A month with an Intel smartphone: Motorola RAZR i review

    It's been a month since I received my upgrade from Orange, a shiny new Motorola Razr i. I swore I'd never touch another Motorola after being caught out when they didn't upgrade my DEXT beyond Android 1.5 despite releasing version 2.1 for its American counterpart, but here I am suckered into owning another Moto.
    So why did I pick the Razr i over the competition? After all, there are a whole slew of rather good phones out there at the moment and this one might seem a little of an outsider.
    At this point most phone reviews go into a great long spiel about the minutiae of differences between  near-identical smartphones, talking about screen technologies, fractions of a millimetre in device thickness, minor screen size variations and pointless manufacturer-installed software bling. But it's a futile exercise. Within reason, pretty much all phones at a particular price point are functionally identical; one black slab these days is fairly interchangeable with another of similar specification. What matters in a phone is this: will it run my apps quickly enough and will its hardware ever let me down?  In more specific terms, is it OK for making calls, does it run a decent operating system, does it have a reasonably quick processor, and does it have a decent camera for its price? And if it satisfies those criteria and doesn't come with an outrageous price tag, that's all that needs to be said. If you want a traditional review of the Razr i then most tech sites should have one by now, meanwhile here are my impressions as a user.
    So here are the basics: Build on the Razr i is good, it feels solid with an aluminium frame, Kevlar back and Gorilla glass front. The screen is an OLED job, nice and bright with plenty of space and resolution for desktop site browsing. It's far better than my DEXT was at getting 3G signals in rural areas and it doesn't lose calls as frequently. It's not quite as good as most Nokias at conjuring signals out of nothing though. The OS is Android 4.0, thankfully without Moto's awful MotoBlur interface, and an upgrade to 4.1 is promised. As a DEXT owner that brings forth hollow laughter, but at least by the time 4.0 feels old there will be third party ROMs available for it. The camera is not as good as those on the best phones on the market but it is perfectly acceptable for the price and has a few tricks up its sleeve, of which more later.
    The Razr i's party piece and the feature that attracted me to it though is its processor. It has an Intel processor rather than the more common ARM, and it is one of the first Intel-powered phones to move forward from the Intel reference design.
    The Intel processor in the Razr i is a single core device as opposed to the the multicore configurations usually found in ARM phones. It makes up for this with a faster clock speed, at 2GHz nearly twice that of its ARM competition, and enough to run Android and its apps at a truly blistering pace.
    An Android phone with this processor faces two problems, and on how well Intel have tacked them will ride the success or failure of their push into smartphones. First, the Intel instruction set is not the same as the ARM instruction set so there might be an expectation of software incompatibilities with Android apps designed and tested on ARM devices. And second, such a high clock speed might be expected to shorten battery life as faster processors run hotter than slower ones.
    Based on a month with an Intel smartphone I think they've done a pretty good job. On software incompatibilities there has been no issue save for the unavailability of one app, BBC iPlayer. Since this depends on Flash, a dead mobile technology if ever there was one, I can forgive them for this. In fact the lack of Intel support rather proves that Flash is dead on mobile, for if it was still alive it would surely have been ported by any of the rather large parties involved.
    And on the power consumption front I think they've succeeded too. Intel have a lot of experience in their more traditional markets making silicon that adapts its clock speed and thus power consumption for portable use, and this has resulted in a phone that I need to charge every other day in general usage. Considering that it's not uncommon for smartphones to barely last a day on one charge, that's pretty damn good.
    The camera is one of the make-or-break pieces of hardware in a phone for me. In hardware terms the Razr i's sensor is not as good as some of its competition, at 8Mp it lacks the resolution of more expensive phones and its lens is nothing to shout about. But that said the hardware is perfectly acceptable, and the way it has been implemented makes it stand apart from other phones in its price bracket.
    This camera is fast. Really fast. And it has a mode in which it starts from sleep mode with a single press of the shutter button. I can wave goodbye to fiddling with an unlock sequence to take a picture, to those camera phone pictures that failed to catch fast moving subjects due to shutter lag, or that embarrassing wait while the phone saved your latest JPEG. Press the Razr i's shutter button, and that's the photo taken and saved. No messing about, on to the next one. As someone who takes a lot of camera phone pictures, that has changed the way I use my phone, it really is a point-and-shoot device.
    There's only one feature of the camera software that sticks out from the crowd; it has an HDR mode. HDR, for the uninitiated stands for High Dynamic Range, and it refers to composite photographs created from multiple shots of the same scene at different exposures to ensure that all parts of the scene are at optimum exposure.
    The trouble with HDR is that like all new toys there is a tendency to push it a little too far. Thus if you search Flickr for HDR pictures you'll find reams of startlingly garish pictures in which the photographers have turned the software up to 11 without considering whether or not it makes a better picture. Thus those three letters don't always instill confidence, they usually mean something a little painful to look at.
    The HDR mode on the Razr i is fortunately not turned up to 11. Usually it brings out the detail in shadowed areas of your scene and results in a brighter picture. Exactly what you want from a snapshot camera. However, it sometimes produces a picture with a bit too strong an HDR effect, and at other times it has problems mixing the different exposures. So I find it broadly useful, but sometimes capable of getting it wrong
    Here are some example pictures: First, an outdoor shot in bright sunlight. HDR above, no HDR below. Probably the camera at its point-and-shoot best, it may not be capturing the nuances of a professional model but as a snapshot camera it produces pictures that are bright and full of detail.

