Root

Recently we upgraded our Verizon Motorola Droid to the Android 2.2 Froyo OS (upgrade available). Froyo is almost entirely a win. It runs everything much faster, and includes plenty of upgrades all around although some apps are not yet fully debugged for the new OS. However, in their infinite inanity, Verizon locked down the Droid's tethering ability with the new OS, and any attempts lead one to a page for a new plan upgrade they can purchase to enable previously free tethering. This is a brilliant way to alienate loyal customers. Fortunately, there is an app for that. EasyRoot safely roots the Droid phones for $1. Rooting, is giving the user and with user permission other applications, superuser complete control over their Linux phone. Once rooted, many other free applications allow users to take full advantage of their phone's potential including effective use of the terminal, phone-wide ad-blocking, and fixing USB tethering, and turning the phone into a wifi hotspot. EasyRoot has been blocked from the Android Market owing to Verizon's cozy relationship with Google, however it is still available for manual install. EasyRoot even has unroot capability in case you have to take your phone in for service.

*Update* - We also managed to root the Droid 2 using the following procedures: link.

Themes in GWT

As a Google junky, we tend to prefer Google products over competitors if we can help it. Therefore when faced with a need to learn a website creation package preferably based in Java, we inevitably learned to use GWT. GWT is a brilliant software which allows you to write web apps with the ease of Java and many of its libraries, and compile them into fast, obfuscated, and optimised Javascript for every browser. Google Wave runs on GWT. Unfortunately, the real brilliance of the toolkit lies in the compiler and the development tools and hooks. Unfortunately, they have completely neglected the CSS skinning of the toolkit, and generally leave it up to developers to hire their own CSS designers. There are only 3 primary themes built into the toolkit, and they all look amateurish. Instantiations makes a tool, GWT Designer, which allows WYSIWYG manipulation to help design GWT based pages. This can speed in basic layout development and simple colour and font manipulations, but you pay for it with awkward, ugly, and verbose Java code you then have to manually clean up later. If you know Java and the GWT library well, it is almost worth it just to skip GWT Designer entirely. That said, we fully respect and have been impressed by the features of GWT Designer.

To help developers make compelling apps and websites and perhaps to stimulate interest in GWT, we encourage Google to devote more resources to design, themes, and templates for GWT. What do other GWT developers think?

Secure Obfuscated and Encrypted Web Browsing for Iranians

For those, particularly Iranians, who wish to browse the web safely, Haystack may be a good solution.

Haystack is not an ordinary proxy system. It employs a sophisticated mathematical formula to hide users' real Internet traffic inside a continuous stream of innocuous-looking requests. In addition to providing anonymity, Haystack uses strong cryptography, ensuring that even if users' traffic is detected, it cannot be read. Trying to find and decipher our users' traffic amidst all the other traffic on the web really is like trying to find a needle in the proverbial Haystack.

Once installed Haystack will provide completely uncensored access to the internet from Iran while simultaneously protecting the user's identity. No more Facebook blocks, no more government warning pages when you try to load Twitter or access news sites -- just unfiltered Internet.

...Not that Facebook is how you should be spending your time online.

Google Chrome Extensions

Google Chrome has finally added Extensions, and so far all the standard extensions I use in Firefox now have equivalents in Chrome. This includes Readability, Google Translate, Google Voice, Adblocker, and Flash Block. Since its inception, Chrome was faster than Firefox. Now that there are extensions Chrome, it is the best browser available. We will keep Firefox around as a backup and will always respect the Open Source Mozilla Foundation.

Soon we will be demoing the Google Chrome OS and will give our review.

Droid

Motorolla has finally released Droid. The company tries to rape its customers with the Data Plan Tethering $30/month option, but luckily a $30 One time programme delivers the same functionality to the user. PDANet. Overall, Droid looks like solid hardware and quite hackable. We plan to start a demo this week. PDANet also works for jailbroken iPhones.

Google Voice

Google Voice allows callers to forward calls to their Google Voice number to any other phones simultaneously until one picks up. Therefore someone could set their home, mobile, and work phones all to ring when someone calls. Constant availability with one number including SMS and it is free. Google Voice provides a web interface and an Android Application for mobile phones to change settings. It can be connected with Gizmo5, a Skype alternative, to allow one to send and receive free US phone calls or make cheap international calls.

Google voice will maintain a permanent record of voicemails and will transcribe them and email them along with the audio to the owner. The option exists to receive SMS of the transcription as well.

We have been using Google Voice for over a year and it is wonderful. It has become our primary phone number. All other phones have become access points to the Google Voice interface.

GV is brilliant, unparalleled and free.

