Oliver Bolch / PhotoAdventure – the show gets funny

Funny Stuff 4 Responses »
Nov 242008

oliver bolch Oliver Bolch / PhotoAdventure the show gets funny Yesterday’s PhotoAdventure games just took a funny turn – Oliver Bolch, one of the organizers of the funky event, went crazy and sent us the following email (translated by yours truly):

Dear Sir,
it’s your style of communication!

If you ever call an employee of mine a wanker again, I will tear up your small ass, so that a horse can walk through (SIC!!).

Best regards
Oliver Bolch

Neither I nor Doris have ever described an employee of Bolch&Wiltner OEG as a wanker – their erratic behavior IMHO shows clearly who’s the one to blame.

P.S. For sanity reasons: yours truly is smaller than a horse – so a horse cant fit me. But Oliver Bolch apparently thinks that the laws of physics don’t apply to his holiness…

P.S.2 The German email is below – German speakers will definitely have a good laugh:

Sehr geehrter Herr Hanna,

es ist der Ton, der die Musik macht. Und wenn Sie einen meinen Mitarbeiter nochmal einen Wixer nennen werde ich Ihren kleinen Arsch aufreissen, daß ein Pferd hindurchmarschieren kann!

Mit feundlichen Grüßen
Oliver Bolch

Posted by Tam Hanna, Site Founder at 6:41 pm

PhotoAdventure idiocy – how to fuxate a tradeshow

Uncategorized No Responses »
Nov 232008

Austria was recently graced with a small photography exhibition going by the rather funny name of PhotoAdventure. While I usually don’t care too much about these small events, Olympus’s new E30 looked promising. As I had some free time on hand, I ventured out with Doris in tow…oh boy, adventures we had indeed.

Usually, journalists passing by are admitted if they are members of a journalist’s club which is of good standing. The process goes along the lines of show ID, shake hands, go in. Afterwards, reports go on-line or to the press. This process has all over the world for the last years…

Unfortunately, the organizers of PhotoAdventure (Bolch & Wiltner OEG) think different. As they had a few journalists who didn’t report (enough) about them, their chauvinist egos were hurt…which led to them refusing admission to people who didn’t register weeks in advance.

So: yours truly had issues and didn’t get in at first. Nobody was at range who was willing to help out…we eventually stumbled across the B&W boys sitting at the local coffeehouse trying to fatten up.

None of them felt like doing their job in a proper fashion: for them, journalists apparently are annoying critters who hinder their fattening process. OK – yours truly might be skinny…but definitely wasn’t there to steal their food.

Anyways: as we were not willing to put up with a bunch of lazy and haughty madmen who need to be prodded to do anything, we decided to call it for a day. No reports for you, and no reports for Olympus and the other exhibitors.

I came here with the honest intention to gather info on the E30 for you…but it was not possible. I hope for your understanding…

Cutting a long story short: it’s the exhibitors who get to foot the bill. Imbecilic press accreditation leads to less/no free column space – unfortunately, this system is not understood by many.

Posted by Tam Hanna, Site Founder at 5:07 pm

BlackBerry Storm shortage leads to fights

Funny Stuff 2 Responses »
Nov 232008

This one is so funny that I simply have to share it with you:

More than 200 people had waited at a Verizon store in mid-town Manhattan early in the morning, many of whom were turned away after it ran out of the new phones less than an hour after opening at 8 a.m. The angry customers caused a ruckus and police came to restore order.

Verizon said hundreds of others were in lines outside its stores up and down the U.S. east coast, but added that it had “plenty of phones” and would keep getting more shipments. It declined to give specifics on inventory levels.

Anyone saw such a run when the Treo Pro came out? Hmm – not me…

Posted by Tam Hanna, Site Founder at 4:21 am

Gmail adds themes, labs for all

Uncategorized No Responses »
Nov 222008

Our overlords have been updating their mail client, GMail. For those of you who don’t know, gmail provides (currently) 7265 MB of storage space for any mail you can possibly chug into it. I highly recommend google mail to anyone who is looking for a new account.

At any rate, they have recently updated gmail adding themes and making labs available to all users.

The themes are basically just css hacks that give gmail an entirely different feel:

mail fullscreen 320x200 Gmail adds themes, labs for all

There are about twenty themes to choose from, ranging from plain color changes to images, and full theme conversions. However the ability to use user created themes is not involved (probably a good idea, imo!)

