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This site is no longer maintained.
My current weblog.
Saturday, May 04, 2002I've decided to release my Radio Redirection program, which I used to migrate this site from here to here. The program allows you to replace all items on a weblog hosted by Userland's radio.weblogs.com (or another RCS) with pages that redirect to a new location. See the README for complete details.
This is my first real go at a VB.NET program. It requires the .NET Redistributable, of course. Source code included, BSD-licensed. Fully XP widget-ized, but it should run fine on any platform supported by the .NET Framework.
It doesn't need to run from the same machine that Radio is running on, so Macintosh users can run it on a friend's computer or under an emulator. You will need to know your password hash and have access to an up-to-date copy of your site's directory.opml file (either on the filesystem or a URL). It's not complicated, complete instructions are in the README.
Lots of blogging about Spider Man today. I'd link to several, but I'm lazy. Glenn says: Don't take your kids, that's worth pointing to. Every child is different, and some youngsters may not be able to handle a movie with violence and death.
I was never into comic books, but as a child I loved cartoons and Spider-Man was one of them. I'm going to see the movie tonight with my roommate at Muvico's Premier. They're running four screens with all of them having Premier seating available. All of the showings last night sold out completely, including the expensive Premier seats, even the shows starting after midnight.
But I am more looking forward to Star Wars Episode Two. Star Wars had a much greater influence on me as a child than any other movie or cartoon. I just wish that I had some income so that I could justify a trek up to Disneyworld to see it... they have the only digital screens in Florida.
Bah! Even if I had income, I'm too lazy and not geeky enough to drive 200 miles to see a movie that I probably won't like anyways...
GPRS Makes WAP Better...
One of the things that turned me off to WAP was the speed. With "classic" WAP phones the data connection is circuit switched, most phones literally dialed into a standard pool of analog modems at 9.6kbps. It took several seconds to establish a connection, several more seconds to transfer each page. Some phones supported a 14.4kbps "ISDN" mode, all-digital with faster connection establishment, but none of Nokia's phones have that feature.
With GPRS, this problem no longer exists. GPRS is packet-switched and always-on, there's no need to establish a connection. GPRS is in the neighborhood of 40kbps, transfering pages very quickly.
Suddenly, WAP is reasonably fast.
I'd like to see Jakob Nielsen update his WAP field study using current GPRS phones. I would bet that task times would fall to 30 seconds or less, and that users' opinions would be far more positive.
WAP may have finally arrived, but does anyone care? Perhaps AT&T does. As a technology, their mMode is nothing more than WAP over GPRS, cleverly marketed as the American version of NTT's iMode.
PocketNow has a review of the Toshiba e310, complete with Palm V comparison photos. This is the Pocket PC that I declared the Palm m515 killer. It's the smallest Pocket PC to date and is reasonably priced at just $399. Downsides are 32MB RAM, poor battery life, and no Compact Flash. Wireless PDA geeks should look elsewhere.
My roommate is learning WML. I was one of those early adopters that got sick of WAP within minutes of buying a WAP phone in Germany, a Nokia 7110. If Jakob had published WAP Backlash a couple of months earlier I would have found a better toy to waste $400 on...
Anyways, I guess WAP is new for my roommate, he's coming off of Kyocera and Samsung PDA phones. Besides building WAP-friendly templates, he's working on some WML / WMLScript stuff for posting Movable Type entries.
Getting his Ericsson T68 to accept direct WML, instead of WML served with an HTML mime type and "converted" by the gateway, is proving to be a problem...
CNET: Code Red and Nimda still a threat. It's frightening how many servers these worms have infected. It's not difficult to protect against these threats.
