shahine.com/omar/

As I was falling asleep last night I was thinking to myself, Why Cingular? Why did Apple announce a phone and strap themselves to the carrier like every other Mobile Device Maker (Palm, Microsoft, etc).

You see, a couple of months ago I was asked by a co-worker what I thought of the possibility of the iPhone. I responded that I thought it was real, that is was going to be amazing, groundbreaking, and that I think Apple would break free from the handcuffs that the Carriers have on every technology company... perhaps by launching their own phone brand like Virgin.

You see, by partnering with Cingular, Apple is now subject to a few very annoying things:

• They cannot release the device before Cingular can field test the device. This can take anywhere from 3 - 6 months. If Apple is releasing the phone in June, they better hope Cingular fast tracks this testing. If they do a rush job it's possible that coverage and radio reliability sucks in some places.
• They cannot release the device before Cingular gets its say. That ultimately means installing a bunch of craplets on the device and generally messing up the phone in some way.
• They will require customers to sign a 2 year contract to buy the device. They do this because they are subsidizing the device. You think the price that Steve Jobs put up on that screen at Macworld is how much Apple can afford to sell it to you? Nope, it costs more than that, which is why Cingular is happy to absorb some of that cost to lock you into their network for 2 years.
• You want a new iPhone when the next one is announced at Macworld 2008, or when the battery dies? Well you are screwed. You have to now pay an out of contract price (which is likely $200 more than the prices Steve quoted). This is because Cingular hasn't finished eating the cost of subsidizing the phone for you, and the next time they do this they want you for another 2 years. Cingular typically allows you to purchase a new phone and the discounted price 18 months after the start of your contract.
• You want that new software update with all the bug fixes that Apple has been working on? Sure, just plug in your iPhone and iTunes will take care of..... NOPE.... wrong again. The carrier (Cingular) needs to test this out, and they need to make sure it's field test etc.

Anyway, you get the picture right? This is the reality that everyone else faces (like Microsoft Phone Makers, RIM, Palm). Is Apple going to be allowed to "break" these rules? Well if they do, Cingular better think about extending that courtesy to, um, the rest of us. I sure would like it if Microsoft could update my Samsung BlackJack with bug fixes.

Now, what I thought would happen is that Apple would give the carriers the boot, and go it alone... selling an unlocked device themselves that customers could then go and plop in a SIM card from T-Mobile or Cingular (sorry Sprint/Verizon customers, you don't have this luxury... carrier still owns you) thereby circumventing all the nasties that us geeks hate about carriers. It's not clear that Apple can just drop in a software update direct to you.

But instead they got Cingular up on stage... I'm not sure why but I think Cingular gets more out of this relationship than Apple... thanks to Number Portability etc Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint are probably not happy. Cingular is likely to get a wave of switchers when the iPhone is in stores.

Of course people that don't use Cingular, or don't want to use Cingular are going to bitch endlessly to Apple... but Cingular won't care. They'll be selling you some overpriced data plan with a 2 year contract.

2 years is a long time to own a lifestyle device like the iPhone assuming it lasts that long before it's stolen, broken, can't hold a charge or you see the next version and want that.

Update: PC Mag tells us what Cingular gets in this deal.

It used to be that the Steve Jobs "Reality Distortion Field" only worked on Mac users. Now that Apple has expanded it's customer base to include practically every one on the planet (courtesy of the iPod) it seems everyone is susceptible to the Reality Distortion Field. Protecting yourself is non trivial. I personally find hiding under a desk with a Tin hat the only real protection.

I was encouraged to see at least a few posts today that indicate that people are starting to understand that they were subject to his powers the other day.

Mobile Crunch says:

Some of you - most of you in fact - likely think that I should capitulate now, kneel before the mighty Apple and swear on a stack of iMac manuals that I shall never speak of Symbian again. But wait; has anyone but Mssr. Jobs ever used the device? Has he? Does it actually work? Maybe. But the truth is that at this moment and until at least June - a full six months from now - we simply don’t know.

