The Motorola Droid A855 is the first Android 2.0 phone. I have been using one since Monday, having switched from a BlackBerry Pearl. I also wrote about Terah s iPod Touch recently, so I ll be making comparisons to it too. Here s my review. Hardware Physically, the device is very nice. It fits well in my hand. It comes in a fairly small box. It s surprisingly heavy for such a small device, but it isn t so heavy as to be a problem. It feels solid, sturdy, and durable throughout. Terah has the most recent iPod Touch 8GB, and compared to that, the Droid is thicker and heavier. The Droid s screen is awesome; a little longer but not as wide as the iPod Touch s. The iPod Touch screen seemed to offer less friction as I d slide my finger over it, which was nice but not a terribly big deal. I don t share some other people s annoyance with the keyboard. It is far better than the BlackBerry Pearl, or many other BlackBerries I ve seen. Along the bottom of the screen are some silkscreened buttons. My gripe with them is that they are easy to accidentally press. I ve done that more than once while using the phone in speakerphone mode, but you can lock the phone keyboard while you re on a call. I also don t share the complaint about battery life. It is excellent compared to the Pearl. Despite having a long-life battery, if I had it charged fully when leaving work at 5PM, by the next morning at 7AM it would often be completely discharged (though sometimes only half discharged). I believe that has to do with my home being in a poor reception area, and it spending a lot of energy looking for signals. In any case, the Droid has impressed me with its battery life and I have no complaints there. The screen, as I said, is brilliant and sharp. It is readable in various lighting conditions. By default, its brightness adjusts with the brightness of the ambient light. That s normally fine, but it can be annoying to stand in front of a light with the Droid in a shadow, watch its screen darken, and then shift a bit and it becomes bright again. There is a setting to disable automatic brightness. Button-wise, it has four physical buttons: the power/lock button at the top, volume up/down on the side, and a camera button on the side. The camera button only works when the phone isn t suspended (locked), and disappointingly can t be remapped to something actually useful. Just beneath the screen are four touch buttons: back, menu, home, and search. These are the ones I complained were easy to accidentally press. MicroSD and USB The Droid comes by default with a 16GB MicroSD card already installed. This is one huge advantage over the iPhone or iPod Touch: you can actually put things on the phone yourself, directly, without having to use iTunes and its limited features. I have, for instance, downloaded a PDF on the Droid and later copied it to my PC. I also copied a KeePassX encrypted password database from my Linux computer to the Android, for use with KeePassDroid. The iPhone/iPod Touch password programs don t support this kind of copying of files from your PC to the device, though one will let you put a database up on a webserver you control and download it from there. Plugging in a MicroUSB cable will start charging the Droid automatically. In order to make the SD card mountable, you must simply drag down the notification bar (which is how you get detail about what it s telling you normally) and touch the USB icon. When the SD is mounted on the computer, the Droid won t see it, of course. Touch the USB icon again to mount it on the Droid again, or just unplug USB. Wireless and Wifi The wifi support works like you might expect: pretty well. The cell phone reception works well, as does its Bluetooth support. It has an easily-activated airplane mode which disables all wireless features, which can then later be re-enabled. You can also individually disable wifi and Bluetooth. Oddly, you can t disable the cell phone network individually. The only way I could find to disable it is via Airplane Mode. User Interface The user interface, overall, is very slick and polished. However, I would have to say it is not as slick and polished as the iPhone/Touch interface. A few of the animated effects have a low framerate, which isn t really a big deal. More of a big deal is that settings and options can be scattered in many different locations, making them hard to track down at times. The device also offers fewer visual cues than the iPhone/Touch, though that is perhaps not significant. Like Apple s device, the Android 2.0 UI offers you three home panels, which you switch between by dragging your finger left and right. The iPhone shows some dots at the bottom of the screen, a standard UI indicator on that device that you can flick left/right, while there is no such indication on the Android. This is somewhat nitpicky though. I would put Android 2.0 and iPhone in the same general class of user interfaces, way above any other such device I ve tried. The Droid has an on-screen keyboard similar to the iPhone/Touch, though somehow it felt like the keys were smaller or easier to mistype. I m not sure why that is; maybe they really are smaller. The physical keyboard can be used at any point too, of course. Background Apps This is an area where Android really shines over iPhone. Android supports background apps everywhere. That means that your weather widget can be always correct, instead of being hardcoded at the factory to show 73 degrees as iPhone s weather icon does until you tap to open it. It means that more apps remember where you were and what you were doing when you switch to/from them. And it means that you can do things while that PDF downloads. Finally, it means that you can have native Jabber clients on the Android without having to do some mess with Apple push notifications plus third party servers, significantly reducing the complexity of such apps. Browser Now moving on to the applications preloaded on the phone, I ll start with the browser. It is, in a word, awesome. It is far faster and reliable than the browser in my N810. Compared to BlackBerries, of course, this is a real browser, not their limited one; and even so, it is still faster. It is also faster than the iPhone/Touch browser, sometimes significantly so. The pinch to zoom feature of the iPhone/Touch is lacking, and it must be said is both useful and pretty. Zooming softkeys appear on the screen when you tap, and do work well. It also automatically zooms if you tap on the page to fill out a form, for instance. The bookmarks save thumbnail images similar to the iPhone, and you can put bookmarks on your home screens as well. Rotating the Droid to landscape orientation causes the browser to also rotate, and on most websites it will also zoom in by default at that point, since it s got a wider orientation and doesn t have to shrink stuff to fit as much. The physical keyboard is very nice for filling in usernames and passwords. iPhone-optimized sites, such as Bloglines, work great on the Android. Though many of them fail to autodetect the Android as an iPhone-like device, and thus you have to manually ferret out their iPhone-optimized URLs. Email This is both a strong and a weak spot of the Droid. First off, it comes with two email client apps preinstalled: one for Gmail, and one for everything else. I haven t used the Gmail one, so this review doesn t consider it. You can connect the email program to your IMAP, POP, SMTP, or Exchange (ActiveSync) accounts in the predictable way. Each account can be configured with its own notification preferences, so you can easily see an icon, vibration, or beep when you get new mail on one account and not the other. All folders on an IMAP account are accessible, which is a very nice feature that is not shared by the BlackBerry. You can view your mail as a unified INBOX if you prefer. In such a few, a thin color bar to the left of each message summary tells you which account it came from by its color. This is a nice way to quickly deal with all new email, wherever it may be from, and ought to be emulated by some desktop clients. You can, of course, also view each account individually. The email program supports attachments, both viewing and sending. It does not appear to have the iPhone/Touch bug if failing to display emails forwarded as attachments. Now to the drawbacks. First of all, it inexplicably doesn t support the IMAP IDLE command. As a result, IMAP accounts are polling-only; there is no near-instant notification of new mail as there is with Exchange accounts, even though IMAP supports that trivially. Like the iPhone/Touch, Android 2.0 s mail program has a great deal of trouble with self-signed SSL certs, or SSL certs that are unusual in any way. Both devices refuse, by default, to talk to mail servers with self-signed SSL certs. Neither one offers to let you add an exception to recognize a particular cert in the manner that the built-in web browser on these devices would do. On the iPhone/Touch, at this point you need to obtain the cert by other means, stick it up on a web server, browse to it from the device, and add it that way. This trick doesn t work on Android 2.0, nor does adding it using the import from SD option. There appears to be absolutely no way to teach the mail program to use a self-signed cert on Android. The good(?) news is that you can choose to have Android accept any certificate. Many people in forums suggest that, and it does let it connect. Of course, it also removes much of the security benefit of using SSL/TLS in the first place, and is a terrible excuse for the lack of proper self-signed cert support. Both iPhone and Android devices have a horrible user experience in this area Quickoffice The Droid comes with some sort of Quickoffice software pre-installed. It can be used to view PDF, Word, and Excel files (at least; maybe more). But it is a