2003

As if getting a new (and amazingly gadgety) cellphone weren’t enough, I just upgraded to OS X 10.3. So far so good: despite doing a wipe-and-install, with manual restoration of preferences, things have gone pretty smoothly (the one unaccountable and annoying problem is the complete loss of my NetNewsWire Lite subscription list).

This is a big upgrade: Apple was modest in adding .1 to the version number (as they were with 10.2). My mac is much more responsive now, the interface, for the most part, has been subtly improved, and there are a lot of obvious new “bullet-point” features that really are useful. It’s encouraging to see that Apple has not been resting on its laurels after the success of the 10.2 release–that was a pretty good OS, and they could have gotten away with tweaks for this one, but it’s clear that either they had a lot of stuff in the pipeline already that couldn’t be vetted in time for 10.2, or they still see OS X as an unfinished work (which is true of all software). It’s also interesting to see how much headroom is apparently left for system optimizations, and I wonder what we’re in for when they eventually release XI.

I have some beefs–I’m not sold on the metallic Finder, or the sidebar (which is resizable, but the resizing apparently doesn’t take, and which can’t be manipulated from the keyboard like other columns, as far as I can tell). And so on. But it’s good.

More on the saga of phone switching.

Two days ago, I received my Belkin Bluetooth dongle. Plugged it in and my Mac instantly recognized it.

Yesterday, I got the Sony Ericsson (I always forget whether to double the C or the S) T610 and Jabra headset. Reactions:

• The phone has very nice industrial design. The buttons are small, but spaced so that I haven’t really had any fat-finger problems, and I really appreciate that they’re laid out as a keypad, not in the amorphous formations Nokia has favored of late. The joystick doesn’t always respond predictably to the “push in” action but is a nice idea. Screen is ok. Color screens on cellphones create more problems than they solve, but it does look pretty. Some have complained that it washes out badly in sunlight–this is a little bit of a problem, but tolerable. The phone’s overall size is a little taller than my old phone when folded, but as slim as the old phone when unfolded.
• This is my first candybar phone. The previous one was a flip phone, and the one before that was a sort of hybrid that was a candybar–or rather brick–shape with a flap over the keys (this remains my favorite phone shape). This is the first phone I’ve had where I need to worry about accidental key activation–it’s already been making calls without me realizing it. This can be prevented using the key lock feature, but another problem cannot be: touching a key activates the screen; if the keys are constantly being pressed, the screen is always on, and with a color phone, that means the battery gets run down very quickly. The key lock should really be a dedicated slider, rather than a combination of regular keypresses. Time to get some kind of holster. One odd quirk is that the numeric keys can get hooked under the faceplate–when this happens, the soft keys and joystick stop working. Very frustrating and mystifying until I noticed the wayward key.
• I was surprised that this phone doesn’t auto-discover the time.
• As you can see, the camera on the phone takes amazingly shitty pictures. And that picture was taken in “high-quality” mode.
  
• Bluetooth is a hoot. I love it. It’s a little fussy getting two devices to recognize one another, but from a security standpoint, that’s as it should be. Moving all my contacts from my address book on my Mac to the phone proceeded smoothly–everything is properly tagged, though I would have preferred that the “company” field be ignored. I suppose there must be a way to hack that… Apart from contacts, files can be moved back and forth between phone and computer via a little file browser. This is OK, but really, the phone should appear on my desktop like just another device. Using the Salling Clicker is great fun, in an incredibly nerdy way.
• After following these very helpful instructions, I succeeded in connecting my Mac to the Internet via the phone. Slow, but usable. This is pretty nifty. Some bandwidth tests: I found a bandwidth-testing WAP page that works in the phone’s WAP browser: a pathetic 1.43 Kbps. (I have actually owned 300-baud and 2400-bps modems. Funny how these things come around.) Using the phone as a modem, and loading the 2wire bandwidth page, I get a more respectable 31.4 Kbps. By way of comparison, that page shows my DSL connection as yielding 1596.2 Kbps. Incidentally, this is much higher than DSL’s nominal 384 Kbps, but roughly in line with similar tests. The more informative Speakeasy tests show the following
  

