So, the great news over at TechCrunch today were that Google has added a feature called Mail Fetcher to GMail, which basically allows you to grab email from other services, such as Yahoo.

This sounds great, and it probably is for GMail users, but it is also great for Google. Someone with legal wits should point a browser towards GMail’s terms & services, and check whether there are any provisions to exclude or include, explicitly or not, the scanning of all incoming and outgoing email from these other services. Maybe Google will also scan the contents of the additional email services you add to your GMail account to send you targeted ads. Maybe Google will have even better demographics by tying the IP addresses found in the headers of all the additional emails with their own database of registered users. There is a saying that nobody sells dimes for 9 cents, it’s a rather good saying to move your wallet by.

Any lawyers in the audience?

Reading The Daily WTF today, a neat site that posts screw-ups made by programmers and tech management, I noticed the owner mentions his new company, HiddenNetwork.com. What strikes me is that they are targeting bloggers straight on, paying them to run a JavaScript banner that links to job offers, paid for by the employers looking for talent.

A blogger who signs up will receive $5 per 1.000 impressions, and $25 for each employee referral. In theory, only good quality jobs are posted through this network. This is not exactly like paying bloggers to write product reviews, which stirred a good deal of controversy, but what would happen if a blogger writes bad about a company or product whose job offer is appearing right above the post? Comments welcome.

A few days ago, while looking for a new mouse, I stumbled upon a game controller, which consists of a seat and a wheel styled in Formula 1 fashion. Right now, Fernando Alonso is looking as the candidate to win this year’s World Championship with Renault, and so he has become a coveted prize for any advertiser worth anything. Now, picture the box of the game system:

Can you spot the cheeky part? Yes, the device is designed by none other than the world-famous…Fernando. Not Fernando Alonso, but the great Fernando. I feel sooo compelled to buy this thing right now and give it a place of honor in my house. Besides, the guy in the picture looks like he is about to hit a bridge head on.
The second piece of totally wrong design is this:

So, how am I supposed to use this Bluetooth GPS receiver, which came with the Route66 Mobile package, without voiding the warranty? The ‘void if broken’ label is placed on the wrapping, not covering a screw hole as usual, to prevent opening of the actual device. If one could switch it on without opening the wrapping, it would still be viable, but the battery that comes with this module, is an external LiIon that needs to be installed prior to use! So, if you buy Route66, beware – you will not be able to use the product without voiding the warranty, which makes it kind of useless…

Ars Technica reports that Microsoft is being sued by a company named PalTalk, which has two patents on a “Server-group messaging system for interactive applications”, original patent filings here and here. If you read through the patents, it becomes evident that they cover a hugely broad number of messaging systems, wether delayed or in real time.

The patents date back to 1998 and 2001, and I remember vividly using IRC during my university years (it was born late August 1988), and mailing lists even before that. Heck, remember BBSs over 1200bps modems? Well, these people at PalTalk seem to have patented just that. IRC and mailing lists. And by default, all other chat platforms that have come ever since – MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Google, to name a few big ones, but miriads of smaller, targeted server-based chat mechanisms. Voice you say? I was using voice to talk to simulated ATC (yes, people actually acting as ‘virtual’ air traffic controlers, way cool!) while flying on a simulated airline in Microsoft Flight Simulator eons ago, when 800×600 was a decent resolution to run your games at.

Can anyone say ‘prior art’ and ‘patent trolls’? Further info on BusinessWire’s PalTalk press release.

…you can tell who made your latte at Starbucks by feeling its weight – this morning I was handed one that felt so obviously light, it was one third froth. This has been happening for a couple of weeks, and always when a particular barista was at the wheel. The solution? Sip off the froth, top up with milk from one of those thermos conveniently placed at the accessories counter. I made it very obvious so she could see the action, let’s see what happens tomorrow.

What do you do when you need to embed WiFi into a project really quick? You look for OEM modules – one of the best manufacturers being Digi. They make, amongst other variations, the Wi-ME, a small box that has a RTOS chip (it can be made to run Linux apparently) and the WiFi adapter, with a serial interface and GPIOs that go to your application. In essence, you can bridge a serial port to a TCP or UDP port and stream data to the internet, all without messy wires!

