Google Maps Navigation on Android 2.0

It was only a matter of time, really, before Google Maps became a turn-by-turn mobile application.  And now it has.  Gizmodo has a good write-up on its features and abilities, and of course it looks polished even in beta form.  (What isn’t beta in Google-land, besides GMail?  Oh.  Google Apps, actually, and a few other things.  Drat.  It was always fun to joke about how long things stayed in beta with Google.  Oh well, I guess I’ll have to fall back on making jokes about how no one knows you’re a dog on the internet.)  For right now, the application is available only to Android 2.0 users, but there are plans afoot to get it on the iPhone.

Anyway, what surprised me about the Gizmodo review of the application is this:

My fears on zero pricing, for the long term: If Google sells this in the App Store for zero dollars, those millions of bucks Apple makes off of GPS app sales will likely disappear. It’s not for us to worry about until there’s no more GPS competition except Google, and we’re dependent on their pace of progress, but no competition is a bad thing. And it’s a little strange that Google’s search money is going to pay for a free map app that is competitive with stuff that costs $100 a year from full-time GPS makers like TomTom. Unfair is the word that comes to mind. But I can’t say I don’t want this app.

I’ve written about my concerns regarding the freeconomy before, and this Engadget link essentially proves the point.  TomTom’s shares are down about 20% as of the time of this writing, and Garmin isn’t faring much better, down about 15%.  Free is nice and all, but it does have a cost.

(Sure, yeah, fine, in the long run all the buggy-whip manufacturers eventually ended up making something else, right?)

And the Cloud Goes Poof!

Not really, because there are an awful lot of people committed to making sure that you do your computing remotely, but halfway reading this PC Magazine article (via Yahoo! News), I started thinking, “hey, this sounds like Dvorak.”  No surprise, it was written by him.  He’s been very, and loudly, critical of the Cloud over the years, and the Mass Sidekick Annihilation of 2009 is the perfect opportunity for him to take another swipe at it.  As I am on the record as being pretty anti-Cloud, I of course like the article.  But this post isn’t about his article (which even takes EULAs to task), but about the damned Cloud.

“Politically Charged” App Apparently Approved

Ooooh, look at that consonance!  Anyway, it looks like iSinglePayer has been approved after all, sayeth Engadget.

Hack in the Box Conference

Today marks the beginning of HITBSecConf2009–the Hack in the Box Security Conference–being held in Malaysia.  The topics sound threatening (“Clobbering the Cloud,” “Attacking Interoperability,” “Bugs and Kisses: Spying on BlackBerry Users for Fun,” and “Defeating Software Protection with Metasm“) but the conference is geared toward education and enhancement of security: “The main aim of our conference is to enable the dissemination, discussion and sharing of deep knowledge network security information.”  And while a large part of the conference is devoted to attacking interconnected data, whether it is stored in “the Cloud,” or on seemingly more-secure local servers, there’s even a “lock picking village” that aims to show that even physical storage of data isn’t 100% secure.

It’s not like this is some sort of ultra-secret cabal (though some attendees are no doubt black hat);  the conference has a plethora of big-name sponsors, including IBM, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Google.  And the lessons learned from conferences like Hack in the Box and DefCon do have the tendency to create innovations which lead to greater security.  At the same time, however, it is rather like trying to plug a dam, because once one security hole is fixed, another is discovered.

iPhone App Developers Souring?

Macworld has an interesting post about the C4 independent developers conference, and the apparent trend towards not developing for the iPhone.  As the post points out, yes, the App Store has been incredibly popular (more than 2 billion served–watch out McDonald’s!), but the frustrations surrounding the platform are mounting.

Among the concerns cited are the tight grip Apple places on developers (which can be seen by looking at the restrictions Apple puts on how Apps and the App Store can be marketed, even down to the amount of white space surrounding the App Store “badge“) and the low return on investment in developing an App.  It’s a good read, so check it out.

Opera Mini 5 beta for BlackBerry

I saw this morning that Opera has released a new version of its mini browser.  (See this Gizmodo post and this PC Magazine post (via Yahoo!).)  Being fond of Opera’s desktop efforts, and generally liking its other endeavors for the smartphone market, I gave it a shot.

My quick thoughts on it?  Despite the welcome advancements in bringing tabbed browsing and the speed dial to the device, Opera Mini just seems incredibly slow and sluggish.  That can be forgiven, as it is still in beta.  What is less forgivable is its peculiar habit of dropping letters at the end of apparently random words.  For example, its EULA says things like “Agreemen” instead of “Agreement.”  And when I looked at my previous post (about France’s copyright legislation), it would show “fai” instead of “fair,” or “Registe” instead of “Register,” or “thei” instead of “their,” or “Fo” instead of “For.”  Or “chambe” instead of “chamber.”

The Loki side of me gets stirred when I think of the potential law school hypothetical that presents itself in this situation.  But the rational side of me will just file a bug report and get back to work.

