Community Matters

As I pointed out before, Nikon is a bit lacking in large aperture prime lenses. So I’m very excited that Nikon added an AF-S 24mm f/1.4 ED lens. I wish I could say “I preordered mine” – but at an expected street price of $2200 (around $500 more than the comparable Canon lens) I don’t think this is within reach any time soon.

Still, it is a step in the right direction and hopefully more lenses in this range will follow. A Nikkor AF-S 28mm f/1.4 ED or AF-S 30mm f/1.4 ED lens would be extremely welcome by the market, I think.

Also announced was an AF-S 16-35mm f/4 ED VR lens. I’m a bit more ambivalent about this lens. VR doesn’t seem to be as important on a wide angle lens – yet f/4 versus f/2.8 to me is a pretty significant step back. Of course the AF-S 17-35mm f/2.8D IF-ED with a street price of about $1600 is even more expensive than the new 16-35mm f/4 (which is expected to start selling at $1260).

I have the old Nikkor AF 20-35mm f/2.8D lens which sadly has been out of production for almost a decade, but still is easily found at less than half the price of this new lens. I love that lens and use it quite frequently – it does of course lack a bit of range on the wide angle side and the VR – but it gives you f/2.8 for a lot less money.

My good friends at Google have done it. They’ve created a truly awesome phone.

I’ve only had the Nexus One for a day (it was waiting for me when I returned from a trip, yesterday) and must admit that I’m thoroughly impressed.

Is this the “iPhone killer”? I don’t know and frankly I don’t care. I never liked the iPhone and haven’t used one enough to really compare them.

Is this the best Android phone? Absolutely. Well, as long as you don’t have to have a keyboard. I know people who just cannot deal with touch screen input, those might prefer the Droid. Or they might not.

The thing about the Nexus One is that it is fast. Impressively fast. It’s testament to the fact that 99% of all phones have an insufficient CPU (and that definitely includes all iPhones – and the rest of the Android phones that I’ve played with). The experience of having a phone with a CPU that is actually fast enough for its software stack is quite amazing. And of course this immediately made me want to get my hands on an LG GW990 – a phone with a real CPU (Intel Atom) and an OS that I am somewhat partial to (Moblin).

But oddly even though I’m part of Intel’s Open Source Technology Center – no one is willing to get me an LG GW990… so for now I’ll enjoy the Nexus One, running a competitor’s CPU.

I think we’ll see the same development in phones that we have seen in PCs in the past. For the next few years Moore’s Law will bring us faster and faster phones – and we will wonder how we ever lived with the slow phone we had last year. That’s certainly how I’m feeling right now.

Thank you, Google. And don’t rest on those laurels, the Atom based phones are coming.

This has been an ongoing frustration for me for a long time.

I used to be a mutt user – still one of the best email clients out there. That is, if your email comes from an IMAP server and is mostly text-only. No images, HTML, links, etc. Yes, it can sort of kinda work with those things, but please, let’s get real.

Emacs and its various mail modes are of course an interesting option (especially as you can, in fact, display most everything inside modern emacs). And Notmuch is making handling tons of email even easier with decent emacs integration (yes, it’s very early in its development, but for things like reading lkml it is amazing).

Or you can go with Thunderbird (version 3 is really impressive, the tabbed UI takes a little getting used to but then worked rather well for me). Or claws-mail (fast but rather unstable and its single-threadedness really got me to hate it). Or even (yikes) Evolution. Sadly without a strong leader anymore and rather aimless for the last year or so.

But the problem is this – if you want to access work email as well as your personal stuff, chances are that you are forced to integrate with MS Exchange. I can give you tons of reasons why Exchange is a Really Bad Idea™, but of course your corporate IT department is likely to ignore those and tell you “Exchange it is”. And among the biggest flaws of Exchange is its rotten IMAP support. Incredibly slow, barely standard compliant (actually, there are a bunch of annoying bugs). And if you want calendar integration (arguably the best feature in Exchange) there is no good way around MAPI (at least not with Exchange 2007).

And that’s where open source email clients really fail. The only one with even attempted MAPI integration is Evolution. And that is one of the weakest parts of Evolution. Extremely unstable, slow, and so frequently flat out broken that I cannot really suggest using it for day to day work. Emails disappear, or their envelope is there and no content, parts of the headers are missing. The calendar is completely hit or miss: the latest version seems to get my single-instances meetings correct if they come from another user, get the time zone wrong if I enter them myself on the Blackberry or via OWA, and seems to completely miss out recurring meetings that were NOT entered by me. Not useful if I need to be able to rely on my calendar being correct (which is, after all, the point of a calendar).