Along with themes, those of use who are into bleeding edge features can play with ranging from a quick links tab next to your list of labels, which allows you to throw any sort of link you would like and have it available at any gmail session . Also available is mouse gestures, keystrokes, signature tweaks, and mail goggles (not googles, as I thought when I first read it):

mail goggles Gmail adds themes, labs for all

Both of these new features can be available from the settings menu in GMail.

Posted by Ryan Rix, Vice Administrator at 8:10 am

Increasing Network loads – embrace the lag

Editorials No Responses »
Nov 212008

Increasing Network loads embrace the lagHutchison 3 can be considered one of the unofficial sponsors of the Tamoggemon Content Network – their highly affordable data plans have allowed me to write and publish many an article on the go in the last two years.

Two years ago, yours truly paid 9€ for 3GB of data after a generous cut of over 50% – nowadays, 9 Euros buy every Austrian the same amount (or even more). Furthermore, faster and more powerful handsets increase the data throughput per customer: two years ago, uploading 20MB was difficult; nowadays it’s blazingly fast. And don’t even get me started on YouTube/iTunes…

We probably all agree that data usage is increasing: unfortunately, carriers are not prepared as well as they should be according to their marketing departments. Don’t get me wrong: I am not into the business of peddling fear of network outages, internet addiction or any of the other things where snake oil peddlers amass huge fortunes.

But: the problems in the mobile broadband area can not be ignored. Industry journals like Mobile report that customers have begun to return their dongles frequently due to low speed; major network outages have occurred in both Austria and the UK (which are data-heavy countries).

Insiders at a major Austrian carrier tell me that the problems are not due to the wireless equipment, but rather due to the uplink system connecting the cell towers to the network. As more and more customers gang up on a cell, the uplink no longer is able to handle the data transfers…which leads to slower speeds.

Carriers frantically upgrade their networks – unfortunately, this leads to outages like the A1 and T-Mobile outages experienced recently (to be fair: Hutchison had a small one, too…which struck me in the very moment when I needed the web urgently). The problems will be solved in the future – in the mean time, customers can do little except embrace the lag…

Image (c): abc texte/Dr. Kohrs – no reproduction permitted

Posted by Tam Hanna, Site Founder at 11:01 pm

Palm lays off employees

Editorials 5 Responses »
Nov 212008

The end for Palm seems to be coming close – a bunch of employees will soon be laid off according to insider sources:

A truckload of people have been let go at Palm. Most from the US (~200), plus closure of the office in Singapore, decimating the office in Australia, plus more in EU… :-/

While Palm definitely could need a thorough “weed-out”, I am pretty sure that the ones addressed by this measure will be folks who are not the ones to blame for the corporate culture – the long-time ex-Apple folks IMHO will not be laid off till the very end as they are considered “core staff” vital for the operation of the business.

Ryan Kairer’s boys claim that many of the folks ate from sales/marketing: while this is not exactly a bad step, some of the newly-appointed press contacts have managed to make themselves a bunch of enemies quickly (e.g. Palm Germany).

Eric Sink is famous for his article on how companies die slowly:

…
There’s a camera shop here in Champaign. … Nature has selected this kind of camera shop for extinction, but the owner of this particular store is fighting back. The newspaper recently reported that he has laid off everyone but himself. That will help keep his doors open, but it doesn’t help … He could close up shop tomorrow or he could keep going for years.
…

If we apply this theroem to Palm Inc., we could one day find “Big E” and a few sycophants facing the courts in an Enron-like bust – while I don’t want to accuse anyone of false book keeping, the downward trend is clearly visible for everyone who is willing to see it.

Sorry folks: Palm essentially is doomed and on its way out. Face it – I think that it would be a miracle to see them survive 2009…

Posted by Tam Hanna, Site Founder at 6:31 pm

Palm Treo 680 back on sale at Amazon Germany

Palm News 4 Responses »
Nov 212008

Update: The actual sales and shipping is handled by a partner company of Amazon – thanks to all who sent this in!
Unbenannt Palm Treo 680 back on sale at Amazon GermanyApparently, the Centro can’t completely satisfy all the Palm users who currently use a Treo 680 – the boys at Amazon Germany seem to be among the first to figure this out.

Their newsletter mentions blow-out deals on a variety of cell phones – on page two, the Treo 680 can be found near the bottom.

