I won’t ask the question, “How could so much change so quickly in the technology world?” because I already know the answer: “That’s the way it is.” Instead, I thought I’d take a minute to say goodbye to two of my favorite tech-related joys that no longer exist — and cross my fingers for the third.

Many start-ups closed down in 2001, but I hated to see Eazel cease operations in May. Their goal of bringing a truly beautiful, innovative desktop environment to Linux (called Nautilus) was important from my perspective. I wanted to see Linux thrive on laptops and desktops everywhere, and I liked the look and feel of the environment Eazel created. They had a terrific team who embraced open source ideals, and I miss their work. If you’re looking for some good talent to hire, you might want to check out the Eazel Alumni page.

There are lots of web sites that I miss, but the one vanishing that brought tears to my eyes was when AdCritic.com closed its doors. This site was an endless source of entertainment for me as I watched countless QuickTime videos of ads, spoofs, and countless other two-minute delights. AdCritic is offline until further notice, and there’s nothing else like them on the Net.

Finally, the lizard isn’t dead, but he sure was quiet in 2001. The Mozilla project team has continued to publish new builds and refine its set of inter-related technologies, but they still haven’t managed to publish version one (we’re currently at build 0.9.7). According to the Mozilla 1.0 Manifesto, we might see version one sometime in the spring of 2002.

In the meantime, the progress of .NET, Mac OS X, Liberty, and other emerging platforms and services threatens to leave Mozilla behind.

I’ve already said goodbye to too many innovative, intelligent tech friends in 2001, and I don’t feel like losing another. So I’m still pulling for the big lizard.

What tech-related sites and businesses do you miss?

Related link: https://www.nanomuscle.com/

At about the size of a paperclip, NanoMuscle Actuators are miniature “motors” sporting features perfect for consumer electronics: silent operation, fluid movement, low power-consumption, no gearing required, and low price. Expect to see such things showing up in amateur robotics, cameras, interactive toys, and scientific instruments.

One of my hopes is that software companies view Mac OS X as a opportunity to enhance their offerings instead of merely porting the same old applications to the Unix-based OS.

The latest AIM client for Mac OS X, version 4.5.4, adds some features I’ve never seen before on a Mac, and brings back a couple of favorites. In the ReadMe for this version, the software team does a nice job of keeping users posted on what’s new and what’s coming down the pike.

My favorite new item is the enhanced Mail Status display that I can set up in the reconfigured My Account Settings dialogue box. Previously I was only notified when mail arrived in my AOL account. Now I can add any POP account that I want and set how often AIM checks those accounts.

AIM scans those e-mail accounts according to the parameters I establish, and when mail arrives in one, the flag goes up and the whistle sounds. There’s a drop-down arrow next to the mailbox, that if I click on it, shows me the subject, sender, and time stamp for the letter, so I don’t even have to switch to my e-mail client to see what’s arrived. Now that’s convenient.

In the My Account Settings dialogue box, I can indicate which e-mail client I want to use to open the letters displayed in the AIM Mail Status window. If a letter arrives that I want to read, then I simply click on my account and AIM sends me over to my preferred client.

Another new feature that I tested was the Send a File or Folder function. This still needs some refinement, but I sent several text documents and Jpegs to others through the AIM client. Very handy.

Now there’s AppleScript support too, and they provide a folder full of sample scripts to boot. Adding scriptability to this client is consistent with Apple’s renewed vigor toward AppleScript.

I haven’t covered all the features here, and more are on the way, including emoticons and file sharing. But clearly the software team for the Mac OS X AIM client are taking this opportunity to improve their product. And as a fan of Mac OS X, that’s exactly what I want to see.

Download the new client and let me know what you think.

In my A Week with the iPod article that ran last month, I complained about both the iPod and iTunes inserting space between tracks on “mix” discs. Several people wrote in with suggestions. I tried all of them and more, but the problem still shows up when listening to my favorite live mix DJ albums.

To get to the bottom of this, I’ve done quite a bit of experimenting and research. I’ve tried a variety of rippers and encoders as well as ripping entire discs to one MP3 file. The ripping of entire discs to one MP3 file worked well, but bumped into a bug in the iPod where the hard drive keeps spinning when a song larger than its buffer is played. I have hopes that this problem will be fixed in an upcoming iPod Software Update, but that seems to be still in the future.

