The Machine Stops

Secret Herbs and Spices

2011-08-25T12:08:00.000-07:00

So you want to learn more about how your PC actually works?. Perhaps you'd like to know more about the inside workings of your Intel or AMD processor. Well, that's no problem, of course. Hugely detailed technical datasheets are available from both these vendors. Sure, they are a bit reticent about some details - internal debugging registers, that sort of thing. But, for the most part, if you want to know what connects to each of the pins, what the instruction sets and registers do, and how the device works internally, all that information is available.

And so it is for most electronic devices. After all, how could engineers design without this information?. Or hobbyists learn the secrets of circuit design?.

Unless, of course, we're talking mobile device CPUs (and GPUs). Suddenly it's a world where, unless you are (as Nvidia state in their developer forum) 'considering a market for 100,000+ devices', then frankly, you're out in the cold. For some reason most of the mobile CPU vendors are incredibly secretive about the internal workings of their ARM-based SoC (System on Chip) devices.

Oddly, Texas Instruments appears to be the odd one out. They do make detailed technical reference guides available for their OMAP series of devices. I'm not quite clear what earth-shattering secrets the other vendors feel they can't disclose, but for open source developers this paranoid secrecy must be absolutely infuriating.

But if your device comes from Qualcomm or NVidia, forget it. Their device secrets are available only to a select few.

You can understand, perhaps, that these vendors hardly want to support hobbyists who want to tinker with their chips. But TI's relatively open approach has made it possible for a whole open source infrastructure to spring up around their chipsets, such as the Beagleboard. I think the other vendors are really missing an opportunity here. If they persist in their paranoia, in the long run, it's likely that the more open vendors will get the attention of the Open Sourcerors. Already, Canonical have made a real effort to support the ARM architecture, for example, but these attempts will founder on the proprietary extensions made to the architecture by each vendor, particularly if the technical details have to be reverse-engineered.

So, Qualcomm and NVidia. This is a plea to open up more. What secret herbs and spices do you really think your competitors don't know about, that are buried in your private datasheets?. Open up and let the innovators come knocking at your door. It's your market to lose, long term, if you don't, regardless of how many devices Samsung or HTC are buying off you right now. When the market matures you need to look for diversity, and that comes from smaller players, who may be considering integrating ARM and Android into all sorts of products, such as car dashboards, refrigerators, stereos.... who knows what. If they can't easily get technical data when they're doing a proof of concept, they'll go to the vendors who are willing to engage, and design around their products.

You can see this quite clearly in the embedded processor market, where Microchip made the PIC series of processors incredibly popular by actively encouraging hobbyist designers. No matter how technically amazing your products are, its a maturing market. Imagine if Intel and AMD kept their processor datasheets secret. Would we even have Linux or Android now?. I doubt it very much.

Corporate denial

2011-07-29T14:39:00.000-07:00

A few months ago I purchased an Archos 101 tablet. I was very impressed with this device - sure, the screen viewing angle isn't as good as the iPad, there's only 256M RAM and you need to install a hack to use the Google Market, but at half the weight of an iPad, its a nice little package.

But hardware engineering ain't always easy. Apple learned that with the iPhone 4 antenna fiasco, and Archos have learned the hard way with the A101.

Specifically, there's a problem with the USB host port. It will fail. When it does, the device will also stop being able to sleep, so you're up for turning it off when you're done using it and then rebooting every time you need to use it again. Otherwise the battery will run flat in a few hours.

Of course, I didn't know there was an endemic problem with the device until I had the problem. Now, modern electronic devices are so reliable (six sigma and all that), that it's been a while since I had a hardware failure. And pretty much every hardware failure I've had in the last decade can be traced back to the humble capacitor. A lot of these have failed due to a fascinating story in industrial espionage gone wrong - but you can google 'bad caps' to learn more about that one.

This was different. And, regrettably, so was the way Archos seem to be handling the situation.

Now, before I continue, let me just say that Micro Anvika, from whom I purchased the unit, have been very professional. I took it in, they accepted it for repair and what happened next was entirely out of their control.

What happened next was..... nothing..... Archos accepted the unit for repair and...... nothing. Nearly six weeks later it was clear that getting things sorted in a timely manner didn't look likely. Micro Anvika were quite willing to replace the unit, but by then I'd read all the postings where others had apparently had very similar issues. So I declined, and got a refund.

The point of this, though, is not that things fail. I accept that. Recently I had an LG monitor fail. Bad caps, I think. I was all ready to go and buy another one when I checked the warranty and found to my astonishment that LG warrant the monitor for a full three years. It was two and a half years in, so I rang them. Yes, sir. Bring it in to your place of work and we'll have a courier deliver you a replacement. Which they did. Fantastic service.

Archos, though, appear to be in denial. Is there a serious problem with the A101?. Well, forum posters think so. But Archos remain silent. The problem here is that this silence, coupled with an apparent inability to turn around warranty repairs in a timely manner, really impacts consumer confidence. I'd have accepted a replacement if I'd been confident in the company, but clearly, they aren't providing an acceptable level of after-sales service.

Companies have to learn that burying bad news always makes things worse. Right now, I'm very wary of ever purchasing - let alone recommending - any product from this company. Yet if they had been open about the issue and resolved it promptly, I'd have been more than happy to give them another chance.

I will be writing to the CEO of Archos about this. Reputational damage is very hard to overcome, and it's a shame - their products are innovative and cost-effective. But consumers are much more informed than they were a few years ago, and negative press will quickly pile up and overwhelm a company which buries its head in the sand when problems arise.

A rude shock for HTC fanboys

2011-06-14T11:44:00.000-07:00

So the original HTC Desire isn't getting Gingerbread after all. Not enough RAM, apparently. You'd certainly think 576M was a fair amount, but obviously not if you want to run Sense.

This is a blow for Android, because clearly pretty much all the devices, regardless of vendor, released prior to 2.3 will probably now never get an upgrade. Sony, Samsung and the rest will breathe a sigh of relief; if HTC weaselled out, so can they. And they will.

Of course you can root the phone and install Cyanogen, and I'm wondering how long it'll be before some of the more enterprising 'mom and pop' mobile phone stores start offering this service, managing the tedious task of getting all your apps and data across, for some kind of (hopefully not too steep) fee.

It's also a blow for vendor (and carrier) customisation, because if this is seen by customers as potentially blocking future upgrades - and it certainly has had a huge impact in the timeliness of upgrades in the past - there will be growing pressure for handsets to be offered with stock Android builds, further commoditising a market already rapidly heading the way of the PC.

But it's also a worry when it comes to malware. As I said a long time ago, Android's openness is a two-edged sword. Coupled with an infrastructure of devices that cannot be updated, it's a crook's paradise, since existing security flaws will be there indefinitely. Sure, the Android Market *might* catch some of the bad guys but given that software can dynamically load other components, and that the kernel exploits may never be patched, how easy will it be to keep control of this.

HTC need to urgently re-think this decision. It might be a loss of face to abandon Sense - but the wholesale abandonment of its existing user base to what can only become an escalation of hackery, is a disaster in the making. How long will it be before customers sue HTC because they were hacked, for example?. Does HTC have a duty of care?. It's a tough call, given that Microsoft, for instance, have drawn a line on future Windows XP patches - but with device lifecycles as short as they are, how willing will customers be to upgrade. And even if they do, those 'non-upgradeable' handsets will make their way down the food chain. What happens when some litigious customer gets a multi-thousand dollar phone bill due to hacking and sues the carrier and HTC for negligence. Or will the carriers start barring old phones as a pre-emptive measure to avoid these kind of scenarios. That'll be a popular move!.

How ironic it would be if CyanogenMod actually offered *better* security by rooting the phone then vendor locked-down customised Androids did.

Google's stewardship of Android has been pretty erratic. The lockdown on Honeycomb certainly has helped, when it comes to the market being flooded with knockoff iPad wannabees, mass-produced from inferior components, but this can't last forever. Google really needs to think about parental responsibility here. Right now, baby Android is hanging around with some pretty scuzzy lowlifes, and Mom's looking the other way. And as Android users, not all of us enjoy playing in traffic. Time to wake up, Google, pull down a curfew, ground the kid for a while and get into some Tough Love. Otherwise, it'll end in tears....

Yahboo!

2011-04-28T14:56:00.000-07:00

I've had a yahoo business mail account for a long time now - and it's worked fairly well most of the time. Mailbox search failed at one point, but other than that, well, it's email, what can you say.

Stupidly, I assumed that because I was forking out something like 6 pounds a month for the service (and a further fee for my own domain), that this somehow entitled me to any form of support whatsoever when things went wrong. Because of course, I could have had my domain hosted by gmail for free.

Well, I've learned my lesson now. Things started going wrong about a week ago when suddenly my phone indicated a login failure checking email. I thought nothing of it until I logged on from my home PC to be informed that my account 'might have been compromised'. Since my password is reasonably non-obvious, that was worrying, but things rapidly went downhill from there.

I tried resetting my password, since now my normal password no longer worked, but apparently the alternate email I'd set up was a hotmail account which I couldn't recall setting up. That's my fault, of course - moral number 1, don't forget your alternate email account. But we are talking something like a decade ago when this was set up.

