Stupid Blackberry ad

The ad asks, "What kind of mad genius is behind this?"

I believe his name is Steve Jobs.

Beat iPhone hold 'em

So that picture is what you get when you win the Dubai tournament. It's the same as the "winner" screen for all the other tournaments except for the prize amount. I've done this a few times now. It's really not too much trouble to beat the bots in the iPhone poker program. They don't really change any as you progress upwards through the tournaments.

I play with the phone in the landscape mode. In this mode, you can't watch the video of them to look for their "tells," but I find I can't easily follow the position very well with the portrait view. And position and relative stack size are more important anyway.

The biggest weakness of the bots is that they don't have any internal concept of being pot committed or of fold equity. They're quite content to bluff 75% of their stack and then fold to the re-raise. This makes the ideal strategy against them to be one of always raising and never calling. They will call you all-in with crap draws that would normally be very -EV plays (particularly in tournament play). Yes, occasionally those will suck out, but most of the time they won't. And once you cash, simply either fold or go all-in on every hand pre-flop (which alternative will obviously depend on the relative stack sizes in question and, of course, your cards).

Of course, all of this is sort of poker masturbation. In general, it's a bad idea to play against bots - particularly bad ones. The risk is that you'll pick up habits against the bots that don't work against real players (particularly good ones). But in this case, the ideal strategy isn't tremendously different from normal SnG strategy. You just need to crank the aggression factor up much, much higher than you normally would.

The payouts for the "two table" tournaments (that is, everything above the "Cruise Ship") have payouts that would be reasonably correct if they were actually 3 table shoot-outs, meaning that they take the top 3 finishers from 3 tables and sit them down at the final table (which means you actually had 27 opponents in the prize pool). I've never come across any real tournaments that do that (most shootouts take the 9 first place finishers from 9 single table tournaments and have them play a final table). The payouts for the single table tournaments (Cruise Ship and below) pay out at a much higher rate than they should (obviously the Garage game, being a free-roll, pays out fixed prizes simply as a bootstrap). Thus the ideal bankroll strategy is to play only up to Cruise Ship for as long as you can to build your bank. Then skip upwards only once you've got a lot of (fake) money. Once you have a couple hundred grand you can take a couple shots at Dubai and if one of them hits, you'll have plenty of bank to repeat and build from there.

My favorite iPhone apps

Here's what's on my phone:

• Texas Hold'Em $
• AIM
• TouchTerm $
• Showtimes
• SolFree
• Speed
• Here I Am
• ICE $
• StillInTune $
• Remote
• VNC $
• PayPal

I actually paid for the apps marked with the $.

As well, I've got links to Bejewled (you can play on the web for free instead of buying the full app in the store), iCalTrain, iMineSweeper, and BattleFleet on the home page.

Got my iPhone 3G!

Well, I gave up on getting an iPhone 3G today, but my lovely wife Scarlet didn't. She called up the Valley Fair Apple store and they still had some. Clearly Apple has managed to prepare for the launch better than AT&T.

For the most part, the new phone isn't really that distinguishable from its older counterpart. It's a little bit lighter, and the 3G network is noticeably faster. The bad news is that in my house, the phone only gets EDGE (well, it really gets WiFi, of course, but if I disable WiFi for testing, I get no 3G coverage).

The GPS functionality works well. As long as you're outside (and in some cases, inside) you get a blue dot on the map that follows you around. Unfortunately, Apple didn't turn the google maps app into a full GPS turn-by-turn app. The official excuse is that the GPS receiver isn't "good enough" to properly deliver turn-by-turn navigation. I still don't know why Apple didn't go with a bluetooth GPS solution. The receiver could be plugged into a car's power jack (remember when they were called cigarette lighters?) and basically left there. But as it is, the GPS functionality that is there is an improvement. At my parent's house on Point Loma in San Diego, the old phone always decided that we were near Lindbergh Field in downtown (an error of over 5 miles and across two bodies of water).

I still would not have bothered with the upgrade if it wasn't for the broken screen. The only appreciable difference between the two generations is the 3G networking and GPS. The rest of the updates were in the 2.0 firmware, which means they're available for users of both models.

