Is it Firefox, or is it me? Something's wrong.

I've used Firefox for years, and it's never been as flaky on OS X as it's been for the past month or so.

Of course I don't know whether the problem is Firefox, Google's web apps, or OS X 10.4. All I know is it's getting miserable.

Firefox loses track of the cursor position in wysiwyg edit boxes. Firefox pegs the CPU. Firefox sucks memory. Firefox crashes.

If Safari worked with Google I'd switch. I may try Camino again, though it uses the Firefox rendering engine.

I don't see many other complaints, so if you're having trouble leave a comment or two. Maybe it's just me.

Update 2/28/2008: I had to go back to Firefox -- at least for Google properties. Safari has too many problems with Blogger, and it doesn't work at all with the page editor. Some of the problems, such as pasted text showing up outside Safari's rich text editor, have to be at least partly Safari bugs.

Update 3/4/2008: Now I'm trying Camino, which has gone through a few point updates since my last try. It certainly feels bloody fast, and so far Google is treating it like a first class client. It would be nice if it has fewer memory leaks and SPBDs than Firefox.

Google App services for Blackberry - yes, they exist

Ok, so we made the big switch, and now I have to make my wife's Blackberry tolerable before she kills me.

I know she's going to hate the keyboard - at least for a while. She and I are both pretty good at Graffiti, and it's great to be able to scrawl a quick "ink" note on the screen. There's nothing like that on the BB. At the moment I doing text entry at about 1/10th the speed of non-predictive Graffiti 1.0. The prediction engine is really struggling with URLs and other non-word strings. It doesn't help that the manual has gone missing.

So I was looking about for ways to ease the pain, so I figured I'd try the Gmail client. It installed, but it doesn't work with Google Apps. It directed me to the web UI for her Google Apps Gmail. Yech.

Happily, I persisted. It turns out that there IS a version of the client for Google Apps Mail, and for other Google App things besides -- including synchronization with the Google Calendar ...

Gogle Apps Mobile

... Gmail mobile application for BlackBerry® smartphones

... BlackBerry® smartphone users can access their mail around town with a slick new Gmail application. Download the free application by browsing to http://m.google.com/a from the internet browser on your BlackBerry® smartphone. Within minutes, you'll be sending and reading messages, just like you can from a standard computer browser. It's fast, and allows access to your entire message archive. You can even open attachments, like Microsoft Word documents, PDF files and photos.

...Google Talk mobile application for BlackBerry® smartphones

You can also stay connected your contacts while you're away from your computer with the Google Talk application for BlackBerry® smartphones, offered by BlackBerry®. Just browse to http://www.blackberry.com/GoogleTalk to download the free application...

Google Calendar synchronization tool for BlackBerry® smartphones
mobile calendar sync

With Google Sync for mobile, your BlackBerry® calendar application stays synchronized with your Google Apps calendar. Appointments added or changed online will be reflected on your BlackBerry®, and changes you make on your BlackBerry® will show up in Google Calendar. Just go to http://m.google.com/sync from your BlackBerry® browser to download and install the Google Sync for mobile application...

Google Docs access from mobile browsers

Access and view your Google Docs on your Blackberry®, iPhone®, Windows Mobile phone or other phones which support the Webkit browser...

Update 1/26/2008: More here, with some editorial comments on where this is going ...

OS X video encoding for Blackberry Pearl

My current plan is that tomorrow we will switch from Sprint to AT&T, and from my despised Motorola RAZR and my wife's beloved ailing Samsung (PalmOS) i500 to a pair of Blackberry Pearls (cute, eh?).

In February/March I will switch to an iPhone and my Pearl will be an unused (subsidized!) backup phone.

Once ePocrates runs on the iPhone, and the 32 GB GSM-high speed iPhone 2.0 is released, the iPhone 1.0 will go to Emily, I'll get iPhone 2.0 and we'll sell one Pearl and keep the other as a backup phone (gotta love GSM card swaps).

Anyway, more on the move with full details this weekend. In the meantime I was intrigued to come across an obscure reference to an OS X application that uses FOS tools to transcode video to run on a Blackberry. Potentially handy for keeping the kids amused in an emergency:

• Encoding videos for BlackBerry Pearl and Curve at Aqua 211
• Blackberry Mac Users forum

The BB Mac forum looks useful. In preparation for this migration I've added the Blackberry Mac forum to my custom OS X search.

A deal with the Devil: We move from Sprint to AT&T and towards an iPhone

We have completed Phase One (!) of the family migration from Sprint (Motorola RAZR (yech) and Samsung Palm OS i500 (lovely)) to AT&T (BlackBerry Pearl and Nokia 6555). Phase II will replace the Nokia 6555 with a February iPhone. Phase III will replace iPhone 1.0 with iPhone 2.0 and the Blackberry Pearl with the used iPhone 1.0. Somewhere along the line either the Pearl or the Nokia will be sold.

