Imagine my surprise when a simple exchange last night — asking if anyone had an affiliate link I could follow for a registrar, and replying to two colleagues (@timsegraves and @travisberry) who recommended name.com, that my simple tweet saying “thanks, I’ll check out @namedotcom” – would turn into this unexpected summary of me and my skills from name.com: (read them in reverse order)

Don’t think I’ve ever seen a company try so hard to win over a customer. Maybe I should hit them up for a discount, since I’ll be moving several dozen domain names from GoDaddy this week…

Only a few days later, at the time of this writing, there are 31,516 backers (there were only 31,497 when I started writing the sentences above, that’s how quickly people are jumping on this!), and they’ve passed $4.5M in pledged funding, an average of $144 per pledge. It was interesting to read last night how Eric and his team went through the Y Combinator program to get started, but then fell flat on funding because none of the VC’s wanted to back a hardware project. Were those on the VC panel out of touch, or do they see something that 31,000 other people haven’t seen yet regarding the success? Or are they all kicking themselves for not funding this themselves after all?

The Pebble just makes sense. It has a lot of simple features, and none of the overbearing things that Sony or Motorola have had to overcome. Here are a few thoughts on why I backed the project:

Battery Life
A simple e-ink display should last “7+ days” according to the developers. Frankly, I’m used to replacing a watch battery every year or so, and my current Casio watches are actually solar powered and may never need a new battery. While it’ll take some getting used to plugging in a watch to charge it, doing so once a week is not prohibitive.

Simple OS stack
According to the project notes I’ve read, they’re using a low-footprint real-time OS. Their previous project, inPulse, uses FreeRTOS, and their SDK will be a simple C-based development environment similar to programming for Arduino. Frankly, I’m not interested in having a full Android stack on a watch. If you look at devices by Sony, Motorola and imWatch, you’ll see how thick they are, some of them are half an inch thick. And all of them, if I’ve read their notes properly, may last up to 24 hours on a charge.

Simple UI: buttons
I don’t need a touch screen on my watch. It would add unnecessary complexity to the OS, expense on production, and really isn’t needed. The Pebble is meant to be a simple device. I’m happy with a 4-button control system.

Style
I’m not that into fashion. I could give a rip about the multiple colors they produce. I’ll take the full black Pebble happily. But the Pebble design seems both modern and elegant at the same time. Simple is better.

I’m *really* looking forward to the Pebble. It’s a simple device, and that’s all a watch really needs to be. I don’t need a Dick Tracy device — my phone is a better tool for playing music, replying to SMS/Email, etc. All my watch needs to do is tell me the time, and display high priority notifications.

The enormous backing of the project clearly shows that there’s a market for smartwatches of some degree. I passed on the Sony and Motorola models, as well as the i’mWatch which I saw at Google IO last year, because I don’t believe a watch needs to run a full Android stack to be functional. If I’m going to reply to a text, I’ll use the phone itself; I don’t intend to listen to music from a watch; I don’t need games, etc., on the watch. I need it to tell me the time, it needs to keep good time without needing constant synchronization, and needs to have basic watch functions like an alarm and stopwatch. Everything else is candy.

My biggest requirement in a watch, frankly, is that it stays synced with NTP, which my Android phone handles for me, so updating the watch itself with a new time periodically to correct for drift is the biggest thing for me. And using it as a vibrating alarm clock instead of an obnoxious beeping alarm would be far better for me in the mornings. And if I have to charge the watch one night a week instead of wearing it to bed, then hey, that’s the morning I sleep in.

There are certainly trade offs with such a simple RTOS design, instead of a full Android stack, of course. Would it be handy to have full apps? I suppose it depends on the app, but I don’t envision myself reading Tweetdeck or doing web browsing or playing Crush The Castle on a 144×168 pixel screen. Trying to be “all things to all people” is why Sony, Motorola and imWatch have to charge outrageous money for their devices (granted, Sony recently put their device on sale for about $120, I wonder if in response to Pebble). The flip side is that chances are good that I’ll have to write apps both for the Pebble *and* Android to keep things sync’d between my devices.

