Open source appliance

I've been struggling since one month ago to decide on a device for "mobile digital entrainment" (sorry, I've been unable to find a better name for this). What I basically need is a rich web experience (including web 2.0 sites, video, Internet radio) and access digital content (music, video) stored locally in the device or other storage devices.

My first candidates are the Nokia Internet Tablet N800 and the Archos 605. Other option I briefly considered were the Sony PSP and the PapperPad 3. I ruled out the PSP because its web experience is istill far behind of my needs. The PaperPad,in the other hand, seams to be a good product but its form factor makes it less attractive fro mobile usage.

Both candidates has "similar" capabilities, like integrated wifi access, full flagged web browsers and rich multimedia applications. However, they differ in one significant aspect: the Nokia N800 is, in this moment, more an open source device, very appealing to developers and savvy users, while the Archos is more an appliance, close but fully functional and usable by any user.

What I would like to have is the best of both worlds: an open source appliance. An open device for developers and hackers, but ready to day to day usage. Why is this so difficult? I believe that in this question resides the key for the success of open source outside the niche it is now (a big niche, sure, but a niche after all).

Dr. Ari Jaaksi, Nokia's director of open source has an interesting document about "Building consumer products with open source" and here we found a key "The open source culture is very much for trials, hacking, innovation and other creative aspects of software development. Meeting deadlines, dropping your latest crazy idea, and making compromises to gain stability are not what many open source communities or developers naturally do. In addition to us, the Linux project, Debian, and others seem to have difficulties making a final good quality release on time".

However, I must admit that I found more appealing the N800 because the open nature of the device is attracting a lot of interest and just recently I've seen a couple of developments that improves its usability a lot: both an iPhone like on screen keyboard and a kinetic scroll. By the way, both improvement ideas come from iPhone . . .

So, at this point the question is: will these two open source projects change focus from hacking to usability, from innovation to stability or is here where they will fail, as many other such projects.

The computer desktop . . . finally

After some 20 years dealing with the unintuitive concept of pc desktops from mac, windows and more recently Linux, we have finally got the REAL desktop . . . or table top. It is the Microsoft Surface. Before anyone jump on saying that MS didn't invented most of the technology behind it, and that they are as always stealing ideas, the reality is that they bundle all the required items and came with the product and this is what matters. And by the first time in the last decade, they came with it the first-

Let me say this stright: It has been a long, long time since any news in the computer industry excited me just a little bit, but I think that the Surface is going to be the next big thing in the computer market. Really big. It actually will define an entire new market. Or more than one market, maybe.

To start with, they will be real home PC. Forget about media centers (ah, I see, you've already forgotten them. Me too) and home servers. Ordinary people don't want them. Even most of the geeks out there (including me) don't want them because it is too much a hassle for too little benefits. The Surface, on the other hand, brings the usability to a new, higher levels.

Secondly, at the office, I foresee a no so distant time when knowledge related workers (managers, programmers, designers, researchers, physicians, and the like) will use this kind of work surface as its main desktop. Even more, I'm pretty sure that the surface will replace the conference room tables very, very soon. The possibilities for collaborative working are endless.

Enter the future desktop.

Web sites to take

I have just came across Raccoon, a mobile web server that can be used to expose to the web the functionalities of a Symbian S60 based mobile device (like my Nokia N70).

Putting a web server into my phone sounded at first glance as either the more stupid or the geekiest think to do with a phone.

But as Just a Traveler said on onee one of his interesting blog entries: "you can now create Apache modules to access all the phone’s resources, use mod_python along with Python for S60 to create dynamic web pages ... and the possibilities are endless!". (thanks Just a Traveler for pointing me into this direction).

I could then create a nice web based user interface to make appointments or enter contacts directly to the phone from my desktop using a browser. Man, I just can't wait to start working on this. I can fell the geekness becoming stronger in me!

I could also publish the latest photos I just took one minute ago with my phone without uploading them to my Yahoo Photos site, provided that I have enought bandwith from my phone to the internet.

Raccoon's web site has an interesting reflection about the consequences of this technology:
We believe that being able to run a globally accessible personal
website on your mobile phone has the potential of changing the
Internet landscape. If every mobile phone or even every smart phone
initially, is equipped with a web server then very quickly most
websites will reside on mobile phones. That is bound to have some
impact not only on how mobile phones are perceived but also on how
the web evolves."

Suppose now that instead of just putting some web pages to access the phone I put web services in there? Then, I could make any other web service capable device to talk to my phone. Ans hey, my phone can also make this trick and talk to other devices using web services. I could make them cooperate and create a sort of personal area grid!

