I retired from personal blogging in July 2008 but you can find me over at blog.xero.com
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Motorola CEO Ed Zander (a guy who should know) reckons Apple are doing a smart phone.
Motorola CEO: Apple ‘to build a smart phone’
He also added fuel to persistent speculation about Apple’s interest in producing its own phone. “And we know that they are going to build a smart phone–it’s only a matter of time.”
Another stunning day. Breakfast at Pipe’s and people surfing waist high waves out the front.
We had a meeting with a Reseller that’s coming on board, and they made cookies!
I must have unconsciously have been smelling them baking because I remember thinking I’m very happy here.
Jimbo took me to my first baseball game last night. SD Padre’s beat out the SF Giants 9-1 to make the playoff’s. It was wild.
Highlight was Trevor Time, when ‘The Closer’ Trevor Hoffman comes on in the 9th to shut down the innings. He arrives to AC/DC’s Hells Bells at full volume.
Bobby got us great seats behind the Padres dugout, so it was a awesome newby experience.
I feel initiated.
So Apple will deliver an iTunes client for Windows Mobile. That’s a big call, as while the iPod is sexy, a Windows Mobile device is a pda, phone, music player.
So what does this mean?
In the iTunes launch Steve Jobs said that artists are earning more selling their music on a per song basis on iTunes than by traditional music retail. Madonna has now put her own entire collection on iTunes so that must be true.
Chatting to a mate of mine Jimbo in San Diego, a friend of his has a band in LA and they publish straight to iTunes.
What SJ must be doing therefore is disintermediating the music industry and cutting out the record labels and/or distributors.
This must be so lucrative that he’s prepared to let Windows Mobile devices compete with iPods.
Very interesting.
Noticed link on Sacred Cow Dung …
Charge up your buzzword count here.
Apple iTunes for Windows Mobile 5 spotted!!!
In the same week that Palm announces Windows Mobile.
Has hell freezed over?
Must be my 5th or 6th time in San Diego. We have a good reseller here, so plenty of excuses to visit. Driving down from LA you hit Carlsbad. Surfers in the water, dolphins around them, people hanging out.
On the way down through the SoCal beach communities of Newport, Huntington Beach, Laguna, Dana Point. Spectacular.
Finally got one of the upgraded Air New Zealand planes from AKL to LAX. They do look good and having the (WindowsCE powered) Video on Demand is great.
As a Gold Elite member I normally get upgraded especially if I do a non confirmed points upgrade.
But here’s the rub …so this time I put in my 400 points to upgrade but only made it to Premium Economy. While there is more space than economy it’s nothing like a normal business class seat so really hard to get comfortable and sleep.
So an unintended consequence of AirNZ’s change to economy/premium/business class model is that it’s better for me to change to Qantas which has the traditional economy/business/first arrangement so if I can up upgrade I can sleep on the long haul flights.
Update: My wife has ‘read the manual’.
… 600 points to get a standby upgrade from economy to business class … 400 points gets you a confirmed upgrade from economy to premium economy.
On the US West Coast this week. Quick trip to take advantage of some networking and customer opportunities.
I’ve had almost a month at home. Nice. The trip cycle starts again. I’ll be US East Coast end of October.
Love it. I take it everywhere as it’s so small so my podcast consumption count is way up. Even with just 2GB I’m hardly using any space.
It’s the coolest bit of kit for getting a reaction. So surprisingly small.
Haven’t pulled the 40GB iPod out for a week, but it’s good to know I still have that for carrying music if we go away at all.
Pre-advertising heads up for AfterMail.
Looking for Technical Writers. Great opportunity to get you head inside a product and own the documentation.
Help desk. Work lifestyle hours to support customers in the UK and US.
Let me know.
Google builds an empire to rival Microsoft
Dark fibre comments especially interesting.
Imagine how many wonka bars would get sold if they had a few golden tickets to this …
Google invites 400 to ‘off the record’ event
Bet there are more than a few peeved to not make the invite list.
Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar Beta
- Explore and modify the document object model (DOM) of a web page.
Locate and select specific elements on a web page through a variety of techniques. - Selectively disable Internet Explorer settings.
- View HTML object class names, ID’s, and details such as link paths, tab index values, and access keys.
- Outline tables, table cells, images, or selected tags.
- Validate HTML, CSS, WAI, and RSS web feed links.
- Display image dimensions, file sizes, path information, and alternate (ALT) text.
- Immediately resize the browser window to 800×600 or a custom size.
- Selectively clear the browser cache and saved cookies. Choose from all objects or those associated with a given domain.
- Choose direct links to W3C specification references, the Internet Explorer team weblog (blog), and other resources.
- Display a fully featured design ruler to help accurately align objects on your pages.
All of that would be useful for IE6 today.
Update. Frank and others noted that it actually does work with IE6. Doh!
We’re building an application that requires displaying times in various countries. The problem is displaying the time correctly with Daylight saving etc. We looked at WebServices but then found this example which shows that all times, including daylight savings info, are in the Registry.
World Clock and the TimeZoneInformation class
Windows NT’s time zone database is stored in the registry, at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Time Zones. Under this key are subkeys describing each time zone. Each subkey has the following values (examples taken from the GMT Standard Time key):
| Value | Type | Purpose | Example |
| Display | REG_SZ |
Display name | (GMT) Greenwich Mean Time: Dublin, Edinburgh, Lisbon, London |
| Dlt | REG_SZ |
Name for zone during Daylight Savings | GMT Daylight Time |
| Index | REG_DWORD |
Unique index number for zone | 85 |
| MapID | REG_SZ |
Unknown. May be related to Win95 clickable time zone map. | 0,1 |
| Std | REG_SZ |
Name for zone outside Daylight Savings | GMT Standard Time |
| TZI | REG_BINARY |
Offsets and savings start/end date |
Tom Scotts cartoon this morning was especially good…
I already have a 40GB iPod (gen III) so I didn’t need a Nano. I only walked into grab a cable. But then I saw it. Much smaller than I was expecting. Colour. Gorgeous. Had to have it.
Nano for podcasts - constant companion. iPod for music. That’s how I’ve justifed it to myself.
Not long ago, when we did services, I would have been physically sick by not being at a PDC when so much new stuff is being announced.
The two sides of what did PDC deliver or not
1) Office 12 demonstrated publicly for the first time. Tons of new features and new UI.
2) Windows Vista features demonstrated publicly, including search integration, new performance enhancements, new sidebar.
3) LINQ (Language INtegrated Query). Cool database stuff for .NET developers.
4) Windows Presentation Foundation/E. “E” for everywhere.
5) Start.com updates released.
6) Atlas (our AJAX Web development toolkit) demoed for first time.
7) Microsoft Max. A new photo sharing and display application.
8) Digital Locker. A new place to find, try, and buy software.
9) New sidebar and gadgets and new Microsoftgadget Site.
10) Coming later today? Sparkle. A new way to build Windows applications.
11) Coming later today? Lots of server stuff.
12) Coming later today? More Office stuff.
13) Coming later today? Workflow stuff.
But now we’re doing a product the reality of the Long Tail (thanks Andy) of Enterprise Software is apparent. We still have customers running Office 2000. 5 years old, two versions old, relatively unsupported (MS: … The fix for that is upgrade to Office 2k3).
A lot of the new, shiny, things rely on the new, shiny, infrastructure and so we’re seeing an increasing Long Tail. Vista will lengthen that considerably as it will require a hardware refresh.
If you can therefore deliver the business benefits of today on 5 year old infrastructure, you’ve got a good market. There are still lots of VB6 developers out there.
As a product company, the new, shiny, stuff does not necessarily make the boat go faster.
Probably the most significant changes to Office over the past 3 versions …
Microsoft Showcases New User Interface for Office “12†Core Applications
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