mamamusings: technology

best n95 software EVER

I’ve had a Nokia n95 phone for nearly a year now, and for the most part I’ve been indifferent about it. I like that it has a high quality camera, and I’ve used the GPS functionality for walking directions in unfamiliar cities. The RoadSync software I bought gives me full Exchange sync capability, which is always important. And the voice dialing is really nice (no need to record names for people; say the name and the voice recognition software matches it in your contact list). There were a lot of UI issues for me, though.

I was planning to purchase an iPhone next month to replace it, and wasn’t expecting to miss the n95 much. Until today.

I just downloaded some software called Jaikuspot, which turns my n95 into a mobile wifi hotspot, sharing its 3G connection with my computer. As a result, I’m sitting in an office on an Air Force base, where I have no network access, happily posting to my blog. (And checking my email.) Now that’s useful. Really, really useful.

Yes, it’s a little slow. I don’t even have 3G in this location, so I’m sharing a poky Edge data connection to the computer. But I’m online, when I otherwise would not have been online, and that’s nothing to sneeze at.

Color me impressed!

mobile phone services that make me happy

Over the past few weeks, I’ve found myself using two services a lot on my mobile phone, and when I talk about them at conferences people tend to “oooh” and “ahhh”…so I thought I’d post about them here, as well.

The first is one I thought most people knew about, but I’m finding that’s not true. It’s Google’s “411” service for automated directory assistance. You call 800-GOOG-411, and are prompted for city, state, and business name or type. It then gives you a list of matches, and you tell it which item on the list is the one you want. Then they connect you. There’s no charge for this at all, which makes it a whole lot better than the phone company’s directory assistance. And the voice recognition quality is very good.

The second service I’m enamored with is also based on voice recognition. It’s called Jott, and when you call their number it listens to your message and transcribes it for you. You can have it send the resulting text to you or a contact via email or SMS. You can even have it send the text to a web service like Twitter, Remember the Milk, or your blog. It’s ideal for times when you say to yourself “I need to remember to…” but you don’t have your computer or a notepad handy. The voice recognition is really amazing, and it will let you spell out words that it might not interpret correctly. This evening, for example, I called it and had this exchange:

Me: Dials Jott (voice dial on my phone, so this can all be done via headset)
Jott: Hi! Who would you like to Jott?
Me: Myself (I could say “Twitter” or a contact name here instead)
Jott: Go ahead!
Me: Remember to call Wolk W-O-L-K Manor M-A-N-O-R about dinner plans.
Jott: Got it. Want a reminder?
Me: Yes.
Jott: When?
Me: Tomorrow.
Jott: Thursday, May 29th. Got it. What time?
Me: 9
Jott: am or pm?
Me: am
Jott: Got it.

Then I hung up. A few minutes later, an email appeared in my inbox that had the text of my message, and the scheduled time for the reminder. Tomorrow morning I’ll get both a text message and an email at 9am, reminding me that I need to call about dinner plans with my grandmother. Nice, huh?

corporations bicker, and everybody loses

I got an iPod Touch for Christmas, which was really exciting, because I love watching TV shows on my iPod (especially when I travel). But then I went to the iTunes music store to download the TV shows I wanted—specifically Project Runway, Top Chef, and Battlestar Galactica. Much to my surprise, none of them were there. Since I’ve downloaded those shows in the past, I was confused…until I did a little research, and discovered that the spat between NBC and Apple had resulted not just in NBC network shows being pulled from the store, but also all of the Bravo and SciFi Channel shows being yanked as well.

That sucks.

My iPod Touch is still great for mobile web browsing (when there’s a wifi network around), and for music. But the thing I most wanted to use it for, watching TV shows, is no longer easily done.

The irony of all this is that I’ll probably start downloading those shows using BitTorrent, and getting them for free—when I was completely willing to pay a reasonable price for them. So everybody loses here. It’s ridiculous.

computer update

I’ve held off for a while on my computer saga update, because I wanted to be sure that I hadn’t gone into the fire from the frying pan. So far, however, the news is all good.

After my last post about my frustrations with the MacBook Pro, I got an email from our regional Apple rep, Roger Sampson, who’d been pointed to my blog post by another Apple employee who happens to be one of my students.

Roger offered to escalate my case to a higher level of service, and I gratefully accepted his offer. He also was nice enough to provide me with a loaner MacBook while my MBP went out for repairs once again.

When I got the machine back after its next round of repairs (which included a new antenna), it was still exhibiting problems with both network reception and sleep/wake behavior. At that point, Apple gave me the option of trying to have it repaired again, or of getting a brand-new MacBook Pro to replace it. That was not a difficult choice. So, right before Thanksgiving, I received a new 17” MBP.

So far, I’ve had zero problems with it, other than a few annoyances related to the Leopard upgrade. The hardware seems stable, I can get wifi reception on the road again, and my frustration levels are greatly reduced.

Many thanks to Roger and the service team at Apple for turning things around before I abandoned Macs for good. :)

commenting still broken...pondering next move

Apparently changes in the way they do rewrite rules on the new server has also broken commenting, and I haven’t yet figured out how to fix it. As a result, I need to seriously consider migrating the blog. The two options are to switch to Movable Type 4.0, which requires some reworking of templates but shouldn’t require any changes to archive paths (a critical part of this), or to bite the bullet and jump to WordPress. My only concern about the latter, without having done any research at this point, will be preserving the permalink format for my five years’ worth of entries. Ugh.

