There's no place like home

When I was growing up I read a lot of Science Fiction. I still do actually.

Lots of things that I read about have come to pass. Science Fiction has been an amazing predictor of new technologies and gadgets.

For example Wikipedia has a short list of inventions predicted by Robert Heinlein that have come to pass. The list includes:

• Automatic light switches (from "The Man Who Sold The Moon")
  
• Hand dryers (from "Coventry")
  
• Drafting software (from "The Door Into Summer")
  
• Mobile phones (from "Space Cadet" and "Assignment in Eternity")
  
• Moving walkways (called "slidewalks" in "Space Cadet" and "slideways" in "Beyond This Horizon")
  
• Solar panels (from "The Roads Must Roll" and "Coventry")
  
• Waldoes (remote manipulators) (from "Waldo")
  
• Screensavers (from "Stranger In A Strange Land")
  
• The San Francisco-Oakland BART Transbay Tube (from "Citizen of the Galaxy")
  
• Waterbeds (from "Double Star", "Stranger In A Strange Land", "Beyond This Horizon", and "Waldo")
  
• Vehicle remote keyless system (called a "magic wand" in "The Number of the Beast")
  
• Online newspapers (from "Beyond This Horizon")
  

One thing I don't see on that list is Pocket Computers. I know that I have read about Pocket Computers in various SF stories, but I'm not sure if they were Heinlein stories.

In any case with the development of the latest Smart Phones (including the iPhone) I believe that we have achieved Pocket Computers.

Laptops and Netbooks are very powerful, but are still pretty bulky. And they always will be as long as we need keyboard input and large displays. They have their place and now that the batteries have a reasonable life (3+ hours) I love having one.

But the Smart Phones...

I am very impressed with my Droid. We joke at work that when three or four of us are sitting around with our phones that we have more compute power at the table than they use to run the space shuttle. But it's not really a joke because it's true. The space shuttle is still run by 1980's vintage IBM 5150 computers with 1MB of RAM.

I'm pretty sure we have more compute power around the table than they had at all of NASA when they were running the Apollo missions.

One thing you need to understand is that I was born in 1962 - that officially makes me old. It also means that the Personal Computer didn't arrive until after I graduated from High School. I didn't grow up with computers in the house. I got to take a basic programming course in Jr. High School using a teletype hooked to a mainframe through a 300 baud modem and I loved it, but the Apple II didn't arrive until a few years later.

Cell phones were not around until much later either. Sure, they have been around since the early 80's, but no one I knew had one until the mid to late 90's or so. I didn't get my first cell phone until 1999 - after swearing I would never want one.

So going from starting out programming on a teletype to working on this blog entry on my cell phone - that's a lot of change.

For the younger generation - including my children and many of my co-workers - smart phones are just another cool gadget.

But for me - who grew up reading SF and dreaming about the future - smart phones are an indicator that the future is arriving.

I now realize that I've been looking for the Pocket Computer for quite a while. I got a Sharp ZQ-2200 Electronic Organizer with a whopping 32KB of storage when they came out. (Still have it actually.) It's actually not a bad bit of kit - it has an address book, calendar, clock, calculator and a qwerty keyboard. But it's really just a glorified address book.

I got a Sharp Wizard OZ-7000 when they came out (still have that too). It's like a ZQ-2200 on steroids. But still really an address book and calendar.

The Apple Newton was pretty close to the Pocket Computer - and ahead of it's time, but then Apple screwed the pooch on marketing and it died before it could get good. I always wanted one, but never owned one.

I thought the Palm Pilot was getting pretty close to the Pocket Computer. I bought a Pilot 5000. The Pilot was different than the Sharp Organizers. It had hand writing recognition - that really worked. You could download and install applications to do all sorts of things. I loved my Palm Pilots. I ended up with a Palm III and then a Palm V. But then they started putting phones into them and charging what I thought was an outrageous amount of money for them. When my Palm V died I stopped caring about Pocket Computers. I actually started using a paper based organizer system for a while, but lost interest in that too.

Lots of my co-workers and friends have iPhones. Don't get me wrong, I think iPhones fit my definition of a Pocket Computer. But I have huge issues with Apple's licensing agreements and corporate attitude. I would never buy an iPhone or an iPad. I am a huge proponent of the "I bought it, I own it, I get to do with it what I like" attitude. Which is about 180 degrees from Apple's.

