Archive for the 'Blog' Category

Tonight we Ignite Portland for the Third Time

Published
by
Josh Bancroft
on June 18, 2008
. 0 Comments

Tonight is Ignite Portland 3. We’re having it at the Bagdad Theater again, because that venue was just awesome last time, and it fits the spirit and character of Ignite Portland to a tee. The presentation lineup is just stellar, and we have a (hopefully) more streamlined “advance tickets + general admission” that should reduce the size of the lines (which stretched for BLOCKS for Ignite Portland 2) but still let people just show up and get it. The 450+ free advance tickets were gone in less than 24 hours, and there’s every indication that we’re going to pack the Bagdad to fire code again (700+).

If you’re coming, look for me and say “hi!”. I’ll be the geek in the cargo pants, black t-shirt, and bright orange Crocs. ;-) If you can’t make it, you can still partake in the parts of the event that will take place online (the backchannel chatter on Twitter, watch the videos tomorrow, etc.). I just put up a post on igniteportland.com with details on how to experience Ignite to the fullest.

I’m very proud to be one of the organizers of such a cool, popular event. The folks from Legion of Tech (a non profit organization we formed to manage organizing events like Ignite Portand, BarCamp Portland, Startupalooza, and the monthly LoT Happy Hour meetups) are awesome in every way, and I’m humbled and honored to get to work with them (I’m on the board). I can’t wait to see how IP3 turns out tonight, and I’m already looking forward to Ignite Portland 4! :-)


Teach Skills and Tools, not Programs and Rules

Published
by
Josh Bancroft
on June 17, 2008
. 4 Comments

You probably go to too many meetings. I feel like I do, sometimes. Some are worthwhile, others are a waste of time. Thankfully, for the ones that aren’t that interesting/engaging to me, I can usually pay partial attention, and either let my mind wander and chew on things, or perhaps even do a little reading online to make myself smarter and better informed. The topic of this post materialized in my brain over the course of a couple of these meetings where I was paying partial attention. Specifically, someone asked the question “how do we make our blogs less boring, and less self-referrential?” After some discussion, an answer bubbled up from the group: we need to acquire the skills to be un-boring. And that’s when the little light with the bell went off in my head.

When you’re dealing with the online world (and this extrapolates to a lot of offline stuff, as well), it is much more important, productive, and effective to teach and learn skills and tools, rather than focusing on programs and rules. Teach people useful skills and correct principles, and let them govern themselves. Let me give a made up example, to illustrate my point. Try to think of how you could apply this to your job and your life.

Say, for instance, it was part of your job to take your company’s employees, and encourage them to write on a group blog (this is a generic example - this applies to almost anything, I think). You’re a very process oriented individual, in a very process oriented company. You decide to create a “strategy”, outlining the goals and ends you want to achieve by having an active community of bloggers. You could then work backwards from that, and get some milestones and metrics that will help you measure how well you’re doing. Say, a certain number of blog posts from a certain number of contributors per month. This many visits per month, and a growth rate of n percent. And then you could have lots of brainstorming sessions focussed on those milestones - “How do we get more bloggers?” “How do we get the bloggers to write more?” “How do we sound less boring and less self-interested, to get more audience engagement?”

Based on brainstorming sessions like that, you come up with a plan. You’ll have more meetings for everyone involved. Mandatory training. Rules (call them “guidelines” if you wish) for how to write a good blog posts. Rules about what NOT to write about. Rules about who can and cannot be a contributor. Rules about how you count and measure hits and visits and comments and contributions. At long last, you have a “strategy” for your blogging “program”.

You get a few enthusiastic participants - people who seem to be natural bloggers, and take to it with gusto. But on the whole, you end up feeling like you’re having to constantly keep after the bloggers, to get them to post. You’re always encouraging them to write more, to be more engaging and personable (so more people will read the blog, and leave comments). You may go so far as to cook up some bribery/reward schemes to entice them to post more (a carrot instead of a stick). You feel like you’re exerting a lot of effort for diminishing returns, and eventually, you get tired of it, and stop trying so hard (so the whole program starts to fall apart).

Any of that sound familiar?

Now let’s imagine a different approach. Instead of falling into the trap of process and programs and rules (which is easy, because it’s what you’re used to, and besides, everyone else is doing it!), you should think of ways to achieve your objective by teaching skills and tools - actively helping people learn to do new things, or old things in new ways that are more efficient, and more fun. Your goal should be to help people find that “I kick ass!” feeling, and you should trust that doing so will induce them to achieve your “other” goal, be it a vibrant community of bloggers, or more sales, or whatever.

Teach people to find a way to deal with the things they hate most about their job or their life. Show them better spam filters, or how to use a feed reader to bring the web to them and give them more time by reading more efficiently. Show them tips and tricks, and teach them how YOU learned the tips and tricks.

What’s different about the “skills” approach? Do you think it can be just as effective? Which do you prefer? Can you still have a “strategy”, and if so, should you? How you find out what skills are important, and then learn them well enough that you can teach them? Or should you find experts to teach the skills? Is this really better than programs and rules? Let me know what you think. I’ve deliberately held back some of my thoughts on this approach, until they’re a little more developed. I’ll post more on this, soon. Plus, I love kicking ideas back and forth with you. So let me know what you think! :-)


I’ve Come to Hate the Tech Industry (or: Technology as a Lifestyle vs. Technology as a Business)

Published
by
Josh Bancroft
on June 12, 2008
. 9 Comments

I’ve been trying to make time, at least once a week, to sit down and write something substantial. Something more than excited gadget/software lust, more than a collection of 140 character microposts. I’m really enjoying it. I’m learning a lot about myself, my goals, and my motivations. I try to go to a place where there’s no internet connectivity to minimize distractions - I’m easily led afield by my feed reader - and do some reading before I write (which always stirs up ideas). So far, so good.

