After a number of years using WordPress as my blog engine of choice, it’s time for it to wander off into the sunset. I’ve been working a lot with Drupal lately, and it’s a very nice platform to develop information-rich websites with. Rather than try to support two different platforms, I’m going to be consolidating (somehow) everything into one. I’ve also not really been keeping this site up lately, as I’ve been busy posting in other places.

Ultimately, I’m looking to bring all my online output together in one place, and Drupal looks like a good platform to do that with. Hopefully, I’ll be able to import all this WordPress stuff. Not really sure how that’s going to work though.

I used to own dozens of Internet domain names. I can’t even remember them all. When I moved to Australia, I let several of them lapse. While I let some others go just a few months ago, I still have a handful, kept around for a variety of reasons.

My friend @praxxis put me on to domai.nr, which is a terrible horrible nasty thing to show an addict. I nearly bought another 4 or 5 domains, spending way too much money. I managed to hold back though – barely. I’m still sorta considering one though. It’s awfully expensive, but so cool…

Riges Younan recently Twittered about an interesting article by Eric Ries entitled What does a startup CTO actually do? Having been the CTO at a handful of startups – and it’s what I’m doing now – I can say the list is pretty much spot on, with just one exception: etc. Et cetera is all the other stuff that needs to be done, but no one’s been hired to do it yet.

Usually a startup has one or two people (including the “CTO”) in the technical department. As tasks get too big or too complicated for the CTO to do by themselves, they need go and find someone to do them. Hopefully, this search is planned for, and there’s budget for it. Having a CTO that does too much “etc”, makes for an unhappy and unproductive CTO, and the company as a whole suffers because of it.

I don’t understand them. I used to categorise music into two genre-busing classifications: “bad” and “good”. However, after getting jiggy with some “bad” stuff, I’ve shifted the categorisations 90° to “interesting” and “boring”. I like the interesting stuff.

The new iTunes 8 eliminates the preference item for turning off that spooty genre browser. Luckily, Mr Paul Milson found the hidden preference item to turn it off again:

Copy and paste that into the Terminal, restart iTunes, and all will be well.

You can also turn off those iTunes Store arrow links with:

All will be well again.

As much as I’ve whined about Optus’ paltry data plans, they’re the best things going in this, the arse end of the world. Much of the buying public seems to agree. Vodafone and Telstra shops next door to the Optus shop I was at were pretty empty.

I am now an Optus customer. So far, I’ve been with Vodafone, AAPT, Vodafone again and now Optus. I also have a 3 MobileBroadband card.

I started a contract for a 16gb iPhone Friday afternoon. I would have been able to walk away with an 8gb model if I wanted to. The 16gb models sold out instantly in most Optus stores. A small number of stores still had 8gb models, but 16gb seemed to be sold out pretty much everywhere.

Big upside for Optus here. I think they’re gaining a lot of new activations because of their relatively aggressive iPhone plan pricing. In just talking with people in the shops, more than half of the people getting iPhones with Optus are churning from another provider. What’s more, their plans have a nice deal where you’re allowed free 5-minute calls to other mobile numbers within the same account. Because of this, I’m bringing the other two mobiles in my family along with us – they were prepaid on Vodafone, and now they will be on Optus caps. I don’t think I’m unique in this regard either.

As an aside, I learnt that a 3G USIM is backwards compatible with 2G phones. I put the new Optus USIM into my old Siemens S55, and it’s working fine. Reception in my house is better than Vodafone was (no surprise there).

Gizmondo Australia has some leaked Vodafone pricing and it’s horrible. Makes Optus look good.

How can you offer 5gb of data for $39 and charge more than four times that when the data is coming from a phone? As much as I ridiculed Optus, they might have won themselves a new customer.

Unless Telstra’s plans are reasonably priced.

(Hahahaha!)

I see you’ve acquired a sense of humour! How wonderful. The hilarious email you sent out this arvo with your iPhone pricing is one of the best pieces of humour writing I’ve had the pleasure of reading in recent memory. Tears – actual tears! – streamed down my face. I could scarcely breathe for laughing so hard. Rogers recent iPhone packages in Canada were greeted with great peals of laughter, and Optus, here in Australia, have risen to the challenge admirably. Let’s read together my favourite passage:

And the great news is you’ll be able to get an 8G iPhone 3G from Optus for $0 on a $79 Cap plan over 24 months which provides $550 of calls, text and more, plus a whopping 700MB of included mobile data for Mobile Internet Browsing.

