Older blog entries for etbe (starting at number 1133)

Taxing Inferior Products

I recently had a medical appointment cancelled due to a “computer crash”. Apparently the reception computer crashed and lost all bookings for a day and they just made new bookings for whoever called – and anyone who had a previous booking just missed out. I’ll probably never know whether they really had a computer problem or just used computer problems as an excuse when they made a mistake. But even if it wasn’t a real computer problem the fact that computers are so unreliable overall that “computer crash” is an acceptable excuse indicates a problem with the industry.

The problem of unreliable computers is a cost to everyone, it’s effectively a tax on all business and social interactions that involve computers. While I spent the extra money on a server with ECC RAM for my home file storage I have no control over the computers purchased by all the companies I deal with – which are mostly the cheapest available computers. I also have no option to buy a laptop with ECC RAM because companies like Lenovo have decided not to manufacture them.

It seems to me that the easiest way of increasing overall reliability of computers would be to use ECC RAM everywhere. In the early 90′s all IBM compatible PCs had parity RAM, that meant that for each byte there was one extra bit which would report 100% of single-bit errors and 50% of errors that involved random memory corruption. Then manufacturers decided to save a tiny amount of money on memory by using 8/9 the number of chips for desktop/laptop systems and probably make more money on selling servers with ECC RAM. If the government was to impose a 20% tax on computers that lack ECC RAM then manufacturers would immediately start using it everywhere and the end result would be no price increase overall as it’s cheaper to design desktop systems and servers with the same motherboards – apparently some desktop systems have motherboard support for ECC RAM but don’t ship with suitable RAM or advertise the support for such RAM.

This principle applies to many other products too. One obvious example is cars, a car manufacturer can sell cheap cars with few safety features and then when occupants of those cars and other road users are injured the government ends up paying for medical expenses and disability pensions. If there was a tax for every car that has a poor crash test rating and a tax for every car company that performs badly in real world use then it would give car companies some incentive to manufacture safer vehicles.

Now there are situations where design considerations preclude such features. For example implementing ECC RAM in mobile phones might involve technical difficulties (particularly for 32bit phones) and making some trucks and farm equipment safer might be difficult. But when a company produces multiple similar products that differ significantly in quality such as PCs with and without ECC RAM or cars with and without air-bags there would be no difficulty in making them all of them higher quality.

I don’t think that we will have a government that implements such ideas any time soon, it seems that our government is more interested in giving money to corporations than taxing them. But one thing that could be done is to adopt a policy of only giving money to companies if they produce high quality products. If a car company is to be given hundreds of millions of dollars for not closing a factory then that factory should produce cars with all possible safety features. If a computer company is going to be given significant tax breaks for doing R&D then they should be developing products that won’t crash.

No related posts.

Syndicated 2014-07-10 02:48:38 from etbe - Russell Coker

Desktop Publishing is Wrong

When I first started using computers a “word processor” was a program that edited text. The most common and affordable printers were dot-matrix and people who wanted good quality printing used daisy wheel printers. Text from a word processor was sent to a printer a letter at a time. The options for fancy printing were bold and italic (for dot-matrix), underlines, and the use of spaces to justify text.

It really wasn’t much good if you wanted to include pictures, graphs, or tables. But if you just wanted to write some text it worked really well.

When you were editing text it was typical that the entire screen (25 rows of 80 columns) would be filled with the text you were writing. Some word processors used 2 or 3 lines at the top or bottom of the screen to display status information.

Some time after that desktop publishing (DTP) programs became available. Initially most people had no interest in them because of the lack of suitable printers, the early LASER printers were very expensive and the graphics mode of dot matrix printers was slow to print and gave fairly low quality. Printing graphics on a cheap dot matrix printer using the thin continuous paper usually resulted in damaging the paper – a bad result that wasn’t worth the effort.

When LASER and Inkjet printers started to become common word processing programs started getting many more features and basically took over from desktop publishing programs. This made them slower and more cumbersome to use. For example Star Office/OpenOffice/LibreOffice has distinguished itself by remaining equally slow as it transitioned from running on an OS/2 system with 16M of RAM in the early 90′s to a Linux system with 256M of RAM in the late 90′s to a Linux system with 1G of RAM in more recent times. It’s nice that with the development of PCs that have AMD64 CPUs and 4G+ of RAM we have finally managed to increase PC power faster than LibreOffice can consume it. But it would be nicer if they could optimise for the common cases. LibreOffice isn’t the only culprit, it seems that every word processor that has been in continual development for that period of time has had the same feature bloat.

The DTP features that made word processing programs so much slower also required more menus to control them. So instead of just having text on the screen with maybe a couple of lines for status we have a menu bar at the top followed by a couple of lines of “toolbars”, then a line showing how much width of the screen is used for margins. At the bottom of the screen there’s a search bar and a status bar.

Screen Layout

By definition the operation of a DTP program will be based around the size of the paper to be used. The default for this is A4 (or “Letter” in the US) in a “portrait” layout (higher than it is wide). The cheapest (and therefore most common) monitors in use are designed for displaying wide-screen 16:9 ratio movies. So we have images of A4 paper with a width:height ratio of 0.707:1 displayed on a wide-screen monitor with a 1.777:1 ratio. This means that only about 40% of the screen space would be used if you don’t zoom in (but if you zoom in then you can’t see many rows of text on the screen). One of the stupid ways this is used is by companies that send around word processing documents when plain text files would do, so everyone who reads the document uses a small portion of the screen space and a large portion of the email bandwidth.

