Fun with mobile, blogs, podcasting, videoblogging, RSS, wikis, social software, etc. from Roland Tanglao who's been blogging since 1999 and has over 60,000 photos on flickr, is one of the founders of Bryght, a Web 2.0 startup, and is based in Vancouver, BC, Canada. Contact me: +1 604 729 7924 roland AT rolandtanglao.com Skype/iChat/AIM/twitter: rtanglao

The N97 ain't my N999 concept but it's closer

On the night before I receive my N97 from Nokia WOM World for a brief trial, just for fun I looked back at my N999 concept/vision from December 1, 2008. And what the heck here's the N999 concept updated for July 2009 (notable updates are in bold):

  1. screen with as many pixels as the 5800 Tube or iPhone (sorry but QVGA doesn't cut it in 2009!)
  2. S60 simplified and fixed as Rui describes
  3. 5 megapixel camera with cover and Xenon flash with 3x optical zoom and 640x480 30fps video (basically re-use the awesome N82 camera hardware and software and combine with the N93 optical zoom)
  4. Quad band GSM and 3G (i.e. works on Rogers and AT&T in North America AND European 3G out of the box just like the N85, no funky North American model)
  5. Built in ShoZu (with 10MB limit removed for 3G and WiFi, make the limit 50-200MB for 3G and WiFi) - killer app for photographers and videobloggers - Qik is built  into the N97 why not ShoZu? (I can't stand Share Online's limit of 6 photos at a time since I take over 50 a day; hope it's removed on the N97)
  6. Bult-in Qik (killer app for videobloggers!) - Qik is built  into the N97 can't wait to try it!
  7. Awesome web browser (Nokia's Web Kit browser was great in 2006, it is now far behind Apple's)
  8. Lots of available RAM (as much as the N95 8GB please!), 8GB storage on built-in card - Reviews are mixed on the N97, sounds like it has a lot of RAM (more than the N95 8GB)  but with widgets it takes up a lot more. - I doubt I will use widgets!
  9. Built in Nokia viNes to take advantage of Nokia's great GPS hardware (killer GPS app!) - viNes apears to be dead. Nokia Sports Tracker appears to be alive, soI'd rather have that built-in
  10. Built in Twitter App i.e. built in Gravity

Now I know the above list is not possible given today's processors and batteries but in that case I can live without optical zoom! Everything else is doable as far as I can tell.

I still don't need:

  1. QWERTY keyboard - I'd rather have an awesome camera and flash than a touch or QWERTY keyboard. And for me touch keyboards are just as good as QWERTY.
  2. Email (Email is dead to me (ok email isn't dead but my resolution is to take any email thread  that I need to keep that has more than 2 replies to a wiki or blog); I continue to use it  for work and to communicate with "normal" folks!) - If the browser is as good as the iPhone's, then webmail clients work just fine.
  3. Touch (would be nice, but not convinced Nokia has the software chops for this; I am not interested in S60 transmogrified with touch, I would prefer touch to be part of a totally revamped user interface that's NOT S60.) - Unfortunately it appears that Nokia's current touch interface s*cks. I hope I am proven wrong by my N97 trial.
  4. Micro SD card slot
  5. Calendar (would be nice but that's what my laptop is for :-) !) - Again with a good enough browser a web client would be good enough)
  6. IM (Twitter is IM enough for me and I am fine with using it in the browser)
  7. VOIP is dead to me except for Skype
  8. MMS - I am not convinced I need it, I can always use ShoZu email photos :-) but I was wrong about SMS (so maybe I am wrong about MMS) - I am pretty sure I am wrong about MMS and I am pretty sure (unfortunately) I will be MMSing my relatives with pictures since they all finally seem to have MMS plans and devices and none of my luddite :-) relatives still use flickr or any of the other public or private photosharing sites!


 

RimuHosting.com is my new post-Bryght Host

Back in action with RimuHosting as recommended by Boris using Debian Lenny instead of CentOS 5.2 ! Now to figure out the Drupal WYSIWYG API module and to get thismobilerocks.com and other sites moved over.