So, commenting is on hiatus until I figure out the next technical step. Sorry. :(

testing, testing, 1-2-3

We’ve had some technical trouble this past week with our hosting service—they moved our sites to a new data center, and a bunch of permissions and rewrite rules they changed broke the MT installation. I suppose I should just bite the bullet and upgrade to MT4, but I wanted to get this all working and backed up before I did anything drastic.

If this shows up, it means (I hope) that the problems are over, and posting/commenting should be functional again.

things i have time for on vacation

44

new toys

The Sony Bravia 46” XBR4 tv that we decided on and ordered from Amazon arrived yesterday, and it’s gorgeous. The only down side is that our satellite provider, Dish TV, doesn’t have local channels in HD, so we actually have to have an old-school antenna hooked up to the TV. We bought a Phillips rabbit-ear style antenna, which didn’t work for us at all, so we’ll be shopping for something different today so we can get our favorite network shows in HD.

But the XBOX 360 games? Wow. Just…wow. Katamari (my addiction) is glorious in HD, and Lane couldn’t believe how good Splinter Cell looked. And the HD channels we do get look spectacular.

As if that wasn’t all good enough, my new MacBook Pro 17” replacement computer shipped yesterday, and is due to be delivered today. (That’s why I was sitting at home, rather than the office…I was hoping that it would arrive before I thought I had to leave.) I’m picking up a DVI-to-HDMI cable today so that I can use the new computer to play DVDs onto the big screen TV, and so that I can see what WoW looks like in immersive mode. :)

Now if I can just slog through the last 20 projects to be graded (40 done! Yay me!), I’ll be free and clear to play with the new toys for two full weeks before classes start back up again…

—

Update: Argh! According to the FedEx website, the computer was delivered exactly three minutes after I left the house. At least it’s there. Squeeee!

an-tic-i-pation...

need hdtv buying advice

I am a compulsive researcher, so when Gerald and I decided to use our tax refund to buy our first real TV in 15 years, I began burrowing deep into web sites and reviews and comparison shopping. After looking at displays in multiple stores, we’ve both decided that we like the Sony Bravia series best—the lack of reflection is important in the room we’ll be in, and the angle viewing on the LCD is remarkably good.

However, even having narrowed it down to a specific brand and size range (46”-52”), as well as knowing we want full 1080p resolution, we’re still puzzling over some key differences.

Right now, we’re basically trying to decide between two very similarly priced (after applying various discounts, etc) Bravia models.

One is a 52” W-series Bravia, and the other is a 46” XBR-series Bravia. As far as I can tell the major difference between the two is that the XBR series uses the Bravia Engine Pro rather than the Bravia Engine Ex. Further research revealed that what the Pro can do that the Ex cannot is “upconvert” high definition 1080i and 720p signals to 1080p, while the standard BRAVIA Engine only processes standard definition signals.

Unfortunately, this means not a whole lot to me, since I’m new to the world of HDTV. So, dear readers, if you know more about this than I do could you give me your views? Thanks!

first impressions of nokia n95

I spent a good bit of time in airports yesterday playing with the n95 phone that I won in a drawing at the Nokia event on Thursday. I have to say, I’m impressed.

Things I love:

• Gorgeous screen - big, bright, clear
• Better reception and sound than my Blackjack mean that phone calls are much easier to hear
• Coolest voice dialing ever—I don’t have to record anything, it simply does speech recognition on my voice and looks for a matching entry in my address book. And it works!
• Wifi and 3G, so I get fast data just about everywhere
• Great camera
• Lots of games, including Sudoku

Things I don’t love:

• Sliding it into a snug pocket of a bag causes the sliding screen to open, and the keypad to unlock
• No QWERTY keypad
• No touchscreen or stylus; moving the cursor around with the d-pad is tedious
• The web browser. It takes too many clicks to get to pages I want, uses an annoying interface for moving back through viewing history, and doesn’t seem to store cookies after the phone is turned off.

The big issue for me with any phone is my ability to get data—especially calendar and contact data—from my Exchange server. Happily, there’s a third party tool called RoadSync that does exactly that. I’m using the 30 day trial version right now, but if I decide to stick with the n95 as my primary phone, I’ll definitely purchase it.

Also, I discovered that the n95 has barcode reading software built in. I was really excited about that, thinking that we could use it with PULP, but it turns out it doesn’t work with the kinds of standard UPC barcodes on most products in the US. It works with 2D barcodes (aka QR codes), which are much more common in Asia.

gaga over grand central

I had seen a few references lately to the Grand Central service that Google purchased, but it wasn’t until I saw a Twitter about it from Gina Trapani, life hacker extraordinaire, that I decided to take a closer look at it. After I read a bit on their web page, I immediately wanted in…and managed to find a friend with an invitation still available.

So, what exactly is it?