Yesterday, I was in Mountain View, California, at Research@Intel Day. I was there to shoot video and otherwise cover interesting stuff for my group, Intel Software Network, and our developer community. Research@Intel Day is Intel’s annual public science fair, where the researchers and groups in CTG (the Corporate Technology Group) get to show off the stuff they’ve been working on to the press. Most of it is future freaky science fiction-type stuff - a biological microprocessor, dynamic physical rendering, etc. I’ll have some videos, photos, and blog posts up soon about what I saw there this year.

As I was on the plane at the San Jose airport, coming home to Portland, I reflected on the culture of Silicon Valley. It is the heart of the technology industry - hardware and software, startups and ancient tech companies like Intel, side by side. Their names are all over the buildings you pass on the freeways. You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a technology company. Usually more than one. There’s Yahoo, next to EMC, next to McAfee, next to Sun, next to Intel. And oh, look - there’s Moffett Field, where the Google guys park their private 767.

The airports, hotels, restaurants, and roads are crammed full of people who obviously work in tech. Tan slacks, polo shirt with a company name or name of some conference they attended on the sleeve, maybe a sport jacket if they’re really important. Bluetooth headset stuck to the side of their head, BlackBerry in hand, or doing that weird walk-around-with-their-open-laptop-perched-on-their-forearm thing. There’s no mistaking them. They’re everywhere. Doing business. Talking about business. Exuding business.

You’d think I’d feel right at home there, among “my people”.

But I don’t. I feel like an alien every time I go there. A vague, uneasy feeling like I don’t really fit in. It’s not just an “Oregonian in California” thing, or because I actively thumb my nose at fashion, walking around in orange Crocs, cargo pants, and a faded black geeky t-shirt from Penny Arcade or O’Reilly or ThinkGeek. I’ve got my uniform just like they have theirs. So what’s the difference? What keeps me from feeling like the Valley is my homeland, and making plans to move there (besides the insane real estate prices)? I’d never really given it much thought before, but sitting in the airplane yesterday, waiting to take off (my eyes being involuntarily drawn to the laptop screen of the Boeing guy in front of me, who was broadcasting how important he was by looking at some obviously confidential spreadsheet long after the crew told us to turn off and stow our electronic devices), I had sort of an epiphany.

I’ve come to hate the technology industry.

Hate is probably too strong a word, and that statement doesn’t mean what you might think it means at first, so let me explain.

I love technology. I was born practically surrounded by it, and grew up as a citizen of that world. It was clear that I am 100% geek by about age 5 (and remember, this was before it was cool to be a geek!). Every job I’ve ever had has been in the technology industry. Web development, support, QA testing, community building, and teaching. It pays my bills, buys me gadgets, and I’m not really suited to do much else. So how can I say that I hate the technology industry?

It’s because I make a distinction between technology as a business, and technology as a lifestyle.

Silicon Valley, and it’s culture, is all about technology as a business - all about the money. And that is what I realized I hate. I don’t think it’s wrong for people to be in the technology business - in fact, I depend on them. I need them, like you do, to keep churning out the improvements, upgrades, and new stuff that makes our lives easier, more efficient, and more fun. And I’m not blind to the fact that this industry pays my paycheck, and always has. In fact, I absolutely love my job. Does that make me a hypocrite?

I don’t think so. And here’s why. I have no problem with the fact that the business-centric tech industry culture exists. It’s a good thing. I wish it huge success, and I’m willing to work to make that happen. It’s just not who I am, or where I’m going. People for whom technology is a business go home after work, and become who they really are. I am a geek 100% of the time. I couldn’t turn it off if I wanted to. And I don’t want to. ;-) I choose to find my culture, the things I care about deeply, and obsess over, and do in my free time, elsewhere. I would like to think of myself as “in the tech industry, but not of it”.

So what culture DO I feel like I belong to? The one where technology is a lifestyle, not just a business. The culture of geeks, and people who use technology in new and useful ways because they can, because they see it as a challenge. The culture of makers and hackers and people who read science fiction not just for entertainment and diversion, but for inspiration. The culture of people for whom reputation, and whuffie, and being recognized for contributing something useful or clever is its own reward, and not just a way to make more money. People who learn programming languages for fun, and for what can be learned through the experience. In my culture, technology can be a business, but it’s often SO much more than that.

I devour books by my favorite sci-fi authors - Cory Doctorow, Charlie Stross, Vernor Vinge, etc. - and I yearn for the easy, natural way that people use technology in their stories. Wearable computers, data-enhanced visual overlays, subvocal communication and silent messaging. Direct, fast, effortless connection to information and other people. I look forward to a time when the exponential growth in technology eliminates more and more of the mundane, cruel, painful, tedious problems that affect us as meat creatures. A post-scarcity economy when we’ve finally found way to get rid of poverty, and disease, and death. The natural extensions of our increasingly connected world.

Now, I’m not a Utopian. Or even really a Singulatarian. No matter how often I half-jokingly say I’ll be first in line as soon as they figure out how to do a direct brain-to-Internet connection, there are things outside the world of technology that I care about even more. My relationship with my wife and children. Being a good person and serving others. Right and wrong. You could take away all of my technology and it’s accompanying culture, and as long as I had those things, I would be fulfilled and happy. I recognize and am grateful for the luxury of having time, and money, and access to all of these technological artifacts that I talk so breathlessly about. I recognize that it’s all “extra”.

This was my epiphany - this distinction, in my mind, between technology as a business, and technology as a lifestyle. It helps me make sense of the conflicts and irritation I sometimes feel when I see practically the entire world around me start talking about “social media”, and “Web 2.0″. Things that were once the sole domain of geeks. For a long time now, listening to non-geeks expound upon these topics twisted my stomach - even though it was the stuff I love, and have been promoting and teaching and evangelizing, I felt resentment as more and more people around me (remember, I’m surrounded by the “industry”) started picking up these tools. Until now, I couldn’t put my finger on why, but I think I’ve figured it out. It’s when they’re rooted in the business culture, different from mine, and eyeballing things in my world that they want to use for their own ends, that my hackles go up.