While the price of about 450 Euros is outrageous (much more than the device cost when it first came out), I nevertheless felt like letting you know – Amazon wouldn’t run this if it didn’t move produce after all…

Posted by Tam Hanna, Site Founder at 1:53 am

News from the mobile flash world

Development No Responses »
Nov 192008

Brandon Miniman’s recent rant about the rotten state of mobile flash apparently motivated manufacturers to improve their flash offerings – here is the round-up of all things flash:

ARM and Adobe cooperate on Flash
IMHO, one of the reasons why Java is as popular as it is is the so-called Jazelle unit found in most ARM processors – it can accelerate some types of Java code significantly by executing it in hardware.

Flash may soon get similar treatment according to Reuters – they claim that a series of optimized CPUs is upcoming:

The two companies said in a statement on Monday a series of ARM-based processors for cellphones, set-top boxes and other devices adapted for Adobe’s Flash 10 and AIR should be available in the second half of 2009.

The collaboration, part of Adobe’s Open Screen Project, was endorsed in the statement by several chipmakers including Texas Instruments, Nvidia and Freescale.

Full-featured Flash upcoming
As already stated in Brandon’s rant, the current version of Flash Lite can also be called YouTube enabler – as it is incompatible with most recent flash files.
However, this will change soon according to CNet:

The company has worked on Flash Lite for mobile phones for years, but a new generation of powerful smartphones has enabled Adobe to bring the full-fledged version for PCs to the mobile market. Lynch urged programmers and content producers to treat mobile devices with the same priority as regular computers.

Flash goes Android
One of Apple’s main competitors in terms of buzz (the T-mobile G1) is said to get Flash shortly. This singles out the iphone as one of the few mobile platforms not capable of Flash – I predict that Apple will cave in sooner rather than later…

Posted by Tam Hanna, Site Founder at 9:38 am

Documents to Go Version 11 released

Uncategorized 8 Responses »
Nov 182008

Dataviz has recently updated their Word Document editor to version 11.000.

This new version is available for 30$ (standard version) or $50 (premium version)

New features include:

* View tracked changes in word processing files
* Apply and view Styles in word processing files
* View border and wrapped text in spreadsheets
* 10 starter Templates included for creating Word and Excel files

This update brings Documents to Go as the only way to view and edit Word 2007 files, so if you need to use these files on a daily basis, it is a highly recommended piece of software!

Full details, including purchase information

Posted by Ryan Rix, Vice Administrator at 5:21 am

Palm & Product quality – Treo Pro cracks reported

Funny Stuff, Palm News 4 Responses »
Nov 172008

The folks at Palm’s seem to consider a few severe defects features – but we’re not talking about the perpetually-defective power buttons here. Instead, the recent releases from the orange boys have a new habit – cracking cases.

WMExperts reports a raising amount of users with cracked cases on the WM Treo Pro line (which is very similar to the Centro which has similar problems):
crack1 thumb Palm & Product quality Treo Pro cracks reported

As of now, the boys don’t call it an “epidemic failure” – in case you know more, please let them know!

via WMExperts

Posted by Tam Hanna, Site Founder at 12:13 am

AMD doesn’t care about “Netbooks”

Editorials No Responses »
Nov 152008

I have never liked the term Netbook too much – for me, a device like the MSI Wind U100 is a cheap and extremely portable notebook. I chose the device fully aware that it is slower than my old notebook was…and thus am happy with it.

Unfortunately, Intel’s marketing department felt that customers are too dumb to grasp this concept – and coined the term Netbook. This decision now seems to back fire – AMD’s Dirk Meyer stated the following in a recent CNet interview:

…
“We’re ignoring the Netbook phenomenon–just thinking about PC form factors above that form factor.”

I think that is a pretty unambiguous statement. But if that wasn’t clear enough, here’s what Bahr Mahony, director of notebook product marketing at AMD said: “We’re going to offer the Congo and Yukon platforms as an alternative (to processors and chipsets for Netbooks). There are a fair number of people that are not satisfied with the experience they’re getting on these mininotebook platforms.” (AMD uses the terms Netbook and mininotebook interchangeably.)
…

I personally think that most of the “dissatisfied” customers purchased their boxen not knowing what to expect. If you expect dual core performance, you need to lug around a 12″ device. If you want to go ultraportable, CPU performance suffers…understanding this makes sure that there are no nasty surprises in stock…

What do you think?

