Oblomovka

2008-10-23»

So I caved and got a T-Mobile G1 phone today. I have to say, despite the reviews claiming it is not quite 1.0, I’ve been having an awful lot of fun with it. At the very least, getting it to sync with the music on my Linux machine, and then being able to set my ringtones to one of those tracks without paying through the nose was a lovely relief. For me, it’s already proven much more flexible than an iPhone could.

My hopes of managing to finally being able to own a truly open phone, as controllable and configurable as a PC, and able to run whatever code I could throw at it, have been rather dashed however. It’s absolutely true that you can run any code you’ve written to Android’s Java-like virtual machine, which is sandboxed away from the real hardware. But exploring and executing code at a lower level on the G1 isn’t currently so free and easy.

I got a chance to peer around the phone using the Android SDK’s android debugger bridge (adb) utility. It quickly became clear that even Android developers can only access a relatively restricted part of their own phone: more than given to normal Android apps, but far less than you’d expect to have as “root” on a Linux system. You can only explore or create files as the “shell” user. Much of the filesystem is owned by root, which means there’s a lot of the filing system that’s closed off from user access. There’s no official documentation on the bootloader for running your own root-level code, or flashing your own kernel.

So, as is so often the case, those who want to use their own code on their own phone will have to wait until somebody comes up with some privilege escalation flaw or undocumented flash utility to take control.

Of course, bright minds are at work on doing just that. Overheard in the excellent #android @ irc.freenode.net IRC channel:

<RyeBrye> I hacked my camera’s firmware manually by using an exploit to cause it to execute arbitrary code – and then blinking out the entire firmware in 0’s and 1’s on the autofocus LED – read in by a photo transistor attached to a sound cable plugged into my microphone port – and then put back into 0’s and 1’s…
<– jbq_ has quit (Read error: 110 (Connection timed out))
<RyeBrye> Then disassembled the ARM9 code in it and worked on porting CHDK to it…
* waldo_ is away: auto-away
<RyeBrye> I’m pretty sure having a whole OS at my disposal should make this a lot easier

I sense that the people behind Android at Google would like its flagship device to more open than it is. It’s certainly sad that for now the iPhone pwnage exploits really do give you root on your device, while Android’s official SDK offer no such thing — making the Apple’s theoretically closed phone more practically open than Google’s theoretically open game-changer.

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2008-10-22»

If there’s one thing in my queue that I’m absolutely dreading doing, I tend to clatter to a halt for days while I steadfastly refuse to do it. I’ve had one of those for the last few days, and finally somehow tricked my subconscious to actually finish it (which took all of five minutes).

The funny thing is that when I have a few things on the boil, this seems to happen less often. I’ve certainly noticed that since blogging dropped off my daily schedule, I’ve found it harder to get other matters done quite so punctually.

Clearly, I need more distractions. So, I’m going to start up blogging again, and then I’m going to double-down and try this year’s nanowrimo. There’s five other people in the office having a go, so we’ll have some camaraderie.

My last attempt was a terrifically gloomy science fiction novel in a future where libertarian cryptopunks (a recurring theme, no?) have suffered a catastrophic collapse in their plucky sea-based micronation, and now have to survive, gypsy/ashkenazi like in a puritanically zero-privacy secular environment.

It was fun to write, but absolutely no fun to read. I hope to reverse that equation this November, when I’ll be adopting the most potentially humiliating possible literary form ever mishandled by amateurs: the contemporary satire. Don’t ask me why. I have also been insulting petty bureacrats of late. I have been seen wearing a hat and some bright colours. My bourgeoisie instincts are failing me. I smell an imminently awful turn of events.

