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Name : Jon
Email : click here
Profession : Programmer
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February 23, 2009 -
Cleopatra 2525 -- Episode 5
It's worth noting that while humans have been driven underground by the "baileys" for "as long as anyone can remember", bars and health drinks are still an integral part of society, as this marks the third episode in a row where a bar or club has played a part in the proceedings. I suppose the despair over having lost the surface of our planet has turned humanity into a load of binge drinkers. For some reason, all glassware from the future is actually day-glo plastic, possibly rummaged from a giant dollar store.
Episode 5 moves us further into the mythos of the world of Cleopatra 2525 (hereafter refered to as C2525). We had established a bit of the backstory in the very first episode, at which point the writers decided to abandon that track for a few episodes. It's nice to see that the writers did, occasionally, try to make this into a not totally unwatchable series.
So, to catch us up, Cleopatra has been more or less integrated into Hel's team, but she hasn't been given the whole wrist-blaster/web-shooter/enterprise sheild generator. To be honest, I can't say I entirely blame Hel for this decision, as Cleo seems likely to blow her own fool head off. While watching the girls down a health drink at a local bar, we're quickly introduced to a new type of betrayer, which Sarge recognizes as a person who lived in her village. The fact that this person hasn't aged since Sarge was a child is our tipoff to the fact that this, is in fact, a betrayer.
Look, I can't really critize the action sequences on the show. It's a low budget show, and you just have to deal with it. That aside, do we really need over 3 minutes of low budget action shots? This is the kind of stuff that would make Gene Roddenberry's:Andromeda look like Battlestar Galactica.
After destroying this newer, tougher betrayer with their wrist blasters, VOICE gives the girls a mission to find out how the baileys create and control the betrayers. I'm surprised that since the baileys have been ruling the surface for 'as long as anyone can remember', nobody's tried that before. Also, didn't the old generation of betrayer take special bailey weaponry to destroy? I suppose the special captured weapon could have been integrated into the web-blaster-shooter-ray-gun, but it'd be nice if the writers mentioned that.
So, on the surface, we've got special tinted lenses and bug eyed goggles which Jennifer Sky manages to pull off. Unfortunately, she doesn't pull off the "Dutch boy paint" haircut.
Mythology update. The baileys may control the surface, but some humans still live there. We're introduced to the 'dwarks', who are humans that live on the surface. The baileys tolerate them as they harvest their guts for the biological elements of the baileys (baileys are partially cyborg). The baileys also use the dwarks as models for betrayers. Got all that?
So, the dwarks have their next sacrificial victim for the baileys ready to go, and after a little flashback magic, we now know that the next victim is none other than Sarge's sister. Hel offers to provide cover, and Sarge needs little prompting to run out and rescue her sister.
Quick aside, they could at least give Cleo a wrist band with shields. That'd only make sense.
The ensuing battle with and escape from the bailey features the worst, bar none, running-from-an-explosion ever to be shown in first run syndication.
So, the mission now in tatters, the girls decide to substitute Sarge for her sister, and offer Sarge to the baileys. We also get an X-Files, Star Wars, and Star Trek reference in the span of 45 seconds. These writers, they don't miss a trick.
Another battle with some bailey drones, and we're back at the dwark village where Cleo uses Vulcan wisdom (really) to convince the village elders to allow Sarge to be the next sacrifice to the baileys.
And, just in case we're keeping score, we've got a Battlestar Galactica reference. This all goes down while trying to convince Sarge's sister that the baileys aren't benevolent aliens from another world come to take lucky dwarks to their home planet. Needless to say, this shit doesn't sit right with the sister, and she won't buy that story.
So, we've got sarge on the sacrificial patio table, and we get a Close Encounters of the Third Kind reference. Sarge is then beamed up to a bailey, and wait, she's not. Her sister jumps in and ruins the whole thing, by betraying her sister to the baileys. Her sister, it seems, ain't down with not being the chosen one. As she's about to be beamed up, Cleo jumps in and tries to pull her out of the magical beam and they're both beamed up.
Mercifully, the episode ends here. Unfortunately, I've got 17 more episodes of the series to go.
April 06, 2008 -
Yahoo To Go!
It seems longer, but I've been using Yahoo To Go for a year now, and I have to sing it's praises. It's really the ideal mobile services application. FYI, if you don't know what Yahoo To Go is, head over to the official site and check it out.
