Some of you may have noticed that I am not a concise author. Perhaps that has something to do with the fact that I am not a concise reader. I like facts, details, and lots of them. So as a recent Nexus 7 purchaser, here you go.
Genesis
I ve long used Android devices, and last year had a company-issued
Motorola Xoom, which was the first Google Experience tablet with Honeycomb. That tablet has specs roughly similar to iPads; its 10.1 screen was the same, the 1280 800 screen was better than the iPad available at the time, and its 730g weight identical to the early iPads (though 10% higher than the current iPad). I lost access to it when I changed jobs, and had been without a tablet until recently.
Other devices I own are the Galaxy Nexus, sporting a 4.65 screen; and what s now called the Kindle Keyboard, with an eInk screen.
I had been somewhat interested in the Kindle Fire, but the closed nature and limited capability of the system kept me away.
The Nexus 7 reviews, however, were stunning, as was the price. $200 for a great tablet. I wound up buying the $250 16GB model. But not until after I spent a great deal of time thinking about size.
Physical Size
My main concern was that the Nexus 7 would be too small to be useful. I had never been particularly pleased with my input speed on the Xoom. I tried to touch type on it, but was just never fast enough to surpass frustratingly slow. I have long been a fast and accurate typist on keyboard; well over 100 words per minute, and it is frustrating when my fingers can t maintain that speed.
I figured the situation would be even worse on the Nexus 7, given its smaller size.
I also found the Xoom to sometimes feel a little small with the 10 screen, and was concerned about that as well.
And finally, 7 doesn t sound all that much larger than 4.65 .
However, having actually had the Nexus 7 for a little while now, I m very pleased with the size, and may even prefer it. The 10 tablets are just too big and heavy to comfortably hold in one hand, and I ve realized that part of my Xoom frustration was the fact that I had to set it down and prop it up for anything beyond very brief use. At 340g, the Nexus 7 is less than half the weight of the Xoom or iPad, and it makes a huge difference. While still nowhere near where I d be with a keyboard, two-thumb typing in portrait mode, or even something approaching touch typing in landscape mode, is possible on the Nexus 7.
The screen size hasn t been a bother, at all. This may be due to the fact that it s higher resolution (it s 1280 800 like the Xoom, but those pixels are crammed into only 7 ). I think it s also partly due to the fact that the browser in Jelly Bean is significantly better than the one in Honeycomb, and perhaps that websites are better at tablet-friendliness, too.
Overall, the Nexus 7 feels a lot farther from the size of a laptop than did the Xoom, and as such is more prone to come with me in lots of situations, I think.
It works reasonably well with foldable Bluetooth keyboards, so when thinking about a laptop replacement or alternative, that might be the way I go. A Bluetooth mouse also works with it, though I found it didn t provide near the utility that a BT keyboard does.
Display
The display is both amazing and disappointing. Browse some photos and some of them will show up in eye-popping clarity. Websites display fine. But the screen can also take on a washed-out appearance at times. I am notoriously picky in my displays, and this bothered me enough that I researched it. Analysis has shown that poor firmware calibration has lead to the compression of highlights, which mirrors what I was seeing. I am mostly used to it by now, but it s a disappointment.
Most of the time, though, the screen is excellent. In comparison to my eInk Kindle, however, I don t think any tablet will ever be as good for book reading. The eInk screen truly is easier on the eyes, and the reflection of overhead lights on the Nexus 7 display can be distracting at first.
I have had occasional issues with it not registering touches properly. This is always cleared up by touching the power button to put the unit to sleep, then waking it back up.
Other Hardware
There are three hardware buttons: power and volume up/down. Physically, the device fits my hand well, though I might wish it was a little lighter like my Kindle. Charging is accomplished via high-power 2A micro-USB, and there is, of course, a headphone port. There is no alert LED like my Galaxy Nexus has, and no vibration feature. The speaker is on the back, and the microphones along the left side a position which, it appears, many Nexus 7 cases are blocking.
Battery Life
I am astonished at how good this device is battery-wise, especially compared to the battery disaster that is the Galaxy Nexus. Google claims the Nexus 7 can survive 8 hours of solid screen-on use, and I don t doubt it. Mine s never gotten low enough to get a solid measurement.
Wifi
The wifi works well, as far as it goes. The wifi doesn t support 802.11n in 5GHz, which although somewhat common for devices like this, is a bit of a disappointment.
Software
The big story about the Nexus 7 is Jelly Bean. I had used Honeycomb on the Xoom, and Ice Cream Sandwich on my Galaxy Nexus, so I m familiar with its predecessors. Let s take a look.
Project Butter
Much has been made of Project Butter, Google s attempt to optimize Android to improve its responsiveness and the smoothness of things like scrolling. I can say they have done quite well. This device is so smooth you don t notice how smooth it is. It wasn t until I had been using it for a bit that I really noticed. That s a job well-done.