In a nutshell, they issue you a new phone number (you get to choose the area code, then select from a set of numbers). You can then have that phone number ring as many of your existing phones as you’d like when it’s called. You can set times of day for some numbers, and you can customized what happens based on who’s calling you. When you get a call, it shows up on your phone as your Grand Central number. But when you answer it, the system doesn’t immediately connect you to the caller. Instead, it tells you who is calling (by name if they’re in your address book), and asks if you want to take the call, send it to voicemail, or “listen in”—which allows you to listen as they leave voice mail, and decide if you want to break in and answer the call after all (like screening calls on a home answering machine).

There’s more you can do, much of it useful. For example, you can transfer a call between your phones—so if you pick up the call on your cell phone, and want to transfer it to your home or office phone because your battery is low, you can do that with two key presses. You can add a “call me” button to a web page that doesn’t reveal your telephone number, and can be turned off whenever you want. And, best of all, you can centralize and access all of your voice mail through a web interface that looks a lot like the iPhone’s “visual voicemail.”

The down side? For it to work, I have to give Google an awful lot of information about myself. Not just my phone numbers, but all the interaction data about who calls me and when they call.

That’s always the rub in social software, of course—the tension between convenience and privacy. And really—is anybody better at leveraging that convenience card than Google?

how my 17" macbook pro has killed my apple fangirlness

It takes a lot for me to stop loving a brand that I’m really enamored of. But Apple has managed to do it to me with this lemon of a MacBook Pro that I’m toting around. Sure, I know, buying a first generation anything is risky. But it shouldn’t be this much of a disaster.

I can live with the nuclear heat and resulting inability to put it on my lap without a pillow and a lapdesk shielding my legs.

I can live with the significant weight of lugging it around.

I can live with the less-than-state-of-the-art graphics, and the limited memory capacity (2GB max), and the loud fans.

I’ve even been managing to forgive the increasingly flaky wake-from-sleep behavior. (Sometimes it wakes, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it wakes, and after I log in the screen goes black. Sometimes it goes to sleep when I close it, sometimes it doesnt.)

But I simply cannot live with the completely unreliable wifi. It’s been going on for a long time, and I first documented here in May. But it’s gone from bad to worse. In the past two months I’ve had the following replaced:

• Airport card
• Logic board
• DVD drive
• Keyboard
• Hard drive
• OS

Did any of that work? Nope. If anything, it’s worse now. I can’t pick up a wifi signal in 90% of the locations on campus that everyone else can use—including my office, my classrooms, and the conference rooms. And the last straw is that now I can’t even get a consistent connection at home, where it used to give me poor but serviceable reception. Now I can pick up the signal (two bars from 20 feet away from router), but although the signal doesn’t drop, I lose my ability to talk to the network every 5-10 minutes. (This doesn’t happen to any of the other computers in the house—a MacBook and three PCs—or when I’m connected via Ethernet.)

I’m at a loss as to what to do next. Our tech guys want me to send it back to our Apple-authorized tech person again, but what’s she going to do? What’s left to replace? The display, I guess, since that’s where the antenna is. But I’m dubious about getting this machine to work properly, ever. And as I result, I’m pretty well over my 20+ year infatuation with Apple. Buy an iPhone? I think not. Replace this MacBook Pro with another one when I’m up for a new machine next year? Unlikely.

I’m blogging this less as a warning to others, and more as a probably useless attempt to get Apple to notice that they’re slowly alienating some of their very best customers. But you know, I don’t think they really care about that any more. Which just makes it worse. :(

technology troubleshooting

I brought two computers with me on this trip to Redmond—my Macbook Pro, and the Thinkpad that I need to return to MSR when the symposium is over.

The reason that I kept the Thinkpad until now was that a lot of key symposium information was in my copy of Outlook, and Outlook 2007 doesn’t offer any easy or obvious way to export a batch of messages.

Unfortunately, when we arrived here at the hotel and tried to turn on the Thinkpad, it appeared to be completely and utterly dead. Wouldn’t start up, wouldn’t light up the charging light when plugged in. Ack! But after having gotten up at 4:30am eastern time for our flight, I was in no shape cognitively to do much about it.

This morning I woke up somewhat refreshed, and took another look at the machine. There were no obvious problems visible from the exterior, and the whole thing seemed to be purely power related. Finally it occurred to me to not just remove and replace the battery (which I’d tried), but to remove it and then plug in the power cord. Success! The power indicator light came on, and the machine starts up.

I’ll grab the information I need off the machine, and then see if reinserting the battery allows it to be recognized now. But I’m delighted that the immediate problem of “how do I get that data back right now” has bee solved. :)

Now if only all the problems that are bound to arise over the next three days can be resolved that easily…

rochester mac repair recommendation

I’m in the midst of my usual pre-trip panic—Lane and I leave for Seattle at 6am tomorrow morning, and I feel completely unprepared.

The panic was magnified by the fact that my beloved MacBook Pro went out for repair this week—a new logic board, as part of the ongoing attempt to fix the intermittent and frustrating wifi problems I’ve been encountering for months.

When it got picked up yesterday, it seemed pretty unlikely that I’d get it back in time, and I’ve been frantically trying to prep a PC laptop for the trip. But the wonderful woman who does our department’s Apple-authorized mac repair emailed me this afternoon to say that she’d finished the logic board swap, and was willing to drop the machine off at my house since RIT was already closed for the day.

