Galaxy Tab 2 Sep 2010

So, there’s a new kind of Android device in the world. The world still isn’t sure just where it is that tablets are the right tool for the job. That granted, this is a nifty product. And I’m developing my own theory of what tablets are for.

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A Story of O 31 Aug 2010

In recent days I’ve been thinking of JavaOne, as we kicked it around and decided we just couldn’t send speakers; and of Oracle OpenWorld, to which JavaOne will now serve as an appendage. It reminded me of a conversation I had last year about Oracle.

[Update: I reported this conversation, which I thought was instructive, carefully avoiding any conclusions. The commenters on the piece, however, drew lots of conclusions, which I enjoyed reading, and you might too. In particular, I thought some of the guesses as to my un-shared opinion on all this were quite illuminating.]

The conversation involved myself and a person with a convincing title who, as they’d say in the paper, was “familiar with the situation”.

My question was: “OpenWorld is this totally all-about-business conference. The Oracle Develop meeting is just a second-rate sidebar. Where does Oracle go about building developer mindshare?”

I’ll try to reproduce the answer in full as best as I can remember it:

“You don’t get it. The central relationship between Oracle and its customers is a business relationship, between an Oracle business expert and a customer business leader. The issues that come up in their conversations are business issues.

“The concerns of developers are just not material at the level of that conversation; in fact, they’re apt to be dangerous distractions. ‘Developer mindshare’... what’s that, and why would Oracle care?”

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Late But Essential Review 28 Aug 2010

I read Michael Lewis’ The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine months ago, and have been feeling guilty about not recommending it, because this material is sort of essential for anyone who would like to understand how our economy ended up in the toilet. Read on, not just for a (spoiler: positive) review, but for potentially time- and money-saving advice.

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Tethering 28 Aug 2010

I travel quite a bit, and I have found that the “tethering & portable hotspot” facility in Android 2.2 is just absolutely wonderful. It has saved me considerable money and got me reasonably-good connectivity in places I wouldn’t otherwise have had it; I’m looking at you, big-name US hotel chains.

When I heard that telephone companies were charging extra for this, I couldn’t figure out how they were doing it; without considerable deep-packet inspection, how can you tell that there are other computers gatewaying through my Nexus One, which in fact seems to hotspot just fine on certain networks that are said to charge extra? The answer is obvious but only once you see it: the network operators modify Android on the locked phones they sell cheap along with a contract (perfectly legal, it’s open-source) to remove the built-in tethering/hotspot option, and replace it with one of their own, which they charge for.

I’m not going to weigh in on the pros and cons of the business model, because I have no insight into telco cost structures or indeed what would happen if tethering became free for everyone. There’s no doubt that for some of us it’s a major value-add and it doesn’t seem unreasonable to pay a little extra for it. I paid a few bucks a month for Boingo until I got this going, and that seemed fair.

However, I will point out that for people who travel a lot, an unlocked phone (in the range of $500 for most decent Android devices) might end up looking cheap.

Further practical advice: plug that puppy in if you’re going to be doing this for more than a few minutes, because that WiFi radio seems to eat watts in hotspot mode. And don’t stick it in your pocket; the Nexus One, at least, runs way hot when plugged-in and tethering.

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Late Summer Tech Tab Sweep 23 Aug 2010

Some of these puppies have been keeping a browser tab open since April. No theme; ranging on the geekiness scale from extreme to mostly-sociology.

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CL XIII: Carpentry 17 Aug 2010

Most people who have a cottage which isn’t a mini-mansion spend a lot of their cottage life maintaining and improving it. This can be a little stressful to those like me who are more or less entirely without home-improvement skills.

I dunno why I never got the bug. I do like the idea of being a builder, but I can’t make a nail or a saw proceed in a straight line very well, and I find that things that are supposed to fit together don’t, and once together can’t be made to come apart as expected, and the whole thing involves a lot of pain and swearing and small precious pieces that fall on the floor and roll under immovably-heavy objects.

So, this picture requires some explanation.

At the cottage, we have this lovely deck built around huge trees overlooking Howe Sound, and we like to eat out there, but we don’t have much of a table; a flimsy round plastic thing that tends to spill one’s beer when jostled by a bouncy child.

We also have a big stack of lumber, trees that were cut down a few years back to get us a little more sun and have been milled into a variety of dimensions notably including 2x6", first-rate hundred-year-old cedar. So I got the idea of a sturdy companionable home-made picnic table and have embarked on building one.

