NATH@N KINKA.DE

Today I was in need of pre-allocating a 50G file on a number of CC’s servers. I started off with this:

# dd if=/dev/zero of=bigfile.bin bs=1M count=50000

However, that operation was too expensive in terms of disk I/O and was causing critical web services to fail. I played around with multiple options in dd but to no avail. I finally ended up doing this, which works, but seems rather ridiculous. Surely there’s a better way to do it:

# for i in $(seq 1 50000); do nice -n 19 dd if=/dev/zero of=bigfile.bin conv=notrunc oflag=append bs=1M count=1 &> /dev/null && sleep 0.1; done

The nice probably isn’t necessary, but I threw it in for good measure.

I received my Openmoko Neo Freerunner last Monday, August 4, much earlier than I had anticipated. Score one for both the Canadian postal system and the USPS. I haven’t had one big chunk of time to experiment with it, but a few hours here and there over the last 6 days. I’ll start with some general impressions first.

This device is fun. Any phone that I can SSH into is a phone that I’m bound to like, even if it doesn’t work perfectly. Don’t compare this device to an Apple iPhone. It does a disservice to Openmoko as well anyone who might mistakenly get the impression that this is some sort of iPhone alternative; it is not.

I won’t even bother talking about my experiences with the device prior to the official August 8th release of the Om2008.8 distribution/image. Before installing this official release the device was only semi-functional in any given area. That said, I have to note that I was still loving it.

So, the Om2008.8 release is actually pretty good. All aspects of the phone that would matter to me seem to work nicely, SMS messaging works well, the device suspends after some inactivity and then wakes upon receiving a call. The interface is fairly nice, intuitive, and even reasonably snappy.

One thing that surprised me is that GPS functionality wasn’t working out-of-the-box. I had to manually install gpsd via opkg and also install tangoGPS.

The device is mostly functional but still quite buggy. At the present moment this phone will probably not serve as a primary phone for most people. However, this will probably all change over the next number of months. If you are interested in being an early adopter, buy this phone now. If you want a smartphone that 100% works, wait a while. I’m very happy with my purchase, and look forward to seeing how the software progresses over the next, say, 6 months.

Anyone interested in this device owes it to themself to subscribe to community@lists.openmoko.org and support@lists.openmoko.org. Those lists are somewhat busy, but have proved invaluable.

Soon, I’ll probably create a page that describes various configurations that I’ve done, fixes, and general notes on getting things working.

Other than having posted about nutridb.org a couple weeks ago, I haven’t really thought too much about the site or code in a while. However, once every couple months it occurs to me to search Google for “nutridb” to see if anyone else has mentioned it. Today I did one such search, and was surprised to find a site that was using the nutridb code: foodary.org. There are a couple of other sites associated with this one: foodary.wordpress.org and foodary.com.

I was pleased to see that the author, Keith Taylor, was nice enough to credit me at all three sites. This is the type of usage I was hoping to see … someone taking the code, putting a prettier shell around it and perhaps extending and improving it.

At the moment he appears to have just modified the CSS and added a header image, but this is fine. Viva free software. I released the PHP code under an MIT (X11) license, and I generally prefer this license type, along with BSD licenses, to the [L]GPL because I consider them to truly be free in every sense of the word, though I do think there are certainly cases where the GPL and LGPL are warranted.

A couple days ago I took the plunge and ordered an Openmoko Neo Freerunner. It is generally considered to be a smartphone, but I’m viewing it more as a pocket-sized portable computer than a phone. The Neo Freerunner is nowhere near as functional or elegant as an Apple iPhone, for example, but it’ll be a cold day in hell before I ever own an Apple product.

The Freerunner is built upon a free and open software stack, including a Linux kernel. Even the hardware designs are open. Interesting for me, being a CC employee, is that the CAD files for the case are released under a Creative Commons BY-SA license.

At $400, plus $40 shipping from Canada, the device was a bit pricey, but for an unlocked touch screen phone with a lot nice features, and that runs Linux, I was happy to pay that amount, if for no other reason than to support such an organization.

I’m sure I’ll post more here about my experiences with the device once it arrives (hopefully by 2008-08-11).