At the after-hours party, this guy was bright even in the bright lights.

• Standing out even in bright light
• Camera: NIKON D300
• Aperture: f/4.0
• Shutter: 0.05 sec (1/20)
• ISO: 800
• Focal Length: 22 mm

Last week I went to the Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco and as usual (I’ve only missed one I/O, you see) I came back excited about the future and all hot on new technology.

Of course the stark contrast to all this cool innovation is the current state of the newspaper cum online news industry, which left a very small tinge of sadness around things — but that’s a post for another time.

Android was, naturally, the big focus but Google is a lot more than a one trick pony (again, there’s that tinge) so there was plenty of developer love for the non-Android types. There were tracks on Geo, App Engine, Google Apps, and handful of others as well. Some of the things that caught my eye were:

Fusion Tables.

• Silhouette on escalator
• Camera: NIKON D300
• Aperture: f/4.0
• Shutter: 1/2500 sec
• ISO: 400
• Focal Length: 16 mm

Man, Fusion Tables rock. I’ve known about them for some time but never really used them. Basically they’re database tables “in the cloud” and you can do all kinds of stuff with them — like SELECT and such — via a RESTful requests.

I was unaware how powerful they can be, especially for mapping — and I loves da mapping. I fully expect to use Fusion Tables in my next project.

Google App Engine

I’m a huge fan of Google App Engine (SacTraffic runs on App Engine, you know) and there were a host of updates announced at I/O.

I spent some quality time talking to some guys from guardian.co.uk about how they use App Engine for their news publishing.

Chromebooks

Note everyone checking out their new tablets.

• Color free zone
• Camera: NIKON D300
• Aperture: f/4.0
• Shutter: 0.006 sec (1/160)
• ISO: 400
• Focal Length: 24 mm

I’ve been intrigued by Chrome OS for some time. I know a lot of people don’t get it, not seeing how a Chrome OS powered device (aka a Chromebook) fits in with a tablet, but I see a distinct difference in the two and am really looking forward to getting my hands on a Chromebook — to both play with and develop for.

Included as part of the famed I/O swag this year was a new Android-powered Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet and the opportunity to pick up a Chromebook when they ship in June. So far I’m been underwhelmed by the tablet — so far it’s just a big iPod — but I have high hopes for the Chromebook.

Chrome Developer Tools

As a web developer, Firebug has been a staple but Chrome’s developer tools have really come of age and I was really excited to see some of the things they can do. Setting breakpoints on DOM element changes was pretty freakin’ cool.

So all in all it was two days of uber-geeking and I enjoyed myself immensely. Now I need to go build something.

Just before the opening Keynote in the crush of attendees...

• Yours truely, keynote mob
• Camera: NIKON D300
• Aperture: f/4.5
• Shutter: 0.02 sec (1/50)
• ISO: 400
• Focal Length: 12 mm

• Kindle
• Camera: NIKON D300
• Aperture: f/5.6
• Shutter: 0.017 sec (1/60)
• ISO: 400
• Focal Length: 105 mm

So I got a Kindle 2 for my birthday this year and now that I’ve taken some time to get a feel for it, I thought I’d share my thoughts a bit.

In case you’ve been living under a rock, the Kindle is the latest “e-book reader” from our friends at Amazon.

The attraction of the Kindle is that one can carry a huge number of books around in a package roughly the size of a DVD case with even more books on demand wirelessly from the online Kindle store. This alone is awesome! Add to it bookmarks, highlights, searching and on-the-fly definitions from the Oxford English Dictionary and you’ve got a powerful tool. Throw in syncing across multiple readers (like the new iPhone app) and it becomes almost insanely great.

But not quite…

The prevailing theory — written about at length on the web — is that the Kindle was primarily designed for book readers and this seems to make a lot of sense as the book metaphor is used heavily throughout the device. But what happens when an avid screen reader, a user — like me — who’s already familiar with the digital world, finally decides to, excuse the phrase, re-kindle his book reading?

Well, the result is decidedly mixed.