 Here the scene is a little more challenging, an overcast day and a tree against the sky. Again the HDR is the upper picture. It's done a good job with the pub, but straight away you can see in the branches of the tree that the HDR algorithm is having problems deciding which exposure to use.

 Now we're pushing the camera to the limit with a night-time shot. As expected, there is plenty of noise present in these images. However, the left-hand HDR image does manage to pull out more detail, for instance the car numberplate is legible. 

 So would I recommend the Razr i to a friend? After all the market is very crowded at that level and there are some real contenders, why buy something a little off-the-wall when you can have a Nexus 4, for example? The answer's simple. I'd recommend the Razr i to someone who wanted a quick phone with a very quick camera and had it on offer as a carrier upgrade. For someone paying up front for a phone I'd suggest they look at getting a phone with a cast-iron guarantee of receiving Android upgrades while its technology can support them.Sorry Moto, you've made a really great phone here, but I still can't forget your cavalier attitude to Android upgrades in the past.

The most valuable piece of code I ever wrote

    Thinking about a planned interactive feature for the OxfordWords Blog recently I was reminded of a little piece of Javascript which is probably the most valuable piece of code I ever wrote. Valuable in terms of revenue generated for the customer that is rather than value to me, for it took a very short time to write.
    It was a mid afternoon in 2007 or 2008 when one of my customers at the time rang up with an idea for a little feature for his web site. His company is a rather large second-hand vehicle specialist and he's one of those customers for whom I have a lot of respect. No-bullshit, but fair in return and one of those guys you can learn stuff from.
    The second hand vehicle business works over the telephone, if they can get you on the phone they're pretty good at persuading you to part with your cash to drive away in one of their machines. Their conversion problem therefore lies in getting the customer on the phone in the first place.
    So their site, a large catalogue of vehicles, was and still is plastered with their phone number. No need for a shopping cart or online payments, their industry has enthusiastically gone online but their customers still like to deal with someone directly when parting with cash.
    The problem facing my customer was that his conversion rates were still pretty low. Our spiffy site was generating him lots of traffic so he knew the customers were interested, but they were browsing and shopping around rather than giving him a ring in sufficient numbers.
    His idea was a simple one. If they stop on the page for a particular vehicle for any length of time, they must be interested in it. So he asked me to make a little pop-up that asked the question "Do you want us to call you about this vehicle?" the first time a customer stopped on an individual vehicle for more than a minute. Fill in your name and number, click the "Yes" button, and an email went off to his salesmen who'd give you a ring.
    Coding it took about half an hour. A hidden div containing the HTML form, a little bit of Javascript with a timer to unhide it after a minute, a bit of code to set a cookie so the user didn't get bothered by the form more than once, and an extra address for his form-to-email script. Nowadays I'd use a line or two of jQuery code and probably a fade or something, but back then it was straight Javascript. Still, hardly a big job, and I had it ready for his approval by the end of the day and live on the site the next day.
    A second-hand vehicle dealer like my customer buys his vehicles at auction, mostly not very old vehicles in bulk from the fleets run by large corporates. He then services them and gives them a current MOT test and warranty before offering them to his customers. His is the reputable end of the second-hand vehicle market so his customers pay a premium for good quality vehicles with a provable history, something they can't get from dodgy used car lots. He thus has quite a high turnover and running cost, but the margin on each vehicle sold is also fairly large. If he sells a vehicle by a means that didn't cost him much money, he's made a four figure sum.
    Hence my half-hour piece of Javascript was the most valuable piece of code I've ever written. Because it provided him with many more conversions from his web site at a very low cost, the first vehicle sold through it paid for it many times over and it made him many thousands of pounds thereafter. I'm guessing over the years it will have generated an astounding amount of money, for even though the company I worked for then has since folded in the recession and the customer's site now runs on a different platform it still features an updated version of my pop-up form.
    I'm glad that it was such a small piece of code that did so well for my customer. The customer went away happy and rewarded us with more business and lots of word-of-mouth recommendation, and I learned something important about calls to action and that not all industries fit the same web shop model.
    If only all my code proved to be of such value to the people paying for it!

