We’re spending Tết in Can Tho with Kim’s family. This is my second Tết in Viet Nam. I’m hoping that next time I’ll be able to see what the celebrations are like in the Big City.

I have a couple of blog posts in me looking for a way to get out but, in the meantime, my Western clients are unaware that it’s a big holiday here so I actually have work that needs doing.

So Chúc mừng năm mới once again, and I hope everyone has a healthy and successful Year of the Tiger!

Charlie Stross, an author that I greatly admire, explains the latest happenings. There certainly is a fight between publishers and Amazon on ebook pricing, but Amazon is not the knight in shining armour that its customers would probably prefer it to be. Customers and authors are both caught in the middle of this, and that’s unforgiveable. There is much to admire about Amazon. Amazon certainly has a duty to its shareholders to maximize profits, and I certainly don’t blame them for trying. But using authors and customers as pawns is flat out wrong.

However this plays out, I will likely be reading ebooks on my Android phone for a while. I’ll wait, patiently, for a tablet that meets my requirements. And I’ll probably write about it when it arrives.

But I still won’t get a Kindle…

Microsoft is a company every geek loves to hate. And, really, what’s not to hate? I’ve railed in the past about their operating systems and I still think that for the datacenter there are better alternatives. Their productivity software, on the other hand, has been maturing steadily. If you’ve not had a look, let me highlight a couple of unsung gems:

Windows Live Writer – I use this tool for blogging to my WordPress blog. It’s an excellent, minimalist editor on one hand and a complete blog management tool on the other. It gets out of the way and lets me write. It has a simple interface and automates a lot of the tasks associated with blogging. Things like automagic photo upload, drag and drop text and image insertion, links to the WordPress management page—these are all handy features that just work. I’ve edited a ton of entries on various blogs and it’s been rock solid.

Windows Live Photo Gallery – I am a huge fan of Picasa. I use it to manage my photo library and Picasa Web is where I keep my photos for sharing. Picasa makes it simple to tag photos with faces and geolocation, then upload them to my Picasa Web account. Having said that, there are features that Picasa lacks and Windows Live Photo Gallery takes up the slack. The most notable missing feature in Picasa? Stitching.

It’s hard to tell, but this photo is a composite of 9 photos in a grid (3×3). My camera only has a stitch assist mode for horizontal strips, so the 9 pictures were shot without any kind of in-camera stitch assist. Point, shoot, move over, shoot. Eyeball it all the way. In Photo Gallery, all I had to do was select the 9 photos and select “Create Panorama Photo” from the right-click menu. Photo Gallery chewed on the pictures for a while, then gave me the results. A little cropping and the final photo is as you see here.

Classic strip photos work well too:

This panorama is almost 270 degrees of arc and consists of 7 individual shots. This time, I used the in-camera stitch assist. The panorama function of Photo Gallery was able to generate almost a complete 7 shot stitch. Only minimal cropping was required.

I’ve not given up on Picasa. It’s preview function (for viewing photos in Explorer) is fast and rich. It’s integration with Picasa Web is excellent, of course. I’ve really only used Photo Gallery for the Stitch Assist/Panorama features, but for that it’s truly an excellent tool. I plan on playing around with it to see how it compares with Picasa for more basic functions. Expect a post about that soon.

So. Two Microsoft productivity tools that don’t suck. There are more, and I’ll write about them as I get around to using them.

Back when the iPod was first released, most people, including a lot of tech pundits, simply didn’t get it. Apple was releasing an MP3 player? WTF?!? There were plenty of MP3 players on the market–most from companies dedicated to that market segment. How did Apple expect to supplant them? Were they crazy?

As history shows, Apple didn’t merely supplant its competitors, it blew them away. Swept them aside like dust. Because Apple didn’t release an MP3 player with the iPod, they released an ecosystem for the enjoyment of (first) music and video.

