Yesterday, I ended up helping a friend pick up a new PC at Fry’s. Not super high on my list of things to be doing on a Sunday, but I’m rolling with it. All we needed was a minimal computer to run a browser, so after looking at the laptop and nettop selection, we decide to go for a 10″ EeePC. There was a 12″, but we were told that it was out of stock, and after we decided on the 10″, we were told that was out of stock (and discontinued) as well. These netbooks were running Windows 7 Starter and I asked what the difference was (vs Home, Professional, or whatever), but the sales associate didn’t know. In the end, he brought out an also-discontinued but similar (single-core N455, not dual-core D525 Atom) netbook. At this point, I’m jonesing to get the hell out of dodge, and after another 20 minutes of dicking around, it’s sent to the front desk for checkout/pickup. Overall shopping experience grade: pathetic.

Anyway, I don’t want that to overshadow what’s coming next, so lets just move on (had I known I would have just told my friend to order online via Amazon or something else civilized). Now for the setup… It’s been close to a decade since I’ve unboxed and booted a retail Windows PC, so I was sort of looking forward to see how the experience has improved.

It doesn’t start off too bad. A nice bootup logo, some simple form fields to fill out, and then a Samsung installer that automatically runs to install some system software. We leave for lunch, and when we return, it’s… still… running. All told, it takes just under an hour before I reach the Desktop, after which the laptop (with 1GB of RAM) is almost unusably slow. Sure enough, looking at the Task Manager shows that it has 0 memory free. Interestingly, the Bing Bar is the app using the second most memory. After another hour+ of uninstalling the apps that presumably were just installed in the previous hour (Norton first, and then the Bing Bar, and the Samsung System Tools being some of the worst offenders), I downloaded Google Chrome, and ran the “boot performance” tool (another half-hour), and ended up with a usable laptop with a passable web browsing experience. Overall initial boot/setup experience grade: super pathetic.

Now granted, this is a <$300 device, but I'm honestly surprised at how horrible the first boot experience was. Much worse than I remembered, much less what I was expecting in 2011. How can a manufacturer get away delivering this sort of experience and still be in the business of selling computers? After a decade of using Macs (and occasionally imaging Linux systems on similar class hardware), my mind is just boggled. I wonder if people buying these things don't know any better, or if they fully understand the horror, but simply must endure it (like me in this case, I suppose).

It certainly occurred to me more than once during this ordeal that if I had brought my USB stick, it would have been much faster to have wiped the netbook with an Ubuntu installation and be done with it.

Of course, if you’re not gonna be hacking on one, it’ll be a decent web browser or photoframe, and I have no doubt that the homebrew guys will keep plugging away for a while, but I’d treat it more as a disposable $100 purchase. (My thinking is the upcoming Amazon tablets will split the difference in pricing, but ultimately have much better longevity).

Now, back to the hardware for a bit. While there have been a rash of articles blaming the TouchPad’s performance on the hardware, I think that’s baloney. For those that aren’t regularly comparing ARM specs, all you need to know is that in terms of raw power, the Scorpion should hold it’s own – equivalent to current-gen Cortex-A9/GPU combo like Apple’s A5/SGX54x or Nvidia’s Tegra2 (maybe a little less memory bandwidth/IPC, but it has a faster clock). There’s an Anandtech article that does a good job summarizing.

The Anandtech article has a SunSpider comparison, which mirrors the launch benchmarks. The TouchPad is slow because the web layer is slow. Luna, webOS’s GUI, runs entirely on web layer. QED. This mirrors my cursory prelaunch SDK testing (NDA lifted 6/30).

I mostly gave up on webOS back in the summer of 2010, pre-HP acquisition, and although I retain a fondness for the idea of webOS, the execution has always caused ambivalence for me, primarily because of performance. I think Dion makes a bit of an understatement, when saying they should have spent more time profiling. More than any other feature or app (well, Maps), lag, OOM erros, and unresponsiveness was the primary issue that drove me away.

Although a lot of it comes down to doing (hard) low-level optimization work (or dumb easy stuff like turning off logging), I think at least some chunk is just due to running on old software. Last year at the Palm Developer Day, the excuse given about why webOS software was so out of date was due to recertification issues, but w/ webOS 3.x being a tablet-only fork, this obviously didn’t prove to be the ultimate reason.