Want to hear something strange? Now that I’ve figured that out, I don’t care any more. It doesn’t bother me, now that I understand my feelings about why it ever did. I can’t explain why, except perhaps to say that now I know better who I am, and how to reconcile the two cultures. Now, when I think of the marketing department (of any company, not just mine) trying to “leverage” some social tool, like Twitter or blogs or podcasting, instead of feeling defensive (”They’re marketers! They don’t really “get” it! They’re going to screw it all up!”), I see it for what it is. And I’m happy to try to help them do it right. To impart cluefulness to anyone willing to listen (those who AREN’T willing to listen still make me mad). Business is important, too, and they’re just trying to do the best they can at fitting in with this rapidly-changing world. That’s a GOOD thing, one that I’m willing to work towards.

Now, instead of wondering if I really am an arrogant hypocrite for getting defensive when marketing catches up to something that was heretofore the realm of geeks, I can accept it, because I understand why they’re doing it. The internet, as a whole, is better off for having been adopted by business. Sure, it has its annoyances: spam, intrusive ads, threats to privacy, etc. But there are ways to deal with them. Would we REALLY prefer to have stayed with a wholly non-commercial internet, a throwback to the days where there was no free webmail with gigabytes of storage, comprehensive lightning fast search engines, and almost-ubiquitous connectivity, because no one could figure out how to pay for it all? I, for one, welcome will tolerate and coexist with the internet’s new corporate overlords.

See? I told you that hate was too strong a word. :-)


Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: Reading from the Intel Cookbook

Published
by
Josh Bancroft
on June 10, 2008
. 1 Comment

The Apple WWDC 2008 keynote has come and gone, and my wild speculation about what Apple might say about the next version of OS X, 10.6 code named “Snow Leopard” (and affectionately christened “Snot Leopard” thanks to a typo during my WWDC liveblogging ;-) ), that it would be announced as the operating system for a “netbook” or Mobile Internet Device powered by the Intel Atom processor, didn’t come true. In fact, besides a brief reference to an after-lunch WWDC session (under NDA), Steve Jobs didn’t say much about Snow Leopard at all. Since then, a few more details have become available, and Apple has put up a page with the (limited) info:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/snowleopard/

Much has been written about the more controversial questions - are they really not adding any new features? Are they going to drop PPC support? Is it going to be 64-bit only (and if so, what about early Intel Core Duo chips that aren’t fully 64-bit capable?). I’ll leave all that to the people who know what they’re talking about. But what strikes me as interesting is that the few fundamental technologies they HAVE discussed looks like a mirror image of the technologies Intel, and specifically, my group Intel Software Network (we’re Intel’s developer community), have been promoting and evangelizing to software developers for quite a while now.

First, I have to cling to my hope and dream that one day, Apple will release something along the lines of a “netbook”, like the Asus Eee PC or the MSI Wind. Something like the MacBook Air, but much smaller. Apple’s throwing fuel on that particular speculative fire with statements like this:

Snow Leopard dramatically reduces the footprint of Mac OS X, making it even more efficient for users, and giving them back valuable hard drive space for their music and photos.

Having recently paved and done a clean install of Mac OS X Leopard on my MacBook Pro, I can tell you that the operating system itself only takes up about 5.5 GB of hard drive space. Hard drives are growing in capacity and dropping in price at an astounding rate (did you ever dream you’d be able to pick up a terabyte of disk space for a couple hundred bucks?). So why would Apple care about reducing that 5-6 GB footprint, when drives are huge and cheap? Think SSD. Solid State Disks. Like the ones in the netbook devices. The Asus Eee PC I got to play with a while ago had a 4 GB SSD. Current models have 12 or 20GB. Fast, efficient, and no moving parts. Perfect for mobile devices. But still really expensive - you can get a 64GB SSD in a MacBook Air instead of the much slower 80GB hard drive, but it will cost you a cool $999 for the upgrade. SSDs are coming down in price, but they’re still going to be expensive in any really large sizes for a while. So, if Apple was thinking of doing a Mobile Internet Device or netbook, it makes sense to squeeze OS X down as much as they can, to make, say, an affordable 16GB SSD a viable option that won’t get hogged by just the OS.

Next, there’s the new “Grand Central” technology, that focuses on taking full advantage of multicore processors:

“Grand Central,” a new set of technologies built into Snow Leopard, brings unrivaled support for multicore systems to Mac OS X. More cores, not faster clock speeds, drive performance increases in today’s processors. Grand Central takes full advantage by making all of Mac OS X multicore aware and optimizing it for allocating tasks across multiple cores and processors. Grand Central also makes it much easier for developers to create programs that squeeze every last drop of power from multicore systems.

Emphasis mine. Intel Software Network has been banging on the multicore drum for quite a while now, ever since it became clear that the future of processor performance was more and more cores working in parallel, rather than ever-increasing clock speeds. In fact, we have a whole multicore developer community (hosted by my awesome colleague, Aaron Tersteeg) dedicated to multicore programming resources, tools, learning, and access to the Intel experts who literally wrote the book on this stuff. I’m sure as Snow Leopard gets closer, you Mac developers will (hopefully) be seeing a lot more details from both Apple and Intel on how to make your apps sing on many-core processors. It’s the biggest fundamental shift in computing since, say, the x86 architecture became the standard. I can’t wait to see this gain broader acceptance and implementation.

Finally, Apple teases us with this little tidbit on the vaguely-named Open CL (Open Computing Language), apparently aimed at taking advantage of upcoming super-powerful GPUs for other computing tasks:

Another powerful Snow Leopard technology, OpenCL (Open Computing Language), makes it possible for developers to efficiently tap the vast gigaflops of computing power currently locked up in the graphics processing unit (GPU). With GPUs approaching processing speeds of a trillion operations per second, they’re capable of considerably more than just drawing pictures. OpenCL takes that power and redirects it for general-purpose computing.

