However, that was the last flight of the day and the item in question was out of sight of other passengers, but my newspaper was sticking out, which meant that it was likely that the seat pocket would be examined in cleaning. It’s extremely likely that my property was picked up by one of your employees either after the flight or in the morning before the next one. I immediately registered with your web site for the item in question, identifying not only the flight, but the seat (thanks for not posting a phone number, but only an impersonal web page. It really shows how much you care). So, given that this kind of thing happens all the time, I did hope that there was a chance I would get it back. It was a long shot, to be sure, but not a non-zero one.

Now you Apple, thank you for creating the mechanism so that I could track my device, send a message to it, lock it and wipe it. In this case, I can’t locate it or send a message to it as it was on airplane mode. So, most likely, whoever has it has either wiped it, failed the login and had it wipe itself, or is trying to hack it (or fence it). Since, by your own definition, the device is now stolen property, maybe you could let me know when someone else tries to use it after it has been reset? No, of course, you can’t do that. Doing that would mean that you might be liable in all sorts of ways, right? There are so many ways that some mechanism could go wrong like that, that your corporate council decided it was best not to get involved. Even though you could actually immediately notify me the minute that the device registered to me with the unique ID you use to track your customer’s devices popped up again. This actually works out better for you, because now you’ll have sold me the same device twice.

So, yup, I can now troll the net looking for the device myself in a time-consuming, frustrating and fruitless attempt while constantly reminding myself of my own mistake. I wasn’t that fond of it in the first place, but I actually need it for a project, so I’m not left with much choice. I’ll need to file this as just another case of crappy customer service.

Thanks for nothing guys!

I have to say I was very pleasantly surprised. The atmosphere was indeed distinctive and unusual, but not overbearing. The dining room was open, light and inviting, the bar cozy and dark. There were certainly some antique touches and lots of big plants, but it felt more like the Palm Court at the Plaza in New York or the Laurel Court at the Fairmont in San Francisco rather than your great grandma’s dining room.

The food was also better than expected. My seafood fritter appetizer had been allowed to go cold in the pass-through and was not impressive, but my dining companions’ fried oysters were hot and quite good. However, my halibut main course was cooked perfectly; the inside tender and the outside with a nice thin crust. The others had the Salmon and also enjoyed their meals. For desert, I had a coconut pudding that was a bit sweet but which I had no problem finishing.

The service was good, attentive, but not overbearing. The staff friendly, but not obsequious. The prices were a bit high, but not unreasonable.

I think that this would be a good restaurant to try when looking for something a little different, something unique.

The experiment is posted on the labs area of my site.

Is Apple jumping on the crazy train?

I liked this article on Newsweek: Apple vs. Everybody: The company’s epic battle over a missing iPhone is only the latest in series of contretemps.

It’s the kind of attention that Apple, long a media darling, isn’t used to. Apple’s control-freak nature didn’t matter as much when it was a plucky underdog. Yes, Jobs was a demanding boss and a finicky perfectionist—but he created great products. We rooted for Apple, and wanted it to survive. Apple seemed like the anti-Microsoft, a company that was on our side. But this year Apple will do nearly $60 billion in sales, and its market value stands at $240 billion—the third-largest in the United States, bigger than Coca-Cola and Pepsi combined. Any company that big can seem a little scary. So when police start breaking down doors over a lost phone, it’s a PR disaster, especially for Apple. The company works hard to cultivate a counterculture image, with ads that have featured Gandhi and John Lennon, not to mention the “I’m a Mac” hipster. Yet lately Apple has started to look like the big bully of the tech industry, the kid who doesn’t play well others. Over the long haul, that can put customers off.

It definitely can put developers off (including this one), and when your platform has a lot of competitors gunning for it and a slim percentage of the desktop market, putting off developers is not really a very good idea. Apple is betting the company on their new strategy of a tightly controlled ecosystem where they make a small amount off of every transaction and act as intermediaries between content producers and developers and their customers. It will either be fantastically successful or Apple will crash and burn in a spectacular fashion. Only time will tell.

