Zeigen

If all went well, you won’t see any difference.

However, it seems to have blown away all of my categories. Hmm.

EDIT: Fixed my categories, what a pain. I fixed them by following steps at this article. If you happen to have this problem with your blog when updating from 2.0x to 2.6, only the last step is actually needed (you don’t need to mess around in your phpMyAdmin page) — but you do have to repeat the step for each category. I have 30 categories, so this was annoying, but it’s done now. If you see anything else about the blog acting funky, please let me know.

EDIT THE SECOND: I’ve switched on avatars and converted from the default permalink structure to a month-and-name-based structure. (Old links will still work.)

EDIT THE THIRD: I’ve installed a plugin to make it easier to read this blog on an iPhone/iPod Touch.

If none of the above makes any sense to you, ignore it.

Last night someone in customer support sent an outage escalation to our on-call team. (Turned out to be a non-urgent issue with one of their tools.) I was tickled by the IT employee’s e-mail response to the escalation, which was:

“We will oil at this and get ba do to you.

Sent from my iPhone”

Texting on an iPhone is generally quite easy and the auto-correct usually does its job very well. But just like embarassing situations where a spell check does something like automatically changing your boss’s name “Semmelly” into “Smelly,” every now and then the iPhone oils up.

What’s your most embarrassing typo sent in a work e-mail?

I’m still very enthusiastic about my iPhone. But with today’s announcements, I definitely do plan to upgrade to a new 3G phone when they’re available next month. I’ll get double the storage space, faster download speed, faster processing, plus GPS — all that in exchange for $299, two more years of AT&T contract commitment, and an extra $10 per month for the 3G data plan.

For both new and old iPhones, the app store will be a world-changer when it launches. I know of dozens of interesting, useful and mind-bending applications just waiting to be unleashed for the masses.

However, despite all that positive news, here are the things that one might have hoped would be addressed in the iPhone 2.0 but are still going to be limitations:

• AT&T only. Not a problem for me, but many customers say they can’t stand the company, or live in areas where AT&T’s coverage is bad.
• Battery: It’s still internal, and not user serviceable. (Unless you’re daring enough to trust this scary battery alternative.)
• No IM: Even with the application store forthcoming, it doesn’t seem like there will be an instant messaging solution. Never mind, looks like this one is solved.
• Camera not so hot. It’s 2 megapixel, with really bad performance in low light situations; the iPhone 2.0 doesn’t seem to change it.

Overall, though, a lot is improved — and a price cut that significant really is incredible.

Today I attended Jack and Andy’s fifth birthday party at Hoover park, and watched Bob get pelted by water balloons and shaving-cream-filled sponges by ten ecstatic kids. (How I escaped that fate, given I’m a co-godparent? Dunno! But I am oh so grateful.) Aunt Beth made two cakes, one a race car, and the other a chocolate volcano with lava made from melted orange lifesavers. Amazingly beautiful cakes.

* * *

While I was feting twins, Kimi took Sammy and Sophie to the Hiller Airplane Museum, which never gets old for Sammy.

Me: Sammy, what did you see at the airplane museum today?
Sammy: Airplanes.
Me: What kind of airplanes?
Sammy: Old airplanes. With wings!

* * *

Yesterday was Sophie’s eight month birthday. She babbles incessantly now, has the tiniest of teeth buds coming in, gives a smile to everyone, likes to wave somewhat erratically at people, and can roll over, but seems to show no interest in crawling. We’ve started the ferberizing to break her of her 3 a.m. feedings, and so far so good; she slept through the night for the last two nights.

* * *

Yesterday was also photo day at Sammy and Sophie’s school, and in addition, teachers’ lunch out for Sophie’s class. This semi-annual event asks the parents to donate their time and a little money for the teachers to get an escape, while parents come in during the lunch hour to watch the kids. There are eight kids in Sophie’s class, ranging from four months to almost a year old. For the noon to 1 shift where I helped out, we had five parents. When we first started our shift, the teachers had left us well-fed, happy, clean-diapered kids. Within about, oh, ten minutes, half of the kids were bawling, and most had dirty diapers. We parents just looked at each other and laughed. What a profoundly difficult job. The two teachers handle four infants each, with aplomb. We parents were having difficulty with less than two each. Things soon settled down though, and the hour ended up flying by.

