Day: June 19, 2009

Meta: theme switch again, other tweaks in progress

I have switched themes again to ahren.org’s Ahimsa, as it is becoming obvious that while Inanis Glass is a nice looking theme, it’s a bit too bandwidth intensive right now, and is also not as customizable as I would like.

I’m also adding some more tweaks. Anyone hitting the site a few nights ago would have caught me in the middle of an experiment with the TTFTitles plugin. This experiment while using the Inanis Glass theme was, at best, an educational failure; the Inanis Glass theme is a bit too rigid on the title being the same size text as normal text.

I will also be adding some more general pages and background information about myself. It just occurred to me the other night that many of my readers probably do not know a whole lot about me, and I would like to try to fix that.

Finally, I’ve been making some behind the scenes changes on how I write blog articles that will mean there are a few more of them. Before, I relied almost exclusively on the WordPress built-in post/page editor. I have looked at various blog clients, most notably BloGTK and QTM. The latter was appealing as it was available for almost any OS I had a desire to edit my blog from, whether out of choice or necessity (right now, sometimes Windows is the only viable option; I do see this as a serious problem whenever it comes up and do plan to make it go away for good). Unfortunately both of these clients are not without faults.

BloGTK lets me access drafts I have saved online, but it is hard to weed out the drafts from posts I have already submitted. I still have not found a way to access the WordPress “schedule” feature, which lets me publish a post and delay the time it actually becomes available online. It also appears to be for Unix or Unix-like systems only, though I know the GTK+ libraries are available for Windows, nobody has actually made a port.

QTM does not let me edit drafts I have saved online, as far as I can tell. Nor can I edit previous posts. I can edit drafts I have edited in QTM just fine, but I can’t use Press This to save the URL to an article and then pull that into QTM. This is a major deal-breaker for what is otherwise a decent blogging client.

Both of these clients do not allow an external editor to be used, and possess rather clumsy internal editors. That led me towards a solution based on the editor I would be using: Vim. I found a script called Blogit written by Romain Bignon which appears to meet most of my needs. It also has one annoying problem I will get to later, but it isn’t a deal-breaker yet and should be easily fixable anyway.

My attempts to find a decent HTML macros package for Vim came up more or less fruitless. I decided I could get most of what I want by writing in Markdown and then running all but Blogit’s headers through the Markdown filter. (Blogit adds RFC-2822-like headers, similar to what you would find at the top of an email message, to support the post title, which it refers to as a “subject.”)

Anyway, the one beef with Blogit is that it appears to only easily allow one blog account, hard-coded into the script (one replaces the sample URL, username, and password before using the script). I suspect it would not be too hard to replace these on the fly, and/or feed the script different values for the other blogs I plan on maintaining in the future.

Yes, that’s other blogs, plural. I will announce further details as they materialize, but my die-hard fans can rest assured this blog isn’t going anywhere.

Mobile phone exclusivity agreements under fire

Reports from both ITworld and Infoworld detail an inquiry from four US Senators to the FCC, regarding the exclusivity arrangements wireless phone manufacturers (such as Apple and Palm) have been making with wireless telephone carriers (such as AT&T and Sprint).

This follows an FCC petition by the Rural Cellular Association asking the former to investigate these exclusivity arrangements.

The timing couldn’t be worse for AT&T, as the telecom giant is dragging their feet to support MMS and tethering, among other things. Apple’s other carrier partners worldwide have been able to handle this without issue.

However, it should be noted that AT&T is not the only wireless telephone carrier in the crosshairs of the Senators and the FCC. T-Mobile and Sprint are known to have made exclusivity deals as well, which would undoubtedly be subject to the same scrutiny.

All of this is definitely a step in the right direction towards respecting the freedom of wireless phone users, or in other words, the rest of us. It is long overdue, but there is still a lot of work to do once exclusivity agreements are seen for what they are: anti-competitive collusion.

There is still a lot of cleaning up to do after this, however. Most notably, it would greatly benefit the wireless telephone users if there was one and only one standard in use: GSM. CDMA needs to go the way of the dodo, the sooner the better; the network design takes a significant amount of freedom out of the hands of the user, where it belongs. I consider myself rather technologically literate, and I did not know this until fairly recently (about a year or so ago).

GSM networks and phones use SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) cards for authentication and identification (or how the network tells which phone belongs to which user). If one wants to change phones, one simply powers down the old phone, removes the SIM card from the old phone (usually hidden behind the battery to make it impossible to remove while the phone is powered on), inserts the SIM card into the new phone, and powers the new phone on. The carrier (phone company) never has to get involved.

On a CDMA phone, it’s nowhere near that simple. One has to take the new phone into the store and have a staff member key in a bunch of magic numbers, and make changes on the wireless network so the new phone is recognized as legitimate. The wireless telephone carriers have the control; they can choose not to let you use the new phone on their network at all if they see it fit. It is, in fact, in the carrier’s best interest to get the customer to buy a brand new phone instead of re-activating an older model.

I have been told that Sprint will not activate non-Sprint phones for their service (i.e. phones not branded for use with Sprint). I would not be surprised if Verizon (and any other CDMA carriers?) adopt a similar policy.

Fortunately, we may actually see the demise of CDMA in our lifetime. Verizon is already in the process of changing over to GSM; that would leave Sprint as the last national US CDMA carrier in existence.