C. Scyphers's posterous

Thanks To @Layer7, A New iPad

Fri, 03 Jun 2011 18:02:00 -0700

When I was at #glueCon last week, I entered the booth prize for an iPad from Layer 7. And I won. This makes two free iPads I won as door prizes in the same year.

Clearly, I need to buy lots of lottery tickets.

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Facebook URLs == AOL Keywords

Mon, 07 Feb 2011 06:15:00 -0800

Have you noticed the number of advertisements ending with "go to facebook.com/<product name>" Last night's Super Bowl was chock full of them (as Ryan also noticed). Does no one in the ad world remember the "keyword AOL" trend of the early 90's?

As far as I'm concerned, this is yet more evidence that Facebook is heading full speed down the AOL walled garden route. And it will end pretty much the same way.

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#TronLegacy -- Skip It

Thu, 23 Dec 2010 19:55:00 -0800

Tonight, I caught Tron:Legacy. The short form of this review? Don't.

The acting was wooden, the plot absent and the 3D effects not worth the discomfort of the glasses. The visuals of the digital world were quite interesting, but hardly enough to justify the price of the ticket.

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Oracle & Iron Man 2 #oow10

Tue, 21 Sep 2010 12:48:00 -0700

I've written about this before, but being here at Open World raises more questions again. In between sessions, there's a display with four of the Iron Man suits (from the movie, presumably). Overhead, a screen runs a 60 second clip on repeat, showing each of the six times Oracle is name checked in the movie (including two which are just ridiculous and would never have been seen by anyone if it wasn't pointed out) and ending with Uncle Larry's cameo.

As a shareholder of Oracle, just how much did they pay for what seems to be a very minimal amount of exposure?

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Why Do We Go To Keynotes? #oow10

Tue, 21 Sep 2010 09:05:00 -0700

I'm sitting at the Oracle Open World keynote, listening to Intel and Oracle drone on about how much their products will save us bazillons of dollars while also making everything more fun. And I'm wondering, why does anyone go to these things?

Keynote at vendor conferences like this are usually nothing more than well rehearsed marketing messages, focused on selling products/services/something. Very rarely will any useful information be imparted or news made. There's certainly no reason to drag yourself out of bed at 7am to get a good seat.

However, occasionally, there is some useful information. The other night when Uncle Larry announced a Linux fork was a big deal. But at's the exception, not the rule.

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Why Do People Insist On Movies During Presentations?

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 08:36:00 -0700

Why do people insist on movie clips -- and long movie clips at that -- during presentations? It's like a cinematic during a computer game; completely taking the audience out of the talk. Not to mention that the speaker usually just stands on the stage, trying to blend in with the furniture.

The keynote at Oracle OpenWorld from Fujitsu had both the good way to implement movies and the bad way. Stopping the talk entirely -- twice -- for a history lesson and a marketing promo was horrible; it added nothing to the talk and only broke what little rhythm the speaker had. Later in the talk, he talked about using super computers to model fluid dynamics within the human heart. While he was talking, a clip ran in the background showing a simulation of a human heart. *That* is the right way to use movie clips; it supported his point without overwhelming the speaker.

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ESR on #Android/#iPhone

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 06:54:00 -0700

Eric Scott Raymond opines on the latest news concerning the rise of Android over iPhone

CNET reported a few days ago (while I was busy at the World Boardgaming Championships, or I’d have blogged on this sooner) that Android hits top spot in U.S. smartphone market.
There’s a boatload of bad news in the numbers for Apple fans, but no surprises for anyone who has been following my strategic analyses for the last seven months. In the first quarter Android new sales passed Apple’s but ran second behind Blackberry sales; in the second quarter, Android has passed Blackberry and opened up an 11% gap in front of iPhone sales.
Other reports indicate that, at about 160K per day, Android activations now exceed the totals for iPhone 3, iPhone 4, and iPad combined.
Apple’s bid to define and control the smartphone market is going down to defeat. I was going to describe the process as “slow but inexorable”, but that would be incorrect; it’s fast and inexorable. My prediction that Android’s installed base will pass the iPhone’s in the fourth quarter of this year no longer looks wild-eyed to anybody following these market-share wars; in fact, given the trends in new-unit sales a crossover point late in the third quarter is no longer out of the question.