After looking at the ordering page, I duly contacted the spanish distributor Matrix. I needed two modules by this last Monday, and so I requested to have the devices shipped by Friday last week. It all turned out into one big mess, with vague excuses about not being able to ship due to warehouse problems, or that the proforma could not be generated – and so I could not pay, and they could not ship…to cut a long story short, I got the units on Tuesday.

It usually is not a problem to have a shipping delay, but in this case, I arranged a meeting with the mechanical engineers working on the project, in order for them to see the device and fit it into the 3D plastics project. They actually measure the parts, as they say working from datasheets can usually spell trouble, so ideally they would take them away after the meeting. Had Matrix simply said “we cannot send it until Monday”, I would have arranged the meeting on Wednesday – no worries. But, as it frequently happens, they wanted to look good, without having the solid ground under their feet to do so.

When a company makes a commitment, whatever it may be, it has to stick to it. And when the costumer calls, obviously pissed off at the poor performance and the mount of problems he has landed on, you have to be hellbent on fixing the situation. If the person answering the phone cannot handle the situation, he/she must be trained to transfer the call to someone who can.

What did I do? I emailed the CEO, Joseph Dunsmore. His email address is not published on Digi’s site, but if you look on the Management Team page, and scroll down a bit, Jan McBride’s email is displayed. It was a case of formatting Joseph’s name in the same manner as Jan’s email, send the diatribe, and wait. The next day, I got a reply from Joseph, telling me he would follow up the case with Digi’s Managing Director in Europe. Not three hours had passed, and I got a call from Digi’s top man in Spain, who was very supportive and understanding. By this time, I had been so smoothed over, that I really didn’t want to complain anymore! The conversation ended up very well, with Digi offering their full support on our development, and a visit arranged sometime next week.

Would I recommend Digi to anyone deciding about whether to use their products? Absolutely!

Today I am really peeved with my MacBook Pro. This is the second time I start this post, thanks to the almighty never-ever-hangs-honestly OS X. I intended to write a short diatribe about how remaining time for various things is not calculated right.

Let’s get the first part over with. Just before the crash, I woke up the Mac from suspended animation, and surprisingly, the battery monitor reported 158:34 hours of battery life remaining…whoa! Lets assume the average battery life of 3 hours corresponds to a battery capacity of 4Ah (Ampere-hours) – then my Mac carries a 118Ah battery. For reference, your run-of-the-mill car battery has around 70Ah. Go figure.

The second time miss-calculation happened when I extracted an archive with StuffIt, which told me I had over 300 hours to wait…when the file size was only 2MB. I will try to take screenshots next time. It is obvious that these are dumb figures, but one has to wonder why there isn’t a top limit on the values, mainly so that it doesn’t look ridiculous.

Now, for the fuming rant. I am heading back home on the bus, and to kill time, I decided to write this post. To connect to the internet while on the move, I use a Nokia N70 over Bluetooth, which gives me 3G speed (you at the back, stop giggling!). Suddenly, and before I had time to click ‘Save and Continue Editing’ for the first time, the connection froze. I tried to disconnect, and Internet Connect remained stuck on “Disconnecting…”. There was no way to get it to actually finish the disconnection process…then I noticed the N70 was actually frozen too! Cursing my luck, I removed the battery from the phone, switched Bluetooth off on the Mac, tried to kill Internet Connect using the terminal…nothing. Whether the Mac froze the N70 or the other way around is unknown, but it is clear that both have a serious flaw for this to happen.

Shutdown time. I copy-pasted the text I had written into TextEdit, and saved it to the desktop. Then, without closing TextEdit, I tried to restart the Mac, but it was having none of it. As a last attempt, I held the power button down for five seconds, and finally, it shut down. The surprise came after restarting – the text file was gone from the desktop, and with it my half-written post. There was no trace of it anywhere, neither in Finder’s nor in TextEdit’s recent file list…Is this a serious problem?

