kugelfish

Maybe it is a sign of maturity for the Android platform that for the first time, I don't find at least one highly anticipated new feature in a new Android release or new phone. When comparing supposedly new flagship phone Nexus S with Android 2.3 with my current Nexus One with Android 2.2, I actually prefer my Nexus One. Gingerbread looks much like a maintenance release, providing a lot of internal cleanup and a very subtle UI face-lift. Since I don't play any games, I didn't notice any of the speed improvements supposedly coming from using native hardware graphics acceleration. The only new major feature - support for NFC tags - is of no use to me, since there are no NFC tags around where I live. Comparing the new Nexus S to the Nexus One, there is not as much of a wow factor either. Performance is about comparable, battery life supposedly a bit worse even, display, physical design and overall build quality mostly a matter of preference. There is clearly not as much of a...

We recently had a coffee-room discussion on the futility of trying to introduce new relevant programming languages. Computer scientists seem to invent new programming languages on a daily basis - it's an important contribution to conceptual research in computer science and having at least one language to one's name seems to be important for bragging rights in certain circles. However for a programming language to become practically relevant is extremely rare. We can make the somewhat flippant educated guess, that since the dawn of commercial computer use in the 1960ies, there have been about 5 major commercially successful languages: FORTRAN, COBOL, C, C++ and Java - roughly about 1-2 per decade. Certainly, there have been many other vendor and/or domain specific languages over the years or others with a significant popularity, just not enough to make it into the all-time A-list. There are multiple surveys which try to measure which are currently the most popular programmin...

Despite what the likes of Mark Zuckerberg may say, there are still some people who strongly care about privacy.  This seems to be more so the further east you go from Silicon Valley. And even in the Valley, an increasing number of people are becoming aware of this, even though they may not understand or appreciated the alternate viewpoints. Whenever I am asked for an opinion on the European "obsession" with privacy or for an explanation on why the Germans seem so incredibly hung-up on privacy, my standard answer goes about as follows: Yes, there are indeed differences in the approach and attitude to privacy in particular between the US and non Anglo-Saxon continental Europe, but in substance the differences may be smaller than the commonality. And yet we humans seem to be particularly good a picking out small (cultural) differences and get disproportionately stressed-out over over them. In robotics when a humanoid model is close, but just doesn't feel quite right,  th...

I am by no means an expert web developer or particularly familiar with JavaScript, which might influence my distaste for it. My experience is mostly from making small changes in moderately complex existing applications. JavaScript was originally intended as a small domain-specific glue-language to ad some client-side behavior to otherwise largely server-side web applications: do some client-side input validation, dynamically modify the page based on user input, etc. But with the growing popularity of AJAX style web-applications, much of the JavaScript client-side code has grown into monstrosities - mostly because of a lack of inherent support for modularity and encapsulation. One of the most important properties a language environment should support in order to scale to large projects is a way to divide an conquer. There should be a way for one programmer to build upon the work of others without having to understand the implementation details of these building blocks which might be...

One of the side-effects of moving internationally is that one is typically required to completely re-evaluate the set of services which we are generally accustomed to - e.g water, power, telecommunications, transport etc. Partly because traditional utilities are very local and partly because the circumstances of life are more or less subtly organized differently in different places. One such difference can be the available pricing models for a particular service - most commonly some form of flat-rate or metered pricing. In areas where both flat-rate and metered pricing plans exist, analysis often shows that even though many consumer prefer flat-rate, the typical user would be better off with metered pricing, as only very few heavy users manage to fully use or "abuse" the plan. Consumers often quote predictable cost and "no bad surprise" at the end of the month as a key benefit of flat-rate pricing. But another interesting observation to take into account is that in ...

I just finally got the new Android 2.2 release for my Nexus One (it's a long story...). Most of the significant features of this release are behind the scene like increasing java execution performance through just-in-time compilation or increasing javascript performance in the browser by using the V8 JavaScript engine from Chrome. Not sure I really notice much of a difference in everyday use, since I mostly use apps which are UI and framework bound for their performance (no CPU heavy games...) and most web-pages are light in JavaScript and browser performance is limited by network and rendering performance. But still these are very welcome optimization to help improve the platform overall. There are a few small enhancement - most significant for me is the ability to switch auto-correct/complete languages for the on-screen keyboard on the fly, since I write emails and SMS in multiple languages on any given day. There is now also finally a switch to disable the use of cellular data i...

After struggling with a few apps which use lots of battery and network resources while trying to sync half the Internet onto the device, one wonders if Apple didn't accidentally have a point with their claim that most apps don't really need background processing as long as there is a way to push background notifications to the device. This leads to a split application design, where part of the application resides on a server in the Internet, doing whatever the background service on the device would be doing, but with a lot less worries about power and bandwidth. If there is something new and interesting, a small notification is pushed to the device to alert the user, that there is something worth looking at. As long as the device has network connectivity when the user acts on this notification, the details of this notification might be about is loaded on demand. If mobile networks are ubiquitous and fast enough, the resulting experience is almost as good as an app which contin...