I tried to recover access to my hotmail account but to be honest I wasn't entirely sure what the heck it was called. At any event, this proved fruitless so I tried contacting Yahoo support by email. 48 hours later I got a response apologising for the delay and telling me to ring customer support. I'd already tried that, of course, but it was obvious that this was an exercise in futility. There's an option for Yahoo small business - when you take it, an infuriatingly upbeat female voice smugly announces that telephone support is no longer available and I should sign in for support. But I can't sign in!. Ah, Kafka, where are you now. How you'd love this!. As for trying to contact account support, forget it. You just end up in a queue from hell. And, ringing long distance from London?. I don't think so.....

Meanwhile, the whole yahoo email infrastructure appears to have collapsed. Hence, it's even more impossible to get access now than it was a day or two ago. Apparently something has gone horribly wrong switching people over from 'classic' email to the new-look email. This wasn't my problem but now I am swamped in a huge queue of angry people who also can't reach their yahoo email, but for a completely different reason.

Well, I'm giving up for a few days. Fortunately, access to mail isn't life-threatening for me, but clearly it's essential to regain control of my domain and move everything to a company where customer service actually means something. A lesson learned, fortunately not the hard way, but if I had been running my own business, this could have been catastrophic.

The long and winding road

2011-01-20T11:56:00.000-08:00

I've posted earlier about an attempt to create a media server using an old Asus EEE 701 netbook. Since then a second laptop from the growing family computer collection (don't ask!) has become available for recycling - an IBM Thinkpad T40, which is obviously a considerably more powerful machine.

This led to the plan of setting up the T40 downstairs, connected to the TV and with the whole music collection moved onto its 80G drive. Because the T40 has an S-Video output, it can be directly connected to one of the TV inputs and this now allows us to watch stuff on iPlayer that we forgot to record on the PVR (which, of course, now only has Now/Next functionality, see earlier post).

[what a marvellous invention iPlayer is. I am reminded of the wonderful passage in one of Douglas Adams books where the protagonist invents a time machine so he can go back and watch all the TV programs he forgot to record - now we have exactly that, thanks BBC....]

The home theatre 5:1 system only had a spare digital audio input free, but that's easily fixed with one of Maplins low-cost (about 20 quid) USB audio devices, which has both 3.5mm stereo outputs and a standard optical out, and requires no drivers (it also works just fine on Linux, by the way).

So that was the easy bit, but then, what to do with the EEE. Well, the bedroom stereo would really benefit from being able to access the downstairs music collection, so obviously turning the EEE into a little satellite would be ideal. This turned out to be a little more complex than I had anticipated.

The first step was to blow away the standard - and now very old - Linux distribution that the machine runs out of the box and put a copy of Ubuntu 10.10 on there. This was quite simple; instructions are widely available on the net but basically it's a case of grabbing a 1G (or larger) USB key, and formatting and copying down the ISO using a free utility. Then boot the EEE off the USB key and install Ubuntu.

Note that you won't see the USB key as a bootable option unless you plug the key in, start the machine, go into the BIOS and fiddle with the boot settings. This caused some confusion because there is a 'removable device' option in the boot order that initially looked like it would be the USB key. Anyway, once that's sorted, Ubuntu installation is reasonably painless, except that the dialogues don't all fit on the EEE's screen. This is only a minor inconvenience; to get at the buttons to continue during installation use the left mouse key and ALT to allow windows to be dragged around the screen to expose the clipped bits.

Ubuntu flawlessly recognised the wireless interface and audio, and at this point it was a simple matter to decide which media centre software to use.

The plan was to access the downstairs box via an SMB/CIFS share. To do this, you need to install SMBFS using APT-GET or the Synaptic program manager GUI, and then you need to set up an entry in /etc/fstab to get the share mounted at boot time. This is fairly well documented on the net, so I won't bother repeating all the steps here.

I would note that setting everything up as a static IP address seems to be simplest. I found that otherwise, my Windows boxes could ping each other by host name but both the EEE and my Android phone couldn't resolve the IP addresses, even though the local Dlink router is supposed to be providing DNS services to the local subnet. The Windows boxes presumably resolve names using Netbios over TCP and there is an optional component for Ubuntu - Winbind - that supposedly provides the same functionality.

I did experiment with it but found that strangely, ping would now resolve the IP address from the hostname, and display it, but then the ping would fail.

In uninstalling both XBMC and Winbind using Synaptic, somehow, Ubuntu got completely screwed up and would only boot to a text command prompt, so at that stage I cut my losses and reinstalled from scratch and settled for fixed local IP addresses. This also simplifies the Android phone connectivity.

Once this was done, I had a directory under my home directory called 'music' which gave me access to the SMB share on the IBM T40. Next, I installed media player software. Since I wanted to remote control the player from my Android phone, this limited my choices somewhat.

Initially I went with XBMC, but there are two significant problems with it. Firstly, it's quite resource hungry and audio glitches were common. At first I went looking for all sorts of other causes, as the CPU, while high, wasn't at 100%, but ultimately it became apparent that XBMC is just too much for a low-end box like the EEE. The second XBMC annoyance is that if you want to use VNC to remotely connect to the EEE from another machine, the XBMC interface is incredibly slow due to all the gratuitous animation and stuff, that AFAIK can't be disabled.

It was a pity because the XBMC remote software which I installed on my Android phone worked very well. On a more powerful box I'm sure XBMC would have worked well.

So I switched to VLC. This uses a lot less CPU and played audio perfectly. And the VLC remote application for Android works very well - it also has a volume control, something that the XBMC remote did not have.

Setting this up involves going into preferences and specifying VLC as a startup program with the command line

/usr/bin/vlc -I http

This enables the HTTP interface. Note that the default directory that it always starts at is the users home directory, so mounting the SMB share directly underneath it (or symbolically linking to it) will ensure that the music folder is immediately accessible.

All was well.... or was it.

It became clear pretty quickly that if the VLC remote volume setting was any greater than about 25%, serious distortion was evident in the audio. This led me on a wild goose chase for a while, and unfortunately exposes a weakness of Open Source solutions - the lack of decent documentation. As a consequence all sorts of contradictory advice float around the net. I discovered that if I installed alsa-mixer I could see an additional slider for 'PCM' which also controlled overall volume, and supposedly, setting this to less than 100% would solve the problem. It did not. During the investigation I also found that the slider settings aren't saved and restored during a reboot, although there's a way round this. But, as I said, this turned out to be a dead end.

I also tried an external USB audio interface (I have two of the Maplin units) but this didn't help.

Then - suddenly, for no obvious reason - audio stopped working. Although, oddly, the 'test speaker' option in Ubuntu still worked. Eventually I managed to fix it by shutting down VLC completely, rebooting without it set in startup, running Rhythmbox and playing something - this seemed to fix the problem, but I have no idea what went wrong.... sigh!.

The solution to the distortion problem - it turns out - is to enable VLC's graphic equaliser. This is also not entirely obvious, but the trick is to stop the HTTP-enabled copy (which, remember, was started at boot time) and start up a normal copy of VLC with the UI visible. Then go into preferences, enable the advanced option, go into audio filters and select the graphic equaliser and set the gain to 0 (it is otherwise +12dB). Then type in ten 0s separated by spaces for the fader gains i.e
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

then save this and go back to the main VLC UI and enable the graphic equaliser. Turn it on. Now shut down VLC and restart it and go back into the equaliser and verify it is enabled.

Finally restart the HTTP-enabled VLC and confirm that the problem is now resolved. Why VLC does this in the first place, I have no idea.

At this point another problem raised its head. The VLC remote doesn't seem to cope well with two scenarios that the XBMC remote software has no issue with. This is, to be honest, most likely a problem at the HTTP server end rather than with the remote software itself.

The problem is that you will get a fatal XML error in the remote application if either:-

(a) you have a lot of albums in your music folder. A few hundred seems to be the limit. I had more than this, so the easy solution was to break them up into subfolders labelled A-F,G-K and so on, which also makes looking for something quicker.

(b) The filenames contain certain non-standard characters such as international accented characters etc. The solution is to rename troublesome files. Quotes are also a problem. Still, while tedious, this only has to be done once.

And that's it. Now I can access my entire CD collection from any computer in the house, plus two of the three stereo systems (lounge, bedroom) the other being in the kitchen. I need to pick up another EEE second-hand for that. They seem to sell for around 50 quid on eBay which makes them excellent value - this, after all, gives you a complete wireless media server and is far cheaper than the dedicated, very expensive solutions you can purchase from places like Richer Sounds. And your mobile phone acts as the remote. Sweet!. Now, if I could only find a mobile-friendly interface for iPlayer. Currently my only option is to use Android VNC, which is extremely awkward when controlling the full screen of the T40. I'm sure there's a better way, just haven't found it yet. (i.e, some kind of mobile-optimised interface which would show a list of programs with a simple search and then let me start it playing on the T40 in fullscreen mode, with some transport controls.

EDIT: I found that I still had the occasional dropout, for which the cure appears to be to specify a reasonably large cache buffer time using the --file-caching command line variable, and in this case I specified a 5 second cache, which seems to be working fine i.e the command line to run at startup becomes

/usr/bin/vlc -I http --file-caching 5000

What were they thinking?

2010-08-12T13:34:00.000-07:00

By now, you'll read that they blinked. 'They' being Vodafone, who pushed out an Android update to UK owners of the HTC Desire that wasn't quite what the proud phone owners expected.

