kallewoof.com » Hardware

iPhone Personal Hotspot

Kalle — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 12:50:49 +0000

The next version of iOS (iPhone OS), 4.3, features a thing that android phones have had for awhile now (and jailbroken iPhones) — Personal Hotspot. I.e. the ability to set up a WiFi station on your iPhone and surf the net from a computer or such.

A few hours ago, my network at home went down so I found a use for that personal hotspot feature sooner than I’d imagined (I got the beta of the iOS release as a developer). It’s… fast. I’m actually not noticing a difference in the speed web pages are loading. And me and my wife are both using my iPhone 4 to surf.

The battery is plummeting though but I’m in the house after all. Just need to plug it in, but was interested in seeing just how much pressure this’d put on the little thing.

Still, way cool.

Organisms and software. And space travel!

Kalle — Thu, 06 May 2010 12:11:23 +0000

Earlier today I saw two unrelated posts that somehow lead back to human engineering being compared to evolutionary engineering. The first one is a slightly naïve (but nonetheless interesting) post on Discover Magazine called “Linux versus E. coli” which brings up research made at Yale, which compares how Linux evolved to how E. coli evolved*, and another completely unrelated post by Cory Doctorow on Locus Online Perspective, where he talks about being the victim of a phising attack, despite technical competence and general wariness online. In his post, Doctorow draws the correlation between human engineered networks (internet) and evolutionary engineered networks (the human body) and mentions how parasites infect each in strikingly similar ways.

It reminds me of a talk at the Voices that Matter conference last month in Seattle, where Erik Buch talked about MVC, but also about his experience in the Aerospace software development field, where bugs must not be, and how the development strategies for this field differ greatly from those of e.g. games, where a crash will lead to a pouty kid or a drop in sales, at worst, rather than burning, stinking bodies splattered against the ground around a crashed airplane.

If you think about it, traveling thousands of feet up in the air across the globe is a rather extreme thing to be doing, if you don’t have wings to keep you up there, but we do it all the time. We’re at the verge of taking that step into space (which in some ways is less extreme than air travel), and I can’t help thinking what evolution can teach us about maintaining autonomous bodies with up-times that average 70-80 years (i.e. us humans).

In software development, we oftentimes streamline and optimize by ripping stuff out and “sharpening” the software to where it does everything it should with as little code as possible in as little time as possible, but nature doesn’t really think this way. Sometimes nature does the obviously taboo thing in software engineering, namely copy-pasting functionality around. It’s like a merging of the philosophies behind RAID and the philosophies behind optimized code. With millions of years of experience, our Great Programming Mother has made some very curious design choices, and all of them have been extensively unit tested and thought through by changing fractions of the code, testing it extensively, discarding failures, and keeping successes. Very similar to how software developers write code, just infinitely more thorough, and over a much greater span of time.

Nature takes things into account at a far greater scope than we do. For example, let’s say we have code in an automatic sliding door. The code does 4 things: it detects movement on either side (A), it opens the door (B), it waits (C), and it closes the door (D).

For this code, we have 2 sensors (one on each side of the door) for motion. We code these sensors to call up “B” (open door) whenever we detect movement.
We code up “B” to open the doors wide. When “B” is done opening the doors, “B” then calls up “C” (wait).
We write “C” to wait for X amount of seconds and then to call up “D” (close the door).
We finally code up “D” to close the doors.

When we try our door, with the wait time set to 3 seconds, we realize pretty quickly that if two people walk through the doors with only a few seconds in between, person #2 will almost get the door in their face, so we tweak our code a little.

In “B”, we open the doors if they’re not open already. If they are open already, we call up the new “E”.
“E” we code up to reset the timer in “C”. Thus, every time someone triggers the motion sensor on either side of the door, the 3 second timer is reset.

And there we have a human engineered sliding door in operation. Now there’s one very distinct thing we’re doing here that nature oftentimes does differently: we presume that it works.

A lot of code that we write, we write with the following notion in mind: I have to take every scenario into consideration, and have to account for every possible thing that could happen, and to deal with that in a good way in my attempt to perform “X“.