I'll add to his last line:

As I predicted would happen months ago, the ubiquity game is clobbering the control game; Apple has wound up outflanked, outgunned, and out-thought.

At the risk of being a bit gloat-y, may I add "...outflanked, outgunned, and out-thought again." This seems to be a re-run of the Windows/Mac fights of the 90's:

Apple releases a paradigm that redefines the industry (GUI, mouse, WYSIWYG, etc.)
A major competitor slowly starts to catch up with Apple's innovative leap
While never quite completely catching Apple, the competitor improves to the point of being good enough and the significantly lower price point means the competitor wins in the market place (q.v. The Inventor's Dilemma).

It was Microsoft before, it's Google now. And the common thread seems to be Uncle Jobs' two pronged insistence both that he knows better than everyone else as to what his customers should want and that his company is the only one that can be trusted to deliver on said vision.

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Final Thoughts On #EVO

Fri, 06 Aug 2010 14:31:00 -0700

As it happens, I believe I will be keeping the EVO phone. The unreadable screen thing has been resolved (see below) and everything else works well enough. Here are some final thoughts:

Battery, Battery, Battery

Yeah, it's really, really, bad. I think I've mentioned this before, but it must be mentioned again.

International Calls

Another strike against Sprint/Verizon (and for AT&T, interestingly enough). Both Sprint & Verizon use the bastardized CDMA standard. Which is great, unless you want to go anywhere else in the world and still make a phone call. Sprint's "workaround" to this problem was as follows:

The Evo will work anywhere that has CDMA service. You can find out if the country you are travelling to offers CDMA service by visiting http://sprint.com/international
The Evo will not work in countries that use the older GSM standard. The Evo does not have a GSM radio. There will be no software patch to install a hardware radio.
If you travel frequently and need to use your phone internationally, we offer several phones that have GSM and CDMA radios built in - including the HTC Touc >sic< Pro 2, a full function Windows Smart phone.
Please be aware that international roaming calls, text and data are quite expensive - as much as $1.99 a minute. If you plan to stay for some time internationally, you may be better off purchasing a prepaid phone in-country for better rates.

Ah, I see. Sprint's flagship phone, and their suggestion is to get a different phone if I want to travel overseas to such benighted places like Germany or Australia (but it will work in Belarus or Kyrgyzstan! Lucky me!

A Better Screen Protector

After the debacle I had with the prior screen protector, I went out on a limb and tried an Invisible Shield protector. It works and doesn't white out in direct sunlight.

Root Your Phone

It's worth it, and unrEVOked makes it as simple as can be. Why root your phone, you may ask? If for no other reason, to install Juice Defender and Titanium Backup. Juice Defender will extend your battery by 40-70% (read here, hours); Titanium allows you to do a complete backup. Of everything (apps, settings, etc), which is more than the non-root backup apps do. And that's important, now that you'll have root and can quickly brick your phone.

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#Verizon's 1mth plan = 1G of transfer? On What Planet?

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 21:01:00 -0700

Really? The "pay as you go" 1 month plan is capped at 1G of transfer and goes for $50? So, when I blew through 1G in 8 days (hard to imagine a techie working on documents and diagrams using lots of bandwidth), does that mean I can sue for false advertising?

