Hugo’s blog

I’ve been increasingly unhappy with my Treo 680. The battery life sometimes drop rapidly (I can’t figure out why), and The Missing Sync has more and more trouble synchronizing my information. It actually is bad enough that I do not synchronize my work calendar anymore.

I have actually been waiting for the next version of the iPhone to be released, and am happy to see all the recent rumors about it. However, I’m wondering how long I’ll be able to wait with my Treo making a pain of itself almost daily.

Thinking about changing phones, I realized that I’m taking more and more photos with it, despite the crappy quality of the Treo’s camera, and the fact that I need to reinstall a PRC regularly in order to be able to download them to my computer. In order to make my life easier, I have been looking into buying a small camera that I could carry with me all the time. The Casio Exilim EX-Z200 looks really cool, but it means carrying a camera in addition to my phone, and I’m not really imagining myself carrying two devices.

Unfortunately, I’m not convinced that the new iPhone will have a good camera. The current iPhone seems to be taking pretty nice photos, but it seems technologically pretty far from what its competitors can do in this domain: 2 megapixels, no auto-focus, no flash.

Looking at the competition, there are a few interesting 5-megapixel cameraphones:

Sony Ericsson K850i

Sony Ericsson’s K850i seems pretty nice, but it does not have WiFi capabilities.

Also, after I had two Sony Ericsson phones die days after their warranty expired and had similar problems with a Sony Clié, I swore not to buy crappy Sony products anymore.

Nokia N95 8GB

Thomas showed my his Nokia N95 8GB which is really neat. It has WiFi, GPS, and the Flickr gallery for the N95 looks promising, though the photos taken with an iPhone look better to me. Maybe iPhone users are more artistic than Nokia owners.

Nokia N96

The Nokia N96 is the successor of the beloved N95, and it looks very promising.

Sony Ericsson C902

Finally, the Sony Ericsson C902 seems to be closer to a camera than a phone, which might be what I’m really after.

Apple, Sony Ericsson, or Nokia?

The problem is that I’m picky: I also want an adequate music interface as I listen to podcasts daily, good PDA capability, good connectivity, and a decent Web browser. Maybe I’m asking too much.

I feel like the iPhone is falling short in terms of storage and camera quality, while the others have a much lower usability – the interface of the iPhone is really the killer feature – and not as good Web browsing capabilities. But then again, it’s really the camera that I’m after, and since all phones can play music these days, as long as I can sync my podcasts from iTunes and that it can synchronize my events, to-dos and contacts, I should be fine.

I feel that I’m going to ponder about this a little while longer, until the N96, C902 and the new iPhone come out.

I just finished giving a facelift to my blog. I upgraded to WordPress 2.5 very smoothly, played with CSS and JavaScript to adapt the Stardust theme to my needs. As part of this, I added avatar support very easily:

<?php echo get_avatar($comment, '32'); ?>

So now I have little faces next to comments:

The new interface to write posts is also pretty nice:

In particular the media library functions:

Go and get it!

So this morning, I arrive at the train station as the train is stopping. I run on the platform, and see that nobody is going in nor out anymore. I quickly think: either I run to the ticket validating machine, and I’m pretty sure I’ll miss my train, or I just get on the train without validating my ticket. I go for the latter. It turns out that the train stays in the station for an extra 30 seconds, so I might have had time to validate my ticket.

Anyway, as the doors close, I go straight to the ticket controller and explain that I didn’t have time to validate my ticket, and ask him to validate him for me.

Ensued a 5-minute lecture about Caltrain rules; some highlights:

• Can you see the sign there? It says that you cannot board the train without a ticket.
• I should really be writing you a ticket.
• Do you know that it’s not my job to validate your ticket? My job is to get you to your work on time. Your job is to get to the train station on time, and validate your ticket.

I did have a time management lecture once as well, but this guy, behind his sunglasses, was just out of control.

When I mentioned that I could have just gone hiding into a corner and not pay for my ride, he just went on and on about how I was making him waste his time. At some point when he was talking about how his job was to bring me to my work on time and how he should fine me for being late to the station, I wanted to ask him what were the consequences of him bringing me late to my work, but the discussion was getting more and more absurd, so I decided to just smile and nod, and he finally validated my ticket.

Interestingly, years ago, I had a similar experience in Paris. I had bought a ticket, failed to find the validating machine, and boarded the train with my freshly bough – but not validated – ticket. When I got off the train, I tried to exit the station, and the machine wouldn’t let me out because it rejected my ticket. Instead of tailgating behind a passenger with a valid ticket, or jump over the doors, I thought: hey, there’s a controller back there, he’ll sort my problem in no time. The guy assessed that I had cheated on purpose (nevermind my proof of purchase from 1 hour beforehand, and the fact that I was the one that came to see him), and proceeded to fine me.

Something’s seriously wrong with ticket controllers!

There are many ways one can make money with a Web site: you can add ads around some content you produce (e.g. by publishing photos), point people to some products that they may be interested in buying as a result of visiting a site (e.g. by reviewing items), help people save money and take a cut (e.g. with Web hosting coupons).

However, all of this really works when people coming to your site are motivated enough that they’ll click on anything to get answers.

That’s what’s happening on my wife’s Web site right now. We had a bed bug issue in Paris a few years ago. That was an awful experience, and it was really tough to get rid of them (that required having a professional spray some very nasty chemicals twice, and we were not so far from throwing our bed and bedding away and moving apartments). You can see from the comments how desperate people can be when facing this problem, and they’re very happy to follow any link that could be helping them.

So the key is: write about problems. My dog pulled me off of my bike two weeks ago, and I hurt my hand and knee. I should have taken a photo…

101 South was completely empty last Thursday at 10am South of Menlo Park:

I’m not sure why that was, but that was very weird.