Switching to four week sprints was mostly to reduce the amount of time spent in the scrum meetings themselves relative to the amount of working time. Between planning poker, retrospectives and sprint planning, a lot of time is lost to the process itself in a two week sprint. For a team used to working on 6 week sprints, fitting stories into 2 week chunks was also difficult. I like the idea of two week sprints, but in practice, it was difficult for a team that is new to scrum. We’ll maybe try 2 week sprints in a future product cycle.

We still haven’t switched to our planned internally created scrum tool which itself makes things difficult. Our backlog is an excel spreadsheet and our tracking is all on Wikis. Hopefully, we’ll be converted over to the tool by the next sprint, which should make life a bit easier on me and the scrum master.

It is a total processor hog, on purpose. I basically wanted to use it to push the limit of what could be done in the player, so I kept adding more filters and processors to it until the audio started to break up on my Core Duo 2 Mac Book Pro and then stepped back just a little. It turns out that you can actually do a ton of audio processing interactively in the player leveraging Pixel Bender. This was also designed to run as an AIR app, which means that if you really want to play with it, close all your other tabs. Really.

Pixel Bender Synth Experiment

I’ll be posting all the code on the page eventually.

Some techy details:

• Each Pixel Bender shader is encapsulated within an Actionscript class and launched via a ShaderJob.
• Each Pixel Bender filter processes two samples at once to double throughput.
• The synth uses three Pixel Bender Shaders as does the Reverb, the other filters use one.
• The delay-based filters (reverb/delay) are using simple bit-bucket style delay in actionscript, but the delayed signals are mixed back with the main signal via Pixel Bender shaders.
• All signal paths are stereo. When mixing two stereo inputs, a pixel4 representing the 2 sets of stereo channels is used. When processing/generating a single stereo signal, a pixel4 representing two sequential stereo samples is used.
• The filters are ordered as such:
  

Will post more info soon. Ask any questions in the comments. Thanks!

Like the rest of the software industry, I’ve been pondering what the effect section 3.3.1 of the iPhone 4.0 SDK will have. I had fully been planning to make an iPhone application at some point. I had planned to do the initial version with Flex to prototype, but then also spend time doing a Cocoa version to better learn that SDK for myself. This iPhone 4.0 SDK announcement honestly has me questioning if I do really want to develop for the iPhone. Not just because of a higher-minded sense of indignity at Apple’s lack of openness of their platform, but rather because of that combined with their somewhat arbitrary and opaque app store approval process. Could I spend months of my spare time learning ObjectiveC and working on an iPhone application only to have that time be a complete waste if the App store reviewers decide that they don’t want that app in the store?

Thinking about it this morning, I realized that not only was Apple’s move to lock in developers nothing new, but that I’d already written about it before (in fact, I’ve been blogging about it since almost the day I started doing professional development for the Macintosh): iPhone SDK: The carrot for Cocoa, the stick for Flash, The difference between being an Apple developer and a Microsoft developer, Developers Developers Developers Developers.

Gruber had the motivation right, I think, but I also think he got the ramifications wrong. Since Steve returned to Apple, they have been applying the screws tighter and tighter to their developers, trying to get them to lock in. It was somewhat indirect at first, but the long term implication was clear: “We’ll tell you how to develop for our platform, if you do as we say, then you’ll be fine. If you don’t do it the way we tell you, your life will be a never-ending stream of headaches.” The move to Intel (forcing all developers onto X-Code and a big rewrite of any PPC-assembly) was step one, the move to 64-bit (dropping support for Carbon after promising it) was step two. The iPhone 4.0 SDK is just the most obvious move in this process because it basically spells it out. You no longer have a choice: it is Apple’s way or the highway. The problem is the App store. On the Mac, I control my own distribution. On the iPhone platform, Apple does. That means that they no longer have to negotiate with their developers, they can now finally dictate to them.

As a developer, this makes the iPhone platform a lot less attractive because I also can’t be sure that they won’t change the terms again. Once I’m locked in, I’m locked in. Apple can do whatever they want and I’m forced to rewrite my apps or get forced out. As someone who writes software for a living, this scares the crap outta me.

Here are some other blog posts that I thought were good reading around this:
The iPad isn’t a computer, it’s a distribution channel (O’Reilly Radar)
Five rational arguments against Apple’s 3.3.1 policy (37 Signals blog)

I’ve been using this iPad for less than a day, so maybe my opinions will change, but I don’t know how. My primary complaints so far are not about the software or the lack of features. My primary complaint is about the form factor. It is really bad, almost unusable on it’s own.