CrowdTrust - My New Job

Moving Forward with CrowdTrustMy new job is at a Vancouver-based startup, CrowdTrust, a company that is aiming to get people to "network what you know" something that I have informally called "more than twitter and delicious, easier than blogging and public and private and everything in-between".

My job title is "Chief Products Officer" which is a grandiose title for person in charge of all things product related (except of course the developers). 

CrowdTrust is a Ruby on Rails based web application with a Firefox only  toolbar and there is a "pre-Roland" public  PROTOTYPE that you can check out.

It doesn't show you the true power and promise of what CrowdTrust can do so I won't be pushing the prototype hard, but it's a fine starting point.

I am (obviously) responsible for all product releases going forward and therefore would love your feedback, ideas, and constructive criticism to make the future releases of CrowdTrust the best they can be. In the words of Dave Winer, "Let's have fun!".

Oh and one more thing :-) ! We are hiring Rails developers (email careers@crowdtrust.com if interested)!

End of my Bryght Era

May 15, 2009 was my last day of work for Raincity Studios and with it of course my involvement with Bryght ended as well. It's been a great ride! Thanks to all the Bryght Gals, Guys, customers, investors, friends and of course the folks at Raincity Studios. I am certain that the "Bryght Children" will in their own way (in a small "Fairchild children" way, haha!)  continue to make their mark  (e.g. Rilli, Bootup Labs, and I predict many many more). My next post will be about my new job but for now a few random thoughts and reflections (apologies to the great people I have omitted!):

  • I'll never forget moving day into the first Bryght offices at 525 Seymour with the folks at EQO (also gone).
  • Bryght Light developed by Adrian and the rest of the Bryght team was and is a Drupal milestone. I can't to see what the fine folks at Lullabot and Acquia  and WorkHabit and the other fine folks doing Drupal hosting come up with. Not to mention what happens with Development Seed, Adrian and  the other folks developing Aegir. Aegir definitely ups the proverbial Drupal hosting 'ante'.
  • Speaking of WorkHabit, I will always be impressed by their VPS hosting partnership with Bryght. As far as I know Bryght VPS was the only Drupal-centric VPS hosting from a Canadian company, one of the few in the world and probably the first. Nobody did it better. Thanks to Richard, Gary of WorkHabit, incredible system engineers and sysadmins: Narayan Newton and Ben Holt. Learned some great lessons:i.e. always iterate, automate and listen to the market!

Herewith some random Bryght photos to end it off in a visual style! Ciao Tschüß!

Fri19Nov2004 Dinner with Dave Winer at Phnom Penh - Boris, KrisWalking to New Town Bakery - N95-1 image - 035Buying a Europe to North American adapter - 07/12/2006Bryght walk - Downtown to Strathcona 05June06 - 7Loyalty Fidelity Broccoli digitally cross processedDrupal - OSCON 2005 T shirt sneak peekPre Gnomedex - 22June2005 - 12New Raincity Studios Offices - Album Cover Pose IIPhones for Fearless-20081223-129Adrian arrives in Vancouver - 2Walkah plays with N91 - 17112006096Puregin aka Djun at OSCMS

Gravity S60 Twitter client is the exception that proves the rule

Gravity s60 twitter client Screenshot0069

Gravity, the fantastic S60 Twitter client proves that German S60 developers continue to rule the moribund S60 apps ecosystem (unfortunately the S60 app industry is a cottage industry compared to the iPhone app industry). First, profimail ruled the world (back in 2004 when I bought my first S60 phone and thought the mobile email was relevant, just say no to mobile email, just say yes to short form customized mobile two way communication like Twitter) and now gravity rules. And if you don't believe me that the iPhone app industry is clearly dominant over the S60 app industry than that's your prerogative and I'd have to wish you the best of luck making money with your S60 apps!

Behold the awesomeness of Gravity in my Gravity Screenshot set on flickr!