But nature’s code works on a different methodology — it goes something like this: I am trying to do “X“, and it might fail or it might succeed.

Nature works based on a fire-and-forget philosophy, where the reaction to situations is much more “lazy”, while being infinitely more flexible. The downside to nature’s approach is redundancy. Nature copy-pastes code all over the place because it has to. It has to double- and triple- and quadruple-check to see what’s going on, because it discards the idea of guarantees of success.

In the above sliding door code, nature would have most likely made a lot of different choices on the implementation. Fewer presumptions on what works and what doesn’t, and more redundancy to cover up for potential failures.

In regular software engineering (not the aerospace software kind), the place where our code looks the most similar to nature’s code is in initialization routines. Take for example this very simple example, where the sound card, graphics card, joystick and keyboard modules are initialized for a game system — emphasis on the concept, not on the (bad) code example:

int error_code;
error_code = sound_init();
if (error_code != ERR_NONE) {
  alert_user("Sound initialization failed! Check your sound card settings. Sound has been disabled. (internal error code = %d)", error_code);
  sound_enabled = false;
}

error_code = gfx_init(true); // true for hardware accelerated graphics
if (error_code != ERR_NONE) {
  alert_user("Graphics initialization failed! Check your graphics card settings. Software rendering enabled. (internal error code = %d)", error_code);
  error_code = gfx_init(false); // false for software renderer
  if (error_code != ERR_NONE) {
    alert_user_and_exit("Graphics initialization failed, again! We can't even do software rendering. Aborting! (internal error code = %d)", error_code);
  }
}

int use_keyboard = true;
if (setting_use_joystick) {
  use_keyboard = false;
  error_code = js_init();
  if (error_code != ERR_NONE) {
    // fall-back to keyboard
    use_keyboard = true;
  }
}

if (use_keyboard) {
  error_code = kbd_init();
  if (error_code != ERR_NONE) {
    alert_user_and_exit("Keyboard initialization failed! (internal error code = %d)", error_code);
  }
}


The above code is relatively robust. It doesn't presume that something is going to work, and it tries to deal with the situation if it doesn't. It disables sound if the sound card can't be initialized, it tries to fall back to software rendering if the hardware accelerated rendering fails to initialize, and it falls back to the keyboard if the joystick (is enabled and) fails to initialize. It pukes at the user only if the graphics or keyboard can't be initialized at all. This stands in stark contrast to especially low level code where the implementation simply cannot afford to do a bunch of fail checking. The lower we step in the hierarchy of code, the further towards hardware modules we sink, we find that the flexibility decreases.
When your computer freezes up and the mouse just sits there on the screen no matter how much you wag the version on your desktop around, that's when someting went wrong down below. Imagine for a moment what would happen if this was a biological machine that just "froze". The closest similarity we can find is when we're knocked over the head and everything goes black and we go unconscious. We might compare it to a kind of "reboot". Though I think a closer comparison is heart failure. If a heart failed as easily as a computer freezes up, we'd all be dead by now.
And that's kind of the point. A heart won't just fail like that. The ultra-low components of our body aren't made to do-or-die. They're made to do their best, always, and nothing but, and to make the best of the situation always. Unfortunately, writing code that "does its best and makes the best of the situation" is hard, to put it mildly.
Which brings us back to aerospace software and space travel, because aerospace software, software for a space ship and nature all have one thing in common: they mustn't fail, ever. If Microsoft Windows imploded on board a space ship, the pilot couldn't just put in the CD and reinstall. If somewhere in the system, there was a bug that caused trouble, it shouldn't wreak havoc throughout the ship's system.
A bug is a stupid little insect**. They just cause an itch. An insect doesn't knock you unconscious or cause your heart to fail.
The good news is, this isn't new and groundbreaking stuff. Erik Buch stated that to date, not one single person has ever died from software failure on an airplane. I'm not sure the same can be said about space ships though... quite a number of them have spontaneously exploded at launch, and I'm not sure they know exactly what caused the disaster in each of those cases. I just know that if you find yourself on a space ship several years worth of travel away from Earth, and something goes wrong, you can't likely call home and ask for a helping hand. I think it's also safe to say that without computers and software to automate things, we'll never be able to go into space without a dedicated education on our belts, and as such, we will be relying more intimately on computers than ever once we go "out there".
Which I kind of hope is pretty soon.
---
(* and while the research generally concludes that "the two are more or less completely different," trackbacks on the comments section read "How the Linux Operating System Is Like the E. Coli Virus". Sometimes people are more interested in talking about what is being talked about than getting their facts straight)
(** aside from a few dangerous ones!)



