Finally, "real" Chicago pizza in SF, and in Hayes valley! In news thats probably not good for my waistline, I passed the former location of Powell's Soul Food on Hayes near Octavia, and there was a sign in the window for "future home of Patxi's Chicago Pizza. (hmm, its the picture here used for Yoga Tree, the paper'ed up store front between Yoga Tree and New Leaf) Patxi's makes a Giordano's style pie, like Zachary's Chicago Pizza of Berkeley/Oakland. Its not my favorite type (Lou Malnati's, Nancys, Pizza Bakery, etc), but its a close second. Patxi's recently opened in Palo Alto, and is pretty good. There's no information on their website about the new location, yet. Frankly, Zachary's missed the boat on this one, I'm sure they could have expanded beyond their two stores, but they've been stagnant for too long, so Patxi's is going to try it instead.

There is a "Pizz'a Chicago" in SF at the Wharf, but they're pretty far from being an accurate rendition of a Chicago Pizza (decent meatball sub, though). There was a chain Pizzeria Uno Chicago Grill on Lombard, but it recently became an SFO something (similar signage, UNO->SFO, and recent enough that the yellow pages and the picture at Amazon are of the older one). The chain isn't that much like the original, and the original isn't my favorite, but if you got the Classic it was an ok pie (did I mention I was a gourmand, not a gourmet?). older one

Last week, Amazon's A9 search unit came out with their new Yellow Pages service which has actual ground level pictures of the storefronts in 10 cities across the US. Its pretty cool, at least in theory, but there are quite a few errors in the data, for instance my first search was for Memphis Minnie's, my favorite local BBQ place, turned up a picture of a boarded up building a block away. Other things I tried didn't really have any good picture, or turned up just pictures of intersections. If you click through to the Amazon page, however, you can suggest a better picture, which is a cool. The whole concept of the 'yellow pages' having a full amazon page where you can post reviews and feedback is definitely cool, and adds to the existing service where you can find restaurant menu's on amazon as well. On the other hand, the a9.com interface is apparently too "complicated" and "magic", since it basically wouldn't work on my treo when I tried to show it to some people, and forwarding the url didn't help much either (http://a9.com/memphis obviously doesn't include much information, such as the location you searching or what "modules" are enabled, so the person won't get the local search results for my section of SF).

There is an article on USA Today about the service, which brings up some "privacy" concerns that the service works for "abused women's shelters, abortion clinics and adult video stores". Now, if there are actually recognizable pictures of people in the pictures of those places... I can see there is a privacy implication, but that's not what the article mentions as a complaint. They point out complaints about those places being in the data at all. Now, are we trying to hide abused women's shelters from abused women? Is the security of these places based on needing to know the secret handshake or the right person to find them? That hardly sounds like a real solution. Its the off-line equivalent of "securing" your content by having it on a "secret" url and telling people not to link to it or share it with others. Ie, it doesn't work. Hopefully this is just a case of sloppy reporting, since the partial quote they include from Pam Dixon implies the problem of the photograph containing a picture of the abused women, and not the location (though as quoted, its still not clear).

So, after sticking with my Startac for nearly 6 years, and enduring months of people telling me it was time to upgrade, I finally took the plunge. With the new year, I replaced my Startac with the new Palm Treo 650 (still with Sprint). I've also had a Danger Sidekick with T-Mobile as a portable web terminal for over a year.

I was almost scared away from the device by the sales reps at the Sprint PCS store. They claimed that when the device losses power (by taking the battery out or letting it die), you can lose some of your contacts, or the entire phone can be reset and need to be re-programmed by Sprint. I couldn't find any mentions of this particular bug on the web, though there were clearly a lot of other bugs out there. They were also careful to tell me about the 30 day return policy on the phone, and told me not to buy accessories in case I return it, etc.

My main concern was actually how well the phone would work as a phone, and that is still my main concern after having it for nearly two weeks. I liked my Startac in that it was a natural phone form, and the speaker wasn't very directional. I've tried to use friend's Nokia phones, and felt I had to hold the phone at exactly the right point to hear it. I've felt some of the same with the Treo, but not as bad. I think part of it is the Treo speaker isn't "crisp", at leat not at high volume. Its also uncomfortable on the ear for long discussions, so I've bought a headphone piece for it (and noticed it came with one) so we'll see how that goes.

