Those Instagrammers...

Weird bunch ... honestly.

Last week they were busy complaining that Android users started to ruin their community, because it was no longer iPhone-only... WTF ??
Now they all threaten to leave Instagram, because it has been acquired by Facebook.

I do understand the fear that a larger company like Facebook can ruin the smaller startup and the service... and we have seen that a lot of times, so it would not surprise anyone...

But we leave now? Give them a chance, and let's see how it turns out over the next couple of weeks.

Instagram for Android

Instagram finally became available on Android. And the Apple-Instagram-fanboys hate it...

I - however - love this... Have to try it out.

I'll probably give up Lightbox ... which was sort of the interim replacement app.

Digg this...

Just noticed how uncool digg is.

Not to remove the submission and comments ... yeah, I get that... Would sort of break the networking/social aspect of it.

But only through the contact form and no direct action in the account settings to close it?

That's bad.

Keyword Search on Google Chrome

I discovered this one by accident (i.e. I must have hit the tab key at the right time in the location/search bar), so I did some (re)search and found an awesome - somewhat hidden - feature on Chrome that I was missing all the time.. mainly because I'm using it a lot in Firefox.

Keyword search

i.e. you just type a keyword for your search engine / site and the browser will do the rest for you.
In Firefox you just type the keyword for the search engine followed by the search term and then hit enter.
In Chrome you type the keyword for the search engine, then tab, and then the search term (and enter):

As soon as you hit the tab key the label of the location bar will change to the search engine/provider you associated with the given keyword like this:

You can configure those search providers in the Chrome options; the fastest way is to right-click into the location bar and then select "Edit search engines..."

There you provide the name, keyword ans search URL (with a %s for the keyword, like in Firefox).

And that's it.

I still have to get used to the tab thingy...


PS: turns out the tab is not necessary, space will do as well - just like Firefox... so even better.

New Gadget in Town

No, not the new iPad... I'll stick to my (original) iPad for the time being.

It's about something different.
Just a month ago I decided it was time for a new car radio, because the old one we had (from 1998!) was just that... a car radio (with CD player).  This is our old 1998 Audi... so no fancy stuff that came with the car...

Since we have all our music and podcasts in iPods or our smartphones, the radio did not do much good anymore.

I opted for a Blaupunkt Toronto 410 BT (as in bluetooth), and it is fantastic:

• bluetooth hands-free... finally
• bluetooth streaming ... so I don't have to cable-connect my phone for a short ride.
• iPod (or others) via USB
• SD slot for the permanent car collection :)

Actually I took my old iPod mini with a battery that only lasts for about 1 hour - so totally useless in the wild -  loaded it with music and put it in the car... Since it gets the power over USB there, the dead battery it no longer an issue, and I have more music in the car now, than I ever had on CDs there before.

So on my next trip alone, like my bimonthly trip to Ljubljana, I can listen to podcasts without end... without any of the in-ear headphone nonsense.

On Mobile, Apps and the Cloud

The other day I heard about a bartender app for Android that seems to only have a lot of drink recipes and some tips&tricks.
So basically this is a book(let) made into an app.
Yawn.

Why are so many phone and tablet apps just stupid books or references?

Dear developer, you have a full phone/tablet at your disposal, meaning:

• you know where you are (location)
• you have the time, date, durations, ...
• you have (more or less) full internet connectivity

So, e.g., for a cooking app, don't just tell me to do something for 5 minutes, start a freaking timer, and tell me when those 5 minutes are over!

With internet connectivity  you have unlimited compute power, currently called "the cloud". 

So please use it.

And not just by providing storage in the cloud (as cool as the HTC/DropBox deal is), use it for real computing.

Also, while we are at it: I venture a prediction:

Within less then 12 months, we will not only get free cloud storage with our phone, there will also be offerings for a free cloud-hosted virtual machine with your tablet.

So then, you'll get your Windows 7 or 8 PC as a VM and just use it from your tablet.

I'm pretty confident on this.

HTC got it

Kudos to HTC.

In Barcelona they announced that with each of their new Android smartphones - of the HTC One series - customers get 25GB of storage on DropBox.

They did not go for an HTC Cloud Storage, but decided to cooperate with DropBox. Good. Because DropBox has apps, users, APIs, ...

I wonder how the HTC internal IT guys fought this decision ("we can do this ourselves").

Good for you, HTC.

Back to the basics for my phone

As much as I love my HTC Desire Z (or Vision for the US guys), it had one major flaw from day 10 or so.

For about 90% of the incoming calls, when I answered them (drag, or click on the <Answer> button), the phone would not really answer the call, it would keep ringing... and the other party would continue to get the ringback tone. After 7 or 8 or so rings, it would finally put the call through. Sometimes it would take too long, and I'd lose the call.

Annoying.

Very annoying.

Well, my dear friend V. noticed this behaviour the other day on my phone (granted, after a couple of beers) and told me there was one of those creepy #*codes that would switch of some networking stuff and make it work normal.

So while he was searching his archives to find this code, I also did some googling myself and found this behaviour described like this:

If you sync your Facebook contacts (on an HTC Desire)  this could happen; and the solution -   delete the Facebook contacts - seemingly did help a couple of users.

Well, it was a convincingly high number of users that reported both the problem and the success through removing the Facebook contacts.
So I gave it a try, removed all my Facebook contacts, had a co-worked call me (a couple of times) and it seemed to work.

3 hours later, V. sent me the code.