Wow. I am impressed and delighted. So I want to give her a plug here, for people who might be looking for Rochester area Mac repairs — her name is Christine Cormack, and her company is CoreMac. Send some business her way if you’re in the area—that kind of service is hard to come by, and it sure beats spending hours on the phone with Apple’s service center, or dealing with long waits at the Apple Store genius bar!

Now all I have to do is finish the laundry, buy Lane a pair of pants that fit and don’t have rips or stains, pack, and try to get to sleep early enough so that the 4am wakeup call isn’t completely unmanageable…

using an existing cookie to control access to mediawiki?

For an upcoming event, I’ve created a homegrown registration system with unique user IDs and logins. It’s handling the basics of what I need well, but I’d also like to give registered participants access to a wiki for some pre-event coordination.

Does anyone know if it’s possible to use the existing cookie that’s set when my users login to control access to a mediawiki (or other wiki) installation? Either through built-in access control in the wiki software, or through some kind of .htaccess-level checking? I’d really prefer not to add a second level of authentication if I can avoid it, but I also don’t want to depend on security through obscurity.

microsoft lifechat lx-3000 headset on mac os x

The short version: it works, perfectly. Yay!

The long version: I’ve been wanting a USB headset (headphones + microphone) for a while, primarily to use with Teamspeak (a voice chat program that my WoW guild uses when we do group activities online), but also for VOIP tools like Skype. I’d looked over the options in local stores, and on Amazon, and couldn’t find a low-priced but reasonably well rated model that claimed to work with my Mac.

At the Microsoft company store last week, I decided to pick up the Microsoft Lifechat LX-3000—it was only $20, and I figured I could use it on my Vaio even if it didn’t work on my Mac. The packaging claimed it was for Windows only (unlike MSFT mice, which usually advertise their cross-platform compatibility quite prominently), so my expectations were low.

I was very pleasantly surprised, however, when I plugged the headset into my MacBook Pro’s USB port. Under my sound options I immediately saw “Lifechat LX-3000” as a choice for both input and output. It worked like a charm in the Mac version of Teamspeak.

The headset is comfortable, and the quality of sound seems quite good. On the downside, it’s hard to imagine looking any geekier than I do with it on. :)

no, i still don't want an iphone

We saw quite a few iPhone-toting folks at GLS, and also visited an AT&T store where we got to play with them for a while.

Yes, the UI is amazing. It’s beautiful. It’s seductive. And no, I still don’t want one.

Biggest reason why not? I have semi-long fingernails (not outrageous, but feminine). And they make it nearly impossible for me to hit the keys on the iPhone’s screen-based keyboard. It was incredibly frustrating trying to type in URLs or addresses. I don’t have that problem with the keyboard on my Blackjack, nor is it an issue on a stylus-based interface. But the iPhone is really tough for me to enter information onto. That’s bad.

My hope is that future models will include a styus option, or something that makes it easier for me to do text entry. 3G data would be nice, too. And the ability to send photos directly to Flickr. So, I can wait.

why i'm not lusting after an iphone (yet)

I’ve been an Apple early adopter since before most of my students were born. I had a 128K Mac hot off the assembly line in 1984—my father paid for half of its $2400 cost as my college graduation present.

I’ve owned a Mac SE, a Quadra, a Powerbook 170, a Newton (yes, a Newton!), a PowerBook 540c, an iMac, a PowerBook G3, a 17” PowerBook G4, and I currently have a 17” MacBook Pro. I owned a first generation iPod, too.

So why don’t I have (or even want) an iPhone? It’s not that I can’t afford it—right now is actually a time when I can afford new gadgets. And it’s not because I’m tied to another cellular carrier—I’m already an AT&T/Cingular customer. It’s not because I don’t want my phone to be more than a phone, because I do.

There are two reasons.

The first is that after over twenty years of being an early adopter of new Apple products, I’m starting to realize that the fun of being the first on the block to own the new gadget is often outweighed by the speed with which Apple releases a new, improved, and often cheaper version of that same gadget. With the MacBook Pro, I really feel that I got burned (even literally) by that. My MBP is outrageously hot (so hot that even the keyboard becomes uncomfortable to use when a graphics intensive program is running), has a loud hard drive, gets terrible wifi reception, and is significantly slower and smaller in capacity than the versions most of my colleagues are getting this year.

The second is that there are certain things I really want from my phone, and for many of those things the iPhone is currently very weak. I use my phone as an actual phone on a regular basis, and things like voice dial and quick phone number lookup/dialing aren’t available on the iPhone. (On my smartphone I can simply start typing a name on the keyboard, and it pops up a list of names that’s narrowed down as I continue to type.) I frequently use my phone to take photos and upload them to Flickr, and (so far as I know) there’s no way to automatically upload to flickr with a single click on the iPhone (as I can with ShoZu on my smartphone), or even to send them via MMS to someone else’s phone. And because I’m one of those boring business users, I love my smartphone’s ability to synchronize over the air with Exchange, making not just my email but (more importantly) all my calendar events and contacts available from my phone without ever having to connect it to my computer. (I’m not holding my breath on that last item being addressed, but if it were, the iPhone would pop to the very top of my wanted list.)

