needful things

When you don’t know something you may be scared of it, or you might just WANT it.
I was reading Marcus’ blog (read the next post. Next? Yes, be patient) and I followed a link to Vodafone and then I saw a strange picture. following a few links and googling a little bit I discovered that I WANT this phone + the “bull accessory”.
It’s all Japanese so I can’t understand ANYTHING and I actually don’t know what it is and what it’s needed for, but I know that I just need it!

Take a look here.
If you go down around the middle of the page you will see an accessory (or at least I THINK it’s an accessory) called “bull”. I want it!

WURFL around the world

I just got an e-mail from Erik, with a link to this page:
http://www.dagbladet.no/kultur/2005/09/01/442083.html

I don’t speak Norwegian, so I can’t translate, but basically dagbladet is an important newspaper and news-site. They also provide WAP access to their site.
The news announces the full support of the PSP by their site and guess what? They use WURFL for the markup and image rescaling.

I am really glad to see this, thank you Erik.

Finding information in mailing lists

Mailing lists are a great thing!
When I started to get on internet (we still did not browse it), I used to read on newsgroups. For some reason I have never had a good feeling with newsgroups, I always felt like it was hard to communicate and so as soon as I could I left them (as soon as I found other resources).
Mailing lists are my favourites (or favorites, as you like it better). I have to admit that from a user perspective the mailing list is not SO different from a newsgroup, you still use an e-mail client, your reply gets “propagated” to all the other subscribers and everyone can read and reply. Both newsgroups and mailing lists may or may not be moderated. Don’t ask me why, but I have always felt more comfortable with mailing lists.

Forums are a great thing. I have to say that the UI is MUCH better, contents are generally grouped by argument in sub-forums and all threads are grouped all together. When you find what you were looking for, you can follow the original thread and maybe reply (and quote). Modern forums (or bulletin boards) are very powerful.

On the other side, the mailing list arrives in your mailbox. Even if you can filter emails and maybe move them into specific mailboxes, you will always see a little number or something that reminds you that a mailing list you’re subscribed to is waiting for your replies. Considering my habits and my memory, this is of great help! I generally end up not reading forums or maybe visit them occasionally.

Now, what I DON’T LIKE about mailing lists?
This is actually not specific of mailing lists, I see it happen often in forums too, but anyway… I don’t like repeated questions.
If you have been on a mailing list for months or maybe years, you will notice that questions are often the same or similar. I personally don’t like to answer “STFW” or similar, I always try to give good pointers, but basic question are always repeated.
Unfortunately, as a new user on my mailing lists, I am sure I have asked those very basic, already seen, questions more than ones ( I feel so bad when someone answers “look at this message or thread” and I find the exact same question). So what I’m saying is not that I am pissed with people writing stupid questions, because I found myself in the same situation. I learnt to search in the archive, but sometimes it seems like I can’t find that specific question even if it was there.

I wonder there could be better search engines, but I alwso think that if they are not in place, yet, maybe they just could not find a way to make it work properly.
Sometimes I searched on Google’s newsgroups, but I never really found what I was looking for (and maybe my bad feeling about newsgroups did not let me search enough).

Did you ever try the search on Yahoo! groups? That is really bad. They should seriously work on that to make ti more usable. It’s 2005, we are approaching 2006, you can’t still have the “one word search” inherited from eGroups. How long ago did Yahoo! buy those mailing lists? And they never had a week or two to make it nicer?

Final words are that I don’t have an answer, but if you are working on anything to solve this (and I don’t mean writing a FAQ), please let me know and I’ll support you! 😀

Why I love to Shuffle

I recently started travelling more often (two days a week for about 3 hours).
Fortunately I don’t drive, but I use the train. This means I can read, watch a movie, look outside.
The first times I read the newspaper, then I brought a book, sometimes I watched a movie.
Being a Mac user I thought I needed an iPod, using all the battery of my PowerBook to use iTunes didn’t sound so smart.
I was about to buy a nice iPod shuffle, the 1GB, but then I read some rumors that a 2GB version was coming so I decided to wait a little bit.
Thanks to DADA, one of the companies I’m consulting for, I received a FREE 512MB iPod shuffle.
It is not exactly the model I wanted, but they gave it for free and this made me happy enough.

I plugged it into my notebook (unfortunately it’s a little bit too wide and I need to unplug my mouse while recharging), but it worked like a charm. I formatted it and loaded some random songs.
To my surprise and happiness I listened to a number of songs that I hadn’t played for quite a while! The battery lasts even too much (now that it’s new) and I could probably play all the songs at least 3 times! I have never drained all the enrgy out of the battery, I always wanted to load more songs before the battery ran out.
The update process is really simple and takes a few minutes. It loads about 110-120 songs which are more than enough for my full trip.
Now I don’t go out if I don’t have my shuffle.