When the project hit $1M in funding, they decided to make a design change and make the device waterproof. At $2M they announced that everyone would get access to the SDK early. At $3M they teased us that more news would be coming soon, and they pinged everyone again to let us know they are officially the most funded project on Kickstarter. Now that they’re up to $4.5M, it’ll be interesting to see what other changes they make.

How would I spend their money? Glad you asked.

Lots of people are asking for Bluetooth 4.0 which would give the Pebble far more reach in the market than restricting it to iOS and Android only. The team has even said they can’t support WP7 because WP7 doesn’t support the necessary Bluetooth functionality. That sounds fishy to me. BT4 would make the Pebble more generic for sending/receiving information.

Inductive charging would be amazing, but I imagine the batteries aren’t small enough to be practical.

Personally, I’d love to see them change to a micro USB charging port instead of their planned proprietary plug. In this day and age, it doesn’t make sense to spend money developing and maintaining proprietary plugs any more.

I’d love to be a beta tester for their SDK and Emulator to get a jump start on apps. Releasing the SDK in August for a September release will make developers feel rushed.

And I’d love to hear that they have plans for a marketplace for other watch bands (though they claim any 22mm watch band will fit). I’d love to hear more plans for their marketplace for downloading/buying apps for the watch.

And finally, I’d love for them to explain what the two metal contacts on the lower left edge of the Pebble are going to be used for. And to tell us how thick they expect the device will be.

(by the time I finished writing this, Pebble’s backers are up +200 to 31,706 in the time it took to write this simple blog article)

Update, April 19, 2012:
It seems that Google isn't showing my user review on the app. At best, they're holding it for human eyes to review since it was both a 1-star review and contained a URL back to this blog post. At worst, they mark those comments as spam so only the author of the comment can see it. Here's a screenshot of my comment:

At work, I'm the permanent scrum-master for my team, and was looking for tools that would help semi-automate the process, or at least provide a better way of taking notes to share with other teams than writing on a notepad and typing it up on my system afterward. Elmer was always much better at this using some tool that would generate nice notes based on markdown.

Scrum Master Assistant, on the surface, looks like a great tool. You can set up multiple kinds of meetings, add participants, add notes, new issues, it even has a timer so you can track who's a chatterbox during scrum to keep things running quickly and smoothly. They've recently added a "publish to Google Docs" feature which makes a pretty neat spreadsheet. I figured I'd test it out before our actual scrum meeting and could NOT believe what I saw.

In the settings, I had already told the app which Google account to use for publishing to Google Docs:

When you publish to Google Docs for the first time, the app prompts you for permission, which I would have expected:

A second prompt asked for access to Google Spreadsheets, which I also allowed.

Once published, I logged into Google Docs, and saw that the spreadsheet for my sample meeting, where I was the only attendee, had sharing permissions set to "only the people listed below" but to my horror saw that the app developer added THEMSELF as a shared person on the document. If that wasn't bad enough, they added themselves as an EDITOR to the document:

I couldn't believe that the developer would pull such a blatant move. I immediately left feedback on Google Play and uninstalled the app. Then I reinstalled it to grab screenshots.

When you install the app, it tells you about the following permissions:

• modify/delete USB storage
• take pictures and videos
• full internet access
• act as an account authenticator, use the authentication credentials of an account
• read contact data
• view network state
• discover known accounts

On the surface, those permissions seem fine, given the published list of features of the application. Namely, it would use your contacts to add people to meetings, it could take a picture of who was at the meeting, needs Internet access to publish notes online, and needs access to your Google account to push to Google Docs. I suppose it needed access to your USB data in order to save notes to your device.

Version 1.3.3 of the app, published March 2, 2012, says it fixed a few defects and *removed* unnecessary user permissions. As of version 1.3.1, it said it was no long ad-supported yet maintains a full name of "Scrum Master Assistant (adware)", and added the Google Docs integration.

