MrCopilot

To Mock or Not to Mock

noreply@blogger.com (MrCopilot) — Thu, 8 Jan 2026 11:55:00 -0800

Applications depend on data to function, and in the modern world that data is usually stored somewhere up in the nebulous concept known as the "cloud" but is actually a computer processing your requests and spitting back data.

During the development of an application decisions about how to supply the required data and service those requests for more must be made.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of options:

Real live production Actual Data.

That poor lil computer in the cloud did nothing to deserve being pummeled with malformed and/or repeated requests for the same data during live testing. Let alone tortured with automated testing on every commit. Be a considerate developer.

Local Representative fake Data

This is a good starting point. It has the unfortunate side effect of having to be manually updated, maintained, and carefully constructed with every edge case.

Local Cached data captured from live session.

Few downsides, requires vigilant maintenance and api level checks and a recording & playback system. This approach facilitated testing. Diagnosing random and transient bugs better than even the most verbose logging can achieve. Big fan.

Fake live data (Mock)

This approach gives the developer complete control over the testing environment. This is the most labor intensive. Where in the developer builds, buys or acquires some sort of Mock Server that responds appropriately as the original data source would.

Real Live Fake Data

Run a production (or as close to it) actual server with limited users, access, data and datastore available to CI and included as local app in build tree for developer to test/offline. Also sometimes known as Docker solution. But in this case I'd rather have a build-able piece of source code.

Going to stop right there because that is where this developer landed for this application.

I need interactive data & I need it be local to run testing before going to CI. The organization needs to deploy its own server but if they did I still wouldn't want to hammer it.

Thing is, if you ship a client with a tiny server isn't complete decentralization a few commits away???

Links and references:

Mock Or Not

To Mock or Not To Mock?An Empirical Study on Mocking Practices Delft University of Technology Software Improvement Group: Davide Spadini, Maurício Aniche, Magiel Bruntink, Alberto Bacchelli

To mock, or not to mock, that is the question by Alex Kondrashov

Testing Basics: SUT and DOCs

The Difference Between Mocks and Stubs

SNAC

SNAC Social Networks Are Crap

How to run your own social network (with Snac)

May be distracted for a bit...I should really push these changes first...

One Week of KDE & some Tokodon.

noreply@blogger.com (MrCopilot) — Wed, 7 Jan 2026 17:33:00 -0800

After a week of poking and prodding, installing, configuring, and much studying of documentation, code, infrastructure and general vibe & culture,

and in the spirit of my new motto, "You can complain or you can help",

Here is where I am on Tokodon:

The Bug that brung me:

I haven't even filed it. Bad developer.

Quote post do not display properly in notifications timeline.

Added code to display the quoteposts but header still missing.

These unknown posts fill the More->Posts list for some reason when present.

That reason is the quote type I added was not excluded from the any of the exclusive lists, boosts, replies, mentions, follows...FIXED it also wasn't handled properly anywhere else FIXED

This was likely missed in test as notification test data json was missing QuotePosts
I mangled the json data, KDE CI let me know via email after I had gone to bed.

Basically the equivalent of pushing unreviewed/untested commits just before clocking out on Friday at 5:01pm. Good Job newb.

Sent myself from Fire tablet via kde-connect

Android (amazon Android 9) Icons failed to load across the app & continue to
from FDroid (Droidify) Nightly Build Repo.
~~TODO: Investigate Android builds~~
UPDATE: Already Fixed

Hey look at that a sort of mock quote notification.

NOTE: Need to check the Image blurring code, Images should be blurred/hidden by default when Content Notice is attached. (Unless set to view all, where is that Eyeball setting??)

Notifications are a tangle for sure, there are Notifications, Notifications and then Notifications and of course a Notification.

Notification

Mastodon notifies your about everything.
https://docs.joinmastodon.org/entities/Notification/#mention
Tokodon notifies KDE primarily to shuttle updates from mastodon.
but must have handlers and settings and filters for each type.
KDE knotify notification abstraction layer for OS
https://docs.kde.org/stable5/en/plasma-workspace/kcontrol/notifications/index.html#application-settings

All of which have their own permissions, structures, formats, and possibly stray text files.

Almost covered them all. Settings page is still a little borked.

format-text-blockquote-symbolic is the name off the icon I think I am searching for....

Thanks cuttlefish

https://develop.kde.org/docs/features/icons/

Mastodon Web client.

Awfully dark in here...

Tokodon quote post notification implementation.

Complete with settings.

Still need Requests, Approval and Rejection for quotes and quoted and appropiate actions.

AND Then there is still "a post you have quoted has been edited" notification... sigh.

Meanwhile In non Notification news... The boost button opening a menu instead of boosting behavior that Mastodon has adopted across the web and at least the official android client is yucky and hacky if these are listed in the mentions instead of boosts.

Always vital to resist natural tendency to force defaults set to developer preferences though. So reach out and check if there is a plan that would be trampled upon.

(You may also just grab folks work copies, check roadmaps, milestones, bugtrackers and just look, but I am wrapping my head around a bunch of models right now and don't want to get distracted any more than I constantly am already)

I have to go clean up some json test data. Yes, Again.

TODO: like maybe think about looking into the autotesting for these features big guy?

And it happened, as it inevitably would.

No as you can see from this week's blog entries, I slowly pull my code out of my brain kicking and screaming one letter at a time. You can tell, because I am slow, do not speak about which I know not, careful, and well. human. I consider the user. I consider the team. I consider code. I consider.

I heap a lot of use & abuse on Google, I've found it helpful, Their AI products, not so much. It is much the same no matter the AI's daddy. And Microsoft is dead to me, for a variety of reasons.

Topic probably deserves it's own post...

Anyway, glad someone is looking out, Thanks Justin.

Pushed the changes. Created First Merge Request.

https://invent.kde.org/network/tokodon/-/merge_requests/785

Should have Pushed the world's easiest MR with the README.md update, trivial isn't really my bag though.

https://invent.kde.org/mrcopilot/tokodon/-/tree/work/mrcopilot/quote-post-support?ref_type=heads

Update: Merge request merged!

Developer Environment

noreply@blogger.com (MrCopilot) — Mon, 5 Jan 2026 18:15:00 -0800

The Developer's Environment:

Building
Lighting
Desk & Chair
PC/Laptop/Mobile
Mouse Keyboard & Wristpad
Display(s)
OS
Desktop Environment
Language
Tools
IDE
Target
Source Control
Code Reviews
Milestones
Test Plan
Network, Intranet, Internet
Continuous Integration
Documentation
StyleGuides
Code Of Conduct
Licenses
Forums
Wikis
Messaging Apps
Email
Maintainers
Release Managers
Users
Developers
Team(s)

Upstream
UI/UX
Accessibility
Marketing

Social Media
Home Life
Existing CodeBase
Your Code

At any given point in any (or every) day, one or more of these can become disfunctional. Although it is not great for your productivity, Development can usually continue to get done in this Environment.

Onboarding is critical in a large organization to familiarize a Developer on the finer points of the Environment that the organization supports, supplies, requires, and expects you to integrate into without with little to zero disruptive disfunction introduced anywhere else in the Developer Environment.

Many default to criticizing a new Developer Environment when no onboarding actually took place and most of the availble guidance is: To each their own. Good Luck.

For these reasons and many many more most corporations insist on the dreaded "Standard Client"

Breaking out of the Standard Client to utilize your preferred tools is a past time as old as coding itself.

This does not negate the need for them.