I'm a huge proponent of Open Source. Of being able to tinker. I'm vehemently anti-DRM. I firmly believe that if it's a computer, I should be able to run whatever I like on it. With the iPhone that's just not possible. With the iPhone they censor the applications. With the iPhone they dictate what languages you can write in. With the iPhone they make you jump through hoops to get your application into the market.

With an Android phone I can go download the SDK for free. I can write an application for my phone in whatever language I like. I can install that application on my phone and run it. And I can make it available to everyone else in the world without having to jump through any hoops.

And think about all the technology and cool stuff that is crammed into a Smart Phone these days:

• A GPS that can tell you where you are - anywhere in the world!
  
• Mapping and navigation software that can use that GPS and give you turn-by-turn directions to any address.
  
• Voice Recognition that can be used to dial the phone, look up an address or search the web.
  
• Web browsing
  
• Email
  
• Appointment Calendar
  
• Send instant messages - in a variety of formats - to anyone in the world
  
• A camera - the camera in my Droid has a 5MP sensor - that's the same pixel count as my Canon Digital Rebel SLR. Of course the SLR takes much higher quality photos - but a 5MP camera in a phone? Amazing. (Yes, I know there are higher pixel counts out there, but still.)
  
• An amazing amount of storage - my Droid comes with a 16GB Micro SD card and there is a 32GB card coming. 32GB in a phone! I still have hard drives in computers that are smaller than that!
  
• An endless list of applications including:
  
  • Databases
    
  • Music Searching (like Shazam)
    
  • Games - tons and tons of different types
    
  • A map of the stars in the sky
    
  • An editor to edit MS Word and Excel documents
    
  • Full function scientific calculator
    
  • WiFi Scanners and Signal meters
    
  • Programming languages
    
  • and the list goes on...
    
  
  

I have to declare that the current generation of Smart Phones have reached the Pocket Computer realm and will only continue to get better. Any Smart Phone out there with the correct application could perform any of the Pocket Computer functions that I can recall from SF stories.

Sitting at lunch today I was musing about how cool it would be to be able to program on my phone in Perl.

I have one interpreter on the phone already - Frink - and while it's and amazing tool it's not a language I am as familiar with.

So I did a Google search (on my phone) for Perl and Android and lo and behold there is a project called the Android Scripting Environment and they currently have interpreters for Python, Perl, JRuby, Lua, BeanShell, JavaScript and Tcl!

Astounding.

So of course I loaded it right up!

Here is the current list of apps I have on my Droid and my comments about them - It's a long list...

Roughly grouped by category. Rated 1 - 5 smilely faces. There are no zero ratings since I took those apps off and have forgotten them already.

- Eh. It's worth keeping on the phone until you need more space.
- A semi-useful or fun app. Could use some improvement.
- Most of these are apps I have installed, like the looks of, but have not used much yet.
- Very well designed and useful or fun apps. Almost a must-have app.
- Must have applications. These are the apps that make having a Droid worthwhile.

So far I have only purchased two apps. Everything else I've found has been free.

As many of the links as possible go to pages with QR codes on them so you can use ShopSavvy to easily install them.

I just created an xls spreadsheet in OpenOffice on my Ubuntu laptop, put it in my Dropbox folder, installed Documents To Go on my Droid, and edited the spreadsheet there!

Now I'm blogging about it using the web browser on my Droid.

OMG!! I think I might have a Nerdgasm!!

And you know what? It just works...

Wow, a blog post. It's been a while.

If you read my Facebook wall, or follow me on Twitter, you know I have a Droid now. I love it. One of my friends asked me (in an email) about it and this is the reply I sent. I thought it would make a good blog post, so here it is.

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I love my Droid. One major thing I like is the real keyboard. Also check the 3G coverage map, AT&T's coverage sucks ass outside the major corridors. Normal cell coverage works, but no, or slow data.

As far as Droid vs iPhone, I have nothing against the iPhone as hardware, it's a nice piece of kit. It's Apple's business practices that will keep me from buying anything from them.

The other major plus as far as I'm concerned is the tight integration with Google - my contacts are stored in my Gmail account - edit them on the phone and they are instantly (more or less) updated on Gmail and vice-versa. It made moving my contacts to the phone really easy - I exported a CSV from Outlook, massaged it in Excel and imported it into Gmail. Viola - my contacts were on the phone.

