I need to start thinking before I write. Or at least verify my assertions.
The other day I posted about the n900 and droid root exploit. Well, as Brentonpointed out you can get dev versions of droids that have root without needing to resort to bit twiddling boot loaders. I foolishly assumed that since someone did it, that it was necessary to do. sigh
Then I assumed the drivers for wifi and cell radio were closed binary drivers. Felipe Contreras quickly corrected me on that assertion.
In a previous post I jumped too far ahead of myself and was promptly thwapped by rtaycher.
My mindless ramblings make me look like a fool. However, the upside is that I learn a lot of new info by being corrected in my false reasoning. Which I love. The downside is that by being incorrect all the time, people may stop listening. I suppose as with most things in life, I just need to find the balance to create that elusive moderation.
I received a n900 last week and it is several levels of awesome.
I do not really consider myself a gadget geek. My wife might disagree with that assertion due to all the devices littered around the house. However, my previous cell phone was almost ten years old. Thats right, I bought my last phone at the turn of the century. I would say that fact alone removes me from the gadget geek school.
That ancient phone and the n810 were a really nice combination. I could access the net via DUN over bluetooth (http, ssh, etc..) and make phone calls. I wanted to merge the two devices and I knew the n900 would do that. That ability alone made the n900 worth waiting almost a year for. (That was when I started getting sick of having two devices.)
While the n900 is a spectacular device it definitely is not the shiniest. Google and Apple have that covered. With that in mind I keep getting asked why spend more for less? Why not just get a droid or iphone with access to all the apps, multi-touch, etc.. etc..
You will never see that on the n900. Not because the devs at nokia are security geniuses, nor because the maemo community lacks hackers. That post will never be needed for the simple reason that there is a rootsh in the apps repository. Yes, that is right. My phone comes with immediate and easy access to root.
I am definitely NOT a linux geek, nor an adept hacker. I will probably never use rootsh, but other people will and I can benefit from their efforts. As I discovered with the n810 there will eventually be a need to get access to root. And when some hacker creates /sbin/butterfly they will do it without having to bit twiddle the boot loader.
The n900 is a great compromise between the draconian iphone and the loose freerunner. It has its binary drivers and inaccessible hardware (you probably can’t hack the wifi or cell radio easily.), but offers an open debian based linux distro.
One last point that probably needs yet another post, while the droid is open-ish when compared to the iphone, it is still just another way for google to get ads in front of you. While this is not inherently bad, I am not comfortable paying someone so they can market to me.
For many years I have been making really great coffee. Everyone who drinks it is amazed at how good the coffee is. While I would love to claim that I am some kind of coffee prodigy, I simply follow Tom at Sweet Marias. The guy is pure passion. All his product recommendations and bean selections have been amazing.
Sweet Marias has a personality too. It is not some slick rounded corner corporate site trimmed down to a bland stub by lawyers. It finds that hard to reach middle above the myspace eyesore. Tom appears to be on this constant search and is tirelessly hunting for good coffee. It is not just the beans, he finds the best tools too. Pure awesome.
I hereby dub Tom of Sweet Marias the internet’s coffee person.
Now I have decided that I like tea. I am starting to like tea enough to invest in making good tea. However, I have run into a road block: I am unable to find the Sweet Marias of tea. I have found Adagio’s and other misc places, but I am not getting the same passion from them. They all look and read too polished to be run by people who really care. Don’t get me wrong, I am sure Adagio and friends are really great people, I am just not seeing the same single minded awesomeness I see at Sweet Marias (If I don’t get any real response from this post I am probably going with Adagio).
Perhaps I am making too brash an assumption that the coffee and tea culture would be similar enough to have Tom’s doppelgänger.
I am putting this out there to see if anyone is aware of where I can go to get access to a singularly and freakishly awesome tea guru?
I noticed something the other day. It was surprising at first, then the more I thought about it the more I realized it made sense.
You have classic works like Don Quixote that have created iconic cultural terms; "I felt like I was tilting at windmills." There is big-endian vs little-endian created by Gulliver’s travels and popularized by computer culture. There are many more but since this a random musing I can’t think of them.
The surprising thing is that you have a massive thousand page work and what we have left from it is "Tilting at windmills.". I am not aware of any other popular phrase derived from the knight. I am reading Gulliver’s Travels and all that is culturally familiar is the little vs big satire.
Both of these memes occur rather quickly in the works. You don’t have to read all that much in order to stumble onto them. Is this common? Do so few people read the entire work?
Don Quixote has the cave of Montecino(sp?) and Gulliver’s Travels has the floating island kingdom of inept academic fools (which is hilarious.), to name just two off the top of my head.
The real question is: Are there any iconic cultural memes that occur towards the end of the works?
I am afraid we only enrich our culture with the first 25% of great ideas.
Things I knew before I started, but ignored: There is usually a reason that markets are under served.
Here is some background before I get to the real story.