Why electrical network frequency analysis might be unsafe to trust in court

    Tl;dr: Electrical network frequency analysis involves analysing the frequency of recorded mains hum to verify the time a recording was made, and that it has not been edited. This piece expresses concern that it could be fooled using readily available computer equipment, and makes a suggestion as to how that might be prevented.

    Electrical network frequency analysis has been in the news recently. It offers a solution to the problem facing courts when dealing with audio recordings; that of establishing the time a recording was made and that it has not been edited or tampered with.
    It works by analysis of any mains hum present on a recording. The mains electricity system uses AC, or alternating current, which is to say that its current changes direction many times a second. AC power cables thus are surrounded by an oscillating magnetic field which induces a tiny AC voltage in any electronic equipment that comes within its range. If the electronic equipment is a tape recorder then that tiny AC voltage will be copied onto any recordings it makes, resulting in a constant detectable background hum.
    In the UK our AC power grid operates at a frequency of 50Hz, which is to say that its current changes direction 50 times a second. All our power lines are connected to the same grid, so when there are minute variations in the frequency of the grid power in response for example to instantaneous surges in demand, those variations will be identical everywhere in the country. Thus if you were to store the frequency of the grid power as it varies over a period of time you could identify when a recording was made within that time by comparing the variations in frequency of any mains hum it contained with your stored values for mains frequency.
    It is a very effective technique, because the mains hum provides a readily reproducible timestamp. An infallible weapon in the fight against crime, you might say.

    Unfortunately I have my doubts.