Also I started this reply on my Droid, saved it as a draft and am now working on it on the Gmail web interface. I think that's pretty stinking cool.

As for battery life, yes, it depends. Like all cell phones, if you are in a poor (or no) coverage area it will burn through the battery really fast. But you can disable the cell radio and just use the local apps if you know you are out of coverage for a while. Under normal daily use I get about 16 hours out of it (I unplug it at 6:30am and plug it back in at 11:00pm or so - and there is still battery left.) No smart phone is going to match the battery life (days) of a normal cell phone. You will want a car charger. You will want to retrofit a charger to the motorcycle if you go on long trips (I plan on getting another car charger, tearing it apart and putting it in my tank bag.)

The GPS is pretty nice - but so is the one on the iPhone. Having Google Maps is cool, but if you have no data coverage it can't d/l the maps while you are on the go. They are talking about caching the Google maps, but it's not there yet. Also, you don't appear to be able to modify the suggested route at this time although forum posts suggest you may have been able to in the past or maybe can on other phones.

I bought ($30! - so far the only app I have paid for) a GPS program called CoPilot Live that has maps loaded on the phone and interfaces with a PC based app. I'm not sure if I want to try and use my Droid as a GPS on my motorcycle or not. There is a weatherproof case I found for $35 online...

As far as the apps go, there are tons. So far I have found everything I wanted to do (and more.) Some apps are great, some are good and some you uninstall after trying them once. But there are lots of free ones to choose from.

I have taken photos with it and uploaded them to Twitter and Facebook - it's dead simple. I have not looked at the photos in an image editing program yet, so I don't know what the quality is - I'm guessing not great. It's a 5MP camera, but it's got a tiny lens - and the low-light photos suck. But it does have a "flash" that is really, really bright. (No flash on the iPhone.)

It has an MP3 player built in, but doesn't interface with iTunes. But it's certainly easy to get the songs on it - you just plug the USB cable into your PC, mount it as a USB drive and drag and drop the mp3s onto it. You can even drag them out of iTunes right onto it.

The Droid comes with a 16GB SD card. And a 32GB card is starting to become available. And it's user swappable, as is the battery. (Neither are true on the iPhone.)

There is not much fuckery involved. It just works. It's pretty simple to use.

It seems pretty sturdy - I've dropped it twice: once in the grocery store - about three feet to the concrete, and once at home - about three feet to the wooden floor - and no damage. I do have one tiny little ding in the screen (probably from one of the drops) so get a screen protector right away - I have one on it now.

I would recommend it. As a matter of fact, I suggested my cousin buy one and she told me she didn't want all that stuff on her phone and bought something else (not an iPhone.) She hated it, returned it and bought a Droid. She loves it.

There are other geeky reasons to like the Droid, but I know you probably don't care that I can open a terminal on my phone and run linux commands, or the fact that I can tether it to my laptop and get internet access through it. And the fact that I can do all this (and more) without having to "jailbreak" or "root" the phone...

As far as should you buy an iPhone or a Droid, that's something I can't answer. Obviously I chose to buy a Droid.

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After writing this email I went looking for information about iTunes and the Android phones and found something called DoubleTwist that is supposed to read your iTunes library and sync it with anything. I think it's supposed to be an iTunes replacement actually. I'll be downloading that at home and trying it.

Oh, and you know that Steve Jobs said "Folks who want porn can buy an Android phone." right?

That might be the deal breaker for some people.

According to this article, FreeNAS v0.69 includes BitTorrent services!

Is there anything FreeNAS can't do?

My new hard drives should arrive today, but I don't think I'll be able to build my new FreeNAS server until tomorrow at the earliest.

UPDATED

Apparently there isn't anything FreeNAS can't do. Here is a forum posting about how to add a Usenet client (sabnzbd) to FreeNAS.

Da-amn!

Thanks to a comment left on my Backup Your Shit! post by HarryD, I have learned how to implement Snapshots on FreeNAS and also got a link in the comments on HarryD's blog to LearnFreeNAS.com.

HarryD also has a posting about tuning FreeNAS that looks pretty useful.

Thanks HarryD!

Last night I sat down to watch an episode of The Practice that I had downloaded to my OpenFiler server in the basement.