Enter the following code in the dialer screen. *#*#2347#*#*

So I did.
(and got a "CFU query when camp-on is off" message... talk about non-cryptic :))

It still works fine.

Only problem now is, ... Against everything I learned and preached when I was working in software support decades ago, doing heavy problem determination work... never ever change two parameters at the same time, when you want to get to the problem source... never ever ... you understand?!

Well I here did... So I still don't know what made the phone work, removing Facebook contacts or V.'s cryptic CFU-query-when-camp-on... code.

So if anyone else runs into this problem, please try only one of them, and report back here.
Thanks

Anyway... my phone is now back to its basic functionality, taking calls.

This is a good one...

It's The Little Differences

To quote Vincent Vega:

Vincent: But you know what the funniest thing about Europe iPhone vs Android is?
Jules: What?
Vincent: It's the little differences. I mean, they got the same shit over there that they got here, but it's just-- just there it's a little different.

Like on the iOS virtual keyboard you have the key to switch to numeric on the left:

whereas on [edit: HTC] Android you have it on the right:

For some reason I'm used to the former, i.e. Apple way, and therefore on my [edit: HTC] Android phone I always hide the keyboard...

It's nice...

... to see Google clueless... for once.

Thunderbird Clipboard Bug Fixed

Wow, indeed in Thunderbird 10 the clipboard/paste bug from Excel/OpenOffice is indeed fixed.

Weird Thunderbird Bug

Since I upgraded my Thunderbird to version 9 if could no longer paste tables from OpenOffice.org Calc to Thunderbird as a table... they always get inserted as graphics.
Paste-without-format would just copy the plain text, but - of course - no format.
The problem has also been reported with Microsoft Office and LibreOffice.

I did not really notice the first couple of times, until co-workers started to complain that they no longer could copy/paste elements from my "tables" because they were images.

Did some searching on the web and found the bug ... indeed introduced in TB9 supposed to be fixed in FB10 (have to test this on a vbox):

The actual problem is when Thunderbird parses the meta-data of the clipboard, it does a locale-specific parse of a decimal number (the version)... but the version string will always contain a dot (.) and never a comma (,), since it is not really a decimal number. So there is a difference between e.g. German and English system(!) locale, i.e. the problem will appear on German windows, but not on English windows.

Changing the decimal symbol to a dot (.) in the Windows system settings will actually "fix" (circumvent) this problem. I just tested this.
Not sure, which system-wide setting I should keep now...

As I noticed in the bug, the fix is to treat the version as a string, not a (decimal) number.... That's better.

Start 2012 by Taking 2 Minutes to Clean Your Apps Permissions

Wow, the most simple app ever... just links :)  mypermissions.org

Start 2012 by Taking 2 Minutes to Clean Your Apps Permissions

If you have a habit of trying all new services that come around, and use your Facebook, Twitter, Google, ... account to sign in, then you'll have a mess in the apps/services permissions in Facebook et al.

My Permissions.org just has the links to all those plattforms, directly to the permissions pages.

So simple, yet so useful.

Bookmark this!
Visit it every odd month!

Favorite Equation

This is not really IT related, but geeky enough, I guess.

The other day I read a post or article about job interviews in the tech sector, like Google et al... And - so the article went - Google (if I recall correctly) once asked a candidate what his favorite (mathematical) equation was.
That made me think...

So here are my favorite equation(s) - not a surprising choice, given that my background is electrical engineering.

1. Euler's Equation (wikipedia link)

This one keeps fascinating me since I first heard it in an early math lecture at TechU Vienna. It goes like this

(or rather substitute a j for the i... as I said - electrical engineering :) )

What's so fascinating about it, you ask?
Well, it contains 5 elementary constants/numbers  (0, 1, e, π, j) and it contains the 3 basic arithmetic operations (addition, multiplication, exponentiation)... more on Wikipedia.

2. Maxwell's Equations (Wikipedia link)

No surprise here for an electrical engineer, again, right ?

I'll show the most simple (and differential) form here, since I think this shows their beauty best:

For an explanation and the more general form, check out Wikipedia.

And why those?
Well I think the symmetry is apparent. And they are so fundamental to basically everything


Also, according to Wikipedia, I'm not really alone with that choice:

A poll of readers conducted by The Mathematical Intelligencer magazine named Euler's Identity as the "most beautiful theorem in mathematics". Another poll of readers that was conducted by Physics World magazine, in 2004, chose Euler's Identity tied with Maxwell's equations (of electromagnetism) as the "greatest equation ever".

So... rather mainstream, right? Would not get me a job at Google :)

Evernote Clearly

A new tool to read article-like web pages (blogs, news, ... ) without the noise.

Evernote Clearly

Our newest browser extension for Chrome and Firefox makes a beautiful, distraction-free reading experience on the web with just one click.

Get Evernote Clearly →

In the past I used to achieve this, by saving those articles to ReadItLater and the read them (without noise) on my iPad. With Evernote Clearly I can do so immediately in my browser...

And this is, how this post looks in cleary... leaner.. more easy to read.

Available for Firefox and Chrome.

The Top 30 Android Apps And Games Of 2011 | TechCrunch

Nice selection from TechCrunch...

The Top 30 Android Apps And Games Of 2011 | TechCrunch: The best Android apps are thus the ones that can both push the technological envelope while also remaining accessible to the vast majority of users. This is no easy feat.

Not necessarily my view with every app, but a good starting point for all you new Android owners...

