I have this idea on what application I want to write for the Palm Pre. It’d be fine for the other smartphones too, but I have a pre, so that’s what I want to write for. But the damn Mojo (Palm Pre Developers Kit) is still unavailable for public consumption…
Just had to complain… open up Palm… we’re waiting…
For the last weekend, I couldn’t see my calendar on my pre, even though it was alerting me to my events. Finally figured out that the problem was I had too many calendars. My work Google calendar lists 20 calendars in total, and home has about 8… so the display was just over-whelmed. On the pre I just told it not to display most of the calendars in the ‘all calendar view’ and everything works fine now. Of course, then I removed calendars from my other accounts that I don’t care about anymore either.
So I stood in line for a palm pre… two actually. My current plan has the 1500 family with unlimited data plan already, and the phones my wife and I use contract was ready for new phones, so we were good to go for new phones.
Decided to go to Sprint store rather then risk BestBuy not having enough. Good choice as it turns out. 150 in stock at Sprint, and like 2 at BestBuy. With over 200 people that I know about showing up at the small store I went to, it must have been good for Sprint to see that volume move. (Though now I have to deal with the mail-in rebate, which is lame)
Palm pre itself is fairly easy to use. Comments made about the sharp edge when opening the pre is no joke, but easy to deal with. The OS is interesting and while learning the ins-and-outs of it, I think I now get the ‘palm’ and ’sprint’ business plan with them trying to recover.
First palm… this is a good phone, and I can see why some say its an attempt at going after the iPhone. But really what palm is doing is what Google should have done with their G-Phone… it integrates with websites easily. All my mail accounts (yahoo, google, corporate which is basically google for me) are available. All my contacts (not yahoo for some reason, but that’s fine with me) are there, faceboook integrates easily, etc. WiFi makes it fast at home and (likely) at work on Monday. Really, this is a better google-phone. They didn’t really try to one-up the iPhone by ofering what it has and more. (iPhone is just an extension of the Apple hardware suite. Google-phone is an extension of the Google/web suite) Which makes me think that Palm wants to be bought by Google. If anything, this phone proves it. (Yeah, its not android, but there is no reason the ’software/website’ integration that webOS makes easy couldn’t be done in Android. Though I can’t wait to see the Mojo API and start making my own webOS apps.)
Now Sprint. The service they give now is better, and starting with the palm pre gives people less reason to go to AT&T or T-Mobile… so this reduces the stream of people leaving. But what I noticed is that the plans are much cheaper on Sprint compared to AT&T and T-Mobile. I had a 20% discount on Sprint from working at Thomson. When I left, I was able to keep that discount, so I never left Sprint. Now with a CostCo membership, you can get a 23% discount. Anyone can get that. What the palm pre release on Sprint does is get Sprint’s name out there again… which will also make their discounts more known. Palm will be releasing on other providers by 2010, so Sprint’s discounts will make them more palatable now.
After a few more days, I’ll post about using the phone itself. Right now, webkit works like it does everywhere else. The fact that speed-dial is replaced by universal search will take some getting used to. (Or figuring out how to set speed-dial) Tweed (3rd party twitter app) is ‘okay’ on the phone, and the New York Times app is a good start. Of course, the task list I’ve already started using… and I await the day that it syncs to Google tasks. (Oh man, that would be awesome!)
More later…
I’m starting my evolutionary programming again after a 2+ year hiatus. I decided to change my approach somewhat. Some of you may remember that my EP swarm I built was referred to as ‘my bees’. However, they were somewhat suicidal for reasons that I still do not understand, and the results they gave were useless.
My new approach will still use the ’swarming’ technique, but this time the goal of the system will be to optimize an evolutionary computing neural network. This makes the ‘hive mindset’ I was programming before a bit more structured and less chaotic. Because of this structure, and the system is now truly a data-mining application, I decided to call my new implementation of the ’swarming’ technique ‘Migo’ after the Lovecraftian Migo.
