/devel

Title says it. A month is enough time to get a better understanding of the device and to get asked repeatedly about my impressions. Many have wrote theirs, so I doubt I will be telling anything really new. Before I go on, a short disclaimer, since my writings on this blog stay around longer than might be sensible.

I wrote this post at the start of February 2010. I believe everything I write about technology to be hopelessly out of date after 6 months, but I expect this article will be obsolete even sooner. So by the time you got around reading this, most of my gripes might not even be true anymore.

Nokia N900 is an uncut diamond. A wonderful thing made by talented designers that has quite a few rough edges, not all of them in device. I wouldn’t recommend it to most people, but to some of you it might become your favorite computer. It goes with me almost anywhere.

If you want a rock solid phone, then this device is not for you. I was unlucky to be in minority of people who experienced constant reboots. By constant I mean few times every hour.  My Nokia also lacked a 2GB partition, which meant I was constantly running out of space in which to install applications. Both of this problems have since been fixed. I still have a problem with GSM connection occasionally completely dying, which I can fix only by manual reboot. I’m personally not bothered since I don’t use it as phone.

On the other hand updates to software are regular, with one major firmware update already, that fixed some of my problems (reboot). Annoyances of today might literally be gone by tomorrow and thus my disclaimer.

I know how much effort goes in good software and don’t want to be too negative, but email really does suck for IMAP users. Not only doesn’t it cache headers, so if you have a slow connection and a big Inbox, get used to waiting. You also can’t set sent mail, drafts or trash folders which makes it useless to me for anything but reading email. Even worse, it creates its own folders (like iPod touch) to make a mess in your account. I am all for simplicity and avoiding needless configuration options, but it could at least get a list of folders and compare Levenshtein’s distance to common names (Sent, Sent mail…).

Gecko (Mozilla) based browser though is great, in my opinion much better than iPod’s and I completely switched my mobile browsing to N900. I am biased since unlike many I never was fond of constant zooming in and out (with pinching). My opinion might have been different if my eye-sight was poorer and I needed to zoom more.

If you are a Linux user or appreciate freedom, then it’s difficult to find a better mobile device. N900 is a Linux machine which happens to also be a phone and you have complete access to everything. There is a store (Ovi) and app manager, but you can install and run anything willing to run without permission from anybody. Terminal is loaded by default together with tools needed to prod into the system and root is one package installation away.

I dislike fixed space of iPod. N900 is only slightly better. You can expand it with SD cards, but you have to open battery cover. It looks so fragile that I don’t intend to actually do this unless absolutely necessary. Speaking of storage, as a programmer I can understand why applications can use only 2GB of it, but as user it simply looks daft.

Pair of contact and conversations applications is absolutely brilliant. Instant messaging, Skype and SMS are superbly integrated and they also feed contact application with information about your buddies found on those networks.  Install Hermes and you can update it with data from Twitter and Facebook.

Screen has higher resolution than iPod’s, but physically same (small) size, which means I’ll keep reading PDFs on my 770. Since it’s resistive instead of capacitive, it needs more pressure than iPod’s, but works better at -12 degrees centigrade (this picture was taken with my gloves on).

Maemo has a very active and generally supportive community, but some members can also be needlessly unfriendly. Just because you know where everything is and have seen certain faux pas 100 times before, it doesn’t mean either is true for a new N900 owner with a problem.

N900 RUNS PYTHON, which was my main reason for preferring it over an Android phone. Documentation is a bit all over the place, not always current and I still haven’t found information about how to control built in cameras, but I am an optimist that this will be sorted out soon and that documentation will improve as well.

I compared N900 with diamond, but maybe a better comparison would be a sports car. If you want a polished, sedated experience then N900 is certainly not for you (yet). But if you are a tinkerer who doesn’t mind rough edges in exchange for freedom to make it do almost anything, then you should give it a spin.

There is so much more that could be said, but big picture wouldn’t change much. I haven’t talked much about UI since I simply couldn’t do it justice in few sentences. On the whole it works fine and multitasking is really great even though I think iPhone/iPad’s switch-to-where-you-were model is in my experience rarely a problem and wouldn’t be surprised if it was here to stay.

If there is anything about it you would like to know, then please ask and I’ll try to respond to it promptly.

Well, I’ve jumped the gun. It seems IPRED2 has been derailed (at least for a while).

Still, better this than being right.

FSF Europe has prepared a short document describing problems with IPRED2, the new “Intellectual Property” rights directive from European Union. If passed, it could lead to jail sentences for intellectual property violators. Proposal doesn’t distinguish between kinds of intellectual property, but it does limit itself to sadly undefined willful infringement.