I admit that so far, the Mac has proven very stable, with very few problems, and minor ones at that. But if it is possible to have incidents like the one I experienced, then the message about how Macs are un-crashable is simply not true. I know that Robert Scoble had a similar problem with a machine just like mine, his post relating to Dave Winer’s crash report. In my case, the damage wasn’t that great, but imagine this happening towards the end of a long process, like encoding a long video edit. Mac accolites will surely say “But Windows crashes too!”. I’d answer “But Microsoft doesn’t go around publishing agressive campaigns saying how Windows PCs are rock-solid in comparison with the monkey-on-acid-squeek-of-death”.

I love my Mac. But I disagree with the hype.

Today I received an email with some technical specs I was supposed to review, but the document came in OpenOffice Write format (.odt), and since on my MacBook I only had Office installed, there was no way to open it.

Checking the OpenOffice.org site, it appeared a version was available for OS X, but in the traditional open source way, I was met with thinks like:

“en-US builds for Intel based Macs will be listed here as soon as they passed QA. In the meantime please” (The phrase really ends like this, I am quoting vervatim!)

…please…what? What am I supposed to do in the meantime? Ask the guy who sent me the document to re-send it in Word format? Oh, wait, here is the solution:

“The builds use X11 and are meant for the user who doesn’t care that much about look but functionality and cross plattform integration and usability. Other prospects are the Darwin community and the Unix-savvy MacOS X user community and forming a platform for us to build the Quartz and Aqua tracks for the traditional Mac user.”

I thought Intel Macs had only been around for a few months, so how can there be a tradition? Last, but not least, the list of mirrors for the english version were empty. No problem for German or French users, so congrats to you, lucky people! The fact it was empty explained the “in the meantime” statement.

What is this rant all about? The discussion I had the other day with a diehard opensource defender – the type that scream “Linux will conquer the desktop next year, really, this time” any chance they get. I think it is really great that people are willing to donate their time to contribute to opensource projects, some as large as Linux or OpenOffice, but they have to think in terms of reality, not utopia. To think Linux will take over Windows on the desktop, or that OpenOffice will replace Office, at least in the short or medium term, is wishful thinking.

I expect to be beaten to death by the diehard Linux fans, but there is no way my mother would know how to “vi your X86 configuration file to change the video adapter so that it works”. Until Linux or OpenOffice offer similar experiences than Windows or Office, there will stay in niche or very specific target groups. Companies are migrating to these operating systems and office suites, yes, but they usually have the resources to implement the transition, both from technical and training standpoints.

So, good luck with the project, I honestly wish it every success, and I am sorry that I am not a competent UNIX programmer so I can contribute. But from a user’s perspective, it has some way to go.

Why? Because demand either totally exceeds supply, or the other way around. And the fares stay the same. A few days ago, I found myself on a hunt to get a cab that would take me to the bus station so I could get the last ride home that night – and ended up walking half the distance while watching taken cabs go past all the time. When I finally managed to find a free one, I had to convince the driver I’d give him a handsome tip if he would cut off the bus that had already left the station.

What is my proposal? To link all the meters to a central database which tracks in use versus free cabs at any one time in a particular area or city, and adjusts the price of the minimum fare accordingly. This minimum fare could then be shown to potential clients on the LCD display most modern cabs now sport on their roofs. This would have a few effects:

1. It would make cabbies happier. They hate taking people two or three streets for the minimum fare, which then causes them to have to drive around again for a while to find a new costumer.

2. It would make people who really need to take a cab (like I did) happier, as they would be more likely to find one when they most needed it.

3. It would give tons of free publicity to the first city to implement this!

I bet some of the people riding the dozens of cabs I saw that evening would have been willing to pay a minimum fare of $5 instead of $1.50. Today, there were tons of free cabs at the stop, so the fare would be cheaper, and more people would feel compelled to take one.

The twist that makes this work is that the fare you pay doesn’t represent the same distance or waiting time regardless of the actual price, but it is proportional. So, a $6 minimum fare would get you four times as far as a $1.5 minimum fare. The travel cost is the same, but the value of it changes – that is, the distance people feel is worth walking to save the cost of the cab.