Global Nerdy

In an article in The Guardian titled My new mobile is lumbered with a bewildering array of unnecessary features aimed at idiots, Charlie Brooker complains about his Samsung mobile phone:

It seems to have been designed specifically to irritate anyone with a mind. It starts gently – a pinch of annoyance here, an inconvenience there – but before long the steady drip, drip, drip of minor frustrations begins to affect your quality of life, like a mouth ulcer, or a stone in your boot, or the lingering memory of love gone sour.

I understand his frustration.

The features offered by the more expensive mobile phones offered by my provider — Bell Mobility (whose motto could be “great signal, not-so-great phone selection, semi-amusing TV commercials”) — or any provider, for that matter, don’t seem worth the added expense. Hence I went with a relatively simple phone: a near-bottom-of-the-line Samsung that doesn’t even feature polyphonic ringtones. The only “special features” of the phone that I’ve ever used are SMS text messaging and the alarm clock function (it’s handy when travelling). The only feature I wish I had was Bluetooth syncing with the Address Book application on my Mac laptop.

Like many people, I’ve been using my mobile phone as a pocket watch. This phone even has an extra display you can read when it’s snapped shut, which is perfect when you just want to know what time it is.

With all the other mobile phones I’ve had, being cut off from the network didn’t mean that I was also cut off from knowing what time it is. Those phones would simply rely on their own clock. Not my current phone: when I’m in the subway and the network is inaccessible, the phone doesn’t show the time. Instead, it displays an animated dish antenna and tells me that it’s attempting to find some phone service, as pictured below:

This annoys me to no end. I want to know the time, and all the phone wants to do is go “Ooh! Look at me, boss! See how hard I’m working for you, boss! Pleasepleaseplease buy more Samsung products!”

Thanks to this, I’ve grown to become annoyed with the animations that the phone insists on playing whenever I turn the phone on or off. Must it display the Bell Mobility logo whenever I turn it on? Trust me, I know that my phone service is Bell Mobility: I get a bill from them every month. (Bell Mobility, if you really want my attention, how ’bout you pay me every month instead?) Almost as annoying is the animation that plays when I turn off the phone — an array of cubes that shrinks and rotates to display the message “Powering off”. Although I know that it’s good to have some kind of feedback, my reaction to this over-the-top animation is “I knew that — I pressed the ‘off’ button, didn’t I?”

It’s been a while since I’ve gone phone shopping — is it this way with all mobile phones, or just the Samsung ones?

Family-social-network-cum-genealogy-site Geni has gone from $0-$100MM (in valuation) in eight months (I’m sure the “seven weeks” in Mike’s TechCrunch post quoted below is a typo).

Seven week old Geni raised a $10 million second round of financing last week, led by Charles River Ventures (see our coverage of CRV here), with a post-money valuation of $100 million.

This is a 10x increase in valuation for Geni. The company’s first round of financing, led by Founders Fund, was $1.5 million, at a $10 million post-money valuation.

Sacks describes Geni as a “social network for the family.” It provides an easy to use (and easy on the eyes) Flash based family tree. As you add family members, they are optionally emailed to register as well and help fill out the tree.

I’ve used it (only to build a family tree so far, I haven’t spammed my family and in-laws with invitations yet), and it’s very straightforward as family tree builders go. My hat’s off to the Geni team.

Still, it strikes me as weird that we’ve got a $100MM social networking site whose primary population will be dead people.

Source: $100 Million Valuation For Geni

The good news: a major band has released their latest album, in its entirety, as DRM-free MP3 files.

The bad news? It’s the Barenaked Ladies.

I kid because I love. And also because, as a Canadian of a certain age, I was practically force-fed BNL from their earliest days, whoring their self-produced tape release on MuchMusic (the nation’s music station, if you must know).

Mike “TechCrunch” Arrington says the album will be released through Amie Street, the digital download service where tracks start out free, becoming more expensive as they gain in popularity (capping out at around a buck, I think).

The songs will only be free through the first few downloads, and will start to rise after that. But even at full price, listeners are getting quality music, DRM-free. Let’s hope other labels follow Nettwerk shortly. Market driven prices and no DRM = Music Nirvana.

I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for the major labels to follow suit, Mike.

As for Amie’s “market driven prices,” I beg to differ. Since there’s no scarcity (there’s an infinite number of copies of any digital track) there’s no market condition making these tracks more expensive as the demand increases. That happens when there’s more demand than there is supply. While I wish all success to any company trying to do something different in digital media retail, it bugs me when people refer to Amie Street’s pricing model as market based.

Source: Barenaked Ladies: New Album. Free. No DRM. Now.

