The Kohana project have recently released an update to their 3.0 release, so I’ve integrated this back to the RPM distribution and you can now get an updated RPM package from the RPM repository here and a source RPM is as usual available here.

Its a pretty cool device and (to my surprise) it allowed me to abandon all the other phones I was carrying with me, pretty much with in a couple of days (I expected it will take me at least a week to transfer all the things I was doing with mobile connected devices to a new device). So now – probably to the surprise of many of my friends – I carry just one phone instead of 3.

I’m using the Cellcom provided Milestone, as it comes with a very cost-effective plan, and less so because it comes with complete Hebrew support in its Android firmware.

After 1 week of usage, I have to say that I’m very happy with what it can do and it has definitely upgraded my communication experience – I get a better email experience (and that was hard to improve on the Ericsson P1i I was using previously), better synchronization for the address book and calendar (now I get both Google calendar and the company’s calendar synced) and I even have IM connected most times (which is to say – if you try to IM me and I’m less then responsive, likely I’m driving or something).

Things that I’m still not happy about:

• I can’t get tethering for dial-up to work. I haven’t tried USB tethering yet, but bluetooth tethering doesn’t work for me (though at this point it looks like more a problem with my computer then with the phone).
• It has crashed a couple of times on me so far (which is to say – much less then my previous phones at about the same amount of time, but still).
• It eats battery like crazy – if I’m not really playing with it all day, let say: 1 GPS drive to work, some emails and a few calls during the day, maybe some IMing and when its time to go home the battery can be dead. If I actually do any battery intensive usage such as playing games, listening to podcasts or stuff like that – it will be dead withing 3 to 4 hours. I’ve put the complimentary car charger, I got with the phone, in my car and I keep it connected while driving. This usually (but not always) allows me to get away without the battery dying on me at inconvenient times.
• The system’s software update does not work – I know there are updated firmwares from Motorola, but when I try to run the software update from the system settings it tells me it can’t connect to the server and to try again later.
• There are some annoying bugs in the system, such as: the music player starting itself when the headset disconnect, the market fails to install applications if Google Talk isn’t connected (sometimes, but not always) and a couple of other minor stuff.
• The bluetooth headset disconnects sporadically, and also sometimes looses the A2DP connection. This is less frequent, less serious and much less annoying then it was with the P1i, but its still a menace. Maybe it is the headset after all.
• The “application drawer” is a useless UI. The default way to launch applications in Android (at least those that you don’t have shortcuts for on the over-crowded home screens) is the application drawer – a huge list of any application and plugin that you installed order by alphabetical name. You can’t re-order them and you can’t put them into sub folders or anything. If you’re like me and installed a bunch of stuff on your phone, then you are forced to scroll through several screens full of icons before you find what you need (at least kinetic scrolling is fun). When you get a new Android device, the first thing you should do is install a launcher replacement that allows you to put folders on your home screens, then treat the folders like subfolders in the Symbian menu system.

That’s the bad stuff, now for things that are awesome!

• The UI is pure joy. The touch interface is fast and responsive, and easy to work with. And unlike the Nexus One, the “Android Experience” buttons (the static buttons under the screen) work easily and always react properly.
• WiFi works great! It even notifies you if you are roaming about outside your home WiFi network and come across an open hot spot.
• The hardware keyboard is really nice, and even has a dedicated language button to switch between Hebrew and English. I’m still missing a few keys but its no where near the problems I had with the Nokia E90. Specifically I couldn’t figure out how to type a comma when in Hebrew mode, and a few useful characters where relegated to a special “Symbols” menu that in some applications is not accessible.
• Surprisingly enough – I kind of gotten used to the software keyboard as well. Although I hated the iPhone virtual keyboard, I find the Android one quite useful. I wouldn’t presume to say that the Android keyboard it better then the iPhone’s – most likely I simply gotten used to it.

The next order of business is to find a good pod-catcher. I’ve already checked and my favorite mobile pod-catcher, Escarpod, is not available for Android so the search continue. This probably warrants its own post so expect that in the near future.

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It again boggles the mind, how Apple takes on a well known feature of existing products, tacks a bastardized version of it on a new revision of their product, and everyone hails at how innovative they are…

Here’s the Wired quote:

iPhone 4 includes a front-facing camera and support for videoconferencing with other iPhone 4 users, via a feature called FaceTime.

Here’s what I can do today with my 3 years old Ericsson P1i, my Nokia E-whatever or my fiance’s $20 Nokia (as well as about half of Nokia phones released in the last 8 years or so), and many other phones from other manufacturers:

• Above mentioned phones include a front-facing camera and support video conferencing with any other phone that supports standard 3G video calls, on any 3G network.

