So my Apple adventure ended yesterday. Five long months. I purchased a Sprint/HTC Hero yesterday. So far, there’s good and bad.

The Bad

It’s pretty buggy. Like the iPhone, the Hero has “virtual desktops” (to use a parlance I’m comfortable with, that’s not what they call them) but on the Hero each of the 7 desktops can be running what’s called a “widget” which is a smaller version of a given app. There’s a clock widget, a music playing widget, a browser bookmarks widget, twitter widget, etc. They’re good for info “at a glance” or whatever. You can also place application launchers on these desktops.

The configuration of these desktops, at least on the Hero, is called a “scene.” The phone ships with some scenes that are pre-populated and you can save scenes that you customize. Three or four times since I got the phone yesterday, my scene has completely disappeared leaving nothing on any of the desktops. Even one of the provided scenes (the HTC one) has lost its mojo and loads empty desktops when you load it. Not the end of the world, but pretty annoying.

Several times when doing text entry (mostly in the Marketplace) the text field I was editing would disappear as would the (not great) keyboard and I’d be back at the previous window with no obvious catalyst for this change.

The UI isn’t very responsive. It reminds me of our completely horrible DirecTV HD DVR, which will often take a long time to respond and when it does, it’s queued up every button you’ve pressed and does something you didn’t want because you thought it hadn’t seen your input. Same deal here. I find the “Phone” app really frustrating in that regard. I’ll try to hit the “make the dialer go away” icon and instead will click “Call” right next to it. What follows is a cycle of “OH CRAP END CALL…. END CALL…. END CALL… END CALL!!” only to have the phone see that as: end call, call, end call, call.

I’d read that the preview units were pretty sluggish and many of the video reviews demonstrated this by swiping around the desktops. I’d also read that the European version of the phone had some firmware update(s?) that addressed those issues. Those updates came out a while ago, so I figured that the US version of the phone likely had them. My phone has the most recent official firmware and I’m not ready to go unofficial anytime soon. It’s easy to blame sluggish performance on the problem I described above (queuing of events.)

Not that my iPhone (3G) had great performance, mind you. I finally got used to the fact that pulling the phone out of sleepyland and going into the SMS app would take 5 seconds of white-screen waiting.

The Hero supports Micro SD(hc) and the cards (as you’d expect) can be swapped with the phone up. You need to tell the phone to unmount the card, which I’m fine with. But, the Settings app is pretty clunky and it takes a while to find your way around to the menus you need for various tasks (this one included.) It also took me a while to figure out how to mount the SD card on a computer when the phone is connected via USB. You get a “notification” but the text wasn’t clear and I also didn’t know that clicking on notifications did cool stuff. Still beats the pants off the iPhone’s only supported method of connection: iTunes. Fucking iTunes. *spit*

I received the phone with about a 35% charge. I took it back to work and plugged it in via USB while fiddling with it thinking I’d be charging the phone. I didn’t gain much if any ground and later I found out why. Once I took it home and plugged it into my Lenovo a short while after messing with apps and so forth I got a message on the phone that said something like “The voltage from the power source is too low for current consumption. Please consider using the wall charger.” Wow! I was using more power than I was providing via USB. That was pretty surprising to me.

A friend has a G1 and he told me that he turns off WIFI and GPS in lieu of charging twice a day. I’d heard that the G1 didn’t have a great battery situation and that the Hero was better. I let the phone charge to 99% last night (wouldn’t go to 100) and I’ll leave everything turned on to see how the battery life is. I unplugged it 2hrs ago and it’s already at 87%, so I’m not hopeful.

On the iPhone, you’re protected from acci-dialing by the fact that there’s only one button (mac users aren’t too bright) and if the phone is asleep/locked and you press that button, you’re presented with a “swipe right to unlock” UI. The iPhone also has the option of a more complex “password” to keep unwanteds off your precious precious.

