Abort, Rephrase, Ignore?

There's been rather a lot of talk about vulnerability in recent HTC Android phones, and rather less about the lock screen flaw on the Samsung Galaxy S II for AT&T.

The summary version of the former, for those who don't want to read that whole article or who don't understand it: recent HTC phones include an always-on logger which has access to pretty much everything on the phone. This logger can be accessed by any application on the phone which has the basic "internet" privilege, which is pretty much everything.

So it's a giant gaping hole just waiting for someone to exploit. As best I can tell from the discussion online it's not remotely-exploitable, if you have one of these phones it isn't immediate-panic-stations time, but it does mean that any application you install could be siphoning data off and sending it elsewhere, without needing to ask you first.

The latter requires physical access to the device and may only be relevant to the AT&T variant. It's a simple trick which lets anyone who can get their hands on the phone get in to it even if you've set a security lock.

Both of these demonstrate a risk that comes with Android: there are many fingers in the pie, and you can't be sure where all of them have been. Code on an Android phone will have come from a mix of Google, the device manufacturer, and your mobile operator. You have to trust that all of them get it right, and it is demonstrably true that this is not always the case.

It's an argument in favour of the Apple/Microsoft model wherein only the OS supplier mucks about with the internals, neither the OEM or telco can modify the system beyond installing simple apps with no elevated rights. It may be that Google wind up trying harder to dissuade OEMs from altering the system, we'll have to wait and see how that pans out.

In the meantime it's a pity that Windows Phone 7 isn't getting more carrier love. Obviously they don't like the "can't make mandatory customisations" thing Microsoft is insisting on, just how Microsoft are going to bootstrap to the point Apple is at where the carriers need them more than they need the carriers is another interesting question.

Such a shame the Nokia N9 -- which is even getting television advertising, rather odd for an end-of-line device like this -- is dead on arrival.

I've been using Launcher 7 on my Android phone for the past week, and it bears out my initial impression of Windows Phone 7: that the launcher/home-screen is a really nice combination of the live content Android typically provides and a clean reasonably attractive set-of-icons.

So I'm thinking much more about my next phone being a WP7 device. I have very easy access to the HTC HD7 and Mozart, but unfortunately they seem to be about the worst of the first-gen WP7 phones: really bad cameras, lousy screens that were previous-generation a year ago when they were released, small batteries.

I may have cheaper-than-standard access to the new HTC WP7 phones, but that's a way off and in the meantime I'm going to have to choose something for a work phone in probably a month from now.

There is some temptation to pick up a Samsung Focus as an import from the US. They're basically the Samsung Galaxy S but running WP7, so a great display and decent battery life by smartphone standards. They're available second-hand for ~AU$200 on eBay, or new from Mobicity for AU$479. The advantage of buying from Mobicity is pretty obvious: known-good vendor, 12-month warranty, another $30 and they'll throw you a loaner while repairs are underway.

The device from the new batch which is most interesting to me so far is the Focus S, but there's fairly limited information available. My hope is that we're basically looking at a Galaxy S II but with a single-core processor. The specs as released suggest this, but until there are review units floating around it's quite uncertain.

And chances are I won't have particularly cheap access to those anyway.

I have my stupider ideas late at night/early in the morning, so will admit right up front that this may well be one of them.

There's this video going around of the Nokia N8 running the leaked Symblan Belle release. And it looks pretty good. At a superficial level I'd have to say that the UI/UX looks better than stock Android 2.3, even though it's running on hardware that'd be considered very low-end on a 'droid.

And the battery life of the N8, while not as awesome as Symbian phones used to be, is still far better than typical Android phones. In the GSMArena review they're claiming about two days of moderate/heavy use on a single charge -- a typical droid will get a day. And this is on the original Symbian^3 release, one may perhaps hope for some improvement in Anna and Belle.

It's not lost on me that this is the second Nokia OS release this year that's really knocked my socks off. If WP7 doesn't work out for them, or there's another coup at the top, they've clearly got more than one direction they can go.

So, yeah, I'm looking at this and can't help wondering if an N8 running Belle might not be just the ticket for the next year or so while the dust settles on just where Android and WP7 are going.

