dd-wrt v24 is out and can do 802.11N on the Asus WL-500W (as oposed to openwrt).

(continued from In the beginning, there was the X)

So it was all mobile (by 1993 standards) and converged and everybody was happy. Except everybody was basically a handfull of lucky academics and things weren’t all that pretty most of the time.

At some point regular people started to get online and that was done through commercial isps or walled gardens like aol and compuserve which sold access and wasn’t all that interested in selling mobility. So the expensive storage was pushed out into the edge into people’s pcs through pop and information got basically locked up in an inaccessible dead end.

This was kind of the dark ages of the budding internet. People were trying to transition to wintel, microsoft was fighting the internet and trying to trick people to sign into their own bbs system, msn, styled after the dying models of compuserv and aol. We had html2 and then 3, marquee text and bookmarks files. Mailbox files and bookmarks files and everything was files, at least until your disk died.
You had your work email account and your home email account and pretty much nothing in between. Mobility repioneers had to rent servers somewhere in the internet to push email and bookmarks (manually sadly) back into the network. The server hosting this pages is one of those. It was expensive, and tedious to keep together.

Meanwhile the internet was getting less clunky, despite microsoft internet explorer 5.x (ye gods!!), and storage was getting cheaper and hotmail emerged of its post-buyout nonworking times and by 1998 email was liberated back into the web.

(to be continued)

The summer build up around iPhone3G and Android got me thinking about the perfect phone. The perfect phone nowadays is everything but a phone so the feature list runs fairly long. Here we go,

• it needs to be a phone (duh)
• it needs to have an address book
• the address book needs to know how to sync with stuff
• it needs to be a 3G phone, preferably 3.5G
• and have bluetooth with a2dpc, pan, obex and sync profiles
• it needs to have a decent web browser
• it needs to have a microSDHC slot
• it needs to have a decent camera, 5Mpx, glass autofocus
• and a crappy camera for video conference
• it needs to play mp3 and whatnot
• it should have a decent screen, the palm T|X 480x320 screen seems reasonable
• preferably a touch screen for joting down notes
• and it must be good enough to play video (that’s what microSDHC is for)
• the good camera should be able to capture CIF@25fps (microSDHC is for that too)
• it should be Linux or OSX powered
• or at least S60v3
• and be able to run extra software so it can be my pda
• wifi would be nice but i’m not so sure about that one

So the iPhone3G comes close and it’s pretty likely one of the Android phones get there. So go ahead, make my day!

Redoing the site came about for two main reasons. One was me not being happy with the n-year old content in the old site and with the zombie book of days. The second, unsurprisingly, was me wanting to tinker with current web technologies.

The engine decision was pretty easy, i already used blosxom in the past and i pretty much like it for all the blosxomy reasons. The design itself was on the other hand excrutiating as i’m very much not a designer.

So it started as a technical exercise in xhtml/css which proved in itself pretty depressing as xhtml1.0/css2.0 isn’t particularly more interesting than html4.01 in terms of splitting content and design which again i like to think is the reason why all web designs are fixed pixel-acurate typographical designs (as opposed to the web designers being a bunch of dolts who can’t transition from paper to screen). In the end getting a nice multicolumn flowed design turned out pretty difficult both cause float doesn’t really work that well and flowed layout depends on the block order in the content side of things, not the layout side of things. And of course, i was cheating and ignoring the multitude of css bugs on ie6 to avoid utter madness.

In parallel it seemed a good idea to go utterly web2.0 and thick-client and push all non-static content to the browser. That was obviously a ploy to play with jQuery and newer versions of Dojo. So i had content being pulled from feeds, put into accordions and tabs all very much dynamic and moving on the browser.
And then it dawned on me it was all very daft. Nothing was actually being accomplished, i was creating huge load times, breaking box models left and right (hello microsoft!), fighting doms and nothing was accessible anyway. And in the end, most people would be viewing the content through a feed aggregator and would never touch the site itself. So that would be a wasted month if i didn’t come out of it much more experiences in the horrors of the web.

So in the end most of the stuff got scratched, all javascript went away, content got constructed server side and floats went away.
On the down side tables came back. Here xhtml/css is much better than html4. Instead of tables going into html they came back on css so we get divs that render as tables and we don’t break semantics but we can’t influence render order in css so we end up saying the table layout in html.

Eventually, 10 years from now, browsers will catch up to xml/css3 and i’ll be happy happy doing server side components that spew out xml that’s perfectly laid out by a designer i’ll wont need to know.

Hi. There’s a new site here. There’s still a link to the old one somewhere. But this one will actually have content.

So there.

Vote Wiggum’08