“Hello, may I speak to Donald (something) please?”
“Sorry, you have a wrong number.”
… pause …
“Oh, I really *do* have the wrong number. I thought I didn’t for some reason. Sorry!” *click*
o_O
Month: June 2008
Obligatory iPhone 2.0 post
Nothing earth-shattering in the announcement, but some pleasing things…
- Rumor is it gets better reception — might be very welcome here in San Francisco, where you get 5 bars on one block and 0 bars the next…
- Faster download speeds are great… assuming I get any reception… :)
- Longer battery life — I charge it every night anyway, but might be nice during travel.
- GPS — more accurate placement for maps would be handy, but I’ve found it good enough on the old system.
Otherwise it’s pretty much the same, hardware-wise. New software will be available on the old model too, and there’s still not a model with 32GB storage. 16’s not quite enough for my full music library, so I don’t have a huge incentive to upgrade from the 8GB model unless the reception really is good enough to… say… successfully make phone calls from my flat.
As for pricing… the purchase price is lower, but the the plan’s an extra $10/month, which more than makes up the savings over the contract lifetime.
On the plus side, the draconian requirement to activate your contract at the store means our European friends will stop pestering us to buy iPhones for them to take home and unlock. >:D
Mobile format tweak
The HAWHAW library used for our Hawpedia-based mobile gateway does this cute thing where on a “grown-up” web browser it squishes the formatted output into a tiny rectangle, with a cute picture of a mobile phone around it.
This “simulator” mode makes it … sort of… look like an actual mobile device. But IMHO this causes more harm than good. Two main problems:
- Unrecognized devices can end up being shown the simulator skin, often horribly misrendering it (like the Palm Treo at right — hopefully recognized since a few weeks ago)
- It’s harder to actually get a feel for the variety of behavior on devices with different screen sizes. There’s everything out there from the tiniest cell phone to the iPhone to the Amazon Kindle reader’s big ol’ 6″ screen. There’s no way to resize the tiny rectangle, so you can’t estimate how things are going to feel on the medium screens.
I’ve now disabled this. With the simulator / “big screen” mode off, regular web browsers and unrecognized devices get pretty much the same output style that you see in things like the iPhone. It’s reasonably clean, and will properly scale and wrap with your screen size.
Conference season begins
Velocity
June 23-24 – Burlingame, California
Domas Mituzas, slayer of slow database queries and WMF board member, will be giving a talk on Wikimedia’s operations. Since we’re having a staff meeting here in San Francisco around the same time, the whole tech team will be out for the conference; come ’round and say hi!
Wikimania
July 17-19 – Alexandria, Egypt
Awwwww yeah
OSCON
July 21-25 – Portland, Oregon
I’ll be taking a detour through scenic Portland on my way back from Egypt to hit OSCON; I’m particularly interested in checking out the Open Mobile Exchange to get a sense of what’s going on in the mobile web & rich mobile app space.
Portland is the birthplace of Wiki, of course, so a pilgrimage is required. :) Hope to run into some wiki-friendly folks while I’m up there…