I've bought a few things from the App store so far: ICE, which is a small app intended for emergency responders who find you unconscious (say, laying near a set of railroad tracks), and check your phone to see if there are any clues as to who you are. The icon is a giant red cross in a white field, labeled "ICE," which means "in case of emergency." At $1, the price is right.

I also fetched the PayPal app, the AIM app, Remote, and I bought the Apple Texas Hold'Em game. I also bought Bejeweled 2 for my wife's phone. The Texas Hold'Em game is beautiful and functional, but the AI for the computer player is rather annoying. They tend to be calling stations.

iPhone 3G anger management

I was not angry since I came to France
Until this instant.

- Henry V, Act IV Scene VII

I was confronted with a situation this morning of such effrontery that I can't leave it alone.

A couple weeks ago, I dropped my iPhone and the screen got cracked. I took it to the Apple store and they basically said that it would cost as much to repair it as it would to simply wait for the iPhone 3G and upgrade to one of those.

Now, right away my response to that is that Apple is becoming more and more like HP (and we're not talking about the old, good HP - the ones who are now Agilent). I'd have paid $100 to get it fixed rather than $200 to get it replaced, but no.

Now, I stood in line at the iPhone launch. I was there a couple hours before the launch time, and by my estimate everyone who was in line before the actual launch time got the phone of their choice.

So I was not too concerned about this launch, seeing as how they managed to do things more right than wrong. Surely they can't fuck it up - particularly having done one of these before.

Yes, they could.

I arrived an hour early. 7 AM. I was, by my estimate, perhaps the 150th person in line. When I got up to 6th place in line, they announced they had run out of the 16 GB versions - both colors. By that time, it was about 9:45. Almost 3 hours of my life that I'll never get back. Thanks to AT&T.

Let's say that only 10% of the folks in line wanted the smaller phone. That means that they must have started with fewer than 70 of each color of the 16GB model.

Really, AT&T? 70 of each was going to be plenty?

Now that's even before I rant about how they could have counted people in line at 7:45 and let us know then rather than waiting until they ran out. What could they possibly have had to gain by not telling us 3 hours earlier that we were going to be wasting our time? When they sell concert tickets, they start by handing out numbered wristbands. That never occurred to them at AT&T?

And, naturally, you can't just order them from the Apple store. No. That would be far too convenient. So now, I will be forced to poll the store(s) daily until either Apple or AT&T pulls their fucking thumbs out.

Thanks for nothing, Steve.

Fixing vonage voicemail to work with the iPhone

We have vonage. We're pretty happy with it. One thing that's particularly nice is that they will e-mail you voicemails as attachments (I wish they would not then also store them in a voicemail box that has to be hosed out periodically, but that's another issue). The one downside is that these voicemails are attached as µLAW WAV files, which aren't compatible with the iPhone.

Not to worry: if you run your own mail server, a little bit of perl can re-encode them as MP3s, which the iPhone is perfectly happy playing. So now vonage voicemail comes in as e-mails on the iPhone, with MP3 attachments that can be listened to. Huzzah!

To use this, set up an alias in sendmail to pipe the e-mail through this perl file, adding the destination e-mail addresses as arguments. For example:

vm-fixit: "| vonagevm.pl user@example.com other@example.com"

Then, set the vonage e-mail address in the voicemail set-up to vm-fixit @ your domain. With the example above, it will change the audio to an MP3 and mail it to user@example.com and other@example.com.

#! /usr/bin/perl

use Email::MIME;
use Email::MIME::Modifier;
use File::Temp qw/ tempfile tempdir tmpnam  /;

my $in_msg;

{ local $/=undef;
  $in_msg = <STDIN>;
}

my $message = Email::MIME->new($in_msg);

$message->walk_parts(sub {
  my $part = shift;
  return if ($part->content_type !~ m[audio/wav]);

  ($fhw, $filenamewav) = tempfile( SUFFIX => ".wav" );
  print $fhw $part->body;
  close $fhw;

  (undef, $filenamemp3) = tempfile(SUFFIX => ".mp3");

  system "/usr/local/bin/sox $filenamewav -t wav -w -s -r 8000 - | /usr/local/bin/lame -m m -b 32 - $filenamemp3";

  my $mp3audio;
  { local $/=undef;
    open FHM, $filenamemp3;
    $mp3audio = <FHM>;
    close FHM;
  }

  unlink($filenamewav);
  unlink($filenamemp3);