It definitely shows that in 2011 the Android ecosystem - while it did not fully catch up - narrowed that gap to iOS. And apps are increasingly becoming tablet ready or compatible as we go into 2012.

iPad Video App Freeze

Since I updated my iPad[1] to iOS 5, I frequently had the problem that the video app that comes with iOS is simply frozen, when you open it.

Even closing the app does not help.
A reboot of the iPad did not help either.

My idea was to somehow not start the video app, but launch a video directly, but for lack of a file manager on iOS, this is not easy.
Turns out it is... simply do a spotlight search for a known video name, wait for it to appear in the search results and tap on it there. Next best thing to a file manager :)

Voila, the video app should start and not freeze...
Works everytime for me know... a bit cumbersome, but still.

Hope that Apple will fix this.

--
[1] first gen iPad, that is

Letters to Steve

Nice easy reading for the holidays...  a collection of Steve Job's email responses...
and no, it's not just a book full of "Nope" and "Yep"... :)

Maybe a little bit too close to the Steve Jobs Bio by Walter Isaacson which I finished only a couple of weeks ago.

Dropbox app for Android update

There's a new version of the Dropbox app for Android. Among several UI and usability improvements, the most important to me is that you can now upload text files from the share/send menu.

I was really craving for this, because quite often in order to get real-life logs of my own app, I'm using the Log Collector app to gather log files and send them to my PC. Dropbox did not support he upload then, so I was using gmail for this (not wanting to bother with Bluetooth and the likes).
Tried it just now with the 2.0 version of the Dropbox app and it really works like a charm. Click - and just some seconds later I have it in my local Dropbox folder on the PC...

So thanks, Dropbox team, for getting this fixed.

A simple HTML tag will crash 64-bit Windows 7 • The Register

WTF ?
A simple HTML tag will crash 64-bit Windows 7 • The Register:

An unpatched critical flaw in 64-bit Windows 7 leaves computers vulnerable to a full 'blue screen of death' system crash.
[...]

the simple HTML script, when opened in Apple's Safari web browser, quickly leads to the kernel triggering a page fault in an unmapped area of memory, which halts the machine at a blue screen of death.

What weird architecture is this, that allows a usermode application (browser) to crash the kernel?
And this is through Safara (not Internet Explorer, which I'd understand to be more closely tied to the kernel)

Strange, strange.

Dropbox auto-updates

I just happened to hover over my dropbox taskbar icon (well not I personally, my mouse pointer) I noticed that it said

Dropbox 1.2.49
All files up to date

I was pretty sure that last version I installed was 1.2.48 - see here.
So I googled for "dropbox auto update" and found the following:
Dropbox - How do I upgrade to the latest version of the Dropbox application 

So yes, it does auto-update... good. thanks.

More on the Firefox Sessionstore

After I cleaned the Firefox session store about 2 weeks ago by manually deleting the sessionstore.js file, I decided to watch its growth.
I did so by simply doing a copy of the sessionstore.js file with a task scheduled daily.

Here's the results

You can see that there is no constant (monotonic) growth. The sessionstore.js file grows a bit, then shrinks again, then grows a bit...
But it stays at about just under 1MB...

Should this change significantly, I'll report here again.

Google+ page

I'm testing a Google+ page for this blog... find it here and follow me, if you want.
Or try the badge to the right (--> somewhere over there, right beneath my book recommendations).
I mainly want to find out if and how Google+ (brand) pages work...

Of course I will post update there.

duuuh

Dear foursquare,
don't I give you my location with each check-in anyway??

Firefox Sessionstore

As I mentioned in my previous post  "Firefox 8 - Slow and Memory Hog?", I managed to get FF8 to behave "normal" again by manually resetting the session store.

In order to learn more about the session store I did some googling...and found several interesting parameters in the FF config.
Check here for a list.

One that might be of particular interest is that you can specify the interval for FF to save the sessions into the session store with browser.sessionstore.interval; the default (in FF8) is 15 seconds, which seems ok... not too frequent, but still enough to capture your sessions...
Might be fun to play around with his; e.g. move it down to sub-second level in order to totally ruin your PC performance :-)
or increase it to 1minute or more and see if it is still useable then, in terms of session-state captured...

Moving

No worries,  this is only about my home PC.

I finally moved off my 8.5 year old 1.2GHz [1] single core 1GB RAM Windows XP machine to 4core Windows 7.

Well it first had Vista on it, and hardly anything worked (try DB2 for a start), then I decided to go Windows 7 before I do most of the migration, so I won't have to re-do everything again.

I have to say, Win7 is really a nice product... especially compared to Vista, but after only a week, I started to prefer it over XP as well. And compatibility is great, all of those nice little tools I had on XP work fine here as well.

And finally I got some RAM and clock cycles to work with... Android development (esp the emulator) is a lot easier now... :)

---
[1] or so, I don't even care enough to check this

Firefox 8 - Slow and Memory Hog?

I'm running Firefox 8 now since it came out last week.

Not only did I find it to be slow (compared for both, FF7 and Chrome), but also a real memory hog.
~800MB on my work laptop, with only 6 tabs open, and really not responsive at all.

FF7 and earlier never had more than 300-400 MB (roughly) on that machine - with the same tabs and apps open, and the same extensions installed. So this was odd.

Especially start-up was a catastrophe.

Then, yesterday, I got the slow-script warning for sessionstore.js.

Well that about just did it for me ...

I went to my profile directory[1], and found a sessionsstore.js with more than 3MB.
I renamed it, restarted FF... of course with none of the pinned app-tabs open, because I took the session store away... But that's what I wanted.