As if people usually read terms of service and privacy policy, here’s an email I received today:

Re: Notice of Changes to Scripps Network’s Policies

In the past you have provided your email address and other personally identifiable information ("PII") to Scripps Networks and its affiliates (e.g., LIST). As part of our ongoing development of our sites, we have made changes to our Privacy Policies and Terms of Use of these sites. PLEASE TAKE A MOMENT TO CLICK THROUGH AND REVIEW THE NEW PRIVACY POLICIES AND TERMS OF USE as the changes affect the way we will use and share your PII and the terms and conditions for the continued use of our sites.

DIYNetwork.com: Privacy Policy
http://www.diynetwork.com/diy/press/article/0,2019,DIY_13703_2291323,00.html

DIYNetwork.com: Terms of Use
http://www.diynetwork.com/diy/press/article/0,2019,DIY_13703_2291309,00.html

FineLiving.com: Privacy Policy
http://www.fineliving.com/fine/about_the_site/article/0,1663,FINE_1459_974467,00.html

FineLiving.com: Terms of Use
http://www.fineliving.com/fine/about_the_site/article/0,1663,FINE_1459_974465,00.html

FoodNetwork.com: Privacy Policy
http://www.foodnetwork.com/food/privacy_policy/

FoodNetwork.com: Terms of Use
http://www.foodnetwork.com/food/legal_information/

GACTV.com: Privacy Policy
http://www.gactv.com/gac/about_us/article/0,,GAC_26085_4700542,00.html

GACTV.com: Terms of Use
http://www.gactv.com/gac/about_us/article/0,,GAC_26085_4709297,00.html

HGTV.com: Privacy Policy
http://www.hgtv.com/hgtv/about_us/article/0,1783,HGTV_3080_1424715,00.html

HGTV.com: Terms of Use
http://www.hgtv.com/hgtv/about_us/article/0,1783,HGTV_3080_1424672,00.html

HGTVPro.com: Privacy Policy
http://www.hgtvpro.com/hpro/about_us/article/0,2616,HPRO_20139_3386704,00.html

HGTVPro.com: Terms of Use
http://www.hgtvpro.com/hpro/about_us/article/0,2616,HPRO_20139_3386705,00.html

Recipezaar.com: Privacy Policy
http://www.recipezaar.com/about/privacy.zsp

Recipezaar.com: Terms of Use
http://www.recipezaar.com/about/tos.zsp

If you do not agree to the new terms of use, do not continue to use our sites. Continued use constitutes acceptance. If you object to the changes to our privacy policies, you can opt out of the new policy below with respect to your PII collected under the old policy. However, any new PII you supply us will be governed by the new policy.

I love the If you do not agree to the new terms of use, do not continue to use our sites.

Fascinating.

A little more work on the Slug’s front… It took me a while to figure out why iTunes could talk to my Slug, and my Roku SoundBridge could not. And the answer is: the default firewall.

I didn’t try to understand what exact rule was the culprit, but the following fixes the issue:

iptables -P INPUT ACCEPT
iptables -P FORWARD ACCEPT
iptables -P OUTPUT ACCEPT
iptables -F
iptables -X

Since the Slug is behind my NAT anyway, I don’t really need a firewall. I wish I could actually disable the iptables support from the kernel altogether, but it’s not compiled as a module.

Our Mac Mini finally died. It turned out that the random crashes I was seeing were due to hardware issues, namely the hard disk.

Its sole purpose was to share music, and act as a storage server. I looked at a number of options to replace it, including buying a new Mac Mini, or a low-end PC. I ruled the latter out because of form factor: I wanted a small box to hide in a corner. Mini PCs exist, but they are pretty expensive, and a new Mac Mini is about $600. It seemed wasteful to invest into so much horsepower to have it sit doing nothing most of the time, and streaming audio files once in a while.

I therefore decided to go with a more exotic solution: a Linksys NSLU2, which is a network box running Linux in which you can plug USB hard drives. There’s a lot of hacking going on on this device, and it is cheap: $60 on Amazon.

I was faced with the dilemma of choosing which firmware to install, out of the 9 flavors available. As a matter of fact, I experienced more than the dilemma, since I experimented with quite a few of them.

I wanted the following features:

• Ability to run the firmware without a flash drive: flash drives are pretty slow, and not really designed to have repeated reads and writes that a root partition will get.
• Media server available: this is the primary purpose of this box.
• Multi-user support: I want to use it as a storage server for different servers.
• Ability to spin down the hard drives attached to it: most of the time, the box is idle, so I don’t need to have the disks spin.
• HFS+ support: I have some disks that were formatted on a Mac.

I ended up settling with OpenWRT, which has all those features:

• Self-contained: It is very small and fits on the 5MB root partition of the Slug.
• Media server: mt-daapd is installable via Optware.
• Multi-user: adduser is available via Optware to help setup user accounts (though you could obviously do it by hand).
• Spinning down drives: using the shell script from NSLU2-Linux with sg_start from Optware’s sg3-utils works beautifully.
• HFS+ support: OpenWRT has a modern (2.6.21.6), well packaged kernel, that allows to install exotic modules as needed.

Amazingly, the 32MB of RAM are enough for the Web server used for configuration, the SSH server for login, the FTP server for file transfer, the media server for iTunes streaming, without the need of a swap device.

I did try alternative firmwares. DebianSlug is a fully-fledged Debian distribution, but it’s much bigger, and requires installation on an attached drive; it actually took me 3 tries to manage to install it, and for some reason, it broke after a few hours (I couldn’t log into the box any more!). SlugOS/BE would probably have worked, but it didn’t feel as polished as OpenWRT.

All in all, I’m happy about the solution that I ended up with: the NSLU2 with OpenWRT is a low-cost, low-energy solution, which works really well.