Technobabble

HTML5Test: Safari on iPhone OS 4 Scores 134/160

2010-04-17T15:20:00.001-07:00

Safari on the iPhone OS 4.0 does much better than most browsers on the HTML5Test with a net score of 134/160.

Here’s the breakup of the test results with the failures:

Doctype – 4/4
Canvas – 12/12
Video – 25/30
- Ogg Theora codec support - No
Audio – 22/24
- Ogg Vorbis codec support - No
Geolocation 5/5
Storage – 8/8
Offline Web Application – 11/11
Workers – 0/6
- Web Workers - No
Section elements – 7/7
Grouping content elements – 2/2
Text-level semantic elements – 4/5
- time element - No
Forms – 22/27
- autocomplete input attribute – No
- keygen element – No
- output element – No
- progress element – No
- meter element - No
User Interaction – 12/19
- hidden attribute – No
- Undo manager - No

Safari on iPhone OS 4.0 Supports WebSocket

2010-04-16T11:57:00.001-07:00

Safari on iPhone OS 4.0 (build 8A230m) supports WebSocket. Here’s the output from the WebSocket test:

Yes, the browser still reports OS 3_1_2 even though the OS is really 4.0. The AppleWebKit version is newer than the iPad.

I was able to run a WebSocket test against Kaazing’s WebSocket Gateway.

James Gosling Quits Oracle

2010-04-12T08:46:00.001-07:00

James Gosling, the creator of Java has quit Oracle as of April 2nd this year. While his blog entry didn’t give any specific reasons, it is not a surprise by any means. Sun and Oracle have very different corporate cultures – one focused on employees and the other focused on the business. It was always going to be hard for Oracle to retain someone as free spirited as Gosling. I’m pretty sure he’ll be joining the rest of the Java gurus at Google. If that doesn’t go well, IBM perhaps. I hope he doesn’t even think about joining Neal Gafter.

IPEVO S0-20 WiFi Skype Phone

2010-02-25T19:31:00.001-08:00

My recent searches (see the December 2009 blog entry about the ASUS SV1TS) for a Skype phone replacement for the Netgear SPH200D brought me to IPEVO’s S0-20 wifi Skype phone. This is an all-in-one wifi phone from Taiwanese company IPEVO. It has a form factor of a regular cell phone and is extremely light-weight – just 80g including the 3.7V Li-ion rechargeable battery (rated at 900mAh)! The phone connects to 802.11 b/g networks.

After charging the battery initially for a few hours, the phone was a breeze to setup – walk through a few setup screens to choose and connect to the wifi network, and then sign-in to Skype. I was able to place my Skype test call in under one minute. The phone automatically downloads contacts as well account information. The phone charges in a cradle which comes with a 100-240V 50-60Hz charger, making it suitable for international use.

The phone can also be charged via mini-USB (USB cable not included in the package). IPEVO also provides periodic firmware updates which can be applied by putting the phone in a special mode and connecting it to a PC via USB. I was able to upgrade the firmware without a hitch but the process takes 18 minutes.

Call quality with the phone is excellent. The light weight and small form factor makes it an great phone to carry around, especially if one is in neighborhoods with free wifi. The phone is available at Amazon in a one-pack for $128.50 and a two-pack for $229.95.

Well worth the price and portability!

3D Fractals

2009-12-30T08:45:00.000-08:00

Ever wondered what intricate patterns might show up with a 3D rendering of the Mandelbrot set? Check out the Real 3D Mandelbrot Fractal. Here's a sample image with lots more, in high definition at the site:

ASUS Skype Video Phone Touch SV1TS

2009-12-25T12:05:00.001-08:00

The ASUS Skype Video Phone Touch SV1TS (Silver/Blue) is one of the newer Skype phones that brings PC-less video calls to Skype. It’s an all-in-one unit with a 7-inch 800x480 touch-screen display, built-in microphone, speaker, webcam, wifi and ethernet, and jacks for optional external headset. The phone also comes with a rechargeable battery pack.

The touch screen and menus made it a breeze to setup and start making calls in a couple of minutes. Audio quality is great but the video resolution leaves a lot to be desired. The complete package is also rather bulky, weighing in at 1.6 kg (about 3.5 lb) and at 25.3 cm (9.9 in) tall. The photographs of the phone don’t highlight this aspect but when seen in-person, the phone is definitely heavy and huge! One of the big disadvantages of this phone is the lack of portability compared to the cordless/wifi Skype handsets. Since the focus is on video calls, it can only be used a desk, making it unsuitable for causal home use as a replacement for a landline. The phone would have been a better package if it also included a cordless or wifi handset for non-video calls. After a few minutes of use, these disadvantages outweighed the cool-factor of the video and touch screen, and I had to return the phone.