The Hero doesn’t seem to be able to lock without a more complex password. You can press the “hang up” button and the display will turn off. You can then press the Menu button and swipe down to get back to the phone’s UI. The sad part is that you can accomplish this same task by pressing Menu twice. If you carry your phone in your pocket like I do, that’s no good. I don’t want a more complex password because I like it that other people can get into my phone easily with a long explanation of how to enter a password. The guy at Sprint suggested that I could make my password be just like the iPhone non-password (just a swipe from left to right.) I don’t like that either because the user is presented with a password screen, not a screen that says “swipe left to right to use this damned phone!”

It’s entirely possible that the phone supports a non-password protected button-lock that I haven’t yet discovered in my less than 24hrs of owning the device.

When you first set up the device, it presents you with a bunch of social apps that it knows about (twitter, facespace, etc) among them is Gmail. I set up my Gmail during the initial setup and then when the phone was set up, I clicked the Email app and was presented with a choice of imap/pop or exchange. ??? Turns out there’s a separate Gmail app, but that wasn’t obvious.

Sadly, the Gmail app can only handle one Gmail account. I have an @gmail account, but I also use Google apps for my domains. Some of us also use Google Apps at work to avoid Exchange, and I can’t get to that either. Kind of a drag.

My work uses that atrocity Exchange and I wasn’t ever able to get my calendar to sync to it. It just said something like “Failed to create the account. Try again later.” Ah, later. Later is good. Maybe it was a Microsoft error.

Sprint bundled an NFL and a Nascar app that I can’t seem to delete. I hate having to see those icons.

The Good

Everyone else on the entire planet knew this, but I didn’t. When I bought an iPhone, I thought that I’d never ever pay for an app, but I was still curious about the applications. I went to install a free app, and was presented with a password dialog. What password? WTF are you talking about? Well I probably wrote all of this in my iPhone post, but here’s a quick recap: You need iTunes to use your fucking iPhone. You need it to set up a credit-card backed account that you can’t set up any other way… even if you only want to install free apps. When you do install an app, the AppStore app quits and you’re ejected to the apps menu so that you can watch your download progress.

In the Hero’s Marketplace app, you install free apps with no account. I’ve yet to purchase an app, so I don’t know how that works yet. What’s more, the Marketplace will tell you what “stuff” the app you’re installing has access to, saying that a given app will use the GPS or the network or hooks into how you make calls or SMS messages or whatever. It’s a nice touch. Further, when you click the install button, the phone tells you that your app is being downloaded in the background and you’re free to keep on shopping or do whatever you like. You know, what you’d expect in 2009.

Everyone knows that Apple is the king of multimedia. Everyone knows this, but it’s complete BS. I’ve made a few code-swarm/gource videos at work and my Mac-using co-workers always have trouble playing them. The guys using Linux never do.

I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to make a ringtone for the iPhone, but I feel sorry for you if you have. It’s a 652 step process that involves changing the extensions on files to “trick” fucking iTunes into letting you do something they’d much rather charge you for.

On the Hero, I can go to any music file on the device and with 3 clicks have it be the main phone ringtone. A couple more clicks and it’s a specific contact’s ring tone. It can also “crop” a song for a ringtone right on the device. I haven’t done that yet, but it’s there.

A reviewer I saw talking about the phone commented that it was much more “data oriented.” I have to agree. The Notifications area is spectacular. When I get a new email @gmail, the phone knows a few seconds later. When someone mentions me on Twitter, it lets me know. New IM’s, same deal. On the iPhone I’d have to launch each of those apps to know if there’s new data to be found for them. Short paragraph, but a big deal.

The phone synced my contacts from Google without me doing anything special. iPhone can do the same thing (although via iTunes! *SPIT*) Generally, the contacts handling on Hero is much nicer than the iPhone. The People app has an incremental search at the top. You can associate pictures from your photo albums to a contact. If you’re a Facebooker, you can see that person’s events. You can see a call history for a given contact and even email them and see emails from them.