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Review Of The Sprint #EVO, Week Three

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 10:06:00 -0700

Another week down and we're in the home stretch (at least as far as the 30 day trial period from Sprint). This week's observations:

The Screen Is Not Readable During The Day

Particularly in direct sunlight. Even at 100% brightness on the screen, it is essentially unreadable. I did a bake off with the iPod, the EVO and the BlackBerry. It's not even close; iPod is fine, my wife's iPhone is fine, Blackberry is fine, EVO is unusable. Granted, I'm a techie and more likely to be inside than out, but my conversion to total vampire is not quite complete. Off all the things I have found with the EVO, this is probably the biggest thing that may result in me not selecting the phone.

A caveat; both the EVO and the iPod Touch have screen protectors. While it seems like a reasonable thing to do in order to protect the screen, I expect there to be a decrease in readability. How much of a decrease I cannot say.

--Update--

As it turns out, the screen protector on the EVO is a massive hinderance. My faather upgraded his Hero to an EVO and I did a small bake-off between his naked screen and my protected screen. The naked screen is still somewhat hard to read but infinitely better than the protected one.

--Update 2--

After I took the screen protector off, it is better; direct, right-angle sunlight is unreadable (but that's just about impossible for any screen) but reading in sunlight is acceptable, so long as it isn't going to be a long email. It should be fine for the occasional SMS message.

Power Management Software Is Essential

If you don't use power management software, you will drain your battery in about 4-5 hours on nominal operations (4G, GPS, wifi all on, etc). Having software automatically turning things on and off is critical to making the phone last even a single day.

Ironically enough, the "Power Manager" app uses quite a bit of power. I would recommend skipping it.

The Android Store Needs Help

Unless you are actively reading review sites (Gizmodo, O'Reilly, Mashable, AndroidTapp), you will have a tough time finding worthwhile apps within the standard Android store.

For A More BlackBerry-like Email Experience

Download K9. No idea why this app is not in the app store (as Google doesn't seem to be all that picky about which apps do and do not make the cut, but it is very much so worth the download. Now if only if could do filters...

Holster, Pt III

Remember when I said the holster works? Yes, well, sorta. I can feel it, but not as much as I could on my BlackBerry.

Google Voice Integration, More Or Less

I should have mentioned this earlier, but I figured everyone knew about it. On an Android phone, Google Voice is natively integrated. No more 406 numbers, no more bass-akward dialing routines, just pick the number, hit call and the GV integration handles everything automatically.

Unless, of course, you want to send a text message. Sure, you can choose GV as the messaging app from the contact page, but you're still going to receive a text message on your phone; the Android GV app doesn't seem to notify me of SMS messages.

MicroUSB

I understand why the choice was made (slims the profile of the already rather large case), but it's still annoying. A standard USB port would have been nicer.

Phone Calls While Browsing

I was on the phone placing an order to a restaurant. I wanted to pop over to Evernote and check the order list to make sure things were correct. As it turns out, Evernote does not store notes locally (only in the cloud -- something you may want to fix, Evernote guys) and I could not do anything with the web while talking on the phone.

Believe it or not, this is a point in favor of AT&T. Apparently, according to the HTC Forum, such bandwidth multitasking is only possible on a 4G network. Which will be great, as soon as Sprint/ClearWire rolls it out to a more major market and I have a portable generator to keep the battery alive.

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Review Of The Sprint #EVO, Week Two

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 07:46:00 -0700

Another week has gone by, and the EVO is getting more useful. I've been on travel, visiting family. Thanks to Google Voice, I just redirect calls from my old cell phone to the new one. Here's some of the observations for this week:

Physical Keyboard Really Would Be Nice

I know I shouldn't do this, but occasionally I write a text message while driving. In this case, it was texting the grandparents as to when we would be arriving and asking them not to call (the kids & wife were asleep in the car). Honey, if you're reading this, it was just the one time. And it wasn't even very good. It didn't mean anything... I can to this without looking (that's sorta safer, right?) on the BlackBerry, because I can feel where each individual key is. For virtual keyboards (iPhone, EVO, Incredible, etc.), you pretty much have to look at what you're doing to type out a message.