Yahoo to go is one of those rare mobile applications like the mobile versions of Google Maps and Mail that people install and actually use more than once. But Yahoo To Go goes further than those applications in that it really tightly integrates with the Yahoo site.
What this means is, if I set up news sources on my My Yahoo page, they'll show up in the news section of the Yahoo To Go (Y2G) application. And trust me when I say that reading a news article in the Y2G application is much, much nicer than using a standard mobile browser.
You also get access to Yahoo Mail, which is a given. Again, it doesn't have to be said the using the Y2G application to read email is infinitely nicer than using a mobile browser.
The killer feature, IMO, is the ability to upload your cameraphone pictures to flickr on the fly. It's a great idea, and it works easily and painlessly.
I am worried about Y2G 3.0. Version 2 was nice and simple, but I'm afraid Yahoo seems to have caught Nokiaitis and made version 3 into a widgetey mess, with all sorts of carousel metaphors. I'm hopping the final version won't let me down, but from what I've seen of the beta, I'm afraid I'm going to be losing a valuable addition to my mobile toolkit.
September 30, 2007 -
Enter the N800
I just recently picked up a Nokia N800, and like everyone else who's gotten one of these amazing little devices, I feel compelled to blog about it. So here we go...
Why the N800
I've always been a proponent of smartphones, and maybe deep down I knew this day would come, but the fact is that our connectivity options have evolved to a point where smartphones just are not practical anymore. Case in point, look at the following 2 examples of S60 design:
Nokia 6600/20 -- Probably one of the biggest selling S60 devices back during their time. Absolutely gorgeous screens, the 6620 had oodles of RAM, and both of them had keypads that were amazingly unsuited for doing anything other than dialing numbers.
Nokia E50 -- A gorgeous QVGA screen and a decent keypad. Unfortunately the keypad was so big that they had to squish that gorgeous screen into what was left of the case. As a result, you needed to carry around an electron microscope to see the screen.
The point I'm trying to make is that with a smartphone you have a very limited amount of space to put your keypad and screen, and it's a difficult balance to get just right.
That is, until Apple came along. Any smartphone user who denies drooling at the first shots of the iPhone is a liar. Getting rid of the keypad and making the entire device a big screen was a stroke of genius, and obviously (in hindsight) the next step in phone evolution. And then Apple went and released the details of their 'SDK', and someone from the crowd shouted, 'Move along, nothing to see here,' and we all went back to poking at our tiny keypads or looking at our microscopes to see who was calling us.
Note to Apple fanboys. Before you email me blaming the locked iPhone on AT&T, make sure you take the following two factoids into consideration. AT&T sells other smartphones that aren't application locked in the slightest and the iPod touch is very, very locked.
Enter the N800
I can't say I was unaware of the fact that the N800 was out there. I'd seen pictures of the N770, but just didn't see a point. I was happy with my smartphone world, at least until my smartphone started getting long in the tooth, and I realized that there were no replacements.
When I say there were no replacements, I'm not being literal of course. Nokia continues to churn out lots of S60 smartphones which they dump into the marketplace and then drop all support for 6 months later. They've also started wasting money on things like the Nokia Music Store (internal Nokia codename: Operation Wasted Resources). I just couldn't see anything compelling. And the N800 was starting to look mighty good as a smartdevice. So armed with a 30 day return period, I decided to try one out.
And before you even have to ask, there's no way in hell it's going back.
What the N800 does well
First of all, the N800 is portable, but not pocketable. There's a difference. It's a great device to throw into a bag and go, but it's not something that you can clip to your belt. That said, the slightly larger than a smartphone form factor gives the device amazing utility.
Like Apple, Nokia dropped the keypad/board from the N800. The resulting space has been used to house a absolutely gorgeous 800x480 display. There really isn't any way to convey how gorgeous pictures look on this thing without shoving one into someone's hands and letting them see.
Web browsing is phenomenal. Worried that the screen is too small? Don't be. You can zoom in and out all you like. This is easily better than the safari browser on the iPhone/Touch and makes the uber browser on the new S60 devices look like the waste of resources it was. Once you browse on a N800, you will *not* go back to smartphone browsing if you can avoid it. And, oh yeah, it does Flash 9. Real Flash. Right in the browser.
