I’m a big fan of my Kindle 2, and I use it nearly every day. I like to read, and I like to read several books at the same time. I also travel frequently, and often I find myself reading new releases, which meant I’d find myself trying to cram multiple hardcover books into my shoulder bag, which was bad for my shoulder bag, not to mention my shoulder. I’m even contemplating acquired the new, larger-screen Kindle DX.

But, the feature I really want will have to wait for the Kindle 3: I want a touchscreen on the Kindle that responds to a stylus so I can write on my Kindle. This could mean allowing me to take notes on the margins of a book I’m reading, but the main reason I want it is so I can get rid of the last analog vestige of my day-to-day-life: the composition book. I simply want the ability to create blank pages on my Kindle and then scribble upon them.

I started using composition books back in 1995 to take notes, jot down ideas and generally manage my day-to-day life and have continued using them to this day. If memory serves, my inspiration for using the composition book came from Vinod Khosla, who at the time was at Kleiner Perkins and was an investor and board member at Excite. If the lowly composition book had any part in making Vinod so effective, I figured I couldn’t go wrong by trying to integrate habitual note-taking into my life. It turned out to be a remarkably effective tool for me, mainly because I find that (for me, your mileage may vary) the simple act of writing something down really helps organize and cement that thing in my mind. I still keep a stack of all my old composition books in my office drawer and sometimes refer back to a filled-up book months or even years later.

If I could simply take notes on my Kindle with a stylus, I’d be a happy man. I’d effectively have a composition book with an infinite number of pages, and, ideally, it would be backed up online and accessible on the web as well. I’d ditch my composition book, save a few trees and have a digital archive of my life available online. I don’t even need the Kindle to give me character recognition or anything like that. My handwriting is so bad anyway, I doubt any algorithm could ever be up to the task. But as long as I had the ability to tag pages, search and browse through them on my Kindle and online, possibly share individual pages with others, and perhaps even farm out some of the pages to be transcribed (no doubt via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk), I’d be even more enamored with my Kindle. Amazon, are you listening? This is my number one feature request for the next-generation Kindle. Whaddya think?

While I wait with eager anticipation to get my hands on the new iPhone 3GS, I’ve been enjoying a new gadget: the Verizon MiFi. The MiFi is a combination wireless 3G EVDO modem with an integrated router/hub and wifi, all delivered in a sleek black unit the size of a small stack of business cards.

I use a MacBook Air, and I had a Verizon EVDO USB modem, but the aesthetics of having the dongle hang off the side of my MBA bothered me, and then the unit stopped functioning, giving me an excuse to jettison it. The beauty of the MiFi is the ability to share the connection with up to 5 users — very handy (and a great way to make friends) while in the back of a car with colleagues, at a local coffee shop or anywhere that lacks free wifi. The connection is really zippy and Verizon’s coverage puts AT&T’s to shame.

Ironically, I sometimes even connect my iPhone to the MiFi because it enhances the performance and coverage I get over using AT&T’s 3G crappy network, which brings me to an opportunity to rant about just how bad AT&T is. AT&T is lucky the iPhone is a such a great device – the iPhone is so good it is succeeding in spite of the inferior network users are forced to subscribe to.

Apple’s iPhone 3GS announcement this week really put AT&T’s weakness in focus — they announced that iPhone software 3.0 would support MMS messaging and tethering functionality, two oft-requested features, yet Apple had to footnote their announcement to mention that both features were “coming soon” for those of us unlucky enough to be stuck with AT&T’s lame service.

I can imagine that Apple will be more than eager to jump to a new carrier when their exclusivity with AT&T ends. For shame, AT&T. You’ve got the most popular mobile computing device ever created tied to your infrastructure, yet you are squandering this opportunity with your lame network. I’m no network architect and I’m sure I don’t appreciate the complexities around build-out and capacity planning, but I’m guessing AT&T’s crappy network is not a result of unsolvable technical issues, but rather lack of will and general organizational inertia and incompetence. Or maybe a calculated decision to enhance profits in the short term by delaying capex. But neither scenario puts AT&T in a good light.

