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This site is no longer maintained.
My current weblog.
Wednesday, April 17, 2002.NET CF Follow-up
One of the interesting bits of knowledge to come out of today's .NET CF announcement is that CE.NET is not a requirement to deploy .NET applications. According to the .NET Compact Framkework and Smart Device Extensions FAQ, the beta release supports:
Pocket PC 2000, Pocket PC 2002, and embedded devices based on the upcoming update to Windows CE .NET, version 4.1, codenamed "Jameson".
This implies that PPC developers will be able to distribute the .NET CLR and CF with their applications. Customers will not have to wait for the PDA manufacturers to release an updated OS. Sweet.
UPS puts faith in Windows CE for driver's handhelds [via PDABuzz.com]
The article and PDABuzz blurb note that it's Windows CE, not Pocket PC. Makes perfect sense to me. UPS is building an embedded system that will likely do just a few things: check packages in and out of the truck, capture signatures for deliveries, and upload reporting data. Pocket PC is just a collection of applications (ie: Pocket Word), services (ie: ActiveSync), and related APIs (ie: POOM) that turn a Windows CE device into a useful PDA. For an embedded system, they are unnecessary.
Ask and Ye Shall Receive
[Bryce's Radio] "Wishlist: RSS feed for Google News"
[Ken Rawlings] Thanks to the magic of RssDistiller, here's a Google News RSS feed. Setting it up was easier than expected, since Google sets all the links to have the same CSS class.
Google News is like CNN's Headline News. It gets you current on the day's news, in minimal time. And now it flows through Radio. Thank you Ken! I am inherently lazy, else I would have done that myself 
Microsoft .NET Compact Framework
"Today at the Microsoft Mobility Developer Conference, Microsoft Corp. announced the beta release of the Microsoft® .NET Compact Framework, extending the .NET strategy to smart handheld devices and delivering on its mission to enable rich computing on any device. The .NET Compact Framework is Microsoft’s mobile application platform technology that harnesses the power of XML Web services on mobile devices." [via PocketPCHow2 Log]
Making my day, oh yeah! More information, including how to obtain the beta.
Update: It's not an open beta, one must apply and be accepted. Bah! If anybody out there knows anybody, put in a good word for me 
Toshiba debuts Pocket PC [IDG InfoWorld]
The e310 is not yet listed on the Toshiba PDA web site. According to InfoWorld, it will have the standard Pocket PC specs with 32MB RAM and an SD socket, and a street price of $441.
Updates: Frank McPherson has some comments. Official Toshiba page, specs include 1000mAh battery, 140g, 125x80x12.4mm. Contrast this with the Palm m515 at 129g, 114x79x13mm, and we can clearly see where Toshiba is aiming. The $399 price tag mentioned by several other sources is further proof (InfoWorld probably meant EUR441).
It's not quite the Palm Vx dimensions that I am longing for, but damned close.
Look out, Palm, the Pocket PCs are coming to get you!
The real AT&T mMode site. What I linked to yesterday was for "Mobile Internet", which is apparently different. I'm getting the impression that mMode is a walled-garden, useful only for consuming services offered by AT&T and their partners.Nomad Jukebox 3 Follow-up
Maybe the optical port is useful, and shows amazing foresight on the part of Creative. The specifications suggest that the Nomad 3 has an on-board MP3 encoder. The music industry is releasing albums that do not work on PCs, and TOSlink enables the community to route-around the MP3 outage. The Nomad 3's optical port enables it to be part of the solution, instead of falling vicitim to the problem. Neat.
More Power
The Alegna PowerLink 572 is as big as a PDA, and weighs 12oz, but it packs a whopping 5000mAh of power. $200.
Philips: Microsoft's backing DVD+RW [ActiveWin]
I've been waiting for drives to fall to $250, but with Microsoft in the DVD+RW camp I may wait longer. How did DVD recording become so fragmented? This is bad for consumers.
CNet: Microsoft preparing for high-end Windows. [via Hack the Planet]
Microsoft is working on NUMA support. Interesting. I'm a Windows guy, but my last employer ran the majority of their hosting business on Irix (SGI) and it was hard not to pick up a few things. At a conceptual level, NUMA is like localized clustering. One or more CPUs are grouped with their own memory, and accessing another CPU's memory occurs over a high-speed, low-latency bus (CrayLink in SGI land). With SMP, the multi-processing system common in x86 servers, all processors have access to all memory over the same bus, which requires that CPUs be in close proximity.
NUMA scales better than SMP, but the OS is burdened with trying to schedule threads near their memory. Compared with clustering, NUMA is mostly transparent to the application and adminstrator. SGI systems are "trick" in that when you outgrow your Origin 200, instead of trading up to an Origin 2000 you can simply slap another O200 in the rack and connect them with a (thick and expensive) CrayLink cable to create a single, more powerful server.
30-Second Movie Review
Monday night I watched Man on the Moon, a 1999 film about the life and career of Andy Kaufman, named after the REM tribute song of the same name. What took me so long to see this film? I haven't cared much for Jim Carrey since the third season of In Living Color. Eventually the Carrey whose comedy I enjoyed returned to the world of acting, but nobody thought to put out a press release.
IMDB user review:
Your fondness for `Man on the Moon' may well be predicated on your feelings for Andy Kaufman, both as comic performer and offstage human being. And, as this film suggests, there was not, ultimately, a very wide gap between the two.
Absolutely! In my opinion, Carrey was born to play the role of Andy Kaufman, his portrayal is uncanny. The film itself isn't a stellar biography, Kaufman's early discovery is glossed-over and unbelievable, but from there the film never failed to keep me interested and entertained. The final scene before Kaufman's death, in which he flies to the Phillipines to visit a healer, had me laughing the hardest. Kaufman realizes that the healer is a fraud, and begins laughing to himself. For the first time, Kaufman is in the audience, the victim of someone else's mean joke. And he gets it.
If you grok Kaufman, you probably already own this movie.
How did I miss blogging the new NEC MobilePro 300E / Packard Bell PocketGear 2060? At 146 grams it will be the lightest Pocket PC available (30g lighter than the Maestro, and a bit thinner). SD built-in, CF and PC Card via expansion packs, replaceable battery, no Bluetooth. The styling is a little bit funky, but there's nothing wrong with that.
Nothing to indicate plans for a US release.
And speaking of NEC, I received an email from Robert Scoble today, who has landed at NEC's Mobile Solutions group.