Well, Vodafone have pulled that update and apologised. Not before time, mind you. You can read the Vodafone forums for details on the update, which, amongst other things, foisted 'Vodafone 360' software onto users which couldn't be uninstalled, and added bookmarks to - of all things - adult sites like Flirtomatic. So great was the outrage, the story got quite a bit of coverage within the news media. Not the sort of publicity that Vodafone wanted, surely.

What were they thinking?. I know what they were thinking.

They were thinking:-

1. Users will think this is the new 2.2 Froyo update so we'll get lots of uptake
2. They're all at the start of 18 or 24 month contracts, so what can they do?. Just whinge and suck it up.

I'm quite sure Vodafone knew *exactly* what it was doing here and calculated, rather cynically, that the fuss would die down pretty quickly. Unfortunately (for them) they miscalculated and, presumably, someone at a VERY senior level eventually had to put a stop to it.

It's interesting to look up a certain Wikipedia article and find this definition .... an abnormal lack of empathy combined with strongly amoral conduct ....

It's part of the definition of a psychopath. Yes, what we have here is corporate psychopathy. It's a scary thought. A complete and utter contempt for its customers, coupled with a cynical determination to extract as much money from them as possible.

Meanwhile the whole affair has shed further light on one of the great weaknesses of the Android platform; the irresistible urge by both the handset vendors and the carriers to tinker with the stock Android releases.

Now, certainly, many of the handset vendor enhancements have arguably added value - HTC's sense UI and their keyboard are certainly an improvement over the standard Android functionality - but these customisations are bad, in the long run, because they fragment the Android market.

Consider the release schedule. Google release Froyo. HTC (or whoever is the handset vendor) port their enhancements and test them. The carriers all personalise the HTC stock release - and it looks like HTC do this for them, in most cases. Finally the poor consumer - if they're lucky - gets the upgrade.

This is an expensive and time-consuming process and it can't continue for many more iterations. Imagine if your PC could only run Windows 7 after Dell had produced a special 'Dell Windows' version.

So we're back in the dark ages of the early PC. All those vendors who took MS-DOS and then produced special versions of it for incompatible machines with different hardware etc. Remember that?. Well, I do. Apple have managed to lock down the iPhone experience and any carrier trying to personalise the iPhone would simply get their knuckles broken. Unless Google start taking a much harder line, Android users are going to continue to experience - if they're lucky - frustrating delays before each and every Google Dessert gets served to their phone. If they're unlucky, well, Vodafone have shown them what they'll get. A turd on a plate.

Just be quiet and consume, consumer!

2010-07-20T14:06:00.000-07:00

When my Digifusion PVR suddenly wouldn't show the day's programs when I turned it on recently, I knew immediately it wasn't a fault. And sure enough, some googling showed that, as I suspected, InView, the company providing the electronic program guide (EPG) information had decided, with no notice whatsoever, to simply terminate the service.

The reason for this is somewhat obscure. You can google for the official 'explanation', which witters on about lack of bandwidth, etc etc, but clearly, business being business:-

(a) someone was paying InView for the provision of the service

and

(b) that 'someone' has stopped doing so.

Now the affected machines come from a range of manufacturers. Digifusion was taken over by Beko, and Sony rebadged one of those machines themselves. Inverto and Thomson are two other affected brands. How many machines are affected is unclear; several thousand is probably a fairly reasonable guess, it could go into five figures, given that the Digifusion machines, in particular, have proven to be highly stable with excellent software - and, judging by forum posters - hard to replace with equally capable modern models.

It's not clear therefore exactly who was paying InView (and has now stopped) and everyone's staying rather tightlipped. On the Digital Spy forums there's a lively discussion on this topic, a petition with over 1,000 names already added, has been started, and with luck the actual truth behind the whole affair might emerge shortly.

But in the interim, organisations such as the Digital TV Group (DTG) have rather mendaciously informed affected owners that if only they had purchased machines with the official FreeView 'tick' - the DTG seal of approval - this problem wouldn't have happened, because these machines would have fallen back to the Freeview standard 7 day EPG.

Unfortunately for them, someone has dug out some of the packaging these machines came in. And found that in fact some of them - the Digifusion units, for example - DO have the official Freeview 'Tick'. Of course, when that was awarded, there WAS no 7 day Freeview EPG. This is why manufacturers had to come up with their own EPG system. So there's no way for these 'officially certified' boxes to fall back to a standard that, at the time of their certification, simply didn't exist.

So now we have a whole bunch of people running for cover. They probably expected that those placid, flat-screen owning consumers would simply blink in surprise, go down to Curry's and fork out all over again for a new PVR. That's what consumers do, after all. Isn't it?. But to their surprise a rather substantial number of owners have decided that having an essential service cut off with no warning and then subsequently being lied to by all parties, is not acceptable. Letters are being drafted, to MPs, to Which?, to the BBC (who have, in fairness, given some airtime to the issue).

Now the obsolescence of a bunch of 4-5 year old boxes might seem a small thing to get upset about. But the Freeview consortium approved these boxes. Now it appears to be collaborating with some of its business partners to simply abandon their owners and to misrepresent the certification issues for which it must take responsibility.

There's talk of Sony possibly stepping up to fund the service. I'm not holding my breath on this one. But it really makes me wonder how we could have come to this point - where consumers are simply held to ransom and treated with what can only be described as utter contempt.

EDIT: A quick look back at DigitalSpy after posting this reveals that the digitallogo.digitaluk.co.uk website has apparently quietly removed the Digifusion model from their list of certified devices. A spokesperson for the company even had the gall to respond to a query from one of the posters by replying that they couldn't find the device listed!.

However, someone's kept a previous google cache, which clearly shows that the models WERE certified, so now the fur's really flying!. A fascinating tale and I can't wait to find out what happens next.

But what does it do, Ug?

2010-04-15T13:44:00.000-07:00

When IBM released the original PC, industry pundits were astonished. Instead of proprietory IBM components, it used an off-the-shelf Intel 8 bit CPU, the 8088. The source code to the BIOS was included in the manuals. Any manufacturer could produce compatible plugin cards for it.

But that was nearly 30 years ago. It's been an amazing ride since then, but what's become very clear is that the initial open design ethos and the hacker culture that went with it, may be drawing to a close.

What provoked these thoughts was the unveiling of Apple's iPad and the subsequent industry speculation about Apple's first homegrown processor, the A4. Was it an ARM-based chip, as originally thought, or possibly a PowerPC architecture?. Electron microscopes have been wheeled out to settle the argument, and pundits have pontificated that certain microscopic features point to Samsung as the manufacturer.

I don't know about you, but I find this astonishing. In essence, Apple has reduced us all to a bunch of cavemen (and women), like the apes in 2001, gesticulating with their primitive bone tools at the mysterious black monolith, whose workings they could never hope to comprehend.

And Apple are not alone here. Let's quote from Harald Welte, who has published a very interesting and informative guide to how a GSM phone actually works. This is what he had to say

QUOTE
The GSM industry is one of the most closed areas of computing that I've encountered so far. It is very hard to get any hard technical information out of them. All they like to spread is high-level marketing information, but they're very reluctant when it comes down to hard technical facts on their products.
UNQUOTE

He's quite right, of course. Interested in the inner workings of that Qualcomm Snapdragon processor that powers your latest phone?. You'll look in vain for technical manuals on the internet, they're a trade secret. (its older sister, the MSM7201, does have manuals available, but you have to search very hard to find them and they are clearly marked as highly confidential, so it's only a matter of time before Qualcomm gets them pulled out of circulation).

As Harald points out, information on how the baseband processor that actually does the heavy lifting works is even more tightly restricted.

But, remember, we're CONSUMERS. Consumers don't pull things apart to discover how they work, as children, so that they can pursue a career in engineering later in their lives. Consumers consume. Indeed, this is exactly what so many commentators have said about the iPad; it is a device for consuming content, not producing it.

I read this week that one possible explanation for the Fermi Paradox (where are the aliens?) is that any advanced civilisation eventually becomes self-obsessed and turns in on itself. Thus we have Twitter and Facebook (and, I suppose, this blog, for that matter) but we no longer have a credible active space program and dreams of landing on Mars or sending probes to Alpha Centauri are just that - dreams. Meanwhile our creative energies are spent raising virtual crops in Farmville.

I feel sad that the promise so evident in the original IBM PC - a promise that, in essence, started the whole personal computer revolution in that it transcended proprietary designs and created a level playing field on which all could compete, both in the hardware and software arena - has come to this, a return to proprietary design, trade secrets and locked-down systems that verify that the software that runs on them has been digitally signed before it is permitted to execute - to execute, mind you, on hardware that (we might hope) we own, and have paid for.

But we are where we are. Consumers have voted with their wallets that walled gardens such as Apple's (or Sony's, with the recent forced removal of Linux support from the PS3) are what they want and.. well, let me quote the Eagles....

.... and freedom, oh freedom
well that's just some people talking....

'Marketecture'; how to confuse and disappoint the consumer

2010-03-20T10:00:00.000-07:00

A number of laptop owners have found to their surprise that despite having machines whose processors support hardware virtualisation, the vendor has chosen not to allow this feature to be enabled in the BIOS. Sony has come under particular fire for this, though they are not apparently alone in disabling the feature.

This has come to prominence recently because - until it announced a patch the other day - Microsoft required hardware virtualisation support to run 'XP mode' in Windows 7.

