Utah Open Source Planet

I've had a Palm Treo 700p for a couple years and a Treo 650p before that, both with Sprint as a wireless carrier. The 700p acted up a few months ago, so I took it into a Sprint repair center. They promptly wiped it, upgraded the firmware and gave it back to me as "fixed." Only, it wasn't fixed. I'm not sure, but I think the firmware they upgraded me to wasn't intended to ever run on a 700p, but I'm not sure. As a result, the phone has kinda-sorta worked since then.

I've read on Engadget about a new phone exclusive to Sprint from Samsung called the Instinct. At first glance, it looks eerily similar to an Apple iPhone, but as I read more about it, it looked like it might be a good fit for me.

Boy, was I wrong.

Before I go into some specifics, let me just say that Samsung and Sprint can easily save this phone. All they need to do is open it up just a little more and listen to the "corporate" users.

What I liked

One thing I liked about the Instinct is that it does not run Windows Mobile. I've avoided Win-Mo on principle, but have helped other people with problems on Win-Mo devices and have experienced the frustration that is running Win-Mo. Using a Palm Treo vs. a Win-Mo Treo is the difference between night and day. One operates like cold tar (and has a lower video resolution) while the other is relatively stable and snappy.

The Instict is an awesome phone, it just isn't quite a "smartphone" and definitely isn't a geek's phone.

The "haptic feedback" is very cool: The phone generates a mild vibration when you touch an active icon on the touchscreen, thereby giving you physical feedback that you've activated a button or other onscreen feature. This goes a long way toward alleviating the "flatness" problem a lot of touchscreen devices have.

The Instinct has a very nice GPS navigation program that plots routes and gives you turn-by-turn directions. This is an amazing feature for a mobile handset that nets you $129 after rebate.

The sound quality of the phone is very, very good, both as a handset and as a speakerphone. Kudos to Samsung for that.

The web browser is "okay." It's better than the Blazer browser on the Treo, but it's not quite what it wants to be which is a browser that people will want to use more frequently than just when they're desperate for something off the Web.

The camera (still and video software is included) is, by far, the best cell phone camera I've ever used. Wow! It lacks a flash, but performed pretty dang well in low-light.

The Instinct has "visual voicemail" which is bound to become a de facto feature on new phones moving forward. Very cool.

Plugging the phone into a USB port on my laptop running Linux worked well. Linux detected a USB mass storage device and let me mount it. If I understand correctly, it's just acting as a card reader for the mini-SD card. This gives you access to all the non-phone media like pictures, movies, and music.

What I really didn't like

E-mail was a dealbreaker. The Samsung/Sprint e-mail client software tried to be very accomodating and provides wizards for setting up mobile e-mail accounts for popular webmail sites like AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo!, and GMail, but doesn't quite deliver as more than a basic e-mail client in any other regard. It does let you set up multiple POP or IMAP accounts and supports SSL-encrypted access for privacy wheres supported. However, I don't believe it's a true IMAP client because it only displays 25 of your most recent messages (I think you can bump that up to 100 in the settings) and doesn't let you access IMAP folders other than Sent, Inbox, and Trash.

Browsing HTML e-mail messages is lame because, while the Instict does take a stab at parsing the HTML, it only displays the text and does not give you any links which you can click on to view on the phone's browser.

E-mail attachment support is nonexistent.

While I don't care, the Instinct only offers a bare minimum support for Exchange users via Outlook Web Access and doesn't sync with Exchange (or anything else, for that matter).

Speaking of synchronization, Sprint does offer a remote sync feature that let's you store your contacts and other data on a remote server. The benefit of this is that if your phone is stolen or broken, you still have access to your address book. Additionally, Sprint provides a web-based facility for you to manage your contacts.

I thought this was going to be cool. I could just export my contacts from KDE's address book and import them into Sprint's web facility and, voila, all the contacts I've had on my Treo would instantly be available to me on the Instinct.

The Sprint import facility had instructions for Outlook users to export their contacts as a CSV file and even went as far as to indicate what column names were valid and would be recognized by the import routine. I tweaked the CSV file my system generated to match the column headings Sprint wanted. The import process took several minutes and then told me it couldn't import anything. Game over.