This isn’t really the phone per se, but with Android, the users decide what’s a good app for the marketplace, not some evil corporation. There are also multiple marketplaces if that’s your thing. Maybe it means nothing to you, but having someone else decide what I can and can’t run on a device I own really bothered me.

A common dig at Android is that the Apple AppStore has way more apps. How many Fart Generators and Mr T Soundboards do you need? I’ve yet to not find an app I wanted. Many of the apps I paid for on the iPhone are free or have free equivalents that are just as nice on Android. I think I’ve read that 90% of the Android Market is free.

I can replace my battery if it wears out.

I can have unlimited storage via MicroSDHC cards. I don’t need a horrible application to put/get data on/from my phone.

My phone plays a wide variety of audio formats, including Ogg/Vorbis.

The display is brighter and the camera seems better (especially with low light) than my iPhone 3G. I recorded a test video and it looked pretty decent.

The Same

Both the AppStore and the Marketplace are HORRIBLE. Even with search they’re horrible. Why is it so hard?

When someone would rattle off the number of apps available for the iPhone, I’d always respond with “Yea, and you can see maybe 50 of them!”

For one thing the categories are way too broad. For another search results should show you how many results in each category so that you can make use of the categorization while searching.

On Hero, I searched for ‘better keyboard’ and had to wade through pages and pages of themes for the app before I got to the app itself. Exact matches should always float to the top.

Anyway. I have 30 days to decide if I want to keep this phone. It’s a bit of a gamble to keep it, as I’d guess that no updates will be released in that time. We’ll see what happens.

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In no order.

I’m a colossal sell-out. I own an iPhone. Trust me that no amount of hassle you might send my way will be greater than the amount of hassle I send my own way about it. I love having a real browser and some fun games all in my phone. I don’t love the massively inconsistent UI (well I sorta do because it gives me FUEL for my FIRE!) the crashiness, the slowness, the lack of multi-tasking and the leakiness. But most of all I don’t love that I was stupid enough to buy right before the next gen hardware comes out with stuff you might expect a phone this old to have.

The App Store is a bad joke. It’s impossible to browse in any meaningful way. It asks you for a password, but doesn’t explain *what* password it’s asking you for. I’m sure mac-droids “just know” but I didn’t. You have to have a credit-card-backed account to download free apps. You can’t make that account via a web page and you must install the second worst software on the planet, iTunes (MS Word, you’re still king!) to create the account. Why would they let you create it on your phone with a web browser when they can infect your PC too? For me this meant finding a windows install to put iTunes on. Thank god iTunes installs quicktime! I love that quicktime!

Anyway, blah blah blah. I feel like a failure and a sell-out. Apple you still suck.

Why not the G1? Apple holds the multi-touch patent! Thanks! Also inertia. I’ve been an at&t customer for a long time and I’m shockingly lazy. T-Mobile didn’t really help themselves though. I spent 45 minutes in their store waiting to talk to one of their customer service monkeys. They thought it was a better use of their time to help people who came in after me and whose questions largely revolved around nickel & dime stuff like pre-paid phones. Maybe that’s where they make their real money? Anyway, I tried to use it and it seemed clunky, but it also wasn’t on a network, so it was hard to gauge. The whole experience played on my spectacular laziness though, so I ended up sticking with what I had provider-wise.

Switched back to Debian for about 10 minutes at work. Couldn’t make the fonts look anything but horrible, so I switched back to Ubuntu which made me sad. Still can’t get a font that looks this good. Maybe it’s my white-on-black requirement like Happy suggested?

Steve Yegge has announced that he’s going to quit blogging. More sadness. I hope it’s a joke or that he changes his mind. He’s easily my favorite blogger by a very very large margin.

I bought a Flip Ultra HD 8G and think it’s pretty cool! It’s an HD video camera that’s about the size of a pack of cigarettes and costs about 200 bucks. Pretty fun. Their website sucks so they don’t get a link, but you know how to use a search engine.

