May 2011 Archives

Tue 05.31.11 - Driving northbound on the 5 fwy.

This spring has been travel crazy here at Black Phoebe and one of the ways that I have been able to keep within the parameters of my AT&T International data plan is to use Ovi Maps when I was in London and Amsterdam, as you can download the maps before you go and those maps also have all of the most current place information that one would want.

When I was in London, I switched off between using Google Maps on my Nokia N8 and using Ovi Maps. I noticed that Google Maps is quite the data hog using it online and Ovi Maps set to 'offline' was much easier on my data usage.

When I was in Amsterdam, I was surprised how thorough and good that Ovi Map's offline offering was. I was to meet up with friends for dinner, but trying to find them was a moving target as they did not know where they were going and I was about 10-15 minutes behind them. One friend texted me the name of restaurant that they had decided on and without going online, I was able to use Ovi Maps to get the address of the restaurant and the map of how to walk there. It was on the fly with no data usage.

At the beginning of May, Surya Nair, Ovi Maps community manager, invited me to attend a workshop this week in Berlin on Ovi Maps and a few other applications. I am looking forward to meeting the team behind Ovi Maps and to talk with them and other workshop participants about the mobile maps/location/etc.

Off I go to Berlin this evening, volcano willing.

Sat 05.21.11 - All photos of various family and friends at Grandma Grace's memorial service & dinner taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N8. Photo slideshow of Grace's life coming soon, I will email the link to interested parties.

Wed 05.18.11 - After a surprise rain storm the last two days, it was quite windy & chilly this morning. As Scruffy & I left for our morning walk, I saw my neighbors Earl and Ryan dressed up like it was winter not the verge of summer.

Jeremy Rifkin's Empathic Civilisation lecture at the RSA, a must watch:

The short RSA animated version:

Sun 05.15.11 - Mobilism 2011 was a great conference, not only were all the sessions quality, but all the folks I met were smart and thinking about as well as doing some cool things in the web and mobile web space. Big thanks to PPK, Krijn Hoetmer, and Stephen Hay for all of their vision & organizational abilities!

It was also great to be back in Amsterdam after 18 years away, even if for only 4 days, as the city has changed for the better and it was lovely to see a small slice of it. I will definitely come back.

Sat 05.14.11 - Here are a few of the photos taken during and after the sessions of Mobilism 2011, as well as on Saturday. Both Thursday and Friday, I had the opportunity go out for delicious dinners with other speakers and friends. On Thursday, we went to Kantjil & de Tijger, a dutch-indonesian fustion place on Spuistraat, and on Friday a super delicious Italian slow food restaurant, Pianeta Terra on Beulingstraat. After dinner on Friday, we went over to Cafe Hoppe (Anno 1670) for drinks and talk.

On Saturday, after all of Mobilism was over, I rented a bike from the hotel, took the ferry to the NDSM werf and met up with Martin & Abi Sutherland and their family for a late lunch at the fun & funky Cafe Noorderlicht and then a lovely bike ride up to Het Twiske, as well as a tour of the book cases. As a proud reader & book addict, I too, one day endeavor to have a two wall living room / book case showroom. Even more important, Abi gave me a few good book recommendations.

On Saturday evening, after a bike sprint back to Amsterdam and a walking sprint to the Ouid-Zuid, I met up with Brian LeRoux, Joni Rustulka, and her brother Jay. We had dinner at an Eritrean/Ethiopian restaurant that had the best tasting Ethiopian food I have ever eaten (not usually a fan) and a lot of laughs. All was well, until 2am, when the food decided it didn't like me. Oops.

All photos at Mobilism or afterwards taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N8.

Fri 05.13. 11 - Here are the slides from my Mobilism 2011 presentation this morning, I would also like to highlight the conclusion ideas and some of the links:

Moving Forward:
* Form a grassroots set of folk to work up the hybrid server/client side solution for mobile browser and feature detection as proposed in Brian Rieger's presentation.

