DeepDarkSee

The Dark Side of the Fruit
I really like the stuff Russell Beattie is writing about in his blog these days. Great picture of a Nokia phone with a projected laser keyboard!

The picture…I’m fascinated with the stuff showing up on Deviant Art lately. Sort of a “hot or not” for art.

I was on the Dell site tonight and see that the system I ordered is now on sale, a day later for about $200 less (and doesn’t require a hokey $300 mail in rebate to get it). Grrrrrrrrr.

Oh, this picture? Pretty, what’s the word, not enchanting, not perplexing, almost compelling, maybe compelling attention…anyway, click on it for more info.

Soon to be a Dell owner

OK, so I broke down and ordered a Dell yesterday. I went for the Inspiron 8500 with the 15.5″ wide orientation XUGA screen, DVD+RW, 2.2Ghz P4M, 802.11g. I figure if I have to give up my mac, I should get something else that is high end. I’m spending a lot of hours a day doing cell phone development work, so it makes a big difference.

I’m going to miss working under Mac OS X. I’ve come to really appreciate the environment, but need a fast “XP based” development environment for the cell phone stuff, and Mac OS X with Virtual PC can’t do it. Maybe next year with the new 64 bit processors…we’ll see.

So, in a couple of weeks the Dell will show up, I’ll move my stuff over, and put the Mac up for sale on EBay. Too bad, so sad…

Groovy Lizard

Check out Groovy Lizard, a web design site out of the UK. It looks like one person with an innovative way to promote their web design. I like the style(s) too.

Anguish

So I recently bought one of those new Apple 17″ notebooks. It is a wonderful machine in most every respect. The screen size is great for my many hours at the keyboard, the industrial design needs no comment, and it has worked flawlessly. This is my first time living day-to-day with Apple OS X, and it has been very solid. Most impressive is the work Apple has done to make the OS and hardware work well together.

I carried a Linux based notebook for several months (Redhat 7.2 notebook install) and it worked well, but there was always a new gotcha…making the modem work properly, switching Wifi connections, bridging to share connections, sleep and wakeup. Let’s call it a “do it yourself’er”. Windows XP is Microsoft (need I say more?), but it worked more smoothly. Mac OS X is the first UNIX based environment that really makes the OS user friendly for the masses. I remember hearing from some people at Sun about how Scott McNealy was on a rampage to make Sun Solaris easy to install and manage. The word was that he just didn’t understand that UNIX was complex. Well, Apple proved him right, but did it for Apple rather than Sun. Just look at the software install process and control panels under OS X and you will see what I mean.

So my Anguish? I’m doing a lot of software development work for phones that use the Qualcomm BREW runtime environment. This is a PC-only development environment. My answer has been to use Virtual PC on my new Mac. I did fine with another product to run XP as a virtual machine on my Linux box. I knew that it would be slower on a Mac because the Mac doesn’t have an Intel processor (as the Linux box did), and the PC-on-Mac is running at about what my old 700Mhz notebook did, except that screen updates are slower. It is a little slow, enough to be annoying and nag at me (and impact productivity a little, more when having to step through code in an emulator). But now I’ve run into a next level of problems. I can VPN into one client site from my virtual XP machine just fine, but not another (which works from a ‘real’ PC). I also need to run an MS Phone emulator to evaluate another product, and that emulator won’t run on my Virtual XP machine. Other Java J2ME and Symbion projects that may come up are likely to have similar issues.

Since I have to deal with Windows, it is nice to have it relegated to the status of one app window on my Mac (with the ability to go full screen when I want to). But I need it to be faster and without the glitches. I hate to admit it, but I was at the Dell site last night looking at the new Inspiron 8500. I feel so dirty. No decision yet…

Microsoft Can’t push into Mobile Phones

They tried to push into the cable market and were soundly rejected. They tried to push into consumer electronics providing an OS to those platforms, and the CE players wanted nothing to do with them. The MS-Home initiative is going nowhere fast. The X-Box is hemorrhaging money. Now they are on their second version of buggy bloatware for phones. Rejected again!

Mobile Phone Browser Options

It is alphabet soup when it comes to evolving mobile phone text markup and page rendering standards. WAP 1.x with WML, WAP 2.x with XHTML-MP, iMode phones with cHTML. Russell Beattie put together a good post laying out comparative capabilities and some evolutionary history.

Forest? Trees?

Well, I’ve been head down working on a BREW based corporate email application for a confidential client. When I focus like this, I get incredible amounts of work done, but miss out on ‘the landscape’ out there. Have to fix that.

I did take a break to help my daugher Audrey’s class setup a camp for their 3 night group camping trip, including a huge Teepee. Now that was fun!

BlogChalking

This is my new blogchalk:
United States, California, Half Moon Bay, Miramar, English,