Comments Off on uni-tasking; hats; bad writing, coming soon

2008-10-18»

Two “productive” wastes of time that writing a blog causes you to commit: re-reading your old entries, which is mostly like re-playing funny youtube videos of people’s skateboarding accidents, and following trackbacks, which is mostly like running into the toilet after giving a talk, and then clamping your ear to the cubicle door to listen for people’s opinions. I don’t get many trackbacks, because I am now delightfully obscure and doing Alexa dead-cat bounces, which means the people who link to me are mostly old friends. It is internally flattering though it may perhaps be annoying to everyone else, like the pica-celebrity equivalent of “Christmas Book Picks” that are just people mutually puffing up their friend’s new novels. I will only, then, mention Lee who was always the secret driving force behind NTK, and asked the question that I’d want to ask Neal Stephenson, had I thought of it or ever met him:

This is arguably the first presidential election of the HDTV age. So is it more important a candidate looks good on high-def… or on YouTube?

It’s an allusion to Interface, Stephenson’s great political techno-thriller, where someone notes the difference between looking good on HD and looking good on ordinary TV, and the effect that had on politicians. Feeding a little into that, it’s definitely true that I’ve heard people say that McCain sounds better on radio, and much worse in HDTV — the makeup over his scars is really obvious, in fact evoking a weird awkwardness when he talked about “having the scars to prove it” in his last debate. The other question is: do your micro-expressions look good in Photoshop? My other thought, flicking through my own backlog, is an idea I’ve had for a few years — a site called Backtracks, where we dig up the posts that bloggers were saying five and ten years ago, and hold them to the acid-soaked cottong bud of enquiry. Easy money! Man, if only I could come up with an idea whose demographic wasn’t “people most likely to be running an ad-blocker.”

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2008-10-15»

While the position who have particular political biases are relatively constant, it’s fascinating to watch the spotlight of what appears crazy to the general public shift around.

I first started reading Little Green Footballs during the run-up to the Iraqi invasion, because I felt that what they said there gave an insight into how decisions were being made or accepted among a large sector of the public. Steven Den Beste was required reading, because he seemed to be constructing (or interpreting) the abstract framework that best represented Bush’s foreign policy (he ended up writing a WSJ editorial spelling it out).

I didn’t agree with these people, but what they said certainly had predictive value — far more predictive value than those on most left blogs. People would say “surely Americans will see through this bullshit”, and they didn’t. Meanwhile, one of the warbloggers would say that Dean would pay for saying we weren’t safer after Saddam was captured, and lo! That’s what public opinion would reflect. The statements of the conservative bloggers matched much of public discourse (in the US, of course). I remember people like Brad deLong spending much of the first decade of this century standing with their mouths open, agape at the discrepancy between what was obvious to them and what “everyone else” appeared to see.

What’s is fascinating now is watching that spotlight move very dramatically away. The conservative bloggers confidently predict that McCain or Palin ruled the debate and … reality lurches away in the other direction. ESR talks about Obama’s campaign smelling of defeat, right as they begin their meteoric rise up the polls. None of the levers work. The die falls snakes eyes, throw after throw. You move the mouse up, and the cursor goes down. At this point, they’re convinced that the mainstream media, *and* the pollster, *and* random people in the street are just making shit up.

Again, this isn’t about right or wrong. This is about your ability to predict the general population. Just as it didn’t help to talk about dictators stealing the election when over 50% of the American population thought Bush was an allright fella, all the accusations that Obama is a marxist terrorist muslim aren’t going to help you when people are saying sure he’s a marxist terrorist muslim, but they’re going to vote for him anyway because he has a good healthcare policy. How do you compute that if you’re instapundit?

Most of all, I love watching that spotlight of opinion refocus on a point after these debates. And the focus pull in this election seems to be online videos. I thought McCain did okay in this debate, actually, but that’s not where the spotlight has fallen. It’s fallen on the reload button next to the YouTube clip of his “Zero? WTF?” moment. And he can talk about Joe the Plumber all he wants, but the more people who see Obama actually talking to Joe the Plumber (and it’s worth watching all the way through), I think the better Obama looks, not McCain.

I hope to god I’m almost done with this election. My citizen friends are voting early. As Nate Silver says, Obama is in “live boy, dead girl” territory these days. If there’s going to be a change in that, it’ll be one that no-one on either side predicts. The spotlight is steady, and for now it’s trained on the new president.

