out why anyone would want something that is otherwise.
The best features on my Palm are the applications I have purchased for it. The Palm OS 4.1 software comes with a program that will sync your Outlook mail, but I wanted something that would pull your mail from the server over the phone's built-in Internet connection. So, I got SnapperMail, one of the nicest applications I've ever seen on a Palm. The program even has a mode for browsing e-mail without a stylus because you don't want to pull it out. It's a great time saver.
I also have MyBible, a great Palm application that turns your phone into a bible study device. You can load in numerous translations of the scriptures, highlight and take notes on verses, etc. Pick a book with the stylus, and then you can type in the chapter and verse via the phone's built-in keypad. Plus, there's no big book to carry around.
A few times, people have called me while on the road saying something is wrong with my website. Most of the management of the site is best done with SSH, but what if I'm nowhere near a computer? I found a free, open-source program called TuSSH which will allow you to get into your full SSH session if needed. I don't recommend doing major administration on such a small screen without a keyboard, but in a pinch, it'll do.
My absolute favorite, though,, is Pocket Quicken. For years, I've been keeping track of how much money I have via the ubiquitous Quicken software, and this is the perfect add-on. Whenever I purchase something or go to the bank/ATM, I pull out my phone and quickly enter the payment into Pocket Quicken. It does a great job at autocompleting the company you're paying as well as the category this transaction goes in. Most of the time, it only takes a second or two to enter the transaction. Plus, I always have that main screen there to tell me what the balance of my accounts are. When I am going to update my desktop quicken, I just HotSync my phone with my computer and it all gets transferred over.
So... what does this all have to do with the Apple iPhone? Well, it has to do with Steve's WWDC Keynote where he announced that you could make web applications for the iPhone. Only one of these programs can be done on the iPhone, and that's using their built-in mail client. I doubt their mail client will have all the features that SnapperMail offers me, either, especially since in January Steve talked about working with Yahoo! Mail and I use my own mail server.
For the Bible, I could log on to BibleGateway and read it there. Who knows, it might look good on an iPhone. But, how long does it take to connect to AT&T's wireless internet? 10 seconds? 20 seconds? No matter what, it's longer than it is on my Samsung smartphone. It's gotta take longer to search via the webform too.
SSH? Well, a quick search on Google shows that you can do it if the iPhone supports Java. But, who knows if it will? Apparently someone is already working on getting an iPhone SSH client working, but I have to imagine it's going to be much harder to do just with the default Safari install than if you actually had a full development environment for the iPhone.
And Pocket Quicken? Fat chance of something that cool and useful coming to the iPhone until they release a large SDK. Sure, I could probably use a Quicken.com account to do the same thing. But, how long would it take to enter a transaction? 10 seconds to connect to Internet, another 15 seconds at the least to login and navigate to the entry page, and then at least 15 seconds to enter it. That's easily 3-4 times as long! Even if it can autologin to Quicken.com over a web SSL connection, it'll still take a bunch longer.
And, what if I'm out of a high-speed data area for whatever reason? I'm dead in the water. I can't use any of my custom applications. One decent solution that was mentioned on this week's TWiT was that it could work if the iPhone was outfitted with something like Google Gears. Applications with Gears or its cousin, Adobe Apollo, could possibly give users such as myself the functionality we need with their ability to work offline and synchronize when they are back online.
So, for now, I'm looking for a phone to replace my Samsung i500. It looks like I'll have to go with one of those bulky Palm Treos.
Taste In Movies
UPDATE: Well, apprently nobody got this post, so I'm going to try again with a bit more context. It's probably still not as fun if you have to explain it. First of all, my boss seems to love almost every action movie (except maybe the ones I like the most). He often asks me what I think of the new movie that came out the past weekend because, undoubtedly, he's already seen it. So, when he came up to me this morning, I wasn't too surprised he had seen Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, the latest action-superhero B-list movie. As you may be able to tell from the conversation below, he was rather surprised that I was not excited about the movie, and maybe even a bit more surprised that I unashamedly gave him a hard time for even thinking I'd like the movie. See, I told you it'd be boring if I had to explain it.
My Boss: So, Dan, did you see the Fantastic Four movie?
Me: (indignantly) No!
My Boss: Dan, I'm surprised you'd respond in that way.
Me: (somewhat condescendingly) That's too bad.
My Boss: Haha, nice.
My Boss: (as I was walking away) Yeah, well, it was mediocre.
New CityBuilder.org Site
Last year, the website CityBuilder.org was the host of tons of information relating to building cities for Christ in the People of Praise. Much of the short video pieces were related to fixing up and building houses in Allendale, a poor neighborhood in Shreveport, Louisiana. However, the weekly live video broadcasts covered a much broader section of topics applicable to City Building and People of Praise life in general.
Tonight starts the second summer of live videos, but this time they're not going to be from Louisiana. This year, there are city building projects of different types in Indianapolis and also starting in Memphis, Tennessee in the fall. So, this year's broadcasts are, at least for now, coming from South Bend, Indiana. Who knows what they'll be about, but I'm told that you'll be able to watch them anytime from their archives on blip.tv, which is great. (They also put up the archives from all last year too!) So, if you want to learn a lot more about People of Praise life, check out what we've been thinking and talking about this summer and last and, if you want, join in the conversation. Also, don't miss the nice new CityBuilder.org website, which includes a blog, photos, and much more about our life in common. Join us live tonight, too, if you like.
Safari on Windows? Why?
This morning was Apple's WWDC Keynote, where Steve Jobs speaks to the world and a the thousands of the developers actually in the room. Because it's to the developers, it's always the more geeky and technological side of stuff. Last year they spent a lot of time looking at the new features of Leopard, which of course they did again this year.
