Kikkoman

I recently switched from AT&T wireless to TMobile.

That left me with two nice but locked and useless phones, my old t68i and the ATT t226 replacement. I’d like to give one to my gf and one to my brother for them to use with prepaid cell plans.

So little little Googling and I found gsm-software.com, where I was able to purchase a cable and unlocking services. I accidentally blew a “credit” ($12) reading the codes off my t68i when I meant to unlock it, but oh well. The total cost ended up being about $60 for the cable and 2 unlocks. More than I wanted to spend but it was fun.

Given the success in unlocking my old phone (which would be ok if I broke), I decided to try unlocking my new Nokia 3650. Unlocking the 3650 was a joke: $5 and no cables needed. Very cool.

FYI, if you have a SonyEricsson you can check your firmware revision number by: Pressing >*<<*<*

The firmware on my t68i is old, but never gave me any problems: R3C001 (apps) & R1A (os). The latestest is something like R8C (apps) & R5 (os).

I decided against upgrading the firmware on the t68i as it works fine now, and would cost another $24.

Show on the Discovery channel.

In the 60’s and 70’s they did an experiement to teach a few chimps sign language. In the 80s one of them had a baby, and the baby learned sign language from its mother. How cool is that!

DNA wise, Chimps are closer to humans than Gorillas.

Wow, FEMA disaster search dogs. In the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing the search dogs would get bummed out at the end of the day of searching and only finding dead people. It would get to the point where the dogs didn’t want to work anymore. It got to the point where they would stage a successful find of someone so that the dogs could end the day on a good note.

Regulatory Capture is when, “when regulators serve the interests of those they’re allegedly regulating in the general public interest.”
See post here.

There are two key parts:
1 Over time the regulators and regulatees become friendly &
2 The established businesses come to find that the regulatory environment is beneficial to them by keeping new competators down/out, in that it raises the barriers to entry in that market.

Anyways the whole point of introducing the concept of regulatory capture is to link to this article. Aka, California AG position paper doc on P2P networks turns out to have been written or edited by someone from the MPAA. Mmmm, smells good don’t it?

Bowman (Wired): Split css design into two sheets, one for layout and one for color, nifty as you can use the same selectors.

Or you can set a class on the body and just change that, eg for colorscheme changes that don’t happen all that often.

Sliding door CSS tabs. Way cool hack. Presentation here.

Jim Trudeau, from Metroworks.

25 million Palm devices sold
5 million Symbian in its first year (2003)
more smart phones that handhelds in Europe in 2003

Symbian is projected to have 75% of the cell market.

Java on a cell phone is a “theortical advantage”. Write once, test everywhere. Slower than os specific code. Sandbox limitations. That said MIDP 2.0 is much better, networking, https, etc.

Network restrictions: Unless you are signed, you can’t access any place but
where you came from.
Sandbox: You might not be able to go fullscreen.
Write once, test everywhere. Crazy stuff like the pixel aspect ration between phones are different.

Symbian: From the ground up specifically for cell phones. C++. Specifically not MS.
Not portable across Symbian phone, eg can’t write an app for a Nokia Series 60 and have it run on UIQ. Eg, base core with UI patched in on top.

Btw, this guy is a very good presenter.

mmmm Developing for cell emulators. Metroworks is the only way you can get good debugging on Symbian.

Metroworks actually runs the developer community/forum stuff for alot of the manufacturers and carriers.

MIDP 2.0 does have support for bluetooth access but it depends if it is implemented on the phone. The P900/800 supposedly has it.

here

Very true. No I will not fix your computer.

So I just bought my first bit of indie music: on the internet via paypal no less.

Tramplinehouse won a web award at SXSW and they have music playing in the background on the site. Voyager One - Wires was one of the songs, and I had to have it. Google pointed me to AudioLunchBox where I was able to listen to the tracks and buy the album as mp3s. Fantastic! I’m going to have a great time sampling the techno there.

Joi Ito: Activist in Japan frustrated with the political process in Japan and found out that this is problem with democracies worldwide. Wrote it out there

Problem with the Republic method is that you vote and walk off, and the leaders go off and do their own thing.

Emergent Democracy as in order arising from chaos. The printing press changed the nature of the “public”, in the same way won’t the internet do the same thing?

Wilcox: Note that while the printing press revolutionized things it only did it in half of Europe. The Ottoman empire managed to squelch and supress the progress of the printing press very effectively.

Rosen: check this out indymedia
ausion indymedia

Joi Ito: chat room I am not the leader, I am a custodian.

How is emergent democracy resist outside influence to co-op it / usurpt it? Wilcox: Actually networks are more resistant. Take for example the Sierra club, there is radical wing trying to take it over and basically take over its endowment. They aren’t very resistant because they aren’t in active contact with their constituents.

Direct democracy is scary, its the market. Emergent democracy is needs to be a little more mediated.