New KDE app, who dis?

noreply@blogger.com (MrCopilot) — Sun, 4 Jan 2026 18:44:00 -0800

We interrupt your regularly scheduled kde dev updates with the following important applications.

As an enthusiast, early adopter, bleeding edge techno-wizard Linux greybeard, you'll find that you have developed preferences over time. On the one hand there is a lessening of the insatiable need to know about EveryNewThing. You have gathered enough data to make an informed choice and the matter is resolved.

You settle back into primarily learning about any new thing out of necessity. Those begin to happen less and less frequently. Until they become either annoyances or novelty.

Or you make it a necessity...

& so I shall.

One of this greybeard's preferences decided long ago was the choice of linux desktop. I gathered much data, but ultimately and consistently choose KDE. #YMMV

Keeping up with updates, news and generally lurking about. I had less and less to say as more and more of my needs were met. Apps have been chosen for tasks that have not changed & continue to work.

But now is no longer then.

The tech landscape of ideological young coders turned increasingly into 5 guys my age burning down the world to free themselves of having to pay for human labor.

Some preferred choices need critical re-evaluation.

As I am in the middle of re-acquainting myself with developing with KDE and the newerish bits of QT, might as well toss a few apps on the lab bench and cross some wires, see if anything sparks.

First up, a chat up.

No one can be told what the Matrix protocol is.

It takes the average website visitor about .098 seconds on a kde app page to be invited to ask questions in a secure public room chat.

That doesn't sound at all creepy.

Setting aside the clearly obvious utility of having all of your support & developer answers in a nebulous unsearchable cloud of disjointed chat bubbles...

The KDE Network team offer NeoChat a cross platform matrix client.

In appearance, like every kde app, NeoChat follows my preferred chosen theme and has per app appropriate light/dark settings.

Setup & login was fairly straightforward and basically involves following an invite link that offers an array of Matrix clients for your operating system/platform. All the features you expect are here and so far, for me, function as designed.

There is some irony, not lost on me, that while I am digging into the guts of one decentralized distributed communication internet chat app, I am immediately encourage to communicate with the developers using another.

This is the way of things now.

via Mastodon

But for NeoChat itself, I have *no complaints as of yet.

* (OK one, the android app fails the login cycle from app to auth page on this ancient kindle fire and there is no alternative login flow ie #Tokodon copy hash method but I suspect the odd Amazon Spork of Android 9 is at fault, and well, it was a nightly build I'll check back tomorrow. ) UPDATE: Worked itself out...

Via Matrix (Unlinkable)

<Checks dev notes> "distracted by Falkon"

Every once in a while, you can feel the platforms we all use shift and rumble.

Remember when Microsoft packaged a web browser for the first time?

Or that first time you used Konqueror to browse the web, ftp, and local drives in tabs?

Or when bitTorrent launched, or when Mozilla released Firefox?

Or when Google unveiled Chrome.

I do, and it felt alot like browsing with Falkon feels now.

Out of the box with adblockers speed dial, vertical tabs if you want em, lightning quick and fairly light on the cpu, Falkon is impressive. So far has not choked on anything I've thrown at it.

I have found a few bugs in extensions and a hardware acceleration checkbox that required me to edit an ini file to launch again without command line args. I am not sure the spell checking is working properly despite following the oddly manual "dl and copy" instructions it appears to recognize the dict and is enabled, but I can't mangle a word bad enough to trigger it or find its check now box. (Update: it seems to work everywhere but this blog editor, which is a bummer. I'm only spellchecking in another browser now.)

As I generally raw dog the internet to better gauge the content providers by their actual content & that includes the scroll after scroll of garbage article-like ads, I may now be biased by how nice & quick the open web looks & feels without tinkering and installing extensions at all.

Falkon has proven incredibly productive running along side my other older well informed preferences. It appears to be sticking around.

And thats's Falkon, Its a browser, its quick, sleek, and cares about keeping your data yours and it appears to do all that pretty well.

It defaults to DuckDuckGo for Search & URL bar but are selectable back to your comfort food search engine or set it up to just use as dedicated Wikipedia browser.

Although I never have need for it, there is a one-click setting to dispose of all data & history after app is closed. There is a ton going on under the hood of this thing and I look forward to see it evolve as I browse.

Again, it reminds me of the early days of Chrome in all the best possile ways & its built on QT tech.

<checks dev journal again> "distracted by KDE-Connect"

KDE-Connect is magic of which we are not worthy.

Install client on device & device can see every other installed client on the network, sprinke some DBus fairy dust and a little VNC and your world shifts radically.

After pairing, each client has available actions, multimedia controls and seamless file sharing available to every other paired client. Device goes to sleep or drops off network it becomes invisible. the client allows access controls, pretty painless pairing, and a host of features you may never even use.

For instance, you may install a VNC/remote destop veiwer on the rather large tablet that sits on your desk unused most days. Through the magic of virtual frame buffers, kfrb & krdf vnc, and dbus, Bippity Boppity Boink, you just added a second/third touchscreen monitor to your workspace, and even its inputs are usable. this is not restricted to tablets side by side pcs and laptops also work great. Keep having to stop myself from building a video wall out of tablets and old phones.

If you are not that adventurous, you can just use your computer keyboard to type that long text reply on your phone.

Turning something down or up or pausing music or video from any device that happens to be handy is the feature I am wearing out though.

None of these features make interesting screenshots, as a matter of fact KDE-Connect seem completely unconcerned with anything but functionality, and I find that refreshingly useful.

But here we'll take one or two for consistency

Once Accepted It appears in your KDE Connect status icon.

And whatever protocols are supported are a click or drag & drop away.

The list above contains

Kindle Fire 8 surviving on FreeDroid

Bazzite Desktop PC

SteamDeck

10 inch Android Lenovo tablet

Notifications & SMS from paired mobile devices appear on paired desktop.

SMB:// can burn in hell, FTP, USB sneakernet, #GTFO the file is already there,

Click Browse this device and the dir made permissively available on the device, opens on the Desktop's Dolphin file browser where you may edit with your favorite Desktop tool of choice.

Here is that file in Kate.

Fixed a bunch of typos, but I'm not screenshotting it again.

Having just a common share interface between the family phones, steamdeck, tablets, reader androidtvs and desktop pcs is indeed the world as it should be. Thank you KDE.

There are of course a ton more KDE apps both new and old that might be worth taking a peek at to enhance your life.

Back to the grind.

-MrCopilot

Welcome to 2026 You can complain, or You can help.

noreply@blogger.com (MrCopilot) — Thu, 1 Jan 2026 02:23:00 -0800

Welcome to 2026

You can complain or You can help.

Software Development is hard. Really hard. You just won't believe how vastely hugely mind bogglingly hard it is. I mean, you think molecular chemical biology is complex, but that's just peanuts to Software Development.

My apologies to sir Douglas Adams.

"Space," [the Hitchhiker's Guide] says, "is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.

This sustained level of difficulty and complexity is mentally exhausting. every original line of code I've ever written has been weighed and tested and considered and tortured before the first letter was typed, and the "work" has just begun. In many scenarios some entity is paying you to exhaust yourself to design, run, support and maintain a fictional rube goldberg machine in your head for anywhere from a month to years to decades.

In many other scenarios the pay is solving a problem, and sometimes the pay is sharing the solved problems.

In all cases there were people working their neurons to nubbins to produce this immaterial thing we call software. As a now low neuron to nubbin ratioed veteran, all of you are my heroes and try to carefully criticise companies, organizations and management.

Those Free and Open Source folks, they are my Justice League or Avengers, whichever Super Heroic team you identify with is fine.

