What I like about my macbookpro – Top 5

1. no more out of battery issues

I used to run Fedora 9 on a toshiba laptop to work on the train while commuting. Every so often I would have forgotten to charge it, and then it would shut down before I could do anything useful. Very annoying, compounded by the fact that the estimate of runtime tends to be wrong, so by the time it warns you that it will shut down soon, and you scramble to find the power supply to connect to, it will shut down right in front of you while you try to plug it in.

So yesterday was one of those mornings, my macbookpro had run out of power over night and was in hibernate mode. I noticed right before I was getting ready to get out the door. I connect the charger and get everything else ready and then disconnect and go after about 10min. Once in the train I open it up and am surprised to see a full 1.5 hours of runtime, and sure enough I can work all through my commute and have plenty of power left when connecting it back to power at my desk. Yay!

2. The powerful apps!

I created some tunes with Garageband, it is real fun and the loop database that comes with it is amazing for somebody that just starts like me. Anyways, so I wanted to share some audio mp3 on facebook with my friends, but facebook does not like uploading mp3, it only allows videos. So I drag and drop some photos out of iPhoto onto the iMovie app, and add my audio as a background song. This is done in minutes, and I am uploading the video to facebook…

3. safari detects network up and reloads tabs.

A typical thing I do is open up a bunch of tabs with the news websites so I can read it in the train while offline. When I command-click on the links to further stories they open up as ‘network disconnected’ in the additional tab as expected. But unlike what I am used to with Linux + Firefox, I don’t have to find the ‘reload all tabs’ menu item once I reconnect to the network – it automatically reloads the tabs…

4. apple remote control

Its a simple thing but so effective – be it itunes used to DJ at the party, VLC to watch a movie, or my iPhoto presentation, I can always switch around and adjust volume from the small remote while sitting on the couch. Very nice.

5. X applications – while I am certain that professionals do the right thing when paying $$$ for photoshop, I think I can do most of what I want to do with GIMP – and it works really well, just like I know if from Linux.

I am changing my mind on G1/itunes – now that I have a new MacBook !

I was so wrong!

With all the frustrations that I had in my early iphone days, and being forced to use itunes on windows because it was not available for Linux, and having no other way to import/export stuff to it, I was returning it and got the google android g1 phone from HTC.

Less than half a year later, I am ready to reverse my decision – mostly because I jumped ship and finally bought in a macbook to find out if it is really so great as my colleagues keep telling me. And I find IT IS! Further, I get to understand itunes better, and see it as highly functional – the windows version is terrible, but the mac version is working great.

I have it set up so I can just plop in one of my audio cd’s and it will start ripping it into mp3 files, adding them to my itunes library. The files are also accessible as real mp3 files through the filesystem, so I can just drag and drop them on my g1 phone attached as usb storage. All the software that was included with the OS is slick and highly functional, i.e. the photo importing/management iPhoto.

The days where I used to have to do certain things in windows xp are over – both Skype as well as netflix streaming work on the mac. I bought parallels just in case I would have to run xp in a virtual session next to my mac stuff, but so far have had no reason to install it yet. I installed ubuntu into parallels so I can access my linux environment that I am used to, but have to admit that I use it less and less.

So it looks like this:

1992 – switching from windows to linux
2009 – switching from linux to macos X

There is lots more to say but I will just sum it up as ‘buying the macbook pro was the best decision, and am tempted to ditch the htc/g1 in favor of a new iphone. I just had to factory reset my G1 this morning again, the second time in 6 months…

Of course there are also downsides, of which I found only a few minor ones yet and will probably soon discover more… but so far I am in love!

more ec2 playtime

Turns out it is much easier to launch fresh images and configure them on the fly than to keep doing iterations of download, unbundle, mount, customize, unmount, bundle, upload… also I don’t really like that a command line tool has to invoke a jvm to get simple things done.

The perfect tool for this is aws which is a standalone (mostly, invokes curl) script allows you to command ec2 and s3 with minimum of configuration / parameters. (key and cert go into a single file .awsecret and thats it).