Chrome
The browser in Jelly Bean is now called Chrome. I am not sure if this is just marketing or not. It doesn t really feel all that different from previous versions of the Android browser, and the changes have been along the lines of incremental changes Google has introduced before.
One of the very best new features happens when you touch a link that is close to other links on a page. Rather than getting a pretty much random page, Chrome pops up a partial-screen zoom box showing the part of the page near where your finger touched. With everything showing up huge, it is now easy to touch the precise link you want. Do so, and the box goes away, and your page loads. I am amazed at how much improvement this one change brings. Compared to ICS Browser, bookmarks can be brought up quicker, and the tab interface is nicer.
All is not perfect in the land of Chrome, however. It contains several regressions from the Ice Cream Sandwich browser.
I have two complaints about bookmarks. One is that previous versions of the browser would show thumbnails of sites in the bookmark viewer. This was a nice navigation aid. Chrome shows only favorites icons, if one is available, or a generic icon if not. Also, the bookmarks synced with other Android devices are called, confusingly enough, Desktop Bookmarks now, and require an extra tap to access.
I have had occasional trouble with Chrome not wanting to prompt for credentials for servers on my LAN that use HTTP auth.
Chrome has also removed the ICS browser s ability to save a page, including all its elements, for offline viewing. Good for things like an airline checkin screen and such. I have no idea why Chrome removed this. I installed the Firefox Beta for Android, which also doesn t have the offline save feature, but it does have a save to PDF feature.
Soft Keyboard
The on-screen soft keyboard in Jelly Bean is a significant regression from previous versions of Android. My biggest complaint is the lack of visual feedback for keypresses. On earlier versions of Android, when you push a key, you ll see an image of it pop up on the screen, offset a little from the location of the key itself. In JB, all that happens is that the key itself changes colors. Not very helpful, because it is under your finger at the time. This small thing frustrates me to no end.
The keyboard in ICS introduced some nice features as well, mainly long-presses as shortcuts to other features. For instance, you can long-press a key on the top row of letters to get numerals without having to switch to the number mode. Similarly, long press the period and you get other common punctuation. The JB keyboard removed both of those features.
Thankfully, in the Market, there is an app called
Ice Cream Sandwich Keyboard. It appears geared towards people running earlier versions of Android. Sadly, it is also a step up over what we have in JB.
Google Now and Voice Recognition
The other main headline feature in Jelly Bean is Google Now. The somewhat-competitor to Apple s Siri, Google Now takes a bit of a different approach than Apple. It is said that Siri is better than Google Now at responding to queries, but Google Now is better at predicting what you want to know before you ever ask. I haven t ever used Siri, but I would buy that explanation.
Google Now is available with a swipe up from the bottom of the screen, or with a single touch from any Home screen. Bring it up and it shows you current information about what it thinks you need to know. Examples include weather and forecast information, time to get to home or work from your current location, alerts that you need to leave soon to get to a certain place on time, flight schedules, sports scores, etc.
Google Now has been mostly a gimmick to me, but that may be because I fall outside its target demographic in significant ways. I live nowhere near a public transportation system, work at home for the most part, haven t flown wince I ve had the Nexus 7, don t follow sports, and already know how long it takes to get places (and when it varies, it s because of muddy roads or harvest neither things that traffic services know about.)
The weather widget always seems to show the temperature from a couple of hours ago. It does show the weather in your current location. Well, mostly. I was in Newton, KS one day. I tapped on the icon for more detail. That simply took me to a Google search for weather Newton . Which showed me the weather for Newton, Massachusetts 1600 miles away. Fail.
Speech recognition in JB is definitely improved. It is somewhat useful with Google Now. I like being able to simply say set alarm for 30 minutes. And it does it a lot quicker than I could in the interface. It s supposed to be able to let me bring up my contacts in the same way, but it is much more likely to try turning such an attempt into a Google search than an actual display of a contact. It s picky on the precise language used for setting an alarm too; say it slightly differently, and it s another Google search.
JB also supports limited offline speech recognition. I say limited because it s a bit strange. I have, for instance, a Remember the Milk widget on my home screen. It has a microphone icon to use to speak a new reminder. Tap it, and you can t use it offline. It also has a button that brings up the on-screen keyboard. Do that, then touch the microphone on the keyboard, and you can use offline recognition. I have no idea how to explain this difference, since both are clearly using Google s engine.
The speech recognition is indeed better, and might make it suitable for use instead of a keyboard for composing short texts and such. But it rarely produces even a sentence that I don t have to correct in some way, even now.
Conclusion
Despite some of its shortcomings, I am very fond of the Nexus 7. It is an excellent device. And at $200-$250, it is an AMAZING device. I am truly impressed with it, and don t regret my purchase at all.