So… what I do today is offlineimap to get emails from Exchange (or any other IMAP server) into a set of local MailDirs (this hides the latency of the IMAP implementation – especially important with Exchange), then Evolution to read that email locally and OWA for calendar.

Really, not a good solution at all. We need a decent MAPI client. The libraries are all there, the communication with the Exchange server is relatively easy to set up. What’s missing is an acceptable front end that can deal with the typical mess of email that people get (Thunderbird seems to be a good start and appears reasonably active and well maintained), that can do calendaring (again, Thunderbird with Lightening could do the job) and that has a reasonable UI, good keyboard shortcuts for the power users and most importantly is fast. So I guess we need MAPI integration into Thunderbird. Any takers?

Yesterday at IDF Dell announced the first Netbook with Moblin preloaded. And I hear rumors of another one being announced shorty from a different OEM, that one based on Novell’s Moblin build.

Two years ago Asus created the Netbook segment with Linux – the Xandros based EeePC 701. A somewhat limited device with a 7 inch screen, a puny little keyboard and a not very well adapted Linux build. It turned out that the customers didn’t like the Linux experience that was offered (at least that’s part of the story). And so right now the vast majority of Netbooks ships with 8 year old Windows XP Home. But this might change now. Assuming, that is, that there’s sufficient demand for a Linux preload that is actually designed for Netbooks and works well out of the box. And has a refreshingly different, well tuned user experience that actually makes sense for computers in the Netbook form factor.

So in a way we are at an inflection point. The Linux community keeps asking OEMs to be more open to preloading Linux. Yet the OEMs tend to be unhappy with the sell through of their Linux preloaded machines. The solution is simple. If you like the idea of Moblin on Netbooks, if you want a really affordable Netbook without a Redmond tax – go to Dell’s site and get a Dell Mini 10v with Moblin for $299 (and sorry, I haven’t figured out yet how this works from outside the US – comments with data points are very welcome).

And yes, I already ordered mine. Even though Dell only offers the Broadcom wireless cards with it – a true disappointment given Broadcom’s lack of Linux support. I wish they offered Intel wireless – I’d happily pay a few $$ extra for that…

The moment I see other Moblin based Netbooks, I’ll post here with links how to get them. I hope we can change the available options for Netbook buyers for good.

I’m the proud owner of a Google Voice account. Awesome. I love the voice mail transcript / email feature. But there’s still room for improvement. This is the transcript of a Spanish phonecall I got today

or leave me a more the best of the stuff i can’t okay hi take care of motel me more i guess

Maybe this wasn’t fair…

Usually I like to post solutions to problems here – but this one I haven’t been able to figure out… maybe someone else has an idea? Please comment.

When connecting the Kindle 2 to a MacBook Pro via USB the connection is basically unusable. I get no where near the 480Mbit/s that USB2 would promise (and I checked in the System Profiler – the Kindle does show up as a USB2 device). I appear to be getting a few kbit/s – transferring a 3MB file takes 15+ minutes.

Doing some googling points to SpotLight as a potential problem. Since the Kinde 2 shows up as a FAT partition many of the usual ways of preventing SpotLight from indexing it don’t appear to work. Certainly disabling Spotlight for the Kindle through the Preferences tab failed for me (with the always helpful “an error occurred” message). What does seem to work is to create a file named .metadata_never_index in the root directory of the Kindle (something like

touch /Volumes/Kindle/.metadata_never_index

in a terminal window.

But even after doing that (and verifying that SpotLight is no longer trying to index the drive) transfer performance over USB is still abysmal.

Help?

I’ve been fighting to get TweetDeck to work on my Linux system for a while. There simply is no comparable native client under Linux. I’ve used Gwibber which is ok, but no comparison to TweetDeck.

There are a couple of problems to solve: first, you need to get Adobe Air to work. And with all due respect to Adobe – they clearly haven’t figured out the kinks to making their software actually install easily on the various Linux distributions. A quick Google search seems to make that painfully clear.

Forget 64bit Linux. Yes, allegedly it works for a few people with various 32bit libraries installed, but after six weeks of trying to get this to work I came to the conclusion that this was a lost cause.

