There's been a lot of speculation about Mac OS X 10.3, 'Panther' that Steve jobs will be demoing on Monday at the WWDC keynote speech. even though the update isn't due to come out until September, it's being unveiled to get developers on the bandwagon to support 10.3 features on launch day.

One of the features with the biggest potential for impact is 'multiple GUI logins' which basically means that more than one user can be logged in at once. The conventional wisdom has been that this would let Bob stay logged in while Jane logs in to work on her paper as Bob is temporarily away, so each user doesn't have to shut down everything they're doing just so someone else can access their files and use the computer. I think this could be a lot bigger, though.

Ever since the iMac came out with two headphone jacks on the front of the computer, it's been clear that Apple realized that educational computers are shared computers. The ability to log in to a computer has been tremendously important in educational environments, because students can take their workspaces with them.

but what I haven't seen mentioned is the possibility for simultaneously shared computers. Pop in a second video card, plug in another keyboard and a second mouse, and suddenly you have the usefulness of two computers where before you had one. And when you only need one, you have one computer with two screens!

True, there's the obvious argument that this could cost Apple sales, but I really wonder how many two-mac homes there are right now. It seems to me that the ability to buy one computer that the kids and parents could use at the same time would be a strong reason to buy Mac over PC, and when you only have a 3% market share, coming out with a feature that could lure a fraction of the remaining 97% is worth losing a fraction of the 3%.

Now that assignments are required to be typewritten at earlier and earlier ages, two or more kids having to share one computer at home is turning into a big problem. Wouldn't it be nice if the mantras on the value of sharing weren't halted by the digital divide?

And wouldn't it be nice if Apple came out with a 2lb thin client wireless tablet so you could use your computer anywhere around the house, even as your wife does the same?

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Well, maybe not. But I could.

Combine a close lightning strike every few seconds with an apartment with ungrounded outlets (despite being 3-pronged), and the reasonable thing to do is turn off and unplug the computer, and so I have.

Let me just mention how cool my hiptop (err, 'sidekick') is, that I can, with no modification, browse to my weblog's composition page, and hammer (well, thumb) out a blog post, despite not having a computer turned on anywhere around.

There will be a hiptop review and, after spending a week or two with it, I'll be able to go into so much greater detail than I could have with 15 minutes in a conference room.

I love it, and there are a lot of areas that need improvement, almost all software, thankfully. The biggest testament for the hiptop interface may merely be that it isn't a pain to use it to compose a post of this length!

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Kudos to How Stuff Works for a timely, useful, and informative article about Digital Satellite Radio (aka XM-band radio).

Just like the net is starting to move from the ever-weakening advertising model into subscription services (Salon, Yahoo! and Slashdot are prime examples), mainstream media is following suit. HBO is a purveyor of fine serial content instead of just movies, people pay monthly fees to ditch commercials via TiVo, and streaming ad-free audio in your car is available now, and will probably be everywhere in the next 18 months, with low hardware costs, designed to lure you into the $9.95 monthly fees.

Anyhow, an interesting article. Hope you enjoy it, and that your Thanksgivings are going well!

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Handspring announced the Treo Communicator line of PDA/phones today.

The first two models don't come out until early next year, followed mid-year by a color version, but they look really cool and well thought out, not a PDA-in-a-phone or a phone-in-a-PDA, but a really nice balance.

I was excited before, but after seeing that they're so small (narrower and shorter than a Palm V, and only 0.3" thicker) the unit looks really good. Now the only decisions are whether to get the B/W or color, and whether you prefer graffiti or a little thumb keyboard.

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So Handspring's poised to announce the Treo line on Monday. One of the devices has a build-in mini-keyboard to compliment the cellphone and internet capabilities of the device.

The color version won't come out for another couple months or so after the first two, but it just might be enough to convince me to rethink my Palm V, especially if they do go with Cingular in the bay area, so i could just tack it on as another phone on my existing account.

All this, of course, is contingent on my still having a job. (okay, to ease the melodrama, they'll be announcing staffing changes in mid-November, and it probably won't affect me or my group, but still...)

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Now that Cingular has 'info alert' functionality, they've been trying like mad to make it useful. The problem is that it's not on-demand. You have to go to the web site and preprogram what you want. "I want Giants scores at 5pm (regardless of when the day's game ends), weather at 6am and my horoscope at 8 sharp."

Aside from the difficulty in even finding the page where you customize your info alerts, the alerts themselves are tiny to fit on a regular non-WAP Nokia 5190, 6190, or 8290 screen.

