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Ever wanted to buy an iPhone 3GS without T-Mobile contract? Now you can buy mine on eBay! Starting at 1 EUR

So, why is that? I love to embrace change. I hate DRM, and I hate big companies that forget what innovation means, I hate company policies that prevent me from using the full potential of my computing device. Microsoft used to be the evil company number 1, but nowadays things change: I see Apple and Google right before Microsoft. They are the successful ones now, and they need to defend that position (I would do the same). They need to earn a lot of money for the share holders and they need to comply with a lot of different contracts they have with other companies. Probably, they can also not experiment anymore to the full extend. Whatever.

Apple products are still normal products, they don’t offer some kind of enhanced lifestyle experience. I am constantly confused when people start talking about their Apple products and how easy and irreplaceable  they are. It’s true, if you buy one Apple product, than you need another one so you don’t run into compatibility issues. Isn’t this exactly what Microsoft was blamed for?

Fact is: There are other good and quite usable smartphones beside the iPhone. Of course if you managed your whole Music library via iTunes, it’s hard to change. But why do I use iTunes? Right, because I bought an iPod once and then I was forced to use iTunes. Then I found out, that iTunes for Windows is somehow slow, so I had to buy the Mac Mini. Then I found out, that the PC keyboard layout is not really usable on a Mac, so I had to buy a Mac keyboard. Then my gray PC mouse was looking strange right next to the white keyboard, so I had to buy an Apple mouse. And so on. What kind of fucked up lifestyle is this?

I agree that Windows Mobile is crap, if you compare it with the iPhone. Not sure about the next version, but that’s not the point. I gave up waiting for the next Windows version many years ago. Fact is, that Windows devices are no option right now and it will probably still be hard to sync them with alternative operating systems or your Google account in the future.

Then there is Google with Android. I had an Android phone until recently, because I thought I might be interested in app development. I didn’t like the user interface (looks like the last 10 years didn’t happen), I don’t like Java. The music player is not what I expected. Then there are the OS update issues, everyone is talking about. Maybe Google learns how to handle that, maybe not. I don’t feel like that should be my problem.

The only remaining option is Palm. I thought they will simply run out of money. But now they were bought by HP. For now, I can trust them, if they commit themselves to WebOS. WebOS supports app development with standard Web technologies like JavaScript and HTML, which is exactly what a Web developer is looking for. So, because I embrace change, I ordered the new Palm Pre Plus last week. My first impression:

• After entering my Facebook and Google account details, it already knows all my contacts, my email and my calendar out of the box. The iPhone has a lot of different apps (some cost extra), but the built-in functionality is still very basic.
• It doesn’t wake me at night, just because a new email arrived. Still don’t know how to disable that vibrating alert during the night on my iPhone.
• I can copy any music or video file directly via USB to the device without using iTunes (that means from ANY computer). How cool is that?
• It’s black, features a modern user interface and multitasking. Wow!
• No problems with battery life so far. About the same as my iPhone.

For that reason, I am going to sell the iPhone now. It’s not a bad product, but I don’t feel like it’s the best I can get. I feel like I am forced by Apple to buy things I don’t really need or want. I want my freedom back.

Today, I prepared for the upcoming PHP/JS conferences and had a look at the mysterious bug #883 of Google Chrome and those related to it. Also I read though SquirrelFish source, which is used by Safari 4.

The reason for the odd behavior of Chrome seems to be a if/else construct that is repeated throughout the source of runtime.cc:

// Check if the name is trivially convertible to an index and get
// the element if so.
if (name->AsArrayIndex(&index)) {
return GetElementOrCharAt(object, index);
} else {
PropertyAttributes attr;
return object->GetProperty(*name, &attr);
}


Chrome makes a difference between properties and elements. And they do weird type casts. If you check JavaScriptCore, you see there is a better way:

inline JSValue JSObject::get(ExecState* exec, const Identifier& propertyName) const
{
PropertySlot slot(this);
if (const_cast(this)->getPropertySlot(exec, propertyName, slot))
return slot.getValue(exec, propertyName);

return jsUndefined();
}


Iterating over an objects properties can result in a seemingly random order, it’s always the same order in Chrome, but in a different order for other browsers. I posted this as bug #223 a couple of weeks ago. John Resig posted the same issue as ticket #883 a day later. It was confirmed in the meantime by the chromium developers and described as an expected behavior. Very funny.