Note that this problem of wasted screen space isn’t specific to DTP programs. When I use the Google Keep website [1] to edit notes on my PC they take up a small fraction of the screen space (about 1/3 screen width and 80% screen height) for no good reason. Keep displays about 70 characters per line and 36 lines per page. Really every program that allows editing moderate amounts of text should allow more than 80 characters per line if the screen is large enough and as many lines as fit on the screen.

One way to alleviate the screen waste on DTP programs is to use a “landscape” layout for the paper. This is something that all modern printers support (AFAIK the only printers you can buy nowadays are LASER and ink-jet and it’s just a big image that gets sent to the printer). I tried to do this with LibreOffice but couldn’t figure out how. I’m sure that someone will comment and tell me I’m stupid for missing it, but I think that when someone with my experience of computers can’t easily figure out how to perform what should be a simple task then it’s unreasonably difficult for the vast majority of computer users who just want to print a document.

When trying to work out how to use landscape layout in LibreOffice I discovered the “Web Layout” option in the “View” menu which allows all the screen space to be used for text (apart from the menu bar, tool bars, etc). That also means that there are no page breaks! That means I can use LibreOffice to just write text, take advantage of the spelling and grammar correcting features, and only have screen space wasted by the tool bars and menus etc.

I never worked out how to get Google Docs to use a landscape document or a single webpage view. That’s especially disappointing given that the proportion of documents that are printed from Google Docs is probably much lower than most word processing or DTP programs.

What I Want

What I’d like to have is a word processing program that’s suitable for writing draft blog posts and magazine articles. For blog posts most of the formatting is done by the blog software and for magazine articles the editorial policy demands plain text in most situations, so there’s no possible benefit of DTP features.

The ability to edit a document on an Android phone and on a Linux PC is a good feature. While the size of a phone screen limits what can be done it does allow jotting down ideas and correcting mistakes. I previously wrote about using Google Keep on a phone for lecture notes [2]. It seems that the practical ability of Keep to edit notes on a PC is about limited to the notes for a 45 minute lecture. So while Keep works well for that task it won’t do well for anything bigger unless Google make some changes.

Google Docs is quite good for editing medium size documents on a phone if you use the Android app. Given the limitations of the device size and input capabilities it works really well. But it’s not much good for use on a PC.

I’ve seen a positive review of One Note from Microsoft [3]. But apart from the fact that it’s from Microsoft (with all the issues that involves) there’s the issue of requiring another account. Using an Android phone requires a Gmail account (in practice for almost all possible uses if not in theory) so there’s no need to get an extra account for Google Keep or Docs.

What would be ideal is an Android editor that could talk to a cloud service that I run (maybe using WebDAV) and which could use the same data as a Linux-X11 application.

Any suggestions?

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Syndicated 2014-07-06 06:53:58 from etbe - Russell Coker

Blog Comments

John Scalzi wrote an insightful post about the utility of blog comments with the way the Internet works nowadays [1]. He starts out focusing on hate comments that could reasonably be described as terrorism (death threats with the aim of preventing people writing about politics meet any reasonable definition of “terrorism”). Terrorists on the Internet are a significant problem but it’s one that doesn’t get much attention as it generally only affects people who aren’t straight-acting white men.

Blogging About Technology

One corner case that John doesn’t seem to consider is that of writing about technology. Issues related to programming often aren’t related to politics and are often testable so comments will be based on things that have been shown to work rather than stuff people invent or want to believe. I’ve received many useful and educational comments on my technical posts with little hostility. Even getting a snarky comment is rare when writing a strictly technical blog post.

The comments problem for technology blogging is spam. I’ve been using the WordPress plugin Block Spam by Math [2] (which is obsolete but still works) for years. Initially it stopped almost all spam, but now I’m getting at least 20 spam comments a day.

Extremely Popular Blogs

The comments section of a blog is sometimes described as a “conversation”. When a blog post gets comments from less than 10 people it is possible for them to have something that resembles a conversation with the author that is of benefit to other readers and doesn’t take excessive amounts of time for the author. When a blog is very popular and every post gets comments from 50+ people it’s not really possible. So a traditional blog comment section seems to work best when the blog is primarily read by a small well connected group of people who sometimes comment and some casual readers who never comment (but sometimes find value in the comments of others).

Discussions of blog comment systems usually include a reference to a post written by someone who disabled comments on their blog and found it to be a good thing, it always seems that the person who writes such a post has a large and varied audience who’s comments would take a lot of time to moderate. John followed the usual form in this regard by linking to a reasonably popular SF author who would presumably have a lot of fans with good net access.

I’m not going to criticise anyone for disabling comments when their blog becomes really popular, but any advice that they have to offer about such things won’t apply to the vast majority of blogs. Due to the long-tail effect the small blogs would probably comprise the majority of all comments so in terms of the way the blog environment works I don’t think it makes much difference when the small minority of very popular blogs disable comments. The vast majority of blogs that I regularly read only have a small number of comments.

One thing that should be noted is that getting a lot of readers shouldn’t be the only factor for writing a successful blog. For example some of my blog posts about SE Linux are aimed at a small audience of Linux programmers and have an even smaller number of people who are qualified to comment. When I write a post that can only receive comments other than “please explain more because I don’t understand” from a few dozen people that doesn’t make it any less important. Sometimes the few dozen people who know a topic well need to work together to educate the few thousand who can implement the ideas for the benefit of millions of users of the software.