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2008-10-12»

Walking down a Bernal Heights street, I heard a guy shouting from behind me to a woman in a garish, oversized white t-shirt with somebody’s name on it. “Hey, you guys are doing well — I see posters for Tom everywhere!”. The woman shouted back, “Thanks! Who are you walking for?” “Eric!” “Cool!”. Later, a bunch of bicyclists fly by in convoy, playing an upbeat latino tune on speakers, and waving flags for another candidate.

It’s election time in San Francisco. As well as the presidential election, there’s the usual Bible-sized selection of other plebiscites to be plebbicized, including the election of the supervisor for my local neighbourhood. You can decide whether you should vote for Eric or Tom or Eva or David or Vern or Mark or the other Eric by thumbing through the 268 page local voter guide here. I believe that’s on top of the 166 page State guide.

I was going to witter here a little about the vibrancy of American elections, and then I remembered where else I’ve lived where elections were this vivid and fun. When I was eight, I remember the cars driving around with loudspeakers balanced on top, and posters, and speechifying and lots of local excitement to a British election. I grew up in Basildon, a marginal constituency (Ohio-on-the-Thames, if you will), and ground zero for those wanting to extrapolate results from their glib little parodies of voting patterns. You had to admit though, both sides fought like prize-fighters for every voter there.

San Francisco is about as far away from a swing state as you can imagine (unless you mean between Cindy Sheehan supporters and Nancy Pelosi fans), but the internal city politics are gloriously internecine and bloody. Supervisors have a surprising amount of power: en mass they are a counterbalance to the major. One of them just pleaded guilty to take $84,000 in bribes. I admire the huge encyclopedia of political explanations that turn up on everybody’s doorsteps every election, as well as the miles of columnage in the local papers analysing the minutiae of the city’s internal politics. Even the alternative free papers here often have front covers with titles like “REVEALED: JUST WHAT THE HELL DOES DEPUTY VICE ALDERMAN DIFRAMBRIZI THINK HE IS DOING WITH THE MANHOLE COVER FINANCIAL ALLOCATION FOR FINANCIAL PERIOD 2007/2008?”. To give a less made-up example, I have just read a (genuinely fascinating, actually) three page piece expose on the fines builders have to pay for having their cones in the wrong place. It is all connected with police graft, of course.

I honestly wonder who reads all of this, and yet I love that it’s there. I was reading Linus Torvalds slightly agape bemusement at how uncivilized American elections are, and wonder: is it better that politics be such a loud carnival? Or would all this corruption go even more unnoticed if no-one was watching?

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2008-10-11»

Every Friday at EFF, we have a Python class, where anyone in the org (and a few friends from outside) join up to learn a little Python, talk about coding and share what they’ve learnt. There’s a good mix of seasoned python hackers, coders who don’t know much python, casual programmers, and people for whom this is their first experience of programming.

The part i enjoy the most (apart from congratulating myself for reaching a level of maturity that means I don’t go I KNOW I KNOW whenever i know the answer) is the material that isn’t about the technicalities of programming, but of the culture. We often discuss, for instance, about the most aesthetically pleasing way of writing code. Watching smart coders attempt to verbalise those instincts is fascinating, especially when the instincts begin to spread through the group.

To give an example, we’ve been coding up a Python version of Conway’s Game of Life. We all spent a fair bit of time discussing that niggling problem with counting up how many neighbours a cell has. Do you do it “manually”:

or iteratively:

I think most coders would end up doing the first, but they would feel a bit dirty doing it, just as I always feel a bit dirty when I have x and y as attributes, instead of being able to treat them as different aspects of the same thing. It’s the right instinct to try and generalise, and it was fun seeing starter programmers expressing their mild discomfort.

After we’d got Life to work, Seth rewarded us by showing Golly, which is a great cross-platform Life simulator with many pre-programmed patterns. I really had no idea that they’d managed to code up a Turing machine in Life, let alone patterns that emulate a universal machine, running a program that runs the Game of Life.

