bytex64.net/blog

Most people, when they go shopping, arrive at the juice aisle and think, "Wow, there sure are a lot of kinds of juice to choose from!" They ponder the available selections, pick one, and go on their way.

Other people, perhaps stranger or more adventurous folks, arrive at the juice aisle and think, "Wow, look at all the juice that isn't here!" They ponder combinations of juices yet undreamt. They ponder the fruits of far away places, and what their juices would be like. They ponder fruits unimagined by man, lying in wait on distant worlds and in the minds of similarly curious botanists. They might grab a few bottles and maybe head back to the produce section, wild-eyed and curious.

So here's to the artists, the explorers, the creators, and the dreamers. Here's to everyone who makes the world a more interesting place to live (and drink juice) in. :)

Nope, fuck it. I don't like this. Back to the Pixi.

It's not that the E6 is a bad phone. It's really not. It's plenty capable, it just doesn't fit the way I do things. Over the past few days, I've realized I have two distinct use cases for a phone:

1. When in my home area, I rely heavily on messaging and searching websites like Wikipedia and IMDB.
2. When traveling, I rely heavily on mapping, phone calls, and some messaging/web searching.

The Pixi is really good at case 1, and the E6 is really good at case 2. But I don't spend the same amount of time in each case. I'm in case 1 waaaaay more often than case 2. So if we're optimizing for the common case (and as a computer scientist, I'm duty bound to), it just doesn't make sense to keep the E6. WebOS is just waaaay more streamlined for those everyday communication and search tasks. Even with the performance penalty, it's probably still faster at getting things done.

The E6 is also not as fast or as battery efficient as I'd hoped. Symbian is a much lighter system than webOS, and yet the E6 sat and chugged on some simple tasks. There was a noticeable redraw delay for some things like the mail widget or the conversation display, and Qt apps took their sweet time loading. The Pixi and the E6 were nearly matched in performance (806MHz vs 680MHz ARM11 and 256MB of RAM), but the E6 still seemed like it was struggling. I even ran out of RAM once. Either Palm really did some magic getting Linux down to Pixi size, or Nokia really doesn't know what they're doing with Symbian. It's hard to say which is less likely.

And the way Symbian multitasks is just awkward compared to the fluidity with which webOS manages applications. Symbian^3 is a good example of how UX decisions are made based on the inertia of past successes. Palm moved past their 90's success and made webOS. Nokia is only just now doing the same by licensing Windows Phone.

I'm furthermore coming to realize that the sins of Android — inconsistent UI, platform fragmentation, and unintuitive multitasking — were invented by Symbian S60. And while both platforms are moving forward, they are still living up to the expectations set by smartphones a decade ago. That's not a world I want to live in.

So I'm sticking with Palm for now, even though they are now twice dead. I'm holding out hope that someone will make a worthy successor someday. Right now, there isn't one.

My shiny new E6 arrived yesterday, and I've been having a lot of fun getting used to it. Wait, did I say fun? That's not the right word. What's the word I'm thinking of... hmm. Oh, yes. That's it. "Trouble". I've been having a lot of trouble getting used to it. You know those dreams where you wake up in an unfamiliar place and you're trying to leave, but none of the doors lead to the outside and you can't find anything to break the windows? It's kind of like that. (The psychoanalyst line forms to the right...) Which is not to say that it's all bad, but whew, is it different.

First off, the obvious: The hardware is brilliant and the call quality is excellent. The glass and stainless steel case feels solid and weighty. It's likely that if I hurled it at someone, it would actually hurt them. That's important to me. The 8MP camera is good for a phone camera — it does the cool stuff like face tracking and 720p video. A plethora of buttons means that functions are always at your fingertips. In addition to the qwerty keyboard, you have call, end, home, mail, calendar, contacts, volume, record, directional, select, and power buttons. One really cool innovation is the sliding lock key. To unlock the phone, just slide it down. Slide again to lock. And here's a really neat trick: hold the slider down to light up the flash LEDs as a flashlight. Stuff like this shows that Nokia put a lot of thought into how people use their phone.