rather strange beast. It has no icon on the applications screen. The only way to open Quickoffice is by opening a file that it supports in another app. So, for instance, tap on a PDF in the browser or open a Word attachment in email. I haven t played with it much, but I can say that it s read-only but seems to have high-quality rendering of all document types. Its PDF viewer is glacially slow on any page that has graphics. Flip the page to one with graphics and up pops a progress bar. And good thing too, because it might take 15-30 seconds to render a page. I will be looking for better PDF viewers in the Market; there are quite a few. Lack of file manager And that brings us to the next surprising limitation: there is no built-in file manager. I downloaded a PDF from the browser, and saved it to the SD card, but there was no way to look at it from the phone! Absolutely none. No way to delete it, rename it, etc. Several people recommended Astro, which solved all of those problems. Not having such a program built in is a weird glaring oversight. Of course, the iPhone/Touch doesn t have one built in, but in their case the glaring oversight is not having any files to manage Calender, Contacts, and PIM features This is an area of exceptional strength for the Android. I believe it s got the best PIM features of any mobile device out there, though it s not without its quirks. There are two calendar apps on the Droid, and they both have virtually identical interfaces and feature sets. I am rather at a loss as to why we are burdened with two separate apps. In any case, the app called Calendar works with a local calendar, or with Google Calendar syncing. It supports all the features you d expect, and plenty you wouldn t, including excellent support for meetings, viewing other people s calendars that you ve configured access to on google.com/calendar, viewing subscribed iCal calendars, etc. It has push syncing with Google Calendar, so new events appear in about 10 seconds. It is well-executed and completely flawless in every way I could see. Corporate Calendar is the same, but for hooking into Exchange or Exchange-compatible calendars via ActiveSync. We are evaluating groupware, and have so far tested it with Zimbra and Scalix. It worked well with Zimbra, and not so well with Scalix. That s not to say there were no problems. The meeting invitation emails Corporate Calendar generated appeared to have no body in the Zimbra mail client, or in Thunderbird (though if you look at the raw email, you see it does have a vcal entry in it). Meeting invitations sent to the Android can be displayed in the Email program, but the Email program doesn t offer accept/decline buttons, so you have to manually pull up the event on your calendar to accept or decline it. Other than that, it worked flawlessly with Zimbra. Scalix exhibited several data integrity issues that will probably make it unsuitable for syncing with an Android at this time. There is a built-in Calendar widget you can put on your home screen. It will show you the date and info about your next appointment. I miss the BlackBerry Pearl theme that showed me the next two appointments. There are some apps that claim to do this, but none of them work well. Contacts are also quite powerful. The contacts viewer aggregates your contacts from multiple sources into a single view, which is nice. It can sync in Gmail contacts, ActiveSync, and Facebook contacts. (How s that for a device with corporate and personal appeal?) The viewer works better than Apple s, and creating a new contact lets you choose which source you d like to add it to if you have more than one available. Continuing the trend of many recent devices, the Droid has no task/todo list support built in. Maps I ve heard people be all excited about Google Maps, saying it s the best maps ever in a phone (though I suspect they have forgotten that Garmin has added on a phone to their GPS products in the past). In general, they are probably right. And also they are probably irrelevant. The first thing that must be said is that the maps on the Android, like the iPhone/Touch and other such devices, are not actually installed on the Android. Consequently, for mapping or navigation to work, you must have a data signal, either wifi or CDMA. That immediately turns this into a GPS accessory, not a go-to device, because who wants to be stuck without a working GPS someplace without cell phone reception? (Such as several areas right near my house) I have a Garmin Nuvi 500 (see my review), and despite not being a terribly expensive GPS, it runs circles around the mapping in Android 2.0 (or iPhone for that matter). The 3D display on the Nuvi is very helpful for driving in dense city streets, and that s not available on Android or iPhone. The Nuvi has nice features such as one-touch detour calculation, excellent geocaching integration, accurate and sensitive receiver, etc. I will not be leaving it at home for trips just because the Android supports maps. That said, there is something to be said for having maps of Android s quality. It can be a nice crutch if you re somewhere unfamiliar but didn t expect to be, and thus left your GPS at home. It also can give you routing on transit sources, which Garmin can t, so if you re in an urban area with bus/subway options, the Android maps could be very helpful. I will probably try that out when we re in Chicago next and still pack the Garmin unit for driving around rural Indiana. The Phone The last built-in app to discuss is the phone feature. Yes, the Android is a phone. As expected, the phone integrates well with the system. There is not much of any great interest to discuss here. It s a phone. It integrates with contacts. It works. I use Google Voice, and have had their BlackBerry app for some time now. The Google Voice android app is far nicer. You have the option to make all calls via Google Voice, none via Google Voice, prompt each time, or only international calls via GV (which is presumably cheaper for such than your carrier). A couple of annoyances, though. One is that you have to touch a button to activate the keypad (to send touch-tone digits while you re on a call). It should be activated by default. Android Market vs. App Store I know some people love it, but to me the Apple App Store is like a cross between the sleazy guy selling watches from his car trunk and the tourist trap strip malls that sell 50-cent useless plastic memorabilia for $20. Yes, there are some quality apps in the App Store that aren t overpriced, don t violate your privacy, and do something useful. But you ll have to look hard. It still boggles the mind that most of the secure password storage tools for Android think they need access to the GPS, Internet, and at least one of your contacts, phone number, logs, etc. Yes, you heard me right. A password storage tool wants GPS and Internet access. And, being Apple, we all know how tight they ve locked down the App Store. Emulators are banned. Useful apps get arbitrarily banned at various points. Now, the Android App Market is better than the Apple App Store in the sense that it has a lower percentage of the crappy apps, and perhaps more useful apps, at least to my taste. That s not to say it s without crappy apps. It boggles my mind why most weather applets on the Market think they need to know my phone s status and identity, and why some apps that have nothing to do with the Internet or location services want to know all of the above. I don t install such apps. But there are gems out there. The small 400K weather applets that do what they advertise, and do it well. My absolute favorite is droid48, an emulator for my beloved HP 48GX calculator. Yes, an emulator. You can also find various NES, SNES, and C-64 emulators on the Market; Apple famously removed the latter from their App Store recently. And you re not tied to the Market either; you can install apps from wherever you like. KeePassDroid is another one. It reads the same database as KeePassX for Linux or KeePass (.kdb format only) for Windows. It s a secure password management system, and I can periodically copy the file from my desktop over to the Droid and have all my passwords at my fingertips but encrypted, of course. There is simply nothing that convenient for the iPhone/Touch because the device doesn t permit it. Music and Video I haven t played with these much, but the music player seems to just see MP3s placed anywhere on the SD and presents them as you d expect a music player to do. It looks fully-functional and easy to use. Conclusion Overall, I think the Droid is a very nice phone. It isn t perfect, but it bests the iPhone in a number of areas. I think it s probably the best phone for many right now, and the iPhone for some others. Update Nov 11: Two other annoyances I forgot to mention. One is that the power-button shortcut menu, as well as the lock screen, have a quick shortcut to put the phone into silent mode. Very well. Except, confusingly, these buttons not only enable silent mode but also disable vibrate mode while checking the silent mode checkbox in settings does nothing to vibrate mode. There is no built-in shortcut to enable vibrate mode; you d have to unlock the device, use the volume keys to go down the vibrate. The app Silent Mode Jammer helps with this. Second is that the documentation is as poor as any other cell phone around. For instance, there s a setting that says Voice Privacy. It s a checkbox. The description is Enable enhanced privacy mode. Thanks, but that tells me nothing. Nobody online seems to know either. A few overconfident forum posters claim it s encryption, linking to posts from 2003 about a Sony phone with a checkbox with the same name. Maybe it is encryption, but that is hardly definitive. The bottom line is it s not documented anywhere. Neither of these change my conclusion above though.