The in-phone address book is terribly lacking. For starters, there's 's no way to store a company name with an entry, only last name or first name.

Text messaging was... okay, but cumbersome.

Typing text on the Instinct is not too bad, but has some serious caveats. While the text entry routine provides spellcheck on-the-fly, it doesn't provide spelling or grammar correction on the fly at all. That seems odd considering just about every phone I've used the last ten years or so has had that. It should at least auto-conjugate and insert apostrophes when I type "cant" or "doesnt." Nope, won't do it. Even a lone "i" surrounded by whitespace on either side remains lower case. It's smart enough to capitalize the first letter after punctuation and it will highlight mispelled words (including my un-conjugated conjunctions). Tapping on a mispelled word will offer suggestions, but this is a time-consuming affair!

I registered as a developer on Sprint's Developer website hoping to create some cool third-party apps for the Instinct -- fill in some of the gaps, but got discouraged rather quickly.

In one of the developer forum posts, a developer asks, "Is there a desktop USB SDK for access to the Calendar, Notes or any other built-in data? " A Samsung developer replied: "There is no USB SDK/API supported on the Instinct."

The Sprint sales representative who helped me purchase the Instinct told me, up front, the Instinct did not support tethering so I could not use it as a wireless modem for a laptop. I thought I'd investigate that a little further before I gave up on it -- see if it looked like it would be forthcoming as an official capability or as a third-party software add-on, but it doesn't look good.

End result?

I'll be taking the Instinct back to Sprint in the next day and will either purchase a Palm Centro instead or give their technicians another shot at fixing my 700p.

Samsung and Sprint need to assign some hardware interaction and usability people to this phone. Not only are most of the applications painfully minimalistic and basic, they're not as easy to use as they could or should be. 

Again, this could be a good smartphone for Sprint if they give more attention to the needs of "professional" users.

A few of us were discussing minimal desktop environments the other day and I was reminded of the olden days when I used XFCE.  I really liked the clean interface which did not display any desktop icons by default.  Looking back on that I was reminded that it is an option available in Gnome as well, so here is how to do it.

Disable Desktop Icons In Gnome

A lot of Gnome configuration is done via the gconf-editor.  I’ll outline how to do this manually and graphically, including a command you can use to activate it from the shell.  Give it a try and let me know what you think.  Do you prefer icons or not?  They always seem like clutter to me.

The graphical method of stopping icons from displaying on your desktop is as follows:

Alt-F2 "gconf-editor"

Navigate to “apps > nautilus > preferences” and on the right-side look for “show_desktop”.  Toggling this will toggle, in real-time, the icons from being displayed on your Desktop

This setting can also be achieved by entering the following command at your shell:

gconftool-2 --set /apps/nautilus/preferences/show_desktop --type bool 0


and to revert these changes set the bool to 1:

gconftool-2 --set /apps/nautilus/preferences/show_desktop --type bool 1

Activating Additional Icons

A second, similar setting is to disable mounts from being displayed, or adding the “Computer”, “Home” or “Trash” icons to the desktop.  The graphical method of displaying the additional icons is as follows:

Alt-F2 "gconf-editor"

Navigate to “apps > nautilus > desktop” and select the boxes “computer_icon_visible”, “home_icon_visible”, “trash_icon_visible”.

Disabling the display of mount points (CDs, USB drives, etc) is done by deselecting the “volumes_visible” option.

Again, these can also be toggled by way of the following commands:

Activate Computer Icon

gconftool-2 --set /apps/nautilus/desktop/computer_icon_visible --type bool 1

Activate Home Folder Icon

gconftool-2 --set /apps/nautilus/desktop/home_icon_visible --type bool 1

Activate Trash Icon

gconftool-2 --set /apps/nautilus/desktop/trash_icon_visible --type bool 1

De-Activate Volumes

gconftool-2 --set /apps/nautilus/desktop/volumes_visible --type bool 0

Related

• Gnome and Nautilus Keyboard Shortcut Keys
• At-A-Glance System Monitoring With Panel Applets
• Adding Weather and Locations To Your Desktop Clock
• Enable The Nautilus Advanced Permissions Dialog In Ubuntu 8.04

On Tuesday, 13 May 2008, the Fedora Project released the latest version of their Linux distribution, Fedora 9.

