The free new N95 vs the old iPhone
It all started years ago when i got a Nokia 6600. It was a dope phone and it really raised the bar for me in regards to my expectations for a smart phone. It was one of the first “good” symbian devices. In regards to today’s standards - it isn’t that great. But back then it rocked the house. I remember telling my friends “OMG. check it out. you can take movies!” and running around making movies. After the 6600, I picked up a Nokia 7610. This device was basically the same, although a bunch faster and a bundle of better looks. it was quite stylish. Then came the N70. Then came the E61. Then the E50. Then the N73. And then the E61i. Each iteration was much much better and faster. It was a fun to go through those. You could have called me a Nokia fan boy.
Then came the iPhone. It basically broke my conception of how smart phones should work. The full browser, the full email client, and simple applications made me realize that i would rather have a good phone that does a lot of stuff well - than a good platform that does a lot of stuff mediocre. It took a minute for me to realize that (so much that I gave my first iPhone to Hiromi, thinking that I didn’t like it).
Awhile back, Nokia WOM emailed me and asked if i wanted to test drive a N95 8gb for free. I of course accepted the challenge. There was no catch, requirements, etc. They wanted me to blog about it and let people know what i thought - but they certainly didn’t require this. It also wasn’t mine forever, just a test drive. I was stoked. This is the device that dreams were made of. It was all that was good in the world. It had real GPS, ran symbian, had decent media, ngage, etc, etc, etc. It was basically the culmination of all i thought i needed in a mobile device.
I wondered how it would compare to the iphone i had been using for almost a year.
It didn’t. I used it for an hour and couldn’t deal with it. it was hard to use. hard to make calls. hard to take pictures. hard to listen to music. hard to figure out where I was with GPS (honestly, that was the clencher. All I wanted was to update a webpage with my location using GPS. I got it going by hacking my iphone easier than using the N95). It made me remember why I liked the iphone. It made me bummed that the “best” phone in the world kinda sucked.
So, I gave the phone to my buddy Craig at work. He loves it. It was a great upgrade to his POS dying Sony Ericsson. He planned to use it until the new iPhone comes out.
I guess Nokia is going to have to rethink how their phones work. I was their super fan. I read all the blogs, proselytized their phones, hung out with their engineers, and loved their products. However, I am unwilling to give up the experience that I have with the iPhone. The ease of use, the full browser, the big screen and the platform that isn’t insane.
I am excited to see where this innovation (or lack there of) takes us. I imagine that Nokia will bounce back, but certainly not any pre-iPhone devices. Stay tuned for sure.
I am really thankful for Nokia giving me this experience. Even though it wasn’t the phone for me, it was fun to play with and think about why it wasn’t my thing. It is still a dope phone even if it isn’t beating the iPhone.
YES WE CAN. Obama apparently wins the democratic nomination
Barack Obama seems to have won the democratic nomination. After all the time and work we all put into his campaign, I am VERY happy to hear this news.
I am more happy that Hilary Clinton didn’t win. She was really hurting my insides me with all the negative campaigning. I did not like how attacky she got in the end. I hope that she is done being annoying.
Now is the time to start supporting the Barack Obama, and the democratic party to defeat John McCain in November. Electing McCain is basically saying that you love President Bush and really want to fuck up the United States. I am not a fan.
The best part of having Obama be the democratic nominee is that he invokes hope in people, not fear. I am tired of fear.
Go donate money now.
Speaking at TechCocktail conference on thursday
On Thursday the 29th, the TechCocktail Conference is happening at Layola. You should go, and while you are there, you should come check out Scottv and my talk on technology agnosticism. It should be delightful. For those of you that know me - the time slot is hilarious: 9:30 in the morning. Wth. I rarely have an interesting happening that early in the morning. I am usually sleeping.
Here is some generic info. This is my bio. We are finalizing our presentation (i.e. writing it) and are attempting to figure out how to beat our last presentations. I will post slides later. I promise.
UPDATE: here are the slides from our presentation. It seemed to go pretty well. It was really fun to participate and speak. I have also placed all my presentations on slideshare.