Boxee + iPhone as Remote = Awesome!

2009-12-13T14:29:00.001-08:00

Boxee, in their own words, “… is a social media center. With Boxee you can play videos, music and pictures from your computer, local network, and the Internet. You can also share with your friends what albums you're listening to, what movies and TV shows you're watching, send recommendations and more.” Hooking up a computer running Boxee to a television is a great way to get access to tons of video and audio content from Hulu, Netflix, YouTube, BBC, Pandora and so on. Boxee’s got a lot of positive press lately. With the recent addition of the Boxee Remote application, the iPhone can now be used as a remote for Boxee via wi-fi. Here’s a video of the Boxee remote application in action:

End of Mininova

2009-11-26T19:39:00.001-08:00

Mininova has announced that they are limiting their activities to their Content Distribution service. All the copyrighted content has been scrubbed from the site. It’s time to thank Mininova and move on.

Does that mean no more Top Gear downloads? Well, not according to FinalGear who claim to be considering other options including RapidShare and MegaUpload.

Installing Ruby Gems via a Proxy

2009-10-05T09:49:00.000-07:00

On Linux, to install Ruby gems via a HTTP proxy. simply set the HTTP_PROXY (all upper case) environment variable to point to the proxy.

For example:

export HTTP_PROXY=http://my.proxy.server:port/
gem install sproutcore

Update: Brat points out that FTP_PROXY may also be required for FTP access. For example:

export FTP_PROXY=http://my.proxy.server:port/

SproutCore 1.0

2009-10-03T23:41:00.000-07:00

SproutCore is a HTML5 Application Framework written in JavaScript, that makes it easy to use HTML5 features across the browsers. At the Silicon Valley Code Camp this year, Charles Jolley from Sprout gave a great presentation about the features of SproutCore and did an excellent demo of a simple HTML5 ToDo app that runs using the Google App Engine. Seems like a very interesting framework to take advantage of HTML5.

Gentoo and KDE

2009-10-03T23:21:00.000-07:00

I've been using Gentoo since early 2003 and have generally been very regular (almost daily, at least weekly) with system updates using emerge. There was a period of time though when the system was on KDE 3.x and I didn't do any updates for several months. Eventually it took me a lot of effort to resolve dependencies and fix the blocked packages to go up to KDE 4.1. Being an old machine, I didn't do much on that system for the past 5 months. Now it seems like it's going to be very very difficult to any updates.

Running emerge -av kde-meta:4.3 give me a huge number of conflicts and blocked package:

Total: 290 packages (26 upgrades, 59 new, 205 in new slots, 228 uninstalls), Size of downloads: 556,992 kB
Conflict: 272 blocks (12 unsatisfied) ('installed', '/', 'x11-libs/qt-svg-4.5.0', 'nomerge') pulled in by
~x11-libs/qt-svg-4.5.0 required by ('installed', '/', 'x11-libs/qt-4.5.0', 'nomerge')

('ebuild', '/', 'x11-libs/qt-dbus-4.5.2', 'merge') pulled in by
>=x11-libs/qt-dbus-4.4.0:4 required by ('ebuild', '/', 'media-sound/phonon-4.4_pre20090520', 'merge')
x11-libs/qt-dbus:4 required by ('ebuild', '/', 'dev-libs/soprano-2.3.1', 'merge')
x11-libs/qt-dbus:4 required by ('installed', '/', 'app-misc/strigi-0.6.4', 'nomerge')
(and 2 more)

('ebuild', '/', 'x11-libs/qt-svg-4.5.2', 'merge') pulled in by
>=x11-libs/qt-svg-4.5.1:4 required by ('ebuild', '/', 'kde-base/kleopatra-4.3.1', 'merge')
>=x11-libs/qt-svg-4.5.1:4 required by ('ebuild', '/', 'kde-base/kwallet-4.3.1', 'merge')
>=x11-libs/qt-svg-4.5.1:4 required by ('ebuild', '/', 'kde-base/nepomuk-4.3.1', 'merge')
(and 232 more)
...

Gentoo systems have always had problems when upgrades are not done frequently but right now it looks like the system is un-upgradeable.

Any quick fix solutions here? I already run Kubuntu, Open SuSE and Enterprise Linux on other systems. So I'm aware of other common Linux distro choices but I'd like to get the Gentoo system back to the latest in Portage.