  $part->body_set($mp3audio);
  $part->content_type_set("audio/mpeg");
  $part->name_set("voicemail.mp3");
  $part->filename_set("voicemail.mp3");

});

open SENDIT, "|/usr/sbin/sendmail " . join(" ", @ARGV);
print SENDIT $message->header_obj->as_string;
print SENDIT $message->crlf;
print SENDIT $message->body_raw;
close SENDIT;

iPhone store credit

I got my Apple store credit for being an early iPhone purchaser. The procedure was painless. You need the serial number, which you can get from iTunes with the phone docked, the phone's phone number, and a number that Apple sends to you via an SMS message. When you're done, they give you a PDF to print out. You can use the numbers at the online store, or the barcode at the physical stores.

Thanks, Steve.

iPhone ringtones

Come on, Steve. Here was your big chance to do the right thing.

You could have simply allowed people to assign any song on the iPhone as either a general ringtone or the ringtone for a particular contact. Instead...

1. You have to buy the song from the iTMS (though if you have bought it before you don't need to buy it again).

2. They only let you make ringtones from a smaller subset of available songs.

3. You have to pay extra to make it a ringtone.

There are shareware apps out there that will let you simply copy any audio file into the ringtone folder on the phone, but at the moment they clash with iTunes 7.4. And who knows how hard Apple will work to protect this revenue stream. Personally, I suspect that AT&T insisted on this functionality, and I suspect they're getting the lion's share of the 99¢ ringtone fee.

I have only one song I want to turn into my ringtone, so I'll still probably go about it the "official" way - simply because it's cheaper than the shareware options and less trouble in the long run. But Apple, being the imperfect institution it is, sometimes is capable of disappointing in a big way.

A solution to the GPS-less iPhone

I am embarrassed I didn't think of this myself.

One shortcoming of the iPhone is that the google maps app - though it is without a doubt amazing - doesn't have any positional information. That is, the map doesn't know where you are. There's just no room in the iPhone (or juice in the battery) for a GPS chipset.

But who says the GPS has to be built in?

All credit goes to Craigy on MacRumors for the idea. And it's a fantastic one. If you simply kept a bluetooth GPS box in your car, then your iPhone could use it to provide a "You are here" pin in the google maps app, and could automatically step through the turn-by-turn directions as you go. It could even give you ETAs (with real-time traffic, of course).

Yes, it would be better to have GPS built-in, but Apple could create a whole market for iPhone GPS add-ons. And, conceivably, they don't actually have to be bluetooth tethered. There's no reason you couldn't simply connect up a GPS add-on to the dock connector.

But in any event, it's going to require a lot of software support from Apple.

We'll see.

Little things in iPhone

Here's a to-do for Steve and his team:

1. A mechanism to add additional root certificates to the X509 key store for Safari. Lots of folks use them for intranet stuff.

2. LEAP authentication for wireless. It's what we do where I work. The mac can do it, so should the iPhone.

3. Flash. You're just not going to get your way on this one, Steve. Promise.

4. Voice dialing.

5. Internet IM.

6. custom ringtones from iTunes.

7. A2DP - also known as high quality stereo over bluetooth. Rumored to already be on the way.

Comprehensive iPhone report

Ok. Now that I've had 12 hours with the phone (though to be fair, for most of that time I was asleep), and am on a real keyboard (the built-in keyboard is very smart, but I'm much faster with a full sized one where I can use all 10 fingers), I can make a full report.

You cannot (yet) assign an iTunes song as a ring-tone. That's kind of a bummer, but it's so obvious that I do expect them to fill that gap with a software update later.

Turning the phone sideways for landscape mode is very cool, but it only works in selected apps. It works in the browser and in iPod (though videos always play landscape). Where it does work you can flip it left or right (that is, with the home button on the right or left side of the screen) and it works. You cannot flip the to upside-down portrait mode (it stays upside-down).

I've browsed a number of websites and, for the most part, they all worked just as well as they did on my desktop machine unless they required flash or java. I'm unconvinced that Apple is going to completely have its way about a plugin-less web. I think they're going to have to buckle under and support one of the two (and I'm pretty sure the obvious choice would be flash).

The phone functionality is very nice, and visual voicemail is the topper. My only complaint is that the speakerphone is very, very weak and there is no voice dialing capability.