I am somewhat involved in boy scouts, my son is a Webelo II and I volunteer for that I can. Last summer I volunteered to coordinate summer camp. This boils down to collecting forms, having parents fill them out, copying the info to different forms, handing forms in to the main office, hoping and praying that they don’t lose track of it,
keeping copies and then transcribing yet more data. All of this is done via paper and pen. I have never spilled so much ink in my life. Keeping track of so much paper and who has done what was a nightmare of epic proportions for someone like me. Other people’s money was involved in a mixture of checks and cash all with different amounts
due and constantly changing based on a mind boggling laundry list of variables. If ever there was a process ripe for automation, this was it.
I thought I found an itch I wanted to scratch.
The ephemeral goal was to provide a basecamp on steroids for scouts to organize themselves. I wanted something less complicated than BigTent, but a bit more custom tailored to scouting than a generic group org system would be.
I am quite satisfied at my current job. I wanted to solve a problem, not alter my life. I quickly realized that I needed to do two things; find a designer/usability guru and figure out if this was going to be a viable project. In other words, will this eventually pay for itself?
I got my friend Brenton Klik to sign on and together we did some research. I try to use conservative numbers, but when they become too bleak I shift to conventional wisdom as found in Hacker News. This is what we found:
There are about 20,000 cub scout packs and troops in the US and that number is shrinking. Right at the beginning there is a limited customer base. If we assume a maximum 10% market penetration over the course of a few years we end up with 2,000 customers.
I didn’t really want to do this myself so I wanted to hire someone, this means a decent developer and tech support person. With a part time support position and full time developer the initial yearly cost would be $80k. I
In order to eventually enter the black within a few years, I would have to charge $10/mo per pack, not per user. I didn’t really see the model working on a per user basis. Nor did I want the uncertainty of ad revenue. Basecamp charges $25/mo for the minimal package, so $10/mo seemed reasonable.
Brenton and I met with a representative from the scouts to figure out whether this was a viable idea. You can read his post for details on that experience.
In my opinion the biggest hurdle is that the scouts is a volunteer run and volunteer funded organization. I wasn’t out to make a living on this project, but I certainly didn’t want to lose any money either. There were significantly cheaper solutions out there. None of them do much of anything particularly well, but they do it cheap enough and
tolerably well enough. Which is what matters.
As Brenton said, for the price of a coffee we found out that the project wasn’t worth it. There are reasons why blue oceans are blue.
I am struggling with a decision I never imagined I would have to make. Most of those who know me would be surprised at what I am considering. The question that is weighing on my mind is whether I should buy an iMac.
(All the following is NOT derived with scientific rigor. It is merely the ramblings of a floss purist questioning his ideals via personal anecdotes.)
A long time ago I realized that I am not a typical computer user. I use Firefox to surf the web and emacs for everything else. These preferences, which tend towards a positive feedback loop , have brought me to a small isolated area of the Venn diagram.
However, I do have a wife and son and they fall into the larger section of that imaginary Venn diagram. They browse the web, use email (predominantly through the web), IM (again web based), manage photos via f-spot, watch videos through mplayer, play some time wasting games,etc.
Of course my son does a bit more with various tools like scratch.
The core problem and reason for this post is that he wants to do more, but can’t. Editing videos on linux is near impossible. Cinelerra is about as useful to an impatient ten year old as mowing the lawn with a pair of scissors. Kdenlive looks promising, but crashes constantly with segfaults and other weird errors. After hours or days of stubborn persistence his natural response it to give up. I don’t blame him.
The core philosophy of floss is freedom. Freedom is a hollow concept without pragmatic consequences. “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”, thus for popular systems at least stability is approachable. Of course there are caveats and other problems with this which I will punt. With FLOSS one also has the ability to make an application do what they want (the freedom part). If a package comes close, but not quite, then you have the ability (whether you do it yourself or higher it out) to get the feature you need. This saves you writing a system from scratch.
Non-free systems in the floss view are bad because you can become entrapped in that system. In order for Digital Restrictions Management to ‘work’ it has to be infused throughout the system from the hardware level up to user level apps including network services. Enforcing whimsical industry group policies through fallible systems is always a poor judgement call.
Expanding closed systems through undocumented, broken api’s is an exercise in frustration. While there are exceptions they are exactly that, rare exceptions.
One can easily observe some real world consequences that are surprising for a floss purist. Floss tends to be a copycat of the closedgiants. One can easily argue that the closed giants also copy each other.
Another observation that contradicts the philosophy of floss is that the media apps tend to crash. Sure, mplayer and co. will play most codecs perfectly fine. Creating or manipulating media is a different experience entirely.
A naive observer would be forgiven wondering what benefit there is to all this freedom when innovation is not the de facto emergent property.
Bringing all these tangents together I am back where I started: Do I buy an iMac so my son can create media with relative ease or do I hold onto ideals and contribute to an immature ecosystem? In other words do I side with short-sited pragmatism or hold out for potential long term rewards?
I recently succumbed to gadget lust and bought an ebook reader, BeBook to be precise. I read a lot of books and luckily they tend to be public domain works from long dead authors. My tastes allow me to take advantage of the reader while not compromising my DRM == Evil stance.