Disabling Comments on Contentious Posts

One interesting method John uses is to disable comments early when posting about contentious issues. It’s a general practice when running a blog to disable comments on posts after a certain period of time (3 months to 1 year seem to be common time limits for comments). This means that the moderators can concentrate on recent posts and not be bothered with spam bots hitting ancient posts as the interest in writing legitimate comments on an old post is vanishingly small. John has a practice of disabling comments after a couple of days when the comments start to lose quality.

No matter how contentious the issue is I’m not likely to get the 400+ comments that John gets. But the idea of closing comments quickly still has some merit for my blog and other blogs with less traffic.

Not Accepting Comments While Asleep

John has a practice of closing comments while he’s asleep to avoid allowing a troll to get 8 hours of viewing for a nasty comment. The most immediate down-side to that is that it inconveniences people who don’t want to wait 8 hours to comment and prioritises comments from people in the same time zone, this makes me think of Cory Doctorow’s novel Eastern Standard Tribe (which is available for free download and I highly recommend reading it) [3]. It seems that a better solution to that problem would be to have a team of moderators to watch things 24*7 which is what a lot of popular blogs that allow comments do. The WordPress capabilities model doesn’t support granting a user no special privileges other than moderating comments [4], as WordPress is the most popular self-hosted blog software this limits the possibilities for people moderating comments on other people’s blogs.

No variation of this would work for me. I have lots of things that require my ongoing attention and don’t want to add my blog to the list. If I have other things to work on for a few days I want to just not bother with my blog. This means that my blog needs to be able to run on autopilot for days at a time – however I do monitor my blog closely after publishing a post that is likely to attract nasty comments. One extra problem that I have is that the Android client for WordPress has problems in synchronising comments.

Using a Forum for Comments

Popular Planet installations such as Planet Debian and Planet Linux Australia syndicate more than a few blogs that have comments disabled. A forum installation for such a Planet would be useful to allow people to comment on all posts and also support bloggers who are thinking of disabling comments. While the use of a forum for blog comments has been proven to work well for Boing Boing forums have their own issues of spam and anti-social behavior.

Debian already has a forum [5], if a section of that was devoted to discussing blog posts from Planet Debian then it shouldn’t make much of an increase to the work of the forum administrators while providing a benefit to the community. Also if the Debian forum had such a section it would probably attract use from more Debian Developers, I would use that forum if it was a place to comment on blogs that don’t have a comment section and I might also comment on other forum discussions.

It would be good if there was a forum for discussing Linux in Australia. I’m not volunteering to run it but I would help out if someone else wants to be the main sysadmin and I can offer free hosting.

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Syndicated 2014-07-01 03:34:36 from etbe - Russell Coker

Links June 2014

Russ Albery wrote an insightful blog post about trust, computer security, and training programmers [1]. He makes a good case that social problems in our community decrease the availability of skilled people to write and audit security code.

The Lawfare blog has an insightful article by Dan Geer about “Heartbleed as a Metaphor [2]. He makes some good points about security and design, ways of potentially solving some flaws and problems with the various solutions.

Eben Moglen wrote an insightful article for The Guardian about the way that the NSA spying is a direct threat to democracy [3]

The TED blog has an interesting interview with Kitra Cahana about her work living with and photographing nomads in the US [4]. I was surprised to learn that there’s an active nomad community in the US based on the culture that started in the Great Depression. Apparently people are using Youtube to learn about nomad culture before joining.

Dave Johnson wrote an interesting Salon article about why CEOs make 300* as much money as workers [5]. Note that actually contributing to the financial success of the company is not one of the reasons.

Maia Szalavitz wrote an interesting Slate article about Autism and Anorexia [6]. Apparently some people on the Autism Spectrum are mis-diagnosed with Anorexia due to food intolerance.

Groups of four professors have applied for the job of president and vice-chancellor of the University of Alberta [7]. While it was a joke to apply in that way, 1/4 of the university president’s salary is greater than the salary of a professor and the university would get a team of 4 people to do the job – so it would really make sense to hire them. Of course the university could just pay a more reasonable salary for the president and hire an extra 3 professors. But the same argument applies for lots of highly paid jobs. Is a CEO who gets paid $10M per annim really going to do a better job than a team of 100 people who are paid $100K?

Joel on Software wrote an insightful article explaining why hiring 1/200 applicants doesn’t mean you hire the top 0.5% of workers [8]. He suggests that the best employees almost never apply through regular channels so an intern program is the only way to get a chance of hiring the best people.

Chaotic Idealism has an interesting article on some of the bogus claims about autism and violence [9].

Salon has an interesting articleby Lindsay Abrams about the way the food industry in the US lobbies for laws to prevent employees from reporting animal cruelty or contamination of the food supply and how drones will now be used for investigative journalism [10].

Jacobin Mag has an interesting article by Geoff Shullenberger about the “Voluntariat”, the people who volunteer their time to help commercial organisations [11]. I don’t object to people voluntarily helping companies, but when they are exploited or when the company also requires voluntary help from the government it becomes a problem. We need some legislation about this.

Laura Hudson wrote an insightful article about how Riot Games solved their online abuse problem [12]. There are ideas in this that can apply to all online communities.

Matt LeMay wrote an interesting article for Medium titled “What (Else) Can Men Do? Grow The Fuck Up” [13]. It’s a general commentary on the treatment of women in geek communities (and most other places).

