My memory of Steve is tainted by my feeble attempts in telephone negotiations with him in 1992. NeXT was developing NeXTSTEP 486 for the Dell 450 DE/2 DGX, and both companies wanted a more formal relationship. Steve wanted large sales volume commitments, $2.5M worth if memory serves, and I knew that we at Dell didn’t want to make any volume commitment. In trying to keep the conversation going, I was making excuses, and Steve accurately but unkindly challenged my excuses. There are other positive personal memories, of Steve demoing NeXTSTEP 486 on stage on a DGX, and of face to face meetings regarding some large sales opportunities, but memories of him mocking my words still linger.

Since his death, I’ve seen hardly any positive discussion of NeXT, yet what Steve did with that company was so important, with regard to Apple products, but also with the beginnings of the World Wide Web. (The only significant post-mortem NeXT-oriented report I’ve seen is Jonathan Schwartz’ Realigning the Stars.)

It is perhaps exaggeration, but not wild exaggeration to say that Mac OS X is NeXTSTEP adapted to have the Mac OS 9 look and feel. iOS internals, in turn, are derived from OS X. At least from a software perspective, all of the prominent Apple products, current Macs, the iPhone and the iPad, trace back to Steve and his team at NeXT.

It is no secret that the first Web server was built by Tim Berners-Lee on a NeXT machine at CERN. And that the first Web browser was also built on that machine. [See 20 Years Ago Today: The First Website Is Published, Welcome to info.cern.ch, and World Wide Web.]

What if there had been no NeXT, no NeXTcube and no NeXTSTEP? Would there have been a World Wide Web? It is easy to say that Berners-Lee might have used a SPARCstation and SunOS instead, and the Web would still have thrived. But in 1991, there were Gopher, USENET, and other alternatives to the Web. Who knows what would have happened? Without Steve Jobs, the Web as we know it might have never come to be. So give him some credit for the Web while you’re thinking of him, an exceptional person who gave us so much.

At
http://shop.sprint.com/en/shop/why_sprint/4g/4g_plan_details.html,
“Everything” doesn’t really mean “Everything”. That page used to say “Because we’ve boosted your data experience with this phone’s amazing services and features, you’ll need our $10/mo. Premium Data add-on” [emphasis by Sprint]. Initially, this seemed tied to Sprint’s 4G WIMAX network. However, the $10/month premium was applied even when 4G didn’t work reliably, as in my experience in Austin, and even when 4G was not available at all. I readily accepted the $10/month when the Evo was new and I had been convinced that 4G would work well in Austin. 3 months ago, I was considering buying a second 4G capable phone, a Samsung Epic for my wife, and appealed to Sprint that they should not charge another $10/month for the Epic.

I spent several days trying, as a “Sprint Premier Gold” customer, to get Sprint to make an exception, even escalating to CEO Dan Hesse’s office, but to no avail. Everyone I spoke with repeated the assertion that the 4G capable phones put extra traffic on the 3G network when 4G was not available. But they would never provide a plausible technical explanation for the assertion. When my wife said she wanted an LG Optimus anyway, I accepted defeat. [When I first signed up with Sprint, it seemed like they would do almost anything to make customers happy. Even 5 years ago, when I would escalate some problem, Sprint was surprisingly, perhaps excessively, accommodating. Perhaps the less accommodating position is viable, since Sprint seems to actually be regaining customers again.]

In January, in the third paragraph of the press release Smartphones Drive Wireless Data Explosion, Sprint overcame the seemingly indefensible $10/month premium for 4G capable phones by “applying a $10 per month Premium Data add-on charge to activations of smartphones beginning Jan. 30.” — the premium now applies to 3G only phones such as the LG Optimus.

But the plan naming didn’t change. Sprint still touts the “Everything Data” plan that really isn’t everything, since typical data capable phones have a $10/month premium.

Though http://shop.sprint.com/en/shop/why_sprint/4g/4g_plan_details.html now simply says “Plans for this phone require our $10/mo. Premium Data add-on charge in addition to one of the plans below.”, that page lists 6 “Everything” plans with “unlimited” data.

