Category: technology

More than enough memory formats to ponder on?

Ok so correct me if I miss one.
CF, SD, SM, MMC, XD, RS-MMC, miniSD, MS, MS pro, MG, MG pro, ATA and of course MS duo. All make up the complex, confusing and nightmare eco-system of Flash memory.

I personally think Sony memory stick is the worst of all of them with 4 different types of Flash memory formats which seem largely incompatable with each other. The licencing also keeps Memory Stick(s) prices quite high and I believe there are only 4-6 makers which can actually legally make them. I like what Sony do sometimes (psp and playstation) but come on now, its time to let go of memory stick and let the market decide. Ok enough about Memory stick for now. MMC, ghezz dont start me off. Why didnt it just merge into SD? MMC looks the same, acts the same but has odd voltages which dont work with certain devices, SD just works plus it has IO capbilities. Honestly I dont care if its called SD or MMC but they should have sorted it out before the mini's were produced. MiniSD fits smoothly into SD but is the true of Reduced sized MMC? I've not seen any sign of such a smooth interchange. Oh well, at least Smart media is slowly going away but the very odd xD has replaced it. I dont know why xD is around, what advantage does it have over SD and MMC? Lower voltage? What's the point?

On a positive finishing, Flash memory is getting really cheap now. 1gig SD and CF is about 35 pounds now and USB thumb drives are really becoming ubiquious. The 4 gig Flash memory in the ipod nano sounds like a lot now, but Samsung have already showed off 4x the space (16gig). With all this in mind, 2-4gig could be just around the corner but I assume other formats are also just around the corner too. Some suggestions for new names. xD nano, SD micro, SD-MMC, Mini Micro MMC, reduced micro sized SD, Memory stick super duo magic gate pro. Nahh, it will never catch on.

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iTunes on windows mobile

Itunes 5 on the pocketpc

So when I first saw these screenshots, I was thinking those guys at Aspect software have done a great job with wifitunes. But no the screenshots are actually from a special build just for Windows mobile 5 devices. Apple are really gunning for the mobile market.

Looking at the blog post, there seems to be no iTunes sharing (zeroconf) but iTunes store ability seems to be just around the corner. This is all pretty straight forward when you consider that iTunes has had Mobile phone syncing cabilities since 4.9. But lets step back for a moment, maybe the whole thing is a hoax? Engadget are certainly considering it. I personally think its a early build and maybe true, specially if you consider the next Razr could include iTunes.

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My next mobile could be a Nokia…

People who know me well, also know I had Ericsson preference when it came to mobile phones. But I've been looking around for the next phone I should upgrade to, and honestly theres not much out there.

I said I would go back to Windows mobile but there are so few of them which support 3G (UMTS) and are not really mini pocketpcs. And I dont think any SPV type smartphone form factors are coming till after the new year. So I'm forced to look elsewhere.

So I spotted the Nokia N90, which was previewed in Engadget in April. I think you will agree this certainly looks like a phone for 2006.

Nokia N90 in camera mode

Nokia N90 fits in the palm of your hand

Of course its got the spec to go with it. Just the screen rez alone out does my PocketPC and current Sanyo 3G phone. 128px x 128px in 65k colour on the outside of the phone and 352px x 416px in 262k colour on the main screen. 2 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss lens. Not big fan of RS-MMS because of the price and lack of compatablity with most of my SD enabled devices, but I'll live with it. Triband and 3G support tops off a quite large but very interesting phone. (Theres a huge review on mobile review by the way) But I'm wondering if I should just wait for the Hard drive enabled Nokia N91 instead? Which I hear has been delayed again, but sounds like a phone worth having

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Do you Firefox beta or Deer Park alpha it?

I've been using Deer Park alpha 2 for quite sometime now, but recently with the Firefox 1.5 beta publicly available I've been tempted to change. So after reading Uche's review of Firefox 1.5 beta I decided to actually install both of them on my machine. I have not used SVG for quite some time, but svg plus xforms seems like a logical step forward for browser technology

I still have not got around to installing IE7 or even Opera 8.5 free edition. But I'm sure there time will come.

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Changing the small things in software

Influence can be such a subjective thing, but just recently I've been able to shape or even influence the things around me so much more. Maybe that influence has always been there, in each and everyone of us?

So talking about influence and shaping, here's some things which I would like to shape.

Fireant
I've been looking for something to replace Blogmatrix Jaeger for downloading rich media via RSS for quite some time and Fireant seemed to be it. However there are a range of things which I think Fireant should take from Jaeger.

