Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

I ran into something interesting this evening. I am trying to finish an Amazon Kindle book on my Samsung Note 3 that I started on an iPad Kindle app. I couldn’t download the book due to “license limit exceeded”and that the book could be on a maximum of 6 devices. So I deleted the book from the iPad and a couple of Android devices, thus freeing up three licenses. Trying to download the book still failed. I looked in the “Manage Your Kindle” interface on Amazon. It is possible to find the books that I’ve bought but there is no way to see which devices Amazon thinks the books are on. So I called Amazon customer service. They helpfully explained that the number of available licenses was 0, which is why the downloading was failing. “Well… I deleted the book from three Kindles so shouldn’t I have at least three licenses available?” They just kept repeating that the number of licenses was 0, as though from a script. I asked if they had any way to tell what devices the book might be on. They said “no” and that their preferred method of debugging was simply to deregister entire Kindle apps at random and see if the problem went away.

The whole Kindle system seemed well thought-out at first when an owner could have just one Kindle but I wonder if the left out something critical…

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Thanks to the installation of a couple of Schlage keypad locks, I am enjoying a mostly keyless lifestyle. On those days when the female portion of the household permits me to use the family car (2007 Infiniti M35x), however, I must add an RFID tag to my pocket. Given that I always carry my phone, which has both Near Field Communications and Bluetooth, why can’t I use the phone to authenticate myself to the car? The car already has Bluetooth. Newer cars certainly could incorporate NFC at a pretty low cost. The security on Bluetooth is good enough for payments (see this article on PayPal using it).

Hyundai is supposedly working on this (source) but why is this seemingly obvious idea not already implemented in at least any car that has Bluetooth networking? Is it a battery drain issue? A car battery is pretty huge.

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Folks:

Some friends have a long-established physical goods company in Manhattan. They have a market-leading niche Web-based business that sells digital goods via a site built with the Magento toolkit. They’ve outsourced development of this site with mixed results (though better than healthcare.gov!). I suggested that they might be better off hiring their own programmers who will be dedicated to the site and the customers.

I’m thinking that they would need a product manager who does some coding and database development and two programmers (one fresh out of school and one with a few years of MySQL/ecommerce experience?).

First, do readers think it is positive or negative that they have a Manhattan location? Obviously there are talented people in Kansas who can work at a lower salary and still enjoy a very comfortable standard of living. On the other than there are a lot of young people who want to live in Manhattan.

So… if they are to hire some full-time people are they better off establishing a satellite office somewhere else? And, if not, what are the going rates for competent full-time PHP/ecommerce developers in Manhattan?

Thanks.

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As a complement to seeing Hollywood’s All is Lost (previous post), I watched Wild Eyes streaming from Netflix. This is a made-by-the-proud-father documentary about Abby Sunderland‘s attempt to be the youngest person to sail non-stop solo around the world. If your impression of 16-year-olds is that they spend most of their time texting friends, this is an inspiring story of a teenager who learned all of the systems of a 40’ oceangoing yacht and pushed it through (most of) the Southern Ocean.

Even if you don’t like sailing, the documentary is well worth it for a single scene in which the 7 existing siblings of the Sunderland family learn that their mother will soon be giving birth (at home, of course) to an 8th child. The lack of enthusiasm is all too real!

[Separately, the Wikipedia story is interesting for the story of how the Australian government, instead of using a military plane, charters an airliner from Qantas to go looking for Sunderland. (TIME reports that the cost of a USAF Boeing 757 (C-32A) is about $43,000 per hour to the taxpayers; Conklin & De Decker says that $12,000 per hour is about what an airline would spend to fly one extra hour; a source of mine at a U.S. company that charters out 757s says that the cost is about $4500 per hour not including fuel (roughly another 1000 gallons per hour times about $3/gallon at the refinery (source)).]

Related:

• my June 2009 review of the book Black Wave, a multi-person trip that goes a lot worse than Sunderland’s solo voyage

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Having switched from an iPhone 4S to a Samsung Note 3, one of the things that is most confusing is the contacts interface. My iOS contacts were simply set to sync with Google as though Google were a Microsoft Exchange server. The phone knew only about contacts with a phone number. My Android phone, however, similarly set to “show only contacts with phone numbers” responds to a search query with, for example, three separate contacts for my friend Jannis (one is the real contact with a phone number; the other two are orphan contacts that have an email address only). Thrown in for good measure are all of the people that I’ve ever exchanged email with whose name or email address contains a subset of the search query.

This makes it very cumbersome to find contacts with a text search.