Voice dialing is sort of a double-edged sword. It was never very reliable for me on my RAZR, but it was much safer for driving. The iPhone is going to be a lot more trouble for drivers not only because of the lack of voice dialing, but because the touch surface is, obviously, completely lacking in tactile feedback (that is, you have no choice but to look at the screen to know where to touch). Fortunately, I have a GPS with a built-in speakerphone, and thus I can at least interact with a touch screen that will be positioned near the windshield.

Since I have a GPS in the car, I'm not sure I'll have too much use for Google Maps. But the one improvement is that it can display real-time traffic information. Adding that to my GPS would cost me about $10/mo, plus buying a traffic dongle.

Typing complex passwords in with the keyboard can be amusing.

I guess having youtube built-in sort of makes up for the lack of games (at the moment). Unfortunately, most of the web based games I play with require flash. The big thing I occasionally count on from my phone is entertainment when I have to wait for something. While I was in line for the iPhone, I played Tetris and Bejeweled. Now, if I have to wait in line for something, I can surf the web.

One big blow is that I have not yet found a way to turn on the ability to use the phone as a hard disk. This used to be the big reason I had an iPod - I could always plug it into a machine and use it to sneaker-net files around. So far as I can tell, that ability is absent on iPhone.

Another was that the iPhone will not act as a dialup modem for a laptop. In fact, though you can discover the iPhone via bluetooth, there's nothing at all you can do with it. It appears only to be able to use bluetooth to set up a handsfree connection, at least right now. Given that you can, theoretically, move up to 7 GB of data across to the phone, syncing over bluetooth would probably be too much to ask. And since it is so Internet connected, you can, for example, use e-mail to move pictures out of the camera.

Another missing point is that the WiFi capability is limited to accessing the Internet. You can't use it to print or browse local shares for files or anything of the sort. Of course, if you have web sites on your intranet, they are accessible.

The biggest difference of all, though, is that this phone is very likely to receive software updates as we go along. No other phone I've ever owned got a software update ever, even if the same model often got updated firmware in the retail channel. So maybe some of these deficiencies will be addressed later on.

Got my iPhone!

I am blogging this post from my new iPhone.

I stood in line for a couple hours at fhe AT&T store in Santa Clara. The line moved very slowly once 6 PM rolled around. I think that had a lot to do with the fact that they were trying to upsell accessories and DSL, and their computers were bogging down. It's a little weird using the keyboard, but I'm sure I can get used to it.

I'm going to stop here and switch to a real keyboard now.

iPhone bound!

Well, enough details have now come out about the iPhone and its pricing that I think I've turned the corner.

The iPhone will work with existing Cingular/AT&T customer plans, and will add $20/mo. But currently, I am already paying about $20 per month extra for unlimited data on my current piece of crap phone, so presumably I'll be able to trade in that $20 charge for the iPhone and wind up with the same bill I have now.

I've also talked about the insistence on having the iPhone act as an EDGE modem for my computer, but I'm beginning to think that if the mobile version of Safari is all it's cracked up to be, I'll probably find myself using that less rather than more. For example, occasionally Mark and I perform Thawte notarizations, and in the past I have brought my laptop with me to Coffee Society in order to do the notarizations in real time. But so far as I can tell, there's no reason I couldn't do the same thing with just an iPhone.

I'm pretty sure the phone will be able to visit sites on the corporate intranet as well. I won't be able to bring up a terminal window, but then if I am in a position to be able to use my laptop to do that, I'm very likely somewhere where broadband is available one way or the other.

iPhone June 29th

The date is getting closer. Apple has posted some new TV ads for it. Nothing particularly new. I still have questions and therefore won't be absolutely first in line, but I'd be very surprised indeed if my questions had bad answers. This is Apple we're dealing with. They may not have ever made a phone before, but back when they made the first iPod, they hadn't made a music player before either and still got that more right than wrong.

iPhone is close...

The iPhone is just that much closer. The user-agent string is showing up already in people's web logs. Other sites have reported the rumored release date of June 20th.

I still have questions about the iPhone. Enough of them that I probably won't be the first one in line. But not since the old days of the Motorola Star Tac have I owned a phone with a user interface that just worked (and the Star Tac gets a pass only because of it's limited functionality).