Based on the 3.0.2 SDK Emulator, here’s a rundown of some of the stack:

Linux Kernel 2.6.26 was originally released Jul 13, 2008. In comparison, Android Honeycomb runs 2.6.36 (Oct 10, 2010). There is in fact an active project that’s done great work patching the kernel (better schedulers, governors, compcache), although I’m not sure if all the modules required to upgrade vs backport are available.

webOS reports using AppleWebKit/534.6. WebKit was tagged Safari-534.6 on Aug 27, 2010. This might not seem too bad when comparing w/ kernels, but to give some perspective, Chrome 7.0.517 was released with AppleWebKit/534.7 in Oct 21, 2010. I’m currently running Chrome 13.0.782.112, which uses AppleWebKit/535.1 (tagged on Aug 11, 2011). Safari 5.1 is using AppleWebKit/534.48.3 (tagged Jun 24, 2011). webOS has ACID compliance and other standards issues, and is lacking in many useful HTML5 features, which is somewhat ironic considering.

Probably more relevant to performance, however, is the V8 version. webOS’s node.js is compiled against V8 2.5.9.22-2 (released Nov 11, 2010). The current latest version, released last week, is 3.5.6. Especially for JS runtimes, improvements have been coming at a blistering pace. Running V8 Benchmark v6 on Chrome 13/Canary 15 (V8 3.3.10.25 and V8 3.5.6) on my desktop gave results in the 9400/9500 range. An old version of Chrome 7 (V8 2.3.11.22) scored… 5400 on the same test. (There BTW is your 2X performance.)

webOS 2.x+’s services are based on a node.js layer. That’s great. The version of node.js they are using is 0.2.3, which was released on Oct 02, 2010. The current version is 0.4.11 (stable) and 0.5.4 (unstable). node appears to run standalone, so that can probably be upgraded (and the JS tested) without too much trouble.

The much bigger challenge for people sticking with webOS is how to deal with all the custom-compiled/embedded bits. The biggest pieces (at least memory-wise) are the WebAppMgr, LunaSysMgr, and BrowserServer, but updating any the luna bits are completely dependent on the whim of HP.

If they don’t open source webOS, hopefully whoever’s left can push out as many of the low-level performance optimizations and maintain some sort of robust build/update system.

Sadly, the most likely scenario is that in a couple months we’ll just all be flashing an Android port.

That was the impetus for the latest addition to my bashrc, a helper function that lets you set volume in the command line (scale is 0-100):

vol () { osascript -e "set volume output volume $*"; }

However, it was a huge fight getting it setup, so I figured I’d write this down for posterity.

There is a PIDA MacPort, however there is no maintainer, it’s for Python 2.6 only, and it didn’t work out of the box for me. You’ll need to fight it enough that you might as well go whole hog. Here’s how I got Pida running w/ MacPorts python27.

First the ports:

sudo port install librsvg py27-gtk py27-gnome dbus-python27 py27-notify-python
sudo port install vte +python27
sudo port install vim +python27 +x11 +gtk2

Then the Python libraries:

sudo easy_install py
sudo easy_install pygtkhelpers
sudo easy_install Logbook
sudo easy_install bpython

Next, after grabbing the source, your build environment:

PKG_CONFIG_PATH="/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/pkgconfig" PATH="/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/bin:$PATH" python setup.py build_ext --inplace
running build_ext

Now, you’ll be able to run, but you may get a dbus error (which won’t let you select your editor among other things). Here’s how I made sure that dbus was running:

launchctl list | grep dbus
sudo launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchAgents/org.freedesktop.dbus-system.plist
launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchAgents/org.freedesktop.dbus-session.plist
launchctl list | grep dbus

Note above that dbus-system should be as root, and dbus-session should be loaded as the user.

Once I did this I was able to get up and running, however the Python shell subprocess throws an exception for me, and the font rendering and overall look, and of course all the non-vim keyboard shortcuts are painfully alien. Sadly, if you’re looking for a vim-like IDE-ish solution on the Mac, I think Vico, while quite new and still incomplete, is probably a better bet. If you’re looking for better Python introspection/debugging with a not-totally-awkward keyboard shortcuts (and incidentally, dead easy OS X installs), Reinteract and iep look to be the best choices I’ve found. (There’s also Spyder, which has a python26 Macport, but it depends on qt4-mac which may cause your MacPorts to build the world.)

I’ve been lackadaisical lately w/ my sysadmining, but with the unfriendly waters, I took some time to tighten the ship up a bit. I probably be publishing a little “hardening Ubuntu for really lazy/busy devs” guide soon.

