Google Wave

I got me an invitation to Google Wave from Ronny Ager-Wick over at the PHRUG (Philippine Ruby Users Group) mailing list. Thanks again, Ronny! I haven’t really yet been able to use it as Google intended, although I suppose that’ll come as I use it more. In the meantime, some first impressions:

It imported the contacts in my GMail address book who are also in Wave. As far as I can tell, not all of them have GMail addresses but I could be wrong, haven’t asked all of them yet. In fact, Ronny, who sent me my invitation, uses his develo.ltd.uk address on PHRUG. However, that seems to be the only integration with GMail — Wave doesn’t send me notifications of new waves, for instance, so I have to keep another Firefox tab open just for Wave.

To get me started, Ronny recommended a Wave robot, elizarobot@appspot.com — it’s not very smart, however. Check out this dialog:

Eliza the Robot Shrink: How are you? Tell me… 

me:  Refreshed, just got up from a nap.

Eliza the Robot Shrink: I’m not sure whether I understand you!

me:  Gosh, you’re not as smart as some Eliza implementations I’ve come across.

Eliza the Robot Shrink: Do you like to have come across?

Eliza the Robot Shrink might not be an official Wave robot, but still, the dialog shows you that you’re better off waving with a real person.

The Reply function can also be confusing. If you use the Reply button at the top of  the wave window, you get a wave at the top level. If you hover your mouse at the bottom of the wave, the border turns to a double-line, and you can click it to compose a reply that’ll be one level below that wave — i.e., indented a single tab setting. That’s about as deep as the threading goes, at least in my situation — in other words, if I click on the bottom border of a wave that’s already indented, the reply is at the same level as that wave.

You can attach files to your waves. Now it will be interesting to find out how this works. With email, you attach a file (e.g., a document, graphic image, or presentation) to colleagues, then each downloads it,  emails comments, and the original source of the file updates it and uploads it again. I created a wave with an .RTF attached, modified the RTF, and the modifications came through. This means an end to the back-and-forth uploading and downloading and re-uploading and re-downloading that email requires.

More on Wave as I use it as designed. I expect to be using it seriously over the next few days.

In the meantime, I don’t have any invites yet to give out, so please don’t ask. When I do get the ability to give them out, you’ll hear from it here.

Why Max?

Cyberpress held a forum Friday last week on the topic “Why WiMax?”. The question, in more detail: “Is this really the technology that will bring affordable and reliable Internet connection to more and more homes in the Philippines? What are useful qualities of WiMAX versus other wireless technologies?” This was held at Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf at A.Venue on Makati Avenue, with presenters from Intel Philippines, Globe Telecoms, and SMART Communications. Also present were executives from Lenovo, Acer, and HP (through their PR agency). I expect the proceedings to be posted on the Cyberpress Website “soon” so I’ll go straight to a question and two comments I made during the forum. I did warn especially the two telcos present that they might not like the second comment.

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Intermec´s CN50, a Rugged Mobile Device

It looks like a cell phone, and in fact features 3.75G HSUPA connectivity and even has an accelerometer to set the display to portrait or landscape depending on how you´re holding it. It´s also got BlueTooth and WiFi, a 3.1 megapixel auto-focusing color camera with flash — features that would put this gizmo in the class of the Sony-Ericcson Xperia, Apple´s iPhone, or most of HTC´s mobiles. But do any of these have a main processor and a second processor just for the 3.75G radio? And that´s just the beginning — add an integrated scanner capable of 1D and 2D barcodes and support for Enhanced Mobile Document Imaging that enables users to capture high quality full-page document images on the move. Throw in an integrated digital compass and GPS radio. It can survive a 5-foot drop, justifying Intermec´s claims of a rugged mobile device. In fact, if you look at the Intermec web page on the CN50, its title is ¨CN50 Mobile Computer | CN50 Computer¨ — not ¨CN50 cell phone¨, and it mentions ¨cell phone¨ third from last in the list of features.

Who´s the target market for such a beast? Certainly not the preppie or the yuppie, or even the senior executive. In fact, Jack Tay, Intermec Regional Marketing Manager for Asia, whipped out a Samsung during his presentation. That market would be hard-pressed to justify the US$2,500 price tag. No, the target users are field personnel, especially those who work in harsh environments. Utilities, for one, can outfit their meter readers with the CN50, for scanning the meters. For more on the CN50 and its applications, visit link above.  Intermec products are distributed in the Philippines by MSI-ECS (Phils), Inc. The CN50 will be available in the Philippines from the 31st of August.