Guilty pleasures.
Kalle — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 11:02:39 +0000
I guess most of the people who know me even remotely know that I’ve gotten into iPads and iPhones and Macs and such lately. Part of this has to do with work, actually, as I’m currently tasked with writing software for the iPhone/iPad devices (which is a pain to write, so I refer to them as i*s or iStars). I spent the last couple of weeks in the United States with a MacBook Pro, my iPhone and my iPad as my only available computers, and as such, I was more or less forced to adapt to the Mac way of doing things. It’s not that bad, actually, once you get over the fact it’s NOT a variant of Windows but a whole separate system altogether.
I’ve been a linux user for the last decade. More, even. I’ve had brief encounters with Windows, most of them horrific, all of them resulting in me eventually giving up and going back to linux, and none of them in the last 5+ years. I hear Windows is getting better, but as we say in Sweden, “bränt barn skyr elden*,” and I’ve come to the realization that I will most likely never use Windows again, even though I’m pleased to hear it’s shapening up after all these years.
One might say I’m a hard-to-please customer. Some might even accuse me of being the worst kind ever. I whine about things that don’t do their jobs, and even if they’re open source and free as in liberty, it doesn’t mean I won’t complain when they can’t do their jobs properly. I recently spew pus over PulseAudio and Ubuntu 9.10 — the worst experience since 1990 — and I stand by what I said, but in the end, I love linux, and it’s unfair to blame it all on the system, when there are so many factors out of the developers’ control.
Hardware manufacturers couldn’t give less of a fuck about linux, unless they’re making server-specific hardware.

Software manufacturers couldn’t give less of a fuck about linux, unless they’re making server-specific software.
It makes for a really ugly scene, sometimes, and people have to jump through living lions while spinning firey globes of radioactive customs officers through quality assurance managers. It’s messy, and it takes hours and pain, lots of both.
And this is an ongoing perpetual circle, where new hardware and new software clashes and collides over and over, year in and year out, in the uphill battle that is the linux desktop scene.
One of the most annoying things about being a linux user isn’t necessarily that hardware and software manufacturers piss in your corn flakes. It can be really frustrating when you’re struggling to get something working and someone goes, “Why are you using that piece of shit anyway. Linux sucks man. Just install Windows.”
Twitch. I mean, dude. Twitch. I don’t think there’s anyone out there as defensive and protective of their operating system as the linux user. We’re the first to take offense when someone tells us linux sucks. You tell a Windows user that Windows sucks and the most probable reply you’ll get is, “Uh-huh, I know that.**”
Sigh. So retarded. Well, I’ve gotten better about that, and these days I don’t have an agenda against anyone. I just know what works for me and what doesn’t, and whatever works for you, you should stick to. I still get picked on for my choice of OS though, playfully of course, and so the last couple of weeks my guilty pleasure has been to say things like:
“Damn, handbrake seems full of win. And it’s available for linux too. (And Windows, but who cares..)”
on Twitter. Which is fed to Google’s Buzz, which appears for some of the people who tend to poke fun at me. Now I’m poking back.  
Joke aside, it’s interesting how the tables have turned. One of my best friends who’s a hardcore Windows user (and a skilled tech guy at that) and I have been discussing the whole linux/Windows deal for more or less ten years, and suddenly I’m waving my i*s around and talking about the innovative and prosperous market, while he’s pointing to Android and upcoming tablets that will potentially turn the tide on Apple’s tidal wave of domination. He’s suddenly wielding the open source cap and I’m wielding the closed source proprietary cap. And it happened overnight! Granted, his change isn’t as dramatic as mine — he’s simply opposed to the Mac experience, and will grab at anything that means not having to use a Mac (including some of the Win7 devices that are closing in on the market). In my case it’s a little more extreme, but in the end, I’m just excited about a rare opportunity. In the end, I do not believe the i*s will control the market, but I believe they will lead the way, and I’m excited to be a part of that process, even if it’s an unsignificant part.
—
(* “burnt child fears fire”)
(** except for that one guy in Wisconsin who got real offensive about Windows when *I* said it sucked; never mind me being a hypocrite, but I was completely taken by surprise by this reaction, and immediately labeled him a confused patriot thinking Windows somehow was connected to the pride of America)
Update: timely — MS cancels their “iPad killer”: http://gizmodo.com/5527442/microsoft-cancels-innovative-courier-tablet-project



