Gizmodo covered an app for the i730: it's a status light java app, which amazingly isn't part of the default UI. The author, Michael Blake, related a total horror story via email about distribution, hassles with existing Nextel publishers, and nasty, lying pirates who have preyed on him and his app. Without OTA download, he's left with cobbling together his own DRM and security scheme, and stuck with putting in *way* too much effort to release what is fundamentally a simple solution for a simple problem.

Clive Thompson of Collision Detection notes the appearance of pro-Republican, RNC funded games --- or perhaps better described as anti-Kerry online games. I won't include a picture: they are so ass-ugly I would hate for someone to misconstrue them as my work.

 Maybe we could settle it all with a death match between Kerry and Bush -- hell, you can invite Nader -- for a 3 joystick arcade battle of Tron or something. No wait, I take that back. Bush must be practicing pretty hard for that on his numerous vacations.

Add this to the Christmas wish list -- Charmed Labs is selling a kit to extend the Game Boy Advance. Covered in the typical dry fashion over at Dr. Dobbs this month, it seems like a wonderful playground for low-cost, mini or embedded applications.

The GBA does has a bit of a following of developers working on homebrew projects with "limited" budgets.

Well, so much for that last post predicting Perry or Jones -- today the Patriots traded for Corey Dillon. Dillon is a powerful and fast back who has regularly put up big numbers for Cincinnati until this year -- and except for the very public and very vocal grousing about wanting out as a Bengal, would seem like a great fit for the Pats.

Curiously, the trade is on the heels of moves by the Eagles and Broncos, which has been speculated as positioning for drafting Jackson, and a strange arrest of Ty Law. Can't help but consider whether concern over Law's situation, either as trade-bait or his ability to play this season, affected the timing of the deal. In fact, it had been public for awhile that the Bengals wanted a second rounder for Dillon -- if Law isn't part of a planned trade, then perhaps the timing of the trade was merely to thwart the Raiders or Cowboys (other rumoured suitors for Dillon).

Dillon's arrival does close the door (I hope) on the 'curse' of Curtis Martin (also #28) to Parcells and Jets years ago. Martin was also a 30-ish back coming off his first major pro injury, and although the spin from the Bobby Grier NE personnel department was that he wouldn't be the same, Curtis went on to have four more great seasons. Drafting, then losing to devastating injury, Robert Edwards was merely a tease -- a karmic jab on the short downward pre-Belichick spiral.

Steven Jackson, the consensus top running back in the draft a week from now, is the subject of a considerable amount of buzz and rumours about his draft slot. From being projected as dropping into the last first round a few weeks ago, draftniks are now guessing that Denver's leap and Philly's leap this past week in the first round are due to jockeying for Jackson in the 16-20 range. Both need backs -- Denver losing Portis, and Philly losing Staley -- and other rumours suggesting even a top 10 slot.

 The Boston press is almost uniformly covering Jackson today, and it's a real wonder that with all of this buzz, across all the papers and sources, pushing up his perceived (at least public) value -- and he hasn't even picked an agent yet. Usually this fury is tied to an agent's weasley action...

 I think the odds are Greg Jones or Chris Perry -- without climbing up. There you go: I'm on the record. San Diego is on the clock.

From the President's press conference:

Reporter: In the last campaign, you were asked a question about the biggest mistake you'd made in your life, and you used to like to joke that it was trading Sammy Sosa.

You've looked back before 9-11 for what mistakes might have been made. After 9-11, what would your biggest mistake be, would you say, and what lessons have learned from it?


President Bush: I wish you'd have given me this written question ahead of time so I could plan for it.


John, I'm sure historians will look back and say, gosh, he could've done it better this way or that way. You know, I just — I'm sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference, with all the pressure of trying to come up with answer, but it hadn't yet.

From boingboing, a student project that uses hamsters to trigger a happy little midi-ditty, with pictures, soundfiles, and a detailed review.


Very cool. Not just fun with rodents, but a commentary on the automatic nature of composing music in our super-tech era of music.

From the Fierce Wireless newsletter,
Symbian's David Wood paints a wonderful picture of a mobile phone open standards movement.


This first bit doesn't sound unlike the old standy "Write Once, Run Everywhere":

"The real power of open phones arises when the third party experimentation that is carried out for add-on services on one phone can be re-used for add-on services on other phones. This allows an enormous third party development ecosystem to form. These third parties are no longer tied to the fortunes of any one phone, or any one phone manufacturer. Moreover, applications that start their lives as add-ons for one phone, can be incorporated at time of manufacture in subsequent phones, including phones by other manufacturers. "

"The degree of success of an open phone platform is closely linked to the degree to which the functionality of all lower levels of the software and hardware stacks in a phone can be accessed, modified, and augmented by add-on software and hardware. Java makes a good start. MIDP v1 allows modest access by add-on MIDlets to phone functionality, and MIDP v2 takes the situation further. However, for the foreseeable future, a native programming language such as C++ will remain the best way to access many of the lower level or deeper aspects of the on-board functionality. Native programming interfaces greatly multiply the overall opportunity." (emphasis added)

And here is where the rubber meets the road.

Symbian is undoubtedly the best OS for the phone. All others are either too dumb and simplistic -- like an overzealous LED display -- or overblown (MS Phone). Features, ease of use, years of experience in the field, have got Symbian years ahead of the competition in terms of pure quality, stability and ease of use.