There are definitely things about the iPhone that I really really covet. The beautiful screen and multitouch interface, for example. The extremely cool and very useful visual voicemail interface. But those simply aren’t enough for me to give up a platform that does exactly what I need it to do from a functionality standpoint. At least not yet.

i love this mouse!

For about two years now I’ve been using Microsoft’s wireless optical notebook mouse, which I’ve really loved. I have small hands, and the notebook mouse fits me perfectly. The wirelessness keeps me from knocking things over with the cord (like cans of diet coke), which I used to do a lot. I wasn’t in any hurry to replace it—it’s held up like a champ under heavy usage and lots of travel. But when I got to MSR this summer, I was browsing the company store and saw the brand new Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000 (why 8000? who knows? who cares? silly msft naming people).

Why was this one so seductive? Look at it:

See those buttons on the bottom? You can use them to control a Powerpoint presentation! On Windows or a Mac! w00t!

I have the Mira software that lets me control a presentation using my Macbook Pro remote, but that (a) requires me to remember to bring and use two separate devices (the mouse and the remote), and (b) won’t work when I’m using my Vaio (which I often travel with because it’s so light).

And this mouse feels great to use. It’s…dare I say it?…sexy! Sleek, silky, smooth. Just the right weight and shape. Lovely.

I told someone a few months ago that my Windows Mobile phone was the only Microsoft-powered item that I had any kind of emotional attachment to, but I’d forgotten what a kick-ass job they do on mice, too…

macbook pro network problems?

I’m trying to figure out if the problem I’m currently experiencing is a function of my cable modem, my macbook pro, or neither.

When I first go online with my new cable modem and my mbp (whether I’m directly connected via an ethernet cable or using an airport express for wifi), the speeds are fine. But if I’m on for more than an hour, the speeds gradually begin to slow down. It’s most obvious if I’m playing WoW, since it gives me latency in milliseconds, and I can see it creep up. But it’s also causing all other net-related apps to slow, and traceroutes are sluggish.

If I reboot the mbp, everything goes back to normal again, and speeds are fine.

A couple of technical people have told me that “there’s no way” the mbp could be causing the network slowdown, but the fact that I can consistently repeat the process of rebooting the machine and having the network speeds immediately improve seems awfully suspicious.

Any suggestions as to what could be causing the problem, or what utilities I could use to better diagnose it?

I am planning on taking the mbp in to the Apple Store this weekend because there are other annoying things (the frequent wifi connection problems I mentioned a few weeks ago, a loud whirring noise from either the fan or the hard drive, problems with the screen not coming back after sleep, etc). But the more specific I can be when telling them what’s wrong, the more likely it is that they might actually fix it :)

incredibly frustrating macbook pro wifi connection problems

For the past several months, I’ve had increasing trouble with my 17” MacBook Pro (purchased last summer) not finding my regular wifi networks, getting terrible connections to access points that are very close by, and generally making it much easier for me to use wired rather than wireless access whenever possible. I’ve been waiting ‘til the school year ended to send it in for service, but now I think that was a mistake in judgment.

I’m out of town at the moment, in Canada, where my cell phone incurs expensive roaming charges, and where I really need to be able to be online to do work as well as communicate with friends and family. Except my computer will not connect to the hotel network from either of the two rooms I’ve tried. It will work (most of the time) in the hallway, or the lobby. But not in the room—the signal drops to one bar, and then disappears completely.

I finally discovered that if I set the computer up on the bathroom counter (that’s the hallway-facing wall), I can get only with at least a weak signal. So right now I’m sitting at a chair I’ve dragged into the bathroom from the guest room, with my hands at a completely uncomfortable angle, just so I could make a Skype call home and start grading online assignments.

I’ve been through a bunch of forum suggestions for fixing this…from trashing the system preferences to zapping the PRAM. No luck. Even in the bathroom, the signal keeps dipping from 3 bars back down to one, which is making me think that it’s a hardward problem rather than a software one. As danah, would say, “le sigh”.

I leave Winnipeg tomorrow for Montreal, where hopefully the hotel room will have a hardwired connection rather than only wifi. And next time I travel, I’m bringing my Vaio with me.

google maps has forgotten where i live

I don’t know when it happened, but sometime in the past few weeks Google Maps has suddenly decided that it doesn’t know how to find my house.

This is definitely new—I’ve used it for mapping and directions since its release. But now, no matter what form of my address I enter, it claims it can’t find the address.

Which makes me wonder—how often does this happen? And what recourse do any of us have if Google suddenly makes us invisible, whether it’s from missing map data or messed-up page rank? There’s nowhere on the Google Maps site to report something like this, so I suppose I just have to hope that at some point the missing data reappears. And, in the meantime, switch to Yahoo Maps (which has updated its interface and is much more enjoyable to use).

why twitter matters

I’m completely fascinated by Twitter right now—in much the same way I was by blogging four years ago, and by ICQ years before that.

