Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

Palm: Back From the Brink?

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As I’ve mentioned before, I have had a lot of frustrations about smartphones. Most of them are kludges with major usability or extensibility problems. I finally settled on a BlackBerry Bold as my new phone, which I am very happy with so far, but I’ve had a long-running soft spot for Palm and the long-neglected Palm OS operating system.

Palm lovers like me though have had a rough few years. First, the old Palm Inc. (which made the hardware and the software) lost its way and its original founders left to start a new company called Handspring. Handspring made some great devices which ran the Palm OS made by Palm (under license), including my beloved old Handspring Visor Pro and the original Tréo smartphone.

Then Palm, for reasons nobody really understands, split itself in two. PalmSource was the company that would build the software, and PalmOne would build the handhelds and phones themselves. Both would have legal right to use the name ‘Palm’. PalmOne quickly merged with Handspring (bringing Palm’s original founders back in-house) and embarked upon some of their best hardware devices ever, including the groundbreaking Tréo 600 and Tréo 650 phones that set the course of the smartphone market for years to come.

Read more . . .

Changes to Mobile Browser Support

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I’ve made a number of modifications to the ‘low-fi’ version of Off on a Tangent that gets fed, primarily, to mobile and text-only browsers. While the mobile version of Safari (the iPhone/iPod browser) and the Android browser each do a decent job of rendering the full version of the site, the drop-down menus and other elements of the site don’t work too well in a mobile environment. As a result I have started sending the low-fi version to mobile Safari and the Android browser.

I also made some modifications to make the low-fi version work better on those two browsers—everything should be readable and usable. I have also improved support for the most recent version of Internet Explorer Mobile on the Windows Mobile 6.1 platform (it should work well in portrait mode in IE 6 Mobile, but there are still some minor issues in landscape mode and on higher-resolution WM devices).

You can see the up-to-date list of supported desktop and mobile browsers (as well as screenshots of the site in each browser) on the ‘About the Site‘ page. While the listed browsers are the ones I actively test with, the site likely works on lots of other browsers too. I expect that the changes I’ve made will improve the site on various unsupported mobile browsers as well.

As always, I recommend you use the most up-to-date version of your chosen browser (since I do all my testing in the newest versions of each). If you have any problems with the site in a supported browser, please let me know!

Permit to Carry a Concealed Handgun

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chp2chp1So the folks over at the Fairfax Circuit Court finally woke up and mailed my Concealed Handgun Permit six days past their legal deadline. Apparently the court’s definition of 45 days is, in fact, 51 days. According to the paperwork, the law enforcement folks cleared me on 11/26 (ten days after submitting my application), the circuit court cleared me on 12/18, and the permit has a printed ‘Issue Date’ of 12/29 (which was a couple of days before their deadline).

The postmark on the envelope was 1/6 though, so it either sat around somewhere for a solid week-plus or they falsified their issue date. I’d believe either.

Regardless, I now have permission from the Commonwealth of Virginia to exercise my God-given civil right, guaranteed by the Constitution, to keep and bear arms un-infringed (except in those places where the state chooses to infringe anyway . . . ~sigh~).

Apple iTunes Store Goes [Mostly] DRM-Free

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In October of 2007 I wrote a fairly detailed comparison of Apple’s iTunes Music Store and Amazon’s then-new MP3 store. My verdict was not too clear—Amazon’s MP3 store won kudos for its DRM-free 256-bit MP3 files that could be played in almost any jukebox software and on almost any portable player. iTunes, however, had a much wider selection of songs.

iTunes was the first digital music store to offer unencumbered, DRM-free songs, but only from the EMI record label and (until Amazon MP3 entered the market) at a higher price. After Amazon MP3 entered the market, these so-called ‘iTunes Plus’ tracks came down to the standard $0.99 price but were still offered only from EMI artists. iTunes had become a confusing mish-mash of DRM-encumbered and unencumbered tracks and, as a result, I did most of my music buying through Amazon MP3.

Well, iTunes is [finally!] back in the game. At today’s MacWorld Expo Keynote, Apple VP of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller announced that ‘iTunes Plus’ DRM-free tracks would become the standard, with most songs available without DRM immediately and the store going completely DRM-free within three months. Users can also ‘upgrade’ their previously-purchased tracks to being DRM-free, but personally I removed the DRM myself from those tracks using my legitimate fair-use rights and have successfully avoided that unnecessary expense.

Regardless, this is good news for music lovers like myself. We now have renewed competition between Amazon MP3 and Apple iTunes for our music dollars, and neither will lock us in to a DRM-encumbered universe. We can own our own music again. The music industry might just survive after all, if only they would start supporting the good artists again ;-).

Doug and Valerie Herrman: Parents of the Decade

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It’s only January 5th, and I’ve already stumbled upon my nominee for the parents of the year. In fact, they’re my nominees for parents of the decade.

Doug and Valerie Herrman took in two-year-old Irvin Groeninger III as a foster child and, before too long, adopted the boy and gave him the name Adam Herrman. In 1999, when Adam was approx. 12 years old, he disappeared. The Herrman parents apparently weren’t too worried, because they didn’t report him missing in the next several days . . . or months . . . or years. In fact, Kansas police have just started trying to piece together what happened to Adam ten years ago, since they just found out about it.

I don’t even know what to say. How could two people who loved this child enough to take him into their home and raise him for ten years go for two days, let alone ten years, without reporting him missing? I just don’t understand. According to the Herrmans’ attorney, “they were very worried about him.” Well, we have ten years of negligent inaction that would imply they weren’t very worried at all.

Amazing.

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.