The box arrived today. It's an ASRock ION3D 152D, which is a small-form-factor barebones with an Atam D525 CPU and ION graphics. Comes with a DVD-RW drive as a built-in (there's a version with a BD-ROM drive for ~$100 more) and an IR receiver for use with the bundled MCE remote. Plus it has a gigabit NIC.

Added 4GB of RAM and a 750GB 5400rpm 2.5" SATA disk.

Hooked it up -- HDMI to the telly, analogue stereo audio to the switchbox, ethernet to the switch, stuck an XBMC-Live disc in the DVD drive and booted it up.

Everything but the remote worked out of the box, no futzing around required.

Rebooted, installed XBMC-Live on the disk. Turns out it's just a slightly-modified Ubuntu 10.04LTS install rigged to automatically log in to the "xbmc" user and run XBMC on the display. Completely suitable as-is to use as a house server, XBMC when chewing through all the media files only eats ~30% of a core, and this thing reports four.

(I think it's actually dual-core with hyper threading, but whatever.)

So I've updated everything to 10.04's current state and added some extra cruft on. Getting the remote working was a bit of a trial -- there was a change in how LIRC deals with remotes in a kernel update which made its way into 10.04's update repo, so the vendor packages no longer work and there are lots of people talking about how they fixed it but most of those didn't actually work.

This worked for me.

System basics:

matt@ant:~$ uname -a
Linux ant 2.6.32-33-generic #72-Ubuntu SMP Fri Jul 29 21:08:37 UTC 2011 i686 GNU/Linux

matt@ant:~$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
[…]
model name : Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU D525 @ 1.80GHz
[…]


I am rather less impressed with Dropbox, though. I've been using it for an offsite backup of my music collection -- yes, I could get much of it back by re-ripping my CDs, but I've a fair bit of music I've purchased online now. One neat thing it does is sync over the LAN if you've got multiple registered machines on the same network.

So I fired up the client on ant. And would you believe, Dropbox ate the 90GB "Music" folder? Nuked the copy stored on their end, blew away the primary copy on my end too.

Fortunately I have this covered by Time Machine for an on-site backup, so I wasn't completely screwed. But I'm disinclined to pay for Dropbox again when renewal time comes around in six or so months!

Anyway. The only outstanding issue now is moving my leafnode installation across. Once that's done the old machine can be retired, and this nice low-power very very quiet machine can take the place of both the old "server" and the hacked first-gen AppleTV.

I have time off and a shiny HD display to fiddle with, so I've ordered myself a (relatively) cheap box to double-up at media-centre and house-server duties.

Specifically, it's this, an ASRock Atom D525 with ION GPU. Added 4GB of RAM and a 750GB 5400rpm disk.

Will poke around at the Windows 7 media-centre stuff first, as I have spare licenses. And with the XBMC live install. The former appeals from a "can play random DRM cruft" perspective, the latter because simpler and would do a better job at the house-server role, given I could easily jam a copy of Samba on there.

Cost all-up is AU$550, including shipping.

Why is the aTV running XBMC insufficient? Well, because it doesn't do 1080 properly (it runs the screen at 1280x1080) and it can't decode HD content. It can do some 720p stuff, but not all. It's an old slow single-core CPU and XBMC can't make full use of the video hardware. And given the very tight memory constraints and limited expandability it's not really suitable for the house-server role.

But I am otherwise very happy with XBMC. There are plugins for everything I care about (Pandora, local catch-up TV services), some really great skins, and I've even now got my usual couple of radio stations available through it as my ISP started relaying ABC NewsRadio with an MP3 stream rather than the nasty Windows Media+Real combo the ABC provides.

If I wind up deciding that Win7 is the way to go, guess I might stick a VirtualBox instance on there with Linux for the server-y bits. Shall wait and see. Expect it'll probably go XBMC-on-Linux, though.

I keep reading it as "Kindle Kloud Reader". Gah.

Anyway. Read a couple of chapters this afternoon. It works pretty well, overall.

As noted elsewhere by many others, there's no page-turn animation. I know it's possible to do such a thing in a HTML5 application on the iPad, the booki.sh reader does a nice fast sliding animation -- it slides the new page in over the old.

This takes a little getting-used-to, it's surprising how much one's brain is wired to expect something more than an instant screen redraw with the new text appearing immediately.

The one criticism I will make of it as it stands is that the offline mode does not appear to work, or at least it doesn't for me. It tries to cache the application, there's a little message at the bottom of the Library screen indicating that it is trying to do so, which is eventually replaced with an error.

