Gadget 1: My Pocket Media Device

Don’t worry, this is just a descriptive name, I’m sure that the fine folks in marketing will come up with a much better name for this device.  My pocket media device is about the size of an iPhone and has more than just size in common.  Of course, I expect this device to serve as my phone, messaging, and internet device.  I expect it also to play music, videos, and show pictures.  It should have GPS with turn-by-turn directions.  Flip it over and it should have a reasonable point and shoot camera.  This camera will have plenty of pixels and a good lens with zoom and auto focus.  If this device is going to replace a phone, music player, and camera it has to be good at all of them.  Very few phones are also good cameras; I want it to do both.  If I can talk interface for a moment, holding this device like a camera leaves my thumbs in the perfect position to pinch-to-zoom on the multi-touch screen.  Is this too much to ask?  I want a Phone-Messaging-Media-Camera-GPS-Gaming device that is actually good at all of it. Come on gadget-makers, get on that.

Gadget 2: My Netbook/Ebook Device

Netbooks are hot right now: they were some of the hottest devices of 2008.  What exactly constitutes a netbook is still a bit fuzzy.  Some say they’re defined by their impossibly small size, others their price.  I think the category is defined more by function.  A netbook should boot almost instantaneously, be heavily connected, and have a UI that provides quick access to the web, email, basic document editing.  Ok, it should have some sort of VOIP client and media player too, but since I already have a communication and entertainment device, I’m ok without those.  It certainly doesn’t need video editing, games, or a full desktop OS.  If twitter is what you do between blog posts then a netbook is what you use between trips to your desktop or full notebook computer.  This is not your everyday computer, this is the one you use while you’re out and need to do something quickly.  Ok, so far, I can get this device today.  Here’s what I want that’s different.  When the lid is closed it reveals an e-ink display for reading documents.  I want to be able to read books, documents, emails, whatever on a very low-power e-ink display.  Let’s take it a step forward.  If I’m reading a document for a co-worker or perusing my emails, I want to hit one button, open the lid, and the netbook will come right up to the document or email editor.  When I close the lid again, it’s my ebook reader once again.  I know that I don’t like reading on a back-lit display and I know that I don’t want to do daily tasks on an e-ink display, but why does that necessitate two separate devices?

Ok, there you have it, this is my 2010 wish list.  I want all of my devices to converge into just 2.  There’s one more very important thing, price.  If I have to spend $1000 for both devices, they’ll never take off.  Each of these devices should be a few hundred dollars and I guarantee that nearly every person in America will carry these two devices.  Come on gadget-makers, make my wishes come true.

The Retro-car Craze

Some would argue that the retro movement started with the Plymouth Prowler or maybe the PT Cruiser. One might even try to argue that the short-revived T-bird deserves credit, but it’s clear to me that the real credit for the retro-craze goes to Ford with the new Mustang.  The original Mustang was so revolutionary that an entire class of cars were formed around it, the pony cars, which later led to the muscle cars of the 60s and 70s.  I don’t want to start a religious argument by interjecting my personal feelings about the Mustangs of the late 70s and 80s, but what Ford did in 1964 they did again with the latest iteration of the pony car.  The new Mustang is the best of both worlds, it’s reminiscent enough of the original to excite those who are old enough to remember when a Mustang was a Mustang and it’s modern enough to appeal to those of us who were born after the Mustang II.  Just as before, this new Mustang invented an entire class of cars, the retros.  Since Ford unveiled this car in 2004, Chrysler has followed suit with reincarnations of the classic Charger and Challengers and Chevy is expected to release the new Camaro any day now.  These modern-day incarnations of yester-year’s gas guzzlers are coming out during some very trying times, thanks to increased gas prices, decreased credit availability, and increased unemployment, but they sure give us car lovers something to get excited about.

Reforming the Big 3

Let’s face it, GM, Ford, and Chrysler are in trouble, big trouble.  Whether you blame their troubles on labor practices, management failures, poor foresight, or any number of other reasons, these venerable American institutions are about to look very different.  I don’t view these changes as a bad thing, however.  The big three have stood by their laurels long enough and it’s time for them to put up or shut up.  Let me make myself clear.  I don’t think and certainly don’t hope that any of these companies will be gone any time soon.  Instead, I expect a very high level of innovation in the coming years.  The old model doesn’t work, this much is clear.  Now that they have seen possibility of the entire US auto industry disappearing overnight, I believe that these companies will finally change and change for the better.  I expect to see exciting new designs, drivetrains , and possibly new classes of vehicles to come out of the Big 3 in the next decade.  Why would I expect this when there’s no money to be spent in R&D?  Simple, because they have to! Nothing revolutionary has come out of Detroit since the minivan, but I think that’s about to change.