I'd had bad feelings about this trip, mainly because it was so short. I didn't expect this to happen though... Back story: Smudge has always been fairly wary of Stumpy, for some unknown reason (perhaps her boisterousness?) It came to a head when we did our road trip to Atlanta. We got back home, and Smudge had pooped in all the wrong places, and was hissing and growling at Stumpy whenever Stumpy looked at her the wrong way. The cat sitter plead ignorance, but something must have happened while we were away. Smudge has been pretty hopeless around Stumpy ever since. One theory was that maybe Stumpy (or Smudge) had some health problem, so we had them both checked out and no red flags were raised. The other option was to put Smudge on Prozac for a while to see if she settled down. I didn't like the idea of drugging her, so we've opted to separate them for a while. Smudge is in our bedroom and Stumpy and Lily have the rest of the house. Smudge and Stumpy only have supervised time together. We've tried a bit of play therapy as time permits, but it hasn't made much of a difference. So fast forwarding to now, and we didn't want to leave Smudge in our bedroom all by herself for the week, so we thought we'd put Stumpy in a cat boarding place, since we figured she could handle it, and let Smudge and Lily have the run of the house. Our neighbour Carol was going to check in on Smudge and Lily. All good. I think it was yesterday (my brain is not dealing with the various timezones plus jet lag) Sarah got an email from Carol saying that the cat boarding place had called her because Stumpy hadn't been eating, and was all lethargic. Carol went and brought her home, and she didn't do much better at home, she was just lying around, so she took her to our vet. She was having breathing problems, and generally showing symptoms of congestive heart failure! Her blood work was otherwise okay. The vet said they couldn't do much and needed to send her to a specialist vet at Campbell, where they could do an ultrasound on her heart. This is where she currently is, in an oxygen tent on diuretics for fluid around the heart/lungs. The prognosis isn't very good at all. She managed to make it through the night, but I don't know if she's going to make it until I can get home. I've moved my flight a day earlier to Friday night, so I can get out to the vet's on Saturday. The vet was saying that even if she does make it through this, her long-term prospects aren't good. Maybe a year. This is only a four year old cat! The vet said she has an enlarged heart, so it's some sort of congenital condition she's always had, but was probably triggered by the stress of being in the boarding place. It's just come as a total shock to us as she's always been really healthy, and the most hyperactive of the three cats. Sarah, being the cat lover that she is, is particularly upset, because this is "her" cat, and she feels terrible because Stumpy is all by herself. I'm really hoping Stumpy can at least hang in there until I get there. I don't want her to die alone, despite how frustrating she can be. We owe an enormous debt of gratitude to our neighbour Carol for doing a lot of running around for us. I don't doubt for a moment that Stumpy would be dead by now if it weren't for her.