As Ed Vizard once wrote “Words are only words and they have no regard for what they say.”

Update March 13: See, also, Sprint’s Dan Hesse differentiates between unlimited and ‘unlimited’ in latest TV spot and Sprint increasing 3G data plan pricing by $10/mo, calling it ‘premium data’.

I first encountered the ’547 patent, “UTP based video and data conferencing” in 2004, when Avistar was challenging Polycom, and I asserted then that ’547 should not have been granted. Three years ago, Microsoft filed for ex parte re-examination of ’547. I speculated that ’547 would not survive re-examination.

Last week, the U.S. PTO Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences issued a decision on appeal, affirming in part the examiner’s final rejection of all claims of ’547.

Intellectual Ventures can appeal further, but maybe they will not.

From the decision’s conclusion:

“The Examiner established that the combination of Ensor, Ahuja ’88, Ahuja ’90, and known prior art renders obvious:

1. separate data and video paths arranged over unshielded twisted pair (UTP) wires as required by claim 1;
2. the limitations as required by claims 4 and 5; and
3. a combined mosaic video image as required by claim 10.

The Examiner did not establish that the combination renders obvious:

4. a system capable of the transporting audio and visual (AV) signals over a UPT (sic) AV path and reproducing spoken audio and visual images based on the AV signals, as required by claim 11.”

In 1996 I, when I was last active in IMTC, I participated in board meetings in Munich and London and the annual meeting in Boston. This time I participated in the IMTC annual meeting mostly from my home office, but also while driving, running errands.

The primary venue for the meeting was RADVISION’s SCOPIA Desktop, which also allows for participation by H.323 video calling and PSTN calling. The participation probably peaked at 30+ distinct callers, mostly calling by SCOPIA clients, a few calling by telephone, and at least one conference room calling, presumably using an H.323 system. Though there were glitches of various kinds at various times, the overall experience was surprisingly good.

Compared to flying to Boston or across the Atlantic for a three hour meeting, it was definitely better than physically being there. About two-thirds of the way through the meeting, I was interrupted and needed to leave my office and the SCOPIA client. But I had had a chance to browse materials in anticipation of the rest of the meeting, and listen in from my phone while I ran my errands. (Android doesn’t seem to be a client option yet, but perhaps it will be.)

On the other hand, there were no direct chances to get to know the participants outside of the Internet meeting. The 90s IMTC meetings were typically multiple day events, with hundreds of attendees and opportunities. None of today’s participants were people I knew from back then, so some informal contact would have been useful. And there was no opportunity to sample the attractions of Boston, London or Munich.

In the 90s, one of the major activities of IMTC was fostering the now irrelevant T.120, but IMTC was also at the forefront of fostering conferencing on packet switched networks, particularly the Internet. (Today there was a bit of nostalgic disparagement of T.120…) Now IMTC is fostering a much broader range of options, with many activity groups pursing topics across the spectrum from hand-held mobile devices to immersive “telepresence”.

There was much lamenting lack of interoperability, not that different from When will they ever learn?, but with commitment and plans to try to improve interoperability. There should be a recording of the meeting and copies of the presentation materials available soon at IMTC.org.

Though the song is about more substantive issues than interoperability of video calling solutions, that refrain comes to mind when thinking about all of the isolated islands of video calling solutions that seem to be proliferating instead of reconciling.

It’s hard to keep up with them, all the instances this year: Cisco umi Home Telepresence that won’t call other Cisco systems, the Logitech TV Cam that seems to only call other Logitech Vid instances, not Logitech’s LifeSize sytems, FaceTime that only calls other iPhone 4′s and iPod Touch, Qik that only calls between Evo and Epic, …

In July, I had hopes for fring, and that Skype would soon leverage the video capable hardware of Evo and iPhone 4. I actually succeeded with a fring to Skype video call just before fring stumbled out of sync with Skype when iPhone 4 launched.

For a while I was dismayed that Skype had not become available on Evo, with the Android Skype only available for Verizon phones. Skype lifted the Verizon-only limitation a few weeks ago, but so far Skype isn’t doing video on phones. Skype is moving in lots of directions, so patience may be necessary.