I manually re-established my pinned app tabs, and voila
FF8 now was back to using 250MB, and the sessionstore.js was around 200kB

So - fixed for now. I think I had the session store build up for more than 1 year now and never cleared it (and quite frankly, why should I). So maybe cleaning it once might really fix the problem, and FF8 is not such a memory hog after all - or maybe it will be back after a couple of months...

Let's see, how this progresses from here...

--
[1]  can be found in %appdata%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles

New Dropbox release

Awkwardly Dropbox (of all services) does not have a notification for a new release. Well, a new one is out - 1.2.48 for Windows. I guess, this is to support the new Dropbox for Teams. Anyway, since there is no notification, I took the task to tell y'all :) Download Dropbox

Thunderbird 8 and Lightning 1.0

So, 2 days ago Thunderbird 8 has been released.

The major changes are:

• more restrictive handling of extensions/add-ons, especially those that come from other apps... those will be disabled by default... Thunderbird Installer will guide you through this.

• keyboard short-cuts for the various search options have been changed.

While it has been Ctrl-F for both, the Find within the current message and the QuickFilter for the current folder, it is now

• Ctrl-F for Find (within the current message)
• Ctrl-Shift-K for the QuickFilteron on the folder
• and Ctrl-K is unchanged for the global (indexed) search.

Took me 2 days to get accustomed to the Ctrl-Shift-K.
Well, almost. Not entirely. But I'll manage.

Also I had to "manually" upgrade 3 add-ons that were not declared compatible with TB 8, because no-one cared to update their install.rdf in the XPI file... quite cumbersome... See my rant earlier this year.

Ah, yes, and Lightning finally made it to official release 1.0 ... after years of beta.

Save icons

Is there any reason - except for convention or tradition - that icons for the Save action are still a 3.5" diskette symbol?

Will today's kids actually understand this?
And when was the last time you saved anything to a "floppy" disk?

They joy of forgetting your Kindle at home

Yesterday I was on a business trip in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and wanted take my Kindle with me to continue reading the Jobs bio. However, in the hotel I noticed, that I forgot.

No problem... take the iPad, start the Kindle app, sync to the furthest point read... and continue reading.

And tonight, I'll sync again on my Kindle an continue where I left on the iPad yesterday.

Still, the reading experience is a lot better on the Kindle than on the iPad, but occasionally, when there's no Kindle around, it is sufficient.

Finally someone publishing calendar data

Baby steps, baby steps... both to proper publishing of calendar data and to open data in government/administration.

The municipality of Vienna publishes the calendar of public school holidays for this year as an iCalendar file... (here at
Schulferien in Wien im Schuljahr 2011/2012; German only).

For non-nerds they go so far as to explain what an ICS file is: "for integration with e.g. Microsoft Outlook, Ical or  Google Calendar".

Nice.
Let's hope this is not a one-time, static file for 2011/2011 only, but will become a stream of school holiday data...

Thanks, Martin, for the pointer.

Remember the Milk - new feature

When I moved to an Android device earlier this year, I decided to fully use Remember the Milk (RTM) as my task/todo management tool.

Mainly because
a) stock Android does not have any such tool
b) it is available on the Web (read: PC), on iOS (my iPad) and my Andoid mobile...
There are a lot of plug-ins and other integration methods into other tools as well, listed here.[1]

For the web browser there's a "quick add" bookmarklet that allows you to easily add a web-page to your task list as well.

I was missing exactly this feature for the mobile, so I asked in the support forum for this. Android has the architecture for this, the android.intent.action.SEND intent. All apps implementing/exposing this, will be listed in the "Share" or "Send to" option of the browser and other apps that support this.

Now the feature has been implemented in the latest release of RTM app for Android. And I only noticed because all of a suddent "Remember the milk" turned up in the "Share" menu of the browser.

So: Kudos to the Remember the Milk team for picking up my suggestion and implementing it. Excellent support.

--
[1] There's also a Thunderbird/Lightning plug-in as well, but that does not really work with Lightning 1.0 and is no longer supported.

Public Parts - Finished

So I finally managed to finish Public Parts by Jeff Jarvis.

The book starts (and ends) with a couple of excellent observations and thoughts on privacy versus publicity... and also how those two concepts came to be.

Good read... but if you know Jeff Jarvis' blog and other statements already, this will not be news to you. Also he devoted too much space on essantially a re-cap of his earlier book What Would Google Do?

I still highly recommend both books.

Nokia did it again...

They still manage to surprise me. Just unsubscribed from one of their newsletters...

Guess what, it will only take them "up to 14 days before" the remove me from their mailing list.

How to build up a 1000+ € phone bill..,

... without you knowing.
And no roaming.
Or doing anything different ... compared to the previous month.

This is what just happened to a friend of mine:
She learned from their operator that she ran up a 900€ data bill, and the month (i.e. billing cycle) was not even over.
Did she have an app running, that kept data open? No.
Did she have a video running in the background? No. [1]
But she did have a 15MB email in her outbox that could not be sent for days.

The email app (on the iPhone) was trying every 3 minutes.
Could be tracked down with the operator's help.

My guess: it failed, because the mail server (or mta) did not let it send a 15MB+ email...
So it kept retrying, without any chance to succeed.

Simple math:
3 minutes a day = 20 times an hour = 480 times a day

Lets just say it successfully transmits only 1MB before the error[2], that's still 480MB ~~ 1/2GB a day.
Continue for a week or so, and you have 3.5GB... and through the 3GB ceiling and you hit the area where it gets really expensive.

