Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in derrickrabble's LiveJournal:

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Monday, October 9th, 2006
1:49 pm	The Proliferation of Connectivity Part 1 Recently I had lunch with Michael and got to chat a bit about Gizmo and other VOIP stuff. I am also secretly coveting the about to be released Net Gear Wifi Phone. While waiting for it to come out I decided to take a peek at what else is in the market. Although I use Skype a fair amount, I have a specific issue that I am sure is shared by some others. My laptop has the headphone attachment at the front of the keyboard. If that isn't enough of a deterrent, I also find that if I have headphones on that I am listening to music as a force of habit. What this means is that my ever ringing phone goes unanswered as long as I have the headset on. Because of that, I don't use headphones and also don't really use Skype as much as I would like. My first look at what was available was USB connected phone devices, you know, kind of like a headset except it is a phone. I am not sure how that was going to help me. I decided to pass on this. I came across the Linksys CIT 200 Skype phone after digging around and thought that this was an interesting idea. This device allows you to connect a USB broadcast node to your PC or laptop that communicates with a wireless phone base station that can be anywhere within 150 feet or so. Although I don't really like the idea of another device connecting out to my laptop as an aftermarket part (it should be baked in) I was immediately attracted to the idea that I could now disembody a phone from my PC and use Skype. A bit about the phone. It looks like a phone. I can dial numbers and such although I don't plan on doing that in the near term because I have these things called cell phones that I have on me at all times. At the bottom of the dialpad is a button that says Skype. When you pick up the phone and click on the icon, the device connects to your PC and Skype client and your buddy list is populated on your handset. How cool is that? You can then scroll down to the person that you want to call, click on them, and presto, free VOIP calling. I haven't really taken the phone through a lot of uses so far but within the first day of setting it up, I spent 45 minutes or so talking to a potential hire from London and I have to say it was crystal clear. I wandered the office chatting like I was on a call except it was international and it was free. I have to say that I am very fascinated by the idea that we are developing combinations of hardware and software platforms that not only allow us to do interesting things because of our connectivity but that we are increasingly able to proliferate or redistribute that connectivity in new ways. Although to say that I am becoming a Skype broadcast node for my office is a slight stretch, it isn't too far from the truth. In fact I have a couple of other examples of this proliferation of connectivity in two follow up posts to this one coming soon. (10 Comments |Comment on this)
1:00 pm	The Proliferation of Connectivity Part 2 In my last post I wrote about how our connectivity that we use can be extended and allow us to free ourselves from the tied to the computer experience. Although my Skype phone gives me the freedom to leave my computer and walk around the room like I am using a normal phone, I am still linked to my device through a USB transmission hub. Hopefully in the next week or two I will pick up the Net Gear Wi Fi phone which disconnects the handset from the device. While I am waiting for this device, I have another device that I have written about that adds a bit more color to this discussion. That device is my PSP. Several weeks ago our family made the trek out to the desert for a quick get away. On Sunday morning we took all the kids out to the community pool where we were staying. My kids were very hungry right around the time of kick off for football. While the kids were snacking on chicken fingers, I reached into my bag and pulled out my PSP. I fired up the device and started looking for available wifi networks. Immediately, I saw that the bar area had very open, very strong public wifi. I configured the device to log onto the network and I fired up the Location Free interface. Within a couple of seconds, my PSP was showing the NFL Red Zone Channel from Directv on my device by the side of the pool. Can you beat that? Conceptually to me this is another example of the intersection of devices and our connectivity and the types of services that become available as more bandwidth surrounds us and our devices can leverage the network. To me it is a very powerful experience when I can take my media experience, that previously has been confined to my house, wherever I go with the aid of a small portable device. In the last post and this one I have talked a bit about some practical uses and examples of how I can take my connectivity and share it with a detached device ala Skype to a handset, or more broadly how I can take my programming with me anywhere in the world with the use of my PSP and my Location Free server. In the next post I will talk about how the next phase is looking at the device not from a downstream perspective but as an upstream or broadcast style device to extend the experience in the opposite direction. (Comment on this)
12:49 pm	CTIA In LA I missed the early / pre day at CTIA but am headed up on the train this AM. It should be a busy couple of days of meetings in my old hometown. I can't wait to hear what big announcements come out of this session. (Comment on this)