Much Better Bluetooth

One of the things I was looking forwards to the BlackBerry Bold was it's ability to play music. Yes, it doesn't do it very well, but I was excited about the possibility of bluetoothing the phone into the car and using it for both music and calls. Well, that didn't work; I could either connect the phone to the phone in the car or to the media in the car, but not both. The EVO does both and does it pretty smoothly. Perhaps this is just an upgrade to the Bluetooth standard, but it's still very nice.

Holsters Matter

Amazon surprised me and shipped the holster early. It makes a big difference; I can feel the phone when it rings and it is generally more accessible.

The BlackBerry Is Much Better For Email

When you think about it, a BlackBerry is basically an email client that happens to make phone calls. If you're primary focus for mobile technology is email, then get a Blackberry. It's really as simple as that.

One of the very nice things the BlackBerry does with email is server side filtering. You can create filters based on sender(s), title(s), dates -- just about any specific detail -- and that email will never be sent to you. I'm starting to miss that with the Android email system. Everything comes to me, buzzing my hip and interrupting my thought process. Evite is nice and all, but it doesn't need that level of immediate response.

BlackBerry Profiles > Android Profiles

Want to turn off the GPS (to save power), turn on Bluetooth (to connect to your car) and silence the ringtone? On Android, that's at least three steps -- and that's assuming you have shortcuts/widgets on the home screen to make those changes. On Blackberry, it's one command. You can create customized profiles which are accessible from the main screen. If you can do this on Android, I haven't figured it out yet.

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Review Of The Sprint #EVO, Week One

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 14:38:00 -0700

I'm a BlackBerry user. Have been for about five years now. But, after repeated droppings and bouncings across various forms of pavement, I am in the market for a new phone.

My wife has an iPhone and adores it. Seriously, it's the only time I've ever heard her refer to a piece of technology with the word "love". I have an iPod Touch and it's a pretty good piece of hardware. Very good user experience -- particularly for music and such -- and a decent range of apps with good utility. For what it's worth, I would recommend any of the following:

FreeMemory
Key Ring
WeatherBug
EverNote
DropBox
Snap
WifiTrak
OpenTable
Kindle
IMDB
Remote

But I will not own an iPhone, pretty much under any circumstances. Mostly because of Apple's policies and actions with regards to developers, but largely because the Apple ecosystem is a closed, walled garden. I agree with ESR; this is a bad thing and should be stopped.

So, I've been taking a long, hard look at the Android suite of phones. The Nexus One was very interesting and appealing but ultimately failed for two reasons:

You can only buy it online; no chance to hold it in your hand and see if you like it
Want to use it as more than a cell phone? Hope you really like T-Mobile.

T-Mobile isn't a viable option for me; I spend a good bit of time in upstate MI and they essentially have zero coverage where I would be sleeping.

Other contenders were the Droid Incredible (Verizon) or the EVO (Sprint). The deciding factor between the two was Sprint's 30 day, money back, no questions asked guarantee. So, why not?

Well, it's been about a week. Here, in no particular order, are my thoughts so far:

Keyboards Are Important

The biggest thing I find myself missing from the BlackBerry is the physical keyboard. It's just so much easier to type with it -- if for no other reason than I can type things in by feeling the keys rather than having to look at what I'm doing. Then again, perhaps this is a good thing; I just about BlackBerry thumb-ed my way into carpal tunnel syndrome last summer mediating a contract dispute between some co-workers; a bad keyboard may make me save the long missives for when I have access to a proper keyboard.

4G Rocks

I was in Baltimore on Friday with my kids and managed to get away for a second to play with the 4G deployed in that city. In a word, it rocks. Like religious experience rocks. Imagine wifi speeds anywhere. It's the kind of thing where I could seriously see watching a TV show on the phone while on the subway. Of course, the downside here is that Sprint has only rolled this out in a very limited number of cities (Kansas City, Amarillo, Snohomish, Greensboro and Wichita Falls before DC, LA, New York or Boston? Really?)

