12/10: Just crazy enough to work
Yeah, I know… you see that phrase in a film, a book, wherever, and you may generally safely assume: additional suckage will abound. It’s not something you see in anything you’d actually want to watch without popcorn or a potential sexual partner present and/or read without strong liquor present…
But now and then, y’know, in real life…
So I’ve been mucking around adding stuff to PSPKVM—this Java VM for the PSP. My main thing has been input, ‘cos that’s my thing. ‘Cos I type fast, need/want something portable that can soak that up. I’ve pretty much got that working now…
One of the odd annoyances was, tho’, that screen real estate was always a problem.
Now on the semichordal board, this was only a marginal problem. Or it was for me. Since I don’t tend to look at it much when I’m typing anyway, now, so I could just turn off the key display, work without it entirely… But it did add keystrokes when, for odd keys you still don’t remember, you had to blink it back on again for a sec or so. And for folk learning it, they do like to be able to see it all the time.
And that’s annoying and difficult, because it takes room. The PSP’s screen is big for a portable device, sure, but if you start chopping stuff off the side to make room for the key layout display, it does make a difference. You miss having that room for the text. Be nice if you didn’t have to do that…
And then I added a ‘Danzeff’-style virtual board clone for certain users who were asking for the same (proles, I tell ya… good as Danzeff is, mine’s a lot faster, once you get to know it… but sure, Danzeff is easier to learn… Hell, integral calculus is probably easier to learn than mine, okay, sure…). And for that, you’ve got the same problem. It’s yer basic reactive online board… You need to see where the keys are, at least the rarer ones, and for beginners, you need the display up all the time, really.
Other virtual board types around had just bitten the bullet, chopped space off the fullscreen textfields to do this. I didn’t want to do that. For one thing, it’s a bit of a waste, since the boards are around a quarter of the screen, and typical (rectangular) text box implementations pretty much require you to chop them to half, leave a whole pile of space unused… Coulda made them wrap around the board, too, but that’s a lot of code, too, also odd… And it still eats real estate in the text box…
But then I got to thinking… hey… what if you overlaid the board over the text pane… And just had it move out of the way when someone was going to type under it? Pop it over to the opposite corner of the screen just when you need to or somethin’?
I know what you’re thinking: sounds like it would be… weird. I had the same thought. A bit strange, maybe hard to get used to… Who knows…
And yes, it is a bit strange. But in a good way. Because I tried it out in a build the other day, got it doing that right, and actually: I absolutely love it. Board display is kinda helpfully hanging around in view if you need to consult it, but it stays away from the cursor. And if you come too close with your text, it jumps away like a skittish kitten…
But not too far, see. Hangs out on the opposite corner of the screen, sayin’: ‘hey now, we can still play. The jumping part, that’s just what I do when I play.’
Crazy enough—or just weird enough—to work, see. And I’ve put it in a downloadable build, now, as it’s just perfect, the way I see it, really very nice to work with. You get your whole screen, you get your keyboard display, too, and you don’t even have to think about it… it’s just there for when you need it, out of the way when you don’t…
So it’s got that ‘you read my mind… and thanks’ quality about it a really weirdly clever (if I do say so myself) interface sometimes has. A good thing, methinks.
But now and then, y’know, in real life…
So I’ve been mucking around adding stuff to PSPKVM—this Java VM for the PSP. My main thing has been input, ‘cos that’s my thing. ‘Cos I type fast, need/want something portable that can soak that up. I’ve pretty much got that working now…
One of the odd annoyances was, tho’, that screen real estate was always a problem.
Now on the semichordal board, this was only a marginal problem. Or it was for me. Since I don’t tend to look at it much when I’m typing anyway, now, so I could just turn off the key display, work without it entirely… But it did add keystrokes when, for odd keys you still don’t remember, you had to blink it back on again for a sec or so. And for folk learning it, they do like to be able to see it all the time.
And that’s annoying and difficult, because it takes room. The PSP’s screen is big for a portable device, sure, but if you start chopping stuff off the side to make room for the key layout display, it does make a difference. You miss having that room for the text. Be nice if you didn’t have to do that…
And then I added a ‘Danzeff’-style virtual board clone for certain users who were asking for the same (proles, I tell ya… good as Danzeff is, mine’s a lot faster, once you get to know it… but sure, Danzeff is easier to learn… Hell, integral calculus is probably easier to learn than mine, okay, sure…). And for that, you’ve got the same problem. It’s yer basic reactive online board… You need to see where the keys are, at least the rarer ones, and for beginners, you need the display up all the time, really.