An announcement for this meeting just dropped into my inbox with Apologies for the lateness of this announcement; some crossed wires . It will be in #spi of irc.oftc.net as usual, at 2000 UTC. The agenda is available online and someone will email the logs to spi-general afterwards.

The great thing about living and working in NYC is that there is a steady stream of conferences to attend, such as the fast approaching digital labor conference entitled Internet as Playground and Factory. The problem is that since I live 1/3 of the year in San Juan and often get stranded and stuck when my mother gets hospitalized, as is the case now, I am often not in NYC. Depending on my mom s prognosis tomorrow, I may or may not make it but I am working on my slides and revamping a few of my thoughts as I would like to attend. My new title is one I think some readers of the blog might enjoy: Fsck Purity: The politics and pleasures of free software (thanks karl) and the talk will be part of a panel The Emancipatory Politics of Play with Chris Kelty, Fred Turner, and Ben Peters. If you are interested in attending, register soon as it is free and open to the public but requires advanced registration. There are also already a collection of short interviews videos available, the one by me is a basic discussion of the politics of free software, conducted at the end of a very long teaching day, so I am not sure it makes any sense. I never watch my own interviews so I can t quite be the judge

The great thing about living and working in NYC is that there is a steady stream of conferences to attend, such as the fast approaching digital labor conference entitled Internet as Playground and Factory. The problem is that since I live 1/3 of the year in San Juan and often get stranded and stuck when my mother gets hospitalized, as is the case now, I am often not in NYC. Depending on my mom s prognosis tomorrow, I may or may not make it but I am working on my slides and revamping a few of my thoughts as I would like to attend. My new title is one I think some readers of the blog might enjoy: Fsck Purity: The politics and pleasures of free software (thanks karl) and the talk will be part of a panel The Emancipatory Politics of Play with Chris Kelty, Fred Turner, and Ben Peters. If you are interested in attending, register soon as it is free and open to the public but requires advanced registration. There are also already a collection of short interviews videos available, the one by me is a basic discussion of the politics of free software, conducted at the end of a very long teaching day, so I am not sure it makes any sense. I never watch my own interviews so I can t quite be the judge

Earlier in the year I bought some stuff from UK clothes retailer USC. USC kindly included some gift vouchers in my delivery. This is a good example of how to sweeten a deal and make your customers happy. The vouchers did not include any expiry date on them. I banked them until the autumn, so I could maximize their potential by using them in conjunction with a heavy winter coat. I recently spotted a coat I liked a lot. It's a bit pricey at nearly 200, so I decided to cash in my vouchers. Unfortunately, the vouchers didn't work Frustrating! I emailed the company to ask them why, and it turns out that -- despite not including a printed expiry notice -- the vouchers had expired. I asked the company if they would be willing to issue me with a replacement voucher, and they stopped replying to my emails. This is a good example of how to really sour a customer's impression of you and make them look elsewhere. I did so, and found another retailer selling the coat 20 cheaper.

So when I teach my Introduction to Human Communication and Culture class, we usually do a section on humor and among other articles, I assign a chapter from one of my favorite books, On Humour. It is a nice, quick read delivering however some serious philosophical punch. Given the pervasiveness of humor on the Internets I also ask students to send me what they think are 2 of the funniest videos. I then compile the list, send out to the class, and they vote on the 2 funniest ones. Here is the list and in a week I will report back on the winners, at least winners from the perspective of NYU freshmen:

A) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fVDGu82FeQ B) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqD2aBrqcmQ&feature=related C) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7gIpuIVE3k D) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-do8lSJOts E) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tM4eIBs8WBw F) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3sX30NubTs G )http://www.sickanimation.com/cartoon.asp?name=murshaq H) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xD-Huwlg2kY I) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fVDGu82FeQ J) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGOohBytKTU K) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1upZz3a-7iM L) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCdmiZyyGjQ M) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tU4fB9nUgc N) http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/74/the-landlord-from-will-ferrell-and-adam-ghost-panther-mckay O) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKBQrXxrvu0&feature=related P) http://www.youtube.com/user/doglover199709#p/search/1/rMdWqaN_Tms Q) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5ALIL7T764 R) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCpjgl2baLs S) http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1799458 T) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfZ8yVcnLPs U) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVn27YXEWho V) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bh8UttrmmLc W) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YU_nOtD7acQ

*Thanks to James and emacs, here they are with links!

Youtube
Youtube
Youtube
Youtube
Youtube
Youtube
Sick Animation
Youtube
Youtube
Youtube
Youtube
Youtube
Youtube
Funny or Die
Youtube
Youtube
Youtube
Youtube
College Humor
Youtube
Youtube
Youtube
Youtube

So when I teach my Introduction to Human Communication and Culture class, we usually do a section on humor and among other articles, I assign a chapter from one of my favorite books, On Humour. It is a nice, quick read delivering however some serious philosophical punch. Given the pervasiveness of humor on the Internets I also ask students to send me what they think are 2 of the funniest videos. I then compile the list, send out to the class, and they vote on the 2 funniest ones. Here is the list and in a week I will report back on the winners, at least winners from the perspective of NYU freshmen:

A) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fVDGu82FeQ B) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqD2aBrqcmQ&feature=related C) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7gIpuIVE3k D) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-do8lSJOts E) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tM4eIBs8WBw F) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3sX30NubTs G )http://www.sickanimation.com/cartoon.asp?name=murshaq H) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xD-Huwlg2kY I) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fVDGu82FeQ J) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGOohBytKTU K) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1upZz3a-7iM L) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCdmiZyyGjQ M) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tU4fB9nUgc N) http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/74/the-landlord-from-will-ferrell-and-adam-ghost-panther-mckay O) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKBQrXxrvu0&feature=related P) http://www.youtube.com/user/doglover199709#p/search/1/rMdWqaN_Tms Q) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5ALIL7T764 R) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCpjgl2baLs S) http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1799458 T) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfZ8yVcnLPs U) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVn27YXEWho V) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bh8UttrmmLc W) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YU_nOtD7acQ

*Thanks to James and emacs, here they are with links!