And even with 32bit Fedora-11 there still are a number of problems to solve. First you need to make sure that you have all the dependencies installed – even though it would be easy to have rpm do that for you, Adobe clearly hasn’t figured out how to do that… so you have to do this manually:

sudo yum -y install gnome-keyring rpm-build nss

Then (thanks to erik jacobs) you appear to need to manually create another link for librpmbuild:

sudo ln -s librpmbuild.so.0.0.0 /usr/lib/librpmbuild-4.7.so

Now you are ready to run the installer:

chmod +x AdobeAIRInstaller.bin
sudo AdobeAIRInstaller.bin

But this still doesn’t solve the problem of installing AIR applications. Adobe wants to install them into /opt by default (which a regular user can’t write to) – and even after changing that to do writeable by my user things still failed with cryptic (and useless) error messages. So I finally figured out that I needed to manually download the AIR installer packages (like TweetDeck_x_yz.air) and then run the AIR application installer from hand (again as root):

sudo Adobe\ AIR\ Application\ Installer

and then pick the .air file in the file select box; the installer is too dumb to allow you to pass a .air file on the command line. Come on guys…

With all these steps I got it to work – but frankly I think this is an embarrassing sign for how much further AIR has to go to be really useful on Linux. 2 out of 10 points, Adobe…

The clash of the titans. War! Fight! It’s fun to read what has been written about the GoogleOS. Clearly this is getting the juices flowing. Nothing sells newspaper (or online ads, I guess) like a good old conflict. And who better to pit against each other than the Evil Monster Microsoft (seriously?) against the “do no evil” Google.

But of course that’s missing the point. Google isn’t writing a new OS. They didn’t do that with Android, either. They are using the existing Linux kernel. They are using tons of existing user space code that the open source community has worked on for 20+ years and that the Linux vendors have perfected over the last 15 years (and that Ubuntu has taken a free ride on for… wait, I digress).

So what Google really is doing is that it is putting its well proven brand and marketing muscle behind something that mostly exists. And then it’s using its not-quite-so-proven productization muscle (hey, Gmail is no longer in beta after umpteen years) to shape the very flexible Linux OS to its liking.

More focus on web. Less focus on native apps. More focus on binding the user to a monopoly (sounds familiar?), less focus on freedom and choice. We’ve seen this play out. Many times.

What is interesting is that with Moblin (and all the Linux OSVs who have announced Moblin compliant versions of their Linux OS) there is a pretty interesting contender just about to go product – about a year ahead of Google’s Chrome OS. So is Google actually hurting Linux here with its “quick – don’t look – we’ll do something even better!” announcement? I wonder. The timing is sure odd. Long before they have anything to show for, just making sure that no other standard emerges?

Well, time will tell. Moblin needs to succeed on its own merit – and it has plenty of time to do so. And a year from now we’ll know more about Google’s ability to create a production quality OS for a broad set of hardware platforms. In the mean time I’m excited about all the opportunities.

Oh, you may have noticed that I didn’t talk about Microsoft Windows 7 and Apple OS X in this post. That’s right – those target different markets (I know, MS dreams of Windows 7 for Netbooks – but at a 20% price premium compared to a free OS… that will be a tough sell). I don’t think that Google Chrome OS (or Moblin, for that matter) will have a chance against W7 and OSX on full fledged notebooks, desktops and workstations. And I don’t think that either is trying to do that. On the other hand I think that there’s plenty of space for a free OS on limited capability. And that’s where Google’s Chrome OS is indeed competing with Moblin, Google’s Android and other Linux based offerings.

Peter Schütte is a local photographer here in Portland who does wonderful Oregon Photo Workshops – if you are a beginner or a more advanced photographer, check out his site and the classes that he offers. They are a lot of fun and extremely instructional – I certainly have learned a lot from him and can’t wait to find the time again to go to another workshop this summer.

I’ve already done his Central Oregon High Desert Safari, the Portland at Night and the North Coastal Photography workshops (and a couple others that I’m forgetting right now). Definitely worth it.

After seeing hosting providers offer Atom based dedicated servers I started wondering how they are doing that? A pile of EeePCs? Unlikely.

Turns out there are a couple of companies offering blade servers with Atom blades – one is SERVER8 in Italy which seems to have a very smart approach – off the shelf Micro-ATX or Mini-ITX motherboards, including Atom-based motherboards can be used in a custom 6U case following the Open Blade spec.

SuperMicro offers 1U Atom-based servers and has announced an Atom-based blade server as well. There are do it yourself 1U rack mounted servers available. And I’m sure there are more similar offerings out there.

In general I guess server processors are the better fit for servers – but for this interesting niche market of people who want a dedicated server but don’t need a ton of performance (i.e. for things like hosting your own blog) these atom-servers could really be the perfect solution.