Technical

So I became acquainted with the “Blue Ring of Death” on my old (and Maire’s current) K850i; the phone doesn’t power on, with the screen staying black, the blue ring on the camera coming hard on, and the keyboard lighting up.

Not a thrilling sight.

A little Googling took my to an initially rather unpromising discussion which explained that:

• The K850 is notoriously unreliable and BRODs under all manner of circumstances and firmware revisions.
• The Sony-Ericsson Updater tool can’t fix the problem.
• Sony themselves can’t, either, and will typically take your phone and fail to fix it.
• There are a number of payware unlocking/reflashing tools that can.

The last was rather irritating. Not because I begrudge the people who developed Davinci or the other such tools, but because this is a perfect example of an anti-feature: like most mobile phones, the K850 is so locked down that when it blackscreens and becomes unusable, not only can I not fix it, neither can Sony, and I need to spend extra money to buy a third-party tool to rescue it.

Fortunately a little more reading about the place provided my salvation: the A2 Uploader, which works with a variety of Sony-Ericsson phones, including the K850i; and TopSony for the images needed to make it work. Download the latest firmware, reflash the filesystem, and then upload the customisation files and lo! The phone works (sans all the on-phone data, but you do make backups, right?).

So, phone restored for free. Hell, A2 Uploader will letme rip the obnoxious Vodaphone branding (useless menu and button items) out of my C903). Win, right?

Well, in one sense, yes. In another, though, not really. This whole thing is a parade of antifeatures:

• SE (and other phone manufacturers) don’t want anyone developing other tools to work with their phones, and go out of their way to make it difficult for third parties to help me, the phone owner, customise the phone I own.
• SE don’t want to allow me to up or downgrade to avoid buggy firmware that makes the phone crap itself. I can only get firmware and filesystem images from third parties of questionable legality.
• I can’t customise my phone to get rid of crapware (Facebooks apps and other rubbish).

Ada with her OLPC

So, I didn’t get to writing anything for Lovelace day proper. This is probably because I was busy writing about Jean Reno for French class (il est pas rasé). Homework first, people. Although I guess if I was less stupified by poor sleep this week I would have thought to write about a famous woman and combined my homework with an educational exercise re: Lovelace day.

So, I don’t have that. I do, however, have this; a picture of Ada playing with her loaner OLPC, which provides her with many hours of entertainment and budding computer literacy.

Pleasantly surprised to note that the Sony-Ericsson PC suite will out-of-the-box sync with any SyncML capable host—Funambol or eGroupware—thereby syncing your phone to the rest of your world. While I’ve got a (tiny) data plan and I’m generally happy to OTA sync, New Zealand belongs to that sub-Third World chunk of the mobile data universe where data is excruciatingly expensive and syncing by cable can be an attractive option.

Anyway, if this is relevant to your interests, it’s pretty straightforward:

Having had a good time getting Funambol working for OTA syncing is great, but it’s one part of a solution; it’s great for backup and multi-device information sharing, but it doesn’t give much in the way of, say, cross-user calender sharing.

Enter groupware solutions. (Look ma, I’m talking like an architect!)

Having poke about a bit, I’m trying eGroupware. It’s an free solution (albeit with a more featureful commercial variant); it supports PostgreSQL (a must-have for me), and it doesn’t require any kind of full stack replacement (other suites of this sort, as I have lamented in the past seem to require you replace your existing mail server, web server, and random other components). This all looks reasonably positive, as does the fact that it’s regularly producing releases and appears to be taking patches from an active community.

I’ve been thinking that iPhone vs Andoid has more than a whiff of Mac vs PC all over again about it, and Apple going after HTC as a proxy for Google just bakes that impression in; I’m not the only one who remembers as far back as Apple’s look and feel lawsuits, although that seems to be rather undercommented upon these days, as is Steve Jobs’ apparent long-forgotten view that people making expansion cards for the old pre-Mac Apple platforms were stealing money that belonged to Apple (which was, presumably, part of the reason why the original Mac was a sealed box).

Apple’s hostility to openness is one of those odd features of the modern computing landscape; they are, to the best of my knowledge, the only company the FSF refused to have software ported to (because of the look-and-feel suit), and their modern-day developer agreements for their sealed platforms are fabulously Draconian. It was one of the weirder aspects of LCA2010 to hear people booing DRM, software patents, overzealous IP law, and Microsoft, while watching them poke at their iPhones and Macbooks. Disconnect much?

There is one thing I must disagree mightily with Harry McCracken on:

So here’s the grim and dystopian scenario, and it’s grim and dystopian for Apple, not for HTC or Google: A few years from now, maybe this new case will end up looking as ill-advised as the 1988 one.[...]Maybe people will see the iPhone as a breakthrough that lost ground to a less inventive but more pervasive competitor. I hope not.

