OpenMoko progress

I have had my Neo1973 for three months now and the software is finally getting usable. There were a lot of changes during August, the totally new theme and a lot of updates to the kernel and low level libraries. I had the first successful "out of the box" call with OpenMoko using a build from ScaredyCat in September 3:rd, but after that things started to go bad. The daemon handling communication to the GSM modem was more or less broken for a month and calling did not work out of the box for quite a while. That was if you even managed to get the rootfs built. WebKitGtk failed to build almost every time, and so did many other programs too.

This happened for many reasons, mostly because the understaffed development team had to focus on the hardware for GTA02 to iron out all serious bugs, and also because some of them finally had some well deserved vacation.

Despite these issues, the first batch of Neo1973's sold out quickly. A second batch was produced during late September and more people got their hands on the GTA01 phones in early October.

Trolltech also published an image for the Neo1973 and it worked really well. Even managed to use up the rest of my prepaid sim card calling friends.

Since then things have really sped up again. OpenMoko hired XorA to manage OpenMoko in OpenEmbedded and take care of build issues and bitbake recipies. This quickly made a big difference when it comes to getting the complete OpenMoko distro to build. Also, WebKitGtk now compiles more often than not and the default build has seen a several additions. It now includes the openmoko-browser2 based on WebKitGTK. The browser is a bit unstable still and the design is awful since only about 50% of the screen is used to display the actual web page you're browsing.


Also the media player has gotten a face lift and is becomming usable, with the exception that the mp3 decoding library is not yet optimized for the Neo. There's some usability issues still, like that the volume slider is difficult to control with your fingers only, and how you add files to the playlists.


The manufacturing of the second hardware revision of the Neo1973 is just about to start and hopefully all eager developers can get hold of a GTA02 before Christmas. If I didn't have a GTA01 already I would probably wait for the GTA02. The WiFi and faster processor would surely be nice to have. Of course bigger flash disk, the accelerometers and the graphics accelerator are nice too. In addition to that, the AGPS chip has changed to U-blox. (For a comparison of the two revisions of the phone, look here.)

Talking about that, I really hope that Broadcom will release an EABI driver for the Global Locate chip in the GTA01. Since Broadcom bought Global Locate it's been awfully quite about the GPS and even if you can get the old driver working in a chroot, it's a shame it takes so much effort. There's also no applications what so ever for using the GPS either. Not beyond a few shell scripts at least.

Science and Nature Writing

I just finished reading The best American Science and Nature writing 2006. This is the seventh version of this book series and I definitely wish I had found out about it earlier. Each book is made up of about 25 articles that a guest editor selects from about a hundred articles chosen by Tim Folger.

The 2006 edition is edited by Brian Greene who just happens to be one of my favorite physics writers. The articles span everything from bittorrent and blogs to animal psychology, anthropology and advanced physics. Coming from sources like Scientific American, The New York Times and Wired, most articles are easy to read and don't get detailed to the point of being boring. I had actually managed to read some of the articles already, but the others were a great way for me to be introduced to areas of science I knew very little about.

Some of my favorite articles are Dr Ecstasy about the chemist Alexander Shulgin, His brain, her brain about the differences between the male and female brain, and The coming death shortage describing how the increasing life expectancy of humans will affect us.

I encourage everyone interested in widening their scientific horizons to read this book. It's only 280 pages long and reading one chapter per night before falling asleep was perfect. 9 out of 10 points for this book from me.

Digital Fortress

My lovely girlfriend just finished reading Dan Browns Digital Fortress and handed it over to me. I finished it in two nights, just as his other books, and I think this book is at least as good as The Da Vinci Code.

Unfortunately it's not as detailed on the cryptology part as I would have liked, but at least he succeeds with a bit of name dropping. I remember Diffie-Hellman and ElGamal being mentioned, along with some other cryptology terms. The classic Caesar cipher was described more in detail as it's easy for anyone to understand how it works.

The story is basically the same as his other books, shy academic guy is forced to play detective instead of solving the problems he has with his beautiful and clever girlfriend. The plot is based around the search for the key to an "unbreakable" code. The NSA can't break it, and send the professor David Becker to Spain to get it back. Meanwhile, things are not going according to the plan back at the NSA Crypto headquarters...

It's a fun story and very fast paced as usually. Everyone is lying to everyone and it's not obvious right away who is fooling who. Feels like a perfect book to bring for a lazy summer day, except that you'll finish it in a few hours of reading.

The Fabric of the Cosmos

Last night I finished Brian Greene's excellent popular physics book The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality. I would recommend it to any one interested in theoretical physics or just curious about how far the scientists have come in trying to understand our universe.

The book is quite a heavy read, 493 pages plus a lot of endnotes and references. Having read The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory I can say that The Fabric of the Cosmos (TFotC) is an even better book. It takes up some of the same theories mentioned in Elegant Universe, but includes a lot more about The Big Bang and general relativity. In TFotC Greene starts out with water in a spinning bucket hundreds of years ago, through the discoveries of general relativity, the uncertainties involved in quantum mechanics to the latest super string theories, finding the key to "the arrow of time" along the way.

It's not easy to describe all this in a way that makes in understandable to people who aren't theoretical physicists, but Greene does a great job. It's barely any mathematical formulas or equations, instead he relies on similes and methaphores to get the point through.

Overall it's a very thought provoking book. In the middle of the book there's a lot of discussion about spacetime and the implications of quantum mechanics and general relativity. The more you learn about these things, the more obvious it seems that there is no such thing as free will. I find this very difficult to accept and my mind opposes it, but it's hard to contradict his logic reasoning.

I find the chapter on entropy and the arrow of time to be well written and the examples he is using are very fitting. Sometimes he gets a bit too excited over the numbers, printing a page or two with zeroes trying to describe the enormous values of some probability or metric. It's still well beyond what you can grasp.

Even if Greene is a strong supporter of string theory, he does a fair comparison between that and Loop Quantum Gravity in the last chapter of the book. But I still think that the way the book is written, most people will convinced that Branes in superstring and M-theory is the way to go.

As a final grade, I'll give it 8/10. It's a great book, but you really need to focus and think while reading.