When one travels from commercial software produced by corporations with eye popping profits to software produced by volunteers, interns, ideological coders & other Samaritans one should adjust one's expectations and entitlements.

One often doesn't.

Even the wizened grey bearded low neuron to nubbin veterans.

Treating the entire open web as your personal gripeboard is a gross misuse of technology.

Should we not endeavor to do less of that? Well...

You can complain, or you can help.

It's been a minute, but I did just set up this new kde desktop...

What are we looking at?

Tokodon

A modern client for Mastodon and other decentralized servers that implement its API (such as Pixelfed).

https://apps.kde.org/tokodon/

Check the forum, Check Matrix? Not yet.
Check for Bug Reporting, hey we got a hit.
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=496147

Alrighty then.

Source Code.
https://invent.kde.org/network/tokodon

But don't bother grabbing it from there because...

Building

The easiest way to make changes and test Tokodon during development is to build it with kdesrc-build (Link leads to:)

https://develop.kde.org/docs/getting-started/building/kde-builder-setup/

OK.

If you haven't set up kde-builder already, please follow the steps in Set up a development environment before proceeding.

OK, this might take a minute...and several GBs...

If you plan on building an application or on following our Kirigami tutorial, you should allocate at least 15 GB of storage space.

If you plan on building Plasma Desktop, you should allocate at least 50 GB of storage space.

If you cannot afford this storage, you might want to consider building projects manually or with distrobox.\

I'm not really ready to discuss anything intelligently just yet...

KDE On mastodon https://kde.social/@tokodon

Pablo knows art.

noreply@blogger.com (MrCopilot) — Fri, 15 Aug 2014 12:15:00 -0700

Ubuntu 14.04

noreply@blogger.com (MrCopilot) — Wed, 6 Aug 2014 19:11:00 -0700

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

The good folks over at Canonical have released the newest Long Term Support version of their Free Linux operating system Ubuntu codename Trusty Tahr.

After waiting for the update to show up on a previous LTS 12.04, impatience won out and a fresh install of Trusty Tahr was inaugurated on a 64bit AMD box's spare drive.

Desktop

Despite it's name, Unity has a pretty vocal community of detractors. With past versions, Unity quickly got under my skin and ends up as a spare session rarely, if ever, used, instead opting for a lighter more traditional desktop experience. LXDE worked well and stayed out of my way and was the first post installation package. To render a fair judgement for this review, Unity has been the primarily used session since installation, but it is comforting having the old standby ready and a re-login away.

Many users complain about Unity's rearrangement of applications menus to the top of the screen for the currently focused window Apple style. Canonical apparently has had enough of this complaint and added the option to move them back (where they belong) via the Appearance option in System Settings.

Even with the menus in the title bar, you'll find the behavior has been tweaked to allow for more natural mousing around. See Also Autohide, and Workspaces options. These slight UI changes really do go along way in making Unity a more usable and less annoying desktop. The fact that it crashes about 99% less often is also a very welcome improvement.

7 Thoughts on patents, copyright and promoting progress of science and the useful arts.

noreply@blogger.com (MrCopilot) — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 11:17:00 -0800

The Congress shall have Power…To promote the Progress of Science
and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors
the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
United States Constitution, Article I, Section 8

The subject matter sought to be patented must be sufficiently different from what has been used or described before that it may be said to be nonobvious to a person having ordinary skill in the area of technology related to the invention. USPTO

Hi there, I'm MrCopilot. I develop solutions, usually involving a general purpose computer and some clever arrangements of words and numbers. I am a product of the digital age, I grew up with technology in an era when it was just peeking its head into homes and business. I recall the brief flirtations with red LED watches, laser discs, the advent of the home computing, networking, email, 300 baud BBS ..., and on through to the present day where everyone is interconnected by multiple devices per person. I have come to understand a few things that are seemingly nonobvious to the major players in the information technology industry based on the current court dockets.

1) Software is already covered by Copyright law.

Program = collection of words, numbers and symbols.

Book = collection of words, numbers, and symbols.

Both offer the Author protection for his "writings" as defined above. Many tend to depend on that protection in the free software and open source world that I prefer to live in, and many more depend on it in the closed source world that I tend to not visit often. It needs no further protection. You can't use it unless I give you permission. Feel free to implement your own version or licence it under my terms.

2) No piece or collection of software is an invention.

It is software. It is writings, it is math, it is function.

That interpretation immediately precludes the issuance of any Software Patent. Unfortunately, that interpretation has not been the prevailing one by those in charge of issuance. Consequently we have battles in courts across the country about whether a programmer can develop utilizing in-app payments, device manufacturers having to change software because it allows a user to slide to unlock or universally search their device and internet.

3) It is all obvious.

Every single piece of software ever written could be written by any other programmer of ordinary skill in the area of technology related to the software. The level of sophistication, abstraction, design, and elegance would vary, but given the same input nearly all competent software developers can accomplish whatever is asked.

4) General Purpose Computing promotes the useful arts. Limiting their functions, development, deployments and sales does not.

Any software designed to run on a general purpose computer should be free from patent infringement as by definition of its use it is promoting the useful arts. Banning the import and sale of a general computing device based on software it contains is as ludicrous as banning a book for the ideas expressed as to similar to previous works. Essentially, "You can't sell a dictionary, We already sell a dictionary." The implementation of an idea may be patented, but the idea may not. and yet, that is what I see in every software patent case I come across.

5) Software & Hardware development move at different time frames from each other and "real time".

The current Patent grant of 20yrs is 4 to 10 lifetimes in the technology world. 5yrs is ancient in terms of hardware, The useful lifetime of a typical "novel' software innovation is limited by what it runs on and the constraints of the day. New interfaces, increases in computing power, memory capacity, easy networking and other improvements render old solutions unnecessary and obsolete sometimes in the time frame of months. In software we keep what we need, and incrementally improve it, but also cull out the cruft, thin out support for ancient hardware and disused protocols. Extended exclusivity of a certain function, feature or description implemented in software ensures it will never be useful to anyone but the patent holder, in other words the opposite of progressing the useful arts.

6) Patents have become weaponized.

A competitive advantage can be gained by disrupting normal operations of your competitors with long, costly legal battles and filed injunctions across the globe (even when you have no actual hope in winning in the end). If you can afford it and they can't. If you can get a temporary ban, well, than that is even better for the bottom line. Patent abuse is as old as patents themselves. The modern equivalent is something far worse, far more destructive to actual innovation than any abuse seen before.

7) Only Congress has the power to affect the changes required to solve this problem.

They set the rules, the limits, the renewal fees and time frames through legislation. That gives you the voter a lever to use to help solve this problem. This gives me both hope and dread. Hope that the problem rises to the level of congressional action (no easy feat), Hope that enough people pay attention for a minute to whatever godawful first draft comes outta the House subcommittee on Technology and Innovation, and properly raise SOPA type hell. Yes, it is really Chaired by Ben Quayle! Dread rising...

Fortunately many agree that there is a problem. The scope and severity is debated internally but many are of the opinion that something must be done and debates over possible solutions are occurring regularly.

SCU put on a lovely conference about what can be done.
http://law.scu.edu/hightech/2012-solutions-to-the-software-patent-problem.cfm

Groklaw has a decent overview written by a thoughtful attendee.
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20121124032902769
Wired is running an extended series of opinion pieces done by industry figures entitled The Patent Fix
http://www.wired.com/opinion/category/the-patent-fix/

Facts figures, news and analysis
http://www.researchoninnovation.org/
http://www.ffii.org/
http://www.progfree.org/

Pay attention and make your voice heard.

