Ubuntu Hour, Dublin, July 2011

So an Ubuntu Hour was called to coincide with Laura Czajkowski been back in Dublin.

A good turn out in the Trinity Hotel chosen for their free wifi which always helps.  Also a nice quiet location so you can hear yourself think.  And there was no need for a tv-b gone though it was nice to see somebody came equipped. :-)

Will be interesting to see if people manage to get ubuntu into their work places to replace windows.  Even one or two systems adds to the overall linux presence and another foothold.  I've found that it is hard to remove linux once it has gained a foothold.  Which is why I encourage it everywhere!

And I loved to see the mobile technology that people use and android has really captured the geeky market.  I don't remember seeing anything other than android in use.  And thanks to Julie for her qr code business cards which were fun for a few minutes to see how the various devices handled virtual business cards with varying success.

If you have any pics of the event add a link in the comments and I'll make sure they get added to the Ubuntu IE pix.ie account.

The straw that broke the camels back #2

Why I gave up on the iphone.  I bought an iphone 3g as a toy to play with as i was curious why people were raving over them. The os was mediocre and not even close to the capability of my nokia device in terms of capability.

• It had no cut and paste which made text handling awkward.  Of course when an update added it a nokia fan did agree that apple had made a better cut and paste than any other mobile device.
• It didn't shoot video.  The camera is capable but it just wasn't there in software.  Annoying.
• Only having a touchscreen made text entry slow and clumsy.  Keyboards allow humans to use muscle memory to aid in typing.
• No memory card slot meant there was no expansion option available.
• The lack of a disk option (available and much used on ipods) meant I couldn't transfer files like I did on nokias.  It was handy to throw media files or iso's onto my phone as I travelled to and from work.
• Battery life was woeful compared to my nokias.  Barely a day compared to 2-3 days with nokias.
• Data management on iphone was woeful.
• Bluetooth was non existent as far as I was concerned.  I couldn't tranfer files/data onto or off of the device with bluetooth.  It didn't handle bluetooth keyboards either.
• As shipped it had no global search.  A limitation of my early nokias as well.  After using a palm in the 90s releasing a device with no global search for local data seems dumb and limited.  Adding notes and been unable to search for them other than manually was very annoying.
• Add on software was terrible and limited. I was used to creating standard docs and xls files as well as txt and html files.  Also writing python scripts and running 8bit emulators was impossible.  Not because the hardware couldn't but because it's not part of apples 'vision'.

Yet I used it as my main phone for nearly a year.  I even had the money put aside to get a iphone 3gs and was 3 days away from picking one up before turning my back on ios.  I switched to it when nokia broke my nokias with the stupid camera click.  My disgust and mistrust of nokia made me give the iphone a second chance despite it's limitations.

• I liked its handling of media.  I pointed itunes at an external drive with media and it shuffled files onto and off the device as i watched them.
• I liked it's friendliness.  Whenever showing people a web page on a mobile device.  If I showed them that same page on a nokia device you had to give them a few words on how to move around the page, what to press and what not to press whereas on the iphone no such instructions were necessary.
• My vodafone mobile data was altered to add a vodafone brand and links to almost all pages whereas my iphone on o2 gave me the page as it was.  There was no way that apple would allow such tampering with data like that.  At least that was my view of the crappiness of vodafone.

What made me give up on ios?  The news that google talk had been held up on the app store.  A service that I had no interest in was been delayed by apple.  It was an indicator that apples control of the app store was going to become an issue that was going to eventually spoil my enjoyment of the device.  It's my device and I should be the final decider of what is run on it.  Apple may think that they are protecting their users but their decisions seem to show that they are protecting their monopoly by preventing alternate software.  You only have to look at the popularity of opera mini on ios to see that people aren't happy with the default browser.

So I spent half the money I had saved for an iphone 3gs on my first android device.  A htc hero that gave me a very nice portable device.  I still use the iphone.  An occasional call and sms plus I use it as a media player.  I uninstalled all the apps I had downloaded as I prefer the android equivalents.  It's a pity as it is still a nice device.  Just ruined for me at least by apples short sightedness.

Come on the OLPC project

I have an OLPC.  It is my favourite laptop.  By a very comfortable margin.  And no manufacturer has learned anything from it.  It's now 2 years old and nobody other than the OLPC project have created hardware that is remotely as useful.

What they got right:

• Battery life.  If i'm out and about I can turn off the colour screen and wifi and easily get 10 hours of use.
• The screen!  Oh the screen.  If you haven't had the pleasure of using an OLPC get your hands on one and see the screen.  Indoors it is fine and dandy but comes into it's own if you bring it outside into sunlight.  The black and white mode of the screen is perfectly usable outdoors were most modern laptops fail.  You can sit outside and work in the sunshine and not have to worry about brightness or screen glare.  Mostly when I am indoors I use the black and white mode as I find it very easy on my eyes.
• The handle.  It may seem small but I believe that laptops should have a handle.  The early ones did but somewhere along the line these were considered unnecessary or ugly when in fact they are useful and reduce the risk of your laptop been damaged while been moved.  A small thing but suggests it was designed by somebody who knew it was going to be used as a portable device.
• Dimpled plastic surface.  Unlike most electronics it has a rough dimpled surface.  This means that it's easy to grip in your hand and it creates friction when on fabric.  A laptop that won't slide off your lap.  Inspired!
• The robustness of the device.  Most mobile technology is made smaller and smaller sacrificing toughness for prettiness.  The OLPC was designed by somebody who knew it was going to be knocked, banged and dropped.  It feels robust.  It is robust.  I wish more manufacturers would follow their example.  When closed it has no exposed ports or parts sticking out.  It forms a complete secure shell.  The usb and audio ports only appear when you open the ears that lock the keyboard shut and double up as wifi aerials.