I won’t reproduce my original article (linked above), but I’ll go through each of the predictions and make some comments:

• Software as service is standard – My prediction was that social networking, media sharing, and all kinds of apps would be increasingly integrated/prepackaged OOTB. I think that this has been born out, certainly on the mobile and device front, although this year may be the inflection point for the desktop (iCloud, ChromeOS, etc). Even without that, probably the majority of consumer computing is now service/browser based. I find myself totally dependent on many cloud-based services (Evernote, Checkvist, DropBox, Google Docs, GMail/GApps, Twitter, FB, etc). Also, the majority of my small business’s software is also cloud-based.
• Global digital identity / reputation / relationship system – my prediction was that online/offline personas, relationships, and physical presence would be tied together, potentially controlled by a single company. I think in mid-2006 I would have guessed Google would end up taking it all, but FB was a strong contender, and they’re on top at the moment. Still, as of mid-2011, this ball is still in play, and there are certain components (location, reputation) that are still almost complete tossups. Note: while FB has been enormously successful and will almost certainly be the first Internet company to hit 1B actives, there are some signs that it may have peaked in its developed markets, so it’s not invincible. There’s also a lot of potential left in terms of social utility that’s still completely unexplored (and only in the most superficial ways in many other cases).
• Digital media – I predicted streaming/wireless syncing of media from anywhere. While iCloud was only just announced (to compete against Amazon Cloud Drive, and Google Music) and music has been lagging a bit (although celestial jukebox services like Spotify and Rdio have been hitting it out of the park, so maybe unfair to dismiss music completely), we’ve seen this come true much more for video. Maybe this is due to the competition traditional TV/Film has faced from the YouTube/Internet video juggernaut (my first YouTube video, uploaded just over 5 years ago). Netflix in particular, which not only has overtaken web traffic, but also BitTorrent. Expect the cord-cutting to accelerate. One last observation. Amazon’s current homepage menu now completely highlights digital goods:
  
• Smart phone – I think I hit this one 100% percent. Not much to say about it. Well, one caveat is that while there were rumors of an iPhone floating around for years, it wouldn’t be announced for another 6 months. Apple gets huge props for single-handedly helping to drag the lagging handset/telecom industry into this future, as well as totally shaking things up with its App Store. I’m sure there are some charts somewhere that show recent numbers on mobile vs fixed Internet use, but if that number hasn’t been crossed, I’m sure it will be soon.
• RFID – I was totally wrong. At Lensley, we’ve been doing some neat RFID integrations with clients, and RFIDs have had huge adoption in thing that touch people’s daily life, like in supply-chain and public transit (as well as less well thought out ways, like US Passports). On the whole, though, they’ve remained too expensive and too niche to get much consumer love (kits from Sparkfun notwithstanding). While NFC in Android (an RFID-compatible superset) has gotten lots of hubaloo, there’s pretty much zilch in terms of real world use, much less anything remotely spimey. We’ll have to see how mobile payments pan out over the next couple years. (2012?)
• Self Monitoring – While the Quantified Self has been getting some traction (a conference! breathless writeups!) and there are a proliferation of services and devices (Runkeeper, FitBit, Gowear Fit, Zeo, Withings, etc), this is still a pretty niche/nascent movement. I have no doubt it’ll keep growing, and there are some pointers (the proliferation of Feltron-like reports for social activity, checkins) that there’s a tipping point approaching. We’ll see
• Personal Aggregators – I saw the other day that Flipboard’s at 400M flips/month, and one might argue that Facebook’s news feed algorithms, modern blogs (Gawker, HuffPo, Engadget, etc), or even Twitter have stepped in to fill big roles in terms of filtering the bombardment of crap, but it seems like treading water. I would have expected some smarter/more robust attention management tools to have been developed, but maybe I’m completely wrong on how most people handle infoglut.
• Shared everything – obviously wrong about fine-grained privacy. Facebook has given us a “mostly private enough sort of for now” model that’s been pretty sucessful. Certainly at moving everyone torwards the social-everything model (you win some, you lose some).

Of my long-shots (things that I thought would be awesome), we actually got one of them in a huge way. At the time I had written this, I just received my iRex Iliad ($700) after waiting for years for an honest to goodness E-Ink device. Sadly, it was a pretty useless white elephant of a device. However, the display was phenomenal, so I threw it on the list. In late 2007 Amazon released the first Kindle, and a few weeks ago, Amazon announced that it is now selling more Kindle books than print books. The Kindle 3, BTW, was the best-selling product in Amazon’s history.

3D printing/fabrication has gotten a lot more traction (even a recent Stephen Colbert interview), as has the maker movement in general. Although it’s still niche, the pricing is right. At $1300, the Thing-O-Matic is cheaper than most people’s first laser printer.

AR HUDs, are as ever, another 5 years away. (The OVF on my X100 is pretty sweet though.)

