Ripping mobility from the clutches of telecom
Archive for February, 2007
CTIA in Florida
Feb 26th
After Shmoocon I’m heading down to CTIA in Orlando March 27th to 29th. Drop me a line if you want to meet up. Should be an interesting week. Which do we think is going to be more surreal? The Washington DC based hacker conf purporting a record absence of moose or the Florida based wireless industry conf apparently headlined by Howie Mandel? Curiouser and curiouser.
Converting Videos for iPod
Feb 25th
Before going straight to mencoder or ffmpeg (the normal behavior on a Linux system) in order to convert videos on my Mac, I decided to look around and see what else might be out there. I happened across an old post from Engadget that describes using VLC to convert Tivo recordings for use with the iPod. Fantastic, VLC was already my video player of choice, I just didn’t know it converted videos to MPEG4 as well. Now it’s like doubly the coolest bit of video software out there!
I keep thinking that at some point I’ll stop using the iPod and just put the videos on my E61, but it’s still a cumbersome process to do stuff like that. The Nokia Podcasting software doesn’t work for me. I’m never in the same place, and I want it to download over wifi not GSM. I can’t get that working consistently. And even when I give up and tell it to use GSM, the client still hangs up and I need to go in and kick it and prod it and coax it into actually downloading what I want. Blech, not interested.
I was fooling around with the ZuCasts stuff from Shozu, but I couldn’t get that working consistently even with the channels out there already. Usually it says ‘unsupported video” or something of the sort, and then it kinda played part of one video and I had problems with it. Pull the battery out to regain control of my handset problems. And then yesterday it told me I had a new ZuCast and I didn’t even have the app running. Which is kinda sweet in a “wow, that’s magical” way, but also scary in exactly the same way. So I put that aside for now and will have to come back to it later.
Which leaves pretty much just transferring the videos over via bluetooth as the only valid option if I were to get them encoded. So if I’m going to restrict myself to transferring things while the device is in the same general area as my computer, I might as well transfer it to the one that does the transfer in seconds over USB and has 60 gig of storage instead of the one that does it at about 700kbps and has 2 gig of storage.
Would seem like some simple over the air sync between my phone and a bunch of my videos living out somewhere on the internets would be achievable with just some basic free bits of stuff. I’m willing to take care of the most of the issues: turning normal video into 3gp and putting it up somewhere on the network. Does the built in SyncML client on the Nokia allow for just keeping a file store in sync some way? I’ve been meaning to dig at SyncML for a while… might this be the thing that actually gets me to do it? Any SyncML folk out there know the capabilities included in the SyncML client that Nokia installs on the E61?
Wifi vs Cellular, Again
Feb 22nd
I actually had a post I queued up while in Barcelona about this, but forgot to publish it before I got home so I was just going to punt on it. However, Charlie went ahead and reset the stage for discussion, so I’ll chime in.
When I was out of the country (at the 3GSM conference of all places) my phone worked fine, it’s quad-band. My carrier had agreements with a local provider so that I theoretically had voice and data capabilities where I was. However, my primary access mechanism was Wifi whenever I needed to do something online. Why go through the bother? The traditional argument is that cellular trumps Wifi because cellular is everywhere, and you have to hunt around for Wifi. That doesn’t work when the cost for cellular data is 2 cents per kb (that’s $20 per megabyte for the math impaired, or about $60 per hour translating to my email/IRC/IM/SSH heavy online existence). TOO EXPENSIVE == NOT AVAILABLE.
Sure, you have the business users who have their bill footed by their company, and they’ll pay the outrageous charges. But those costs are hindering the growth of the environment as a whole. The secret backroom talk that I’ve heard on that one is that the carriers actually don’t want data usage to expand, they don’t have networks that are really suited to large amounts of data. The decision to rape a small number of highly motivated and price-insensitive users is a conscious one. I find that kinda hard to believe given all the posturing about the future of mobile data that carriers do. Should I be believing it?
WordPress Mobile With Style
Feb 22nd
I’ve been fooling around with the mobile version of this blog. It all started out with getting the home page to display the most recent post instead of the recent post list and just kinda spiraled out of control. I’ve put my version up: wp-mobile-style.zip, for those who might be interested. Stuff I was playing around with besides getting it to look like more than text:
- Lifted a bunch of stuff from the GAP recommendations and templates to make things a little less ugly
- Added back in the ?mobilenow hack I’ve been playing with to be able to validate things when doing adaptation
- Validates as XHTML Mobile
- Almost best practices, I needed to change the content format for the dotMobi ready report
- Got a 5 out of 5 on the MobileReady report
Still seems like it’s impossible to come up with a single page that passes all the tests and recommendation checks from the different areas. Would be great if that weren’t the case.
Update:
I’ve stopped using the direct mobile version plugin on this blog and started using the Mowser WordPress Mobile version instead. The Mowser version has the added benefit of mobilizing all outbound links as well.
East Coast End of March
Feb 21st
I’m going to be on the east coast of the US end of March this year, for Shmoocon. Drop me a line if you’re going to be in the DC area and want to meet up.