IT S FINALLY IN!
With this last upload of the MiniUPnP daemon 1.7-3, I ve reached a first milestone: all of the MiniUPnP libraries, daemons and clients are finally in Debian, in a shape which I am not ashamed anymore.
What is UPnP for?
Back in the days (around Linux 2.0.3x), the only way to share a single Internet connection was to run a Linux box as your gateway. These days are far gone, and nearly every home connection is done through a mini home router, which also often provides a small switch and a WiFi access point. Every computer on the LAN gets its connectivity through the router thanks to NAT, and to be more accurate, masquerading. That works very well for outbound connections (browse the web, send a mail, etc.), but it is then a lot harder that something connects to a server located in the LAN. If you run a permanent server with a fixed LAN IP address, that s fine, you just configure your router to do some port forwarding, so that any inbound connection will be forwarded to the computer of your choice in the LAN. But if one application needs to listen on the public IP address just for a while (for example, IRC using DCC connection), so that something can connect to it, it becomes a way more tricky. That s when UPnP comes into play. UPnP stands for Universal Plug and Play. It s a protocol so that any application on the LAN can open ports on the public IP address of the gateway. Note that an UPnP router is also often referenced as UPnP IGD (Internet Gateway Device).
Why using MiniUPnP, don t we have already linux-igd?
Before my packaging work, the only UPnP server that was available in Debian was linux-igd, which has a dependency on libupnpX. That library is quite big for what it does (about 500KiB, on top of which you have to install the 200KiB daemon itself), while MiniUPnP is designed to be lightweight (only 158K, with dependencies on iptables, iproute, uuid-runtime and libc6 only). That seems ridiculous, but when you have only 8MiB of flash in your old router, saving few hundreds KiB is really important, and here, we re saving more than 500 KiB, with a full implementation of the UPnP protocol, and the Microsoft NATPmP implemented as well (yes, Microsoft decided that one protocol wasn t enough, and that they should implement their own (sic!)).
Who is using MiniUPNP?
Probably, you already have the libminiupnpc installed in your SID/wheezy desktop, because the transmission bittorent client which is installed with Gnome by default, depends on it, and minissdpd might be in your desktop too, if you installed the Recommends: packages as well. Which is why these are scoring quite high already in popcon. Previously, transmission was embedding its own version of the MiniUPnP client library, so it s nice to have it as a standalone shared library now.
Also, because of its very light weight, and the fact that UPnP is often needed for gaming (both XBOX 360 and PSP need, and can use, the MiniUPnP daemon that runs on your IGD), many ISP who ship a router to their customer, install MiniUPnP in it. For example, at least, the 2nd and 3rd largest Internet access provider in France (Free Telecom and SFR) are shipping MiniUPnPd in their box (one of them using OpenWRT on their router). So probably as well, you are also using MiniUPnP daemon without knowing it.
But isn t UPnP unsafe?
To this question, I d answer that connecting to Internet is unsafe. It isn t less safe than connecting to Internet on a WiFi hotspot for example. So adding UPnP support on your gateway doesn t make it less safe, especially since MiniUPnP has some features to help with security (like an ACL with IP and port lists, or a secure mode were the router will only open ports to the client requesting it). Also, we are running a distribution where dependencies are easy to check, so it s easy for you to check if a client uses UPnP or not, and decide to trust it (or not). I personally have no issue trusting transmission, x-chat or warzone2010 (more exactly: I don t trust that incoming connectivity will make it less safe for these applications, there are so many other things that could go wrong).
MiniUPnP consists of what?
MiniUPnP is a set of 4 source packages to handle all of your UPnP needs:
- The client library, libminiupnpc (and the corresponding -dev package), with its sidekick miniupnpc client program (you can use it to check the public IP of your gateway, or manually open ports).
- The UPnP IGD daemon, miniupnpd, which just reached Debian Experimental. The latest version, 1.7-3, also includes debconf configuration so that you can choose the NIC and IP address to bind on. If you installed previous version, I strongly recommend upgrading to fix previous problems.
- The libnatpmp client library (and the -dev package) for implementing the Microsoft protocol as a client (it also has a client package binary for your tests).
- The minissdpd daemon to keep memory of all UPnP devices that announced themselves, and speed-up using the UPnP protocol (used by the MiniUPnP client library).
