Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

RIM’s Flaw: Single Point of Failure

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I became a Research in Motion (RIM) BlackBerry user a little bit over a year ago now, and overall I remain as happy with my BlackBerry ‘Bold’ 9000 as I was when I wrote my positive review of the device. It’s a good phone, and it has treated me well—far better than the AT&T 8525 (HTC TyTN HERM100) that preceded it. The hardware has held-up through heavy use with only minimal damage, and the software remains solid and crashes only on very rare occasion.

But while I have very few complaints about the phone itself, one of my biggest qualms about the BlackBerry universe before getting one remains my biggest problem today. I hate having to rely on a middle-man to pass emails from my server(s) to my phone. Phones from Apple, Palm, HTC, Motorola, and others all manage to communicate directly with mail servers, but RIM insists on passing all BlackBerry email traffic through their North American data center in Canada. The RIM servers stand between my phone and my email, polling for messages on the servers and pushing them out to my phone.

Usually this works okay—in day-to-day use, what does it matter what route your email takes to get to your phone? My objection is that it adds another potential point of failure to the system. With any other smartphone, if your wireless carrier provides a working data connection and your email servers are up your email will work. With a BlackBerry, you need both of those plus a working RIM data center. This adds an extra, unnecessary place where the system can break down.

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Airlines Can’t Hold You Hostage (For More than 3 Hours)

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We’ve all heard the horror stories about plane-loads of passengers being trapped in an airliner on the tarmac for hours on end. Maybe the weather turned bad, or maybe there’s a mechanical problem on the plane. They pushed back from the gate and just parked there, then sat . . . and sat . . . and sat. Those of us who fly even on rare occasion have experienced 1- or 2-hour waits, and the unlucky few have had to sit in planes for 5, 6, 8, or 10 hours.

This has always been absolutely, unequivocally wrong. You don’t trap people in an airplane. If the plane is broken or if it can’t embark, let people off. Your average human being can figure this out, but it is apparently beyond the capabilities of the average modern airline executive.

Thankfully the Department of Transportation has stepped in to put some simple, common sense restrictions on how airlines treat their passengers: You can’t keep them on the sitting in a parked plane longer than 3 hours, and you have to keep the toilets working while they’re trapped on the plane. Oh, how terrible. The airlines will go bankrupt trying to abide by these stringent new regulations.

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“Don’t Bring a Gun to a Snow-Ball Fight”

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The Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) of Washington, DC, doesn’t have the best reputation as a law enforcement agency to begin with, but an incident during this last weekend’s blizzard really takes the cake. A ‘veteran’ detective with over 25 years of experience, when faced with a crowd of people wielding snow-balls, pulled out his handgun in an apparent effort to deter this wild crowd of . . . snow-ball throwers.

Look, the snow-ball throwers were in the wrong—some of their snow-balls were hitting passing cars, which is potentially dangerous, and they didn’t exactly behave in a respectful way toward the detective. I don’t fault the detective at all for stopping his car, confronting them, or calling for backup. Fine. An overreaction, but an understandable one. But pulling your gun? In what universe do hand-lobbed balls of snow (and this wasn’t even wet, packable snow) constitute a threat worthy of brandishing a firearm?

As you might expect, the detective has been placed on desk duty pending an investigation. Check out the video below, including the enjoyable chant that I stole as this entry’s title.

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A Few Blizzard ’09 Pics

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I’ve mostly been hanging out indoors, but I did spend some time yesterday afternoon and then again today digging out the car. They plowed our street today, so we are no longer stranded. Our total accumulation was somewhere in the 18″ ballpark, easily ranking in the top three biggest snowstorms I’ve experienced. I love snow!

Website 21.1 Revision

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I took the snow-day opportunity to tie up the last bit of development and launch a minor revision to the site, bringing the version to 21.1. Visually this is just a small, incremental improvement, but I’ve done quite a bit on the back-end. There are a few little touches throughout that you will probably like. Here are some highlights:

  • Social Media Integration: Much as I don’t like it, people are spending more and more time on Twitter and in the ‘walled garden’ of Facebook—and, consequently, less time visiting real web sites like this one. New Off on a Tangent posts are now automatically cross-posted at my previously-disused Twitter and Facebook pages.
  • Pretty Photo & Gallery Pop-Ups: If you click on a photo in an entry, it’ll now come up in a nice little pop-up (powered by Thickbox). Click on one and you’ll see what I mean. You can even click through multiple photos in an entry from within the pop-up.
  • Mobile Site Improvements: The mobile site looks about the same as it did before, but the code is heavily reworked (and faster). Now that I’ve dropped support for the ancient Palm OS ‘Blazer’ browser I could write some modern code for the mobile side.
  • Holiday Information: For a long time, special images have appeared at the top-right of the site on particular religious and civil holidays. Now, mousing-over the image on a holiday will give you a little pop-up with the name of the holiday, a brief description, and a link for more information. Oh, and mobile users get a holiday notification now too.

Lots of other small (mostly-technical) changes are part of this release, so if anything isn’t working for you please let me know!

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.