Strange Results

I have a feeling that the author of this Time article on the old tripey trope that one shouldn’t wear white after Labor Day didn’t mean for this to happen:

I’m pretty certain that Sarah Palin has nothing to do with wearing white after labor day.  Or Pope Benedict (whose fashion slideshow is also linked).  Or Michelle Obama (ditto).

Which leads me to conclude that Time runs software linking key words in articles to other articles published by Time.  And which further leads me to conclude that perhaps that practice needs to stop.

Windows 7 Pricing

Gizmodo has the details on Windows 7 pricing (gleaned from the Windows Blog), and it appears far far far FAR better than I expected.  If you recall, I cynically expected upgrades to cost about $50 more than they cost now.  But I was wrong.  If you act quickly, you might be able to get Windows 7 Home Premium for as little as $50 as an upgrade.  (If you don’t act quickly, it will cost you $120).  There’s no discount on an early order of Windows 7 Ultimate, though, and I don’t think there are any details on what will be crippled from Ultimate yet.

Pardus 2008.2 Part 2

As I discussed in my last post, just getting to the point where I had actually booted into a working Linux environment seemed a rather difficult task.  But, nontheless, there it was, Kaptan asking me for information.

Kaptan is Pardus’s welcome screen, and it allows you to select the way your mouse (or trackpad) will work, the desktop theme, the way menus will work, and other initial settings.  It’s slick, and seemed to work with no problem.

The other thing you’ll notice with Pardus is that it uses the KDE environment (the official release says KDE 3 is installed by default), which some people don’t like.  I am somewhat ambivalent.  It definitely looks similar to XP (and you can make it act like Vista), but it also appears to be more extensible than either.  What I like about it is that the network icon on the bottom right-hand side is right there to click on, and I was able to set up my wireless network by entering in the WEP key.  And it worked.  “Out of the box.”  Fantastic!  Now, that’s why I chose Pardus in the first place, because I had read somewhere that it may be one of the only distros that plays well with my particular card.  And true to form, it worked perfectly.

So I launched Firefox, and the next thing I knew I was able to bring up pages.  What a nice thing to be able to do.  Flash was also preinstalled, because pages with Flash objects were not presenting any problems.  Now, certain things about Firefox for Linux bother me a little.  For example, I’m used to being able to click on the address bar once and have the whole address get highlighted.  That doesn’t happen for me.  Also, double-clicking on just part of a URL doesn’t segregate just that part of the URL.  (e.g., if I double-clicked on cmchoatelaw in the URL above, I’m used to it highlighting just cmchoatelaw, so that I can replace it with www instead if I need to log in to WordPress.)  But these are minor complaints.

Other things that are nice about Pardus:

Frozen Bubble game, which is ridiculously addictive; GIMP; codecs; Karamba Themes; Amarok; TASMA; PiSi (though it is bereft of certain things); Turkish support; it’s built from the ground up (i.e., not based on another distro); OpenOffice.org; and a bunch of other stuff.

What’s not so great?  OpenOffice.org.  This is because it isn’t the most recent version (3.1) but rather is v2.4.  Not the biggest deal-breaker but it would be nice to have the most recent version of the suite.  It’s common knowledge that installing software on Linux is a lot easier when you’re using a package manager, and PiSi does a good job of doing that with the software in its repository.  The problem is that OOo3.1 isn’t in the repository, near as I can tell.  There’s a PiSi link out that apparently you can use, but from what I’ve seen it’s somewhat crippled.  And trying to install OOo3.1 without a package manager has proved to be a nightmare, with it not recognizing that I actually DO have a directory called usr/java on my system.  But whatever.  It’s an irritation, but it was free, you know?

And I apparently only need to wait a few more weeks for Pardus 2009 to come out, which apparently has these improvements:

Latest stable release of KDE family version 4.2.4 is available with enhancements for Pardus. Pardus 2009 Beta comes with many new features of base tools PiSi and COMAR, the installation program YALI, Pardus manager family and KAPTAN. The new version contains up to date packages like KDE 4.2.4, Linux kernel 2.6.30_rc8, OpenOffice.Org 3.1.0.6, Mozilla Firefox 3.5 RC1, Gimp 2.6.6, Xorg 1.6.2pre, Python 2.6.2 and many more in just one CD. (From the main Pardus site)

Pardus also has the benefit of feeling swifter than XP; I get less hiccups with it than I was having with XP, but to be fair, I have far fewer things installed at this moment.  We’ll have to see if that makes a difference as I play with it some more.  One thing I know for certain, though, is that I feel like I could use Pardus every day if I wanted, and I think that’s saying an awful lot.

Pardus 2008.2 Part 1

I’ve been playing with a great Linux distro I hadn’t heard of until this past weekend.  It’s called Pardus, and it’s really very nice.  Before I get into discussing why it’s nice, I think I’ll talk a little bit about why I’m using Pardus instead of some of the more mainstream distros, notably Ubuntu.