Recently, Jason Hunter (who is currently also in the midst of iPod ownership joy) sent a link to the LAME Technical FAQ which talks about this exact issue. Apparently, the silence at the start and end of an MP3 file is inserted by most encoders due to the way that the way the format works. To not insert these silences would compromise the sound of the first and final few frames of music.

So, from the standpoint of the encoder makers, I can understand why the silence is inserted. After all, who wants to compromise the sound of the material that you are encoding? But, I can’t understand why the encoder designers went with this design choice knowing that it would make it impossible to have adjacent tracks play seamlessly together. Even if they don’t listen to electronic music like I do, many classical albums have continuous tracks and you would think that at least a few of them would have tried out a bit of Mozart at some point. I hope that the Ogg-Vorbis designers have paid attention to this little detail.

In any case, it seems that the gap problem is inherent in the format. But, it also seems (at least from my standpoint as someone who’s never written a MP3 player or encoder) that a smart player could (if it were reading data for the next song ahead of time) merge the data of tracks together and ignore the padding. This might result in a clean mix between tracks. But what do I know? :)

Since I’m not a MP3 player software genius, I’m just waiting for the long song fix to appear for the iPod. And I’ve put in a feature request to Apple (via https://bugreport.apple.com/) to add an option to rip all the music from a CD into a single MP3 track. If this functionality would be valuable to you, please also let Apple know either using the link above or sending feedback via other mechanisms such as Apple’s Discussion Forums.

Do know more about how the MP3 format works or have other ideas? Let us know!

I’m a big fan of my IBM 1GB Microdrive. It fits nicely in my Canon D30 digital camera and gives me the ability to store lots of pictures. And because it is a hard drive rather than solid state, it used to run rings around other CF cards when it came to performance.

That was a year ago when I bought the Microdrive. Yesterday, I was at Keeble & Schucat, a photographic store in Palo Alto, with a friend of mine who is interested in buying a D30 for himself. While he was busily snapping pictures, I suddenly became quite jealous. The camera in the store was saving pictures noticeably faster than mine does. After snapping off a couple of frames to verify that it was cycling faster than mine, I popped the CF card out and found one of Lexar’s new high performance Professional 16x cards.

What a difference a year makes when it comes to solid state devices. I own a 64MB 8x Lexar card that the Microdrive trounced in performance, not to mention storage space. Now, you can get these new fast cards in capacities of up to 512MB. From the little bit of research that I’ve done on the net in the last few hours, the Microdrive is probably still faster than solid state for long operations, but the Lexar cards win for in-camera use when you are writing out a image file from memory because they don’t have to spin up the hard drive to start writing.

Now I’m plotting to sell my Microdrive and pick up one or two of these new Lexar cards. Digital photography — it’s an expensive habit for sure.

What have your experiences been with Compact Flash “digital film”?

Related link: https://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/27/technology/circuits/27PBOX.html

Deja Vu, a UC Berkeley project, hopes to bring a little art (albeit computer-generated abstract art) to our ATM visits and computer logins. Rather than hard-to-remember passwords consisting of strings of letters and numbers, the researchers employ our innate ability to recognize images we’ve seen before. /. has some discussion of the security ramifications.

Related link: https://www.economist.com/science/tq/index.cfm

On the chance it escaped your notice, the Economist makes their Technology Quarterly available online. In this issue: wind-up chargers, speech recognition, overhauling the pen, and oodles more.

Related link: https://www.grandcentral.com/developers/

“By simply exposing relevant business processes to the Grand Central Network and defining the policies that manage interaction, Grand Central enables . . . companies to effectively collaborate.” Grand Central is a Web Services orchestration (aka business logic) clearing-house offering low-barrier access to a reliable, secure, flexible, subscription-based enterprise-to-enterprise network. GS uses a message queue metaphor; messages are inserted, routed via “switches” and “connectors” or “routers” through zero or more intervening services, and delivered. Orchestration is defined by the service provider via simple “if-then”s and access is controlled via password or the requirement of a Verisign certificate. GS just released it’s SDK in Java, Perl, and COM/.NET flavours. There’s no particular, proprietary magic in the SDK, mind you; Grand Central speaks straight SOAP.

Related link: https://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/24/technology/ebusiness/24CARL.html

Carl Malamud’s NetTopBox is “trying to make television as easy to use as the Internet.” The Open Source project aims to provide something like a cross between Epinions and the Internet Movie Database — a rich, interactive, easy-to-use TV guide available on the Web and (hopefully) a set-top box near you. NetTopBox is going up against Gemstar-TV Guide International, purveyor of the traditional electronic program guides you know and, well…, don’t particularly love. Far from yet another proprietary system, Malamud is creating open protocols and APIs for providing and consuming television listings.