Reevaluating Google Sync

2009-08-16T11:27:00.001-07:00

I’ve been using Nuevasync for since late 2008 for syncing my Google Apps calendars to my iPhone. At the time, it was one of the few over-the-air syncing solutions for hooking up Google calendars (including Google Apps) to the iPhone. When Google came up with native Google Sync earlier this year, I evaluated it and found that Nuevasync was better. Since then, people have commented on my post about various improvements to Google Sync and it seemed like Google Sync was finally at the point where all my original issues had been fixed. So I had to try Google Sync again.

The steps to move to Google Sync were straightforward:

Backup the iPhone by syncing with iTunes.
Since I use Google Apps, I had to enable syncing for my domain.
Configure Google Sync on the iPhone per the instructions. I chose to delete all contacts and calendar data on the phone since my contacts were already being synced with Google Apps Contacts via iTunes.
I use multiple calendars on my Google Apps Calendar and this requires a weird configuration step via the mobile web interface!

With these changes, the Contacts and Calendar data started syncing over the air. I have Calendar data going back several years (migrated from old Palm to Google) and so it took about 45 minutes for the calendar data to arrive on the phone.

On the Calendar front, I have no issues. I can see multiple calendars. For the invitees on events, despite the iPhone calendar’s limitation, via Google’s hack, I can see attendee information.

On the Contacts front, I did lose birthday information again. However this is because the iTunes sync to Google Contacts doesn’t map the iPhone’s birthday field to Google’s. However for contacts where I had entered the birthday information in Google Contacts, the over-the-air sync did map them back to the iPhone. Contact pictures also sync but again, since the iTunes sync didn’t move them over to Google in the first place, I can only see what was in Google Contacts.

Overall, I’m pleased that Google has fixed the earlier issues and I’ll be using Google Sync full time.

AD-5526 Digital Multimeter

2009-07-26T06:55:00.001-07:00

The AD-5526 is an ancient multimeter from A&D but for $10 one can’t complain. Has all the basic features one would expect from a multimeter and at 5.2 cm X 9.5 cm X 2.6 cm, it’s quite compact. Uses a LRV08 12V alkaline battery – not a common battery in the USA.

Maldol MH-510 Antenna

2009-07-25T16:38:00.001-07:00

The Yaesu VX-8R FM transceiver comes with a stock antenna (YHA-65) consisting of the “Base Antenna” - recommended for operation above 50 MHz - and the “Extender Element” for frequencies below 50 MHz. With this antenna, I was receiving signals from only a couple of repeaters, and that too restricted to certain parts of my house. The N6NFI repeater (Frequency 145.230 MHz, Shift –600 KHz, PL 100 Hz) was the one with the best signal, and I could hear some nets like the SCARES weekly net, all on the 2m VHF band. I also had very little success transmitting indoors with the stock antenna. Outdoors, the transceiver worked pretty well with the stock antenna.

Having seen good reviews for the Maldol MH-510 antenna at eHam.net, I decided to give that a shot. The antenna is for 6m VHF, 2m VHF and 70cm UHF. It is 20.75” tall and is thin and flexible. Gain is advertised as 0/0/.32 dBi and the MH-510 can handle up to 10 watts. The antenna terminates to an SMA and fits directly with the VX-8R. With this antenna, I can actually receive quite a few 70cm UHF signals indoors. Definitely an improvement over the stock antenna! One obvious disadvantage though is that the antenna is quite tall and therefore not exactly suitable for a handheld radio; but that’s not much of an issue for indoor use.

Silicon Valley Code Camp V4

2009-06-22T12:37:00.000-07:00

Silicon Valley Code Camp V4 is on October 3rd and 4th 2009 at Foothill College. Register now and save the date! There are already 38 sessions covering a whole range of technologies and more to come as we get closer to the date.

Arduino: Problems With librxtxSerial.jnilib

2009-06-21T14:24:00.000-07:00

Recently the Arduino IDE installation refused to start on my Mac with the following exception:

uncaught exception in main method: java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: /Users/arun/arduino-0015/Arduio15.app/Contents/Resources/java/librxtxSerial.jnilib: no suitable image found. Did find: /Users/arun/arduino-0015/Arduino15.app/Contents/Resources/java/librxtxSerial.jnilib: no matching architecture in universal wrapper

Rather bizarre error and as far as I know, I hadn't mucked around with any settings. According to the Arduino forum it had something to with the Java version and suggested giving priority to Java 5 over Java 6. However this didn't work on my setup. Eventually I just downloaded the Java 6 compatible version of librxrxSerial.jnilib and replaced it in the package contents of the Arduino app. This fixed the problem.

Firefox 3.5

2009-06-19T08:36:00.000-07:00

iPhone OS 3.0 GM Seed

2009-06-11T21:28:00.001-07:00

Earlier this week Apple made available the iPhone OS 3.0 GM Seed (build 7A341). It's the best build to date. Compared to the previous build, E*Trade's Mobile Pro application now works without crashes. Apple have also implemented one of my feature requests - the ability to retain the order of application icons between restores. So this upgrade was the smoothest of them all.