Mac OS X Leopard, available in October, is certainly a nice upgrade to the already-popular Mac OS X line. Steve Jobs touted 10 new features, including a neatly redesigned dock that might convince power users to start using it. The new look of the desktop, somehow actually looks like it stole some of the ideas from Windows Vista, in my opinion. There's also a nice preview option called Quick Look which promises to be a bit faster than actually opening up a new program. 
He did some amazing stuff with rendering a couple hundred movies at one time using the Core Animation system as well. And, finally, Mac OS X Leopard looks like an incredibly easy system to back up and move data between networked computers.
For me, though, the more interesting parts were after Steve said his famous "One more thing...." The two things here were both a bit of a disappointment during lunch hour while reading a live news feed, so I thought I'd wait a bit before writing a bit of a rant. But, after watching the full keynote myself, I'm still a bit mystified.
Steve Jobs announced the availability of a Beta version of Safari for Windows. The formerly-Mac-only browser, based on the open-source Konqueror engine, is known for being a fairly lightweight engine that adheres to web standards well. And, well, if you're looking for all that Apple shininess that you're used to from iTunes, now you can have it in your browser. But really, why? Steve Jobs said it's 1.6 times as fast as FireFox, another quality browser. I don't think that's reason to switch from a free, open-source browser to an Apple browser.
The other big thing that Steve touted was that Apple has experience writing Windows apps. As someone who's still waiting for the money to buy a MacBook Pro and leave Windows, I can't help but contest that statement. Almost every time I close my iTunes, it crashes before closing. If I have iTunes open, another user on my Windows XP machine cannot open the program to listen to music. Steve, if you're letting your iTunes developers take vacations, they're selling you short. I did download Safari and it does let multiple users run the program at the same time, which is good.
Also, I have about 5 friends who live on the block who have MacBooks. Every single one uses FireFox and I've never seen them use Safari. If nobody on Mac uses this Apple product, why would anyone else use it? Sure, it looks nice, but it still doesn't look like it has half the features or extensibility of FireFox, the leading browser for persons who use the web constantly.
The second thing Steve announced was their "solution" (read: cop-out) for making apps for the Apple iPhone. You can use the powerful XHTML and JavaScript functionalities of the iPhone's built-in, full-featured Safari engine to make apps for the iPhone. (Steve used the buzzwords "Web 2.0" and "AJAX" instead of "XHTML" and "JavaScript", but it's the same difference.) OK, so the app they came up with worked nicely and did the basic integration with the other apps, but besides that, it was fairly boring. And although they touted that you can make it look just like the iPhone's interface, how did they do it? Were those contact list pages just basic unordered lists of information? Were they using a bunch of images to make those nice rounded corners and that search icon? It seems so, because they claim there's no SDK or API. So, have fun accessing the same "Web Apps" that you use on the Palm or BlackBerry. And, wait, what happened to "Web Standards" if we have to make a desktop version, a Palm version, a BlackBerry version, and an iPhone version of a web app? Sounds like 1998 wants its <blink> tag back with all that custom development.
Why do I want a real development system for the iPhone platform? Well, on my Palm-based phone I have open-source games, a third-party mail client that I love, a program with the entire Bible, and even an open-source SSH client. If I can't do that stuff on the iPhone, it's not the killer phone for me. Yeah, it might crash every so often, but I know that's my fault, not the phone. Of course, maybe if it is running full OS X, they can sneak a Terminal app in the interface somewhere so that I can administrate my servers remotely. If they do that, I'll probably go for it.
So how was this year's WWDC keynote? It was OK. Not what I was hoping for, for sure, but I suppose the real Mac fanboys are happy. I guess I'll find out the real story when I listen to MacBreak Weekly and TWiM tomorrow.
Minneapolis Biking Adventure #1
Last week we biked to Hidden Falls and on Tuesday I biked to and from work, but I needed to kick it up a notch this weekend because I didn't bike at all on Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday. So, I biked for 17 miles (and got a bit of walking in over by the lakes). Here's the map:
First, I biked along the Hiawatha Light Rail line for a bit until I got to the Lake Street Area. There I biked right onto the Midtown Greenway, which stretches all the way through South Minneapolis and a good way beyond. The Greenway is a great, long path that replaced an old railroad bed that stretched all the way through South Minneapolis and further west. 
The western end of the Greenway opened in 2000 and is a nice, wide path in most places for biking and walking. Throughout all of Minneapolis, it is in a bit of a trench that goes underneath almost all the streets along 29th Street, but it is nice and green and has landscaping projects going along with it. It is connected to a further trail west, such that I biked past Highway 100 before turning back.
Plans are still in gear for the east end of the Greenway, although it is almost complete. The crown jewel of the Greenway seems to be a bridge they are currently constructing that goes across Hiawatha Avenue and the Light Rail line. (Temporarily the bikers and walkers just had to walk across the busy street at a light, but now you can't even do that with the bridge construction.) It looks like the designers were trying to rip off Norman Foster, but I just found out from this blog post that it is because of all the obstructions they had to get the bridge through on the East side where large power lines, another bike path, and light rail collide. It'll definitely be fun to ride across.
On the way back, I decided to take a more road-focused but direct way home. I rode up Hennepin Avenue until it became a bit of a freeway, at which time I found a cool bike/walk bridge and a path down to Loring Park. I just then biked through downtown on Nicollet Mall and then across the Hennepin bridge to University Ave. It was a great 17-mile trek, and I really enjoyed exploring Minneapolis by bike.