Apple versus Adobe.
Kalle — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 11:35:37 +0000
The iPad won’t have Flash support. I giggle when I write this. It’s not news, at all, I’m just slow on the pick-up. Adobe person on Adobe’s blog reacts to this. A guy at TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog) responds to THAT. I lean toward the latter person. I giggle even more than ever.
This is an unexpected turn of events. Apple with its “closed” approach versus Adobe with ITS “closed” approach leading to more openness. Two wrongs do not make one right, you say, and I point at this wonderful, glorious exception of where just precisely that is happening. The very nature of “closed” means you can shut out whoever you want however you want, and Adobe in all of its proprietary glory shuts pretty much everyone except Windows users out (yea, Flash runs horrible on the Mac apparently, it’s a resource hog, and crashes constantly).
And Apple shuts Adobe out. Do you hear my giggles as I wheeze for breath?
It reminds me of MSIE back in the day. It was THE browser. The alternative was Netscape Navigator and it was a disastrous piece of crap where Internet Explorer was a shiny piece of solid gold. So developers ignored everything else. Even when Firefox came around, they continued doing so, at least the short bus folks did. Fuck web standards. Then suddenly, their “dis sait rekirs intrnet exprdorerlolstfu” sites were hurting, badly.
But it took a long while. Banks in Sweden required Internet Explorer up until a mere few years ago. My mother’s stock market site (uh yeah, my mom’s dealing in stock, but that’s another story) even to this day requires Internet Explorer.
Now we have Flash, and we see people doing the same mistake all over again. Especially with the web as it is today, with video content and all that, it’s no wonder people are going for Flash, because Flash is pretty much the only alternative. Well, sort of, anyway. Ah-yep-. If you clicked the link you probably noticed that it said “HTML5″ and if that didn’t mean much to you, let me rephrase:
No Flash.
Actually, I can rephrase that even nicer:
No Proprietary One-Company-To-Rule-Them-All Plugins Required.
Did I mention that HTML5 video is supported by the iPhone?
As a developer, this is the part where you go look at the figures for exactly how many people own an iPhone. And the part where you take a stand on whether the iPad will sell to millions or if it’ll flop over and keel. This is the part where you get the numbers fed to you: 42.5 million.
Forty two point five million iPhones as of Q1 2010. And your cute, bunny-hopping Flash-site? It’s a fucking piece of Lego right now, for those 42.5 million users when they browse on their phone.



