*scottstuff*

Okay, so I posted yesterday that I’ve decided that a PDA without top-notch desktop sync support is worthless, and that Palms are the only PDAs that sync right with OS X. Great timing–according to Brighthand, PalmSource isn’t going to produce an OS X sync program for “Cobalt,” their new name for PalmOS 6.

It’s not really the end of the world–it’s unclear if the basic sync protocol has changed, although the formats used by the native PIM applications is different. So, there’s a chance that Palm Desktop 4 will work along with a small update to iSync (which replaces the native PIM conduits in Palm Desktop). Failing that, Mark/Space has committed to producing an OS X sync solution, and they’ve been pretty good in the past.

Basteges.

As part of my current organization kick, I’ve been thinking about what I want in a portable computer (PDA, handheld computer, smartphone, tablet PC, whatever). I’m a geek and a bit of a gizmo freak, but I try to be at least a bit practical–do I really want a Linux-based PDA that’s going to need ongoing sysadmin work just to be usable?

My experience with the Windows-based Motorola MPx200 smartphone rammed home another point–an organizer that can’t sync reliably is useless.

Finally, playing with Life Balance and ReaderWare has demonstrated that organization applications with both a PDA and a desktop component can be more useful then either component would be on its own.

Three simple points that most of us already know, but they’re easy to forget when faced with gratuitously cool new hardware. In short, the purpose of computers is to run software, and the point of software is to give you access to information, and if your handheld can’t run your software, or it can’t access your information, then it’s really just a cool paperweight with a nice display.

Since I’m running OS X on my primary computer, it stands to reason that I’d be best-served by a handheld that syncs with the Mac, and has as many applications as possible that can sync application-specific data between the Mac and some PDA application. And, since I want to run Life Balance, I’d be best served by a handheld that can actually run it. In every case, the best choice is some flavor of Palm, either a traditional one from PalmOne, a Sony Clie, or a PalmOS-based phone.

Now that I’ve finally answered the question “what do I want a PDA for?” I can stop looking at PocketPC handhelds, Zauruses, and whatever else is out there, because they aren’t going to do what I want them to do. It’s a nice realization, and I guess I have Motorola to thank for that, mostly. Who knows where I’d be now if they could build a battery that worked :-).

Now, if only PalmOS 5 didn’t suck so bad…

I finished reading Cory Doctrow’s A Place So Foreign and Eight More over the weekend. It’s a collection of (surprise) 9 of his short stories. I wasn’t very impressed with Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom when I read it a month or so ago, but A Place So Foreign was much more enjoyable. I’ve really been enjoying science fiction short stories more then novels recently.

I didn’t mention it at the time, but I finished Charlie Stross’s Singularity Sky a few weeks back. I enjoyed it more then Down and Out, but less then A Place So Foreign. He has a collection of short stories out, so I’ll try to grab those next.

My current read is Lamb by Christopher Moore. I loved Island of the Sequined Love Nun (possibly the best title of any book ever), along with most of his other books, so we’ll see how this one goes.

As those who know me know, I’m not exactly the world’s most organized person. It’s not uncommon for me to over-organize a few small things while large swaths of my life sit in disorder for way too long. Sometimes it bothers me, some times it doesn’t. It tends to go in cycles of two or three years–the disorder will start to bother me for one reason or another, so I’ll start some new way of organizing things, only to drop it after I’ve made enough of a dent in things so the disorder doesn’t bother me anymore.

I’m currently in the middle of one of those cycles. I’ve had too many things piling up at home and at work recently, and I feel like I was losing track of most of the things that I needed to be doing. Every time something new added itself to my plate, something else fell off.

I started by trying to keep a simple to-do list in iCal and syncing it onto my phone, but that just doesn’t cut it. I need to be able to break big tasks down into smaller pieces in order to manage them, but if I do that, then I end up with a huge long linear list that is too big to be manageable. So I avoid putting little things onto the list, so they don’t obscure the big things, except now I’m losing track of things again.

I’m currently in the middle of phase two: I’m trying out better software for managing to-do lists. I’m kind of excited about Life Balance, which is kind of new-age sounding, but seems to do what I want. You lay out your life as a series of goals and projects in a big hierarchy. Leaf nodes in the tree are essentially to-do items. Each node has a priority and an effort metric associated with it, along with an optional to-do date, location, and some other settings. Life Balance then tries to produce a simple, linear to-do list of what you need to be working on right now. It’s actually quite a bit more powerful then that sounds, because it can gauge the importance of different projects and sub-projects against each other, and then try to balance them using the feedback that you provide.