Watch for all sorts of follow-up, discussion (and possibly a shouting match or two) over at O’Reilly Radar, where Tim O’Reilly starts a series of articles titled Programming Language Wars. In Part One, he presents a graph comparing book sales on computer languages between January 2006 and January 2007, based on data from the Bookscan Top 3000 Report (click to see it at full size):

Tim writes:

As you can see, books on every language but Actionscript (Javascript for Flash), JavaScript, Ruby, and SQL were down, some more than others. Ruby books did outsell Python books. But Javascript — driven by everything Ajax — was the biggest winner.

Link

Perhaps most of the tips listed in the article 12 Quick Tips To Search Google Like An Expert might be old news to you, but there may be one or two tricks in the list that you might have missed. In my case, I was unaware of the “numeric range” search, such as this one: president 1940..1950.

One tip they don’t list in the article is the unit conversion feature. For instance, give these a spin:

• 180 pounds in kilograms
• 500 miles in light-years
• 1 parsec in cubits
• 1 femtosecond in fortnights

Feel free to try less ridiculous conversions. Or more ridiculous ones, if that’s your thing.

Link

Designer/developer Joshua Porter lists his five design principles in the latest post on his blog, Bokardo:

1. Technology serves humans.
2. Design is not art.
3. The experience belongs to the user.
4. Great design in invisible.
5. Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

Pretty sound advice. Even if we could only get techies to follow principle 1 and artists/designers/ponytails to follow principle 2, that would solve a lot of problems.

Link

If you’re like most of our readers and live in the U.S. and Canada, it’s time to enjoy your last week of standard time. Come this Sunday, daylight saving time begins — a full three weeks earlier than usual.

The change to daylight saving time is deceptively simple in appearance. In 2005, the Energy Policy Act was signed into law. This act, whose purpose was “to help every American who drives to work, every family that pays a power bill, and every small business owner hoping to expand”, included among its measures a change to daylight saving time. Starting this year, daylight saving time would be extended by four weeks, starting three weeks earlier on the second Sunday in March and ending a week later on the first Sunday in November. The rationale for this change: if daylight saving time saves energy, then extending it will save even more.

If you’re looking for someone to blame, Ben “Buzzkill” Franklin is a good candidate. In 1784, riffing off his earlier “early to bed, early to rise” nonsense, he wrote a letter to The Journal of Paris titled Daylight Saving. Written in the excessively florid language used only by 18th century statesmen and aliens on Star Trek, Franklin suggested that by waking up earlier, Parisians would enjoy more daylight during their waking hours and as a result use fewer candles and economisez beaucoup francs.

In a move as telling of the stereotype as their coinage of the word schadenfreude, the Germans were the first to put the daylight saving concept into practice in 1916. Eager not to lose the stereotype war, Newfoundland implemented this silly idea a year later. The Americans implemented daylight saving time in 1918 along with the establishment of time zones, but it proved to be so unpopular that it was repealed a year later. Daylight saving time became something that was practiced at the discretion of several localities — a few states and cities — rather than at the national level. This was followed by a whole lot of governmental meddling starting with FDR and currently ending with GWB; you can read the rest of the sordid history over at the WebExhibits Daylight Saving Time site.

The concept of daylight saving originated in a world that predated not only the concept of time zones, but also a globalized economy, ubiquitous computing and a world that runs on timetables, so perhaps “Buzzkill” Franklin can be forgiven for his crime against humanity in light of such extenuating circumstances. However, the current U.S. administration, who live in the current world and who should recall all the work that went into averting the potential problems of Y2K, should know better.

In the New York Times article Time Change a ‘Mini-Y2K’ in Tech Terms, the problem with the change is put simply: Most internal clocks in computing devices are programmed for the old daylight-time calendar, which Congress set in 1986. The end result is that all sorts of tech companies and vendors are scrambling to patch systems programmed to the old spec and that extent of the effect of the change on uncorrected systems is unknown.

The article lists a number of systems that could be affected:

• Email applications
• Calendar applications
• Hotel wake-up call services (many hotel chains’ wake-up calls are centralized under one or two data centers)
• Smart electric meters, especially in systems where the charge for electricity varies on the time of day
• and, of course, the number of appointments and meetings that will be missed as a result of the change to the time change.

The upside is that for most of us, the change to daylight saving time will be an annoyance. As Rich Kaplan, Microsoft’s VP of Customer Service puts it, “It’s not as if you’re going to lose any data — your documents, e-mail, digital music or pictures.” (I quote Mr. Kaplan with the caveat that it is perfectly appropriate and even prudent to worry when a person high up on MS’s org chart tell you that there’s nothing to worry about.)

My advice: download the appropriate patches for your computer and other devices, confirm and re-confirm any appointments that take place during the first three weeks of daylight saving and don’t take the word of any electronic clock in the month of March without corroborating evidence.

Links

• Time Change a ‘Mini-Y2K’ in Tech Terms (New York Times)
• WebExhibits’ site on daylight saving time
• Wikipedia entry on daylight saving time
• Ben “Buzzkill” Franklin’s letter, Daylight Saving, to the Journal of Paris