The net result is 'news alerts' that consist of obscure headlines only, no stories. You have to go to the web site to read the full story.

Undoubtedly the worst part is the horoscopes. Call me spoiled from having read some truly great astrologers, but Cingular's daily cellphone horoscopes plainly suck. Yesterday's was: "Plug the leaks. Take a mental health day. Yoga practitioners are ahead of the game." Sunday: "Talk with authority. Color code your moods. Don't argue about small differences." Huh?

After reading these for months I'm convinced they're not written by an astrologer, or even a fortune cookie copywriter. It seems more likely that someone just wrote a few hundred sentences on pieces of paper and grabs them out of a paper bag randomly, arranging them into barely cogent pebbles of 'wisdom.'

Heck, that's what computers are for! So, to share my wry amusement with these horoscopes, I've taken several dozen of these cellphone horoscopes and broken them apart and last week on the train (where, incidentally, I'm writing this post, while slogging through the south bay salt beds (yeah, really funky timeshifting in the editing process here... Deal with it. :-) ) ) I wrote the Cellphone Horoscope Generator.

I wrote it in perl since I don't have a PHP interpreter on my mac (yet), but I translated it to PHP tonight so it will work within the existing system without a problem. If you haven't noticed it yet, it's be there in the navbar on the left, under 'Cell-o-scope.' Every reload will give you a new cellphone horoscope!

Yes, I was a little bored on the train...

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Palm's VII replacement, the m705, and two new 'always connected' wireless Handspring models got FCC regulatory approval this week, and are due in stores before Christmas. I so want one of these. I'd been thinking about getting a Blackberry for a while, and Sony's Clie has also been poking at my wallet, but I think I'd much rather have a Handspring k180, which has a keyboard like the blackberry, but with palmOS and built-in cellphone. If only it were in color...

The interesting twist is that just a day after the FCC granted the licenses, Palm and Handspring requested the approval be postponed, so public viewing of the FCC application is withheld until they're closer to launching. Think Christmas.

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Great news today. Apparently Palm is buying Be for $11 million in Palm stock.

This is exactly what Palm needs. The problem with PDAs, from the Newton to the Psion, to the Palm and, to a slightly lesser degree, WinCE, is that while they're great at manipulating snippets of information, they have lacked real multimedia capability. Playing MP3s on a handheld or any sort of video requires a really specialized application, and they're nowhere near as adept at handling multimedia data streams as even a cellular phone is. The OS just isn't built that way.

Enter BeOS. After showing such promise as a multimedia OS at the expense of all else, it couldn't find a market and has been foundering for the last three years. It's already been demonstrated that other OSes can be emulated in the Be environment, and PalmOS has already been ported successfully to other desktop platforms. All that's left is for Palm to pull an Apple and graft the existing PalmOS onto the slick media-centric BeOS and put it all into a tight m700-style case with a G3 cell connection.

This would be the machine that lives up to the hype. IT would be the knowledge navigator that fits in your pocket and can handle realtime video as easily as the current PalmOS can handle appointments. Bandwidth will be the sole remaining bottleneck to the full solution, and G3 systems should take care of that. Storage space will be irrelevant as the Palm will be (literally) a thin client, grabbing music, video, and videocommunications through the network.

Okay, so I'm waxing a little Dick Tracy here and we've heard it all before, but speaking as a former Newton programmer, I just want to say how vital a step it is to create a handheld OS with deep multimedia underpinnings, and I can actually say that I'm glad that Be ended up going to Palm instead of Apple (though sadly at one tenth the $125 million Amelio offered for Be just a few years ago).

And the future chugs along...

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First, why do we call it 'anti-piracy' protection when it's some company's crypto, but 'privacy' protection when it's ours?

Second, why do people constantly get persecuted and imprisoned under the DMCA when they try to publish the vulnerabilities in encryption systems (CSS, SDMI, eBook, HDCP). but several people have demonstrated successful attacks on WEP (802.11b wireless encryption) without any reprisals? Is it more onerous when someone documents how to attack a copy-protection protocol than when they document the vulnerabilities of a privacy protocol?

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Metricom announced today that the Ricochet Wireless Network would be going dark on August 8th, as the company goes into Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings.

Offering ISDN speeds wirelessly over most of the Bay Area and 12 other markets, (we used to call them 'cities'), these people will now have to be satisfied with inferior CDPD coverage and providers.

