DiPot: Ice Tea tech » Opinion

WM, Android, or, maybe, a Maemo smartphone?

ageor — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 11:13:11 +0000

I am a long time user of Windows CE, Pocket PC and lately Windows Mobile devices. I am no fan of Microsoft’s. However, I have always thought their mobile OS, although not always the best and, certainly not open, it was a step in the right direction with decent devices and plenty of software.

It’s time for a new smartphone. I admit habits die hard and this is the first time since 2000 I am actually considering changing mobile platform. Not because touchscreens were “non-existent” before multi-touch, as Apple fans would put it, but because Microsoft has, or is close to managing what seemed impossible: lose in the software availability arena. Most new mobile applications for new Web 2 needs are created for the iPhone and Android first and for Blackberry and WM later.

Microsoft clearly failed to recognize the mobile devices market trends in time and doesn’t even seem to do anything serious about it. WM updates are drugged by hardware and other developments and are nothing to write home about. Devices are still best-of-breed, thanks to HTC and others, but this can’t be credited to MS.

So, these are the lists for and against staying with WM:

Stay with WM

10 years of usage (habit)
It does work, most of the time
I have almost all the applications I need
MS Outlook synchronization. What about Outlook synchronization with Android? Android Market’s web interface is bad to useless. It’s a Google product with no search!
HTC HD2

Leave WM

WM is not open. Android or Maemo would be candidates as open platforms
Most hip programs and services are first available on other platforms. Android is the only candidate here as the iPhone is closed, regulated and not the best hardware around
All else being equal, open platforms are also hosted by cheaper devices

Any thoughts would be appreciated!

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Ning Greek Localization Error in Translation

ageor — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 11:26:43 +0000

I am a user of two Ning networks and I think it’s a great product-service!

Localizing everything can some times be a waste of effort. In other cases, localization (ie. of an infrastructure) can be well worth its while. Ning is such a case. In terms of multilanguage support prolepsis, as english is a simpler language than greek and others, building localization mechanisms is no easy task and translation can be tricky…

The case in point is four terms in Ning Forum’s messages greek translation. When Forum conversations grow long, pagination is introduced at the bottom of the page with the english messages “First”, “Previous”, “Next”, “Last”. The greek terms used for these messages are “Όνομα” (”honoma”), “Προηγούμενο” (”proeghumeno”, in Ning notation, where “h” shows where the word is stressed), “Επόμενο” (”ephomeno”), “Επώνυμο” (”ephonymo”) respectively. However:

“Όνομα” is greek for “First Name”, not “First Page”. The correct term would be “Πρώτη” (”prhoti”, “first in order”)
“Προηγούμενο” and “Επόμενο” are basically correct. In greek, however, adjectives have a gender. In this case the term refers to a page, which is “η σελίδα” in greek and has a she-gender. Therefore, the correct terms are “Προηγούμενη” (”proeghumeni”) and “Επόμενη” (”ephomeni”) respectively
“Επώνυμο” is greek for “Last Name” (or “Surname”), not “Last Page”. The correct term would be “Τελευταία” (”telefthea”, “last in order”)

Ning first-last messages in english

Ning first-last messages in greek (translation error)

Thanks, Ning, for allowing us to built our own social networks. Please keep improving!

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PeopleBrowsr: The Multi-Social-Networks Client Pros, Cons & Wishlist

ageor — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 20:42:43 +0000

PeopleBrowsr is an excellent multi social networks client. Although still in Beta RC 1.5, it is very rich in features and often leads the way for dedicated clients. On the flip side, it has a number of issues that prevent it from being the hands down client of choice, nor a one stop shop for the networks it supports. All comments are about the Air version of PeopleBrowsr, running under Windows XP SP3, although most are valid for the PeopleBrowsr web version as well.