Now if you will excuse me I have some useful arts that need promoting.

-MrCopilot

Onlive Desktop or Windows for Android

noreply@blogger.com (MrCopilot) — Mon, 5 Mar 2012 19:17:00 -0800

OnLive Desktop is an Android or iOS App that gives OnLive users their own Windows 7 machine in the cloud. For free users have touch enabled desktop access, Microsoft Office, and some cloud storage.

Why? Full versions of Microsoft Office that will render and edit your documents with perfect fidelity, if you are in to that sort of thing. Also you'll be running a fresh clean Windows install, remember what that was like?

If you want access to speedy flash enabled browsing on your tablet, or customized desktop, be prepared to shell out $5 a month. Might be worth it to you if your tablet has a fruit on it.

Upon loading, the os syncs your Documents folder to your user account. You can upload files and documents at files.onlive.com. Which would seem a fairly painless way to test cross platform websites during development on the go. IE will let you browse local html files. It certainly less stressful than trying to run a vm on your hardware.

Unfortunately running foreign exes is a no- no. So if running portable apps or testing your own is important, that will cost you 9.99 a month. Bummer, really wanted give Blender a spin. Plan details.

Windows on a tablet is even less attractive proposition than Windows on a desktop. The technology is interesting, but with Windows as the only non enterprise consumer option, the appeal wears off rather quickly for this user. Something tells me OnLive Desktop could be an interesting tool for developer testing purposes, if the chains were loosened a bit. As it stands, stick with their gaming service which has the good sense to hide the Windows running underneath.

-MrCopilot

OnLive Cloud Gaming for Android, PC Gaming is Dead, Long Live PC Gaming.

noreply@blogger.com (MrCopilot) — Mon, 5 Mar 2012 12:13:00 -0800

Abstraction is a prime mover of technology. Innovation gets all the press, but more often than not, that innovation is actually just abstracting away of existing technology. So it is with OnLive.
In a sentence, OnLive is an instant on subscription service for streaming PC Gaming.

The key abstraction here was to pull the hardware requirements away from the customer. The client has the requisite screen, input and sound hardware, and OnLive has the hardware that runs the game, and the software to stream the game video and audio to your screen and speakers as well as carry your inputs back to your game. Similar to the way various remote desktop and vnc software works, but If you have used a vnc client, your first thought was probably "graphical performance will be hit or miss, laggy and highly unpredictable." That is where OnLive has spent its R&D dollars over the last few years. Compression and optimization, to allow multitudes of gamers access to a fairly sizable and eclectic library of pc games. In addition to trailers and allowing users to become spectators and cheer or jeer the players for free, Onlive allows free timed trials of many games, a definite improvement over relying on reviews and boxart as your purchasing metric.

Users are given a chance to have or watch a real players experience and decide whether this is or is not your type of fun. Since they are just streaming the game to you, streaming the video to multiple clients needn't even require that much technical wizardry, It is highly impressive to use though.

OnLive has either very deep pockets or very favorable developer licensing terms, probably both. A look at the breadth of content available and the various pricing levels shows a depth of target market strategy that is kind of brilliant. OnLive checks all the focus group boxes, no matter whether you are a Mac, PC, iPad or Android Gamer. None of the above, no problem, they sell a console or a seperate controller too.

What kind of Gamer Are You?

Rental Gamer Day passes 2.99 5.99
Subscription Gamer Netflix: 9.99 all you can game 150 game play pack.
Purchase Gamer: Full Game at varying discount prices 4.99-54.99
Bargain Bin Hunter: Frequent Bundle Sales and Discounts
FreeLoader Timed Trials
IndieGamer Nice library of Indie Hits and releases
Parent: Instant Library Play Pack + Console

OnLive Play Pack gives you access to over 100 games pulling from every genre for about the price of 2 AAA games a year, $9.99 a month. Not bad if you have always on internet with a decent speed above 3Mbits recommended.

Lets take a look at the OnLive Gaming experience for Android. (Android Market)

You get 2 choices of Android client. Spectator Only, works well on our Logitech Revue for a bit of gaming voyeurism on the big screen.

Fully compatible Android devices allow actual gamelplay. OnLive is quick to point out they are adding more tablets and phones to the fully compatible list everyday.

While OnLive has customized some games to enable touch only controls, the majority require at least a mouse and keyboard.

The android client is every bit as smooth as on the PC and Mac, same Ozymandias wall of screens showing live games you can drop in and out on to watch or play. Gameplay is surprisingly fluid and the visuals are frankly amazing.

As long as you keep a good wifi signal, compression artifacts are hardly noticeable.

Take a few steps outside your wi-fi zone and things get blocky, and you get warned before OnLive drops you out of the game completely.

Find yourself a good internet connection, an OnLive client and have yourself a afternoon of gaming. Watch em, Try em, Buy em, Rent em, Subscribe em.

With a bit of manual Wine tweaking or the help of the linux gamer tool playonlinux, you can run the client on your Ubuntu box as well, checking off the last box, Console, Windows, Mac, Android and iOS, and Linux.

PC Gaming is Dead, Long Live PC Gaming.
-MrCopilot

Asus Transformer Ice Cream Sandwich and a Bluetooth Keyboard

noreply@blogger.com (MrCopilot) — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 12:23:00 -0800

Text input on a touchscreen device is a necessary but painfully evil problem. It is true there are a few on screen keyboards are better than others, high praise akin to the improvement in soup with the addition of 1oz versus 4oz of rat poison. OS vendors and device manufacturers are well aware of the problem, which results in a plethora of on screen keyboard choices, varying degrees of annoyance inducing autocomplete and text prediction engines, and hyper active haptic feedback complete with IBM selectric sound effects, and finally with the admission that the problem just cannot be solved, most devices support bluetooth, usb or/and hardware keyboards.

When choosing which new device to purchase for everyday usage, you need to consider your needs carefully along with your budget. Last year, when in need of a tablet for a development project, we took some time to consider the use cases and set up some sensible requirements.

Recent Android OS
External SD or microSD Storage
Keyboard Support
Large Tough Screen
HDMI Out
Capacitive Touch Screen
Reasonably Priced
Front and Rear Cameras
No Contract

Google handed out the initial batch of Honeycomb Xoom tablets at their annual Google IO conference, making it the odds on favorite. Despite being Google's official Android development device, the Xoom version released for sale was far less attractive, being overly high priced and shipped knowingly with non functioning SD reader hardware/drivers. Briefly the Atrix was a possibility with their linux based webtop dock, but after a few too many complaints from friends, slow to non existent updates and Motorola was off the list.

Acer and Asus had dueling 10 inch tabs with virtually identical specs. Acer's Iconia line offers full size usb ports, while Asus has a nifty if a bit pricey physical keyboard dock equipped with an extra battery "transform"ing it into a first class Android net/notebook with a ridiculously long time between required wall wart copulations.

Foolish nights investigating the many thousand variations on 6 or 7 Chinese designs wrapped in horrid iPad plastic cases, attached to flaky resistive touchscreens and oddball screen sizes with stale Marketless versions of Android. Low memory, low on storage, missing features, every corner cut twice, In a word cheap. The whole lot of them come off the list.

An unexpected sale knocking $99 off of any tablet forced a decision with the Asus Transformer (TF101) winning out in the end.