* * *

While the photographers set up outside the school and we lined the kids up to have their individual and class photos taken, smoke and haze filled the sky from the nearby Santa Cruz mountains fire. Yesterday morning over 3,400 acres had burned, dozens of homes were destroyed, and the fire was less than 1% contained. Even though we were fifty miles away, kids rubbed their eyes and coughed; and the strange air reminded me of a smell from my childhood, in London: walking down the street in winter evenings, with seemingly every house having a fireplace with a blazing wood fire, smoke pouring out of chimneys, getting on your clothes.

Chim chimminee, chim chiminee, chim chim cheroo.

I was very glad to see the unexpected and unseasonable light rain today, giving the firefighters the break they needed to control the mountain blaze. The dull weather was not so much fun for five-year-olds attending a birthday party, but everything in life is a trade-off.

* * *

Earlier in the week, I caught Speed Racer and then snuck in to a showing of Prince Caspian. It took me about thirty minutes to catch on to Speed Racer’s vibe, but once I did, I loved it. I think this is a vastly underrated movie. The critical smackdown is somewhat intense; I guess most of the critics never watched the original cartoon, because I think the movie catches the goofy tone of the movie pretty much perfectly. And the visuals do not disappoint, exceeding even the hype.

Prince Caspian, on the other hand, is a dreadful bore, missing all spark of charm and whimsy of the first Narnia movie, laying the religious theme on over-thick, and really missing the point of the book (which I read probably twenty times before I was 12).

Speed Racer is over two hours but feels like 60 minutes. Prince Caspian is over two hours but feels like three or four.

* * *

Rob and I have been playing a new card game, Race for the Galaxy (which Steve and Larry introduced me to when they visited a couple of months ago). We play whenever we get a chance. I love this game. It’s a bit fiddly to learn, and the fact that you’re not directly interacting with your opponents takes a few plays before you understand how you can actually have a huge effect on your opponents’ play — but it’s such a short and intense game, I find myself even dreaming about it. Get this game!

* * *

Kimi gave me the new Flight of the Conchords CD for my birthday (among a lot of other CDs, thanks sweetie!). Although I loved the first season of the HBO show, I had thought some of the songs were hit or miss. But I was able to really listen to the lyrics (thanks to the iPhone making it easier for me to carry around music), and now I love all the songs. Buy this CD. Please mister, you won’t regret it.

* * *

There’s a friends-and-family deal at TiVo right now for a TiVo HD. If you’re a friend or family and want a new HD DVR, drop me an e-mail.

* * *

While I do aim to generate content, rather than pass along content from elsewhere, here’s a link. I have to say I applaud these two for their convictions and avocation.
* * *

Kimi: “Your blog is so random. No one likes all the content. No one!”

Guilty — variegated miscellany is what this is. I do tend to be all over the place. Everything’s connected, somehow. Just think though — there are half of the categories listed on the right not even touched by this post. But comments are what I like best, so let me know what you’d like to see more of, and less of.

(Sorry, iPhone haters! Three blog posts in a row about the iPhone… Go read The Sneeze or something.)

Maybe everyone already knows this, but I just found out about it by accident: Holding down a virtual letter key can produce alternate versions of that letter for different languages.

For example, if you want to enter a character such as é (for you francophiles) or ö (for you Mötörhëäd enthusiasts), just hold down the E or O buttons on the keyboard for a second or two.

• E offers È É Ê Ë Ę
• Y offers Ÿ
• U offers Ú Ù Ü Û
• I offers í ì ï î
• O offers Ø Œ Õ Ó Ò Ö Ô
• A offers À Á Â Ä Æ Ã Å Ą
• S offers ß Ś Š
• L offers Ł
• Z offers Ź Ž Ż
• C offers Ç Ć
• N offers Ń Ñ
• ? offers ¿
• ! offers ¡

Now I’ve got a question for the world. When entering a URL, how can you enter in a # character? It’s used for web page anchors within a page. There doesn’t seem to be a way to enter that character at all (other than bookmarking on your computer and syncing that bookmark over).

Update: Kevin Fox answered this in the comments. Use the shift button after hitting @123.

Web development for Safari on the iPhone is a pain in the button.