I´d like to thank Anj Segovia, MarComm Assistant at MSI-ECS; Maurice A. Altar, AVP-Marketing and Communications, MSI-ECS; and Jack Tay for inviting me to the launch. I also happened to win a Buffalo external hard drive at the raffle, and am in the process of putting it through its paces. Short shrift: It works in all my three operating systems: Windows Vista Starter, Windows 7 Beta, and OpenSolaris.

Installed OpenSolaris Development Desktop

I used the instructions here. uname -a gives me SunOS opensolaris-tp 5.11 snv_118 i86pc i386 i86pc Solaris, previous one was svn_111b. This build seems even more stable than 111b, which would lock up on the strangest occurences — e.g., changing the size of a FireFox window playing a Flash video. When I closed the lid, I would get the password prompt to unlock the screen but it would stay there, covering everything under it. Sure, I could log off, then log on again but that´s a workaround, not a solution. This time, with the development build, I can close the lid, open it up again to get the unlock screen, and it would go away. No lock-ups either on Flash or other videos. My sound card also seems to be supported, no more need for the OpenSound drivers. I couldn´t complete the instructions though — pfexec pkg install verm-b111-i386 — because it would time out on SUNWgnome-commander, but I guess I can live with that for now.

 Life keeps getting better.

Dragging URLs in Firefox

Have you ever dragged a URL onto a Firefox tab — the wrong tab? For instance, I’ve got two links from Free Software Daily through Google Reader. I want to read the full story, in the same tab. Instead of copy-paste, I prefer to drag the URL by clicking on it and dragging it to its own tab. Sometimes though my eyes deceive me, and I drag a URL to the next tab. Then I discovered that I could drag the URL to the location bar. No more dragging to the wrong tab for me.

As an aside, I was at first disappointed that IE 8 wouldn’t let me do the same thing. It turns out that I have to drag the URL to the menu bar.

Nintendo/C64 purse — every geekette should have one

Red Box’s user interface

Late last month, Epson Philippines treated Cyberpress to a night at Red Box. Thanks to Hideto Nakamura, President;  Eduardo “Ed” Bonoan, Senior General Manager; Donna Ferro, General Manager; and the rest of the Epson Philippines staff for a rocking good time. Ed and I chatted a while, observing that the user interface of the videoke software was by-the-numbers — i.e., to get to the Artists menu, you’d press a number (6?) on the remote control, then ‘1′ for those artists whose names begin with the letter ‘A’, ‘2′ for ‘B’ (or something like that — I’m working off my failing memory here). How primitive, we agreed, likening it to the old green-screen terminals — never mind that the screen was colored. We joked that the interface was so 20th century, and it needed a 21st century refresh. Like maybe a touch screen. To be fair, the song title search is a little more “modern”: press “23″ to get song titles starting ‘W’, but instead of pressing enter, keep spelling out a part of the song title; “15″ for ‘O’, then “14″ for ‘N’. At that point, you can press the Enter button to get songs starting with “WON”. As an aside, I was looking for The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” but their publisher has refused to license their songs to videoke bars. Oh well…

A few weeks later, I find instructions — or maybe more precisely, a build log — for a DIY multi-touch surface-like computer. The authors say it took them about two weeks, some of which was spent in the error part of trial-and-error.

Now here’s a challenge — anyone care to drive their Magic Sings with one of these puppies?

Geek Replaces Lost Finger With 2GB USB Finger

The Borg are here.

<excerpt>
You’ve heard of USB thumb drives, but you likely have not considered the real thing - a lost digit replaced by a USB Flash drive.
</excerpt>

Finnish programmer Jerry Jalava lost his left ring finger in a motorcycle accident and doctors treating him joked that he should replace his lost finger with a USB “finger drive”. So what else is a Geek to do? Jalava’s replacement finger looks like the real thing, except that it’s detachable, and he leaves it in his computer’s USB slot.

<excerpt>
The Finnish programmer plans to “upgrade” his finger in the future with one that has a removable fingertip, an RFID tag and more storage space.
</excerpt>

If I were to get a similar replacement, I’d get an 8GB (at least) and install a minimal Free Unix-like OS on it.

He’s not likely to forget to “safely remove” his USB drive.

Screen brightness on ThinkPad SL400

In an earlier post, I wrote that when I plugged in the ThinkPad, the screen screamed at me — i.e., it became considerably and uncomfortably brighter. I found out a few weeks ago that I could change this behavior. All I had to do in Windows (both Vista Starter and 7 beta) was right click on the battery icon on the system tray, then adjust the screen brightness when the TP’s plugged in. Works in OpenSolaris, too.

So that’s one minor annoyance out of the way.