The Description of the app says this:

**** No Ads ****
**** Publish reports to Google Docs (Beta) ****
**** Adapted for tablets ****

The application will help Scrum Masters at daily Scrums to gather
impediments and help team members stay focused, restrict the meeting
duration to 15 minutes. Every meeting is immediately followed by a
scrum report with all the collected issues and meeting details to
show who was too talkative.

Features
- Meeting duration timer and timer for every participant to keep
  everyone focused on agenda
- Participant details, photo can be imported from Phone Contacts.
  Contacts can be synchronized with Google contacts
- A photo can be also captured using a phone camera or taken from
  a picture gallery
- Collected Action items, issues can be shared via Google Docs or
  sent as Excel report to e-mail

Key words: Agile tool, Scrums, Daily Scrum, Standup, Scrum Master,
Meetings, Meeting Notes, Meeting Minutes

There is NO notice anywhere within the app that tells you the dev is going to share every document with them. There's no disclosure of why they need access to USB storage.

How have no others users reported this yet??

Lessons that I think Google has learned since the Nexus One:

• Heavy phones weren’t as desirable. The Samsung Nexus S, Nexus S 4G and Galaxy Nexus are all plastic cases and quite light compared to HTC’s Nexus One and its metal case. Granted, the Nexus One “felt” like a substantial phone.
• Trackballs suck, but notification lights do not. The multi-color trackball on the Nexus One was great for notifications, but in the year I had the phone, I almost never used it. On the Nexus S, I don’t miss the trackball, but miss the notification light. Thankfully the Galaxy Nexus will have a notification light but I haven’t heard anywhere if it’s multi-colored or not.
• Curved glass is nice. Yeah, maybe it feels better holding it to my face, but honestly, I haven’t seen other manufacturers step up on this one. Obviously not a *necessary* ground-breaking move by Samsung.
• SD cards are so last year. While I was initially annoyed by the lack of SD card in my Nexus S, I get along fine without it. I have an rsync tool that I use to sync my phone wirelessly with a NAS drive at home. The Galaxy Nexus will take the internal storage one step further by removing all partitioning. The downside is that Linux and Mac users don’t have the “plug and play” capability over USB, but as long as my rsync tool keeps working, I won’t mind.
• NFC is the future. For now, anyway. The latest Facebook app update includes NFC capabilities, and I read more about NFC uses every day. I’ve used NFC on my Nexus S exactly once: at Google I/O in May 2011.
• Buying phones online was great for people with agoraphobia (fear of going outside), but it was too risky. The Nexus S was sold in Best Buy stores and later at Sprint stores with the Nexus S 4G revamp. The Galaxy Nexus sounds primed (no pun intended with the rumored device name) to sell at several carrier stores in the near future, as well as Best Buy and Radio Shack.

Knowing all of that, and the latest buzz around the Galaxy Nexus, I need to ask: Was Verizon really the best choice to launch the Galaxy Nexus?

When the Nexus One was released in January 2010, it launched on T-Mobile with 3G capabilities but you could only buy it online, which was risky, and was a solid phone. Rumors of having it on all 4 of the major US carriers flourished, but only AT&T picked it up, and it was quite a while after launch. Verizon and Sprint eventually admitted they weren’t going to carry the device. In December 2010, the Nexus S was released, and again only a T-Mobile version was launched; Sprint picked it up half a year later.

Verizon, aka “Big Red” has had a lot of news coverage about blocking tethering apps, installing permanent bloatware, and then it leaked that they were installing a few apps on the Galaxy Nexus, which is supposed to be entirely free of Carrier applications. I read a lot of “quit whining, it’s only 2 apps” on Engadget, but the truth is that this device wasn’t supposed to have ANY. Over the past few days, it was announced that Verizon and Google were at odds about Google Wallet on the Galaxy Nexus, and today the news broke that Verizon broke some federal rules about the spectrum deal from a few years ago when they blocked Google Wallet from working.

I was quick to criticize Google a few days ago over letting Verizon stipulate the terms of what is supposed to be a “pure” Android device, and that criticism still holds true for me. I don’t believe that Google should have to bow to anyone in that regard, and that the carriers need to just back off and let Google lead the charge. T-Mobile let them. Sprint let them. Yet Verizon is causing so many problems, it’s like they don’t WANT to release the device now.