    As an electronic engineer by training, when I read the BBC piece linked above, I thought immediately of Fourier transforms. A Fourier transform, for those fortunate enough never to have had to learn them, is a mathematical method for taking a piece of data in the time domain and looking at it in the frequency domain. If this sounds confusing, consider a musical stave. As you move from right to left along it you are moving in the time domain, the notes it contains are each played as you pass them. If however you shift your viewpoint through 90 degrees and look at the stave end-on, you are now looking at it in the frequency domain and you are seeing each note as it is played represented in its position on the paper by its pitch. If you encounter a chord, you will see several notes at the same time each at a different pitch.
    Now if you were to imagine the same trick applied to a complex recording such as human speech you would need to abandon the musical stave and instead imagine a much wider frequency range. And instead of single frequencies generated by musical notes you would see a multitude of different frequencies at different intensities which make up the astonishing variation of the human voice.
    Once you have transferred a recording into the frequency domain like this, you can examine individual frequencies such as any 50Hz mains hum. The forensic teams will use this technique to measure any variations in the hum, it's an extremely useful piece of mathematics.
    However, as well as examining individual frequencies you can also manipulate them. You can remove them entirely if you want to, or put new ones in. Then you can recombine all the frequencies from your Fourier transform back together into the time domain to create a new, altered copy of your recording.
    And it is this ability that is at the root of my doubts about electrical network frequency analysis, that since it is possible to remove the mains hum timestamp from a recording in this way and replace it with an entirely different one it seems to me that relying on this technique to verify when a recording was made and that it has not been altered is inherently unsafe.
    While researching this piece I had a good long chat with a friend whose career took him in to the world of DSP. From the course of our discussion came an idea as to how the job of detecting manipulation of a hum signature might be achieved.
    As it has been described, the forensic analysis can only look at the frequency of the 50Hz hum. They record it at their lab and compare it with the recording under examination. Yet the local mains supply where the recording is being made will contain so much more information than simply the hum frequency, it will contain a much wider bandwidth of noise that is unique to the mains environment in that particular location. That noise will be generated by the mains equipment electrically close to the recorder; everything from electric motors through fluorescent lights to poorly-shielded electronics. In addition it will contain phase changes, small movements of the waveform in the time domain, caused by any of those pieces of equipment that do not have purely resistive loads, and those phase changes could be readily linked to the noise from the devices that generate them. This information would be much more difficult to remove from a recording than just the 50Hz hum, so could provide a means to tie a genuine hum signature to a recording.
    Unfortunately though the only component of this that will be recorded will be the strongest lower frequency component of this noise, the 50Hz hum itself. This is because whatever is recorded has to be induced in the recorder by the magnetic field of the mains installation, hardly a coupling conducive to the transfer of higher frequencies.
    But what if instead of relying on induction the recorder mixed in a suitably attenuated copy of the complete  mains noise spectrum with the input from its microphone? In that case all the information about nearby mains-connected devices and their effect on the phase of the 50Hz hum it might contain would be preserved, making it extremely difficult to insert another hum signature whose phase changes do not match the changes in electrical noise also present on the recording. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility to imagine that "official" recorders in police stations and the like could be modified to record this noise.
    Of course, I may be an electronic engineer, but I spend my days working for a dictionary. The frequency analysis I do for a living these days involves language and word frequencies rather than audio, and any digital signal processing I have a go at is strictly in the hobby domain. I know the removal and reinsertion of a 50Hz hum signature in the way I have described is nothing special and could be performed by someone proficient with DSP software on a rather modest computer far less powerful than most modern cellphones, but I have no knowledge of any specialist techniques that might be used to detect it in a finished recording. My concern is that I am seeing a forensic technique acquire a scientific halo of being somehow a piece of evidence that is beyond reproach, and this prospect worries me when I can see such a flaw. This is not from a desire to damage justice but to strengthen it, for it is not unknown for evidence to be found to have been fabricated.
    So if there is nothing to be concerned about and manipulation of hum signatures in the way I have described could be easily spotted, fine. That's what I want to hear. Don't just say it though, prove it. But if instead this technique turns out to be a valid attack on network frequency analysis, then let it be brought into the public arena so that methods of detecting it can be devised.

Slashdot is beyond resuscitation.

    I'm a news junkie. Specifically I'm a tech news junkie. Part of my morning routine involves scanning Google Reader to see what's new from a long list of tech news sites.
    One of the consistencies in my news feed for well over a decade has been the venerable tech news blog, Slashdot. News for nerds, stuff that matters, as the tagline put it. My Slashdot ID isn't one of the really low numbers and I've not used it much but it's low enough to date me to the early 2000s. The site has helped shape my outlook on Internet culture and brought me first news of some of the defining tech stories of the last decade.
    But all good things eventually decline. I first saw whispers that Slashdot was past it and Hacker News was the Place to Be a few years ago and though I followed HN I refused to believe that Slashdot was dead. Sure they sometimes took a day to post a story and there were the inevitable dupes, but nobody's perfect, you insensitive clod!
    This week however I finally see that Slashdot, the Slashdot that I used to know, is dead. Why? I'm at the epicentre of one of their stories. Well, I should say I was at the epicentre, they're not just a day late but a whole week late on a story that was all over mainstream media last Monday. Yes, my US colleagues chose 'GIF'(verb) as their Word of the Year and like your rather out-of-touch elderly relative Slashdot has caught up with a week-old newspaper on the day room coffee table and proudly announced the story as today's news.
    News for nerds, stuff that mattered a week ago. Worth following only for old time's sake.