Impatient for something useful/usable, I started trying to setup a SIP environment that would allow me to use one of the SIP apps for Android. I’m still pursuing that, but it is much slower going than I hoped. That’s another story for another writing or two.

Tango seems plausible for phone to phone video calling, but there are no indications of interoperability beyond phones.

FaceTime may well become available for other Apple platforms, but will it ever call non-Apple systems?

For now, I’ll hope that Skype and Tango may become more useful on my Evo, and try to get things going with SIP, and wonder “When will they ever learn?”

The most-publicized caution, battery life, has been a non-issue for me.

The most-publicized feature, 4G via WiMAX, has also been a non-issue, because the coverage isn’t quite what I hoped.

Other than that, my concerns and anticipations of problems had been needless, and the surprises have been good. I’ve come to think of the Evo as the best (for me) pocket computer I can imagine in today’s marketplace, and a good mobile phone, as well.

Let’s get the two most talked about items, battery life & 4G via WiMAX, out of the way first.

Battery Life

The first data on battery life I saw was positive (“We know what you’re thinking, though: what about battery life? Amazingly, …”) in the May 19 Engadget review. However, the same day, Walt Mossberg was reporting Sprint 4G Phone Hits New Speeds, but Battery Lags. That day, still a couple of weeks from my own hands on experience, I accepted those as different experiences due to different usage and expectations.

Nothing since has made me think much differently. I was concerned about battery life, so I ordered a cheap second battery. While waiting for the off-brand battery, I tried to see how long the battery would go with minimal usage, just my normal phone usage. I was able to get three days out of a single charge. That’s not much worse than I was used to with my pocket phone (LG Muziq), so I started thinking that I would be OK with battery life.

After the extra battery came, I fully charged the original battery, set it aside to be my spare, and have used the off-brand battery ever since. With my normal usage habits, including powering down the phone when I’m sleeping, I usally go two days between charges. Only once, after a long day of heavy phone usage, camera usage and my grand-daughter’s game playing, has the phone asked to be recharged, after 13 hours use that day.

The most comprehensive review I’ve seen are the 13 pages from AnandTech on June 28. The page discussing battery life leads off “There’s no other way to put it: the EVO 4G has terrible battery life.” The data there doesn’t contradict my experience. But that reviewer wants perfection — the last sentence says “While I’d be willing to carry something the size of the EVO, I’d need it to be perfect in order to make that tradeoff.”  I’m not expecting perfection. With hardware in general, and certainly “phones” like these, one can always wait for something cheaper/faster/better. I don’t see anything currently available that would be better for me than the Evo. Droid X, though a littler newer, doesn’t seem any better. I ponder about the iPhone 4, but only ponder.

4G via WiMAX

Click on the top map above and you’ll see the coverage at my home, light green to indicate some WiMAX signal, but not the dark green to indicate strong signal, with big patches of white (no signal) nearby.  The other map is a broader picture of our part of town, mostly dark green, but noticeable patches of white and light green.

Though I can use and appreciate the WiMAX in some places, it is mostly artificial, in that I mostly would either not use my pocket computer in those places, or would choose WiFi over WiMAX in the places where I would use the Evo. Most of the places where I’ve really wanted to use WiMAX, the signal just hasn’t been strong enough.

Sometimes it seems the Evo is trying to use WiMAX when it should accept that the WiMAX signal is too weak and revert to 3G. To avoid that apparent phenomenon, I usually leave the WiMAX turned off, turning it on every few days when it seems like it might really be useful. Then I wonder why Sprint is charging me the extra $10/month for 4G, but rather than protest I hope for the day when the coverage here is comprehensive.

All the “little” things

To me some of these are a much bigger deal than battery and WiMAX concerns. They make Evo a good pocket computer for me.

Display

Both the size, 4.3″ diagonal and resolution, 217 pixels/inch, are a delight to me. I can’t imagine anything physically larger that would still be a pocket computer, until flexible displays become practical, if they do. I’m typing this report on a screen with 99 pixels/inch. Looking at photos and videos is so much more pleasant with the Evo’s higher resolution. The difference is dramatic enough to make me curious about the iPhone 4 “Retina” display, at 326 pixels/inch, but not curious enough to go looking for one.