Foz Meadows wrote an insightful analysis of the attempts of bigots to influence science-fiction [14]. If I had more spare time I’d read some of the books by bigoted authors on the “Sad Puppy Slate” (from a library of course) and see if they lack talent in the same way that Orson Scott Card does.

Racialicious has an interesting article by Phenderson Djeli Clark about the horrible racism and bigotry of H.P. Lovecraft [15]. I have only read two HP Lovecraft stories, one was mediocre and the other (The Horroe at Red Hook) was quite poor – largely due to his inability to write about non-white people.

Grace Wyler wrote an insightful article for Vice magazine about the right-wing terrorists in the US killing cops [16].

Paul Rosenberg wrote an interesting and amusing (for people outside the US) article about the gun crazies in the US [17]. Maybe the gun crazies should have a “loaded assault rifles and tequila” party to follow up on their “gun appreciation day”.

A US TV show made a 4 minute clip of some of the stupid things that Tony Abbott has done [18]. Tony is almost as stupid as Dubya.

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Syndicated 2014-06-30 09:08:57 from etbe - Russell Coker

Fixing Strange Directory Write Access

type=AVC msg=audit(1403622580.061:96): avc:  denied  { write } for  pid=1331 comm="mysqld_safe" name="/" dev="dm-0" ino=256 scontext=system_u:system_r:mysqld_safe_t:s0 tcontext=system_u:object_r:root_t:s0 tclass=dir
type=SYSCALL msg=audit(1403622580.061:96): arch=c000003e syscall=269 success=yes exit=0 a0=ffffffffffffff9c a1=7f5e09bfe798 a2=2 a3=2 items=0 ppid=1109 pid=1331 auid=4294967295 uid=0 gid=0 euid=0 suid=0 fsuid=0 egid=0 sgid=0 fsgid=0 tty=(none) ses=4294967295 comm="mysqld_safe" exe="/bin/dash" subj=system_u:system_r:mysqld_safe_t:s0 key=(null)

For a long time (probably years) I’ve been seeing messages like the above in the log from auditd (/var/log/audit/audit.log) when starting mysqld. I haven’t fixed it because the amount of work exceeded the benefit, it’s just a couple of lines logged at every system boot. But today I decided to fix it.

The first step was to find out what was going on, I ran a test system in permissive mode and noticed that there were no attempts to create a file (that would have been easy to fix). Then I needed to discover which system call was triggering this. The syscall number is 269, the file linux/x86_64/syscallent.h in the strace source shows that 269 is the system call faccessat. faccessat(2) and access(2) are annoying cases, they do all the permission checks for access but don’t involve doing the operation so when a program uses those system calls but for some reason doesn’t perform the operation in question (in this case writing to the root directory) then we just get a log entry but nothing happening to examine.

A quick look at the shell script didn’t make the problem obvious, note that this is probably obvious to people who are more skilled at shell scripting than me – but it’s probably good for me to describe how to solve these problems every step of the way. So the next step was to use gdb. Here is the start of my gdb session:

# gdb /bin/sh
[skipped]
Reading symbols from /bin/dash…(no debugging symbols found)…done.
(gdb) b faccessat
Breakpoint 1 at 0×3960
(gdb) r -x /usr/bin/mysqld_safe
[lots skipped]
+ test -r /usr/my.cnf
Breakpoint 1, 0x00007ffff7b0c7e0 in faccessat ()
from /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6

After running gdb on /bin/sh (which is a symlink to /bin/dash) I used the “b” command to set a breakpoint on the function faccessat (which is a library call from glibc that calls the system call sys_faccessat()). A breakpoint means that program execution will stop when the function is called. I run the shell script with “-x” as the first parameter to instruct the shell to show me the shell commands that are run so I can match shell commands to system calls. The above output shows the first call to faccessat() which isn’t interesting (it’s testing for read access).

I then ran the “c” command in gdb to continue execution and did so a few times until I found something interesting.

+ test -w / -o root = root
Breakpoint 1, 0x00007ffff7b0c7e0 in faccessat ()
from /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6

Above is the interesting part of the gdb output. It shows that the offending shell command is “test -w /“.

I filed Debian bug #752593 [1] with a patch to fix this problem.

I also filed a wishlist bug against strace asking for an easier way to discover the name of a syscall [2].

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Syndicated 2014-06-25 02:40:42 from etbe - Russell Coker

Expectations of Skill and Time

On many occasions I’ve seen discussions about the background knowledge that people are expected to have to contribute to FOSS projects. Often the background knowledge is quite different from the core skills related to their contributions (EG documentation mark-up skills required for coding work or knowledge of code required for writing documentation). One argument in favor of requiring such skills is of the form “anyone who’s good at one aspect of the project can learn skills for the other areas”. Another is of the form “anyone who has time to contribute in one area has time to learn all the other areas, anyone who doesn’t want to learn is being lazy”.

I think it’s reasonable that someone who is considering donating their time to a project would want to start doing something productive immediately. If someone has to spend many hours learning how things work before contributing anything of value they may decide that it’s not a good use of their time – or just not fun. Also if the project is structured to require a lot of background knowledge then that will increase the amount of time that long-term contributors spend teaching newbies which is another way of sucking productive energy out of a project.

