Brandon Sharitt's Blog

Following in the footsteps of Apple, Google, and RIM, Nokia has finally gotten around to releasing their own central content store, the Ovi Store. Basically it combines the current Download! app with the Mosh download app and just gives Nokia some much needed centralization. It seems to stream line at lot of the “official” development process for devs and fixes the fees to something a bit more workable for smaller developers on S60, though probably not as good as Apple or Google yet, though there is still the option of installing unsigned app without crazy hacks on S60, unlike Apple. Being on one of the older platforms out there, the range of content is certainly varied, with support for S60 and S40 devices. The store has native apps and widgets for S60 along with Java apps, ring tones, wallpapers, and other media for both.

I’ve played with the Apple App Store on an iPod touch before, but I just downloaded a couple of apps that I needed, with the multitude of other apps seeming pretty worthless to me. The experience with the Ovi Store on my E71 has been pretty much the same. Of course having just launched, the Ovi Store does have less apps, but the number of useful apps already seems close(though more games for the E71 would be great). Despite the Ovi store being available for S40 devices, it looks like my fairly recent Nokia 3555 isn’t supported, so I can’t say a lot about the S40 side of the store, but I’m going to guess it’ll be more heavy on ringtones and similar media with some Java games thrown in.

Overall, I’d say the Ovi store doesn’t do anything revolutionary, just catches up with everyone else. While each store has it’s own little quirks, I’d rate it about even with the Apple App Store on overall experiance. Basically, I wouldn’t consider anyone’s app store a reason to go with a particular platform, just the fact that it has one, and now Nokia is in that crowd of “haves”.

With the baby at her grandparent’s for the weekend, my wife and I went to the movies and for some reason she actually let us go see Star Trek. Overall, the movie was pretty good, and my (non-geek)wife actually enoyed it too, though as a long time trekie, there were a few problems I had with it. So if you want to see a typical movie review and not a nerd rant, move along(but don’t worry, it’s not all rant). Also note there may(read: will) be major spoilers below. (Also, first long post from my phone, so spelling errors are a certainty.)

The biggest thing I felt uneasy about is that they did a clean reboot of the universe, meaning that all 10 previous movies and all the previous series except Enterprise(being that it is set before the fork in the timeline). Sure, this is technically just a paralell universe, but we’ll never see the old one again. Tha being said, a reboot(and a major change in this new universe) can create some interesting possibilities. Practically wiping out the Vulcans, major players in the Federation, could change every thing by the time you reach the TNG timeline. Aside from general reboot feelings overall, they did take care of setting up the alternate reality rather brilliantly. I also have to say this was one of the few time travel stories I’ve actually liked. None of that let’s go back and fix the timeline crap, instead they replaced Vulcan with a blackhole and left it that way.

Now onto the rest of the move. I found the overall story and plot fairly weak, but luckily it doesn’t matter, this trip was all about the characters. As is typical for a J.J. Abrams work, the characters are rich enough you don’t care about plot holes you can an island or starship through. While I thought all of the new characters were pretty good, not all of them were good fits for the shoes they were filling. The biggest being the new Sulu. I don’t know if it was because he’s Korean insead of Japanese, or because I kept expecting him to fly the ship to White Castle, but I didn’t buy him as Sulu. For the main trio, Kirk, Spock and Bones were all spot on. While Chris Pine’s Kirk wasn’t quite Shantner, he still conveyed the essence of a young Kirk. With Spock and McCoy, it easy to forget those weren’t younger versions of Deforest Kelly and Leonard Nimoy, even along side Nimoy’s portrayal of the older Spock. And of course as mentioned in nearly every other review, Scotty stole every scene he was in, very much embodying Jimmy Doohan’s portrayal in the movies. The weakest character was primary villan Nero. He’s definitly no Khan, more of a minor plot device if anything.

Overall I did enjoy the movie and would go so far to put it in my favorite Trek movies, behind Wrath of Khan and First Contact. While there will be debates over the little things for decades to come, I see the movie staying a favorite of hardcore Trekies. For non-trekies, it should also stand up well as a sci-fi action film with good special effects(the reimaged/original Enterprise looked great), with a lot of humor sprinkled in, and my wife liked it because she found Pine-Kirk is more pleasing on the eyes than the ageing Shatner-Kirk. If you haven’t seen the movie, do yourself a favor and go.

Posted by Wordmobi

Just got WordMobi, a native S60 WordPress app, and just trying it. With this I can be entirely mobile.

Let’s try a picture.