Electricity, it’s finally going to be huge!

Ok, to GM’s credit, they’ve tried the electric thing before.  Remember the EV1?  Think very hard.  This poor little car was only available from 1996-1999 and only in an extremely limited market (seriously, only about 1000 were ever made).  Well, now there’s a sleugh of new electric automobiles on the way.  Clearly Tesla is leading the electric car charge with the Roadster and now the Model S, but there’s dozens of virtually un-heard-of car brands vying for this market (and the associated government funding).  Did you know that even Detroit Electric, that’s right, ole’ Tom Edison’s car company, is making a comeback? It’s going to take a few years for electrics to become mainstream, but low-cost Asian car builders and exciting companies like Tesla will eventually bring this technology to the forefront.

What else is new?

Ok, do you still not have enough to get excited about?  Don’t forget the new hybrid drivetrains, like the Chevy Volt.  There’s also the new materials, such at the Kelp-car.  How about solar cars?  Shape changing cars?  Stackable cars!  About a year ago we saw a car that could drive underwater and this year we saw a plane that could drive on the streets!  Don’t forget the resurgence of turbos and diesels to bridge the gap between today’s cars and tomorrow’s.  If you can’t find something to be excited about these days, you, sir or madam, are not a car enthusiast.  Mark my words, the auto industry and the great American roads will look drastically different a decade from now.

While some would credit the OLPC XO laptop with blazing the netbook trail, I think credit is due to Asus, the maker of the Eee PC. Please don’t think that I am trying to belittle the noble efforts of OLPC, but commercial success is not among their goals, unlike Asus. I have a hard time imagining the board meeting during which someone stood up an pitched the Eee PC. Let’s build a PC that is smaller and less powerful than a typical laptop, then we’ll put an OS that nobody has heard of on it, with an interface like nobody else’s, and sell it for half the price of the cheapest laptop on the market. Amazingly, somebody say okay and the rest is history. The Eee PC sold out before other computer makers could blink. Now the rest of the industry wants a piece of the action. The latest to announce an ultra-light, ultra-cheap netbook is Dell, who cleverly put a prototype into the CEO’s hands as he walked around the All Things D conference in May…bravo.

What’s so appealing about these minimalistic laptops? I work each day on one of the 10 fastest computers in the world, so I can tell you a thing or two about computer performance. Very few users need 1/10th the power that their personal computer provides, but every year we feel the need to buy faster and faster computers. Unless video editing, computer generated graphics, digital music production, or PC gaming is your cup of tea, you’re buying too much computer for yourself. While the aforementioned activities are becoming far more popular, likely due to the increased power available to computer users, an increasing number of people are using their computers almost exclusively as a portal to the Internet. If I can do this from a computer that’s lighter, cooler, cheaper, and probably consumes less power, why wouldn’t I? Even basic photo and video editing can now be done online. Face it, most people think photo editing means getting rid of red eye and cropping and they think video editing is adding transitions and music, all of which can be done online for free. Even when such activities need to be done on the local computer, netbooks have plenty of oomph to get it done for most people.

So where are netbooks lacking? Although one could do banking completely online, I feel that most people will still want Quicken or Money to keep their financial data close to home. I don’t blame them, that’s how I feel. While it may be practical to store one’s complete photo library online, it’s unlikely the someone will do the same with music and videos, so there still needs to be a machine somewhere in the home for multimedia storage hogs. Nobody is claiming that a netbook will ever be your only computer, but there’s been little talk about how to tie your netbook back to your home computer. I’ll address this more in a later post. The name netbook also implies that one really needs the Internet to survive with such a device. Cloud computing is the buzz work du jour, but wireless internet is not yet ubiquitous, so the netbook needs to remain useful, even when it is disconnected. Products such a Adobe Air and Google Gears seem so promising for such a computing environment, but they’re still very immature.

Personally, I think a netbook is a very appealing product. When I look at how my wife and I use our computers, I see us using a lot of computation power to do very little. I think a small, cheap laptop replacement is exactly what we, and most computer users, need for our day-to-day computing and I can’t wait to see future minimalistic computer products. I truly thought that my next laptop would be a Macbook (for reasons outside of the scope of this article), but now I feel fairly confident that our next computer will be a netbook. Portable, simplistic, cheap…it’s a win all around.

Be sure to come back for my next post in the series: Why Microsoft (and Apple) is missing the boat on netbooks.