I still have an old 28Kbps Ricochet transceiver, and I understand that they can work peer-to-peer. I wonder if there will ever be a good use for these things. The wireless network is going up for auction on August 16th, so there may yet be life for the hardware, but with what changes? I'm just glad that I finally realized that I'm more productive on the train without net access than with it. At least it was my choice before it was made for me.

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I'm writing on the train, but I'm not going to worry about posting wirelessly. I'll just hotsync the palm and post once I get home.

So, today's blogfodder falls into the realm of serendipity. I was thinking about a project I wanted to make, a relatively simple one, but with wide application. I'll describe it later (that is, if you're one of those like Karen who reads the blog chronologically, bottom-to-top (and for whom posts longer than one screen must mean a lot of zigzagging up, then down, then up again) but I digress.. If you read from top-to-bottom, then you already know what I'm talking about.)

At any rate, I was looking for a nice, short mnemonic domain for this service which, for lack of a domain I'll call 'clip' (at least initially it will probably live at 'clip.fury.com').

So I was domain-name hunting before work this morning and after a few hundred ideas (nearly all taken in .com, .net. and .org) I settled on either ibidibi.com (pronounced 'ibbi-dibbi' and though a cool palendrome, not quite as cool as idibidi.*, which I'm pretty sure is taken), or voxen.net.

I like voxen.net, as it sounds cool, is short, and even has a little Latin root in there to spark the imagination. It's a little like vox (speech), vixen (sex sells), and voxel (a 3D pixel). In fact, a geek prone to hypercorrection might think that voxen is the plural of voxel.

But I digress...

After deciding on voxen.net, I started thinking about how it lends itself perfectly to my voice-blogging project (that and Dinah noting that vox is voice). Briefly, the voice-blogging project would be a service using VoiceXML and Tellme's developer services to allow registered users call Tellme and record voice blog entries that will automatically post to their site. A lot has to be hammered out, including whether I can do on-the-fly mp3 compression or if I have to use aiff or wav. Then there's hosting. Should I follow Blogger's model and let those who have room and wherewithall to host their own voiceblog entries use the service for free, and either charge those who use Voxel's hosting, or have some sort of advertising model. Anyhow, that's a bit out there, and a lot of things need to be figured out before we get there.

So that, really briefly, is the current vision for voxel.net. You're in your car, stuck in traffic (which frankly is where I get most of my interesting ideas, the forebrain wanders as the backbrain takes the wheel), and you have a thought, you call tellme, login through voice commands, and share your thoughts.

Leia doesn't think she'd use it beyond playing with it a few times, because she wouldn't want to present herself in her voice. I completely understand. I have a lot more control over my tone and content when I'm in front of a keyboard (though you'd never guess it from this rambling post touching on many thoughts but mastering none). I think the idea voice-blogging is like text blogging without a backspace key or the ability to stop for even a moment. Heck, I record my answering machine greeting 10 times before I'm happy done.

Think it's useful? Have an alternate use in mind for the application? I'm all ears.

Actually, as a big 'sike' to everyone, I'm not going to try to explain 'clip' just yet. I'll have it done in a bit (unlike my other projects, when this one's up it'll be fully functional in its glorious simplicity) and you can see it and use it for yourself. Some of the best mainstream tools are born from the inventor personally wanting to salve a problem for themself. Clip falls in that category. I hope you find it useful...

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I wrote this on the train last week, only the stupid OmniSky browser couldn't handle the form submit, so I had to wait to post it.

6/12/2001: So I'm trying something new. Right now I'm on the Amtrak train going from Sunnyvale to Emeryville, in what has become my daily commute home. I have my Palm V and a Stowaway keyboard, writing as we wind through the surreal landfill/wetland/ghosttown at the southern end of the bay.

Once I finish writing this and the other posts for this evening, I'll take off the keyboard and plug in the Omnisky modem and post them up to the web site. The fact that you're reading this means it works!

Just because I'm impatient, I'm uploading this one now, before I write the other one or two...

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So I got Omnisky set up and actually posted a test message to the site from my palmpilot. (I deleted it because ti basically said, "this is a test message. cool.")

This message is not from the wireless, because I (yet again) accidentaly clicked the 'metacookie update' button and needed to post something.

I'm going to see Moulin Rouge tonight with friends, so I'll post some fashion of review tonight or tomorrow. I managed to sleep in until 1pm today, all that sleepdep caughtup with me, and hopefully I'm mostly over it now. Got to get to sleep before 11 tonight though...

That's all for now. More to come soon (as always!)

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