6 months and 4 timely over the air updates later, Ice Cream Sandwich in the last one, (thanks Asus), there are no regrets save one, purchasing the slate without the keyboard dock. But In a household with 5 Android devices and counting, the expense just wasn't justifiable for a single device keyboard and without impending trips away, the standard battery lasts long enough for my daily usage. However, as usage increased, the realization that a real keyboard was needed to fully utilize the technology productively. The on screen is fine for a quick chat or post but tedious for any sort of long form communication and you can forget coding.

Unlike the Acer and Xoom tablets, Asus has a proprietary connector for charging, data USB, and docking. If you would like to attach a USB device, like say, a keyboard, an additional $40 USB adapter or the $150 keyboard dock is required, leaving Bluetooth as a real alternative.

Once upon a time you could pick up a bluetooth keyboard for a song. But then someone figured out that ant Bluetooth keyboard works on an iPad and therefore should cost near as much as Apple's keyboard. Look at this list from Staples

Apple Wireless Keyboard $69

Apple makes some mighty fine hardware, but pairing it with my droids feels like it would be wrong. Not ironically enjoyable wrong, like pairing Microsoft's mouse and keyboard with a linux box ( bonus achievement for plugging in a wired Xbox360 controller, another for doing so without actually owning a 360.) Truthfully this is one of the finest wireless keyboards ever available and you could do much, much worse.

Logitech Android Keyboard $69
Logitech has been making keyboards for nearly the entire history of consumer computing. Our Logitech Revue's keyboard is brilliant and would be perfect at home if not for its oddly named unifying wireless protocol. No usb port, no unifying adapter. Not to worry Logitech has you covered with a solid slim chicklet keyboard with Android specific keys and a clever case that does double duty as a stand when not holding the keyboard.

Microsoft Mobile Keyboard 6000 $89
They make plenty off money off Android devices they don't really need your $90, which is why you can find it online for around 40 or 50.

We'll pass without review.

Model specific Case and Keyboard Combos
For Transformer owners this option is fairly far off the table. Third party case and cover makers rightly assume if you bought a Transformer and want a keyboard you probably want the Asus keyboard dock eliminating the need for a cover. If you are a Xoom, Iconia, Thrive, Kindle Fire, or iPad owner there is a plethora of folio style case/keyboard combos available from $40 through $199.

Various roll-up, fold-up or micro sized keyboards

If you are pretty sure you'll always be typing on a hard surface, a roll-up wireless silicone keyboard might be up your alley for $49 to $59.

The fold out portable keyboard has been with us since the early days of palm and pocket pc devices, and most still feel like they are breaking if not with every keystroke, then during the origami storage and unfolding rituals. pass.

The tiny remote sized keyboards might be great for texting but would be clumsy to use on a table top and repetitive multi-modal shifting required for anything but the alphabet earns them a pass as well.

Generic Bluetooth Keyboards
You might expect there to be a sea of choices under this heading, but once you lop off the high end close to or more expensive than the Asus dock, the list gets paired down quite a bit to a few wireless standard pc keyboards that use bluetooth, a few mac keyboard clones, and a very few generic tablet\iPad.

With the full size PC keyboards, although your fingers might find them comfy and homey, they do not travel very well. The mac clones are of questionable quality yet priced at nearly the same cost as Apple's aluminum beauty, better off spending the extra $19. So our test bench is graced with something from the generic tablet / iPad category from a manufacturer familiar with tablets, designers of many a case, aCase.

$39 Acase(TM) Ultra Slim Bluetooth Keyboard Stand for Any Tablet PC / SmartPhone
Design
Slim and sexy, the smoke grey folio cover closes with large magnetic tabs that when open attract to form a sturdy enough stand to support nearly any tablet or phone in either orientation. The all black interior and width might fool you into thinking it was made for the Asus Transformer. When closed up, it is so thin that even in its packaging it was delivered in a priority mail envelope. Placed on a flat surface the keys seem to rise up from the surface lending comparisons of a supermodel draped over one of David Coverdale's sports cars not entirely unjustified. When was the last time a keyboard could make that claim?

Setup
Android 3.x devices and higher work fairly seamlessly with nearly any HID Bluetooth keyboard as does iOS. Testing with our newly Ice Cream Sandwiched Transformer, setup was a breeze. Turn on Bluetooth from the status bar, search for devices, select, enter the number on the keyboard and you are paired and ready to go. After 10 minutes of inactivity the keyboard goes to sleep, Android's Bluetooth status notification turns grey, touch a key too wake it back up and the status bar indicator lights blue. As a nice touch if you are currently editing text when the keyboard nods off, the onscreen keyboard pops up, when you wake up the bluetooth keyboard, the on screen keys hide automagically. A small but delightful thing.

Layout and Keys
Very much in the vane of other folio style keyboard cases, with a single piece of silicon covering all the keys, providing both the spring for the keys, as well as keeping dust and the occasional splashes of carbonated beverage from invading its innards. The keys feels spongy to type on but are spaced well and after a while your fingers get used to the odd way each button travels when depressed. The qwerty layout is complete with F1 through F12, del and backspace, and arrow keys. Noticeably absent were pgup, pgdn, home, end, and damn it all, the right hand shift key. Clearly marketed toward iPad customers, the fn, control, alt/option and command keys are to the left of the space bar. An Apple Home/Back rectangle button lurks ominously in the top right corner and function as a Home button in Android.

Android Function Key Mappings

f6 Search works like a dedicated hard search button, within an app with search capability it shifts focus to the search box.
f7 Previous Track,
f8 Play/Pause
f9 Next Track
f10 Mute
f11 Volume +
f12 Volume -
All of the media keys work perfectly and will not interrupt your current app or activity.

Through sheer rote testing, we have found a few more hidden shortcuts for Android as well that are universally available even while within any app.

Command P    opens Google Music App and shows current playlist. (does not start playing)
Command C    opens Contacts App, or the People app in Ice Cream Sandwich.
Command A    opens the Calculator Application
Command L    opens the Google Calendar
Command M opens Google Maps
Command B   opens the Browser.

and Hey, what do you know...
Command UpArrow is PgUp
Command DownArrow is PgDn
Esc = Back

The control and alt keys appear to not function in any apps, (current vim is a bit of a challenge without control.) The habit of shift arrow highlight, ctrl-c and ctrl-v is a tough one to break even after the third time watching your text be replaced with a "c" followed by the futile attempts to undo adding "z","z","z" and realizing that block of text is now also gone into the aether.

Performance
OK here is where the Acase falls a bit short. comfortable enough to type on, it has a rather annoying habit of randomly repeating keys. Admittedly, re-editing occasional double esses is still miles less frustrating than the every other word correcting the onscreen hoists on you. All hail the arrow keys which make quick work of these edits. It should be noted that on at least one occasion, possibly due to a low battery, there was a mad dash to try and stop the keyboard from backspacing over an hour of work, flipping of the keyboard's power switch ended this writer's newest nightmare. So far at least, after a good charging, that issue has yet to recur. Too soon to gauge the battery life, but the ever so helpful manual claims:

Maximum working time:25 days
Uninterrupted Working time:90 hours
Standby Time: 100 days

Not bad from a 4 hour usb drip charge.

The rest of the manual is dedicated to pairing with your iPad. The box however, is quick to point out just how device agnostic it is, and I quote:

"The case with slim and lightweight
also functional to folding into a stand,
FOR A VARIETY OF MODEL TYPES,
such as iPad, iphone 4 and majorities of tablet PC can be using this keyboard,
the main material of Silicone, thickness within 1.35cm,
"ULTRA SLIM, light and easy to carry
even vacating more space"

Add in the extra points for engrish hilarity, the utility of editing and working with a whole page of text at a time unobstructed, a very nicely angled stand, Android 4's elegant integration, subtract the annoying repeating and slightly spongy keys, and Acase still manages to squeak out a buy recommendation, well worth the $39, especially if you have multiple smart devices around the house.