Pros:

really easy to update and use
tiny and super-lightweight
plays a good number of songs

Cons:

none

I really can’t find a real con they only I can think of is that all my songs don’t fit in it, but I have to admit that the “shuffle feature” made me discover a good number of songs that I hadn’t played for a long time and this become a pro automatically!
Anotehr thing that someone might identify as a con is that it doesn’t have a display. In my opinion the display was not in the original idea of the player. IMHO the real idea behind the Shuffle is to upload a bunch of songs automatically and play them while walking, running, etc, so you don’t need a siplay like on the iPod where you have all your songs and playlists and go pick your single song or pick your favourite playlist.
For what I believe was the target of the iPod shuffle, it’s a complete success!

And now a nice “action shot” that sows how useful it can be at the seaside.

Back from holidays

I am (unfortunately) back from my short holidays. I am back online and got all my emails.

I will still not work full time and dedicate some time other things in my “real life” (do I still have one?), but I promise I will try to answer to emails quickly.
I am impressed by the amount of emails I received during this couple of weeks and WURFL, thank you all.

More updates in the next days.

How much does WURFL take?

These days I spent some time reading a post from Russell Beattie about Mobile Research and the replies that followed. I have in some way already posted about it.

Later replies also made me think about the time that I invest in WURFL. While sometimes the project might seem dead or silent, I constantly work on it and Luca Passani does the same.
Initially the project was just an idea, collect the data that the few readers and writers of wmlprogramming were already storing. At that time we were not so many and basically we all were developers experimenting this new technology trying to find our way out of the “quicksand”.
After Nokia’s ringtones (strictly monophonic) and after all the other manufacturers understood that personalization would have brought money, more companies and people started minding about “device capabilities” and of course new developers joined the wmlprogramming mailing list looking for information about devices and support. More technologies have arrived (MMS, EMS, J2ME, etc) and WURFL kept growing in size, contributors and most of all users (users that often don’t contribute back, but the few that do keep the project alive).

Luca and I started to feel that the project was growing when the number of emails about WURFL on wmlprogramming and most of all emails directed to us personally started growing a lot.
Today I was wondering about the time I spend on the project. A rough count is that I spend about 60-90 minutes per day replying to personal emails and emails on the list.
Aside from this I spend a few hours per week, I would say an average of 3-4 distributed during evening and weekends, mostly importing data in the XML. I think I reach peaks of 10-12 hours, sometimes.
I am sure developers supporting WURFL are also spending some extra time just because they think it’s a good project and they think it can help other people as it helped them. This is why I respect anyone who sends me an email and always try to reply quickly and fully.

Who is using WURFL? While many think it’s just an “underground” project, there are indeed some big companies using it. Sometimes they won’t tell us because they don’t mind, some other times they will consider it an “industrial secret”, some other times they might be scared we will ask for money. What else? I am sure there is someone in some big company that users WURFL and is pretty satisfied with the results, but won’t tell it too loud just because it’s a big company and knowing that it uses something free instead of paying a lot of money to some big company that SELLS software and consultancy would not be good.
Why am I not asking for money? There are many reasons, here’s an unsorted and incomplete list:

I take advantage of many other open-source software so this is my little contribution back
WURFL was born as a collaborative effort and should continue that way. No one invested fresh money in it, if not his own time, but this is also one of the reasons why it was successful
In the last 2 years I got contracts ALSO because I work actively on WURFL and companies hiring me were HAPPY that I dedicated some time to project
I don’t think that selling WURFL (intended as the XML) would really give me much money. I think many people (probably not understanding the difficulty) would say that anyone can collect data about a device. What could give money would be some added value. It is funny when sometimes I receive emails of people asking me to develop some software for them. Do they think that just because I work on an open-source project, working is a hobby, for me?

There are probably many other small reasons why I do this, maybe also the dream of a worldwide fame, going on TV, being interviewed and so on. But probably this is too far away, I should have done something more popular, like eMule or Napster…

BitTorrent performance

This is jsut a quick post to congratulate with myself for getting a new DSL provider.
Forgetting about the *20* days that I had to wait for them to fix some problem in their servers (20 days are counted from the day they told me it should have worked, until it worked for real), I am now enjoying the pleasure of a 4Mbit download bandwidth.

Downloading Ubuntu was a good test, take a look at this screenshot:

As a non-pro-bittorrent-user I REALLY like Azureus. I don’t know if it’s the best, I don’t know if it’s the worst, I just like it (not only because it works on my mac). Did you see all the cool statistics? I can just staire at them for hours.
When I had a 2400baud modem I stood there, looking at my Zmodem (or Xmodem, depending on the BBS) looking at PKZip (200KB) downloading and uploading.

AH, I LOVE statistics.

Yahoo audio search

Thanks to a post on Julien’s blog (Italian only) I discovered the new “audio search” from Yahoo. Try it out, works nicely, too bad it directs you to payed downloads, but at least it’s legal! It nice that they provide the file format (WMA, for example) and the protection, such as if you can burn it on CD and pricing, of course.

Search page
About Audio Search

Does anybody remember ftpsearch.ntnu.no? The early days of file searching on the web.
Later it was acquired by Lycos, if I remember correctly, even if it was a project sponsored by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. At that time you could also search for “pirated” MP3’s, obviously they closed it soon, but the original idea was really good. Today you can use File Mirrors, but you can still find pirated files, somehow…

Thumbs up to Yahoo for also listing other providers of music and not just their own songs.

