MOBODOJO

Contrary To Reports, I Am Not Dead…

Tyler Regas — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 19:11:14 +0000

I have not expired and gone away. I have not moved to Canada or Georgia (either one). I have been deeply busy behind the scenes at PHRiND and fonfaq, as well as a new venture with a friend of mine which I cannot unveil at this time. Interestingly enough, there has been very little to report on, and frankly, I’d just be squabbling over nothing. Starting in April, however, there should be plenty to spew about as the first iPads start falling into consumer hands and the war for that platform begins.

In the meantime, I will try to start posting again. Of course, you could head over to the PHRiND Blog and start participating. I’ve not yet had time to start community building, but if you all want to do it for me, I’d love that.

An Observation About Apple and the Anti-Trust Question

Tyler Regas — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 17:47:42 +0000

I just got done reading Mark Gibb’s Backspin piece on the iPad, and I have to agree with him on a number of counts. Well, except one. Is Apple a monopoly in waiting? Is Apple on the fringes of Federal destruction because its violating Anti Trust laws? Are the wolves lingering in the trees waiting for the right moment to unleash their judicial fury?

No.

I’m not saying that Apple should be allowed to continue its current, as Mark puts it, “walled garden strategy”. No company should be allowed to control that much of any market (ahem… Microsoft!) while at the same time controlling the reins of the entirety of said market. I submit, however, that Apple is not stupid and there are reasons to believe this.

Apple has been slowly and methodically winning back market share from Microsoft and has made itself an extraordinarily powerful entity with some very cunning market and product moves. Apple’s core (no pun intended) business has always been computers, but their bread and butter is the iPod. They know that. They also have no intention of blowing this position with a ridiculous claim of Anti Trust.
Apple won the record industry by hobbling music with DRM. Now that’s mostly gone, so you can put your iTunes music on any player that supports AAC, and most of them do. It may not be as seamless to sync a non-iPod, but its not that hard, and would be a very hard position to try and win with that in court.
Apple only controls a very small portion of the desktop and laptop market, despite being the top retailer for such systems now quarter after quarter. Apple’s very sharp lawyers need only indicate Microsoft’s marketshare and previous Anti Trust issues compared to their own marketshare to indicate how ludicrous the concept is that they are a monopoly.
Apple does use and contributes greatly to open source projects, most notably Darwin which lies at the core of its own OS, Mac OS X, and supports a number of open source initiatives. Most recently with the arrival of the iPad it has stated that the device specifically supports the ePub standard, which you can read about at WikiPedia.

Again, Apple is not stupid. They have, in my estimation, cleverly positioned themselves to be in that unique place where they are wanted and deemed needed, but aren’t required. That, I believe as I am not a lawyer and simply don’t know, is likely the difference between being an industry giant and being “invited” to Anti Trust depositions.

SharePoint 2010 Beta Makes Me Angry

Tyler Regas — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 05:47:45 +0000

There was a time when Microsoft released a beta of something and it worked. It worked well enough that it was pretty usable. I’d been through enough beta programs to know that by the time MS got to the general beta phase they had pretty much hashed out all of the major issues. I was an official beta tester with Microsoft back in the days when betas weren’t released to the general public. I worked on the likes of Windows 98, 98 SE, ME (blech!), and one of the best OS to come out of Redmond, Windows 2000, then later XP. I worked on a number of books which covered, in one form or another, each of these operating systems, and I think I know Windows pretty well.

There’s another side to Microsoft software, though. That’s the side where those who aren’t fond of Microsoft say something along the lines of “Nothing from Microsoft is any good until version 3.0″. Interestingly enough, there is some good background for this case, and it started with Windows 3.11. Then Windows 95 came out, and it wasn’t any good until Windows 98 SE. The Windows ME came out, and it blew chunks beyond belief, and it skipped a beat and then we got Windows 2000. It doesn’t always work out, but you can see there’s at least some kind of pattern.

Of course, I’m not talking about an OS. I’m talking about… uh… SharePoint. Yeah. I can’t really call it software because its a website thingy, but then its not a website because it has application features. Its supposed to be some sort of workgroup collaboration slash content management system slash web portal type framework thingamabob, but its foundations stem from the hideously awful FrontPage days when Microsoft actually decided to call websites “webs” instead of “sites” since everyone called them “sites” and Microsoft apparently can’t be bothered to talk like that.