The one thing I’ve missed the most with Mac OS X is PC card support. I’ve never been that fond of using the USB cable for downloading pictures from my digital camera, but I had to dig it out of the junk drawer and press it back into service with Mac OS X 10.1

At least the inconvenience of having to use a cable again has been offset by Apple’s cool digital camera application, Image Capture, which I’ve become quite fond of using for downloading my images. It allows me to preview thumbnails and send the pictures to various folders on my hard drive.

But when I read today that PC Card support lives again, I figured that I’d be saying good bye to both my USB cable (yaay!) and to Image Capture (sigh)

Well, I was half right.

I anxiously took the Smart Media card out of my Olympus camera, put it in the PC card adapter, and inserted it into the PC card slot on my TiBook. Lo and behold, a drive icon appeared instantly on the desktop. My heart soared!

Then, just a few seconds later, Image Capture launched and was ready to go to work just as if I had been connected via the USB cable. How cool. The TiBook figured out what type of media I had inserted, and launched the digital photo software.

Except now the shots I selected for download transferred from the Smart Media card at triple the speed of the USB cable.

After spending the better part of the morning wrestling with my Windows laptop to even recognize my PC card, tonight’s experience with Mac OS X has me grinning from ear to ear.

Once again, the software team at Apple has done a sweet job in adding this new feature to Mac OS X.

If you’ve had any new discoveries with this latest update, let us know.

Apple’s OS X team has an early stocking stuffer for us: Mac OS X 10.1.2. For those keeping track of build numbers, it’s 5P48. Grab it via Software Update.

This release fixes lots of bugs, and brings updates to several components. Noteably there is now support for IrDA modems on FireWire based PowerBooks and a new version of AppleScript that supports applications created with AppleScript Studio (which itself just arrived in the December 2001 Developer Tools package).

What have your experiences been with 10.1.2?

As if Palm hadn’t had a tough enough year, now we have a district court in Rochester, N.Y.
ruling that Palm’s Graffiti handwriting-recognition system was ripped off from Xerox. Palm and its parent company, 3Com, are both liable for damages.

Xerox, which has been on the ropes for years, can hardly be blamed for trying to recoup some of the profits from one of its inventions. But we can ask, why start now? Xerox R& D — primarily out of its Palo Alto Research Center, PARC — almost singlehandedly came up with all the inventions that make the computing industry the consumer-friendly marketplace it is today. Maybe U.S. Robotics thought Xerox technology was fair game. The story of a pre-Macintosh Steve Jobs getting a tour of PARC in the early 1980s and seeing both the mouse and the graphical user interface at work is an industry legend now, a contemporary version of the myth of stealing fire from the gods. Ethernet came out of the place, and if memory serves, electricity and rope, too.

Xerox’s top execs, based in chilly Rochester far away from the bean-bag-chair visionaries at PARC, never showed too much interest in making a killing off the ideas that came out there. They were focused on holding onto patents in their core business, office copier machines — pretty hot stuff in the 1970s. But so was the telecopier. In the end, the feds made them share their technology with competitors like Sharp and Canon, who of course undersold them and drove them right out of the small office and home market.

Over the past year, Xerox’s share price has been treading water just to keep from hitting the pink sheets. (It closed at 9.03 on Thursday.) Maybe it will get another bounce from this coup, as the courts recognize its ownership over the technology it rather uncleverly dubbed “Unistrokes” (snicker, snicker).

Meanwhile, Palm can add this one to their debit column, right below iPaq’s rising market share and just above Carl Yankowski’s severance package.

Related link: https://www.globe.com/dailyglobe2/347/business/At_the_core_of_Apple_s_OS_X-.shtml

This interview by the Boston Globe gives a view into the reasons why one of the founders of the FreeBSD project now works for Apple on Mac OS X.

A few weblogs ago, I noted an occasion where my iPod seemed to run through its battery very quickly. I had attributed this to a faulty battery meter, but instead it turns out to have a different root cause.

A reader comment to my "A Week With the iPod" article noted that when playing very large MP3 files, the hard drive doesn’t spin down. This wrecks havoc with the iPod’s battery saving strategy of reading 20 minutes of data at a time and not spinning the hard drive much.