“Keyboard”

I didn’t know what to think before I tried the on-screen keyboard. I didn’t think I’d miss having tiny physical keys and knew that a pocket computer couldn’t have big enough keyboard for touch typing. I’d gotten used to the on-screen keyboard of my i300 easily enough, without learning Graffiti, so I thought I’d be OK but clumsy without a stylus. Learning to use the keyboard, with just my fingers, has been faster than I expected, though I’ll usually rotate the Evo for landscape keyboard unless what I’m entering is very short.

Google integration, Android, HTC Sense

With Evo’s Android, I expect good fit with Google, and that has been true as far as I’ve explored. Besides search, I mostly use Google for Reader, and Reader works OK in mobile mode for skimming tens of headlines (actually groups of 15) at a time. I don’t use Gmail much, but will probably use Gmail a little more as time goes on and I become more dependent on the Evo. Having Google Maps in my pocket has been useful a few times. But I really haven’t explored Android or HTC Sense very much so far. That is an endorsement from my perspective — as an end user I haven’t had the need to explore the software much. Eventually I will, but because I want to, not because I need to.

Camera(s)

“Faster/better/cheaper” applies to cameras, in particular, cameras built-in to computers and phones. The Evo’s built-in cameras suffice for almost all my purposes. The still photos are about as good as the pocket camera I bought last year, with lack of optical zoom being the main limitation. For video, the Evo is definitely preferable to my “marvelous toy” (AIPTEK MPVR+) of three years ago. Optical zoom and 1080p are the main reasons I think of separate cameras now.

YouTube (Flash)

Browsing Android phones at a Sprint store earlier this year, I was dismayed about the absence/clumsiness of YouTube support. So I was expecting to have to deal with that when I got my Evo. But YouTube HQ was already in place, and works just fine. Other Flash video doesn’t work, but I don’t have much need for other Flash video, and will probably just wait for the Evo to have Android 2.2 and Flash 10.1.

Apps

My daughter was dismayed that I’d had the Evo for more than 24 hours and still hadn’t downloaded any apps. I don’t think she was impressed that I responded by getting ConnectBot (SSH client) and AndroidVNC (a.k.a. Android VNC Viewer). I hadn’t tried SSH or VNC on a phone since the i300. They both seem to work just fine. I’ve even tried using vi after logging in to a Fedora machine with ConnectBot, knowing that the on-screen keyboard would make it very hard to use vi normally. That I was able to use vi at all seemed worth celebrating. ConnectBot is mostly for SSH tunneling, at least in my current thinking, and handles that well to the extent I’ve tried it with VNC, IMAP and SMTP.

I’m still behind the curve in downloading apps. Since I haven’t explored many of the factory installed apps, and what I’ve explored has met my needs, I’m not likely to be much of an app consumer. I did download “Barbie in a Mermaid tale” for our grand-daughter — she and our daughter like to play that.

Mail

Ever since I’ve been handling mail servers for myself and others, I’ve been a fan of IMAP for mail servers. I’ve been less of a fan of most mail clients’ handling of IMAP. The only two clients I’ve ever really liked with IMAP, particularly with regard to handling of folders, are Netscape Mail and the Outlook Express lineage of Microsoft options, including the current form, Windows Live Mail. I’m pleasantly surprised by the handling of IMAP folders by the Evo mail client.

Multitouch

Reading about the lack of multi-touch in Android had been one source of trepidation, unnecessary trepidation in my Evo experience. Multi-touch may not be present in all of the apps, or as fully featured as in other environments, but seems OK in the browser and the PDF viewer. AndroidVNC doesn’t seem to have adopted multi-touch yet, presumably because the APIs are relatively new to Android, but does have discrete zoom buttons.

More to come

Froyo

Before I got the Evo, I thought I’d be impatiently waiting for HTC to update from Android 2.1 (Eclair) to 2.2 (Froyo), if for no other reason than to have Flash support. Since the Evo YouTube HQ support seems just fine, I’m simply curious about 2.2, not impatient. Now is probably a good time to start taking a closer look at how Android and HTC/Sprint software all fit together on the Evo.