Pros

The PeopleBrowsr people listen and respond
Multiple Stacks
Very Strong Search
Multiple networks support (alphabetically): Bitly, Digg, Facebook, Flickr, FriendFeed, Identica, LinkedIn, MySpace, Photobucket, PingFM, Plaxo, Seesmic, Trim, Twitter, Webpage, YouTube etc.
Multiple accounts on each supported network
Both a Web and an Adobe Air version
An impressive list of Options in Settings, including but not limited to:
- Auto refresh rate in seconds
- Auto sync Following/Followers
- Auto Refresh
- Show real names
- Show Location
- Persistent Stacks compression for more information in the same space (Stacks can be individually set to be compressed or not, but the setting is not saved when the session ends)
- Show absolute times instead of how long ago posts were posted
- Added value among PB users
Combination Stacks like DM+Replies+Stacks for Twitter
PB Groups can contain accounts from different networks, thus not becoming obsolete after Twitter introduced Lists
Color-coding and custom names for Stacks
Twitter threads (when available)
Posts can be delayed, repeated and post on multiple networks at once

Wishlist & Shortcomings

Trim down the top

PeopleBrowsr top part

The top “Post”, “Search”, PBIDboxes, PBExpet and Logout boxes/buttons/choices are too wide and actually takes a 1030pixels wide window for it to display properly! When narrower than that, the Search box goes down and sits on top of these stacks’ titles. Very annoying.

Improve non-latin text support: Sometimes Greek, Cyrillic etc. text decoding fails to display properly
Keep Twitter Lists up to date: My lists seem to have been read once and have not been updated since
Keep FriendFeed Lists and Groups up to date: They seem to have been read once and have not been updated since
Friendfeed Lists and Groups cannot be managed at all
Improve the Twitter Lists and PB Groups manager: As it is, it leaves a lot to be desired; see the “Twitter Lists Support: Management Status & Optimization Wishlist” post
Fix the “Font Size” setting to work in both the Stacks and, while it used to work properly, now (v1.5) only sets the Quickstrip’s font size and is not persistent between sessions
Improve the memory management: PB keeps allocating more memory while running, eventually bringing any system down on its knees
Fix program exit: When I close PB Air, it remains resident withholding large amounts of RAM & virtual memory and can’t start again until its previous process is killed
Prefill #hashtags and all @twitterers in replies
Add a “delete post” feature
Update the database when posts are deleted from other clients, so deleted entries do not keep showing
Support OpenID

I like PeopleBrowsr; a lot! And I’m impressed with the work done so far. Which is why I expect even more from the development team

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Twitter Lists Support: Management Status & Optimization Wishlist

ageor — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 12:31:52 +0000

I follow 2001 Twitter accounts (the limit Twitter inexplicably imposes for my number of followers). I have created some Twitter Lists and added some accounts in them, usually as I come across them. Twitter’s web interface leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to Lists management, so, this is a slow, painful process. I had also created groups in PeopleBrowsr, TweetDeck and PockeTwit. Having done part of the work to organize those I follow in Groups and Lists in a chaotic manner over time, I now wish for an easy way to bulk organize everything in Twitter Lists and be done with it. I wish for a Lists Manager that will let me optimize the process. While searching for it, I came across the following facts (please note that this is by no means a thorough survey; I just went through the clients I know of and use):

Clients that support Twitter Lists
- Seesmic for Windows now offers read only support
- SocialWhale offers read and add support on a per user basis, like Twitter
- PeopleBrowsr initially offered read only support and now also supports additions
- TweetDeck was the last to market but offers the best support so far, including read, easily add and export of its own Groups to Twitter Lists
Export the application’s Groups to Twitter Lists
- SocialWhale asks users to import their preexisting Groups to Lists at login
- TwitDeck fully supports copying Groups to Lists
- PeopleBrowsr initially did the opposite; it copied Twitter Lists to PB Groups. It does not do it in the right direction
Bulk-add accounts to Twitter Lists
- Twitdeck shows a selected Group, List or the complete list of followed accounts and allows to multiple-select-and-import any account from all friends, TweetDeck’s own Groups or Twitter Lists to a Twitter List
- PeopleBrowsr shows 16 accounts already in the Group or Twitter List with an “x” next to each one for one-by-one removal. To add an account to the List, one needs to manually type (part of) the names one by one and can’t bulk select them from a full list or PB’s own Groups
Applications’ own Groups vs. Twitter Lists management tools
- Oddly enough, both TwitDeck and PeopleBrowsr have different Managers for their own Groups and for Twitter List

