Monday, September 24, 2007

iBrickr

David P. pointed me to this app for your iPhone. I'm gonna try it out, hopefully tonight!

Use at your own risk – worked fine for me, but who knows if Apple/AT&T go psycho and nuke your phone for it eventually…

http://iphone.fiveforty.net/wiki/index.php/IBrickr

iBrickr is the app to let you upload free ringtones, install custom apps, etc. The wiki I linked is one of the central iphone hacker resources for stuff like custom apps and other stuff for the iphone.

-David

Sunday, September 23, 2007

Good article on housing market

Oregonian does what it should have done a few months ago. Finally started to report on the changing dynamics of the real estate market in pdx. Good article by Robert Bruss on buying rental houses located in the Homes and Rental section of the Oregonian. I'd link to it but it takes freakin' forever for anything from the oregonian to come up, and they do this annoying thing when you want to see an article where you have to type in your zip code and age, and its just ignoramous so I'm going to not wait any longer. However, the author has his own website, which came right up and has much better information anyway, so i'm going to link to it here to reference for myself in the future.

Saturday, September 22, 2007

Pearl District Condo Slowdown...

Matt Fife pointed me to this link:

Most of the media is paranoid to report on the virtual halt of condo sales in the pearl. Finally the Wyatt has thrown in the towel. This beautiful building is going to go to apartments, with only 25% of the units sold.

Condo sales drop in Pearl

The Wyatt reports sales of just 25 percent of its units.
By Alan Scaia
Friday, September 21, 2007
Developers in the Pearl report a drop in condominium sales. The owners of The Wyatt say they have sold just 25 percent of their condos, so they have decided to rent the units as apartments.

Monday, September 03, 2007

Free WiFi in Portland! or not....

I've meant to post about this for some time. Free wifi is supposed to be pwning portland. Problem is, this technology was never meant to 'blanket' an area. The
802.11a/b/g specificaion was very specifically built for small scale deployments. Wimax was the sister technology, better suited to wide scale deployment. Attempting to use 802.11 a/b/g for anything else is not wise, and the flawed efforts to blanket this town and others with 'free' technology is going to prove a failure. I remember thinking to myself 'who are they kidding, somebody will eventually do a story and break this open and talk about how stupid of an idea this is'. Eventually, some sane IT person will point out the specifications purpose and its lack of ability to do the magic the politicians envision. Why, so late in the specifications lifecycle, would one even try this? To me, its totally irrational behavior. When an architect builds a specification, it is designed for a specific purpose. Deviate from the intended purpose, and you are walking in dangerous grounds. We necessarily restrict our usage model to increase reliability, simplicity, security, cost, etc. Sometimes specifications and architectures can be extended in some rational capacity, layering another one or two generations on top of it. However, you don't drive the 3 member family across the country for Christmas in a scooter and this is exactly what is being proposed and will fail miserably attempting to use 802.11 a/b/g wireless across an entire city. I recommend using the public resources in a reasonable fashion and including some pragmatic, rational engineers with significant RF credentials the next time. Maybe it won't be such a screw up.

My understanding is up to this point no taxpayer money has been spent on the project. My voice will become louder if this changes.