I don’t think it’s lazy to want to avoid learning unusual tools before starting a project. Firstly there is the issue of wanting to make productive use of your time. If you have a day for FOSS contributions and you can choose between spending 6 hours learning an environment for one project or 1 hour for another project then there’s a choice of 2 hours or 7 hours of productive work. Someone who has the luxury of being able to spend several days a month on FOSS projects might think it’s lazy to want to make effective use of 1 day, but there are a lot of people out there who are really busy and can only spend a few days a YEAR contributing, spending half a day learning an obscure development environment or documentation system can take a significant amount of someone’s yearly time for such work. To make things even worse some of the best programmers are the ones who have little free time.

For documentation MediaWiki (the software behind Wikipedia and Wikia.com) has a lot going for it. While it’s arguable that it’s not the best Wiki software out there (many people have wanted to argue this with me even though I don’t care) it’s obvious that MediaWiki is the most widely used Wiki software. If you have documentation stored in MediaWiki then most people who have any exposure to the IT industry, the FOSS community, or the Internet in general will already have experience using it. Also Wikipedia serves as a large example of what can be done with MediaWiki, there have been more than a few occasions when I have looked at Wikipedia for examples of how to layout text. Some people might think I’m lazy for never reading the MediaWiki documentation, but again I’ve got lots of other things to do and don’t want to spend a lot of time learning about MediaWiki instead of doing more useful things like creating content.

Project source code should be as consistent as possible. While large projects may have lots of modules and dependencies it’s best to try and keep them all in one place. If your project depends on libraries of code from other sources then it’s helpful to distribute copies of those libraries from the same location as the project source – particularly when the project depends on development versions of libraries. Then if there’s any mismatch between versions of libraries it will be a clear unambiguous bug that can be reported or fixed instead of being an issue that requires checks of what versions everyone is using.

One thing we should aim for in FOSS projects is to get the “long tail” of contributions. If someone spends a day fixing bugs in a dozen projects to get their own system working as desired then it would be good if they could submit patches without excessive effort at the same time.

This doesn’t just apply to FOSS development, it also applies to a large extent to any collaborative project on the Internet. For example if I was to start a Wiki for fans of a sci-fi series wikia would be the first option I’d consider because most potential contributors know it.

Proprietary Software Development

I’ve seen all the same problems when developing proprietary software. The difference is that money and morale is wasted instead of contributions. Often in commercial projects managers choose products that have a good feature list without considering whether all their staff need to be retrained. Programmers can usually train themselves so it’s often a hidden cost, the training is paid for in lost development time (both directly in time spent learning and indirectly when people make mistakes).

One significant advantage of using free software on Windows is that programmers can play with it on their own. For example I’ve never done a fresh installation of SourceSafe or ClearCase, but if I was going to work on a project that involved Git or Subversion on Windows then I could play with it and learn without risking disruption to the rest of the team. If commercial software is to be used then being common and relatively cheap is a significant advantage. MS SourceSafe offers significant benefits over most version control software on Windows simply because the vast majority of Windows developers have already used it and because it’s cheap and easy to setup a test instance if necessary.

I don’t care about the success or failure of proprietary software projects in general (I only care when I’m paid to care). I also don’t expect that people read my blog with the aim of getting advice on running successful proprietary software development projects. This section is merely to illustrate the general nature of such wasted effort on collaborative projects – and I should put my observations of failing proprietary software development projects to use.

Debian

Some Debian Developers are having a discussion about such things at the moment. That discussion inspired me to write this post. But I’m mostly writing about my experience over the course of 20+ years working in the IT industry and contributing to FOSS projects – not in a direct response to the Debian discussion (most of which I haven’t yet read).

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Syndicated 2014-06-20 10:30:24 from etbe - Russell Coker

Phone Car Accessories

Tree Frog Dashboard Mat

phone stuck to fridge

I’ve been given some more MobileZap products to review. The first is the Tree Frog anti-slip dashboard mat [1]. This is designed to allow a phone to stick to an angled surface of the inside of the car without slipping. The pictures on the web site show a phone stuck to a curved angular surface of a car dash. To test this I stuck my phone to my fridge, the flat metal surface of the fridge and the almost flat plastic surface of the gel case of my phone are pretty much ideal surfaces for the sticky mat to adhere to. But even so keeping my phone stuck to a vertical surface is impressive. This mat is cheap enough that it could be used for many other tasks than securing a phone in a car, for example it could be used to stick a phone to the wall of your office. It’s apparently washable and can be expected to keep gripping things if washed regularly.

One thing that could be improved in the mat would be to have some holes in it. When I detached my phone from the fridge some large air bubbles developed between the mat and the fridge, this would be a problem if I wanted to regularly stick my phone to a flat surface such as an office wall.

When in my car it didn’t work nearly as well. The pattern on the surface of the car dash which is designed to avoid glare when driving is difficult to stick to, it’s a bit like trying to attach sticky-tape to unpainted wood for similar reasons. A phone will still remain in place on a 30 degree angle from the horizontal (which is significant) but the mat grips much more tightly to the phone than the dash, which is a little inconvenient as the mat stays attached to the phone when you remove it from the dash.

Sorry for the boring picture, it’s black and flat so there’s not much scope for making it interesting.