Other virtual board types around had just bitten the bullet, chopped space off the fullscreen textfields to do this. I didn’t want to do that. For one thing, it’s a bit of a waste, since the boards are around a quarter of the screen, and typical (rectangular) text box implementations pretty much require you to chop them to half, leave a whole pile of space unused… Coulda made them wrap around the board, too, but that’s a lot of code, too, also odd… And it still eats real estate in the text box…
But then I got to thinking… hey… what if you overlaid the board over the text pane… And just had it move out of the way when someone was going to type under it? Pop it over to the opposite corner of the screen just when you need to or somethin’?
I know what you’re thinking: sounds like it would be… weird. I had the same thought. A bit strange, maybe hard to get used to… Who knows…
And yes, it is a bit strange. But in a good way. Because I tried it out in a build the other day, got it doing that right, and actually: I absolutely love it. Board display is kinda helpfully hanging around in view if you need to consult it, but it stays away from the cursor. And if you come too close with your text, it jumps away like a skittish kitten…
But not too far, see. Hangs out on the opposite corner of the screen, sayin’: ‘hey now, we can still play. The jumping part, that’s just what I do when I play.’
Crazy enough—or just weird enough—to work, see. And I’ve put it in a downloadable build, now, as it’s just perfect, the way I see it, really very nice to work with. You get your whole screen, you get your keyboard display, too, and you don’t even have to think about it… it’s just there for when you need it, out of the way when you don’t…
So it’s got that ‘you read my mind… and thanks’ quality about it a really weirdly clever (if I do say so myself) interface sometimes has. A good thing, methinks.
‘Kay. So it’s more a conquest of the Java VMs on the PSP world. Point is: things are moving along.
I’m doing this entry on Bolt, yet another J2ME browser the VM runs happily. Working on the semichordal board has become convenient enough now that I regularly edit the project wiki entries using it—using both Bolt and Opera Mini. I regularly also use the thing as a portable notetaker, too—it’s more than fast enough.
We’ve another release coming out shortly, too—with various enhancements to text support, a few other things…
(Today Albuquerque… Tomorrow…)
I’m doing this entry on Bolt, yet another J2ME browser the VM runs happily. Working on the semichordal board has become convenient enough now that I regularly edit the project wiki entries using it—using both Bolt and Opera Mini. I regularly also use the thing as a portable notetaker, too—it’s more than fast enough.
We’ve another release coming out shortly, too—with various enhancements to text support, a few other things…
(Today Albuquerque… Tomorrow…)
… wit’ fun, scratchy geetar ‘n muted trumpet…
(Smallish but sharp version is embedded below… if your bandwidth is up to it, it looks much, much better in HQ and original size… you have to go to the page and pick ‘HQ’ and ‘Original size’ from the menu on the lower right.)
(… and yes, I only really did it for an excuse to play around with RoseGarden again. Ya got me… And yeah, that’s Thelma in the background, in the first few frames. She seemed to figure she should be in the shot, so I didn’t argue.)
(Smallish but sharp version is embedded below… if your bandwidth is up to it, it looks much, much better in HQ and original size… you have to go to the page and pick ‘HQ’ and ‘Original size’ from the menu on the lower right.)
(… and yes, I only really did it for an excuse to play around with RoseGarden again. Ya got me… And yeah, that’s Thelma in the background, in the first few frames. She seemed to figure she should be in the shot, so I didn’t argue.)
14/07: Caps lock considered harmful
Today’s incredibly niche concern: whyinhell is there still a caps lock key?
