Current Events

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Lets see. What are the 4 or so things which already suck about the whole iPad experience:

  1. Its a tablet but it runs a phone OS.
  2. You can run all the iPhone applications but you have to run them sequentially.
  3. It will browse the web but you cannot watch flash on it.
  4. You can read books on it but you cannot do anything else.
  5. It will not do USB unless you buy expensive dongle-age.

Geez, then you gotta see what happens when Hitler heard about it. Thanks to Rich for this one,

Yeah Baby!

I’ll just run right out and get one now. What a sad waste of years of waiting. I’ll stick to my decidedly inferior netbook running Windows 7 which has a 250g hard disk drive in it that can do all the things that the iPad cannot. Even reading ebooks. This is an extremely sorry device and I cannot wait for the Linux community to root the thing and give it some meaning. If I were rich I would put a bounty on it and get a savvy Linux hacker a small fortune to put debian on it or something. Then it becomes useful.  It would mount file shares, run office applications, be a real convergence device or something. But hell no. It runs a phone OS. Back to one of the points above.

Edit 2.5

The so many thousand reasons why the iPad is so disappointing. Read them and weep. Some of the reasons may be BS. Others may be distorted or be a case like with me of pure and distinct Apple dislike fever; but other people may have purchased one until they heard about a few of my salient points above. Steve needs to gather the fanbois and do a state of the ipad presentation like Obama just did for the nation. He could tell us why:

  1. Its okay for the iPad to run a phone OS.
  2. That people really don’t want to load content directly
  3. That iTunes itself is not evil and people should be glad to have the Outlook of digital media available
  4. That iTunes is the only way now to sync data

That last few are really deal killers for me. I tried valiantly to get away from iTunes and it libmusicmangle.so approach.

I’m here in Singapore now; gonna meet up with Art tomorrow night for a dinner and a trip to Funan Center DigitaLife Mall here. Going with Art to a electronics mall is like being taken to Disneyland by the Mouse or Duck. You have the feeling that they know what is around each corner, know all the doodads and gizmos worth looking at, and also know what things to miss. I’m looking forward to going to the Mall. Been there one other time when I was here in Singapore the first time.

I also went with Art to the Akihabara Electric Town in Tokyo. Imagine a place you can walk into a tiny stall and ask for something like “type 10035 dual home toggle switch with backlighting” and the guy knows what you want. The bigger thing is that Art knew what one was too. Art is the Gizmo Guy!

On Wednesday morning I board the financially bankrupt JAL but still possessed of some of the best in-flight service (bar Singapore Airlines and perhaps ANA) and head on back to the home frontier. A few things await me there like a Nexus One phone and three calls from AT&T offering an iPhone upgrade to my almost ended ATT account. I think you know my answer. Not interested. I’ll stick with the prepaid sim card thing I got going now.

Hello Hanoi!

I landed in Hanoi, Vietnam at about 1045pm and got through customs in record breaking time. Took all of 10 minutes from start to end. Very nice. I’m staying at the Intercontinental Westlake for a week or so. I’m here for our annual sales conference and to do a few presentations myself on our products and engineering focus.

After a week here, I fly out to Singapore next Friday for 5 days and then back home again. Not like my earlier trips where i stay gone for months at a time. Around mid-February, I will depart again for Singapore and India for engineering meetings, work and deliverables execution, and other stuff. I’ll be on the road it appears every 45 days for this year. That’s fine for me.

First night after flying 16 hours is kinda strange. I slept or rather fell unconscious for about 6 hours. I slept on the 6 hour plane ride from Narita to Hanoi. Luckily the flight to Hanoi was not too crowded so I had two seats to myself so I could stretch out.

This trip, I’m going with no real books. Instead, since I am an inveterate reader; I’m going with the world kindle. Folks tend to ask me all sorts of questions about it. Yes, its easier than lugging around 2 or 3 pounds of books. Battery life is decent. It links to my regular amazon account. Books are downloaded to it automatically. If you travel; its worth the savings in weight.

I also purchased a Lenmar 4 port international USB charger which lets me charge phone, iPod, kindle and even my PSP at the same time. Very handy. This is a great deal if you travel frequently. Just remember to carry the slightly different USB cables. Beats the heck out of carrying little travel chargers with plugs, etc.

Today, I find a cheapo Vietnam Simcard to use while here and also just rest a bit after the flight. Going to have breakfast here in a bit and take a look around the hotel boundaries. Maybe take some photo’s to add to my flickr stream.

Finally, don’t travel with the wrong OS on that computer folks. Leave Windows at home and use Ubuntu. Easier to manage, update, deal with strange networks. I’ve found Ubuntu Karmic 9.10 to be a very handy and capable OS. If you cannot do this; how about using a live CD instead? No real tracks of what you did, banking, etc. Give it some thought. Do you really need all that fluff and stuff on Windows 7? Probly not :-)

Santa says

Travel to Hanoi and have fun. Don’t buy paper books or hardbacks. Use the Kindle. I bought one and the idea of being set free from trying to plan out the books, carrying all that weight, and having something portable and easily packed in carry-on baggage is very nice. I read a lot so always in the past had to carry two books. Now, I carry a few more but they’re inside the kindle waiting.