Since I had just purchased additional memory so that my Dell Inspiron 1520 could run VMs, it occurred to me to wonder whether Virtualbox was actually using hardware virtualisation. Sure, I'd enabled the feature when setting up the VMs and I knew the laptop processor - a T7250 - supported hardware virtualisation (aka VT-x), but was it really enabled?. Up till now I'd just assumed that since Virtualbox was allowing me to select hardware virtualisation, and the processor supported it, that hardware virtualisation was actually being used

WRONG!

A quick google led me to two utilities - one from Microsoft, called havdetectiontool.exe, and a second, securable.exe, from Gibson Research.

These both reported that hardware virtualisation was 'locked off', so despite VirtualBox pretending to use it, it wasn't.

Luckily Dell are not one of the vendors who have locked the feature out; it can be found under the POST options setting in the BIOS.

Once enabled, both utilities reported hardware virtualisation was active and my VMs certainly appear somewhat more responsive. Tests elsewhere have suggested the overhead of software virtualisation is between 25-40%, so it is an important feature if you intend to use VMs. This also implies that XP mode - when the patch is released - will perform considerably more slowly on some machines without hardware virtualisation, although it will run.

Intel's decision to randomly enable VT-x across their processor range is an odd one. With the recent surge in interest in virtualisation, the fact that you have to carefully check which processor supports it and which does not, then double-check that the machine vendor hasn't locked it out anyway in the BIOS, makes this a minefield for the unwary purchaser. Contrast this with AMD, where just about every processor since the Sempron has hardware virtualisation support. Of course, I don't know if any machine vendors have then chosen to lock this out. A quick check on my old Asus M2V motherboard running an Athlon 6400X2 revealed that virtualisation was definitely enabled, which was reassuring.

A particularly baffling - and frustrating - Intel example can be found in the CULV processor pair, the U4100 and SU7300, which apart from a small cache difference, are almost identical. Except that the SU7300 supports VT-x and the U4100 doesn't.

It's hard to get definitive prices for these processors; they aren't sold to end users and the Intel site, which doesn't list prices, has 'buy now' links to Avnet and Arrow which both come up with unknown product codes. Nor does searching these sites for U4100 and SU7300 get you anywhere.

However, some googling suggests that both processors sell for $289 in qty 1000. That information doesn't come from the Intel site, however, and may not be accurate. If the price is accurate, though, its baffling that Intel provide these two, almost identical processors.

What I do know, though, is that the excellent little Samsung X120 subnotebook costs over £100 more equipped with the SU7300 than it does with the U4100. Since both processors run at the same clock rate and there is only a small cache difference (3m vs 2m), the other main differentiator is the support for hardware virtualisation. This seems an odd thing to differentiate on for a subnotebook, which might not be a very attractive virtualisation platform in the first case. So what Intel's up to is somewhat of a mystery. Possibly the idea is that 'consumers' - how I hate that word! - will assume that something called an SU7300 will be *much* faster than something called a U4100. It's hard to say, but either way, Intel really ought to rationalise its product line.

Another concern is simply that the CULV products, with their 5-10W TDP, absolutely trounce the Atom. The Samsung X120 can be picked up in the UK for £399, with 3G of RAM and a 250G hard drive, Wifi and Bluetooth. This makes it hard to justify the cost of some of the higher-end netbooks, which even with a more modern Atom processor (Pinetrail) are still going to be left in the dust by these CULV processors, albeit that they may offer a slightly lower overall power consumption and longer battery life.

When the price is not the price

2010-03-04T04:13:00.000-08:00

Today I had a Strange Encounter with a novel pricing policy; the Internet Only price. It came about because I needed to upgrade the memory in my laptop, and PC World advertised 2G PC5300 sticks for £33.99 each, which seemed pretty reasonable, given a quick comparative internet search. In any case, I needed them right now, so a bricks and mortar store was really my only option.

So I trucked on down to Sunny Slough, a 10 minute drive, and went to the shelf - and lo, the price was £52.99 per stick. Hmmm. I enquired further and after the - admittedly most helpful - assistant and I had browsed the net together, it transpired that in 8pt tiny writing just above the price were the words 'web exclusive'. Next to that is a button that lets you 'collect at store'. I was told that the way it works is that you place an order through the internet and then the staff go pick the stock off the shelf. Then you drive down and pick it up. That'd be the same shelf we were just standing in front of, then.

So, for reasons that - well, I can think of a reason - but let's just park that thought for a moment - anyway, reasons that might not seem entirely obvious, it'll cost you a cool £38 extra to rock on down and pick them off the shelf yourself.

Of course, I simply did the Polite Incredulity thing and of course, picked them up for the original internet price. But it got me thinking. PC World's prices have often seemed 'you're having a laugh', (particularly for stuff like inkjet cartridges), but this seems like a fairly cunning way of being able to stick it to walk-in customers who haven't done their online research, while still looking competitive in the open world of the net, where price comparisons are only a click away.

I could, presumably, have whipped out my Android phone, browsed to their site, ordered the stock and then stood there while the assistant went to the shelf. Kinda surreal, but it really does remind you - in the UK, in particular - buyer beware!.

To be perfectly fair to PC World, I've had a similar experience with Comet, purchasing a dishwasher, where the online price was a good deal cheaper than the sticker price in the store, and yet I would have been picking it up from exactly the same store, anyway. So, folks, be careful out there and check those web prices. So far, I've found staff perfectly willing to match them, presumably because they know you'd walk if they didn't. But it seems very unfair on shoppers who expect transparency and fairness in pricing. It'd be different if the stock was being fulfilled, like Amazon, say, from a central warehouse. Then you might expect online pricing to reflect the economy of scale. Otherwise, this seems like a fairly blatant piece of customer exploitation; perfectly legal, of course, but hardly ethical.

Are the barbarians really at the gates?

2010-02-02T03:59:00.000-08:00

Fraser Spiers' thought-provoking blog entry

http://speirs.org/blog/2010/1/29/future-shock.html

suggests that the iPad will be the 'computer for the masses' and that the negativity expressed by many technical commentators simply reflects their dismay at seeing their rice-bowls shattered.

Compelling though his arguments seem at first sight, there are some real flaws in the idea that somehow, by creating a closed infrastructure, Apple have magically created the first computer that didn't need a resident geek hovering in the background to fix it every time Mom did something silly.

Apart from the rather obvious fact that lots of non-technical folks are managing perfectly well with ordinary old-fashioned open computer systems - my 95-year-old mother, for example, who emails me regularly from her laptop and has a broadband connection - there are some use-cases that Mr. Spiers simply doesn't address, and when you consider these some of the magic evaporates.

Suppose I want, for example, to transfer some photos from my non-Apple camera to the iPad so I can show my friend on the iPad's screen. The camera doesn't have WiFi and the iPad doesn't have a card reader. Sure, I can purchase a docking station - which, presumably, will have a card slot - or at least some USB ports into which I can plug a card reader - but I'm at my friend's place and I don't have it with me. Yes, I know you can buy WiFi-enabled SD cards, but they are hardly ubiquitous, and they are not cheap.

Or what if I wanted to project those photos onto the wall. My friend has one of those cool pico-projectors but - again - how am I going to get video across from the iPad to the projector?. (now think sales meeting.... hmmm. Not so cool now when I stride in with iPad tucked under my arm)

But the biggest issue that I think Mr. Spiers has overlooked is printing. In the real world, we still need reports, invoices, presentation handouts etc etc. Now, even if, just for a moment, we imagine that everyone starts installing WiFi printer gateways, there's still the small matter of printer drivers. How do these get installed?. If all printers spoke the same language, that'd be fine, we could make the iPad talk PostScript or something - but they don't. And I still have to grapple with margins and stuff. How does the iPad make all that painless?.

Of course, I can transfer (I hope) the document to another computer and print from that. But this isn't quite the seductive vision of seamless computing being expressed in this blog.

Another scenario - I'm typing my thesis for a PhD. Now, seriously, no touch-screen keyboard is every going to come close to the typing speed a skilled touch-typist can manage on a real keyboard, not to mention the damage you'll cause to your fingers constantly banging them against an unyielding surface. So you'll need an external, battery-powered, bluetooth keyboard. And remember to carry it around. And remember to check that the batteries have a charge. And pair it with the iPad, remembering the four-digit code. Since a significant number of people have trouble remembering their ATM PIN code, is this really something the average person is going to do?.

Oh, and prop the iPad up so you can read it. Now you have something that looks awfully like a notebook computer, just more awkward and more fragile, too, because in carrying the iPad around, there's no protection for the screen as there would be from the lid of a notebook computer.

Incidentally the Visigoths do like to play games. The iPad is simply not going to blow you away with World of Warcraft at 50fps, is it?. Even if you imagine cloud-based gaming, with the rendering being done elsewhere, internet latency makes the whole proposition very questionable. Nor can I pipe the output from my Xbox to the iPad on my lap.

Let's just step back for a minute and be realistic. The iPad is slick, no doubt about it. But I own an Android phone which comes very close in user experience to the iPhone. It's no leap of the imagination to imagine a new generation of Android-powered devices which are either tablets or - much more sensible - a hybrid device with an attached keyboard AND a touch screen. You can fold the keyboard entirely flat underneath the device and use it like a tablet, or you can use it like a notebook. Of course, being based on the Linux kernel, Android should be able to support an extensible print subsystem and leverage the huge amount of work done by Open Source developers to support most modern devices. This will require some changes to the architecture - Google has hacked Linux around rather a lot to produce the Android kernel, but nothing too difficult.

