Rabidgremlin's
Soapbox

Yep so Vodafone announced their plans for the iPhone release this week in New Zealand; what a disaster…

After getting everyone all frenzied last week with statements like “an iPhone from $199” the ugly truth emerged: Sure you can get an iPhone for only $199 but you need to sign up for a two year plan which will cost you over $6000 !

Check out this Vodafone sales exec getting beaten up in a TV interview:

One of the key things in the interview is the statement that the iPhone in New Zealand is been marketed as a premium product.

That I believe is the fatal flaw.

For years telcos have been trying to offset the declining revenue from voice with revenue from data services. In New Zealand mobile data services have been mainstream for almost 10 years but the costs have been so steep that most consumers have been trained to not even consider using them.

The iPhone is a perfect platform for mobile internet and in fact without good Internet access the usefulness of the device is eroded.

What Vodafone should have done is set their data plans to match (or even undercut) typical ISP broad plans and then gone to market with a “hey the mobile internet is here” campaign using the iPhone as the flagship device. Even if you had to pay a grand for the device people would have still gone for it (for years high end phones have sold for around $1000 and the iPhone is also an iPod and GPS unit so well worth that kind of money).

In a few year consumers would become so accustomed to having good, cheap mobile Internet that everyone would use it and of course Vodafone would then become the de facto supplier (and mostly likely make good in-roads into other ISPs market share as well).

But I suspect this will never happen instead they will just gouge early adopters and then sit around wondering why no one uses their data services. Sigh.

One ray of hope: Rogers, a telco in Canada, which suffered a similar public reaction to their plans has just backtracked and offered up some better deals.

Perhaps Vodafone New Zealand will see the light too.

I’m in the midst of transferring my domain to a new registrar (to consolidate things) but there seems to be some major mix up going on and the transfer keeps failing :(

So this site might drop off the web for a wee while…

Why do I always look so silly in photographs ? Sigh…..

The link: Awards’ finalists air innovative use of IT

Wow I certainly scored a lot of great birthday goodies this year. I’m very impressed with my reticulating saw, sonic tape measure and carpenter’s pencils (real man’s pencils, you need to sharpen them with a knife).

My sisters-in-law made me this fantastic pac-man cake:

I was also given a cool mini Bluetooth based keyboard for my media center. Its a Logitech diNovo Mini, it has a full keyboard a bunch of special function keys and a track pad. Very cool and very very tiny.

Currently the keyboard works fine with Ubuntu but the track pad doesn’t. Apparently Ubuntu doesn’t like the USB Bluetooth dongle that ships with the diNovo but will work with others. I have one at work that I will try out and see how it goes.

My folks bought me a one hour session in a real flight simulator for 737-800 which is awesome

All these presents and a long weekend, what more could I want.

So Google has released the judge’s scoring for the Android applications.

Bubbles! was in the top 25% in all categories (Effective Use, Polish, Indispensability, and Originality) and in the top 25% overall.

This website pulls together some of the scores that have been publicly published.

The 50 first round winners have also been release and there is a pdf with the winners in it (but it seems to be corrupt ?)

So the landscaper has started at my house. It’s only been a couple of days and the old garden is completely gone.

Yesterday they had the bulldozer in to level things out. It’s all rather dramatic… here are some pics:

Just received an email from the Android Developer Challenge team, seems that Bubbles! my Google Android application didn’t make it into round two:

_During the past few weeks, 100+ judges around the world reviewed over 1,700

applications. They were extremely impressed with the diversity and the

large number of high quality entries submitted. It is clear that the number

of great applications far exceeds the 50 top scoring applications that will

move on to the final round of the Android Developer Challenge._

_We regret to inform you that your entry was not among the top 50

submissions._

Ah well it was worth a go. Apparently they are going to be putting up an Android Developer Challenge

Gallery shortly so we will get to see what I was up against.

As I mentioned in my last post I updated my media PC to Ubuntu 8.04 without any issues. Turns out that was not the case…

Over the weekend I discovered that my sound playback has started to stutter especially with apps like VLC playing back video. After doing some digging it appears to be an issue with PulseAudio which is the new sound engine for Ubuntu.

Apparently it has some buffering issues particularly on older/slow machines.

Luckily it is easy to fix. The following command:

`As I mentioned in my last post I updated my media PC to Ubuntu 8.04 without any issues. Turns out that was not the case…

Over the weekend I discovered that my sound playback has started to stutter especially with apps like VLC playing back video. After doing some digging it appears to be an issue with PulseAudio which is the new sound engine for Ubuntu.