And she really did not do anything wrong. Claimed that there was no error message, from the mail-app... And why should there, it kept retrying anway...

Well, the operator in an act of humanity - or to avoid the negative publicity of a court case - found a way to help here. But only because it totally breaks her data pattern until then.

--
[1] The operator really asked this... no pun.
[2] unlikely, it probably occurs after a lot higher transfer volumn, so those are best case numbers.

My Kindle Experience So Far

I have read a couple of books on my Kindle so far. Here's what I found out:

1. The Kindle is an excellent reading device. The e-ink display has the perfect contrast for reading... Once you started reading on a Kindle (or just looking at it) you'll never ever consider reading a book on the iPad again. Trust me.
   Not surprisingly, the display/e-ink quality was my reason for buying a Kindle:
   My actual craving for this device started on the tube in London, when I first got a glimpse at a kindle of a fellow passenger. My first thought was "This is a mockup". Honestly. I really thought someone just glued some paper on some dark carton, before I realized this was the real thing. (Well, the real kindle... not real paper).
2. Buying books for the Kindle is - of course - even more instant than buying a paper-book on Amazon (which is still amazingly simple). It's a matter of seconds.
3. That said, I still browse for books and buy them from my PC/Laptop. I do this very rarely on the Kindle directly. The userinterface and "browser" speed there is simply not suitable for this. It's a reading device after all. Not a tablet or a PDA.
4. Sharing books - forget it.
   With my wife working in a book store, we share a lot of books. It was quite common that I picked up a book which she just had finished (reading). Well, it's different now on the kindle, because I would have to share the device with her..
   So while I'm reading book A (on the Kindle) she of course cannot read book B (on the same Kindle). This used to work pretty well with real books :)
   Maybe she should get her own Kindle[1].
5. Privacy
   When you read a book - say - on the underground, everyone can see what you're reading. This could be embarrassing... depending on your choice of books. With a Kindle, no one knows what you read.
6. Publicity
   As I just said, with a Kindle, no one knows what you read.There's no visible/public bookshelf - in your home. So you cannot brag with your library. Most of us judge people by their library, in a way. And really, browsing the backs of the books on a friend's bookshelf sometimes gives excellent conversations and recommendations. This will have to work differently with a Kindle. You will have to ...
7. ... share
   So if you want to have the publicity about your reading habits, about your library, you'll have to do this actively, like in a blog, on Facebook, on Twitter, on Google+, on Goodreads. You'll even have a bigger audience there.
8. As for the act and experience of reading itself. NO DIFFERENCE.
   We'll maybe for books with illustrations :-)
   But when it comes to being able to concentrate, or (not) getting distracted, or getting tired... no difference to a real book. I came to prefer the Kindle over books when it comes to the shape and how you hold the thing... it's lighter (in most cases), there's no clumsy page turning (as with thick books), ...

Don't get me wrong; I still LOVE real books. And I still read them... (see the problem with sharing above). But there is nothing to be said against the Kindle. 

--

[1] yeah right... like booksellers would buy a Kindle...

Non-hash-tags

So dear Google+, kudos for finally making hash-tags link to the respective search, i.e. allowing # as a keyword marker, like Twitter.

... BUT...

... there are some pretend-hash-tags, that really aren't.  Sometimes a has is just a hash...

Like in
#define
#include
(for the geeks among us)
or #1 #2 ... (again in geek terms #\d+)

But still better to have the link to a pointless search than not have the link at all.

Kudos.

Quoting

Is it really ok to fully quote an article from someone else as your blog post and then just add a "Source: xyz.com" at the end? (In a much smaller font even)
I say no.

But if you do, then you have to cope with the criticism you receive, and you cannot just say "I'm only quoting xyz."

Icecream sandwich approaching?

It seems like the majority of my Android apps from the Android/Google marketplace have been updated during the last couple of days. Some it seems on a daily basis.... This can only mean, that everyone is getting ready for Icecream sandwich... Right?

Meaningful error messages

This calls for a new series:

Excellent presentation on Cloud Computing

Ok, this is a bit old (OSCON 09) but still easily the most fun and solid presentation about Cloud Computing:


Found it via the IT Conversations podcast.

Flight Search - Hipmunk

If you ever wanted to know how fast a search for flights can actually be, try Google Flights. Only US for the time being ... but this is really fast.

But what I really wanted to show is, how flight search results can be presented... Try Hipmunk.

Cool overview; excellent timeline; nice and helpful coloring. Check the above image (click to enlarge)

Also: redundant flights are being masked out, i.e. flights with the same time but different number (code sharing), or just a higher price - but you can unhide them with the dropdown to the very right.

I have yet to search a real-life flight for me to be able to judge it, but it looks promising indeed.
Also available for iPhone and iPad and Android. Granted, on sub-tablet form factors[1] this is less helpful than on PCs and tablets.

Most importantly: it got an animated chipmunk.


--
[1] formerly known as smart phones.

Public Parts

Thanks to the Amazon Kindle pre-orders, I'm now proud owner of Public Parts by Jeff Jarvis on my Kindle.

Or am I? "Owner" that is  - with all that DRM nonsense?

Anyway... I have it... and can't wait to read it.

That Hurts

So the Apotheker had to go, after the webOS and PSG disaster.
Good.

SCOTTY mobil for Android

The Austrian Federal Railways (OeBB) finally released their mobile timetable / route-planner app for Android.

