Related link: http://www.gisuser.com/content/view/7122/28/

In the words of Kim Fennel, President and CEO, Telcontar, “it’s a whole new ball game.” Of note, the event was sponsored by LBS data providers Tele Atlas and Navteq. Fennel welcomed the attendees, estimated to number about 150, and kicked things off by discussing “our” market opportunity with respect to location-based services. He referred to the market chain as including data and content providers (i.e. Dynamic data, POIs), the geospatial platform providers (ie. Telcontar), application developers, and the carriers and device makers. Moving the market for LBS forward requires cooperation among all the parts in the value chain and Fennel stated that all must share a common objective and that events such as the “devcon” foster getting the LBS ecosystem together, encourages dialog, stimulates ideas and idea sharing, and perhaps most important, facilitates linkages and partnerships… even access to venture capital funding. Coincidentally, event partner Navteq used the sponsorship to promote a related event, the Navteq LBS challenge… a very successful event designed to promote and stimulate the development of innovative location-based services and applications. Check out the full article for Telcontar’s view on the emerging LBS market

Is the market for LBS growing or tanking?

The 7100 series of BlackBerrys was created to bring the BlackBerry to the masses. It looks more like a phone than a traditional BlackBerry does. To reduce the size, RIM reduced the amount of keys. Instead of one character per key, the 7100 series sports a technology called SureType that predicts what you’re typing as you type since more than one character is assigned to most of the keys.

It actually works surprisingly well, but there are some nuances that, if understood, can help you squeeze a little more productivity out of the tool.

Once you start cranking out emails on a 7100, it won’t be long before you notice that there are some key combinations that correspond to more than one word in SureType’s built-in 35,000 word dictionary. For example, try typing the word “see” then try typing the word “are”. Another example is “hold” and “golf”. SureType can’t determine exactly what you mean, so you are left choosing from a list that is presents the possible words given the key sequence you just typed.

Once you choose a word from the list two times in a row, that word becomes the default word in the list for the next time you key in that sequence. That way, you won’t have to use the trackwheel to choose the work you want - you can just keep on typing away. This feature is known as Frequency Learning.

What if you type a word that isn’t in the built-in dictionary? Well, the word you end up typing ends up going into a custom wordlist that’s stored locally on your BlackBerry. That word is then merged with the built-in dictionary for future typing only it has a higher priority than the built-in words. From that point forward, the BlackBerry remembers the words in your custom wordlist and presents those first in the list if you type an ambiguous key sequence. This is called Auto Word Learning.

Here’s a nagging consequence, though. Say you accidentally misspell a word that’s not in the dictionary. That word goes in your custom wordlist along with your other words. From then on, the misspelled word is your default option for that key sequence - curses! How do you remove it? In handheld versions before 4.0.2, it is buried deep in the bowels of the device in Settings, Options, Language, Input Options. You have to click the trackwheel and choose Custom Wordlist from the menu. From there you can see your entire list of custom words and change, delete, or add new ones. As of version 4.0.2, this screen is promoted way up to the Settings menu, right above Turn Wireless Off.

Both the Auto Word Learning and the Frequency Learning can be turned on or off in the Language options on the device.

Comments or suggestions? Leave them here.

Related link: http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/802/11/802.11_Timelines.htm

In addition to the main status page of 802.11 activities, I find the 802.11 timelines invaluable when answering questions about when certain standards revisions will be done.

In addition to being a great snapshot of the works in progress, you can tell how complex a standard is (either technically or politically) by looking at the number of drafts. 802.11j adapted the 802.11a PHY to the Japanese regulatory domain, and was relatively simple because the technology needed to conform to an external standard. Drafts only went up to version 1.6. In contrast, 802.11i (security) went to ten drafts, and 802.11e (QoS) went to thirteen. It will be interesting to see how some of the current standards shake out. In particular, I’m interested in how many drafts it takes to get the eventual 802.11n finished, since there has been so much activity before settling on an initial draft.

Related link: http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net/

I was recently working with a new Mac iBook G4 running Tiger (OS X 10.4), and needed to hook up an old PCL parallel-port printer (HP LaserJet 5P). I checked HP’s support site, and they do post an OS X driver for the LaserJet.

Problem 1: The iBook has does not have a parallel port. I need to convert between some interface the iBook has and the parallel port used by the printer. That part seems easy. There are several inexpensive “print server” boxes that will take a print job from the network and spit it out an attached port. I was a bit surprised that parallel-port print servers are not as easy to find as they used to be. I eventually decided on the D-Link DP-G321, which also has two USB ports.