In this system, each computational node can evolve and the neural pathways can be taught. In the bees approach, each program evolved and acted alone. The ‘hive’ was constantly changing in fairly random ways and never converged correctly. In the Migo approach, the neural network is the end goal and the number of components that can evolved are smaller, which should be easier to see if its working and what changes to make.
I’ve always enjoyed my bees and I will try to get them working again one day. Though I’m hopefully the Migo experiment will have better results.
Rcov is a great tool to verify what code is touched by test cases. Its only C0 testing, in that it checks that the code is hit for a test but not testing for all possible permitations.
The original project is all but abandonded and several forks on github.com have come out. The latest one that I like the most is the relevance on which is based on Spicycode’s fork.
So the Mini9 came today, and I moved it into place on my wifes desk.
Its a pretty nice machine. This model has the faster processor, 2 Gigs of ram, 32Gig hard drive and blue-tooth support. At some point well get her a blue-tooth mouse and keyboard, but for now we’re using the one she used to have. Also, we hooked up her old monitor as the external monitor.
As sad as it is to say, its pretty much as powerful as her old system, with a few differences. Its a touch slower, but runs much of the same programs she’s use to just fine (Firefox, open-office, pidgin). The keyboard is fantastic, though a little small for my hands. Its the perfect size for Jacob, who much to his disapointment, as to settle for Kirsten’s old computer.
I’ve include a second picture so you can see how tiny it is compared to a 17inch monitor. The box it arrived in was smaller then a book sent by Amazon these days. Honestly, I want to get one for me now.
It looks like Big Blue may purchase the Sun. This would only be good for Sun and specifically, benefit Java developers big time, as IBM is really one reason why Java is as successful as it is today.
But at my core, I wonder what would happen to the recently purchased MySQL folks compared to DB2 and the PostgreSQL support team. I have no clue on how IBM’s very strong database group would view those segments.
Amazon has taken a page from the Apple playbook and issued a DMCA take down request against a python file that reveals the ‘pid’ of the kindle. Basically, each kindle has a unique serial id. When you buy a DRM book, Amazon encrypts it against that id. So those books will only be viewable on your kindle. The python script in question reveals that ‘pid’ which can be used to make purchases in other stores. There is actually a second script that has to run to make a minor change to the resulting ebook file so that its viewable on the kindle. Amazon can’t do anything about that second script since it acts on content that isn’t on the kindle, nor is that content from Amazon. So instead, they go after the original script that exposes the ‘pid’. Keep in mind this is not circumventing the encryption… its using the same encryption… so it ‘doest not seem’ to be a DMCA thing… the end result is a book that only can be read on the kindle. No where else. Amazon is unhappy because the DRM is being used to get books other retailers to work on the kindle. (Interesting enough, because the benefactor is a retailer, Amazon could have legal win against retailers that push it, though Amazon will lose their image in the end.)
I’ve not tried this myself. I like my kindle and I like the Amazon store front for the kindle. But I kinda figured this day would come; Amazon is really pushing their store usage more then they are the Kindle as a product. I’m sure the end result is no DRM books, but I just wonder how long it will take Amazon to get there. I’m pretty happy that I can use the Kindle for the free Gutenberg books as well…
Not sure how many people read my tumblr log… its basically a dumping ground of random stuff. But last Sept 17, 2008 I noticed a huge spike in the price of gold that came out of nowhere, and posted it. It seemed like someone was manipulating the market. Well, thanks to one of the 2 people who actually watch C-SPAN, we now know that around that time money market accounts in the US were being depleted. The gold-spike we had was akin to water at the beach retreating before the tidal wave comes in. I still feel that to achieve such a spike in the gold market required automatic trades initiated from computers, but I have no proof.
Just a note that most movie geeks already know by now. You can get Netflix on your Tivo. It just appeared on my Tivo box today. We were planning on going back to Netflix once they did this.
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