Ito: In the US the is a functioning democracy so it only makes sense to replace it with something that is markedly better. Interesting stuff is going on in other countries, eg Iran. There are around 100,000 Iranian bloggers and some of them are being thown in jail.

How do you protect the system from the users: Flash back to Wienberger’s talk last year about constitutions.

Joe got good at the end. paraphrasing: The single most imporant act of the primary was Kerry writing himself a 6.4 million dollar check. That bought him the 2% edge over Edwards in Iowa. So it is a reflection of the system, but at the same time not a knock against Kerry. That he was willing to put in 6.4 of his own money when facing the abyss says that he will fight.

Glad Kerry won and not Edwards.

Physically, Joe reminds me Jon Stewart, just a little heavier.

What follows are my very bad notes: Kat took much better ones. I wanted to sit and enjoy.

Disconnect between internet media and political people. Since 1976 the big parties have put together rules (the Hunt commission) that would prevent insurgent canidates.

Fast forward to 03/04 nominating processes

As an insurgent you have to take Iowa and New Hampshire and co-opt the rigged momentum play in the first two states.

Rusted, Busted, Corroded broadcast system. 40 yrs since the 1960 elections, TV became dominate. 33 lobbiest for every member of congress.

“Not the net, but the people who use it.” Dean campaign & Move on is the equivalent of the Nixon / Kennedy TV debate.

Blogs & bubbling on the net drove the Trent Lott issue.

Did everything. Largest SMS political text messaging in the nation, 5000 ;). (pun) Wow!

Almost every cool idea we had came from the blogs. The 50 states –> Puerto Rico –> expats example. Open source campaign.

First off, there is free wireless at the conference, and so the iChat Rendevous list has 22 ppl on. Neat.

Frequencies: 900 2.4 5 24 & 60
Didn’t know about the 24 and 60 GHz spectrum.

This is the first panel that the Bluetooth guy has been on since CTIA and basically got chewed out on how much bluetooth sucks as compared to wifi.

About a dozen medical bluetooth devices. PulseOx. (Oh Really)
Fedex guy has 3 bluetooth devices: Printer, PDA, wrist watch device.

Spec for streaming audio over bluetooth just came out. Eg stream audio from the iPod to a blue tooth headset. Nifty but, eh.

UWB guy: been at this 5 years and there aren’t any chipsets yet, so the “slow” pace of bluetooth isn’t so bad.

The FCC is open to unlicened spectrum: just opened up 255 MHz. Unlicenced TV: 3650-3700.

Wireless USB using UWB. High data rate, short distance. Hehe, the list of companies onboard looks like a Nascar.

SDMA guy: extension of wifi (didn’t explain what that means)
The state of Wifi: Stat from unnamed wifi manufacturer: 25% of the wireless access points they ship out result in a service call.

For all these standards, what do you define as success. EG, wireless irda is pretty much on every laptop and cell phone, but does anybody use it?

QA: time
First guy is a blowhard. Point is that all the tech hear is pretty much only “urban” only. Response is that WiMax is looking at 3 km 802.11.

Security:
Bluetooth: invited the guy that discovered the snarfing hole to join the security panel. Wifi: WEP –> 802.11i. Wep isn’t great, but it does raise the barriers to entry. USB UWB Wireless –> security thru distance.

plexi.net was metioned on boingboing, and promptly died under the load. However I did find a place that had the clips they were talking about. Very strange.

Beauty Kit
E-Baby

here

Sorry, just finished watching the last episode of season 7 of Stargate.
Blog entry about Capability-Based computer systems.

Also, the Darpa view of the lessons learned in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Gen X version of Popular Mechanics to come out soon?

I don’t think we are any less creative than our forefathers, its just that we play with different sets of legos.

For example, here is a nifty wireless web “hack”

Froogle now has its WML version. So next time when I am in a bookstore, I can point my phone’s browser to wml.froogle.com and compare price directly. It is so easy for books because I only need to input the ISBN number.

Muhahahaha!     No more buying stuff “in the dark”. Eg you spot something nice at Fry’s or Costco, now you can find out if it is really a good deal w/out leaving the store.

Its been raining and ugly out for the past few weeks. Its actually nice out today. I’m going to go lay out in the Sun.

here.

Makes me willing to pay for Intellij. Not trying to dis Eclipse at all, it looks like a very powerful platform, just not so much of a good application yet.

Ideally there would be a few different builds of Eclipse available, with all the plugins “common” plugins bundled in, and a sensible layout.

BareBones Eclipse download #1.
JSP/web development (no EJB) download #2
JSP/web/EJB development download #3
Applet/Standalone app development download #4

After installing Eclipse, it takes like a half an hour before you see your code and can do anything useful with it. That needs to be reduced to 5 mins.

Japanese soldiers deploying to Iraq are being encouraged to grow a mustache or beard so as to fit in better with the locals. Great idea.

here

very cool.