Q: Wenn ich den Links zum der Browser-Crash Demo Folge, dann brauch ich
bei der letzten Seite nur noch mit der Maus über den “HERE” – Button
zu fahren und mein ( mit allen Updates versehenes ) Vista friert
sofort vollständig ein… Spricht das jetzt eher gegen Google oder Microsoft..?

A: Der Tenor nach der Veröffentlichung des Browsers lautet doch: Google
greift Microsoft an. qed.

Aus dem heise forum

I just found my first bug in Chrome: If you iterate over object properties (using jQuery’s $.each()) and insert HTML generated inside that loop into the DOM, then that HTML appears in random order. Very funny. Might be a problem with threads or Chrome changes the order of object properties by itself:

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=223

There was a posting re “Mozilla’s Thought On Google’s Chrome” on Slashdot today… which has a comment that underlines what I wrote earlier:

IMHO, the real target is MS Office. Google makes their money from advertising, which means eyeballs and correlated data. Unfortunately for them, many people spend a majority of their day inside MS Word and MS Excel and other apps. Google would love to have those eyeballs and all that data to better shape their profiles and thus better deliver advertising. What better way than to get all those different apps to “occur” inside the browser?

Google will publish a beta version of it’s own Web browser tomorrow. Sadly, the beta will run on Windows only. Of course, they put some energy in speeding up JavaScript execution as they need this for their own applications. Otherwise they simply won’t be able to provide solutions that can compare with traditional offline applications.

For more information check out the online book about Chrome or the Google Blog.

While visiting the Google Blog, I found out, that a JS warning window appears in Firefox 3, if you hit the back button too fast. You’ll see something like this:


SyntaxError: unterminated string literal
w_xa()@:0
eval("try {\n_WidgetManager._HandleControllerResult('Blog1', 'backlinks',{'numBacklinks': [...]

JSONP seems to be unstable in certain conditions. What makes me wonder is why the browser starts to execute incomplete code and outputs that code in an alert dialog. So, it might as well be the fault of the Google Widgets error handler… but who cares anyway.

The thing is, any time you get a provider in the market that has a predominantly large share of that market, questions start to get asked about their practices, about what their motives are. I desperately hope that they [Google]…in fact I expect that they will change. They will become as grown up as some of the larger companies around, so in some respects it’s a predictable thing.

Peter Cullen, Microsoft’s chief privacy strategist

As you can see from my recent postings, the submission on Slashdot asking Has Google Lost Its Mojo? is no surprise to me. Here’s an interesting comment:

Speaking as a Googler, “some” is an understatement. The best and brightest have been exiting Google at the earliest for months, leaving behind the political climbers, backbiters and the just plain incompetent. Now Google mainly runs on interns, everybody else is too “smart” to do the grunt work like coding, debugging, or much at all beyond getting face time. The reason for this is simple: narcissistic managers whose main talent is claiming credit for the work of their subordinates while punishing anyone who shows initiative, and thus possibly could get promoted. These days at Google, showing skill and dedication is a great way to get a bad review from your manager. Eric and friends seem blissfully unaware of the developing train wreck. by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 25, @07:39PM (#24744501)

Bad PR always is a clear sign for upcoming problems. In this case, there are the privacy concerns about Google Street View:

Don’t expect privacy in your front yard, even if your house is located one mile down a private, dirt road. (PressDemocrat.com)

Also, Google is taking away free dinner. I mean, this is not the worst thing on earth, but still, bad PR, because you can see, that Google is not different from any other company, trying to increase its profits. Also, Google has serious spam problems with Gmail. Also, I noticed that Google Suggest is the default search now – that means, Google seems to care about cuil.com. And so on…

At a T.G.I.F. — a weekly meeting for anyone who wanted to ask questions of Google’s top executives — in June, the Google co-founder Sergey Brin said he had no sympathy for the parents, and that he was tired of “Googlers” who felt entitled to perks like “bottled water and M&Ms,” according to several people in the meeting. (A Google spokesman denies that Mr. Brin made that comment.) [...] When a stock was rising as fast as Google’s once was, it was easy to buy the view that there was something truly special about Google. But when the stock is falling, overlooked problems start to loom large. Having discovered that Google is not, in fact, the promised land, a number of Googlers have left recently to join start-ups, hotter companies like Facebook — and even Microsoft. (New York Times)

I just found a wonderful articale by Nicholas Carr:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google

“Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California—the Googleplex—is the Internet’s high church, and the religion practiced inside its walls is Taylorism. Google, says its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, is “a company that’s founded around the science of measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize everything” it does”