Not being a lawyer makes it hard to judge, if FSF’s objections are valid. According to a report from FFII, big IP companies are not happy with it either. Directive’s proposal certainly leaves a lot to interpretation and FSF’s scenario doesn’t seem far fetched. Especially for those of us who’ve seen how difficult it can be for lawyers to agree on anything.

In short, it’s another piece of ill-considered legislation that wants to help entertainment industry in their fight against reality at the expense of almost everyone else.

I wonder if someday people will look at IP legislation of late 20th and early 21st century the way we see now tax on windows (not to be confused with windows tax, which opens gates to completely different discussion).

It seems like ages ago, but it’s really been less than a decade since I was busy being a localization lead of slovenian Linux user group. There was a lot to be done and I had great plans how to achieve it with few of us working on it. If only we’d execute my plans timely and precisely, we could make a mini computer revolution in Slovenia.

“A mind of a soldier and a heart of a poet.�

I used to believe this old description of me from an Indonesian friend was simply a compliment. I haven’t recognize then how wonderfully he had praised and berated me at the same time. And rightfully so.

What I hadn’t grasped then is that setting the rules, making plans and pushing people to do what you think is the right thing to do in general doesn’t achieve much. Lucky for me — and for others — I’ve left after I’ve done my part and hopefully before I prevented others to do theirs.

I’ve learned through the years — and spending so much time designing things certainly helped me with that — how subtle changes can have big consequences.

France is burning.

I won’t pretend I know why and how to fix it. There are certainly wiser and more informed people than me trying to do that and little would be gained by me joining them. But ever since I’ve read Thomas Cahill’s wonderful book How the Irish Saved Civilization, one image has stuck in my mind.

Thousands of hungry “barbariansâ€? waiting for Rhein to freeze so they could risk (and awfully many lose) their lives to enter Roman empire. Not to end it, which eventually they did or to become romans, as many tribes before them. They just didn’t want to be hungry anymore.

And on the other side you had a nation too self-absorbed and still proud of their civility and achievements, unable to fathom the fragility of their great civilization, unable to see imminent end to 12 centuries old empire and rule of law.

It’s hard for me as european and history buff to not see similarities between then and now and it’s even harder to believe that problem can be solved by simply not letting people in. Like that was ever possible.

What is really bad is not that some of us have too much, but that too many have too little. Or nothing.

I remember when towers fell in New York. I remember my anger at USA, a country I’ve never been to, and the feeling of injustice, of not being heard or simply being ignored. I wish I didn’t and I’ll regret it for the rest of my life, but is this the anger painfully felt in France?

We were cooking miso soup today, a dish my wife and I both love and I was thinking about Japan while doing it. I’ve always been fascinated by Japan and its culture and even though I’ve spent a great effort and a lot of time studying it, it was obvious today that my wife is a much better cook and that I haven’t got a clue about the land of rising sun.

I tried to remember what I was taught in school about it. Or about any other place outside of Europe. It wasn’t nothing. In fact it was quite a lot, especially for time allotted to it. Time — that is — which wasn’t spent learning about history of Europe and even more of our nation in it.

But it’s been clear where the focus was and I don’t think our history lessons are in approach much different from history lessons elsewhere. Simply by choosing the focus of lessons we subtly or even not so subtly show what’s important and build patriots. So far a sense of a nation seems to be the only way of maintaining a state longer than a few decades.

At the same time we guarantee and promote ignorance that clearly doesn’t help us and which leaves people like me with profound sadness and too many unanswered questions.

When I started this blog, it was my intention to create a place, where I could share little knowledge that I have as a developer and I intend to continue doing this in the future. But it became obvious today that I’ll be able to do so only after I’ve written this post, no matter how unheard and insignificant it is. I at least have a way and opportunity to speak up.

I’ve just noticed that a lot more time has passed than planned since my last post about Linux. I wanted to write a follow up to installation post a week later, but it completely slipped my mind.

It’s been a few weeks now and my Linux box has become the place, where I do most of my work. There are three reasons for this:

• kioslaves like fish let me work with remote filesystems over various protocols as if they were local
• abundance of tabs which can be navigated with keyboard (terminal, editor and browser all support them)
• bookmarks in file dialogs even for remote filesystems make using even a complicated directory layouts a joy

There are other things I really like, but it’s really hard to live without those three. The only thing really ruining my happiness is a sucky USB keyboard. So far I had no luck with finding a reasonable replacement.