After they claimed for years that it would be available for "all relevant mobiles" [1]... only not for Android, when it already had top market share.

Anyway... it's here now. And it looks good :)

SCOTTY mobil - Android Market


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[1] "für alle gängigen Handymodelle"

Why did Google buy Zagat?

Because they not only need to index the pure content (and pagerank it by means of links etc), they also need to know the author's location in your social network.

Hence Google+.
Hence Zagat... The review alone is not sufficient, they need the author as well.

Annoying DNS Problem

If you cannot reach this blog [1], your ISP is probably Telekom Austria.

Since about early August this year, they must have changed something in their DNS infrastructure that no longer allows them (nor their clients) to resolve it-conservations.com (nor execmampf.at - my food blog - for that matter).

I was affected, too.
When I noticed this, I asked some google+ followers to check from their side, and only Telekom Austria (aon) customers had problems.
Interestingly, their mobile half (a1.net) and their nameservers don't have a problem.

Well, I changed the nameserver setting on my router at home to 8.8.8.8 (Google nameserver); so all my clients work fine now.

So if you can read this despite of DNS problems and you are NOT on Telekom Austria, kindly let me know in the comments section.

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[1] but you are reading this right now... weird :)

Google+ Follower Model

To be honest, I haven't quite come to terms with the Google+ follower model. I am of course familiar with it from Twitter (i.e. anyone can simply follow you, ...). But Twitter is public. As public as can be. So on Twitter I don't really mind or care who's following me. It simply is their problem, not mine, if my chit-chat clutters up their Twitter stream.

I know that I should have the same approach to this on Google+, but somehow I don't. It definitely is a bit more personal that Twitter, that's probably why I do care a bit more who's following me. Still not as much as on Facebook.

But it does not mean, that I have to follow them. And I don't.

So thanks Google, for implementing this here the other day:

Really helpful.

The Amazon Kindle tablet

I'm pretty sure that the details MG Siegler provided on the roumored Amazon Tablet - allegedly to be called Kindle like the ebook reader - are accurate.

So it will be a 7" Android device, without any of that Google stuff, a less sophisticated multitouch, but full Amazon store integration.

The ultimate Amazon shopping device.
The perfect media consumption device, that does not even pretend to be for work and all the enterprisy stuff.

Calling this an Android tablet is probably wrong - even if technically correct - and misleading for both, this gadget and all the other "real" Android tablets.

Its a multimedia kindle.

A thought about Android

With the currently ongoing patent wars around Android (and iOS) where everyone is suing everyone over alleged patent infringement (usually over patents that shouldn't have been awarded in the first place) and copied design, I think the real fight here is not about the mobile space (i.e. smartphones and tablets) as it appears, but rather about the upcoming embedded space.

Both Android and iOS are already beyond phones and tables, see Apple TV and Google TV.  And then there's also the range of all the other devices, where visionaries about 10 years ago (and more), told us, they'd be connected and "intelligent":
Like the fridge (not sure if that will ever make sense), or smaller wearable devices, like a wrist-watch  and/or a pulse watch etc etc. Maybe digital cameras as well.
See what WIMM are currently releasing as technology prototype and developer platform for such devices. All Android based.

Kind of the Java promise from 1995 :)

Android Call Reminder

As long time readers of my blog and my rants may remember, I once owned a Nokia 6233 which could schedule calls, i.e. have a calendar/todo/reminder entry for a phone call you wanted to make. When it was due, it would alert you, and you could - with only one click (on the green button) - make that call.

Then came my Nokia E71, which was in all ways superior (and most probably the best Nokia handset I ever had), except for this: It simply could not schedule calls, and I could not find any 3rd party software for it.

Now on my HTC Desire Z / Vision I again went on a quest for such a beast. Android doesn't have any stock reminder/todolist app at all, and none of the ones I saw so far, could handle calls (Astrid, Remember-The-Milk).

Then I found Call Reminder (and more importantly Call Reminder Pro).

It does exactly what I was looking for.

You can set a reminder for a specific call (number or entry from your contacts) and it will notify you then.
Then you can call, snooze or dismiss this reminder.


But more importantly - or conveniently:
It also sends you a notification for every incoming call (or every missed call, this is a preference setting).

So let's say you were away from your phone, and a call in the meantime that you obviously then missed. You will see the default Android missed-call logo and notification, acknowledge (and thus remove) it, get distracted and not return this call.

Well, 30 minutes or an hour later (again depending on our settings) Call Reminder Pro will step in and remind you of this missed call, and what you want to do with it.

This auto-reminder feature is really handy.[1]

Of course you can manually schedule calls (as noted before), you can change the time/date of the reminders etc etc. 

One weird effect is for calls you actually took: you still get a reminder.

Sure you can turn this off. But ever so often you briefly take a call, tell the other party "I'll call you right back!" and then of course fail to do exactly this.

So this is the one more case where Call Reminder Pro comes in handy. That's why I still keep it enabled for all calls, not only missed calls.
Would be cool to have an option to say, "Missed calls and call calls less then 20 seconds"...

Call Reminder comes as free (trial) version with limited features, i.e. you cannot manually schedule a call for any other day than today... annoying.  So for only 1 buck don't even bother with the free version. And also, if you install first the free and then later the Pro version, you have 2 call reminder apps running, and get all the notifications twice (until you uninstall one of them)... As I said, don't even bother with the free version. Call Reminder Pro is worth its money.

I've been using it for about 1 week know, and it already caught 3 calls I'd have otherwise forgotten[2].

