8 March 2010, 11:25 am
I’ve finally gotten around to updating my personal GPG key. At the same time I’ve plumbed in the various bits I need into my mail client so it’s a little easier to sign, encrypt, and verify GPG enabled email. Of course the super paranoid will want to check the public key linked to is in fact mine and not some evil twin clone of me. Contact me by some other means (any of my XMPP accounts* will do although to be safe I recommend using a Off the Record plugin).
If you show me your cryptographic fingerprint I’ll show you mine 
* That would be LJ chat, Google Talk or the new Facebook chat
5 March 2010, 11:10 am
One of the reasons to own a smart phone is to run applications on it. There are some fantastic ideas out there and given the relative youth of the mobile app explosion I’m sure there is plenty more to come. Today I thought I would offer my thoughts on Smart Alarm Clock.
The concept is fairly simple. When you go to bed you place your phone on your bed. It uses the built in accelerometers to monitor your movements as you move about in the bed. By analysing the magnitude of your movements it attempts to deduce what part of the sleep cycle you are in. Once your within range of when you want to wake up it and it detects you exiting the REM cycle of your sleep it will gently wake you up.
There are some problems with some models of phones that require the phone doesn’t go to sleep for the sampling of the accelerometer. However the workaround of leaving the phone on is fairly benign as it’s the time the phone is attached to the charging cable. Also there has been an update in the last few days which increases the accuracy of movement detection. You even get a nice graph of your movements over the night.
The app also has a number of other features including a useful muting of all ringtones while you are asleep as well a feature I haven’t tried that attempts to stop you snoring by giving you an acoustic nudge.
As I’ve gotten older I’ve often found myself waking before the alarm, however when I don’t the waking I’ve gotten from the gentle increasing alarm sound has been a lot less jaring than John Humphrys suddenly berating some politician. I have noticed I’m remembering my dreams more vividly the last few days but I suspect I need a few more data points to see if it is due to the app. Either way the trail version is free and I can heartily recommend giving it a try.
3 March 2010, 12:40 pm
“We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”
- Steve Jobs, Apple
With the embers of the SCO’s legal shenanigans slowly dieing down we were long overdue for the next round of legal attacks on Free Software. We all knew it was coming, having failed with spurious copyright claims the next tool the enemies of free software would employ would be patents. The opening salvo came from Microsoft when they sued Tom Tom for making their devices interoperable with the worlds most used operating system. It was a short skirmish that ended in a settlement and no clear precedent set, and the usual technical workarounds. However free software advocates knew that bigger patent threats were out there and have been preparing for the next round. The biggest fear would be a patent troll would assert rights over free software that would be hard to defend against with counter suites. As it happens the next enemy of free software is not a troll but the polo-neck wearing lawyers of Cupertino.
Apple is obviously worried by the rise of Google’s Android smart phone operating system and has decided to protect it’s market share by suing the competition for patent infringement. While Apple haven’t invented the smart phone (much like they didn’t invent the MP3 player) they were the company that brought smart phones to the mainstream. It’s obviously an area they wish to monopolise.
Regular readers will be aware of the many problems with patents, especially as they relate to software. Patent’s are meant to be awarded for novel and innovative solutions to problems and give the inventor a limited time to monopolise those inventions in return for making the details public and growing the corpus of human knowledge. Patent’s are routine in areas like biotech where companies get a number of years to sell their drugs at higher prices to recoup the cost of development before the patent expires and everyone can make them. The problem with software patents is they are rarely novel and innovative, they are usually just a codification of commonly used techniques written up in patent language and submitted to the relevant authorities.
Apple have listed 20 patents in their suit. They include such innovations as turning off the camera when power is low. Others are more technical like the concept of using objects to manage graphical elements on a display. Needless to say none of them look especially novel and hopefully most will get invalidated now the legions of free software users that were so instrumental in researching the flaws in the SCO case turn their attention to finding prior art. There is also the possibility the Open Innovation Network will step in and counter-sue with it’s broad range of defencive patents. Unlike a patent troll who has nothing to loose Apple could have it’s injunctions served against shipping products if they (as is likely) infringe.
It will be a few days before all the key players make clear how they are going to respond to Apple’s legal attacks. It’s a fight that is likely to get fairly nasty given the stakes involved. In the meantime any pretence that Apple are a company that is friendly towards free software is should have demolished by their action yesterday.