Youtube
Youtube
Youtube
Youtube
Youtube
Youtube
Sick Animation
Youtube
Youtube
Youtube
Youtube
Youtube
Youtube
Funny or Die
Youtube
Youtube
Youtube
Youtube
College Humor
Youtube
Youtube
Youtube
Youtube

So yesterday we had a really nice meeting with few french Debian folks. Luk and Ralf were visiting us, so we went at Prosper's for some meat and wine (and Aberlour). We were a bit too much to be able to speak to everybody (so mainly there were two 6-packs of people), but it was fine anyway. Though, the main point of the evening was that some (most?) teams in Debian are really (*really*) understaffed, and it might become problematic in the near future (like now). For example, from what I understood:

• debian-x has one active contributor
• pkg-xfce has one active contributor
• evolution has one de factor contributor
• pkg-gnome is better since Josselin had some help, but it's still not perfect
• d-i has only one active contributor
• libc has only one active contributor

I don't know the state of other teams, but it doesn't really look fine for the incoming freeze. So if you want to give some help, even if you're not yet technical enough, feel free to offer it to the teams above. Usually, starting with just using the package is enough. If you use it, you want it well-maintained, and there _are_ stuff to do to which don't require large technical knowledge, and the (few) active contributor will be happy to have some help and point you to what you can do. If you want to give some time to Debian, before filing some ITPs (even if you'd really like to have that package you use everyday), check if you can't do something for those above teams (and others which might need help too, like release team or kernel). Oh, and don't be scared, working on Debian is fun. It's time consuming, but it's rewarding. Don't let it become not fun.

• when people upload to Debian with an @ubuntu.com email address
• even better, if they do that when they are DDs (so with a @debian.org address)

Yeah! Actually, doing so shows several things: That the collaboration between Debian and Ubuntu actually works out. That people that feel more attached to Ubuntu also do care for Debian. And that those people started to realize that contributing things back to Debian actually does reduce their own workload with respect to not having to maintain seperate patches, with the benefit of all involved parties. So big kudos to you people being able to look over the corner of your little universe and see the bigger picture for the benefit of all!

Jeff sent the following while I had connectivity issues and I hadn't gotten around to posting it here. So without further ado, and given the success of our initial R / Finance 2009 conference about R in Finance, here is the call for papers for next spring:

Call for Papers: R/Finance 2010: Applied Finance with R
April 16 and 17, 2010
Chicago, IL, USA
The second annual R/Finance conference for applied finance using R will be held this spring in Chicago, IL, USA on April 16 and 17, 2010. The two-day conference will cover topics including portfolio management, time series analysis, advanced risk tools, high-performance computing, market microstructure and econometrics. All will be discussed within the context of using R as a primary tool for financial risk management and trading. One-page abstracts or complete papers (in txt or pdf format) are invited for consideration. Academic and practitioner research proposals related to R are encouraged. We will accept submissions for full talks, abbreviated "lightning talks", and a limited number of pre-conference tutorial sessions. Please indicate with your submission if you would be willing to produce a formal paper (10-15 pages) for a peer-reviewed conference proceedings publication. Presenters are strongly encouraged to provide working R code to accompany the presentation/paper. Data sets should also be made public for the purposes of reproducibility (though we realize this may be limited due to contracts with data vendors). Preference may be given to presenters who have released R packages. Please send submissions to: committee at RinFinance.com The submission deadline is December 31st, 2009. Submissions will be evaluated and submitters notified via email on a rolling basis. Determination of whether a presentation will be a long presentation or a lightning talk will be made once the full list of presenters is known. R/Finance 2009 included keynote presentations by Patrick Burns, Robert Grossman, David Kane, Roger Koenker, David Ruppert, Diethelm Wuertz, and Eric Zivot. Attendees included practitioners, academics, and government officials. We anticipate another exciting line-up for 2010 and will announce details at the conference website http://www.RinFinance.com as they become available. For the program committee:

Gib Bassett, Peter Carl, Dirk Eddelbuettel, John Miller,
Brian Peterson, Dale Rosenthal, Jeffrey Ryan

See you in Chicago in April!

I have been reading comments on Sandro's post about the use of email addresses. I am not sure about what he really wanted to express exactly, because I can't see anything wrong when someone from other distro upload a package into the archive and they use their distro's mail addresses so it is clear that I don't agree with the first point of his post. Now, regarding the second point, I don't understand why when being a DD and an Ubuntu Developer at the same time some people prefer uploading to Debian archive using @ubuntu.com but well, anyone is free of doing what they think is correct and this is not something which is in the policy so it's OK. But reading the first point made by Stefano's post made me understand why.

I got surprised when I read the Jon's post about debian kernel contributors and I looked for the word debian in http://lwn.net/Articles/247582/ and nothing was found. I subscribed for a while, just for curiosity, in the Linux Kernel Mailing List and I was able to read some mails from people I know they are in Debian and just because the patches weren't signed off with debian mail addresses Debian does not appear in such a post at lwn.net. I'd like to add that, for not being misunderstood, I do respect all kernel contributors, because their contributions are really important for the whole community and we are aware of Debian's contributions. My point is that it should be accepted that there exists an impact when using one or another email address and it should be considered (when you are part of both projects, in this case, Debian and Ubuntu).

Sandro Tosi writes to complain about Debian/Ubuntu members using their Ubuntu email address for Debian packages. zack responds, wondering what's wrong with that. I generally agree with Zack. However, back when Jon Corbet was producing summaries of kernel contributors (here's one for 2.6.23: Who wrote 2.6.23), I thought it was a shame that the many Debian contributors who work on the kernel were not represented. I suspect most Debian kernel hackers are paid to work on the kernel, and sign off their patches with an address at their employer's domain.