Life Balance runs on Macs, Windows PCs, and Palms. The Palm and desktop versions sync with each other, and the Palm version can sync its version of the to-do list with the system to-do list. I’m currently testing Life Balance out along with Agendus on a Clie that I’ve had sitting around for a couple years. I’m still tuning the way I use the two programs, but they seem to interact almost perfectly. I’ll write up a longer review when I decide to buy them.

The MPx200 is gone, and I’m back to a Sony-Ericsson phone. It’s a T616 this time instead of a T68, so it’s a bit bigger and faster, but the basic design is the same. It’s still a pain to look up phone numbers, and the UI is still way too back-button intensive, but it works.

On the plus side, it syncs flawlessly with the Mac, unlike the MPx200, where syncing was an adventure each and every time I tried it. I’m slowly cleaning up the damage that PocketMac did to my calendar–one entry moved from PST to GMT for no obvious reason, and a couple birthdays are missing. I’m still waiting to hear back from them on my bugs, too.

I’ve had it with the MPx200, and I’m going to be returning it to AT&T, thanks to their 30-day refund policy. It’s a cool phone, and it has a lot of interesting features, but no matter what I do, it won’t last longer then 8 hours before the battery dies. I’ve deleted every program that I installed, removed the SD card, replaced the battery, and it still runs down its battery astoundingly fast. Cool is nice, but it’s got to be a usable phone. And a phone that’s dead isn’t very useful.

Plus, the PocketMac people still haven’t been able to fix my sync problems. As it stands, I need to reboot my Mac every time I want to sync the phone. Allegedly they’ve handed me off to their “driver guru,” but I haven’t heard anything from them since then.

So, what am I going to do? I have no idea. I’ve been tempted by the Treo 600, but it’s over $300 more then I paid for the MPx200, and it has a lousy LCD display. I’ve had Palms with 160x160 displays before, and I don’t really want to go back there again.

So, I’ll probably get their cheapest Bluetooth phone (this week, it’s the Sony-Ericsson T616) and start looking for a new PDA. I’m leaning towards the Palm Tungsten C for reasons that I’ll explain shortly.

They’re back again, 100+ blog spams for some casino. Rather then delete them automatically, I added the mt-blacklist plugin. It includes the ability to bulk-delete comments based on IP address.

Interestingly enough, last week’s anti-blog-spam measures didn’t really help–the spammer followed the comment form right to the new, renamed comment CGI. So, it looks like we’re headed for a real spam arms race. Bastards.

We’ve had a wireless network at home for over 3.5 years, and I’ve had a wireless-equipped PowerBook for almost two years. In all that time, I’ve never managed to get the laptop to work wirelessly from anyplace actually useful. This is a generic failing of the Titanium PowerBooks–their wireless antenna is inside of a big, titanium faraday cage, leaving them with a frustratingly short range. So, I haven’t been able to use the laptop from the living room couch, or from the bedroom. Instead, I’ve been limited to 30 or so feet, which draws the line somewhere in the middle of the dining room.

Until today. A couple weeks ago our second wireless access point died. It was a cheap (at the time) SMC, which replaced the original Apple “UFO” base station which basically melted itself down. I was faced with a dilemma–I could buy a high-power wireless card and antenna, plug it all into one of my Linux boxes, and then run HostAP, or I could buy another cheap AP. In the end, I decided that it was better to have a working network now then to wait for the HostAP hardware to arrive via FedEX, so we bought a Linksys WRT54G. The nice thing about this specific model is that it runs Linux under the hood, and there are a few hacked firmware loads for it that give it a number of features that Linksys never planned on. Including the ability to crank the transmitter power from a wimpy (but common) 30 mW up to 84 mW. It’s not the 200 mW that high-end stuff can handle, but it’s good enough to finally let me sit on the couch and use the computer. It only took two years.

In the continuing saga of search engine weirdness, I’m now up to 550 search engine hits from people looking for terms including the word “hilton”. Most of these are from MSN. This doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in their ability to produce relevant pages for simple searches.

On the other hand, Google isn’t a whole lot better anymore. Apparently, I’m number 8 when searching for ”work is hell”. I’d love to know what I’m doing right.