Travel

I’ve not gone on any trips with Evo yet. I’m expecting that having a pocket computer will make me much less likely to bring out a laptop in airports, etc. On the other hand, the Evo’s (extra $30/month, so far not purchased by me) portable Hotspot capability may be attractive in terms of both convenience and avoiding airport and hotel WiFi charges.

Videoconferencing

I haven’t tried Qik video chat — I don’t know anyone to call with Qik! I’d really like to try Skype on Evo, but my impression is that Skype won’t be offering video calling on Android/Evo any time soom. I keep seeing intriquing reports about fring, and it appears that a production release of fring for Android is available, so I’ll have to give fring a try.

Development

I’m assuming I’ll have to build an app of my own for Android/Evo, if for no other reason than to say “Hello World!”, but it will probably be a while before I do so.

But right now, I need to respond to all the text messages that are making my Evo beep at me…

For whatever reasons, I’ve favored the odd-numbered Fedora releases (and the odd-numbered Red Hat releases before Fedora), so I was predisposed to like Fedora 13. And I do like Fedora 13.

I’m not sure what else to say. (I gave up on VMWare hosted on Fedora — trying to accomplish that wasted much of my time with Fedora 11 and 12.) I’ve now, as of Sunday, got Fedora 13 in all of my production Linux environments plus several others.  I can’t remember any noticeable problems migrating from Fedora 12, so 13 must be lucky.

The 450MHz Pentium II mail/web/name server had been seeming more sluggish, and the load average was often in the low single digits, not cause for alarm, but not the totally loafing I was used to seeing less than a year ago.

Every time I would investigate, thinking that web traffic might be the problem, especially MySQL for WordPress, I’d find multiple instances of spamd consuming the most processor and memory.

This was anything but rigorous analysis, but surprising/disappointing. After considering moving both mail and web to the 3.0GHz Pentium 4 sitting next to the 450MHz PII, instead I moved only the web service to the 3.0GHz P4, leaving the 450MHz machine to just handle mail. The web traffic, including MySQL, seems to place minimal load on the 3.0GHz processor, but the load average on the 450MHz processor still creeps up, as it fends off spam.

I’m used to Fedora releases sticking with minor updates to the kernel they start with, i.e., I was expecting Fedora 12 to stick with kernel 2.6.31. Wrong! A few months ago Fedora 12 updated to kernel 2.6.32. Though I was able to get VMware to sort of run on kernel 2.6.32 with the conventional recipes, it wasn’t right. In particular, my Windows 2000 Pro virtual machine would start to boot and then die when running on VMWare Server 1.0.10 on Fedora 12 with kernel 2.6.32.

The advice thread (vmware-specific-specific 5.5.x and kernel 2.6.32) that originally made me optimistic did not continue to offer encouragement. Anticipating Fedora 13 and kernel 2.6.33 left me more pessimistic about the VMWare on Fedora course.

So I started thinking about alternatives. My experience with KVM and VirtualBox didn’t entice in either of those directions. So I flipped over one practice of the last three years [Upside Down (Windows over Fedora 7 Linux)] and switched to another [Real Virtual] — now the machine that had been running Windows 2000 hosted by Fedora 12 is now running Fedora 13 hosted by Windows XP.  I don’t have a solution, yet, for the Digium Wildcard TDM400P. Except for that, which will only matter, if and when I get back to pursuing Asterisk,  ”right side up” (Fedora VM hosted on XP) seems just fine.

As I’ve become increasingly enamored with WordPress, I’ve been waiting for this day, the day that WordPress 3 is (finally) ready. As I’ve waited, I’ve also thought of “jus’ press” as analogy appropriate to WordPress, beyond (just) the word “press”.