In fact, we don’t know a lot of things. Like whether the battery is removable - if it’s not the thing is an expensive brick between charges. We don’t know if the “typing” really is significantly faster than on something like a Treo or a SonyEricsson P990 with their small but well engineered thumb keyboards. Steve-o didn’t do any typing during the demo, did he? Of course durability has to be a question. Few devices have to stand up to as much abuse in the line of duty as a typical mobile phone. Will that beautiful display go the way of the Nano after a few short weeks? What then? Is it replaceable? By the user? Or only by the dealer with a six week turn-around time and a two-hundred dollar you can afford it if you can afford Mac penalty?

Marc Orchant also weighs in:

It's a product announcement folks… of a product that won't ship for nearly six months . A product that no one outside the fortress is Cupertino has apparently even seen or held except in the center of the RDF-powered MacWorld keynote. Watching the Steve do his thing the other day evoked an image of Edward Norton in the recent movie The Illusionist. No judgment implied before you start twitching to tell me what an idiot I obviously must be. What I mean by that analogy was that in the movie, most of the people in the audience weren't sure whether what they saw was illusion or reality. On the fringes on either side were those resolutely predisposed to believe what they saw must be one or the either. They knew it before they entered the theater and the experience of the performance only cememnted that predisposition.

...

So please – everyone – discuss it amongst yourselves as you like but please don't accept the illusion as reality in the absence of proof. 

And then of course there is the bitching that has already started:

Ryan’s list contains a lot of the tear-inducingly sexy fantasies that were going through my own mind on Tuesday morning when we all heard that the iPhone was going to run OS X.

Like a lot of my friends, I (probably naively) took the announcement to mean that, as on my own Mac, I’d be able to install Cocoa applications built to take advantage of announced features like WebKit, Core Animation, and so on. Sure, given the foreseeable hardware limitations, these wouldn’t be the exact applications that we’re each running on our MacBooks today, but, hell, I’d take “OmniOutliner Mobile” or “iTerm Lite” or “Textmate for iPhone” in a heartbeat. No question.

Yesterday morning, though, I started to hear rumbles about the “inability for users to install additional applications of their choosing.” And then later, after Brian from Gizmodo got a hands-on demo along with a sit-down with official Apple honchos, he noted…

It isn’t OS X proper, as you’d expect. And like an iPod, it won’t be an open system that people can develop for. Remember, this is both an iPod and a Phone.

…and I died a little inside.

Fat chance you will be able to install apps on this thing.

Apple will be lucky if they get this thing out in June and weather the force that is the Mac Faithful when they rip this thing to shreds till Apple cries Uncle. Just you wait... June is doing to be a fun month on the blogesphere.

Just remember... Steve has just sold you his dream, and that dream is scheduled to ship at some point. Reality isn't guaranteed to match what he was selling.

Remember the Newton. Best PDA EVAR!!! on version 4.

I give up and am uninstalling Quicken. My trial barely lasted a few hours. Was this app written in Java or something? It flickers, redraw is horrendous and the user interaction model sucks. Reconciling transactions from a bank is primitive. You can't even specify what date range to use when downloading transactions from your bank. And yes, I downloaded the R3 version just a few weeks after downloading the R2 version.

Man this is depressing. I guess I'm stuck with Money till some nifty web based online site comes along with a similar feature set. None of these do.

I wonder what's going on with http://onestatement.com/. Looks promising, but no updates since July 2005.

I mentioned one reason to get Vista Ultimate a while back: Volume Shadow Copy. Well, another reason to get Ultimate is that it includes a MPEG2 encoder/decoder. Why should you care? Well Windows XP always required 3rd party MPEG decoders to do things such as play DVDs. If you own a Media Center PC then you know just how sorry this is since it's completely useless without one. It was always blamed on licensing costs (MPEG is not free).

Well great, so how did 3rd parties take care of this opportunity? The usual way... they created buggy substandard software that was sometimes ok at decoding but incapable of encoding. Or, it would install their DVD player that would often get in the way of the built in Windows software it was meant to service and behaved a lot like Anti Virus and Security software constantly saying "hey look at me!!! check out my always running tray icon process, and watch how I take over when you insert a DVD". They found all sorts of ways to take something that costs $5 or less to licence and turn it into anywhere from a $15 to a $60 "opportunity" with fancy bells and whistles you never needed in a DVD player. Thankfully, nVidia finally came out with a decent decoder a few years after XP came out but seems like they too have fallen victim to the "Bronze", "Gold", "Platinum" strategy of selling you more expensive sugar water.