Now if I want to start 20 instances of my cluster nodes, I can do that with a shell script I wrote which invokes aws to start the instances, waits for them to become available, and then deploys the necessary pieces to them and distributes the /etc/hosts so all nodes know about each other.

Apple has nothing to fear – amazon mp3 store on android g1 phone is keeping buyers out

I can’t believe how hard they made it to purchase music. Months ago I was bored, browsed the mp3 amazon offerings and wanted to purchase a song on a whim. A message informs me that I will need wifi to complete the purchase. So I abort it and lose interest.

Another month later I have wifi on and really want to purchase a beatles album. Surprise is I find tons of covering artists but not the original albums as mp3? I guess apple / itunes store has an exclusive contract for those. I give up.

Now today I want to really purchase the queen greatest hits album – yes its available, yes I have wifi as I am home. So I select buy, and it asks me my amazon account info. It goes through a list… authenticate ok… charge credit card failed. Please update payment info. Only two choices are retry or cancel. So total stop again. Luckily I am at home and get on the laptop to log into regular amazon.com and review my credit card info. I delete the old expired ones and leave only two that should be current. Nowhere I find where to select one for the mp3 store. Purchasing it only gets stopped out again claiming I have to download and install a download manager first. Well that’s why I am not an itunes customer. I am tired of trying to jump all the hoops. Logout…

They have no future.

Amazon EC2 / cloud computing

Today I got a chance to play with Amazons cloud AWS and was impressed how quickly I could get a machine with my web application online, without having to study a lot of the infrastructure detail first.

All I had to do was go into their AWS management interface, click on create instance, pick one of the 2000 public virtual image templates (picked centos 5.2-git), download the ssh key for it while it was installing, and in less than 2 minutes I was logged into my new virtual machine through ssh without having to enter a password using that key.

I scp’ed my tarball at 450KB/s into the image, extracted it, yum installed httpd and php, and was able to access my webapp.

I had to shut it down to not incur per hour online costs, but it appears to me that I will be back with more

Here is the breakdown of public images that I saw on their interface:

293 ubuntu
80 debian
69 centos
54 fedora
18 gentoo
13 redhat
3 suse
78 windows
1 opensolaris
and the remaining 1400 where appear to be ‘other linux’

Now it’s time to study how to build and test my own images offline and how to do secure virtual networking between them when they are online…

G1 android phone app ShopSavvy saves me money

I was shopping for wireless pci cards at best buys and narrowed it down to a netgear marked $59. Out of curiosity I scanned it with shopsavvy and it listed several local alternatives starting at $35 at walmart. After clicking on that it offered to call the store or get directions.

Wow if this happens more often I will save the cost of the phone in no time…

I wonder if once this is more common stores will cover barcodes for products on the shelves, but I guess then we can just type in model numbers…

PS: posted from my G1 with wptogo application

how to reformat a paragraph of sgml source to 80 column width for easier editing? emacs kung fu comes to help

I have not been using emacs for 10 years, but now that I was trying to reformat some documentation source to conform to an 80 character per line style, I remembered emacs’s neat ‘esc-q’ reformat feature.

Now since that just reformats everything, I was wondering how to do that just for a selected paragraph. With the help of some gurus on #emacs I quickly got the recipe together:

1. set word-wrap column to 80 (default is 70):
ctrl-u 80 esc-x set-fill-column

2. select the region you want to reformat:
move to beginning, ctrl-space, go to the end and perform next step

3. narrow down to selected region:
ctrl-x n n
(The first time you do that you have to confirm with y)

4. reformat:
esc-q

5. undo narrow down of region to see full document:
ctrl-x n w

Lather, rinse, repeat, … DONE.

Back to vi

G1 google android phone – half a week in and loving it

A quick follow-up in form of notes on my G1 experience:
1. hands-off music on!

I discovered that I can press the ‘accept call button’ on my wired stereo headset to start the mp3 player without having to touch the phone. Awesome!