If that can be made to work reliably, then they'll be well on their way to having a quite usable alternative to the native application, should Apple try to play silly-buggers later.

I've had my HTC Desire for about eighteen months now. Probably a little longer. It's not strictly necessary to upgrade or replace it, but there are some rather shinier toys out there now, and I'm the kind of guy who winds up thinking about it a lot.

My new gig -- which I start in a couple of weeks -- includes a phone as part of the package. Not sure exactly what models are available, just that they have "some pretty nice" smartphones on the list, including some Android models. It's a telco, and I can make a reasonable guess that the options will match up with what they sell to consumers, so either the HTC Sensation or the Samsung Galaxy S II is probably on that list.

And there's a fair chance the iPhone 4 is, too.

Anyway. I've been increasingly disenchanted with Google. It started out with their rather boneheaded "real names" policy with Google+, but the way they've handled the fallout from that, the complete lack of transparency, the apparent gagging of dissident employees, and their general failure to be able to deal with "product service" -- remember, we're not the customers, we're the product -- makes me leery of relying on them too much for anything I couldn't do without.

There are other options in search. There are other options in mail. Calendar and contact management is a little hairier, but there are alternatives and there will eventually be more.

There are also other options in mobiles.

An Android handset needs (or at the least very much wants) a Google account. If something goes wrong with that Google account, your phone is basically screwed in a bunch of ways. I'm not sure I'm happy with my phone being tied to an online service such that if I were to have my access withdrawn I'd be facing considerable inconvenience, particularly in a situation where I'm a product rather than a paying customer and the company running that service has a bit of a track record for not knowing how to do the people stuff.

(Hell, if what I hear around the place is true, they have an active disdain for "people stuff" as part of the corporate culture.)

So, I don't know. I might well try for an iPhone 4S/5 or whatever when it comes out. But the Nokia N9 is looking increasingly appealing, even with that whole "DOA" thing going on. It may have a rather limited app ecosystem, but on the other hand Nokia isn't trying to sell me and my data to anyone at all. They're a phone company, not a data-mining advertising firm.

Now I have a TV which doesn't suck (I finally replaced my ten-year-old 32" widescreen CRT with a nice 46" LCD) I've felt inclined to poke around a lot more with XBMC on the AppleTV.

Skin-wise, really digging "Ellipsis". Nice clean design, everything's big and easy to see from a distance.

Much to my pleasure it turns out some people have made an unofficial add-on repository for Australian "catch-up" TV. You can find it here. Download the zip file, scp it to the aTV, use the "install from zip file" option in the add-on manager, install the ones you want from there.

They all seem to work just fine. The ABC iView one is the most useful as iView has a decent amount of content. ABC News24 is just a live stream, which I can get from my digital STB with better picture quality. Channel 10 has very little. Plus7 is kind of lacking in anything I care about, but may float your boat. SBS works properly too.

Now, if I could just get the Pandora add-on working properly I'd be over the moon. I've got Pandora working on desktops, and via the browser on the PS3, but the XBMC add-on can't log in. Looking over the forum thread on the subject it seems kind of dodgy. Oh well. Not the end of the world, I've got Radio Paradise…

Nuked my Desire Yet Again™. I had been running CyanogenMod 7.1RC1 with all the GO replacement parts (Launcher, Contacts, SMS, Keyboard), but I found that occasionally GO Launcher would go unresponsive -- which was deeply inconvenient at 1AM when I wanted to change the alarm clock! -- and CM7.1 simply ate too much of the built-in storage, particularly given the number of extra widgets and whatnot I was using.

So now it's Oxygen 2.1.6, which is a fairly stripped-back ROM based on AOSP 2.3.4. And I bit the bullet and paid for SBP Shell 3D. This is yet another replacement launcher for Android, and it comes with a bunch of rather well-designed widgets.

SBP made pretty much the best-regarded replacement shell for Windows Mobile, back in the day, so they've got a lot of experience doing this kind of thing. What they've done here is quite good, and I suppose once you consider the number of nicely-designed widgets they've included the $15 price tag isn't completely insane, even if it is pretty high by Android app standards.