Frankly, I was ready to pony up $300 of my dollars, plus a $50 ETF to T-Mobile, to switch my service to Verizon, plus pick up several of the accessories, but lately I’m regretting that decision and wondering whether to hold out for another carrier to carry the phone. If Sprint would allow the device on their network, I’d consider it, but not sure I’d want to stay with T-Mobile as they have poor coverage where I live. AT&T isn’t even an option. They’d have to give me the phone for free including cell/data if they ever want me back as a customer.

I know that Google has some sort of “bidding” process where handset manufacturers compete for the rights to build the next Nexus device, but I wonder whether they do the same for carriers, and whether someone’s legal team is going after Verizon over the many delays of this product.

Given the pentaband radio support in the Galaxy Nexus, would it make more sense to just sell an unlocked device where you got to choose your carrier based on the SIM you insert? Should I pick up a Canadian model over the holidays and see which GSM carrier to use?

My natural instinct was to look for a Perl cmdline regex parser, which works great if you're manipulating a file and not shell variables.

In the end, since he only needed a simple search and replace, and not an actual regular express, this suffices:

#!/bin/bash
VAR1="foobar"
VAR2=`echo $VAR1 | awk -v srch="foo" -v repl="bar" \
   '{ sub(srch,repl,$0); print $0 }'`
echo $VAR1
echo $VAR2

W: GPG error: http://ppa.launchpad.net natty Release: The following
signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not
available: NO_PUBKEY 751A20CF523884B2

Here's how to fix any NO_PUBKEY error in two simple steps:

$ gpg --recv-keys 751A20CF523884B2
gpg: requesting key 523884B2 from hkp server keys.gnupg.net
gpg: /home/id/.gnupg/trustdb.gpg: trustdb created
gpg: key 523884B2: public key "Launchpad PPA for Diodon Team"
imported
gpg: Total number processed: 1
gpg:               imported: 1  (RSA: 1)

$ gpg --armor --export 751A20CF523884B2 | sudo apt-key add -
OK

$ sudo apt-get upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages will be upgraded:
  diodon
1 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 55.4 kB of archives.
After this operation, 115 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y

While I'm always interested in running apps "in the cloud" (and we seriously need a new term for that), I'm not sure if I want to get into Java programming just yet. I remember attending an introductory "This is Java, this is how it'll change the world" evening session with some coworkers from QNX back in late 1996, but I guess I've always enjoyed the rapid development cycle of scripted languages because I can make fast changes to code for testing without having to stop and compile anything.

I'm currently in the process of moving a client from a built-by-me e-commerce buying portal to OScommerce because I have too much on my plate already to rebuild his inventory/sales system from scratch. I was hoping to have had the time/energy to rewrite the catalog system in Python and move him to G.A.E., but his needs outpaced my available freelance development time.

What boggles my mind, however, is that Amazon has an Android-compatible Kindle app, yet no native Linux app. Since I'm much more comfortable doing development in Linux, I needed a way to read my Kindle book via Linux so I didn't have to squint at the 4" screen of my Nexus S in order to read. Perhaps Google IO next week will surprise me with a free tablet, but I'm not holding my breath.

Wine 1.3.x to the rescue. While it's not the 'stable' release for Ubuntu (at work) or Gentoo (on the laptop), it will allow you to run Amazon's PC application which is a free download. And it works very well. Everything sync's up just fine, but I'm still disappointed that Amazon, who seems to love Linux for their EC2 platform and other AWS services, would forego a native Kindle app.

1. Open Google Calendar
2. Add a new calendar if you want the sessions in a separate calendar, then go back to your main Google Calendar display
3. Click the "Add" link at the bottom left, the one with the down-arrow icon, select "import calendar" from the submenu
4. Select the file from your local computer, and choose the calendar you wish to import into.

Here's the other post I wrote a few days ago with some auto-generated CSV's you can use to sort/scan for your favorite sessions.

