My little point-and-shoot camera died and my N73 has been getting long in the tooth, so I thought I’d replace it with a Nokia N82, a small phone with a 5 Mpixel camera, GPS, geotagging, 802.11, 3.5G, and running Symbian 3.1.
Well, it didn’t last long… the N82 was run over by a car a few weeks later. It was a decent phone, but I don’t think I will be replacing it for the time being. But here are my impressions:
- Symbian has been slightly improved relative to previous versions, in terms of performance and stability. However, Symbian still has plenty of bugs and UI problems. Searching and dialing contacts is as cumbersome as ever. Applications open and close slowly and without rhyme or reason.
- The text input methods have been reconfigured again, but work just as poorly as before.
- The accelerometer is useless for rotating the screen; the screen will flipflop helplessly between landscape and portrait, and most applications don’t even support it.
- The phone make a poor MP3 player; although the sound quality is great, the player application and its user interface are awful. Among other things, the player app still takes a long time to rescan the phone to discover MP3 files, every time anything is copied over.
- In an attempt to appear a little more fashionable and modern, Nokia added a pseudo-3D carousel of applications and stuck a random button on the face of the phone to invoke it. The interface is nearly useless.
- Battery life was generally good, less so with GPS enabled. Wifi worked well, as did 3.5G.
- The browser was actually a step backwards from earlier Symbian phones, failing to render a number of sites that the E90 and even N73 have no problems with.
- The N82 probably has the best image quality of any camera phone around, but that makes it at most as good as an entry level digital camera. The N82 doesn’t have a tripod mount or zoom either.
- Functionally, the N82 with Shozu, 3.5G, and GPS is a great imaging platform: you can take pictures and videos and they get geotagged and uploaded automatically and quickly.
Altogether, the Nokia N82 shows what potential the convergence of 3.5G, imaging, and GPS has. And Symbian shows what a multitasking, extensible phone OS could do in principle… and then promptly drops the ball with numerous bugs and even more numerous UI blunders.
So, I won’t be replacing the Nokia N82. I won’t hold my breath for Nokia to improve the OS or UI much, but at least it looks like they and others are coming out with hardware that’s either a lot better (a Samsung phone with a 5Mpixel 3x zoom) or are a lot cheaper.
Categories: General
Most scripts trying to set up chroot jails copy a lot of files into the jail itself. This used to be necessary, but with FUSE, we can actually do better. Here is a simple shell scripts that uses FUSE (in the form of funionfs) in order to set up a chroot jail:
#!/bin/sh -x
mkdir jail || exit 1
for dir in usr etc bin lib lib64; do
test -d /$dir || continue
mkdir jail/$dir
mkdir jail/.$dir
funionfs -o dirs=/$dir=RO:jail/.$dir -o allow_other NONE jail/$dir
done
mkdir jail/etc
cp /etc/passwd jail/etc
mkdir jail/tmp
chmod 777 jail/tmp
mkdir jail/home
chmod 777 jail/home
echo === entering jail ===
chroot jail su www-data
echo === leaving jail ===
for dir in jail/*; do
fusermount -u $dir
done
rm -rf jail
Of course, this is just a demonstrator. To flesh out this idea, it would probably be best to write a new FUSE file system that could take care of importing all the necessary directories in one step, as well as providing features like disk quotas for the jailed application.
Keep in mind that a chroot jail does not prevent network connections, so you probably don’t want to use this for sandboxing untrusted applications.
Categories: General
Mini Review
The HP2133 Mini Note is a nice ultraportable laptop with a great keyboard and a great screen.
I bought it with SuSE pre-installed. The SuSE installation on it works well for what it is; you can do web browsing, word processing, etc on it just fine. Issues with the SuSE distribution are:
- When trying to install additional software, it asks for a SuSE DVD; there’s no documentation on where to get one or how to select an on-line repository. Most people are therefore probably going to be stuck with the pre-installed software.
- SuSE comes with a bunch of services preinstalled that make the machine unnecessarily slow and lower the battery life (Beagle, Tomboy, etc.).
- The X11 configuration that ships with it doesn’t support 1024×768@60Hz or 800×600@60Hz, the two most standard frequencies for presentations.
Basically, it looks like HP slapped the standard SuSE install on it and left it at that, with little afterthought or adaptation. I’m sure for their Windows build, they are going to spend a lot of time trying to make it work. SuSE, however, should be doing a better job, for example, enabling on-line repositories by default.
Installing Ubuntu 8.04 LTS
So, I installed Ubuntu 8.04 LTS on it. For that, I made a separate 10G partition (I still keep SuSE around). The end result is a machine that not only runs the software I want, but also actually is quite a bit more responsive than the same machine running SuSE.
Ubuntu generally works fine on the machine, including audio, networking, and power management. There are two issues:
- The wireless doesn’t work out of the box; you need to use ndiswrapper. Unfortunately, the Ubuntu 8.04 ndiswrapper doesn’t work either, you need to install the latest one. The procedure is quick and simple, and it’s described here: http://steelisreal.wordpress.com/2008/04/26/how-i-fixed-my-hp2133-mini-note-wireless/
- The VIA graphics card fails with the default drivers; you need to install using “Safe” mode. After rebooting, things still won’t look right, but reconfiguring the X server will fix that if you use “vesa”.