Things that suck about the caps lock key: i) password entry is a pain in the butt if you nudge it on, ii) PEOPLE WHO SCREAM ON THE NET (most or all of whom are wankers, a goodly proportion of the wankers being nutbar conspiracy theorists… digression: is there a clinically useful relationship between one’s use of the caps lock key and paranoid delusions… exhibit one: the TimeCube guy…)
(Things that suck about parentheses: people who digress entirely too readily… but I digress… again…)
… anyway. Add to this iii) it complicates implementing keyboards. That’s the real niche one, I guess. But it is a bit of a pain. Got to thinking of this over lunch. Took a few minutes outta eating to look at a bit of non-work-related code… as mentioned, the PSPKVM folk are picking up my semichordal board implementation, and there’s a release coming up. I told ‘em I wanted to clean up a few things, one of them was caps lock handling. Wanted to make it properly alpha-characters only, as is generally expected on modern boards; wasn’t, previously… acted more like an old-time mechanical shift lock, shifted everything; apparently, this isn’t done anymore…
Anyway. This wasn’t so big a deal, all told. Did add some work, tho’. And so I still got to thinking: why? Why is it even still there? In my case, I guess, just ‘cos people will expect it… and one other odd reason I’ll get to in a moment, a bit more compelling… But I was tempted just to dump it. Honestly… who uses it anymore? One anti-caps-lock guy out there noted it’s only used by 419 scammers and Fortran programmers… and y’know, in PSPKVM’s space, I’m not sure how many of those are likely to drop into the bug tracker program and bitch me out because it was omitted…
But here’s the funny thing: in the ME we’re emulating, there’s even an internal interface that’s supposed to tell the virtual board to start up in caps lock mode. What? Why? Again, I just can’t see this coming up, much…
Anyway. Given that, fine, it’s there. For now. More so people can turn it off if the midlet vendor is on crack and calls up that interface and it turns out that’s just silly… I guess. Tho’ maybe that should just be their bug… And why do I get sucked into these things again?
End rant. Legacy features preserved against all sense from the dawn of the information age equals annoying, tho’.
Things that suck about the caps lock key: i) password entry is a pain in the butt if you nudge it on, ii) PEOPLE WHO SCREAM ON THE NET (most or all of whom are wankers, a goodly proportion of the wankers being nutbar conspiracy theorists… digression: is there a clinically useful relationship between one’s use of the caps lock key and paranoid delusions… exhibit one: the TimeCube guy…)
(Things that suck about parentheses: people who digress entirely too readily… but I digress… again…)
… anyway. Add to this iii) it complicates implementing keyboards. That’s the real niche one, I guess. But it is a bit of a pain. Got to thinking of this over lunch. Took a few minutes outta eating to look at a bit of non-work-related code… as mentioned, the PSPKVM folk are picking up my semichordal board implementation, and there’s a release coming up. I told ‘em I wanted to clean up a few things, one of them was caps lock handling. Wanted to make it properly alpha-characters only, as is generally expected on modern boards; wasn’t, previously… acted more like an old-time mechanical shift lock, shifted everything; apparently, this isn’t done anymore…
Anyway. This wasn’t so big a deal, all told. Did add some work, tho’. And so I still got to thinking: why? Why is it even still there? In my case, I guess, just ‘cos people will expect it… and one other odd reason I’ll get to in a moment, a bit more compelling… But I was tempted just to dump it. Honestly… who uses it anymore? One anti-caps-lock guy out there noted it’s only used by 419 scammers and Fortran programmers… and y’know, in PSPKVM’s space, I’m not sure how many of those are likely to drop into the bug tracker program and bitch me out because it was omitted…
But here’s the funny thing: in the ME we’re emulating, there’s even an internal interface that’s supposed to tell the virtual board to start up in caps lock mode. What? Why? Again, I just can’t see this coming up, much…
Anyway. Given that, fine, it’s there. For now. More so people can turn it off if the midlet vendor is on crack and calls up that interface and it turns out that’s just silly… I guess. Tho’ maybe that should just be their bug… And why do I get sucked into these things again?
End rant. Legacy features preserved against all sense from the dawn of the information age equals annoying, tho’.
So the PSPKVM folk are integrating that keyboard of mine into the project, which is nice…
And I’ve also agreed with them to help out in other ways…
Which is dumb, I know. It ain’t like time is exactly overflowing in my life.
Still, weird as this may sound to some of you, this is a sort of play for me. Code I have to write: work. Code I get to use that makes my personal world a little more like I’d like it to be: fun. And hey, there’s no snow in this hemisphere (or none outside Blackcomb’s glacier) anyway right now. And the weather sucks even for other outside stuff this summer… What else am I gonna do for said fun?