Bye bye analogue telly

   It is with some sadness that I note today sees the turning off of the final UK terrestrial analogue TV transmitter in Northern Ireland. Not because I miss Ceefax or because I hanker again for the days of only three, four, or five channels, but because analogue TV was what gave me my start in electronics when I was a teenager.
    When my contemporaries were doing more conventional 1980s teen stuff like riding BMX bikes or burning away their money on Pac-Man, I was hunting through skips for discarded TV sets, fixing them, learning how they worked, and using them as sources of components for my other electronic projects. I must have had hundreds of them pass through my hands, mostly the sets from the colour TV boom of the early 1970s. I learned the foibles of the Philips G8, the Decca Bradford and the ITT CVC5, I understood how an analogue PAL decoder worked and I picked up what is now one of the most useless skills around for an engineer, converging a delta-gun colour CRT.
    I remember some of my projects, the UHF transmitters fashioned from tuner cavities and the scary spark generator using TV EHT parts. My DX-TV setup, my home-made satellite receiver, and those weird Lockfit transistors. And the FM bugs made in IF cans, or the stereo valve amplifier using dirt-cheap PCL86 TV frame output valves. I made a lot of awful projects, some useless projects, other scary projects and one or two really good projects from discarded TV parts.
    As you might expect, I never had to pay for a TV until I was 35 and wanted an LCD panel.
    I still have one or two sets left over from that period. A few black and white sets of varying sizes, and a solitary ITT CVC5 colour set, rather battered. I sometimes fire one up with a Humax set-top-box, but there's no practical reason for me to keep them. Too good to throw away though.
    I feel privileged to have grown up as an engineer in the 1980s. Not only did I get the explosion of 8-bit microcomputers, I was also lucky enough that the electronic devices of the day were accessible enough to understand. I pity today's teenagers for whom electronic devices are highly integrated and surface-mount, they have such a restricted opportunity for experimentation.
    So bye bye analogue telly. I can't say I'll miss you in 2012, but I'm indebted to what you gave me. I doubt I'll see your like again.

What I really want from a mobile phone

    Every week it seems, there comes a new smartphone launch. Despite the fact that they are increasingly becoming identical black slabs, we're told that this one is different, special somehow because of one of its new features. It has an extra few mm of display width, it's 0.5mm thinner or it has an extra core in its processor.

    All very nice, but y'know what? I don't give a toss.

    For me, a technophile, to say that indicates that for me at least the multi billion dollar mobile phone industry has failed. Its products are all pretty much indistinguishable, but more importantly for me they don't do what I want from a smartphone.

   My perfect smartphone must have these features:

• Nuke-proof hardware. Tough enough to survive my pocket, clever enough to conjure a signal out of almost nothing.
• A useful and popular operating system. And a realistic chance of OS upgrades over its life, if I buy a phone from you that gets Osborned you simply will not get another chance. I'm looking at you, Motorola, I haven't forgotten my DEXT with its official support for Android 1.5 only.
• No stupid manufacturer front ends or resource-consuming bloatware.
• A QWERTY keyboard. Hey phone companies, I've got NEWS for you! We don't all have tiny fingers, and sometimes we use our phones in environments where touch screen keyboards are quite frankly shit. No, let me qualify that. Touch screen keyboards are ALWAYS shit.
• A kick-arse camera. No, simply having a gazillion megapixels is not enough. It has to be a decent quality camera module in the first place. Nokia cracked this one a decade ago, wake up at the back there!
• Enough screen area and resolution to be useful for browsing, enough processor power to keep up.
• Decent hardware expandability. 3.5mm audio, Micro SD, USB, no weird and expensive proprietary connectors. 

That's it. I don't give a toss about device thickness, dot pitch, chipset willy-waving, Angry Birds, tinny built-in speakers, cheap music deals or all the other crap. If I could buy a bullet-proof QWERTY Android smartphone with a camera like the Nokia Pureview 808, I'd pay full price. Five hundred quid, there and then. Until then, you can keep your shiny black slabs, and I'll keep my money.

