nomaded's little corner

T-Mobile G1, first impressions

Here are some comments I made to friends via lily & twitter:

Comments to lily

• Got the G1 for 14 days.
• I'm liking it. Easy to download apps.
• The keyboard isn't bad. Typing all of this from this a ssh client I grabbed.
• The screen is pretty nice. Not quite as high res as the HTC Touch Pro.
• The scrollball is nice. Works well for most things.
• The coverage seems decent. Haven't seen 3G yet though.
• It's nice the port works with a regular mini usb cable for charging.
• The chin is a little in the way for typing, but it's not bad.
• The only thing I've found so far that is really bad is the camera app. It takes too long for the shutter to go off.
• No flash on the G1 that I can see.
• The barcode scanner app is fun.

Comments to twitter

• Going to check out the G1. Maybe try it out for a week before deciding on my next phone.
• At dinner for my father's birthday. Playing with the G1.
• Wow. The camera app on the G1 is really bad. Very slow to register shutter presses.
• $0.20/min to forward calls from my Sprint Treo to the G1 while I test it.
• How weird. Looks like Tmo is the only service that gets any decent coverage in this building. No 3G tho.
• G1 verdict after 1.5 days: Tmo coverage is ok - 3G coverage not good. Battery life kinda meh. Keyboard ok. Can live with Android.
• I don't mind the look of the G1. It's not flashy, but even with the iPhone, I'd wrap it in a case to make it grippier/less bling.
• Android is a bit rough. Definitely see lots of potential but it's not to iPhone's level yet. Hope this gets Apple to open up more.
• Flipping back and forth between 3G and Edge is painful.
• The G1's battery life still sucks (charging it now off my work desktop), but it's nice that I can just use a mini-USB cable to charge it.
• I'm definitely finding some interesting/helpful apps for Android. Will need to see if there are equivs for the iPhone.
• I really want to like the G1. Android is pretty nice, but the G1's battery life is making it hard to be my main phone.

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Goodbye PalmOS, my old friend

Within a few days, my contract with Sprint will be up. I currently have a Treo 700p, and I don't plan on keeping the Treo nor the Sprint service. I've been a continuous PalmOS user since 1997, after getting a PalmPilot Professional, so this isn't a decision I'm taking lightly. Palm just isn't a viable choice anymore for a smartphone.

There hasn't been any real updates to PalmOS in over 5 years. The promised "PalmOS 6" (aka Cobalt) never materialized. The technology was sold off and turned into Access Linux Platform. Who has seen a ALP-based phone? Exactly. Then Palm said they'd have a Linux-based platform as the future of PalmOS, available in the middle of 2009. I hate to say it, but I'll believe it when I see it. But then again, I'd imagine the future Linux-based PalmOS be much like Android - it'd run a PalmOS-compatible GUI layer on top of a Linux platform. Still, too little, too late, with the competition out there.

The traditional alternative to PalmOS is Windows CE (aka PocketPC aka Windows Mobile). WinMo seems ok, but it feels really clunky to me. I currently have one in the form of a work-provided Motorola Q9c, running on Verizon Wireless. Again, it's ok, but I can't get really excited by it. It's kinda slow, and the quality of 3rd-party software doesn't seem that great - at least what I've found and tried.

So, I have come to the conclusion that my only choices moving forward are either the T-Mobile G1 running Android or the Apple iPhone 3G on AT&T's network. With the iPhone being a fairly well known quantity, based on the amount of coverage it's gotten over the past 2 years, I will be giving the G1 a test-drive, to see how well the hardware works out and how good the OS is. I hope to write up my experience shortly.

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New aim for this blog

I've had a blog for what? 5? 6 years now? It's been a bunch of meandering of thoughts. Not very pointed, and not very consistant.

After reading lifehacker.com's post about how to prepare for the downturn in the economy, Gina suggests setting up a nameplate website.

This seems like the purpose I've been looking for, for my blog. Most of the day-to-day tech chatter, I have other outlets that I can use, but I think I need to use my blog to concentrate on tech/career related things/tasks/hurdles that I encounter every day.