12:49 pm	Quien es mas macho? Windows Mobile or Symbian I spent some time last week with the Cingular 8125 Windows mobile device. One of our handset developers has been raving about Windows mobile so I figured I should take it for a spin. I spent the better part of a week with the device and came to a couple of conclusions. The 8125 is a computer that also has phone capability. It is not a phone that has smartphone capability. To me that is an important distinction as the device I carry around with me is preferably a phone in my case. What do I mean by that? Well the most important thing I do with my phone is call people. I also happen to use it to check email, occasionally surf the web, and sometimes use it as a modem. When I use my Symbian based phone, all the smartphone stuff is subordinate to the phone stuff. I have to dig to get to the power user features. I actually like this because my primary use case is phone. The Windows mobile device is just like your desktop. The start button and everything is always resident in it's passive state. At first I thought that was really cool. The responsiveness was fairly good and the qwerty keyboard is roomy. I imported my 1500+ contacts into Outlook and set up my email. I was very excited. That was until I had to make a phone call. Aarrghh. No numeric pad. Also navigating in and out of the base OS was fairly clunky. At the end of the week. I reset the device to the factory settings and returned it to the development pile. To summarize and to be fair, I followed up with Josh and asked him how he could be excited about Windows mobile. He stated that there are two distinct flavors of Windows mobile and that the 2125 smartphone has the operating system flavor that is more phonelike. I may pick one up in the coming weeks to revisit, but until then, I am very happy with my Symbian device and if I has to replace my device today it wouldn't be with the Windows smartphone I used. (Comment on this)
12:49 pm	Roomba I have robots on the brain right now. I blame Tate. This weekend we were at Circuit City and I glanced over that the robot section with Tate. Right next to the Robosapien were two different models of the Roomba. I had heard people talk about the Roomba but had never seen one in person until I was at SXSW at the Lifehacker party. When we walked into the bar where they were having the party I glanced over at the pool table and on top of it were two modified Roombas dueling. It was quite a strange sight, not unlike two giant roaches in a courtship dance. It smacked just a bit of Survival Research Labs. At any rate I bought the Red Roomba to see how it worked. So far so good. (Comment on this)
12:49 pm	Chumby One of our board members, Steve Tomlin, recently unveiled his new contraption, The Chumby. He has been talking about it for a while and put it together with a merry band of part timers and geeks. They had their debut this last weekend at Foo Camp. I ran by his office today and grabbed one to play with. Here it is on my desk displaying the latest headlines from Make Magazine (One of my new favorite sites/magazine) I can't wait to dig in a little and see what we can do with it. Can you say Rabble widget? It's great to see all the buzz they have gotten since giving out prototypes at Foo camp. It will be fun to say what kind of hacks and other neat things that come from the Chumby. When I walked into the Chumbalow to get one, I immediately saw a plush Tinky Winkie doll with a Chumby screen embedded in his chest. Nice. (Comment on this)
12:49 pm	The AOL Data Leak and Attention The Attention Trust Blog reports some of the details of the AOL user data leak in this post here. Imagine if everything you ever searched for on Google, Yahoo, MSN or AOL became available to people. Looking up old friends? Searching for some ahem something you shouldn't be? Are you trying to lose weight? (I am). Etc. etc. What I have discovered since installing the Attention Recorder on my browser is that there are times when I stop myself and hit the pause button before I continue on to the next site. This awareness becomes even more important when you think not only of the personal things you do but also the competitive or business related things you do. I have a badge on the right hand side of this blog that shows a list of the top sites I clicked on and the gainers and losers. VCs? Competitors? Business Partners? It's easy to get a sense of what one is doing with click data. Installing the recorder has allowed me to become more cognizant of the power of that information. It has also made me even more cognizant of all the data the various portals have on my combined surfing history going back a long time. I think at some point a lot of people are going to wake up to this and start becoming more vocal in word and deed about how information about them is collected and how they can take control of that information. (Comment on this)
12:48 pm	Rabble Mention in Loopt launch article I was interviewed last week for a TBD launch of another mobile social community, which turned out to be Loopt. The article is here and it included a nice screen shot of Rabble! (Comment on this)