The overall experience of reading on the BeBook is quite good. Needing light to view a display on an electronic device is still surprising. The screen is a bit smaller than I expected (though I am not sure what I was expecting exactly.) which means more page turns to read a book. Turning a page does take a few moments, however, it is easy enough to anticipate and click the button while you are close enough to the end. You can then finish reading while the reader does whatever it does to render then next ‘page’.
I often end up reading in bed. It is a habit I got into while I was single and luckily I have an understanding wife so I am able to continue doing this. It is so much easier using a reader while laying down than a book. Unfortunately, the buttons emit a clunky click when pressed. I initially thought this was the death knell for reading the BeBook in bed. Luckily, the wife has yet to complain.
For reasons I have yet to figure out, the default zoom level of some pdfs can be illegible. Zooming involves pressing the number key with the magnifying glass on it. NOT the buttons with the + and -, which are for volume. That took me longer to realize than I care to admit. The zoom button cycles through the various modes in one direction. This means that if you go one step too far you have several more page refreshes to go through to get back to where you want it. This can feel like it takes a while due to the slight delay in display refresh. I don’t really plan on using this to play audio, so it would be really nice to remap the volume buttons to zoom.
There really isn’t much to say about the software. It just works. Which is both surprising and good. As far as I can tell the UI is just a file browser, if there are more ways to browse your library, I don’t know about it. Since the file view has worked well enough for me I haven’t bothered to look.
I read mostly pdfs and epub books. Rendering epub is definitely superior to that of pdfs. If I had to guess, I would say this is because epub is an open standard, pdf is extremely complex while epub has a single purpose, and it appears there is more epub content. I have not tried any other formats since they tend to have DRM and I don’t want to throw away money or support such a horrid concept.
OpenInkpot needs mention. It is a linux distro for the Hanlin v3 (BeBook) and other ereaders. It is an interesting idea and deserves some attention. I want to use it some more before I decide whether to switch. The few times I have booted it, Inkpot seems to be very similar in how the BeBook functions. At least I haven’t noticed any marked difference yet. I am definitely going to play with it again and would recommend taking a few minutes yourself.
Content. The single reason to buy these things is to put books on them. If you can’t do that, they are quite pointless. Sure, you can put feeds into ebook format and consume them that way, but then links are dead and I have found it to be rather constraining. However, I do use zinepal.com and for what it is, it works very well. (more on that in another post.)
If you don’t care whether your soul is sucked into the maw of giant corporate blobs, then DRM is for you. There are two big buy offers on your soul; Amazon and Sony. You can give them lots of money for the privilege of temporarily accessing big name authors and other pop-culture trends. Then they will take it away at a whim. Who wouldn’t want that?
Even if you did decide your soul was worth their baubles you would still have to run a vbox/vmware image of windows. Most of their spyware is not cross platform.
Your other choice is to travel into the world of Public Domain, Tech Tomes, and Unknowns. Lucky for me, this happens to be where I enjoy traveling. Reading authors that were around before the Brimstone Puking Demon was envisioned is extremely entertaining and rewarding. O’Reilly has decided that their customers are not amoral savages so there is a wealth of cool, but expensive, content. There is also a bunch of places offering self-published authors and a few publishers that have functioning brain cells, http://www.baen.com
There is enough content out there allowing you to avoid DRM altogether. It just requires a bit of work to find. I am still looking for good sources of books. I love that O’Reilly doesn’t have DRM. However, building a library of their material would be extremely expensive at $30+ a pop.
Is the BeBook worth it? Yes. It allows me to easily read classic lit, all the tech tomes I could want and find great unknown authors. Using it for only a week and I am hooked.
First, I would like to apologize to everyone who put so much effort into qunu.
Current Status:
The server has been taken offline. There are no backups which are current, the latest is one month old.
Why:
The server that was just taken offline was to be a temporary home lasting one, maybe two months. We were then going to find a more permanent setup. As with most things that have a deadline it received no attention until it was necessary.
Apparently there was some confusion as to the date which the account was to be canceled. It was scheduled to be taken offline on December 21, 2007. However, the server was taken offline nine days before the scheduled time (e.g. today)
A few weeks earlier, Mickaël at process-one had generously offered to take qunu off our hands. So we had finally found the home we had been looking for. I had even started the process of getting all the data off the server. Unfortunately, the transition is not going as smoothly as I had hoped.
Once again, qunu will suffer through a period of downtime before it is finally resurrected again. Maybe qunu should be renamed Phoenix or Lazarus
At some point when all the kinks are worked out, probably next month, qunu will be started at its new home. Don’t hold your breath, but don’t give up hope either.
Just ran into this emacs key binding. Someday I need to just read the manual and mark all the stuff I wish I knew already for later study. But since I will probably never do that here is yet another cool thing in emacs which I didn’t know about:
C-x h runs the command mark-whole-buffer
which is an interactive compiled Lisp function in `simple.el’.
It is bound to C-x h,
Put point at beginning and mark at end of buffer.
You probably should not use this function in Lisp programs;
it is usually a mistake for a Lisp function to use any subroutine
that uses or sets the mark.
Not only can you edit videos in emacs now, but you can also create music. My initial response was WTF!? However, after watching the demo videos, I can see the practical uses.
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