Apparently it has some buffering issues particularly on older/slow machines.

Luckily it is easy to fix. The following command:

`

Will ‘kill’ the PulseAudio engine, Ubuntu will then fall back to the older engines and everything will be right.

For the moment I have just configured this command to run when my Gnome session starts up. Which turns off PulseAudio when I boot up.

I read that a patch will be out soon. If it works I’ll turn PulseAudio back on.

Just prior to my Christmas break last year I “dropped” my laptop as it was hibernating, it was only an inch or so as I put it down but the knock was hard enough to corrupt my Windows registry! After trying to recover the damaged file I got XP to reboot but it was all a bit messed up.

Not having my XP install disk (it is a work laptop) and desperate to have my laptop up and running over the holiday I decided to install Ubuntu 7.10. The install was painless and as a bit of an experiment in using Linux as a desktop OS I have kept Ubuntu on my laptop since then.

So when my automatic update offered me to upgrade me to 8.04 I thought, “Why not?”. Having never done a complete OS upgrade via an automatic update process and knowing that I had tinkered with my 7.10 install quite a bit, I expected that it wouldn’t be a smooth process but kicked it off anyway.

So after about 6 hours of downloading and answering a couple of questions I was pleasantly surprised, when after a reboot, I was running my bright and shiny 8.04 install.

Then I was informed that propriety video card drivers were available and did I want to install them ?

Now my laptop is an old Del Inspiron 8600 which has an ATI video card in it. ATI unfortunately hasn’t quite joined the open source party so although they support Linux it is with a closed source driver. When initially setting up 7.10 I did try this driver but did not have much luck especially with issues when hibernating my latop.

Hoping that things had gotten better I decided to give them another go.

First off I enabled the drivers but had a persistent red dot on the hardware drivers screen that indicate that the driver “was not in use”.

Additionally I wasn’t able to turn on the desktop effects and I was beginning to miss my spinning desktop cube.

After digging around on the web it turns out that running:

fglrxinfo

should list out information that indicates that OpenGL support is been handled by ATI. In my case, no matter what I did Mesa stubbornly remained listed as the provider!

I then found this link: http://ubuntu-utah.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=569654&highlight=600m+gutsy which had an excellent guide (although targeting 7.10). Following this guide I came to the conclusion that my fglrx kernel module wasn’t been loaded because running:

lsmod | grep fglrx

Didn’t produce any output. Using some Google-fu I then found this link: http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6017 which had an suggestion of commenting out a line in /etc/modprobe.d/lrm-video.

Following this advice and a reboot later, everything was just peachy. I was able to enable the Visual Effects and get my spinning desktop cube, all using a nice speedy ATI driver.

So was the hibernate problem had been fixed? Closing my laptop lid I waited with baited breath… and no its still broken. In fact it appears hibernate flat lined my CPU, all my laptop fans came on and the laptop got very very hot ! Not so good.

For the moment I have simply changed my power settings to shutdown instead of hibernate when the lid is closed. Its a pain but at least I get my 3D acceleration.

Hopefully this problem will get fixed but if you follow the various forums the root cause is some incompatibility with a library that the ATI drivers use and of course because they are closed source we have to wait for ATI to fix them.

Since this has been an issue for a while I’m not holding my breath but 8.03 has LTS (long term support) for 3 years so we may get lucky.

After the success of my laptop upgrade I also did my home theater PC which I’ve also been running Ubuntu on (after surprise, surprise another Windows issue caused me to migrate). This one was completely painless.

At this rate I’m not going to have any Windows machines left in my household !

Well working into the wee hours of the morning I finally finished off my Google Android Developer Challenge entry.

Bubbles! allows you to create a pop (point of presence) that is ‘broadcasted’ from your phone. Other Bubbles! users in close proximity (about 50m) get to see your pop and you get see theirs. Of course as you move around so does your pop.

A pop is anonymous and consists of a message and a nick name that you choose for yourself.

I was going to implement a feature whereby you could tie a pop to a location. This would allow you to attach messages to a point in space for other users to see. Unfortunately I ran out of time but its next on my list to build.

Here are a few screenshots so you can see Bubbles! in action (click to see them full sized)

I’m also thinking of including the ability to see the history of pops for another user and perhaps even the ability to initiate a chat session with another Bubbles! user. Maybe even overlay the pops unto a MapView (which would hook into Google Maps) .

Of course if I get into the top 50 for the first round of the challenge I’ll have some money to invest into more development. We’ll have to see how I go but here’s hoping.