Oblomovka

2003-01-10»

Something I didn't realise until now. GtkHTML, Gnome's HTML widget, was originally a port of KTHML too. It's wandered alot since then, but that does imply that the interface itself might be compatible.I wonder if GNOME will be able to suck down Apple's improvements?

So the UK government has been proposing what they call an Entitlement Card - a universal ID card for every man, woman and child in Britain. Every government seems to propose this the moment they get into office, and ever since 1952, the voters have rejected it. It's one of those things that civil servants like to slip into the "TODO" list while the Minster isn't looking.

The usual way of stopping it is to complain that there's no mandate. The present government are getting around this by holding a "Public Consultation", where they write a 13MB PDF document (here's an HTML version we hacked up) talking about how great ID cards would be. They then solicit comments. The government is very pleased with this scheme. Lord Falconer, the government's ID card point man, keeps talking about how the majority of responses have been positive (they've had over 1500 so far).

I'm not so sure that's true. NTK subscriber Dan Blanchard emailed them to complain about the proposals, and got a nice mail back saying "Thank you for your e-mail in support of the introduction of an entitlement/identity card scheme.". Whoops.

Now I can't be sure they're miscounting here. I am pretty sure that there's a large number of people who are anti-ID cards, but haven't spoken up. So we've set up an easy front-end to their consultation process: you can just check the boxes, add your own comments, and mail the consultation email address automatically. We're counting all the messages that are against the proposal, and we'll see how they match up against the government figures.

Also, I can't help thinking that 1500 replies is pathetic compared to a good slashdotting. I think the blogosphere might be able to swing the balance around in a week or so.

Anyway, if you're British and you don't like the ID card proposal, have a look over the site and make your voice hear. We've only been going for a few hours, and we've already got around three hundred responses.

Oh, almost forgot to add: Bwahahahahaha.

So they're calling up the reservists in the UK. The Ministry of Defence is sending out notes to them on Monday, but wanted their employers to know that this might happen before that. So to get the word out, they spammed 100,000 random addresses in the UK. Even stranger, they paid a German company to do it.

Ah, the mastery of the tools of the high-tech info-war. I fear this is going to go down in history as one of those Spanish-American, Lions-Led-By-Donkeys affairs.

2003-01-09»

Cory's first novel is out. Buy it, then download it for free. It's a fun, geekazoid read. I romped through it on the Caltrain back around Codecon (if you're an NTK email subscriber, you can find a mention of Whuffie hidden in the X-Excuse header around about that time.) The next day, I shimmied up to Doctorow at the conference and insisted that I was the book's first fan. I began quizzing him on ridiculously fine-grained plot points. He seemed very touched, and answered my questions perfectly civilly even when I went on far too long and the whole thing become very tedious. "How was that?", I asked, before returning the conversation to more normal lines. Fine, he said, kind of fun. "Good. Welcome to the rest of your life."

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2003-01-07»

I for one, welcome our new Konqueror implementation. Actually, it does explain why David "Chimera" Hyatt went over to work at Apple. From a posting of his back in June:

What Gecko has going for it is correctness (and a very large range of implemented standards!), but I'd rather see someone try to do it better. A browser on OS X done right should be able to dust Gecko in terms of speed and footprint. It should be able to just smoke Gecko in startup time and page load time. The fact that this hasn't been done yet doesn't mean it can't be done.

I guess he went over to see if it could be done.

2003-01-05»

I've just found out that Lee Felsenstein will be talking about the Jhai remote IT project at Stanford this Wednesday, 2003-01-08, 4.15pm. If you're in the area, it should be an interesting talk.

It's also Saint Joshua Norton's birthday deathday. I shall have to find a way to pay my respects at the Bill Gates Building.

I've been settling into a slow lazy orbit of gadget-stasis. After a lifetime of craving all kinds of gizmos, I ended up with a shortlist of things I wanted two years ago. I have since failed to add anything new to it and slowed purchased everything else at bargain-bucket rates when they've ceased to be fashionable.

In the end, I realised that there was only one thing left on the list - a USB key drive. You know, one of those 64MB widgets you can hang off a keyring and plug straight into a USB port, where it magically appears as a normal drive on Mac, PCs and Linux. When I first decided I wanted one, they cost hundreds of dollars and were highly first-adopterish. Now they're cheap and ubiquitous, I thought it was time to take the plunge.