12:48 pm	Regarding Operating Systems I spend some percentage of my time trying new things in technology. For example right now I am spending some time with the Cingular 8125 Windows Mobile Device. It is always hard to overcome the bias you get from being wedded to a way of doing things. I really like how Symbian works and have to figure out how to not let that bias color my impression of Windows mobile. Although most of my experimentation has been around mobile devices and related web based technologies, my recent purchase of a Mac Mini for home has given me a recent renewed interest in operating systems. As a bought in Windows user for the last 10+ years, it never occurred to me to spend any time looking at operating systems as new versions rolled out. My previous experiment with operating systems goes back to around 1994. I had an earlier computer phase back in high school and early college and then took a long break from computers until around 94. In 1994 I decided that I was going to build a computer and try out some different operating systems such as Slackware. My initial impression of Slackware was that it was interesting but I hit some pretty nasty problems trying to configure PPP so I ultimately punted on the experiment. This time around, the breathtaking look and usability of OS X piqued my interest to see what else is out there. I had installed Windows Vista on my old broken down laptop and it has performed well. It really is a nice improvement from XP but it feels more incremental than an overhaul. I am guessing that when you use it day to day that it might feel a little different but right now it is hard to say. On my Mac Mini I installed Parallels to run Windows XP in a virtual machine and I have to say that I have only fired it up a couple of times. I have found that most of the things that I do are net related and haven't required invoking my windowness to get things done. With all the niceness and coolness coming from my Mac, I asked around the office about how far Linux has come. Ben showed me the Linux GUI XGL which, simply put, is insane. Seriously insane. I tried to make a run at using it on my old home computer (1999 Gateway Pentium 3) to no avail. I then tried a plain vanilla install of Ubuntu and also Open SUSE using a wireless network card. Wireless isn't all it's cracked up to be on Linux. Today I finally gave up and dragged the old beast over to an Ethernet connection. Once there I got Ubuntu up and running and plan on giving it the rounds here and there in the coming weeks. Stay tuned for more. (Comment on this)
12:48 pm	Ancestry.com Two weeks ago I read a newspaper article about people using the Internet to search for their family tree. In the article they gave much praise to Ancestry.com. I hadn't spent much time looking at my family tree in the past as there were a number of gaps that I hadn't desired or been able to walk through. My father and my mother divorced when I was two years old. Although they were divorced he was stationed almost always on the west coast which meant he was around a lot. My father's sister had tracked back the Oien family to Norway back to the early 1700s which I thought was really impressive. As of the last time I checked they hadn't done that on his mother's side. Their family name was Venn. I need to give her a call and get some details. On my mother's side there were two branches, one of which I knew and one which I didn't. The one I knew went back to Mexico fairly quickly and then presumably went to Spain. My great grandmother, who I spent a large amount of time with growing up had the maiden name of Castillo. Other family names were Figueroa and Valdespino. My mother's father was estranged from our side of the family by my mother's choice if I recall. So I sat down with a trial account of Ancestry and a couple of family names going back. I won't bore you with any more details about my family but I will say that the tools that are available are amazing. ESPECIALLY the census data. I was checking census records back to the 1860s which blew me away. When I sat down I thought that my family was all Norwegian on one side, and then a mix of Spanish, German, Irish and English on the others. In reality I ended up realizing that I am 1/2 Norwegian, 1/4 Irish, and 1/8th Spanish and 1/8 Swedish. Not what I expected. I managed to track back every side out of the country, with most branches going in the 1880s and one branch going back to the 1850s (Irish potato famine refugee I assume). I did this in 2 hours. I don't plan on going beyond that our getting all the details together but when I do decide to do that I know that there are some amazing tools online today. (Comment on this)
12:13 pm	US Cyworld is live I didn't see or hear anything about it until a friend mentioned it today. Sign up at us.cyworld.com. I haven't spent anytime with it yet so I don't have any feedback. (Comment on this)
12:13 pm	Fantasy Football And so last night another season began. I think I have been playing fantasy football pretty consistently since 1998. Each year it has ramped up a bit more in terms of my engagement. Two years ago I went beyond the normal fantasy league and joined a keeper league. This has been by far the best experience so far as it requires me to always have some kind of background thoughts that are engaged with football all year round. Last night was a draft for a Dynasty league, which is a league where you keep almost all of the players for good. It will be interesting to see how this pans out. I was dicey on keeper and have really enjoyed it. Dynasty will place a big premium on focusing on new incoming players out of college. The tools that are used for fantasy football have continued to improve as well. The news services, the draft tools and the various communication tools are just amazing. I believe that our choice to use AIM for our draft was directly responsible for 6 new people in their 30s to start using instant messenger. Last year I believe that there were 3 of us using IM. Now it is 12. I wrote back in April of this year, this post, that talks about how the NFL drives technology adoption. I think Sprint is doing some smart things with their various NFL Tie ins. I frequently cite fantasy football as an example of user created content that is a big driver of consumer entertainment. Although the primary content is the actual sport/game itself, we fantasy football nuts spend a massive chunk of time looking at stats, arguing over rules, making trades with other players, paying for services, and buying every channel that Directv will offer us for pro, college and any other kind of football. As more of us non Gen Y folks take control of our entertainment experience, whether it is through things like fantasy sports or other things, we will continue to see and understand that media is undergoing an unparalleled paradigm shift where the users are in charge. (Comment on this)
