I was only a little surprised when I found out that Qi Hardware, the company behind the NanoNote, was founded by former members of the OpenMoko team. They’ve already made commitments to copyleft software, community driven software development and upstreaming their Linux improvements. This gadget is particular intriguing to me because I did a fair bit of OS coding for school using OS/161 as a basis, which has a 32-bit MIPS kernel. I might actually be able to contribute to the OS. If not, I could certainly contribute to application development.

This device, with its 32 MB of RAM, doesn’t take aim at the netbook market so much as the gadget market. Think Sony Mylo, or GP2X, or the Nokia Internet Tablet series. It’d be a welcome replacement to my Nokia 770. For one thing I imagine I’d be able to IM a lot more easily with it.

What’s possible? Hard to say. Even for a thin client the machine is very limited. Don’t expect to be able to view websites as well as you can on your iPhone. Do expect something a lot more hackable than a PDA. I missed out on the Zaurus clamshells that I wanted so badly in 2005, but I might save up to grab one of these NanoNotes. Maybe not the 本, maybe I’ll wait, but I would love to play with one. The 本 will ship in fall. I hope that Qi releases their projected price soon.

Take a look at a list of the Zaurus software index for ideas of what’s likely to hit the NanoNote first. My guess is an emulator will be the first port, probably for either the NES or the Commodore 64.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Suggestions For Learning FPGA Development At Home? (ask.slashdot.org)
• Openmoko Steps Back, Re-evaluates Road Ahead (ostatic.com)
• Open source hardware bank: P2P lending for hardware hackers (boingboing.net)
• Open Source Hardware Hackers Start P2P Bank (wired.com)

The interview with Nora Young of Spark went over general issues of net neutrality, which is why my questions weren’t asked. My questions were a bit more technical and Nora felt they were already answered either in The Current or an article in The Gazette. I’m still not content despite these three pieces.

I’ll lay out my biggest problems with the interviews so far: They all include Bell claiming they need to do this to maintain network integrity, they give no explanation of where the congestion occurs or why they moved their throttling from the transit level to the DSLAM level, and they fudge the differences between wholesalers and resellers.

For example, from the Gazette article:

What they do instead is they buy a wholesale, end-to-end Internet product and put their brand around it. Then they don’t have the ability to manage their own network. It’s the same network shared between retail and wholesale. Those ISPs that bothered to invest in their own infrastructure, this problem doesn’t affect them. The use of the term “leased lines” isn’t quite accurate and I see that in a number of newspaper articles. It’s a very, very important point.

If it’s wholesale, it’s not an end-to-end Internet product. If it’s wholesale, the ISP has to provide their own transit. Bell will just provide the point to point connection that connects the user to the ISP. The ISP provides the connection to the internet. TekSavvy is not an end-to-end Bell technology. It just takes one trip to their DSL sales page to realize that.

This service is intended as a two-tiered option where you can go DSL Unlimited over Cogent (5ms to 15ms more latency) or if you prefer a premium option, DSL over Peer1 (premium routing). The difference between Unlimited and Premium Capped service is in its use of internet onramps. Call for further details!

TekSavvy, along other wholesalers like Eagle.ca, is being throttled even though they’re using an entirely different transit provider. The big question is whether or not this is covered under the tariff as reasonable network maintainence. Is the DSLAM the point of congestion? Is throttling there necessary to maintain the integrity of the network? Is Bell even entitled to throttle at the DSLAM level? No one has tried to answer this.

My inclination is “no.” All of the ISPs that built up transit capacity were able to handle the traffic without their customers complaining. The throttling has impacted all sorts of traffic, not just peer to peer, which isn’t even as big of a hog as YouTube. There are scads of problems without any transparency or even demonstration of why the throttling has to occur at the DSLAM, let alone whether Bell should be allowed.