This longwinded story curves back around now to unveil the meat of this tale; SharePoint 2010 Beta sucks beans. I’m not kidding. I’m not being flippant. Its some of the worst software I’ve ever seen, and this is supposed to be near final code. I’m frankly shocked, but the other day my partner in crime, Darin, came to me and informed me of the hugely improbable issues he was having testing a deployment of Exchange 2010, and that’s release code!

I’m not going to go into the gory details, but I’ll cover the basics. I grabbed an HP box with an Intel Core 2 Duo x64 CPU, 8GBs of RAM, and a 1TB drive in it, and installed the x64 version of Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition on it. Though I find some of the administration choices MS made in 08R2 a little weird and needlessly cumbersome, I’m liking it overall. I then fetched the installer for SharePoint 2010 Beta from my TechNet account and loaded it up.

Like a number of complex applications Microsoft builds, SharePoint 2010’s installer includes the prerequisites autoconfiguration tool. I’ve used them before in SharePoint 2007 and several iterations of SQL Server. In all of those cases, the setup of the prerequisites worked out peachy. It seemed the same with SP2010, but it was not meant to be. It installed .NET 3.5 and SQL Server and a bunch of other stuff I didn’t bother myself to find out about, and it seemed to put it all together rather nicely.

I was wrong.

The first time around, I thought it had worked, but when I couldn’t connect to the DC or add users from the AD, I knew something was wrong. I ticked off the usual suspects; I verified that I had, indeed, bound the host to the domain and that DNS was working just fine, then I went in to check on IIS. It was reporting an error. I did some reading and discovered that I hadn’t run the configuration wizard, so I ran that. It failed. I made some changes and modified some application pool permissions based on someone’s suggestions. That didn’t work, either.

I ran the repair routine on SharePoint, and that seemed to fix something and the IIS error went away. I made some changes, and rebooted, and a new error appeared in IIS, this time with the WAS component. I removed SharePoint. I reinstalled it. That didn’t work. I removed SPS and SQL and turned off the .NET 3.5 role and reinstalled everything. That didn’t work. I removed the IIS role and installed it manually before installing SPS. That didn’t work, either, and all of these later renditions of SPS worked less than the first installation. Finally, I figured that the box had a bad install, so I flattened it and installed WS08R2×64 from scratch on a clean volume.

Surprise of all surprises… that didn’t work.

So, if you’re looking to SharePoint 2010 Beta as something cool to jump into and run test deploys, think again. I didn’t even bother testing a migration, since the basic, default, unmodified install was took broken to work. I followed all of the rules, and it refused to work at all except for half a day at the very beginning where I thought it was working, but them later discovered the user issues. I won’t even bother talking about that since there’s no point getting you interested in something that will likely break the moment you lay eyes on it.

I’d say something like Buyer Beware, but you can’t even buy it yet.

Why Does Apple Deserve To Sell Servers When It Hates Enterprise?

Tyler Regas — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 19:55:32 +0000

What did we do wrong? Was it something we said or something we didn’t do? What failing of ours was worse than all others to warrant you ignoring the fact that there is an enterprise market out there? Honestly, if its something we did, we want to know about it so we can make up for whatever bad thing we don’t know we did. Hell, we must have done something to piss Steve off, because the enterprise is simply ignored by Apple. Sure, they pander to us in the form of Apple-branded 1U rackmount servers as sleek and powerful as their appearance suggests, but they don’t care for us.

So it must be that Apple doesn’t have a corporate identity which it can expose to the world. Any good company which serves enterprise has a clear identity. They certainly get banged around a lot by competition, but you can’t buy an identity like Cisco has, very well known for their enterprise switching equipment. Cisco made complex networking solutions when people needed them, and that built their identity for them. Apple, so far, has chosen to completely ignore the fact that it even sells servers. The XServe is like Apple’s red-headed stepchild.

