• May 6, 2013

    Firefox OS at its Peak: Upgrading Gaia on Your Geeksphone

    FirefoxOS logo

    I received my Geeksphone Peak Firefox OS Developer device today. Firefox OS consists of two core parts:

    1. Boot2Gecko, which is essentially a Gecko rendering engine stapled on top of the Linux (Android) kernel
    2. Gaia, which is the HTML/JS/CSS front-end

    The Geeksphones are aimed at developers, so you’ll want to live on the bleeding edge (and in this case: you really should). Out of the box the Geeksphones come with Gaia 1.0.1 installed, which is pretty old. There’s some significant improvement going on for 1.1. Here’s how you upgrade to the latest and greatest version of Gaia. I tested this on a Mac, I assume on Linux and perhaps Windows it works similarly. I own the Peak phone myself, but for the other models the steps should be the same (other than the HIDPI thing, which I’ll note later).

    Read more

  • April 30, 2013

    A Criticism of the World’s First Website

    The Verge reports that the first ever website has been brought back to life at its original URL:

    April 30th may seem as ordinary as any other date, but in 1993 it marked an important milestone in the development of global communications: it was on that day that the World Wide Web entered the public domain. CERN, the same research group that’s presently busy smashing protons together using the Large Hadron Collider, made World Wide Web technologies available to everyone on a royalty-free basis. Without that enlightened decision, backed by web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, we might never have enjoyed the glories of GIFs, ubiquitous social networking, and instant music streaming.

    In a celebration of the web’s proud history, the CERN team has started up a new project to revive the very first website at its original URL.

    So, let’s have a looksie. It’s pretty spartan, yes, but that’s not the thing that bothers me. This is what bothers me:

    Screen Shot 2013 04 30 at 16 16 17

    What’s up with the hyperlinking of that space there? Apparently Timothy wasn’t much of a perfectionist. But it gets worse:

    Screen Shot 2013 04 30 at 16 16 26

    Spaces before the comma, spaces around the comma. Sure, let’s just insert random spaces and be super inconsistent. Perhaps this is due to the way the HTML is layed out?

    Let’s have a look at the HTML:

    Screen Shot 2013 04 30 at 16 19 59

    What happened here? Is this generated by FrontPage ’93, or what? Name attributes without quotes, weirdly wrapped lines — wrapped in the middle of tags. And the comma-space party cannot be blamed on the use of HTML tags either, look at line 18. There’s no reason the spaces had to be there around the comma.

    In many ways I’m not a perfectionist, but this kind of stuff can drive me up the wall…

  • April 26, 2013

    German Comments

    From a slidedeck about making LibreOffice 4.0 more hackable:

    Germancomments

    I started programming when I was 9 years old. I basically learned my first English from Pascal’s syntax and APIs (IF, THEN, ELSE, REPEAT, FOR, WriteLn). My dad, who taught me programming, suggested I always use variable names in English and comments too. So I did.

    Therefore, the idea that anybody would write variable names or comments in any language other than English, even if whoever you work with speaks the same language as you, just feels completely wrong. Mixing English programming language syntax with your native language just seems insane to me. But… apparently it happens. Apparently it happens in huge projects like LibreOffice formerly known as OpenOffice.org, formerly known as StarOffice.

    Please don’t do this.

  • April 25, 2013

    Tim O’Reilly’s Google Glass Experience

    Tim O’Reilly received his Google Glass preview in the mail. From his G+ post: 

    Tim O'Reilly Google Glass

    I just got my Google Glass last night, and it’s been a long time since a tech gadget has had me grinning ear to ear so often. I was at the Tech4Dem event, and let Marci Harris and Macon Phillips try on my Glass. Both of them quickly got the same big grin!

     

    It’s not at all what people expect! It’s a magical experience. I haven’t yet been quite able to put my finger on why it feels that way, but I think it’s the immediacy. Rather than fumbling for your phone, then opening the camera app, you can take a picture or a video with a touch, and share it with another touch. You can also talk to the device, taking pictures, doing google searches, getting directions, or sending emails or texts, without ever touching the devices. (You can wake it up with a touch or by tossing your head slightly.)

     

    A couple of comments:

    1. People have this notion that it’s privacy-invading. It really isn’t. It’s pretty easy for people you’re interacting with to see when the device is on – the lit-up screen is viewable from the other side. Yes, you can quickly take a photo or video, but only with either a voice command, or a push of a button on the frame, so it’s clearly noticeable.
    2. People also have the notion that you won’t be able to tell when someone is talking to you and when they are on the device. Again, that’s just not true. It sits above your eyes and it’s very clear when someone is looking up at the screen rather than looking at you.
    3. Speech is the natural interface for this device, but there are also a lot of gestures on the frame that control it. It’s elegant and intuitive. But some of the magic is the immediacy of talking to it, or touching it, and having something happen.

    More.

  • April 24, 2013

    TraceGL

    Rik Arends, my former boss at Cloud9 launched a pretty cool product yesterday: traceGL. It’s a trace debugger for node.js and browser JavaScript code. I asked him some questions about it on InfoQ.

  • April 23, 2013

    Firefox OS: It’s All About the Apps

    Today Geeksphone has started selling its first Firefox OS phones: the Keon and the Peak. As the online store opened its virtual doors, I was first in line. Not because I believe that the €119 Keon or €194 Peak will be the ultimate replacement for my €750 iPhone 5, but because I’m buying into a vision: the web has to become a first class citizen on mobile. It just has to happen.

    Read more

  • April 19, 2013

    If you read only one thing about Bitcoin, read this

    NewImage
    I’ve been following Bitcoin, the cryptographic currency, for a year or two, but I still learned a lot about it from this article by Felix Salmon. There’s two angles to Bitcoin: the technical angle (how does it work, why does it work) and the economic angle. Felix Salmon does an excellent job at covering the economic angle:

    A few days ago, the value of all the bitcoins in the world blew past $1 billion for the first time ever. That’s an impressive achievement, for a purely virtual currency backed by no central bank or other authority. It’s also temporary: we’re in the middle of a bitcoin bubble right now, and it’s only a matter of time before the bubble bursts.

    There are a couple of reasons why the bubble is sure to burst. The first is just that it’s a bubble, and any chart which looks like the one at the top of this post is bound to end in tears at some point. But there’s a deeper reason, too — which is that bitcoins are an uncomfortable combination of commodity and currency. The commodity value of bitcoins is rooted in their currency value, but the more of a commodity they become, the less useful they are as a currency.

    If you read anything about Bitcoin and its future, read this.

  • April 18, 2013

    Amazon Sure Knows How to Scale: 2 Trillion Objects, 1.1 million reqs/s on S3

    Wow…NewImage

    Last June I blogged about the first trillion objects stored in Amazon S3. On the first day of re:Invent I updated that number to 1.3 trillion.

    It is time for another update!

    I’m pleased to announce that there are now more than 2 trillion (2 x 1012) objects stored in Amazon S3 and that the service is regularly peaking at over 1.1 million requests per second.

    It took us six years to grow to one trillion stored objects, and less than a year to double that number. 

    How many things can you keep in your head at once?

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