User Adaptive Email Filtering
Feb 20th
I’ve been trying out the email client on my phone again, an E61. The push email support isn’t fantastic. Even with firmware v3 I get it to hang up pretty frequently and require me to restart the client, sometimes restart the phone. But I wanted to try out using it at least for the little emails here and there that I can jam into 5 minutes of free time while away from my laptop. Problem: I send all sorts of crap to myself through email. I have subversion checkin notifications, forum reply notices, monitoring system warnings and errors. My normal email inbox is too verbose of a stream to be useful on my phone. The constant interruptions are annoying, but I don’t want to pull my email either, I want it sitting there and ready for me to use. My inbox also frequently tops 500 messages when I have a big project that sucks up time and I can’t keep tending to my messages. I wanted something that was a little more adaptable and tunable. This is what I’m trying out:
- I’ve created a distinct email box on my server for my mobile client. That box gets a subset of messages forwarded to it (anything from admob.com that isn’t one of the bots or script, and isn’t a subversion checkin). The outbound mailbox is still my primary address, I just pull from a different source. The client on the E61 groks different send and receive config, so no problem.
- I installed the Courier::Filter modules on my server and hacked up a new module to watch outbound traffic, traffic that I send through my own SMTP server is passed as normal but the To: addresses are recorded in a text file, called my “sentto” file.
- The maildrop config for my primary account also checks to see if an email address is in my “sentto” list for the last two days. If it sees an inbound message from someone I sent to, it sends the message to my mobile inbox as well. I also have a whitelisted group of folks this happens for all the time apart from my general admob.com allow.
- There’s a cron job running cleanup-maildir on the mobile inbox and cleaning up anything older than two days, so I don’t have to manually go in and delete stuff out of that mobile cache of messages.
We’ll see how that works out. I was thinking about having the outbound filters pick up commands in messages sent to a virtual address to manipulate the config on the server, but I think I want to try to make all the “commands” implicit in what I do instead of explicit requests. It’s worked pretty well so far, though I’ve had it running for just a few hours. Only created two mail loops in the process. Not bad, I expected more.
Fring for the E61
Feb 18th
I just started playing around with Fring for the E61. I installed it and tried out a quick Skype conversation, seems to work well. It has IM support for Skype and GTalk, which is pretty neat. I’ve been using Skype more and more often, so it would be fantastic to be able to start calls with just my handset and a wifi connection.
Mobile Sitemap
Feb 17th
I’ve been running the WordPress Mobile plugin for a while, works very well. While doing some housekeeping today and upgrading WordPress to the most recent, I decided to try out the Google Sitemap plugin to generate a sitemap for the blog. What I really wanted though was a mobile sitemap. Because the WordPress plugin currently works based off of the user agent of the blog (or being forced into mobile mode with a ‘mobilenow’ parameter) I wasn’t sure if Google was picking up the mobile version. So I applied some quick and vicious hacks to the sitemap plugin to get it to also generate a sitemap with with ‘mobilenow’ parameter turned on to see if that gets Google to pick up the mobile version. Turns out Google probably was hitting the mobile version, but we’ll see how the sitemap ends up affecting that.
There’s a lot of stuff still quite undefined when it comes to working on mobile web publishing. Search engine optimization and marketing have become pretty staple in the online side of the world. But with the mobile side all mixed up across transcoding and content adaptation depending on http headers or user agents, the proper behavior for the environment really depends on a lot of contextual factors that aren’t well specified. How would something like the mobile version of a wordpress blog get bootstrapped into Google if it weren’t for manually jamming in sitemaps? In the RSS side of the world that’s done through an alternative format metatag link. That’s not really appropriate on the mobile end cause there’s no distinct MIME type to hang onto to distinguish the mobile version from the wired web version.
Still, seems like something of the sort would make the activities involved much more obvious from the outside and open up the environment. Right now a lot of the stuff that’s done through server controlled adaptation really needs to be more transparent and explorable. A lot of the stuff out on the mobile web is effectively cloaked from the search engines because the sites might not see the indexers as mobile clients. The alternative of having the engines crawl with user agents that match known devices causes problems for the publishers because they can’t as easily distinguish spider/crawler hits from real traffic. Currently Google seems to be crawling with a somewhat devicelike user agent: Nokia6820/2.0 (4.83) Profile/MIDP-1.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.0 (compatible; Googlebot-Mobile/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html). Not bad, that gets picked up as a mobile device by a lot of the adaptation techniques, which will look at the longest matching prefix string to figure out what the device is. Yahoo crawls with something pretty similar: Nokia6682/2.0 (3.01.1) SymbianOS/8.0 Series60/2.6 Profile/MIDP-2.0 configuration/CLDC-1.1 UP.Link/6.3.0.0.0 (compatible;YahooSeeker/M1A1-R2D2; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/crawling/crawling-01.html). What does your site do when you feed it that user agent? Can the indexers see your mobile version?
