I’m extremely excited about Better Place.  Read their site. Get involved.  We need a global conversion to alternative energy powered transportation.  Better Place has the plan to do that, and is rolling out beta countries. Check them out.

I spoke with a good friend of mine for a bit, and we ruminated on the new mobileme service from Apple and it’s integration with the iPhone.  Given the processing power, storage, connectivity and portability of this device (particularly the new 3g version) it begs the question: what exactly do I need a computer for?

Apple would answer, “well, to make that iPhone work”.  You can’t update software, sync non-itunes purchased songs and media, or otherwise pimp up your iPhone without a computer to slave it into.  I think the app store, and the SDK-developed software that it will support will resolve these issues rapidly.  The biggest issue is one of interface.

The real need is screen realestate.  eeePC is proving that horsepower isn’t the driver for technology investment, that portability is.  I suspect that Apple, or a coordinating partner, will rapidly release a dock for your iPhone with the obvious usb ports for keyboard and mouse, but revolutionarily an internal video card (ala the targus usb docks or matrox firewire external display boxes) that will allow you to run a screen.

Apple has already patented (saw this on apple insider) a monitor-as-dock system where a tablet or (suspected at the time) macbook  air could slide in the side to dock, and leverage increased screen realestate.  The only extension to this is the technical hurdle of driving a display via USB rather than the MBA’s internal video processor.

Perhaps the better solution is improving the internal video processor in the iPhone to support external resolutions.  I would suspect that performance wouldn’t be the issue (forget 3D, altho Nvidia’s recent releases are driving on this point) it’s more about being able to support BIG pixel realestate.

What system already does this?  AppleTV.  We’ve seen AppleTV mockups with docks in the top for iPods.  The AppleTV is basically just a video card in a box.  Do I have to spell it out Apple devs?  Make this happen and free us from our desks and our laps!

Apple just had a pretty fantastic keynote; Macbook Air, iPhone updates, iPod Touch that isn’t gimped anymore.. wonderful. The product that really stood out to me as meeting a long term need however was the Time Capsule.  I don’t know about anyone else out there, but backups are annoying.  However, i’m in an evenworse lot.I’ve got Family.Yes, i’m the family nerd.  I made the first step towards reducing total strange calls in the middle of the day or night about error messages and wireless networking by getting everyone to buy cute little white macbooks.  Marvelous!  However, backup remains a looming concern.I’ll buy a Time Capusule, just for me.  But if it can backup over the WAN port, backup over the internet, now then it’s a Family solution. Plus, as a business traveller, how nice to flip open the trusty MacBook Pro, and watch happily as Time Machine whirrs to life, backing up my typed-on-the-plane masterpiece over hotel Wi-Fi!  Apple! Don’t do your characteristic feature limiting. It’s a hard drive with an ethernet port, please let us use it as such!

I have Comcast cable internet.  I’m a non-traditional customer, i’d say that I upload more bits than I download.  I have an asynchronous data rate of approximately 1 megabyte per second download and 60k per second upload. This is what i’ve paid for.  However, when uploading files, I’ve noticed that for the first 5 megabytes or so, I upload as well over this 60k limit, closer to 200k.  Clearly my connection is capable of this higher speed upload, and Comcast has implemented some “speed-boost-esque” speed shaping to ensure that folks uploading puny files get snappy results.  I’m not frustrated that this is the policy, I benefit from the boost just like everyone else.  

What I am frustrated about is the boneheaded business decision to not offer this speed without the shaping as a package to customers.if 1mb/60k is 50 a month and upping that to 1mb/200k would cost me 100 a month, I’d buy it tomorrow.  Why build a network capacity and then decide not to sell it?  GROAN.The options for high-bandwidth upload in our country are amazingly terrible.  If I lived in Korea or Norway or any of several other lovely places, I’d have more bandwidth than i’d know what to do with.

 But no, I live in the great US of A where for whatever reason (stupid politicians, stupid regulations, stupid corporations) we’re still on the bike lane of the internet.

 I’ll get back to pedaling now like a good member of the proletariat.

 Carry on. 