Dialing while driving is definitely out. With my Startac, I could dial by feel, or I had memorized the right steps to certain people in my phone book, and a quick glance would be enough to know I had the right person and call. Not being able to dial in the car might be a good thing, or I might get the voice dialing working (but you have to pay extra for that? What?)

Speaking of "paying for it", I was somewhat surprised by the software CD the Treo came with, in that it had a bunch of software on it, some was labeled as requiring purchase, some that was just demo software but wasn't labeled as such (10 games on Tetris? Come on), and some that wasn't Palm software at all, like Realplayer, Quicktime and Windows Media Player 9. I need to get suggestions for software.

The only bug I've hit to date is trying to set up VersaMail. Its buggy, that's clear from all the forums. For me, it resets the device after it finishes syncing to my IMAP server. The "push" mail application on the Sidekick is clearly superior in most respects to VersaMail, from the interface to the fact that I don't have to "choose" how often to sync my mail, it just always arrives. Setting VersaMail to sync more often than once an hour causes it to warn you that you might shorten your battery life. Well, maybe that explains why the Treo lasts for days, and the Sidekick is lucky to last 36 hours.

As for web browsing, the Treo beats the Sidekick in almost all categories. Some of this is because the Sprint 1xRTT network is much faster than the T-Mobile GPRS network, and its very obvious while using the device. The Sidekick does do a better job navigation wise, with the roller for scrolling and the back button to go back. I haven't quite figured out how to use Palm hotkeys on the keypad for easy back. On the other hand, the Treo also feels faster because it does this two level render, where it first renders the html in a very basic format, and then fills it in after it gets most of the images. This allows for much more efficient browsing of sites which have way too many images, especially ones before the content of the page. On the Sidekick, you have to wait for the images to load, and it usually doesn't let you scroll beyond them. Also on the Treo, you can switch to a "full view" instead of the optimized view, so you can use websites and tables which just can't be compressed (by allowing horizontal scrolling). The Blazer browser on the Treo also supports javascript, and in generally just feels faster to start fetching a page. There must be something about the proxy/rewrite model the Sidekick uses which just adds latency, which is noticeable even beyond the latency of the network... or the network is just that bad.

My only other beef so far is with the SMS messaging. There is this confusion between email and SMS messaging, but I don't really "text" anyone (couldn't really on my Startac) but I use it heavily as a pager (I'm oncall at work) and my pages are all email... but I want to be able to respond from the phone, and the SMS client really doesn't want to respond correctly. It doesn't follow the Reply-To of the email, it doesn't let you edit the To address (unless you add a voice/image message.. but you have to add the voice/image attachment). On the Sidekick, I couldn't use the email as a pager, since I didn't want to be notified on every new message, and I can't use that on the Treo since VersaMail sucks and its not push. So, no replies from the phone.

I haven't been able to get bluetooth syncing to work, though I have used the infrared fairly easily. My laptop found the Treo, and my Treo found my laptop, but wouldn't sync. Dunno. I could have used the Treo DUN Hack when I was in a hotel in Tahoe without internet connectivity, but instead spent my time browsing the web via the Treo. I also found the pssh client to work amazingly well, and haven't had the annoying constantly dropping connections that I've had with the Sidekick's Terminal app.

Overall, I'm fairly happy. I haven't quite figured out how to answer the phone when its in my pocket (I keep answering it while getting it out, and then hanging up when I go to answer it). We'll see how it lasts. I don't think it will last 6 years...

And yes, I was tempted by the Startac 2004, but $1600? That's a bit much...

I guess I should point out, I watched this thing over the holidays, and it was horrible. If you've read the books, avoid it. If you haven't read the books, read them instead. The first three books are fairly simple and straight forward, and skip a lot of things that I thought could have been fleshed out well in the mini-series, but instead we got a wishy washy forced combination of the first two books that seemed like an overly obvious attempt to shoe horn Earthsea into the same "formula" as the Harry Potter movies. Jeez.

Check it out: www.courtandbrandon.com. Thanks to Jack for the design.

So, recently I've taken to watching Stargate SG:1 (and the new Stargate: Atlantis shortly after that). For whatever reason, I hadn't succumbed to my normal impulses for the x number of years its been on. Recently, I re-evaluated that decision in the midst of the TV summer doldrums, and admitted to myself that I've watched far crappier SF TV in the form of such grand shows as the last season of Earth Final Conflict, Andromeda, or even on ocassion Mutant X, so why should I stay away from Stargate?