If you haven’t tried it yet, Twitter is a site that allows you to post one-line messages about what you’re currently doing—via the web interface, IM, or SMS. You can limit who sees the messages to people you’ve explicitly added to your friends list, or you can make the messages public. (My Twitter posts are private, but my friend Joi’s are public.)

What Twitter does, in a simple and brilliant way, is to merge a number of interesting trends in social software usage—personal blogging, lightweight presence indicators, and IM status messages—into a fascinating blend of ephemerality and permanence, public and private.

The big “P” word in technology these days is “participatory.” But I’m increasingly convinced that a more important “P” word is “presence.” In a world where we’re seldom able to spend significant amounts of time with the people we care about (due not only to geographic dispersion, but also the realities of daily work and school commitments), having a mobile, lightweight method for both keeping people updated on what you’re doing and staying aware of what others are doing is powerful.

I’ve experimented a bit with a visual form of this lightweight presence indication, through cameraphone photos taken while traveling. A photo of a boarding gate sign, or of a hotel entrance, conveys where I am and what I’m doing quickly and easily. But that only works if people are near a computer and are watching my Flickr photo feed, and that’s a lot to ask.

I also use IM status messages to broadcast what I’m doing. My iChat has a stack of custom messages that I’ve saved for re-use, from “packing” and “at the airpot” to “breaking up sibling squabbles” and “grading…the horror! the horror!” But status messages have no permanence to them, and require some degree of synchronicity—people have to be logged into IM, and looking at status messages, while I’m there. Because Twitter archives your messages on the web (and can send them as SMS that you can check at any time), that requirement for synchronous connections goes away.

Blogs allow this kind of archived update, of course—but they’re not lightweight. Where one might easily post a Twitter message along the lines of “on my way to work”, a blog post like that wouldn’t be worth the effort and overhead.

I’ve heard two kinds of criticisms of Twitter already.

The first criticizes the triviality of the content. But asking “who really cares about that kind of mindless trivia about your day” misses the whole point of presence. This isn’t about conveying complex theory—it’s about letting the people in your distributed network of family and friends have some sense of where you are and what you’re doing. And we crave this, I think. When I travel, the first thing I ask the kids on the phone when I call home is “what are you doing?” Not because I really care that much about the show on TV, or the homework they’re working on, but because I care about the rhythms and activities of their days. No, most people don’t care that I’m sitting in the airport at DCA, or watching a TV show with my husband. But the people who miss being able to share in day-to-day activity with me—family and close friends—do care.

The second type of criticism is that the last thing we need is more interruptions in our already discontinuous and partially attentive connected worlds. What’s interesting to me about Twitter, though, is that it actually reduces my craving to surf the web, ping people via IM, and cruise Facebook. I can keep a Twitter IM window open in the background, and check it occasionally just to see what people are up to. There’s no obligation to respond, which I typically feel when updates come from individuals via IM or email. Or I can just check my text messages or the web site when I feel like getting a big picture of what my friends are up to.

Which then leads to one of the aspects of Twitter that I find most fascinating—exploring clusters of loosely related people by looking at the updates from their friends. There are stories told in between updates. Who’s at a conference, and do they know each other? Who’s on the road, and who’s at home. Narratives that wind around and between the updates and the people, that show connections. Updates that echo each other, or even directly respond to another Twitter post.

There’s more to it than that, but I’m still sorting it all out in my head. Just wanted to post an early-warning signal that I see something important happening here, something worth paying (more than partial) attention to.

microsoft innovation: features rather than products

Robert Scoble has a rather surprising post up claiming that nothing he’s seen come out of Microsoft in the past three years has made him go “wow.” It’s surprising for two reasons.

First, for more than two of those years Robert wrote nearly daily blog posts about things at Microsoft that made him say “wow”—and that contradiction, to me, raises some credibility questions.

Second, and more importantly, despite the fact that I’m no Microsoft fangirl (as Robert knows, I’m a long-time Mac user, and a big fan of many of the startups he names), there are quite a few aspects of Microsoft products that have made me say “wow” over the past three years.

The thing is, they’re not brand-new products or services—instead, they’re features of existing products that I’ve discovered just as I needed them, or that changed the way I worked. And most of them are a function of innovative integration. Here are three examples:

• Windows Mobile + Exchange email and calendaring. Nothing else touches this for a seamless experience. If I add a contact to my phone, it shows up on my computer. If I receive email, it appears on my phone. If I add an appointment to my computer, it shows up on my phone. No wires, no manual sync, it just happens. It’s wonderful.
• Microsoft Word + Excel + Entourage merge integration. This has been there for a while, I assume, but I never needed it before. Since I use Excel for grading, and Word for creating formatted gradesheets, it suddenly occurred to me this year that I might be able to email those formatted gradesheets rather than printing them out and using up paper. And it worked like a charm. Had me going “wow” and “cool” and showing it to anyone who’d come into my office.
• Windows Live Messenger sharing folders. Makes me wish that people I know used Live Messenger, or that Live Messenger worked with AIM accounts—this is a super-cool feature that’s hobbled by the fact that IM services don’t all interoperate.

(And now, back to grading. Amazing how much more attractive blogging becomes when you’ve got an onerous task you’re trying to avoid.)

lightweight and ubiquitous

No, not me. (I wish.)