There are lots of patterns on the Web and I picked this one because it doesn’t have built-in benches; rather than making the ones in the pattern, I plan to get nice comfy outdoor chairs that you can lean back in while you sip your wine and admire the scenery.

Now clearly this pattern is beyond my powers, involving as it does many subtly-curved pieces of wood. I may not be able to build, but I can model, so I re-did the pattern to eliminate the curvature and replace almost all the 2x4" bits with 2x6" because that’s what I have.

Lauren, who actually has a gift for carpentry, has instructed me in the use of a circular saw and a belt sander. The saw is tricky and I’m still mastering the skill of mounting the pieces so they don’t sag and twist and tear as the cut nears completion. The belt sander though, it’s a dream; you can make rough-milled timbers smooth as a baby’s bottom reasonably quickly and without having studied the technique for years.

And I have to say, time spent out on the deck measuring and cutting and sanding and so on is pretty relaxing. So far, no small parts have been lost.

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Opaque Visual Remnants 15 Aug 2010

I’ve been so busy at work this last little while, I still take lots of pictures but don’t have time to run that many. I was glancing back over the library and pulled out a few to publish for my pleasure and I hope yours. These have in common that they’re sort of opaque; in the range from non-self-explanatory to mysterious.

The above opaque piece of marine architecture is located just offshore of Vancouver’s shiny new convention centre. Maybe a former helipad?

The above opaque piece of marine architecture is located just off the premises of Barnabas Family Ministries, a very nice church-run retreat/camp establishment located on Keats Island just around the corner from our cottage.

Obviously you can tie boats up to it, but I’m not sure what the woodwork is in aid of, and most floating anchorages aren’t made of richly-rusting iron.

Above could be the attack of the feral boys, driving ashore somewhere on Vancouver’s Spanish banks to inflict endless video games and bad movies on the populace; in fact, it’s a little league baseball team’s championship-season celebration moving from one beach to another.

The picture above is of a foozle.

Left to right: Tin Woodman, Cowardly Lion, Scarecrow, and Dorothy, as presented at the conclusion of a week-long musical-theater camp for 11-to-14-year-olds.

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Nazis in a Teapot 13 Aug 2010

Last Thursday evening Michael Gartenberg, who’s a smart analyst, and blogger, tweeted that he’d searched for “Jewish” in Android Market and came up with some Nazi trash. Sure enough, he was right. The moron who was selling a “Hitler theme” and other related junk had used “jewish” and “jews” as keywords. Mind you, this crap was like five screens down, you really had to be working to see it.

Anyhow, Android Market has pretty clear-cut policies about this kind of thing and someone filed a takedown request in the right place, and now that stuff is gone. The next morning Mr. Gartenberg wrote: “From Google. ‘the apps have been removed as a violation of Android content policy’ the system does work.” I think so too; thanks for that, Mr. G.

Check out Joshua Topolsky’s Editorial: Waiter, there's a Nazi theme in my Android Market over at Engadget, which, while it gives this particular tempest more attention than its teapot size probably deserves, does ask the right question: Might the benefits of keeping Nazis out of the store make up for the costs of prior-restraint censorship? I’d offer this case as evidence in favor of the current setup: Anyone can publish anything, but there’s a smooth well-oiled process for ripping the weeds out of the garden, once they get noticed. I’d be interested in Mr. Gartenberg’s retrospective take.

It’s an interesting question, and I’m sure there are more chapters to be told in this story.

Now let me jump out in front of the libertarians and free-market fundamentalists and free-speech absolutists who are going to whine about us policing Android Market: It’s not a public commons, it’s a store. But hey, if it’s essential to your happiness that National Socialism or triple-X video or warez or trademark knock-offs be available on your Android device, they’re out there; click the little check-box on the “Applications” settings screen and you can load apps from any old scuzz-farm out there that you want. Or, more usefully, mail them around and post them on wikis and lots of other things that have come to seem essential to me.

Let me exit on a cheery note: while I’m quite certain that there are commercial opportunities in porn and warez and copyright knock-offs (assuming you can find somewhere to host your server and avoid getting busted) I’m pretty sure that nobody’s going to make any serious coin selling Hitler themes.

