August 2008 Archives

I've only had the Kodak Zi6 for a day, so I haven't come to any conclusions about the overall quality yet. My initial impressions: good color reproduction and video compression, but motion blur and jittery video can be distracting.

Kodak Zi6 - 60 FPS from Matt Ferrell on Vimeo.

Comcast has been under fire for limiting peer to peer traffic on their network, so it isn't a surprise that they're trying to find a less offensive way to manage their traffic. Customers who exceed 250GB of bandwidth each month are in violation of service. When a customer goes over the limit, they may (emphasis on "may") receive a phone call from customer service. Go over the limit twice in a six-month timeframe and your service can be terminated for a year. Here are my problems with this approach:

• A phone call is not enough. Customers should receive emails when they start nearing the limit, and bandwidth usage should be displayed in their Comcast website account and bills.
• New services and technologies are pushing internet usage to all time highs, and this trend isn't going to stop any time soon. Whatever limit seems fair today may seem unfair a year from now.
• Punishing customers with a termination of service is heavy handed. Why not charge extra for going over the 250GB limit? First offense is $25. Second offense within a six-month timeframe is $50.

Read the full article here.

I know publications write up obituaries for notable people ahead of time, but publishing them prematurely? That's a new one. Bloomberg accidentally published their Steve Jobs obituary on Wednesday. Big whoops.

Read the full article.

MildMannered Industries blog has a recent post about MobileMe and the challenges of syncing (via daringfireball). While the post is insightful and pragmatic, I disagree with the sentiment that syncing is too hard and shouldn't be attempted.

"Personally, if it was me, I would have let .Mac die a quiet death. The problem set for ubiquitous syncing is just very very hard, and the consequences of failure, in terms of user dissatisfaction are too high. I suspect that, in time, MobileMe will go the same way as the Newton."

I can't speak to the syncing challenge from the developer point of view, but as a long-time .Mac and MobileMe user I have a consumer oriented angle.

When syncing works, it's a magical and wonderful tool. When it fails, you curse the gods for smiting you and wonder if there is justice in the world. A little over a year ago, I had .Mac wipe out my entire address book and calender data because of a hiccup between computers. I learned a hard lesson that day about backups, or in my case a lack of backups.

Shortly after MobileMe launched, one entry in my address book kept duplicating itself. Each day would add one more version. If two weeks would pass without me noticing the duplication, I'd find 14 additional entries. After some "maybe if I pat my head while I click the mouse button" troubleshooting, I stumbled upon the culprit. Microsoft Entourage on my work computer is set to sync address book and calender data with my Mac apps. There was a hiccup between Entourage syncing and MobileMe syncing that created the duplicates. The answer was to delete the duplicates and original entry and enter that person anew. Easy fix, but still frustrating.

One issue that continues to make my brain hurt is undead email that surfaces in my mail clients. If I delete an email in Mail.app, it still shows up on my iPhone until I refresh my inbox list. Irritating, but I understand why this is happening. However, if I delete a message on my iPhone and then check MobileMe's webmail, the messages are still there. Wait ... what? With no clear way to refresh the inbox list, I have to click and delete one of the undead to make the entire list refresh. I'd expect the webmail client to be the most up-to-date and free of conflicts. Yet, there they are: the undead emails. Sitting there. Taunting me.

Clearly Apple has not found the holy grail of syncing yet, but that doesn't mean I want them to give up trying. Overall, I've found MobileMe more reliable than .Mac when it comes to syncing my data. Apple is taking a step in the right direction and I can only hope they don't give up.