The need for speed…

First off face it, the Kindle, for all its coolness, is dog slow. Crazy slow in fact. Every action, from sliding the power switch to wake it or turn it on to turning pages or scrolling through menus, is slow. I suppose, if you had no prior experience with technology, like desktop computers or mobile phones, you might not notice the molassis feel of the thing (and I’m talking about the Kindle 2 here, it’s supposed to be faster than the Kindle 1 which must have been simply maddening to use) but being familiar with how technology is supposed to work, the Kindle’s sluggishness stands out. Even the iPhone — no speed deamon itself — feels spunky by comparison.

I don’t know if the speed is due to the device itself (perhaps somewhere in the firmware/software?) or due to the revolutionary “e-ink” screen or both. Either way, it requires some getting used to, some “re-adjusting of expectations”, and that’s not a good thing.

About that screen

The screen on the Kindle has gotten a lot of press because it uses “e-ink” technology and it’s easily one of the most talked about aspects of the Kindle. The e-ink screen is said to be great for reading and greater still for low power consumption. Supposedly, it is only when the screen is actually updating that it uses any power but when it’s actually displaying something, it uses no power at all.

While all that is pretty cool, and gives the Kindle an incredibly long battery life, the reality is the screen is no great shakes. It’s lower contrast than I would prefer (so much for “great for reading”) and did I mention it is very slow to update?

Furthermore Amazon gushes about the new Kindle 2 supporting 16 levels of gray. 16 levels of gray?!? When did it become 1990? My old Apple Macintosh SE/30 did that… and was faster at it too.

Nor does it have a damn backlight. Yeah, this seems petty, a missing backlight, but again it is something I’ve grown used to. I have no problem reading off my laptop, or iPhone, or a Handspring before that, or a Newton before that and all with a backlight. I do have a problem sitting comfortably down somewhere after the kids have gone to bed only to realize I need to turn on a light I never had to before.

So is it a book, or isn’t it?

• Kindle, next page
• Camera: NIKON D300
• Aperture: f/8.0
• Shutter: 0.017 sec (1/60)
• ISO: 400
• Focal Length: 105 mm

The application of the aforementioned book model is rather interesting. On the Kindle there are no “pages” per se, only “locations”. The idea being that if you change the font size, which you can do quite easily, the page numbers will change but the “location” won’t. Ok fine, but why do the page buttons say “next page” and “prev page” if there are no pages? This hurts my head.

As an avid screen reader I found myself frustrated by the inability to scroll. I like to scroll through documents on the screen as I read them, after all this is the way we’ve done it on computers for years. Now, I get why you can’t scroll on the thing, the e-ink screen can’t update fast enough, but the thing is on more than one occasion I found myself at the top of a page and wanting to reference back only a few lines but this necessitated a “prev page” click. Because the page changes are so slow this becomes almost tedious — not at all like its physical book analog. And multiple page turns, to get more than one page forward or back, are just not worth doing at all.

You can see where the speed issue becomes a problem.

It’s really about the content

Ah the dream of digital content: the exact digital copies, the intra-book navigation from a table of contents, notes being automatically linked… all manner of digital nirvana, right?

Not so much. Like with physical books, in many cases there are different “printings” of the Kindle versions of books and this makes no sense to me. I still can’t figure it out. With books it makes sense, there is a finite number of copies of a physical book, but with digital copies why would you need more than one?

Unless maybe you were updating a book release with “bug fixes”, but now we’re talking about software and not book, right? Well, once you start putting features and DRM in your books, that become software. Tell me that doesn’t make your head swim.

On that thread, I’ve been surprised to find that all AZW files (the Kindle’s native file format) are not created equal and there’s no indication of the quality of the digital version when you go to buy it. You may or may not have a “table of contents” and if you do, it may not be linked. Chapters may start at weird places on the screen and what’s more stunning is the prevalence of hyphenation in odd places (like in the middle of a line). This is a dead giveaway that the content is not an actual digital copy so much as an OCR scan of an existing book.