The winner, so far, is TwitDeck; hands down. The race is not over, though and neither is my work, as I still have the PeopleBrowsr and PockeTwit groups to convert to Twitter Lists. So, I am waiting for them to add a competitive Lists Manager that not just gets the job done, it also removes some of the pain that goes with it. Some optimization suggestions to that extend:

Show the avatar, full name, site’s URL, following and followers along with account names

Long lists are difficult to handle just by a nick name.

Make the list auto resizing with the size of the window

The more the information available, the faster and easier the process.

Make it reliable and responsive

PeopleBrowsr often shows me a partial list of Twitter Lists and TwitDeck sometimes retries and fails to add accounts to Twitter Lists.

With Christmas and New Year around the corner, it’s a good time for wishes to come true… Meanwhile, I will update this post will any relevant information I come across, so check back.

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Twitter: Unable to follow more people (following 2000 limit)

ageor — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 14:47:59 +0000

Twitter has never been my favorite, especially compared to FriendFeed, but I can’t overlook the valuable community built around it. Lists have just made it much better, but there’s still no decent way to manage them that I know of and they come with limitations of their own.

Twitter: You are unable to follow more people at this time. Learn more here.

Plus, I have just ran into the inexplicable “You are unable to follow more people at this time. Learn more here.” pop-up, only to discover there is a 2000 follows limit! From http://help.twitter.com/forums/10711/entries/68916:

“…

What are the limits?

We don’t limit the number of followers you can have. However, we do monitor how aggressively users follow other users. We try to make sure that none of our limits restrain reasonable usage, and will not affect most Twitter users.

We monitor all accounts for aggressive following and follow churn (repeatedly following and un-following large numbers of other users). You can read more about these below, but if you don’t follow or un-follow hundreds of users in a single day, and you aren’t using automated methods of following users, you should be fine. Please note that the only automated following behavior that Twitter allows is auto-follow-back (following a user after they have followed you). Automated un-following is also not permitted. Please review our Automation Rules & Best Practices for more information on automating your account.

…

Additional limits if you are following 2000 or more people:
The rules about aggressive following and follow churn still apply. In addition, every user can follow 2000 people total. Once you’ve followed 2000 users, there are limits to the number of additional users you can follow: this limit is different for every user and is based on your ratio of followers to following. When you hit this limit, we’ll tell you by showing an error message in your browser. You’ll need to wait until you have more followers in order to follow more users—basically, you can’t follow 10,000 people if only 100 people follow you. When you reach a daily or total limit and we show you an error message, you’ve hit a technical limit imposed to limit egregious behavior by spam accounts and to prevent strain on the site. These are just the technical limits for your account; in addition, you are prohibited from aggressive following behaviors. These behaviors may result in account suspension, regardless of your account’s technical ratio.

Limits improve site performance by ensuring that when we send a person’s message to all of their followers, the sending of that message is meaningful. Follow limits cannot be lifted by Twitter, and everyone is subject to them, including verified and developer accounts. Based on current behavior in the Twitter community, we’ve concluded that this is both fair and reasonable.

…”

For the record, my behavior has never fallen into anything described in Twitter’s Following Limits and Best Practices page, except for trying to cross the 2000 limit. It turns out that “… this limit is different for every user and is based on your ratio of followers to following …”. It seems this ratio is a big secret, although online sources like @JanSimpson and “Using Twitter” give it a value around 1.1. Limits seem to be the approach of choice for Twitter to keep their service running. They have another one: you can only have up to 20 Lists, which, of course, you discover only when you try to create the 21st!