And yet, despite all this, I’ll be stuck with AT&T since I plan to upgrade to the new iPhone as soon as I can. I just wish I had a choice in carriers.

I just finished reading one of the most nerdtastic books I’ve read in a long time, thanks to Kwin Kramer at Oblong, who generously gave me the book he had just acquired at the MIT Press bookstore while in Cambridge. Kwin hadn’t even read the book yet, but I think he saw me salivate (and therefore judged me more in need of the book than himself) as I thumbed through the pages and saw snippets of assembly code and discussions regarding the coding necessary to perform game calculations in the processor cycles available during the analog/CRT video horizontal and vertical sync intervals.

The book was a true pleasure to read and made for a nostalgic trip down memory lane since I was an avid Atari 2600 gamer as a kid. Guilty childhood confession: I once even made friends with a kid I probably wouldn’t have otherwise hung out with because he was the first one on the block to own Activision’s Pitfall!

Reading this history of this seminal home video game system and technical discussions of the constraints and idiosyncrasies of the platform gave me tremendous respect for early Atari game designers like Warren Robinett, David Crane and Howard Scott Warshaw. First, these guys did it all — graphics, sound, gameplay, design, etc. Each game was a one-man show. Even more impressive was how they were able to produce great games with technical constraints that today sound totally ridiculous — these guys had to confine themselves to 2K of ROM for games and graphics, no frame buffer for rendering a screen (they had to render each CRT scan line in real time in code) and a laughable 128 bytes of RAM.

Some of my favorite programming tricks covered in the book involved the arduous process of code-size optimization. 2K was not much to work with, so programmers often had to squeeze every last byte out of the code and graphic sprites in order to get them to fit in the highly constrained space. This often involved hand-optimizing of MOS 6507 assembly code, and economizing via clever hacks. For example, in Yar’s Revenge, Howard Scott Warshaw need to create a random-looking field of blocks on the screen, but he could not afford the space or computational time needed for a pseudo-random number generation algorithm, so instead he just used sections of the code itself to produce a string of seemingly random patterns on-screen. So cool.

In another game, a programmer was able to save a byte of space when the final byte of a subroutine happened to be identical to the first byte of a sprite bitmap, which happened to immediately follow the previous portion of code in the ROM. So the programmer cut one of the duplicate bytes out and pointed the sprite bitmap to an address one byte earlier in the code to enable both the code and the graphic asset to share a single byte. That is a hardcore level of optimization, possible only when programming so close to the hardware.

The architecture of the system was originally designed to enable games like Pong and Combat, so the system was given two controllers and assumed head-to-head-play, and a video rendering subsystem that included two moveable sprites, a cursor and a missle and hardware support for things like symmetrical playing fields, scaling and mirroring of sprites and collision detection of onscreen objects. The book does a excellent job tracking the evolution of the games developed for the system, with programmers taking the system to a level of sophistication and functionality likely unforeseen by the architects/designers of the platform, a remarkable feat given the simplicity and constraints of the system.

And perhaps most unforeseen by Atari was that their console sparked the rise of an ecosystem of developers and publishers around a game platform, presaging the modern videogame market. Atari hadn’t anticipated this, never published a spec for their proprietary system and assumed all games would be developed in house. In fact, they initially tried to prevent third-party developers from releasing titles for their system. Several early Atari programmers who felt under-compensated as a result of their $20k salaries and no participation in the multi-million dollar profits their games generated for Atari spun out to create Activision, the first third-party game developer. Parker Brothers even made games for the console and had to hire a team of programmers to reverse-engineer the system by disassembling the code in existing game cartridges, since Atari wasn’t interested in publishing a spec or providing tools to allow third parties to develop games for the platform. As a result, they lost out on lucrative licensing revenues from third-party publishers, an error Nintendo wisely learned from when they launched the NES in 1983.

If you are a gamer interested in the history of video games or have an interest in how software design and programmer interacts with hardware design, this book is for you. My only complaint is that this book is not available on the Kindle. C’mon MIT Press, get with the program! I understand the subject matter of this book is retro, but think of your audience here in the 21st century.