Location hacking. Or how I am addicted to knowing where I am
The last few weeks have been a whirl wind of travel, emergencies and fun events. All of it has made my life a mess in regards to plans, knowing whats up and keeping track of where i am supposed to go and when. Out of necessity, I decided it might be fun to track where I have been and where I am going. To handle this I use various sites like Dopplr, TripIt and fireeagle to keep track of my travels. Dopplr is my favorite, however I use TripIt to overall manage my travels and then push it into Dopplr and fireeagle - so my friends can be alerted as to where I am.
After melding all these things together - i decided it would be neat to have the info on my homepage. So, i created this “mashup” to keep track of everything. It was my first foray into being a consumer of oauth (myself, programatically) and i really like it. I am for sure going to use this for the threadless API when it launches (thanks friends!). Dopplr’s API is a pain in the ass (there is about 1 page of API documentation), but i finally figured it out.
With all of the sites melded together - i was able to get my current location (fireeagle), and my future and past travels (dopplr). The info for both of these sites is provided in part by dopplr and tripit. Tripit feeding dopplr which feeds fireeagle. I feed tripit with emails. It has been hungry lately.
Seeing all this info together on my home page made me think of my friends page where he tracks exactly where he is at all times. its kinda freaky and pretty invasive. But i wanted to know if i could build it. And i figured that building the gps “puck” as Ilya calls it would be a good experience.
Since i have an iphone instead of a phone with true GPS, I used an app made by Erica Sadun (an awesome apple hacker) that queries the wifi APs and cell towers that the iphone uses to handle its pseudo GPS. With this app I am able to grab my location and post it to a script i made to track everything. From the script I am able to handle posting to fireeagle or twitter or whatever. A lot of the writeups of this sort of thing have the iphone handle the posting to fireeagle or twitter, however that doesn’t really make sense to me - since having less http calls on the actual device seems to be a better plan for battery dominance.
You can check out my current-ish location here.
The theme for this spring is travel
Man. It has been a long time since I really felt like blogging. Blogging is weird sometimes. I finds myself being VERY busy and not having the time nor energy to blog thoroughly, so i end up forfeiting an entry, when i could have easily whipped up a couple paragraphs describing whats going on. I instead find myself concentrating on twitter or something else. Its pretty cool - but not as important as my blog.
Anyway.
The last couple months and the next couple months are all about travel. Its insane. It reminds me how much i love traveling, but how much I HATE flying. I used to love flying, but recently it has only been horrible experiences. I don’t know why it is so horrible, but for some reason - I have had NOTHING but bad experiences. It makes me not want to fly any longer. I need to work on just appearing.
After speaking at the U of A in Tucson, I went on to fly to San Antonio to hang out with Rackspace for a week. It was pretty awesome. We had some problems we needed to ferret out and Rackspace was very facilitative. I have always found it so much easier to work with people once you have met them and hung out. Then - the repertoire is much more than just the mysterious phone voice that tells you things. It was awesome to meet our team, flesh out our migrations and other various upcoming projects. San Antonio is a very strange place. I am not sure what i think of it.
After San Antonio, most of the Threadless engineering team flew to Santa Clara for the 2008 MySQL Conference. As always, the conference was great. I had a nice time and was able to see a lot of my friends and talk shit about technology and how to name hosting companies (It’s Mosso like MOSS. Not like mow). A couple of highlights from the conference were meeting and hanging out with Blaine Cook; getting my picture taken by Julian Cash; and having dinner with various engineers from MySQL, Digg, Mosso and Rackspace. The conference (like all conferences i think) was best experienced through the people who were there, not the actual sessions (although there were some cool ones - memcached, IMVU, etc).