3GSM Wrapup
Feb 17th
I spent the last few days at the 3GSM conference in Barcelona. It was the first 3GSM for me, very informative, met lots of interesting people, had lots of great conversations. Here are some of the highlights and takeaways from my perspective:
- I thought Rudy and company did a fantastic job with the Mobile Monday Global Peer Awards. I heard about a bunch of new companies I hadn’t ever seen before (check out the list of finalists for some interesting pointers), it was a great chance to connect with a bunch of folks I hadn’t seen in a while, and I was proud to see that the local team (Mobile Complete) fared so well in the placings.
- There was more Linux presence than I expected there to be. Of course I knew Trolltech was going to be there with the Greenphone. But Access also had a tremendous booth and signs up all over the place about their mobile Linux stuff. The Motorola and Samsung booths also had Linux featured pretty prominently. It’s interesting to see the different usages of Linux as a base, varying from completely open like Trolltech to completely hidden like Motorola and Samsung.
- I got a chance to play around with the E90 Communicator in the Nokia booth. Like all the communicator series it’s a brick of course, but this time the brick runs a whole boatload more software than the previous versions cause it’s S60 based. The old communicators had a really very small screen on the front and the large screen inside. The outside display on the E90 is the same resolution on something like a 6680, so you can use it closed for real applications. And the inside screen is nearly laptop resolution. Will they manage to start shipping it before my interest in the platform dies completely? Only time will tell. I’m just going to assume this time that push email won’t work, so that I don’t get disappointed.
- While helping out at the AdMob booth I was forced to realize that the mobile world won’t end up changing the online world like I had assumed it would. It really looks like the innovation is going to flow the other way around. People who are already working in mobile have had all semblance of initiative and innovation beaten out of them. You can lay a new business model down in front of them and explain in detail how it works, and generally they aren’t able to grasp it unless it looks enough like something they already know. However, people coming from the online world and looking to expand into mobile generally are accustomed to a shifting environment and taking in new opportunities and integrating them into their mental framework. It’s really wrong on a number of levels. The number of handsets out in the market dwarfs the number of PCs, the experience on those handsets are different, the context of the user is different, the networks inbetween offer different capabilities, and asynchronous messaging means something completely different. The stage should be set for mobile to completely subsume the online world. But instead it’s the people from the online world staggering out into the sun and realizing there’s no one trying to grab the potential of the new medium and just picking up the pieces waiting for them. Just means we’ll have to wait a while as the online folks start to really understand “this whole mobile thing” in order for the real applications to start coming around.
- I got to meet Luca and Andrea of WURFL fame and have some good conversations, caught up with Dan Appelquist to jaw some about the future Mobile 2.0 events, and had some great conversations with the dotMobi folks about their developer initiatives. The dotMobi folks have been talking about growing the overall mobile ecosystem, which is exactly the kind of thing I’ve been trying to help do with Mobile Monday in Silicon Vally, the Mobile 2.0 conference, and overall at AdMob. And Dan pointed me at the Betavine project going on at Vodafone with the same goals. With so many of us pointed in the same direction hopefully we’ll be able to make some progress on that goal.
- In general the European operators do seem to be more progressive than the US carriers. Most of Europe is still clinging to the per-KB based charge structure for data, which really stifles the mobile web quite a bit, so I tend to lump them all into the same conservative grouping. But they do seem to smell the winds of change and they’re interested in trying to stay ahead of the game. I kept getting the question about what’s the best way to increase mobile web usage, to which I always answer flat rate data plans. Everyone still wrinkles their nose and generally doesn’t want mobile web to expand badly enough to give up data tariffs. I heard a lot of activity around 3GSM from groups that do stuff like “consumer advocacy”, generally complaining about the hidden data costs associated with services like music download and the general opaqueness of the pricing plans. It just seems such an unlivable situation I’m not sure how it’s gone on this long, so I won’t say it’ll stop soon. But the forces do seem to be aligning against the oppression of data services through pricing discrimination.
I have a few pictures I took to show to folks back at the office, but there’s nothing interesting in there like juicy unreleased product photos. It was a great event, very happy I had a chance to attend and check it out in person.
Mobile Blogging Applications
Feb 8th
A long time ago in a galaxy far far away I wrote a simple blogging application for Palm devices. At the time when I was working on it Blogger was still a standalone company, and it seemed like a blogging app would tie in well with some of the major trends that were going on online. And then the whole blogging thing exploded into activity, I started working on the server side of a bunch of stuff, figured the whole mobile device blogging end would sort itself out. I open sourced the app I had in case people wanted to play around with it.
And here we are a few years later, and I still get the occasional trackback from someone playing around with that old app. It’s not like there aren’t other mobile blogging apps:
But most of them are point solutions, focusing on getting images up to their own server or existing services. Back in the early heady days of the Atom Publishing Protocol and the MetaWeblog API the vision was that some generic APIs for publishing blogs would arise, and then you could use any client tool with any server side implementation. Bam, magic, it all works, no reason to work on a client app, it’ll all come out in the wash. What ever happened to that?