3.1A USB Car Charger

AA battery charger and 3.1A car charger

Above is a picture of a 3.1A USB car charger and a AA battery charger. The car charger isn’t particularly exciting, but providing 3.1A through two USB sockets is noteworthy – it can charge one device at 2.1A (the maximum any device draws) or two devices for a total of up to 3.1A [2] (with protection against over-current). Previously in my car I used the 2.1A charger that shipped with my Galaxy Note 2 and an inverter to provide 240VAC as the devices I had to charge a phone from a car socket didn’t provide enough current. This new device uses less space and also allows charging two phones at once. One problem with this device was finding USB cables that could handle the current, for benchmarking I used a phone that was running Ingress and acting as a Wifi access point. I discovered that the cables that Samsung ships with their recent devices (Galaxy Note 2 and Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet) seem to work best and support charging my Galaxy Note 2 or my wife’s Nexus 5 while playing Ingress and running as a Wifi AP. Most of the other cables that I have in my collection won’t even allow a phone to remain at the same charge level while playing Ingress.

AA Emergency Phone Charger

The AA phone charger is best suited for emergency use only, it takes one AA battery and has limited current capacity [3]. A NiMh rechargeable battery has a nominal Voltage of 1.2V, to provide 5V to charge a phone the Voltage has to be boosted by a factor of 4.16 which would reduce the current by a factor of 4.16 if the charger was 100% efficient. As 100% efficiency is impossible the current would be reduced even more. It seems unlikely that a AA battery would be able to sustain a current of 2A so the supply from that charger would be less than 500mA – IE less than the least capable PC USB port or mains powered phone charger. A test with a Nexus 5 showed the phone charge level decreasing while being very lightly used (mostly just checking whether the charge level was increasing) when a NiMH battery was connected. A test with an alkaline battery and the same Nexus 5 showed the phone charge level increasing when lightly used – but it probably wouldn’t do so while playing Ingress.

It seems that a single NiMH AA battery can only be used for charging a phone in a real emergency situation (IE an “act of god” type disaster not a need to level up in Ingress). If mains power was out then you could charge a phone while it’s turned off (AFAIK all Android phones support this) and then use it once it’s charged. This charger supports a wide range of phones (including LG phones from 5+ years ago and Nokia from ~10 years ago) so it could be good for charging an old phone in an emergency. Older phones need less power to charge and generally last longer between charges.

With an alkaline battery the charger works a lot better, but it’s still for emergency use as I generally only use rechargeable batteries. This is a device I might put in the bottom of my case when travelling, not a device that I’ll use regularly. I don’t think that this is a deficiency in the product, it’s just a limit of what can be done with the power requirements of modern phones and the capabilities of AA batteries. If you want a battery to use while playing Ingress you definitely need something a lot larger.

This charger is good for emergencies but not suitable for my main use (charging phones while playing Ingress) so I’ll give it to my parents, they do a lot of hiking and camping and my father often goes fishing. Taking a few AA batteries to charge a phone would be much more convenient for such use than taking one of the larger batteries I use for Ingress. Also as the charger is relatively cheap there’s less potential financial loss if you drop it in sea-water.

20800mAh Battery

picture of 20800mAh USB battery

Above is a picture of a 20800mAh battery pack that MobileZap sent me [4]. I haven’t yet discovered what it’s capacity is, during the recent Interitus anomaly it kept my Galaxy Note 2 and my wife’s Nexus 5 adequately charged for 5 hours of intensive Ingress playing (we alternated between phones). Without an external battery it would be unusual for either of those phones to last for 2 hours.

The battery has two ports labeled 1A and 2.1A which implies that it can supply a total of 3.1A. I am a little dubious of that implication. After the Interitus anomaly my wife and I had dinner with some friends and I let a friend charge her Samsung Galaxy S5 on the battery at the same time as my Note 2 (which claimed to be 2% charged). When I connected my friend’s phone my phone instantly shut itself down due to lack of charge, so I presume that the supply on the 2.1A port is reduced when a demanding device is connected to the 1A port.

The next day my wife and I went to the city again to play Ingress and attend a protest against some of the awful things that the Abbott government is doing. As an experiment I didn’t charge this battery to see how it would go for two days of use charging two phones. Again there was no problem and it still claimed to be half charged when we got home.

So far the only problem I’ve found with this battery is that it never reports being fully charged, not even if I leave it on charge for days. That doesn’t seem to be a great problem to me, if I disconnect it before it’s fully charged then that won’t hurt the battery life (unlike NiCd batteries that have to be fully charged every time) and even if it’s not fully charged it will still charge phones for a long time.

The battery is about 19cm long. I have jeans with unusually large pockets to fit large phones [5] so I can fit this battery in my pocket while a USB cable is connected to charge my phone. I also have a new winter jacket from Scottwear which has pockets that can fit the battery (and lots of other things). Anyone who doesn’t have such clothing should plan to use a backpack, handbag, or some other bag – this type of battery won’t fit in the pockets in most clothing.

MobileZap also has some other interesting Nexus 5 accessories [6].

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Syndicated 2014-06-19 03:21:17 from etbe - Russell Coker

Google Hardware Support

Ironically just 5 days after writing about how I choose Android devices for a long service life [1] my wife’s Nexus 5 (with 32G of RAM to give it a long useful life) totally died. It reported itself as being fully charged and then 15 minutes later it was off and could not be revived. No combination of pushing the power button and connecting the power cable caused the screen to light up or any sound to be emitted.

Google has a nice interactive support site for nexus devices that describes more ways of turning a phone on than any reasonable person could imagine. After trying to turn the phone on in various ways (plugged and unplugged etc) it gave me a link to get phone support. Clicking on that put me in the queue to RECEIVE a phone call and a minute later a lady who spoke English really well (which is unusual for telephone support) called me to talk me through the various options.

