Bill’s Blog

This election season there's a new trend -- cellphone spam! My cellphone is being innundated by calls from politicians and activists begging me to vote for this or that pol or issue. This has become more than a nuisance -- I am now getting more calls from politician-spammers than calls that I actually want. They are coming in while I'm at work, while I'm eating breakfast, while I'm sleeping.

So get this pol-spammers -- If you call me on my cellphone I will not vote for you. I may have been thinking about voting for you or for your issue, but one phone call to my cellphone will ensure that you will NOT get my vote.

Spam my phone, loose my vote.

So I just got out of the MacWorld Keynote and saw Steve Jobs introduce the iPhone.

Obviously, he spoke about a lot of other things too -- iTV is now Apple TV and all of a sudden the Beatles are cool again -- but the iPhone is the big news.

Interesting news that was not announced at the keynote: Apple has silently announced the next version of their WiFi base station, the AirPort Extreme. It's got 802.11n, three ethernet ports, hard drive sharing capability (for USB2 drives) and they've ditched the ridiculous dome shape in favor of the elegant (and stackable!) Mac Mini shape. I like this.

Enough with the chatter -- tell me about the phone!

So, first the name: iPhone. As you know (if you've been paying attention), Cisco recently introduced a product called "iPhone" that makes VoIP calls. Evidently Apple has been in negotiations for use of the trademark up until last night. So Yes, Cisco owns the trademark and we don't know what the deal is that allows Apple to use it.

Jobs introduced the phone by describing a new video iPod with a 3.5-inch widescreen display. It turns out that's just part of the new phone. What it's not is a video iPod. My video iPod has a 60G drive in it -- the iPhone is only available in 4G and 8G sizes -- not really enough to hold my music collection, let alone a season of Battlestar Galactica.

And as a phone, okay it's really slick. And it looks like a tremendous improvement over existing phones -- which really shouldn't be that hard to do. But it's missing something that's a dealbreaker for me and a growing number of my fellow baby-boombers -- I have to look at it to dial -- and I don't see so good anymore. At least I can dial my Motorola Razor (which I hate with a vengence) while driving. I don't have to look at it -- I can feel the buttons and speed-dial "1", "2", or "whatever". The iPhone doesn't look like it would be easy to do that with. I don't think I'll be able to use it while driving and that's a major requirement for me.

Zune Killer

One of the most important features of the iPhone is its wireless capability. Combined with the fact that iPhone has 802.11 WiFi and runs OS X, this is the actual Zune killer. Zune claims to be able to share music wirelessly -- but it's sharing capabilities are severely crippled. Of course Apple would not be able to offer officially sanctioned unrestricted media sharing capabilities but the fact that it runs OS X means that regular folk can (presumably) write applications and extensions for the thing -- so there's no real restriction on what can be done (presumably).

... one more thing

It would appear that Apple Inc.'s decades-long feud with Apple Corp. (the Beatle's record label) may be drawing to a close. Steve seemed particularly proud of his collection of Beatles tunes while demonstrating both the Apple TV and the iPhone. He even played a few cuts off Sgt. Pepper. As a fan of both Apples, I hope they can finally Let It Be.

I just checked -- still no Beatles on iTunes. Oh well.

... and am I the only one who noticed that Apple went out of it's way to rename iTV as Apple TV but left the iPhone name alone? iPhone is a trademark already owned by someone else. Is this a flip of the finger toward Cisco? Hmmm.... inquiring minds want to know.

... and finally -- strange as it may sound at an Apple show, I want to thank Microsoft for the comfy chair and net access to update my blog at the show. Very nice, and decidedly un-evil.

--Bill

I ran accross this page while watching Rocketboom:

http://www.wwwdotcom.com/

Being, well ... me, I thought, what a cool domain name! So I decided to look up the registration record. Nothing too interesting ... it's been registered since 1995 (as has my original domain, bearnet.com) and it belongs to some guy in Escondido, CA.

Still, the page is cool!

I started the bw-blog project a few years ago because I thought the existing blogging programs were far too complex for what they did. I decided to write something small and functional, and I did that. And it works.

I had intended to expand bw-blog into a full-featured blogging system, but I just never got around to it. In the mean time, I have come to realize that what I want is not a blogging system but a content management system (CMS).

I have a number of friends and clients who would like to have web sites that they can update themselves but they are lacking the skills to create and update a site, or the funds to hire someone (me!) to do it for them. A CMS would be great for them but there is a serious lack of simple, affordable, consumer-friendly CMS systems in the marketplace today.

Yes, there are free and free-ish systems like Movable Type that could be used as a CMS, but these are geared toward blogging and that's not really what most people want. Most of these folks want a simple way to put simple content up on a web page or six.

So that's where this project is going. I'm going to change the name to bw-cms and basically start over.

Another change of direction -- I'm going to write it in C.

Perl has served me well for a long time, and in some ways it would be a great way to do something like this. I want something small and fast and scalable and it just seems that C is the way to do that.

Also, I like C. I used to write lots of C. I enjoyed that. I'd like to enjoy it again.

So, to sum up: bw-blog is history. bw-cms is the future. C is cool.

--Bill

I saw this list of Ten Reasons Gay Marriage is Un-American on a BBS. It was unattributed so I took it and posted it on my web site. :)

Enjoy.

--Bill