Its not that Apple doesn’t make a distinction, though. They have recently unveiled a version of the Mac Mini which is designed to be a tiny, desktop server, but that doesn’t give them enterprise cred. It gives them cred with the SMBs who were already using Mac Minis as servers. Now you can just buy one all ready to go. That’s fine, really. Its not much of an identity, but Apple seems to think they can get by with that. Meanwhile, they have these ridiculously kickass XServe’s sitting around with no real market identity around them and no real marketing campaign to push them. The XServe isn’t even that expensive, as servers go.

So, my question is, why does Apple deserve to sell servers? Why don’t they just shut that one-horse town down and move on to the CE space where they really want to be. I have a feeling they might, but I’d like to see them try before just giving up. All they need to do is get the word out that Apple servers are prime for small to medium sized virtualization projects, MAMP-based server farms, and are a fantastic alternative to a Windows-based domain controller in Mac shops. I have to say, though, that its telling how many Mac shops I see which have Windows-based servers.

I can’t really imagine that Apple is pleased with that. I have a feeling that Steve Jobs just puts it out of his mind and acts like its not there. That kind of treatment didn’t work for the red-headed stepchild, either.

How Wrong I Was About The Apple iPad

Tyler Regas — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 23:38:37 +0000

I’m rather surprised at the number of you who read my pre-launch article about what is now known as the Apple iPad was not going to be. Don’t get me wrong! I was pleased, but surprised nonetheless because I posted it the day before Steve Jobs trotted it out. Thank you much for reading.

Now, as you may have noted, I got a few points wrong, and I freely admit that. It just goes to show that you shouldn’t try to second guess Steve Jobs. Jobsian Law dictates that no other individual or group of individuals in any combination will ever determine the combination of thoughts in Mr. Jobs head.

One thing I was pleased to guess right on the nose, though, was the price. I did say US$500, and WHAM! (just like in the presentation), it starts at US$499. I had a very strong gut feeling that the price point which “leaked” was a smokescreen, a red herring if you will, to get enough information out there, but give everyone a real jolt when the real price was revealed.

If you’ve watched the keynote as I have, you will detect a very strong reaction to the real starting price. Mssr. Steve was right about the pundits, and he fooled us all. I’m just glad that it didn’t work the other way around. To see this super slick device pass for US$1,500 would have been heartbreaking.

There is one thing I would like to say about one of my predictions. It is a giant iPod Touch. I don’t know yet how I feel about that yet. I watched the keynote and the video and I’m pleased with the result, but did it really have to be a SuperSized iPod Touch (just add US$499, please!) and not something new and revolutionary? Its possible I’m just re-judging it. Listen to MacBreak Weekly over at TWIT.tv. Episode #177 is a special recap of the day and they have some interesting thoughts.

Say Hello To The Official Apple iPad

Tyler Regas — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 00:02:31 +0000

Technical Specifications | Pricing Information

Stand Alone Predicts New Apple Form Factor

Tyler Regas — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 04:56:16 +0000

I didn’t notice this in my Press inbox before, but it just caught my eye. Brian Akaka of Stand Alone Inc., a software company which makes mobile apps for the iPhone and Palm webOS, has pre-empted Apple’s announcement with one of their own. You can read the entire press release after the jump, but suffice it to say that they are working on a larger version of their Crosswords application. Its a rather bold move, though I have a sickening feeling that it will be drowned out by the torrent of media from Apple tomorrow. That would be a shame, since its small developers like Stand Alone which have made the iPhone what it is.

Interestingly enough, the release refers to the Apple _______ as the iPad, so they’ve either settled on what they think it will be called or they’ve gotten advance developer units and have just incurred the wrath of Jobs and are simply waiting to be magically disemboweled by the will and might of the Impossible Steve. I believe the latter to be untrue, however, as Apple generally only gives a very small and elite number early access to their unannounced products, and while I think Stand Alone is a collection of cool folk, I don’t think they rate, much in the same way that I don’t rate.