The iPad is too heavy to be held in one hand for too long. Even if you could hold it in one hand, the keyboard is then too wide to type with and difficult to type with more than one finger at a time. If held with two hands, it is too wide to type with your thumbs (phone-style) even vertically.

Since it is too heavy to hold in your hands for too long, you need to brace it on something. If you are sitting, you have to slouch or sit in an awkward position to brace it on your knee. Right now, I am having to sit cross-legged on the couch with two pillows on my lap to prop the iPad up in a semi-comfortable position. If you are sitting at a table, the rounded back of the iPad makes it difficult to use on a flat surface.

The iPad screen itself is wonderful, but the nature of the device itself means that it will be continually covered in fingerprint smudges that have to be wiped off.

Watching a movie makes the screen quality really shine, but also showcases the poor design. If you are holding the device in landscape mode (which is the logical way for video watching), you have a problem. If you hold the device so that the home button is to the right, your hands are either resting on top of the on/off button and the speaker grill or your left hand is blocking the headphone port. If you are holding the screen with the home button on your left, you are resting the bottom of the device on the volume rocker.

I hope that Apple addresses these flaws in future version, but I really have to say that so far, the iPad is really inferior in usability to the iPhone in my experience.

Putting it together, I bought a few components and two different ones failed within two weeks (two weeks of each other and two weeks of opening their boxes). One was the Elgato EyeTV Hybrid. A USB-based TV tuner to record over-the-air digital TV. The other failed component was a Logitech DiNovo Edge (Mac Edition) bluetooth keyboard. Both of these are fairly pricey components, and are each somewhat critical for an HTPC.

The EyeTV just stopped being recognized by the computer. It worked fine for a few days and then poof. Dead. It happened right around the same time I did my first over-the-wire software update from them. I can’t say that it definitely was the software update, but very little else changed between when it was working and when it wasn’t. Rolling back to the previous software helped not-at-all. The computer doesn’t even see the EyeTv when it is plugged into the computer. For a device that is basically a few days old, this is a pretty crappy user experience. I contacted Elgato and they responded pretty quickly. After asking me the “dumb user” questions, they promised to send me a replacement quickly with a return label for me to return the dead unit. That was almost a week ago and I still haven’t received the new unit. Tomorrow it will be a week. That is unacceptable, I think, but I do like that they basically send you the replacement first and ask that you return the dead one.

The DiNovo keyboard was a different story. I removed it from the box, charged it successfully once and haven’t been able to charge it successfully again. I get an error light when I try. I looked on the Logitech forum and saw many other users having this same problem TWO YEARS AGO. This is has been a problem for a long time and Logitech haven’t fixed it yet. This is also unacceptable. I own a lot of logitech gear, but this keyboard is the most expensive thing I’ve gotten from them and it kind of sucks that it was nearly DOA. Logitech also had a bit of a less-friendly customer support experience. Where Elgato was basically “fix the problem and work it out later”, Logitech was all about “prove to us that you deserve a fix.” They also demand that you ship them back the defective unit before they ship you a replacement. This means that if I didn’t have another keyboard, my computer would be useless for A FEW WEEKS while I wait for them to receive my very expensive keyboard and then send me a new one. That is lame.

We’ll see how long it takes between reporting the issue to the companies to receiving replacements and we’ll also see how long the replacements last. So far, I’m not overly impressed with either company. If I was really dependent on this PC for my entertainment, I would be spending quite a lot of time waiting for these companies to replace gear that should have been caught by their own quality control.

[Update 3/31/10]
Got my Elgato replacement unit today! Along with the box to send the defective unit back in and some simple instructions on what to do to switch them. Definite kudos to Elgato customer support on this.