I was referred to Creating a World Without Poverty during a discussion on advogato some months ago, but it took rather a long time to obtain the book for various reasons and then I forgot about this review until a recent discussion on new Cooperatives-UK Chief Ed Mayo s site. Better late than never, here s my review of it. Let me know what you think of this book. About the Book Author Muhammad Yunus is founder of the Grameen Bank, Bangladesh, one of the microcredit pioneers, but that story has been told in another book Banker to the Poor. The prologue of this book starts with the creation of Grameen Danone a joint venture between the bank and the France-based Groupe Danone then part one describes problems in capitalism and introduces the idea of Social Businesses as a complement to what the book calls Profit-Maximising Businesses (PMBs), or what most people know as usual shareholder companies. Part two then covers the Grameen Group from its start in banking, through an impressive list of short company case studies some Social, some PMBs, some joint-ventures up to the first year or so of Grameen Danone. The final part then talks about creating a marketplace which is open to Social Businesses, harnessing Information Technology to spread these ideas (more on this in a later article on this site) and using those innovations to banish poverty from the world. The epilogue is the Nobel Prize Lecture Poverty Is a Threat to Peace which seemed to read almost as a simplified summary of the book s main ideas. Annoyance I got quite annoyed with this book because I feel there is a lurking absurdity in its main big idea:- On the one hand, the argument seems to be that profit-maximising businesses are problematic because of their single-minded focus on profit-maximisation. This is an argument that I largely agree with, as you may remember from my short review of Joel Bakan: The Corporation. On the other hand, it proposes to remedy this by creating Social Businesses with equally single-minded focus on social problems this seems like a recipe for disaster! If profit-maximisers threaten to wreck the environment, human rights or whatever else isn t in their goals, why won t Social Businesses using similar single-purpose company formation rules just as easily threaten to wreck whatever mentioned isn t in their goals? If this book is correct and entrepreneurs are multi-faceted human beings who will act to promote social aims (which they must if they are to invest in Social Businesses), then the only robust way forward is to promote businesses that do not try to simplify that multi-faceted nature, whether for profit-maximisation or for a subset of social aims. The best form of businesses that I know for trying to represent all interests of their owners are cooperatives. Dismissed after less than a page Cooperatives are examined in part one of the book and dismissed after less than a page (p35) because they are not inherently oriented towards helping the poor or producing any other specific social benefit (which is a misleading claim because concern for community is a basic principle of cooperatives which all should uphold), they can be owned equally by the wealthy as well as the needy (why is this a problem?) and they can sometimes be demutualised into PMBs. Ultimately, if that s the will of the people, that can t be completely prevented, but recent developments have found ways to make that much less attractive (so-called anti-carpetbagging rules). Doing what people want is not usually a problem in other spheres it s democracy. What s really infuriating is that the author proceeds to describe Social Business which are aimed at specific social benefits (rather than all), can only be owned by the needy but can access the resources they need by donations from the wealthy or by forming joint ventures with them (even very unequal ones) and can be desocialised into profit-maximisers (p178). The same problems which were used to reject cooperatives exist just as badly, if not worse! Conclusion: a bit disappointing So, ultimately, I found this book a bit disappointing. There are lots of good ideas, but when presented with a ready-made round wheel for the basic problem of tempering profit maximisation, this book reinvents an oval one. I suppose I shouldn t be surprised. The misleading criticism of cooperatives is sadly typical of much of the current social enterprise movement, which I mentioned as a drawback in the recent case study of our co-op by Cooperatives-UK. I don t know if social enterprise enthusiasts are informed by the thinking of people like Muhammad Yunus, or if the high-profile authors simply reflect the movement. Have you read this book? Did you spot this contradiction? Do you feel it has other problems that I m ignoring? Or is it a work of genius and I shouldn t be disappointed with it?

• when people upload to Debian with an @ubuntu.com email address
• even worst, if they do that when they are DDs (so with a @debian.org address)

grrr

I ve recently been diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome (AS) [1]. Among other things this means that I am genetically predisposed to have an interest in solving technical problems and give lectures about how I solved them, but that I tend not to be a people-person . AS is generally regarded as an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), but there is a lot of debate among the experts about the exact relationship. Some people (such as the psychologist who assessed me) believe that AS is a synonym for High Functioning Autism (HFA), however one theory I ve heard is that HFA people are more sensory oriented and Aspies differ by being information oriented in that case I would not be regarded as HFA. I m not bothered by this issue, I m sure that in a few years time the experts will have some consistent definitions for such things that most people can agree on. There is no Boolean assessment for AS, the assessment is based on a sliding scale of number of criteria. People who are almost Aspies but don t quite pass the test (or more commonly don t get assessed because they don t think they would pass) are sometimes referred to as Asperger Cousins (AC), this is a slang term that is not formally recognised but is often used in online discussions. I m sure that a significant portion of the readers of my blog would regard themselves as being at least ACs if they investigated the issue. The test at Glenn Rowe s web site [2] can give you an idea of how you rate by some criteria but note that this is not at all conclusive and it s based on the theories of Professor Simon Baron-Cohen [3], not all of which have general agreement. Leif Ekblad is running a project to analyse long-term changes to the Aspie score of adults [4]. The main quiz for that project seems quite popular for self-diagnosis, but again it s not conclusive. I think that diagnosing oneself for an ASD is not nearly as crazy as most things which might fall in the category of being one s own psychologist, but I still strongly recommend getting a formal assessment if you believe that you are an Aspie. In Australia it costs about $600 and there s a waiting list of about 3 months. Chaotic Idealism has an insightful post about the pros and cons of self-diagnosis [5], if you suspect that you may be an Aspie then I recommend that you read it before doing the tests.