See you at Google IO!

One of my favorite features about World of Warcraft was the bittorrent client in their upgrade/installer software, allowing you to download patches in a fraction of the time. I don't understand why Ubuntu's installer can't parallelize the download process to use more of my available bandwidth by downloading from other sources.

@jeffthms: Session times and locations are hidden, just view the source of the session page to see them - http://bit.ly/gAkyah #io2011

... which is correct. View the source, look at the 'noscript' tag for where the div tags are rendered, and voila, you see the day/time/room of every session.

So after some quick parsing during a coffee break this afternoon, here's a CSV file for everyone. Sort it however you want.

Update: April 28, 9am
The CSV file is now auto-generated when you click the link below, but only if I can scrape the dates/times from the Google IO "Sessions" page. If scraping fails, you'll get an old copy.

download: google io session schedule (google.csv, ~48kb)

Update: April 28, 6pm
Google released a public schedule today, but their schedule doesn't specify rooms, or 'level' (101, 201, 301) of the sessions, so I reworked my scraper to build a better schedule.

download: google io session grid by track/level/times (google2.csv, ~8kb)
 
 

Let me back up a little.

I like T-Mobile. Let's make that clear. Their service is decent, call quality is good, and their Android phone selection is pretty great. And the fact that their spokeswoman, Carly, is also Canadian, y'know, just icing on the cake.

What they DON'T do well, however, is handle customer service when it comes to insurance.

Backing up a little more: in early 2010, my wife and I switched from AT&T to T-Mobile after several years of AT&T "service". Or, as some might call it, "serv..hello? hello?" I got the HTC Nexus One as my first Android device, and my wife got a Motorola Cliq because she needs a physical keyboard on her phone. Over the years, we've both been using Google services more and more, and the idea of sharing a calendar directly on our phones was extremely appealing. Unfortunately (for her), the Cliq was already close to end of life (EOL) but T-Mobile never told her that. They also sold her a $5/month insurance policy against loss/damage. A month later, she needed to get her Cliq replaced because the touch screen wasn't responsive. A few months later, she lost it, and T-Mobile told her to go through the insurance group, Assurion, to get a replacement. Assurion sent her a refurbished model with a broken keyboard. They replaced *that* one with one with another unresponsive touch screen. Finally, they had one that sorta-kinda worked, but the Android 2.1 update was just coming out and then her newest replacement phone started having serious lag/responsiveness issues.

We called T-Mobile, who told us that because THEY hadn't replaced the phones, they could only exchange the phone at a store for another refurbished unit, and that they'd have to replace it in-store three times within 90 days to warranty getting an entirely different phone, but that they got to choose the model and couldn't guarantee it would have a keyboard. Or even be an Android phone. We tried in vain to argue with the customer service rep about how Assurion was sending out bad replacements, and they told us they couldn't do anything about that, and the replacement phones given through Assurion didn't count towards T-Mobiles 3-in-90-days replacement guarantee.

So why the heck were we paying T-Mobile $5 a month for insurance if they weren't counting those replacements?!

Bewildered, we gave up trying to argue our point. I tried to convince my wife at Christmas to let me get her a new phone. I had already written a review for Sprint's Epic 4G for AndroidPolice.com in August 2010, but she didn't want to spend the money at Christmas. Thankfully, Sprint ran a special through March and April this year where porting your number to Sprint with a new contract would give you a $125 credit to offset any ETF fee. Since her ETF with T-Mobile after one year was now only $100, we actually came out money ahead in that regard. So, we got her the Epic 4G, and she loves the AMOLED screen and the bigger keyboard. Now if we could only get Froyo/Gingerbread on there for her without rooting it and going to CM 7...

Update: April 27: Speculation is that since Sprint is launching their Nexus S 4G on Mother's Day, May 8th, and Google IO is on the 10th, that maybe Google will be giving away the Nexus S 4G at IO2011. If that's the case, I might offload my T-Mobile phone, too, and switch to Sprint. If that IS the giveaway, and if it comes with 30 days of free service like the giveaways last year, it'll give me some time to see whether the Sprint version has better coverage than T-Mobile at home and office.