Honeycombs good yeah yeah yeah

noreply@blogger.com (MrCopilot) — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 21:12:00 -0700

ITS NOT SMALL NO NO NO.

Green Lantern Movie Review: Go See it.

noreply@blogger.com (MrCopilot) — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 22:35:00 -0700

Ah, Green Lantern, the unsung protector of the universe's sector 2814.
Good Ole Hal Jordan, DC's goto guy when they need boost sales with a number of crossover events spanning several paychecks worth of pulp.

Now at long last parent company Warner Bros looks to the Emerald Knight to see them through the Batman-less Summer 2011 blockbuster movie season. A full length live action feature film with A-list stars and a CGI budget that was out of this world even before the execs at Warner kicked in an additional 9 million towards the end of production. Which incidentally Warner will tell you had nothing to do with some very vocal fan reactions to early looks at the effects, *coughBS.
Full on promotional marketing, Action figures, Animated DVDs, Video Games, Little Paper Rings in your subway meal and Ryan Reynolds staring at you from the chocolate isle at the grocery, you know the works.

In preparation for this review, lets just say, many many comic pages with a green hue were turned over one reviewers lifetime, while another more demographically appealing female subject was chosen having only cursory knowledge of Mr Green and Sparkly.

In addition, the professional critics were consulted to excess before actual viewing. It was the most thorough drubbing of a film in recent memory and the one-upmanship barrage of insults hurled at supporting cast members, its director and herd of writers, was only to be outdone by their near universal fawning admiration of Ryan Reynold's ab-tastic physique if not his gravitas.

As entertaining as the critical review of the critical reviews was, you kinda got the vibe that maybe Warner's great green hope is not only the worst movie of the summer, but quite possibly the "Worst Comic Book Movie Ever!" which in itself is intriguing, in a Mystery Science Theater 3000 kinda way, if you are in to that sort of thing. More importantly at least one of our intrepid reviewers was actually interested to see the translation from page to screen, no matter how mediocre Dana Stevens thought it was and he was paying, so....

The Movie:

Hal Jordan is your every day mild mannered, cocky, defense weapons contractor fighter-jet test-pilot. You know the type, drives fast cars, has casual sexual encounters, not very punctual, but nice to look at. Whilst being particularly cocky Hal destroys his jet and two irreplaceable prototypes, the consequences of which nearly destroys his employer, his relation ship with his ex-girlfriend/boss/bosses daughter/wingwoman, and their potential contract with the government, also destroying the jobs of many an angry townfolk. Hal's grounded.

Oh yeah, there was some stuff going on in space too.
Good Guys are Green and use power of will, Bad Guys are Yellow, and use the power of fear. Big Bad Yellow guy, stopped and imprisoned by Green Guy. Yellow Guy escapes and mortally wounds aforementioned Green Guy. Green Guy's ring recruits Hal.

Hal eventually becomes Green Lantern defeats yellow guy, saves universe. Roll Credits, after credits ending scene setting up sequel.

Of course that description leaves a lot to the imagination, doesn't it. To make any of that appear to make any kind of sense requires a fair amount of esplaining to be done, and splaining Green Lantern does and fairly successfully, with lots of green stuff in space and some excellent voice over work. Guardians, Oa, Kilowog, Sinestro and the Corp. A tiny outline of Carol Ferris and Mrs Samuel Jackson, I mean Amanda Waller, And for no reason at all Tim Robbins as a Senator who hates his son, Tim Robbins, everybody.

What more could you ask? Top of the charts opening weekend, Done.

Was is it a great film?
No. It was at the same time over and under done.

Was it an entertaining movie?
Yes. However you can still feel the studio notes trying to wrench that away too.

Ryan Reynolds as Hal Jordan/Green Lantern?
Works for us. See ya in the sequel Ryan.
Now that all the explaining is over with, make with the ring slingin.

Rating:
Go see it. Have some popcorn. We enjoyed it.
Some of it was really pretty, some of it was silly, but most of it was fun.

Note to Mark Millar, RE Worst Comic Book Movie Ever, Do you include the ill fated Fantastic Four and Captain America movies?

-MrCopilot

Thanks for the reminder, Google doodle. Chaplin is a genuis.

noreply@blogger.com (MrCopilot) — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 15:10:00 -0700

Every couple of decades we are collectively reminded how much of a genius artist was and is the man Charlie Chaplin. Last time it was Robert Downey Jr or Johnny Depp, this time Google video doodles us all.

I prefer the real deal myself. Happy 122nd Birthday Charlie.

This was a new one for me.

Mobile blogging

noreply@blogger.com (MrCopilot) — Fri, 8 Apr 2011 13:23:00 -0700

Mobile post from android using Blogger app from Google Inc.

Seems to work well enough:
Painless publishing to multiple Blogger blogs, Check.
Attach images, Check.
Attach photos from camera, Check.
Editting published posts, Check.

Apple vs Everyone.

noreply@blogger.com (MrCopilot) — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 15:03:00 -0700

Not a day goes by without rampant speculation on the machinations and possible motives of Apple or Steve Jobs splashed all over the blogowebspheretubes.

Yesterday, for once the news was just that, actual news. None of that speculative unsourced stuff we are used to seeing. As often is the case with real news, it requires more than a "sound bite" of history to understand the impact of the "new reality". But hey this is the internet, right?

&nbdip;Library of Congress Wants You to Root Your Android Phone&nbdip;

&nbdip;An Emancipation Proclamation for the iPhone&nbdip;

MrCopilot

That's it I'm going back to Windows

noreply@blogger.com (MrCopilot) — Thu, 1 Apr 2010 17:17:00 -0700

I've had it. I can't stand the independence of my PC smugly running for months and months without needing any support from me whatsoever.

I miss the reboots, the re-installations, and oh how I miss the joy of re-purchasing my OS every couple of years. I miss the constant support calls from relatives. I miss the hour a day I spent on my kids.

So sign me up Mr. Balmer.
You win and Season's Greetings.

MrCopilot

If you are in China you cannot read this.

noreply@blogger.com (MrCopilot) — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 21:38:00 -0700

The wise and powerful leaders of China have decided to shield their fragile citizenry from the wretched horrors of words on a screen.

It always starts out in cases of Government Censorship (tripped another flag) that only some small collection of words cannot be looked at. Obviously there would be no point in restricting information that your economy may depend on for growth.

The Chinese government encourages the development and spread of the Internet, and promotes the opening of the Internet to the outside (world). Discussion and expression on China's Internet are very lively, and digital commerce is developing rapidly. The facts demonstrate that China has a healthy environment for investing in and developing the Internet. China will unwaveringly adhere to a guiding policy of opening up, and it welcomes participation by foreign businesses in developing the Chinese Internet."

See, China is still cool.

China has a simple solution, Mandatory Self-Censorship.

All companies operating in China must, well I'll let China explain.

Figuring out how to make good on our promise to stop censoring search on Google.cn has been hard. We want as many people in the world as possible to have access to our services, including users in mainland China, yet the Chinese government has been crystal clear throughout our discussions that self-censorship is a non-negotiable legal requirement. We believe this new approach of providing uncensored search in simplified Chinese from Google.com.hk is a sensible solution to the challenges we've faced—it's entirely legal and will meaningfully increase access to information for people in China. We very much hope that the Chinese government respects our decision, though we are well aware that it could at any time block access to our services. We will therefore be carefully monitoring access issues, and have created this new web page, which we will update regularly each day, so that everyone can see which Google services are available in China.
Google Blog

Oh thats not China's response, that was Google.