There are a few more cool party tricks, as well. The phone comes with an app called Vlingo that does speech recognition to do basic tasks like sending messages and searching the web. Just hold down the record button, talk, and it does its thing. The phone will also do AV-out throught the headphone jack and USB-OTG so you can plug USB devices into the phone.

Symbian Anna adds some modern features on top of the classic Symbian experience. You get several homescreens with widgets, which feels a lot like Android. There's an app switcher that shows thumbnails that feels a bit like webOS. The interface is better laid out for touch, and the apps integrate with social networking services like Facebook and Twitter. It's still Symbian, though, which means the smartphone experience is pretty damn oldschool.

This becomes painfully clear at times because the E6 has a brilliant 640x480 LCD screen (that's half of an iPhone 4 screen). A lot of software (even some of the stuff that's built-in) still assumes more modest resolutions, so reading things often becomes a squint-fest. And using S60 or J2ME apps can be an exercise in frustration because they were designed for older phones with a 12-key keypad. It's a little absurd when I have to hit an options soft-key to pop up a list of actions and then select Send when I have a perfectly good Enter key.

And then there's Symbian itself. I really expected it to be a little snappier coming from webOS, but it is at times pretty slow. Sometimes it'll just stop responding for a bit (typically after installing a new application). The messaging app has a threaded view, but it's a bit awkward to use — Enter inserts a newline, and the send button is way up at the top of the screen. Starting a conversation is three clicks at best. The applications menu isn't searchable, unless you use the Search app or widget, which works but isn't configurable. There are a hundred tiny little annoyances, but the worst part is that I can't really tinker with the insides and fix them.

Some of the software is really good, though. Opera Mobile is probably the best mobile browser out there. The video player is the only one I've seen that supports MKVs with subtitles. And Ovi Maps is probably the best mapping application ever made. But those are a few gems in an otherwise barren landscape. If the webOS App Catalog seems small, the Ovi Store is kind of a ghost town. Angry Birds, Snake, a handful of apps, and several hundred themes. Of course, there's a large library of old S60 apps, but I've already explained the problem with that idea. :-/

And then there's mail. I set up my IMAP account the first time unsecured because I hadn't yet installed the Dreamhost NDN CA certificate. I set the fetch frequency to "soonest", which ironically failed to fetch anything at all. After converting the NDN CA cert from PEM format to DER, I got it installed and set up my email account again with encryption. Mysteriously, "soonest" was gone and my best option was "every 5 minutes". I guess Nokia doesn't believe in IMAP IDLE. At least I'm getting mail now. I've also tried to get Windows Live synced via Exchange ActiveSync, but all I managed to do was nuke my address book (restored from VCF with no issues, thankfully).

Battery life is also not quite as good as I had expected. After a typical day's use I'm down to 42%. I'm beginning to realize now how well optimized the Pixi is; similar use would see the Pixi at about 20-30% by now. Considering that the E6 has 15% more battery capacity, it's not doing a whole lot better. I guess smartphones are still smartphones. "If you use it, you lose it."

So... not looking so good right now. Amazon gives me 30 days to return it, and right now, I'm feeling like that's a likely outcome. We'll see how I feel about it after a week or so.

Lately I've been through a lot of phones. Well, only three, really, but that's more than anyone should go through in a month. Let's rewind.

I was doing some remote terminal work on my Palm Pixi, and a long string of output bogged it down. I sat it aside, and had dinner. I came back to it later completely locked up, and after a reboot, I got a deluge of messages from a failed machine at work. "No," I thought, "This cannot stand. I need a dependable phone for work."

So I thought deeply about that for a while, then disregarded those thoughts and bought an HP Veer.