Posted by Wordmobi

I just installed a plugin to display my blog better on mobile browsers. Sure no one reads this site to begin with, much less while on the go, but the option is there anyway. There is a separate user-agent section for touch based browsers(iPhone, Android, etc), but I don’t know what it is different about it and I no longer have my iPod touch, so if you try it out on one of these devices, let me know if there are anything neat about it. Otherwise it works well with my E71.

Speaking of plugins, if you look on the right hand side panel of my site, you might notice a couple of extra new plugins, Twitter and Google Reader. I used to share links on my blog all the time, but now unless it’s really something I like I generally go with Google Reader, so if you want to see links I like, add me as a Google contact(or at least I think that’s how it works). I also really like Twitter, though I keep forgetting it’s there, but now that I’m back to using Gnome Do, it’s a bit more accessable to post updates. Everytime I think of writing a Wordpress replacement just for fun, I keep thinking I can’t use it for my own blog, because I’ll miss the plugins.

For a while now, there have really been no Windows machines in my home(exception being a couple of months when my wife got a new laptop and I wasn’t there to install Ubuntu), and have been running Linux(namely Ubuntu) on everything. With the recent release of Ubuntu 9.04, I thought now would be a good time to go over what I’m using Linux for at home and any obstacle there maybe and any things that have improved by using Linux.

Background

There are two people using the PCs in my home, my wife and me. My wife is you typical PC user, not a geek, just used Windows all her life to do basic things like web browsing and email. I, on the other hand, am a bit of a geek and haven’t been a full time Windows user in quite some time. I’ve actually used Linux on and off for over 10 years, and before making this most recent switch to Linux, I had been a Mac user. I work in IT and spend everyday cleaning up Microsoft’s mess at work, so I’d rather not do it at home. I’m actually not going to talk about the file server since I’d never run one using Windows or any other non-Unix-like OS.

Current Uses

The are 5 machines currently running Linux in my home, two netbooks, my desktop, a file server and an old laptop re-purposed as a HTPC. My wife and I each have a netbook and our uses are what you’d probably expect on such a device, web browsing, IM, email and writing blog posts like this one. I use my desktop for much of the same with a few extra things that need the power like software development and the occasional image or video editing.

Hurdles

Now matter how good the new platform, moving from one OS to another is always going to present so hurdles. For my wife, the issue wasn’t so much an issue of losing any thing, my simply adjusting to minor differences. She spends most of her time either in a web browser or organizing photos. Luckily, when she was still on Windows, she was already using Firefox and Picasa, so she there was no change there. The only real application change was going from the Yahoo’s IM client to Pidgin, but IM clients are so simple, most users can’t even tell the difference. As for for me, I’m generally able to work in a platform agnostic manner, so switching from Safari on the Mac(Firefox is really crap on that OS) to Firefox wasn’t a big deal, the same with going from Apple Mail to Evolution for mail.

One of my early problems was syncing my AppleTV that I had at the time with content and only a Linux box. While iTunes would work in Wine, it wouldn’t sync to the AppleTV(at least not at the time), so I was stuck running Windows in a virtual machine to run iTunes. The problem was eventually solved by getting rid of the AppleTV(I actually got rid of the Mac to escape Apple’s closed ecosystem) and replacing it with my Linux powered HTPC. So far, the Ubuntu laptop hooked up to the TV running the Elisa media center software has been able to do everything I needed from the AppleTV without a proprietary piece of software available from only one vendor.

Another hurdle that some face is games, but coming from a Mac, that wasn’t actually a big one for me. There are a few older games that I like to keep around, but this play fine on Wine. For any gaming I just go with my Wii anyway.

Benefits

Obviously, if there were no benefits, I wouldn’t have bother switching to Linux. For my wife’s Windows machine, the most obvious benefit was no more worrying about viruses and other malware. Since my wife spends a lot of time on MySpace and gets a lot of forwarded e-mails from people, which means even with anti-virus and and anti-spyware software, her laptop needed lot of attention and a format and reinstall seemed to be almost routine every few months.

For me, the reasons to switch were a bit different. Of course I had stayed away from Windows for so long for the same reason I needed to migrate my wife away, but the Mac had addressed those issues. With its Unix heritage, the Mac OS has many similarities to Linux, so why change? The biggest reason was freedom of choice of hardware. Apple only offers a relatively small selection of overprice hardware, meaning I could only choose from what hardware Steve Jobs has blessed, meaning no netbook for me. There’s also my favorite thing about Ubuntu, easy access to tons of software in the repositories. I no longer worry about trying to find the right software to complete all my tasks, instead I end up trying find tasks so I can use this vast array of software.