Never quite works that way, does it? About the same time, I read on Slashdot about a new generation of these little drives, with a new generation of chipsets. As well as store files, they could work as MP3 players and voice recorders too. I got the cheapest of these, the splendidly named Yo!Fun 130 for Christmas. It does MP3 playing and voice recording as well as file storage - and it can take SmartMedia cards. It's also very diddy and wee.

Unfortunately, it's the strangest engineered piece of consumer electronics I've seen. Inside it, I estimate it has an MP3 player/voice encoder chipset tied together with rope to a mass storage chipset, with a complicated pulley and winch to connect one of them to the outside world at a time. Neither know of each other's existence. You switch one or the other in, you have to crank a switch on the side of the box. If you sniff the USB output, you can watch this happen. One moment, the USB is saying "Hi! I'm a perfectly normal USB storage device made by Dull Company of Taiwan", the next the winch activates and "Zzzzt! Wait! No! I am, in fact, an MP3 player made by Somebody Different of South Korea".

Each chipset uses a different storage format. So every time you switch, you have to reformat all the memory. Want to copy some files across, then listen to MP3s? Forget it - you'll need to delete one or the other before you can move that lever. This isn't systems integration: it's systems smooshing.

Yo!Fun also isn't Linux compatible - not really surprising, I suppose, given that it's not even compatible with itself. So I took it back, and got a Cendyne Gruvstick. Bit more expensive. Slightly better. At least that presents itself as just one thing to the USB interface. Unfortunately, it's not anything that anyone outside of its own device driver would care to comprehend.

The Gruvstick uses the STMP3410 chipset which, in theory, supports the USB mass storage protocol (the standard that lets you just slam these things into Macs, PCs or Linux without needing drivers). But the Gruvstick spurns this petty interoperability for what looks like its own magic moon language. Having your own language is, of course, the very definition of proprietary. But I have to say, after poring over dozens of specs and snooped USB traffic - what a weird way of doing things. The standard says, 0x28, when it wants to read some data. The Gruvstick has exactly the same function, only *it* uses something like 0x03. Thus, presumably, doubling the work for the engineers, and rendering it utterly incompatible with anything other than their specially written drivers. Drivers which crashed Quinn's Windows 2K machine. (I may be wrong about the details of this, incidentally - and this is a blog, so it's almost obligatory to be a bit wrong. But it still looks like the Gruvstick is being proprietary for proprietary's sake. And there's not a single thing its software does that the standard USB storage protocol doesn't support. Except, I guess, DRM.)

Anyway, the upshot of this is that the Gruvstick needs its own drivers. Drivers you can only get for Windows. Now this makes it useless for my purposes - not just because I'm such a Linux wonk, but because I want to use it as a replacement for floppy disks. How can I transfer files, if I need to install drivers to get the storage device to be even recognised on a foreign machine?

So I took the Gruvstick back. Then, finally, I did the sensible thing. I went to the Linux USB working devices list and searched for what I wanted. There, I found some optimistic reviews of the Daisy Diva MP3 Player/File Store/Voice Recorder/Compact Flash reader. This, it looks like, does it all right. Normal USB Storage protocols; no weird hybrid shit; Linux support - plus, it's pretty much the same price as the Yo!Fun. And it's got a slightly less silly name.

I haven't bought it yet - because I made the mistake of visiting the rest of their catalogue. Now I'm wavering between that, or the Daisy Music Pen, which is all the same stuff (sans CF reader) in a pen-sized form factor. Again, it's cheaper than the Gruvstick. Or should I really splash out and get the same company's PhotoClip? Which is - glad you asked - a combined MP3 player, file store/CF reader, voice recorder, still camera, webcam and video recorder. $149, although I don't know how much of that is Linux accessible.

I'm still in the middle of deciding. But I've learnt three lessons: one, the folk who make the sensible engineering choices are probably the smarter and cheaper manufacturers too. Two: you always do your best consumer research in the two hours after you bought the goods. Three: no matter how long you stay out of the gadget rat race, there's always one more object of desire.