• No label support, requiring a stupid JavaScript workaround? Check.
• Inconsistent and kinda messed up DOM? Check.
• Required use of bizarre meta tags for appearance? Check.
• Limited troubleshooting methods? Check.
• Bugs when you change orientation? Check.
• Some really bizarre and buggy behavior with the built-in Go button upon form submission? Check.

(If you don’t have an iPhone, move along… Nothing to see here.)

The newest version of software on the iPhone, 1.1.3, lets you save buttons on your home screen that point to web pages.

I ran across an article with a method to let you make a button that automatically dials a number you choose. But that hack was a bit too cumbersome for me to use, plus it requires you entering in your phone numbers in a URL that could be logged on someone else’s server.

So, I wrote a front-end to make it a little easier to create speed dial buttons. Full credit to Nate True for his discovery and method; I just put a nice form in front of it and made it so no logging is possible.

This doesn’t interact with your contacts at all — it’s just a virtual web page. Once you’ve created it, you just touch your home screen button, tap Call, then — voila — you’re dialing.

To create your own buttons, just go to zeigen.com/dial using Safari on your iPhone, and follow the instructions. (Requires javascript on, and 1.1.3 or later.)

Nothing you submit is stored on my server, and once you create the Home button, it dials automatically without Safari needing to be connected to Edge or wireless.

You can view-source on that page to see how it works. It’s basically a data URI built with JavaScript that uses meta refresh and the tel URI to make your phone dial.

I’m working with a friend to provide some sample icons to select from. I also hope to add more error checking of entries and a preview of the icon you’ve selected.

Let me know how you like it!

Update: Version 4 released around 9pm 1/26 — implements version checking and a message if JavaScript is off, and lets you switch off the instructions, plus a little cleanup of language.

New Update: Version 0.5 (with retroactive re-versioning!) released around 1:30am on 1/28 — adds a selection of spiffy icons you can choose, thanks to Kevin Fox.

Update: Back online after about 1pm. Glad to see 1.1.3 supports map auto-locate, multiple SMS delivery, customized home screen layout, web shortcut buttons, chapters in video playback, video rental, IMAP for GMail, and probably more.

I’m so upset right now. I just found out that an e-mail I sent using my iPhone on Sunday night in our hospital room to my closest friends and family was never delivered.

I used the “Email Photo” feature to send a photo (the first one I included in the blog entry below, the one with Kimi and Sophie taken minutes after Sophie was born). I heard the “whoosh” sound to say the e-mail was sent. But it didn’t get delivered, didn’t get put into my Yahoo mail Sent folder, no error messages no nothing. I don’t even have a record of who I need to apologize to.

I don’t know if it’s the iPhone’s fault or AT&T’s fault or Yahoo’s fault, but in testing right now it’s totally random whether the photos I mail get delivered or not.

I at least called my immediate relatives to tell them the news, but some of my cousins — Mark, Tracy — and closest friends — Howard, Ken, Bob, John and many others — never got the news or photo.

In testing earlier, only 2 of my 10 test picture mails arrived (all going to the same address). But just now 2 out of 2 were delivered fine. In perhaps related news, different apps (photo, iPod) seem to be crashing a lot. My iPhone is unmodified if that makes a difference.
There’s a lesson about reliance on new technology in there somewhere. But I’m too furious to see it right now.

This is day four of using my new iPhone. I’m still getting used to it (and my typing on it is slow as of yet), but I think of it in terms of what other devices it replaces for me. The iPhone is a hybrid — and normally hybrid devices are inferior to the dedicated devices that they try to replace, so that you end up with a compromise.

With a combination fax/printer, for example, you have to ask yourself if the combo does a good enough job at both printing and faxing, or if in the process of making it a single device has introduced so many shortcomings that it’s worse than just buying a separate printer and a separate fax machine that can actually handle what you need.

But in the iPhone’s case, it’s not a compromise. I can legitimately head to a meeting or go on a trip with fewer devices and gadgets than I previously would have taken along.