The Droid App Store Is Sufficient

Apple's app store has more apps and they are generally better (see next item). However, I found enough Droid apps to do basically the same things I was doing on the iOS platform (excepting a version of Civilization, Kindle, TweetDeck and LinkedIn. But none of those are really critical to me).

Apple Apps Are Better

Particularly when you compare the same product on different platforms. The FaceBook app is significantly better on the iOS; Drop7 (a game) is almost unplayable on Droid. Whether this is a sign of Apple being a better platform or Droid being less mature is unclear

Battery Life

Yep, it's an issue with the EVO. One night, the battery drained from 62% to 0 while I slept. I'm playing with settings to see if I can extend it.

A Holster Would Be Nice

For every phone I've had, I was able to purchase a clip where I could wear the phone on my hip. Geeky, yes, but it allows me to feel the phone when I have it on vibrate (which I basically always do). There is one for the EVO; it will be available in about three weeks.

HotSpot

This is actually one of the large reasons why I bought this phone. I haven't tried this yet, but I intend to very soon. And, yes, I know that you can do this with any Android 2.1+ phone by rooting the device; I just haven't done so yet.

Video Conferencing, Turn-By-Turn Nav, Speech Recognition

I haven't had either the need or the opportunity to try any of these, so meh...

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#IronMan2, #LarryEllison & #Oracle

Sat, 29 May 2010 03:56:00 -0700

Just how much did Uncle Larry pay to be in this movie? Not just for his ego, but for the Oracle branding of one of the major fight scenes...

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The Walled Garden ! > Open Web

Wed, 26 May 2010 12:24:00 -0700

In a NY Times article, the victory of the walled garden is predicted:

But a kind of virtual redlining is now under way. The Webtropolis is being stratified. Even if, like most people, you still surf the Web on a desktop or laptop, you will have noticed pay walls, invitation-only clubs, subscription programs, privacy settings and other ways of creating tiers of access. All these things make spaces feel “safe” — not only from viruses, instability, unwanted light and sound, unrequested porn, sponsored links and pop-up ads, but also from crude design, wayward and unregistered commenters and the eccentric voices and images that make the Web constantly surprising, challenging and enlightening.
...
The far more significant development, however, is that many people are on their way to quitting the open Web entirely. That’s what the 50 million or so users of the iPhone and iPad are in position to do. By choosing machines that come to life only when tricked out with apps from the App Store, users of Apple’s radical mobile devices increasingly commit themselves to a more remote and inevitably antagonistic relationship with the Web. Apple rigorously vets every app and takes 30 percent of all sales; the free content and energy of the Web does not meet the refined standards set by the App Store. For example, the Weather Channel Max app, which turns the weather into a thrilling interactive movie, offers a superior experience of meteorology to that of Weather.com, which looks like a boring cluttered textbook: white space, columns of fussy bullet points and thumbnail images.

In a word, poppycock. This only holds true because people are revisiting the download and run locally phenomenon -- just like in the BBS days. And it may remain as the best user experience until the web standards catch up. The exception being native hardware performance tricks, like the accelerometers in the iPod/iPhone/iPad, but the "good enough" standard of web apps will eventually surpass this shortfall.

Basically, open always wins out over closed.

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#Android Sales > #iPhone Sales (in US)

Mon, 10 May 2010 18:53:00 -0700

Coming about six months earlier than I expected it, more Android phone(s) were sold in Q1 2010 than iPhones.

During the quarter, Android (Android) handsets accounted for 28% of smartphone sales, beating out iPhone OS and its 21% share. BlackBerry was the bestselling OS, with its devices capturing 36% of the market. NPD attributes the shift to strong sales of the Motorola Droid and Droid Eris.

By the way, Apple? If you're wondering why this happened, I'd start with the "phone(s)" observation. Macs lost major marketshare back in the 80's when Jobs refused to license the Mac operating system to a clone manufacturer (Franklin, Motorola, others) while Microsoft licensed their OS to anyone with a checkbook. Funny how things keep repeating themselves with Apple...