My travel computing solution, which I’m thoroughly appreciating during this delay-ridden trip to Colorado Springs.

My lightweight (< 4 pounds) Vaio, plus a Verizon broadband access card, equals easy online access from anywhere…including this table at the Chili’s Too restaurant in O’Hare. Lovely.

totally amazing video about the web

In under five minutes, Michael Wesch gives us the history and future of the web, complete with linguistic and social implications.

Unbelievably good.

(via Jill)

software of men

A great post from Karen Schneider:

Too much OSS is, in a way, Software of Men: grim, grey, and—for those who have ever attempted to ask a newbie question on an OSS list—pugilistic and thoroughly patriarchal. You either are part of the in-group or you are a “fugee” (Children of Men jargon for ‘refugee’—a major subtext of the movie is the treatment of immigrants). If you are a fugee, God help you; you are no equal to the developers.

Now, before you think this is going to drift into “Command line execution is from Mars, GUIs are from Venus,” I know plenty of women who think in code—women for whom a command line is bliss—women who are geek from the git-go. (I keep referring to the “guys” in my department, even though several of us, including me, are female.) I am also not going to describe us as the kinder, gentler sex—not after working in libraries for fifteen years.

But I will ask this of you, ye who are of the geekish inclination. Go see Children of Men, and then think about software development. Who do you want building your software? What kind of world do they come from?

I hadn’t planned to see Children of Men (I tend to like my movies on the lighter side), but I think now I may have to.

a flickr feature i wish for

When I go to someone’s page of Flickr friends, I’d love to be able to see who we have in common. (This is a feature that I wish a lot of sites had, but I thought of it again tonight while browsing some Flickr photos.)

Just wanted to make a note of that before I moved on to another task.

comments fixed

I hadn’t realized that comments were broken—happened when I upgraded to 3.33, and forgot to rename the comments script. :(

All’s well again.

smartphone not synchronizing exchange calendar :(

I love my smartphone, and what I love most about it is its seamless synchronization with our campus Exchange server—email, calendar, and contacts. Add a phone number to my phone, the contact gets updated on the server and then synchronized with my computer—no wires necessary. Add a meeting to my calendar on the computer, and it shows up on my phone, complete with reminders. Fabulous.

Until last week, when suddenly calendar events stopped synchronizing. My email works just fine—I’m still getting it sent to my phone with no problems. But Calendar events won’t synchronize. If I go into ActiveSync and watch the process, it shows it connecting, shows it seeing that there calendar events to sync, but then the events never make it onto the phone.

I am so so so so sad about this. I depend on my phone to tell me where I need to be an when, and now I can’t trust it.

Our helpdesk, of course, pleads ignorance. I haven’t changed anything on my phone—no new software, no nothing.

Can anyone help? Please?

sidebar photos fixed

If you don’t just read this site in an aggregator, you may have noticed that a couple of months ago I replaced the “most recent five photos from Flickr” sidebar with one of their Flash widgets. I did this not because I liked the widget better (I didn’t), but because the 5-photo badge had somehow stopped working.

Happily, the badge seems to be working again, so I’ve put it back in the sidebar (click on “Recent Photos” to reveal it).

lost data, courtesy of total choice hosting

For some time now, this site has been hosted by Total Choice Hosting. As soon as I get home from this trip, that’s going to change.

Careful readers will note that a full week’s worth of entries and comments have disappeared from the site. Apparently the server on which mamamusings is hosted had a hard crash—which can happen anywhere, I know.

However, the most recent backup from which they were able to restore was a full week old.

That’s mind-bogglingly irresponsible. Thank god I don’t host any business-critical data on that site, or transaction data. I’ve lost a week of intensive content-creation, however, which is infuriating.

The saving grace? Bloglines still had the posts, and I’ve grabbed them in HTML format and will recreate them tomorrow.

Apologies for the lost comments, or any broken links that may result.

And if you’re using Total Choice, let this be a warning to you to be backing up your own data on a daily basis, since clearly they’re unable to do so. :(

mira remote control software for macs

My new Mac came with a nifty little remote control that works with the Mac’s “FrontRow” software to play DVDs, music, slideshows, etc on the computer. That’s nice for home stuff, but I found myself wishing I could also use the remote for business applications—specifically, for PowerPoint presentations that I use in class and at conferences. I was jealous of people like Larry Lessig and Dick Hardt who didn’t have to hunch over their keyboard while they clicked through lots and lots of one-word slides.

Then last week I saw an article about Mira, a Mac software tool that allows you to use the “Front Row” remote bundled with new Macs for a variety of other applications. For $16, it seemed worth trying, so I bought a copy.

And it works! It adds a little control panel to the system preferences pane, and allows me to configure what each remote control button does for any given application. It comes preinstalled with a huge number of defaults, including some for PowerPoint, so I didn’t actually need to configure a thing…just point and click and it works.

Well worth the price, and it will make it easier for me to do the kind of presentations I’d like to in class and at conferences.

i got my moo minicards!

My Moo “minicards” finally arrived yesterday (I was notified on 9/23 that they’d shipped, but the postmark was 10/13, so something must have gone temporarily awry).