They don’t name any one company’s products or technologies, but it’s well known that Nvidia and Intel are both working on many-core GPUs that support “GPGPU” - General Purpose (Computing) on the GPU. And again, my group, Intel Software Network, has a whole community (this one just freshly minted!) dedicated to what we call Visual Computing. Steve Pitzel hosts this community (Steve has more interesting stories than ANYONE I know - ask him some time!), and the super swanky page design came from our resident web development wizard, Kevin Pirkl. Intel has a little upcoming product called Larrabee that we think is going to really turn the notion of what a GPU is for on its head. Have you noticed how Nvidia has been getting very aggressive towards Intel, some might say even attacking? Yeah, it’s because of Larrabee. And knowing Apple, they’ll be right there, ready to take advantage of all of the advances in the visual computing world. Competition is a good thing.

Anyway, that’s it for today’s dose of idle speculation, and listening to me play armchair industry analyst. I have to say it feels pretty cool to work for a company (Intel) that has such influence over the world of technology. I get to see SO MANY COOL THINGS in the course of my job, I feel spoiled. And I try to share as much with you as I can - like tomorrow, I’ll be filming demos at the Research@Intel event at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. From the previews I’ve seen, some of this stuff is just freaky sci-fi cool. I can’t wait to see it, shoot it, and get it out to you. As usual, I’d love to hear your thoughts, even if all you have to say is how wrong you think I am. Leave it in a comment! :-)
Crossposted on the Intel Software Network blog


Liveblogging the WWDC 2008 Steve Jobs Keynote

Published
by
Josh Bancroft
on June 9, 2008
. 8 Comments

I’m pretty much counting on Twitter being down (or rather, turning into a smoking crater where their servers used to be) during this morning’s Steve Job’s keynote at WWDC. So I’ll be liveblogging it here. I’m not at WWDC, but will be following via various online tools, and geeking out with fellow Macheads at Intel while it’s going on. This post is mostly going to be my observations and opinions on the news, rather than actually breaking the news, so if you want to follow along as “live” as you can, check out ArsTechnica’s live coverage, MacRumorsLive’s autoupdating page, and Engadget’s live coverage. Twitter and Summize also have a page set up to track the news, but like I said, my money’s on Twitter getting obliterated (it’s already flaky this morning).

The world is about to change. New iPhone. The iPhone App Store. And then what? New devices? OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard” (here’s my prediction on what that one really means). I can’t wait! This is better than Christmas! :-)

I’m in the new JF1 “living room” area at Intel, where they have a few tables set up under a 65″ plasma TV. I’m hooked up to it, using it as my external monitor, getting ready to scour the interwebs for each new tidbit as it makes its way from the mouth of Steve. I’ve got my Mountain Dew and some Pop Tarts. I’m ready. Let’s do this thing! :-)

Josh Liveblogging WWDC 2008 Keynote

Steve’s on stage now. We’re getting the best updates from the Ars IRC channel (#wwdc on irc.arstechnica.com). Steve’s talking about the enterprise features of the iPhone 2.0 software - calendar and contact sync, remote wipe, etc. Stuff we already knew. Now he’s bringing suits out on stage, from other companies. Stuff we hadn’t heard already - capability of viewing office documents, SharePoint access, VPN and two factor authentication (as in SecurID/SoftID). Cool…

Now talking about the iPhone SDK and how many similarities it has with the “real” OS X kernel and code. APIs are the same, line for line. Location-based services, 3D positional audio, how easy it is to develop for it and debug it, etc. Showing a new demo app, “Nearby Friends”, which sounds really cool. I’ll have to go back and watch the video of this, showing how easy it is to build an application, live. Talking about how much developers love coding for this platform. Yay, look how awesome we are!

Now comes the game demos. First up, Sega, talking about Super Monkey Ball. I have a love/hate relationship with that game on other platforms. The “party” parts of the games are really fun, but the “roll the monkey in a marble across this platform surrounded by a bottomless abyss on all sides” are freaking FRUSTRATING. In the keynote, they’re saying the demo looks awesome. Full “tilt” control using the accelerometer. Will be available “at the launch of the app store” for $9.99. Not a bad price - people were speculating that iPhone apps would be a lot more expensive - $20 to $40.

Now demoing an eBay app, which sounds technically cool, but honestly isn’t very interesting to me because I don’t use eBay. Now they’re talking about an app called “Loopt” (”connecting people on the go”), which Ars is excited about, but I’ve never heard of. Sounds like “friends on a map, showing you what they’re doing”. I’m not to keen on the idea of these kinds of apps, but I guess I’d have to see a GOOD one in action to really decide.

BTW, thanks to Brent, Matt, Tod, and Jerry, who are sitting around the table, correcting my mistakes and typos as I write this. :-) Matt’s trying to listen to a live audio stream, which is sort of working, but it’s more delayed than the Ars IRC feed (which is AWESOME! FAR better than any other way I’ve done this before. Thanks Ars! :-) )

Matt listening to a WWDC keynote audio stream. Sort of.

Showing a Typepad blog authoring app, that’s going to be free at the app store launch. Yawn. Show me a generic XML-RPC compatible editor (I can has MarsEdit for iPhone please?) or something that’ll work with WordPress and I’ll be interested. I’m sure that will come soon enough. And an AP “see local news and photos based on your location” app. Sounds kind of dumb - how much news do you know of that has specific location information, more than just “Dateline: this city”? Meh.

Next up a game developer showed off a couple of games that look cool (kind of hard to get a sense of them when I’m reading text descriptions in an IRC channel - I’m sure we’ll see lots about the games soon enough). And an indie dev who works in the insurance industry made a really cool virtual musical instrument app called “Band” that he developed in 8 months in his spare time. And now talking about Major League Baseball. Woo! Not.