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Galaxy 12 Aug 2010

That’s what Samsung is calling their Android phones, the latest wave of which is getting reviewed all over the place. I’ve seen a few of ’em at Android HQ, and no doubt about it, they’re nice; but so are the other recent Androids. What I’m astounded by is Samsung’s marketing virtuosity; they’ve managed to line up every big mobile telecom I’ve ever heard of, all over the world, to carry one of these devices. I don’t recall ever seeing anything like it from any handset maker. I wonder how it’s done?

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Small Airport Victories 12 Aug 2010

Two of them in the last couple of days, both courtesy of having the Internet in my pocket.

SFO Win

I was traveling home Wednesday evening and at 7PM found myself in the United lounge at San Francisco airport, wanting to videoconference into an internal meeting, one I really didn’t want to miss. (At 7PM in this case because we needed some folks across the Pacific on board). The problem was that I needed to be not only online but on Google’s VPN; you can buy airport WiFi from T-Mobile but the price is exorbitant and the quality only so-so.

T-Mobile’s 3G coverage, on the other hand, is very solid around SFO. So I found a place to plug in my Nexus One, created a local hot-spot, and got online with my Mac; check. Tried launching Google VPN; check. Fired up the videoconference plug-in, and there I was, looking at my co-workers’ faces. The video occasionally lagged a bit but the sound was perfectly decent. After an hour-long videoconference, though, I have to say that poor little phone was one toasty piece of plastic.

YQR Win

That’s the airport in Regina, Saskatchewan, where I was heading to hang with my Mom for a few days. Just before getting on the plane in Vancouver, I’d polished and published Dave Burke’s nice piece about Chrome to Phone and C2DM. Waiting on the sidewalk outside the airport while Mom shuttled the family and luggage back and forth to her place, I fired up my email and, oops, there were two different reports of typos.

It occurred to me that the Android browser, based on WebKit, ought in theory to allow me to edit a post on blogspot.com, and hey, it turns out that it really works. It’s not the most user-friendly experience and I had to turn Swype right off, but those typos bit the dust under the harsh Prairie sun.

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Upcoming Gig — Mobile Tech 9 Aug 2010

That’s MobileTech Conference in full, a new conference in Mainz, about which I know nothing except for it’s near Frankfurt. It’s by the same people who do the well-known “JAX” conference series all over Germany. September 6-8; notable for being my first keynote appearance on behalf of my new Android day job.

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Upcoming Gig — JAOO 9 Aug 2010

I don’t know what the acronym stands for, but JAOO 2010 is in Aarhus, a place I’ve never been to in Denmark; Oct 4-6. It’s a popular event and I’m honored to be among the speakers. What happened was, before I started at Google, they invited me to come and talk about my Doing It Wrong piece, which I regard as summing up my years at Sun. After I joined Google, I wrote back and asked “Can I talk about Android too?” so I’ll be speaking twice on successive days.

Observant readers will note that this is the week after I speak in Tokyo; which has to constitute a major travel-planning failure. I think the events are (just) far enough that it makes sense to go the long way round, stopping in Vancouver for a couple nights’ sleep at home in Vancouver. Blecch.

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Upcoming Gig — GDD Tokyo 9 Aug 2010

GDD stands for Google Developer Day; since not everyone can come to Google I/O, we take I/O on the road to various points in several continents and both hemispheres. GDD Tokyo, on September 28th, is 2010’s first; I’ll be helping out there talking Android in the keynote. I assume the Tokyo Googlers will find something else useful to do while I’m there. Regular readers here know that I have a special relationship with Tokyo — can’t wait to be back.

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CL XII: Far Away 5 Aug 2010

The primary recreational activity in our cottage life isn’t boating or hiking or swimming or any of those undoubtedly worthy and improving pastimes; it’s leaning back in a comfy chair on the deck admiring the view, frequently through a camera with a great big chunk of glass on the front, with a refreshing drink (this can range from a stiff G&T to a nice cuppa T).

In this series, the tool is the big Tokina, the subject is faraway mountains, and the drink is Quail’s Gate Rosé, which works just fine with those mountains and that lens.

The effect you get, when shooting through several kilometres of air with a fixed-focal-length 400mm lens, is sort of hazy and ethereal and I like it a lot. I shot these in early summer when there was still lots of snow on the mountains.

I’m not sure there are any better ways to enjoy a glass of wine.

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Unserious About Security 4 Aug 2010

Our devices all touch the Internet all the time. There are many people on the Internet who are extremely smart and extremely bad and want to steal your money. We need to take security very seriously. The tech community’s writers, both professional and amateur, are doing an inadequate job; arguably guilty of both recklessness and laziness.

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