Baby killer

    My car was involved in a collision with a teenaged cyclist this morning. As far as I am aware she's shaken but OK, with little worse than a nasty graze to show for the incident. Nothing I'm particularly proud of but fortunately in the view of the police officer who interviewed me it was a fairly unavoidable accident caused by another motorist making a sudden risky manoeuvre hiding me and the cyclist from each other's view. I'm a cyclist, pedestrian and motorcyclist as well as a motorist, and turning it over in my head I can't imagine another outcome. The cyclist wasn't doing anything bad crossing the road in the context of what she could see and I was using a road I've used thousands of times in the last twenty years. My reaction times, good brakes and in the view of the police officer non-excessive speed meant she lives to ride another day.
    What did shock me though was the actions of other motorists. I'm a man driving a small hatchback. It's a 5-door family model that has a small economy engine chosen for diesel MPG rather than BHP so it's no sports car, but to them I was obviously a reckless young baby killer in a hot hatch. So they proceded to paint a picture of the incident so ludicrous in its level of malicious falsehood that the policeman said in as many words that he was far more interested in the facts of what had really happened.
    It started when I got out of the car. I suddenly had this crazy woman from another car haranguing me. Sorry love, I've just been involved in an accident, I don't need a silly bitch screaming at me. In fact the girl who's just limping to the side of the road doesn't need it either. Shouty woman was lucky, I'm sure someone other than me might have engaged with her as aggressively as she did and she wouldn't have liked that.
    Meanwhile I went over and made sure the girl was OK. Her mother was there and turned out to be a lovely lady who had seen the whole thing and said in effect "Don't worry love, I saw what happened and you weren't to blame".  Thank you very much for that, I can't express how much that meant to me.
    I could see several other motorists who had stopped, discussing it amongst themselves. This was where it started to become scary. I could hear them going over what they had happened, sharing tidbits and embelishing their stories. By the time the police arrived I heard them saying the most outrageous things in their statements, turning an everyday Oxford manoeuvre into something from a particularly boisterous touring car race. I had it seemed swerved around all over the road at an impossible speed, narrowly avoiding killing them all before moving down a helpless child. As I said to the policeman when he came to me, I considered those things to be barefaced malicious falsehoods that I would vigorously contest, and I was able to easily and quietly demonstrate both my lane discipline and with my relatively short stopping distance, evidence of my lack of excessive speed. I consider the fact that the policeman informed me that he would not be recommending any further action as vindication of my actions and if I hear any more credance being given to the lies I will vigorously defend myself.
    But I can't help being worried at how close I came to getting into trouble based on someone else's malicious falsehood. In effect, those people made up some lies with no consideration of the effect it might have had on their target. As I told the policeman I am completely certain they wouldn't like someone doing it to them.
    I am well spoken, approaching middle age, and the driver of a spectacularly unexciting car. By telling the truth I was able to foil any lies and describe what had happened to the satisfaction of the policeman who interviewed me. But what if I had been driving a performance car? What if I had been a so-called "chav", a non English speaker, or perhaps from an ethnic minority? Would I have had the same experience? I hope the answer would have been a "yes", but I can't help think my path would have not been so pleasant this morning. I also can't help thinking that people who are so ready to lie to put someone in my position in a bad light are not helping either justice or themselves, and that there should be some form of censure for people who do that. Because without it. we're all at risk of being accused of the most outrageous things. Me, you, those lying motorists, everybody. Do you feel comfortable with that? I certainly don't.

Living in a post-PC world

    I've spent the weekend having a clear out. Lots of old tax papers, magazines and assorted detritus, all gone. And a load of treasures from a couple of decades of hoarding PC bits.

    Some things are easy to part with. An ISA multi-IO card, for instance, is an easy throw. I'm never going to need one of them again in my life. Or an 8-bit cheap-and-nasty Soundblaster clone from about 1990. I've never even used it since levering it out of the XT clone it came from, space wasted.

   But then I came to the pile of cables. IDE cables, do I really need ten of them? Floppy drives. CD-ROM drives. Even old hard drives of a gigabyte or two's capacity. These were real treasures a few years ago, but now I can buy a flash card with tens of gigabytes for a few quid, they simply aren't necessary.

    I realised as I was clearing out my stock of PC bits that what I was seeing was the end of an era. For the last couple of decades my computers have continuously upgraded, but they've all been desktop PCs. I still have one, an AMD Duron running Lubuntu, but my main PC is now a seven year old laptop and I'm increasingly finding my development and everyday computing happening on ARM devices. The Raspberry Pi, and Android phones.

    For me, the PC era seems to be drawing to a close. I can see the next generation of ARM tablets - either Android or Windows 8, I haven't decided yet -  will eventually replace the laptop for portability, and the next generation of Raspberry Pi-style Flash-based single board computers will replace it for development and power. My storage has already migrated from the PC - either into NAS or the cloud - so the PC with all its inbuilt peripherals and power consumption is now an increasingly redundant web browsing platform. I'm entering my personal version of the post-PC world.

    So, does anyone want a stack of fully-populated Pentium motherboards or enough 72-pin SIMMs to pave a driveway?

Oxford Raspberry Jam meetup 3

    So last night a bunch of us made our way down to Electrocomponents HQ again  for Oxford Raspberry Jam meetup number 3. As before, a fairly informal show-n-tell format with plenty of scope for discussion, and a lively exchange of ideas.