• [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspie
• [2] http://www.glennrowe.net/BaronCohen/MaleFemale.asp
• [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Baron-Cohen
• [4] http://www.rdos.net/eng/Aspie-quiz.php
• [5] http://chaoticidealism.livejournal.com/70133.html

I have been reading a great many posts about Android lately, some consisting of criticism, some of praise and some simply addressing issues in the Android community . Let s have a look at those. Matt Porter s Android Mythbusters presentation and Harald Welte s reaction
I haven t seen the presentation live, but I had a look at the slides. Impressing work done by Matt putting all this information together. However, we all knew that Android only (ab-)uses Linux, without making use of the GNU userland for a long time, didn t we? In his presentation Matt has shown things such as Android s udev replacement that uses hardcoded values for device node creation and (on his blog) Harald has then come up with a statement I have found to be very strong:

The presentation shows how Google has simply thrown 5-10 years of Linux userspace evolution into the trashcan and re-implemented it partially for no reason. Things like hard-coded device lists/permissions in object code rather than config files, the lack of support for hot-plugging devices (udev), the lack of kernel headers. A libc that throws away System V IPC that every unix/Linux software developer takes for granted. The lack of complete POSIX threads. I could continue this list, but hey, you should read those slides. now!

Now both of these statements target technical details, but the root of the problem seems to be elsewhere. Where is my Android 2.0? Okay, that heading might not be making any sense in the context of this post at a first glance, but let me elaborate on that. Google and the Open Handset Alliance refer to Android as being an Open Source operating system, but the project is different from real Free Software projects: development takes place in a closed group and the results are shared with the community later on, when they are deemed to be ready. This means that innovation also takes place behind closed curtains and that the community is not involved in the actual development process at all. Lately we have seen the result of that, as Motorola is bragging about working close with Google on Android 2.0 ( Eclair ), but the AOSP source trees, open for everyone to have a look at, show no signs of version 2.0. In fact no changes that might even remotely suggest the release of a new major version have been made public in the past few weeks. So where is the openess there?
Actually, the Motorola Droid has already shipped with Eclair on 6th, but still, there is no indication that Eclair will be made available to the broader public. In short Android seems to be developed behind closed curtains, with hardly (read no) community input whatsoever and is sometimes released as Free Software, not what I would describe as an open development process. The Android Market problem As we have seen in the past Google is enforcing their copyright on proprietary applications that ship with pretty much every Android device, such as the Android Market. This has become really clear when Steve Kondik received a cease and desist letter when packing the Google-proprietary applications into his ROMs. Okay, it s Google s right to enforce their copyright and there is nothing wrong with actually doing so, the thing I really have a problem with is something else: the Market is proprietary. Now what this means should become rather clear. You can have an Android device without Google s proprietary bits, but with default settings you just do not have any way of installing additional software. In my opinion the Market should be freed by Google themselves, or the community has to react and come up with a free replacement to overcome the vendor lock-in. Oh, you might know a replacement called SlideMe (or Mobentoo) already. Well, that bugger is proprietary too, so not a solution at all. Nokia and Maemo to the rescue In most discussions about the openness of Android someone throws in Nokia and Maemo, as a solution to the dilemma. Reading all those positive comments I simply had to give it a try, but all my hopes were destroyed within a few minutes. Let s start with the good news and let alone the reason why my hopes were destroyed for another minute or two. Maemo is based on Debian GNU/Linux and various Free Software components, such as GTK+, gstreamer, esd and friends. Most of the system is Free Software which is a good thing(tm) and reading all of this really got me into Maemo. Okay, some applications seem to be proprietary, but I am sure that could be fixed rather easily, so I could once for all use a truly open phone. and then came the SDK installer shell script:

#!/bin/sh
# Copyright (C) 2006-2009 Nokia Corporation
#
# This is proprietary software owned by Nokia Corporation.
#
# Contact: Maemo Integration <integration@maemo.org>
# Version: $Revision: 1110 $

Now there is one question you should ask yourself: Why would someone trying to promote his platform as being open make the *installer* script for its SDK proprietary? Come on, it s an installer script, how much of your secret juice could be in there? What s the problem with people modifying it and working on this installer script in an open development environment? I had high hopes for Nokia actually doing a bit better than Google, but it seems they ve failed to do so. It may be me overreacting, but a proprietary SDK installer shell script scares me enough not to install the SDK and have a look at it for now nor to think about buying a Maemo-based device in the near future. Please Nokia, either get the facts straight or provide us with a free SDK to your free & open platform. So, in short, Google is bad at working with the community and creating a truly open development process, and Nokia simply fails in terms of not scaring off prospective developers for their open platform with the proprietary SDK installer. Do you have any solutions in terms of an open phone environment, apart from what OpenMoko has come up with?

Custom function decorators with TurboGears 2 I am exposing some library functions using a TurboGears2 controller (see web-api-with-turbogears2). It turns out that some functions return a dict, some a list, some a string, and TurboGears 2 only allows JSON serialisation for dicts. A simple work-around for this is to wrap the function result into a dict, something like this:

@expose("json")
@validate(validator_dispatcher, error_handler=api_validation_error)
def list_colours(self, filter=None, productID=None, maxResults=100, **kw):
    # Call API
    res = self.engine.list_colours(filter, productID, maxResults)
    # Return result
    return dict(r=res)

It would be nice, however, to have an @webapi() decorator that automatically wraps the function result with the dict:

def webapi(func):
    def dict_wrap(*args, **kw):
        return dict(r=func(*args, **kw))
    return dict_wrap
# ...in the controller...
    @expose("json")
    @validate(validator_dispatcher, error_handler=api_validation_error)
    @webapi
    def list_colours(self, filter=None, productID=None, maxResults=100, **kw):
        # Call API
        res = self.engine.list_colours(filter, productID, maxResults)
        # Return result
        return res