This year's SXSW keynote by danah boyd is probably one of the most insightful contributions to the debate on privacy and social networking. For those who have not yet seen it, the rough transcript can be found here . It puts a finger on so many important points, that it should be required reading for anybody who wants to work on consumer web services. To summarize a key point: in real life things are usually not as simple as they seem. And that's bad news for the technocrats who typically build and run the virtual environments where social interactions are taking place online. Engineers and scientists like to simplify and standardize problems, apply Occam's razor, optimize systems along the dimensions of an assumed known quantitative model etc. The operators of today's large web properties study and analyze their users behavior and think to understand them better than the users understand themselves, but behind the user behavior observable from web logs are layers of s...

I have noticed, that a good part of the articles I read online have been suggested by members of my various social networks. Maybe it is a part of the true utility of social networks to be a platform for "User Curated Content". While the web in its first phase tried to mirror the offline world, by moving every brick and mortar institution and service online, the so called web 2.0 promised a new world of participatory media, where everybody can create content. While digital media have drastically lowered the production costs, the web has driven distribution costs to near zero. Looking around on blogging sites, flickr, YouTube or other cornerstones of the "User Generated Content" revolution there are some seriously talented people out there! Some people have managed to make a mark, some even managed to make a living or become minor Internet celebrities in some field. Some other stuff is whimsical, funny or personal. There are unexpected viral hits or observers who ha...

Todays top suggestions on google.com search for "How do I" are: how do i delete my facebook account how do i find my ip address how do i get a passport how do i know if im pregnant how do i love thee how do i look Out of which only #5 has a relatively straightforward answer: ... Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight For the ends of Being and ideal Grace. I love thee to the level of everyday's Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light. I love thee freely, as men strive for Right; I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise. I love thee with a passion put to use In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith. I love thee with a love I seemed to lose With my lost saints, --- I love thee with the breath, Smiles, tears, of all my life! --- and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death. Sonnet 43, Elisabeth Barret Browning

The Swiss government recently reduced the quota for work-permits for applicants from so called 3rd-states - which typically means countries outside the EU and not covered by the free-trade treaties between the EU and Switzerland. After a highly publicized protest led by high-tech companies like Google, Microsoft and IBM, the Swiss government has rather quickly reverted its decision. In the midst of a recession with higher than usual unemployment and increased levels of immigration from the EU following the free-trade agreements, the general mood in the population is not very supportive of any increase in immigration quotas. This is seen as yet another attempt by greedy corporation to undercut the Swiss standard of living by importing cheap labor from overseas - typically from south-east Asia in what is generally by called the IT or information technology sector. How can there be a shortage of IT labor, if almost everybody knows someone who is unemployed and supposedly somehow "in ...

My favorite and most used app on Android isn't even an app, but rather a service. It is the Google Transit public transportation directions feature in Google maps, which can also be accessed more easily through the Maps application on Android - or on any other mobile platform which supports Google Maps for mobile . In combination with the extremely dense and frequent network of public transportation in Switzerland, the transit directions on the phone offer a level of spontaneous mobility, which is generally associated with driving. When it came to using public transportation networks, people tended to know the routes by heart which they frequently travel (e.g. daily commute), while anything else required thorough planing by poring over books of printed time-table - an activity enjoyed only by the most hard-core train buffs. The Swiss public transportation systems has always been particularly well integrated, across all providers and including everything from urban transit, buses, ...

I am notoriously bad at memorizing. If not, I might have gone to medical school and chosen a more lucrative career than Engineering... But as the number of online services I uses increases, so does the number of account username and password combinations. I try to standardize as much as I can on the same usernames(s) but some sites make this really hard by requiring strange and unusual conventions (name must be at least 8 characters long and include at least special character and number??? Whose name looks like that?) or by dictating that the username be whatever 10 digit number their database uses as the unique key for the account record. Same drama for the passwords, except that using a standard password everywhere has the added disadvantage that once the password is compromised, the attacker would have access to all my various online service accounts - if sHe could guess those bloody convoluted usernames... ;-) Things got particularly bad for accounts, which I use very rarely and w...