Now showing off a bunch of medical reference/learning applications. Talking about med students and K-12 education. I love the idea, but how many K-12 students do you know that have iPhones (or would be allowed to have iPhones by their school’s policies)? Still, very cool ideas, and it’s great that these applications are coming, and relatively easy to develop.

Enough with the 3rd party app demos. I want to know what Apple has to show us today!

OK, now Forstall’s talking about the lack of a good chat platform, and how to receive notifications from your apps while they’re not running. He says the WRONG solution is background processes, because they sap battery life and performance. (And now he’s showing how Windows Mobile does this, and making fun of it! :-) ) “We have come up with a far better solution.” A push notification service to all developers. When your app is running, you’re connected to a server. When you quit, the connection dies. Apple maintains a persistent IP connection to the iPhone, and 3rd parties can push notifications through that server to the phone (badges, sounds, alerts, etc.). Alerts can include buttons to automatically launch your app (so it doesn’t have to stay running the background), and the phone only has to maintain one server connection (presumably to Apple) to make this works. Works over wifi and cellular. Coming in September. I have to admit, this seems like a really clever solution to a really tough problem. We’ll see how it works out in real life!

Steve’s back on stage, and talking about new iPhone 2.0 software features. Contact search, iWork (create and edit iWork docs - cool!), bulk delete and move in email, save images from emails, new calculator, explicit content filters, and new language support for Japanese and Chinese character input - draw them with your finger. That’s a welcome feature for a lot of people, I’m sure. The 2.0 software update will come in early July, will be free for iPhones, and $9.95 for iPod Touch owners (gouged again!).

Now on to talking about the app store. Wireless download and install, automatic updates, devs set prices and keep 70% of revenues. “We FairPlay apps” - FairPlay is iTunes’ DRM for music, so that means that apps will be locked (and presumably, cracked shortly thereafter - FairPlay has a reputation of being pretty breakable). If your app is larger than 10MB, you can only install over wifi. Enterprise apps can be deployed on the intranet, downloaded to your computer, then synced and installed via iTunes. Sounds like a good solution for corporate apps.

Now for something completely different: Mobile Me, new mobile service. Worst kept secret in the industry - this is basically .Mac done right - “Exchange for the rest of us”. Works on Mac, PC (woo!), and iPhone (double woo!). Push your contacts, email, calendar, and files into the cloud, and keep them in sync across all devices. But I do this already with Google - Gmail, Reader, Docs, Calendar. Will be interesting to see how this compares. Or maybe MobileMe will just be powered by Google. The site is me.com. Going into a demo now - I’ll check this out myself later, see if it’s worth it. It’s a cool idea, regardless. $99/year, 20GB of storage, and there’s a 60 day free trial. Expensive for what you get. I’ll probably pass. “Available with iPhone 2.0 in early July”. So, does that mean no iPhone until early July?

OK, now he’s talking about the new iPhone. “Next challenges.” 3G, enterprise, 3rd party apps, more countries, more affordable. iPhone 3G introduced today (big surprise!). Even thinner. The back looks plastic, black. Solid metal buttons. Same display and camera. Flush headphone jack (yay - no more adapters!). Improved audio. Feels “even better” in your hand.

3G = faster data downloads. Email attachments and downloads. Doing a video demo speed comparison between EDGE and 3G. 3G is faster. Duh. Comparing to other 3G phones. It’s faster. Of course it is. Tell us something new! Show us pictures! Their claiming “great battery life”, which was one of the big concerns with previous 3G chipsets (which were also too big).

Talking about location services now, and “GPS”. The question is, does it have REAL GPS (satellite-based, not tower based)? From the demos (tracking a drive down Lombard street), it looks to be the real thing. Or at least, good enough to pass for it (smooth tracking, etc.).

More countries - they’re aiming for 12 countries for the 3G launch, with a stretch goal of 25 70 (!) countries over the next several months. Hear that sound? It’s the bottom dropping out of the international iPhone resale grey market. ;-)

More affordable. It started at $599, sells now for $399. 3G 8GB iPhone is $199. Yow! Nice! 16GB is $299. And “something special” - a white one, 16GB. Same price. Saying launch in 22 countries on July 11. I wonder if the U.S. is one of those countries? Showing a new iPhone commercial. Twice.

Jobs has left the stage. No “one more thing”. Nothing on Snot Snow Leopard OS X 10.6 (though they said there will be a session after lunch to talk about it, that’s under NDA). Bummer! I still held out hope for a new hardware class of device, Atom powered. Oh well - there’s always MacWorld 2009 in Januuary!

This was fun. Ultimately, there’s no real new hardware. We all knew about the new iPhone and its features ahead of time. Kind of bummed that it won’t go on sale for a month, but that gives me more time to save up my pennies. ;-)


Why I think Apple OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard” is for upcoming Atom-based devices

Published
by
Josh Bancroft
on June 7, 2008
. 15 Comments

It’s the week before Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC). That means the rumor mill is in overdrive. I’m not immune - it’s fun to speculate! :-) Take this post for what it’s worth. I don’t have any inside information, I don’t know any secrets, I’m just guessing and having fun.

Besides the new 3G iPhone (which is almost a certainty), the other juicy tidbit that surfaced this week was news of a new operating system revision - OS X 10.6. Jacqui at Ars got the scoop, letting us know that it’s supposed to be called “Snow Leopard”, move completely to Cocoa (dropping legacy Carbon support), and that it will be for Intel processors only (dropping support for the PowerPC chips in older Macs), and not contain any new features, only enhancements to stability, performance, and security.

But a few things just don’t add up to me. It sounds plausible that a new operating system would get announced at the Developer conference (as opposed to a consumer event), to give developers time to get ready for its release. I could buy that it’s Intel-only - they’ll probably drop PowerPC support at some point. But it does seem a little soon to be talking about the next OS release - OS X 10.5 Leopard has barely been out 8 months. And people would be reluctant to plunk down the $129 that Apple has always charged for a new release of Mac OS X if it doesn’t have any new features.