Stuff so far: added diacritics support to my board for folk who need things like accents ‘n umlauts (I’d always meant to, anyway), fixed a bug someone had left in the stuff rendering the built-in typeface which made a lot of those not show up… Now looking at giving the thing a clipboard. It needs one, I need one, it’s all good…
(And seriously, it’s not like I do a lot of ‘community’ things, anyway, I guess. Could argue mebbe this one’s a bit due.)
And I’ve also agreed with them to help out in other ways…
Which is dumb, I know. It ain’t like time is exactly overflowing in my life.
Still, weird as this may sound to some of you, this is a sort of play for me. Code I have to write: work. Code I get to use that makes my personal world a little more like I’d like it to be: fun. And hey, there’s no snow in this hemisphere (or none outside Blackcomb’s glacier) anyway right now. And the weather sucks even for other outside stuff this summer… What else am I gonna do for said fun?
Stuff so far: added diacritics support to my board for folk who need things like accents ‘n umlauts (I’d always meant to, anyway), fixed a bug someone had left in the stuff rendering the built-in typeface which made a lot of those not show up… Now looking at giving the thing a clipboard. It needs one, I need one, it’s all good…
(And seriously, it’s not like I do a lot of ‘community’ things, anyway, I guess. Could argue mebbe this one’s a bit due.)
In a word: multitasking.
Sure, the PSP is mostly a one thing at a time device, running stock software. But run this emulator, and dang… you can have yer browser and yer IRC client too.
Only one visible at a time, sure, but still… nice.
Sure, the PSP is mostly a one thing at a time device, running stock software. But run this emulator, and dang… you can have yer browser and yer IRC client too.
Only one visible at a time, sure, but still… nice.
09/06: Java. Fear it.
It’s a funny thing, that language. Popped up when it did so full of promise… It’s entirely possible that without it my life would have gone very differently, insofar as my early proficiency with it put me on the radar of certain tech companies, even though I wasn’t even working in that industry… besides leading to my going on to working in C++ rather painlessly and happily (yes, I did it a bit backwards… OOP type stuff first, then gradually moving down the network stack to structured stuff and assembler—and sideways to Perl and company—sorta… certainly knew lower-level stuff first, but my first big, useful things were in Java, then C++—and I’ll still use the latter over vanilla C for most things, provided there’s a decent compiler and STL implementation available for the platform… just find it neater, faster, usually… anyway)…
And then, sure, after that splash the heat around Java did seem to die down a bit, for a while. People did’t seem to know for that while what exactly to do with it. And yeah, it could be a bit slow, running a VM in 90s-era hardware. And write once, run anywhere turned out to be a bit more like write once, debug everywhere…
But geez, flash forward to today, and it sure does seem to have found some interesting niches. Not having really been paying attention, I am happy to discover that if you want a midlet that does web, email, ssh, IRC, spreadsheets, whatever, the answer is: yep, someone’s written one. Or several someones have…
So, long story short: having done that bit of code to make PSPKVM useable for those of us who do like to write and type at some length, I suddenly have software available to do all that and more on a pocket device… And can background stuff, in a reasonable approximation of a desktop running multiple apps… browse the IRC client’s online help while you’re setting it up (and yes, I’m writing this on Opera Mini, of course… again… the little guy asleep beside me as I do).
Still needs support for a clipboard or somethin’ like that, tho’… May have to do that next.
Anyway. Java. Fear it.
And then, sure, after that splash the heat around Java did seem to die down a bit, for a while. People did’t seem to know for that while what exactly to do with it. And yeah, it could be a bit slow, running a VM in 90s-era hardware. And write once, run anywhere turned out to be a bit more like write once, debug everywhere…
But geez, flash forward to today, and it sure does seem to have found some interesting niches. Not having really been paying attention, I am happy to discover that if you want a midlet that does web, email, ssh, IRC, spreadsheets, whatever, the answer is: yep, someone’s written one. Or several someones have…
So, long story short: having done that bit of code to make PSPKVM useable for those of us who do like to write and type at some length, I suddenly have software available to do all that and more on a pocket device… And can background stuff, in a reasonable approximation of a desktop running multiple apps… browse the IRC client’s online help while you’re setting it up (and yes, I’m writing this on Opera Mini, of course… again… the little guy asleep beside me as I do).