Also, apple announced their own video conferencing protocol (the so called “FaceTime”), as discussed in ReadWriteWeb:

That’s what Apple aims to do with the introduction of FaceTime. The awkwardly named protocol could be implemented by all major handset manufacturers so that consumers could perform video calls as easily as we perform voice calls today.

There is only one problem with that statement: there is already a standard protocol for video calls – as mandated by the cellular industry’s leading standard body, 3GPP: the 3G-324M protocol, was developed jointly with ITU (the telecom industry governing body for standardization) and is implemented in virtually all video call capable cellular telecom devices.

Now here’s a video:

(you can also watch this video on Youtube)

I apologize for the directing instructions in Hebrew (the guy operating the calling phone had trouble locating the “Dial” button on the phone) and for the lousy focus of the camera when closing in on the phone (but you should be able to make out that the calling phone is showing me videoing Sagi – the guy that takes the call).

Thanks to Sagi and Alon for taking a time out of their busy schedule to help me rant about stuff like that.

[Update:]

I still can’t get over how stupid Americans are – here’s a direct quote from Apple’s presentation:

Steve Jobs: “This is amazing, I grew up here in America with Jetsons, Star Trek and communicators — just dreaming about video calling. And it’s real now.”

Yes, but it was real 8 years ago as well – a long time before even the first iPhone came out!

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You can find Kohana RPM for the current stable release 3.0.5 here, and the source RPM is available here in case you want to rebuild it yourself (and you might, details follow). New releases to correspond with new releases from Kohana will be updated there as needed.

This package is built on a CentOS 5.4 machine, with pretty much default settings.

Please note that Kohana is not tested with the PHP version 5.1.6 which is what RHEL/CentOS 5 uses by default, so there could be some problems with using it on such a default installation of the operating system. There was one place where Kohana uses a function in a way that is not supported on PHP 5.1.6, and I had to patch that with a workaround.

This package includes additional patches that I felt where necessary, some to work around Kohana issues and some to add functionality that I felt is missing or or lacking. If there is interest I can expand on the work there. I do intend to submit all patches upstream, of course – once I’m more familiar with the community process of Kohana.

In the mean time, you can try it out and let me know if it works for you or not.

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Yep, that sounds about right.

What is interesting (to me anyway), is that the game is full encoded using HTML and Javascript – each ghost or pacman and also all the dots are graphics assigned using CSS to HTML DIV elements, which are moved on the screen using Javascript (source code is here at the moment – it is minified but its not hard to figure out what is going on).

[Update:]

As per the schedule, the pac-man game was removed after about 48 hours.

The Linux Action Show review is useful, and good, but its not really fair – Chris and Bryan ranted on a lot of things that do not work well for Fedora, such as not a lot of applications pre-installed and some new and immature applications being introduced, Flash being hard to install, codecs missing and obscure instructions on Fedora’s wiki pages on how to address these issues, and more.

The thing is, is that all those comments are fair when looking at an operating system that is geared towards the general public – like Ubuntu – but Bryan and Chris themselves mentioned that Fedora is not aimed at that crowd but is meant for power users and developers (the debate about what is the target audience for Fedora is raging – I think the best description I heard so far, is from Máirín Duffy – heading Fedora’s design team – where in an interview she said “Fedora is aimed at people who want to work on Fedora).

When taken into the context that Fedora is an operating system for developers and power users, and specifically those that want to work on Fedora, then most of these problems are not important – its like harping on MS-Windows that it doesn’t come with a lot of software out of the box – its not supposed to.

Fedora people are very cautious with everything that is proprietary software and/or patent encumbered – hence the very ambiguous “You can find many interesting things using a search engine like Google” quote Chris mentioned: Fedora does not want to get involved in anything remotely DMCA applicable, and as much as I don’t like it – them being based in the USA and sponsored and hosted by a commercial company, I guess it is understandable.

I would love it if Fedora will put up detailed “follow these easy steps to enable patent-infringing and possibly copyright-violating codecs on your new Fedora system”, but I doubt they can get away with it and there is no point ranting. Chris and Bryan, if you’re listening – I’m not saying its all your fault, but that’s what you get for living in that crazy country you call home .

My Fedora Experience

My impression of Fedora 13 is also about mixed feelings – less about all the stuff that was already mentioned (because I was expecting it) and more because I expected a lot of other (quite advanced stuff) to work properly out of the box (or with-in reasonable tweaking) and it didn’t.

