rebron.org: Everyday Life, Work, Ironman Training

photo of Playa del Carmen

This is Playa del Carmen, I’m here through Sunday and then to Mexico City for a day and then home on Monday. May drop over to Cozumel on Saturday and definitely would love to vacation here for real to see Tulum, Chicken Pizza, and hang out for a while.

I’m doing work though and actually a product launch hopefully today. I came because have to work out some things and then the fact that Playa del Carmen has wicked good web access sealed the deal. Otherwise, I’d do the product launch from home but then why not launch a product from Mexico or work from Mexico or anywhere in the world really if you can.

Which brings me to this. Wireless internet access should be ubiquitous as the phone. I should just be able to open up my laptop and start surfing away regardless of location: in the mountains, on the beach, in a cafe, at home, wherever. I had a problem in San Mateo the other day and I was looking for directions. I had to go into a Starbucks and pay for web access when I really should’ve just been able to open up my laptop and start surfing.

Mountain View and San Francisco via Google is going to get wireless access City Wide. I’d like to see Ask step up and give free wireless access to the city of Oakland. Maybe Microsoft should do the same and do it for Seattle and possibly AOL for Washington D.C. Once that starts happening, maybe other companies need to step in and the government can step in and then we’ll have this crazy free (or pay a premium for a little better/more secure) wireless network.

Safari on Windows is not a surprise. It’s something that at Mozilla (actually even at Netscape) we were predicting. It was just a matter of when.

What people might not know is that the Safari team consists of a lot of ex-Netscape folks from the Netscape 6.x days. Once you get into the groove of building browsers, you just kind of do it and enjoy it because the software and the problems and opportunities that browser software development has is so diverse and it’s so interesting. The feedback is cool too, someone builds a web application, it works or it doesn’t work, what needs to be changed in the browser to make it work — in a nutshell.

Anyway, it’s good to see Safari on Windows. I think that the Safari team should also consider whatever hooks they might have that’s Safari-Apple-iPhone-whatever only should be ported to IE Windows and Firefox.

There’s definitely a danger that QuickTime and Videos work best in Safari and works moderately ok in IE or Firefox. Also, while the Apple team may know what the business opportunity is for having a browser, I don’t think they *really* know what that potential is.

Also, Apple better be careful with their marketing with Safari. If they’re going to call out that Safari is the fastest browser out there, they better be able to back that up.

[I had deleted an earlier post for one reason or another on XUL Runner. I’m rewriting per a request]

I’m coming at this from a different perspective so what I’m thinking could be inaccurate.

Background 1

The evolution of XUL runner was based out of AOL being able to leverage the Netscape browser into the main AOL client. Basically one instance of the browsing engine should be on the machine and it could be leveraged by AOL, Netscape, CompuServe or whatever application that may need it. This kinda launched as GRE or Gecko Runtime Environment. One of the bigger reasons for this at the time was download size of the different applications. Of course that was in a still dial-up world in the year 2000.

In any case, AOL never embedded Netscape into their main client, it was tested and launched in the long defunct CompuServe client. It did work though.

Background 2

The modern thoughts on XULRunner came when the Mozilla Suite needed to be broken up into the separate applications. The thought was a Firefox or Thunderbird or Sunbird or whatever other applications that come up could leverage a single XULRunner instance and the download would be light, there would be shared components, and all would be happy.

Problems

There are three:

1) to do a XULRunner is hard, not easy building one of these and be able to predict what all the applications want, different versioning, etc.

2) The investment in XULRunner was minimal (just not a priority and if it’s not Firefox who cares) and didn’t get the chance to really get flushed out. Who was gathering the requirements? Who was talking to customers? Who was evangelizing the platform? Where were the white papers? It’s still a project and maybe it will get it flushed out more down the road.

3) Possibly the biggest issue, no one is building client software anymore, none that matter anyway. You have two extremes, little shareware type applications that do one or two things that can be done using platform specific code. The other extreme is like an Adobe Photoshop i.e. some wickedly complex piece of software and you’re not going to base Adobe Photoshop on XULRunner. Given #2, you’re not going to get #3.

The interesting thing is that XULRunner is in direct competition with offline apps. XUL versus AJAX type offline apps would be a neat exercise to see what’s good and bad about each. It’s funny because we’ve had “offline” apps for the longest times, it’s called n|VU and Thunderbird, and Songbird.

*I think this is what I said in the post deleted “XULRunner Pipe Dream” or something like that. I just whipped this up so I probably have more thoughts on this.

[First off, Mitchell Baker’s blog is a must read if you’re serious about being in the Web industry. If you don’t know of her, what’s wrong with you. She doesn’t blog often but when she does it’s important and her more personal posts (as much as a CEO can get personal) are pretty funny.]

Mitchell wrote about her experience with traffic school, and I had a good laugh at that (not that I was surprised, it was just funny). Anyway payback sucks in terms of schadenfreude and I got my first ever speeding ticket in April on my way to San Diego. I’ve gotten a bunch of tickets lately, a no U-Turn ticket in Alameda (on Park Street), and a couple of parking tickets. And I’m like what the heck is going on!

Anyway, I used http://www.gototrafficschool.com/. It took me a little over an hour to complete the course and test which was pleasant. It was a good refresher but I don’t remember anything (thank goodness for tabbed browsing and the nifty find feature).

What differed with my experience from Mitchell is that verification of who I am was done online (otherwise a notary or some other method is required). I did my verification through Experian the credit history people. I gave them information about my accounts that really only I should know and they gave a time limit for me to answer them. They asked about accounts I’ve held and also how much my mortgage was and a few other challenge questions. [I’m wondering if someone could just buy my credit history and do the same thing.]

Now, there’s got to be a better way to verify identity than me having to pay Experian a $15 convenience fee. I need to read about DSS some more which I guess is standardized? And I don’t know about personal certificates either. People just won’t get how that works.

I’ve never had an interest in doing the Escape from Alcatraz triathlon, but lots of my friends have and many of them are doing it today, Sunday, June 3rd 2007. I think it’s kinda crazy — it starts off jumping off a boat into the San Francisco bay waters.  Here’s the story.

Anyway, the t-shirts and the cycle jerseys are nice. I would do it for that but overall not really interested. There’s another Alcatraz triathlon but Escape from Alcatraz is supposed to be the better one.

I’m also in what they call the “no ironman zone”. After four of these damn Ironman races I’m just not interested in training for this next one in Canada. I’m really not interested in doing much of anything right now.

I got a Nuvi 650 GPS device. It’s pretty cool. It works pretty much out of the box. The screen is nice 4″ x 3″, it’s color and fairly big. The voice is fine but I don’t have any place to stick the device unless I mount it on the windshield (luckily I have a little compartment that I can use for it where the GPS device for the car was supposed to be).

I recommend it overall and definitely over the other 600 series — it has the wide color screen with the least features so the least expensive of the bunch. I’m sure the devices will get even bigger but this one is large enough and the voice is loud. I haven’t explored the other features, there might be too many. This device gets the basics right — map, directions, places of interest — so that’s all I really need.

I would wait until it gets down to like $250 - $300 though if it ever gets there.