The Veer was a spiritual successor to the Pixi, but it didn't quite fill the same square. Where the Pixi was a fully featured but slow candybar, the Veer was a tiny hobbled slider. Most of the reviews for the Veer kept saying "It's too small!" but that wasn't really the problem. A small smartphone is a great idea (as evidenced by the Pixi), but the Veer was a victim of excessive compromise to achieve that ideal.

For some reason, Palm decided that a slider was superior to the candybar. The slider, unfortunately, adds weight and bulk inside the case. Folded up, the Veer is shorter than the Pixi, but it's thicker and heavier. Unfolded, it's practically the same size. WebOS devices are power hungry, so they wedged as much battery as they could in the rest of the case — and this meant it was non-removable. Because of the lack of space inside the case, they ditched the headphone jack and USB port, instead connecting it through a magnetic jack reminiscent of the Nokia pop-port. And that port was really the misfeature that killed it. In order to listen to music, you had to keep around a dongle. Ditto for USB and wired charging. And that means you have two more things to lose. What do you think the odds are of finding a Veer USB cable if you forget yours at home? Slim-to-fucking-nil. So that just wasn't going to work for me.

(As an aside, I gave the Veer to my brother, and he loves it.)

At this point, Alex scrounged up the old Pre 2 that we had worked with on a mobile game for EOH. And that worked pretty well for a while even though the keyboard was frustratingly cramped. And then I dropped it on cobblestones and fried the LCD display. So I bought a replacement on eBay. And that one worked pretty well for a couple of days until I realized it was failing to notify me of new messages. :-/

So we're back at the beginning now. I've switched back to the Pixi, which is actually quite a relief after all of that. I really do like the Pixi. It's a brilliant little phone whose only flaw is that it's slower than Congress passing a bill to raise taxes on the rich. I'd still like something a little more reliable, too.

So I'm looking at Nokia again, because if anyone can make a phone that never fails, it's Nokia. Not that they always do, mind you, but they have. My first phone was a Nokia 6010. It never needed to be rebooted, lasted a week on a charge, and had excellent sound and signal quality. I've ordered an E6-00 to try out, and I'm hopeful that it'll be not terrible enough to work for me. Flawed though it is, webOS has unparalleled (and often imitated) UX design. It's going to be hard to give that up. On the other hand, not having to charge the phone every day is nice, too. And Symbian^3 is going to get updates until 2016. The latest release, Symbian Belle, is coming soon for the E6, and adds a proper notification system. So maybe it won't be that bad.

We'll see in a couple of days when it arrives. :)

"Do you remember the garfleburgers of Spalagnatz IV? No, I guess you probably don't. Even nowadays putting a brain in a tin can is a tricky procedure, and it was downright dangerous when you were transcribed. I'm sure a lot of good memories got lost then, but it's not like we had much of a choice. But don't worry, I'm here to help recover some of those memories.

"Anyway, the garfleburgers... You begged mom to let you go to Spalagnatz IV for spring break, and she would only let you go if I came along. I wasn't too happy about having to play chaperone, but I was glad to get out of the house. So that July you and I hopped a spaceliner to Spalagnatz IV where we found the garfleburgers... Well, I should back up a bit.

"Spalagnatz IV was a natural paradise planet in the Hyperion cluster. It orbits a yellow star much like the sun, but it burned a little brighter, so the native plants were blue-green. Humans immediately saw its large tropical zone as an opportunity and turned it into the biggest beach party in the universe.

"After checking in at the hotel, you met this guy, his name was Venutias. Half Beloran, I think. He was also on spring break, and had been to Spalagnatz IV a couple of times before, so he offered to show you around. I, of course, didn't trust him one bit, so I made a point of it by tagging along.

"We went to the beach which was completely crowded despite there being several thousand miles of it. Their sand is pink... something to do with extra iron in the soil or something. We swam and had a good time. Turns out Venutias was an alright guy. Some stellahead jock tripped over our towel and then started giving you crap for it. Venutias told him in no uncertain terms to get lost, and the jock left without a fight.