One of the things that works mostly well for me in Fedora 13 is KDE: I really like the KDE implementation in Fedora 13 (based on KDE SC 4.4.3) – it is very very pretty. While the 3D desktop effects are not as polished as Compiz on the GNOME side, they are still very nice (though I had to tweak the wobbly windows effect quite a bit and it still not exactly what I want, but hey – at least I can tweak it!) and the Plasma based desktop itself is extremely nice. I’m a very big fan of the “desktop activity” model, and I really dig the default activity which is a widget board with a single “folder containment” widget showing the desktop icons at the top left corner. I easily added a battery monitor, trash can, quick launcher (which I rotated 90° and put vertically on the right side), a system monitor and a weather applet.

The folder containment has a very useful effect where you can hover on a folder and then the folder will open in a sub-widget and will let you browse the things inside the folder – into whatever depth you want:

Here is a full picture of my current desktop, without any application running – because my laptop has a small 1024×768 resolution, I ran applications on the entire screen without any panels: the bottom panels is set to “windows can cover” so that it is visible only if there is no full size window (though you can bump the mouse cursor on the bottom edge to get it up) and the small top panel I use for status notifications is auto-hiding.

(Also, please don’t mind the background – one of the setting for the desktop activity is to choose a slideshow for the background, so I have several hundreds wallpapers and the desktop keeps changing every 15 minutes).  As usual, a static picture doesn’t do it justice – you have to see how it behaves: all the UI elements have eye-catching transition effects such as sliding and fade, notifications are transparent bubbles that pop up form the bottom and stack on top of each other, windows have transparency effects, menus slide up and down.

What is not to like about the KDE desktop – the integration is not up to par with the current GNOME setup – for example, I use bluetooth a lot and it simply doesn’t work well or at all in KDE: you can’t right click a file and send it to bluetooth and bluetooth pairing is problematic at best and impossible at worse. Don’t even talk to me about dial-up. The bluetooth software isn’t even running unless you run it manually. Another thing which I also like a lot in GNOME is that you can get into any part of the system through GConf or DBus, while in KDE 4.4 – even though they pioneered the message bus with their DCOP bus which was the basis for FreeDesktop.org’s DBus – currently not many services are exposed to that kind of manipulation, specifically Plasma stuff (which is mostly what you have on a KDE desktop today) is very hard to control programatically.

The lack of an SSH agent for KDE is also bothering me that makes using pass-phrase protected SSH keys as annoying as using passwords directly. When you try to access a remote file system over SSH you get a dialog that looks like a password entry dialog – including a username field – but that asks you for your SSH key pass-phrase. This is really easy to miss a few times until you figure out what to type in, and when you ask it to “save it in the wallet”, it will still prompt you for that next time. SMB access has even more problems. As I said – integration is not great, which is why I still pop into GNOME from time to time, though I’m using KDE now more then I ever used it since version 3.5 – I still can’t say its my primary desktop, but its getting really close.

Now about GNOME in Fedora 13: its OK. There’s nothing new and exciting there, and the GNOME experience in Fedora 13 is somewhat worse then what you get in even Ubuntu 9.10, but its useful and works well and they finally got rid of that annoying Nodoka theme – the replacement is the old Clearlooks style which is easy on the eyes, but as the Linux Action Show guys noted – it looks old.

My main gripe with Fedora 13 is that it keeps crashing! The operating system itself is rock solid, and they added a service that monitors for crashes and allows you to easily report them to the developers as bugs (somewhat like Ubuntu’s apport, but works better and doesn’t require you to use a browser to actually submit the bug, although it has the horrible name “abrt”), but I would have like it a lot better if applications wouldn’t keep crashing all the time – to the point that with most crashes I don’t bother reporting on them.

I’ve ranted on Evolution crashing in a previous post, but that is nothing new – with Fedora 13 everything crashes, I even had Nautilus (the GNOME file manager) crash on me multiple times! When has Nautilus ever crashed? – it was probably the most stable GUI application ever created. It is very important that they extended the maximum size for crash reports, because I sure as hell need it.

Interestingly enough – and back to the Linux Action Show review commentary – I don’t miss Mono at all. While on principal I don’t approve with Fedora’s move from Mono (regardless on which basis it was done), I wasn’t horrified by Fedora 13 dropping Mono completely from the default installed. I was expecting that I’d go and install Mono at one point or another, but it hasn’t happened yet. I’ll probably install it again at one point when I go back to playing with developing in Mono, but at the mean time I don’t need it.

Update:

After using Fedora 13 for about 2 months, I’m basically ready to give up on it and conclude that it is indeed the worst Fedora version ever.