Apple have also provided an iTunes redemption code to pre-test a version of AOL’s AIM that makes use of the push notification service.

In the iPhone’s Settings page, push notifications can be controlled globally as well as for individual apps:

TomTom for iPhone

2009-06-09T08:11:00.000-07:00

TomTom for the iPhone is finally here! Turn by turn navigation with voice, iPhone holder with enhanced GPS, hands free kit. It's been a long while since TomTom's original announcement but this should help the iPhone compete with Pre/Android.

Adobe AIR on 64-bit Linux - ArgumentError: Error #2004

2009-04-21T09:16:00.000-07:00

Adobe has detailed instructions on setting up AIR on 64-bit Linux systems. However they are missing the final step on actual installation of AIR applications. They put a rather unwieldy program under /usr/bin called "Adobe AIR Application Installer". Running this from the command line against any .air file produces this error message: unexpected error: ArgumentError: Error #2004 with no other explanation. Turns out that just running the installer ("Adobe AIR Application Installer") opens a GUI where one can select the .air file and then the installation goes through without problems. Perhaps the command line interface expects arguments in some undocumented syntax.

Oracle to buy Sun

2009-04-20T06:29:00.001-07:00

Just days after IBM dropped their bid for Sun, Oracle’s stepped in and is acquiring Sun for $7.4 billion in an all-cash deals. The deal brings together two of the four horsemen of the dotcom era. With the acquisition, Oracle gets a lot of pieces – Solaris, SPARC, Java, MySQL, NetBeans, GlassFish, Star Office, VirtualBox. Some of these are in direct competition with existing Oracle products and there’ll be some similarity to prior acquisitions where product lines go into long term support. I don’t see GlassFish replacing Weblogic though given the latter's widespread adoption. NetBeans is a lot nicer than JDeveloper and I hope that doesn’t die. Drizzle seems like the only viable way forward for MySQL. I wonder if Oracle will spin-off the hardware businesses post-acquisition. Perhaps a joint venture with HP to expand the Exadata line? In any case, it must be a good day for a Sun shareholder to finally exit one of the worst tech stocks in the S&P 500!

iPhone OS 3.0 beta 3 fixes YouTube bug

2009-04-15T06:51:00.001-07:00

The iPhone OS 3.0 beta 3 (build 7A280f) released yesterday fixes the YouTube bug that has been plaguing people who restored their OS 2.x based backups to their OS 3.0 phone. The bug prevented the YouTube application from connecting with the error “Cannot connect to YouTube”.

iPhone OS 3.0 Beta 2 Available

2009-04-04T19:13:00.001-07:00

The iPhone OS 3.0 beta 2 was made available on Apple Developer Connection earlier this week (March 31st 2009). The new version is build 7A259g. The usual backup-flash-restore-sync cycle worked without a hitch but I do wish Apple would save the arrangement of apps – the sync puts them back in alphabetical order. Here are my notes from some quick testing:

Beta 2 is definitely much more responsive. Apps load quickly unlike the sluggish beta 1. Typing is much faster. The copy rectangle is more responsive.
YouTube is still broken (restored from backup).
Skype works (on 3G) without a hitch. For some reason beta 1 had trouble on my phone.
Some apps like Appigo’s ToDo had issues with text not being visible (white text on white background) – that’s fixed as well.
The GPS errors (blue dot not showing location correctly) seem to have gone as well.

Miniatur Wunderland – World’s Largest Model Railway

2009-03-22T08:33:00.001-07:00

The Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg, Germany boasts the largest model railway exhibit in the world. They have about 800 model trains with over 10,000 railroad cars that run on about 10 km of track! The exhibit includes lots of computer controller road vehicles and ships as well. Here’s the official video (direct link):

iPhone OS 3.0 – Search

2009-03-21T07:28:00.001-07:00

With OS 3.0, the iPhone has finally caught up with one of the old features of Palm OS – the global find. In OS 3.0, in addition to the screens with application icons, there’s a search screen which searches a whole host of things – applications, contacts, calendar, mail, music, podcasts, etc. Here’s a screenshot of the search screen: There are some configuration options that control the behavior of the home button (via Settings | General | Home) including access to the search screen:

Search results can further be customized to include or exclude items and reorder them:

One caveat about the global mail search – it only searches the To/From/Subject fields of messages downloaded to the phone. The mail application has its own search screen too, which behaves the same way but it includes an option to search via the server (at which point search results depend on what the server provides):