Anyway, Vista Ultimate now has a genuine Microsoft included quality MPEG encoder/decoder. One less way to get stuck in DShow Hell. You can now expect the same level of quality from DVDs and the like that you get from Windows Media Video.

update: the mpeg decoder is also included in Vista Home Premium.

Um, the videos that our Canon PowerShot takes are huge. I can manually open them in movie maker and reduce their size by an order of magnitude.

Does anyone know of a good automated way to do this that does not involve writing a bunch of scripts and creating profiles for Windows Media Encoder?

As of May 3rd, JetBlue will fly into all 3 Bay Area airports; SFO being the latest addition. This is just super IMHO and should give American and United a good kick in the rear. Not so good for Virgin America which is still grounded.

Unlike Torres, I would give the Apple TV a B and the iPhone a C. Why? Well I have a bunch of TV shows on my iPod/iTunes and no good way to watch them on my plasma screen. Buying shows from iTunes is waay more reliable than my flakey comcast, flakey ATSC HD, and my Media Center 2005 which is running on 3 years old and starting to show its age. So I could use a Apple TV. Maybe even the Apple TV + the Tivo Series 3 and I can get the best of both worlds (all my photos, music, downloaded tv and HD PVR in my living room). I'm holding out for Vista Media Center + CableCard but who knows when I can get one of those.

Here is the thing with the iPhone. Yes it's cool... and yes it has some crazy cool new features. However, there is a reason it's going to be out in June. It's probably horribly buggy and incomplete. There is going to be a ton of NEW software running on this thing. Mac OS X on a tiny device the size of the Q powering your Phone, IMAP IDLE connection etc? It's going to Crash, need reboots, be slow, lock up (hellooooo spinning beach ball), have trouble answering the phone and so on. You know it will, you just don't know it yet because you haven't lived with one.

I know this because I've owned every version of the Microsoft PDA OS (From the original iPack to the current Samsung Blackjack). I've also owned every generation of Palm handheld and Treo device. They all got better over time, but they sucked in the beginning. I used them because they did something so utterly cool that is now commonplace... but they did less than a cheapo free carrier phone when it came to calls. You think a pre-emptive multi-tasking OS is good for a phone device? I've witnessed my Windows Mobile device STRUGGLE to answer the phone in the past because it was busy doing god knows what. Now you can write this off to your standard anti Microsoft, windows ce/windows is crap rebuttal, but you know better. Hundreds of Microsoft/Palm engineers have spent years trying to make a device running a modern OS (like OS X in this case) do all sorts of crazy things like sync your PIM data over the air, deliver push notification, play video and audio, run applications, manage memory and storage... AND answer the phone when it rings quietly putting everything else on hold. Oh, and it does this while negotiating with cell phone towers while you are moving around going in and out of good/bad signal strength and running on a teeny tiny batter.

You know why the iPhone doesn't have 3G and ride in the slow lane with EDGE? Cause 3G would suck the tiny battery dry in an hour. Just ask anyone with a Samsung Blackjack how their 3G is impacting their battery life.

Don't underestimate how difficult it is to make a convergence device like this work. If you are plunking down $500 for a device WITH a contract for 2 years, you are going to expect a device that CAN answer the phone. Now I have no idea if Apple will nail v1 out the door (they might). But looking at the first versions of Mac OS X and pretty much every other v1 product out there, Caveat emptor my friends.

Now this is an awesome life hack. I love hacks like this because it makes "the man" work for you. I just checked and a few of the items I've ordered from Amazon are cheaper already...

Web site Refund Please tracks your Amazon purchases for price drops in the 30 days following your purchase date, helping you take advantage of Amazon's under-advertised 30-day price guarantee.

Source: Track Amazon's 30-day refund guarantee with Refund Please

Windows apparently didn't get my memo. I don't have a modem any more. This is the dialog you get the first time you add or edit a phone number in Outlook. BTW this happened with Outlook 2007 with Vista.

Windows Home Server is exactly what I need. It solves so many of my sharing/archiving/backup issues. That coupled with unlimited offsite storage from Mozy, Carbonite, Amazon S3 (and maybe one day Live Storage) and I'm set for 2007 . Well more like 2008 unless I get on the beta... hint hint Lee Linden!