In the almost 3 years since I started with WordPress, I’ve mostly thought, as many do, of WordPress as a blogging tool. Last year a friend, Ryan Owen, asked me about using WordPress for a general web site we managed together, a site with many static pages in addition to more dynamic “blog” pages.  My knee jerk reaction was that WordPress couldn’t do things he and I were used to doing with HTML and CSS. To some extent that reaction was true, but also false due to my ignorance — WordPress 2 was far more general and flexible than I realized. With the capabilities of WordPress 3, some of which have been available for a few months on WordPress.com and available in beta versions of WordPress 3, WordPress is a very compelling application for general purpose web site development.

As I used WordPress 2 more, and browsed through the capabilities I wasn’t using, the flexibility and generality gradually became apparent. I’d read various endorsements, and noticed the broader acceptance of WordPress, especially the Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital. (Note the WordPress login page at http://allthingsd.com/wp-admin.)

Early this year I joined a committee established to sort out web strategy for the PET Project. The many existing sites were not coordinated with each other, not keeping up to date, in general not providing the web presence we needed. A typical reaction was along the lines of “I wouldn’t know the sites were related to each other without seeing the Mercy in Motion video.” One person had a strong vision of revamping the sites with a Joomla!-based portal system. However, the expense and organizational complexities of adopting that proposal had left it foundering. Driving home from a meeting in San Antonio in late March, I started pondering a more incremental approach.

At first I tried to see what I could do quickly with Joomla!, without any prior Joomla! experience. Though I could imagine using Joomla! myself, and could understand how it appeals to web professionals, I couldn’t imagine a viable learning curve for the typical content provider without a significant investment in infrastructure and training. That investment made the expense of the foundering proposal seem an underestimate, if anything.

Then I thought back to Ryan’s question, my knee jerk reaction, and my subsequent learning. I started looking at WordPress as a general purpose content management system. Articles such as WordPress vs Joomla vs Drupal encouraged me in this direction.

I started prototyping WordPress-based sites on WordPress.com. The progress was rapid and exhilarating.

However, I started becoming aware of the restrictions at WordPress.com, especially the inability to use <FORM> tags. Since some of the existing sites made use of <FORM>, I started replicating the prototype sites with WordPress 2.9 on my own server.

Though the overall progress and improvement was undeniable, the differences between WordPress.com and separate hosting became apparent, especially in choice of themes and widgets. Themes that worked great at WordPress.com didn’t work at all with separate hosting. Themes that worked great with separate hosting weren’t available at WordPress.com. Widgets available at WordPress.com weren’t available, or didn’t work well, for separate hosting. Other desirable widgets aren’t available at WordPress.com.

Though the widget limitations were annoying, the theme limitations were more than annoying. And that is how I first became a fan of the new Twenty Ten theme. In late April, I think, Twenty Ten became available on WordPress.com. I gave it a try and liked it. Then I listened to some of Matt Mullenweg’s “State of the Word” May 1:

[wpvideo xj8pDCM4]

It was evident that Twenty Ten would be emphasized in WordPress 3, available for both WordPress.com and separate hosting, so I started trying the nightly development builds of WordPress 3 on my server. Finally, we had a theme solution that works well in both environments, WordPress.com and separate hosting.

http://wordpress.org/development/2010/06/thelonious/ and the detailed documentation enumerate the many improvements in WordPress 3, and we’re benefiting from some of those, but Twenty Ten was enough to make us “press” forward.

I didn’t wait for WordPress 3 to be final. http://PETInternational.org/ has been live with nightly builds/release candidates for several weeks. Those versions have seemed good enough. But it is nice to now be using a version WordPress endorses more enthusiastically.

Besides http://PETInternational.org/, we have two affiliate sites live, and others in progress. One of the affiliate sites, based on Joomla!, now mimics our Twenty Ten look and feel! Another Joomla!-based site is contributing content to the WordPress environment.

I have been able to return a favor to Ryan. He’s learned from what we’ve done, switched to Twenty Ten, and made http://RainbowNetwork.org/ fully realized with WordPress, now with my encouragement instead of skepticism.

Back to the notion of “jus’ press”, WordPress has plenty of quirks and inconsistencies — it is far from perfect, but WordPress is better for many purposes than any alternative I see. Like Led watching Uncle Fred, jus’ press. That’s what I’ll be doing.