When Jaeger downloads a piece of media it names the file the same as the enclosure. However when Fireant downloads a media file it makes up a random filename like 9CBF0ACB9207FD9079A0342FA98EC69764756802.mp3 which is no good if you want to transfer stuff to your mobile phone via traditional routes (copying a file). Jaeger actually allows you to choose what type of filename you want, say a sequence of numbers, a date and time or just a filename.

Also, Fireant has support for copying files to ipods and psp's but what about removable storage cards, pocketpc, smartphones, etc?

I can understand why Fireant supports Torrents directly, but how about a option to use an external torrent application? I mean how bad is it when you got two torrent applications running at the same time unaware of each other? Yeah a recipe for a lot of trouble. I suggest a simple option which sends the torrent url or file to the other specified torrent application.

OPML import needs work, PocketRSS has a really nice feature which I actually suggest a while ago. It will go and grab a OPML file from a preset URL every week, month or whatever. So this means you dont need to manage two or more subscription lists. See the problem which you realise after a while, is that any blogger can add enclosures to there RSS. This means unless you provide the same list to Fireant, you may miss out on something interesting. Jaeger would actually automaticly download any enclosures from any subscription, there was no distiction between podcasters and bloggers (which I think is the correct way to go about this).
Somewhat related, is the fact that Fireant can be used as a normal RSS reader. This is once again good in theory but its really terriable in practice. It would be great to turn off all subscriptions which dont have enclosures, you know just let Fireant monitor all the feeds but only shows media items.

Blogging applications
I dont know what happened to Flock, but I'm still using a combination of Blojsom's Bookmarklet and Wbloggar. I thought about buying Ecto but I'm wondering why none of the blogging applications support the range of Microformats? And futher to that, if I drag a calendar entry from outlook or sunbird into my blog application wouldnt it make it make logical sense to automaticly create a Hclaendar link? The same should be true of contacts?
Wouldnt it also be great to be able to define some of those meta elements for entries in the blogging application? Say this entry is a certain creative commons licence and uses these tags. This should be common like how you can set the category and define trackbacks in most modern blogging applications.

Social software
I've outlined all my ideas for change in the bank of ideas. Feel free to vote on my thoughts and others.

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Apple nano, phone and itunes5? What a disappointment

So after all the usual marketing hype, Kevin was right. Cingular will sell the iTunes shuffle Motorola phone. Theres a replacement to the ipod mini called the ipod “Nano” which has a colour screen and is very light and very thin. Oh an theres iTunes5 which syncs with outlook and has a few extra features. Yeah big deal… If your interested, Engadget had a live blog for the event, which included a ichatAV call to some stars and lots of Steve Jobs type charisma.

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What’s your next cellphone? Asks Engadget

It’s been over a year since we last took everyone’s temperature on this topic, so we figured it was high time we did another Ask Engadget where we asked everyone what their next cellphone was going to be.

I'm going back to the Windows Smartphone/mobile platform for my next phone. Maybe the Windows mobile Treo might be a idea but will it support 3G/UMTS? douhtful… Something is certain, the next phone will have to support a high rez screen. I've been comparing my 320×240 screen with some of the latest Nokia's and i'm totally shocked by the quality of the Sanyo S750.
Some things I dont want on my phone, playback buttons. I honestly dont care if my phone has play and pause buttons. Clam style.
Some things I do want on my phone, SD or MiniSD storage. Windows Mobile or some open Linux operating system, USB type connection, 2+ megapixal cameras with unlimited video support (unlimited capture to storage card).

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Saxon 8.5 with collection()

Via Cafeconleche some really good news about the new version of Saxon.

Michael Kay has released version 8.5 of Saxon, his XSLT 2.0 and XQuery processor. Saxon 8.5 is published in two versions for both of which Java 1.4 or later is required. Saxon 8.5B is an open source product published under the Mozilla Public License 1.0 that “implements the 'basic' conformance level for XSLT 2.0 and XQuery.” Saxon 8.5SA is a £250.00 payware version that “allows stylesheets and queries to import an XML Schema, to validate input and output trees against a schema, and to select elements and attributes based on their schema-defined type. Saxon-SA also incorporates a free-standard XML Schema validator. In addition Saxon-SA incorporates some advanced extensions not available in the Saxon-B product. These include a try/catch capability for catching dynamic errors, improved error diagnostics, support for higher-order functions, and additional facilities in XQuery including support for grouping, advanced regular expression analysis, and formatting of dates and numbers.” Besides bug fixes, version 8.5 adds Unicode normalization and enables the collection() function to process a directory.

The collection() function is of interest because it gives XSLT the ability to read a file system metadata without any prior knowledge of the file system, like in the document() function. This was one of the useful things Cocoon does really well via the directory generator. Anyhow, more details can be found on the Xml hack blog including exactly how to call the function.

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