A long process to have MiniUPnP in Debian
All these 4 pieces of the puzzle were not as easy as it seems to be packaged in Debian. Especially, the IGD daemon, MiniUPnPd, used to depend on some header files that were not packaged in Debian. This was a decision of the iptables maintainers, which even after a long discussion, refused to add the necessary headers because it wasn t supposed to be a kernel API. While this might really be truth, the issue was that there was no public API available in the Linux kernel at all, and other distributions (Fedora, Gentoo, etc.) really did supply these needed files. As a consequence, during a very long time (years literally), shamefully, it was impossible to build the MiniUPnP daemon in Debian, while it was no problem on other distributions. Note that I do not want to start a troll discussion here, I m just stating facts, both parties have very strong and respectable arguments. Anyway, this needed API was finally embedded in MiniUPnPd itself thanks to a contributor to the project, and now it builds on both the Squeeze and the Wheezy (that is Linux 3.2) kernel without any issue.
Call for testing
Unfortunately, I don t have a Linux box as my Internet gateway. So I did the tests that I could: I installed MiniUPnPd on one computer on my LAN, and checked that I could open ports from another computer. So it seems to work, but I had no way to really test it live , with some real clients. So if you have an Debian SID box as your Internet gateway, feedback would be highly appreciated.
What is remaining to do?
A transition from libminiupnpc5 to libminiupnpc8 has to happen. Of course, this is too late for Wheezy, so this will happen right after the release. There s not so many reverse dependencies, so it should be ok, but I (yet) have zero experience with transitions. BTW, I had hard time to find out what this transition process was, and maybe some more effort for documenting it would help others (I m thinking about adding some text in the Debian wiki for that). Also, I have called for help on debian-devel, because I m currently the only one maintaining all these 4 source packages, and I m trying to have all my packages checked by others, and team maintained. So if you want to give a hand, or just declare yourself as a backup if I m busy, please raise your hand! Upstream is a friend of mine, and is very reactive to any requests (it very rarely took more than 48 hours to get a reply).
Enjoy MiniUPnP and report bugs!
Again, feedback would be appreciated. :)
Favicons for Server Tabs
Distinguishing server tabs can be difficult, especially if you have plenty of
them. All server tabs have the same icon so you need to search for the right
name. I wondered why this issue doesn't happen so easily with a web browser
which usually also has lots of tabs open. Besides the page name there is the
favicon right in front. So why can't Smuxi make use of that simple but effective
technology? Well, 
Quick Join Bar
One thing that makes IRC really difficult for new comers is the important IRC
concept that channels are network specific. So what happens is people try to
find / join the channel they are looking for but on the wrong network. They
have to connect to the right server/network and then switch to the right tab,
before they can join the channel (using the /join command or join dialog). The
developers of Smuxi had a brainstorming session and came up with something that
should be easy enough for anyone to use and finally solves the issue: the
Ewww, that looks ugly, doesn't it? I will make this one short, here is the cure
with 
Enhanced Text Frontend
The text frontend which is still in alpha state has received the following
enhancements: new /exit command, new /help command, regular and xterm window
title, and, several fixed crashes.
The /connect command now allows you to 
I just released 
Today I'm in bed, because I have le sniffles, and a painful headache. I'm using epiphany to write this post, via VNC to my main desktop, but I'm hating it as I've somehow evolved into a state where the following crashes my browser:
At the beginning of this year, I blogged about 
The Debian project is 19 years old now. Following 
What if you have a mis-behaving electronic device, which might corrupt files you
store on it? I'm interested in tools to inspect incremental backups, look at file
changes and alert me if they are suspicious.
For example, if an MP3 changes, did the MPEG data change, or the ID3 tag, or
something else? An ID3 change is likely to be on purpose, MPEG data less so.
Similar for JPEGs and EXIF metadata.
I decided to poke around in my backups of my music player. I discovered some pretty
weird stuff.
Firstly, quite a few MP3s seem to have changed on my player over time. I found 788
instances of MP3s changing a very small amount: an 11 byte 
It seems that the UK government 
With a 
Often, I install a new Debian package using apt-get install, and as the progress output flies by, I wonder, Whoa!, should I really be using a piece of software with that version number? It says a lot, after all. If I see 
The result was wonderful we immediately were able to deploy schema changes with <= 90 seconds of downtime, which was significantly less than the 5 minutes our stakeholders had agreed to as a benchmark if we were under 5 minutes, we could schedule downtime once a day rather than once a month. We had to fix some API client code to retry more reliably, and likewise fix a few minor bugs in the database connection handling logic in the appservers, but all in all it was a pretty smooth project. Along the way we spun off a small python helper to 
As promised
Recently, I've started converting many of my subversion repositories
to git, some of which contain fairly large files (2-3G). However, git
can be slow to deal with repositories with large files, and it also
isn't able to selectively discard unneeded files when disk space is
pressing. Thankfully,
I feel a sense of pride when I think that I was involved in the development and maintenance of what was probably the first piece of software accepted into Debian which then had and still has direct up-stream support from Microsoft. The world is a better place for having Microsoft in it. The first operating system I ever ran on an