I was able to get my hands on Fedora 9 the previous Friday after it was discovered "in the wild" on BitTorrent networks. I promptly installed it on my Dell Latitude D830 laptop that I use every day for work.

The downside to installing a Linux distribution like Fedora before it is officially released is that you have no access to any updates. You're kind of on your own with what you've got until the official release date.

I wasn't too terribly worried about any of that. After all, Fedora 7 and Fedora 8 were, for the most part, very stable from the get-go.

I think I may have been wise to have waited. Over the last week, I've encountered all sorts of issues. Some have been related to specific hardware I'm using while others are general OS issues. A significant chunk of the issues I've run into are a direct result of my running KDE as my desktop environment. Fedora 9 includes KDE version 4 which is a ground-up rewrite of the fundamentals of KDE.

The experience has given me some flashbacks to 2003 when Red Hat Linux 9 came out with GNOME 2.2. I had been a GNOME user for a couple of years (and used AfterStep as my primary desktop environment before that) and was content with the way the Sawfish window manager worked in GNOME up until Red Hat Linux 9. Now GNOME used the Metacity window manager and I couldn't stand the thing. Where were all my configuration options? What happened to everything I had come to rely on? Well, GNOME had tucked it all away... and made everything work slower while they were at it.

I switched to KDE and found it had advanced leaps and bounds since I had looked at it last. It was mature, reliable, and, most of all, it offered plenty for me as a "configuration nut" to appreciate.

Fast forward to now. KDE4 is cool, very cool, but it's lacking a lot of stuff KDE3 had, understandably. I'm sure it's all forthcoming in due time, but I want it now!

So, below is my current list of annoyances. Some are still outstanding while others I have taken steps to resolve and have documented those steps below so that others may benefit.

Fedora 9 Annoyances

• nVidia video driver - I've got a nVidia Corporation Quadro NVS 140M tucked away in this laptop and to get 2D and 3D accelerated performance out of it, I must use the proprietary nVidia driver available for Linux. I usually get this from the fine Livna repository for Fedora. The kmod-nvidia driver was available from Livna, but it didn't work. I got it to function (details coming) but it's far from perfect.
• Tap-to-click not working on Synaptics touchpad - This is a documented bug and I'm sure Fedora will be pushing a fix soon. In the meantime Bob Kashani at Berkeley has gracefully provided a fix.
• kmix applet is missing - This one is annoying. I have grown very accustomed to having the kmix applet in my KDE taskbar. This gives me a handy mixer utility to control my sound. Without it, I'm forced to launch the kmix application every time I want to adjust the mixer. Lame.
• Font irregularities (related to NVidia?) - Application fonts between KDE and GTK/GNOME applications display differently. This has suddenly been a problem, but it isn't the first time I've seen it. I also saw it with Firefox 3 betas under Fedora 8, but only on this particular system (my laptop) and not on other systems. I blame the nVidia driver.
• Multimedia buttons - The volume up/down and mute buttons just worked out of the box with Fedora 8. With Fedora 9, KDE is completely ignorant of them.
• NetworkManager forgets everything - In Fedora 7, there was a separate KDE NetworkManager component called knetworkmanager which integrated seemlessly into KDE, but major changes within the NetworkManager community forced the Fedora project to adopt the GNOME NetworkManager work for KDE users in Fedora 8 (and Fedora 9). The problem in Fedora is that NetworkManager doesn't seem to be using the GNOME keyring system at all. Every time I connect to a secure wireless network, I have to enter the encryption key or passphrase because it isn't getting saved anywhere.
• KPilot not syncing with Palm Treo 700p via USB - This was fixed with the first Kernel update!
• KDE configuration lacks depth - This is due to the rewrite of everything, but there are things that really bug me: No configuration of the Compose key and I haven't found a way to turn off the silly "Pong" sound the system plays every time I move between virtual desktops.
• No web browser can load Zimbra admin login page - I didn't have any problems with Firefox 2, but neither Firefox 3b5 nor Konqueror can load the Zimbra admin page. Konqueror complains about a script out of control and Firefox 3b5 just sits and spins.
• gpk-application sucks - Pirut (and pup) are gone and now we have this PackageKit suite of applications for managing packages. I think it's a good idea in the long run, but gpk-application has a long way to go before it catches up with how well pirut worked. Just let me install many packages at once, why don't ya?!