I arrived at the Copenhagen airport around 1PM and made my way to the check-in counter by 1:15. My first signs of trouble were when the self check-in kiosk did not find my reservation. Luckily, the person behind the check-in desk had no problem finding it, but told me that there may be a problem with my flight and then took my passport to the booking desk to see if I could be changed to another flight. When she returned she told me that the flight was delayed and that the ticket counter would know in about 30 minutes whether to leave me where I am, or rebook me to an earlier flight. The decision, when it finally came, was to book me on the 2PM flight that was now set to leave at 3:50PM. She walked me back to the check-in to explain to them how to handle my flight. While I was checking in, the woman at the computer decided to double-book my London to Edinburgh flight, just in case I was not able to arrive on time. Turns out, this was a good plan, but it wasn’t quite enough.

Boarding pass in hand for my new flight, I headed for the security check point. I suppose it should go without saying that my boarding pass for a 2PM flight raised some eyebrows at 2:30PM. I can’t blame the guard one bit for her concern, I’m actually glad that she took the time to call down and make sure that everything was fine. I did eventually get through security and checked the board to find my gate…nothing, just “Await Info.” I asked someone if they could at least point me to which of the 4 terminals I should sit in, but was told that my flight could end up in any of the terminals. I found something to eat and waited. Just as I finished my lunch a gate number appeared on the monitor: A-something, if I recall correctly. I was in C. I grabbed my bags and hurried through C, B, and half of A to the passport control, where I was checked and waved through. Just as I walked up to the gate I hear and announcement, surprisingly by the same person who had tried to check me in originally, “There has been a mistake, this gate is for the New Castle flight, please have a seat and we will let you know when we have a new gate number.” Five or ten minutes pass before the next announcement. “I’m sorry to inform you that this flight has been canceled. Please move to the closest transfer station, which is just outside of border patrol.” Ok, I slowly gather my things and let the mad rush go ahead of me before passing back through border control, STAMP, and on to the transfer station, where there’s a plane full of people standing and 2 people at computers helping. Certainly an hour passes, perhaps not two, but I do eventually get a new ticket to London…on my original flight. It’s too bad they only double-booked my connection, not my outbound. Off to gate A15 and back through border control, STAMP.

Not surprisingly I found more than a few people waiting at A15, including some familiar faces. At this point it’s probably near 5PM and the flight is expected at 6:15. Oh wait, that changed to 6:00, progress! I only had to wait about 20 minutes or so there before they started boarding. The hope was that if the plane was full we could claim the first take-off slot that becomes free. I was fortunate enough to share an almost-business-class row with a nice gentleman from London. Once everyone was in their seats the purser announces that they will begin handing out water and orange juice to hold us over until we can get in the air. They no sooner begin pouring and the plane begins moving. “Abort drink service, begin take-off preparations.” We do, in fact, taxi out, to the usual safety videos and what-not, but we don’t get far.

We make a fairly long taxi out from the gate toward the runway, but soon come to the realization that we won’t be leaving. The plane turns around and begins moving back toward the terminal from which we had just left. After a brief conversation with the flight deck the purser announces that we will be returning to the gate to remove some bags that were loaded on our plane rather than the later flight. He told us that leaving these bags on the plane would amount to a big security risk. Past experience told me that this was simply not true (my bag has beat me home before), but the decision had been made, there was no turning back around.

Some 30 or 45 minutes pass while the bags are unloaded and our flight is assigned a new flight number and departure window. Our flight attendants handed out drinks, apologizing that they had nothing “stiffer” to give us, and we waited. The wait eventually passed and the flight to London went without incident. The flight attendants were even nice enough to share the bubbly with those of not fortunate enough to sit before the blue curtain dividing first class and coach. The flight time passed, we landed and pulled up next to the terminal…the now infamous Terminal 5.

We sat, parked parallel to the terminal for an abnormally long time before the pilot finally announced that nobody was at our gate to guide us in. Several minutes later someone dashed by “like a startled gazelle,” as the pilot described, but this someone could not find the switch to turn on the gate lights, so we waited. A truck was eventually dispatched to our rescue and we were guided into our spot, only 15 minutes or so after our arrival and some 30 or 45 minutes after my flight was to leave. I did hear some passengers grumble about the light-hearted remarks of our pilot and purser, but I think most appreciated the attempts to lighten the frustrated mood on the plane. Upon exiting the plane… at last… I learned why this building is given the name “terminal.”

