Alex's Adventures on the Infobahn - android

Nexus of possibilities

2012-01-06T22:47:00+00:00

Looking back the last few months I notice every post has been about family and parenthood. Time to redress the balance a little and add some geek friendly contents.

After Christmas I indulged myself with a new phone. When I got the HTC Hero I'd deliberately skipped the first generation of Android phones to give a chance for the hardware to mature. I also made the rash promise it would be my last phone for some time. As it happens I think 2.5 years is a fairly good innings for a piece of technology where the innovation cycle is measured in months. I still have the Hero but now it's not my main phone I can afford to be a bit more experimental with the software I put on it.

There were a couple of changes to my approach to choosing a new phone this cycle. The first was I brought it outright off-contract. Although I suspect I could get it slightly cheaper overall through a phone contract there are some non-financial downsides to the contract approach. The first is the operator takes the view that the phone belongs to them so they can install (and prevent you removing) what they like. The recent Carrier IQ controversy should certainly act as a salient reminder that the mobile phone companies do not have your interests closest to their hearts. The second is lack of flexibility. Although thanks to Ofcom we have number portability most people are only able to take advantage of it at contract break points. The operators know this and off course do their very best to keep you tied in to their deals. Now I'm off contract I'm currently paying £10/month for unlimited data and all the calls/texts I use. They have to work doubly hard to keep me as a customer as I can jump ship at any point. That flexibility is more than worth the up-front cost of paying for the phone in full.

As far as choice there was only really one in the frame. Much as I like Android and it's open-source nature it does suffer from a problem due to that openness. Although it's heartening to see manufacturers are starting to relent and cease the practice of locking boot-loaders to prevent 3rd party firmware there are still problems in their support. They tend to stop updating the firmware shortly after they stop manufacturing the phone. Some manufacturers also have a hard time meeting their GPL obligations which makes open source support for the hardware a lot harder. As a result I decided to wait for the next in the Google Nexus series which ships with the latest release of Android, Ice Cream Sandwich.

Initial impressions of the new phone are good. The phone is a little bigger than the Hero but pretty much 100% screen with more than a few hints of Star Trek data pad ;-). The Super AMOLED display looks very clear and crisp with both photos and video. The phone is very nippy thanks to the accelerated 3D hardware and duel core processor. The camera is certainly an improvement on the Hero and with the LED flash is close to achieving the quality I was used to on my old Sony K750. The A-GPS also acquires location a lot faster than the Hero. In fact a lot of things I thought were app problems have cleared up when presented with faster hardware. All in all I'm very happy with the Galaxy Nexus and think it easily stacks up against any iPhone you might want to compare it with.

Simple State Machines and Other Things I Have Learnt

2011-12-27T13:27:00+00:00

We've just returned from 3 days at Fliss' Mum's house. Although we are still fairly sleep deprived things were made a lot easier by the presence of aunts and grandmothers who offered to take turns tending to the baby. This included one of those rarest of things, time for the two of us spend together without any other distractions. My life has now been reduced to a fairly simple state machine. There are predominantly 3 activities, for now ignoring the fourth: "At Work" which won't kick in until the 10th.

Checking baby is happy

This involves running though a fairly simple set of checks. Is the baby too hot or cold? Is the baby clean? Is the baby hungry?

I have to confess I have quickly developed the parental habit of sniffing around the crotch area of the baby. It is so far the fastest and most effective way of telling if a change is required.

Ursula is starting show interest in things so occasionally the correct action is just to walk around a bit so she can look at new stuff. I have no idea how her brain is assimilating all the knowledge of corners and ceilings (being areas of contrast she can make out) but it could possibly point to a future career as a engineer ;-)

Checking Mummy is happy

Invariably the baby's internal state eventually resolves to "Hungry" which requires it to be passed to Mum for feeding. Although we have been expressing and trying bottle feeds at the moment she gulps way to fast and invariably throws most of it up after the feed. So far we have found feeding "at source" is generally the most effective. However it does tend to immobilise Mum while she feeds so it falls to me to fetch and carry to ensure as many useful things are within reach when required.

Do everything else

The general order being cleaning, preparing food, household chores and finally if I'm lucky something else. Last night I did get a few hours to play through some of the latest CoD which Santa delivered over Christmas. I do harbour some hope of doing some recreational coding over the next few days although my start-up latency is so high that the state machine is often reset before I get into anything worthwhile.