The serial terminal in action

    It was noticeable that people are starting to get to grips with the Pi's hardware. Our previous meeting has featured limited hardware demonstrations, but this time people had brought complete projects to show us. A serial display from a POS terminal, a Pi used as a network client for an audio industry control standard, and a very neat little serial terminal using an Atmel processor and destined to become a commercial product that can fit in the top of a Pi case.
    It was also encouraging to see a discussion of the Pi's application in education. How to capture the excitement of a huge bunch of kids when you only have a lunch hour to do it in. I realised at that point that I must have been an unusually geeky teen, having saved up my 30 quid for a second hand ZX81 I needed no such encouragement to get stuck in.

RiscOS blowing raspberries.

    On the software front we had a demonstration of the latest RiscOS build. Looking very slick, but with the intriguing promise of more to come as GPU support is included. I was a willing convert to RiscOS on my Pi because of its speed and ease of use, so I am especially looking forward to what the Pi and RiscOS community can achieve in porting more up-to-date software to the platform.
    I brought along two demonstrations to the meeting. The first was a shameless use of the Pi as an appliance, a DarkELEC image. This is an OpenELEC fork that includes all the clients for UK TV-on-demand services such as BBC iPlayer and 4OD. It's an impressive distribution in that it delivers very good performance from the Pi, and a stunning picture on the Electrocomponents meeting room TV. I must have made copies of the SD card for most people in the room.
    DarkELEC might seem a frivolous use of the Pi to some, but I think such appliance distributions are important. They mean more Pis will be used rather than lie forgotten on experimenters desks, and they provide a handle to gain the interest of young people in their Pi, making it more than just a geeky toy.

Yes, that's Internet Explorer 3. Best viewed in...

    My other demonstration was at the same time a joke and a serious demonstration of the Pi's capability. I ran Windows 95 in a Bochs virtual x86 machine over Debian on my Pi. And it was just about usable, despite no effort having gone in to tuning the Bochs setup. I can think of no practical application for Windows 95 on a Pi, but it is not impossible that perhaps someone might have to run a piece of legacy DOS software somewhere and might find Bochs a useful means to do it.
    Anyway, a few tech details. Bochs is in the Debian repository, so a simple apt-get installed it. I installed Windows 95 from the CD that came with a laptop in the '90s to a 100Mb Bochs hard disk image on my desktop PC and transferred it to the Pi on a USB disk. The Pi has no CD-ROM drive and I didn't fancy trying to extract the ISO file to do the task. I used the X-windows Bochs display library, so the Debian desktop was always present in the background of the Windows 95 session. A much faster result could probably have been achieved had I compiled the SVGAlib package and run it without X, but this was more a demonstration for the laughs than practicality. As I said, "You've seen an open OS on your Pi, now here's a wide-open one!".
    So that was it. Another Oxford Raspberry Pi meeting. I look forward to seeing you at the next one.

What was that about "Don't be evil"?

    I'm sure most readers of this blog will be familiar with the famous Google motto "Don't be evil". Having had the chance to look at Google culture from a viewpoint slightly closer than the average Joe it comes across as something taken pretty seriously within Google. When they say that, they really mean it.
    "Being evil" is generally taken as a reference to some of the shady practices found elsewhere in the tech industry. Really good examples of "Being evil" can be found in the history of Opera Software, as the underdog in the browser race they faced over a decade of unfair practices from the developer of the dominant browser.
    But things are different now, aren't they? MSIE is no longer the top dog, and there's a new kid in town. Chrome, from Google, and they have that "Don't be evil" motto, don't they?

    I use all the main browsers, I'm a web developer. I use Opera quite a lot, it's a damn good browser, just like Chrome or Firefox. I'm also a Google user, you might say I've drunk the Google Kool-Aid. So seeing screens like these three from flagship Google services running in the latest version of Opera (12.00) distresses me.

 I develop interactive web sites that work with all major browsers. Chrome, MSIE, Firefox, Safari and Opera. It's standard web developer stuff, not difficult at all. The web is full of HOWTOs, compatibility libraries and guides for the novice developer, so I'd expect the kind of experienced developers Google hires to have no problems writing code that works cross-browser. It's hardly as though Opera makes it difficult anyway, it's one of the most standards-compliant browsers on the market.
    So what I'm seeing is a major browser developer not making the effort to support a smaller competitor's product in their web servicess when I know that supporting that product is straightforward for a competent web developer. And then using the lack of support to display a message pushing users of the smaller competitor product to their own offering.


    "Don't be evil" is Google's motto. It pains me slightly to say this, but as an Opera user I don't think they're living by it here. Come on Google, step up to the plate!