Tag Archives: Internet

Initial Thoughts on the iPhone

I joined the cool brigade and bought an iPhone Friday night. Overall, it is an incredible device totally worth the large price tag (but worth is certainly a relative term).

I want to be brief with my comments on the device, but basically there are no significant issues other than third-party support, which seems to closer to reality every day, and the iTunes requirement (I despise this software).

The GUI is fantastic, touch screen incredible, screen resolution amazing, applications wonderful, size great, etc. Most of my initial issues with the iPhone washed away once I played with it a bit more and became aware of how to do certain tasks or find certain information; it wasn’t that these things were hidden or are hard to get to, just that I hadn’t paid enough attention.

I was surprised at the speed of the EDGE, which is about twice as fast as dialup, and activation was flawless (I was totally up and running in less than 15 minutes; note that I was and am an AT&T customer).

The one significant problem I had was connecting to my secured WiFi network. Passcodes required nuanced entering depending on whether they are ASCII or hex, and nearly all the information I found online about how to enter the information was using the network connection interface for firmware 1.0.0, which is a bit different than 1.0.1. In the end, don’t forget to reboot your router!

The one definite improvement I would like is that Safari would (1) continue loading a page when you switch to a new browser window so you don’t have to wait around and (2) not reload the page you were last on.

The File Solution

Imagine a situation where you want to share large amounts of data among people who are located around the universe. All are sufficiently wired so no worries about connections and probably no worries about bandwidth (but we can always want more). How to go about this?

Among the slightly inconvenient methods I currently use are FTP (via traditional clients, IM), e-mail, and, for when I am connecting to my other machines, remote connections (e.g., Remote Desktop Connection and VNC). There are others, yes; the point of this post is not to methodically go through every way to remedy the hypothetical situation but to highlight two relevant applications about which I just learned.

The first new method is through a Firefox plugin called AllPeers. It works within Firefox and establishes a p2p network among a defined set of users. You can do the basic nifty things with it (for a quick but comprehensive run down, watch the demo). For sharing large amounts of data and in situations where you want users to pull or push the data (i.e., copy to and from), it does not seem to be an ideal solution.

A better solution might be Hamachi, which I just learned about from BH. It creates a VPN’ed LAN. I went through the site’s primary pages and it looks solid, providing a basic solution with some nice frills. Support for Windows is decent–I am talking about the GUI and features, not necessarily stability or completion of the software; it’s in beta–and Linux and OS X progress is, well, progressing. Check it out.

Some Recent Cool Tech Articles

I recently started my new job and some other activities so I’m way behind on posting and Web surfing. I caught up today (1000+ unreads in RSS; 30 unread e-mails from today; hitting my usual daily Web site reading list, etc.).

In catching up, I’ve come across some cool tech articles:

– Nokia preps phones for Web serving (via /.; start screaming Ben)

– Prevent Thumbs.db (for Windows users)

– I like robot sports for some reason; this one is golf

– If you still haven’t RSSed this, you’re asking for it