Immediately after landing in chicago from the bay, we flew to NYC for a R&D conference with Insight Venture Partners (investors in skinnyCorp/Threadless). The conference was interesting. A lot of the companies that attended with us were experiencing very different growth that we are - so a lot of the sessions were not targeted towards small development teams. It seemed that they were attempted to work how we work, but through philosophies like scrumm and agile methodologies. Interesting to talk about, but it doesn’t really fit us. We were, however, able to go to some excellent places to eat. On Monday, we went to Employees Only. And then we went to the pretentious SoHo house. I found Employees Only to be awesome. It had excellent food and quite a drink menu. We also were able to have a really great time there. It wasn’t too pretentious and the people around us didn’t mind us having fun. The SoHo House had mediocre food and a weird vibe. My NY friends mentioned something about it being frequented by bankers - but it seemed more hip than that, but that may have contributed to the weird atmosphere. Regardless of the food and atmosphere, the view was great. After dinner, we ended up at 205 for a LOT of drinks and entertaining shit talking. Great times.
That brings us to the present.
Next I am going to be going to San Antonio again to finalize some of our discussions with our team. Then Colorado for Atkins wedding, and finally to Yamanashi for Hiromi’s grandfathers final funeral (and to hang out in Japan). A lot of traveling.
With this flux of traveling, I have become a bit obsessed with tracking it in interesting ways. For instance, i have been using Tripit.com and dopplr.com to track various aspects of my trips. I have tripit.com hooked into dopplr.com so that I don’t actually have to do any work. Just email my plans to tripit and BAM - dopplr is updated. pretty cool.
Speaking at the University of Arizona
The other weekend, Charlie and I, flew to the University of Arizona to speak at their Thinking Forward Leadership and Innovation in Marketing Conference. It was a cool experience. The people who were involved with the Conference are rather intelligent and they really blew my mind in regards to their thoughts on Threadless/social media/Internet communities. They have words that I have never used that they use to describe the things I do every day. Weird.
The trip was hilarious from the get go. On a Thursday, we flew into Phoenix via SouthWest. That airline is a clusterfuck. I am not a fan. However, it is much better when we have “Business Class” tickets - which apparently means we get a drink ticket to dull the pain, and get to board a bit earlier than the others. It was a mess of annoying drunk middle aged women on a group trip, children and indignant and entitled business men who thought they were all that. We owned them all. Once we landed, we rented a very stupid car, and then drove the neat/boring drive to Tucson. Once we got to Tucson, we wrote our presentation (luckily Jeffrey has spent countless hours creating legitimate slides for us slackers to pilfer) and got on our way.
We had some awesome Mexican Food. Went to a couple hilarious bars, met some cool people, and ended up at a lesbian bar. It was pretty different than our times in chicago. ;) The night life in Tucson, near the college, is full of college kids. Weird. Being around so many young people was invigorating. And annoying. haha. GOD I am so old. OMG.
The next day we went to the event and spoke. It went over well. We got some good feedback. Like: don’t swear as much, don’t put up Obama 2008 slides and practice before we actually do it. I thought that was decent feedback. I think if we did it again the only thing I wouldn’t change is the Obama slide, and it seem that was the most offensive. Apparently, you are not supposed to be political at all on a college campus. I wonder when this happened? It certainly wasn’t like this when I was in college. Maybe at a “conservative” business school, things are different. Regardless, if I were to speak there again - and the political climate is the same as it is now, I would put the same slide up.
The other people we spoke with were amazing. Particularly Robert V. Kozinets. This dude is awesome. He has written extensively about tribes on the internets and burning man. I imagine that you have read about him before (even if you didn’t notice). We ended up hanging out with him quite a bit. Another person who uses words I have never heard to describe things that we do everyday. I am particularly interested in his work on Burning Man. I guess I will have to read it.
After all the festivities of the event were over, we chilled on the streets of Tucson, and eventually met up some of the staff of the Eller College of Management for dinner. The dinner was great, but even more great was meeting Sidney Levy. Sidney is apparently one of the people who developed the world of brand marketing. He was billed as the father of symbolic marketing. This is serious business. However, he was very much not serious business. He was awesome. Charlie and I hung out with him for about an hour, just talking about life, love and all things that occur between. Sidney was quite funny and had a lot to tell us. I am going to attempt to help him get his gullibility project going. Excitement.
Speaking is pretty awesome. I learned a lot from talking to the people around us. It was awesome to hang out with young people who are excited about something that I am not excited about. Inspiring and hope giving. I hope that Charlie and I get to do it again. Hopefully in Hawaii, or maybe Guam, or possibly some other paradisiacal place.