I hope so. I mean, my preference would be for Maemo-MeeGo-whatever the fuck it’s called this week to win out, but I think Nokia’s recent record of shooting its toes off will probably carry over to what is, the bleatings of Google fanboys notwithstanding, the most open phone platform on the market. But as a realist, I’d settle for seeing Android crush the iPhone, if only as a consumer. Consider the iPhone: a sealed unit, no expansion, no replacability, what Apple think I need. It’s Apple 1984 all over again. Andriod, on the other hand—you want an expandable phone? Get an HTC Legend where you have SD card support, rather than paying Apple an extortionate sum for the igger phone option. And a battery you can change. You want to live in the future? How about lobbying Samsung to release their Beam as a product, rather than waiting for Steve Jobs to decide whether you deserve a projecter. That’s the nice thing about the ‘droid; like the PC universe created by the ubiquity of DOS and then Windows, you have multiple manufacturers vying to lure you to their product, and responsive to your niche. You want a better-than-shitty-2 MP camera? There’s a droid manufacturer who’s releasing those. You want a bigger screen? More storage? Longer battery life? Go nuts.

The Android ecosystem is far from perfect; Google are certainly nowhere near as open a company, or as good at playing with the open-source projects they crib from, as their more enthusiastic fans would have you believe. But they are a hell of a lot better than the sealed-hood world Apple would like you to live in. If Apple’s decision to wage patent war against Android backfires and consigned them to the (ultimate) irrelevance of their decisions to prefer litigation and owning a high-priced vertically integrated stack did in the late 80s and 90s, I, for one, will be delighted.

Funambol, formerly Sync4J, is a number of things, but the bit I care about is that it’s a FOSS SyncML server you can download, run on your own server, and appears to be widely supported by all sorts of other FOSS tools (groupware, PIM software, and so on), and offer support for a huge variety of free and non-free SyncML clients. Since I can has data plan the idea of over-the-air syncing to a SyncML host has gained greater appeal, on top of the pre-existing appeal of making it easier to share calendars and the like with Maire.

The out-of-the-box delivery for Funambol is a binary Linux package that contains a JDK, Tomcat6, an RDBMs, and Funambol itself. On the one hand, this makes getting it up and running in a one-clickish fashion kind of easy. On the other hand, if you already have a database server and app server configured (for example) this is a bit of a wasteful duplication of resources; Funambol will let you work with (some) alternatives.

I’m going to miss the magic cloud of Internet that follows me around. (at least, without it costing me per kilobyte..)
_hristine

One of the little perks of my work is getting a better (read: cheaper and more capable) cellphone plan that I’ve had previously. That’s nice and all, and after much deliberation I slapped a small data plan on it. It still costs less than I’ve been spending on my old plan, but I have a shiny new capability.

Sort of.

Kiwis and Aussies will be unsurprised to learn that $10/mo gets me a pitiful 100MB of data; any international reader from the first world will most likely be slack-jawed with amazement. This is a charge rate comparable to Actrix’s rates for international traffic two decades ago; at that point Actrix at least had the excuse that as and that they were one of the first ISPs in the world they were running on what was, at the time, horrifically expensive proprietary Unix hardware and, perhaps more importantly, New Zealand’s international Internet pipe was less than a half megabit for the whole country.

But still. Two decades.

Two things rammed it home for me: LCA2010 where I got to work with a warm, comfortable, CBD-encompassing cloud of 802.11 goodness courtesy of CityLink’s event sponsorship for a week, and Christine’s comment above. In Canada, whose inhabitants consider themselves horribly mobile Internet deprived, she enjoys a 6GB/mo plan. That would cost me $600 per month at the rates I’ve got.

It will be interesting to see what, if any, fruits of this merger will make it into HotSpot’s open code base, or if it will all end up squirrelled away, a la JRockit.

So, the Chromium Fedora repo has vanished. That’s… odd.

These packages have been temporarily removed, due to legal concerns with some of the included code.

I wonder what the “legal concerns” are? RHEL’s lawyers, or Something Naughty in Chromium itself?

When you have more than a few Unix people together you will end up with vehement, and possibly violent, disagreement, over the Right Way To Do Things. This generally starts with Unix flavour, distribution (if relevant to Unix flavour), and then wends its way through the countrysides of editor wars, MUA disagreements, MTA squabbles, and, of course, mailspool layouts.

Once upon a time, I had a mail server used by people who would ssh into the server and use the MUA of choice, in text mode, as God intended. But then Complications arose. More people began to use it, people who did not like console MUAs. Further more, some of the users became trapped behind corporate firewalls who frowned[1] on tunneling ssh through said corporate firewalls.

So some way of providing access for GUI clients, webmail, and console clients, sometime sharing the same mail spool.

So uw-imap was installed, and it was, well, it only sucked a bit, and squirrelmail was installed, and it didn’t suck much. uw-imapd even supported SSL[2].

But time passed, and mailspools grew, and soon the users complained. Webmail was becoming unusable, unless you like spending minutes waiting for 20 mails to be rendered in a browser. uw-imap was starting to suck. A lot. It was time to find something that sucked less.