Posted by Tam Hanna, Site Founder at 6:09 pm

News from the metrics maid

Palm News No Responses »
Nov 152008

The boys at Krusell’s have just provided me with their “top-seller” list for October. In case anyone of you is new to the concept: Krusell is a big case manufacturer who tracks customer purchases in an anonymized (and thus legal) fashion. This data is then used to generate a list of phones sorted by the amount of produce they move – it can be found below:

  1. iPhone 3G (1)
  2. Sony Ericsson C702 (4)
  3. Nokia 3109 (5)
  4. HTC Diamond (2)
  5. Samsung i-900 Omnia (not in list)
  6. Nokia E51 (3)
  7. Nokia 6300 (6)
  8. Nokia E71 (10)
  9. Nokia N95 8GB (7)
  10. Nokia 6220 (8)

As usual, the numbers in the brackets are the previous month’s placement. At a first glance, we immediately see that Nokia dominates the top-10 heavily. There are four S60 devices, three dumbphones, two WM devices and one Apple IOS phone in the top-10.

However: the low amount of dumbphones does not prove the “commonly-known fact” that smartphone owners care more about their devices (so much about J2ME). Instead, it shows that smartphones are now wooing fashion-sensitive clients…there is not a single real businessphone in there except for the E71…

P.S. I am fully aware that these numbers are not too reliable when it comes to assuming how many devices were actually sold. However, customers who purchase a case usually care about their phone a lot…which is what makes these figures truly interesting.

Posted by Tam Hanna, Site Founder at 8:57 am

Health&Diet manager for Palm OS – the review

Productivity No Responses »
Nov 152008

The game of weight gain/loss is an age-old one…some people weigh too much, while others (like yours truly) weigh too little. As body fat transfers have not been invented yet, sensible and strict dieting is the only thing one can do to regain control. iambic’s Health&Diet manager wants to make your life easier…but can it stack up?

Before the program can be used, a profile must be created. These contain diet goals, weight settings and other information, and allow multiple users to share one installation of HDM:
0a Health&Diet manager for Palm OS the review 0b Health&Diet manager for Palm OS the review 0c Health&Diet manager for Palm OS the review

Once a profile has been activated, the program switches to “overview” mode. It lists your caloric balance for the day, among other things:
1a Health&Diet manager for Palm OS the review

Calorie intakes have to be added – this is ideally accomplished via food already contained in the (well-filled) database:
2a Health&Diet manager for Palm OS the review 2b Health&Diet manager for Palm OS the review

Once your food of choice has been found, the exact amount must be entered:
3a Health&Diet manager for Palm OS the review

Special activities (sports) deduct calories from your body. Thus, they must be entered, too:
4a Health&Diet manager for Palm OS the review 4b Health&Diet manager for Palm OS the review

Actual weight data can be added by hand to help the program determine your caloric needs:
0c Health&Diet manager for Palm OS the review

The program furthermore contains a lovely BMI calculator – stop fighting around with tables and start getting meaningful results:
6a Health&Diet manager for Palm OS the review

Finally, ideal training pulse rates can be computed:
7a Health&Diet manager for Palm OS the review

Even though metric units can be activated in the prefs, some settings always remain in US units:
8a Health&Diet manager for Palm OS the review

This review looked at version 3.01 of the program on a Treo 680. The program was stable in the reviewing period and needs about 3 MB of RAM.

In the end, diet managers lve and die by their users discipline and the database quality. While no software in the world can affect the first, the database always was a neuralgic point for this kind of program. iambic’s HDM is no exception – while its database is useful and well-filled, a slight “american slant” can always be felt. As the program is well-done otherwise, I consider it best-of-breed…get the free trial before deciding if its worth the 20$ for you!

Posted by Tam Hanna, Site Founder at 12:39 am

Stupid & in love with widgets

UI design 2 Responses »
Nov 142008

I have never been too much a friend of so-called graphical buttons – coming from the depths of Windows 3.xx, I am accustomed to having text captions on buttons. While this may look boring, the dialog below shows why it has its merits:
idiotgui Stupid & in love with widgets

The texter refers to “Yes” and “No”, but the UI designer decided to deploy graphical widgets which don’t wear these labels. While we (aka the readers of TamsPalm) should be able to figure it out quickly, other users may take a few seconds (and will be frustrated if their machine reboots due to them making a wrong choice).

When it comes to alerts (deciding about very important things), definitely stick to your system’s UI conventions at all cost. Not doing so will probably land you on TamsPalm, and will get you a bunch of unhappy users…

What do you think?

Posted by Tam Hanna, Site Founder at 1:10 am
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