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Will #Facebook End Class Reunions?

Fri, 30 Apr 2010 19:44:00 -0700

This summer will be my 20th class reunion. The good folks who are organizing are basically using Facebook as a contact and people organizing tool. Which is good, right? Events are one of the things Facebook was intended to do.

But I wonder if it does it too well. One of the big draws for a reunion is to catch up with long lost friends and see what they're up; something I can do with Facebook at any time with almost any of my old classmates. Either that, or try to show off how successful you are after not being one of the popular crowd (that's the stereotype, at least).

Let's compare going to a reunion to FB:

	Reunion	Facebook
Catching up	All you can do in one night -- but only for the people in your graduating class	Possibly too much sharing -- and it's for people the year(s) before or after, so long as they're on the web
Showing off	"Have I told you about my five kids in private school?"	"I have five kids in private school
Cost	Hotel + Travel + Babysitter + Food	Free ($$$), but a massive time sink
Attire	Dress To Impress	Jammies, if you want
Human Contact	Lots	Not so much

The first two are toss-ups, but the next two are pretty clear wins for Facebook. As far as the latter goes, sometimes it's a win for the reunion, sometimes not.

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App Store To Exclude Sexual Content

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 19:41:00 -0800

As far as I'm concerned, this is just another reason why the App Store will eventually fail.

Over the last few days we’ve been tracking Apple’s recent decision to remove all sexual content from the App Store. It’s an alarming move on Apple’s part, if only because it shows that the company is willing to throw developers (and their livelihoods) under the bus without any notice at all. Now developers are left wondering: just what exactly is allowed on the App Store? As it turns out, the new policy may be even more restrictive than it first appeared.

I'm not particularly defend porn (hey, if it's what gets you through the night); rather, it's how Apple retains absolute right to remove applications unilaterally. Add to that a little in loco parentis, and you end up with a situation where those who think themselves better than you believe you don't need access to whatever they disapprove at that moment, so you should be a good little boy/girl and follow their instructions.

Specifically, you cannot do any of the following:

No images of women in bikinis (Ice skating tights are not OK either)
No images of men in bikinis! (I didn’t ask about Ice Skating tights for men))
No skin (he seriously said this) (I asked if a Burqa was OK, and the Apple guy got angry))
No silhouettes that indicate that Wobble can be used for wobbling boobs (yes – I am serious, we have to remove the silhouette in this pic))
No sexual connotations or innuendo: boobs, babes, booty, sex – all banned)
Nothing that can be sexually arousing!! (I doubt many people could get aroused with the pic above but those puritanical guys at Apple must get off on pretty mundane things to find Wobble “overtly sexual!))
No apps will be approved that in any way imply sexual content (not sure how Playboy is still in the store, but …)

At this point, if I were to be releasing a mobile app, unless I specifically need access to hardware features (accelerometer, GPS, etc.), I'd skip the App Store altogether and deploy to the cloud using HTML5.

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Will #Foursquare Ever Be Useful?

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 14:37:00 -0800

In a so-so article about location aware applications is this comment:

It's exactly then, when services become personally useful, that people start saying "maybe my phone should be tracking me," says Dennis Crowley, co-founder of mobile check-in service Foursquare

I use Foursquare as a lark. It's sorta interesting, but I wouldn't depend on it to find anything nor to try out something new. So, how -- exactly - will Foursquare be useful to me personally?

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#Oracle & #Sun Merger Blessed By EU

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 16:24:41 -0800

I was wrong; Uncle Larry is not going to have to give up MySQL after all.

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Morgan Evans Scyphers

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 13:25:00 -0800

We are pleased to announce the early arrival of Morgan Evans Scyphers at 2:40pm on December 29, 2009. 7 pounds 8 ounces, 20.5 inches. Everyone is doing fine.

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