Silly me, when I buy a Kindle version of a book, and from Amazon no less, I kinda want… no expect… it to be all “kindley”.

I’m wondering if an SPARS code type of thing is needed for the Kindle files where it denotes if a file is a digital copy of and OCR scan or an actual digital copy of the original files.

What about newspapers?

Well, despite my background and my profession, I must confess that I have not yet even looked at a newspaper on my Kindle. Thing is, I can’t imagine why anyone would want to. The idea of a full sized newspaper reduced to the Kindle screen is comical to me. The idea of a gaggle of random stories (aka a newspaper) delivered to my Kindle magically in the night seems, to an avid online reader anyway, almost quaint. I’d be more interested, I suppose, in a Kindleized version of a web site, which happens to completely defeat the point in the first place. And besides don’t we already call that RSS?

No, newspapers on the Kindle are silly, leave it at that.

It ain’t all bad, tho

Ok, it sounds like I’ve bashed a lot on the Kindle, and I have, but it’s important to consider that the Kindle is very much a step in the right direction. I dearly love its size, that it’s a library in my hand, that I can pick up reading on a completely different device right where I left off on the first and that it’ll run forever on a single charge (well, compared to most other electronics that is).

True, much of the Kindle technology isn’t quite where it needs to be yet, e-ink technology certainly isn’t, but it’s damn close. Certainly close enough for the early adopter crowd (like me) to be thrilled to have one. I know very well that technology moves fast and I fully expect to look back two years from now at what will then be the comically out-of-date Kindle 2 and be amazed that we used to use it… and that we liked it.

But the purchase of my first widescreen TV almost did me in.

My father was a rocket scientist. Seriously. He probably forgot more math than I ever knew (and I took calculus in college) yet in my house growing up “home entertainment technology” was limited to the 4 channels that magically showed up on the TV and that old scale model of a Duesenberg with the AM radio in it.

Even though Dad could (and often did) clearly define the electromagnetic spectrum to the 10-year-old me and and describe precisely what was meant by Very High Frequency (VHF) and Ultra High Frequency (UHF), our TV — well into the age of cable and VCRs — only ever got those same 4 channels.

“What the hell do I need cable for!?!” he’d bark and I’d mutter something about all the cool kids getting MTV and things would undoubtedly head downhill from there….

Anyway, apparently I inherited some of this. Despite all the tech in my house, I never put much into the TV so when our old CRT TV finally gave up the ghost (this after being thoroughly scratched by one of the the two small terrors that run through my house) I was dragged by the wife into Costco and pushed in front of the wide-screen TVs.

“That one” I said, pointing at the one that seemed to look the best even though I was completely uneducated on the ways of widescreen TVs. It became ours, and my education began after the fact.

The very first thing I learned about widescreen LCD TV screens is that they suck for SD signals. Though the 4:3 viewable area was only nominally bigger than our old CRT it was noticeably worse quality-wise. Not noticeable to the kids mind you, SpongeBob looks fine to them, but I notice it. Perhaps its that the LCD screen is better and it highlights the crappy signal, I don’t know.

Perhaps the DVD would be an improvement…

My DVD player, old but reasonably advanced, is capable of 480p resolution on a component connection, which in theory should be better than the stock 480i connection off the cable. As fate would have it looked like poo on the old CRT screen but looks pretty decent on the new screen… to a point. There are a number of settings to tweak it but as in digital photography it is all a tradeoff. Noise reduction is a wonderful thing but it softens the image and you lose detail. Crank DNR up enough and the movie looks like mud. In the end you can apply only so much duct tape, so my beloved Ironman DVD looks… passable.

I decided, therefore, I must get something HD.

Now, I’ve also been wanting a DVR for a while, but my wife was happy with a VCR (shades of my Dad, I know. How creepy is that?). It finally came down to my daughter who was absolutely distraught that The Wiggles started coming on at the same time as Wordworld as they are both her very favoritest shows in the world. Well, dear, if we had a DVR… or an HD DVR…

A trip to a Comcast (yeah, I know) pay center later and now we have an HD DVR. What a scam, ya know? You are already getting the HD signal but ya gotta use their gear to thet the HD output to your set. Slimy.