"Anyway, we had dinner at this little burger shack he knew about which had the 'best garfleburgers on the planet.' A garfle was apparently a native animal. Seemed kind of touristy. Their idea of a hamburger was pretty strange, too. Burger, chili sauce, onion, green pepper, marshmallow creme, and cream cheese in a small pie shell. Frickin' weird. It was alright, though. You could barely taste the garfle over all the toppings, but I guess that was the point. I looked it up the other day. A garfle is a small scavenger animal, like a squirrel. Apparently they run rampant all over Spalagnatz IV, and selling garfleburgers to tourists is just one of the ways they keep the population under control.

"By the time we left, you definitely had a crush on Venutias. But like most interstellar romances, it was just not meant to happen. We went back to Earth and he went home to Balora, and we never saw him again. I suppose it was for the best. After you died and they translated your mind to digital, there wasn't much left for you in the physical world. Maybe some day I'll get to see what it's like in there.

"Anyway, I have to get back to work. I'll see you later, sis. I love you."

After HP gave up on webOS devices, they incited a bit of a panic. The announcement was so abrupt that webOS users everywhere have been recovering from whiplash and wondering where to go next. HP says they're not abandoning the platform, but at this point, I don't think anyone's willing to believe them. Even the faithful are helpfully providing exit options for their flock. By all accounts, webOS is a sinking ship.

But it is the strangest sinking ship you've ever seen.

HP slashed the prices on the Touchpad to $100/$150 to clear out inventory, resulting in it completely selling out last Sunday. Best Buy's 250K units they couldn't sell? Gone. My good friend Alex said he was one of only a couple of people returning his, while there was a line out the door for people showing up to buy. Overnight, the webOS community grew by likely 300,000 users, with more on the way. And the old guard is welcoming them with open arms.

This "accidental userbase" has caused a sharp spike in webOS interest. PreCentral was having trouble staying up under the load, and apparently app sales are "Way up." HP wanted to be #2 after the iPad, and it looks like they might succeed at this rate. And all they had to do was kill the brand and lose $200 on every unit sold. This enthusiasm will wane, of course, since the Touchpad has no future. But where HP has given up, homebrewers and hackers are likely to keep the platform going for some time.

The software of webOS has always been a little... quirky, and the hardware hasn't always been up to snuff. But the community behind webOS has always been the most solid part of the platform. Emboldened by the fire sale gains, some are banding together to help save webOS (for whatever that's worth). I mentioned PreCentral's welcome above, and webOSroundup has a pretty good introduction to where to look for help from the community. WebOS fans have been through hell and just got shot in the back for their trouble, so they're more than willing to help someone out if they're struggling. As long as those die-hards are still there, then webOS isn't truly dead.

So here's to webOS's meteoric rise to the bottom!

I'm sure by now you've heard the death knell — HP is quitting the webOS device business. Where that leaves the software business is anyone's guess right now. In fact, nearly everyone has been guessing about what's going to happen. Apparently not AT&T or even the webOS GBU (nee Palm) knew that this decision was being made. We do know one thing from this, though: this whole thing is being handled extremely poorly.

So I'm sitting here, typing this on a now defunct device, reflecting on the whole thing. Yesterday was mostly going through the six stages of grief:

1. Denial - Nigga what?
2. Anger - Why the fuck would they do this a month and a half after the launch!?
3. Bargaining - It's OK, the homebrew community will pick up the slack.
4. Depression - Now I'll never get to sell the apps I've been working on...
5. Acceptance - You know what? My Touchpad still works just as well as it did yesterday. Everything will be fine.
6. Wry humor - Hmm, I've lost nearly $500 in virtual money playing Vegas Klondike solitaire. That's sort of like if I'd bought a Touchpad when it was new. Oh wait. I did.