Receiving a phone call is a much better experience than making a call. It meant that if the queue for phone support was long then I could do other things until the phone rings. It’s impossible to be productive at other tasks while listening for hold music to stop and a person to start talking. The cost of doing this would be very tiny, while there would be some cost in hardware and software to have a web site that tells me how long I can expect to wait for a call a more basic implementation where I just submit my number and wait for a call would be very cheap to implement. The costs of calls from the US to Australia (and most places where people can afford a high end Android phone) are quite cheap for home users and are probably cheaper if you run a call center. If the average support call cost Google $1 and 3% of phones have support calls then that would be an extra cost of $0.03 per phone. I expect that almost everyone who buys a $450 phone would be happy to pay a lot more than $0.03 to avoid the possibility of listening to hold music!

I received the phone call about a minute after requesting it, this was nice but I wonder how long I would have waited if I hadn’t requested a call at 1AM Australian time (presumably during the day in a US call center). In any case getting a 1 minute response is great for any time of the day or night, lots of call centers can’t do that.

While the phone support is much better than most phone support, it would be nice if they added some extra options. I think it would be good to have webchat and SMS as options for support for the benefit of people who don’t want to speak to strangers. This would be useful to a lot of people on the Autism Spectrum and probably others too.

The phone call wasn’t particularly productive, it merely confirmed that I had followed all the steps on the support website. Then I received an email telling me about the web site which was a waste of time as I’d covered that in the phone call.

I have just replied to their second email which asked for the IMEI of the phone to start the warranty return process. We could have saved more than 24 hours delay if this had been requested in the first email or the phone call. Google could have even requested the IMEI through the web site before starting the phone call. It would have been even easier if Google had included the device IMEI in the email they sent me to confirm the purchase as searching for old email is a lot easier than searching through my house for an old box. Another option for Google would be to just ask me for the Gmail account used for the purchase, as I only bought one Nexus 5 on that account they then have all the purchase details needed for a warranty claim.

While the first call was a great experience the email support following that has been a waste of time. I’m now wondering if they aim to delay the warranty process for a few days in the hope that the phone will just start working again.

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Syndicated 2014-06-10 01:39:58 from etbe - Russell Coker

Android Device Service Life

In recent years Android devices have been the most expensive things I’ve purchased apart from airline tickets and other travel/holiday expenses. As they are expensive I’d like to use them for as long as possible to get the most value for money. Also as I give my devices to relatives when they no longer work for me I’d like to avoid having relatives hassling me about their phone not working as desired. So I’ve been thinking about the features that I need to make it possible to use a phone or tablet for a long time.

RAM

The way Android works is that when an application in the foreground requests more memory background applications may be closed to free some memory. Android doesn’t use swap by default, there is some documentation on how to enable it (and it’s not difficult to figure out for anyone who has used Linux before) but generally it’s not done.

If you run a larger application the chances of apps closing in the background (causing delays when you switch back to them and possibly a loss of context if the app is buggy and doesn’t preserve all state) are increased. As a general trend apps tend to get bigger to provide more features and also because users who own newer bigger devices don’t complain as much about memory use.

Also to make things worse new versions of Android tend to use more RAM. So a phone that runs well can suddenly start performing badly when you upgrade to a new version of Android (which incidentally usually can’t be reversed) and upgrade to new versions of apps (which can’t be reversed through the Google Play Store).

The Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 was a very nice phone when it was released, it ran Android 2.1 very quickly. When I upgraded the Xperia X10s that my wife and I used to Android 2.3 (which was necessary to have the phone run as a Wifi access point) performance dropped considerably. The Android upgrade combined with newer larger apps means that those phones are barely usable now. 384M of RAM was plenty in early 2011 when I first used the Xperia X10 but it’s not nearly enough now.

Recently 2G of RAM has been the minimum for a mid-range or high-end phone. It seems difficult to imagine a new Android feature as compelling as the addition of Wifi access point support in Android 2.3 that would drive an upgrade to a future memory hogging version of the OS. It also seems difficult to imagine Android apps needing enough memory to destroy the performance of a phone with 2G of RAM. But then I couldn’t imagine the 384M in an Xperia X10 becoming inadequate or the 512M in a Samsung Galaxy S becoming barely usable either.

Storage

Until fairly recently storage in an Android device was divided into USB attached storage (a VFAT filesystem that could be directly mounted on a PC) and a Linux filesystem that was used for all internal operations of the phone. On such devices it typically wasn’t possible to change partition sizes without a lot more skill than most users possess and most of the storage space was reserved for USB attachment. If you only had a few Android apps and lots of photos, movies, etc then this worked well. But if you wanted to install larger Android apps then you would have big problems. Even with Android 4.x devices (which all seem to have a single filesystem) you can easily run out of space.

Modern games often take several hundred megs of storage. Games that take 500M+ for the Android package install (which also requires the same amount of temporary space for installation and upgrade) are common. Sometimes games download data files after they have been installed for a total size approaching 2G (such as The Sims Freeplay).

When I bought a Nexus 4 for my wife I got the version with 8G of storage because paying an extra $50 for the 16G version seemed unreasonable. 8G was fine for my wife, but when she got a new phone I gave the Nexus 4 to a relative who wanted to play The Sims and other big games. That relative isn’t so happy about having a limited number of games on their phone and I have to fix it when storage space runs out and things start aborting (when storage runs out the Google App Store program aborts and uses lots of space for temporary files).