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2008-10-09»

Me: So, guess what they’re showing on a huge movie screen at Dolores Park tonight?
Ada: Ooh, what?
Me: [TRIUMPHANTLY] The muppets! Want to go?
Ada: Oh god.
Me: What?
Ada: Is it the Muppet show?
Me: No, the Muppet movie!
Ada: Oh man. That’s even worse.
Me: What, you don’t want to see the muppets?
Ada: No I do not! You know what I do when people put on the muppet show for kids to watch?
Me: What?
Ada: I pretend to watch it and when they’re gone I go do something else.
Me: But… but… the muppets are great!
Ada: Hmmph.
Me: You’re a kid, Ada, how can you not like the muppets?
Ada: Because they are scary monsters that talk. [ FOLDS ARMS ]

Meanwhile, all the grown-ups I knew were sneaking off work early to get a good seat.

I fear this will be the splinter issue the boomers will use to pry us away from the millenials.

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It’s awful to say that there are parts of recessions that I rather like. Maybe it’s just familiarity: I came of age in the early eighties, and left college in the 1990-1994 recession. My sense of what’s important gets confused in upturns: everyone is talking all at once about matters that I just can’t get excited about, but I feel somewhat silly for even thinking they might be wrong. Then the recession comes, and all my clever cynicism is (selectively) rewarded. In a recession, the signal to noise ratio seems greater. It’s easier to pick out promising ideas, and it feels better for the soul if you can express optimism when everyone else needs some extra.

I bumped in Jake Applebaum today, and we talked a little about NoiseBridge, the San Francisco Hacker Space that he is helping to launch. It’s a little surprising that SF hasn’t had one before, but I think that’s partly because there are lots of informal, ad hoc spaces, and also because during boom times, there’s little need. Every start-up has a tiny piece of what you need to make a hacker space, and won’t give it up.

The timing to me seems perfect, though. It’s a good time to pool both resources and ideas: gather together everyone to work and talk together about their projects, and co-operate on relieving some of the burdens of getting ideas off the ground. I’ve already thought about how, given that I’m probably going to be moving into an even smaller space myself, how I could deposit some of my most valuable textbooks at NoiseBridge: saving me space, and increasing their use. A lot of people will be wanting to broaden their skills, or spryly cross over to wherever there is a demand for hackerish minds (I remember well the great Perl hacker bioinformatics migration of 2001), so crossover technology like a chemistry lab and dark room is useful.

Something I noticed about the old recessions – the eighties, the nineties, the noughts, was that technology became a route out of poverty and dead-ends: there’s a huge proportion of system administrators and programmers who never made it through college, or high school, and found themselves in Silicon Valley, being airlifted to a sustainable life by one another’s efforts. I imagine this will happen again in this recession too. If we hunker down to build what comes next, it’ll be good to do it in a place where teenagers can help lead the charge.

Now I’m thinking of backspace on the banks of the Thames: an engine that seeded excitement behind a bunch of art and business projects (especially those that could not decide which they were). Is there a new hacker space imminent in London, Edinburgh, Manchester or elsewhere? I think it’s about time. Plenty of city business spaces going spare and empty, soon! Lots of advice available!

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2008-10-08»

So you may have noticed that I’m not quite posting here daily. That’s because I’m exercising my precious new freeedoms. The second month finished a while back (on the 17th?), and I’ve been running on inertia and the powerful fumes of trackbacks and comments since then. As everyone says it does, the blogging has helped out in a bunch of other areas. I’m writing better and faster in other spaces, I’m paying a bit more attention to the world, and I end up finessing ideas instead of going “huh, maybe I should write that down somewhere, one day.”

Most of all, I impressed by the magical power of public guilt. I am thinking about other potentially humiliating things to do to get ORG more members; I am also thinking a little of new beginnings. It looks like I’ll be moving apartment again pretty soon (sainted flatmates’ toddler is getting very walky, and they want more room). I might have a studio on the top of Bernal Heights to look down on the city. My work is picking up again, too: for a while, one of our team was telecommuting from the East Coast, which is good for the fact that we have to deal over lots of timezones, but not so great for co-ordinating between us. He’s been here in SF now for less than a week, and we’ve already picked up a little pace. I like to keep work out of this blog, but the issues do wriggle so, begging me to form half-baked opinions, if only ones highly tangential from what I do during the day (where we spend much of our time baking our opinions until they are perfect).