Hey speaking of, has Google lost its edge or what? Seems like the last two months most of my searches have spam at the top. I’m getting way more spam in my inbox in my slower-than-ever google apps account too. What gives, Google?

After months of struggling with the very-crashy and 90s-web-design of MediaTomb, I found PS3MediaServer and it’s impressive. My favorite feature so far is the ability to rip DVD ISOs and play them on my PS3 over wireless with little quality loss. It’s the very first Java app that I’ve ever had a positive experience with.

I’m really really digging writing stuff in Ruby. I’ve finally started to get object-oriented programming and while I don’t see it as a panacea, it does make some things way easier.

While I love writing stuff in Ruby, I don’t yet love running stuff that’s Ruby. When you want to run a Ruby web app, and to a lesser extent when you’re writing Ruby, it seems like the documentation is written assuming you already know how to do it. This isn’t an uncommon problem with documentation. When writing documentation it’s difficult to think of the things you might not know, but Ruby (and Git) documentation seems especially bad about this. Maybe it’s just that those are the two things I’ve been trying to learn lately.

As if you’re still reading. Ha!

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Thanks spammers. I got tired of deleting wordpress users created by spammers twice a day, so now no one can register. If you want an account for posting comments about what an idiot I am, email me and I’ll turn it on long enough for you to get your account.

Urge to blog, falling.

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I’m sincerely grateful that you’re into my blog. Could you fetch my feed slightly less often? I really don’t update every 30 minutes.

kthxbye!

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I make blogging too hard. I always think I have to be writing something important and that’s just untrue. So here’s a small collection of thoughts since I last blogged.

Yaketystats 2.1 is out. I feel like we’re floundering exposure-wise. I really think we have the best product out there, but no one seems to care. We’ve talked about writing an article for a Linux mag and doing an OSCON presentation, so maybe that’ll help.

Firefox in Ubuntu has been driving me crazy for the last several months. My work machine is an 4CPU 8G atom-smasher and FF is still crazy slow. Like you’d laugh and ask “how is that possible?” slow. I don’t have many extensions, and it seems like my box should be able to handle tons of extensions, but I regularly find myself waiting several seconds for a new tab to be usable and I’m always waiting for text boxes to catch up to my typing. It sucks.

I’m also really frustrated with Ubuntu in general. Coming from Debian where in-place upgrades are the norm, it’s really weird and sad to read that reinstalling come upgrade time is the norm in Ubuntu culture. Sure you can upgrade in place, but it’s fraught with peril and things often don’t work right. For instance, I finally got my laptop wireless working in 8.04, but it didn’t survive the upgrade to 8.10 and I can’t make it work at all now, so I’m living in Vista. Don’t get me started on Vista.

There are a lot of cultural things about Ubuntu that just rub me the wrong way. I guess I’m getting old. As much as they do to make it all work together and feel cohesive, to me it feels very tenuous and fragile. If NetworkManager (for example) doesn’t work for you, well sorry, you’re just fucked because that’s the Ubuntu way to do it and you’ll be swimming upstream the rest of your Ubuntu-life if you try to do it another way. PulseAudio is another example of this.

BTW, when did “for example” cease to mean anything? It’s like banner-ad blindness; people don’t even hear it anymore and immediately start arguing the details of your example ignoring the point you were trying to make by using the example. It’s one thing to say “Well, I see the point you’re trying to make, but I don’t think your example supports your point and here’s why,” but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about “Oh, since you brought up X, let’s argue about that now and I’ll completely ignore any point you were trying to make when you brought X up.”

I started twittering but I don’t expect it to last. Having not grown up with Twitter, it seems like they make finding your friends overly difficult. Searching by invite/email address? Really?

