Now that I'm not letting the cat out of the bag (I bought these as gifts) I
can write a review.
The use case was pretty simple: I thought it'd be a cool Christmas present
for our parents to give them something Internet-enabled that would give them
regular updates on their grandchild (when he/she arrives). I was thinking a
picture a day type of thing.
So I hunted around for a WiFi-enabled digital picture frame, and found the
iGala being sold pretty much
exclusively by
ThinkGeek.
The reviews seemed pretty good. I know WiFi-capable frames have been around
for a few years, but they always seemed to be pretty lacking in terms of
WiFi functionality. Like they wouldn't do any security, or they'd only do
WEP. This particular product claimed to do the whole gamut, including
WPA2. The fact that it was a touch screen and ran Linux also made it
appealing.
So I ordered a couple of them for a few weeks before we
headed to
Australia, with the intention of making sure that they'd work. Here's
the highlights.
WPA2 didn't work (nor did WPA)
Despite the software on the frames claiming to be able to talk WPA2, the
frame would not associate with my
Linksys
WRTU54G-TM. I had to drop it all the way back to WEP to get it to
connect. For me, this was the most disappointing failure. I bought the
product specifically on the strength of its claim that it supported WPA2,
and it just didn't work. It was also pretty impossible to debug the failure.
I downloaded the latest firmware update, and that added additional settings
for TKIP or AES when selecting WPA2, but neither option helped.
The automatic updates are brain-dead
Speaking of downloading firmware updates, the latest firmware that I
downloaded and installed on the frames added automatic over-the-air firmware
updates. Nice enough feature, except for the implementation. The frame tried
to make an HTTP GET request for a non-existent file, every 6 seconds.
So the frequency of checking alone is totally ridiculous, but couple with
this the fact that it's making a GET request (this is what $DEITY invented
the
HEAD
request for, people!) and the website has a "friendly" 404 Not Found
page that weighs in at a little over 10 Kb. By my calculations, that's
nearly 150 Mb of failed update checking traffic
a day. Taking these
frames to a backward country like Australia, where ISP users still have
monthly quotas, gives the frame a pretty horrendous running cost in terms of
traffic. Not to mention the outbound bandwidth requirements for the server
hosting the updates. Crikey, the mind boggles.
I'd have thought checking once a day and on power on would be perfectly
sufficient.
Transitions are unavoidable
It may be just me, but I hate cheezy transitions. Digital picture frames
tend to come with a myriad of them, but they all look cheap. It's impossible
to tell the frame to just change the picture, it has to use at least one
transition effect all the time. It defaults to randomly choosing from all
the available ones. At least you can tone it down to just one.
Automatic on/off time
I liked that it was possible to configure operating times. No need to have
the thing chewing power 24x7. It just seems to turn off the backlight
outside of the programmed operating hours, so it's still doing the lame
uber-frequent and bandwidth-intensive checking for updates even when it's
"off".
Photo check frequency is configurable
Another nice feature was the ability to check for new photos at varying
intervals. What I wanted for my parents was to just update once a day, so
they'd get a new photo every day (assuming we put a new one in the Picasa
web album that it's checking). This was very doable, and coupled with the
automatic on/off time, means they should wake up to a new photo every day
(that we change it).
Built in photos are a bit too sticky
There's 3 or 4 in-built photos as part of the firmware. If there's nothing
accessible or available online, it'll cycle through these. Somewhat
annoyingly, you need to have at least
two photos in your online
source for it to stop wanting to incorporate the stock photos in the mix.
The workaround is to put the same photo in the online album twice, so you
don't realise it's switching between two images. Lame, but it works...
Touch screen UI was adequate
Given the alternative user interface for digital picture frames is a little
IR remote control and some dinky menus, the iGala was nice to configure. A
full on-screen QWERTY keyboard pops up for entering WEP/WPA/WPA2 keys and
configuring the Picasa/Flickr connections.
Fairly responsive support
The main near-showstopper for me was the lack of advertised WPA2 support. I
emailed the Aequitech support folks quite a bit during my "evaluation"
period. They got back to me fairly quickly most of the time and wanted to
know exact details of my setup so they could reproduce it in the lab. They'd
be well served having an actual ticketing system, instead of hiding behind
an email address, as it made it hard to keep track of the multiple issues I
was raising with them.
It's written in Lua?!
I have no familiarity with
Lua,
other than I know of its existence as a programming language. I'm curious as
to what their motivation was for this language choice. All of the Lua code
shipped in the complete firmware refresh ZIP files is bytecode. I have no
idea if it's possible to decompile it. The CPU architecture would appear to
be a
Blackfin
based on the few compiled binaries included in the full firmware.