Last week my friend Mark pinged me and mentioned that I should get together with a friend of his who was in town for PYCON. I am always into meeting new people so I had dinner with Brian Dorsey. It was awesome. I was able to rant and rave about all my ideas, interests and whatnot with new and possibly interested. Brian immediately suggested that he introduce me to a friend of his who he thought I would enjoy talking to. So I was introduced to Anders Conbere. The reason Brian thought we should meet was that we both incessantly talk about XMPP.
Anders and I talked for a couple hours Friday, and found that we had a lot of similar ideas and thoughts about XMPP and its place in the world of social software, communities and data. Anders explained that we weren’t the only crazies who thought that XMPP should be used for more than instant messaging. He mentioned that some cool kids were also looking into the relationship of XMPP and social software. As Anders was dashing out the door to his flight, we decided that we needed to create or at least foster the growth of a mailing list to collect people.
Earlier today, Anders introduced me to Peter Saint-Andre who is the Executive Director of the XMPP Standards Foundation. We chatted a bit and then came to the conclusion that there needed to be a place for people to talk about their ideas, uses, experiences and what not. And thus social@xmpp.org was born as the go to mailing list to discuss these topics.
I have a lot of ideas and hopefully with the help of this group, I can flush them out and really tackle them. I am pretty excited about it.
I am finally recovered from my flash travel/party tour. Being shuttled around the country going to parties is a rough life - let me tell you. It was awesome. I met some great people and saw some really cool stuff. It was really cool how much overlap occurred between the boulder crowd and SXSW.
Startup people are fun.
I want to run down the events and how they turned out. The first was boulder. Boulder is a weird place. Seriously. It is strange. The boulder event was at this bar called the Foundry. I am guessing that if it wasn’t packed to the gills with tech people from the front range, I would never go there. It was a pretty hilarious venue, however the tech people really filled it out. So it turned out to be a great choice.
In boulder there were a lot of cool startups presenting. The one that really caught my eye was Socialthing. These guys are sweet. They are doing a very simple and elegant solution for the crowded social aggregation space. Although I really like the community features of their direct competitor FriendFeed, I like the design and interface of socialthing alot. It is great - and they are sweet guys.
There were a fair number of other startups, but unless they have real words in their names - i won’t link them. Just kidding, but seriously - there were a fair number of people with startups that plain didn’t have the best names. It is a bummer. Especially because the people were so nice and their ideas/technology seemed solid. It is hard to name a company. Anyway - some of the not so awesomely named but awesome technology and problem solution startups in boulder are:
Lijit.com - doing search for your blog. kinda like google site search, but with your social graph built in. Really cool stuff.
Villij.com - not my favorite name. The guys are cool and they have some cool ideas about recommendations in the social graph space.
I also met a really awesome “startup enabler” named Jeremy Tanner. He seems to do what I do at Threadless for various startups in the Colorado scene. Jeremy moved from Detroit to Colorado - so he had a lot of input on how it was going from city to smaller city. He had great things to say about being able to jump on his motorcycle and head to the canyons for an awesome lunch time experience.
After this event, I crashed at my hotel. Spent some time with my parents and was off to SXSW for ONE day!
With much insanity, I finally made it to Austin and barely made it to the People Powered Powwow. It was awesome. Hearing the experiences of Etsy, Timbuk2, Moo, JPG and all the other awesome companies was quite inspiring. It was also awesome to meet the people who are behind all these awesome brands. It was like a secret people powered club where we all tell our people powering secrets. A really powerful meetup. I am glad that Richard (from moo) set it up. it alone was worth the trip.
Some of the companies that were there that I really liked:
Styleshake - I was surprised by this one. Styleshake is a neat community that helps facilitate custom dresses. Another thing I would have never guessed would be made into a crowd sourcing enterprise - but it works. And it seems to work well. The dresses are cool and the variations are impressive. If I was a svelte young woman I would certainly check this out.
BurdaStyle - I thought this was the coolest idea i had heard in awhile. Open source sewing patterns. Taking various patterns and releasing the designs to the community to create and manipulate. Helping to foster the crafting, sewing world as well as create awesome clothes.