Still needs support for a clipboard or somethin’ like that, tho’… May have to do that next.
Anyway. Java. Fear it.
06/06: Success!
So I spent a bit of time yestereve and just now mucking around in the guts of that PSPKVM project I’d discovered that runs Opera Mini so very nicely on the PSP… Figured, hell, I’ve got the code for that lovely semi-chordal keyboard scheme of mine just lying there, and I do speak Java… how hard can this be?
Answer: not terribly. I’m writing this entry (directly in the browser, the PSP online thru wireless) using it. Opera Mini asks the VM for a virtual keyboard when I click on the dialog I type this into, and when it does, it now gets the new one I just built into that very VM… And we’re off to the races.
There were some gotchas—had to remap some of the dedicated/built-in stuff for doing things like bringing up network controls to get them out of the way… that was no biggie. The only slightly ugly part was tracing around the event handling stuff well enough to do some minor modifications. Somewhat annoyingly, the KVM has this virtualization stuff wrapped around the PSP’s controls—supposed to make it look like a phone to apps. But I needed somewhat more detailed state information to really make this thing work…
Solution: cheat. I added a few events passing just such state along, wrapped it up in such a way that apps that don’t specifically say they want it won’t be bothered with it. So sure, the VM within is now not exactly to spec, but it shouldn’t cause any trouble. Opera sure seems to get along with it, anyway.
So: I now have a handheld browser I can actually type into at decent speeds.
I’m calling this a win.
Answer: not terribly. I’m writing this entry (directly in the browser, the PSP online thru wireless) using it. Opera Mini asks the VM for a virtual keyboard when I click on the dialog I type this into, and when it does, it now gets the new one I just built into that very VM… And we’re off to the races.
There were some gotchas—had to remap some of the dedicated/built-in stuff for doing things like bringing up network controls to get them out of the way… that was no biggie. The only slightly ugly part was tracing around the event handling stuff well enough to do some minor modifications. Somewhat annoyingly, the KVM has this virtualization stuff wrapped around the PSP’s controls—supposed to make it look like a phone to apps. But I needed somewhat more detailed state information to really make this thing work…
Solution: cheat. I added a few events passing just such state along, wrapped it up in such a way that apps that don’t specifically say they want it won’t be bothered with it. So sure, the VM within is now not exactly to spec, but it shouldn’t cause any trouble. Opera sure seems to get along with it, anyway.
So: I now have a handheld browser I can actually type into at decent speeds.
I’m calling this a win.
So my dreams are simple, really. I just want a device that’s portable enough to put in my pocket and that does email and ssh and browses the web and does it from anywhere over GPRS if that’s all that’s around… Oh, and I want to be able to write my own code for it, and I want to be able to type at something like 100 WPM on it, and…
Okay, so the 100 WPM thing I haven’t got quite yet. But I have been clocking between 25 and 40 WPM on that semichordal beastie I built for my custom firmwared PSP, last I checked… And I just discovered the Opera Mini browser runs just fine on it via PSP KVM, a truly awesome JVM ported to said platform. Better than fine, even—I’d say more thing of beauty, after the awkward and slow built-in browser. Snappy, powerful, loads huge pages sans hiccups, handles Gmail, damn… I mean, I was testing it out the other day, kept loading massive blog pages full of comments just to try to give it some stress, and it’s like it was just saying ‘oh, as if… been there, done that… c’mon, give me something difficult, loser.’
Yes, my browser is now trash talking me.