2. Exchanging contacts
When meeting another G1 owner, the question is always, how to exchange contact info the quickest. One obviously is to send it as an email, but that means typing in the others email address which is already half the contact info you wanted to share. The other is rather surprisingly smart: Use the application Barcode scanner – you select which URL/clipboard-entry/contact entry you want to share, and it shows it on the display as a 2D barcode. The other user just holds his camera over it running the same application, and *bleep* it transfers. Wow.

3. Other cute apps:
- bubble: shows how level something is using the accelerometers
- tiker: show stream of flickr

4. Chassis issues
I find that I am also bothered by the design deficiencies of the phone: Since you charge through the same USB port that you connect your wired headset to it’s either or, not both at the same time. And when I have my headset wired in, then typing on the keyboard is more awkward than the elevated right chassis half already makes it. Still would not trade it for an iphone with its touch screen keyboard ever though, ha ha ha !

4. Camera issues
The camera delay really sucks! It is hard to take a snapshot of a situation unless its really frozen in time in front of you. The resolution and sharpness is OK, but depending on the angle I see some fisheye effect (bent surfaces that should be straight).

5. web browser rendering issues

I noticed that the slower than treo webbrowser rendering does not really matter as much with 3G as it would have with edge.

I still would wish the caching and background loading of multiple pages would work better, the same grief I had with my iphone-1.

6. Battery lifetime
It is not as bad as with the treo, and once connected to an outlet it charges real fast. I charge about once to twice a day depending on how heavily I use it. And I use it heavily

7. Adding ringtones from any mp3 song is just sweet.

So my summary – I am loving it and find out new things all the time.

My first day with the Google Android G1 phone – yeah I did it!

It’s not as if I had not given it plenty of thought I even owned the first generation iphone for about a week before dropping back to my treo 680 – and if having full enterprise email access (via goodlink service) would not cost me $240/year in fees on top of the wireless internet plans on the 680, I might even still be ok with that.

So finally after hesitating for almost a year, I jumped ship, knowing that I won’t have my enterprise calendar/email for a while longer but at least have a decent internet phone, I bought it through costco to get the extra bluetooth piece and car-charger for almost the same price, and I am happy and very impressed !

First notable impressions (I already read all the reviews beforehand and knew what to expect for the most part, won’t mention those things here)

1. I could mount the phones storage through usb on my linux system and just copy over the images and mp3’s that I wanted to take with me. Take that, apple/iphone! Yes I own the content that I import, not you. And I will plug in a larger micro-SD card as soon as I got it from tigerdirect.

There was however a weird thing that the partition on the storage only showed up once I selected ‘mount though usb’ on the G1 phone side, but once I had googled that tidbit of information it worked like a charm, and Fedora 9 mounted it for me automatically.

2. application marketplace

Holy moly more than I care to know about.  So I used search to find what I was most interested in and had heard about, and tried out some of the featured apps as well. I did not see any for-pay apps yet.

Interesting that before installing you are asked to read multiple pages of license stuff that all is very uninteresting for a user. I wonder if that can even be legally binding if they hide something in there that actually matters – most of it talks about rights to copying software, how does that relate to a phone user downloading it through the marketplace that the company provides it through is beyond me.

Also interesting that before installing it tells you what the application requests to get control over, i.e. your address book, your wifi connection, your gps location, for-pay services like SMS…  and just like with Windows XP AntiVirus/AntiSpyware systems you have to OK all those things anyways to get it to work. But at least you are warned

With all those services asking for a signup I am surprised that we don’t have automatic fill-in of first-name last-name into the signup forms…

Here are the 8 apps  I installed on my first try:

- ShopSawy – point your camera at a bar-code and it tries to identify the item, get you prices and locations. At first I was real impressed, I tried it with a book and it found it right away, quoted me three different prices and locations to buy it at, and with two clicks I got my gps telling me how to get there from where I currently was. Very cool. It also quoted a cheaper online price, did not pursue that.

