Yvan Seth's Hole in the Internet

iDork

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 23:01:00 GMT

Well, it's happened… I'm an iDork. Got myself an iPhone today.

Basically it is far and away the best "smart" phone handset around for now. I played with the Diamond Touch, but wasn't impressed. I've been trying to hang out for an Android handset, but who knows when that'll happen? And what's up with that "leaked" video of the HTC offering, slide-out keyboard? Ick. Flimsy.

The iPhone, on the other hand, is a pretty solid unit. I doubt it can handle the sort of treatment my Moto F3 lives with (thrown forcefully down the stairs, no worries!) but it probably isn't going to break in my clumsy fingers. My Moto A1000, a very nice phone IMO, lasted me a couple of years before I managed to smash the screen. So I'll probably be right.

Speaking of the Moto A1000, that's a phone I have very fond memories of. In the end it was only the fact that my worn out battery lasted a mere 6 hours that made me stop using the thing. The reason I never switched to any other, more up to date, alternative is that I simply didn't think anything else was up to the A1000 standard. I've played with blackberries, Nokia's high-end phones, and countless HTC options, and, frankly, they were all just shit.

When I heard about the iPhone the one thing I knew is that it'd be sleek and probably have an above-par UI. But it was an Apple product. I have never owned an Apple product, not because I have anything against Apple really, more because they just don't do good geek gear. The iPod is nice an all, but doesn't excite me. Their laptops are pretty, but not quite my thing. No iPod? I use a JoS MP3/OGG player, it plays OGGs and is ruggardised. Perfect. No MacBook? I preferred the Thinkpads, my next laptop is likely an Asus Eee. Mac stuff isn't Yvan stuff. Until now.

Problems?

Huge delay between buck and bang, every other phone I've bought I've had working before I even left the shop.
I need an iTunes? For my phone? sigh 60MB download and install later… But it is far better than the usual utter garbage PC/sync software that comes with phones.
Whoa, three different screens full of multi-page click-wrap licences. Bloody yanks.
"upload your photos to the cloud" does it even know WTF it is talking about? This kind of language just rubs me the wrong way.

I know Apple are control freaks, but this is just a little silly. I can live with it though, I live in the UK after all. Big brother is part of the landscape.

It's a nice piece of hardware, after Q4 has rolled past I'll see if I regret it. (But then again, Kat also needs a new phone;)

I was impressed once I finally got it working at home. I entered the map application and asked it where I was, right away it homes in on me. And it was spot on. Nice. Will be interesting to play with the assisted-GPS in the field, see how it goes up against my Garmin.

It's also bloody nice to be able to browse the web and read email on my "phone" again, I really have been missing that old A1000.

Open Tech 2008

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 21:33:00 GMT

A couple of weekends back Kat and I went to the Open Tech 2008 one day conference in London. I had planned to write about some things I came across there in some depth, alas time is against me. It would be criminal for me to let it go completely unmentioned though.

There's something amazing about OpenTech: it costs just £5 to attend. For the breadth of coverage, interesting speakers, things learned, and inspiration gained over the day this is an extreme bargain.

Giving myself a few minutes to note down a few points still in the top of my head 10 days later:

There was an overwhelming theme of "public good" running through the conference. From the projects devoted to this, such as mysociety.org, through to entrepreneurs and icons pushing to inspire everyone to follow their various leads. This is a great change from the usual case of "this tech is cool because, well, it is" – I loved to hear that tech was cool for the ways is was actually helping everyday people.
Further contrast between the geeks and the suits (generalisations, I know.) A few weeks back I went to a serious business-tech conference hosted by the 451 group, this was also good stuff but coming at security from a completely different angle (security was just one of several topics covered.) The contrast is all the more interesting because there's a convergence. At the business conference we hear "security is difficult, we have to try harder, alas, some things may be impossible" at OpenTech we hear "security is impossible, but we can try harder and do better." There's far too much depth to this for me to go into right now, not that my own thoughts are in any good order. Suffice to say, studying the application of security from social and economic standpoints would be very interesting right now. There's a lot of material out there, and people(/businesses) are speaking more openly about security issues these days I think.
More on/around security. People get very confused about identity versus reputation, especially when technical definitions of authentication are worked into the mix. People, even a room full of geeks, know very little about the history of currency, and banking in general (a cultural weakness in the geek horde?) Cryptographers are regarded as some sort of higher being… maybe they are! (Aside: I've just read Simon Singh's Fermat's Last Theorem – it lives up to its reputation, and man those number theorists are an insane bunch!)
Ubiquitous networking has changed the world, maybe those of us who've lived through the changes sometimes don't appreciate how revolutionary the changes are (I have trouble seeing it sometimes, much older geeks seems to see it more clearly.) What's scary, is that the field is still young and haphazard, what further refinement will bring is difficult to imagine.
The above is amazing, now how to we deliver this to the rest of the world. Can it actually help solve the terrible problems most of the world has? I'd like to think so.

Of the sessions I attended these are memorable:

Most entertaining: The Web is Agreement, Paul Downy. A talk/rant around current trends centred on Paul's sketch of the same title. (The talk "Living on The Edge" from Danny O'Brien was also entertaining, and the only time I've seen a geek talk "flood" with what can only be called "groupies", it was strange.)
Most inspiring: Digital Money, David Birch. This guy's online presence seems to be a blog about digital money. In essence this was a short, angry rant about the fact that us geeks have not solved the problem of "digital money." At the core of the rant was the idea that functional digital cash will make the world a better place, breaking down unnecessary barriers in the world of money (think of sending aid/donations right to where they're needed, family members sending money home without the "Western Union" tax, etc.)
Most relevant (to me): Security Discussion with Ben Laurie and Friends. Four security/crypto geeks/experts talking about how much things are broken. Entertaining, enlightening, and (to some) challenging.
Most disappointing: Android and the Open Handset Alliance. It just wasn't techie enough, more a marketing spiel from a "developer advocate." I wa hoping for a crash "how stuff works" intro to Android.

On reflection… of the talks I saw there were a lot of "grumpy old(er) men."

xfig still state of the art?

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 16:18:00 GMT

From time to time I have to draw a diagram. This excites me, I enjoy diagrams. Back in university the way to draw a diagram for a report was either xfig or to marking it up directly in latex. But they're oldskool there are groovy new ways to draw diagrams these days. The state of the GUI diagramming art seems to be either inkscape or dia.

Really? Well… I don't think so. While both are good in an attractive sort of way, they also both suck. On my Ubuntu "hardy" machine I get SEGVs out of inkscape every few minutes, not sure why and have no time to investigate. As for dia, it is just plain lacking. In inkscape I can group objects and resize the group, in dia a group of objects (even just rectangles) isn't scalable! (Even xfig can do that.) So I have one option that breaks and is unusable, and another that lacks essential features and is unusable! All I want to do is draw some boxes with words in them, and maybe make them look pretty.

So, I'm using xfig now. Clearly, it is the state of the art in Linux diagramming. (And I'm oh so tempted to boot over to Windows and use Visio sometimes.)

What else is there? If I want to draw some class diagrams, boxes and lines, maybe even UML shudder, what do I use? A few apt-cache searches bring up some candidates, but I just don't have time to play with them. I've got a bloody diagram to draw! Go go xfig!

Inkscape is extremely promising, I'll maybe try it again in another year.

Quick

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 00:57:00 GMT

"because it's not compiled, it's also very quick" [1]

It's a different definition of quick of course, but somehow I begin to feel disconnected and trolling mode wells up from the darkness within.

But… even in that sense, is it really as quick as we think it is? In my experience it certainly makes it quicker to discover new and interesting types of bugs.

The quote relates to Ruby, but really, be it Ruby, Perl, or Python it seems much the same.

[1] I've quoted from the 3rd page of an article there. I'm still not quite sure why these sites bother to separate their articles into "pages." Even SMH used to be one-page-per-article before this pagination fad caught on.