Well, there's that for starters. I'll probably be blogging more in the future about these problems in more detail, including, hopefully, how to solve or work around them.

I'm not sure what a bandwagon is or why jumping onto one is a pastime indicative of populist persuasion, but I'll jump on up and grab a trumpet.

$ history|awk ‘{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn|head
bash: syntax error near unexpected token `('

Being a procrastinator I waited until early Monday morning to finish my evaluation essay for my English class, then finally retiring at about 4 AM I set my alarm clock for 7:30 but woke up at 9, so I had to rush over to UVSU (yeah, it's official as of this morning. Governor Hunstman's signature made it official amid a great flourish of state today) to print off my paper since I don't have a working printer at my apartment and then Veracity went down. So, thus vexed by my singular misfortune I had to hurry on downtown in great dispatch. I had intended to park at a Trax station and ride downtown but ended up parked underneath the Gallivan Center in some labyrinth they call a parking garage and from there walked to the Shiloh Inn and took the elevator to the 11th floor.

I finally arrived at the Park City room on the 11th floor at around 10:30, half an hour before the scheduled start of the press conference. The room was empty except for Bruce sitting at his laptop typing up some notes for his presentation. It is a rare opportunity to engage in real, meaningful conversation with a great open source luminary. He was very cordial and willing to discuss in depth the issues at hand. At around 11, Aaron, John, Kyle, and Mike showed up to help with the press conference. My job was to take business cards at the door. I thought it would be hard but I guess reporters are used to that kind of thing. One of the other volunteers, sorry that I don't remember, had the good sense to invite Pete Ashdown, the celebrated candidate for US Senate for the state of Utah in 2006, who came to introduce Bruce Perens. There were reporters there from all over the world--a contingent of about 20 altogether.

Bruce is among that amazing, rare class of Open Source community leaders, or Open Source advocates with a very prolific sense of exposition. Had not the conference been curtailed right at 1 PM by another scheduled thereafter in the same room I suppose he could have gone on explaining for hours.

The press conference was recorded aurally and photographically by Aaron, but here are some of the main points I found interesting. First he quoted a very lucid evaluative statement on the Novell, Microsoft deal by Richard Stallman about how the GPL in version 2 form was designed to eliminate all kinds of corporate behavior then known which violate the four essential freedoms the GPL seeks to grant creators and users of the software. One thing I found fascinating both from Bruce's conference and from talking to him beforehand is how subtle and masterfully clever Microsoft was in setting up and executing this deal. In Bruce's own words, or thereabouts: Microsoft made a deal with Novell whose effect was a serious undermining of the Free Software development paradigm. Microsoft put in place a very ponderous threat that quenches or at least gives Open Source practicing developers doubt about the very desire to participate in Free Software by making use of patent law. In the United States no nontrivial software is free from patent infringement and Microsoft can use this as a means to litigate RIAA-style against Free Software developers. Very cunning; very clever.

Microsoft always does things its own way, and they have been very clearly opposed to competition. They have dominated well in the proprietary ecosystem they largely helped create but Free Software flourishes almost Darwin-like, you could imagine, adapted to a hostile, proprietary environment by relinquishing the very traits Microsoft would think are crucial to the development of software, so in their cunning, they use Novell as a means of fatally polluting or permanently damaging the Open Source ecosystem in a way that they can no longer meaningfully threaten Microsoft's business model.

Unfortunately for Microsoft, and also for Novell as far as they are complicit, that Open Source community is very large and very diverse and hopefully anything malicious attempted will be an antigen further strengthening the community against destructive litigation. Bruce explains that Richard in his wisdom and foresight understood the extent to which the Microsoft innovation, the canonical proprietary business model, would evolve but couldn't understand the details of schemas like DRM well enough to provide for them in pre v3 versions of the GPL.