Three.
Kalle — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 14:52:21 +0000
To most people, there are two options out there when it comes to computers — Windows or Mac OS. The former is cheaper (in the sense that its hardware is cheaper) but stable as nitroglycerin (improving, but I’ve yet to meet a Windows user who doesn’t regularly reinstall Windows and/or suffer from crashes or failures sporadically). The latter is more expensive, tightly controlled, but prettier. And more stable. And unless you’re a gamer, or simply used to the former, there’s really no reason to go with anything else, unless you treasure money over convenience. Then to some of us there is also linux, the open source alternative. It’s great, unless you want to play games on it, in which case it blows monkey brains.
Personally I’m the monkey brain blowing type, and I know how bad that sounds. I used MS-DOS and then migrated, unwillingly, to Windows, and from there I bounced back and forth between linux, which was a reeking pile of clusterfuck poured delicately over a yummy-looking pile of maggot-excrement and Windows. Still, linux did beat Windows even then, because Windows back then was about as useful as a web server made up of glued-together sheep wool and saw dust, with no ethernet port, and so finally linux is where I remained. Mac OS was like an unfathomable, lurking beast in the village marsh — I knew about it, I’d even seen it occasionally, touched it once or twice, but … as a kid I happened to like games, and Macs just didn’t have much of that back then.
This was back in the ’90s though. Ten years later, I find myself running Ubuntu 9.10, released about 4 months ago, and it feels like I installed Windows 3.1 all over again. The new pulseaudio service that is supposed to handle what ALSA cannot, is filled with wagons after wagons filled to the brim with stinking diarrhea, stretching to the horizon and beyond, steadily and irrevocably being injected into my blood stream. It – literally – fucks – with – everything – I – do. It fucks with mplayer, it fucks with Firefox, it fucks with World of Warcraft, it fucks with Skype, it fucks with Ventrilo. It literally clusterfucks itself into fuckblivion, and it just keeps on fucking itself like a horny teenager on prom night. Pardon the French. It has, for some ungodly reason, a new input method handler (for non-alphabetic languages, like Japanese), which resulted in me having to help my fiancée rip it out and put the old one back in because the new one — you guessed it — sucked balls and worked nothing like what a Japanese person would expect.*
And then on the far, far other corner of the spectrum I am simultaneously using my new MacBook Pro and iPhone, learning the ropes of Xcode and reading up on iPhone development in general. It’s cool. It’s closed. Oh, so closed. It puts me, the soulless donkey, between two stacks of hay into which the disastrous organizational abilities of Open Source has peed in the one, and the detrimental-to-evolution, devastating-to-our-rights Apple has peed in the other. Neither pile looks very convincing right about now, but hunger is the greatest spice of all, or so they say.
A fellow developer sent me a coupon to get his game on my iPhone to test it out right before it was going to be shipped, and then I got “this coupon can only be redeemed on the US iPhone Store”. That was the first cultural shock that lead down the path of cultural shocks. To develop for the iPhone I actually have to buy an Apple Developer account for (at the cheapest) $99 a year. It’s unthinkable for an old commie linux user like myself that I’d actually have to pay money to help them make their product better, by adding content to it, but it’s Apple, and they are in their own playing field.
Actually, I was convinced a long time ago that the whole closed off, shut off, hold my ears and screw my rights deal was a failure, as proven by Microsoft time and time again, but seeing Apple now, today, was as big an eye-opener as was the first time I ever visited the (North American) South — I’d been convinced from childhood that religion was being phased out in the world, in favor of reason…
Ultimately, I’m conflicted. As I grow more accustomed to the antics of my MacBook (and indeed, to a non-Mac user, there are quite a few, like the unwillingness to maximize, for one), I grow impatient with the bullshit of my main desktop (linux) machine, I grow annoyed with the feeling of being chastised and told where to stand and what to do by my Mac, and if there’s one thing I’ve become more aware of, it’s my rights as a user. The iPhone and the upcoming iPad are clearly changing how we think about computers in general, and while half the crowd aren’t half as impressed as Apple wishes they were, there’s such a huge potential in these two devices alone that nothing will be what it used to be by the time they’re old news.
So Apple is the pioneer, and we’re dragged along. I’m excited and, ultimately, conflicted.
(* I’ve seen this before. I’ve been using linux for over 10 years. I’ve seen the pattern. It’s time to stop this retarded behavior, folks. You can’t throw something random into the distribution, release it and “hope for the best”, and then have it actually working better than its counterpart three years later. It’s not acceptable anymore. We’re better than this. But I saw it with Firefox, replacing Mozilla. I saw it with ALSA, replacing OSS. (Fuck, ALSA replacing OSS is even today a big clusterfuck of clusterfucks where people sacrifice baby maggots daily just to get their set up of game + team speak app of choice in place.) And I see it again, with pulseaudio and ibus.)