I recently bought a Greg Bailey Custom guitar. The guitar used as his horrid background image, in fact. It plays and sounds great. It’s the second aluminum instrument I own and is very very different than my Travis Bean. Maybe I’ll put some experiments with my new ElectroHarmonix Hog on youtube sometime. The Hog is an extremely fun device.

I wish I could find an acoustic that’s as nice as my Travis Bean. I’ve got a $2k Taylor. After a few years it’s not holding up very well and my initial annoyances with it are only magnified now. I got really lucky in that I have a friend who owned a Bean enabling me to find out how fantastic they are. I lack friends with kickass acoustic guitars (vintage or otherwise) so it’s hard to even know what’s out there and what I’d like. Acoustic guitar shops are usually far too uptight for me. It’s almost as if you’re supposed to buy the guitars w/o playing them.

I’m reading Steve Pinker’s The Blank Slate and enjoying it very much. It’s one of those books that really makes you examine yourself and your dogma. In some ways, though, it’s a bit of a motivation killer. I have enough problems with motivation/feeling like part of the machine/etc without feeling like my identity isn’t even cohesive. :)

I guess that’s as good a thought as any to leave on. UNTIL NEXT TIME!

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• So yea… new blog
• News You Can Lose
• Whatever happened to 100%?

A lot like real excrement, it’s a lot harder to give shit away than it is to make it!

It’s hard to believe just how much work we put into being ready to give this software away. You see, when you write something for yourself –and remember that YaketyStats has been in use for 3 years or more in one form or another by my work– you can make all kinds of assumptions about the environment and you don’t have to document anything because if you have a question, you just ask a co-worker.

However when you give it away, first you have to yank out all of those assumptions. That takes a very long time because it’s a hard thing to think about. Confirmation bias ain’t just about new information, bubsie. While you’re tearing out assumptions, you’re making new bugs. You’re fixing old bugs that didn’t really matter to you, but would probably matter to others. Your bug fixes make new bugs. You start to have confidence issues about anyone wanting your crappy code anyway.

You have to make a website, and like all of the rest of this, it’s way harder than you’d think. You can go with the siloed antiques you know (Mediawiki and Bugzilla) or you can try something new on a platform you’re uneasy with (Jira/Redmine) and then there’s all of the time you spend vacillating in between. Don’t forget the time it takes to set it all up and tear it all down, to learn about the new platforms… you get the idea.

Once you pick your website stack, it’s time to document your every little thing about your project. You get to document how to install it, how to use it, why it does all the crazy crap that makes sense to your environment and possibly no one else’s. You word it, you re-word it. You wonder if you’re still making assumptions. You are making assumptions. You re-write it again. You re-organize it. The new organization is better, but you need to re-write some if it to fit the new organization.

Oh, and the whole time you’re doing all of this you’re wondering to yourself if you’re throwing a party which no one will attend.

Then the release date you thought for sure you’d make comes and goes and you make a ton of last minute changes. You drop your “announcements only” WordPress install in favor of using the semi-crappy News feature of Redmine. You re-organize all of the documentation again. Then you try to write a “press release” and ZOMG BBQ lemme tell ya — writing press releases is something that I am in no way equipped to do. So then you enlist the help of others. These others are much more tuned to writing this sort of copy, but they don’t really know your software or why it’s cool and different. You’re grateful in any case. This is the best that the blind leading the people who don’t know where we’re going can come up with:

Athens, GA (Oct. 14, 2008)

We’re happy to announce the WORLD-WIDE release of YaketyStats, a new tool for gathering and graphing statistics about your UNIX/Linux systems.

It has an intuitive, AJAX-powered web interface for graphing data. Graphs are built on the fly, can contain stats from multiple systems and include “Google Maps”-like dragging.

YaketyStats is easy to install, maintain, and extend and is free Open Source software licensed under the GPLv2. YaketyStats supports Firefox and is built on Perl, PHP, and RRDtool.

If you’re tired of having to micro-manage your existing stats system or you don’t have one, you should check out the YaketyStats website and demo video at yaketystats.org

I’ll pretend it’s tomorrow and publish this now.