Same thing happened again with the iPhone. Again, tech pundits called for Apple to be wrapped in a white coat and sent to a padded cell. Companies like Nokia dominate the cell phone hardware business, and there was no way that Apple would get into that.

But Apple wasn’t building a cell phone. It build, again, an entire ecosystem around a smart phone. It did it better than anybody else and, arguably, continues to do it better than anybody else.

In both cases, entire industires were shaken. The iPod ultimately led to the abolition of DRM on digital music. The iPhone showed that the phone companies were not all-powerful–give them a compelling reason and they’d fold.

Tomorrow, Apple will do it again. They will have a nice, shiny hardware device to look at, touch and admire. But behind it, they will have an entire ecosystem ready to go. This time, I think they’re primarily looking to turn traditional print media on its head. They’ll likely take on the cable companies while they’re at it.

Ultimately, the device Steve Jobs shows off will be a game changer, again. But it won’t be just the hardware. And that’s why nobody competes with Apple. They just don’t get it. They think “shinier, faster, cheaper!” But that’s not enough. You need to think different (sorry). You need to think faster.

A netbook is a pretty useful little device. It’s small enough that it can go pretty much anywhere. It’s just big enough to get work done, within a pretty narrow definition of “work”. As a net device, it’s excellent.

The biggest shortcoming of these devices is the screen size–more specifically, the resolution of the screen. 1024×600 is just barely enough to run a web browser in full screen mode (and I recommend Chrome in kiosk mode for this). Multiple windows? I don’t think so. More than 1 or 2 windows introduces a clutter that’s difficult to manage, especially if you’re using the trackpad rather than a mouse (it’s trivial to grab a window and flick it out of the way with a mouse–not so trivial with a trackpad).

In order to combat issues with screen size, I think we need to rethink the user interface. In Windows 7, I move the task bar to be vertical on the left and autohiding, and that helps a lot. It’s still not ideal, though, because the windows are still windows and still have the same properties that make them ideal for larger displays but not so much for smaller ones.

Several Linux distributions attempt to resolve this by modifying the UI elements to optimize them for the small screen. Jolicloud and Ubuntu Netbook Remix are two examples. Both are very nice Linux distros, both are optimized for netbooks, including the display. Both install and run on my S10 with no issues. The way they manage the “window management” issue is simple–each window is essentially a full screen, and you switch between windows as you switch between applications. You don’t ever (or hardly ever) see multiple windows on the screen, though you certainly do have multiple applications.

Which brings us to Moblin. Moblin rethinks the whole netbook package, not just the UI. UI changes are similar to other netbook Linux distros–one window, one screen. But the rest of the OS shows how much can be done when you go all the way back to the roots of the OS. On my S10, Moblin goes from power off to fully functioning in 30 seconds. Battery life on Moblin is better than Windows 7. Screen effects are crisp and sharp. Moblin takes advantage of every hardware tweak netbooks have to offer, and works around most of the hardware compromises. It’s crisp and clean and, after a little tweaking, ideal for my needs.

Moblin can optimize netbook hardware so well because it’s very foundation is created by folks at Intel. These are folks that have intimate knowledge of the Atom processor and the Intel GMA video chips that make up most notebooks. These folks know how to wring every drop of performance out of their hardware, which is as it should be.

Sadly, though, they cannot create a Linux distro. Sure, Moblin rocks. It’s very pretty and it works very well on my S10. But that’s after two days of dicking around with it in ways that your average consumer won’t, and shouldn’t have to, do.

First I had to hardwire my net connection so that I could download, build and install the Broadcomm drivers for the wifi card in the S10. Why? Moblin ships without support for these drivers because they are proprietary. That’s a decision the Moblin team made and I respect that. But there’s no reason why they couldn’t make a package available for people to install, rather than forcing them through hoops. Ubuntu does this with, for example, proprietary nVidia drivers.