I moved fairly quickly through the terminal, hoping that there might be yet one more flight to Edinburgh before the end of the night. As I rounded the corner to the transfer desk I found a line of people long enough to rival that of a brand new roller coaster on opening day of an amusement park; more than one hundred people, channeled back and forth by a thin band of fabric, stood between me and the airline employees who could help me find my way to Scotland. I stopped by the men’s room, realizing that I would be settling in for a long wait, and then joined my fellow, stranded travelers sometime around 6:30 or 7:00 in the evening. There would be no trip to Edinburgh tonight.

Over the next couple of hours travelers came and went, although only rarely leaving from the front of the line. It was several hours before I determined that this was due to the fact that at any given moment, no more than three people were helping travelers find new flights. Meanwhile several other BA employees stood behind the line answering people’s questions as they joined the line and assuring increasingly irate travelers that nobody would be going home until everyone in line had been serviced. Strangely, these same people began disappearing at a much faster rate than those of us in line. Occasionally travelers were told that anyone wanting to get themselves a hotel room could call BA toll free to rebook and would be reimbursed in the morning. We were unimpressed, few people took this offer. Some did try the toll-free number, but the people I spoke to who tried this were turned away by the operators. I even tried using my laptop to rebook online, but the torrent of misplaced travelers was too much for poor ba.com. Those of us in line settled in and got to know each other. Behind me were a mother and two teen-aged girls on their way from Glasgow to the Bahamas. Missing their flight meant missing out on a week in the warm, Caribbean sun. I hope they didn’t arrive too late to enjoy their island paradise.

By about 11PM we began noticing that the already outnumbered British Airways employees were becoming quite scarce. It was becoming obvious that no back-up had been called in and the “nobody can leave until the queue is empty” story was beginning to seam like a fairy tale. It was around that time that two BA employees began walking through the line, handing out bus and hotel vouchers. The 24 hour service line was closing until 4:45AM and we were being brushed aside. I suppose it goes without say that this was unpopular. The tired travelers that had waited more than 4 hours at this time began to wake like a sleeping bear poked by a foolish camper. As people in line, still at least 100 strong, began becoming less irate and more livid, I snuck around the perimeter to claim my ticket, I was tired and a bed sounded better than the cold, hard floor of the airport terminal. As I claimed my vouchers, two lower-management level BA employees came out to try to calm the crowds…they really should have taken the back door out of the airport. I slinked away, wishing my new Scottish friends well, as cries from the line became louder. Before I left, I did ask about my checked luggage. I was assured that when I returned in the morning, it would be put on my new flight. I knew better, but that’s a later story, off to bed.

Naturally, with flights still arriving and more poor saps like myself being sent away, the line through Passport Control was long, but I was probably through within 20 minutes and to the bus stop within about another 10. The bus to the free hotels was not particularly difficult to find, it was the one with 50 or so tired, bagless travelers lined up and waiting. To the bus driver’s credit, he filled that bus beyond capacity, but it still wasn’t enough to service the entire line. Thankfully, my hotel was the first stop, but that was true for most of the people on this particular bus. We piled into the hotel and assumed a position, with which we were all too familiar, in line. Although the hotel had been warned that we were coming, they still chose to use just one person to check us in, while two people stood idle behind the normal check-in desk. Thankfully, I had made it into line close to the front, so I was serviced fairly quickly. The hotel clerk then proceeded to tell each of us that although we had dinner and breakfast vouchers, dinner had closed hours earlier…gee, good thing BA gave us all a granola bar, huh? To bed, I was too tired and hungry to complain.

As I’ve already said, I’ve spent exactly two nights of my life in London. I do hope that one day I’ll actually be able to see some of the sights around London, but until then I’ll remember London as the place I stay when I can’t travel any farther. I will say, however, that the Days Inn near Heathrow is significantly nicer than the cheap hostel, where I stayed in my previous trip through London. None-the-less, I was in a hurry to get out in the morning, already a day late to Edinburgh. I phoned British Airways, got rebooked on a flight that would get me to Edinburgh around 5PM. Now for a short rest and then off for the airport to make sure that my belongings and I make the trip to Scotland together.

As I boarded the bus, the bus driver greeted me, then pointed at my carry-on bag, saying “Kiss it good bye, you’ll never see that again.” Sadly, he was not far from the truth. I arrived at the airport some 4 hours ahead of my flight. Since it’s unlikely that you’ve been through Terminal 5 at the time I write this, I’ll tell you that it is designed for automation. If can check yourself in and put your bag on a conveyor belt, you can pick any of several dozen check-in stations, but if you have anything out of the ordinary, there’s only a small handful of people you can speak with. I joined the line of poor folks who had been turned away by the kiosks, for whatever reason. It took some time to get through the line, but I did eventually get to speak with someone. I explained that my luggage was somewhere in the building and that I wanted to make sure it joined me on my flight. The attendant tapped away at the computer and then assured me that everything was taken care of. At that point, I made my way through security to the mall… err… terminal. Once past security, there was nothing out of the ordinary about my transit from London to Edinburgh; I came, I ate, I flew, I landed.