I’ve had a Motorola MPx200 smartphone for nearly 3 weeks now, and I still can’t decide what I think about it. It has a number of really nice features, but it has nearly as many shortcomings, and some of the shortcomings are really impressively bad.

The Good:

• The dialing interface is really good. It integrates an incremental search through all of your contacts names and numbers and your call log right into the normal dialing process. This is easily the best contact search interface that I’ve ever seen in a phone. It’s great.
• The flip-phone formfactor is much better the the “tablet” style phone when you pocket the phone.
• The phone earpiece and ringer are nice and loud. My T68 was just a bit too quiet; I usually had to keep the volume turned all the way up. The MPx200 tends to stay around 50% unless I’m in a really loud environment.
• The browser and email client are okay, and can be share your PC’s connection via the USB cable if you’re too cheap to pay AT&T insane data rates. This is useful for caching messages with important information on the phone.
• The screen is sharp, bright, and readable.
• The “today” screen on the default home screen gives a good overview of calendars and tasks over the next day or two.
• It charges via a standard mini-USB cable.

The Cool, but not really all that important to me:

• It’ll take up to a 1 GB SD card, if you can find one actually shipping.
• It’ll play .WAV ringtones from the SD card with a bit of minor hacking.
• You can find an assortment of games and media players for the phone, plus emulators for most older video-game platforms.

The Bad:

• Battery life utterly sucks. With a SanDisk 256MB SD card, I’m now under 8 hours of standby time. This is unacceptable–I can’t even use the phone for an alarm clock at home without plugging it in. I was getting 2-3 days of standby time, but I think the SD card is killing me. I’ve swapped for a new battery without any success.
• The third-party PocketMac sync software just doesn’t work right, and their tech support is painfully slow.
• No bluetooth, and the included headset doesn’t really fit my ears right.

The verdict? I’m going to give PocketMac’s tech support a few more days, and I’m going to yell at AT&T’s support people, but if I can’t get the battery life back up to at least 24 hours with the SD card, and if I can’t get it to sync correctly at least part of the time, it’s going back to AT&T.

Update (1/28/04): I left the MPx200 overnight last night without its SD card, just to see if the SD card’s power draw was killing the phone. It was still dead in the morning, so the SD card isn’t guilty. I have one thing left to try, and then it’s headed back to AT&T.

Update (1/30/04): It’s toast.

Overnight, I was hit with 108 comment spams for Xenical from 66.36.249.149. Very irritating, especially since MT doesn’t have a good way to delete bulk spam. This spammer was kind of interesting–it looks like he was actually following the HTML from my archive pages, rather then blindly attacking /mt/mt-comments.cgi. That means that simply renaming the comment CGI probably wouldn’t have stopped this attack.

Here’s a chunk of the access log for those who are interested:

66.36.249.149 - - [23/Jan/2004:03:42:54 -0800] "GET /scott/archives/000001.html HTTP/1.0" 200 5368 "-" "http://@nonymouse.com/ (Unix)" 0 scottstuff.net
66.36.249.149 - - [23/Jan/2004:03:43:02 -0800] "POST /mt/mt-comments.cgi HTTP/1.0" 200 59 "-" "http://@nonymouse.com/ (Unix)" 3 scottstuff.net
66.36.249.149 - - [23/Jan/2004:03:43:05 -0800] "GET /scott/archives/000002.html HTTP/1.0" 404 220 "-" "http://@nonymouse.com/ (Unix)" 0 scottstuff.net
66.36.249.149 - - [23/Jan/2004:03:43:13 -0800] "GET /scott/archives/000003.html HTTP/1.0" 200 8678 "-" "http://@nonymouse.com/ (Unix)" 0 scottstuff.net
66.36.249.149 - - [23/Jan/2004:03:43:17 -0800] "POST /mt/mt-comments.cgi HTTP/1.0" 200 59 "-" "http://@nonymouse.com/ (Unix)" 0 scottstuff.net

Google suggests that ‘@nonymouse.com’ is an anonymizer, so the spammer was actually abusing two services, not just mine. Which also means that the IP address given isn’t very useful.

I’m not sure how best to handle this sort of thing in the future–I’ll try renaming mt-comments.cgi to something less obvious, and probably javascript-ify the comment link on my pages. That’s rude to the poor users without javascript enabled in their browser, but I don’t want to spend hours deleting spam again.