"possibilities are endless!" Sure they are.

it is the usability, stupid

I have just bought a Nokia N70 mobile phone, but on the contrary of what can be expected after having a new gadget, I'm far from been happy. Actually, I'm pretty much upset. Why? because this is probably the more annoying device I've ever seen in my life. Man, if this phone is smart, I don't want to see the dumb one!

I'll give an example: to block the keyboard, you need to keep pressed a tinny button at the top of the phone(which happens to be the power on/off button) until a menu pops up, on which you must then choose the second option using the cursor! But be careful because if you keep the button pressed, the phone will be turned off without further confirmation. Just imagine how many times I have turned the phone off by accident.

Besides this, the phone is just plainly slow performing almost any action: it takes almost 30 seconds to boot (after you have accidentally turned off!).

Remember that feeling of anxiety when we accessed the Internet using a 28Kbps connections and we called it the "World Wide Wait"? Well, this is even more frustrating because a phone is basically an appliance, a device that you expect to do something and do it quickly and flawlessly. Imagine if you have to wait 30 seconds for your microwave oven to "boot" before you can defrost your dinner?

The true be said, this phone has a lot of functionality. But its user interface couldn't be more complex and unintuitive, rendering it almost unusable by anyone but a true geek "technology enthusiast".

Therefore, I find the discussion about the features the iPhone lacks almost irrelevant: it is more important what you will actually be able to do, than what the phone could potentially do . . . if it were just smart enough to make it for you.

update 10-May-2007
After some extensive research in different blogs and forums, I've found that the phone is actually quite nicely customizable. For instance, I discovered that in some cases (but not always) the keyboard protection can be activated using a sinple combination of keys, without using the power on/off button.

Here is a list of blogs you might be interested to take a look at:
Optimizing Shortcuts in S60 Phones
Making the most out of Nokia N70 - Part 3
S60 Navigation - Tips and Tricks

The disappearing Internet

I recently read the excellent novel from Cory Doctorow, "Down and up in the Magic Kingdom", which is available for free download under the Creative Commons License. Besides the interesting main story, a depth reflexion about the human nature, the identity and the pursue of a destiny, I found particularly interesting that the characters in the novel had a brain implant to access the Internet directly. They can access the Internet transparently at any moment and they certantly do it.

I was struck by such idea. I wondered how such an interface will definitely change how we interact with information and will remove any distinction between what happen "on-line" and "off-line", as we do now. We will be on-line all the time. We could make a post to our blog while we are witnessing an event, or start a chat with our wife to decide to buy that home appliance, or read that important email in the middle of a meeting just in time to avoid a unthinkable error. . . options are endless and the impact impossible to foresee.

But having ubiquitous, seamless, access to Internet could change more dramatically our lives and even our society, as the author portraits in one brief but nevertheless disturbing passage in the novel:

He cocked his head again, and gave it some thought. If it had been any of the other grad students, I'd have assumed he was grepping for some bolstering factoids to support his next sally. But with him, I just knew he was thinking about it, their old-fashioned way.

"thinking about it, the old-fashioned way". What a powerful image: People who is so used to go to the Internet at any moment during a conversation to find information, that doesn't think about things anymore.

My first reaction was to consider that such reliance on an "external" source will lead to mindless people. But, latter I realized I was considering just a part of the picture and missing a very important one: that information taken from Internet would very probably come from a social network, "a la web 2.0". Therefore, will be more that just raw information, but the result of a social process, full of interactions, discussions, refinement.

But this is even more disturbing: we will then end-up replacing our personal, immediate (and non mediate) thoughts about a situation by the corresponding "social thoughts". Will we then lose any change of dissension on the commonly accepted criteria? Will we be transformed in mere ants is a connected society?

The google generation

Rising a child is a fascinating, mind blowing experience. For me, one of the biggest sources of wonders with children is to see how they discover and interact with technology while they rise in a highly technified environment. Contrary to us, who "discovered" technology in a later stage of life and had to incorporate it into our perception of the world, for them technology is a integral part of the world. For them, technology is undifferentiated from nature or culture.

For instance, my four year old son has risen surfing the web with me looking for such valuable items as Peter Pan's pictures or videos of trains. A couple of days ago, he saw me opening the browser and as soon as he identified google's main page, he told me "daddy, type 'videos of trains' in there . . . I want to see some train videos". For him, this is how things work: you type what you want in the google's search page and you get it. No wonder, no mystery. Is the way it has always been for him and the rest of the Google generation. This is the world he will live in.