So it may be the end of the webOS world, but you know what? I feel fine. I took a step back and looked at my technological life and realized that nearly everything I use is obsolete or discontinued. I absolutely thrive in the deadpools of consumer progress. I am like a Plecostomus, sucking up the detritus of yesterday's products and turning it into something I can use and grow with. To wit:

• My work laptop is a ten year old IBM ThinkPad T23. Next to it sits a homebrew AM2 Athlon PC, hooked up to a VGA-only 1280x1024 LCD screen that I keep around because I like its 5:4 aspect ratio. My keyboard is a Model M that's older than both of my brothers (which, for those of you not counting, is 23 years).
• My newest game console is a PS2, hooked up to a CRT TV through a mechanical switchbox that shares the TV with a Sony SMP-N100 media player.
• My media server is a dual Socket 940 Opteron server, which displays its console via a 20 year old DEC VT420 (for which I fabricated my own MMJ-DB9 adapter). The drives are hooked up via a PCI SATA adapter because the motherboard has neither PCIe nor SATA onboard.
• My car is a 1988 Honda CRX with 206,000 miles on it that starts every time and runs like clockwork.

So really, I just got what I always wanted: A tablet that works with me, is powerful and hackable, and is now obsolete. All is right with the world. :)

One of the near-future browser enhancements I'm pretty excited about is Web Workers. Web Workers are a kind of heavyweight concurrency system, where you create separate worker threads and then pass messages between them. It's not the cleanest or most transparent concurrency model, but it works pretty well in the JavaScript world, where multithreading doesn't exist.

A web worker is basically a separate JS context with a few helper functions and a message passing interface to your main browser thread. A Worker can proceed without interrupting the UI thread, enabling all kinds of things you'd normally do in a timer loop. Typically this speeds things up significantly because you're not stuck waiting for UI to render or the timer to re-fire. I recently modified Cryptobox to use web workers, and the speedup is pretty enormous.

But...

The Web Workers standard is currently a draft, and browser support is spotty. In particular, IE9 doesn't support it (not that I can blame them). In Opera, workers run in the same thread as the browser, meaning you won't get any speedup on multi-core systems. Chrome has the best support right now, followed shortly by Safari with Firefox somewhat further behind. Most mobile browsers don't support it, with the Blackberry Playbook being the notable exception (their browser is probably the most complete mobile browser out there).

Workers come in the standalone variety or a shared version. The shared version allows you to share a worker across multiple windows/tabs, which could allow you to make a single database backend worker with caching, and share that cache across any number of windows that need it. It's a slick idea, but it's less supported than the regular Worker. Firefox doesn't have it, for example.

Debugging support is practically nonexistent. Chrome has a Debug checkbox in its inspector, but it doesn't seem to do anything. Mostly, if any error happens in a Worker that stops its execution, you have to guess at what happened, make changes, and hope it worked. It's rather stone-age. Without proper debugging support, Web Workers are just a cool browser hack that will be used mostly by people who understand the spec (which is probably like three or four people right now).

I look forward to it being finished, but for now, don't bother.

Two weeks ago I went out and bought a Touchpad. I had been struggling with justification for the purchase, but when it came right down to it, it was really just a "for fun" purchase. The upcoming post-PC world is exciting, and I wanted to play around. So I got one.

The device itself is great. WebOS 3.0 is fast and responsive. Improvements to Just Type allow me to add any search engine I come across. It searches applications, contacts, emails, browser history, calendar appointments, plus applications can add their own plugins to search their content, too. Also, I can start an email, message, facebook post, and more, directly from the card view. It's a system designed to feed information addiction, and it does it extremely well.

Of course it also has the best multitasking and notifications of any mobile system, and it has a small but growing library of games ported from iOS and Android. It is a competent little system. Oh, and it does Flash.