I also, God help me, have been thinking about what the next administration will actually be like. I keep thinking back to the local campaign manager for Howard Dean in San Jose, sitting with me in a cafe crammed with Dean-fans writing letters and exchanging email addresses, back in August 2003. Months before the election, his movement had already shown the others what was possible with the Net, and carried him to the frontrunners table by fundraising and publicity. A year or so before the election, I asked the campaign manager: suppose Dean does get in. Suppose he becomes President. What happens to all of this, I asked. Do you just put it in mothballs for the next election?

The campaign manager’s eyes got all dreamy, and he said: well, think how having this communications network works for a Whitehouse. Think about being able to explain your side of the story to your base like this; build on them to work with other candidates. Report back on how they feel the country is going.

Me, I’m not sure that’s something you can really achieve and stay Presidential. American Presidents are supposed to be folksy, but then ascend into Whitehouse heaven and live apart from the mortals. Not mail them every four hours like MoveOn. And it would feel a little Chavez to have the Obama fans still wired into the secret messaging while he’s also running everyone else’s country.

But the question still remains: when you have a wired campaign, do you run a wired whitehouse?

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2008-10-06»

I like T-Mobile. I’ve been a subscriber to their mobile service in the US for years, and they’ve been pretty good: their support has always answered my questions, their online interface doesn’t suck, and their signal in the Bay Area has been good enough for me. They’re GSM, so you have a choice of phones, and I’ve never had problems unlocking their phones for when I travel abroad and cavort with foreign SIMs. At the moment I have one of their Nokia 6086 phones, which lets you use your WiFi hotspot to make calls, which means that I have free calls at home and work, and I can use it as an EDGE Bluetooth modem for my laptop when I don’t have Internet access otherwise. It only runs signed applications, which shows that T-Mobile’s love of entirely open hardware is profoundly limited, but, hey, as long as I can just treat it as a pipe to my really open device, I don’t care.

When the Android HFC G1 came out, I was tempted. Temptation was as far as it went, because I really can’t afford another gadget right now. Prodding around, though, I was a bit disappointed by Google’s Android OS. Android applications are Java apps running in their own sandboxed VM (Google’s Dalvik). There are APIs, but they don’t give you complete access to the metal, and everything is running in Java-time. That means that, for now at least, it looks like you have to write in Java, and you can’t try clever tricks outside the API.

That seemed to rule out the two applications I would love to have on a G1: a VoIP app, and a modem tether to connect my laptop to the phone’s 3G network. Of course, those are exactly the kinds of application that T-Mobile would blow a gasket to see on their phone, but that’s not a coincidence. Telcoms only fret about software that their users would snatch in a second.

Now, though, I’ve seen a couple of comments in the Android developers’ community that make me more amenable to buying it. The first is this official statement that the G1 lets you run the Android debugging shell and install files and apps via USB. If cross-compiling for the G1 is as easy as it is on the emulated environment that comes with the SDK, that bodes well for writing tethering links — or even a VoIP application.

This comment saying Android will support the Java Native Interface (JNI) in the future, which would mean that native apps could access the Android Java API, and vice-versa, is also comforting. It looks like JNI is already supported, but undocumented.

It’s funny how, even when the entire OS and development environment is open source, there are still concerns that production Android phones could be locked down, and really no indication whether they are or not in tech media coverage of the phones. I don’t even know if the G1 will be upgradeable to later Android versions, whether I can install my own version of the OS (once Google release the source) or what future restrictions may be placed on my usage. These are questions that aren’t just pertinent to hackers — they are what will determine exactly how flexible the G1 and Android platform will be against the more tightly-controlled, but fast-moving iPhone target.

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