Upon landing in Scotland, at last, I made my way to the luggage carousel. There was no shortage of baggage to be claimed. So many bags had arrived that airport employees were retrieving those not marked to have arrived on the current flight and piling them together by the baggage office. Even with this wealth of baggage, my suitcase was nowhere to be found. I wasn’t terribly surprised by this, so I filed my lost baggage report and found a taxi. I’ll tell the story of my luggage in full in a future post, but I did finally reach my destination, only a day late and checked into my room: room 5, how ironic.

Cross-posted at: jeffsbasement.vox.com

So what’s HAML?

HAML’s designer calls it markup haiku. It’s a templating language that stresses structure and readability. HAML is a shorthand mark-up for defining the structure of a web page. It is a drop-in replacement for RHTML templates in Rails, although it also works in Merb and there is currently a PHP library in development.

What’s it look like?

Here’s a very basic page written in HAML. It’s important to note that HAML is space-sensitive, meaning that each nested element is indented with 2 spaces from the previous line. Likewise the resulting HTML will be well-formed and indented with 2 spaces. This may not be obvious in the output below.

!!!XML
!!!
%html{html_attrs}
  %head
    %title HAML Page
    %link{ :rel => "stylesheet", :type => "text/css", :href => "example.css"}
  %body
    %h1 HAML Example

Notice that html elements are marked with the % character. This is not just limited to valid HTML elements, any XML element can be noted this way. Notice that there’s no ending tags, HAML handles this automatically for you…very nice. If you’re a ruby developer, the stylesheet link line will look familiar to you. If you’re a python, perl, or PHP developer, this may look a little unfriendly, but should be understandable. The first two lines of the markup are my favorite part of writing HAML. As you will see below, those lines translate into the XML and DOCTYPE lines of the resulting XHTML document. Since I have to look-up these lines every time I write a new page, I love this markup. That’s enough suspense, here’s what it looks like in HTML:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8' ?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html>
  <head>
    <title>HAML Page</title>
    <link href='example.css' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css' />
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>HAML Example</h1>
  </body>
</html>

What I Like About HAML

I am a stickler for readable code, so I really like both the HAML and resulting HTML. By forcing designers to indent each block of code HAML ensures that the code is readable and maintainable and also makes finding structural bugs easy. HAML also provides a nice shorthand for styled divs, rather than <div class=”foo”>, you can simply type .foo. This notation ought to look familiar to anyone who has ever programmed CSS. As long as the elements do not contain a lot of attributes, HAML’s shorthands are very convenient. Everything about HAML makes defining the structure simpler than RHTML (or PHP, for that matter).

What I Dislike About HAML

I have to stress the fact that HAML is for defining page structure. There’s no notion of inline elements (think <em>, <strong>, <a>) in HAML, only blocks. You can put standard HTML tags in the mark-up, and I’ve found it necessary to do this many times. For the sake of completeness, I’ve tried using HAML to maintain a static HTML page (admittedly, outside of HAML’s primary mission) and found mixing inline HTML and HAML structure a bit tedious. Problems don’t stop at inline elements, any element that require a lot of attributes, like an <a>, <img>, or <script> tag, are far more complex in HAML than in HTML. If you’re using CSS+HTML, this probably doesn’t affect your code too much, but it’s important to mention. In addition to these limitations, I find the choice to require exactly 2 spaces a bit arbitrary. It was probably a decision to make the parser simple and quick, but python, which also uses space-delimited blocks, is not so strict and has a very fast parser. This isn’t a big issue to me, since I generally use two spaces anyway, but if you’re used to 4 spaces or tabs, you may need to adjust. Finally, on several occasions the HAML parser on my machine would not parse the code, but the online parser would. The error messages from the local parser weren’t always helpful, but it tried its best to guide me to my error. It was frustrating, however, that the online and offline parsers had different behaviors.

Final Verdict

I must admit, when I first saw HAML, I thought to myself “What’s the point?” I was quickly won over. For what it is, a simple template language and RHTML replacement, HAML is very good. I love the quick shorthands and neat code. Its limitations are few and easy to overcome. It’s now my template language of choice for Rails and Merb. I’m reserving judgment about using it in PHP applications, but as the PHP library matures, I’d like to give this a shot. I’d really love to see a tool that will let me use HAML templates to easily maintain static HTML pages. If you’ve not tried HAML, I really do suggest it.