Technology-wise its fine and has many useful and interesting features, but from the stability point of view it is computing hell – I’ve used many alpha versions that were more stable then Fedora 13 GA release. Heck, the beta I’ve been using since December was more stable then the GA release! And it seems to be getting worse, not better – the last update to Evolution (2.30.2) completely destroyed my ability to manage my calendar: ever since the update, whenever I receive a calendar invitation or try to create a new calendar entry, the Evolution data-server process crashes and the calendar access fails.

I’m currently running Fedora 13 on two different machines (a desktop and a laptop), but I’m going to move both to Ubuntu 10.10 Alpha 2 that was released recently – I’m sure it will be more stable .

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Yes, this device runs better with all kinds of logo MS-Windows operating systems: you can choose either XP, 7 or Linux

I Am Not Left Handed are unsigned at the moment, though they are involved in a music promotion project called “Slice The Pie” which has an interesting concept – go to their site and click on the “Invest in our album” kite at the top left to learn more about it.

Here is what I Am Not Lefthanded have to say about themselves on their site (which is BTW looks very well for, for a band anyway):

“We don’t play pop music, we don’t write music for art’s sake, we don’t represent any movements, we’re not hip, we’re not cutting edge, we don’t dress to be cool. We manage ourselves, we write our own songs, we do our own recordings, we shoot our own videos, we design our own covers, we run our own website. We’re not generally negative people. Oh yes, and we’re not lefthanded.”

The lead singer has a good voice and they have an interesting music, though its not really out there or hard to swallow (which is a good thing – all you music snobs). And they do make their own videos (though these are not that impressive – I would say: “stick to your strengths” ).

Their music is Creative Commons licensed, though its the no-commercial, no derivatives license, and you can’t actually download their music – 1 song from each of their two albums  can be downloaded for free, where when they say download they mean – “click the link, subscribe to our emailing list and we’ll send you a ‘free download link’ to your email”. So it begs the question of why use CC at all? Still, they make interesting music for cheap – buying their two albums for download will set you back 6 pound (which is about 33 NIS).

I mean – if you are a simple e-mail user: have one account with which you send a few emails, receive a few e-mails and sometimes forward something to your list of friends – then you have several good options including a few web-mail systems.

If, on the other hand, you are more serious in your communication requirements and you need to:

• Work with multiple e-mail accounts and manage them separately but with the option of moving stuff between accounts.
• Connect with MS-Exchange (still most companies in Israel use MS-Exchange for their groupware backend)
• Work with multiple mailing lists with different policies and different internal filing requirements
• Keep all your past communications for reference
• Inter-operate with multiple shared calendaring systems, and specifically with other people’s calendars in a heterogeneous environment (some people do not believe there are e-mail clients other then MS-Outlook)
• Do all this on multiple computers so that e-mail, address books, calendars and what-not are transparently available on all computers
• Use Linux as your computing platform of choice.

Then you are basically out of luck. The Linux requirement is not that of a problem really (contrary to what many people keep saying when they nag me about moving to MS-Outlook) as the situation isn’t really better in Windows or Mac except that you can’t get Evolution to work there and theoretically Evolution could provide what I need.

Currently I use Evolution as my main PIM solution, and while on paper it has everything I need, in practice it gives me more frustration then any other computing system I used ever.

For first thing – if you want to work with MS-Exchange as a server (and in my company I’m forced to do so), then its unstable as nothing you’ve ever seen out of beta in the last 10 years. The old OWA method requires a separate process that tends to crash a lot, leaving you without access to your e-mail, address book and calendar until your do the “force-shutdown” rain dance, and even if it doesn’t crash it still manages to give you grief with the “Formatting Message” bug. The new MAPI method, while understandably immature and a pre-release preview is crashy to the point of absurdity – sometimes you can’t even get into the main window before it crashes. The Fedora 13 bug list for Evolution crashes gets longer by the day (I do feel sorry for Matthew Barnes that has to deal with all this) and I do not believe these are very complex issues: its a segmentation fault, for crying out loud. I can’t believe that at this point – the year 2010 – we still have software that segfaults with invalid memory access on a daily basis! Don’t people check their pointers before dereferencing them?

And don’t start with me about shared calendars! The weird thing is that if you want your Evolution client to use a shared calendar system, you have the option of MS-Exchange support, and.. well, that’s it.   Its not like there aren’t other shared calendar systems in the world (for example – Zimbra and Zarafa to name a couple. Interesting how both start with “Z”), is it just that if you aren’t a corporate Exchange user then you aren’t really someone interesting to Evolution developers ?!?.