The transaction was about as fraught as buying a new home from a crooked realtor using an adjustable rate mortgage. On a coastal bluff. (Update: crooked as a three dollar bill.)

How complex was the deal? At the start of the transaction I thought we were getting two BlackBerry' Pearl's, but then I found out that the great deal price ($100 after rebate for the two) was dependent on a 6 month data contract. I only wanted the data contract on one of the Pearls.

Wicked.

I'm going to tell the story here, as there may be some general lessons to draw. First, the Goal and Motivation. Next how it turned out, with my best estimate of prices.

Goal and Motivation

• John to get an iPhone if the SDK turns out to be real- preferably iPhone 1.1 (ex. with 16GB of memory)
• Emily to replace a much loved but dying Samsung (PalmOS 4.x) i500. There's no modern equivalent, so the move had to be another Palm or a BlackBerry. The new phone had to run ePocrates.
• Since the iPhone has no subsidy, pick up a "free" phone as a backup phone -- and a phone for times the iPhone is too expensive to risk. Note: the iPhone comes with a SIM card too, so I'm told I'll have two phones with two active SIM cards sharing my number.
• Take advantage of my employer's "personal service" option. (15% monthly service discount and 50% off any post-contract phones).
• Family plan with about 1000 any time minutes.
• Any phone (with the notorious exception of the iPhone) should have a standard earset mini-jack, and a charge/sync with a mini-USB cable. [ONLY the BlackBerry phones meet this standard. It's not well documented, but the Nokia 6555 may come close. It has a 2.55 mm earset jack and charges with a micro-USB cable.]
• Disposable phone should have vibration mode and an alarm clock.
• All things being equal, I'd prefer to get away from Palm. Palm is like a barber who was once pretty good, but has since gotten into beer and meth and can't be trusted with sharp objects.

Outcome

In theory you can do all of this stuff online and save $25, or if you don't need a corporate discount you can do it through Amazon and sign up with their oddball contracts.

Good luck.

I never considered trying this online. I had the good fortune to work with Josh M. at the Roseville AT&T/Cingular store - about 3 minutes from my office. That was worth much more than $25

I needed the following:

• a copy of my last Sprint statement (with the account number)
• my corporate "FAN" number, so I could I couldn't find this out (AT&T drives corporate accounts to do all the purchases online) but Josh found it for me quickly.
• credit card
• driver's license

I ended up with the following devices, I'm sure I'll have more comments on them in future posts (Update: the "rebates" come in the form of restricted use AT&T debit cards.)

• BlackBerry Pearl (for Emily): includes an earset and a fairly compact mini-USB charger/data cable. This cost $100 with a 2 year contract and a 6 month BlackBerry data plan; there's a $50 rebate coming in 6-8 weeks. The BlackBerry apparently needs an additional 1GB micro-SD card to be fully useful.
• Nokia 6555: includes a fairly compact proprietary connector charger. In theory will charge and sync with a micro-USB cable. Vibration mode available, has alarm clock. Cost $50 with a 2 year contract (no data); $50 rebate coming in 6-8 weeks.

I ended up with the following charges and plans (AT&T documents this pretty well -- after you commit. The process, however, is so complex that we missed on the final handout pages.):

• Two year service contract. $175 early termination fee for EACH line.
• Family 1400 minutes $80/month: We wanted 1000 minutes, but the choices are 700 or 1400. Funny how that works! We'll pile up tons of unused rollover minutes over the 11 month rollover cycle. Oddly enough those rollovers will make it somewhat tempting to add a third line for a child phone. (I'm sure AT&T never thought of that.)
• Second line charge: $10 a month.
• BlackBerry data plan for Emily: $30/month. $50 penalty for early termination. Note this is a slow speed EDGE phone.
• Activation fee of $36 on the first line $26 on the second. I couldn't negotiate out of this, but I'm a poor negotiator. This is annoyingly high for getting a new customer from Sprint. I suspect the fact that Sprint is hemorrhaging customers has something to do with the high activation fee.
• Additional minutes: 40 cent/min (unlikely to need)
• Text messages: 15 cent/msg. (we did this rather than buy a flat allotment until we see how many we use)
• Canada calling: $4 /month. Costs is then 19 cents/minute to Canada and a discount on roaming. Sprint was 12 cents/minute with no roaming. It turns out that for us this may be a rather significant cost increase as I often call my parents during my daily commute.

There are two rebate forms (total $100). Josh assembled them for me, but I have to mail them in two separate envelopes. First bill includes one month billed in advance.

The transition from Sprint, preserving our original numbers, is supposed to take 3-24 hours. At the 4 hour mark I can use the new phone to call and the old phone to receive.