Interestingly enough, the day I noticed that my battery faded faster than it should have was just after I had started ripping entire mix CD’s down to one MP3 file so that I could avoid the artificial gaps between tracks that I noted in my iPod review. Turns out that my work-around for the gap problem creates 60 to 90 MB files that run smack into this problem of not spinning down the hard drive when playing back large files.

To verify the issue for myself, I performed an informal test to see how fast the battery drains when the hard drive is constantly spinning. I took a fully charged iPod and set it playing an MP3 of a John Digweed album that I had ripped from the original CD as one track (remember, Don’t Steal Music). After playing two CD’s worth of data, I had exhausted half of my battery. A rough estimate based on this test puts battery life at something much less than 5 hours — half of what the iPod is capable of with normal size tracks.

I do have to say that I’m impressed that the iPod can keep the hard drive spinning that long. The new lithium polymer battery technology works very well indeed. I wonder how long my Titanium would run using this new battery technology.

A discussion today on O’Reilly’s editors list considered why Bluetooth has failed to take root year after year. I agreed with the camp that thought it was largely a failure of marketing (specifically, trying to market itself against 802.11b), and also that there has been a sort of chicken-and-egg problem, where Bluetooth in one gadget doesn’t get you much; its power shows when it gets into all your gadgets. This is pretty different from 802.11b, where if you shell out for a wireless PC card, you’re admitted to a glorious world of wireless networks in offices, conventions, airports and — according to Cory Doctorow — enough insecure and community-spirited wireless networks to give seamless coverage in a
cab riding through Manhattan.

But I’m an optimist, so I visited the Bluetooth Developers Conference at Moscone in San Francisco on Wednesday. Attendance was respectable; not as mobbed as last December’s show in San Jose, but a whole lot more energy than the ghost town I walked into at the Annual Linux Showcase in Oakland last month. It was a lot like last year’s show, right down to the demos of cool projects that one could be pretty sure aren’t going to show up anytime soon: a Bluetooh-enabled pen that
is also a camera (!), thumb-sized Bluetooth radios that plug into the USB
port. And three times at three different booths, I saw the same demo: using a Bluetooth connection between a laptop and a mobile phone to use the phone as a modem that connects the laptop to the Internet. At 14 Kbps. Pretty unimpressive, and only slightly less so when you imagine it happening at GPRS speeds — 40 Kbps realistically. Hardly a killer app to demo at shows.

The folks who seem furthest off base with this technology are those companies trying to sell it as a wireless LAN. Bluetooth developers have figured out that the original range of 10 meters is too small, so they’re
calling that Class 2 Bluetooth now, and are developing a Class 1 that
supposedly will have a range of 100 meters. That would put it in (or
beyond) the range of 802.11 networks. But I still can’t imagine any office
environment going for Bluetooth over 802.11, even if the price is about
the same, for at least two reasons: the throughput is a lot less (1 Mbps
against 802.11’s theoretical 11 Mbps and actual 5.5 Mbps), and if you buy
802.11 cards for your laptops you get to use them in lots of places –
unlike Bluetooth.

So why do I remain a Bluetooth optimist? I think once they get over the
idea that they are competing with 802.11 and begin to admit they are
competing with USB, things will move along more smoothly. IBM & Toshiba
are offering Bluetooth capability in laptops for about $100, and the top
three mobile phone handset manufacturers (Nokia, Motorola, & Ericsson) are
all promising to stick tens of millions of the chipsets into their phones
over the next few years. After two years of the world laughing at
Bluetooth’s failure to arrive, they’re beginning to learn to be
conservative in their estimates: one vendor told me they expect Bluetooth to be in 70% of the world’s mobile phones by 2006. That’s 2006. I expect we’ll all be commuting on Segways by then, riding over soaring viaducts and
listening to MP3s streaming down from satellite radio…

Scaled back to these more modest expectations, the software applications
for Bluetooth come into view. Obviously there will be a need for good
synching software at all levels, from apps that attempt to provide lots of
“enterprise” information to workers, to programs that let your Palm
– more optimism here, that there will still be a Palm platform in 2006 –
and your cell phone update each other. It ain’t too sexy, but neither is
USB or ASCII text, and look how essential they’ve become. I met with one
vendor, Rococo Software out of Dublin, Ireland, that has an IDE for J2ME
applications and is porting it over to be a Bluetooth development
environment, presumably for the same types of applications.