DRAFT Nokia Sports Tracker Tutorial in pictures

Sports Tracker Screenshot0047

Here's my very rough draft Nokia Sports Tracker Tutorial for the recently released version 2.06. It still is too complicated and harder to use than Nokia viNe but appears to be regularly updated unlike viNe. And it still doesn't remember my Live Sharing Pref which I think is a bug and is annoying because I want my maps to be always shared ]!

Nokia viNe tutorial in pictures

Nokia viNe Tutorial - End of the Journey

Here's my Nokia viNe Tutorial in pictures. Has Nokia viNe been discontinued? Seems to be quiet. Meanwhile Nokia Sports Tracker just had a new release and while more complicated seems to be better.

BUG Adventures - GPS still not getting a fix, need another antenna perhaps or is GPSConfig not working?

Well it's been 2 weeks and I've been too busy to do much with my BUG Labs BUG but here's the current state of affairs:

  1. fixed my compiler in Eclipse to be R1.4 compliant by setting Preferences->Compiler->Compiler compliance level to 1.4
  2. Started my Bug and the following log is displayed in /var/log/concierge:
    1. [Sun Apr 05 21:32:13 GMT 2009] [INFO] GPSModlet defaulting to passive (external) antenna
    2. [Sun Apr 05 21:32:13 GMT 2009] [INFO] Started modlet from factory com.buglabs.bug.module.gps...
  3. I take it this means that the antenna is set to use the external antenna
  4. Wait 7 minutes and I still see the BUG with no fix
  5. Then I download the GPSConfig app as recommended by the BUG Labs folks and I see:
    1. GPSConfigServiceTracker: start
    2. status=3939
    3. [Sun Apr 05 21:40:31 GMT 2009] [INFO] AppManager started /usr/share/java/apps/GPSConfig.jar
  6. Then I tried using the joystick controller and the select button to configure the GPSConfig app to use the external antenna (and see this log:
    1. status=4003
    2. Switching to external (passive) antenna
    3. ret=0
  7. But the GPS Module display on the 2 line LCS still shows Passive which means it's NOT using the external antenna
  8. Help!
    1. Do I have a defective antenna?
    2. Am I doing something wrong with the GPSConfig app?
    3. Or is the GPS Module incorrect when it states that the antenna is Active i.e. internal antenna instead of Passive i.e. external antenna?

 

Upgraded Kernel and then Root FS of my BUG from R1.3 to R1.4, GPS still doesn't get a FIX

Summary:

Successfully updated my kernel on my BUG and then the ROOT FS (order is important, you must upgrade the kernel FIRST and then shutdown and then update the Root FS). However GPS is still not getting a fix!

Typos and minor bugs in the R1.44 Kernel upgrade procedure:

  • bug_kflash was in /usr/bin NOT /sbin
  • version is: 
    • Linux version 2.6.27.2 (buildbot@darner) (gcc version 4.1.2) #104 PREEMPT Thu Mar 12 11:32:33 EDT 2009
  • which is slightly older than the version in the instructions (probably because the person who wrote the instructions has an experimental, newer version)

Typos and minor bugs in the R1.4 Root FS upgrade procedure:

  • on the Mac, e2fsck and resize2fs are in /usr/local/sbin

Here's what the GPS is showing

command is:

cat /dev/ttymxc/1

(since GPS is in slot 1)

("V" on the GPGLL lines mans "void" i.e no GPS FIX AFAIK!) - Antenna is pointing out the window which means it should get a fix since my other GPSes i.e. E71 and LD-4W have no problem getting a fix there!)