700MB is “whopping”? Is this 1990? Are you AOL?

At least Optus has announced their plans. Telstra mumbled something vague a few days ago, and Vodafone seems to have gone to sleep.

There’s an old memo from billg making its rounds through the tubes lately, and it’s very interesting for a few reasons.

The first, and most obvious to me, is that Bill’s a computer use like everyone else. He can’t figure out some of the weirdnesses of Windows, he’s frustrated when technology doesn’t work the way it ought to. He gets annoyed when websites take too long to do something simple.

it is … like a puzzle that you get to solve. It told me to go to Windows Update and do a bunch of incantations.

and

Then it told me to reboot my machine. Why should I do that? I reboot every night — why should I reboot at that time?

The second, and more subtle, thing I noticed was his management style. He went through the steps to install software like any normal user would. Good. Any CEO worth their beans does that. “Don’t believe your own PR” and all that. He then put together a well-written rant about it and sent it to the appropriate managers. In the postscript, he’s quoted as saying that he considers it his job to do things like that. Again; good.

The problem here is that there doesn’t appear to be any followthrough whatsoever. The people to whom he sent the email have done nothing to fix the problems. While I’m sure they’ve gone and done a lot of interesting work, nothing they’ve done has solved the basic problems that Bill has outlined in his email. Windows Update is still slow, it still asks you to restart at weird times (to be fair, so does Apple’s Software Update). The Microsoft website is still incomprehensible. Add/Remove programs is a wasteland. Little, if anything, has changed here. This is five years later.

The difference here between Bill and Steve Jobs in this instance is that if Steve had to come to the point of writing an email like that, people would be losing their jobs. Where Bill fires off missives about user experience, Steve fires people who don’t measure up. Steve seems a much more hands-on leader. “Drinking the Kool-Aid”, or “experiencing the Reality Distortion Field”, or whatever you want to call it, is a very important element in creating a cohesive ecosystem of products and services. Steve’s got that, Bill doesn’t. Perhaps he did at one point, but certainly doesn’t now. And Ballmer? Don’t make me laugh.

Bill’s leaving Microsoft a few years too late. He should have left a short while after the release of XP, while they were still on top of their game, before Google and Apple were such confirmed threats to their business. Now, it just looks like he’s another rat jumping off a sinking ship. Fake Steve’s analogy of the three-legged race, in which two slow runners try to win a speed running race by tying themselves together by the ankle is apt. A few months ago, it seemed like Yahoo was the weaker runner. Now I’d say they’re equally screwed.

My next computer will be whatever pro-level laptop Apple releases next. That’s kind of a given. I don’t like desktop computers because I can’t throw one in my bag, use it on the tram, and have everything at my fingertips wherever I happen to be. I’m a laptop guy. There are rumours about case revisions, new CPUs from Intel, yadda yadda. They’ll release a new MacBook Pro, and that will be my new MacBook Pro. Fine. After that though, things get a little murky. What will my next next computer be? That’s more difficult to determine. I’m not sure if it will even be a computer as we know it.

Remember mainframes? These massive, mostly infallible computing behemoths that would never ever fail. But when they did, everyone went home, because there was no way to do any work without them. That thing on your desk, while it shares basic components with computers of today, was little more than a screen and keyboard. All the heavy lifting was done downstairs in the massive fluorescently-lit, Antarcticly-cooled room, populated by people in lab coats, who mutter to themselves in acronyms. Sound familiar? Centralised computing is coming back. We call it a web application, we call it software as a service, we call it Facebook, we call it salesforce.com, we call it Windows Live, we call it the iTunes Store.

Computers are getting bigger

At the biggest end of the big-computer scale, you’ve got people like Google and, um, well, Google. They’ve got one of the biggest computers in the world, and anyone can use it. The pedants amongst us will point out that it’s actually quite a number of little computers, but that doesn’t really matter. Functionally, it’s one big computer. And we can do whatever we want with it. Amazon has something similar, and has been around longer than Google’s offering. Sun’s got something like that, and VMWare, Parallels and dozens of others either offer products allowing a regular person to use a slice of their computers to pretend its one of theirs.