So I thought, yeah this is as cool as I read about it before. My wife came home and I tried to impress her: I tried it with two vegetable cans and it could not grasp the barcode – probably since it was round? I tried a cereal box and it read the barcode then said it found nothing. Mhm, so maybe not that much stuff in the database yet…

- pacman – looks like the original. You can use the accelerator method to navigate it, which means instead of pressing keys you tilt your phone – almost like a wee control

- bonsai blast – nice color game, not tried to really play it yet

- imap weather – does what it needs to do plus more. Fails to find my location sometimes and then crashes. Not impressed.

- Wertago – ‘where to go’ nightlife guide application, kind of like yelp but yet-another-social-network-thing. I did not bother to create the account but found the crowd kind of wierd… however this is probably the kind of thing that is going to be really useful once there are more reviews in it.

- Meridian Video Player – I hoped to be able to play my eve online trailers (mov/wmv), but it did not work. Oh well.

- cab4me light – finds phone numbers of local cab companies. Nice…

- imeem mobile -  an internet radio station but tailored to your taste. Wow, just typed in Metallica in the search and now get all those metal songs from all those bands. Nice, have not listened to Manowar in a while…

3. Access to wireless

It was really simple to setup (select wifi station from list identified, enter WEP code, done) but I was surprised that web browsing still seems as slow as over edge/g3. Mhm…

4. what am I going to miss form my treo 680

- real good keyboard – the g1 is not terrible but far from being as good.

- uploading pictures straight to facebook off of the sd card ejected from my digital camera – the workarounds could be getting a microsd in sd adapter and take pictures to that (supposedly much slower than sd though) or even better to get a wifi enabled sd-card (eyefi) – then I would no longer need to eject the card.

- faster/earlier rendering of my most frequented websites in the web-browser.

- superefficient email/contacts when paying the $240/year goodlink fees. but not gonna anyways.

- reasonable low resolution video

5. What I am not going to miss from my treo 680

- call dropping or going on hold right after accepting the call when I fumble the ringing phone out of the pocket

- always out of battery when I needed it the most – lets see how the G1 fares on that

- real bad (i.e. unusable) mp3 player, harsh electric interference noise when it transmitted data and playing music at the same time

- low resolution photo camera

Python based webapplications – WSGI – state of the web 2009

I read a really interesting article by Mike Orr on http://linuxgazette.net/115/orr.html regarding WSGI / python web frameworks, dated June 2005 and wondered what had happened since then. Mike was so friendly to update me and would like to share what I learned:

I asked him: “I saw an older article of yours at linux gazette.net that had an overview of web frameworks and WSGI.  If you where trying to find an update to that, where would you look first?”
The answer:

“There is no state-of-the-web overview that I know of, but a lot has
happened since I wrote that article.  Pretty much all new frameworks
are written for WSGI, and the older ones have been retrofitted.
(CherryPy can run as a WSGI server, Plone can run as an application,
parts of Zope have been extracted to independent Repoze components,
and Quixote has a WSGI gateway floating around somewhere.)  Django
works with WSGI sort of, and has been ported to Google App Engine via
WSGI.

I’m involved with Pylons, a framework that’s fully WSGI and modular to
the core, built on top of Paste, which is a low-level WSGI library.
TurboGears 2 is being built on top of Pylons.  This means that
different frameworks with different goals and target users can share
the same technology, and essentially makes every TG developer a Pylons
developer, doubling our developer base.

There’s a group of WSGI framework developers including
Pylons/TG/Repoze.BFG that is designing a new framework to potentially
supercede all of them, with plug-in personalities to reflect their
different application styles.  This is still at the idea stage but may
have some alpha code by the end of the year.  If so it could point the
way to the next generation of frameworks.

Another big issue is Python 3.  Over the next year frameworks will
either be ported to Python 3 or replaced by frameworks written for
Python 3.  (Though the Python 2 frameworks may continue in use for
several years.)  This has to be done on a dependency basis; e.g.,
Pylons can’t upgrade until all the components it depends on have
upgraded.”

Reproduced with Mike Orr’s friendly permission.