An unnamed official representing China states.

Foreign companies operating in China must abide by Chinese laws. Google has violated the written promise it made on entering the Chinese market. It is totally wrong in halting (censorship) filtering of its search provider...

All coverage is provided via China's official news agency. You can lose quite bit of time reading through the Chinese Embassy press releases, Foreign Minister Q&As. May I recommend you lose at least a few minutes at the winner for all time best government acronym, the Ministry of Science Technology also known as MOST. most.gov.cn

I particularly enjoyed this most-posted LAW while looking for the regulations that were so maliciously disregarded by Google. I'll just quote the first Chapter, but really, go read the whole thing.

Law of the People's Republic of China on Popularization of Science and Technology

Article 1
   This Law is enacted in accordance with the Constitution and other related laws for the purpose of implementing the strategy of invigorating the country through science and education and the strategy of sustainable development, redoubling the efforts to popularize science and technology, raising the citizens’ scientific and cultural level and promoting economic and social progress.

Article 2
   This Law shall apply to activities conducted by the State and the community to popularize scientific and technological knowledge, promote scientific approaches, disseminate scientific ideas and carry forward scientific spirit.
For popularization of science and technology (hereinafter referred to as PST), such ways as may make it easy for the general public to understand, accept and participate in shall be adopted.

Article 3
State organs, armed forces, public organizations, enterprises and institutions, anal Grassroots organizations and other organizations shall work for PST.
Citizens have the right to participate in PST activities.

Article 4
PST is a public welfare undertaking and an essential component of the socialist material and spiritual civilization. It is a long-term task of the State to develop the PST undertaking.
The State supports efforts for PST made by people in minority ethnic areas and in outlying and poverty-stricken areas.

Article 5
The State protects the lawful rights and interests of the PST organizations and workers, encourage them to carry out PST activities independently, and initiate PST undertakings according to law.

Article 6
   The State supports all quarters of society to initiate PST undertakings. Such undertakings may be operated under market mechanism.

Article 7
Work for PST shall be characterized by mass participation, socialization and regularity and shall be integrated with practice and carried out in light of local conditions, and take various forms.

Article 8
In PST, the scientific spirit shall be upheld and pseudo shall be opposed and resisted. No unit or individual may, in the name of PST, engage in activities at the expense of public interests.

Article 9
The State supports and promotes cooperation and exchange with foreign countries in the field of PST.

Now, I'm no fancy city slicker Beijing lawyer, but by my count, The government blocking access to Google's services would seem to violate 6 or 7 of these Articles of Chinese Law, and violate the spirit of the Popularization of Science Technology Law in total.

The State supports all quarters of society to initiate PST undertakings. Such undertakings may be operated under market mechanism.

No Thanks, Chinese citizens don't need the customers sent by Google search or the information found by same. Nor are they secure enough in their national loyalties to view random blogs ranging from technology sites like this one to the weekly habits or fern growers. The people of China cannot be exposed to unfiltered YouTube videos of teen Lady Gaga impersonators and clips of cats and puppies falling asleep.

Citizens have the right to participate in PST activities.

Or do they?

Can you say World Trade Organization? I bet Google can.

No, no, no, the government of China must actively protect its citizenry. Apparently by blocking foreign websites wholesale without regard for actual content.

"Online opinion exchanges are very active in China and e-commerce grows rapidly here. As facts have demonstrated, the environment for Internet investment and development in China is sound," Xinhua

I wonder how much of that exchange of opinion and commerce runs through a Google server at some point in the transaction? Every Chinese language web page that I have ever even remotely understood was translated by Google, and although my count may be higher than most, I'd bet that experience is typical. On this side of the wall, Google facilitates commerce into China. With it's immense population, an increasingly upwardly mobile consumer base, China is as important to Google as Google is to the Chinese people.

As a citizen, I would be vary wary of my government, if it actively tried to block access to the biggest bridge to the global marketplace. But hey, who knows, perhaps the Chinese people appreciate the way their leaders protect them from the rest of us.

If the government of China is to censor me from its people without cause (not cool, China, not cool), the least I could do was to offer my "Lively Online Opinion" on this action.

There is an interesting, but distracting side story with accusations of international espionage, cyber targeting of Human Rights Activists, privacy intrusions, and other high technology skulduggery. China of course denies this fully and completely.

Rather than get bogged down in the details, I suggest we all just wait for the inevitable movie. Somebody call Matt Damon. I was more interested in how the
Chinese people feel about this turn of events. Any of you digital gold farming, boot selling spammers care to comment?

MrCopilot

In the spirit of the Season

noreply@blogger.com (MrCopilot) — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 11:30:00 -0800

I want to say thank you.

I want to say thank you to all the people of the world who contributed to the following efforts, without ever having even met me.

My Employment: Tools that make my job not only easier and more productive but honestly, possible at all.

My Entertainment: Continuing to make it accessible and affordable.

My Curiosity and Education: The ever expanding index of knowledge accessible at my fingertips.

My Creative Outlet: Tools and infrastructure to give any human the ability to broadcast to the world whatever they want.

To list them individually by name, this post would quickly be the focus of the entire blog. Although not a bad idea, (mental note....) So keep in mind, if I leave you out. Thanks.

Richard, Lawrence, Linus, Bruce and Eric, Sergey, Larry, and Eric, Mathias, Aaron.
TO all of you who use, develop, report bugs for, write articles, criticize and praise open source projects like KDE, Debian, Linux, Busybox, Ant, Apache, Ruby, GNU anything;
To all the trolls in Europe, and the Ubuntu groups from here to S Africa, To the Podcasters and Support Sites and Forums, To all the managers, who after being shown, recognize not only the value and cost savings, but also the efficiency gained by having access to the source and documentation and a community. I even want to thank Big old blue, IBM and it's new generation of software engineers freed from the shackles and limitations of the previous model.

In the spirit of the season I want to also thank Microsoft, Thank You for showing me the error of my ways. And Kudos to you for making a nice tidy bundle in the process. Specifically thank you Bill. Thanks for leaving us Steve. Its almost as if you wanted to make the transition easier.

I want to thank you the consumer for choosing your devices based on their functionality and ease of use rather than their Operating System Developer.

So once again, on behalf of myself, my employer and my family:

Thanks to all of you, and have a Happy Thanksgiving.

In the spirit of the coming season, I have something I'd like to give to all of you, but not today. In the coming weeks I will be unveiling it. Please stand by,

MrCopilot.com

Les Paul, Legendary Life ends at 94

noreply@blogger.com (MrCopilot) — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 17:43:00 -0700

Legend of Rock and Roll, Inventor and father of the sweetest sounds of Rock, Les Paul died on Wednesday at the age of 94.

Rolling Stone Coverage

Thank You sir.

Clapton, In Your Honor, on your instrument in 64....

Twitter facebook outage plot thickens, wait, there was and nobody could tweet?

noreply@blogger.com (MrCopilot) — Thu, 6 Aug 2009 19:43:00 -0700

Quote of the day goes to LeetLuXX0rz a commment on the contuing saga of twitdown 2009.

by L33tLuXX0rz August 6, 2009 5:16 PM PDT
That is quite intense to just target one person. But I guess we can say that although millions of people experience discomfort Im quite sure these were some of the most productive hours some people experienced since joining the social media revolution.