Anyway, I found myself thinking, y’know, if they’d just put this browser on this thing in the first place, they’d have probably sold a few million more of them…
Better still, it turns out that JVM port is open source, and the keyboard support implementation that gets called up when you want to fill in text panes (like this one) is in the JVM (not the browser) and from the source it appears to be fairly easy (for me, anyway) to change/add to. So I can probably make it do my semichordal thing with a bit of work… And voila. A browser I can actually type into at a decent speed, and the mobile web is suddenly a genuinely two-way experience, finally, and a not too uncomfortable place for those of us who do tend to go on a bit when you let us…
Now, annoyingly, the PSP’s USB port really isn’t set up to do host, so plugging a GPRS dongle straight into it, that’s not going to be real doable… But, say I were to get one of those odd little cigarette-pack sized personal 802.11 gateways built for people with needs a bit like this very one, plug that into one of those micro GPRS dongle things built for tiny netbooks…*
Hmm. Technically, that’s two pockets. But then, the gateway doesn’t even have to come out of its pocket. Or rather, I guess it just does briefly, when starting. So should work fine in a ski jacket, anyway… Or hip pocket of jeans. Definitely in a car. Sure, I’d probably have so much RF around me that planes trying to come down on instruments would occasionally mistake me for an airport and try to land on me… But hey, what’s life without a little risk, anyway?
Like I said, my dreams are simple. And some of them, I may even be able to implement.
Okay, so the 100 WPM thing I haven’t got quite yet. But I have been clocking between 25 and 40 WPM on that semichordal beastie I built for my custom firmwared PSP, last I checked… And I just discovered the Opera Mini browser runs just fine on it via PSP KVM, a truly awesome JVM ported to said platform. Better than fine, even—I’d say more thing of beauty, after the awkward and slow built-in browser. Snappy, powerful, loads huge pages sans hiccups, handles Gmail, damn… I mean, I was testing it out the other day, kept loading massive blog pages full of comments just to try to give it some stress, and it’s like it was just saying ‘oh, as if… been there, done that… c’mon, give me something difficult, loser.’
Yes, my browser is now trash talking me.
Anyway, I found myself thinking, y’know, if they’d just put this browser on this thing in the first place, they’d have probably sold a few million more of them…
Better still, it turns out that JVM port is open source, and the keyboard support implementation that gets called up when you want to fill in text panes (like this one) is in the JVM (not the browser) and from the source it appears to be fairly easy (for me, anyway) to change/add to. So I can probably make it do my semichordal thing with a bit of work… And voila. A browser I can actually type into at a decent speed, and the mobile web is suddenly a genuinely two-way experience, finally, and a not too uncomfortable place for those of us who do tend to go on a bit when you let us…
Now, annoyingly, the PSP’s USB port really isn’t set up to do host, so plugging a GPRS dongle straight into it, that’s not going to be real doable… But, say I were to get one of those odd little cigarette-pack sized personal 802.11 gateways built for people with needs a bit like this very one, plug that into one of those micro GPRS dongle things built for tiny netbooks…*
Hmm. Technically, that’s two pockets. But then, the gateway doesn’t even have to come out of its pocket. Or rather, I guess it just does briefly, when starting. So should work fine in a ski jacket, anyway… Or hip pocket of jeans. Definitely in a car. Sure, I’d probably have so much RF around me that planes trying to come down on instruments would occasionally mistake me for an airport and try to land on me… But hey, what’s life without a little risk, anyway?
Like I said, my dreams are simple. And some of them, I may even be able to implement.
*Hrm… fun fact: if you’re running a phone running S60 (mostly smartphoneish things) and that does WiFi, apparently there’s also somethin’ called Joikuspot that’ll turn that into a WAP instead. Meaning one less box. But my current phone isn’t up to that. Must mull…
28/02: Life in the dialup lane
So I hadda finally break down and replace my personal cell phone a few weeks ago. I’d lost the previous one, as I occasionally do (I like to refer to these as my ‘blond’ moments).
In the course of setting this up, setting up a dedicated work landline, some other stuff, I noticed that (a) the actually pretty basic phone I was getting could act as a ‘cellular modem’ (grabs GPRS/EGPRS/HSCSD, whatever’s available, passes it on along to a connected laptop), and (b) the cellular data services had become what looked reasonably affordable, of late. Some $30/mo for up to 500 Mb, and a nice little tiered thing going on if you exceed that. And I got to thinking, okay, let’s try this out…
Now one of the reasons I’d never been much into this notion previously is I know well enough that the actual coverage for these services ‘round here is spotty/primitive. That’s to say, if you want some 80 Kb/s downstream GPRS, you’ll probably get that… faster, well, that depends on where you happen to be standing when you ask… And I’ve been living in the high speed age a while, now. Sounded like not much fun.
