2003-01-09»
Magic Kingdom is Out»
Cory's first novel is out. Buy
it, then download it
for free. It's a fun, geekazoid read. I romped through it on the Caltrain back
around Codecon (if you're an NTK
email subscriber, you can find a mention of Whuffie hidden in the X-Excuse
header around about that time.) The next day, I shimmied up to Doctorow at the
conference and insisted that I was the book's first fan. I began quizzing him
on ridiculously fine-grained plot points. He seemed very touched, and answered
my questions perfectly civilly even when I went on far too long and the whole
thing become very tedious. "How was that?", I asked, before returning the
conversation to more normal lines. Fine, he said, kind of fun. "Good.
Welcome to the rest of your life."
2003-01-07»
Apple Kor»
I for one, welcome our new Konqueror
implementation. Actually, it does explain why David "Chimera" Hyatt went
over to work at Apple.
From a posting of his back in June:
What Gecko has going for it is correctness (and a very large range of
implemented standards!), but I'd rather see someone try to do it better. A
browser on OS X done right should be able to dust Gecko in terms of speed and
footprint. It should be able to just smoke Gecko in startup time and page load
time. The fact that this hasn't been done yet doesn't mean it can't be done.
I guess he went over to see if it could be done.
Even when Early Adopting, I'm late»
I've been settling into a slow lazy orbit of gadget-stasis. After a
lifetime of craving all kinds of gizmos, I ended up with a shortlist of things
I wanted two years ago. I have since failed to add anything new to it and
slowed purchased everything else at bargain-bucket rates when they've ceased
to be fashionable.
In the end, I realised that there was only one thing left on the list - a
USB key drive. You know, one of those 64MB widgets you can hang off a keyring
and plug straight into a USB port, where it magically appears as a normal
drive on Mac, PCs and Linux. When I first decided I wanted one, they cost
hundreds of dollars and were highly first-adopterish. Now they're cheap and
ubiquitous, I thought it was time to take the plunge.
Never quite works that way, does it? About the same time, I read on
Slashdot about a new generation of these little drives, with a new generation
of chipsets. As well as store files, they could work as MP3 players and voice
recorders too. I got the cheapest of these, the splendidly named Yo!Fun 130 for Christmas. It does MP3 playing and voice recording
as well as file storage - and it can take SmartMedia cards. It's also very
diddy and wee.
Unfortunately, it's the strangest engineered piece of consumer electronics
I've seen. Inside it, I estimate it has an MP3 player/voice encoder chipset
tied together with rope to a mass storage chipset, with a complicated pulley
and winch to connect one of them to the outside world at a time. Neither know
of each other's existence. You switch one or the other in, you have to crank
a switch on the side of the box. If you sniff the USB output, you can watch
this happen. One moment, the USB is saying "Hi! I'm a perfectly normal USB
storage device made by Dull Company of Taiwan", the next the winch activates
and "Zzzzt! Wait! No! I am, in fact, an MP3 player made by Somebody
Different of South Korea".
Each chipset uses a different storage format. So every time you switch, you
have to reformat all the memory. Want to copy some files across, then listen
to MP3s? Forget it - you'll need to delete one or the other before you can
move that lever. This isn't systems integration: it's systems
smooshing.
Yo!Fun also isn't Linux compatible - not really surprising, I suppose,
given that it's not even compatible with itself. So I took it back, and got a
Cendyne Gruvstick. Bit more expensive. Slightly better. At
least that presents itself as just one thing to the USB interface.
Unfortunately, it's not anything that anyone outside of its own device driver
would care to comprehend.
The Gruvstick uses the STMP3410 chipset
which, in theory, supports the USB mass storage protocol (the standard that
lets you just slam these things into Macs, PCs or Linux without needing
drivers). But the Gruvstick spurns this petty interoperability for what looks
like its own magic moon language. Having your own language is, of course, the
very definition of proprietary. But I have to say, after poring over dozens
of specs and snooped USB
traffic - what a weird way of doing things. The standard says, 0x28,
when it wants to read some data. The Gruvstick has exactly the same function,
only *it* uses something like 0x03. Thus, presumably, doubling the work for
the engineers, and rendering it utterly incompatible with anything other than
their specially written drivers. Drivers which crashed Quinn's Windows 2K
machine. (I may be wrong about the details of this, incidentally - and this is
a blog, so it's almost obligatory to be a bit wrong. But it still looks like
the Gruvstick is being proprietary for proprietary's sake. And there's not a
single thing its software does that the standard USB storage protocol doesn't
support. Except, I guess, DRM.)
Anyway, the upshot of this is that the Gruvstick needs its own drivers.
Drivers you can only get for Windows. Now this makes it useless for my
purposes - not just because I'm such a Linux wonk, but because I want to use
it as a replacement for floppy disks. How can I transfer files, if I need to
install drivers to get the storage device to be even recognised on a foreign
machine?
So I took the Gruvstick back. Then, finally, I did the sensible thing. I
went to the Linux USB working
devices list and searched for what I wanted. There, I found some
optimistic reviews of the Daisy Diva MP3
Player/File Store/Voice Recorder/Compact Flash reader. This, it looks
like, does it all right. Normal USB Storage protocols; no weird hybrid shit;
Linux support - plus, it's pretty much the same price as the Yo!Fun. And it's
got a slightly less silly name.
I haven't bought it yet - because I made the mistake of visiting the rest
of their catalogue. Now I'm wavering between that, or the Daisy Music Pen, which is all the same
stuff (sans CF reader) in a pen-sized form factor. Again, it's cheaper than
the Gruvstick. Or should I really splash out and get the same company's
PhotoClip? Which is - glad you asked - a
combined MP3 player, file store/CF reader, voice recorder, still camera,
webcam and video recorder. $149, although I don't know how much of that is
Linux accessible.
I'm still in the middle of deciding. But I've learnt three lessons: one,
the folk who make the sensible engineering choices are probably the smarter
and cheaper manufacturers too. Two: you always do your best consumer research
in the two hours after you bought the goods. Three: no matter how long you
stay out of the gadget rat race, there's always one more object of desire.