Longer-term, it’d be nice if MT added moderated comments, and a way to automatically change the open/moderated/closed status of entries after a set period of time. That way, new posts could have open comments, and then be auto-moderated after a week or two. That seems like a decent compromise to me, and it’s orthogonal to most of the other anti-blog-spam suggestions that I’ve seen.

Bastards.

Comments closed: bizarrely enough, this post gets more comment spam then any other page on my blog (and nearly more then all other pages), so I’ve closed comments.

It’s been a weird day, traffic-wise: MSN has decided that my simple mention of Paris Hilton referrer spam is good enough to make me their search engine love me–I’m number 18 on their list of sites when searching for “Paris Hilton Video.” I’ve had at least 55 different users today arrive from MSN’s search engine.

Update: Gack, Google’s at it now, too. I just got a hit from “paris hilton jpegs.” Except this one was from someone with too much time on their hands–I’m apparently on the 44th page of listings on Google.

Update 2: I’m now up to number 9 on MSN’s site. I’ll probably break 150 paris hilton hits today. It’s not a lot of traffic, but it’s just so bizarre that they’ve decided to send it my way.

So, a comparison of two computers:

Computer A is the Pentium 90 that I bought in 1994, and Computer B is my cell phone. Don’t you just love Moore’s Law?

It seems like there’s always something interesting lurking in web access logs, but actually finding the interesting bit is a pain in the neck. For instance, over the past day or so, I discovered that I was briefly the #1 Google listing for “andy serkis seattle” and that Lockergnome included me on their list of 2004 PDA predictions. I didn’t see that coming. Cool. My MPx200 notes have generated a bit more traffic then usual, too, and they’re only a day or so old. Searches for the Sony/Ericsson CAR-100 have finally slacked off; google was sending me piles of CAR-100 traffic for a while.

I’m seeing a bit of referrer spam, too–mostly for paris-hilton-video.blogspot.com. Either that, or they’ve linked to me somewhere that I can’t see, and that link has generated a dozen hits over the last month, all from different IP addresses in different countries.

The thing is, I spotted all of these trends manually, by running tail -f on the log files, and then grepping for interesting strings. None of the web log analyzers seems quite appropriate for blog traffic. And, interestingly enough, searching for “web log analyzer” in google hits way too many (web logs) on (analysis). If anyone has any suggestions or recommendations, feel free to leave a comment.

Now that the MPx200 review is out, I can move on to other phone stuff. I’ve been waiting for easy VoIP for years. I’ve watched free Linux server software like VOCAL and Asterisk develop, but I’ve never been able to get either to work (admittedly, it’s been a while). Similarly, I’ve never been able to get any of the free audio or video conferencing software to work well enough to actually be usable. Heck, even iChat usually has problems with my home firewall. I have high hopes for Vonage and the rest of their ilk, but they still only solve part of the problem. I don’t just want to replace my home POTS line with a VoIP converter box, I want to replace my nasty old phones with something more modern and workable. I want something that’ll sync with my address book. I want voice mail to show up in my email inbox. I want semi-integrated phone service, IM, and maybe even video conferencing, all using open, standard protocols. Killing the telcos is just step one.

I realized the other day that my little MPx200 cell phone is 95% of the way to being a perfect VoIP phone. I mean, it has a nice form-factor for a phone, a nice display, it already has all of my contact information, and so forth. The big issue is that it has poor network connectivity, but I could almost fix that with a 802.11 SD card (if Smartphone 2002 supported WiFi, and if there were drivers for the MPx200. And if I was willing to lose my SD slot and have an antenna sticking out of the side of my phone).

Bizarrely enough, Microsoft has been thinking the same thing. Microsoft Research is offering Portrait, a SIP client for PocketPC 2003 and Smartphone 2003 platforms. It looks like it’ll even do video conferencing. Of course, it’s not a real product–it’s a research tool–and while they claim that it’ll work with any SIP server, I doubt it’s ever been tested with non-Microsoft products. Still, it’s a nice start. If Motorola ever ships the rumored Smartphone 2003 upgrade for the MPx200, I’ll probably give it a try.

I doubt it’ll work, but they’ll get it right eventually. The first round of phones with 802.11 are supposed to show up this spring, so the hardware platform (and market!) will probably be ready by the end of 2004. I doubt that any of the US carriers will encourage this, so you’ll have two different numbers, one VoIP and one cellular, and you won’t be able to roam between the two, but you have to start somewhere.