I’m sitting at SFO in the International Terminal patiently waiting for my JAL flight to Narita and then on to Hanoi. Its pretty exciting since I have never been there. After a week or so in Hanoi, I fly over to Singapore for some days for work. Perhaps meet Art there for drinks at Raffles Long Bar.

Happy New Years folks. Hope you all have a happy and profitable year in 2010. If you went to Vegas in 2009, don’t worry. Its all forgotten and in the past…

The dude did something wrong. The dude paid his time. The dude is talented and got hired to play football again and won an award. How about we give him the same rights as the thousands of others who pay their bill to the so-called society and let them get on with life? If his life happens to be in the NFL spotlight, so be it. You all think anyone is truly a saint? If you do, I got this awesome bridge in California to sell ya.

Let the man go.

The ETC…

I always add one. I got my Moto Milestone and I’m stuck in a loving mood with it. Its a great device, has this kinda strange and quirky good looks. It does the phone thing well; but is that the only reason we truly get Android devices? I think we want them because we are discriminating and we don’t want stupid Apple phones that only come in one flavor, one hardware type, with no flashing of ROMs. There is no root on this phone (yet) but we saw the same thing happen when I bought my HTC Magic from Airtel in India. Inside of a month, the phone was rooted and we had great customized ROMs on it. It all takes time.

You may be tempted to think that its the same as the Verizon Droid; but it ain’t. Its unlocked which is the only kinda phone I’ll buy any more. It did have the battery cover issue which I fixed today thanks to this video:

It Works!! Thanks Droidsters!

Sometimes blogging brings about revelations. I told this story once about my take on some prehistoric rock art in the western Mojave Desert we stumbled upon. I felt that these early folks were telling a story; in effect writing a blogpost regarding an event, a happening, a direction. But the act of writing these things transcends them to another level; a more communicative and dialogue based event. They reach out to those that know them, those that never will, and try to catalog something which touched their lives. So what else is blogging? I think there are stages in modern blogging though and I’ve been doing it for awhile and seen a few of them.

  • Stage 1. You need authority and links. You want to surf that wave and become the next great technorati author. Recognized, listed, linked to and from.
  • Stage 2. Non bloggers discuss your blogposts in forum posts. Wow! Basically someone has taken the time to find your valuable meanderings and include something that you wrote. I published this one post once on using Mutt with gmail’s imap support and got a few emails back from non-bloggers about it. Very cool and it felt quite right.
  • Stage 3. Everyone knows you and you reach the zenith and people just quote your words. When you reach this level, you don’t even have to really blog anymore. People know what you are gonna say before you even blog it. Omnipotent powers; but be careful. Don’t be like the guy on Friends and think I just said “impotent”.
  • Stage 4 to 98. Variations on above…
  • Stage 99. Well, you’ve reached the climactic and final stages of blogging nirvana. Now it occurs to you that none of those other stages really mattered. Links and authority, everyone knowing your name, non-bloggers knowing you. What you are writing is for the pure joy of writing because you want to and can. There is no ultimate reward of the blogosphere. No big circus tent or award show for the best and brightest. No emmy’s or oscar’s. Just the honest feeling you get and that each thing you write does not have to mean a damned thing.

Its my birthday so I can write on the wall of my apache server any damned thing I want. I don’t want honesty. I am not terribly honest at times and I lack other things too. The things which if I had I would not be human. I am not terribly social and I’ve known it for a long time. I’m what a rather famous archeologist called me once: “a somewhat private person; shy; with some brightness”. Thanks Phil!

Well, got back home last Friday and been kinda busy with work and family stuff. Its really good to get back. I had to purchase a new phone since my HTC Magic which was running a very nice Hero ROM just stopped working while I was in Chennai. I purchased a new HTC Hero in Singapore at the Changi airport and it came with a non-rooted ROM. As I posted before, you don’t need to really change the SPL on the Hero or anything like the Hboot. You can still use flashrec on phones bought from Newegg and Amazon. I just did this for a friend’s phone and it works fine. Basically download flashrec, install the recovery image, and reflash the new rooted ROM-ware. All done. Takes all of 15 minutes to take a factory default Hero to a custom MoDaCo ROM which is much nicer and rooted as well.

Always seems like there is something new with the Android OS devices which is cool to figure out, hack on, make it work. Ubuntu Karmic has turned out to be a very nice operating system on my laptops and desktops. No real problems on my x64 desktops and my thinkpad T60 laptops. This whole ubuntu thing is getting really good. Windows on the other hand; is only marginal. I don’t think that Windows 7 is that much better than anything else that MS has ever done. Its just another in the long line of consumer OS’es built for a large market share of less than demanding users. I think the problem really is that everyone using Windows are consumers of Windows and not really users. With Ubuntu Karmic its too easy to boot Windows in VirtualBox, run Outlook 2007 when I need to; but leave it all when I travel and just have a much more robust and stable system running Linux. Linux is just better and always will be.