• Phone: A-. Very capable cell phone. More thoughts (and quirks) below. Overall I’m happy to replace my previous phone and use the iPhone instead.
• Pager: B+. I used to carry a separate pager (remember those?). If I hadn’t dumped it previously, I could dump it now. Some issues though: When I get new page that’s long, I always have to scroll up to the top — for some reason it always shows me just the bottom by default. Also, a long page becomes even longer because the right fifth of the screen is taken up with a GUI widget that’s only shown haflway down the page. Most annoying of all (and probably not Apple’s fault), AT&T is assigning random numbers that the page is “from,” which seem to totally confuse the iPhone’s chat model. Deleting pages is one tap too many — tap Edit, tap the minus, tap Delete.
• Laptop: B+. Web browsing and e-mail are both very effective. You can’t edit spreadsheets or project PowerPoint presentations, so for some jobs I still need my laptop. But the web browsing is wonderful and intuitive. On the e-mail side, the default gmail settings totally blow (although I know a solution is coming soon, and you can always just browse to gmail.com), but the Yahoo mail settings work very well — the only things I’ve wanted to do that I couldn’t were to create a new folder, and to make some mail as spam. I can’t yet access my corporate e-mail, but that’s not the iPhone’s fault (although I suppose the native VPN support could be better).
• iPod: A-. Eight gigs isn’t close to enough to hold my music collection, so I’d need to bring my 80gig video iPod if I want access to all my songs (and Apple’d need to create a 300 gig classic model for all my videos). On the iPhone’s iPod player, I find it weird that I can’t see full info on a track (like its year, composer, or any notes I’ve added). But there’s enough space that right now I have loaded 1,161 of my favorite songs, and the interface is smooth enough that I have to agree that this is the best iPod I’ve ever owned.
• Boom box: C-. The speakers are not terrible, but also not loud enough to replace a boom box. I do think it takes too many clicks to pause a song (assuming you don’t have headphones on).
• Calculator: D. Only the basics (addition, multiplication, subtraction, division). Even my old cell phone’s lame calculator handled more than that. C’mon, Apple, couldn’t you have fit in a few more operations?
• Stock ticker: B. Some people carry a dedicated stock ticker device. The iPhone’s quotes are 15 minutes delayed, but you could always use the web browser and log into whatever service you use to get real-time quotes. And most day traders switched to laptops or pagers with custom alerts anyway.
• Flashlight: C. In a pinch, any cell phone can double as a flashlight (and sometimes the results are life-saving). The iPhone offers decent illumination; obviously not what it was designed for, but it can help you find your dropped keys on a dark night.
• Watch / Alarm clock / Stop watch: A. The time of day is shown on every screen. I don’t wear a watch anyway, but on a business trip I wouldn’t need a watch, or an alarm clock, or a stop watch — just the iPhone. I love the timer UI with its weird circular tumblers and an iPod sleep option. The alarm clock should let you wake to a favorite track, but I can deal.
• Camera: D+. It’s a 2 megapixel camera, but without a flash, pretty bad low-light performance, a pokey shutter speed, and no options for controlling camera settings whatsoever. You can take pictures, delete ‘em, set them as wallpaper, associate them with a contact, or mail them off — and that’s literally it. For loading pictures taken on a real camera and showing those snaps to friends, the resolution is great and the slideshow transitions are beautiful — however, all the photo management (selection, orientation, cropping, etc.) has to be done on your PC ahead of time. On the iPhone itself you can’t even delete a photo that you sync’d onto it.
• GPS / map case: B+. Does this replace my TomTom or Dash GPS navigator? Not quite. There’s no GPS in the iPhone, so it can’t tell you when to turn, nor automatically show you on a map where you are, nor does it read out the directions. But you can type in a simple reference to a location (”Mountain View sushi”) and get a list — and show overhead satellite or street views with pins, plus get directions to or from. The map is a delight to browse; a slick implementation of Google maps at the palm of your hand. For a long road trip I’d want my on-dash navigator. For short trips, the iPhone is good enough to get you there and prevent you from getting lost. I love how it walks you through each step of the trip with an animation on the map.
• Datebook: C. Syncing with Outlook is giving me a few fits, and it takes way too long. Any updates throughout the day are not reflected unless I sync again. You can’t sync wirelessly, only via the supplied USB cable and dock. The meeting attendees aren’t included, just the meeting title, time, location, and notes.
• Address book: A. No need to carry your little black book. Once you get your contacts imported, the address function is quite handy and capable. Some of the fields I’d like to use (like a category filter) aren’t really exposed, but the address book is really quite good.
• PDA: B-. When I first starting using a Palm Pilot in 1997, the main functions I used were calendar reminders, address book, notes, the “to do” list, and games. Later came mail and expenses. I stopped using my Palm once wireless became common, and started carrying my laptop everywhere instead. But there are times I miss carrying a Palm. I’ve already covered how the iPhone can handle my calendar and contacts. The notepad on the iPhone is nothing special; you can’t import notes, and the only way to get your typed notes off the iPhone is via mail. I’d also like the notepad better if I could password-protect individual notes. There’s no “to do” list function on the iPhone at all. And there are no built-in games, although more and more web sites with free games are popping up. (Plus you could hack your iPhone and load on the various custom apps and games that are starting to spring up, but I’m not going to do that just yet.)
• Blender: F. There are a lot of references to the iPhone blending, but I don’t see anywhere I can put in the fruit and juice. I still need to carry my dedicated blender if I want a smoothie.