I fired up the Xbox and launched Xbox Media Center. (I should probably upgrade that.) I tried to browse to the share on the OpenFiler server, but it told me it couldn't connect.

That can't be good.

So I headed down to the basement and turned on the monitor. No output. There's a green light on the front of the box, so it's on. I hit the reset button.

The server came up and booted, but the RAID 5 array with the data on it didn't come online. Rut-row.

It appears that I have lost one of the disks in the array. According to the md man page, md won't bring a degraded RAID array online at reboot unless you pass it a kernel argument:

If a RAID4, RAID5 or RAID6 array is degraded (missing at least one drive) when it is restarted after an unclean shutdown, it cannot recalculate parity, and so it is possible that data might be undetectably corrupted. The 2.4 md driver does not alert the operator to this condition. The 2.6 md driver will fail to start an array in this condition without manual intervention, though this behaviour can be over-ridden by a kernel parameter.

So, I have backups, right?

Nope.

I've been meaning to buy a 1TB USB hard drive to back up all my stuff (mp3s and photos mainly) but hadn't gotten around to it yet. I bet you can guess what I'll be buying on my way home.

It looks like I will be able to bring the RAID array up in degraded mode so I can copy the data off of it, so I think I'm okay there.

I went to Newegg today and bought three new 500GB hard drives. I'm just going to replace all the old drives that are currently in the server as they are all the same age and will probably start failing.

I'm also thinking about rebuilding the filer from scratch. The version of OpenFiler that I am running is a little old, and the last upgrade didn't go so well so the OS is in a weird state. I might install FreeNAS instead and see if that's a little easier. It doesn't look like FreeNAS has any snapshot support, but it does have a Recycle Bin option on the CIFS share page so undelete might be possible (something I could have used last week when I deleted a bunch of stuff by accident.)

FreeNAS is also very small and can run off a USB drive. That could be entertaining to try. I'll have to see if the motherboard I have will boot off a USB drive.

A long time ago (in a galaxy far, far away... no, wait.) Mark and I were discussing changing the carburettors on the 82 BMW R100RS to Fuel Injection.

The major stumbling block at the time was the EFI controller. There just wasn't really anything available.

HackADay just put up an article about putting EFI on your motorcycle. And there is an open source EFI controller out there called the MegaSquirt!

On the forum page of success stories there is a conversion of an R50 with R100 cylinders that uses the MegaSquirt and a pair of R1150 throttle bodies.

Just what I need, a new project.

So, sell the K bike, fix up the R bike and convert it to EFI? That could be fun. Not cheap, but fun. I bet Mark would like to help out.

While I was adding some QoS Traffic Shaping to my IPCop firewall, I saw an ad for an open source Application Filtering Firewall project called Untangle.

They say:

Untangle delivers an integrated family of applications that help you simplify and consolidate the network and security products you need, in one place at the network gateway. The most popular applications let businesses block spam, spyware, viruses, and phish, filter out inappropriate web content, control unwanted protocols like instant messaging, and provide remote access and support options to their employees. Every downloadable application is pre-configured and guaranteed to work together.

• All applications run on one off-the-shelf server
  
• Pre-configured on-demand downloads
  
• Integrated administration and reporting

It looks pretty promising and appears to be an all-in-one package that includes a firewall, email virus scanner and web proxy.

Sadly, looking in the forums for Untangle showed me that they don't have any QoS or Traffic Shaping support yet. They are talking about adding it, but that's the feature I am looking for right now.

So I installed the QoS_NG addon into my IPCop firewall and now I have to figure out what kind of shaping I really want and how to set it up.

Playing around with it last night I proved to myself that it was really working. I was changing the default class upload and download limits and then running one of the DSL speed tests. It was limiting my speed, so what I need to do now is figure out what classes I want to setup and then figure out how to apply the rules.

The end goal is to allow my web and mail server to have a fixed minimum in both directions, and to give my desktop a fixed minimum in both directions.

Then when my kids are watching YouTube videos I can still play TF2 without suffering from massive latency.

Look at the traffic graph and guess when the kids get home and hop onto YouTube:

I do have to say that so far I am very happy with my IPCop firewall. I will probably checkout Untangle at some point in the future, but IPCop is doing what I need it to do at the moment.