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[1] And at times, really annoying, because I might just be the 7th reminder for this call... with the voice box, maybe an text/SMS or email, etc etc... you know those guys.
[2] yes, this is rather a problem with me, than a feature of the app, but still. :)

Android SMS client replacement

This is my favorite replacement for the stock SMS client/app on my Android (HTC Desire Z aka Vision):

ChompSMS

Apart from presenting the conversations iPhone-style and does iPhonish smileys, it - more importantly - pops up a dialog when a text arrives and let's you immediately reply from there. Totally handy.

I've been using it for a bit more than a week now, and never regretted it.

Also it is not really intrusive: you keep the old (stock) client, and all you have to do is disable the notifications there (to avoid double-notifications). So you can always go back to the regular app.

WTF HP?

So HP just killed WebOS... Just why?
What changed since they acquired Palm?

WebOS goes down in quiet death | Wireless - CNET News

Mozilla's new version policy

With Firefox 4 Mozilla introduced their new release policy, which basically means a new release every quarter, and also changing the major version number with every such release. Thus we got Firefox 6 only yesterday.

Since I'm not an enterprise, I do not have a problem with quarterly releases... some IT organizations do.
Also, I personally couldn't care less if they call their releases 4, 5, 6, 7, or Bob, Frank, Josephina, ... or IV/2011, X/2011, Fall 09... whatever.

If it were not for the add-ons... Usually you test an add-on you develop against a certain release, and also declare this in the install.rdf:

<!-- Thunderbird -->
<em:targetApplication>
<Description>
<em:id>{3550f703-e582-4d05-9a08-453d09bdfdc6}</em:id>
<em:minVersion>1.0</em:minVersion>
<em:maxVersion>5+</em:maxVersion>
</Description>
</em:targetApplication>

In the past you knew that the architecture would be stable for a major release, so if you'd tested successfully against a late Thunderbird 3 beta you could increase the maxVersion to "3+". And you'd not have to bother for the next 18 month, until the next major version would go to alpha or beta, you'd have a look at it, test your add-on against it, maybe a tweak here or there, and voila, maxVersion++; and publish it.

Now, you have to do this every 3 months; since everything is now a major version, you either have to declare the add-on as universally compatible (and it might break with version 8) or you have to update the install.rdf every 3 month. Even if there is no major change in Firefox or Thunderbird (as this week with v6).

From a users perspective the same happens, with every update you'll see a couple of add-ons as "incompatible" and disabled. And you either go to your profile and patch the install.rdf (which is what I do) or you have to wait a couple of days (at least) until the developers publish the new "version".

True for both Firefox and Thunderbird.
Somewhat annoying. There's a reason why the separation of major and minor version number has been introduced a couple of decades ago...

Totally un-applish

I just recently had to do the routine password change on my corporate email/calendar.  Not a big deal.

However,  why does an iOS device (both iPod touch and iPad) prompt me for the new Calendar password (and remembers it from then on), but not for email (neither IMAP nor SMTP). I really have to go through settings to change this.

This is totally not like Apple.
First of all its annoying (to have to go to settings), and secondly its inconsistent (automatic for calendar, manual for email).

(ah, end yes, Android is manual only... up to 2.3 at least).

Recommendations

I do enjoy "digital" recommendations, both Amazon-style (with just pattern matching on clicks and orders) and the social way, i.e. recommendations you get from your social networks via Facebook, Twitter and co.

But it's also really nice to see the old-fashioned analog recommendation at work, like two weeks ago in London.

As is almost mandatory we were a Foyles.. most probably the best book store in the world.
With the best Jazz (and world-music) department... (at least for a book-store).

While I was browsing their Jazz CD titles there, sorting through the Keith Jarretts... I noticed the excellent music they were playing in the background... So I asked the guy at the counter, he smiled, pointed to the "Currently Playing" display right next to him, looked at the two Keith Jarrett albums I was about to buy and added something in the lines of "You will love this if you like Keith Jarrett", and then went to shelf to get the CD for me.

The artist is Gwilym Simcock ... a jazz and classical piano player I have to admit I have never heard of, and the album in question is Good Days at Schloss Elmau. Now part of my CD collection.

Maybe Amazon could have done this as well... it would definitely fit my buying pattern there... but this analog recommendation was a nice experience and flash-back into the eighties. When "social" was still something you experienced in person.

BTW: this reminds me of the early days of digital recommendations some 10+ years ago, when we were discussing locations based services(LBS) and restaurant recommendations (based on location). We were talking so some providers of LBS and ranting about the quality problems of such recommendations, when one of their managers said "You can't even get a decent restaurant recommendation out of a human being."

True.

UK Public Wifi - A Disappointment

So I just spent two and a half weeks of vacation in the UK, touring South England (all from Oxford via Stratford-upon-Avon to Bath, Cornwall, South, Kent, and then a couple of days in London) with only my HTC and the company SIM card in it... which allows me to data-roam only up to 20MB... (company policy) and I can't even top that up, although A1 would offer such a service. I did not really mind this, because I really was expecting to hit a public open Wifi spot every odd day.

Well, I did not... or hardly ever!

Many times pubs, hotels and other places (like Pret-A-Manger, Starbucks, ...) actually advertise "Free Wifi available" but you end up with a pay-version, like BT-Openzone and others. I only found two (2) truly open, public, free Wifi spots (one in a totally loveable B&B near Bath, the other in a bar in St.Ives). Thank you, guys.

This both surprised an disappointed me.