Actually, theres quite a few choice quotes in the actual article particularly the one from google.

A Google spokesman offered this statement: "We are aware that a handful of non-Google sites were impacted by a DOS attack this morning, and are in contact with some affected companies to help investigate this attack. Google systems prevented substantive impact to our services."

Nissan sees a futire in Zero Emmision Vehicle

noreply@blogger.com (MrCopilot) — Sun, 2 Aug 2009 12:01:00 -0700

After lagging behind the rest of the automotive industry for the last few years, Nissan has finally jumped on the bandwagon, and turned over a new L eaf.

Capitalizing on it's partnership with Renault, Nissan announced their Zero Emission all electric production vehicle dubbed the Leaf scheduled to hit selected U.S. markets in 2010.

Although no pricing is yet available, Nissan claims the MSRP will be in the range of the average V6. While most manufacturers are charging a premium for their electric vehicles, Nissan is considering a leasing arrangement for the expensive battery technology. While the consumer owns the car, Nissan would lease the battery components, effectively rendering the normal economic advantage of not having to pay at the pump a moot point. The added benefit being, when the battery has reached end of life (typically around 10yrs), Nissan would still be responsible as long as the lease is still in effect. I imagine this would give them maximum flexibilty to take advantage of cost savings over time and keeping the (ever more profitable) lease agreement in place.

Nissan claims cooperation with local governments to help build the education and infrastructure required for charging and maintenance of all electric vehicles.

Nissan looks at this car as the stepping off point to an everyday commuter EV not just another expensive toy. With nearly 100 mile range, and a 30 minute charge time, a ton of gadget friendly technology, combined with their possible leasing scheme, could this be THE EV to rule them all?

We'll let you know in 2010.

For more info check out Nissan's Leaf WebSite where they are utilizing twitter technology to answer user questions. Something I've not seen before.

Update: Gas2Go has some more pics and in depth Info, thanks Nick.

Note to Apple, RE Google Voice & iPhone

noreply@blogger.com (MrCopilot) — Sat, 1 Aug 2009 17:32:00 -0700

Mr Jobs,

As you must no doubt be aware, Google has submitted their Google Voice application for inclusion in your beloved App store, with hopes of taking up a small square of real estate on the most popular tech toy since the invention of the mouse.

Word on the street is that, in your infinite wisdom, you have chosen to reject this application, and I'm sure you have your reasons. Competing functions, network bandwidth considerations, I'm sure they are very similar to the reasons not given for the initial rejection of Skype on the iPhone.

It is well known that you were out of office for extended periods over the last 18 months. I wonder if you had time to watch any of the political coverage as you were recovering.

It would seem impossible, that you were unaware that one of the lead technical advisers to the current administration was one Eric Schmidt, Google Chief Executive and Apple Board Member. Given this fact, one would think that Apple would think twice before tweaking the nose one of it's own board member in such a transparently anti-competitive manner.

Google makes a phone OS as well, as I am sure you know, but not content to offer their services to their brethren only, The Google Voice application for iPhone was developed at some expense to Google, and offered up for use on your platform as well as some other not so picky handsets. Clearly a cum baya moment if ever there was one.

Even as the tech world is now is scrambling to cover the fallout from your decision, the mention of Mr Schmidt's association has not even come up. Odd that, it would seem an obvious line of journalistic investigation.

One well placed phone call from Google's Chief Executive and the questions would start flying. But perhaps I am jumping to conclusions here. There is, of course, no direct evidence that the aforementioned phone call ever took place, It could be that the FCC was just reading the news, and saw a problem for the public and is acting proactively to ensure and foster fair competition. Yeah, that sounds like a government organization.

Whatever the reason, the FCC has, in fact, decided this whole situation is worth a look-see. The finger pointing on whose call it was to deny this little square to Google has already begun. Some point at AT&T, while AT&T is pointing squarely back at Apple.

AT&T does not manage or approve applications for the App Store. We have received the letter and will, of course, respond to it.Customers can use any compatible GSM phone on our network, not just the ones we?ve approved and sell. And they also can use apps we don?t approve. We don?t approve iPhone applications.

Seems pretty cut and dry. Except that Apple has a responsibility to it's carrier partners to deny any app that will negatively impact the carrier's network or business model. An argument could be made, and indeed has been made, that Apple was just honoring this agreement (Which we are not privy to the text of).

So in closing, Steve, if I may call you Steve, what gives here?
Where is the legendary foresight? (Not seeing the inevitability of Govt intervention.)
Where is the visionary thinking? (If the carrier can't compete with VOIP that is their problem)

Where is your responsibility to your customers on this?

Meanwhile Google is not content to stand idly by.

"We work hard to bring Google applications to a number of mobile platforms, including the iPhone. Apple Inc. did not approve the Google Voice application we submitted six weeks ago to the Apple App Store. We will continue to work to bring our services to iPhone users - for example, by taking advantage of advances in mobile browsers."

Translation: It's coming whether you or At&T like it or not, so why the runaround? Maybe your hope is just to cripple it in the same way as Lattitude.

Thanks for listening,
MrCopilot

Dear Mr President.

noreply@blogger.com (MrCopilot) — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 13:53:00 -0700

To the Office of President Barack H. Obama:
Submitted through the White House Office of Public Liason

I have been researching the development of transportation transformation from fossil fuels to renewable energy for some time now.

As I am sure the administration is aware, governmental incentives do spurn consumer interest and capital investments.

Given the problems facing the American auto industry and the massive amount of on the road "dirty" vehicles, has the administration considered any policy to incentivize conversion of existing vehicles to electric or hybrid technology?

It would seem logical to assume the new energy economy development costs to the auto industry could be reduced by creating and offering to the public "engine" technology that mates with standard proven drive train, braking and chassis designs. This development would help ensure the jobs of many of the American auto workers and suppliers.

As dealerships are cut, so are jobs cut in the auto repair and maintenance shop in the back.

If the the government in conjunction with the major American auto companies would invest in this type of retro-greening technology, a significant revenue stream could be realized for the participating companies with the added benefit of reducing both our carbon emissions and dependence on foreign oil.

In all the debates on these issues I have heard nothing to address the current number of vehicles on the road.

As many enthusiasts around the country will attest not only can this be done, it is actively being done. Their only question is, "Why wouldn't the auto industry and government like to be involved?".

Environmental researchers, Electrical engineers, Consumers and Laid off mechanics would all surely agree this would be a positive initiative.

To reiterate the specific question:
Has the administration considered any policies to incentivize conversion of existing vehicles to electric or hybrid technology?

Thank You, you may view this annotated and with public comments at http://mrcopilot.blogspot.com/2009/03/dear-mr-president.html

Bill Gates unleashes Bugs, No kidding.

noreply@blogger.com (MrCopilot) — Thu, 5 Feb 2009 21:53:00 -0800

True to his nature, Microsoft founder unleashed an untold number of Bugs on the giants of technology during his talk at the TED conference.

This time he could confidently assure conference attendees that the bugs carried no virus.
Yes Malaria, these bugs were a swarm of mosquitoes.

That's about all I want to contribute to besmirching Mr Gates in regards to raising awareness of the problems of Malaria.

But feel free to add your own captions to the picture in my head of Bill releasing bugs.

Here are the first few that came immediately to mind.

"I know, Bugs, Bill Gates, who'd a thunk it?"

"Relax, they're features."

"We'll take care of these with the next service pack"

-MrCopilot