As the CEO of TekSavvy says,

This is the exact problem and where Bell doesn’t get it. TekSavvy and all third party ISPs are paying for a “slice” of this network, so no, it’s not Bell’s at that point. They’re paid to make sure the infrastructure remains in good shape, but they’re not paid to police it! The flaw in Bell’s thought is in their not understanding that we’ve paid for the right to this space… We’ve paid for multiple Gig-E connections for the data to flow back to; we’ve paid for the DSL aggregation interface (AHSSPI) and we’re also paying on a per user basis (approx $20/month) to have the data relayed directly back to our main point of Interconnect.

So, in short, no, they don’t have rights to this network segment… An easy analogy would be a landlord, who is managing an apartment, gives himself a key to come in and out as he pleases and on top of that decide which tenants friends they let in! I’m not sure about you, but I’m fairly certain, one; the tenant would call the police, but two; you’d land up with a very big black-eye!

I’m going, and I’m considering whether or not to liveblog it. I have the unfair advantage of having wifi access unlike all non-student attendees.

I don’t like the example of Rogers’s BitTorrent packet shaping since that’s protocol based bandwidth partitioning and doesn’t discriminate based on the source. My torrented podcast downloads did suck as much as my buddy’s South Park downloads (and that’s why I left Rogers). Still, Rogers should be much more open about how and where they shape their traffic. Matt Roberts has a good explanation on why some traffic shaping is necessary and what net neutrality isn’t.

I’m not talking about the splash screen ads that you have to view before proceeding to your content, as is the case with Salon and a few others. I’m talking about ads that take up a small, traditional piece of real estate like a top banner or a side skyscraper. Then, when you express interest in them by clicking or sometimes mousing over them, they expand. This is often done by positioning the ad to the top layer, making it huge to cover everything, and then putting transparency in flash.

My issue? Transparency doesn’t work in flash for linux yet. I don’t blame Adobe for this. They’ve been working with the Mozilla folks on this for a while. I do blame advertisers for their lack of consideration. For a while when I was visiting Canada.com to check my email I’d only see a big white box and a tiny ad at the top of the screen. I refreshed and was greeted with a different ad but the same problem. I was very, very annoyed. I know that people browsing the net with linux isn’t a very big segment for developers to consider, but of all users it’s only 0.5% behind Macs as of May 2007. It was on par in November 2005.

There’s still no fix for the transparency issue and I don’t know when it will be fixed. In the meantime I’m living ad-free. It’s a lot nicer this way.

My 3d acceleration just broke after the upgrade. I coped, I don’t need it for much, but as the weeks went on I missed Neverwinter Nights and I itched to tool around with Beryl. I tried every beryl installation guide I could find, using both the radeon driver with AIGLX, and the fglrx driver with Xgl.

Eventually after reading through dmesg I discovered that I was getting “AGP not available” errors. Odd. A lot of Googling later I stumbled upon a bug report that mentions an issue with the edac kernel module prevents AGP from working on some Intel chipsets. My motherboard has a 875P chipset so I was affected. Adding two modules to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist fixed my problem. I’m still not entirely sure what these two modules do but I can run all of my apps smoothly and prettily now. The bug was reported back in January so that means I’ve been without 3d for a good long time.

For some reason the open source radeon driver wouldn’t let me go above 1024×768 on my ATi Radeon 9800 Pro, even though I added that as an available resolution in xorg.conf. I wound up switching to fglrx with Xgl to fix that. That restricts me to beryl 0.20 right now since beryl 0.21 in the universe repository has broken Xgl support. To get that working I had to force the installation of 0.20 from the ubuntu.beryl-project.org repository in Synaptic and lock it too. That’s explained in ubuntuguide.org’s Feisty guide.

Once everything was working I spent at least half an hour with minimize and maximize effects set to “Random” so I could see all of the effects. It was worth the struggle. My favourite effect so far is Beam Up. The F9 hotkey to spread out all the windows is actually useful, as is decreasing the opacity of unused windows over time. Disintegrating all windows to see the desktop with <Super>+F6 is handy. I was surprised to see all the window thumbnails were updated live, so if I had my mouse hovered over an IM window in the task bar I could see the text entry pane update was I typed. I also saw that I could watch a movie in my VLC thumbnail. Cool! Beryl has a lot of eyecandy but there are also some useful features tucked in there. Once I get home from work I’ll spend a lot more time playing with it.