OK, that’s all well and good. But how about the things that I missed completely. Here’s a short list:

• Location – while I tangentially mentioned location, I never listed LBS, mapping and other location services explicitly. Looking back, this is a 100% obvious thing, considering how much usage has exploded since. My only excuse is that being hip-deep/working for so long on local/map/mobile stuff at the time probably blinded me to how ubiquitous it wasn’t for the rest of the world while writing this. (I was working on geocoding/map/checkins at Upcoming, and from ZoneTag to Checkmates, to Yahoo! Maps, I was surrounded by all kinds of crazy LBS/geo/mobile stuff).
• Twitter – I probably first saw Twitter about a month after I wrote my original post. At the time it was “twttr” was a completely different beast – very SMS focused, like group chat. I passed, and didn’t even bother signing up until a few months later when visiting with friends in the UK (it got a lot of early traction because it was cheaper than texting). It took a while (early 2007?) for me to really get to grips with Twitter (writeup here). Kudos to Jack, Noah, Ev, et al for trying out something new, and then working at it for years to refine it. It’s gone through a lot of transformations (mostly for better)…
• iPad – I was a close follower of the Mobile+UMPC+Tablet industry at the time, and if you had told me that in a few years Apple would have released a friggin Dynabook with 10 finger multitouch, 10 hour battery life, amazing responsiveness, and an a complete App Ecosystem (backed by 10s of millions of sister devices), selling for $500 I would have smacked you. After which, I’d have gone out and bought a lot more Apple stock. Like the iPhone when it launched in 2007, the iPad came from a few years in the future and dragged everyone else, kicking and screaming.
• Wikileaks – Even during the year of the iPad launch, however, probably the biggest and most unexpected story of 2010 was Wikileaks (some of my favorite writeups). It has literally changed the world, and the most amazing thing is that it’s been a story that’s been in the making for years, if not decades. Wikileaks and many other stories happening right now (the Arab Spring, Anonymous, LulzSec) in many ways epitomize Clay Shirky‘s postulate that “Communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring… It’s when a technology becomes normal, then ubiquitous, and finally so pervasive as to be invisible, that the really profound changes happen.”

OK, in hope of publishing soon, I’ll be wrapping up now. No 2016 predictions from me, but maybe it’ll be worth catching regardless up in a few years. For those that are really interested in the things catching my attention these days, here’s a spring graph I made early last year:

Update: An editor from the International Business Times dropped a line yesterday with a few questions. Here’s the writeup they did today in the Luxury and Brands section today: Blogger Correctly Predicted the Future in 2006 (Mostly)

• Onboarding is sort of rough. A little step-through tutorial would really help, or intro-ing you to a newbie room or something.
• Scrobbling please. Actually overall, would be nice to have better history – songs you’ve listened to while surfing rooms, who played what in which rooms, what you’ve played. Easier “liking” of track, which in turn would add them to your collection.
• Better room control would be nice. Basic things like changing room options post creation, and adding moderators, but also allowing moderators to white/blacklist, +/-voice, skip tracks etc. Looking at IRC probably gives a pretty good priority list to start with. auto-afk would be really nice.
• A global friend chat would be nice. A lot of times I find myself wanting to hop rooms but enjoying chatting w/ some friends. Would be even neater in thos chats would to be able to see what room/track they’re in, would encourage room hopping
• A bit of a tougher decision, but it’d be neat to see the “on deck” tracks for DJs. It’s hard to really plan a nice flow otherwise when DJing. It’d also allow room members to preskip bad tracks. Accruing enough bad votes over a certain period should probably have an effect
• Currently the Queue/Song could be improved a lot. It’d be nice when you’re DJing to really be able to see your queue and have a list of your history/likes/etc (your collection) and be able to search at the same time. It’d be also nice to be able to search MediaNet and your own files from the same interface and drag and drop songs in otherwise. Right now it’s a bit of a pain, and all happening in this tiny window w/ a single playlist. (Also what happens when you remove a song that you’ve uploaded from your queue? Who knows?
• Room filtering (your own, free djs slots etc). Overal room popularity charts etc would be pretty interesting…

Updates:

• The Turntable.fm Extended Chrome extension does auto-awesomeing and can scrobble, but I haven’t gotten the scrobbling to work…

It’s still early days – I’ve only gone out shooting once (I’ll be heading out shooting tonight as well) and I’m still getting used to how it handles. I know it’s capable of capturing fantastic images, but coming from shooting tens of thousands of frames on Canon DSLRs over the past decade, adapting to the X100 has been a bit of a challenge so far.