*Work with browser makers for a more complete feature profile and to alert of user preferences on data, media, and current context.

*We are all here now, what are we willing to accomplish & organize?
The Mobile Web is young, let's keep the lines of communication open and work together.

The Three Presentations after mine that expand on CSS (Media Queries), Client side, Server side and Hybrid approaches:
Steve Hay's Presentation On Media Queries
Scott Jehl's Presentation on Mobile JQuery and how it is used on the new Boston Globe site (he will be posting this later after permission is gained)
Brian Rieger's Presentation on Muddling Through the Mobile Web

Resources:
Text W3C's Mobile Web Best Practices
W3C's Mobile Web Application Best Practices
Authoring Practices for the Mobile Web
USC's Best Practices in Mobile Detection
Quirksmode Mobile
Detect Mobile Browser
Modernizr
Simple javascript mobile OS detector
WURFL
Deploying WURFL
Tera-WURFL UA & Feature Explorer
The Switcher
Manifesto for Responsible Reformatting

Also, this presentation was geared as a guide on where to begin for web designers and developers to who are wanting to get started in Mobile. I would recommend starting with the resources to move forward.

Also here are a few links to:
James Pearce's Modernizr-server
W3C Media Queries
Rethinking the Mobile Web

Dear reader, As a way to both pay attention and have a good record of the proceedings, I like to type out transcriptions/paraphrases of conference sessions. Here is my final transcription/paraphrase for Scott Jehl, Bryan Rieger, Nicholai Onken, and Jared Spool at Mobilism 2011. - Ms. Jen

Jump to:
Scott Jehl - Getting Started with JQuery Mobile
Bryan Rieger - Muddling through the Mobile Web
Nicholai Onken - The Hitchhiker's Guide to Mobile Dev
Jared Spool - Mobile & US: In the Eye of the Perfect Storm

Fri 05.13.11 - Sorry, today's transcriptions are a bit sparser, as I presented between Mr. Souders & Mr. Hay.

********

Steve Souders
stevesouders.com

WPO - Web Performance Optimization
drives traffic
improves UX (session lengthens as it gets faster)
increases revenue
reduces costs

Mobile Performance test sites/tools
Blaze.io/mobile
pcafferf pcapperf.appspot.com

stevesouders.com/mobileperf

HTTP Archive for Mobile
mobile.httparchive.org

*************

Stephen Hay
Meta Layout: A Closer Look at Media Queries

Links: http://delicious.com/stephenhay/mobilismconf2011
Presentation: http://www.slideshare.net/stephenhay/mobilism2011

Dear reader, As a way to both pay attention and have a good record of the proceedings, I like to type out transcriptions/paraphrases of conference sessions. Here is my transcription/paraphrase for Brian Leroux's After HTML5 and the Mobile Browser Panel at Mobilism 2011. - Ms. Jen

Jump to:
Brian Leroux - After HTML5
Mobile Browser Panel

Dear reader, As a way to both pay attention and have a good record of the proceedings, I like to type out transcriptions/paraphrases of conference sessions. Here is my transcription/paraphrase for PPK's The future of the mobile web and Stephanie Rieger's Beyond the Mobile Web at Mobilism 2011. - Ms. Jen

Jump to:
PPK - The future of the mobile web
Stephanie Rieger - Beyond the Mobile Web

Luke W - Mobile First

Web products should be designed mobile first.

"We're just now starting to think about mobile first and desktop second for a lot of our products." - Kate from Facebook
"We really need to shift now to start thinking about building mobile first" Kevin at Adobe

Mobile First
1. Growth = opportunity
2. Constraints = focus
3. Capabilities = innovation

Web 05.11.11 - Photos in Amsterdam by Ms. Jen taken with her Nokia N8. I arrived in Amsterdam at 9:30am after not sleeping on the plane at all, so the first day before Mobilism was spent in a fun jet lag / sleep deprivation haze. After a small nap at the hotel, I took myself off to Brasserie Luden for lunch, then I walked down the canals through the western canal district of Amsterdam. Around 4pm, I found Brian Rieger and joined him, Stephen Hay, Stephanie Rieger, Lyza Gardener, and Peter-Paul Koch (PPK) at the cafe of Felix Meritis.