We wont' get much of out the Rollover minutes given the high threshold plan we had to get, but here's the contract languge:

Rollover® Minutes : Rollover® Minutes accumulate and expire through 12 rolling bill periods. Bill Period 1 (activation) unused Anytime Minutes will not carry over. Bill Period 2 unused Anytime Minutes will begin to carry over. Rollover® Minutes accumulated starting with Bill Period 2 will expire each bill period as they reach a 12 bill period age. Rollover® Minutes will also expire immediately upon default or if customer changes to a non-Rollover® plan. If you change plans (including the formation of a FamilyTalk plan), or if an existing subscriber joins your existing FamilyTalk plan, any accumulated Rollover® Minutes in excess of your new plan or the primary FamilyTalk line's included Anytime Minutes will expire...

And it looks like when I get the iPhone I'll get hit with yet another activation fee ...

Wireless ...A pricing plan designated for one type of device may not be used with another device...An activation fee of up to $36 may apply to each new data line...

I think I'd rather take my chances with the crooked realtor really. I'll update this post when I find out what the REAL costs are -- with the first few months bills. I suspect AT&T will turn out to cost us rather more than our former Sprint contract, but it won't be easy to tell for a while.

Update 1/26/2008: Check status of the faux-rebates here.

Update 7/30/08: Whatever AT&T may claim, they always set your "contact options" to "I want every form of spam invented by man". You need to go into your AT&T customer profile and turn them all off. I suspect you probably need to do that every few months. Or just give up.

Update 3/25/09: Not necessarily AT&T's evil (though they have plenty), but the Nokia I got turns out to have a deeply evil streak.

Salvaging the Air Book: USB 3.0?

I've been turning the oddball Air Book over in my head. What the heck were they thinking?

It if were $600. If it had Gigabit ethernet, or even Firewire with a firewire/ethernet dongle. If it had a dock ... If did Bluetooth tethering to an iPhone... Built in GSM support ...

But it has none of the above.

Ok, what if the designers were gambling on USB 3.0?

Universal Serial Bus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

.... On September 18, 2007, Pat Gelsinger demonstrated USB 3.0 at the fall Intel Developer Forum. USB 3.0 is targeted at ten times the current bandwidth, roughly 4.8 Gbit/s, utilizing a parallel optical cable. The USB 3.0 specification is planned to be released in the first half of 2008, commercial products are expected to arrive in 2009 or 2010.[20]

* Backwards-Compatibility and Efficiency: USB 3.0 is designed to be backwards-compatible with USB 2.0 and USB 1.1 and employs more efficient protocols to conserve power...

A future Air Book with USB 3.0, and a USB 3.0 to ethernet dongle, and a USB 3.0 docking station -- that could make sense.

Maybe today's Air Book is a marker for that future.

Incidentally, I've been hoping for a 20% drop in Apple's share price to refocus them on delivering value to customers (viz the Airport Extreme disk story). I might get my wish faster than expected!

Jeff Atwood's recommendations: multitool, flashlight, thumb drive

CH's Jeff Atwood spends a LOT of time thinking about his keychain.

Lazy people like me prefer to read Jeff, and just buy whatever he suggests

Coding Horror: What's On Your Keychain, 2008 Edition

Leatherman Squirt S4 multitool

Corsair 8 GB Flash Voyager thumb drive

Fenix L0D-CE AAA LED flashlight

Curious results of various image formats: OS X Preview and PDF

Image compression is a tricky thing. For example, few people know that PNG is by far the best format to use for screen shots; vastly better than JPEG, GIF or (shudder) BMP. (Ok, so Word's mysterious internal format is pretty darned good -- but it's a mystery.)

Storing black and white scanned document images is even odder, however. Consider these results from PDFs generated by my Brother MFC-7820N document scanner (1 page, 300 dpi, b&w). In each case I saved from OS X preview:

• Original PDF: 132kb
• PNG: 155kb
• JPEG 2000 lossless: 296kb
• JPEG 2000 good quality: 380kb
• JPEG: 328 kb (artifact can be seen)
• TIFF zip compression: 220kb
• TIFF alternative compression: 216kb

A PDF of a scan is simply a wrapper, like TIFF, around some other format. PDF uses different compression depending on the image. A B&W image does very well with ancient run-length compression, so I suspect that's what's being used. I was surprised by how large the TIFFs were -- I think OS X Preview isn't providing the optimal compression for a b&w image.

Interesting that JPEG 2000 lossy is almost 40% larger than lossless for a b&w image. I thought I'd get better results there.

PNG, as always, does very well for lossless compression. A shame they never put any $!#$% metadata into the file specification!

Note that iPhoto will handle all of those image formats except PDF.