I am not happy with adhoc limits, particularly undocumented ones. The 2000 limit is both hidden and its mechanism undocumented by Twitter. Look it up and find that “basically, you can’t follow 10,000 people if only 100 people follow you”; hardly indicative of the ~1.1 actual ratio. Why? They claim this is to prevent spam and overload! Spam, though, can be measured with any number of real (and, preferably, documented) criteria…

I say, Twitter just can’t handle the volume. Arbitrary limits may give easy short-term solutions. Then, what? In the mean time, I have to decide weather to start unfollowing good people, try to “Get More Followers Fast” (oops, this is against the rules), try to get more followers slow (wait, “Remember, Twitter isn’t a race to get the most followers”), leave it be, or quit Twitter and concentrate on FriendFeed. Or put new people in an “over 2000″ List…

Did I mention how disappointed I am and how alienated I feel?

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PCs and the Internet: Addiction Magnets or just Tools?

ageor — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 20:44:38 +0000

The traditional Media (at least in Greece, where I live) don’t treat computing nor the Internet right. I don’t know if it’s because of ignorance or because they feel threatened by it. However, I do get the impression that, most of the time, when radio, TV or the press mention PCs and/or the Internet it’s because of a child pornography site, computer fraud or how young people are getting addicted to it.

According to WikiPedia’s “Addiction” article: “… The term addiction is also sometimes applied to compulsions that are not substance-related, such as problem gambling and computer addiction. In these kinds of common usages, the term addiction is used to describe a recurring compulsion by an individual to engage in some specific activity, despite harmful consequences, as deemed by the user him self to his or hers individual’s health, mental state or social life. …”.

I’ve had various discussions with intelligent people who are not well acquainted to computers nor the Internet and they express concerns about its use and hidden dangers in it, especially if they are parents. The concern that “kids, teenagers or people who use their, usually networked, PC for long hours are addicted” is overrated and exaggerated.

From Wikipedia’s “Internet addiction disorder” article: “… To the extent that the Internet is a social medium instead of an object, people cannot be addicted to it. The analogy is made to an environment: a person can not be truly addicted to living in a favorite town (no matter how distressing a change of home might be), and a goldfish can not be addicted to living in a pond.
Secondly, it is widely recognized, even by its supporters, that most if not all “Internet addicts” already fall under existing, legitimate diagnostic labels. For many patients, overuse or inappropriate use of the Internet is merely a manifestation of their depression, anxiety, impulse control disorders, or pathological gambling. In this criticism, IAD is compared to food addiction, in which patients overeat as a form of self-medication for depression, anxiety, etc., without actually being truly addicted to eating.
It is possible that a person could have a pathological relationship with a specific aspects of the Internet, such as bidding on online auctions, viewing pornography, online gaming, or online gambling (which is included under the existing Pathological Gambling), but that does not make the Internet medium itself be addictive. …”.

People spending way too much time “in” the Internet is a misconception dated back to the time we needed to dial-in to the Internet. While connected to the Net over telephone lines the meter was running, hence the need to make the most out of it. Broadband has changed this. We are now “online” all the time for a flat rate, or, at worst, for a pay-as-you-go rate (especially true in cellular telephony). In these early days, we got online specifically to use the Internet, mainly use email, surf the Web and, if advanced enough, to do some instant messaging and e-shopping.

Today, thanks, in part, to digital convergence and the computer becoming a consumer item, we have one PC each instead of one per office or home and we do online pretty much anything we did before the Internet existed at all. Thanks to broadband, the phrase “I am connected” doesn’t mean much any more, because we are online whether we actually make use of the Net or not. Sometimes we are practically online and we don’t even realize it (most high end cellular phones are a click away from the Internet)! We have blended it in our everyday life like the telephone, the radio, the TV, the newspaper, the typewriter, the tape recorder etc. before it.