Then, yesterday, it hit me. What if this new version of Mac OS X, 10.6 “Snow Leopard”, isn’t intended for Macs at all, but for a new class of device altogether? Say, the long-rumored Apple tablet device, a Mobile Internet Device, based on the new Intel Atom processor?

I’ve been chewing on this for a while, and it all makes sense. I can’t find anything that refutes the idea. And the more I think about it, the more I think I’m right. :-) I haven’t seen anyone else speculate along these lines (though I could be wrong), so if that’s the case, I may get to say “you heard it here first!” :-)

Here are the reasons I think the new OS is for a new class of Atom-based, non-Mac devices:

  1. A “tablet” device, bigger than an iPhone but smaller than a MacBook, has been rumored FOREVER. How many appearances has it made it to John Siracusa’s WWDC and MacWorld Bingo cards? ;-)
  2. An Intel Germany executive was recently quoted as saying Apple would be launching an Atom-powered mobile internet device at WWDC (this was later denied by Intel).
  3. Banners were spied at the Moscone Center this week with “OS X Leopard” and “OS X iPhone” on them. Some have speculated this might mean Apple is going to license OS X to 3rd party manufacturers. But what if it means there will be a new class of device that runs OS X that’s not a Mac computer, but isn’t an iPhone either?
  4. It doesn’t make sense to do a whole new OS release (10.5 –> 10.6), with a new code name (”Snow Leopard”), but not add any new features. If they were just going to improve performance, security, and stability, that’s what point releases, like the recent 10.5.3 update, are for. For every one of the six “full” releases of OS X, up through 10.5 Leopard, they’ve charged $129 for the upgrade, but each version has added significant new features. People won’t want to plunk down money for 10.6 without new features, but if 10.6 IS for a new class of Atom-based devices, it would make sense to classify it as a whole new release, with a new version number and code name, since it won’t be sold on its own. The “Snow Leopard” code name also seems to indicate something related to Leopard, but different. No previous OS X code names (Puma, Panther, Tiger, etc.) have had such a close correlation.
  5. Dropping support for legacy technology, like the PowerPC processors, and dropping Carbon for Cocoa, has to happen sometime. But the timing makes perfect sense if 10.6 is for a new class of device that won’t even have those technologies. No need for PowerPC support if the devices that run the OS are going to have Intel Atom processors. No need to maintain legacy Carbon applications if Apple wants to encourage developers to write new applications in Cocoa for this new class of device.
  6. As I was talking about this idea on Twitter a while ago, @davechen pointed out a Gizmodo article that says 10.6 will still support PPC chips. But what caught my eye in the article was this little tidbit: “A number of drivers didn’t load on a Core 2 Duo MacBook, because it was using a 64-bit kernel and the drivers were only 32. The kernel was not only 64-bit though.” I could be completely wrong here, but I think the Intel Atom processor doesn’t have the 64-bit capabilities that the Core 2 processors do. So the seeming backwards step of not having 64-bit drivers could make sense for Atom.
  7. Maybe developers will use a new version of the iPhone SDK to write apps for these new devices. Perhaps that’s why the SDK has been Intel-only from the beginning. Apps for the iPhone are compiled for its ARM processor, completely different from either Intel or PPC architectures. But why complicate things with PowerPC stuff if you wanted to expand the SDK to create apps for the Intel x86 architecture in Atom (which could compile and run natively on Intel CPUs).

Like I said, it’s just a lot of guessing and speculation at this point, but I think it holds together pretty well. If Steve Jobs wanted to say “oh by the way, we’re introducing a whole new class of device” during his WWDC keynote on Monday, he’s want to give the audience full of developers a heads up so they can start writing apps.

Think I’m on to something? Want to debunk my thinking, and tell me I’m full of crap? You’re welcome to. Maybe this will attract the notice of the Macalope or Daring Fireball’s Jon Gruber, and I’ll get the full “you’re an idiot, and here’s why” treatment from them. *swoon* Either way, it should be fun! Only a couple more days until WWDC, and we’ll know if I’m right or wrong! :-)


I Was Born to be a Native Citizen of the Internet

Published
by
Josh Bancroft
on June 5, 2008
. 11 Comments

I’m re-reading the Cluetrain Manifesto for the nth time (grabbed the text from the website, dropped it into a text file, and threw it onto my Kindle). There’s something distilled and concentrated about the ideas it contains. They just ring true, even though the book was written 10 years ago (ancient history in Internet Time). I can barely get through a few paragraphs of it before my mind is swirling with ideas and things I want to write about. Maybe I should just do a “book report” on it, chapter by chapter, and write up everything I’m thinking as I go along.

I feel like I was born to be a native citizen of the Internet. I was reading the Introduction and part of Chapter 1 of Cluetrain, where Christopher Locke talks about how telling stories to each other is an ancient, intrinsic part of what it means to be human, and how when the Internet (and the Web) came along and started to flourish, people who were used to being isolated in their own homes and used as targets for broadcasters flocked to it by the millions. Why? To BE with each other. To laugh and argue and tell stories and learn and be human together.

I was born in 1976, and computers (and later, the internet) have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. Much longer, I suspect, than most people of my age and my experience. I credit my grandfather, Dr. Ron Hansen, for that. He’s one of the smartest, most connected men I know, and from a very early age, he took it upon himself to make sure I had opportunities that most other kids just didn’t. He knew that “computers” were going to be a Big Deal(TM). And not just in the vague sense that someone might look into the future and make that (now obvious) prediction. He was a retired Air Force officer, university vice president, and research scientist, with a PhD, and his own research institute that “spawned many high-tech spin-offs, including WordPerfect, Novell, and Dynix”. He really knew what he was talking about.

