Martin Notes

The iPhone contains a nice 3G radio and a bluetooth radio, so I thought I’d let my Ubuntu laptop connect to the Internet through the iPhone’s 3G. A little research showed that it is quite straight forward to connect Ubuntu to a 3G service there days (since 8.10), so I didn’t expect a lot of problems.

To my surprise the setup failed at the very first step. I checked the iPhone’s bluetooth capabilities by finding the bluetooth address:

hcitool scan

And looking up the capabilities:

sdptool browse <address> | grep Networking

To my surprise the iPhone doesn’t support a dailup connection through bluetooth. Isn’t it rather strange that Apple sells us a phone that doesn’t allow us to share it’s network with the rest of the world? I would assume the TelCos wouldn’t mind, actually I’m surprised they even accepted it.

Apple has been down this road before, the whole Mac OS 9 and earlier was closed to the outside world. You’d have to buy Apple stuff to make it work. Mac OS X improved that a lot, and the hardware support also improved: USB, standard VGA. It’s strange to see that Apple is going back to the more closed approach now. The iPod was still a bit open; you can upload songs from Linux, but the iPhone can’t even be used without iTunes.

Watch it Apple, you won’t be able to hold this so much longer. There will be competition at some point, and then people will start to make different choices. So far you’ve been the best in what you’re doing, but you’re not the only one.

I hope Apple will start seeing that competition is not bad, but that they should learn from them.

Linux, Opinion, Personal, Ubuntu, iPhone bluetooth, iPhone, Linux, Ubuntu

VirtualBox 2.1 has been released. Apparently it is a major update from the 2.0.6 release. Check this installation guide to update or install.

Linux, Opinion, Ubuntu, Web Linux, Ubuntu, VirtualBox

Ok, I have an iPhone now and I’m really happy with it. It’s a beautiful design, brilliant piece of technology, the app store is very cool. I’ve downloaded the most useless and useful apps, so I’m a happy camper.

But.

Why did Apple try so hard to make it impossible to use such a nice device without using other Apple products? First of all in the Netherlands you can only buy it  with T-Mobile. Since I’m a corporate phone user, I can chose between Vodafone. The solution is to buy a phone in Italy or Poland and insert a Vodafone SIM card. That works, but it’s annoying.

When I received the phone, I wanted to use it immediately. But you have to unlock the thing with iTunes. There is NO alternative. This means that you have to run either Mac OS X or Windows to even be able to use the iPhone. I don’t have that at work. I’ve tried to install iTunes in VirtualBox, but VB still has some problems with USB devices. Which is stupid, but not the point right now. So after trying to get it to work for an hour I gave up and asked a colleague if I could use his Mac to unlock the phone.

Ok, I’ve got a working phone. Nice, nice, nice. Good GUI, nice apps, GPS works great, wireless up and running in 10 seconds. For at least an hour I’ve been pinching, dragging, configuring and being happy.

Then I found out that the 3G network didn’t work. I only solved that when I got home. After some Google activity it appears that some iPhone vendors use the ‘Enterprise capabilities’ to lock the phone to their network. So, not SIMlock, but only the network capabilities. I had to download a configuration application to create a configuration profile that I has to mail to myself to install it on the iPhone.

Now it’s working and of course I’m happy and droowling but there is a weird aftertaste. Why did Apple take this approach? Do they think they won’t make enough money otherwise, or is it their idea of controling the quality of service to their customers? I don’t get it. Most people won’t care at all, they are running windows and don’t think about this. I do care, and I think Apple should care.

Opinion, Personal, iPhone iPhone, Ubuntu

I’ve been working with a lot of enterprise software during my whole career and it keep surprising me that almost no enterprise tool has any consideration for performance. I understand that the pricing is usually per CPU, which makes performance a less interesting feature for sales. But it goes too far.

How is it possible that you are advised to run 1 Oracle  WebLogic Portal instance on 1 CPU? I know portal is not comparable to PHP, but a factor 1:1000 is a bit to much for my liking. And Oracle is not alone in this: IBM, SAP, all of these are slow and slower. And it’s weird since we (the IT boys and girls) have fixed this a long time ago.

There is a beautiful concept called HTML caching. Yes, I know: that’s not nice, architectural incorrect, not flexible enough. Indeed, heavily personalised pages might not be the primary candidates for full page caching, but most of the websites out there still use a fairly static homepage. Cache that page!

At Componence we’ve (finally) delivered a standard caching solution to put in front of Oracle WebLogic Portal (or BEA Weblogic Portal and the result is shocking. The performance improvement is upwards of 1:20. Give it a try: http://www.wk-vet.fr. Yes, that’s portal, and it’s dynamic.

Dear enterprise architects, please stop being such principle asses and apply the most common fixes to your performance problems.