- To get the real VIA drivers, you can download the drivers here: http://linux.via.com.tw/support/downloadFiles.action The installation is quick and painless, but you still need an xorg.conf file; the one from the SuSE partition will work, or use the attached one.
Categories: General
Firefox 3 now has an “off-line mode”. This seems to be part of a long-running effort to allow users to run web applications off-line, similar to Google Gears, and to be integrated with Google Gears somehow in the future.
Right now, however, this mode is a usability nightmare. Basically, Firefox 3 can be in one of two states: off-line or on-line. There is no clear visual difference between the two, and both seem to work the same. But if you’re in off-line mode, many web sites can’t be accessed at all (even if the computer is on-line), and the ones that can be accessed show outdated web pages. Basically, the effect of off-line mode is to break the browser in subtle ways. Not surprisingly, this has led to numerous confused support requests on the web. It’s difficult to comprehend how such a serious usability problem could have made it through any kind of Firefox testing.
The lessons we can draw from this are:
- pages loaded in off-line mode must be clearly identified as such, for example by putting a thick red frame around them or putting a big “off-line” logo on top of them or into the page background
- off-line mode should be active only when the computer is actually off-line
- off-line mode should only be active for sites where the user explicitly selects off-line mode
- Firefox needs to take usability more seriously and needs to do more user testing
I
Categories: General
I recently bought a new Nokia E90 cell phone.
The good:
- great screen (800×350 internal, 320×240 external)
- full WebKit-based web browser; combined with the wide screen, this makes for the best mobile web browsing experience in a pocketable phone
- 3 Mpixel camera, fairly high quality output
- fast processor
- good desktop and OTA synchronization with Windows, Macintosh, and SyncML service providers
- adequate IMAP-capable mail reader with new mail notification
- GPS
- 3G, 3.5G/HSDPA
- Putty (ssh client) works and is quite usable
- there are some useful third party applications that work well (MobiPocket, Shozu, podcasting, etc.)
- standard mini-USB connector for connecting the device to a desktop
The bad:
- often useless error messages, generally of the form “Couldn’t do X” or “X failed”; messages like that might mean that the phone doesn’t have a data connection, that the user provided a wrong address, that there is a bug, that some feature is not supported, or one of many other things; this makes it nearly impossible to figure out why things are failing (and fail they do, frequently)
- few applications take advantage of the high resolution screen; most of them waste both the extra width and the high resolution
- badly designed menu system, both for starting applications and for selecting options inside applications
- bad UI in contact manager: search requires multitap spelling (rather than using the multitap choices to contrain the search), confusing user interface for entering/changing/adding fields (cf Palm for how to do this right)
- no obvious way of synchronizing the notes application to the desktop
- built-in IM application is useless (Shapeservices IM+ works well, albeit at an extra expense)
- mail reader uses screen real estate very poorly; several other significant UI annoyances with the mail reader
- poorly designed/integrated T9 input (long-standing problem with Symbian)
- web browser crashes frequently
- web browser recognized inconsistently by web sites (sometimes as WAP browser, sometimes as full browser)
- RSS reader fails mysteriously on some valid feeds, meaning that you cannot rely on the RSS reader to catch up on all your important feeds
- the GPS mapping application (and hence built-in GPS) is useless because the application cannot search for addresses (it has a menu entry, but searches always fail)
- voice navigation for GPS application costs EU 70 extra
- camera lens is unprotected and easily gets dirty; no real flash
- camera application crashes entire phone with some regularity
- 2.5mm combo headset connector on the E90 requires special Nokia combo headset and doesn’t fit standard 3.5mm audio headsets
- using the device as a tethered 3G modem isn’t working with the same scripts as for other Symbian phones (it may still be possible to get it to work somehow)
- applications don’t quit automatically, so either you have to kill processes manually or the device runs out of memory (and when the phone does run out of memory, you don’t get an error message, things just start failing mysteriously)
- camera takes excessive amounts of time to focus, doesn’t focus reliably, making it useless for snapshots and many other purposes; it’s essentially only an “emergency camera”
- device locks up occasionally
- management of network access is inconsistent and cumbersome; the simple notion of “try to use WiFi when available, otherwise use my provider” seems to be impossible for the phone to grasp; any of its built-in strategies will result in it trying to use the wrong network access method (and failing), or potentially using unnecessarily costly methods; the only solution is to tell it to ask every time for every application, but even then, things don’t work right
- keys that start up applications (mail, etc.) cannot be remapped to applications other than Nokia’s
- Symbian pops up useless or redundant confirmatory notices (”I’m using the XYZ mailbox”) lasting several seconds each all over the place, slowing down simple operations like responding to an E-mail unnecessarily
- while not as bad as previous Symbian phones, the user interface is slow
- J2ME/MIDP applications can’t be consistently granted permission to do things
- Google Maps does not work reliably on the device
- the MP3 player is cumbersome to use
- although the microSD card should, in principle, be mountable when connecting the device via USB, some Nokia applications have it “open” making it impossible to do so
- cannot recharge over USB (requires separate USB-to-power connector wire for EU 20)
This will likely be the last Symbian phone I’ll ever buy. With Google’s Android and Apple’s iPhone coming out, there are better choices becoming available, from companies that pay a lot more attention to user interface issues than Symbian apparently does.Overall, if you’re willing to pay a premium for the best screen on a mobile web browser and a decent E-mail reader, the E90 is the device for you. Just be aware that most of the other marketing promises about the E90 are empty: the GPS, the camera, the mapping software, calendaring, contact management, etc. are somewhere between cumbersome and useless.