I'm also dammed excited about the Apple Keynote. Not sure why really... I no longer have love for the Mac OS, but the fact that every Mac is a PC and that I now own every iPod form factor might (yes I bought a Shuffle) have something to do with it. I'm also eying a MacBook Nano if such thing exists.

Unless you crawled under a rock, you should know that this year Daylight savings time has been extended by 4 weeks. This is a result of the Energy Policy Act of 2005. It will begin 3 weeks earlier in the spring, and end 1 week later in the fall. Cool you might think! Well not if you are a computer.

"The bill amends the Uniform Time Act of 1966 by changing the start and end dates of daylight saving time starting in 2007. Clocks will be set ahead one hour on the second Sunday of March instead of the current first Sunday of April. Clocks will be set back one hour on the first Sunday in November, rather than the last Sunday of October. This will make electronic clocks that had pre-programmed dates for adjusting to daylight saving time obsolete and will require updates to computer operating systems. The date for the end of daylight saving time has the effect of increasing evening light on Halloween (October 31)."

[Source: Wikipedia]

Microsoft has documented how different products will deal with this change. IMHO this is going to be a disaster as a number of products will not be updated and your appointments for 4 weeks of the year may be off by an hour.

If you recently launched Outlook 2007 on Vista, or after downloading the optional windows updates for XP you might be greeted with this dialog:

The bad news is if you own a Windows Mobile Device. Apparently it's up to the maker of said device to issue an update. What are the chances your carrier will release an update? I don't know; what is their track record for doing so up till now? Yeah, that's what I thought.

Seems like you can hack together a CAB file with the necessary registry changes to fix the problem. I'm a bit too lazy for that right now. Why we can't provide a download is beyond me.

Anyway this gist of it is this. All your appointments are created with a start time and an end time. Even All day events in Outlook (which is a design flaw IMHO, they should be floating events tied to a date, not an event that starts at 12am and ends at 12am in a given time zone). Well, the timezone information operates according to a timezone rule. The timezone rule is generally managed by the operating system. Well, when daylight savings time changes, the rule needs to be updated (the rule specifies the pattern for when daylight savings time starts and ends). Well, that's great... rule gets updated. But what about all the events that were already created that now live inside the window of the old rule and the new rule (for example, events that fall in the last week in march?) Well, all the events have to be updated to reflect the new start and end time. This has to be done manually by software. Ick. Here is what Microsoft has to say regarding Outlook:

Impact on Office Outlook calendar items

During the extra weeks of daylight saving time, calendar items in your programs will operate as if standard time is in effect unless you apply an update. Outlook, Microsoft Exchange Server, and other products use daylight saving time rules in effect since 1987.

Without an update, the following will occur for Outlook calendar items that are active during the weeks of March 11, 2007, to April 1, 2007, and October 28, 2007, to November 4, 2007:

• Single-instance appointments and reminders will appear one hour earlier than they should.
• Recurring appointments will appear one hour earlier than they should.
• All-day events will shift and span two days. Existing all-day events are associated with 24 specific hours instead of a given date. In the extra weeks of daylight saving time, the event appears to move backward by one hour, which is why all-day events will then span two days.

That's what the dialog above is doing. When Outlook is done you get a log file that has entries like so:

[Original Time Zone]
(GMT-08:00) Pacific Time (US && Canada)

[New Time Zone]
(GMT-08:00) Pacific Time (US && Canada) (Update)

[Time Zone Update Log]
Type: Appointment
ID: 040000008200e00074c5b7101a82e00800000000000000000000000000000000000000004d00000076436
16c2d55696401000000434430303030303038423935313144313832443830304330344642313632354439
3632314542443443343632333334354244424346414541433930393134374600
Subject: New Year's Eve
Old Start Time: Monday, December 31, 2007 8:00 AM
New Start Time: Monday, December 31, 2007 8:00 AM
Old End Time: Tuesday, January 01, 2008 8:00 AM
New End Time: Tuesday, January 01, 2008 8:00 AM
Recurring: No
Result: Success

...

Now I'm set with Outlook... but hosed on everything else.

Update: for a complete list of vendor fixes see this.

Is changing diapers till Feb 27th. As of Tuesday Jan 2nd I'm officially on parental leave at Microsoft for 8 weeks.

