MultiAlien got a great write up on MathFour – a great site that correctly takes the point that math is not a four letter word!    They loved it!  One very apt negative comment was that I needed to add a resume feature.  I’ve done that and the new version (1.006) is in the app store for approval now.  It should be available as a free update in a week or less.  But Bon Crowder (the creator of MathFour) points out some interesting things that he and I discussed but I’ve not posted about before:  games like this open up different learning channels in the brain.   Trying to dodge an alien ship and still shoot the right answer to a question forces your brain to create new paths for that memory.  I did a lot of thinking about this long ago when I was on nuclear subs and we had to do drill after drill on the basics:  fire, flood, battle, radiation leak, etc.  When you drill with more going on than jus stating an answer for a test you really start to know that material.  That was one of the inspirations for how I did this game.  I’ll be writing more on this in later posts, and I suspect that Bon will be too.

Anyway, please check out MultiAlien.  If you want a free code to download it and can promise to tell people about it, let me know.  My email is gherlein <at> herlein.com – do the usual substitution of @ for <at> (must at least try to hide from spammers).  I’m also very interested to hear about other similar games, education theory and learnings, and your thoughts on the game.

I’ve learned a lot about both game development and iOS/iPhone building this game.  I’ll be posting more on that in the coming month too.  But for now, back to vacation!

Over the last few years I’ve become increasingly frustrated.  As a free solution I had no support, so when my wife’s emails were going missing I had no help in chasing it down.  I never did solve it.  I had mails forwarded to me that were indeed sent, but alas, they never showed in her inbox.  That’s probably when I found that there were two inboxes – the real one accessible from POP/IMAP and the web interface.  Last year I seriously played with using a local client (on Linux) for at least my mail.  It was a baby step to the real leap I wanted to make, which was to get off GMail altogether.  But none of the Linux clients were really to my liking; they all had some warts that were just too ugly for me to cutover.  This last week my wife started having problems accessing a web site that happens to be hosted on Google sites.  It was a really strange permissions problem, apparently because logging on to get herlein.com email set a certain user permission in the new Google App infrastructure.  I spent 15 minutes chasing that before realizing that I really want no part of it.

I’ve been able to ignore the privacy implications of using Google for a long time.  However, lately I’ve had a growing sense of unease.  After all, NOTHING IS FREE.    I was getting email services but was paying in units of privacy… and we don’t yet know the conversion rates for that currency!  As I scraped through the new Google App infrastructure I realized that Google’s email is really complicated – it’s not just a simple email interface anymore.  They are bolting on a ton of things underneath that we don’t know much about.  Hell, they may not know much about them either, to be fair.  Does the right hand know what the left is doing over there?  Even if they do, am I comfortable with that much more of my data and traffic crossing that system?

You see, Google is an advertising company cloaked as a technology company.  I work in advertising and I joke that part of my job is trying to make Minority Report style ads really viable.  But Google is DOING THAT NOW, just without the silly retina flashes, and not in ways we can even imagine now.   Over the last few years they ‘index’ all my email, measure my click throughs, and with the Google Apps infrastructure can see a lot deeper into my traffic and inner workings (assuming I host docs there, etc).  To what gain?  Ads.  Better and more specific relevant targeted ads.  Good for them, they are building a business.  I won’t address any moral issues around all this.  For now, it’s legal, they got there first and so far they are executing on it.  Nice.   And supposedly they provide an opt out.  But their system is so darn complicated under the hood, will it really work?

Except that I don’t have to play.  Or at least, I can choose to not accept services in exchange for aspects of my privacy that I cannot measure (yet).  I can move my email to another provider, for starts.

So I did.  I turned on a Rackspace email account and pointed my MX records there.  Unfortunately I didn’t realize that GoDaddy DNS sets the timeouts to 1 week by default for MX records, so I’m keeping Google set at a lower priority and keeping it active for a week, just to be sure I don’t drop an email (as a side note, I’ll be moving my DNS off GoDaddy soon too – I simply hate their GUI).  I don’t really care for the RackSpace web interface for mail, but it’s functional.  That’s my backup really anyway, since I do most of my mail on my mobile, or from my desktop.  And now that I have cut over to all Mac’s at home I just use the Apple Mail program.  It has warts too, but it’s functional, and I love how well spotlight finds stuff on my hard drive.  I don’t need Google to search mail!  Really!  That technology is so commonplace now.  That value add is commodity!  Rackspace has a special deal for SliceHost customers (I host this blog on SliceHost) so my email will cost me $36 per year.  I suspect that my privacy is worth a lot more than $36 per year!

My only remaining question is:  why didn’t I do this sooner?