This works, as long as @webapi appears last in the list of decorators. This is because if it appears last it will be the first to wrap the function, and so it will not interfere with the tg.decorators machinery. Would it be possible to create a decorator that can be put anywhere among the decorator list? Yes, it is possible but tricky, and it gives me the feeling that it may break in any future version of TurboGears:

class webapi(object):
    def __call__(self, func):
        def dict_wrap(*args, **kw):
            return dict(r=func(*args, **kw))
        # Migrate the decoration attribute to our new function
        if hasattr(func, 'decoration'):
            dict_wrap.decoration = func.decoration
            dict_wrap.decoration.controller = dict_wrap
            delattr(func, 'decoration')
        return dict_wrap
# ...in the controller...
    @expose("json")
    @validate(validator_dispatcher, error_handler=api_validation_error)
    @webapi
    def list_colours(self, filter=None, productID=None, maxResults=100, **kw):
        # Call API
        res = self.engine.list_colours(filter, productID, maxResults)
        # Return result
        return res

As a convenience, TurboGears 2 offers, in the decorators module, a way to build decorator "hooks":

class before_validate(_hook_decorator):
    '''A list of callables to be run before validation is performed'''
    hook_name = 'before_validate'
class before_call(_hook_decorator):
    '''A list of callables to be run before the controller method is called'''
    hook_name = 'before_call'
class before_render(_hook_decorator):
    '''A list of callables to be run before the template is rendered'''
    hook_name = 'before_render'
class after_render(_hook_decorator):
    '''A list of callables to be run after the template is rendered.

    Will be run before it is returned returned up the WSGI stack'''
    hook_name = 'after_render'

The way these are invoked can be found in the _perform_call function in tg/controllers.py. To show an example use of those hooks, let's add a some polygen wisdom to every data structure we return:

class wisdom(decorators.before_render):
    def __init__(self, grammar):
        super(wisdom, self).__init__(self.add_wisdom)
        self.grammar = grammar
    def add_wisdom(self, remainder, params, output):
        from subprocess import Popen, PIPE
        output["wisdom"] = Popen(["polyrun", self.grammar], stdout=PIPE).communicate()[0]
# ...in the controller...
    @wisdom("genius")
    @expose("json")
    @validate(validator_dispatcher, error_handler=api_validation_error)
    def list_colours(self, filter=None, productID=None, maxResults=100, **kw):
        # Call API
        res = self.engine.list_colours(filter, productID, maxResults)
        # Return result
        return res

These hooks cannot however be used for what I need, that is, to wrap the result inside a dict. The reason is because they are called in this way:

        controller.decoration.run_hooks(
                'before_render', remainder, params, output)

and not in this way:

        output = controller.decoration.run_hooks(
                'before_render', remainder, params, output)

So it is possible to modify the output (if it is a mutable structure) but not to exchange it with something else. Can we do even better? Sure we can. We can assimilate @expose and @validate inside @webapi to avoid repeating those same many decorator lines over and over again:

class webapi(object):
    def __init__(self, error_handler = None):
        self.error_handler = error_handler
    def __call__(self, func):
        def dict_wrap(*args, **kw):
            return dict(r=func(*args, **kw))
        res = expose("json")(dict_wrap)
        res = validate(validator_dispatcher, error_handler=self.error_handler)(res)
        return res
# ...in the controller...
    @expose("json")
    def api_validation_error(self, **kw):
        pylons.response.status = "400 Error"
        return dict(e="validation error on input fields", form_errors=pylons.c.form_errors)
    @webapi(error_handler=api_validation_error)
    def list_colours(self, filter=None, productID=None, maxResults=100, **kw):
        # Call API
        res = self.engine.list_colours(filter, productID, maxResults)
        # Return result
        return res

This got rid of @expose and @validate, and provides almost all the default values that I need. Unfortunately I could not find out how to access api_validation_error from the decorator so that I can pass it to the validator, therefore I remain with the inconvenience of having to explicitly pass it every time.

Previously i d talked about how we use GNOME technologies in the Moblin Myzone. Now i m going to talk about another component that i m responsible for, the People Panel. An important aspect of the Moblin user experience is about communicating with others and this panel provides quick access to do this. The core of the content is provided by an abstraction, simplification and aggregation library called Anerley. This provides a feed of items (an addressbook of people) that aggregates across the system addressbook, powered by EDS, and your IM roster, powered by Telepathy. You have small set of actions you can do on these people such as start an IM conversation / email / edit them with Contacts. The core of our IM experience is supplied by the awesome Empathy. We ve been working with the upstream maintainers to accomodate some of the needs of Moblin into the upstream source. This included the improvements to the accounts dialog and wizard that landed for GNOME 2.28. One of the biggest problems with the IM experience in Moblin 2.0 was that it was easy to miss when somebody was talking to you. If you were looking away when the notification popped up, whoops, it s gone. With our switch to Mission Control 5 I was able to integrate a Telepathy Observer into Anerley and the People Panel. An Observer will be informed of channels that are requested on the system. This allows us to show ongoing conversations in the panel and by exploiting channel requests and window presentation allow the user to switch between ongoing conversations. This wouldn t have been possible without the assistance of the nice folks in #telepathy and at Collabora: Sjoerd, Will, Jonny and countless others.

A periodic security review at our co-op suggested switching PasswordAuthentication no on even more hosts. One of those caused a bit of a heated discussion about the benefits of increased security and the drawbacks of making emergency access harder, reminding me of the old joke about a secure computer being one encased in a block of concrete, not connected to anything and buried in a secret location. More usefully, I found a Discussion summary on improving SSH which seemed to cover the basics pretty well. It also suggests that nearly two thirds of all SSH private keys were stored on disk with no password protection which is scary and can server admins even detect that sort of risky behaviour? One thing I ve not really noticed before is how common brute-force ssh attacks are. There are some denyhosts statistics which make interesting pictures and Strong passwords no panacea as SSH brute-force attacks rise summarises some data from last year. So what can we do? libpam-cracklib seems like a first step, along with denyhosts. While searching around, I noticed sslh ssl/ssh multiplexer which looks like a useful trick that I might try somewhere. It entered debian testing earlier this week and looks simple to backport to the stable version. What tips would you give? Do you think it s worth having at least one reasonably secure host with PasswordAuthentication enabled, just in case of disasters disabling private keys? Are you a fan of port-knocking and other more sophisticated things? Do you know more numbers about ssh security?