Finally, all the travel still leaves me a bit jet-lagged. I get tired earlier and wake up at strange hours. Hopefully that ends soon. I’ll be leaving for Singapore and Chennai again in February for 2 weeks. Maybe do a r&r trip to Thailand this time. Have to wait and see. Was also thinking of going to Kyoto for a few days. I love Japan.

My trusty HTC Magic that I lovingly rooted and added so many nice ROMs decided to simply not boot up any longer. I noticed in Chennai when I was having dinner my last night, it was acting rather strange. Not to be without a “droid”; I went to the digital lifestyle store in Changi and plopped down cash for a HTC Hero. This phone had the updated ROM but was not rooted so I could not run applications on it like Backup for Root Users. Fastboot on it said, “remote not allowed”. What to do? Well, I followed this guide and then I downloaded Modaco’s custom Hero ROM that is rooted from here. Thanks to Paul for the great ROM and the “rootedness” of it. Basically steps are:

  • Allow non market applications on your phone.
  • Download and place flashrec on the SD Card.
  • Download recovery image for Hero like Amon Ra’s from XDA and place on SD Card.
  • Install the Linda File Manager from the market (not sure what to do with no market like some HTC’s. Perhaps find on slideme.org).
  • Boot the phone and run Linda. Select the flashrec apk package and install.
  • Now select the Recovery Image and install from flashrec. You have to manually enter the name of the name of the recovery image and then flash it to the phone.
  • Now take the update.zip for the ROM image and put it on the sd card (rename the file downloaded from Modaco and rename)
  • Flash the update.img

Done, bingo, voila. Does this sound complex? Well, it took me 15 minutes to get this done and have a rooted Hero ROM. Why have a rooted ROM? Well, if you travel and need the Android Market Enabler; she will not work for you without root. If you want to use an application which needs to “su to root”, no way. So its worth it having a rooted ROM on the phone. Much easier than the Goldcard method and not really needed anyways.

Thanks to all the guys at XDA, Paul at Modaco, and the folks that made flashrec. Some day HTC will close this little back door for root happiness. But for now; installing a rooted ROM and not worrying about the rest is pretty easy and takes all of 15 minutes.

Travel Mode

Today is my last day in India. Tonight I fly out to Singapore for a day and night and then on Friday I fly back home! Going to be seeing a few international airports starting this evening. Gonna be very nice to get $HOME.

Tis the time for the rotation of the holidays and time to reflect on being thankful, remembering the past, looking toward the future, and considering the lint in my navel. Well, none there; so I will get to the serious stuff. Please ignore this if you don’t want to read some kind of retrospective. I just feel compelled.

The Past

Another year goes by with remembering the DaveR from Levanta. I still miss the DaveR unfortunately. That pain has lessened but I don’t think it ever truly goes away. Back in 2006, I went to his farewell party at Cal. It was a touching tribute to a man who touched many lives. Who can really say who we touch for the better or worse? After watching the people chronicle DaveR’s life and times, it came to me he made the true measure of his life even if cut tragically short. Cancer is evil folks.

If there is one bright spot its that the link to DaveR’s blog outlived the company I found him at. That is a good thing. Linuxcare was a fun, vibrant, funky thing. Levanta was sad. One I will miss forever; the other is barely a passing memory. Again, for another year, bye DaveR. Still miss you.

In another entry of being thankful for what you have or have not. Its okay to not have certain things. I was actually quite thankful to be gone from home the time I was. Too many serious events happening there at a personal relationship level that I would never blog about. It gave me time to consider what I am thankful for. Now I am approaching leaving India and am doing so with a bit of trepidation. What happened is both in the past and now; which takes me to the next entry.

The Present

Thanks to Celestix Networks! I am thankful for that job, those people, the caring and empathy and consideration my boss, CEO, President, work colleagues; everyone has shown me. Its the greatest job with the greatest little company that could, will, and can. I enjoy the work tremendously, guys. Thanks!

The Future (if it actually exists)

In a favored book of mine, Edward Abbey maintains he searched for a long time for the underlying reality of things only to figure out that reality truly does not exist and there is no underlying reality. There is desert sand, death, life. Desert Solitaire was a work that touched a few aspects of my life in the past, reaches to the present, and manages to touch the future. I spent years wandering deserts and valleys, forests, and the great plains. The future beckons me with decisions to be made, factors to consider, issues that need resolution. But I have also come to realize much like a few heroes I have that we are truly placed here alone. We come in that way and we leave that way. We can surround ourselves with friends but there is that private place that they cannot intrude. Perhaps by knowing both, the few people who have entered my world mean that much more to me. I don’t see that changing in the future. I am first and foremost a private person. After watching the movie “Into the Wild”, it came to me even as Alexander SuperTramp searched for meaning and finally abandoned himself to Alaska that we all search for that same wildness. It may be found differently but we all rebel and walk the world’s roads. Its our future call. The siren call to our indomitable spirits. But we must move forth alone. There is no reality folks. And we all know that space and time as a continuum is a false paradigm.

The Closure…

Happy day to remember families, friends, and what they mean. Treasure the few that touch your life; but remember you do walk a solitary path. If anyone ever says “trust me; I have your best interests at heart” run for the hills. For they surely don’t .

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