The lack of rangefinder patch, focus screen or some other equivalent is killing me right now (the EVF is not my idea of a good time), but maybe that’ll pass. That being said, I’m actually looking forward to shooting the heck out of this thing. I’m sure it’ll make me a better photographer in terms of thinking about what I’m shooting, estimating distances, and thinking about DOF. It’s certainly not a P&S, and I’ll no doubt miss a lot of shots, but I plan on trying to carry it everywhere, so we’ll see how it goes. (I’ve ordered a Luma LoopIt strap.)

For those considering the X100, I’d probably have to say that this isn’t the camera you want to take with you to evening social events, not unless you really want to work for your photos. While the bright lens (F2.0) and amazing High ISO performance (totally usable at 3200) and quiet leaf shutter would seem to make it great for low-light candids, the AF seems more finicky than average, and sadly, the fly-by-wire focus ring is pretty much useless right now.

That being said, I plan on working primarily in MF mode and zoning, so we’ll see how that works.

Also, there are a lot of niggles in the firmware. On the bright side, these could all be fixed and there seems to be some noises from Fuji that they will work on the firmware. On the negative, that historically hasn’t been the case. I’ll be keeping a running list of things I’d liked fixed here:

General

• Startup Times: I’ve managed to get it starting up fairly quickly (about 1s?) but out of the box it took so long that I kept thinking it was broken.
• File writing: file writes seem to block operations? Is this 2011?
• ISO settings don’t persist across modes
• Even in full manual mode, the aperture doesn’t seem to be physically set, so there’s shutter lag. More of an annoyance than a dealbreaker
• Yep, the battery goes from “low” to shutdown in < 5min; in general power usage/management seems to be rather poor. There must be a better compromise for responsiveness/power usage. Canon DSLR powerpacks are about the same capacity and last forever.

AF

• My current #1 focusing issue, at the cause of most of my misfocused shots is the OVF AF parallax. The FW fix that would help this greatly would be to recompose the AF point with the focal plane (just move it along with the framelines). More discussion here.
• Low light AF; is this the best it gets?
• The focus-frame size can only be adjusted in AF-S; I’ve find it enormously useful if it could be adjusted in MF

Focusing

• The biggest problem is the focus ring doesn’t work at all for covering distances; it’s not helped by it being incredibly laggy as well. This should be an easy fix with a better acceleration curve, and allowing that to be user adjustable/distance-dependent
• In MF, since the command lever is used to enter EVF zoom mode, wouldn’t it make sense to allow the lever to be used for focusing as well? Actually would be a lot less finicky than the ring; you could also use one or the other for rough/fine focusing

Buttons

• It’d be nice to reassign the RAW button (I’m always shooting JPG+RAW, I’d much rather be able to assign that to movie mode or the ND filter)
• Macro should just be a toggle instead of popping up a menu – it’s either on or off! Same w/ ND – these are probably my biggest usability quibbles after the first week.
• Auto ISO should be a toggle in ISO menu (so you can easily flip it on/off in the OVF fn mode); actually, for night shooting, being able to toggle Auto ISO off even easier (long-press?) is even more important; it really screws with you when the metering if off by more than the exposure compensation…

Video

• Manual focusing while shooting. The AF is especially clueless when shooting video
• It’d be nice to be able to set the fn button (or the RAW button) to go directly into recording

OVF

• The histogram doesn’t seem to be right? It doesn’t reflect aperture or shutter speed changes?
• The range scale is good, but would be nice to show the hyperfocal distance as a marking (or as others have suggested, a mode/way to jump to the hyperfocal distance like the GRD)
• In the post-capture EVF review, it’d be nice to have an option to show brights/histogram; being able to have a 1s or even 0.5s preview would be nice as well

I’ll be trying to post more regularly to my flickr account.

After a couple weeks with the X100, I posted an updated list on Engadget.

Way too many hours later, I present autotunnel. It’s a couple configs/scripts that work together to automatically (re)create your SSH tunnels when you’re set to a Network Location that requests a SOCKS proxy. It’s now a one step process (change your Network Location in the Apple menu) to get secure.

(I also found an app that’s quite similar, sheepsafe. It’s a Ruby-based daemon that does automatic location switching based on “trusted” networks. It switches post-network connection (WatchPaths on SystemConfiguration) but I don’t know if that’s a practical concern or not.)

If you’re looking to run something fancier in production, it looks like Etsy has some great stuff going on (see also).

Anyway, if you just want a quick graph and/or don’t want to setup Graphite, the code I’ve put up should get you generating an RRD pretty quickly.