Symbian should take page from their foe in Microsoft -- and work very aggressively to make Symbian the defacto OS on phones. Indeed, this is the implicit message in Wood's article. Remember when your computer was either an Apple or a IBM PC compatible? It's not an IBM PC compatible anymore -- it's either a Dell or Gateway or Compaq -- or more often referred to by OS, simple "XP" or "Windows 2000". Give the licenses away for free to handset manufacturers, but brand the phone with an "Symbian Inside" strategy...make sure that consumers realize that it's not Nokia that makes the phones great (although there are many aspects of their hardware that are great), but the OS itself. When a consumer buys a PC, they check to see what OS comes installed. When you buy a phone, you're really just guessing -- figure that you'll have to suffer through a night of reading the tiny manual to figure out how to get your phonebook to work again.


Oh, and the other strategy from Microsoft that Symbian needs to look at? The famous Ballmer scream: "Developers, developers, developers". Wood says "...for the foreseeable future, a native programming language such as C++ will remain the best way..." This makes me cringe. What forseeable future? Does this signal a unwavering stance on C++ as the Symbian development environ? No commitment to an abstraction layer, java or otherwise, that could more easily enable the open standards noted earlier? Or towards anything -- like VB, Hypercard, whatever -- that would allow a widening of the developer base?


Symbian IDEs and compilers that will work for C++ will still require upfront investment, both in terms of buying software and a Symbian specific learning curve. Legions of geeks and developers with more time between classes and late night Playstation sessions are going to get energized by toolsets and emulators they can download and use for free, not by slogging through a horrible Borland IDE.


Of course, I'm biased. I think that the open standard is here -- J2ME and PJava. Symbian does play ball with Java, but as a VM it lives on top of their OS, and lives quite nicely upon other OS's as well. Symbian is heads-and-shoulders above the rest -- and throwing their entire weight behind a full, robust java support and access to onboard functionality wouldn't strengthen rivals as much as continue to propel Symbian to the center of the ecosystem of openness he describes.

I can't stand Jakob Nielsen. I'll have to go into why some other day. But he did write a good article on his site covering a study about why listening to people talk on their cellphones is so annoying, mistitled "Why Cell Phones are Annoying". Not to sound too much like the NRA, but cellphones aren't annoying, it's the people that use them.

 Most of the results are pretty obvious, including "people pay more attention when they hear only half a conversation" and "It's apparently easier to tune out the continuous drone of a complete conversation." But, in typical Nielsen Listen To Me fashion, he says "If mobile-phone vendors want to avoid a backlash against their products, they're well advised to heed these findings and launch a major effort to make mobile phones less irritating to bystanders." By what? Selling them to mute chimps? By rolling out that brain-wave reader feature? People talk on cellphones, doofus.

The New Scientist is reporting (and the blogosphere is resonating) about software that scans an existing database of images to define your location. Claims are made about it's superiority to define orientation and a level of detail that surpasses GPS. Man, if you need to launch an app to talk to a huge database to figure out if you're facing left or right or north or south, instead of being able to read a map, then....well...you're probably too dumb to figure out how to use the freakin' tool. Or a robot.

Otis Smith returns to the Patriots in what continues to be a seemingly humdrum offseason of loading up on veterans. This roster is all about depth -- including a solid showing in Europe by Rohan Davey.

 There's much buzz in Patriot Nation that Otis could play free safety, allowing Wilson to return to corner. Or that Otis is part of a masterplan to ship out Ty Law. I think it's simpler than that at this point. A still solid, trusted vet to play it out in training camp. Nothing will surprise me -- getting cut in camp, to being a starter for #45.


 Felger has it right this morning, Otis isn't part of some big master plan, but a part of the machinery going into camp. Just like the Mike Cloud signing.

Been thinking about Nixon a lot recently. Not just the John Dean comment about corruption in W's Whitehouse, but comments by the likes of Pat Buchanan that makes you realize that even the Nixonians see the current regime as too extreme.
 But, take it one step further, and Scalia is now in the middle of a tape-erasing fiasco (when will we stop calling it "tape" I wonder?). And he's getting to be a jowly fellow, too. Almost looks like Nixon, but without the little button nose. This is the man who picked our President, and is holding-up (not upholding) the Constitution. It's 1972 all over again. Not to mention the sound of Phoebe Snow and John Sebastian wafting through the wet air.

Mark from Boing Boing has a new article on The Feature about Trip Hawkins' new mobile game company, Digital Chocolate. Details are light, but I do like the idea of a working metronome on your cellphone. But, geez, with that much financing, can't the develop a tiny DSP chip that will turn your cellphone into a guitar tuner, too? Time will tell.
 It's a good thing, of course, to see more energy in the mobile space for games and applications. Hawkins' considerable industry presence will only help everyone.

Tom Curran of the Providence Journal has a great interview (via cellphone in the car, geez Tom, if you get Coach in an accident, I swear...) about how the Patriots approach the draft. It's been said from a lot of quarters that the Pats really spend the time and money on good scouting, and it seems to have paid off in recent years. Curran writes:

"Great. Not more than 90 seconds into explaining the process and already we had to ask for clarification on some of the terms he was using. But Belichick's a pretty patient guy when it comes to explanations. So we opted to ask the question and run the risk of looking like a moron instead of writing a poorly reported story that would remove all doubt."

Funny -- a couple of Super Bowl Championships takes the edge off -- can't imagine anyone calling Belichick "a pretty patient" guy a few years back.