I figured writing occasional sponsored blog articles would give me some extra Starbucks money here and there, and after talking to "Melissa", and telling her why I'd left (I was flooded by irrelevant advertising ideas like lawnmowers) and what I'd need to make it worth my while, she reactivated my account, at which point their system sent me an Email:

I was stunned. Either they'd stored my password in plaintext, or they'd stored it using an encryption algorithm, both of which are a Bad Thing™. If their systems are compromised, your passwords are either immediately readable by the attackers, or they can see which encryption scheme is used and how to decrypt them.

I wrote Melissa a scathing letter telling her that her development team needed to adhere to industry best practices of using hash/salt setups, and while waiting for her reply which never came, I got an Email from them saying I had a new advertisement to blog about: nurse uniforms.

Thankfully, LastPass generates lovely 40-byte passwords for me full of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and punctuation (I couldn't tell you my Amazon password if you held a gun to my head), so I immediately logged into the blogsvertise.com web site, edited my profile, and changed my password to some random 40-byte password which I didn't save in my LastPass vault, so even if/when their systems get compromised, I won't ever have to care that someone knows one of my passwords.

I'm looking forward to attending some of the OAuth2/OpenID sessions at Google IO to hear more about third-party authentication schemes so I don't have to register with so many other services for things.

Then again, if blogging actually paid anything worthwhile in terms of advertising, I wouldn't have even bothered with blogsvertise.com in the first place. Too bad The Rubicon Project kicked out all of their small publishers in late 2009, I was making decent money with them.]]> http://iandouglas.com/2011/04/12/how-not-to-be-secure-blogsvertise-com-stores-passwords-in-insecure-ways/feed/ 0 http://iandouglas.com/2011/04/11/installing-gentoo-on-the-dell-xps15-hopefully-itll-be-a-better-low-power-setup-than-ubuntuwin7/ http://iandouglas.com/2011/04/11/installing-gentoo-on-the-dell-xps15-hopefully-itll-be-a-better-low-power-setup-than-ubuntuwin7/#comments Tue, 12 Apr 2011 06:16:02 +0000 ian douglas http://twitter.com/iandouglas736/statuses/57688406985162752 Updated April 26

I've been trying off and on for a few weeks, as I have free time with work and family (now with two kids), to install Gentoo on my Dell XPS15 laptop. Until recently, I had gotten the OS installed, including grub, in a tri-boot Gnetoo/Ubuntu 10.10/Windows 7 configuration, and Gentoo was smart enough to start in text mode with the framebuffer on, so I got a full 1920x1080 with small text, and very little running in terms of services.

And while I've decided to install KDE on it (and finally got it working thanks to several tutorials I'll mention another time), I plan to keep the Gentoo setup mostly text-only as much as possible so it can be a (hopefully) very low-power setup. Even though I have the extended 9-cell battery, I'm curious whether I can maintain a full day of coding in vim, browsing in elinks, and using my phone for Email while at Google IO in May, without needing to swap the battery for the spare 9-cell.

There weren't many gotchas when it came to getting Gentoo installed, however it's important to note that with the i5 processor, just about everything inside the laptop is Intel-based (wireless, bluetooth, framebuffer graphics, etc), and having the Intel/Nvidia 'hybrid' graphics was challenge enough in Ubuntu to tell it not to run nvidia drivers.

Here are some placeholders for where I'll post my necessary configurations for anyone else attempting a Gentoo install on a similar rig:

• /usr/src/linux/.config
• /etc/X11/xorg.conf
• /etc/make.conf
• /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
• /etc/conf.d/net.wlan0

For what it's worth, WPA_supplicant works great for tethering from my Android phone, although I do need to issue an "/etc/init.d/net.wlan0 restart" whenever I need to switch wifi. Kind of a pain. I'll have to see if there's some auto-detection scheme to detect and change to another wifi setup if available. Obviously this is easy enough in KDE/etc, but I haven't found an easy way to do this via cmdline when in text mode.

http://interactive.nfb.ca/#/pinepoint

Having looked through it several times, I've found pictures of my dad, my sister and I, and several friends. The Hyrniuk brothers who were part of the project were my next door neighbors.