Screenshots and screencasts set to random electronica to follow!

Neutrality.ca has just shown a glimmer of life. It’s said that it’s been migrating to a new owner for about a month now. This time Kevin McArthur has posted a few links before the handover. He’s also begun to bring up his old sites.

There’s no Canadian clearinghouse of neutrality information in his links. Canucks are sleeping through the debate and the lack of a Canadian clearing house isn’t helping things.

The current neutrality.ca site is pretty bare:

Net Neutrality Canada

Thank you for your support, this site is currently being migrated to a new owner. Please check back soon.

In the mean time if you are looking for information on Net Neutrality, please see the following URLs

• Michael Geist
• Move On [USA]
• SaveTheInternet.com [USA]
• Digital-Copyright.ca
• Online Rights Canada
• CIPPIC
• Electronic Frontier Foundation

The shutdown of this site had some collateral damage. If you are not looking for neutrality.ca we will be restoring these domains shortly.

Thanks,

Kevin McArthur
StormTide Digital Studios Inc

Writer of the Wikinomics book, Don Tapscott is giving this presentation. His book is on mass collaboration. He’s from New Paradigm. His book was given out with the expensive passes. All non-reserved seating is used. There’s about twenty people standing five minutes prior. Thirty-something two minutes prior to start.

This has a lot of notes.

• Book has been on US&Canada non-fiction best seller list for 15 weeks.
• Don is chief exec of int’l thinktank New Paradigm founded in 1993
• Research in tech, productivity, completed multi-million dollar IT and Competitive Advantage report
• Trying to convince us that tech is the heart of change in large corporations
• social networking growing, new blog every second, Time selected collaborator as person of the year, but it’s all so 2006
• We’re in new mode of production
• four big drivers:
  • technology, web today isn’t daddy’s internet, changes include access modes. The object of interest is the “thing”: phone, fridge, pen barcode reader that price compares.
  • it’s fast now. Wifi is growing. Eg. One Zone. Bell Canada didn’t expect the power company and San Fran telcos didn’t expect the Google. Google’s business model doesn’t include wifi, why did they do this?
  • geo-spatiality. Geotagging. Browse the physical world. Related searches to your location. Check out Plazes. Or Socialight. Put a sticker on the bakery, when your friends go by they know you like that place. IntelliOne is cool: using cellular signals to figure out where you are roughly. Can be used to figure out speed of traffic. Maptuit does traffic routing.
  • True multimedia. Not just pictures and text. Add Skype. TIOTI: Tape It Off The Internet. Look at PS3. Very realistic graphic. 3d animation could be new paradigm of media. Old web was static HTML, presentation, new web is distributed computing, programming. New web is as much about sharing content. Metadata is now important. Tags. Problems with lack of consistency. Once was said we’d only need five computers. He was off by five: we need one. Not desktop, webtop. New web moves IT to the web. God might have created the world but he didn’t have an installed base. Easier to start new with web2.0 designed to collaborate than to tack sharing onto old base.
• The net generation. People currently under 29 roughly. Thought children were prodigies, then realized it’s a common trait. Conclusion from ~300 kid study: no fear of tech, natural as breathing.
• Echo generation bigger than baby boom generation, marginally.
• Time on the net takes away from time on tv. Huge multitasking trend. IM+news+collaborating+gaming at once. Processes information differently. Kids are authorities on web2.0. Not as big of a generation gap: compare your ipod to your kids’. Generation lap: kids lapping parents in tech race. Check interview on newparadigm.com. E-mail is already dead. Kids only use it for formal tech. :) Question was asked: When do you use email? Response was: Something like a thank you note, something sort of formal.
• Generation wants choice! Customize everything! Don’t be like the auto industry that missed the tuner market. Scion vs Ford. Scrutinizers – they check everything eg images for signs of photoshopping. Integrity!
• Kids don’t get their news from the Daily Show. Daily Show isn’t funny unless you know the news. Gets news online.
• Collaboration allows you to know people online.
• Online do you collaborate, or learn, or entertain yourself? Net gen does all at once but doesn’t always realize it.
• senior exec asks net gen what to do to make company attractive. Kid answers “make the place more fun.” Google vs factory.
• Social revolution? Check flickr vs webshots on alexa. XML based community eclipsed old websites. Community over in-house content presentation.
• Check out Wikinomicists of the World Unite. Within hours of the facebook group’s creation, had ~120 users and critiques of the book (first 2 chapters were posted)
• Economic revolution. Collaboration costs used to be higher. Ford used to have a glass factory because it was more expensive to collaborate with others than to own factory.
• Theme #2 is openness. “The naked corporation.” Fitness is no longer an option, it’s mandatory. Integrity must be baked into your bones. Transparency allows others to build trust in you for you.
• IBM shared IP with linux, saved billions in upkeep costs, came up with solid platform
• World isn’t flat, it’s a skewed binomial. Look at east asia’s growth. Japan disproportionately contributes.
• New principals on how to run company: peering, openness, something, act globally
• Harnessing mass collaboration, 50 year old mining company peers, opens, shares data. Used to keep throwing money at prospecting. Frustrated by lack of results. “If I don’t know where gold is, who does?” Published geodata on internet, held contest, gave $500k to contest for “Do I have gold? If so, where is it?” Found $3.4 billion when 77 contestants used new ways of analyzing data to tell him.
  • peered: let anyone submit
  • open: told people he doesn’t know where gold is
  • acted globally: opened to the world
• What can you create in a way like linux and wikipedia? Linus Torvalds doesn’t know. DBs are boring, who would create an open one?
• Second Life’s content is 99% user generated
• Compare unauth mashup of Grey Album to hacking of Lego Mindstorm. Lego didn’t sue children, Lego opened up mindstorm. Lego made prosumers.
• Biggest new development is the amazon cloud. 200,000 people building apps on it. Mom and pop can use its open api to create value.
• Don forgot to turn his smartphone off, got a call an hour into it.. Then another 30 seconds later. :)