Brand new (virtual) world

One thing is to understand a technology or even to use it, and other very different to realize the consequences of this technology have in your life. Today, I realized the full power or virtualization technologies and had a brief insight on how it will change the day to day experience for most computer users.

I recently got a new laptop, a a Toshiba Satellite M100-184 which came with Windows Xp home edition in Spanish pre-installed. I have the costum to have all my machines installed in English, to make my life easier. So, my first frustration came when I tried to install Windows XP Professional in english and even when I found most of the required drivers, I was just unable to get most of the hardware to work. Very annoying, indeed.

Then, I got and even bigger frustration: I expend most of my spare time during a couple of weeks trying to get openSuse installed, driving through numerous user forums and fighting with increasingly complex how-to's. As I use Linux as my primary development platform, this was more than a mere annoyance, it was a serious limitation. Had I known this before and I hadn't bought this particular machine.

Then, yesterday, I came to a better solution: create a virtual machine on top of Windows XP and get Linux installed there. It sounded easy and it was. I did a quick research on available open source tools, on which I basically considered Qemu and VirtualBox. This brief comparison and a short test of both tools made me decide for VirtualBox, mostly due to its usability and the quality of the documentation. Now, while I write this, I had suse installed in a virtual machine and ready to work, thanks to the "plain vanilla" virtual hardware that Virtualbox emulates.

This is a tremendous change for end users: no more hardware related complexities. Obviously, this has a price: not all hardware features can be exploit, but this less than a problem for more users, who will not use them anyway. Even more, you can port your working environment from one physical machine to another (for instance, between home and work). Also, you can have more than one virtual machine configured for special purposes. For example, my wife will love to have her old and familiar windows 95!

I foresee that soon hardware manufacturers will sale their machines with a small, simple, robust, efficient virtualization layer that offers a set of "standard" virtual machine configurations on which you can install the operating system of your choice. A kind of high level Bios. And yes, this virtualization layer will most likely be based on Linux. A trimmed down version, probably, but Linux after all.

So in the long run, we will get a Linux on each desktop, even if the user doesn't know.

Linus Torvalds revisited

I have never had a good impression about Linus, mostly after reading about his debate with professor Tannenbaun, on which he demonstrated not only his ignorance about modern operating systems design (even when this might sound as anathema to Linux fans), but also his arrogance and lack of self-criticism (let's face it, Linux is NOT innovative at all and share the same conceptual and architectural deficits than Unix)

However, some recent facts are changing my overall impression about Linus. Firs, he impressed me for the way he managed an aparently endless discussion about design decisions among kernel developers. This short except is a gem: "get on with your lives. Realize that there is no 'perfect' value for HZ". I've been myself several times in such discussions and therefore can appreciate both the need and the efficacy of his comments.

Second, he has recently confronted the developers of GNOME to tell them the awful true: user interfaces in Linux sucks and they are not able to fix them because they think end users are stupid and don¡t deserve to be considered. Will them listen? Hardly.

Finally, I read Linus' responses to a proposal to include new functionality into the kernel called syslets. His arguments are really clear and shown a deep understanding of the complexities of designing good programming interfaces, which he summarizes as " think simplicity of use along with transparency, is so important . . . It's just that I think complex interfaces that people largely won't even use is a big mistake. We should concentrate on usability first, and some excessive cleverness really isn't a big advantage."

The quest for a winner open source project

Today I came across this interesting article at Information Week about the keys for a successful open source project: "How tell the open source winners from the loosers". Among other things, they offers a series of criteria to spot a successful open source project:

• A thriving community
• Disruptive goals
• A benevolent dictator
• Transparency
• Civility
• Documentation
• Employed developers
• A clear license
• Commercial support
  

This article put me to consider, again, if my the project I've been developing with my colleges at the UPC, the Grid Market Middleware, has any future at all as an open source project.

Applying Information Week's test, it seams that we meet what is in my opinion the single more important criteria: Disruptive goals. Our long term goal is to offer a platform for the research of economic based grids, opening the possibility to trade computational resources among communities of users, either for profit or as a form of community collaboration. We believe this will lead to a web 2.0 like grid environment. And I think that we are in a perfect timing, as Amazon is now making grid something popular, so we could expect a grow in the demand for grid solutions.

We also have a benevolent dictator: or at least I think that, ahem, I qualify for the job.

The lack of a thriving community or commercial support is not yet a problem, as we are still building the foundations of the gmm.

What seams critical now is to improve the documentation as most of the design is still in my mind. Also we need urgently at least a full time developer to implement the core on which others could start contributing.

I hope we could tackle this resource bottleneck before we pass to enlarge the statistics of "dead on arrival" open source projects.