The evening was a fun speaker dinner boat cruise of the canals of Amsterdam as well as the Ij and Amstel rivers. It was lovely to see Amsterdam from the water and to be able to socialize leisurely with other mobile folk. The best part is we went by the big cruise ship docks to pick up Steve Souder and Andrea Trasatti half way through the cruise. While others went off after 11pm to get a drink and talk some more, the wall of NO SLEEP hit me hard and I went off to bed.

Great first day of Pre-Mobilism in Amsterdam.

Sun 05.08.11 - Happy Mother's Day to you and yours. Magnus the Magnificent visited today and he and Scruffy had the best time running around.

Sat 05.07.11 - Photo taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N8 at the Huntington Beach Dog Beach.

Video of Shikha Dalmia on Bollywood vs. Bin Laden from Reason.tv: Bollywood vs. Bin Laden - Why radical Islam fears pop culture

Honestly, I have stayed kind of quiet on 9/11 and Bin Laden on this blog the last eight years, not because I don't care, but because the whole thing is so fraught with many pitfalls. As a Californian, I felt very distanced from the 9/11 tragedy due to it happening on the other side of the landmass that I live on, much as if there was a great disaster in northern Canada or southern Mexico or Japan, it seemed if it happened in a far off foreign place.

Bush & co. diversion of the WMD snipe hunt in Iraq in 2003 that was conducted in the name of 9/11 was, in my opinion, a gross misuse of American power in the name of supposedly hunting down terrorists.

This past Sunday evening, on May 1, 2011, I was at my Grandpa Jim's 89th birthday party and with the exception of probably three of us liberal pinko arty types, the other 20+ of the attendees are/were died in the wool Republican patriots, to the point a few more toasts were given to patriotism & country than to Grandpa. As dinner was breaking up, a relative announced, "Fox news is reporting that Bin Laden is dead!!!"

Me: Pulls out the N8 to check the BBC as a din of confusion starts around the dinner table. The BBC confirms.

Me in a loud voice, "The BBC confirms that Osama Bin Laden has been taken out by US forces."

Relative: "Fox News says..."

Me: "The BBC..."

Roll your eyes. Yes, I don't trust Fox News, but I do trust the Beeb.

All week, I have been avoiding most of the coverage of Bin Laden's death as it is much ado about much ado. Yes, I am glad that there has been closure. But as I said to my dinner seat mate to my right, Mariano, "It is time for the countries in the Middle East to determine their own direction, the Arab Spring will have more power over the minds of the people than the Isalmists."

Mariano, "But what about the Isalmic Brotherhood?"

Me: "So what if the Egyptian people vote them in, how different is it from Americans voting in the Tea Potters? Both are overly conservative folk who want to roll back time."

Mariano, "...."

The real issue here is post-modernity vs. pre-modernity. This is an issue of mindshare and in the video above Shikha Dalmia of the Reason Foundation nails it on the head with very vivid Bollywood videos on how the post-modern world is in conflict with the pre-modern world of the Isalmists. The Shelia video, below, would be just as offensive to many conservatives in the US as it would be to conservatives in India or Iraq or Iran. Or maybe not offensive but embarrassing when they can't explain their woody to their pastor/cleric.

The question is how do we move the world forward in peace with giving each community and culture set freedom to shake their groove thing or not as the case maybe without blowing each other up?

The original music videos from the Bollywood movies that Ms. Dalmia referenced in her video:

The Sheila & Munni videos reminds me of Shakira, which then makes one wonder if the next war will be between Indian Muslim Bollywood stars v. Lebanese belly dancers v. Brazilian Samba dancers. As long as that war is conducted on YouTube, I think we will all be safe.

Sun 05.01.11 - Photo of May Day flowers taken by Ms. Jen at the Huntington with her Nokia N8.