And here's a screenshot of my "home" screen:

( Read more... )

I've been running Lion on my 2010 Macbook Pro since release day. Yeah, I'm a sucker for the new shiny. I know.

Anyway. There are plenty of good reviews online. I recommend the ArsTechnica review as it's every bit as thorough as their full OS reviews usually are.

The install was of course very easy. The App Store placed an installer in the Dock, I went in to the package and snarfed the disk image before starting, then ran it. It did its thing, and a while later I had a Lion system up and running.

I did however make one big mistake: I fired off the full-disk encryption on the boot volume, then started deleting lots of stuff in an effort to clean up cruft. This seems to have confused matters in some way, as I wound up with it insisting there was only 80GB free no matter how much stuff I deleted. Rebooting into the shiny new recovery partition and letting it do a filesystem repair (there were some errors) seemed to fix things, but then it was back to the same once I rebooted into the OS again.

So, as I have Time Machine backing everything up, and wanted to reclaim the space I'd allocated to Boot Camp anyway, I decided to do a clean install.

Trying to do this from the recovery partition was a non-starter as Disk Utility can't repartition the disk it's booted from. But it can burn an image to DVD, so I did that and booted from the DVD instead. That worked Just Fine and I got a nice clean Lion install.

The Migration Assistant noticed the Time Machine disk and kindly offered to restore from it. I opted to let it restore settings and my home directory but not applications, and that worked Just Fine as well.

However. Trying to restore applications piecemeal from Time Machine didn't go as smoothly. The disk names were different (I renamed the boot volume while I was at it) so the browser wouldn't show the old content. Easy enough to work around by poking through the backup volume with Finder and copying what I wanted out of there.

Compatibility with my apps has so far been great, but I don't have any really old legacy PPC applications I care about. I'd expected VMware Fusion to give trouble, but it didn't. Can't recall if I'd installed an update any time in the last six months…

Spaces is no longer a sort of second-class afterthought kind of deal, it's a key part of the workflow enabling the full screen apps and providing access to the widgets. So I've embraced that -- where I used to ignore it in favour of just using Expose and a single desktop -- by running VMware full-screen in one desktop, Chrome with just my GMail account full-screen in another. Control-left/right to flip between these is very convenient, though Spaces is still weirdly inconsistent when returning to a space with a pile of windows. It really needs to get a clue about this: if you switch back with control-whatsit then you should go back to exactly the state it was in last time, if you go back by alt-tabbing to an app in that space, then that app should have foreground.

Full-disk encryption is neat. My primary machine is a laptop which I use as a desktop most of the time -- external display, keyboard, mouse -- but hey, might as well. The GUI understands the need to unlock volumes when accessed for the first time pretty much everywhere it matters, so I've got my Time Machine and scratch volumes encrypted too.

Autocorrect in text edit widgets is nice but taking a little getting used-to.

I notice that Crossover Games isn't too happy with Lion. Not a huge loss, I don't use it much anyway.

The Emacs build I had from Snow Leopard was fine, but when I wiped-and-reinstalled of course I needed to redo that. I use homebrew for my OS X open sauce packaging. The recipe there needed a few tweaks (compiler and linker options, it wants -fno-pie for both) to make it build, but 23.3 doesn't like Lion -- you get no titllebar and an inconveniently-located window.

Building from HEAD fixes that. Some nice new tweaks in Gnus too, which is cool.

Hm. What else? Lots of tweaks, iTunes is 64-bit and a Cocoa re-write. Chrome was a bit crash-y at first but seems to have settled down (touch wood), it may have done a silent upgrade in the last day or so. I'm using Safari as my primary browser for a while, just to see how it goes -- and because I suspect that once iOS 5 drops I'll want to use the Reading List function a lot. So far so good on that score too.

Switched to iChat as primary IM client for now. My main problem with previous versions was the "one 'buddy list' per service" model and they've fixed that now. I have a shiny new webcam so I may as well use a client that'll work with it.

The new Mail looks awesome but GMail is a crappy IMAP service so I'm not using it right now. Once iCloud drops I'll be giving that a serious look and maybe trialling it for my mail/calendar needs -- Apple has plenty of flaws, but it does at least have a customer service department, unlike Google. And I'm seriously thinking about moving back to the iPhone when the next version hits, depending on a bunch of things. But more on that can of worms later in some other post, eh?

Anyway. Lion, pretty good.