After quoting Richard, Bruce qualifies his remarks with a preface that he cannot be an everyman representative for all Open Source developers but can protest as he sees requisite. Specifically his grievance rests upon the patent agreement. The technical partnership is commendable if it is a fair one, but the patent agreement has at least two ill effects: it sets up the possibility of an extortion racket using patent law and doctrine although clearly in bad faith with the GPL and with it Microsoft appears to believe they have purchased a new license on FUD. It may have cost them 333 Million but having carefully laid the plot this moves them into a position to bring suit against Open Source, the anomaly phenomenon it has not hitherto been effective in vanquishing.

The purpose of writing and participating in Free Software is to create and enrich a public body of great software. The GPL provides a legal framework for this style of software development, and the Microsoft-Novell agreement violates the spirit of the GPL in order to set up the spectre of patent suits against the Free Software commons.

So I've written my first Django template filter. I don't know why I feel a sense of accomplishment over something so simple. Perhaps it's because it's #5000 on dpaste and I was promised a pony as a result.

Anyway, all it does is convert any number that can be stringified into a number-like format that smacks strangely of a common idiom used in the United States for displaying monetary sums in the Arabic numeral representation prepended with the appropriate sigil, which betokens a quantity of that base unit of exchange common in American currency.

And here is the code itself for that day in the future when dpaste #5000 transmutes into the eternal aether and takes its place among all Django code great and small when its corporal electrons are recycled back into raw bits.

from decimal import *
from django import template

register = template.Library()

def currency(value):
    try:
        string = str(value)
    except:
        return value
    return '$%s' % (Decimal(string).quantize(Decimal('.01')))

register.filter(currency)

Lately I've been starting to use python for work and although I've always admired the clean layout of the language, clean to the point that I guess Guido doesn't think it will get in the way, and the readability thereof I haven't used it enough to form an opinion befitting some random python newbie fanboy.

Clean syntax is an understatement for a language whose punctuation is as spare, so far, as parenthesis, brackets, and an occasional colon. This is truly amazing and wonderful at the same time. Moreover, any language that lets me guess the grammar for what I'm thinking and then acknowledges that I'm right gets an egg in my book, sure as π, er whatever.

I know a few people that read the Fozzolog own Palm-based smartphones like the Treo-line from Palm. I own a Treo 700p and had a 650p prior to that. I've been keeping an eye on the Centro because it just looks sweet and addresses most of the complaints my wife has brought up about the Treo when I tell her it's so much nicer in one regard or another than her Blackberry Pearl.

This is going to be a review about a piece of software I recently installed on my Treo and have become quite enamored with. But, before I get to that, let me just say I'm worried about my future as a PalmOS user. If Google does things right with the Android mobile phone platform, I will ditch Palm in milliseconds. For a couple years now, Palm has been saying a future version of PalmOS would be running on top of Linux and would provide backward compatibility with legacy PalmOS applications. The advantage would be a new, modern platform for smart phones based on one of the most actively developed operating systems in history. The result: HUGE VOLUMES of software choices for users and that is really what drives a successful hardware device. But, Palm announced earlier this year that plans to release a new PalmOS on top of Linux have been... uhm... substantially delayed... so quit asking about it.

So, if Google does things right with Android, they'll achieve the same thing for their hardware partners and I'll be one of the first in line for a highly-functional mobile device that will let me do as much or more than I can currently do with my Treo.

Quick News

So, that brings me to something new I've been doing with my Treo: Reading RSS feeds with Quick News.

Now, I don't like paying for software. I generally look for open source software for my Treo before I even bother looking for commercial options. In this case, I paid for a couple applications from Hobbyist Software, including Butler -- an application that, among other things, nags you when you don't immediately answer an alert or alarm. One of the other Hobbyist applications I installed is called Initiate and it's a replacement for the default application launcher. Initiate supports plugins and one of those plugins is for Quick News.