Extra thoughts on iPhone as a cell phone: As a cell phone, the iPhone is very good. The UI is clear and functional, much better than the UI of my Motorola SLVR L7 that it replaces. I can hear people clearly and I’m told they can hear me clearly, and the dialing performance is quick (almost too quick).

Holding a flat soap bar to my head is a little weird (and the screen gets dirty quickly), but it works much better than I expected. However, there are a few quirks and areas for improvement:

1. Importing contacts needs to be more flexible. You can’t take them off the SIM of your old cell phone; iPhone doesn’t seem to use the SIM for saving or retrieving contacts at all. You can’t beam them over from your old cell phone via SMS or MMS or bluetooth or IR. For a Windows user like me, your only options are to enter them manually on the iPhone, get them from Yahoo (if you happen to put your contacts there), or sync them with Outlook Express or Outlook 2003/2007. I can’t stand Outlook and don’t use it beyond what I’m required to at work (where we use it for our calendaring). It took me two days to format my Palm Desktop contact list properly, export it as a CVS file, manually add headers, manually map the fields for importing into Outlook, and then sync with the iPhone. (Wonderful now that it’s done, but it was a lot of tedious work.)
2. The recent call list doesn’t support separation by outgoing and incoming calls — it only shows all calls or missed calls. The iPhone’s a little too smart for its own good about collapsing calls into a single entry. If I call my brother Rob’s cell, then he calls me from his home number, then I call his work, then he calls me from his cell, that all becomes “Robert (4)” and then if I tap for the details, it only shows the times and that the most recent call was from his cell, not a list of who called whom and the duration.

There’s some more I have to say, including the need for a separate RSS reader, some concerns about battery life and recharge time, and some weird UI design inconsistencies (sometimes you confirm in the keyboard widget, sometimes in the upper right, sometimes the upper left). But this is already long enough for now.

Let me sum it up: The sum is greater than the parts. Overall, I love my iPhone.

Busy morning — Kimi’s exhausted and in pain (honestly, I think the baby’s going to arrive any day now), so I took Sammy out with me. Dry cleaning, bagel shop, Costco, Children’s Museum & Zoo, Stanford shopping center for lunch, and then the UMF bit. Shiny new 8g iPhone, at $200 less than what I’d thought about paying for it.

Only now to activate it:

38 hours? 38 HOURS OF MAINTENANCE? Nothing going until Monday at 5:30am? I first called the Apple Store at the Stanford mall to see if this was accurate, and someone named Joe there said this was news to him but activation was an AT&T issue. He could give me the AT&T phone number. Sure, I said. The number he gave me was for DIRECTV. Joe, Joe, Joe. Sorry Joe. You’re fired. In a few seconds online I found the AT&T phone number from their iPhone FAQs page — it’s 1-800-331-0500. I called and eventually the woman admitted that yeah it’s probably down until Monday morning. 38 hours? 38 HOURS? AT&T, you’re fired. This is gross incompetence of the most preposterous proportions. 38 hours?

The main reason I needed a phone is because my old one, a SLVR L7, has started to have a bad speaker — I can hardly hear. So don’t call me until Monday, because I can’t hear you.