MobileResearch in the news

It looks like MobileResearch (a startup company?) has gotten quite some good friends on the net. They are presented as

“the first commercially available solution that provides mobile developers and content publishers the data they need to address the problems associated with mobile device fragmentation”

on their site, here, here and probably on many other sites.
They certainly have a great marketing team and I’m happy to see that more and more people realize that knowing what a device can do is really important.
I am not saying that WURFL is better (or worse) than their product, I haven’t seen it. The good thing and probably their advantage over WURFL is that it’s specifically targeted for the US market (but it looks like they will deliver something for the European market later this year) and WURFL hasn’t had that many contributions from the US market. We have recently (the last 2-3 months) started receiving contributions from the US, this means that they are eventually understanding and feeling the need for such database.
I am sure the guys at MobileResearch have worked and ARE working hard on their project, but you will all agree with me that it’s a great marketing-ONLY statment the fact they are the first… It’s true that WURFL is NOT a commercial product, IT IS FREE! On the other side it is also true that there are other really valuable and EXPERIENCED companies offering similar products. The question is:”Are they as well trained and are they targeted to the US market?” Maybe they have worked hard on the GSM/European market and don’t have much information about US devices. Audiovox devices are not being sold in Europe. There are many devices from Sharp and Sanyo being sold in USA only. Danger is another one, and I could list more.

I just wonder how much marketing is behind this software and how much “substance” is behind the product.

Knowing that more people is working on something like WURFL just confirms the value of the project and seeing that they ask you almost 30.000,00 USD makes me understand the monetary value of WURFL.

I wonder were WURFL could go if people donated some money or time or resources.

PS: while writing this post I noticed they are also putting banners on Google.

Mobile Operators developers’ sites

I have been in the mobile biz for quite a few years now (they are going to be 6 years this fall!) and from the beginning finding information about devices has been a problem.
In the early days of WAP I could understand this, most people didn’t even know what they would have neeeded to know to develop a WAP site. Also, the first devices supporting WAP (in Europe, I’m not talking about HDML in USA) were not yet perfect and firmware releases fixed many little glitches. Having a hard time finding information about 2-3 devices was ok. It would have been better to have it, but still, it was ok, you’d just buy the device and test (and maybe upgrade the firmware when a major release would come).

Now we have tens of manufacturers from all around the world, tens of operators that often require modifications to the default features of a device.
There are thousands of developers around the world working for hundreds of small-medium-large companies and we still CAN NOT find information about certain devices.

Nokia, as we all know, offers the best documentation (for GSM devices).
DoCoMo is not even an issue, all devices are created equal (developer heaven: how do I get in?).
Motorola and SonyEricsson do something and deliver SOME information about their devices (did you ever read a spec doc from Motorola? it’s a little too short, IMHO, but at least I can get the screen size, colors, WAP version and a little more).
Siemens delivers periodically a “device matrix” with a lot of good information of 20-30 devices.

What is Samsung doing? Why is their site MSIE only? Why do they only provide information about j2me? Why is their forum so ugly? Didn’t they ever hear of phpBB or any other FREE forum software?

At least Samsung is doing something!
Alcatel hasn’t updated their developers’s site in a year or so.
Sagem doesn’t have a developers’ site (if you know the address let me know!).
LG doesn’t have a developers’ site.
Sanyo doesn’t have a developers’ site.
Panasonic doesn’t have a developers’ site.
Sendo doesn’t have a developers’ site.

Fortunately some operators thought that it was worth spending a little time testing the devices they were going to sell with their brand and luckily decided to share that VALUEABLE info with their partners and developers. Unfortunately many don’t update their sites!
I registered on t-mobile’s US developers’ site. Nice site, but did the employee leave the company? The last update is dated 2002!!
Cingular (+ AT&T, now) have a good site! +1 to cingular
TIM doesn’t have a developers’ site.
Telefonica has a developers’ site, but is it fair to make me pay to access it? Yes, it’s true that I make money selling contents to their customers, but it’s also true that Telefonica (just like all the other operators around the world) get a HIGH percentage of that money I ask to my customers. Isn’t that money enough? (ermm.. is money EVER enough??)

I am a little disappointed about the service they offer.
In my opinion it’s in THEIR interest (both manufacturers and operators) to share the device information with content and service providers. In my opinion Nokia is the only one who understood the value of this. EVERY new Nokia device that comes on the market is well documented and OF COURSE it will be supported by developers and users/customers will go buy another Nokia because they get plenty of contents well formatted and well designed. Do you know why? Because Nokia gave the tools to the developers!

PLEASE, prove me wrong, give me other good developers’ site! Let me know that LG or Panasonic, or someone else is offering a GOOD developers’ site.

DISCLAIMER: I did not name all the companies and ALL the developers site that I found. +1 to Openwave for their style guides and few device info. I’m sure they could do better, but still, they provide really good information about their browser, the device is not exactly their biz. Sprint developers’ site is good too. Nextel is ok, but a little outdated.

NOTICE: we are working on an updated, new, super-cool wireless FAQ, it would be cool to list all the good developers’ sites there, so let me know of developers’ sites! (in English, please)