I recently bought a tablet with 32G of storage and filled 16G on the first day (tablets are good for watching
TV and TV shows are big). Fortunately the tablet in question has a SD socket so that when space becomes a problem in a year or two I can buy an SD card and keep using it.

An unfortunate recent decision by Google was to prevent apps from being run from a SD card. So even if you have a device with a SD socket you still need to have enough internal storage for all apps and their private data. At 500M+ for a modern game that means a device with 8G of storage (which includes space for the OS) will be lucky to get 8 games installed.

If you want to use a phone to it’s full capacity (playing various media files, games, etc) then it seems that the minimum storage capacity would be 8G of internal storage and a SD socket. For a device without an SD socket (such as the Nexus 5 with 16G or 32G of storage) your future use will be limited. 32G is probably enough for a phone given that you can recode movies to use less space (the FullHD screen on the Nexus 5 is nice but 720p movies will probably look good enough). But the larger screens of tablets demand better video quality so the Nexus tablets are probably a bad choice due to lack of storage space.

Screen Size and Resolution

I have previously written about the sizes of devices and how they may be used by people of various ages [1]. That should be of use for anyone who plans to use their old phone as an educational device for their children (which appears to be very common). But apart from that I can’t think of any reason why size would suddenly make an old phone obsolete. Only young children will have their hands change size in any significant way.

Resolution also shouldn’t be a huge problem, the 480*854 screen on the Xperia X10 is fairly good for a 4″ screen. While a higher resolution makes text more readable at a small size for most users the availability of a higher resolution screen isn’t going to make their old phone obsolete.

CPU

The only Android devices I owned that appeared to develop CPU speed issues late in life were the Xperia X10 phones, and that might be more due to RAM limits and the OS upgrade. All the other devices were either obviously slow at purchase time or are still performing well now.

CPU speed may make it difficult or impossible to play new games, but shouldn’t affect other uses of a phone or tablet.

Conclusion

It seems to me that if you want to use an Android device for more than 2 years then storage capacity should be a major factor in choosing which device to purchase. It seems that lack of storage space is in many cases the main factor that makes older devices annoying or impossible to use.

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Syndicated 2014-06-04 06:05:41 from etbe - Russell Coker

Links May 2014

Charmian Gooch gave an interesting TED talk about her efforts to fight organised crime and corruption by prohibiting anonymous companies [1]. The idea of a company is to protect the owner from unlimited liability not to protect them from law enforcement.

Dr Nerdlove has an insightful article about sexual harassment in geek culture [2].

Rebecca Rose wrote an insightful article for Jezebel about the worse bullying advice ever, her summary is that it should be called “Ways We Can Get You Goddamn Kids to Act So We Never Have to Deal With Your Problems Ever” [3].

In the wake of the Heardbleed bug Imperial Violet wrote an informative article explaining why revocation checks isn’t the solution [4].

Martin Lukacs and Shiri Pasternak wrote an insightful article about the Canadian government’s attempts to stop Canadian aboriginies from exercising their legal rights [5]. I bet that the Australian government is doing the same things.

Nelson Groom wrote an interesting interview with Norrie May Welby, the first recognised agender person in Australia [6]. Marriage equality is bound to happen soon in Australia, now that the government officially recognises non-binary gender people it can’t refuse them the right to get married and therefore the straight/gay marriage distinction isn’t relevant.

BDA Technology has an interesting article on choosing fonts to make text more readable for dyslexic people [7].

Eamon Waterford wrote an informative article for the ABC about how early-intervention social policies save significant amounts of tax money [8]. Conservatives claim to want to save money and try to cut such programs which costs everyone in the long term.

Greta Christina wrote an insightful article for Salon about why religious people want atheists to lie and pretend to believe [9].

Chris Mooney wrote an informative URL about a machine to test whether someone is liberal or conservative [10]. Paul Rosenberg wrote an informative article on the link between conservatism, evil, and psychopathy [11]. The next logical step is to treat conservatism as a mental health problem.

Sociological Images has an interesting article by Jay Livingston about the hypocrisy of “conservative” tax policies [12].

Scientific American reprinted an article from The Conversation by Elaine McKewon about the climate deniers who intimidated a journal into retracting an article about their belief in conspiracy theories [13]. It seems obvious that the climate deniers are the ones who conspire.

Ben Caldecott wrote an interesting article for the ABC about the fossil fuel divestment campaign [14]. It seems that this is getting some success already, as renewable energy will soon be cheaper than coal power this could kill off coal.

Mark Taylor wrote an interesting blog post titled “Observations of an Internet Middleman” about the operations of Level3 and Internet peering [15]. He explains how monopoly Telcos throttle their customers’ Internet access.

Matt Savoy wrote an informative and disturbing article about the fact that US cops are twice as likely to beat their wives as the general population [16]. Apparently the police hierarchy aren’t interested in prosecuting such crimes.

Paul Rosenberg wrote an insightful article about mythos vs logos and the conservative approach to relity [17]. One interesting point he makes is that white men (and members of privileged groups generally) fear a loss of status more than more realistic concerns (such as global warming).

Nick wrote an interesting blog post about using GPG encrypted email on an Android phone [18]. I should get this going on my phone.

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Syndicated 2014-05-29 08:53:51 from etbe - Russell Coker

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