What Apple WON’T Unveil Tomorrow

Tyler Regas — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 04:44:38 +0000

I’d have to say, having been in this game for a very long time, that this is the first time Apple speculation has been rather civil and well thought out. The general consensus seems to be that Apple will pull the covers off of a media tablet device which will offer owners ebooks, magazines, newpapers, some kind of online experience, and a range of multimedia capabilities, all with integrated 3G+ and for around US$800-1,000. My opinion pretty much matches the educated pundits who have been in the industry for some time, including Leo Laporte and Jason Calacanis, but I think price point is where they don’t have it. I’m going to bet that it will land somewhere around $500. I’m of the opinion that the “leaks” regarding price point have been a smoke screen to make the unveiling price point all that more dramatic. Mark my words.

Now, for what it will NOT be. The Apple _______ (you fill in whatever you think it will be called) will not be a jumbo iPod. That’s just too much, and people would expect it to be a phone first and foremost. Whatever it is may actually have mobile telephony capabilities, but that won’t be the centerpiece. The Apple ________ will not be a full-on tablet Mac. Microsoft has clearly proven over and over and over and over again that people simply don’t want tablets which are really PCs without a keyboard. Steve Jobs knows this and will not make that mistake. I’ll bet that it can’t even be hacked to run Mac OS X, since it will likely be running on a chip from Apple’s acquisition of a few years back, PA Semi, and fabless chip maker which builds multi-core x86-compatible CPUs.

The Apple _______ will also not require a costly wireless subscription. It will come with integrated 3G or better, ala Amazon’s Kindle. However, it will be on a faster network, probably T-Mobile since they can leverage (and correct me if I’m incorrect here) GSM/GPRS’s ability to operate independently of a voice network so they can just pump data. Content vendors will pay for this network through their ad-based revenue and Apple will get a cut. Simple and clean, just like the App and Music Stores. Finally, the Apple _______ will not be a gaming device. Sure, there will be some casual games for it, but Apple has clearly positioned the iPod/iPhone as the gaming rig. Hell, they’ve come right out and said it. I know that Apple has made statements only to reverse them, but I don’t think so in this case.

That pretty much sums it up. Now we’ll just have to wait until tomorrow to find out for sure. Who knows, they may announce 32″ and 42″ TVs with integrated Apple TV systems. Despite how cool that would be, it would be a serious letdown.

Why I’ve Been Away Longer Than Usual

Tyler Regas — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 04:14:18 +0000

As you can probably tell, I’ve not been posting as usual, and there’s a simple reason. Last year I became disgusted with all of the social sites and decided to open my own. I searched for a usable domain name and found one in Phrind.com (my wife says its pronounced P-H-RIND and not like Friend, but I disagree). My goal was to start a site based on, what else, WordPress using the BuddyPress social site plugins. That didn’t work out at all, mostly because I couldn’t get WordPress MU installed as a sub-site on my hosting account, so I gave up. Later, I tried to make it a purely mobile site, but that didn’t work out, either, so the whole project just fell by the wayside.

Then one day I had an epiphany, and it was a simple one (as everyone know, the best kind). I was talking to a friend of mine about my daughter’s Autism and how it effects her ability to understand and work with social cues and general socialization, and that’s when it hit me. I would develop a website which would be a social network for the Autism community. It was honestly revelatory. I knew exactly how it would work from end to end in the blink of an eye. Thusly, PHRiND was born. That is, indeed, what I’ve been working on these past weeks. I already have the core site up, hosting of which was kindly donated by Bluehost (it was my opinion that they were the best hosting service before their kind generosity, by the way).

So, if you’re curious about what I’ve been working on, you’ll have to wait a bit longer. As part of the site’s security, you must be invited to join, so you can’t even go look at it right now. We’re also in closed beta, so you can’t even see what it looks like. Hang in there, though, as I’m working on a public-facing site which will have all kinds of helpful information about PHRiND and Autism, as well as resources for non-members. Once I get that site up in the next week or so, I’ll post the link here.

Now, wish me luck. I’m going to need it.