Except for physical activities (debatable; have you tried Nintendo Wii Fit?), computers, possibly connected to the Internet, are used today for prety much everything else. Today, even more than in the earlier days, neither computing nor using the Internet are activities by themselves. They are just enablers for countless individual activities (the following is by no means a complete list, or in any particular order):

Reading, Watching, Listening to Multimedia Documents
Reading, Watching and Listening to our own or others’ material includes art, essays, news, books (electronic and audio), presentations, schematics, photos, music, videos, radio & TV broadcasts, podcasts, etc. or any combination of those and more.
Research
Whether it is scientific or market research, online computers are the tools behind it that collect, store, index, process, search, retrieve, distribute and present all the information and data in ways limited only by imagination.
Multimedia Documents Creation
Most (or all?) of this so-called “content” we can view, we can also create ourselves for us and others to view or use.
Communication & Social Networking
Email, Instant Messaging (IM), VoIP telephony, Video calls, Audio & Video Conferencing are just some types of online communication. Social Networking helps keep in touch with lots of people. Additionally, (micro)Blogging and RSS feeds help us get input from and address potentially unlimited content creators and audience, respectively.
Recreation & Games
Physical activity aside, electronic editions of traditional board games represent only a small fraction of the games we can play with practically unlimited human or computer opponents from around the globe.

It’s not my intention to prove how good technology is; there may be issues in all applications that leave room for discussion. I am trying to raise awareness to the fact that computer and Internet usage cannot be measured as an activity on their own, as they are not. They represent the sum of all their individual uses. Of course (networked) computing (possibly as life itself) is a platform where addictions can occur. Like all drugs are not inherently addictive, nor is technology, computing or the Internet. Still, ‘… With the widespread use of computers in the 21st century, it may be difficult to distinguish users who are “highly engaged” in their computer use from those who might be considered “addicted”. …’ (from Wikipedia’s “Computer addiction” article).

Diversity and multiple activities & interests have always been factors against addictions. Having a tools combination like a computer networked to the all-inclusive Internet actually promotes diversity. Let’s do so, too.

PS. There are studies indicating computer and internet “addiction” or “overuse”. At this point (and I am no expert), I believe many people use or overuse them like they do with any new, shiny toy. Once they both become commonplace, like the telephone and television did, any “related” addiction will be easily traced to the pre-technology causes.

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Apologies for last days’ posts flood

ageor — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 00:17:04 +0000

I apologize for the flood of links of the past few days.

I have been trying to implement Yet Another Autoblogger to bring my Delicious and StumbleUpon bookmarks in WordPress-based Ice Tea tech. It seems that, while everything finally worked fine with Delicious, StumbleUpon kept returning the same posts over and over to Autoblogger causing a flood in the blog itself and to its RSS feed, FriendFeed & Twitter by extension.

I stopped using StumbleUpon a while ago, because it didn’t support greek-encoded titles. It seems there is also an issue between its feed and Autoblogger. So, at least for the time being, I removed it, which is not that much of a problem, as I don’t post there any more.

Sorry about that, I’ll try to contain such incidents in the future. Thank you all for your patience and especially @Sotomi, @Cybereddie, @Chriiiiis, @Botchagalupe, @Alexnewbee, @Skoroneos, @Jimeh, @Vtripolitakis, @Spdd and those I may have missed for taking the time to notify me about it.

In an attempt to minimize the impact, I erased all the Ice Tea tech feed (with posts) from FriendFeed (I don’t know how to bulk-erase the relevant twits, any ideas?). The sideffect is that, as I am about to recreate the feed in FriendFeed, multiple blog and bookmark posts will appear at once, possibly in Twitter as well. Please forgive me, hopefully it will be the end of this annoyance.

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News Reading Thoughts

ageor — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 16:46:27 +0000

I never have enough of a good thing. The first time I read the online edition of a magazine I immediately wished for a filtered edition which would only contain the articles of my choice. When Greek Naftemporiki newspaper’s online-edition provided filtered, personalized content, I immediately wished for a method to push the content to me, instead of going around the sites and soon after that RSS appeared (what I like about technology; it always catches up).

Now RSS is commonplace. Filters increase, but the implementations are still early and immature. For example, except for Google and similar sites, filters usually apply to a single site; that of the content source (like http://naftemporiki.gr -only in greek). RSS makes it easy to gather information from multiple sources to the feed reader of choice, but by itself provides no filtering in the source, except in the form of multiple feeds. So, where should filtering apply?

