darryl ramm’s blog

I had a great early season soaring flight out of Williams Soaring Center on March 1st, with an over 4 hour, 460km flight along foothills on the eastern edge of the Mendocino Mountain range. This was a chance to try out my SPOT Satellite Messenger again. The SPOT messenger is capable of sending manual “OK” and emergency messages my interest is using the messenger in “SPOTcast” mode where position reports (latitude, longitude and time, but not altitude) are sent automatically every 10 minutes.

SPOTcast messages are available on the SPOT website but unlike the manually sent messages they cannot be sent through email or SMS messaging. There is no ability to preview the web site before you purchase a SPOT so people often believe the SPOT web site can do a lot more than it currently does, and for example people assume that the SPOTcast messages get automatically displayed on a map and updated as new position reports come in. What is actually available is much simpler, current SPOTcast messages are displayed in a table, you select the ones you want plotted and click a button to plot on a Google map. See images of this user interface in my previous blog post on SPOT.

The SPOT messenger appeared to work flawlessly, as it has previously. An interesting recent addition to the SPOT website allows the SPOTcast reported locations to be saved in Google Earth kml file or GPS Exchange (GPX) formats. If you are interested in playing with this in Google Earth, here is spot_messages.kml the file containing the SPOTcast position reports from the SPOT web site and 831c4fv1.kml the kml flight trace produced from my flight logger submission to the OnlineContest (OLC). Just open both files in the same Google Earth session and you should see them overlaid as in the large screen shot image linked to the thumbnail above. In Google Earth you can click on each square “Track” point to show the corresponding time and latitude and longitude coordinates.

I’m still on my first set of Energizer AA Lithium batteries after several flights of several hours each. So while I’d have prefered the ability to use external 12 volts DC power, it does not look like battery life is an issue.

I’ll write up some more comprehensive comments on the SPOT satellite messenger soon, but in the meantime I wanted to provide some screen shots of the SPOT web site showing what is available from the optional SPOT Track Progress service from SPOT. Overall I’m impressed by the SPOT messenger and I will be using it in my glider, particularly when flying in remote areas to automatically track my location and as a supplement to my existing McMurdo Personal Locator Beacon (PLB). I purchased my SPOT messenger from my local REI store, it is also available at REI online.

SPOT is a subsidiary of Globalstar, the satellite phone company. The SPOT satellite messenger has an internal GPS receiver and sends the GPS coordinates and message type info via the Globalstar L-band simplex data network. Message types available are an automatic tracking message, or manually triggered events - a “911″ distress alert, a less severe “help” message or just an “OK” message.

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So one of the neatest things Yahoo owns is Flickr. But I’m at a loss to understand the snails pace of innovation at Flickr. There is tons of stuff the could be doing with new features, tools and integration. But anyhow instead of wasting space on that I’ll just whine about Flickr Uploadr 3.0 — the down-loadable utility that is supposed to make uploading photos easier, well previous versions did, the current one is just broken.

Build 3.0.2 at least is broken on Windows XP SP2. Starting with the big one - the actual button to upload images never appears, oops bit of an oversight there. And lots of sloppy UI things — like not having any rollovers/hints in the UI. And when you view Upload>Preferences but don’t change anything you still get a dialog box saying you changed preferences and asking you whether you want to apply those changes to the current photos. Dragging the main window frame out larger and smaller shows strange behavior of an horizontal scrollbar on the right panel if you resize the window enough to have a vertical scroll bar on the right panel. Don’t they know how to do basic UI QA? There appears to be other strange things going on as well. The vertical partition between the panel should be re-positionable. And on and on…

How do you mess up something so simple and then actually want to release it?

Santa wears a black turtleneck and he is giving his usual keynote at the MacWorld conference on January 15th. I decided to hold off on a Macbook Pro purchase hoping to see an upgraded model coming. I need a high end machine for multimedia work, overall desktop PC replacement, including running VMware Fusion.

My MacWorld wish list would be for a 17″ high resolution screen model, with

• Intel Penryn procesor (6MB L2 cache) at 2.6 GHz
• An internal dual layer Blu-ray superdrive (ultradrive?), I guess that would make it something like a BD-RE/BD-R/DVD-R/DVD-RW/DVD+RW/DVD/CD-R/CD-RW/CD optical disk, phew. The ability to play blue ray movies would be a bonus (but not required). Fastmac already has an aftermarket Blu-ray drive available for the MacBook Pro.
• Increased express card connectivity. Ideally two seperate ExpressCard universal slots instead of the single /34 slot in the current MacBook Pro models.  Universal slots accomodate /54 as well as /34 cards. I suspect there would actually be space to put two universal slots on a 17″ MacBook Pro. Failing that one universal and one /34 slot would do. These would give me the ability to carry around an expresscard/54 CF Card reader (for my Digital SLR camera) internally in the universal slot and an expresscard/34 SATA-II controller for hooking up lots of disk for video editing. I’d like Apple, to at least make the single /34 slot a universal slot.