I hate you, AT&T. So much hate. You’re fired.

“UMF” stands for the “unseen mystical force” which urges you to buy things. After yesterday’s $200 price reduction in the iPhone, I am suffering from some serious UMF.

At work today, many are sporting their shiny new iPhones.

For now, I’ve held off. A good friend of mine works at Apple and I was able to see it in action last week. I want one really badly, but I don’t NEED one. And $600 for a phone isn’t really smart for me to spend right now, what with… oh wait, I haven’t announced that yet. Stand by for that.

Anyway, it’s beautiful and elegant and I don’t mind any of the shortcomings people have written about (with the possible exception of the battery being built-in, that does irk me). I want want want. But for now I shall not indulge the Unseen Mystical Force floating all around me.

Every other Tuesday we have a poker night; mostly it’s folks from TiVo, but we also have folks from Apple, Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and eBay show up. (We used to play at TiVo HQ, but HR put a stop to it for insurance reasons. If you play poker and want to join in, drop me a line.)

Happened to be that one of our poker nights was on the Tuesday of MacWorld and the iPhone announcement. One of the guys from Apple was at Macworld and couldn’t play. Turns out he’s on the iPhone team; he told us about it at last week’s game.

So, for months, he had been working on the iPhone. He couldn’t tell us about it, though, because the project was a secret. He couldn’t tell his friends about it. He couldn’t tell his family about it. The other poker player from Apple is one of his best friends, who he’s known for years, who works at Apple, but still he couldn’t tell him about it.

We tried getting all kinds of questions answered on Tuesday, but he really couldn’t say anything. We wanted to see an iPhone, but he’s not allowed to take any of ‘em outside the building where he works.

That’s secrecy.

Some people wondered why Apple revealed the iPhone now when it won’t be available until June. Jobs said (during Macworld) it was because they had to make semi-public filings about it, and he wanted to tell the world about it himself rather than let the FCC leak it.

I believe that. Sure looks to me that Apple takes secrecy a whole lot more seriously than our government does.

I last went to CES in January, 2000 (and there’s a photo of that brave TiVo crew near the front lobby). At that time, our Series1 box had been on the market for less than a year, and version 2 of the software hadn’t shipped yet. No Wishlists, no distinguishing between first run vs. repeats on Season Passes, and none of the advanced features that came later. We were in a deathgrip rivalry against ReplayTV at the time. We didn’t have many employees back then, and about thirty of us went to CES. When we came back, we found out things had been a bit chaotic in our absence. Ever since then I’ve stayed behind to help mind the farm. And truth be told, CES is exhausting, so I haven’t really missed going too much, as much as I enjoy visiting Vegas.

However, I do think it’s scheduled at the worst time of the year imaginable. It’s a lot of work to prepare for CES, and Q4 is always the busiest time of year (not just because of the huge amount of orders that are placed, but also because of budgets and project proposals being due, and almost everyone being on vacation or sick). If you’re on the hook for creating a CES demo, you just can’t relax during the holidays.

To compound the scheduling woes, this year CES occurs at the same time as Macworld. To me that’s just insane. Why splinter the press and attention of the consumer enthusiasts who like both Macs and other gadgets, forcing them to pick between Las Vegas and San Francisco?

Anyway, Apple announced their new iPhone today. Pretty compelling demo (I liked Engadget’s minute-by-minute coverage) and I’m a sucker for iPods (we have three already), but it seems a little big and I don’t like the idea of dialing numbers on a touch screen. Although that Bluetooth headset looks great. $499, hmm. Time for me to talk to the TiVo Rewards team and see if we can add it….

If you’re curious about what TiVo’s announced at CES, check out our press releases:

• TiVo and Comcast (demoing the upcoming TiVo Experience on Comcast cable boxes) — there’s also some great coverage from Megazone over at TiVoLovers, including a lot of photos;
• TiVo and Rhapsody (bringing the Rhapsody music service to broadband-enabled Series2 and Series3 TiVo DVRs);
• TiVo and MusicChoice (adding a great new music content partner to TiVoCast);
• TiVo and Roxio (Mac TiVoToGo, available now) — which I didn’t know about when I made my post mentioning Mac TiVoToGo earlier in the week).

Plus we won an Emmy for our interactive advertising platform!