iPod, then iPhone, then… iPad…?
Kalle — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 11:57:26 +0000
So Apple announces the iPad — http://www.apple.com/ipad/ — I suggest you look at the video (not the keynote). I mean, seriously, I’ve been thinking for the last 10 years that the computers of the future will be exactly what that is, a super-thin touch screen that is big enough to be useful (i.e. not the iPhone) and light enough to not be troublesome when you’re out and about.
So um, what new revolutionary stuff has Microsoft been doing recently? Is it just me, or have they been awfully  quiet, lately?



iPhone does not love linux.
Kalle — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 09:59:47 +0000
With my previous praise for the iPhone, I must of course balance it with some flak. You know me, I’m big on the balance stuff. After all, I did play a Seeker*.
Anyway, the iPhone does not love linux. I knew this though. And this isn’t so much me complaining that the iPhone doesn’t love linux, as it is me marvelling at the grotesqueness of it all.
Look at what I am forced to do, in order to install “apps” from the Apple store onto my iPhone — and no, this is not about jailbreaking the phone, although you might think it is considering all the steps:
1. I have to get Windows or Mac OS. Yep. I read about iTunes in Wine (Windows emulation in linux) and heard it was “garbage”. I do this. I put Windows back on my lap top. For my iPhone. Because it is my master.
2. I have to install iTunes. I do this. Whilst asking myself “why must I…?” I do this. Obediently.
3. I have to confirm my Apple Account, FROM INTERNET EXPLORER. Hang on a minute here.

- I get an email to my gmail address,

- with a confirmation link,

- and clicking it in Firefox

- gives me the Apple “download iTunes for free!!!11111oneneone” page …

- and then when I open iTunes

- I get the “you have not validated your account — please check your email and follow the confirmation link” … 

- so finally after many laps of chasing my own ass,

- I try the confirmation link in IE

- and voilá. Beau-fucking-tit-ful. Welcome to Apple Computing. We come in peace from the 1990′s. We mean you no harm.
Thus, finally, I can get on with installing apps on my iPhone. Great hardware, by the way, pity about its maker.
*) Only a select few understand that one and it has nothing to do with Harry Potter.



I’m home.
Kalle — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 12:04:56 +0000
Yes indeed I am.
And I bought an iPhone. For anyone who speaks Japanese (or for that matter, Chinese or any other language which requires more than the average a-z), I can inform you that which I had wished somebody out there had informed me in a straightforward manner when I started digging into this over a year ago.
Yes, you can use Japanese and Swedish (or whatever combination) on the iPhone simultaneously. I can get my åäö’s which my Japanese cell couldn’t spit out for the life of it (me), and I can get 日本語 to slither out of it as well. You can send SMS’es within Sweden in Japanese, and in general, you can use them as you would in Japan, except that they also properly support Swedish.
In case you are confuzzled about how to do this, the Swedish (with presumed English translation in parentheses) menu alternatives for getting Japanese enabled is as follows:
Inställningar (Settings) > Allmänt (General) > Internationellt (International) > Tangentbord (Keyboard) > Japanska (Japanese) > QWERTY or Kana (whichever you prefer).



October, the month of no internet.
Kalle — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 10:20:44 +0000
The 4th of October, as I was talking to my girlfriend on the phone while walking across the room I managed to get the far-too-short ethernet cable across my foot which resulted in me literally bashing the modem into the ground. It didn’t survive the trip.
Now, 21 days later, I have a new modem. My landlord didn’t break any new speed records on that one, that’s for sure, but at least he gave it to me for free (initially he said I had to pay money to get a replacement).
Ah well. I’m back. I’ve had a hundred different things I’ve wanted to blog about, but sitting down and writing the entries in a text file just sounded too ambitious for me. In any case, I’m back.