I got my first computer when I was five years old. I was in kindergarten, it was 1982. It was an Atari 1200 XL (the top of Atari’s 8-bit line at the time). It had a whopping 64 kilobytes of RAM, and it took cartridges. That is, if you wanted to play Dig Dug or Pole Position, you inserted that cartridge. If you wanted to program, you popped in the BASIC cartridge. Without a cartridge inserted, the only thing the computer could do was display the Atari logo in a phasing, shifting rainbow of color. Programs were stored on and loaded from cassette tapes (later, I got a 5.25″ floppy disk drive, which was the size of a large toaster). My grandfather gave me the computer, a few games, and some books on BASIC programming, and I went to town.

I have a very clear memory of one of the first things I ever tried to do with the computer (which is what sparked me to write this). This was before the era of the personal computer, when a computer in the home, using the TV as a monitor, was still a novelty. I remember getting that first command prompt, and typing a question. Something along the lines of “who was daniel boone?” SYNTAX ERROR was the response. I was reasonably sure that wasn’t the right answer. So I tried again. When my parents (who to this day don’t own a computer) saw what I was doing, even they understood why my query wasn’t working. “A computer only knows what you tell it, what you program it with.” That made sense, and I accepted it. But I what I remember so vividly is that before someone told me otherwise, I instinctively grasped the idea of interacting with computers in the way that’s second nature today to us as “citizens of the internet”, living in the Age of Google.

I spent the following years in the isolation of pre-Internet computerdom. Playing, hacking, learning what I could. But it all felt so limited, looking back. I was restricted to book or software that I could get my hands on through my grandfather, or people he knew (many of his associates in the high tech world had a part in my geek upbringing). Entering in BASIC programs (games, mostly) by hand from books and magazines. But somewhere, in the back of my mind. there was always the insistence that we should be able to ask a computer any question, or use it to talk to any person we wanted, and it should just magically obey.

My grandfather continued to supply me with opportunities to use, play with, and be around computers, long before that was a common thing. He got me a “Franklin Ace” (an Apple II clone with a bad ground somewhere in the power supply, that delivered a healthy shock if you touched the right place on the metal case), a huge 20 pound Zenith 8086 “laptop” (one of the first with a hard drive, and a blue-and-gray 4 “color” LCD), and a succession of PCs. He made sure I got to attend summer programs, and learn a few rudimentary programming languages (I remember Pascal and Turtle Graphics). I learned DOS and Windows by messing around, reading help files, and by playing. By the time I hit my teens, he got me access to Brigham Young University computer labs during the summers. The very places that the pre-commercial, pre-consumer Internet was thriving.

I spent the summer of 1994 learning HTML and the basics of the internet in a computer lab at BYU with Paul E. Black and some of Dr. Phil Windley’s graduate students (yes, that Phil Windley). I created the very first website for the BYU Alumni Association, completely by hand. This is the current site - the Wayback Machine at Archive.org doesn’t go that far. Later, in high school (1994), I was the webmaster for the first school in the state of Utah - Springville High School - to have a website, and helped to build a site for the Springville Art Museum.

That was my first exposure to the world of connected computers, and shared access to more information than you could dream of. Web pages that could magically take you to another page just by clicking the blue underlined text. “Surfing” from one link to the next, and when you found something cool, trying to remember how you got there, so you could get back. Exchanging messages with other people, anywhere in the world, via email. Having so many choices, and so many pages to choose from, that you had to start using a directory site like Yahoo! to find what you were looking for (there were no good search engines yet - this was way before Google, and the idea that you could index the WHOLE web in one place). And, looking back, perhaps the most significant of all, in the context of connecting human beings to each other - the reason we all flocked to the Internet in the first place, before companies figured out how to make money off of it - USENET newsgroups. Precursor and grandfather to discussion forums, blogs, and social networks.

I’m going to pause the story for now - this has gotten quite long. I feel like I’m writing a book. Maybe I am. If a few little pages of the Cluetrain can draw out this much, perhaps you and I both had better prepare for a lot more writing like this. I feel compelled to write it, and it’s fun. I hope someone, anyone, wants to read it. It makes me feel more human. Maybe it will help me find and connect with people who feel the same - other native citizens (and immigrants!) of the Internet. :-)


I’ve had it with the Intel Cafeterias. Full boycott in effect.

Published
by
Josh Bancroft
on June 4, 2008
. 11 Comments

My relationship with the cafeterias at Intel’s Jones Farm campus (where I work) has been declining for a while. Or, more specifically, with the company that runs them, Bon Appetit (warning: Flash crap and music on their site). I’m now officially boycotting them.

At first is was just the constant price increases - every few months, the price for everything would just creep up a little. Way faster than the rate of inflation. 90 cents for a bag of chips. A buck thirty for a Rice Krispie Treat. Eight bucks for a salad (as reported by Michael Brito).

Then there’s the guilt trip they try to put on you. There are always posters and table tents and all kinds of stuff all over the place about how you’re killing the Earth if you don’t eat the nice, sustainable, locally grown, Gaia-approved stuff that they serve. Maybe that’s why they keep raising prices - all that fancy organic local stuff must be more expensive. Nevermind the fact that I always felt like they were browbeating me for my eating habits. I don’t want a sermon from the cafe. I just want lunch.

Earth Day was the worst. It was one of the few days that I decided to go over to the JF5 cafe for lunch. They have a grill there, and I can get a cheeseburger and fries for lunch, without having to leave campus. It was a circus on Earth Day - they were charging extra for paper cups, had a big display showing “this is how much cardboard JF throws away every day!!!1!” It was a Big Deal(TM). I got in line for the grill, and when it came my turn, I asked for a cheeseburger. Only to be told that they weren’t serving beef that day. “Why not?” I asked. “Because it’s Earth Day” I was told.