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• A couple of things that are sort of about Linux

How many times a week do you type /etc/init.d/blah start and then you realize you’re on HP-UX and it’s /sbin/init.d/blah Forget it.

# Turn on extended globbing and programmable completion
shopt -s extglob progcomp

export MYOS=$(uname -s)

if [[ "${MYOS}" = "Linux" || "${MYOS}" = "SunOS" ]] ; then
    INITDIR='/etc/init.d';
else
    INITDIR='/sbin/init.d';
fi
export INITDIR;

function RCCT () {.
    if [[ -z "${2}" ]] ; then.
        ls $INITDIR;
    elif [[ "${1}" = "Start" ]] ; then
        cd / && $INITDIR/${2} start ; cd -;
    elif [[ "${1}" = "Restart" ]] ; then
        cd / && $INITDIR/${2} restart ; cd -;
    elif [[ "${1}" = "Stop" ]] ; then
        cd / && $INITDIR/${2} stop ; cd -;
    elif [[ "${1}" = "Reload" ]] ; then
        cd / && $INITDIR/${2} reload ; cd -;
    else
        echo "Something bad happened.";
    fi
}   

function _myservices() {
    local cur
    cur=${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD]}
    COMPREPLY=( $( builtin echo $INITDIR/!(*.rpmsave|*.rpmorig|*.dpkg-old|*~|functions)) )
    COMPREPLY=( $( compgen -W '${COMPREPLY[@]#@($INITDIR)/}' -- $cur) )
}

function Start () { RCCT ${FUNCNAME} ${*} ; };
function Restart () { RCCT ${FUNCNAME} ${*} ; };
function Reload () { RCCT ${FUNCNAME} ${*} ; };
function Stop () { RCCT ${FUNCNAME} ${*} ; };
complete -F _myservices Start Restart Reload Stop

You might be thinking that RCCT is pretty ugly and it is, but it’s complete-able, so it all shakes out. It also starts and stops services with / as the working directory which is a good idea if you’re dealing with Solaris or HP-UX.

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• Bash & Screen
• Be yourself, even when you’re root
• Bash SSH Happiness

So as I’m sure you’ll imagine I’m not big on blog memes or chain letters, but I thought of one that might be fun, so I thought I’d give it a shot especially since my blogging has dwindled a bit lately.

So the meme is Today’s Hell, the idea being that you describe a situation that could be considered a repeating Groundhog’s Day-style hell-dimension. It doesn’t have to be the worst thing ever, just something funny or annoying that you want to vent about. If you’re one of the 4 people who reads my blog, make one up yourself and pingback/trackback me!

Today’s Hell: I’m stuck at a busy traffic light behind two morons on their cell phones in their McCain-stickered Escalades who are too scared/stupid/not paying attention enough to turn left at the same time. Every track on my CDs and every station on the radio is playing “What a Fool Believes” by Michael McDonald or the Doobie Brothers or whatever the hell. A strong waft of patchouli suddenly floods the car and suddenly I remember that I have HR-mandated sensitivity training once I get to work.

Your turn.

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This is the coolest interwebs ad I’ve ever seen. It’ll take you no time to watch it. Have a look.

Edit: Uh, I guess they took it down. :( The anti-quality war rages on!

Edit again!: It’s back.

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If you use multiple computers, you have to check out DropBox. It hooks into your file-manager (Linux, Windows, Mac) and gives you a special folder that’s synced to all of your machines as well as being accessible via the web (both authenticated and a “Public” folder.) If you’re even mildly interested they have a great demo video on the link above.

If you have your own web hosting, I saw a great tip on the Planet GNOME feed for setting up a URL that’s easier to remember than the one DropBox gives you.

If you’re running Linux, it’s also possible to use DropBox with no file-manager or GUI of any kind. (Also seen on Planet GNOME.)

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