Easy to update
Prior to the new update "functionality" I've already railed against, it was
pretty easy to update. Download a ZIP file and a shell script, put them in
the root directory of a USB key, and plug it into the frame and stand back.
The updates don't seem to cryptographically verified (even the over-the-air
ones), so I wonder if it's possible to break into the frame by way of a
cleverly crafted "update". I have no idea what breaking into the frame would
buy you. I don't know what sort of computing power they have.
Conclusion
I still think the iGala is a reasonable, if somewhat immature product. If
the software is going to be actively worked on, and the support people
continue to be responsive, then I think it's got good potential. For the
price, I expected a more polished product, though.
I received an email from their support people shortly after returning from
Australia saying that they'd fixed the WPA2 problem. Unfortunately I had no
intention of trying to remotely talk my parents through how to reconfigure
their access point or the frame (interestingly WPA2 didn't work with their
Linksys
WAG54G2 either, so I'd love to know what WPA2 devices it was tested
with), so it's 128-bit WEP until I next go to Australia.
Can anyone recommend some videos
to me which explain the ins-and-outs of the chef and puppet configuration
management tools? I have some familiarity with configuration management, having
worked on cfengine (version 2) for a few years. However I haven't managed to evaluate the newer tools effectively. The barrier to entry (setting up at least a master and a slave VM...) has been too high (or I haven't given it enough time!)
If there are any good screencasts/videos that cover not just how they work but their individual advantages, that would be excellent: I have some upcoming time in which I can absorb material like that (but not the kind of time in which I could get hands-on).
Online translators are not hot news anymore. Not by a long, long shot. Still, today I wanted to get a couple of words in Latin. And was amazed that Google's translation service does not (yet?) offer Latin as an option, so I turned to 
One of the things I most like about WNBR is its diversity. Not everybody goes for the same reasons. As people who read me often will know, I took part because I believe (and act accordingly!) that the bicycle is the best, most efficient vehicle in by far most of the situations we face day to day, but we need to raise awareness in everybody that the bicycle is just one more vehicle: On one side, we have the right to safely ride on the streets, like any other vehicle. On the other side, we must be responsible, safe drivers, just as we want car drivers to be.
Ok, and I will recognize it before anybody complains that I sound too idealistic: I took part of the WNBR because it is _tons_ of fun. This year, we were between 300 and 500 people (depending on whom you ask). Compared to 2008, I felt less tension, more integration, more respect within the group. Of course, it is only natural in the society I live in that most of the participants were men, but the proportion of women really tends to even out. Also, many more people joined fully or partially in the nude (as nudity is not required, it is just an invitation). There was a great display of creativity, people painted with all kinds of interesting phrases and designs, some really beautiful.
Oh, one more point, important to me: This is one of the best ways to show that we bikers are not athletes or anything like that. We were people ranging from very thin to quite fat, from very young to quite old. And that is even more striking when we show our whole equipment. If we can all bike around... So can you!
Some links, with obvious nudity warnings in case you are offended by looking at innocent butts and similar stuff:
I am pleased to announce that 
As well as being a member of 
So, next Saturday 
Speaking of Minas Gerais, it is, according to Wikipedia, the fourth in size among the 26 States of Brazil, being just a bit bigger than mainland-France. Minas Gerais is one of the main earth transports hubs of the country (having the largest number of federal roads), and is famous for its tasty food, the beauty of its people, its cheeses, the calm, introspective nature of its people, its interesting way of speaking portuguese, and its alcoholic beverages.
Now, going away from Rio to Belo Horizonte has a single big disadvantage associated with it: we don t get to have the Sea a few minutes away, anymore. Our solution to that is, of course, going to one of the numerous bars (the legend goes around that BH has the largest absolute number of bars of all cities in the world), and drinking instead of swimming! Quem n o tem mar, vai pro bar!
A few years into this running hobby, I realized that my times were getting
better. But I had no feel for by how much, or whether that was a constant
rate of improvement etc pp. Long story short, I started to plot some of the data. What
seemed natural was to record the date, the distance in miles as well as in a
qualitative variable, and finally the average pace. Additionally, I played
with groupings into just three categories 'short', 'mid' and 'long'.
This leads to a natural 'one-factor' model of pace as a function of race date
grouped by race distance. And given how easy it is to do conditional plots in
At first, some of the groups had too few data points to actually reliably
construct regression lines, let alone non-parametric smoothers. But over
time more and more data points were added as I kept running races.
Including for example the somewhat disappointing result from