1 March 2010, 11:26 am
In many ways February has been a bit of bumpy month, the sort when your never quite sure if your going to hit take-off speed for the year. Luckily it’s a short month and this morning I cycled out into bright sunshine on my new bike.
Since the death of my old bike I’ve been muddling along with walking in and using the bike my Dad loaned me. All too often I’ve taken the easier car route and driven the 1 mile (as opposed to 4 mile bike route) to work. However I now have a bright new shiny, off road, well geared and well braked Giant Talon 1 and no more excuses for taking the easier route in. Hopefully I can start reducing the post-Christmas spread that I’ve obtained over the winter months.
26 February 2010, 2:15 pm
I have returned to my clean shaved form. As the mornings get lighter and winter starts to recede I prefer my whole face to take advantage of the additional sunlight. I fairly certain I shall return to bearded form next winter.
Today has been clear-out day at work. Much of the activity has been stymied by the lack of skip which was due to be delivered this morning. I’ve done my best to return spare staplers and folders and the like to the stationary cupboard. I’ve also managed to snaffle a rather nice wide screen monitor for my principle display. The only downside is dragging windows across from the normal aspect monitor on the left can result in ugliness (and the odd feeling the fonts have changed). However as the one directly front of my face is the one I stare at the most I’m willing to live with that.
I am a little dismayed by the amount of stuff going into the skip though. I’ve been assured the electronic stuff won’t end up in landfill but I don’t know if that just means it will get shipped to India or China for dismantling. I can see why it’s not worth keeping the base units (or even scavenging the memory) but I’m fighting the thought that something better could be done with all that hardware. I have rescued an EeePC which will put into service as a router/access point as it’s a fairly low power device.
22 February 2010, 9:25 pm
We have just returned from a weekend in the Peak District, ostensibly for walking although we stayed on for extra loafing and a Goose dinner on Sunday. The event is a regular birthday celebration/mass catering event held in various youth hostels near various peaks over the years. This was my second time attending and it was most agreeable.
The walking element of the weekend included climbing a snow covered Kinder Scout. Unlike previous years I wasn’t failed by poor fitting shoes or a particularly steep ascent so enjoyed the fresh air all the more. I can’t help feeling the large amount of walking I do around Cambridge is essentially useless as a preparation for anything with slopes. Snowden is currently the next beast to conqueror although schedules are starting to fill up.
The journey home did start with a mini-Volkswagen adventure. The road we had followed on the way looked clear the way back. Indeed most of the rolling hills were carefully navigated by following the clear black tire tracks. Unfortunately the final climb up the highest local hillock had a few un-thawed regions which led to a lose of grip before cresting the hill. A vaguely concerning controlled skid backwards as gravity re-asserted itself over momentum eventually rested the car across the whole road. Luckily the road was used by locals with slightly more appropriate 4×4s. In the end we were unable to tow the car up the hill so I tenderly reversed it to the bottom of the hill before a final 3 point turn to take us back the way we came. The locals where very nice about helping but I’m not sure if they were exchanging looks with each other judging the silly southerner in his impractical car. There are signs in the Peaks that instruct you to follow the damn diversion signs and ignore what the Sat-Nav tells you to do, I suspect I fell into the same admonished category.
16 February 2010, 11:09 am
The mystical JJ Abrams series Lost has entered it’s sixth and final season. I’ve been a long time fan of show and remember spending many evenings discussing episodes with Andy back in Manchester. While many stopped watching the show after concluding the writers where just making stuff up while they went along I’ve stayed loyal. While I find the meta-analysis of clues and references an interesting game I’ve always found the character development and acting the main enjoyable factor.
Even so while the show may have made stuff up on the hop (the mysterious numbers are one documented example) it has always consistently followed strong themes. One of the themes I have enjoyed is the way the series has played with time. The first season made extensive use of flashbacks and over the seasons there has been use of flash-forwards and even time travel. The final season has started using alternate time-lines. Of course these time lines may be more closely related than we suppose, I’m assuming this is part of this seasons arc.
TV Sci-Fi has come along way since the Babylon 5 made a point of developing a series story arc. It’s nice to see the form is well embedded and surviving well in the 21st century. I suspect Lost could have pushed for a seventh or possibly eighth season but given the vagaries of TV commissioning it makes sense to bring the series to a close now. After all not many people will buy the box set of a series that doesn’t come to some sort of conclusion (Firefly being a notable exception on my DVD shelf).