The last few weeks have thrown up a few more interesting discoveries though. One of the more recent ones is that white noise is very restful for babies. We've managed to extend naps in the stroller/bassinet from around 5 minutes to up to 45 minutes by running a white noise app on the phone. My favourite Android app so far is Chromadoze which lovely little ope source app with a rather funky main display for setting the frequency balance of the noise. If I get a chance I may have a play at adding some features more aimed at soothing babies.

Phone v3.0

2011-01-07T17:56:00+00:00

I went to the pub last night with some of the ex-Transitive crew who have migrated south. It was a fun night of over the top geekery of the kind you only really get when people like to discuss processor architectures and the pros and cons of various language standards updates. For example I found out they have stuffed lambda functions into the growing list of functionality handled by the C++ behemoth. At some point we did whip out our phones.

I had resigned myself to the fact the Android 2.1 update was the last one HTC would be supplying for my Hero. So I finally got around to rooting my phone.

The process is fairly simple but I did have to spend some time hunting and sifting through numerous guides to rooting. One thing I didn't want to be forced to do was downgrade my system image just to root it. In the end I followed this guide which uses Universal Androot. It took a couple of attempts to work but once it did it was fairly obvious the phone had been rooted.

Instead of using the on board terminal emulator I used "adb shell" from my desktop to flash the recovery image. I had a small panic when the process reported all sorts of read/write errors and looked like it had broken. In the end I rebooted the phone (holding my breath) and tried again and it worked fine.

I chose the VillianROM FroydVillain as a replacement ROM. It's based on the CyanogenMod but with a moderately customised kernel and a few additional packages. The process is fairly simple but it does wipe all your current settings and apps. It's extremely advisable to back-up all your data before you go down this road.

First impressions are fairly good. The phone certainly seems a lot snappier but it's hard to know without having a second phone to hand to do side to side comparisons. I dumped the "Launcher Pro" launcher and installed the open source ADWLauncher instead as I was getting pissed off with constant nagging to upgrade to the Pro version every time I tried do something. About the only thing I miss from the old HTC Sense setup is HTC's clock widget/alarm/timer/countdown.

I suspect if I'm going to do any hacking on the low level I'd switch to using CyanogenMod as most of the derived ROMS aren't exactly source driven. However I need to start writing some proper Android Apps first. However I'm mainly just happy not to be reliant on my network/phone manufacturer to be able to update my phone. People running older Androids might find this article slightly worrying. While the iPhone is never going to be the device for me the fact they centrally manage updates rather than delegating to vendors who may or may not care means they do actually role out security updates. Given a modern smart phone contains so much personal data it does make one think.

A few paragraphs

2010-07-26T10:33:00+01:00

There are a number of potential topics for blog posts swirling in my brain which I'm not going to have time to write. I shall therefor attempt to address each on in paragraph form (Twitter style is a little too brief for me).

We were at Maelstrom this weekend. We splashed out for a van so we could take our proper IC tent to the event which we also slept in. Although our normal sleeping tent is quite spacious the IC tent is a lot more so and benefits from not broiling you in your sleeping bag when the sun rises.

I tried Google's Navigation mode on my software pimped up Hero. I can see why the shares in TomTom and Garmin shares fell so sharply on it's announcement. I particularly liked the street view picture that's presented at the end of the journey for extra confirmation. I predict the era of the dedicated GPS road navigation unit is coming to an end - to be replaced by multi-functional smart phone type data pads.

I awoke this morning to the latest Wikileaks data dump as reported by the Guardian. I can understand why the armed forces are upset about this but it's really an OpSec fail on their part that someone can extract that much data from their systems. Going after Wikileaks will ultimately be a futile exercise. Also baring a live twitter feed of current manoeuvres I'm not sure there should be an expectation of secrecy for historical military data. Transparency is coming to government which I think is a good thing, why not the military? At the same time we need to take some steps to educate the public on the limits of data. If people consider an entry in a database as equating to actual truth on the ground they are going to find themselves disappointed.

We watched the latest Grand Moff/Gatiss collaboration on TV last night. Although the final third had us shouting at the TV for the slowness of the protagonists to put two and two together overall we liked it. The text overlays were fun and the writing has done a good job of bringing the characters forward into the 21st century. We shall be watching the rest of the series.