Anyway, I noticed right away that I’d need a DVI to HDMI adaptor/cable as I was out of component hookups (the DVD player and the Wii took those) so a trip to the brand-new but still dead-store-walking Circuit City solved that. Holy ass HDMI cables are expensive — even with the store-closing 30% discount — and who the hell knew that (like ethernet cables) there are different HDMI versions that support different bandwidths?!? More education ensued.

So, finally, I get all the right stuff and get things all set up. I get the HDMI bone connected to the TV bone and the cable bone connected to the DVR bone and… FINALLY, some whopping 1080i HD goodness!

And what the f*** is that *$*#^%@#% white line on the top of some of the channels!?!? So began my introduction into overscan. Turns out the new TV is capable of displaying the whole display signal which is great for components but not so much for TV signals. A lot of TV stations send data in the first few bits of their signals for things like closed captioning. So somewhere in the TV menus I found THAT setting and now we’re happy (if cutting off 5-8% of your image is something to be happy about).

So I think we’re good for now, we got some HD love and we got The Wiggles and Wordworld on the DVR and even got the SD signal coming in at 480p which is an improvement somewhat.

Man, I just wanted a new TV.

Ok, so if you follow me on Twitter you probably saw my digs at the OLPC folks for their somewhat slow delivery of my G1G1 XO laptop. Well, it finally arrived and after a few days of serious OLPC geekin’ I handed it off to its intended recipient, my 8-year-old son.

First off, if you were thinking (like I was) that an XO would make a cool grown-up geek toy, you’d be wrong. First off, it’s small… really small. The membrane keyboard is icky and to put it bluntly, the system is — lets face it — slow. Oh, and you look dorky carrying it around.

But it’s still neat.

It’s got a whole bunch of built-in applications (called “activities”) like a word processor (based on AbiWord), web browser (based on Gecko) and a number of programs that are all clearly educational, most of which I haven’t checked out yet. I did dig the sound sampling Measure activity and of course I found the Terminal activity most useful since the whole thing is Linux based.

By far the slickest feature of the XO is its collaboration abilities designed primarily for use in a classroom setting. This allows you to share almost any activity with anyone else. The problem here is that although its possible to configure a stand-alone XO to “collaborate” over the ‘net at large (it uses the Jabber protocol for this) I wasn’t sure setting this up on my kid’s computer would be such a good idea.

Anyway, I’m getting off track here. I gave the thing to Ryan and after pursuing the Record activity (the XO has a built in camera and mic) and some of the audio activities, he found the EToys activity which is a sort of a SmallTalk/Squeak development environment and he’s working (with some help) through the tutorial challenges.

“Can we play ‘cars’ again, Dad?” Aw hell yeah! Brings a tear to the eye, it does.

At this point I’m not really sure how long his interest will last. Will it really catch on (“Look, Dad, I’ve created the logic here in SmallTalk so if Santa comes through with some Mindstorms…”) or will the XO will go to that place where all the Leap stuff has gone that we’ve gotten over the years?

Fun to watch though.

It didn’t last long. My little Via C3 powered server I run on my little tiny DSL line almost immediately melted down. Interestingly it wasn’t the server load, as Sactraffic is all client-based code, and it wasn’t the bandwidth as my 1.5mbps/384kbps DSL line never peaked past 70% (though that in itself is well into “yellow-light” area)… it was the sheer number of requests and the rate they came in at that did the server in.

Suddenly there was a whole lot of:

[error] (35)Resource temporarily unavailable: fork: Unable to fork new process

in the logs. I was SacBee-dotted.

My home server was just not configured for that kind of traffic. I did some quick Googling and as I suspected the default kernel settings in OpenBSD are intentionally conservative (secure by default). I made a quick call, while I’m sure I could have tweaked it and gotten things humming, it would still be a ancient homebuilt server on a home DSL line.