Chatting is fantastic. The thumbboard is infinitely superior to T9 input. Anyone who is fast on T9 will likely be faster still with the thumbboard. You need Pidgin for real AIM/Yahoo chatting, and Gizmo for video chatting, but the fact that you can install 3rd party applications is pretty damn cool (Hiya apple).
Setting it up is easy. I was on my home network within 2 minutes. No joke. It just works.
Installing applications is dead easy. Installing applications is sometimes as simple as surfing to an application's website, and... you can figure it out. Hint: Click the install link.
Multimedia rocks. Yeah, I was one of those... people.. who would put video clips and TV shows on my smartphone to watch on the road. Needless to say, bigger screen == better viewing experience. Streaming audio and video is also something to behold on the device.
The battery... it's just really good. 5 hours of medium surfing + chatting is easily doable.
The UI is pretty damn slick. It can sense the difference between a finger and a stylus and will resize (some) widgets accordingly. More importantly, Nokia learned their lessons with S60 task switching, and made task switching on the N800 easy and intuitive, rather than a pain in the ass.
What the N800 isn't
It's not a laptop, and it's definitely not meant to replace a PC. There's no good solution to view Word documents (although PDF and Excel are covered).
And even though the N800 is a Nokia, it's not a phone. You can use Skype or Gizmo to make device to landline calls, but there's no cellular radio. You're dependant on WiFi or a good 3G connection to do so.
The smartphone is dead, Jim.
Having used a N800, it's an easy conclusion to come to. The smartphone as we know it is going away. Not today, but certainly soon. Apple and Nokia have come up with similar, yet different ideas as to where the market is heading. Apple has released the ultimate feature phone, while Nokia has released the ultimate feature phone companion.
Pair the N800 with a cheap (50 with contract) 3G smartphone, and you've got yourself something that blows the iPhone away. Want to make a VOIP call, the N800 has you covered. Want to make a voice call, use the phone that's tucked away in your bag. Want to surf the web, use the N800, and wonder how and why you ever surfed on a smartphone.
Anyone wanna buy my old smartphones?
July 28, 2007 -
It had to happen
This is what happens when a Prius and Buick meet.
Keep in mind that the impact happened at a speed of about 5 miles per hour. It's also worth noting that her car had a few scratches on it's bumper and no other damage. In fact, had she not heard the impact, she probably would have never noticed that my Prius had bounced off her car.
I think Adam Sandler's song is really appropriate when it comes to the Prius and safety/durability.
April 02, 2007 -
What the hell happened to Nokia?
Before I launch into this (long overdue) post, I want to state up front that I'm talking about Nokia smartphones in particular. I know Nokia is doing well in the low end phone space (except in the US). Since I'm such a good history student, before we start this, let's take the Tardis back a few years and look at what was happening back in 2003.
In 2003, more or less, the Nokia 3650 (and the non-retarted keypad cousins of the phone) launched. I apologize if any of these dates are off, but I'm too apathetic to look any of this up. The 3650 (and the non-retarted cousins thereof) were followed up by the 6600/6620 phones.
So in the span of two years, Nokia managed to get 3 (or 4, depending on how you look at it) S60 smartphones out on various US carriers (AT&T, Cingular, and T-Mobile). They never really had a hold on the US market before this, but this was a fine start, and more importantly, people bought the phones. People liked the phones. And if you want to count the ill-conceived N-Gage as a phone, you could call it 5 (or 6) phones.
Meanwhile, Windows Mobile was a joke, Pocket PC phones resembled small bricks, and the blackberry was big, but not as big as it was going to be.
And then Nokia followed those hits up with the abysmal 6682. I'm not sure exactly what they were thinking with the 6682, but here's what they did:
- Increased the camera from .3 to 1.3 megapixels. Good.
- Increased the processor speed. Also good.
- Decreased the amount of RAM. Sorry, no... destroyed the RAM. Sorry, no, raped and pillaged the RAM
So there you had it... a smartphone that was a worthy successor to the device that preceeded it, but you couldn't actually do anything much with it. All because Nokia needed to save .25 cents per unit.
It's unlikely that we, the phone buying public, will ever know what happened with the 6682, but almost as soon as it appeared, it was yanked off the shelves. Apparently Nokia had designed a phone that wouldn't work with Cingular's older SIM cards. Yes, the world's largest cellphone company actually fucked on a level that big. It's almost mind boggling.