When everything arrived, I set up the iBook, and downloaded the driver from HP’s web site. It didn’t make much sense, or even support the printer I had downloaded it for, so I set the driver aside and started reading the manual for the print server. The quick start guide only had instructions for Windows, and referred me to the documentation for MacOS instructions. The main manual said that with OS X, the print server only works with PostScript printers.

Problem 2: Documentation claims that my print server only works with PostScript printers; the HP 5P is a PCL printer, not a PostScript printer.

I think what the print server documentation really meant is that it does not perform any translation on the submitted print job. In the minds of the manual writers, because OS X only speaks PostScript as its printer language, it cannot work with other printers. However, print filters can convert PostScript into other languages (for more information, see chapter 4 in Network Printing, or many other sources on the Internet).

As described in this macwrite.com article, Gimp-Print plugs into the CUPS system on OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) and later, and transparently converts PostScript into the printer’s native language. Open source to the rescue again!

Installing Gimp-Print is easy. Double click on the installer icon, and everything winds up in the right places. In the Print Center application, when you add a new printer, there are now printer models that have the suffix “Gimp-Print” on the driver, such as the HP LaserJet 5 series. (As an important note from the FAQ, you need to hold down the option key when you add the new printer to get all the correct screens.)

The only problem left is that it takes quite some time to submit the job over the wireless LAN. The antenna in the iBook is quite good and has no packet loss to the AP. However, there’s about 15% packet loss from the AP to the print server, and that makes the job queuing very slow. Maybe a better antenna for the print server would make things better?

Related link: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HDTV-in-SFbay/message/18823

Between my digitally fed TiVo and my MythTV system, my TV reception is all zeroes and ones. Generally, the technology is solid, but there are occasional problems. Digital TV is still emerging technology, and it isn’t yet as reliable as the much older analog system. Last weekend, I couldn’t get a signal from KTVU. I’ve had problems receiving their signal in the past, so I couldn’t tell immediately if it was a reception problem or a problem with their transmitter. No information was available by calling the station or on their Web site, but a Google search tracked down the HDTV-in-SFbay group, which had tracked down the information I wanted.

Related link: http://www.gisuser.com/content/view/7031/28/

What makes this year’s event special is the “doubling” of the challenge to include a North American and European challenge. To entice developers, Navteq is putting up more than $800,000 in cash and prizes with the grand prize winner taking home $50k cash and $100k in data licenses. In this feature article from LBSzone.com wer’re introduced to the challenge .. see more at http://www.gisuser.com/content/view/7031/28/

Series 60 3.x is built on top of Symbian OS v9.1, which provides some new challenges for Series 60 developers— partially because it is not backwards compatible with earlier versions of the platform.
Of interest, support is provided for the Location API (JSR 179)—providing GPS and landmark information.

View the entire article at symbianone - http://www.symbianone.com/content/view/2302/

Why, why, WHY does this stuff have to be so difficult?

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not an experienced DBA, which is probably why I’ve ended up becoming a VoIP guy. Yet I do, in the course of consulting, periodically deal with database stuff. A ubiquitous as Microsoft is, SQL Server is everywher. It seems, no matter how hard one tries to live outside the Redmond Control Bubble, it’s impossible to avoid the occassional collision course with Microsoft Enterprise Manager (SQL Server’s administration tool).

Over the last few weeks, a client of mine in the news publishing business has been trying to build high-availability and disaster survivability into his network. When I read that SQL Server 2005 was going to have built-in database mirroring, I said, “Great, we’ll just migrate to it.” With database mirroring in SQL Server 2005, I’d be able to implement an instant hot-failover solution for each of my client’s three SQL Servers.

Of course, that was before September 19, when Microsoft quietly announced (so quietly that the press didn’t pick up on it until a week later) via one of its employee’s blogs that they were dropping the database mirroring feature from the upcoming SQL Server 2005 release. I was disappointed, but not surprised. The Microsoft has a nasty tendency of pulling off last-minute, understated product roadmap changes that have a devestating impact. (When Windows 95 was in beta, the Corel-Draw add-on package published by my employer worked flawlessly until the second-last release candidate–then, it needed a complete rewrite and took a year to be made 95-compatible. But I digress.)

Nevertheless, I figured on building a fault-tolerance solution for my client that didn’t require SQL Server 2005. I looked at shared fiber channel storage, transactional data replication, and a number of other solutions, when the question of the day just hit me:

Why isn’t there a file system that implements real-time, networked data mirroring at the file-system level?

Maybe there is, and I’m just not aware of it. Maybe it’s an impractical idea because of issues with network bandwidth and the asynchronous nature of disk-based file systems. I don’t know. Hey I told you I wasn’t a database guy.

What should my solution be?