Punt.

It took a bit for the firehose to turn off and things to calm down. What’s interesting is that due (I assume) to the massive number of incidents the CHP was experiencing the CHP XML feed that powers Sactraffic was also experiencing problems so at least I wasn’t alone .

After thinking it through a little bit I decided a while back to run with the Traffic on Twitter thing and do it up right. The result: sactraffic.org.

I used that same XML feed from the CHP and in addition to Twittering new incidents I created a local JSON feed of just Sacramento area incidents and “mashed up” some geocoding/mapping, local news, videos and even local weather.

Hopefully this makes a simple, yet useful, tool for folks as there are RSS feeds that can be tailored to a particular set of streets or freeways (think: check your commute in your RSS reader before you leave for the day) and what’s even slicker is using Twitter’s new “track” feature to get live updates on traffic incidents at the street or freeway level right to your phone.

Most of this was made possible by the Google Feed and Maps APIs.

It’s been a fun hobby project and was a good refresher on JavaScript which I was getting rusty at (and perhaps still am). Clearly my design skills still suck (hey, anyone have a line on decent traffic icons for Google Maps?).

I’m serious when I say “hobby project” as I’ve tried really hard to keep work on this limited to my spare time at home. I have plenty of work-type work to do at work, messing around with stuff like this at work would probably be frowned upon.

Anyway, I stuck a big ol’ Google AdSense ad on it so if it gets popular maybe I can subsidize my caffeine habit .

In other words, with few lines of code I’ve been displaying information from people’s sites on my site all purdy like.

I love this. Because it means that with a little brain power I don’t have to be limited to the “badges” or whatever other canned widget frou-frou gunk that these sites provide. What’s also cool, it that with a little more brain power I suppose I could “mashup” all this data in some way I haven’t thought up yet, man how web-two-point-ohy is that, huh?

The fine folks at OpenBSD have the song up for the 4.2 release on the lyrics page. So go forth and rock.

It sounds like they went for a Rush feel this time and its not bad. Its been a while since I’ve actually liked a release song, so this is refreshing.

And of course there’s the requisite moral in the lyrics too….

Unbeknownst to most people the CHP makes available a dynamically generated XML file of all their working incidents state-wide. Borrowing a page from the LA Fire Department, it struck me that using this feed for updates to Twitter would pretty slick.

So @sactraffic was born.

I of course made it configurable so I can set the “Center” and “Dispatch” that I want (in case I get a hankering for “FresnoTraffic” I guess) and then I found that at least in the Sacramento area there are still a lot of incidents so I further added configurable filtering on the “Area” (as in “just give me ‘Sacramento’ and not ‘Placerville’ or ‘Auburn’”).

Then I went and filtered all those nifty CHP shorthand acronyms, “JSO EB ONR” (just south of east bound onramp) and low and behold actually readable alerts.

I was (and still am) concerned that hitting that XML file every 5 minutes is unnecessary traffic and load, I would rather not grab the whole file if it hasn’t changed. I was surprised to find out that the file seems to be generated on the fly on every access as both the Last-Modified and Etags headers apparently update on every access regardless of any changes. And they look like they don’t use compression either. Seems to me that the CHP itself is not worried about excess traffic or load.

This whole exercise took about an hour, give or take, and then a few minutes here and there for tweaking, and of course writing this blog post.

What is it about losing phone connections this week?

This meant that for my internet fix, I was reduced to GPRS access via a bluetooth connection to my mobile phone. You know how people are bitching because they say that iPhones are slow because of AT&T’s slow EDGE network? Well GPRS is the predecessor to EDGE, that’s right, it’s slower. And I don’t have a flat data rate either. Blech.

Anyway, my ISP actually called all their DSL customers because with their DSL down and their phone lines disconnected folks were calling and getting, “Doo Daa Deep – We’re sorry the number you have dialed has been disconnected…” which as you can imagine freaked a lot of people out.

(I knew what was up because I hit their status pages via GPRS )

Anyway, we’re back.