Stuffis

Still "Brent's pile o' stuff" but at least now there are sections.

Palm

• Latest: Ars Technica's Jon Stokes says RIP Palm: it's over, and here's why and sadly I have to agree with him. Such a sad end for a long-time market leader. Engadget also weighs in.
• Four stories on why iPhone third-party apps matter, from a long-time Treo user: For 3 years I've been using the Treo 755p which meets my needs admirably; the above article sums up nicely why platform openness matters to me. I am among those who "watched with frustration as [Palm] stopped innovating and was passed by" and have been eager to see Palm be a leader again. They now have the Palm Pre but I fear it may be too late.
• Originally Palm was going to be like Apple and force all apps through their central catalog and approval process; here's jwz's experience with the process. In response to the bad PR, they have changed course:
  • You can put your app in a different central catalog of some kind (which Palm has yet to create), in which there's no $50/app fee and no approval process, but you still pay $99/yr. to participate.
  • If your app is open source, Palm will waive the $99/yr. fee also.
  • jwz's reaction (why a central catalog at all? PalmOS, and in fact desktop OSes, don't use them; and P.S. why are jwz's apps still not approved?) and ultimately he gave up on them
  • My reaction: I love my Treo's ability to get a PDB/PRC from anywhere; why can't I just distribute an app from my own web site? Where's the logic in providing a web-standards-based SDK and then making distribution go through a central authority?

Hobbyist Computer Construction

• $20 8-Bit "Wikipedia Reader"
• Steve Chamberlin's "Big Mess o' Wires" (BMOW), a custom-built 8-bit CPU
• Babbage Difference Engine with Lego

Other Hardware

High speed network research: Intel achieves 50Gbps in the lab with silicon photonics (silicon-based laser devices, 12.5Gbps per wavelength, times 4); could scale to 1Tbps.

I'm not the only one to notice that certain Diebold ATMs make Woody Woodpecker sounds (and other Diebold ATMs play the "cavalry charge") when dispensing cash.

The TonidoPlug and the GuruPlug: $99 wall-wart sized (SFF) Linux computers. The GuruPlug has 802.11 b/g, Bluetooth, and ZigBee.

An amazing, fast book scanner that allows you to just rapidly flip the book pages by it; it flattens the curved images

tweenbots (urban roamers that explore human-robot interaction)

MIT team builds an Indoor Autonomous Helicopter which functions in a GPS-blocked environment, and can autonomously map out an area, avoid obstacles, etc.

Description of the Microsoft/Danger catastrophic data loss disaster (T-Mobile Sidekick phones). More details are emerging.

• This is a big deal, and a cautionary tale with regard to "cloud services". Clearly Apple architected a safe solution (iPhone syncs to PC which syncs to the cloud), and Danger did not (Sidekick syncs to the cloud which (optionally) syncs to a PC — oops, what happens when your cloud data gets destroyed?).
• The root cause of the data loss hasn't yet come out; I think it's too soon to say it was sabotage, but given Microsoft's history (e.g. Hotmail), "dogfooding" would not surprise me.
• "Pink" is the Microsoft project to create a (Microsoft-grown) Zune Phone. "Yes, they set ambitious and clearly fictitious target dates and then make hard decisions based on those dates. Yes, they half-developed features and then cut them to bring their dates in." (Sounds exactly like Vista.) "Yes they cut SMS from the phone recently (because SMS is 'too hard'); no doubt someone beat them up about that, but the point is that the decision makers are beyond clueless." (If true, that is an incredible decision.) "[N]o one really grasps how dysfunctional Microsoft has become."

Yet another reason why I love AMD's HyperTransport. AMD really shines in 4-way and larger configurations (NUMA).

My TINI site.

My contact information, brief autobiography (such as it is), and family tree.