Of course, it does have its share of bugs and disappointments. After you install or remove an app, searching for apps with Just Type breaks. You have to restart before it'll work again. The browser crashes on some sites. The promised Kindle app is missing, as well HP Play and document editing. All of this tells me that the launch was rushed. All of it will be fixed in time.

Some of the things on the horizon are really interesting to me. My prediction about the Touchpad running X has already come true — I have a little debian chroot system set up so I have my Linux workstation inside my ultraportable tablet. I even got a bluetooth keyboard with the expectation of having something that could truly replace my laptop. But that's where PC and post-PC crashed headlong into each other at 75 MPH.

The problem is that the keyboard mappings for webOS are designed strictly for webOS. In any application, I have no control over the Control, Escape, Tab, or any of the function keys. As you can imagine, that makes a Linux workstation pretty unusable. I'm sure the webOS Internals folks are working on that, but it's pretty frustrating to be so close yet so far.

And the keyboard integration in webOS itself is surprisingly poor. The Esc key is now a key that pops up the notifications area. Handy, but once you have that open, the keyboard does nothing to actually delete or activate the notifications. The windows key works like the center button, throwing you back into card view. But once you're there, you can't navigate the cards or activate an application. And Just Type is really handy when you can type quickly, but you can't explore any of the options it gives you without reaching up for the touchscreen. You'd further expect to be able to scroll using the arrow keys in the browser. Nope. I don't even get Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V for copy/paste.

Not that the keyboard is useless, mind you. I'm typing this up on the Touchpad, but that's pretty much all the keyboard is expected to do on this system — type up documents.

So far, it seems like post-PC has taken away more than it's given. But these are all solvable problems, and there are enough nerds out there that they'll get solved one way or another. Probably by Microsoft. Mobile computing is really still in the pre-pubescent "gee whiz" stage where a lot of new ideas are coming out, but very few of them are actually improving our digital lives. Mostly, it's just a lot of exercises in design that would never get accepted in mainstream computing (like hiding apps that are running in the background — didn't we get rid of that in the 80's?). It's a new and fun and exciting time where we get to reinvent the wheel in the name of progress.

But if you're looking to get stuff done, you should probably come back in a few years.

Most of you know I'm not a fan of social network software. I'm especially disturbed by Google+. Maybe I haven't done a good job of explaining why, though, so I'll explain the problem.

Do you remember back in the 90's when Microsoft got raked over the coals by the Justice Department for bundling Internet Explorer with Windows, giving them an unfair competitive advantage over Netscape? At the time, everyone thought they were the most evil company in the world for that because they feared that Microsoft would use their monopoly to pervert the web to their own ends. Nobody noticed a decade later when Google achieved largely the same goals by dominating the search engine market. I don't mean to imply that Google employed anticompetitive tactics — Google was a superior search engine that really did succeed on its own merit. But Google has turned that success into a privacy strip-mining operation that would make Microsoft blush with shame.

The curious thing about Google is that they're well-known for search, but they make the bulk of their money in a much more traditional avenue: advertising. Web ads have forever been a crapshoot. Smart ad agencies target their ads at websites that cater to similar demographics as the things they're advertising. Even smarter ad agencies get their demographic information by tracking users as they move from site to site. Google is the smartest ad agency of all. They can track your behavior not only through the little Google Ads boxes, but they can also learn more about your preferences through their search engine, Gmail, Google Talk, Picasa, Youtube, Google Docs, Google Reader, or anything else in Google's wide constellation of services. Google knows you pretty well.

The disturbing part about all of this data collection is the complete lack of oversight. Google has pledged to not be evil with this data, but that's not really a guarantee. Even a privacy policy isn't a legally binding document. You cannot use the FOIA on Google. You cannot vote out Google's executives when they misuse your information. You have no recourse except what you can sue for. If Google is going to be responsible for personal and sensitive information, I need some solid assurance that they won't abuse it. And let's be honest, Google's track record on not abusing their position hasn't been great.

So that's pretty much it, then. Google's reach into my personal life has gone far enough.