So the 6682 was discontinued sometime last year.. since then we've seen the Nokia E62, which managed to sell all of 32 units across America, and rumors of the N75. Which leads me to my next point, which is..
What the hell is Nokia doing?
And when I ask that question, I'm asking as a concerned friend. First of all, someone needs to tell Nokia, soon, that they can't honestly call any N-series phone a 'multimedia device' if you can't hook up a pair of goddamned headphones without an adaptor. Either give the phones proper headphone jacks or give them A2DP. If you're not going to give them either, call them what they really are, overpriced toys for fanboys.
Second, Andrew over at the register was absolutely right when he said that "a special circle of Hell needs to be created for the souls behind Nokia's new web browser". A lot of very smart people have spent a lot of time getting the whole mobile browsing thing working to the point where things just fit right on your phone and were usable. Then Nokia comes along and introduces the ultimate parlor showoff trick of displaying a full page on the phone in a thumbnail fashion, and reintroduced 4 way scrolling to the phone browser.
Want to simulate the nokia browser on your computer? Go to cnn.com and resize your desktop to 320x240. Done.
Meanwhile, the email application on S60 has been the same craptastic and sluggish client that's been with us for at least 4 years now. Want to save an attachment with an unknown file extension to your storage card so you can load it on a computer that might understand it. You can't... not allowed. Want to use T9 predictive lookup in your contacts app? Want to see more than one event for your today screen? Hell, do you want to increase the font size of your Today screen so you can read the thing? Sorry, none of these things are possible.
Did the competition waste their time with browsers from hell and VGA camcorders on their phones? No, they did not. They improved and refined. Today, WM2005/6 is arguably better than S60 for business users, and is fast approaching the point where it's better for casual/power smartphone users.
Nokia, or more specifically the S60 division inside Nokia, probably doesn't have the money to screw up and still maintain parity with the Joneses. And screw up they did...
But what about all that great Symbian software? Well, ya see, with S60 V3 (FP1/2), everyone had to start from scratch. And developing for S60 is a bitch. And a half. It's like being thrown to a Sarlacc.
There's just no way to begin to describe how painful getting started with S60 development is. When I started JonnyChat, I wrote the initial java version in a little under a week. When I restarted development to do the J2ME polish version, I did a Windows Mobile port for grins and giggles, and got something partially working in a few hours. If you have a few hours to spare, you *might* be able to get a IDE and SDK installed. And I say might, because if you do anything out of order, or your computer just doesn't look right, they're not going to install and interact properly.
And Nokia, to their credit, is making it as hardly as humanly possible. Let's take a look at Forum Nokia (their development website) and count the IDE's available:
- Carbide.c++ Express
- Carbide.C++ Developer
- CodeWarrior
- Carbide.vs
For the sake of my sanity I've left out the other CodeWarrior. So on the download page, you have 3 different Carbide IDEs, none of which has any benefits or drawbacks listed, and you have to figure out which to choose. Oh, they're all based on Eclipse, so you've got to deal with that loveliness too.
Now, how to figure out which SDK you want is anyone's guess. I defy you to go to the tools and SDKs page and figure out where to begin.
But let's assume you got your SDK and figured out which IDE you want. You've got no instructions on which to install where. Not a clue. It's literally install and pray.
So what does this mean... IMO, fewer S60 apps. Yes, I know, you have your choice of 8 task managers. But the guys over at Sling have a slingplayer for Windows Mobile. They've been working on a S60 version for seemingly eons.. it's nowhere to be found. The guys at Skype have a Windows Mobile version of Skype. They also have Skype client for OSX and Linux, so they probably know something about cross platform coding. They've also been working on an S60 version for eons as well. My guess, S60 development has become so much of a pain in the ass for those people that they've simply shelved the projects, or put them on the back burner.
What can Nokia do to help? First of all, fix your SDK and IDEs. Make it easier for developers to get started with S60 development.
Second, fix your devices. Improve the PIM apps. Put proper headphone ports or A2DP profiles on them. Mini-USB for everyone. Create viable and powerful smartphones, and people will buy them.
Just don't keep doing what you're doing and thinking it's all OK. Because it's not. S60's dwindling marketshare reflects this. It's time to be proactive and fix it.
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