The tools have been expanding and improving. From the days of raw content we now have search, filtering, RSS and a multitude of clients to put them to good use. I tried the very good BlogBridge for a while for its keyword-based virtual feeds (thanks, karagos, for suggesting it). It being offline and other problems I had (bad greek support and hitting the 600 feeds limit of the free edition while not convinced to buy yet) made me return to Google Reader. Regardless of reader, my everyday struggle to get and keep informed about the news and my interests has been getting very time-consuming, mainly due to increasing volume (never have enough of a good thing, remember?).

How many sources and how many pieces of news and info am I talking about? A quick count showed around 2800 items from my (ever expanding collection of) ~750 subscriptions in Google Reader in the last 12 hours. This includes my ~450 FriendFeed subcriptions feed, but not my ~900 people Twitter feed (strangely, only a small count of the tweets I follow make it to the RSS feed). Thankfully, a good portion of the tweets make it to FFd as well (although I fear not all FFd posts make it to the RSS feed, either). At this rate of incomings, it takes me 10-20′/h to browse everything, read and microblog about whatever catches my eye.

This is way too much time. In practice, I browse some of the titles when there’s time and only read the interesting items among them. I do use the Google Reader Filter GreaseMonkey script to highlight items containing an increasing number (~100, so far) of keywords and it is helpfull. But the real problem is with the multiple sharing of the same (great) URLs in FriendFeed, which in turn produce multiple different (as they come from different users) items in Google Reader. Those are not caught by the script’s “hide duplicates” option.

So, for the time being, I consider avoiding duplication my #1 goal for increasing my news-reading productivity. I hope Friendfeed will listen and convert duplicate link posts to likes or comments of the first such post. This would also result in a major added benefit: aggregating all the relevant discussions in one thread, as discussed here. I find it so important, I even requested Robert Scoble to lobby for this here (I guess it’s impossible to read everything, even for him)!

#2 goal is to reduce sources that produce similar content, like press releases etc. Google News does well about it but doesn’t track all the sites I do. Mechanisms of bookmarking sites like Delicious might also help, as they keep URL scoring. While I work on a plan, I’ll stick to goal #1. Please join!

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Which Service should a Post go to?

ageor — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 17:21:55 +0000

I have been trying to organize/visualize the way I post, be it blogging, a comment on FriendFeed, an interesting link a came across etc. During the time it took me to complete the flowchart, more services were added as sources or carriers of my posts. As a result, the chart got more complex than originally anticipated. Interestingly enough, there is a pattern and the flowchart works for me most of the time.

Also get the Posting Flowchart as built in Dia (hence the crudeness), for your own use. So, there it is:

Posting Flowchart

Please do comment. Is posting a one-way street for you? Are there any general rules or do you post on a case by case basis?

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Athens Startup Weekend 2008

ageor — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 07:53:30 +0000

First things first. I told them all in person and I’m saying it here as well. Special thanks go to Andrew Hyde, the mind behind Startup Weekends, Alexandros Pagidas, the person who brought it in Athens, Patrick Malone, our host in Microsoft Innovation Center venue (Patrick and Lydia, you definitely improved Microsoft’s image for all of us), the sponsors of the event (Domino’s, Loumidis, Coca Cola-3E, Wind; hopefully I am not forgetting anyone) and all the professionals who dropped in to give us a hand. I won’t go into the event itself. Others have already done that; follow the event’s site and the links all over this post for that.

In danger of giving the feeling of repetition to readers of other relevant posts, I’ll say it: Athens Startup Weekend was a successful event and proved several points (Greeks can actually work together without shouting or arguing all the time, previous acquaintance is not important, teams can form without guidance or many introductions etc.). Plus, it produced and set off a number of ideas that can eventually work.

Andrew mentioned that Startup Weekends are not meant to create viable startups over the weekend but, rather, form a community among the participants. In a private conversation he said only 4 such startups were created in Startup Weekend history so far (unfortunately I didn’t get the names). The event is meant to prove that people who didn’t know each other before can sit around the same table, share and expand on an idea and make the most out of it in a very short time-frame. The important thing is not the idea, but that these people can work together, add their talents to a cause and produce a combined result that’s greater than the sum of their individual strengths. At the end of the day, these people become potential partners/collaborators in these very same or other promising projects.

