John Burkhardt "If I have nothing to say, my lips are sealed" - Talking Heads
Thursday, May 09, 2002
Carl Zetie wrote an article called "Don't hold your breath for Mobile Web Services"
a large result set from a search might be returned to an application searching a catalog; but for a mobile device, a much smaller and more restricted result would be more appropriate. While well-designed Web services may offer multiple interfaces, some more suitable for mobile devices, not all Web services will be well-designed, and not all clients will be smart enough to take advantage of them.
The article talks about protocols for discovery, multiple required round-trips and supporting large documents. This isn't a problem with web services for devices. This is a problem with the web service itself. Its totally up to the designer of the service to engineer it so that its appropriate for a limited bandwidth device.
I've been basing my whole API on providing ways to limit query results, and receiving header or meta data on results, rather than the full result.
Independant from devices, we have to consider high latency and limited bandwidth.So, I'll design the Web Services with devices in mind, and anyone building the client for a small device will hopefully be smart enough to take advantage if this!
7:29:53 PM
I just got my new Earthlink DSL connection running. I used to have Mediaone cable, then they got bought by AT&T. Nothing changed for a while, and then... suddenly... I was no longer able to get to my pop email account from anywhere else but my cable modem. I tried several times to explain this issue to AT&T. "You can read your email from a browser" was their answer. How lame is that? Not only that, but they discontinued dial-up access numbers. "You can read your email from a browser". Yeah, but if I can't dial up and get to the Internet how can I use a browser??? WTF? The most frustrating thing was not being able to get anyone at AT&T to understand why I was frustrated. One of the cool things with Earthlink is a static ip address so now I can run my own server in the basement and do some more serious hacking! I may gain control of my email yet!
One thing I will miss is the new AT&T spam filter. Seemed to work reasonably well - but I was always worried that real email wasn't always getting through, like if a friend wrote in the subject: Hey, I've got that money I owe you! The filter would most likely reject this. I don't know how many times I've screwed up transactions on eBay trying to pay someone because their email got filtered...
5:18:50 PM
I found this animal while surfing this morning. Too expensive for me, but the concept is intruiging. It runs Linux, can receive email and hold 10GB of data. I remember Matt Pope telling me about a company or paper or something that talked about people carrying around a device that would hold vast ammounts of information on your person, so when you want all your stuff you would just have it with you. This is aligned with the Groove paradigm, where you store your stuff on your machine, not on a server in someone else's control. I kept thinking that porting Groove to a handheld was farfetched - but I don't think it will be much longer before I have something like a P4 with 80 GB of storage and 2GB of Ram in my pocket.
