It is a very interesting market out there. Consumers have the choice between the some huge heavyweights, such has the Apple Iphone, Blackberry Bold,Blackberry Storm, and for the enthusiasts of Palm the Palm Treo. For those people looking for something different, AT&T has the Fuse (HTC Touch Pro), T-Mobile has the G1 made by HTC. And I am sure there are plenty of others that could be categorized in this smartphone market.

I currently have an aging Palm Treo 680, yes I am a Palm advocate. I think they create a great product, or should I say, used to. The Palm hardware and software is becoming outdated quickly, missing the higher res screens, better interfaces and better connectivity found on all modern smartphones. To qualify a modern smartphone, at least for power users, it must have 3G or other high speed network, WiFi, lots of memory, a keyboard (either virtual or physical) and most of the modern ones are also including GPS. My Treo doesn't have 3g, it doesn't have wifi, it doesn't have GPS, but hey, it does have a physical keyboard, and enough memory to store the apps you need.

I am wanting a new phone badly, but can't find one that fits my needs / wants. I don't want the Windows Mobile OS, which really blocks out a lot of the smartphones being developed now days. I would prefer a physical keyboard, but I might be able to get by with an iPhone like keyboard. And I want to be able to control the apps on my phone, not be dictated to which apps I can use on my phone. As you can see this crosses the iPhone off, Blackberries aren't as bad on the app side, but I really dislike the idea of using the BIS for my personal e-mail, especially since it is really just a one-way sync. The Android looks cool, but I really questions how good it is going to be. Don't get me wrong, I really like Google, and they come out with some great ideas, but their products seem rushed and never polished. They just don't seem stable enough. And then you got Palm, using the same OS base for 1901 it seems. Their interface hasn't changed much, but it really hasn't had a need to. But the bad thing is, the underlying components to their OS hasn't changed either, which is killing it, a slow painful death. They have known for years that high speed internet was coming to phones, but yet their OS can't handle 3g or wifi ... WHY Not, this isn't new technology. It is sad, They've been producing the Treo's now for almost 5 years, but not a single change to the OS in that time, okay, maybe small changes, but nothing significant. Microsoft has released two new OSes in that time WM 5 and WM 6. Palm in that time has sold their software side, bought it back, rumors of working with Access to create a Linux based OS was out there, and now we sit here , the fourth quarter of 2008 with nothing.

And now I sit here, with my Treo 680, which needs to be rebooted about once a week, and I have to reboot the reboot each time because it doesn't boot up properly on the first boot up. It freezes on my in the middle of conversations. If I have a call come in while on the other line, and hang up with the original caller to answer the new call, I can't. It doesn't respond until the caller has been sent to voicemail. It is crazy how many bugs are in the OS.

So what am I do, I need a phone. I am on the AT&T network and really don't want to switch. The Bold looks cool, and it could work, but I don't want to pay for a BES connection to get my IMAP mail working. The iPhone could work, but I have Apple telling me what I can and shouldn't load on the phone that I bought. (Why people put up with this, I have no idea, if Microsoft only let you load programs they approved on your desktop .. would you like that). Palm's OS sucks, Windows Mobile sucks. Symbian's are okay, but their aren't any cool phones out there .. It looks like I am stuck with my Treo 680 for a while. Maybe the iPhone 3 will change things. Maybe by the time AT&T adopts the Android it will be proven as reliable and viable option. Maybe Palm can fix their OS and even better, have it be Linux based.

I'm not lying, I promise. Adobe has announced an x86_64 version of their adobe flash player. I unistalled that latest 10.0 32bit version along with nspluginwrapper, and downloaded the v10 alpha. The install was a simple copying it into ~/.mozilla/pugins, and it works.

Two initial findings I have, are dropdown menus are now popping up in front of the flash banner, instead of behind. Which is amazingly great. And the second is cpu usage. So far, listening to pandora is quite a bit lower, probalby b/c it was going through nspluginwrapper, but I notice about 4 - 5% difference in CPU. Can't wait to check out more flash streams that I've noticed cause some high cpu load.