But that’s not my major point today.  One of the things that came up again on this trip is the notion that for the first time in my career Microsoft is just plain not in the game.  Irrelevant.  No show.

Now, I’ve been at this game awhile.  I wrote my first code in 9th grade in 1979 (on a TRS-80 Model 1) well before Microsoft mattered.  But my first real development came during the period when Microsoft was trying to get Windows to be real.  In those days Digital Research had a great DOS called DRDOS that was the cats meow.  And in my opinion, Microsoft did everything in their power to make sure DRDOS failed.  Fast forward through all the history with Microsoft, the anti-trust cases, the clear outright dominance of the market, the flailing attempt of my beloved Linux to get some kind of toe-hold, the Microsoft funded SCO debacle… for most of my professional life Microsoft has been the bruiser, the 600 pound gorilla, the Heavyweight Champion of the World.

Not any more.  When was the last time you heard something about Microsoft that mattered?  Thought so.

The reality is that in the consumer space it’s now Apple and Microsoft.  The shift to mobile-oriented computing is well documented (I won’t elaborate here).  For most people the computer they use most is their mobile phone.  The innovation and the new markets are in mobile.  The interaction with the cloud will be primarily mobile.  In short, the MARKET that MATTERS will be mobile.  And Microsoft has a pathetic attempt with Windows Mobile 7.  It’s late, it’s not as good as what shipped by Apple or Google/Android last year, and it has no compelling EXTRA VALUE.  I’m not the only one who says this – just read here (disaster) , here (doomed), and here (unimpressive) (your own search will return hundreds more like this).   On the desktop market, which still has a place, the only market I see Microsoft in is the old Enterprise.  And if the Oracle momentum is not stopped, that will matter less and less to Redmond too.  That’s a whole different post though.

I want to point out what I mean by EXTRA VALUE.  Android provides compelling value by being free to the handset vendors allowing for a cheaper phone, and it supports the Google ecosystem giving free access to email and navigation.  The only think my wife really misses from her Android phone (I bought her an iPhone) is the navigation in Google Maps.   Microsoft has NOTHING to compare.  Apple has the cool factor, of course, but they also have the Apple ecosystem around iTunes.  Serious extra value is there from an integrated suite of tools that just work.  Microsoft has NOTHING to compare. They simply don’t.  Their software is crap, they have no extra value, and they don’t offer a price advantage.  They still exist on the echoes of their former monopoly power.

As Om Malik points out the shift in mobile is Apple and Android taking market from RIM and Nokia.  Microsoft is not even mentioned.  I could write much the same about RIM and Nokia – they suffer the same problems that Microsoft does.

The bottom line is that we are entering a new era, and it’s going to be one where Apple, Google, Oracle, and Amazon are the new gorillas.  I’ll save it for later why I think Amazon will be in that list, but the most important thing on my mind today is that for the first time ever in my career, Microsoft is simply not in the game.  And I don’t think they ever will be either – they are too big, too bloated, and as described in the The Innovator’s Dilemma they are getting eaten from below.  And as I reflect on the years of their bullying, I can’t say it bothers me all that much.  Long live the new era.  I think it’s rules will be different, but no less cut-throat!

In file included from main.c:1:
serial.h:49: error: expected declaration specifiers or â\200\230…â\200\231 before â\200\230u_charâ\200\231

I knew my language settings were right:gherlein@aslan:~$ echo $LANG
en_US.utf8

After some digging around I found that I was over-riding the environment in my .emacs.   I must have added it years ago to work around something somehow:

‘(current-language-environment “Latin-1″)
‘(default-input-method “latin-1-prefix”)

These lines are not needed on a modern system.

So there you go.  A boring geeky post, but hey, it might help someone.

No time at the moment to really go into details. I wanted to blog something today though, since its been so long since I said anything here. Never fear, I’m around, just really busy and playing with a lot of new technology. I hope to write about a lot of it very soon.

Then there’s the “Apple’s iPad Tablet Could Slay eBooks and Netbooks.”  Steve Jobs slammed netbooks as “slow” and sporting “low-quality displays”. The problem with them, he said, is that ” netbooks aren’t better than anything”. So let’s look at this for a moment.  The iPad has a 1024×768 display that’s not wide screen.  Sure, it uses a nice newer oleophobic, LED-backlit, 9.7-inch screen that uses IPS (in-plane switching) technology.  Newer netbooks will use something similar but will be wide screen.   The nVidia Tegra/Intel Atom chip is incredible at media encoding/decoding.  I don’t know if Apple’s A4 CPU will be much different, but it won’t be radically better.  But the real killer is that the iPad runs the iPhone OS.  It’s single tasking for goodness sakes.  Apple will sell iWork applications for $10 each – but can you image the use case for that?  You cannot switch from your word processor to your spreadsheet and back?  We’ve been able to work like that for what, 25 years or so?  One of the smartest moves Apple ever did was base OS X on the unix-like BSD operating system.  They got great networking and multi-tasking out of the gate.  But on the iPad?  No way.  Did I already ask what century Apple is in?  Oh, and did I mention that there’s no USB ports on the iPad either?  So you cannot just pull out your thumb drive to move some data between machines.   Golly.  I use that all the time.  I carry a thumb drive on my key chain I use it so often.