Due to some extenuating circumstances, I’ve been using my laptop more than I would generally like.  It’s an HP Pavilion dv5020, with a Turion 64 processor (single-core) and only a Gig of memory, which is shared with the ATI Xpress 200M video card.  It wasn’t such a bad purchase 3 years ago, but these days, even with a recent reinstall of Windows XP, it was a sludgy experience, especially compared to my desktop setup, which has a triple-core AMD chip, 4 Gigs of RAM, and a dedicated video card.  The desktop runs Vista with no problems, and I generally like that OS.  But, like I said, XP was running pretty cludgy, so why not see if I can partition my drive, slap a Linux distro on there, and see if I get some performance benefits?

Now, I’ve played with Linux distros before, and as I mentioned the last time I did this, the experience was less than adequate, mainly because dual-monitor support was disappointingly terrible on the distros I used, and because somehow I lost printer drivers on the XP side.  So I went into this new experiment with only a couple of goals:

1. I would not be trying to hook up external monitors to my laptop;
2. I would not be trying to make the laptop my main computer;
3. Wireless support would need to be present “out of the box”;
4. If possible, I didn’t want to have to burn a live CD because my disc burner is hit or miss in terms of reliability; and
5. I didn’t want to use Wubi because I wanted the distro to live in its own partition.

So, taking the last two goals first, I sought out and found a program called Unetbootin, which promises to make it easy to start a “frugal install” from within Windows.  In theory it is a great program, allowing you to select a series of predetermined distros (you can add your own .iso that you’ve downloaded already instead), click a few buttons in Windows, reboot your computer, select the installation function, and away you go.  Unetbootin also allows you to create a USB stick from which you can install the distro, but as my laptop doesn’t allow me to boot to USB, and the bios update didn’t cover that functionality, that wasn’t an option I could try.

Anyway, that was the theory.  I had downloaded Pardus for this purpose, but as it went into the installation process, it kept looking for a CD-ROM drive to install off of, and thus kept failing.  I then tried a number of other distros, almost all of which failed without even going into the live environment.  The only one that didn’t fail right off the back was Linux Mint 6 (which is not where Mint is at this point; they’ve moved on the 7 by now).  But it failed in the end, because it booted into the live environment, which has limited functionality.  The nice thing about live CDs is that they let you play around before committing, and then they give you the option of installing the distro right there on the desktop.  Couldn’t be easier, generally speaking.  Mint looked promising, and as it had been the only one I tried that had actually made it into a live environment, I tried to install it.

No dice.  It, too, ended up looking for a CD-ROM, and failed. Now, I wasn’t the only one having problems with this method of easily installing distros in this manner, but, as this thread demonstrates, getting answers on how to fix this problem, without doing a network install, doesn’t seem to be in anyone’s cards.

Fine, I thought, let’s try Wubi.  I had read somewhere that it was possible to move Wubi from the loop-back file into its own dedicated partition.  (Turns out, the thing I had read somewhere is actually provided by the developer of Unetbootin.)  Now, Wubi is pretty snazzy, and it does a very nice job of letting people play around with Ubuntu without the hassle of partitioning your hard drive.  And if you don’t like it, deleting it is as easy as going to the control panel.  Nice.  However, there are a few problems with it: it’s a squidge slower than if it was on its own dedicated install, you can’t hibernate, and it’s susceptible to power issues.  And it’s Ubuntu, which–I’m really sorry–I just don’t like.  I think it’s ugly.  I know it can be dealt with, but…

Anyway, I installed Ubuntu 9.04 through Wubi, and it couldn’t have been easier to get it up and running.  But here’s the rub: wireless support wasn’t there. I have a Broadcom 4318 card in my laptop, which is found in a huge number of laptops.  One would suspect that such ubiquity would lead to familiarity and thus driver support.  But as Broadcom appears to not be very friendly with the open source folks (though that may be changing) built-in support isn’t there in Ubuntu.  I guess the thing is that you have to tunnel into the firmware or something.  I don’t know; it’s a little over my knowledge level at this point.  Now, there have been all sorts of developments that make it pretty easy to get Broadcom to work properly if you also have a wired network to use as a backup while you do what’s necessary to make it work.  At the moment, however, a wire is a little hard to come by, but I am also of the opinion that wireless should not be a multi-step process.

So I ditched Ubuntu, dug out a blank CD, and burned the Pardus .iso to disc, hoping that the drive wouldn’t go belly up in the process.  Ten minutes later I had a shiny distro in my hands. I rebooted, installed, fuddled with some settings to make it install to the location I wanted, and crossed my fingers.  Half an hour later, the orange screen came up with the login prompt.  I entered my password, it churned away for about a minute, and up came Pardus’s setup manager, Kaptan, and the next thing you know, I’ve got a working Linux distro.

My next post will discuss my experience with Pardus 2008.2