I can’t stay for questions and answers, have to rush to DNS security presentation.

Update 2: On April 27th 2007 I added a link to Excess Copyright which contains a section of the Hill Times report.

Well, it looks like Bill C-60 is returning in a new form. Looking back on the original, it protected DRM and was thought to essentially eliminate private copying. Documents circulated among MPs are available and the Q&A provides a quick overview for those already familiar with the previous bill.

That is, the circumvention of a TM applied to copyrighted material will only be illegal if it is carried out with the objective of infringing copyright. Legitimate access, as authorized by the Copyright Act, will not be altered. … Circumvention for the purposes of making private copies of sound recordings will not be permitted, however.

Also of interest is the legislative summary.

… Section 80(1) of the Copyright Act gives consumers the right to make copies of music recordings for personal use, for example by converting CDs to MP3s so that they can be played on I-pods without the consumers’ having to pay for the same song twice. The anti-circumvention rule set out in subsection 34.02(1) would seem to render the right to make personal copies under section 80(1) virtually useless, since it is likely that all future CDs and DVDs will be protected by technological measures.

…

The bill makes it illegal for anyone other than the copyright holder to place a music file in a shared folder on a computer to which other users of a file-sharing program have access. Thus it will be illegal to upload music files onto on-line shared directories, as is the case when using KaZaa or BitTorrent, unless the person uploading the material is the rights holder of that material. Downloading music files for personal, non-commercial use remains legal under Bill C-60.

The old bill annoyed me. It would have neutered private copying thanks to DRM, made librarians into digital locksmiths, and extended copyright even further. The worst part is the MPs were aware that private copying would be virtually useless. I hope that the trend they predicted is wrong and I’m given hope by some labels recently deciding to go DRM-free.