Here's Richard Cloutier's site: http://pinepointrevisited.homestead.com/Pine_Point.html Please forgive his crazy HTML layouts, etc., the guy has a disability which means he has to design and build the site using voice recognition software.

In the past, they handled my freelance business books, but I closed that down two years ago, and last year's tax prep bill was still $400 "just in case they missed anything..." Our tax prep representative this year had no good reason to explain why our bill was only $50 less, and told us we had to pay $350. "That's just what we charge." That bill ate up what little refund we actually got back from the state this year, and then some.

But $350, really? A couple of W-2's, no itemization, no stock sales, etc., we were *literally* in their office for 35 minutes (we got there 20 minutes early for the appointment).

Next year we'll use H&R Block or just buy TurboTax or something.

But I manually downloaded the leaked OTA, installed it, and then realized that whatever the update was, broke EVERY widget I had installed on my phone. Even widgets by Google. Every widget I had, had to be removed and replaced. In the grand scheme of things, this is an annoyance, but your average home user isn't going to be thrilled about this.

And after deleting them, I couldn't even long-press on the home screen to put them back. Turns out the phone was busy doing something else. I finally left the phone alone for several minutes and tried again, and only then would it let me re-add the widgets. But after putting them back, a reboot of my phone took several MINUTES (again) to reload the data. "My Coffee Card" widget loaded its data in 24 seconds, Latitude in 42 seconds, and all other widgets (including Google Calendar and Google Places) took 183 seconds once the phone had booted. The only fix for the 3-minute delay was reinstalling the programs that created those widgets (SimiClock, a Calendar widget I forget the name of, and a "folder" organizer app which lets me make folder widgets to store apps), then reconfigure them all, and then put all of the widgets back.

After several more reboots, the phone finally settled down, but what a hassle. I do understand that the first reboot after a ROM upgrade on an Android device will take much longer, but it *shouldn't* break widgets without telling the user ahead of time, and certainly shouldn't take a few hours of 4-minute reboot cycles (1 minute to boot to home screen, 3 minutes to load widget data) to clear up the problem.

The title on the FCC label schematics include the text "(Europe common)" so I speculate that this is just a European model. Maybe it has to clear the American FCC (Samsung filed the petition from their California offices) before going to the European counterpart? I don't know how that sort of thing works.

The Tx/Rx test report describes the device as an "850/1900 GSM/GPRS/EDGE/WCDMA/HSPA" device, using GSM850, GSM1900 and WCDMA1700, and a 2.4GHz WLAN interface. The actual text looks something like:

Tx Freq Range:

• 824.2 - 848.8 MHz (GSM850)
• 1850.20 - 1909.80 MHz (GSM1900)
• 1712.4 - 1752.5 MHz (WCDMA1700)
• 2400 - 2483.5 MHz (WLAN)

Rx Freq Range:

• 869.2 - 893.8 MHz (GSM850)
• 1930.20 - 1989.80 MHz (GSM1900)
• 2112.4 - 2152.5 MHz (WCDMA1700)
• 2400 - 2483.5 MHz (WLAN)

And if we look back at the FCC data for the original Nexus S (GT-I9020-T) from late November, see see these transmit frequencies:

Tx Freq Range:

• 824.2 - 848.8 MHz (GSM850)
• 1850.20 - 1909.80 MHz (GSM1900)
• 1712.4 - 1752.5 MHz (AWS WCDMA)
• 2412 - 2462 MHz (WLAN) <---- slightly different than the i9023 up above

... but I couldn't find anything about the i9020T with regards to reception frequencies. But if it transmits on 1700, then it must receive on 2100 for the WCDMA1700 "band 4"

In short, seems to be the same device as far as radios go, so that should quash the rumor that this device is equipped with HSPA+ radios.