12:13 pm	Robots I am working on another post about my current fascination with operating systems and old computers that is borne out of my switch to the Mac and my re-provisioning two old computers to run Windows Vista and Ubuntu. In the process of spending a little time at night tinkering with these things I was inspired to dig out the copy of Make magazine that I received at Gnomedex. What a great magazine! I subscribed. In the issue I have (#6) there is a good section on robots. I think that the BEAM robot materials are just fascinating and if I can learn to use a soldering iron I may build some to play with my son. While looking around briefly and trying to understand the lay of the land I came across the new Lego Mindstorms NXT system of robotics. Wow. Super cool. I want one of these. I think I need to go get one... (Comment on this)
12:13 pm	Radiate / Flipt / Loopt launches The LBS Mobile application formerly known as Radiate, then Flipt, now Loopt launched tonight on Boost's network. Details on the companies now unveiled website can be found here. (Comment on this)
12:12 pm	I Went Apple / Mac I can't believe that I am writing this. If you had told me a year ago that I would buy a Mac I would have told you that you were insane. I frequently referred to Mac's as computers for people who don't like computers. But Saturday morning there I was walking into the Apple store to buy a Mac Mini. What sort of strange series of things had occurred to make this surreal event happen? There were a number of things over the last year that happened that made me make the commitment involved in learning a new OS and all the things associated with it. To recap, the following things occurred: 1. Video Conferencing - My father in law has been pinging me for many years now about setting up web cams for him to talk to our son Tate. I have constantly been telling him that the quality just isn't there. Earlier this year, we installed a Mac Mini in our office to video conference in our Seattle and Montana based employees. When I was told that we were going to conference people in via video, I thought it would be a big waste of time. What it has been though is simply amazing. At any given time I can stroll over to the Mac mini in our office and plop down and start a conversation with one of our remote employees. And it is REALLY REALLY good. 2. Intel Core - Our home computer has been a real workhorse and I am embarrassed to say that Jessica bought the top of the line home PC in early 1999 and we are still using it today. I mean, as of yesterday. When I spoke with our Systems guy, who is a Mac fan, he walked me through how I can use both the Mac OS and Windows XP on the Mac Mini. I have been charged with getting a new home computer but one of the key requirements was that Jessica wouldn't have to learn a new OS. No computer had really gotten me excited until now. With the new machine I set up last night, we can easily switch between the Mac and Windows world. 3. iTunes Buy In - I took the leap and digitized all my CD collection over the last six months as I have been using the Shuffle when I run. 4. Geek Buy In - All the geeks in my office are big fans of the Mac as it supports UNIX. If they can be into the Mac then I know my time to look at it is here. So it's still early for me, but I can tell you that I m really excited and look forward to the new computing experience in the months ahead. I am sure there will be some god stories as I settle in. (Comment on this)
12:12 pm	MP3.com liquidation photos It's funny that people just resurrected the photos from the MP3.com liquidation sale that can be found here. His editorial reflects a lack of understanding of the context of the business but I think it's hilarious. (Comment on this)
12:12 pm	The Anti-Telemarketing Script Lifehacker linked to this script to use when telemarketers call you. This is one of the funniest things I have seen in a while. (Comment on this)
11:38 am	Rabble Integration Manager Revamp - Flickr and Spaces Last weekend we pushed out significant changes to our integration manager on Rabble. What is the integration manager? Our not so well named integration manager allows Rabble users to publish content between the mobile and web environment in either or both directions. Our first cut, while functional was a bit clunky. The new changes make the process of setting up your accounts a lot more easy than it used to be and it also sets us up for the changes we will be making when we roll out version 2.0 of Rabble mobile and web in the near future. A really cool part of this rollout for me was the addition of Flickr and MSN/Live Spaces. Flickr had taken us a long time to get permission and now that we have it I can use the 1400+ photos I have on Flickr with Rabble. Here is a screenshot of setup screens. With these rollouts we currently support - Blogger, Live Journal, Movable Type, Typepad, Webshots, Flickr, Zoto, Eventful, Upcoming.org, Travelpod and MSN/Live Spaces. More to come soon. (Comment on this)
11:38 am	TurnHere Geekd in our office sent an email out about the site TurnHere that has short films about various neighborhoods and communities for people to watch. I love this idea and it reminds me a bit of what the guys at Videonary are doing. My community of Cardiff is featured here. (Comment on this)
11:38 am	PSP 2.8 Upgrade Last night I noticed that PSP firmware 2.8 became available. There are a number of minor features but the biggest one is adding RSS support for video. I was unable to get Rocketboom or Ze Frank working but figure it must be user error. (Comment on this)