After the mini conference, I was fortunate enough to have dinner with the JPG people and Wilson Minor (EveryBlock). We ate at some nice Mexican food place. It was good, better than Chicago Mexican food. Then I made my way to the soon to be bumping party.
The party was fun. There were a lot of people. Floss seemed to be well accepted and it was awesome to meet kid kameleon. Around this time I had the awesomeness to bump into a dude from Threadbangers. he was able to capture my natural retardedness for an episode of threadbangers. haha. Whew.
After my debut in amazing, I was able to take a minute and meet up with some friends. It is fun to hang out with Chicago friends when not in Chicago. I met up with Jacob DeHart, Aza Raskin, Scott Robbin, Andrew Wilson. Another person I was thrilled to meet up with is Heath Row. Heath has always been a favorite person of mine and it is great (and rare) to hang out in person.
After the party died down - we all went to the Pure Volume ranch for the Social Thing party and my trip came full circle. I was able to meet up with the Lijit, Villij and Socialthing guys. After rocking out there for a couple hours i decided to head home, sleep and finally attempt to make my way back to Chicago.
I barely made it. ;)
TechCocktail Boulder and SXSW! Come see me!
I will be in Colorado tomorrow for Tech Cocktail Boulder. It will be awesome to be a part of this event in Boulder. I will be officially representing skinnyCorp - so come get some swag and hang out! For those that have never been to a Tech Cocktail, it is a meet up style event mixing “cocktails” and technology. It offers a great opportunity to meet some of your local technologist, entrepreneurs and other awesome people in the boulder community. It seems that Boulder has a rich startup community being fostered by some cool guys - so it should be interesting to see what happens with Tech Cocktail.
Then on Sunday I will be at the SxSWi Party by Moo, Etsy, Timbuk2 and Threadless. Its going to be pretty sweet. Come hang out and drink free beer. According to the upcoming attendee listing, it is going to be packed - so come early.
If anyone would like to meet up (i.e. boulder tech people), feel free to send me an email or hit me up on a chat machine.
I will see you guys there!
Today I spent a minute setting up a Ejabberd Server for the OLPC Chicago group. This will allow all of us OLPC XO hackers to be on the same “mesh.” To get started using the jabber server with your XO follow these simple steps:
- Boot the XO
- Get connected to the internet
- Open a terminal (activity or ctrl-alt-f1)
- in the shell, type: su -
- then type: sugar-control-panel -s jabber jabber.olpchacks.org
- then press ctrl-alt-erase to restart sugar/X
Once this is done, you should start to see other Chicago XOs. You will know you are successful if you see me (Harper) in the community view. Please let me know if you are able to get on, or if you are having trouble.
Getting the server going was pretty simple. I was able to jump right in thanks to this awesome write up by Morgan Collett of Collabora. The install goes like this: you get your debian install primed, download the source, patch the source, compile the source, install the compiled binaries, edit the config, start the server and edit the server roster config. Then BAM you have a ejabberd server rocking and ready to go with your XO. The only caveat i ran into was that the config file from the ejabberd wiki page details using IPV6 because eventually all the laptops will be using IPV6 to get around. However, the server i used was balking at this - and kept crashing ejabberd with the MOST verbose errors ever (I.E. no error). When i finally figured out what the problem was, it was smooth sailing.
One thing to note - ejabberd is seriously business. Erlang is interesting to work with. I was lost for about 2 hours before I gave up trying to understand what was going on and just dived in. Then it didn’t make sense, but was working and I was happy.
It is really neat how the XO uses jabber to group people together. I really think that jabber is the future and seeing something use XMPP so elegantly is quite inspiring. I found one of the coolest parts of the implementation is how the rosters are forced to see everyone online - which i imagine is what powers the neighborhood view on the XO. This makes me wonder if this could be tweaked to create a more interactive or social networking aspect to the XO neighborhood.
One thing I would like to know about is how the XO uses the Multi User Chat features of the jabber server. I am not sure if the Chat Activity uses MUC to work, but it would be cool if you could chat with XO users with a regular user account on the jabber server by joining a specific room. I will have to research that.