Next, in order to get media support, I had to download and install gstreamer and it’s codecs. From source. This is unacceptable. The Linux Foundation knows that people listen to MP3’s. Again, there are licensing issues that make it difficult to include the codec support in the distro, but, again, organizations like Ubuntu have worked around this. Making Joe Consumer download and compile source code is cutting off your nose to spite your face.

If I install Jolicloud or the Ubuntu Netbook Remix, I get a similar experience to Moblin. But I’m good to go out of the box–there’s no need to hook up a wired connection to get wireless working. There’s no downloading and compiling source code for functionality that should be there from the get go.

I still think that, so far, Moblin is a better experience. I like the way app switching is done, for example: alt-tab shows all open windows in a miniature but live view. I can take a look at a mini version of a terminal and see if the job that was running has completed. Release alt-tab and I’m back where I started.

I respect Intel for getting into Moblin. The assistance they bring to the Linux community for optimizing their hardware is invaluable. I hope that other organizations, like Canonical, take advantage of this. I also hope that Moblin can grow into something much more consumer friendly and Linux-newbie ready. They’re at version 2.1 now. Perhaps with version 3…

So. Today I went to install WordPress on a FusedNetwork account and the installation wizard failed me. It turns out the wizard relies on DNS working the way it should, but at this point we’ve not yet pointed the existing domain to the new site. We need to test before we do that. Completely forgetting the above, I emailed the support guys at Fused. They, of course, reminded me politely that a manual install would suffice.

I fell into my own trap.

An hour later, WordPress was installed and we’re ready to go with site testing. WordPress’s famous “5 Minute Install” takes an hour when you’re bouncing things off a client machine in Viet Nam. If I had full net access with decent bandwidth, it probably would have been pretty close to 5 minutes.

As an aside, FusedNetwork rocks. Their support guys are great. They are incredibly responsive. They’re not the cheapest hosts, but their customer service is what makes them stand out. It is, truly, second to none.

For a while, I strongly considered buying a dedicated ebook reader. I researched and finally settled on Sony’s eReader Touch. I went so far as to almost have a friend visiting from Canada pick one up and bring it along for me. At the last minute, though, I changed my mind.

What made me change my mind was running through the differences between a dedicated ebook reader and reading on a more general purpose device. For the most part, I read books on my G1 phone, using FBReader for Android. Sometimes, I read books on my laptop. The Kindle and the Sony readers both offer huge bookstores that would let me buy pretty much any book I wanted if I had one of their devices.

But here’s the thing: both Sony and Amazon offer software to read these books on a PC. This means I don’t need their device–I just need a PC capable of running their software. I’ve played with both Sony’s software (kind of like iTunes for books) and the Kindle PC software (works, but still a little rough around the edges). Both work great, and both let me purchase books and read them. Coupled with FBReader, I have software that lets me read just about any ebook format out there.

Reading an ebook on a laptop is ok, but not ideal. For one, the laptop I have is a little heavy and warm on the lap. Reading in bed is a PITA. Ideally, I’d like something with the form factor of an ebook, but a more general device.

Enter the tablet, or slate, PC. These devices are creating a lot of buzz at CES right now, and Apple is rumoured to be ready to release their slate–an oversized iPod Touch (according to rumour).

The biggest complaint about tablet PC’s and laptops, when it comes to reading ebooks, is battery life. Dedicated readers have days of battery life. Laptops and tablets have hours at best. But for me, this argument is a non-starter. Everywhere I read tends to be within easy reach of an outlet. Power is not a problem.

Perhaps the biggest advantage to a dedicated reader is its display. The e-ink displays used in these things are terrific. They render crisp, sharp, incredibly readable pages. But is the display issue enough of an issue to change my mind? No. I’m quite used to a laptop display and a tablet PC would be colour–a bonus in my mind.

So I’m waiting a bit. Waiting to see what Apple releases. Waiting for the price of tablet PC’s to fall after a strong showing at CES. And, while I’m waiting, I’ll continue to read books on my laptop and my phone.