Two of my beefs with cellcams that I haven’t yet blogged are fixed focus and lack of zoom capability. I often happen upon an interesting picture opportunity when the only camera I have with me is my Nokia 3650. I switch to the camera application, point at the subject, snap the digipic, et voila, I capture a beautiful image of…something really interesting, but very very far away and almost impossible to make out. This problem is amplified by the sub-megapixel image resolution of many cellcams available today and lack of a flash.
Luckily for all of us would be mobile photographers, Royal Philips Electronics has come up with an ingenious development to address at least the fixed focus part of the problem: A new lens that uses two fluids and electrowetting to vary focus, similar to how a human eye works.
Read the Philips press release for more details, including a detailed explanation of the schematic above.
Following up on my earlier entries on Motorola Linux smartphones and recent device announcements from various manufacturers:
Motorola has announced a new music-oriented Linux mobile phone, the E680. It has all the bells and whistles including J2ME gaming support, 3D stereo speakers, MP3 and MPEG4 video playback, a VGA quality digicam, and the ability to support up to 1GB SD memory cards.
Oh, and unlike previous Linux-powered Moto phones, this one looks to be available outside of Asia, too.
Microsoft is doing things with MS Office that could cause people to violate federal ethics policies. Hopefully this will encourage even more organizations to switch to Open Office/Star Office instead.
Huh? Am I missing something here, or does this article on Vodafone, Nokia, Sun, and others pitching domain name registration for wireless devices confuse more than it explains? Poorly written but intriguing news in its implications.
I read the recent eWeek article “Sun Adopts RSS” with great interest given my employ with Sun and my blogging experiences via my personal site and java.net.
After reading it, though, I had to ask myself: Is this really news? Sun’s been providing developer feeds for many months now and works to make sure related developer sites and communities have what they need to support RSS too (see Netbeans.org and java.net for two examples). The only additional news here is that Sun’s ratcheting up its commitment even further.
Perhaps the article should have been titled “Sun Adopted RSS Long Ago, But We’re Just Now Telling You About It”?
When is the disgrace of new US “security” measures going to end? Once the US government has completely humiliated everyone else in the world into hating and despising us? Or maybe even worse, once we’ve succeeded at building a stunningly safe, but liberty free, society? Doesn’t this smack of Nazi Germany to anyone in Washington?
Benjamin Franklin said it best:
Those that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
If you agree that the US government has gone too far in numerous areas of inspection, surveillance, and the infringement of liberties since September 2001, send your representatives and senators a very clear message that security should not be politicized. And by all means, help vote Bush out of office this November.
Among the stats in this article on Sony Ericsson’s new phones, more information on the rise of cellcams, including plans from several of the leading cell phone vendors for megapixel+ cellcams in 2004.
How well will these new SE devices compete with upcoming Moto phones and Nokia’s plans? The multi-billion dollar the question…
This Reuters/Yahoo! News article on used PCs has some nice tips and ideas for extending their life and minimizing their impact when you do move on to a new system.
I had quite the afternoon today.
I was just finishing up my daily jog late this afternoon when, as I turned into the parking lot of our apartment building, I saw a young guy standing at the left rear corner of my car trunk prying it open with a large multitool. The next few seconds happened without me even thinking about things, sort of an auto-pilot kind of thing.
I walked towards him and called out “What are you doing?”. He responded with something like “This is my friend’s car…” and then muttered something under his breath. I responded “That’s my car.” He looked pretty shocked at that point and just stood there for a second or two until I said “I think you should run now.”
He turned tail and took off, around my car, across the street, up over the grass at an adjacent apartment complex, and out of sight down into their parking area. I really wish I’d taken a cellcam pic of him, but he was gone before the camera application could even load.
Before he’d even cleared the median I was dialing 911 on my phone. I had just taken an infant/child/adult first aid and CPR refresher course earlier this week and, at the urging of the instructor, I had programmed my local emergency dispatch number into my cell phone so that a call from my cell would go straight to local emergency response rather than California Highway Patrol many miles away (what happens by default in northern California today if you call 911 from a mobile). Since I had the direct number programmed into my phone, I was talking with someone from local dispatch as the guy went out of sight just a few seconds later.
The local police had an undercover cop arriving in my location in about three minutes and he tore off in his SUV after the burglar. Two marked cars arrived a couple of minutes after that and started taking my statement. We looked at my car from across the parking lot but didn’t get closer because they wanted to use a canine unit if it was available to sniff for the thief’s trail. (Turns out that the canines didn’t come “on shift” until 5PM, whereas I caught the burglar at 4:30, and so they said unfortunately it would be too long for them to catch a scent so no dogs were used.)
As we were looking at the car, I noticed a yellow emergency supply/first aid pack which had been in my trunk was now lying against our apartment building, behind a shrub. I pointed this out to the officer taking my statement. He asked me to confirm it was mine and I did. Since they can’t get prints off of cloth anyway, he went ahead and had me look through it to verify everything was there (it was).
So at this point we knew the thief had been in the car at least once and gone through the pack, then went back (maybe to grab my lighter-powered tire pump, I don’t know, we didn’t really have anything valuable in there anyway, hah hah). He must have been surprised when the hatch fell on him the first time (the hatchback hydraulics are weak, always thought that was a problem but now I think it’s a feature :-), so he was having to try to get in again as I discovered him.
About the time we looked through the pack several more officers showed up. They were combing the area for the perpetrator (brownish-blond hair with a goatee, about 5ft 10in, white, probably early to mid-twenties, white tshirt with no logos, no discernible tatoos or scars, brownish cargo pants). They were also looking to see if he might have dropped his tool or anything else as he fled. Eventually the forensic van showed up. Photos and fingerprints were taken, and they got at least three good prints off of the left rear of the trunk. If they can pinpoint the guy that did it, apparently the fact that he removed the backpack from the car makes it a felony auto burglary so they can give him some decent time for it.
They have three possible suspects in mind, and one in particular that one of the policemen said matched my description very well and they’ve suspected might be breaking into cars in the area recently, too. They’re checking with other people whose apartments overlook the end of the building to see if anyone else might have seen anything and they said they might bring pictures by for me to look at them and try to pick him out.
I hope they catch him. In any case, I’m glad I interrupted him and, probably, gave him the shock of his thieving life!!!
As USA Today reported recently, placement in Google search results can make a very big difference for many businesses.
I’ve seen this in my own site. If you search Google for “J2ME”, you’ll see two Sun pages listed #1 and #2, then my J2ME Archive is #3.
What does this get me? Looking at the data from a particular day (I chose 10 February 2004), I see that 13.6% of my referrals came from google.com/search. This was 2nd only to visitors with no referrer (46.4%), who presumably came to my site from bookmarks. The remaining eight of the top ten referrers paled by comparison (see below for full dump of the stats), and even then several were Google localized sites (India, Canada, UK) so we really should probably include them in the overall Google referral total too.
The Power of Google compels you, indeed!
| Rank | Referrer | Visitors | % |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. | (no referral) | 2,430 | 46.4% |
| 2. | google.com/search | 711 | 13.6% |
| 3. | yahoo.com/search | 159 | 3% |
| 4. | y365.com/resources.htm | 142 | 2.7% |
| 5. | midlet.org/links.jsp | 91 | 1.7% |
| 6. | google.co.in/search | 86 | 1.6% |
| 7. | http://www.google.ca/search | 72 | 1.4% |
| 8. | sun.com/techtopics/mobility/learn/ | 68 | 1.3% |
| 9. | javaranch.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi | 57 | 1.1% |
| 10. | google.co.uk/search | 55 | 1.1% |
BillDay.com 