Review: Nokia N900 – The Hardware

Tyler Regas — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 14:45:33 +0000

Wake up the kids! Its time for the most anticipated Product Review by a Small Time Blogger with Big Time Connections and Dreams of Greatness of all time, the review of the Nokia N900. That’s right. I got mine a couple weeks back and I can tell you right up front…

Wait! If I do that, you won’t read the review. You’ll find that your choice was validated or not and then go your merry way, assured that I, Tyler Regas, Blogger of Extraordinary Talent, told you so. Well, I’m not going to do that. I’m going to write a god’s honest review of a very, very… device-y device. Yeah. So Click on through after this very large image of the Nokia N900 and enjoy.

If you are familiar with Nokia’s efforts at their web tablet line, you likely are aware, or have even had, the original 770, and the n800, and n810, each of which were markedly better than the previous model (hint: I didn’t have an n800). Those devices were all web tablet, specifically meaning that they did not have phone hardware, but were dependent on wi-fi and bluetooth for their connections. Nokia also ran the gamut of hardware configuration tests to see what would stick. The n810 was the best received, mostly because it was the first internet tablet, or IT, to have a hardware keyboard.

In addition to the hardware, Nokia decided to tap the open source community and produce and sponsor its own flavor of Linux called Maemo. This proved to be an intelligent choice, as over recent years, Maemo has grown in capability and robustness, and as is the case with all open source projects, all of the open source code is turned back to the public good. Nokia has proven to be a good public citizen and friend to open source, and as a result there are a great many open source projects developed for Maemo. Of course, Nokia has also sported its own internal code shop which works on the core, and this is the group who produced the base for Maemo 5, the software behind the Nokia N900.

HARDWARE

Now, I don’t have a slick segue to start up the review, so I’ll just jump in. The hardware is impressive (no, I did not receive one of those insane smoking boxes, and I’m rather thankful to be honest) and smaller, primarily because it is the first IT to be a real phone. That’s right. The N900 contains not only Bluetooth and wi-fi hardware, but also a SIM card slot for service from carriers in the US like AT&T and T-Mobile. As for the rest of the specs, we’re talking a 600MHz TI OMAP 3430 Cortex-A8 CPU, a PowerVR SGX GPU, 1GB of RAM, a 3.5″ 800×480 touchscreen display, inbuilt stereo speakers, and the usual iPhone-type gadgets, all powered by a 1350mAh battery pack. Nokia calls it a mobile computer. Duh.

The N900 is smaller and than the n810 it replaces-ish, but it is by no means less impressive. The n810 would have been awkward to put up to your ear, and Maemo 5 still takes extensive advantage of the 800×480 display for web browsing. The N900 is thicker than the n810, but it works a lot better as a phone. The big change with the N900, however, is that you hold it in widescreen fashion, not tall like an iPhone or Google Android handset. All of the menus and controls are arranged in this fashion except the Phone program, which will change to a vertical orientation when the handset it turned and the slider is closed. This is convenient for the phone, but nothing else works that way.

As with the n810, the N900 has stereo speakers, one on each end of the phone, which sound surprisingly good and clear. The slide lock has been moved to the right end of the phone next to the 3.5mm headphone jack and microphone hole, and there is a micro USB jack on the left side. On the top of the device is the zoom rocker which now also doubles as the volume controller. The power button remains in the middle, and there is a camera button over on the right. Oddly, Nokia included an Infrared window, though I can’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t use the much faster Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR or attach the supplied USB cable for tethering. On the front of the glossy black face plate is the display, an earphone hole, the front-facing camera, and light and proximity sensors. On the back is the 5MP camera with a slider cover and an integrated prop stand.

Overall, this arrangement works well, but for longtime Maemo/Internet Tablet users, the loss of the dedicated hardware menu, back, and switcher keys will take a bit to get used to. I’d say, however, that the Maemo team did a pretty good job, but I’ll get to that in the Software section of my review. The keyboard itself is vastly improved over the N810 version, which was inconsistent and mushy. Nokia also wisely or stupidly (depending on what you need) ditched the D-pad for a traditional set of cursor keys. I know its a space issue and I like having them, but when it comes to gaming, there’s nothing like a d-pad. Of course, this is an issue which has always plagued mobile handsets which are not dedicated gaming platforms, and the N900 suffers alongside its lesser brethren.

That’s the hardware part. I was going to run this review all at once, but its taking too long to finish, so I’ll put up the software review later. Enjoy!