C’mon Santa I’ve been a good boy can I please have these wishes :-)

I stopped using a deskside PC about two years ago and like having my whole computing life in one place on a laptop. I’ve been thinking over what to do with my current ThinkPad T42 laptop which is just too underpowered for what I need. High on the list is buying a MacBook Pro and making the switch back to the Macintosh as a primary computer. Part of wanting to upgrade is driven by lack of disk space on the ThinkPad T42 and part of it is driven by wanting more horsepower and memory to run Photoshop on larger images and to do video editing. For video I have an old copy of Adobe Premiere 6.5 and I’ve been leery of upgrading this on my ThinkPad since most people I know who is doing video are working with Final Cut Express or Final Cut Studio on a Mac.

I’ve been looking at different options and thinking about the switch. Just some of the software I use is shown in the photo above. I thought it might be interesting look at switching from a Windows laptop to a Mac with a reasonable number of applications and so I thought I’d write about some of the experiences. Bottom line is it is going to cost me about $1,200 in software upgrades/cross grades and software relicensing to move to the Mac, and that is without a big splash on something like Final Cut Studio. I wish Apple had a program where I could get an upgrade credit for Premiere to Final Cut Studio, that would make the whole decision pretty automatic. Which will make the purchase of a high-end MacBook Pro something like a $4,700 purchase - Yikes. Sure I get a platform that can do a lot more, especially with video editing, but it’s interesting just how much it costs to move. Time costs of lost productivity and relearning things is going be significantly higher than a few thousand dollars but I look at this as having to bite the bullet some day.

Obviously any switch made easier with the availability of VMware Fusion and SWSoft Parallels Desktop. Don’t expect me to be impartial here, I’ll be using Fusion and I think it is a lot more stable than Parallels Desktop. But both Fusion and Parallels will perform much better than the old Connectix (now Microsoft) VirtualPC did on PowerPC based Macintosh systems.

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Sorry TiVO. I have two older Hughes HR10-250 DirecTV HD TiVO recorders and both of them are running over 1,000 days without dialing into TiVo. These were the state of the art when they came out, I grabbed them off the very first shipments to BestBuy. Except for their really slow menu system they work great.

I just refuse to play TiVO games and give TiVO my viewing information and since I don’t purchase any pay for view events there is just no need to connect. And especially post Rupert Murdoch’s aquisiton of DirecTV there is no way I see the TiVO hating DirecTV folks ever following up on pursing requirements to connect the TiVO units to a land line so they can do their daily calls. Sure they’d love to have the pay per view business but if you are no using that anyhow…

Besides being painfilly slow at times the TiVO user interface on these boxes is better than any other DVR/set top box I’ve used. So I’m not looking forward to what happens if one of these boxes dies.

TiVO was an impressive company with great products and technology but suffered the same problem as companies like Healthion that come into established (and technology backwards) marketplaces and try to shake things up against entenched players. You just know with ad skipping fears and copyright concerns and the past laggard behavior of media companies they were going to have a tough ride. Then companies like DirecTV did not want TiVO in the middle of their food chain. I’d like to see TiVO survive and they are clearly playing around with business models trying to work but since the little TV watched in our house is all DirecTV there is no TiVO in my future.

It is pretty embarrassing when the premier news publication in Silicon Valley can’t get basic email to their readers right. Like not a clue.

I used to get one useful news summary email each morning from the Mercury News. I found it useful and I was more than happy to put up with the advertisements. Over the last few weeks I’ve been getting spammed a few times by the Mercury News with sponsored email from them on behalf of advertisers but the worst is that they seem to be doing insane experiments on their readers with poorly formatted html email. So badly formatted I will not read it. I’m using Yahoo!Mail Beta, but this stuff looks awful under Microsoft Outlook. It looks better under gmail but that’ s because gmail strips the background image, the text formatting and column layout is still awful.

I mean why would anybody with even the slightest clue about html portability try to stick background images in html emails? The screen shots show yesterday’s email rendered in Yahoo!Mail (Beta) and in Microsoft Outlook 2003.

There is just no need for attempting the overly complicated html formatting they are trying to do, and even if the design changes were justified there is no need to be slamming experiments out to all their reader base until have the formatting stable. Oh and you would think that they had email preferences for receiving plain text emails instead of mis-formatted html. Think again (or good luck finding them if they exist). That link at the top “If you cannot see this newsletter correctly, please see out online version here” needs the “If” replaced with a “Since”. Sigh.