As I noticed on Apple Website, the SDK for developing 3rd party applications for iPhone/Touch will be available in February. This solves the biggest problem - offline reading - because with SDK, storing a downloaded copy will be trivial. It also will most likely fix the annoying lack of updatability of calendar and add few more interesting apps.
It is only matter of time until the other eBook formats will be be readable on iPod - such as CHM or PalmDoc (non-DRM-ed version).
Thanks to sudden memory jump in my iPod (from 4GB Nano 2gen to 8 GB iPod touch) I have enough space to load some books in addition to podcasts. I normally do not like abridged versions, but the weather is getting worse so I do not get enough walking time for full versions. These two were both 3-4 disc long audio books.
The Google Story is interesting if you are into history of computing - because it describes the probably the largest transition in computing history - the evolution of World Wide Web to a platform and the evolution of the company that made the Web actually useful. I still remember how much time did it take in 1997/1998 to find anything relevant when the best way how to do this were directories (in early Yahoo! style) or AltaVista and hours and hours of paging through the irrelevant results. Then in early 1998 my friend Rajeeva (I was working in New Jersey at Merrill Lynch) made me aware of that company with funny empty looking page and strange name Google :). And now, 9 years later the shareprice of GOOG is well over $600 - just unbelievable.
Gerd Leonhard, co-author of the Future of Music book is making an experiment with his new book - The End of Control. He is publishing the chapters of the book as they appear in PDF format as well as MP3's on his website. First two chapters - "Attention is the new currency" and "Copyright in the Age of Uncontrolled distribution" are currently available for download / reading / listening.
The books tries to address very important questions on how will the new media business function in environment with little control over the distribution channel. Attempts to enforce control with technical tools were not very successful - just recall the Sony rootkit fiasco's, hacking the HD-DVD and others. Currently, there is strong movement away from DRM and towards non-crippledrestricted content.
For sixty more days (actually 59 days and 17 hours as of Time.now, or if you prefer to speak Javaish rather than Rubyish, new java.util.Date()) you will be able to download free PDF version of the book by Patrick Lenz Build Your Own Ruby on Rails Web Applications - courtesy of nice guys of Sitepoint.
The book download page is here, no strings attached - all it will cost you is disclosing an email address (book download link will be emailed to you) and bandwidth to get the 20 MB PDF. Mine is downloading right now, so I cannot tell anything about the book yet. It has 447 pages and from the table of content it looks like solid beginner's book.
This is blog entry I wrote over a two years ago - before this blog has even started. Now I found it on the disk during cleanups and found out it is still valid. The iPod mentioned was my first, now long dead first generation Shuffle.
Here it comes:
Spent most of Friday night and part of Saturday reading this book. I did not really expect to finish it, considering the size (~ 500 pages) and the fact that I am not such a great fan of Oracle products - especially not the Oracle Apps. But it turned up to be way better that expected. I mean the book, albeit I partially improved my opinion about the 11i. Technologywise, it is still kind a dinosaur, but now I can more appreciate the sheer size of the problem these guys were trying to address. But back to the book.
Today's Blog of the Day is "The Reader".
Everything about ebooks and readers - all the stuff I like. See at http://wowio.wordpress.com/
Here I discovered that Sony is assumably preparing new version of reader - PRS 505. From the changes that should be included, none is IMHO really so important. The memory capacity of the reader with SD cards (which are reaching 8GB these days) is much bigger than you ever will need. If I should pick some enhancements hat would make a huge difference, it would be:
During my recent return to Javaland, I have noticed many improvements in newer releases of well established frameworks and toolkits, as well as many new ones. One such new release is version 2 of Spring framework. It is not really a hot news, because the final version of 2.0 is out for almost a year (October 2006), but it is new to me, because I spend pretty much all of last 12 months in DotNet, C# and OLAP worlds, with only brief visits to older Struts based, Spring-free Java projects.
As the September 28th is approaching (the day when the new iPod touch will be available in Canada), I have a real dilemma: do I go with the "iPhone without the phone" or not ? The price $329 for 8 GB iPod is pretty high - compared to $279 for 80GB classic - which would allow me to carry all my music, some movies and all podcasts with me. On the other hand, the Touch has WiFi and can be used as pretty decent Web browser on top of iPod functionality.
For all my fantasy-loving friends who consider reading in Czech or Polish too inconvenient: the first book of the grand master Andrzej Sapkowski in English is out. It is book of short stories about Geralt, the Hexer (or Witcher if you want), who is the main character of the 5-book saga with the same name.
You can get it on Amazon.
I have been pretty quiet during last month. Few reasons why, none of them business related. The summer is not the season where people in our industry are incredibly busy - that's what winter is for ... and end of March, government fiscal year end ;-). We had family visit - my two nephews were staying with us for few weeks. So instead of blogging, I was spending evenings with them and weekends as a tour guide around Ottawa's attractions. I have even - finally, after 9 years in this country - overcome my dislike for really long car trips and visited Niagara Falls.