It’s 2007. I was told there would be flying cars, replicators, and green women. Despite these lofty claims, we’re stuck with a moron president and a congress that won’t boot him, microwaves that give us brain cancer, and it’s still hard to make a decent graph.

Still.

Hard.

Data really wants to be seen. I’ve designed dozens of visualizations for data, and the execution for each and every one has always been pulling teeth. Options:

1. Go With a Framework.

There are lots of great frameworks you can use and some you can buy and some you can share. Thinkmap. Jung. FusionCharts. PhpCharts. Dundas. SSRS. ManyEyes.  Every single one of them is… close.  Visual constraints, data constraints, layout limits, embedding problems, data pre-munging, blah suck blah.  Dirty teases, the lot of ‘em, UNLESS what you want is what you’ve already seen somewhere else.

2. Draw it with Photoshop.
Exactly what you want! It looks exactly like what you dreamed!  It only took 50 hours of mindless clicking, is totally static, impossible to automate, impossible to reproduce without massive aesthetic subtractions and thousands of hours of dev time.

3. Build it from Scratch.

Thousands of hours of dev time.  Must rebuild everything everyone else has already done.  No standing on the shoulders of giants, instead you have to live up to them.  Groan.

4. Pay Someone Else to do It.

They’re going to do all three of the above, worse than you, for twice as much, behind schedule, and you’re still going to say GROAN.

It’s 2007.  Why are charts still so hard?

If the new iPod Touch runs the same OS as the iPhone, and it has a Wi-Fi antenna, that means you can install Skype, and make phone calls for free.  This is just like having a totally unlocked iPhone, with no monthly fee.  Take this a step further: Google buys the open TV spectrum, which will allow nationwide internet connectivity with the same coverage as analog TV. (read: more places than the cell carriers)

Mark my words: Apple will build an iPod Touch with an antenna for this TV spectrum, and allow Skype calls over it.  This will instantly destroy the existing carrier cell networks.  DESTROY.  This is disruptive like I cannot describe.

You heard it here first!

I am a member of no less than 15 different social networks of one kind or another.  This is like 300.  “This is madness, blasphemy!  No, this. is. WEB 2.0!”

http://bradfitz.com/social-graph-problem/

This is a magical article.  Read it.  Good.  Now, think about how lovely that would be!  Ok. Now think about how terrible it could be!  Ok.  Facebook has lovely toys for making fun with the social graph.  Linkedin has lovely widgets for getting jobs with the social graph.  Myspace has the most horrible pages designed by 13 year old slackjawed drooling delinqents, with the social graph.  But I digress.  What’s not amazing about this article is how it would make _current_ actions easier, it’s the myriad of new actions that would become feasible because of the increased reach and breadth of the network’s structured knowledge.  Just the social statistics alone would be worth ba-zillions to whoever really figured it out.  Someone should call me, we should go help this guy build it.   Wow.

<rant>

I have 52 passwords.  I know back-end server names, IP addresses, control panel logins galore.  I’ve got 19 ways to get to e-mail.  I’ve got local users on domain machines.  I can remote control the router.  I’ve been in a triple nested RDP session to out of country servers.  I’m fastidious with access information, and keep good notes.

Why can’t I get in to anything?

Why, despite what would seem like overwhelming access to data and connectivity resources does it seem increasingly difficult to get to the information I need?  I have an identity, I can prove it on demand.  I know secretish things.  Why are all access systems internally controlled?  Shouldn’t they rely, or at least tolerate, external authentication services, which would allow a user to have a single, albiet complex or rapidly changing access to literally

EVERYTHING

that that person has ever had access to? I just read about Ventner patenting artificial life, a completely custom sequence of self-replicating DNA.  We can do this, and I can’t get to my work?  W. T. F.

</rant>

Just saw Transformers. Love it. Frustrated that film makers in the last 5 years have gone to this shaky cam, massive particle effects, blursmokedustshize all over the screen style of action cinematography. When Optimus Prime punches Megatron, you should be able to see it, without slo-mo, and clearly tell what’s going on. I was against the high-detail designs of the Autobots and Decepticons at first, but after watching the movie i’m sold on that. Good job Michael.

But zoom out a bit, let us see the full shape, let us soak up the beauty of the 40-hour frame rendering…

Is it too much to ask?