I think I'll use this to talk about the things I'm working on, and also use it as a reference for myself, so when I need to do work on something again, I'll have someplace where I've already tossed some notes, and some links, so I don't need "recreate the wheel". I've been doing similar with notes in text files, in delicious bookmarks, and in Evernote. I will try to spend some time each week taking what I've learned, and try to put something in here. Something that someone can also Google search for and maybe get the answer they need.

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Using Vimpress for posting

I think I'm gonna go with Vimpress for posting to this blog instead of Weblogger.el. Vimpress just feels easier to use, for me. I found weblogger.el to be a bit inconsistant in opening and editing previous posts, where Vimpress seems to work flawlessly.

About the only thing that I miss is being able to add new categories with a new post. I'll need to add categories via the main WP inteface. But then again, I would need to do the same with weblogger.el. When I tried to add a new category with weblogger.el, I ended up blowing up my blog, until I fixed it.

One thing I need to figure out how to do with Vim is replicate "fill-region" from Emacs.

edit:

Very weird. I had installed the UTW plugin to try out tagging, because Vimpress said it supported tagging with UTW installed. Apparently I did not install UTW correctly, or did not set up enough of it - it was generating error messages when I'd try to save the post in Vimpress.

edit2:

Ah ha! Looking through the example .vimrc that comes with vim, I see a key mapping of the "Q" command to "gq". This seems to serve a similar function to "fill-region" in Emacs. I found this Vim tips & tricks page that offers some good tips for users new to Vim. I wouldn't call myself a newbie with Vim, but I'm new to customizing Vim.

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Testing Vimpress

testing… 1… 2… 3…

edit: seeing if the vimpress plugin for Vim will allow me to edit an existing post.

edit2: let's see if this will bork my blog, if I add a new tag to this post.

edit3: ok, didn't bork my blog, like weblogger did, but the tag doesn't show up either.

edit4: can I save this?

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Blog borked and fixed

Some how I managed to really screw up my blog yesterday. I'm going to assume that it was related to yesterday's post. I'm pretty sure it was a combination of my use of emacs' weblogger mode and trying to use a category that did not exist. With the help of my gf, my blog started resembling a blog again.

With the customizations I did to TripleK2, and the old version of WP, I think it's time to start anew again. I think I found a decent theme as a starting point. And it's time to upgrade to the current version of WP. I hope to work on some of this during week. We'll see how far I get.

Posted in general, software | 1 views | 1 Comment »

Twitter borked

So, I recently started using Twitter, mostly to see what's the BigDeal(tm) about it. I guess the "fun" of Twitter is the inherant voyeurism of following people without them following you back. I was kind of hoping that Twitter would be more of a "2-way conversation" but that doesn't seem to be happening, at least from where I'm sitting.

Of course, this post is not supposed to be a rant about how to use Twitter, but more about the recent "maintenance" from this past weekend. By Saturday afternoon, I noticed something a bit "off" with my Twitter webpage. I was not seeing as many tweets from others as I wousd have expected. I was trying to catch up on events overnight, and noticed some tweets showing up on gTalk that didn't show up on the webpage. I didn't think too much about it, until Sunday morning, when I noticed more "missing" tweets.

And it looks like Twitter is aware of the problem.

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Twitter-enabled

I've been considering setting up a Twitter account for a little while now, but I haven't because I hadn't figured out a good way to tweet from work, without it it being in the clear. I'd rather not have work be able to capture and track what I'm doing, even if it's just reading my RSS feeds (through the https version of Google Reader). I'm not doing anything illegal, but I want to keep my work-life and private-life separate.

So, my gf offhandedly mentioned that she can tweet and follow with Google talk. I realized that was the easiest solution to my "problem". So, now I have a Twitter account.

I had been considering setting up one of the CLI-based Twitter clients on my linux box from home, but I couldn't decide if I wanted to go with one of the various scripts to tweet and follow from the shell prompt, or if I wanted to try out an Emacs module to do this, like I did for posting to this blog. As an aside, I still can't say I'm totally happy with the Emacs webblogger module. (See the previous post about the wonky timestamp.)

Of course, I just noticed that the Twitter page for tweeting is an https page. Oh well. I would not be surprised if Twitter is something that gets blocked by the work webproxy.

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