[Update 4/14/10]
Still waiting on my replacement keyboard from Logitech. One thing I forgot to mention earlier was that they required me to send them a copy of my receipt of purchase of they keyboard. It was a gift, but luckily I had the Amazon receipt because it was from my wishlist. Don’t know what they would have said if I didn’t have a receipt. I sent the keyboard back to Logitech on April 6th using their shipping sticker. I still had to buy a box to ship it in, so the UPS place charged me $8 for that (plus them putting it in the box). Supposedly, Logitech shipped out the replacement on the 12th, but they shipped it via UPS ground, so that means that I won’t receive it until at least April 19th (according to UPS). Really lame. Luckily, I had an extra keyboard (this was for a MacMini which doesn’t come with a keyboard, remember). Waiting two weeks for a replacement keyboard isn’t cool, especially when that keyboard was defective and also $200+ dollars. Next time, I won’t bother with Logitech. If I get something broken from them, I’ll just return it.

[Update 4/19/2010]
Received my replacement keyboard from Logitech today. One problem, THEY SENT ME THE WRONG KEYBOARD. I have the Mac edition and they send me the PC one. ARE YOU FREAKING SERIOUS? THIS IS RIDICULOUS! I have let them know, we’ll see how long it takes for them to send me a new one. If they demand I send the old one back first, I will take this all the way up their phone tree!

[Update 4/20/2010]
Phone call was the way to go. After reporting that they sent me the wrong keyboard, they informed me (via e-mail) that they no longer make the DiNovo Edge keyboard for Mac and asked if I wanted some other wireless keyboard/mouse combo (I didn’t). They then sent me the UPS to return the windows keyboard to them.

Instead of responding over e-mail, I called this afternoon and spoke to a 1st-line support person who was really understanding and nice about it, admitting that they screwed up. Then they offered to refund me the amount for the keyboard (luckily, even though it was a gift, it didn’t have the gift receipt, otherwise I’m not sure what would happen). I’ll send them the photo of the receipt tonight and if they get it to me reasonably fast I’ll be a lot better disposed towards them. Although, I still think they way they handled this was pretty crappy. Next time, I’ll call first and e-mail after, their phone support seems way better than their e-mail support.

[Update 4/27/2010]
Spoke way too soon on the phone call solving everything. Since that first phone call, I have e-mailed Logitech several times, entered data on their website and called them again. Each time they have claimed that they have not received my proof-of-purchase (the same one that they needed for me to return the defective keyboard in the first place), and each time I have sent it (or posted it on a website) again. Now they have stopped responding. I still haven’t sent the windows replacement keyboard back, because I have a feeling that I’m going to end up with nothing. I have now spent almost a month trying to get some sort of reasonable outcome from Logitech. They’ve told me that when they finally do start the process of refunding me, that it will take 4-6 weeks to get a refund. So that will make it at least two months from getting a NEW keyboard that was busted to getting some sort of restitution for it (they still haven’t promised that I will get a full refund yet). Not happy.

[Update 5/1/10]
I called Logitech again. They had not contacted me after I sent them both photos and a link to an image of the receipt (again, luckily I had the actual receipt even though this was a gift!). The support person hadn’t seen the image I attached (he asked if I was using Apple mail to attach it, must be that their servers somehow don’t like Apple mail? Maybe they could have mentioned that at some point in our many communications over the last month). Again, the support person on the phone was very nice. I’ll say this for Logitech, they train their phone support folks very well. This time he stayed on the line with me, looked up the link to the photo I sent them, asked me for a clearer photo, waited while I took it and posted it to a web site so that he could read it. Confirmed it and then promised to get his manager to make sure it was sufficient as soon as his manager got out of a meeting. He also promised to contact me to let me know either way what his manager said. I never received that confirmation of course. However, I finally decided that it was probably going to be ok, so I finally returned the windows keyboard that they sent me as a replacement for the mac one that I sent. If I don’t hear from them after they receive it (I can track it on UPS.com), I will have to call again. They don’t re-imburse for the original shipping, so this whole ordeal will end up costing me $16 ($8 in original shipping for the gift, and $8 to return the defective mac keyboard to them – the box and packing, not the shipping) plus hours of my time (which is worth a lot more than $16). Again, I’m realizing that it isn’t worth dealing with the automated support with Logitech, it is too slow and unreliable. Call them always. Assuming that the rest of this experience goes ok, I’m still a bit soured on them as a company. The amount of effort it has taken me to deal with their defective product does not make me want to go out and buy more of their stuff, especially compared to the extremely favorable El Gato experience I had.