But curiosity got the better of me. Got to thinking: I don’t get locked in (had my account with Rogers since sometime in the palaeolithic, just bought the cheapish phone outright, since I’m not really a 3G guy) anyway; and the service cost isn’t exactly outrageous—so let’s try it out and see…
Funny thing. I’m using it now, from a place I can get a beer and some pita and dip. And I just realized: I’m a very text-based guy, most of the time, anyway. It’s news, blogs and code, mostly, and those are mostly text. CVS over SSH to sourceforge’s servers, rants and wire stories over http 1.x otherwise…
And for all of that, GPRS is more than fast enough.
Other discovery: it looks like I’m gonna have to work pretty hard to blow past 500 Meg—but then, I know I’m in slightly-faster-than-dialup mode when I’ve got this thing running, so it’s not like I’m gonna go surfing for HD video or audio or nothin’… Stick to text and code, which (see above) I tend to do a lot of anyway, and it’s really a much less painless experience, as well—the actual accumulated transfer notwithstanding—I mean, who wants to see video load so slowly you can actually watch each frame build up, piece by piece…
Seriously, the revelation is: life in the dialup (-esque) lane is okay. Hell, it’s been more compatible with most of what I do longer than I realized, I guess. Sound and moving pictures are nice, ‘n all, but like I said, I’m a text-based creature, ultimately, anyway.
Verdict: I’ll hang onto it another month, I guess. Being able to patch on bits and pieces to OSS projects, blog and read a bit from just about anywhere (even bars where there’s no wireless, no hotspot, no nothin’), it’s a nice thing to have, really.
As to the speed: well, welcome back to 1990 (hey, economy’s more or less the same… it’s like deja vu). But there’s nothing much wrong with having to keep it simple, so far, after all.
In the course of setting this up, setting up a dedicated work landline, some other stuff, I noticed that (a) the actually pretty basic phone I was getting could act as a ‘cellular modem’ (grabs GPRS/EGPRS/HSCSD, whatever’s available, passes it on along to a connected laptop), and (b) the cellular data services had become what looked reasonably affordable, of late. Some $30/mo for up to 500 Mb, and a nice little tiered thing going on if you exceed that. And I got to thinking, okay, let’s try this out…
Now one of the reasons I’d never been much into this notion previously is I know well enough that the actual coverage for these services ‘round here is spotty/primitive. That’s to say, if you want some 80 Kb/s downstream GPRS, you’ll probably get that… faster, well, that depends on where you happen to be standing when you ask… And I’ve been living in the high speed age a while, now. Sounded like not much fun.
But curiosity got the better of me. Got to thinking: I don’t get locked in (had my account with Rogers since sometime in the palaeolithic, just bought the cheapish phone outright, since I’m not really a 3G guy) anyway; and the service cost isn’t exactly outrageous—so let’s try it out and see…
Funny thing. I’m using it now, from a place I can get a beer and some pita and dip. And I just realized: I’m a very text-based guy, most of the time, anyway. It’s news, blogs and code, mostly, and those are mostly text. CVS over SSH to sourceforge’s servers, rants and wire stories over http 1.x otherwise…
And for all of that, GPRS is more than fast enough.
Other discovery: it looks like I’m gonna have to work pretty hard to blow past 500 Meg—but then, I know I’m in slightly-faster-than-dialup mode when I’ve got this thing running, so it’s not like I’m gonna go surfing for HD video or audio or nothin’… Stick to text and code, which (see above) I tend to do a lot of anyway, and it’s really a much less painless experience, as well—the actual accumulated transfer notwithstanding—I mean, who wants to see video load so slowly you can actually watch each frame build up, piece by piece…
Seriously, the revelation is: life in the dialup (-esque) lane is okay. Hell, it’s been more compatible with most of what I do longer than I realized, I guess. Sound and moving pictures are nice, ‘n all, but like I said, I’m a text-based creature, ultimately, anyway.
Verdict: I’ll hang onto it another month, I guess. Being able to patch on bits and pieces to OSS projects, blog and read a bit from just about anywhere (even bars where there’s no wireless, no hotspot, no nothin’), it’s a nice thing to have, really.
As to the speed: well, welcome back to 1990 (hey, economy’s more or less the same… it’s like deja vu). But there’s nothing much wrong with having to keep it simple, so far, after all.