This isn't a post about that, however. While breezing through some episodes on the Tivo, I've seen some commercials for some upcoming shows on the SciFi channel, including a Farscape movie/mini-series, a Battlestar Galactica series, and an Earthsea mini-series.

I was a fair fan of Farscape, though I joined it late as well. I'm glad to see it coming back, even if only for a short time. This may work out ok, though given the somewhat rocky Babylon 5 "movies", I won't hold my breath. At least we'll have an answer to the cliff hanger finale.

I did like the Battlestar Galactica mini-series that SciFi did earlier. I wasn't such a big fan of the original that I had hate for the remake, mostly because I was 6 when it was originally out. I did have the Dagget action figure, and a Viper (which Mom hated because it actually shot something). And the mini-series definitely had that "this is only the beginning" that had "pilot" written all over it. At least I didn't miss the second half like some friends did (poor guide listings by SciFi meant that the Tivo didn't realize there were two episodes, and I had to force it to tape the second one). So, I'm happy to watch some more of it.

Earthsea... I read it as a kid, and remembered liking it. When Tehanu came out, it seemed to miss me for some reason. It had been many years since I'd read the original trilogy, but Tehanu seemed to have more adult attitudes, or maybe I was just more of an adult. For whatever reason, I hadn't re-read the series like I had re-read so many others. Perhaps it is time to re-visit the series. Apparently, there are a couple more books to the series as well.

Worth watching, I think. And hope that the SciFi channel isn't only going for that monsters/horror or whatever schlock that people were afraid of.

Been running programs a lot in gdb recently, and it just occured to me that I haven't spent this much time typing "run" since my Apple ][ days.

In another bit of nostalgia, celebrated three years of dating at Tequila 2004 by passing out on the couch. You'd think I was much younger...

A followup to an early article about RSS Growing pains. It makes it prety obvious that serving RSS with straight Apache for popular sites is probably a bad idea, but you won't know that until you "hit the wall" as he states.

RSS is too dumb to do anything to really stop this, but you would think that aggregators would be a bit smarter. Clients could just have a random walk setting in their fetcher, so it wouldn't fetch every hour on the hour, for instance. If the load was evenly distributed throughout the hour, you'd still have (clients * 24) extra load on your systems, but it could be as much a couple orders of magnitude less "pop".

Fixing the protocol, one could imagine server side aggregators (hmm, that is confusing terminology) which could combine multiple feeds, and then a client could request all of the feeds from the single source. This could be combined with pingers such that these "clusterers" (ugh) would get pushed updates from the people publishing the feeds. The original feeds could even contain pointers to clusterers which support their feed.

In a perfect world, those writing these clients would actually support their own clients in this fashion so their clients wouldn't wreck havoc on the world. They don't have to handle all the feeds, just the most popular ones. Ie, the client would fetch the feed from the primary source, tell the mother service all the feeds it fetchs (anonymously, of course), and then for any feed with more than say 1000 subscriptions, the mother service would tell the client to fetch the feed from them instead. Good citizen and all that. Plus, it would allow the client software to report aggregate statistics about subscribership across the rss world, much like Bloglines does now.

The next step after that would of course be some sort of P2P mechanism for distribution, hijack one of the existing protocols (BitTorrent has been mentioned in the past, but that seems too one shot to me, but I'm not an expert), though you should run this service maybe separate from the primary one (different ports or whatever, no need to clutter the service with rss feeds).

The most obvious answer from a server side is to serve your RSS feeds off of something like squid. It can handle a much larger number of simultaneous transactions due to its async nature, and the caching isn't a bad thing either. It might also help when you have a really large number of feeds. It should be interesting if the GG2 feeds become very popular, for instance. Well, interesting to me, since I'll have to fix the problem...

While in New Orleans, I just had to try Krystal Burgers, which appear (and taste) nearly identical to White Castle.

No clue about this movie.

Someone else's opinion on the difference between the two.

Hmm, here's a supposed recipe for White Castle Cheeseburgers, i'll have to try that...

The big treat in Vancouver though was DQ. Hmm, not the new Grill & Chill, though. And they didn't have Chocolate ice cream, in either the express or the full store. Yes, we had it twice in two days...

A Volvo commercial which features a computer animated car, talking about "when the new blah blah starts showing up in video games", has a disclaimer that states "Animated Car on an Animated Course".

Further disclaimer at the end of the commercial states "Car is a rendering for illustrative purposes and does not precisely depict the Volvo product."

Just in case you weren't sure about those things.