Netbooks for sale at grocery

I dropped by the grocery at Pioneer Center and found a booth selling computer equipment and supplies. The equipment included a couple of netbooks — the Acer One and the Asus Eee PC — in various configurations, starting at about PhP12,000. The MSI Wind PC, the one built around a motherboard with Splashtop, was for sale for about PhP12,000, a hefty PhP3,000 less than the price at the malls. Splashtop is a mini-OS in ROM that takes you to a Web browser, email client, and Instant Messenger client within five seconds or so of bootup. I have a Flash video of Splashtop in action from my presentation at Y4IT, also available on an earlier post in this blog.

I daresay that netbooks are moving into the same territory as household appliances such as microwave ovens and air conditioners, which are also available at the Pioneer Center grocery. The next time you pop in for your week’s supply of milk, oat meal, and meusli, don’t be surprised if you bring home instead a netbook, and forget one or all of the other items. Anyone else see netbooks in a grocery in your area?

Strange results from OSol Disk Usage Analyzer

Disk Usage Analyzer says that my total filesystem capacity is 464.4 GB. That’s really odd, because my hard drive is on 160GB, and I’ve split that almost evenly between Vista and OpenSolaris. So I should only have about 80GB. Could this be why BeleniX barfs on it?

WiFi, OpenSolaris, and the ThinkPad SL400

One issue I was having with my WiFi was that on bootup, it connected to my NETGEAR wireless access point (AP) but I wasn’t connecting to any Internet sites. When I noticed this, the first thing I did on startup was open up a terminal window and ping google.com. I’d get an unknown host error, which means something with the DNS. I’d then bring up inetmenu and apply DHCP on iwh0, my wireless interface. That worked, but it was a pain because my wireless should go up without manual intervention.

So, I moved around the lines in my /etc/driver_aliases so that iwh “pciex8086,4237″ would be the first line, and so far that seems to have done it.

OpenSolaris on TP SL400: WiFi and audio now working

Life keeps getting better: took some work, but I finally got WiFi and audio working on my ThinkPad SL400. The WiFi took more work than it should’ve because the iwh driver was loaded but wasn’t working. Turned out that alias in /etc/driver_aliases had parameters that OpenSolaris couldn’t work with: pciex8086,4232 and pciex8086,4235; I added a line that read pciex8086,4237, and my WiFi light went on. The Network Interface Priorities icon on my toolbar needed a bit more tweaking because the priority interface was my wired Ethernet. Not really a big deal except that it would try to use that first, time out after several seconds, then try the wireless. Switching the priorities around saved me some time connecting to the Net.

As to the sound, hdaudio was loaded as the sound driver but I wasn’t getting any sound.  OpenSound sounded (no pun intended) like the solution. At first, it complained that “hdaudio” was already in use as a driver or alias, so I edited /etc/driver_aliases again and removed the entry for hdaudio. Tried OpenSound again, and this time it said it couldn’t install osscore but completed the installation anyway. osstest confirmed that the installation did indeed complete. Now I can listen to my CDs or MP3 files, and I can view YouTube videos.

So, I’ve got the two most important features enabled: WiFi and audio. Next up,  getting the UltraNav scroll feature to work.

More on Solaris on SL400

My third attempt finally worked, although technically, it may well count as the first since I was trying to install BeleniX the other two times. This time, I downloaded the OpenSolaris combo live and installation CD, and noted that it recognized my wired Ethernet. It did have issues with sound and WiFi though, although I figured that the wired Ethernet meant I could solve those eventually. The thing is, the Intel WiFi Link 5100 is supposed to be handled by the iwh driver, which is supposed to be loaded in the kernel but it doesn’t seem to be detected. Saw somewhere that an incorrect entry in device_aliases (can’t seem to find it on my drive at the moment) and correcting that could solve the wireless thingy.  And what I can’t figure out is why OpenSolaris would install but BeleniX would not. Looks like something the BeleniX project should look into. Unfortunately, the error that BeleniX displays stays onscreen for only a few seconds, not enough time for me to take note and report to the BeleniX team.

I’ve already installed and tried out OpenOffice.org and VirtualBox. It was due to the latter that I discovered I had a 64-bit OS.

Having used DesktopBSD and KDE, I’m still finding my way around GNOME. What I liked about DesktopBSD was its graphical mount tool. If GNOME has one, I still haven’t found it. Of course, there’s always the command line. And GNOME does automatically mount my removable media, i.e., CD/DVD and flash drives, and display icons on the desktop.

As to sound, I tried the opensound driver but still no joy. Not a high priority at the moment but I still would like to get sound in OpenSolaris eventually.

Speaking of which, I don’t know if it had anything to do with Vista, but I first booted to my Vista partition earlier, then rebooted to Solaris, and couldn’t get google and fastmail.fm resolved. I then shut down, thinking there was some hardware that Vista’s settings survived the restart, but still no google or fastmail.fm. So, I manually dropped dhcp on gre0, then started it again. That did it. Sure hope I don’t have to do that often

 So far, so good. When I solve the sound and, especially, the WiFi problems, it’ll be all good.