Finally for the HTPC, there’s not a lot to talk about at first since the operation is about the same for my uses, though the iTunes store is obviously missing if you’re so inclined. There is one big benefit to not using the AppleTV, being that you are not required to be locked into Apple’s iTunes ecosystem.

Conclusion

I’m sure many of you are aware of Microsoft’s security problems and Apple’s lock in problems. But what I really want you to take away from this is that Linux(particularly Ubuntu) is ready for prime time. I highly encourage you to give it a so, just head over ubuntu.com and download the live cd so you can try it out with out installing anything. If you want to go a step further, but not completely get rid of Windows, Ubuntu also offers an option(called Wubi) to install itself alongside Windows so you can try it out further.

Why yes, I am bored today. Link here.

Even though Boxee is technically list as “alpha” quality software, I decided to go ahead and give it a spin since these days alpha seems to be the new beta, and I’m okay running beta software. So I installed the software on a shiny new Ubuntu install on my wife’s old laptop and tried it out. On the bright side, nearly everything worked well out of the box, but the first thing that struck me was how slow and sluggish the whole interface was. Now the computer it’s installed on was no speed demon, but it’s been able to run MythTV and Windows Media Center(actually came preinstalled with this) with no problems. Right away I was disappointed that Hulu wasn’t working today, especially since that was the biggest draw to Boxee for me. Not getting discouraged, I decided to head over the CBS “channel” where full episodes of the classic Star Trek are available. Unfortunately, Boxee doesn’t seem to do any meaningful buffering and the video stuttered and skipped through the few minutes and waited and kept watching. Again, I wasn’t going to discouraged that easily and went to the WB channel to watch so B5 clips, but again with the skipping and stuttering. At this point I decided that the Boxee team just had some more work to do on their internet video, since these internet video sites usually work quite well on this same internet connection.

Next I decided that internet video was just icing on the cake, and what I really wanted was to be able to play the music and videos on my file server on my TV and its associated sound system, so I decided to watch some Darkwing Duck I had. Surely Boxee could do that. With great backends like Gstreamer, Xine, and MPlayer, anyone could hack together an interface for a TV, the hard part’s been done. When it comes to videos, I was sorely disappointed. The videos skipped forward without warning and the sound wouldn’t stay in sync. Just to make sure, I played the same videos on regular media players on the same PC and they played great. By this point I decided to give up for now, but I might try Boxee again in a few months to see how things are coming along.

With Boxee a bust, I needed something else. Sure, there’s the ubiquitous MythTV, but since I don’t need another PVR, it seems like a bit much. Fortunately I stumbled across Fludendo’s Elisa Media Center conviently in the Ubuntu repositories. It’s not as feature packed as Boxee, but it does at handle what it claims to do, and quite well I might add. Basically, Elisa is a Linux clone of Apple’s Frontrow software. Like Frontrow, Elisa is rather bare and basic, but it does put your music, videos, and pictures on your TV without a lot of fuss or overhead. One bright spot is that Elisa does have a plugins API that might extend it nicely, and there are already a couple useful ones like YouTube. This will probably be something I’ll be looking at working with if I ever get the time. The only problem with Elisa that it required a bit of manual tweaking to get the remote to work, but it was pretty easily found in the documentation. Overall I’m happy with Elisa, but I would have liked the online videos of Boxee.

You may have already heard the sad news, but GeoCities is finally getting put down. I know, I know, I too was surprised to hear that GeoCities was still alive. While I don’t use it anymore, it was I got a lot of my early experience building on the web. So my missing it will be out of nostalgia more than anything. I still miss my old site, Starbase 362, which was basically an online Star Trek encyclopedia(way before wikis), but I supposed I, along with the rest of the internet, have moved on and should let GeoCities rest in peace.

Summer is my favorite time to do any reading so I can sit out side in the warm weather and relax with a beer or eight. Now that’s it’s getting that time of year again, and I’m looking to put together a rough reading list. Last summer is was mostly political book, and the year before that it was science(mostly physics). This year I was to change pace a little bit and read some scifi. While I consider myself to be a big scifi fan when it comes to movies and TV, I actually haven’t done much reading in the genre. Most of my reading has been various Star Trek and Star Wars novels and half of Dune, and of course the works of Douglas Adams several times might be able to technically be counted(maybe I should count my book on string theory as scifi too?).

Aside from finishing Dune, what would the suggestions of the internet? I’m pretty open, so may classics that have held up well and some new stuff too. The only things I would rather avoid are books in the Star Trek, Star Wars, and other similar “big” universes. Any suggestions would be appreciate, just leave me a comment or drop me and e-mail.

ARMY OFDARKNESS.