And, for that matter, let's consider Microsoft. Suppose the Apple 'no multitasking' restriction does prove popular. It turns out that after spending the last 20 years bringing multitasking to the masses, they simply don't want it. Well, out of the box, why not disable it and let the technically-astute turn it on if they want. You can bet that Microsoft will produce an easy-to-use version of Windows if the market demands it. Hopefully Apple have taught them how to get it right and will spare us any repeats of the Bob fiasco.

Apple has no monopoly on ease of use. Several years ago, the Asus EEE running a modified version of Xandros showed that you can build a very consumer-friendly product. Everything was launched from a locked-down desktop. You could browse the internet, create documents, play a limited selection of games and generally do things ordinary people do with computers. Even a BIOS upgrade was just a button click; the machine would reboot and apply it automatically.

I know we've all become bewitched with that seductive vision of Tom Cruise performing a ballet with the aether, dragging order from chaos from gossamer webs of light suspended in the air. But even he had to file his expense report at the end of the day. No, when the iPad collides with the mundane reality of daily life, and we stop pretending we're on the bridge of the Enterprise, it won't be warp factor 9, it'll be impulse power.

Six Weeks in DroidTown

2010-01-30T09:53:00.000-08:00

It's been an interesting six weeks. To be honest, it's been rather embarrassing recently, having to admit that my mobile phone, was, well, just a phone, when everyone else was toting impressive glass slabs that, when not conveying real-time Twitter feeds to their owners, could be used for proxy farting, or ocarina playing - thankfully, due to Apple's ban on multitasking, not at the same time!

I toyed with joining the iPhone Set, but Apple's benevolent dictatorship, efficient as it may be, repels me. Nor did I particularly wish to mortgage my soul to a mobile carrier for the next two years for the privilege of being allowed to join the local Ocarina Club.

I'm a libertarian at heart, which left me with a number of options.

Firstly, there was Windows Mobile, the reason I never got a so-called 'smartphone' in the first place, and which hasn't improved much with age. Whipping out a stylus and performing brain surgery on one of these things while being jolted violently around on a number 77 bus just doesn't seem an entirely sane thing to do. Particularly while standing.

Or I could have become the second person in the entire UK to purchase either a Nokia N900, running Maemo (which I believe rhymes with Nemo), or made the O2 salesperson's day by buying a Palm Pre (hey, Steve, I sold one of those Palm things to a geek today!)

No, DroidTown was clearly the place to be. The joint was jumping, neon lights shone everywhere with music and dancing. New models were appearing daily. Albeit with silly names, I mean, Motorola Milestone?. Seriously?. But, Android looked like the future.

Unfortunately, being a pay as you go kind of person - you can ring me, I'll text you back - the cost of a ticket looked pretty steep. Until I discovered the T-Mobile Pulse. At 140 quid, this is definitely my kind of price.

Of course, all phones are starting to look more and more iPhone-ish. And the Pulse - a rebadged Huawei phone - is no exception. I won't bore you by banging on about the specs, but broadly speaking you've got everything here the iPhone has except for video out, or indeed, any kind of a dock connector at all.

So that's the hardware. And pretty impressive it is, reminding us that the Chinese make most of our high tech stuff these days anyway, so why shouldn't their 'own label' stuff be just as good?.

But it's DroidTown I want to talk about. Now, compared to the Apple experience - and I own an iPod Touch, which seems a pretty good point of comparison - there's no doubt there are rough edges. For a start, each of the carriers seems determined to Stamp Their Own Personality on whatever stock Android release the phone comes shipped with. (Imagine Apple allowing this!. The horror, the horror!). When you've seen what Orange can do to a perfectly nice UI colour scheme, you'll know what I mean).

In the case of T-Mobile this means (natch!) an unfortunate fondness for magenta, not, to be honest, a colour I particularly appreciate being jammed up my eyeballs, and which, in my opinion, ought to be reserved for error messages along the lines of 'Pump Failure on Reactor 1. Now SCRAMMING Core. Please evacuate building immediately'... and so forth. Here, every time you type text into something, you're trying to read black on a magenta background. And to bring the phone out of standby, you have to slide a magenta-coloured little ball upwards (why not sideways, like the iPhone?. Is this a patent issue, or something?).

My first surprise was that there's no way to re-theme in Android, so you're stuck with this. Ah well. Over time, like that horrible patterned wallpaper you swore you'd paint over when you moved into the flat (but never did), you get used to it.

After that things went reasonably well. Of course, I expected - and indeed found - that quite a number of apps from the Android Market didn't always work absolutely perfectly. An odd recurrence seems to be that the 'return' key won't work, for example, in any terminal application I can find. And the default mail client, well, let's just say, Apple don't need to lie awake at night pondering how to improve theirs.

But there are enough apps - K-9 mail, ES File Explorer, Aldiko, Astro etc. to more-or-less get the important stuff up and running, such as mail, file transfer, eBooks and so forth, and the phone does come with read-only versions of software to read common Office document formats.

Oddly, there's no Android application I can find that will read rich text files (rtfs) - a niche I commend to some entrepeneurial developer.

My second surprise had to do with contact synchronisation. I already knew that Google Mail was the best place to set up contacts and that the phone would then pull them down - which it does. However I've yet to be able to get it to work the other way, i.e, if I add a local contact on the phone, getting GMail to pick it up. This wasn't The Great Google Experience I had anticipated.

The screen and keyboard seem fairly comparable to the iPhone, albeit that, in landscape mode, the bottom row of keys can be a little tricky - the sensitivity of the capacitive touchscreen doesn't seem to extend right out to the very corners of the visible screen, as it does on the iPhone. Still, that's a hardware issue.

Oddly, the accelerometer will position the display between portrait and landscape but NOT if you rotate round to inverted portrait or landscape. Whereas, sensibly, the iPhone does what you'd expect. I have no idea why this limitation exists, either, and it's annoying, because sometimes if you have the charger plugged in, it would be useful to browse in landscape and have the cable on the other side... but you can't.

I swapped out the default, but rather busy, Android keyboard -it's certainly clever, the way you can shift between upper and lower case while typing, but I much prefer the more spartan version, which resembles the iPhone's keyboard, and started to get comfortable with Life in DroidTown.

Some more quirks emerged progressively. YouTube works perfectly on 3G but on WiFi there's some kind of timing bug that causes many videos to fail to play. This is a widespread issue and has been reported against quite a number of different handsets. Hopefully it's resolved in Android 2.1

Which of course brings me to everyone's major concern. Will the handset manufacturers, not to mention the carriers, upgrade phones such as this, currently running Android 1.5, to later releases?. At present the prevailing opinion is - we think so - but this exposes the biggest issue with Android. Whereas Apple have committed to providing updates for their entire device population, albeit at times for a fee, there's no guarantee that Android handset owners, not to mention owners of forthcoming Android netbooks, will ever be able to update the OS. Now, compared to a truly open infrastructure such as Windows, this really is unacceptable. Indeed, it was one of the major concerns people had with Windows Mobile and Windows CE devices. Many of these have never been upgradeable beyond the initial release, causing a good deal of bad feeling.

Android doesn't help itself here by putting a major roadblock into upgrades. Most Android phones have a very limited filesystem partition for applications, not to mention the operating system itself, and indeed the oldest phones may not be upgradeable to 2.x at all, because there simply isn't enough space, even though you may well have a gazillion gigabyte SD card installed.

In my case, installing some 20 or so applications has already gotten me to the point where my space usage is reported as '92M of 105M used', which means pretty soon I'm going to have to triage applications. Now, sure, Astro, that wonderful file manager, lets you back up and restore apps to the SD card, but you can't INSTALL them onto SD (although most apps try and use the SD card for their data). Why this is, I'm not sure. Security has been raised as a concern as well as DRM issues, but frankly, I think this is the biggest flaw in Android right now and simply needs to be addressed.

Of course, I could 'root' my device, and work round this issue. But that's not really a solution for the mass market.

Other quirks: Every now and again one of the core tasks locks up and a dialogue comes up asking me to 'force close'. To Android's credit, the phone seems to recover from this without rebooting, but it's disconcerting. The browser, every now and again, just quits - but in fairness even on version 3.2, my iPod Touch browser sometimes chokes on odd web pages.

Scrolling is kinda weird. On the iPhone its awesomely smooth. As soon as you start moving your finger, the text scrolls. On this phone - and I suspect this is Android, not the phone - there's a lag. Then suddenly the text will start scrolling. It then scrolls smoothly. I think this is a design decision but it's annoying, and detracts from the fluidity of the touch screen experience.

Of course, there's no multitouch. I'm not entirely sure if the hardware supports it on this phone and we know that on phones which do, the feature has been crippled in the US at least due to the threat of software patents Apple holds. Therefore the browser displays a pair of zoom buttons every time you scroll the text. How I yearned to configure it not to do that - but alas, you can't. There's an alternative browser called Dolphin that I tried, which uses gesture recognition instead, but frankly after trying it for a while, I went back to the default browser. It was just too awkward. Apple's pinch is definitely superior to any alternative UI.

At least they didn't do what Nokia did. I went into the Regent St Nokia shop and had a look at the N900. I asked how you zoomed and the sales assistant went into gestures that looked like he was trying to stir a spoonful of sugar into the screen. Apparently you rotate clockwise to zoom in and anticlockwise to zoom out. Or is it the other way around. At any event it looks risible and when I tried it the whole screen just danced around under my fingertips; obviously, I had not found the G spot.