In addition to being able to run your own stuff up in the Internet cloud, there are now dozens of online application vendors. People selling (or giving away) Internet-based word processors, spreadsheets, CRMs, painting programs, photo management applications, and lots more. Who needs desktop versions of this stuff? Admittedly, the online versions do leave something to be desired, but there is only one way to go with these things, and that’s up. We’re at the beginning of a bit of a fight for advanced net-based languages. There’s Microsoft’s .NET and Silverlight, Adobe’s Flash and recently-announced Air (Flash developers, see that writing on the wall? It’s addressed to you). Sun is still trying to make Java work (give up now), and Apple seems to have completely forgotten about QuickTime, which coulda been a contender. There’s even a camp of people who think some kind of advanced HTML and JavaScript is the way to go. Whichever technology wins (and I’ll write about that later), suffice it to say that within a few years, pretty much everything you’ll need to do will be available online in some way shape or form. The trick here is integrating all these online applications as well as desktop applications are. That’s the really tricky bit, and I don’t see anyone looking at that right now. I’m sure it will happen though.

Computers are getting smaller

While computers are getting bigger, they’re also getting smaller. And I’m not talking about MacBook Airs or EEE PCs, I’m talking about actual computing power. Moore’s Law. Gruber did a good comparison of the power of an iPhone vs the power of a variety of older Macs. Turns out the the iPhone is very generally comparable to the original Blue & White PowerMac G3 (coincidentally, the last desktop computer I used as a primary computer). All the power of a PowerMac G3 in your pocket. Newer phones from Nokia or Sony Ericsson are similarly powerful. And that’s sitting in your pocket!

Simultaneously, wireless Internet connection speeds are getting faster. Much faster. The mobile phone I have right now can transfer at a theoretical 56k/sec. Very slow. I have a wireless Internet card that I’ve seen transferring 1024k/sec in real world situations – on a moving train! My next phone will have that kind of speed built-in. This stuff is only going to get faster.

Put it all together

Network-enabled applications, online data storage, big computers far away, shrinking personal computers, and very fast mobile Internet access. My next next computer might not be a computer at all, but a subscription to a virtual computer that I can access with a pocket computer that we used to call a phone. In order to have the life that I currently store in my laptop with me, I won’t have to carry my big laptop anymore, just a small pocket computer. High resolution versions of my photos, music, movies, writing, email – everything would live up there. I’d carry around the access to it in my pocket.

Problems

Integration. Someone’s got to figure out a way for all these independent online applications to work together and share data, or else nothing will get off the ground.

Security and privacy. How do I make sure no one goes snooping in my virtual computer? If it’s a physical thing, I can keep an eye on it. Virtually, well, who’s to be sure?

What now?

Well, we’ve got to start building some of this stuff. Lots of the building blocks have been created, they just have to be put together in a consumer-accessible way. Apple’s slowly heading in this direction, I think, using a slightly different method of simply plastering MacOS in as many places as they can, and working out the details later. Their .Mac service is a dark horse, I think, in making cloud computing totally effortless for Mac users. We’ll have to wait and see. Certainly exciting times ahead.

Huh? What? Hello? Vodafone? iPhone! Australia? Yes! 3G? Dunno. What? Where did this story come from? What about all the SingTel/Optus rumours? The dark horse, the Vodahorse comes out from, well, the darkness, and announces that they’re some kind of wild worldwide partner. It won’t be for the existing iPhone, because Voda’s networks in most of those ten countries doesn’t support EVDO. It’s going to have to be a 3G unit, at least in Australia. When? Dunno. No one’s saying. But damn right I signed up. I’m with Voda already, and I was planning to use my unlocked 3G iPhone, bought from wherever, on their network anyway.

So what does this mean for an unlocked 3G iPhone? Will it happen, or will Apple continue with their not-so-successful program of locking the phone to a certain network? I’m hoping they’ll do what every other mobile company does, and that is provide locking as an option to the network reseller, but make unlocking a relatively painless process that won’t be destroyed whenever a software upgrade comes down the spout.