For links to download and a chance to read up a bit about the release, check out the SWF Penguin's blog (one of the developers for linux flash)

I know, I missed these release by about 2 months, but better late then never, right? Anyways. Zabbix 1.6 was released. I've been watching this product since the 1.1 release, and they keep making it better. For those that don't know, Zabbix is a monitoring solution. It uses agents and SNMP to collect information and provide a nice interface to view it all. It is actually pretty robust as it is a distrbuted monitoring solution, which can make for some nice scalability through larger enterprise networks.

The last version I used was 1.4 and it was at my old job. I've been watching the development of 1.6, they have added a lot of improvements and features. I can't wait to get my hands on this release to see what it can do. If are looking for a monitoring solution, I highly recommend Zabbix.

Yep, you read the title right, and no this blog isn't becoming an advertising site, just so happens this post and the last are right after one another.

Codeweavers has created a challenge and that challenge has been met. Gas in the Twin Cities as returned to where it was a year ago, at $2.79 per gallon, after being up to $3.79. I guess I will tell them that the avg gas here in Ft. Worth, TX is $2.25 right now, with some suburbs having gas wars between Exxon and QT and seeing the price below $1.95 per gallon. But that is another story I guess.

So for today only, you can go to http://lameduck.codeweavers.com/free/ and get your free serial number for their software. You have to register it before it is any good, and because of the increase of traffic today, their servers have died. Not literally, but they are done, and all their sites are now just plain text. You can get your serial number today only, but they are allow you to register it tomorrow also because of the down time.

For those that don't know CodeWeavers Crossover Office is a product based on the open source application Wine. You aren't paying for Wine itself, but yet the support and tweaks CodeWeaver's has done to the package to help it run your favorite Windows applications. It can run Quicken, Powerpoint, Excel, even some version of Access. With CrossOver Games, you can run your favorite games also. This product isn't just for Linux, but for the Mac also.

So go get, try it out, and hell, if you like it this publicity stunt might of paid of big time as you will likely want upgrades after your subscription is out.

Just found a a contest site with a chance to win $1000 cash. They are calling it Project No Name. The site says that two companies are coming together and are wanting a new name. So they are holding a contest, and if they select your name, you win .. that simple.

It's pretty cool to see companies using the internet for things like this. I had to Dig it http://digg.com/design/Project_No_Name_Wants_You !

Lately I've been getting a ton of spam on my MSN Instant Messenger account. It is quit annoying. I could of just modified my privacy settings in my client (on pidgin Tools .. Privacy, select MSN and block only users on buddy list). But I do a lot of work with open source and communities, and would like to have people who need to contact , actually be able to contact me.

I found a few solutions. First was logging into account.live.com and modify my shared profile. Under social, I changed the permissions to just me. Hopefully that helps a bit. My news step will be using a pidgin plug-in called Bot Sentry. Which will ask users not in your buddy list or approved list to answer simple questions before the message goes through. Ex. Please spell out the number 5. So it should stop all that automated spam.

If I have to go that route, then I will be sure and post a follow up.

We take a lot of things for granted, and we don't really think about how much we actually have. I take computers for granted a lot, and don't think about how I use them in my everyday life, or how convenient they have made things. Actually I do think about how convenient they make things, when I get those e-mails at about 11:30 at night and I end up working :/ But that isn't the point of this story.

The other day I was driving down the highway when it hit me, I never finished setting up that users FTP account into their website. I was waiting for the DNS changes to propagate so I could test everything at once, well that was 12 hours ago, so everything should be good to go. I'm not at my laptop so I pull out my Treo and check the website. It doesn't load, instead I get my servers default home page .. oops, I must not have the virtual host setup. So still with my Palm Treo, I log into my servers and reboot apache thinking I had already setup the config files. Nope, still wrong, the default page loads again. So I log back into my server with pssh, and then setup a config file with vim, and restart Apache .. Woohoo everything works. So I go back in and add run the commands commands with pure-pw to setup a basic FTP account and we are done, it only took me about 15 - 20 minutes.