Enterprise 2.0, Opinion, Web Enterprise, performance

Do you write a text or do you want to share some information? Do you create a drawing or do you want to explain some idea?

I think the current desktop is either application- (Windows, Gnome) or document- (Mac OS X) oriented. But why? I don’t use my computer to open applications or create documents, I like to get a task done. I’d like an interface that is task oriented!

Task oriented design is a well known approach for interaction designers but somehow this never entered the desktop metaphor. The desktop is still mostly aimed at starting applications and handling files. Which is nice and important, but very inefficient. I think the desktop should be able to do those tasks for me. Gnome DO is quite good at finding the application I want to open, and Nautilus is quite good at organising files.

An idea would be to give the user the possibility to create tasks for itself. For example: I want to create a project plan, instead of: open OO Writer, select the project plan template and start writing. I hear you say: “You can use the templates for that!”. Indeed, I could, but then the flow would be: go to a folder where I want to create the plan, right click, find the template I want, create the file, name it, open it. Not efficient.

I’ve written a doc a while ago about a webbased task oriented desktop. Maybe I should expand that into something that fits on the desktop. Next holiday I’m going to work on that…

[Update]

• http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/932/
• http://gabriel.hurley.googlepages.com/userinterface
• http://www.qdh.org.uk/wordpress/?p=244

GUI, Opinion, Personal document oriented, task oriented

The man is making sense. There is no alternative for exchange in the opensource. Not for the server, and not for the client. It’s a sad thing because it makes acceptance of linux in the business world tough, if not impossible.

If Ubuntu is serious about the #1 bug, start thinking about this first: what software stack do you need to be a competitor to M$? That will include business software, quite a lot I think.

Enterprise 2.0, Opinion, Ubuntu open source enterprise

I never wanted to start a business, but just like everybody who has been a professional for some time I do have ideas about how to run a business. Personally I think a business is about creating a mindset in your employees. Try to think how you would like you clients to be treated and train your employees to comply to that. Me personally, I would like my supplier to learn. Never make the same mistake twice, wouldn’t that be great?

In every business you have to make decisions. Usually between money and something. Money and quality, money and people, money and … Whatever. Of course money is an important driver for your business, but there are other drivers. I think the most important one is: keep your business alive. That means: LEARN!

If you don’t learn as an entrepreneur you’ll never run a successful business. Learn from your successes, mistakes, competition, employees, friends, it doesn’t really matter: you have to watch and learn. The funny thing is I’ve had a couple of employers and they all tend to forget instead of learn. It’s probably easier to push a mistake away instead of writing it down at the top of your list of things to improve. “Human nature”?

Frustrating, but I still don’t want to be an entrepreneur. Let other people show that they can make something work. I’ll help them, and keep reminding them to learn.

Opinion, Personal learning, running a business

I’ve been fighting with some stuff in Ubuntu that is pretty straight forward on Windows.

The first was as easy as it gets: editing word documents. It seems that the word documents that OpenOffice delivers have a quite bad layout. Especially the content index is lousy. I must say I’m annoyed by this, I really try to use FOS for everything, but in my job I encounter a lot of MS Word documents. I need to be able to create and edit them.

The second was: we (Componence) switched to Exchange 2007. Ah well, that’s really old, so I guess Evolution supports that. It doesn’t. F*ck! It will be supported in the next release of Gnome, if they (Novell) are able to resolve some licence problems.

The third is that I’d like to be able to use an extra monitor on my laptop. I’ve been using the external monitor as a mirror for ages now, but a real spanning desktop would be nice. It turns out that this is really simple. Why didn’t anyone try to implement that in a way that doesn’t require any config file changing? This is way too simple, and possible for nearly a year already!

The last point made me find a weird thing in Compiz: it can’t handle a viewport larger then 2048 wide or 2048 high. Ehm?

The word file and exchange crap made me install Windows in a Virtual box. I have this open constantly and I spend a lot of my time working in Windows again. I hate it!

Linux, Opinion, Ubuntu disappointment, Linux

I’ve been using OpenOffice 3 beta for a while now and I must say it’s much better then 2.4. I contains some of the features I’ve always liked in MS Office, like comments at the side of the document and language selection. Both were pretty crappy in 2.4… I also have the feeling that the MS Word file format support has improved a bit, at least the bug that a document becomes read only when you add an index (how do you build a bug like that???) has been fixed.

There is still room for improvement. For example: it’s still not possible to accept changes with the right mouse key. This would really make merging changes much easier then it is now.

I hope that the support of the ODF format in MS Office will come fast, then I can just send ODF document to my collegues and clients. That would really make life much better, finally kill that idiotic MS Word format!

Linux, Opinion Linux, open office 3 beta

Sometimes Digg does have humour. I think it’s amazing that people actually make the effort to mark this article as “Possibly inaccurate”.

Opinion digg, humour