Just to be sure, and to compare it to a known 4G device, I took a quick peek at the Dell Streak 7's FCC report, and I saw transmit frequencies like this:

Tx Freq Range:

• 824.2 - 848.8 MHz (GSM850)
• 1850.20 - 1909.80 MHz (GSM1900)
• 1852.50-1907.60 (WCDMA1900, Band 2)
• 1712.4 - 1752.4 MHz (WCDMA 1700, Band 4)
• 826.40 - 846.60 (WCDMA850, Band 5)

My conclusion: if the Streak 7 can utilize T-Mobile's 4G, then it must do so on the WCDMA1900 Band 2 and WCDMA850 Band 5 frequencies to get the 4G speeds. If that's true, then the new Nexus S model i9023 may not be 4G after all.]]> http://iandouglas.com/2011/01/12/fcc-tests-new-nexus-s-model-i9023/feed/ 0 http://iandouglas.com/2011/01/11/is-this-another-gingerbread-bug/ http://iandouglas.com/2011/01/11/is-this-another-gingerbread-bug/#comments Wed, 12 Jan 2011 06:33:31 +0000 ian douglas http://twitter.com/iandouglas736/statuses/25077899480530944 Tonight, I installed Google Books for the fourth time on my Samsung Nexus S. I've never manually uninstalled it. In fact, whenever I see that there's an update for it available, I go to my app dock and sure enough, I see it listed as an installed app, I can open it and continue to read a free Sherlock Holmes novel where I last left off.

Is this another bug in Gingerbread, or is it a fault with Google Books?]]> http://iandouglas.com/2011/01/11/is-this-another-gingerbread-bug/feed/ 0 http://iandouglas.com/2011/01/11/new-android-market-client-finally-pushing-to-the-nexus-s/ http://iandouglas.com/2011/01/11/new-android-market-client-finally-pushing-to-the-nexus-s/#comments Wed, 12 Jan 2011 02:21:40 +0000 ian douglas http://twitter.com/iandouglas736/statuses/25014516660043776 Android Central reported tonight that the Nexus S was getting the new fancy Android App Market client. I've tried a *#*#checkin#*#* and several reboots, and I got nuthin'. Thank for getting my hopes up, guys.

I've had the new market on my Nexus One for a little while now, and frankly, it's not earth shattering by any means. Yeah, it's nice to look at, it's got a cleaner design to it, perhaps less "industrial" looking, but all in all, it still functions the same. Some of Android Central's users claim it runs slower on their devices, but I haven't noticed any speed difference on my Nexus One.]]> http://iandouglas.com/2011/01/11/new-android-market-client-finally-pushing-to-the-nexus-s/feed/ 0 http://iandouglas.com/2011/01/11/haproxy-wont-manage-multiple-ssl-enabled-sites/ http://iandouglas.com/2011/01/11/haproxy-wont-manage-multiple-ssl-enabled-sites/#comments Tue, 11 Jan 2011 19:14:40 +0000 ian douglas http://twitter.com/iandouglas736/statuses/24907061892489216 Well, it was worth a shot.

I spent some time at work over lunch trying to get HAProxy set up in such a way that we could have a wildcard SSL certificate on several Amazon EC2 instances, answering to different domains, and let HAProxy route the traffic accordingly.

Unfortunately, SSL certificates still appear to require separate IP addresses per host that you're securing. And since we can't assign multiple Elastic IP addresses to our HAProxy instance at Amazon, I'm at a bit of a loss for how to run a software proxy server to manage multiple secured domains. Larry and I each read about some work with stunnel, so we're going to look into that some more in the coming days, to see if interfacing that and HAProxy can solve our problem.

After lurking in IRC for a while, a user in #haproxy informed me that routing SSL traffic to a backend configuration required "mode tcp" but that setting TCP mode meant we wouldn't have access to certain ACL information, like the domain name on the incoming request, in order to know how to route traffic. If anyone has any suggestions, I'm happy to hear 'em.]]> http://iandouglas.com/2011/01/11/haproxy-wont-manage-multiple-ssl-enabled-sites/feed/ 1