Anyway, back to Android. I have the keyboard set for haptic feedback, so that each keystroke registers via the phone's vibrator (how silly that sounds, but I'm not sure what else to call it).

Sometimes it'll go into a momentary 'petit mal' epileptic fit where the phone starts vibrating like an angry bee when you type, and won't stop. Pressing another key will calm it down. Rather disconcerting.

After a week of use I charged the phone up one day and left it on overnight. In the morning the battery was absolutely dead. I repeated the exercise the next night. Strangely, no battery drain occurred during the day. After some trial and error I found that if I turn WiFi off overnight, the problem goes away. Something's going AWOL, but what, I have no idea.

Otherwise, to be fair, things have been pretty good. I have never had it crash to the point of needing a reboot. Call quality is good and it seems to pick up a signal most places there IS a signal. And although T-Mobile's 3G network coverage is a bit spotty, where there is a good 3G signal, browsing is an enjoyable experience. T-Mobile's wonderfully generous PAYG plan helps here; if you top up 10 pounds a month, you get 'unlimited' internet access - in practice, a fair use policy of 40M/day - and unlimited texts. This kind of compensates for their higher voice call charges compared to Orange, particularly since most of the time I'm texting and browsing on this phone, not making voice calls.

So, what does the future hold?. Well, outside the affluent Western countries, I think Android has a very bright future. With no licensing costs and Google's fairly benevolent platform management, I think there's no doubt that Android makes the perfect partner to all those 'Shanzai' phones which China currently makes with - I imagine - unlicensed copies of Windows Mobile. Applications are easy to develop - the SDK is freely downloadable with no pesky NDAs - and you don't have to learn a truly weird programming language to write them (although, in fairness, I understand .NET is coming to the iPhone. It needs it).

However, the relationship between the handset vendors, Google and the carriers is definitely strained. Google's Nexus One was clearly introduced so that Google could at least guarantee one handset would always be upgradable to the latest version of Android. But it has driven a wedge between Mountain View and some of the large handset manufacturers, particulary Motorola, who has been granted a miracle reprieve from oblivion with the success of its Droid/Milestone.

HTC, of course, also has a dilemma. As a major player in the WinMo market, and with a handset (the HD2) that many would like to see running Android, it'll be interesting to see what Microsoft have to say to HTC over the next few months. Redmond doesn't like losing and it has never hesitated in the past to use aggressive business methods if that's what it takes to win. You only have to read 'Hard Drive' to see how ingrained this culture is within the organisation.

Google's 'laissez faire' approach to platform control has, so far, only resulted in one piece of known malware. Whether this will remain the case, is hard to say. Obviously bad guys go where the money is. The ARM architecture means that smartphones don't make an obvious nexus for introducing viruses into an Intel-dominated corporate infrastructure, though they could certainly carry them. Network-sniffing trojans, which relay corporate intranet traffic to the outside world, seem like the most obvious threat, and this is where Apple have a trump card.

With the latest version of the iPhone boot rom, which has not yet been jailbroken (at least, untethered), plus the fact that each iPod/iPhone has a unique, embedded serial number, Apple have a traceable and almost tamper-proof platform. Although they screwed up with the earlier Exchange security fiasco, I'm sure they've learned that lesson. Corporate IT will be much more comfortable with iPhones on the network then they will be with Android phones. And it's hard to see that antivirus software is a practical proposition on these platforms, due to resource constraints. So that's an issue.

On the flip side, rolling out a mobile LOB application on Android is much easier for an SME, because you don't need to get Mother's permission. Anyone can write apps for Android and anyone can distribute them. And your developers probably already know Java, so retraining is less costly and there will be a larger pool of developers with business knowledge. Sure, there are lots of iPhone devs, but most of these people are focussing on game development, for which the skillset is very different.

So we'll see. Meanwhile, I'm enjoying the bright lights. I don't miss the walled garden, but it'll all come down to the numbers. When the people inside the wall are watching U2 at Glastonbury, sometimes you don't want to be outside looking in. If Apple can cement enough critical relationships with key vendors - today's McMillan deal is a prime example - it may be better to be on the inside of the wall, at least, for the fortunate Western consumers. Everyone else will be in DroidTown, a little poorer but still happy enough with what they have. At least, as long as their Sugar Daddy in Mountain View keeps pouring aid money into the economy. If not, it could get dark very quickly down in DroidTown.

The Great Media Server Project

2010-01-29T04:27:00.000-08:00

The other day I was rummaging through my cupboards when I came across my old Asus EEE netbook. It hasn't had much use recently, and suddenly I thought, hey, wouldn't this make a fabulous home entertainment system. I could put all my CDs onto a hard drive, plug it into the EEE, add it to the stereo system, then remote control it from either my iPod Touch or my new Android phone.

At first I thought I'd be able to use some 'off the shelf' software to do this, such as Gmote for the Android. However, all sorts of annoying issues arose, mainly stemming from bugs with the fairly old version of VLC available for the Debian/Xandros Etch release modified for the EEE. Nor could I use the http interface for VLC, at least the standard one, because of a serious playlist bug, which I'll mention later. In any case, this interface isn't suitable for a mobile device, with its restricted screen size.

Still, by then I'd become fascinated with the idea and decided to pursue it anyway.

Now, I know I could have installed Windows XP on the machine. But this didn't feel right. Firstly there would be the cost of a copy, unless I felt like being a pirate - and this would bump the cost (free) up rather considerably. Secondly it felt wrong. Linux on this machine runs very nicely and it can be factory reset in just a minute or so. A Linux solution felt much more natural.

The EEE is a reasonably powerful machine, even by modern netbook standards; it uses a Celeron chip underclocked which compares reasonably favourably to the Atom, despite the higher clock speed of the latter, and it certainly can play MP3s without breaking a sweat. And you can pick one up second-hand very cheaply. Since it has a solid-state drive, there's not much to go wrong with it and it seems to be a reliable piece of hardware.

Here is a step-by-step guide to the whole process. It was an interesting exercise, because much of the information on the internet is either plain wrong, contradictory or fragmented. All in all it took me a couple of days but you should be able to do the whole thing in just a couple of hours, or less.

I used a model 701 with a 4G filesystem. Since we are going to use an external hard drive for the main music library, there's no reason this shouldn't work on the 2G model either, and you could probably pick one of these up even cheaper. Incidentally, this exercise doesn't affect the EEE in any way, as regards normal use, so if you still want to use it as a netbook, you can simply unplug it and walk off with it. All the new services run as background tasks and don't affect the operation of the netbook in any way.

These instructions assume you have a main, Windows-based PC, and a home wireless network. However, there's nothing Windows-centric about this exercise and you could just as easily use a Linux PC, or even a Mac, to control the EEE. You also, ideally, need either an iPhone, an iPod Touch or an Android phone to control the media player. The interface is entirely web-based, so you don't have to install any software on these devices.

Of course, being web based, you can control the media player from any PC. But using your phone or iPod is much more impressive.

0. Getting started.

I strongly recommend that the EEE be reset to factory defaults. This is an amazingly quick and simple process, taking only a minute or so. BE SURE to back anything vital up from the machine first.

Press F9 while booting and reset to factory defaults

Note the user name and password that you enter during this process. We will need this information later

Reconfigure wifi and get this working. That's fairly obvious so I won't dwell on the process, it's all GUI driven.

1. Add additional repository for software

We need some software not in the standard 701 repository. Luckily software for Debian Etch works on this machine, so we'll add that repository

Start a terminal window by pressing ctrl+alt+T

Add

deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ etch main contrib non-free

to /etc/apt/sources.list

using the command

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

Note: Nano is a simple terminal-based editor. Press ctrl-X to save changes and Y to confirm them. Later on in this exercise we'll install gedit, the Gnome Editor, which works just like Windows notepad, so that future editing tasks will be somewhat less painful. However we can't do that until we've added this repository first.

Now do an update to refresh the local package list

sudo apt-get update

Note: this produced a verification error on a missing public key at the end of the update - I think this can safely be ignored

2. Install VNC so that you don't have to use the tiny keyboard and screen for the remaining processes. Unless you really want to, of course. Otherwise, why not do everything from the comfort of your main PC and keyboard.

sudo apt-get install vncserver

sudo vncserver :1

(the :1, I found, is important, because otherwise VNC starts spawning new instances, often spontaneously. Eventually this brings the EEE to its knees and it stops responding)

Enter an appropriate password. You'll need to enter this every time you connect via the VNC client on your main PC. Making it the same as the password you used for the installation user would probably be a good idea. You only have to do this during the initial install, after that it will remember it.

Assuming you don't have VNC on your main PC, install it now (I used free VNC 4.1.3)

Run the VNC client on the PC and verify that you can connect to the EEE

Now the remaining steps can be carried out using the VNC session on your main screen and keyboard

3. Ensure EEE won't suspend when lid closed

Obviously you want to tuck it on the shelf with the lid closed, so we need it not to shutdown when the lid is closed.

The easiest way is just to move /etc/acpi/lidbtn.sh out of the way. The EEE will then remain powered up when the lid is closed

i.e, from the terminal window

sudo mv /etc/acpi/lidbtn.sh /etc/acpi/lidbtn.sn.sav

Now verify that the EEE stays running when you shut the lid

Note: I found some software that purported to do this (lidman) but couldn't get it to work. This approach has the merit of simplicity and reversibility.

