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Huge crowd, heard the attendance was 5.5k give or take. There was a veritable geek stampede getting into the room this morning. Not sure if there is any big news that hasn’t already been leaked. The Google music service launch, growth in Android market share, and possibly some more info on Honeycomb. It’s all going down in about 12 minutes.

Vic Gundrota upon stage. His review of past IO conferences ends with a shot at Apple. (You stay classy, Vic.)

Hugo Barra kicks off the Android keynote. Review of the Android numbers. Still focused on activations which is the wrong stat. 210 available devices (mostly phones) is still impressive and 200k app in the Android app store. A healthy market, no doubt.

Two new services being announced today. One must be the music locker.

3.1 Honeycomb being released today. Good stuff in the update: resizable widgets, better USB support, and more. 3.1 will also be available on Google TV.

Next release, Ice cream sandwich, in the 4th quarter. The top priority will be device choice but it looks like the OS will become more homogeneous. Like iOs. Unlike iOS some of it will be open source.

Cool head tracking demo using the device camera to adjust an Open GL scene.

Android market now adding movie rentals. Terms are similar to other online rental outlets like iTunes. You can stream and “pin” a movie to a device which downloads it for playing movies on planes. No tethering to a computer to pin the content. So music must be next.

Music beta. All in the cloud. Uses a client app to move files up to Google’s servers. So far it looks like Amazon’s Cloud Drive. Looks like they have a “Genius Mix” feature like iTunes. All demos are showing off both phone and tablets. Of course no tethering required. The service launches today in beta. It’s free while it’s in beta.

Barra announces an industry group that will govern how updates will happen to Android mobile devices. Should help speed the rate of Android updates.

Android Open Accessory is a new open standard and API for device interconnect. Demoing using an Android device with an exercise bike. Interesting idea. It’s a hardware and software solution based on Arduino. (wow) this looks like a great program for building Hardware that interfaces with Android devices.

Android at Home is an extension of this idea but they are short on details on the hardware and software that drives the simple X10-like lighting demos. Still pretty new. Not available.

Looks like Google and Samsung are giving us all Galaxy Tab 10.1! Thanks! Nice way to wrap up the keynote!

Posted in google, tech

There was a lot of talk on the Interwebs about baked vs non-baked blogging platforms. To summarize, a “baked” blogging system renders all content to static HTML and moves that content to a plain old HTTP server. The alternative is to have a blogging system that renders a dynamic page for every request. The advantages of the former is that nothing serves up faster than static HTML files. It will keep you site from getting slashdotted (does that still happen?), fireballed, etc. if you happen to write something interesting that people want to read.
My original blog, giolist.com was for the longest time a statically hosted site before Google eliminated publishing static HTML using sftp from Blogger. The closest I came to a meltdown was a while ago when I posted something that Dave Winer liked and linked to from scripting.com. Of course because it was all static HTML my site never went down even though it was hosted on a puny Linux box running Apache. This incarnation of my blog is hosted on WordPress.com and I’m not sure it would handle the traffic if I were to come up with something profound. I find myself wanting to go back to a “baked” system partly because of the scalability factor but also because of the simplicity. Using static HTML doesn’t preclude interaction or other dynamic elements. You can still do interesting things with JavaScript includes like twitter badges, or photo streams in the margins of your site, and of course Disqus is more than happy to host your comments if you want them.
I’ve been looking a lot at systems like Jekyll and Hyde but I’ve also been looking at rolling my own blogging system again. A short list of requirements would include:

• Markdown support
• no database, all posts are generated from files
• no server-side CGI required or exposed to the Internet
• plugin API
• functional but not overly complex templating system
• post on the go from an iOS device
• Dropbox integration (although if your file based I think you get this for free)

It’s an interesting project I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. It might just use one of the open source projects as a base, since it’s easier to add some of the features to an existing system than starting from scratch building everything. The templating engine could be a pain and there are lots of good ones out there in many languages. I wrote one ages ago in Perl. I’m not sure I want to do that again. The idea of writing my own system seems right. Now if I can only find the time. *sigh*

Posted in tech

“I don’t even care if they listen to what comes out. I’m concerned with getting it out. Just giving people the option of something other than the norm of American entertainment.” — Frank Zappa

Posted in Uncategorized

I have been called a whore and a traitor by my friends, but I did it anyway. Last week I turned off my Motorola Droid, and activated an Apple iPhone 4 on Verizon. — Technology Viewer

This sounds a lot like how I felt when I switched from a Sony Viao 505 running Redhat Linux to my first G4 Macbook. Sometimes its just about getting stuff done.

Posted in Uncategorized

…when normal people — not gadget bloggers and geeks like us — need to consider an alternative to the iPad, they’re not just thinking of Apple’s lack of “openness” (as Google so vaguely and poorly defines it in relation to Android) or the iPad’s lack of some individual hardware feature. Buying an alternative means giving up Apple’s entire ecosystem. That’s worth it to some buyers, but it’s incredibly impractical for many.

Interesting post from Marco Arment. He may be right. A tablet probably can’t be successful without the kind of support ecosystem and the seamless integration between hardware and software that Apple can provide. My favorite part of the article is how he divides the tablet community along the lines of those that know what RSS is and those who do not. Seems like a simple acid test.

Posted in apple, google, ios, tech

About a week ago my family was gathered in the kitchen — all of us — a rare thing these days what with the kids growing up and all. We were talking about the coming new year and suddenly it dawned on me that when I was their age I thought that by now I’d be living in outer space. I explained that I thought I’d be shuttling back and forth between the Earth, Moon, and Mars, repairing computer systems, visiting friends and family, and generally cavorting in zero G. At first they all looked at me like I had suddenly sprouted another head. That was before they burst out into raucous laughter. I was puzzled by their reaction. They thought it was the most ridiculous thing they had ever heard. I didn’t probe as to where they thought they’d be in 10 or 20 years but I think their dreams are much more down to earth.
That makes me sad. Then again when I was a kid human space exploration was a big deal. The Apollo program, Skylab, Voyager, Viking were all big milestones for mankind. Today space exploration so mundane it hardly gets a mention on the news. It’s all but disappeared from the public consciousness, so much so that kids don’t dream of being astronauts.
So today when we sit down to our New Year’s dinner I plan on asking the kids what they think their future holds. I’m curious what they will say. They are my time machine. They are going to see how this life, this movie, is going to turn out — at least the one I’m living in. I wonder how they think it’s going to end.

Posted in Uncategorized

I highly recommend those of you interested in the whole WikiLeaks kerfuffle to read Bruce Sterling’s article The Blast Shack. I think he’s hit on some strange socio-political conservation law where the Internet and the New World Order are variables in an equation that is trying to balance out. The problem is there are other terms in the equation that will be irrevocably cancelled and lost. A fairly down-beat assesment but very thought provoking.

Posted in politics