Categories: Gadgets
Tagged: E90, Nokia, Symbian
Web serving on my Mac broke. It took a while to track down, but it turned out that I had turned of Read-Only sharing with “Everyone” in the SMB file sharing dialog. Instead of reconfiguring the SMB server, that simply changed the ACL on my home directory.
This is bad for several reasons:
- changing file sharing permissions should not change local disk permissions
- ACL’s are non-standard and interact in non-obvious ways with web servers
- there is no obvious of granting the web server access to the home directory since its user (”_www”) doesn’t show up in the list of users ot grant permission to
- Apple doesn’t provide the POSIX standard utilities for manipulating access control lists
OS X seems to be drifting away from UNIX and POSIX standards further and further.
Categories: Mac
Tagged: Apple, Mac, OSX, UNIX
Although I think iTunes is pretty awful, I still keep my music library on a MacMini because it’s small and quiet. Unfortunately, iTunes manages to duplicate songs massively. I didn’t like the existing solutions for trying to deal with this because they might result in the loss of tracks. My solution has been to write a simple Python script that just prepends “[D]” to the album name of duplicate tracks. This neatly separates out the duplicates but doesn’t result in the loss of any data. Here’s the script (you need Python appscript, which takes just a minute to install using “python setup.py install”).
Categories: Uncategorized
There is no configuration tool for GPRS/UMTS phones to use with Ubuntu, but it turned out not to be all that hard to connect to O2. I’m using a USB cable (although a Bluetooth serial connection would also be possible, but I actually prefer USB).
The following should go into /etc/ppp/peers/O2
hide-password
noauth
connect “/usr/sbin/chat -v -f /etc/chatscripts/O2″
debug
/dev/ttyACM0
115200
defaultroute
noipdefault
user “”
remotename O2
ipparam O2
usepeerdns
And the following needs to go into /etc/chatscripts/O2
# ispauth PAP
# abortstring
ABORT BUSY ABORT ‘NO CARRIER’ ABORT VOICE ABORT ‘NO DIALTONE’ ABORT ‘NO DIAL TONE’ ABORT ‘NO ANSWER’ ABORT DELAYED
# modeminit
‘’ ATZ
# ispnumber
#OK-AT-OK “ATDT*99#”
OK-AT-OK ‘AT+CGDCONT=1,”IP”,”surfo2″‘
OK-AT-OK “ATDT*99#”
# ispconnect
CONNECT \d\c
# prelogin
# ispname
# isppassword
# postlogin
Afterwards, you can start connections with “pon O2″, and stop them with “poff O2″.
Categories: Linux
Tagged: GPRS, Ubuntu, UMTS
After my MacBook broke, I was faced with finding something to replace it with. I was kind of getting tired of the slowness, cost, and hassles of OS X anyway, and spending two hours trying to get H.323 video conferencing to work on the Mac today and then having Ekiga on Linux “just work” made the decision easy.
For $800, I could get an HP DV2415US, a 14″ 1G/160G Core2 Duo laptop. Ubuntu Feisty Fawn installation was straightforward and required almost nothing special. Wireless, suspend, the built-in video and microphone, graphics, and graphics acceleration all worked out of the box (it’s all Intel peripherals).
Only audio output required a small change, adding the following line to “/etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base” (I found this on Google):
options snd-hda-intel position_fix=1 model=3stack
Vista on this laptop was sluggish and hard to use. Ubuntu is a joy. Even Beryl works, and works very well.
Categories: Gadgets · Linux · Mac
Tagged: Apple, HP, MacBook, OSX
Unfortunately, Oblivion never lost the feel of a sequel and it was nowhere near as much fun as Morrowind.
Yes, Morrowind had a number of quirky problems, but the cure seems worse than the disease: elimination of levitation, introduction of fast travel, and other features make the game more convenient and eliminated some problems, but some of them seem contrived and make the game less interesting.
Bethesda made strong claims for the AI and the handling of time in the game. Supposedly, characters in the game were able to act autonomously, according to day-night schedules and bodily needs, and pay more attention to the player’s behavior. But little of that was visible: one could still stand around in someone’s bedroom for 48h without anybody even complaining.
Graphics seemed improved, but inconsistently and not really in a way that made game play more enjoyable. Grass was waving and faraway vistas were more visible, but that was largely it.
Altogether, Oblivion was still cheap entertainment, but, in the end, a disappointment.
Categories: Games
Tagged: Morrowind, Oblivion