Episode 4 of Season 6, “The Substitute” airs somewhere tonight
14 February 2010, 12:32 pm
We currently have 3 large Geese hanging up in our garage. They were locally sourced (from next door) and are slow grown organically fed birds. The only real downside of all this direct food supply is the requirement to pluck and draw them before we can eat them. We are taking them with us to the peaks next weekend for Sunday lunch for a small multitude. This will technically increase the food miles they have travelled, but at least they will be direct food miles rather than bouncing from farm to distribution centre before ending up on the plate.
12 February 2010, 11:18 am
I’ve been spending the last week hacking around in Java. One of the components of the product I develop is the open source OpenNMS. As I’ve mentioned before it’s been lightly modified by myself to blend in better with our code mainly in the JSP department for it’s web interface. Last week I discovered I needed to make a slightly deeper change to the code to export some more data to it’s scripting interface.
While I was exploring the code base and scratching my head at some of the exceptions being thrown I thought I’d have yet another go at making my Java development environment a little more integrated than binding the build script to “C-c c”.
So far I have a couple of observations about Java code. The first is that it never seems to do very much. As you navigate the code base you tend to find a lot of simple skeleton classes, usually working as simple adaptors between one framework and the next. Thanks to Java’s strong support for generics and interfaces you often find yourself looking at a class wondering what else it might do. None of this is helped by Java’s standard/deep/directory/naming/strategy/of/doom. My usual tools of a decent programmers editor and grep start to show their limitations. Java is a language that is designed to be serviced by a full IDE to help you make sense of the whole system.
Having previously tried and failed to get JDEE working I thought I would capitulate and try Eclipse. I blithely thought that given the fact it’s the standard Java developers tool with a long development history it would Just Work ™. I was to be sorely disappointed.
I tried several different versions on both my home Gentoo machine as well as various PPA based versions on my work Ubuntu setup. A lot of times it failed to start up due to some Mozilla dependency issues and when I did finally get it started I couldn’t get any of the plugins to install. The entire Eclipse stack is designed around the concept of plugins and it seems every Java framework comes with it’s own additional plugin for Eclipse. Without the plugins I wasn’t able to get a working build or any sort of source level debugging. Eventually I had to concede defeat and bin the IDE approach and return to some tedious grep work and piece together the structure of the software by hand so I could finally crank out what in the end was a fairly simple patch. I doubt I shall return to Eclipse.
I did have a brief tinker with JDEE which at least installed better from it’s SVN repo (needing a one line patch). However the documentation is a little sparse on how to import an existing large project into it’s view of the world. Annoyingly potentially useful links like the FAQ referenced on the main site lead to dead ends. I never got to the point of seeing if I had a working Java GUD integration. I hope to revisit JDEE in the future when I’m a little less pressed for time at work. It’s hard to work up the enthusiasm for plumbing in support for a language you never intend to use for fun in your own time.
1 February 2010, 11:51 am
We had the slightly odd couple of Lee and TJ visiting the country house this weekend. Lee who hadn’t seen more than the front of the new place since we moved was suitably impressed by scope of the place, probably less so by the even grander plans we have for it.
As they arrived late Friday evening (having negotiated the rather unhelpful closure of the A14) we only got round to a late dinner. However we did take the opportunity to explore a few bottles from my recent delivery. Words like “complexity” were used a lot to describe the rather tasty bottle of Rijoca from the collection. Despite the switch to port as the evening progressed past the small hours we still managed to keep stocks vaguely in shape. Unlike the previous port session with Rich the week before we actually put the bottle back with some contents still in it!
I had a brief excursion during the day on Saturday to drop my parents off at the airport for their late booking ski holiday. Now they are “retired” (whatever that means these days) they are fully taking advantage of the ability to whizz away for snow at the last minute.
Our plans for Saturday mainly revolved around taking advantage of the lovely scenic route for a walk into town via a couple of pubs. Despite making some friends in the second pub and participating in a few drinking games for birthday celebration purposes we still had the wherewithal to leave by 7pm and get home with time to cook some lovely fillet steaks with sweet potatoes and mash. We may of been slightly tipsy, but at least we were being responsibly tipsy!
We didn’t actually get around to discussing Stag plans, allegedly the purpose of the visit, until Sunday morning. If you haven’t heard from my best men by the end of February feel free to poke them into action by me. I should be making the return journey sometime in March. I shall also most likely be up around the early May bank holiday for OggCamp, schedules permitting.