Installed OpenSolaris on ThinkPad SL400!

Quick update: I managed to install OpenSolaris 2008.11 on this ThinkPad SL400. Still have to get sound and WiFi working though. I’ve gotten the Flash plug-in installed on FireFox, and I’m in the process of installing OpenOffice.org as I write this.

LG KU380 — 3G for the masses

Six months ago, C.U.R.E. held a party at the Rockwell Tent and gave away some 750 cell phones in a “raffle”. Since there were about that many guests, the raffle was really for who would get the phones first. They were the LG KU380, billed as “3G for Everyone” because of the relatively low price (about PhP7,500, maybe less nowadays). Oddly enough, although it was a C.U.R.E. event, the handsets weren’t locked to C.U.R.E., which at that time went with the umobile brand. I used a Globe SIM until C.U.R.E. arranged for the delivery of a umobile SIM a few weeks later. I managed to run a few bandwidth tests with the SIM, and I’ll write about those in another post so I can focus on the KU380.

(An aside: “umobile” is spelled with the dots over the ‘u’, i.e., the umlaut.)

The KU380 is a slider phone with 3G, BlueTooth, a 1.3 megapixel camera, T9, Java, and the usual gaggle of software accessories such as an organizer and a multimedia player capable of playing MP3 and 3GP files. Speaking of which, you can set your ringtone to an MP3. The specs aren’t spectacular but the phone gives me what I need, and most of what I want.

Given Nokia’s worldwide market share, a comparison is inevitable. The only Nokia I have is a 6108 which is a hand-me-up from my niece in Australia. It’s an old GPRS model, maybe three years old, but the comparison isn’t as one-sided as you might think.

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One month (and counting) with the ThinkPad SL400

I got myself a Lenovo ThinkPad SL400 about a month ago – 2GB RAM, 160GB hard drive, 1.8GHz Intel T5670 Core 2 Duo, 14” screen, BlueTooth, WiFi, 4 USB ports, 1 FireWire port, Vista Starter. Good bargain, too – I paid much less than the PhP48,745 price quoted on the Philippine section of the Lenovo website. That price includes Vista Business and 1GB or RAM. For what I paid, I got a “free” Vista Starter pack and an additional 1GB of RAM. The specs should be good enough even for Vista Ultimate, although that’s not in my radar anytime soon. In fact, that has to do with my wish list. But more on that later.

Vista gives me more than decent performance, in part because the SL400 came without the usual demoware that slowed down “my” previous laptop, an Acer Aspire. (In case you’re wondering, that was a project-assigned laptop that I’ve since returned to its rightful owner.) Also, Starter lets me open only up to three applications at a time, although one of them is a “heavy” – Sun’s xVM VirtualBox virtualization software, which I use to run the OpenSolaris distro BeleniX and Windows Server 2003 with a 180-day evaluation license. Fortunately, I haven’t yet found a need to run more than three applications at a time. If I ever run into such a situation, I may use BeleniX under VirtualBox to run additional applications.

I get more than three hours of battery life on this machine. We conducted one-on-one orientation of a payroll software system my friends and I developed, moving from one office to another. We started about 2pm, finished up 5pm, and still had about an hour of battery life left. We were shutting the lid between visits to offices, which may have contributed to the low battery consumption. The next day, same thing: started at 9am, finished up about noon, and worked for more than one hour more on battery power before I had to resort to the power sockets. The current power plan was “Balanced”. We couldn’t conceive conducting that training without this laptop.

For all its virtues, I still wish it would run DesktopBSD or BeleniX. DtBSD does have a utility called ndisgen which creates a kernel-loadable module from a Windows driver. Thing is, I need the source code for the system, and the only instructions I’ve read indicate that I need to be connected to the Internet, which I can’t do because DtBSD doesn’t recognize my networking hardware. There may be a way around that, though, which I’ll try once things slow down a tad. BeleniX, on the other hand, did install although the bootup would stop with some error. I’ll have to run BeleniX under VirtualBox until I sort that problem out.

A minor annoyance: if I plug in the power adapter after using it in unplugged mode, the screen practically screams — i.e., it turns considerably brighter.

So for now, it’s Vista Starter for me, at least until the FreeBSD project can come up with drivers for the Intel WiFi Link 5100. Or, I could buy a WiFi adapter which has Free Software drivers, but that may negate the bargain. Still, I always believed that Software Freedom had a price. Nevertheless, even at the quoted price of PhP48,745, the SL400 is a bloatware-free bargain if you’re not too concerned about running a Free Software OS like I am. It took me some time to finance this purchase, but the wait was well worth it.