What? What does beef have to do with Earth Day? I still don’t know. The best I can come up with is that cows contribute to global warming through their, um, methane gas emissions. But if that’s the case, wouldn’t it make sense to EAT MORE COWS?! That day, that’s what I decided to do. I jumped in my car, burned some gasoline to go to McDonald’s, and did my part to reduce greenhouse gases from cows by eating a Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese. I’m happy to do my part. :-)

That was the last day I tried to eat a meal in an Intel cafeteria. Up until today, I’d still pop over there in the morning for an occasional bagel or a donut or something. But that’s been getting worse and worse, too. They’ve been stocking less and less stuff, with the end result being if you don’t get there bright and early (before, say, 8:30 AM), they’re probably going to be gone. I’d understand if they just occasionally sold out, but it’s pretty consistent, and I’ve corroborated it with others who have noticed the same thing.

The last straw came this morning. I was quite hungry, hadn’t had breakfast, and it was 9:30 AM or so before I got a chance to walk two buildings over to see about getting something to eat. When I got there, the donuts, bagels, and other breakfast items were completely gone. “No problem” I think. “I’ll just get a string cheese or something.” Nope - the cooler case was completely empty, too. I was pretty hungry, and didn’t want to waste the trip, so I ended up with a bag of chips and a Rice Krispie Treat, both priced about a quarter more than if I had bought them from the vending machines. *sigh*

So, I’ve decided to expand my cafeteria boycott, and just not go there anymore. I’ll go out for lunch, or just skip lunch (which I do half the time, anyway). Burn a little more gas, probably eat a little less healthy, but I’ve had it with them, and I’m voting with my wallet.

I realize I’m complaining about pretty petty stuff here. Please take this in the spirit it’s intended - I’m venting, ranting. Not expecting to change the world. On the other hand, I’d love to hear any “you think YOU’VE got it bad” stories in the comments. Let’s commiserate! :-)


I want to write more. Do more. Hack more. Learn more. So I gotta read less.

Published
by
Josh Bancroft
on June 3, 2008
. 8 Comments

There aren’t enough hours in the day. I’ve been trying to juggle several side projects, plus all the stuff I have to do at work, plus all of our family stuff which is ramping up for summertime, and still keep up with all of my sources of information crack - RSS feeds, Twitter, books, etc. And it’s not working. A couple of things are crashing down around my ears. Something has to give.

I read a LOT. I used to be subscribed to over 1500 RSS feeds. That was WAY too many. About a year ago, I cut it down to around 500 feeds or so. But that was around the same time that Twitter really exploded in my life, proving itself invaluable for not only connecting and talking with people, but as the fastest conduit for breaking news, the most efficient source for answers to questions, and general serendipitous gems of things that were interesting and made me smarter. So I think the overall level of information overload stayed about the same.

Today, I decided action was needed. Drastic action, maybe. So I went and pruned my Google Reader feed subscriptions down to around 250 - I cut them in half. I have a pretty structured system for organizing feeds into various attention tiers (which I really should write about one of these days, but I haven’t had time - see my problem!? ;-) ). But even that wasn’t enough. So, after backing up my OPML, I got out the machete. Chop chop!

I feel pretty good about what I have left. I have a serious disorder - FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out). I’m always afraid that something cool or interesting or significant is going to happen, and I’m not going to be among the first to know about it! I had to battle that tendency, and be ruthless about what I really needed to keep in my aggregator, and what I could get rid of. We’ll see how it works out.

I pacified my FOMO by reminding myself how effective tools like Twitter, TechMeme, and Digg are at letting the interesting/cool stuff bubble to the top. A few years ago, there really wasn’t anything like them that information addicts like myself could rely on. Now that they’ve matured into what they are today, I’m more comfortable relying on them, and not needing to subscribe to the many, many sources of news myself. It was funny and ironic to tell myself “I don’t need to subscribe to that feed. I’ll just go to the site if I want to see what’s new.” Me, Mister Orange RSS Shoes, lives in his aggregator, etc. You can laugh now if you want. ;-)

Anyway, I hope to force myself to have more time to write (long form, as in blog posts, and maybe other stuff - 140 character microposts on Twitter don’t really count as writing!), and work on some side projects. I’ve been getting the itch to do more programming and hacking. I want to sit down and teach myself Python, or PHP, or build something cool on Google App Engine or Amazon EC2 or something. Create. Build. Hack. Teach. Do.

And as much as I love reading, something’s gotta give, so we’ll see how long I can last on this feed diet…


Come See my Amazon Kindle in Portland Today

Published
by
Josh Bancroft
on May 29, 2008
. 1 Comment

I’m going to be showing off my Kindle in downtown Portland today. I noticed on the Kindle site that they set up a “See a Kindle in your City” forum, where people can volunteer to show off their Kindle. It’s a brilliant idea - I end up doing a public demo of my Kindle almost every time I pull it out in public, and I love to talk about it. Most Kindle owners are natural evangelists, and the Kindle is the type of device that you almost have to see and put hands on to really “get” it. Absolute genius on Amazon’s part, facilitating these “show and tell” meetups.

Here’s my thread in the “See a Kindle in your city” forum, with the details: I’m going to be at Pioneer Place Mall in downtown Portland at 2:00 PM today (May 29, 2008). I’ll be in the little atrium at the bottom of the escalators, near the Apple Store and the Gap. Look for the orange Crocs. :-)

If you come to the meetup, or otherwise decide now is the time to buy a Kindle (they’re in stock, and just got a 10% price drop, down to $359), I’d appreciate it if you use this Amazon affiliate link. I get a small percentage from Amazon, which goes to help pay for all of the dang Kindle books I find myself buying and reading these days. ;-)

For some background, here’s my video “unboxing” and initial impressions post, a post I wrote about why I think ebooks are a great entertainment value, and a really old post I wrote as a rebuttal to Kindle critics. Let me know if you have any thoughts or questions on any of that - like I said, I love to talk about my Kindle!