The biggest thing about this is how simple it would have been for Apple to just hit a grand slam.  Widescreen.  A real multi-tasking OS.  The A4 can decode HD video the way the new Atom/Nvidia chips can – imagine if they’d put an HDMI port in!   And Bluetooth for a wireless keyboard/mouse when at a desk.   Then you’d have a netbook killer *and* a Kindle/Nook killer.  Then the only real issue would be their Evil policies around application acceptance.  I’ve blogged on that before so I won’t again… but it’s even worse that a new platform – a real tablet – will live in such a controlled ecosystem.  If someone really comes up with an amazing new application that is the killer application for tablets (maybe one we have not imagined yet) Apple can just kill the competition out of the App Store.  You cannot buy software from anyone else.  This device that is now clearly more than a phone but less than a general purpose PC, but the fact that you can buy iWork for it indicates it’s more general purpose than not… and now Apple controls the software distribution channel?  Smart business move, but very bad for the consumer.  Restricting the open market is never good for the consumer.

Of course some people (some of whom I really respect) seem to express an attitude that since the software on the device is so easy to use, so polished, that they don’t mind all the other problems.  Kudos to Apple for working so hard on the interfaces and doing such a good job in general on their software.  Other software vendors should aspire to that.  Of course, they cannot use the ‘private APIs’ that Apple can use.  They will never have the access to the in-depth knowledge base of how the inside of the machine/OS runs so that you can optimize your code.  But hell, folks had those disadvantages against Microsoft too and they… oh, wait.   A lot of categories Microsoft now controls dominant market share in.  Gee, how’d they do that?  Apple’s playing the same game.  Smart for them, but bad for the consumer in the long run.

There’s a lot of foo about Flash support.  Frankly, I admire Apple for taking a stand.  I don’t like Flash.  It’s a completely proprietary, close ecosystem controlled by Adobe.  A lot of what I don’t like about APple I don’t like about Adobe (though there are things I do like about Adobe).   I think that Flex is silly and needlessly complex.  I think that Flash video has been a very big detriment overall to what video COULD BE on the net.  Having spent the last 7 years working with IPTV technology, I actually know what is possible.  And Flash video ain’t it!    But since so many of today’s web sites are flash based (including PRN, where I work – where we just launched our new website that is SO much better than our old one) then it’s pretty shocking that you cannot do flash on the iPad.   Just think about it – major companies web sites you cannot see with an iPad.  But then again, if you consider that Apple really wants you to consume media through their channel…  maybe it’s not to strange.  But is it good for the consumer?

Personally, I want a tablet.  I have several use cases for one in my life.  I like to read in bed, but part of what my daily word consumption is the web.  I read RSS feeds, web pages, great articles I pick up from tweets… and then I read a book.  I ride the San Francisco Muni to work a lot, and I won’t pull out a notebook there.  I would a tablet.   In meetings I don’t like to put the screen up and block peoples faces.  But I do like having a computer there so that I can either look something up fast, or more likely, respond to an urgent IM with enough of a reply to let them know I grok the problem and will get back to them as soon as possible.  I want to be able to use the tablet to watch movies too – only in HD and wide screen.    I think there’s a LOT of things you can do with a computer that is with me pervasively like I’d use a tablet.  But I want to be able to install software from an open ecosystem where the best offerings compete for my dollars.  Yes, I do want to develop software for it myself – or at least be able to if the demands of my job and kids ever give me more time.  And I most certainly don’t want to spend $500+ on a device only to then become a captive customer to Apple.

The biggest thing I see is that Apple is using this as a play to control even more of the media puzzle.  This is how Apple will control more of the casual use market (folks who just basically email and simple surfing).  This is how Apple will challenge Amazon for the eBook market.  This is how Apple will try to control the distribution market for eMagazines and eNews.   It’s not about being a good tablet, it’s about being a good content delivery device.  And maybe it will be that for a large market segment.   I’m sure the iPad will  sell like hot cakes.  And I’m sure that as the price drops many more will buy it.

But not me.  No thanks Apple.  I’ll wait for the MSI Android Tablet, or something like it.   What about you?