1 way the iPhone is better than the Nokia N800 (and than anything else out there)

I just came across the article "10 ways the Nokia N800 is better than Apple's iPhone" and I'm surprised with the ingeniuty of the author. He just completely misses the point. Don't get me wrong, I like the Nokia N800 and is very likely I will buy one very soon. But there is just a single way iPhone is better than the N800 and anything else out there: usability.

just consider this excerpt from a review of the iPhone "You could call iPhone perfect":

"The touch-interface works flawlessly, in terms of both technical function and user interface design. Whatever you want to do -- select an album to play, make or take a call, compose and send an e-mail -- your first impulse is almost always the correct one. It is the simpler phone ever. And there are no lags, no pauses, no waiting for the slickly animated UI to catch up with you, even when you're scrolling through a stack of album art that's flopping past your finger in 3D: It's liquid." (bolds are mine)

This is simpler device ever, indeed. That is. No matter the open/close software discussion. No matter pricing. It is . . . just elegant, functional, simple. You WANT to use it. Even non geeks and technology illiterates want to use it.

You can call it perfect.

Convergent devices for convergent life styles

I've been lately investing a lot of time looking for a single device that satisfies my digital needs. That is, that allows me to both generate and consume digital content in a convenient way. This basically includes a multimedia player (music and video), camera and video recording, Internet access for both rich content access (say, youtube videos), convenient creation of digital content (write to a blog, upload a photo) and some tools to help me get organized.

I have considered a lot of platforms, including:

• Sony PSP (yes, i know it is a game console, but...)
  
• GP2X, a less known game console GP2X which is Linux based and completely open to development (with a much announced successor, the GXP that will rock, if ever delivered)
  
• PepperPad a web pad or companion device that is basically aimed to access Internet content.
• Nokia N95 multimedia phone
• Nokia N800 Internet tablet
• Multitude of pda/phones

After this research on the diverse convergent devices out there, I came to some conclusions about the true problems about this devices and most are not technical problems.

First at all, creating a brand new, revolutionary device is a risky business so most companies try to play safe and just create variations of devices that already have a market. New companies that create new devices found difficult to survive long enough to create a market. That's is why mobile phone manufacturers have such a big advantage when introducing "new" devices.

Therefore, most of the "innovation" comes from companies that already have a strong market presence and this leads to two very important problems. First, they are afraid to cannibalize its own products putting too much new features in new devices (for instance, why does the Nokia N800 not have a decent digital camera?). Second, they tend to create "new devices" as evolutions of already existing device categories, instead of approaching the problem from a fresh perspective.

Finally, there is a strong problem related to the business model behind this kind of devices. Hardware only business are long ago became unsustainable for but a few companies. Only those companies that are able to create a business around content or value added services (or to make agreements with partners able to provide these added value and subsidize the purchase of the device) are able to survive. Again, mobile phone manufactures have a big advantage.

Or should I say, they "had" such a big advantage. Apple have irrupted the marked with its iPhone, showing how far are others from creating an innovative device and changing the rules of the market. More on this latter, in a different post. Stay tuned.


A very lucid (but maybe a little reiterative) exposition of this problem can be found in the now classical book "The Innovator's dilemma".

My life online, not an online life

After a very short trial period, I decided not to continue using Yahoo 360º for my personal page and blog (I just made a couple of blog entries, including my new year's intentions for 2007). However, I found it too oriented for "online grupies", that is, people that has an online social life and wants to use the web to keep in touch with their friends and family and even know new people or belong to a community.

I, on the contrary, am more the kind of people that wants to use the web to help me in my real life, which is to a great extend, offline (even when lately I have starting to consume a lot of online entretainment). I basically want to keep all the information I produce and consume, properly organized and accessible at any time, from everywhere. I want also to share some parts of it with other people, but rearely with a community.

Therefore, what I need is a virtual space (I would not say a worl space because i also would like to put some entretainment there) to gather different content and make its access easy. It would be nice if such space were located in one sigle web site, but this seams impossible now. Let's see what Blake Ross finally does with its Parakey project, which promesses to help all of us to keep our content on the way in a easy way . . . not much detail, should I say.

Until then, I will need a painfully long list of applications:
- a personal web page (google's personal page looks awfull. I haven't found one flexible enough)
- a blog (I thing blogger is ok)
- photos (now using yahoo photos, but I'l try Goggle's picassa)
- a PIM with notes, and todo lists (not sure, maybe stikkit, which combine both, but also a mix of posticky and remember the milk)
- online storage

Assemble all this pieces promisses to be a hard work to do.