How about by browsing the list? That’s cumbersome too because I haven’t found any way in Google Contacts to archive an old contact. I can move stuff into an “Obsolete Contacts” group but I haven’t found a way to tell Android not to sync such contacts.

Back in November 2009 I wrote that “Contacts is the weakest part of Gmail and especially a year ago, could best be considered a work in progress.”

Are there obvious features of either Android or Google Contacts that I am missing?

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We went to see All is Lost the other night and the engineer in me kept wanting to know “Why didn’t he have an EPIRB”? My companions haven’t spent too much time in the lonelier parts of the planet so they didn’t have to suspend their disbelief that someone who fits out a sailboat for a round-the-world cruise wouldn’t buy an EPIRB from Amazon.

Having also seen Gravity recently (six of us total; six thumbs up) I’m impressed by how much filmmakers can do with just one or two actors. All is Lost seems more impressive because the hardware is simpler and one is reminded that the open ocean can be just as lonely an environment as space.

The movies reminded me to get the batteries changed in my EPIRBs! (I have a floating ACR EPIRB that I got for a trip down through the Caribbean in a Diamond Star DA-40 (story) and a smaller PLB for helicopter trips through some of the blank areas of the American West.) Maybe it is also time to have the life raft repacked by Survival Products.

My experience as a blue water sailor is primarily limited to vomiting over the side. What did the sailors who read this blog think of the movie?

[For a separate real-life story about how bad things can go when you don’t spend $200 on a Spot or EPIRB, check out this story about a Canadian who ended up killing and eating his German Shepherd after the dog saved him from a bear attack.]

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Various news articles are reporting that at least 55 contractors were involved in building healthcare.gov (example from USA Today). That raises the question of why anyone thought that all of the interfaces among 55 different components were going to work upon launch. But I wonder whether, before hiring 55 different companies, someone didn’t ask “Could we just take the source code for the up-and-running Massachusetts exchange and extend it?”

What does healthcare.gov do that the Massachusetts exchange, which has been running for at least five years, does not do? Wouldn’t that have been the lower risk approach? Add a “state” column to every database table and form, soft launch with 10,000 consumers in each state, and then release to the general public?

Obviously it is easier to say in hindsight what should have been done, but given the existence of a working exchange and the fact that federal workers themselves did not do any programming, why did the Feds fall victim to “Not Invented Here” syndrome?

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Folks: It has come to my attention that Twitter has gone public at a valuation of $18 billion. The company has modest revenue (about $600 million per year) and no profit. Is it a short?

What is the explanation for how this service can make enough profit ($1 billion per year?) to justify an $18 billion valuation? It doesn’t seem like a natural advertising medium. Given the possibility of distributing information for free via Facebook or Google+, Twitter does not seem to offer a unique capability to users.

Generally I am a believer in the efficient-market hypothesis but I can’t understand this one.

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My Samsung Galaxy Note 3 has such vast powers compared to my iPhone 4S that I can’t figure out how to do anything anymore…

Apple offers Photo Stream (now “iCloud Photos”) where photos taken from one’s phone show up on one’s desktop computer. After that I would copy them into regular folders and pick the ones to publish using Google’s Picasa, then push up to Google+ for sharing with friends and family.

What is the Android equivalent? All of the photos go up to Google+ automatically. But I can’t figure out how to bring them down to Picasa. The automatically uploaded directories don’t appear as folders that I can import from Google+ into Picasa. And there doesn’t seem to be a catch-all “sync everything” feature. What are people supposed to do? Once the photos are in the cloud keep them in the cloud and do all of the editing with a Web browser? The interface is very slow and cumbersome compared to the Picasa desktop app.

One thing that seems to work pretty well is Dropbox. A single setting has everything from the phone go into “Camera Uploads” and I can use that folder the way that I used iCloud Photos (actually it seems to work better; I had trouble attaching or uploading files directly from the iCloud Photos folder, which didn’t work like other Windows directories). Somehow, though, I can’t wrap my head around the idea that I need a third party service (Dropbox) to connect two Google services (the phone and Picasa).

Am I missing something obvious?

What is the best workflow that people have found to go from the Android phone to archival directories on a Windows machine hard drive and then to push the best images up to Google+ via Picasa?

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I went to see The Power of Duff last night at the Huntington Theater. It is a beautifully staged and wonderfully acted play that reminds me a bit of The Weather Man, looking into the personal lives of people whose job is to be straightforwardly cheerful on TV. Some critics have complained that the play doesn’t address any profound spiritual issues but I think the play is mostly about the more banal issue of the wrench thrown into the works by a guy who begins to offer prayers during the nightly local newscast.

It plays only through November 9 so if you’re in Boston rush out and see it!

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