They. Are. Beautiful.

Wow.

I’ll take a picture of them tonight and add it to the entry. I selected ten of my favorite sunset photos for the sample set, figuring that it would give me a good sense of how good the color quality was on the cards. And I was blown away by it. They are really beautiful. The color is perfect—better than any online prints of my photos that I’ve ever ordered. I will definitely be buying more cards. Goodbye standard business cards, hellooooo moo minicards.

(Just realized I could take some screen shots of my WoW avatar in various locations around Azeroth and use them to create special gam3r cards. w00t!)

nick carr on "algorithmic integrity"

Nick Carr has a stunningly good post up today about search engine rankings, which can easily be manipulated by determined parties (a process known as “Google bombing”).

He quotes spokespeople from both Google and Microsoft defending the fact that the number one result for a search on Martin Luther King is a white supremacist site. Google’s spokesperson said that they “can’t tweak the results because of that automation and the need to maintain the integrity of the results,” while Microsoft’s representative said that they “always work to maintain the integrity of [their] results to ensure that they are not editorialized.”

Here’s how Carr responds to those positions:

By “editorialized,” [the Microsoft spokesperson] seems to mean “subjected to the exercise of human judgment.” And human judgment, it seems, is an unfit substitute for the mindless, automated calculations of an algorithm. We are not worthy to question the machine we have made. It is so pure that even its corruption is a sign of its integrity.

how do i love flickr? let me count the ways

I just renewed my Flickr Pro membership, which got me to thinking about how much I love Flickr.

I first used Flickr when it bore no resemblance to the service it is today—back in those early days, it was focused on real-time photo sharing and chatting in an interactive Flash-based environment. The first photo I uploaded, in December of 2003, is photo number 216 in the system—which makes it, so far as I know, the first photo uploaded by someone who didn’t work for Flickr.

Three years later, I’ve uploaded 2,160 photos, which have garnered (as of a few moments ago) 99,914 views.

Wow.

So, that list…

Flickr revitalized my interest in photography. I take more pictures because I want to share them with others.

I bought my first cameraphone because of Flickr, and now it’s an essential part of my life. I use it—along with Flickr and the marvelous Shozu software—to document day-to-day details of my life. The small events that are under the bloggable radar, but important enough to remember and share.

My Flickr photos led me to long-lost family members in Brazil.

This week I’ll be receiving the ten free cards from Moo that my Flickr Pro account entitled me to. The samples I ordered will include ten different sunset photos I’ve taken. If they’re as good as everyone who’s written about them says, I’m pretty sure I’ll be buying lots more—for myself and as gifts.

Because of Flickr, every day I get visual updates from people I care about. I know that Eric and Nicole dressed as pirates for “Talk Like a Pirate” Day. I know that Stewart is (was?) in Taipei, that Tantek is in Tokyo, and that Jill has a new camera (ooooo….I’m so jealous! a canon digital slr is at the very top of my wish list these days). I know that Weez has the boys this weekend, that Julie took her kids to visit a salmon hatchery, and that Gina went to a wedding. And I know all that not because of lengthy emails or telephone conversations, but from the constant stream of photos from friends that I see in Bloglines.

I know there are more reasons I love Flickr, but it’s lunchtime and I promised to take Alex to Panera.

i love my new cingular 3125

There’s nothing like a new toy to cheer me up after a long day. And I’m happy to report that my brand-new Cingular 3125 has not disappointed in any way. It’s beautiful, particularly the lovely analog clock that the external LCD displays when a button is pressed. The keys and the click wheel are a big improvement over my old Audiovox SMT 5600. Reception is surprisingly good, even in our house (typically a cell phone “dead zone”). And it connected flawlessly to RIT’s Exchange server today, which means my phone can once again be my primary tool for checking calendars, emails, and to-do lists. Yay!

Now I just need to acquire a Micro SD card so I can put some of my favorite tunes on the phone (and use them to replace the crappy ringtone selection).

my mobile number is changing...again

While we were in Seattle, I got a new cellphone (a smartphone) with a Seattle-based phone number. I don’t remember why, but at the time it made sense to have it on an account separate from our Cingular family plan. Now that we’re back in Rochester, we’ve decided it makes more sense financially to consolidate our cell phone plans, so I’m ditching the Seattle number and will have a brand-new 585 mobile phone number.

Unfortunately, that means friends and family will need to update their address books with my information (again). Sorry, everyone.

I’ll send out email to people who I’m pretty sure call my mobile on a regular basis. But if you don’t get email from me today with that number, drop me a line and I’ll send it along.

Given that we just upgraded all our phones to new equipment , we’ll be on these phone numbers for at least two years.

Wait, what’s that? You want to know what my new phone looks like? That’s it, over there to the left. I’m getting a new Cingular 3125, aka the HTC “StarTrk”, because my older Audiovox SMT5600 seems to have bit the dust entirely, refusing to boot properly. My friend Lili has been using one for a while now (she had one from overseas, where it’s been available longer), and loves it. I much prefer flip phones to the “candybar” style of the Audiovox. My only concern about the 3125 is whether it will get a decent signal in our house, which is notoriously bad for cell reception. I’ll report back after it arrives tomorrow.