Next time, I should get a local (i.e. UK) prepaid SIM card with  a cheap data plan or pay-as-you-go data... in Austria I would do this with Bob for 4 EUR per 1GB/month... much cheaper than adding the one-time A1 roaming-option to my SIM card from 10-100 EUR), although this offer is quite OK (if you need to keep your own SIM/number in your phone).

For two weeks it would be at least cheaper than getting Wifi from 3 or so different providers, and always available...

Google+ Android App

While everyone seems to be waiting for their G+ activation and/or iOS app, I just like to point out that the current Android App for Google+ is in all aspects superior to the Facebook app on Android (and on iOS).

• Faster
• Syncs with all other google services (check this in Settings -> Accounts & Sync -> Google)
• Faster
• Not sure if the Huddle (group texting) service is really a plus... haven't used it so far
• Faster
• The photo/video auto upload feature is great:
  privacy is OK, because your pictures will only go to a private folder in Picasa and they are almost instantaneously available in G+ to share
• Faster
• Images/Photos actually are shown/loaded, whereas in the FB app they fail to load at all in about 1/3 of the times I click on one (Wifi or 3G/HSDPA connection)

So all in all: big + for the G+ app.

Android Gallery Problem

Every Android phone I've seen so far has a problem that all of a sudden recent photos are missing from the Gallery.
Most users then think the picture they just took has not been saved to the phone or sd-card.

Wrong.

This is - as a simple google search will reveal - a problem of the media scanner.
The standard Gallery app relies on the MediaScanner to collect images from the various folders of the SD card. And apps should notify the MediaScanner when they store a new image/video/... on the SD card.

However, something is broken in the media scanner and it seems to die frequently - or at least not work.

Easiest work around (apart from rebooting the device):

Go to Settings and unmount and re-mount the SD-card.
This will force the media to be re-scanned.
However, this is a bad idea to do when you are listening to podcasts at the same time (because they are on the SD-card as well, which you are about to unmount...)

Therefore - even better, download an app like "Rescan Media" from the market place. All it does, is re-invoke the Media Scanner.
Just click on it - voila, the images will be back again.

iPad - the missing key

If you want to edit HTML on the iPad, you quite frequently have to switch to the special character keyboard.
Conveniently it contains all the keys/characters you need to e.g. type in a those nasty HTML tags.

Almost.
The forward-slash (/) key is actually missing.

Oddly enough, there would be enough room for it, see my rendering of this

(The place where I put the key is actually empty).

Mid-Year Resolution

I haven't been working on my Mid-May Resolution:

"I'll get a second (CPU) core in my home PC before I get it in my smart phone."

Granted, I neither have a dual/multi-core CPU in my PC *nor* in my smart phone right now...

but I should be working on the PC issue. Especially the Android Emulator could need it.

Google+

I've been using Google+ now for a couple of days, and I have to admit I like it.
Currently it suffers from being almost 100% self-referential... everyone on G+ only talks about G+.
Apart from that it reminds me a lot of friendfeed. (Odd, since FF was bought by Facebook - of all).

I wonder why they did not implement hash-tags (like twitter). They'd link individual posts to topics, so they provide additional (and in many cases) valuable information - or meta information.

G+'s most important task is to get additional signals to improve Google search/index, so hash-tags should serve well there. Wouldn't they?

Or does Google consider hash-tags as "messing with the algorithm" because they are being entered by humans... and not derived from their algorithms?

Google Takeout

So I joined Google+ today (thanks, Martin, for the invitation), but more importantly I want to write about Google Takeout today.

Best starting point is the video from the The Data Liberation Front:



The announcement seems a lot more promising than the current implementation itself.
It must have been written exclusively for Google+, becaus that's what Google Takeout focuses on.

There is neither Gmail nor Calendar export... Contacts are exported, though, and conveniently grouped into .vcf files (per contact group... and your circles (see, I told you it was designed for Google+).

Still a good start. Better than Facebook for now. And I like their mindset... that this is MY data, not theirs.

Platformness, part two

I recently claimed that a true platform has to protect it's developers from (ridiculous) claims of third parties (indemnification), the same is of course try in the opposite direction:

When an ecosystem around this platform evolves that adds new and important features to this platform, the platform itself should not step in and re-create those add-ons.

Current (counter-) example: Twitter just added their own photo sharing service, thus rendering e Twitpics and Yfrogs obsolete... who were instrumental in Twitter's success during the last years.

In other words: a platform shall not compete with (or against) its developers.
I'd like to call this quality trust.

In The Plex

I just finished this book:
In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy.

Excellent reading, good insights into Google; a bit google-sided but not too much.
I highly recommend this to anyone involved with or interested in Google... (even the opponents and Google haters).

iCloud

Apple's just announced  multimedia cloud storage thingy, iCloud[1] looks like a real threat to Dropbox.
Especially if well integrated into the Apple ecosystem (Mac, iOS and applications).

Not for me, though; the 2GB Dropbox offers for free are sufficient for me... but thats only because I do not keep music or photos/videos there..

Also Dropbox will probably always be more cross-platform.

So I'll keep using Dropbox - and invite you to do the same.

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[1]  if they can keep the name :-)

Platformness

The recent (if not still ongoing)  Lodsys v. Apple fight over patent infringement around in-app purchase revealed another important criteria for something to be a platform: indemnification.

Apple (or any platform provider) has to protect developers for their platform from such claims - whether they are justified or - as in this case - just patent trolls.

For a true platform this must never be burdened on the developers.

Hope Google/Android will follow Apple's example.