  	GPRS	DSL
  Up	9 Kbps	214 Kbps
  Down	26 Kbps	1200 Kbps

• The phone’s voice dialing works just well enough to be frustrating.
• Sound quality seems OK. I can’t really comment on reception: there’s a T-mobile tower within rock-throwing distance of my home, so I always get 4 bars here, but at Gwen’s, I rarely get even two bars, as her neighborhood is poorly served by T-mobile (you hear that, guys?).
• My speech coming through the Jabra headset sounds poor, but incoming sound is fine. The headset doesn’t feel very secure on my head, and apparently will not pair with my Mac, but it works. The phone comes with a wired headset that’s also OK.
• The phone has a huge array of bells and whistles–both literally and figuratively. There are scads of annoying ringtones, and if you don’t like those, you can import more, or even compose them on a little in-phone music sequencer. No kidding: it has a four-track display (drums, guitar, keyboard, horns) with 32 canned snippets for each; you lay down one snippet per measure for each, and keep building up measures until you’ve got a song. I’m pretty sure Moby has traded in his studio for this phone.
• Apart from that, this phone is complicated enough that you really need the manual. I couldn’t figure out how to put the phone into vibrate mode without navigating through four layers of menus until I found out I had to set one setting and then I could hold down the C key whenever I wanted to go into vibrate mode. The phone is also set up to encourage you to use its Internet connectivity more than you might expect–it has a dedicated Internet button on the side, and several menu options put Internet-based content higher up than content inside the phone. This strikes me as a bit cheesy, but I can live with it.
• One interesting feature for managing the complexity of this phone is a feature called “profiles” (there’s a similar feature on the Mac called “Location,” which would obviously be a problematic name if applied to a mobile phone). Profiles are a group of settings for use in different situations–at home, in your car, walking around, at the office, etc. Switching profiles changes a bunch of profiles all at once. Good idea, poor execution. How?
  • The phone comes with several canned profiles; to change one, you select the profile as your working profile, and then edit everything. This makes it harder to reuse your existing settings and modify them–much better would be an option to save the current settings as new profile.
  • Although many features can be subsumed under a profile, there are some that cannot–for example, the key lock, which is handy when out and about, but useless at home.
  • Profile switching is mostly a manual affair. The phone does come with a headset, and it automatically switches to a handsfree profile when the headset is plugged in (but apparently not with the Bluetooth headset), so clearly there’s some ability to switch automatically. This approach should be extended: I’d like the phone to go into “at home” mode when it is within reach of my computer (as discoverable through Bluetooth), or perhaps when plugged in. This idea could be taken a step further by placing (or discovering) “bluetooth buttons” at other locations one regularly visits, so I could have one in my car, one at my coffee shop, etc. A bluetooth button needn’t be more than a transponder that identifies itself with a name and perhaps a GPS position.

My old number has not been ported to the new phone yet, but I have initiated the process. I wound up speaking with four different operators yesterday, each of whom told me I needed to talk to a different department (except for the last one), and each of whom encouraged me to bring my phone and an old Sprint bill in to a local T-mobile office in person (including the last one, but I insisted on doing it over the phone, so she relented). By the way, “port” seems to be the magic word–anyone who is transferring service from one carrier to another will save a couple minutes by using that word rather than “transfer,” etc. But the new phone does work, and is providing me with much amusement.

So, what would make the phone better? Better reception. A camera that’s actually worth using. A memory-card slot. Perhaps an MP3 player (though that would probably be politically unpopular at Sony). A slider to control key-locking, and making ring volume and silent ring part of the volume controls (why they are not is a mystery). The UI could do with a few tweaks.

I’ll update this entry as news develops.

Simson Garfinkel writes about bitrot saying, in so many words, it won’t be that big of a problem. Jeremy Hedley warns, Cassandra-like, that for invidivuals, it might be pretty bad indeed.

I side with Garfinkel.

Like pretty much everyone who has been using a computer for more than 15 minutes, I’ve lost data. The problem of bitrot is one that is pretty widely recognized by now, even if we’re not sure exactly how best to guard against it. This awareness in itself is probably going to help minimize the problem: we may look back on the period from, say, the fifties to the nineties as an anomoly when we didn’t routinely plan on making data available to our future selves.

Bitrot is a three-layered problem:

The physical layer

If you can’t read a floppy, or whatever physical medium you’re using, you are sunk. This really breaks down into a couple sub-layers: the media itself has degraded (all media has a lifespan before it starts losing data; for some, like floppies, it’s pretty short); or the drive requires a connector and/or software drivers you can’t use with any known device.

The data layer

Fine, so by some chance your floppy is still good, but back in 1993 you were using MS Works 2 to store your business data, and there aren’t any programs that can read those files.

The cultural layer

This ties in with the data layer–some formats will almost certainly be well supported in the future, at least to the extent that format translators will exist to convert Ye Olde Data Phyle into the sleek and modern DataFile 3000. This comes down to how popular a format is/was, and whether it is clearly and publicly specified. The file format used by Word 2000, for example, is not publicly specified but is so widely used that a number of programmers have done pretty good jobs of reverse-engineering it. The PDF and RTF formats are publicly specified and very widely used. But MS Works 2? Nope.

So what can we do to avoid the heartbreak of bitrot in our own lives? A few things.

Back up

This should be obvious. My own backup strategy is to back up my home folder to an external hard drive daily, and to a magneto-optical disk (estimated to have 50-year data integrity) weekly.

Save files in publicly specified formats

As I wrote to a friend recently, “every time I save a file in Word format, I’m afraid I’m doing something that will come back to haunt me.” From now on, I’m saving my work as RTF. Plain text would be better, but RTF strikes a balance between preserving formatting and universality.

Move forward

This does not mean jumping on the bleeding edge and buying every gadget that comes along. It means recognizing when a physical or data format is on the way out, finding a safe successor, and moving to that. As long as you’ve got data you can read on a hard drive that works with your computer, and a backup you can read somewhere else, you should be in the clear indefinitely. Eventually we will see net-based storage that is convenient and affordable (we’re not quite there yet), and at that point, we won’t have any excuse for failures at the physical layer.