What they got wrong:

• Distribution.  That you couldn't walk into a shop and buy one. Even buying online wasn't easy. Mine came courtesy of a german friend who took amazons refusal to ship to ireland as a personal challenge. In the end it had to be shipped to the uk before been hand delivered to ireland. Maybe if they had joined forces with a worldwide charity like the red cross, oxfam or the like. A central location per country would allow these charities to meet folk wanting these unique devices and who are interested in supporting this worthwhile project. Some of these people are the types that charities would be looking for.  Even without that these devices would be useful to these charities in the field due to their durability and ruggedness.
• Software.  I like the sugaros that the OLPC is shipped with but it was lacking when it was released.  The most obvious omission when I got mine was the lack of a spreadsheet.  For a device meant for school kids the lack of a spreadsheet was unforgivable.
• Not targetting schools in rich counties. I'm reading everyday about schools giving ipads to school kids. This is atrocius as it teaches kids to be passive consumers depending on a company with a proven track record for lockin and requiring itunes which is not available for all operating systems. Also you can type faster on the OLPC than you can on a touch screen.  It would be better to expose these kids to a computer rather than an unprogramable media device.
• The keyboard.  It seems that the keyboard is susceptible to kids picking at them.  The soft rubber membrane can be easily damaged by kids.  Hopefully the next version will have a tougher keyboard.

Where now from here.
There are new versions of the OLPC been planned.  I'm interested in both the moderate update to the existing hardware with faster processor, more memory while still managing better battery life.  Even the tablet version looks interesting.  Of course it will come down to distribution as to wether I'll be able to get one.

Does meego have a future?

Well nokia has turned their back on meego.  But does this mean the end of the mobile open source operating system?

Without nokia i reckon it might stand a better chance of succeeding.  Nokia has changed direction so many times in the past 3 years that there was the chance that they would destroy or cripple meego before it took off.  They had symbian as their top priority.  They created maemo.  They open sourced symbian.  They merged maemo with moblin and created meego.  They dropped meego and symbian and are now going with windows phone 7.  Headless chickens have better direction.

• Meego may survive as a distro especially for low powered hardware. It is considerably more open than android and not encumbered by java or the patent wars that seem to haunt android.
• Meego may survive as a embedded systems os.  There is talk of it as an in car computer system.  A niche market but one that resists change.
• Meego may survive if it can be put in place of android os on any of the tablets that come out and be shown to be superior on the same hardware.  It was designed with tablets in mind so it wouldn't need much in the way of alterations.  If enough hackers adopt it on cheap android hardware it may gain a community independent of hardware manufacturers.
• Meego may survive if instead of android it gains traction in the chinese cheap mobile market.

That's 4 ifs to start with.  It would only take one of them to come to pass to ensure the survival of the os.  Open source software has a habit of sticking around as long as there is a use for it.  It's not dependent on a single company to keep it alive.  If it can survive it can thrive.

The straw that broke the camels back

So i bought a nokia e71 in 2008.  On paper it was ideal.  Faster, smaller with more features.  Camera with a flash, FM radio, no more pop port.  Greater than 2gb memory card support.

I found the first problem when i added 300 notes from my old e61i to the e71 notes app.  The global search when started would load all the data it was able to search into memory to speed up the search.  This is ok if there is only a few notes.  When you have 300 or so this took nearly a minute before you could actually make a search.  The old version would start and be instantly be ready to make a search.  There was no way to replace the crap version of the software with the old working version.  It's a smart phone with loads of memory.  Somebody at nokia must have tested the device with lots of data.  Did they not realise that prefetching the data was bad?  It was a disaster on Windows Vista, why would it be better on a mobile os?   Why no option to disable that feature?  Strike 1

I used to leave the search application open to avoid the startup wait.  However if I ejected the card to transfer data which I did a few times a week it would shut down all the apps meaning that the damned search startup was waiting for me the next time I made a search.  It also meant that when I started the music player application it would realise the card had been ejected and automatically search the card in case I had added new music.  There was no way to stop this 3 minute delay.  Strike 2

I hate noise.  If you had me and a ninja living next door to you the ninja would be the noisy neighbour.  I can sneak up on cats.  I hate mandatory camera clicks.  It is a stupid requirement in some countries.  It is a bad law as it makes a low vga quality camera on a camera phone make a click when a high end camera phone shooting 720 high definition video can be silent.  It is security theatre at it's worst.  In Ireland thankfully it is not a requirement.  So when i bought my nokia e71 I had checked in advance to see that I could make it silent.  And it was.  A faint beep when it autofocused.  Annoying but tolerable.  Then in Feb 2009 I updated 3 nokias at the same time.  An e71, an e61i and old n70.  All had been silent and I had carefully read the update notes.  Afterwards they had all gained that stupid camera click noise with no easy way to eliminate it.  €1000 of phones destroyed by nokia.  Strike 3 and I'll never buy nokia again.

My iphone can be silent.  My htc hero could be silent.  My sony xperia x10 mini can be silent.  Why the hell did nokia do this without warning?

Moreover I don't recommend nokia anymore.  I reckon I easily convinced about a dozen people a year to buy nokia.  Not any more.  I provided free tech support to friends and family and now almost none of them have nokia whereas it used to be almost all had nokia.

Dumb move nokia!

Pre rant ramble

First post of a blog where i'll nail my colours to the mast on topics of interest to me such as:

• 'Evil' companies
• Hacking
• Hardware
• Internet
• Anonymity
• Open Source
• Privacy
• Mobile tech
• Android
• Meego
• Nokia
• OLPC
• PalmOS
• Psion
• Symbian

• Operating systems
• DOS
• OS/2
• Windows
• Ubuntu
• Xubuntu