I’m probably in the minority of young Canadians because I don’t mind the closing of unauthorized file sharing. That’s fine with me. Now get rid of the levy. I’ll buy my singles unDRMed from iTunes, eMusic, Magnatune, Nettwerk and many others that’re cropping up while also downloading freely licensed music and recording internet radio. Some creators have the courtesy to let me enjoy their work on whatever device I see fit without me having to pay over and over.

There is one good thing that came from C-60 and that should be put in place in the new bill. Liability of ISPs would finally be clarified, with notice-and-notice minimizing collatoral damage done by infringement seeking robots. We can’t get enough about robots. Rather than an ISP being forced to block allegedly infringing content they’d merely be required to pass on notices that were sent. That means that no obviously false allegations would result in content being taken down.

As Russel McOrmond points out the new bill isn’t known by the public yet. Everything up until this point is speculation based upon an article from The Hill Times which still isn’t available, not even behind a paywall. [update: Excess Copyright has a snippet.] Michael Geist summarizes it by explaining that the new bill is similar in reach to C-60 but with two important differences: “tougher anti-circumvention legislation (ie. DMCA-style laws that ban devices that can be used to circumvent as well as provisions that block all circumvention subject to the odd exception) and an educational exception that will provide for free access to web-based materials.”

More details on the old bill can be found at killbillc60.ca. I plan on heading to Copynight to glean a better understanding of this.

In the meantime, please turn your attention to two petitions circulated by Digital Copyright: The user’s rights petition and the petition to protect property rights in Information Technology.

1. Tweak the hell out of your browser interface. I had to dedicate half of a day to understanding my browsing habits and my frustrations before I could really get this down. I decided that I mostly use my browser maximized and I’d like to increase vertical space. I accomplished this by moving the URL bar to the menu bar, bookmarks to the icon bar, and getting rid of the bookmark bar. I also switched to small icons and installed the Whitehart theme to reduce border space on my tabs.

After that I identified my biggest timewasters. To accommodate them I’ve added the del.icio.us and Adblock Plus extensions. (If you get Adblock Plus, be sure to also subscribe to the ElementBlock list to get rid of all those empty spaces.) Now I no longer get those damnable floating ads. Between all these tweaks browsing is once again a pleasure.

2. Get a keyboard that feels good. Ignore the fancy buttons and macro support if you’ve never used them like most people I know. I invested $69 in a Model M with USB connectivity from Unicomp at pckeyboard.com (pckeyboards.com is an entirely different company). I missed the springy action of a model M and this keyboard has it perfectly done. Unicomp bought the patent from Lexxmark so they do make real model Ms, as well as sell originals for the purist. Mine is unlabeled, similar to Das Keyboard II, to keep me from looking down all the time. I’m a touch typist but I’d still look down occasionally and this is curing me of the habit slowly.

3. Install a desktop search tool and a run bar. This is easy with gnome’s deskbar applet which lets me run applications, search my del.icio.us bookmarks, or search through my desktop’s beagle index. Running applications this way is a lot faster than starting the terminal and typing an application name, it’s great to have a search for del.icio.us, and searching beagle is much faster than grepping through find output.

Beagle is the closest thing that linux users have to Google Desktop. It indexes all your files in the background and front end applications can pull that out. Gnome Deskbar groups results into different categories like Conversations for anything said in Gaim or Thunderbird, Documents for any document files, or News Articles for any RSS feeds you subscribe to. And it’s fast!

4. Stop checking five different email accounts! Filter, filter, filter! I’ve phased out my webmail accounts that don’t allow for POP3, the ones that do get checked by Gmail, and my Gmail is automatically pushed to my phone as well as downloaded to Thunderbird at home. (This is also a handy way to get rid of spam.) I use filters based on the beginning of the subject line to separate email lists and I have several profiles set up so I can change my From address easily from a pulldown menu.

5. Unclutter your program bar. Most people keep their desktop clean but comparatively few tidy their program bar. In Windows you can do this by right clicking on the Start menu and clicking Explore. Create new folders to organize different programs and drag them in there. Be sure to do this for your username’s start menu and the All Users start menu. In Gnome, right click on Applications and click Edit Menu.

That’s all for tonight. Happy tweaking!