New Phone

2010-07-22T14:03:00+01:00

One of the advantages of the current bread of smart phones is they are field upgradable. As so much of their functionality is basically software it makes no sense to treat the phone as a static product once it leaves the factory gates. Coupled with the rapid development of the Android OS means that updating the system firmware can result in a much improved experience without having to buy new hardware.

My phone, an HTC Hero, was one of the second generation Android phones. It's a nice phone with a solid feel and nice touchscreen and display. However the default system software is the now rather old Android 1.5. It has been a continual source of frustration watching other phones get their updates to more recent versions while HTC continually slipped the release dates. As the base OS is all open source one might wonder what took them so long. Part of it might be due to the need to integrate HTC's Sense layer with Android. A large part is no doubt due to the fact that by not submitting changes to the kernel upstream the company gets to keep the burden of porting the drivers to a newer kernels. It's not entirely HTC's fault, Google can take some of the blame for developing a power management infrastructure behind closed doors and being surprised the kernel developers weren't going to just dump Wavelocks into their carefully engineered kernel. Eventually the embedded world will wake up to the cost of not working with upstream but I predict it will be a while yet.

The greatest reason is most likely that the bulk of HTC's engineering resources will be working on the software for their latest phones and therefore making older phones work better is lower in their priorities. Unfortunately without jumping through hoops to install community firmware I was dependant on HTC to provide the update. While I was relaxed about getting a locked down phone (compared to a locked down PC) the experience has reminded me there are other reasons to prefer open systems than just a desire to hack about on them.

Unfortunately the promised Over The Air (OTA) update never arrived on my phone so I had to bootstrap the upgrade by manually updating to the next minor version. This took me two days of fighting with various flavours of Windows (install, un-install, re-install in a different order, arrggghg!) and HTC's rather crappy update tool. However once done the notification duly arrived and 3 phone reboots later I had a brand new spiffy Android 2.1 phone.

First impressions are good. The responsiveness seems a lot better and the Google applications all offer significant improvements to the 1.5 based ones. While the hardware has always supported multi-touch the older Android release couldn't take advantage of it. Now I can quickly switch between the many work spaces with a quick pinching motion. It really does feel like getting a new phone.

App Review: Smart Alarm Clock

2010-03-05T11:10:00+00:00

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.

Free Software legal battles version 2

2010-03-03T12:40:00+00:00

"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.

Post Travel Slump

2009-12-07T13:51:00+00:00

I got back from my Hungarian adventures at a slightly more reasonable time than Wednesday mornings departure. Never the less I find travel still zaps the energy out of me. On Friday night I managed to eat dinner before crawling upstairs and passing out.

Saturday has been ably documented elsewhere and basically involved a large amount of DVD watching. I was twiddling with my nascent Android application in the background but until I can make sense out of JDB and it's associated emacs GUD bindings it's going to be slow progress. Once I've figured out how to make breakpoints actually work as well as show position in the Android base code hopefully things will progress faster.

Sunday involved much de-construction as we took down the metal fencing at the back of the property. We are planning on replacing the boundary with more aesthetically pleasing (and fruitful) bushes. Once that was done I was minded to have a final push at getting my playlist patch into Rockbox. I also did my bit testing another outside contributors better solution to my stale hacky m4a mdat patch. I can appreciate Juliusz' frustrations with getting things into Rockbox. It's a great project and it's amazing we have truly free firmware we can install on a variety of bits of hardware. However it's by far and away one of the hardest communities I've had to deal with as a casual contributor. I don't know if the project suffers as a result, it's one of those hard to quantify things. I suspect the bar is pretty high anyway as the embedded nature probably rules out a lot of people used to desktop development unless they are really keen to dig into and learn the code.

Finding Open Source Android applications

2009-10-21T19:00:00+01:00

I love my HTC Hero and growing number of applications that are available for it. However the marketplace really doesn't make clear the difference between free (as in beer) and free (as in freedom). For all sorts of reasons I'd like to be sure the code running on my new favourite device is Open Source. I've been scratching my head about the best way to find a decent applications and had been throwing all sorts of queries at Google and generally getting lost in a sea of links. A lot were irrelevant as proprietary apps get mentioned on news sites with Open Source sections.

Then I had a slight brainwave (you wondered what the burning smell was?). Seeing as the most important thing is having available source code I skipped the main Google index and used their excellent code search. As every Android application contains an XML file called "AndroidManifest.xml" every thing else is a process of refinement.