My new job also involves trying to keep this sad face to a minimum. I'm two days into this job and man it's hard work. My family left town a few days ago and that was super depressing. My Mom has been staying with us for close to 2 months (since Sarah's birth) and my father for about a week. They have been amazing and have been pretty much done all the cooking, laundry, grocery shopping and helping out with Sarah. They left the day after Lora started work (she is only able to take 6 weeks of maternity leave since she is currently "in training" as a fellow). IMHO that's a crime.

When they all left I had that sinking feeling. You know the one you got when your parents dropped you off at college... panic, fear and loneliness to name a few. I'm sure things will get better as she gets older, but it's eerie quiet around my house. This will also sound weird, but this is also when I feel like my daughter went from being a novelty to having a real impact on my life. You see since 2 weeks after she was born I was going to work every day and things kinda seemed normal for a big part of the day. And when I came home, my house was filled with family etc. Now I'm home all day, which is weird, and have to do pretty much everything... Plus Lora isn't around and she knew how to do everything baby related! I will note that my diaper changing times are improving drastically.

Anyway, my time not paying attention to her is extremely limited. As is my mobility and all sorts of other things. Sleep is kinda broke up to as I'm usually on duty for the 2am or 5am feeding.

Anyway, I've set my OOF message on my work email account to tell people to forget about hearing from me with regards to anything work related for the next 8 weeks. If you want to know what I'm up to, my blog is where I'll be hanging out when Sarah and me aren't sleeping .

BTW - I have a new found respect for mommies.

For the past 3 days, Adobe has insisted on creating a folder called Updater5 in My Documents folder. No attempts to stop it have worked (any time you re-install or update it just comes back).

I can't stand this!

Why bother you ask? Well Acrobat Reader 8 sucks much less than previous versions, and I've found some compatibility problems with FoxIt Reader that have brought me back to Acrobat Reader.

I'm also looking at purchasing Acrobat Standard so that I can digitize my scans as PDF files using Optical Character Recognition (I previously used Microsoft Document Imaging, part of Office, but the version in Office 2007 ships with an IFilter that does not seem to work with Windows Desktop Search 3 and Vista, meaning all my current scanned TIFF and MDI files with embedded OCR are are useful as static image files). PDF files are indexed fine though. Go figure.

update: The registry key does not seen to work. Aaron Parker has an excellent post on how to create you own customized installer that will never do anything bad.

[Source: Deploying Adobe Reader 8, A Step-by-Step Guide to Silently Installing and Configuring Adobe Reader 8]

A while ago Paul from Kiwali.com was kind enough to send me some complimentary artwork for our two Nano's (currently they only have stickers for the first gen nanos, stickers for second gen are in the works). A lot of people would ask me how or where I got my iPod (cause it looked so different). Looks like Kiwali has branched out to support the larger sibling of the Nano as well as some artistic t-shirts and the like...

The nice thing about these decals is that they protect your iPod from scratches and fingerprints.

Walt Mossberg has a great write up on the Suckiness of the Comcast DVR. It echoes my experiences with that horrible piece of junk.

I like this quote:

"The answer is that, at least in my recent experience with the nation's biggest cable company, Comcast, the high-definition DVR it supplies is just awful. If cable boxes were sold at retail like consumer-electronics devices, the Comcast DVR I tested, built by Motorola, would get creamed by better competitors."

and this one:

"Also, the user interface on the Comcast box is crude and confusing -- nothing like the elegant interfaces people have become used to on their personal computers and devices like iPods. The TiVo interface, by contrast, is effective and attractive."

and this one:

"In the program grid, even on a 50-inch, high-definition screen with acres of room, the Comcast box displays just four rows of stations at a time. Until recently, there was a fifth row, but now that has been replaced by an ad. The ad not only sucks up space, but also is aggravating because it gets selected each time you reach the bottom of the grid screen.

Advertising is fine, but in this case, sacrificing 20% of an already paltry information screen for an ad just shows contempt for users."

This is by far the most scathing comments I've seen Walt make about any product. "crude and confusing", "contempt for users" are not things you want Walt saying about your product or company.

I wonder if the BigCo media execs at Comcast are at all embarrassed? Probably not.