The event put the best out of us all. We expressed our opinions and discussed difficult matters (we sometimes knew nothing about) in a civil, productive manner. We all got out of there with some fresh ideas, some new potential friends and partners, the knowledge that talented, cooperative people are there waiting to be found and great accomplishments are so much closer than expected. Indeed, 10 great projects were born.

I consider myself privileged to have been a part of it and hope the event does go annual so we can experience it again.

Here are a few additional relative links (no particular order; I’ll be happy to add links I’ve missed):

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The Google Android Platform

ageor — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 15:47:52 +0000

I read about Open Handset Alliance’s Android platform and cellular phones with great interest. The web is full of specs, reviews, comparisons and the like. I just can’t help but share the following thoughts:

Sometimes it seems Google’s Android is the second touch screen platform after Apple’s iPhone

I can’t understand why Android-based HTC G1 and other touch devices are automatically compared to the iPhone. Yes, it is a great looking device. It has a great touch screen. And that’s where innovation ends and limitations begin.

Great as the iPhone may (or not) be, it’s not clearly and objectively superior to Microsoft’s Windows Mobile devices hardware-, software- nor appearance-wise. Plus, Windows (Mobile and its previous incarnations) has been, so far, dominant in the touch arena. So, how come the iPhone (a new comer with plenty of flaws of its own) is the ad hoc point of reference? And how come all Windows Mobile’s long-standing features (touch screen, great sofware library, multitasking) are rarely mentioned?

Android, anyone? Sure, on what hardware?

Maybe I understand a new platform like Android needs to come with new hardware for psychological (marketing) reasons. Now that’s over and done with, why not introduce Android for old and new hardware? Wasn’t one of Linux’s advantages better performance on old PCs? I’m sure I would love to run Android on my current Windows Mobile Phone but I fear this won’t happen any day soon, if at all. How about selling the HTC Touch HD (my favorite, in the absence of an Android phone with no hardware keyboard. With a camera flash, please) with a choice between Android and Windows Mobile? Better yet, sell it able to dual-boot both platforms? I would buy it right now. Now this is not so, I just have to wait and I am not happy about it at all.

Consider how nice it would be to compare different platforms’ sales and performance on the same hardware (isn’t that what Apple avoids at all cost on the PC market?)! How different the HTC G1 is from the Touch HD or any other current model?

It is my prediction that we will see Android and Windows Mobile running on the same hardware not later than 2009. And this will be the start of a new era on the “choice” and “objective comparison” fronts.

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NAS for shared storage

ageor — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 11:46:56 +0000

I have been hooked on the idea of NAS (Network Attached Storage) since around 2000, when I first read about it. Of course, capacities and costs back then were out of this world.

Today I installed an Infrant Technologies ReadyNAS NV+ with 4 Seagate ST3500630AS Barracuda 500GB SATA2 hot-swappable hard disks and 1 gigabit ethernet port. For a total cost around 1.400â‚¬, I got a 3-disk RAID5 configuration with 875 usable GB and a hot-spare disk. In plain english, 2 disks have to fail before any data is lost.

I preferred the Infrant (now owned by Netgear) solution to the much cheaper (~900â‚¬) 2 gigabit Ethernet Intel Entry Storage System SS4000-E, (also with 4 500GB SATA2 disks) for its Active Directory support. However, apart from increased peace of mind (thanks to the hot-spare) the NV+ offers some nice built-in backup and media streaming features, in addition to the 3 USB ports with support for a UPS, printers, flash and USB disks.

I am fairly sure that NAS is the way to go for shared storage. With LAN speeds, disk capacities, users and uses increasing at a hectic pace NAS is cheap (starting at <200â‚¬), scalable and very easy to setup. Please note I am not referring to server applications storage; that’s a different, much more expensive, story.