I previously downloaded a free trial of Quick News and played with it. I liked it more than any other RSS feed aggregator for Palm that I had played with, but didn't really spend the time to explore it completely. When I disovered the Initiate plugin, I spent more time and ended up throwing $14.95 at Standalone Software so I could own it for good.

So, what is cool about Quick News? It's an awesome RSS feed reader. It comes with a boatload of RSS feeds already, many of which I disabled right off the bat because, for example, I'm not a Mac user and I don't really care to read what CBS thinks is newsworthy. But, they still had a few good geek news feeds.

Adding a feed is easy if you know the URL to the XML syndication resource (e.g. the RSS file). This is pretty straightforward when you're adding one site at a time, but can be annoying when you want to populate your Quick News feed list with a lot of sites. It would be easier if there was some way to set up Quick News as a helper application for Blazer so that any time you selected a link for an RSS feed, you could have the option of adding it to your Quick News feed list.

The best feature of Quick News is the auto-update options. I set my feeds up to automatically update every six hours, over the air. You can also update at HotSync, but that requires a conduit -- presumably a Windows application -- on the desktop computer you sync with.

Another excellent feature of Quick News is that it offers the option of downloading images from feeds as well, thereby providing a rich viewing experience. All the downloaded feeds can be stored on your removable SD card so you don't have to worry about filling up your onboard memory with feed content. The amount of feed content cached on the SD card is configurable as well.

Below are some pictures of Quick News in action. These were taken with my digital camera and my screen protector makes them look a little hazy. Sorry.

This first image is the "collapsed" view of all the articles in a feed. In this case, the Utah Open Source Planet.

Next is one of the articles from the feed expanded for reading.

Thirdly, a view of the list of all the feeds currently set up. You can quickly configure which feeds will update over the air, at HotSync, etc.

Okay! If you're reading this then I was successful in posting an entry to my MovableType blog with a free PalmOS app on my Treo called u*Blog. Wahoo!

Many who read the Fozzolog know I've become a fan of Porcupine Tree -- a progressive rock band based out of England. They've been releasing music steadily since the early 1990s.

I saw them perform live last year in San Francisco and had the time of my life. Performing on stage with them was guitarist and singer John Wesley, an American who has accompanied the band on the road since their In Absentia album tour in 2002.

"Wes" is also featured on the band's most recent album Fear Of A Blank Planet.

Anyway, my buddy Thom alerted me today that Wes posted a blog entry to his MySpace site a couple days ago which contained some rather shocking news. Here it is:

This is really cool news and it makes perfect sense. Wes is in a good situation to do something like this -- he's fairly independent and not encumbered by the iron fist of a record company.

I say this is common sense because of my experience with Porcupine Tree. I was introduced to the band by word of mouth and was then prompted to download some of their music from (evil, illegal) music sharing sites/networks on the Internet. Some of the stuff I downloaded is out of print or very difficult to get your hands on otherwise.

Someone (perhaps, someone from the RIAA) might say I'm a bad, bad person for doing this, but consider the outcome: I ended up traveling to San Francisco and attending a concert I otherwise would not have. I bought the band's live DVD Arriving Somewhere (which is excellent, BTW), a DTS DVD-Audio version of Deadwing, and the CDs: Fear Of A Blank Planet and Stars Die - The Delerium Years.

Word-of-mouth and, more importantly, music (illegitimately) obtained from online sources results in money in the bank for artists who make good product.

So, if you're inclined to like progressive or alternative rock, you can do as I will also do: download Wes's stuff. See if you like it. If you do, consider purchasing a CD or two or, better yet, hit that "Demand It" button on his site to indicate that you would likely pay for a ticket to a concert in your area if John Wesley were to perform.

I was watching tonight's episode of Glenn Beck's TV show and his last segment featured a young lady as a guest talking about her 300-page iPhone bill.

I found the transcript for the show here and share it with you now:

Wow.

As for Justine Ezarik... just Google her to find her vlogging, blogging, flogging, etc. sites.

It's nice to find someone more narcissistic and "jacked in" than me so I can point my finger at her and laugh.

Fozzout.