I think putting Bluetooth into phones will make the biggest difference. We all know there are more folks carrying mobile phones than carrying laptops in the world. And here’s a key difference: mobile phone consumers want everything to work automatically; they don’t really need to know how or why, and most don’t care about the technical details. It’s a more passive (or at least casual) relationship than folks have with their laptops. I would guess that at least one third of laptop users could tell you what operating system they’re running; I doubt that 1 percent of mobile phone users could tell you much about the software in those phones. That’s how I think Bluetooth will work: quietly and automatically in the background, your phone and PDA updating each other’s address books, your laptop talking with your printer — about as sexy (and as necessary) as a USB port.

Am I kidding myself?

Related link: https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-Russian-Programmer.html

The Associated Press reports that federal prosecutors have struck a deal with Dmitry Sklyarov, to drop charges against the Russian programmer in exchange for his testimony against his employer ElComSoft Co. Sklyarov was arrested in Las Vegas in July, where he was speaking at DefCon, the hackers’ convention. He spoke on weaknesses in Adobe eBook’s digital rights management scheme; for that, the Feds said he had violated the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act. He could have faced up to 25 years in prison. Sklyarov, who’s been under house arrest in the Bay Area, will give a deposition and then, presumably, fly home to his family.

Related link: https://web.0sil8.com/episodes/megway/home.html

A wonderful spoof of the Segway (nee “ginger”) well worth the bits its printed on. The Megway runs on water , folds for easy transport and storage, and sports a “20 petaflop bioelectrical computer,” “Opposable Digits Technology,” and “HOT RACING ACTION (action, action, action…)!!!” Also be sure to catch the groovy Megway movie.

I, along with a lot of other people, have commented that Apple’s Cocoa documentation needs improvement. As part of Apple’s upcoming December 2001 Developer Tools release, a lot of work has been done to improve the situation.

Matt Rollefson, manager of the Cocoa and Developer Tools Technical Publications Group at Apple, said:

This release includes many small changes (too numerous to list), as well as a substantial reorganization of material. Specifically, it addresses
over 700 method and function descriptions that previously read “description forthcoming”. In addition, substantial amounts of conceptual material that used to be in individual class descriptions have been moved into the Programming Topics hierarchy.

Apparently, the job isn’t quite done. Over the next few months, there will be more work put into completing the reference material. But, from flipping through the documentation I can say that it is much better than it used to be and the writers at Apple should give themselves a pat on the back.

• Cocoa Docs Homepage

• Cocoa Docs What’s New Page

On my way out the door for my daily walk, I grabbed my trusty iPod so that I would have some tunes to listen to. I hadn’t charged it in days, so I checked the battery and found that it had 2 out of 4 bars. Happy, I went on my walk. And then….

Not thirty minutes later did my iPod sputter out and go silent. Out of juice. Bummer. I spent the next couple of hours listening to traffic instead. Man, do you get spoiled having all that music on demand in your pocket. But really, I can’t complain. I had used it quite a bit in the last few days and any amount of thought on my part would have shown that it was high time for a charge. I’m just glad that the fuel gage in my automobile is more accurate.

Lesson Learned: If you’ve got a really good battery in your device and you don’t have to charge it every night, you won’t.

Related link: https://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200112/msg00048.ht…

A glowing review of “The Fellowship of the Ring” on Dave Farber’s Interesting People mailing list. ‘The London Times review greeting the original publication of “Lord of the Rings” applies well to the film: “The world is now forever divided into those who have read these books and those who are going to read them.”‘

Related link: https://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-202-8063250.html

AOL has finally decided to join the Liberty Alliance, the Sun Microsystems led band promising an “open, federated, single sign-on identity solution for the digital economy via any device connected to the Internet.” AOL was conspicuously absent from the initial Liberty roster, working instead on its own “Magic Carpet” identity project. Since joining the Alliance, AOL has forwarded the invitation to rival Microsoft: ‘It would be a positive step if Microsoft would join Liberty as well,” the AOL spokesman said. “If they chose to do so, it would indicate they were moving away from leveraging their monopoly to control this new generation of services.”‘

Related link: https://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2002/create/e_sess

The call is out for speakers, tutors, and others wishing to participate in the upcoming O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, May 13-16, 2002 in Santa Clara, CA. The deadline for proposals is December 31, 2001 — let’s hear from you!