4. Install VLC.

Unfortunately the version compiled for this release of Xandros is a little old (0.8.6a) but it does work. Getting a newer version is non-trivial and involves comments on the net like 'simply compile a new release'. Yeah, on a 4G filesystem, loading all the source and compilers and headers is, like, a great idea. Not!. But this version will suffice for our needs. If some lovely person wants to build an apt-installable package for the latest VLC on Etch, well, you'll be very popular, people will laugh at your jokes, you will grow rich and famous... anyway... pressing on with what we have for now....

sudo apt-get install vlc

Since we're probably using VNC to do all this, you need to allow external hosts to create X-Window sessions, by issuing

sudo xhost +

Otherwise vlc will fail to create its UI over VNC when we run it

Note: this should only be required just the once. From now on in, you won't have to do this.

Then run VLC by typing

vlc

Some suitably cheesy test media files can be found at

/home/user/My Documents/My Music

Unless you're a lover of elevator music, you'll tire of these pretty quickly!. Luckily that big hard drive full of music is waiting to be connected....

Having established that VLC is working, the next step is probably not necessary for most of you, and can be skipped

5. Configure external USB sound device

My home entertainment system is almost out of input ports. Only the optical port is free, so I need a suitable audio device with an optical output. Fortunately (here in the UK), Maplin's sell a very cheap little USB to audio device. It has a single 3.5mm stereo headphone socket which provides a standard line out, plus an optical port. We need to get this working as an audio device. For once, this proved to be quite painless. It really was 'plug and play' under Linux. This is also a useful device under Windows as it doesn't require any drivers to be installed, should you need an optical out.

First plug it in.

Then, go into VLC's settings (Settings/Preferences) and select audio/output modules and then ALSA.

The ALSA device name will probably be 'default'. Drop down the list and select the USB interface from the list. I found afterwards I had to restart VLC. After that, the device should show as hw:1,0 in that list

VLC should now play through the new interface. As I said, you won't need to worry about this unless you don't want to use the built-in audio or need an optical interconnect, as I did.

6. Connect external hard drive with music repository

Obviously the EEE's internal 4G filesystem is far too small for any reasonable music library, so a USB external hard drive is needed. Assuming it was originally formatted as an NTFS drive, you may prefer to keep it that way (I did), since then you can obviously plug it back into a Windows PC and easily copy files onto it. We're going to set things up so that you can, of course, move new music onto the drive via the network, since at some point soon all this kit will be tucked away on a shelf as part of the home entertainment system.

I used an 80G, 7200rpm drive. Nothing fancy, just happened to be something I already had. It should comfortably store at least 1,000 CDs, and I don't own that many. If your music collection is truly awesome, you may want to consider a larger drive.

Unfortunately keeping the drive NTFS exposes a few complications. While the EEE can expose its filesystems as Samba shares, performance accessing these seems to be very poor from Windows explorer, and the whole experience of trying to copy information across got very flakey. I resorted instead to good old FTP for the job, which seems to work reliably. Well, once I found the right FTP server. See later.

Anyway, at this stage, just verify the drive mounts and that you can browse it and VLC will play media from it. It should appear under your home directory (/home/user).

Note: you could of course use an SDHC card in the card slot. However, an external drive provides a much larger amount of storage for hugely lower costs - 1 terabyte drives are now very reasonably priced and would store tens of thousands of CDs. Let's see, 10,000 CDs at approximately 1 hr each would take over a year at 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, to play. That should do it!

7. Configure an FTP connection

FTP is probably the easiest way to get stuff onto the main hard drive from other PCs on the home network. It's possible to mount the drive as a windows share, but performance isn't as good.

First we need to pick the right FTP server for the job. There are several to choose from, the big three, as far as I could tell being vsftp, proftp and pure-ftp. I have also used ncftp in the past, but didn't get to it this time.

There are issues with vsftp and proftp that aren't worth fighting to resolve, in my opinion - in the case of vsftp,paranoid 'out of the box' security settings that make life impossible and which are extremely hard to bypass. Great for Megacorp's online ftp repository, not so great for us. Proftp didn't fair much better. It's picky about its config file, didn't seem to be able to browse the external NTFS disk, and will fail to start under unpredictable circumstances when you make config changes. Not good. Pure-ftp works very well, however, and requires absolutely no configuration.

For the main PC ftp client, FileZilla is the one you want. It's free and has a well-designed GUI. FileZilla has an FTP server as well, for Linux, but not, as far as I know, for the rather old version of Debian that the EEE runs, which is why I used pure-ftp. Otherwise if you want an 'end-to-end' FTP solution e.g between Windows machines, Filezilla is an excellent solution.

Install FileZilla on your main PC and verify that the GUI launches.

Now, on the EEE, install pure-ftp

sudo apt-get install pure-ftpd

Now, we'll launch it, and attempt to connect to it

sudo pure-ftpd -B

This flag launches pure-ftpd in the background

(note: we're going to set things up at the end so the ftp server, the vnc server and vlc all start automatically).

From the FileZilla client, specify the hostname or IP address of the EEE, and logon as 'user' (literally 'user', not the user that you defined when resetting the EEE earlier), and with the password that you set up for the standard user when the EEE was reset to its factory default settings.

You should successfully connect. Your FTP home directory will be /home/user on the EEE and you should see the external hard drive underneath this tree and be able to browse it.

8. Connect to VLC using the default HTTP interface

run vlc with

vlc -I http

(that's a capital I, just to be sure)

Then, using your browser, connect to the EEE either by its server name - which will be eeepc- i.e if you set up the user during factory reset as 'joe' it's name will be eeepc-joe - or by its IP address.

i.e

http://eeepc-joe:8080

or

http://192.168.1.4:8080

assuming that it has that ip address. If you have trouble accessing it by name and are not sure what IP address it has, you can find this out by going into the wifi details on the EEE, which should show you the currently allocated IP. If you want to access it by IP permanently, it might be worth changing the wireless settings to set up a fixed IP address. This is pretty obvious and very similar to how you do it under Windows, so I won't discuss it further here.

You should see the default VLC HTTP interface in all its glory. (this is actually the file index.html in the /usr/share/vlc/http directory)

NOW STOP HERE... DON'T TOUCH THAT DIAL!

Tempting though it might be to play with the default VLC browser interface, DON'T. This is because the version of VLC we are using has a bug with the playlist clear command which will lock up VLC. The new interface we're going to use in a minute works around this problem by clearing the playlist one entry at a time in a loop. (I found all this out the hard way, it's not documented, as far as I can determine).

9. Copy the new HTML interface over

Download the HTML document from the link at the end of this post. Save it as something, e.g, play.htm

Now use filezilla to transfer it to the EEE, to the /home/user directory. Permissions will be a problem regarding getting it to its final resting place, we'll do that in a minute with VNC and a terminal window

Note: you could also transfer this file by any number of other obvious ways, putting it on a USB stick, unplugging the external music hard drive and putting it on your PC and copying it, or even extracting it by surfing directly on EEE and extracting the HTML

Note: a proper text editor would be handy for this. Why not stop for a moment and install the Gnome Editor (gedit). This works pretty much like Windows Notepad and is somewhat less of a pain than terminal-based editors like nano, (which comes installed on the EEE already)

sudo apt-get install gedit

then to test it, just run

gedit

Now in a terminal window, copy the file (assuming it was called play.htm)

sudo cp /home/user/play.htm /usr/share/vlc/http/play.htm

We need to stop and restart VLC in order for it to pick up the new file's existence. (however, we can make changes to this file later without having to restart VLC)

to stop VLC, either just restart the EEE, or type

ps -ef | grep vlc

the | is a vertical bar, or pipe symbol, which is usually the shifted backslash (\) on a standard PC keyboard.

Ok, now you'll see, probably, two lines with VLC on them (plus the grep command). Note the leftmost number on the first line. This is the process ID (PID) for VLC.

Now type

kill -15

where is the PID you found, e.g if it was, say, 17449, type

kill -15 17449

Then repeat

ps -ef|grep vlc

You should now see that VLC isn't running any more

Now restart it with

vlc -I http

and then, in your browser, type in (assuming, as before, that your machine is called eeepc-joe)

http://eeepc-joe:8080/play.htm

and you should see the new interface. Note that under Firefox, the buttons will look rather small; this is because unlike Internet Explorer or the Webkit-based browsers used in most mobile phones and the iPod Touch, the cascading style sheet 'zoom' attribute is not supported; these buttons will appear larger on those devices, for which this interface was designed.

You can now have a play and determine that all is working well. Click on a directory to browse into it and click on the .. line to go back up a directory. When you get to some music files, click on any file to add it to the playlist. If it is the first file to be added, it should start playing immediately. As you click other files they are added to the playlist without disturbing the currently-playing file. As you can see, entries change colour when they are added to the playlist (blue) and the currently-playing file is shown in green. Note that this is NOT updated in real-time, you need to refresh the page. This is because to get a real-time update, a lot of information needs to be requested from VLC each time. I need to create a special XML file which doesn't come with VLC - I'm looking at that.

The + icon will add all the current directory entries to the playlist. The playlist icon toggles you between playlist view and browse view. Finally, you can clear all playlist entries. You will be asked to confirm this operation.

10. Trying it from your mobile device.

Using an Android phone or an iPhone or iPod touch, simply browse to the above page. It's as simple as that, no software to install!.