$GPGLL,,,,,081149.577,V*18

$GPGSA,A,1,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,*1E

$GPGSV,3,1,12,11,89,179,27,24,76,162,,08,57,214,,27,32,183,*72

$GPGSV,3,2,12,07,28,280,,19,28,046,,28,24,317,,03,17,062,*74

$GPGSV,3,3,12,20,17,150,,13,03,220,,23,-1,196,,29,-1,293,*77

$GPRMC,081149.577,V,,,,,,,170309,,*23

$GPVTG,,T,,M,,N,,K*4E

$GPGGA,081150.577,,,,,0,00,,,M,0.0,M,,0000*5E

$GPGLL,,,,,081150.577,V*10

$GPGSA,A,1,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,*1E

$GPGSV,3,1,12,11,89,179,27,24,76,162,,08,57,214,,27,32,183,*72

$GPGSV,3,2,12,07,28,280,,19,28,046,,28,24,317,,03,17,062,*74

 

 

Tried to upgrade Bug Labs Bug Root FS to R1.4 but now my BUG is borked

On Wednesday, the official release of Bug Labs R1.4 came out. Summary: I tried to upgrade my Bug Root File System, and my Bug no longer works and I am not sure where to document my problem (should I put it on the wiki or the forums?). I guess I will get on good 'ole IRC to get this fixed on Monday (I really dislike IRC, it reminds of the 1990s, full of people trying to help you but no RSS feed, no archives without bots that require Kevin Marks level knowledge to keep them up and running, and no distillation of knowledge so you are doomed to explain the same things over and over again!). Help! If you can help, twitter me @rtanglao or email me roland AT rolandtanglao or I'll try to get help on IRC as well as post on the Bug Labs R1.4 thread on community.buglabs.net. Anybody who helps me, gets a free beer the next time they are in Vancouver (how about a Bug Labs meetup at Open Web 2009 in June 11-12 in Vancouver?) Read on for all details.

Details

R1.4 = Bug Labs SDK 1.81 + Root FS 1.4 + Kernal 1.4 (Suggestion to Bug Labs: bundle these together or tag future releases so that tag 1.5 for example is the same release tag for SDK, FS and Kernal)

The Bug Labs documentation and web presence is confusing even for somebody like me who has been developing software for 20 years and uses confusing open source software like git and Drupal so that's saying something! And Bug Labs seems to admit it in this blog post from December, "Finding BUG Tutorials and Documentation". My off-the-cuff recommendation given my developer relations experience at Nortel  would be to create a single wiki page "Busy Developer's Guide to writing software for the BUG" (BDGB) with the bare minimum of info that is always up to date and to have the dev relations person (Alicia?) post a blog post on bugblogger.com whenever the BDGG is updated! Anyways...

Here's what I did:

Tried to upgrade my Root FS to R1.4 using the Mac instructions from HOW to upgrade ROOT FS aka "Update your BUG memory card" (see "Yak Shaving" section below for full details)

Here's what happened:

The Root FS upgrade appeared to work but when I boot the Bug it doesn't come up and doesn't activate the Ethernet over USB so I can't ssh in to check things out.

Here's what I expected:

I expected it to "just work" and then I could proceed to upgrading the kernal to R 1.4

Guesses as to what went wrong

  1. A bug in the Root FS image?
  2. A bug in the ext2fsx software that I used namely 1.4d4
  3. Something else?

Yak Shaving (or what I did in exquisite detail)

(raw gist is here)
dd if=/dev/disk1s1 of=BUG_backup.ext3.bin 
tar xvfjv bug-image-production-bug-R1.4-rootfs.ext3.bz2
dd if=bug-image-production-bug-R1.4-rootfs.ext3.bz2  of=/dev/disk1s1
95105+1 records in
95105+1 records out
sudo /usr/local/sbin/fsck.ext3  /dev/disk1s1
e2fsck 1.39 (29-May-2006)
Couldn't find ext2 superblock, trying backup blocks...
/usr/local/sbin/fsck.ext3: Bad magic number in super-block while trying to open /dev/disk1s1
The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2
filesystem.  If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2
filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblock is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock:
    e2fsck -b 8193 <device>
sudo /usr/local/sbin/resize2fs  /dev/disk1s1
resize2fs 1.39 (29-May-2006)
/usr/local/sbin/resize2fs: Bad magic number in super-block while trying to open /dev/disk1s1
Couldn't find valid filesystem superblock.
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