By any measure, the new Nexus One is a very nice phone: large brilliant display, high-performance CPU core, high-res digital camera, solid low-profile body. With this kind of hardware spec, the Nexus One establishes itself as the current flagship among Android phones. To my liking, it does not have a physical keyboard, which makes for a much more slim and solid feeling body than the G1 for example. In that sense the Nexus One is what I had hoped for in my original review of the early G1 . In the about 1.5 years since the G1 came out, Android has come a long way. 3 major releases of the platform have added important missing features like an on-screen soft-keyboard and helped harden the platform based on experience in the field. At the same time, developers have contributed a wide range of expected and unexpected applications, and learned how to write them so that they don't drain the battery within minutes. There are now half a dozen or so Android phones on the market and many more ...

So it doesn't cure cancer, solve world hunger or even global climate change - but it's still a pretty nice phone! At first glance, the large, crisp high-res display get's all the Uhs and Ahs, including how snappy the UI responds thanks to the 1Ghz Snapdragon chipset. With its speed and responsiveness, the phone is a pleasure to use! The form-factor is thin, sleek with ergonomically rounded corners and lies well in the palm of ones hand. The teflon coated plastic case gives it a nice high-end feeling texture. The biggest improvement in software features for my use case is the ability to sync multiple accounts for the contacts and the gmail app - now I can get notifications for email arriving on any of my gmail accounts. My only serious gripe so far is with the placement of the on/off button, which I need to press each time before and after using the phone. Its location at the top edge, is very un-ergonomic for single handed use - i.e. fishing the phone out of the pocket with...

One of my latest favorite discoveries in the Android market is aLogcat , a must-have for Android developers and power users, who want to know more about what is going on on the device. It is named after the logcat command which can be run in the debug shell, typically via the adb tool from the Android SDK, which requires the device to be connected to a host PC through a USB cable. aLogcat allows to display a log console on the device itself, color coded by levels with options to filter by levels or arbitrary substrings. By default the console updates continuously with new messages as they appear in the log, but it can also be frozen to allow scrolling back through the log history without interfering screen updates. Since logs can also be sent via email, it subsumes the functionality of earlier log collector apps. Now that the number of devices, configurations and version of Android are exploding, it is less and less likely that a developer can reproduce a particular problem, since t...

Since we recently moved, my current backup system has become some what undone. I have not been able yet, to reactive my linux home-server , since neither its power input nor its TV signal output works in the new environment. But since backing up to an aging piece of low-cost hardware running an obsolete version of an OS, which I also happen to use for experimentation does not leave the kind of warm fuzzy feelings which one typically expects from a backup solution, maybe it was time again to look around for another solution. From a maintainable and reliability point of view, it would be better to store the backups in the cloud, rather than on a single computer in the same room. On the other hand, sending the data out of the room opens up some serious privacy concerns The solutions for online backups on mac are still a bit limited. There are some portable solutions using Amazon's S3 cloud storage service or the very open-protocol based rsync.net service, which could have supporte...

I now have a cellphone plan, where all outgoing calls are metered and very expensive, except for unlimited calls to 3 favorite numbers, which are included in the plan. For our international calling, we are already using a discount carrier activated through a dial prefix, which also supports a local land-line dial-in access to be usable from mobile phones. By declaring the access number as one of my favorites, I can make unlimited calls from my mobile phone at the substantially lower rate of the discount carrier. The only problems is that making calls through the indirection of a voice-prompt menu is very cumbersome! This is where Phonecard Express comes in. This highly customizeable application inserts itself almost transparently as a filter between the Android system dialer and the telephony subsystem. Whether a call is made from the dialer, the address book or any other intent, the call setup is intercepted and potentially routed through a calling card service. In addition to suppo...

I started using the new Google Voice service as my standard US phone number. Since they currently only support international calling (billed rate), but not international forwarding, the current setup is a bit suboptimal and roundabout: from Google Voice, calls are forwarded to my US based Skype online number, with my skype account itself being forwarded to my current cellphone. The only catch is that the post-dial-delay of this whole contraption is too long for me to pick up the call before it goes to voicemail and since the voicemail delay is not configurable there isn't much I can do. I once managed to catch a call today, by leaping at the answer button on the first ring - it was a wrong number... At least I get an email notification right away, when somebody leaves a message. I could probably just as well turn off forwarding and just use it as a email based voicemail-box.

Some people seem to be using NetMeter for continuously monitoring their network usage against a limited volume data-plan. Since we are now moving to Europe, where stingy data plans with only a few 100Mbs included per month are the norm, I now also have a sudden interest in measuring my monthly data usage. Since NetMeter is a trouble-shooting tool, oriented towards very detailed tracking of network usage over the last few minutes to see what is going on right now, it is not really very suitable as long-term bandwidh counter. The ideal network usage counter should be low overhead and run continuously in the background - e.g. start itself at boot time. In its most basic form, it should show the current monthly total of cellular data usage. It would also be nice to enter the specs of the data-plan to track agains: how much is included per month, what is the rate above that limit and when does the monthly limit reset. For the current month, the ideal application should always show how curr...