11. Getting everything started automatically

Now we need to configure the EEE so all the services automatically start up at reboot time. For this I am indebted to the instructions at

http://wiki.eeeuser.com/howto:startupscript

Before proceeding, it would be wise to check the wireless connection settings. You need to be sure that the EEE will reconnect to the home Wifi access point on reboot. To ensure this is so, click on the wifi icon in the system tray - oddly, the one WITHOUT the setup spanner - and select the active connection. Then, in the properties dialogue, ensure that the start mode is set to 'on boot'.

First we need to create our startup script. To do this, go to the /home/user directory and execute the following commands

sudo mkdir .icewm

sudo chmod 755 .icewm

cd .icewm

sudo gedit startup

and enter the following

#! /bin/sh
sleep 16
sudo pure-ftpd -B
sleep 5
sudo vncserver :1
sleep 5
sudo vlc -I http

save this file

then

sudo chmod 755 startup

Now we need to add this file to the simple mode startup script

cd /usr/bin

sudo cp startsimple.sh startsimple.sh.orig

sudo gedit startsimple.sh

Locate the comment

# we are switching from full to easy mode

go down to the line about 3 down from this that reads

fi

AFTER that line, add the following

# Media startup
if [ -x /home/user/.icewm/startup ]; then
/home/user/.icewm/startup &
fi
# end Media startup

CAUTION: This step has the potential to cause you great grief if you get it wrong.

Fortunately if you do, and for some reason cannot restart the EEE,the instructions at

http://wiki.eeeuser.com/howto:installrescuemode

should allow you to recover from the situation. Since you made a backup copy of the original startup script, you can easily restore it via the recovery
console and then have another go. But let's not be pessimistic....

Now restart the EEE. All being well, you should find that VLC, VNC and pure-ftpd are all restarted at boot time, and that wireless mode is re-established.

After confirming all these services still work, you're ready to go live. Or are you?....

11a. A world of hurt and pain....

For the impatient: you probably should at this point install the updates from the Settings tab in Add/Remove programs before continuing. Then skip to step 12. For more detail on what went wrong, read this section.

As with almost all software and hardware projects, this is the point where things are most likely to go wrong. All seems well, so you decide to go live. Then.... well, it all goes pear-shaped, as we say in the UK.

Sure enough, after about an hour of flawless playback, while I was copying some files down from the upstairs PC, the EEE crashed. It locked up so solidly that only holding down the power button for 10 seconds would reset it. And then, during boot, it locked up to a black screen again. After cycling power for the second time, it booted.

At this point I recalled my partner telling me that this had happened to her during a presentation. This was one of the reasons the EEE got replaced by my old laptop, an IBM T40. (another was that she needed more raw power, to show audiovisual presentations).

At the time I'd discovered a known issue reported against Open Office for lockups, applied the patch available from the EEE's software updates and thought no more of it. But this looked serious. It looked, in fact, like a hardware problem.

But optimism always prevails in these situations. Perhaps it was a one-off, a glitch. I set it back up and continued copying files down. It ran perfectly. I left it idle and went out for a couple of hours, came back and found it locked up again.

In these situations the first thing is to try and establish if we have a software or a hardware issue. In this case, it sure looked like a hardware issue and my suspicion was that it was temperature-related. Rule 1 is to start with memory tests, so I dug out an external USB optical drive and plunked a copy of Ubuntu 9.10 in there, and booted the EEE to run memtest86 for a while.

This found no issues. Hmmmm....

Perhaps a BIOS update would be a good idea. There have been several updates since the machine was built, and the EEE has the easiest BIOS update functionality I've ever seen, just pick the BIOS from the Add/Remove software updates listing and it's applied automatically. So I did this. But the problem wasn't fixed.

The next step was to try stressing the CPU. That should provoke any thermally-related issues. This was easily done by writing a one-line Perl program that looped endlessly (perl is included in the standard Xandros distribution on the EEE).

To monitor things, I installed gkrellm (sudo apt-get install gkrellm) and enabled the on-board temperature sensor (sudo modprobe thermal). It reported a CPU temperature hovering around 50 degrees, which seemed about right, at 100% CPU utilisation.

Just to really hammer the machine, I also did a cat from the main hard drive to /dev/null, which would read tens of gigabytes from the drive and stress the I/O subsystem nicely.

But this, too, ran flawlessly. This cast doubt on the hardware theory. Could it be software?. I hadn't bothered to install the upgrades after resetting the EEE to factory defaults

So, visiting the Add/Remove software utility again, and going to the 'settings' tab, I applied all the updates. I didn't bother with the security fixes, but applied all the other updates, most notably the 1.0.5 desktop update. I didn't apply updates to any other categories, figuring that since we aren't using that software, there's not much point.

After this, I noticed firstly that the media drive had been renamed and now appeared in the directory tree as 'D:'. Everything appeared to work

I wanted to share the drive and see how Windows managed it, but found that the default name, D: was not acceptable. Fair enough, so I renamed it to HardDrive under File Manager and then shared it. Windows Explorer seemed to work ok, and the terrible browse performance seemed to be fixed. I tried copying some music across and it worked, although considerably more slowly than FTP, taking nearly 5 minutes to copy a single CD. Still, this was encouraging.

After a day of solid running, it looks like the lockup problems have been vanquished.

Note: There is one small quirk now. When I connect via VNC I don't see the EEE desktop, just a checkered background. I can still invoke terminal sessions with ctrl+alt+T so this is only really a minor nuisance, and at some point I might investigate further. After all, in the worst case, all I have to do is grab the EEE off the shelf, open it up and do whatever I have to do directly on the machine.

Note also: you need to run

sudo xhost +

after the updates to re-allow VLC to run when invoked from a VNC session.

12. Modifying the user interface

The HTML is designed to be reasonably easy to change. CSS styles are used to manage the visual appearance so you could easily modify the look and feel.

VLC supports other functionality I didn't feel was essential for a media player. Volume I can control from the main stereo remote control, so I preferred not to introduce confusion by adding a volume slider to the HTML UI. In addition, VLC allows you to control track position externally. Again, this isn't something you normally do when listening to music, so I skipped it.

VLC is a tremendously powerful media player. Unfortunately, as with many open source projects, the documentation is somewhat less than comprehensive and coherent.

We are exploiting VLC's HTTP interface here. What may not be immediately apparent is that the XML and HTML files it returns can be extensively customised and new files created. This would be handy - if time permits it would be useful to add a new XML file that just returns the ID of the currently playing playlist entry. Then the HTML UI could periodically request it, allowing the display to update in real time. Although we could request the full playlist to determine the currently-playing song, this would request a lot of information, especially with a large playlist, and I was concerned this might introduce dropouts, so I haven't implemented it.

VLC has a powerful macro facility to allow these files to return all sorts of information. The learning curve looks rather steep, but I'm sure its doable.

13. What about a Windows server?

Could this be done with a Windows server instead of the EEE?. Well, I had a quick look and discovered that there seems to be a problem with the XML returned by both the browse and playlist functions. The backslashes which separate out the path components aren't being returned. Ideally, I think on both platforms the XML should return identical results i.e use forward slashes. I'm looking into it....

14. Accessing the music library from another computer

It's possible to set up VLC to stream across the network, but the simplest way is just to open the shared media drive across the network. This seems to work well without glitches here, even with two PCs independently streaming audio while the main stereo is also playing something else. I measured CPU usage hovering around 11-15% on the EEE under these circumstances.

15. Adding new music

To be honest, the easiest way is just to pop CDs into iTunes, on whatever machine you're sitting at, having set it to automatically import CDs. Then with a FileZilla window open as well, each time iTunes completes a CD, just drag and drop it over to the media drive on the EEE. Of course, iTunes is sometimes rather wilful about how it categorises CDs, often preferring to do so by artist rather than composer, for classical music, but again FileZilla makes it painless to rename things or move files around on either the local machine or the EEE.

16. Finding stuff

With hundreds or thousands of CDs, the basic UI for the HTML interface starts to involve a lot of scrolling to find stuff. One easy way round this is to add folders for each letter of the alphabet and then drag and drop stuff so that your directory structure looks like this

music
...A
......Abba
......Air
...B
......Bloodhound Gang
......Blur

etc

(names chosen randomly and not to reflect musical taste in any way!).

However I'm looking at adding search functionality to the UI, once I've figured out the best way to make it work. Watch this space....

Appendix. The HTML for the user interface.

Note the line after the //change this... comment

You can change the root point at which browsing starts by changing this line. This is probably a good idea, to get you straight into an album list.

Of course, you could also create copies of this page with different root points. This would let you immediately go to a particular point in the directory tree of your music disk, and set up bookmarks in the browser for each one.

Download the HTML file from Google Docs

On a Clear Disk You Can Seek Forever

2010-01-28T16:23:00.000-08:00

E.M. Forster's short story is the inspiration for this blog title. You can read it online at

http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html

and marvel at Forster's prescience. In essence, he foresaw the very act of blogging itself, not to mention its first principle... No opinion has value unless someone else expressed it first....

This is Yet Another Technology Blog. However, it aims to include practical, useful information, not just random philosophical musings. Coming up.... a practical project to build a cheap, yet easy to use media server that allows you to use an iPhone/iPod Touch or Android phone as a remote control, to pick music that suits your mood. No Assembly Required, we are using an Asus netbook as the server.... Watch this space, tomorrow....