I was pretty stoked that I could do all of this from my cell phone, but what, that isn't the best part. I was able to do all of this while driving down the highway. Yes I know that isn't safe, but Hell, how many people can say they setup an Apache vhost and ftp account while driving down the highway, let alone in a bash shell! It's the small things in life that make you smile.

So apparently Linus Torvald now has a blog, as seen on Reddit Hell as frozen over. But I am glad, I enjoy reading into some of the innovative minds of our age. One of his articles is raving over Intel's new SSD. So much so, he has me excited waiting for it to come out.

I know there has been some anti solid state disk articles out there, but I think they are the future. Soon CD / DVD drives will be a think of the past and machines will have no moving parts (one day even the fans will be gone). But I've been eye-balling SSD's for about a year now, watching and waiting. Knowing the performance and pricing will collide into such a beautiful package that I won't be able to resist any more. From what I can find out know, the X25-M from Intel will be 80GB and cast around 650 bucks. Price per GB that is still pretty high, but that is almost to the point I can't wait. And come Christmas, I won't be able to wait much longer. AnandTech has some pretty amazing numbers on this drive. I find myself getting giddy every time I read a new article on this drive, or when I see specs published about it. I really can't wait.

Right now I have a WD 300GB, and it is fast, and has plenty of storage, but I am barely using 50GB and that is with several DVD iso's on it. I could easily budget my laptop storage to under 80GB, which is another plus, is the drive won't slow down the fuller it gets. Oh I can't wait!

I must say I am pretty impressed with Microsoft on the speed of their support. It took about 3 - 4 days for me to receive the packaging material they provide. Then I sent it off on a Friday and I received back a new one Last night, the following Wednesday. I had to "test" it out, to make sure it wasn't broken, so after about 5 hours of Madden, I concluded that this unit seems to be problem free.

Now it is time to go out and buy Maddon '09!

Just got down spending about 3 hours trying to get a simple gallery page to render the same across multiple browsers. It is crazy trying to get all browsers to work. I think we are dropping IE6 and FF2 from strict compatibility tests. As long as the data is rendered, we are calling that good. But that still leaves, FF3, IE7, Opera, Safari and Chrome. And we have IE8 around the corner, which will initialy just be a render data in a readable format.

The issue we are having is inside Webkit based browsers (Safari, Chrome, Midori, and many others). The have our CMS applying a wrapper to a basic php gallery page. This page uses jquery and galleria to handle the image transitions and such using ajax. Works great on the browsers by itself, and after a bit of CSS work for IE7 works great on that and FF3. But once done, Safari and Chrom wouldn't display the ajax content when the page is loaded directly. Hitting refresh though, the ajax / javascript engine inside these browsers decides to work, and everything works great. It is the craziest shit I've ever seen. Nothing changing besides hitting refresh.

Which brings on to my biggest compliant, UI design sucks. It isn't even for Web Design, but designing applications to work on a variety of interfaces is going to cause problems. Windows has done a decent job of not changing things too much between major backends, so apps developed for 2000 should look find in XP and Vista ... should, but not always. But look at java apps, that share the same code for Mac OS X, Vista, XP, Linux (KDE, Gnome, Fluxbox, etc, etc) and it has some small issues that araise, you got font issues, DPI, resolution, window decorations (or the lack there of). It is a huge issue. And people (end users) don't look toward the person resonable for their platform (firefox, IE, Apple, Gnome) but instead to the individual developer to create special cases for all these different idiosyncrocies. And we, as the small developers, bend over, take it, and try to get all the wrinkles ironed out.

While choice is good for the consumer, it sucks for those trying to create things to work for the most amount of people. Next to writing a custom interface for every single option out there, there are going to be some that run in a degraded mode, ignored, and in the extremem cases not even work.

Okay Rant Over - back to work.