The Google God

Tonight's discourse:

Pace: I really think once people realise the efficiency, many will start programming to the Google Ap engine


Consigliere: uuuuuuuuuugh
that's a TERRIBLE idea
we already have one giant fucking monolith, i.e. Microsoft
why would we want to trade one for another?
the last thing the web needs is a single point of failure, like if google goes down and takes everybody's webapps with it


Pace: they are at least better than M$ - should theoretically still be reployable elsewhere without too much modification


Consigliere: they're only tbetter than M$ at the moment b/c htey';re not as big/dominant
but they certainly will become so
and there's a huge difference between "theoretically" and "in realitiy"


Pace: they do support open source though


Consigliere: it doesn't matter
I"m glad they do
but it'd still be a single point of failure


Pace: agreed


Consigliere: and god only knows what they'd do with all that data once they had it


Pace: they would become God


Consigliere: yeah, but a God beholden to capitalist shareholders


Pace: yes


Consigliere: it woudl be very Old Testament


Pace: haha

Weather

It took me a while to find a decent website for weather. Weather.com is owned by the weather channel and is mostly spam from what I can see. Sadly, this is where I would often go when I needed some weather information. Intellicast.com on the other hand is a great site. No advertising, global content, and readily-accessible multifactor weather forecasts. If you know of some other good weather sites, by all means share with the group.

Doomed to Fail

The Chinese policy of Internet censorship is understandable in the context of recent history. Since the Maoist revolution, Zhong Guo has striven to progress with one mind. The nail that sticks up gets hammered down. Limited freedom of speech proved very destabilising for the entire country in the Tienanmen manifestation. Since then, the authoritarian government has maintained its mandate under heaven by providing blistering economic growth and prosperity to the cities. Internet access there has grown very quickly also as an essential component of communication and economic development. Of course the potentially disruptive force of freedom of expression that the Internet inherently allows has proven frustrating and worthy in the eyes of the party of systematic suppression. For determined and intelligent internauts, expression is always possible through encryption and proxying, but is certainly more difficult with the incredible resources of the Chinese security authorities and the audience is significantly smaller. What Zhong Guo will ultimately have to prepare for is a completely free and open Internet made possible through coming technologies. By 2020, we should expect to receive satellite Internet in a simple wristwatch and I seriously doubt the Chinese military will start using their new anti-satellite system to shoot down every internet satellite out of the sky. The democratising effect of the Internet is inevitable. China's policymakers who overall have done very well in the past two decades must prepare for this inevitability and focus on the future rather than holding on too tightly to the oppressive past.

*Update* I somehow missed this Economist article on censorship and circumvention.

Celebration and Reflection

Happy Christmas! Since the domination of Christianity in Rome, it has replaced the pagan holiday of Saturnalia though now has become just as secular as surely Saturnalia must have been during its decline. Let us celebrate our lives, friends, and families. Let us exchange tokens of our affection in examples of the wonderful progress that humanity has achieved after the brilliant collaborative effort by learned and well-intentioned people of science: iPods, computers, cell phones, DVDs, what have you.

When you have finished, take some time to reflect on the mentalities of those who worked to bring you the iPods or the ability to read this blog: people such as Galileo Galilei, Issac Newton, Allan Turing, James Maxwell, Benjamin Franklin, etc. Then take some time to reflect on the political leaders that have tended to dominate while the scientists progressed to our current state. Surely the scientists had a great deal more to do with our current quality of life than did those politicians and rulers and those rulers who did give us progress did so only through listening to the scientists and technocrats.

As we close 2006, let us all recognise that humanity has tried its very hardest to spite the unquestionably positive phase it has entered in the information technology revolution and revert to: a) the Dark Ages of ignorance by religious fundamentalism and jihad; b) the breakdown of the International political system of diplomacy between cooperative sovereign nation states as seen in the run up to the Great War with the war in Iraq. c) the utter fecklessness of International negotiation and treaty organisations a la mode de League of Nations in performing their vital roles to coordinate and enforce basic regulations for the peace and prosperity of mankind on the planet. I refer of course to the collapse of the Kyoto Protocols or any system to limit and reduce the emission of Greenhouse gases and other factors in the sixth extinction currently taking place. As with the League, the non-participation of the United States in climate protection was the decisive factor in its ineffectiveness. d) the erosion of civil liberties and the enforcement of basic constitutional law with a popular nationalistic, jingoistic mobilisation for war against innocuous innocent bystanders with the ultimate aim of seizing military position, valuable resources, and as some sort of unholy experiment in a backwards and ill-founded ideology disturbingly similar to the Fascism or Communism of Eurasia in the 20th Century. Iraq has lost on the order of 600,000 people as a result of the Invasion, only one order of magnitude below the relative losses witnessed in 20th century conflicts.

As we approach January, let us remember Janus, the god of mirrors, the god of doorways, the god of two faces - one looking forward, one backward. New Years, the modern acknowledgement of Janus is coming soon, and so let us reflect.

So far the twenty-first century since the birth of Jesus, which was to be the payoff for the ~10 millennia of human effort and suffering that went before has been a reminder of the lessons of the previous century. We can either choose to learn those lessons the easy way, through an intellectual study of the past and a willingness to cooperate and act properly as responsible, sentient, civilised beings, or to continue to give in to our racial, sectarian, and nationalistic passions on a clear path toward self-destruction.

That having been said, Robert X. Cringely, one of the technocrats, points out in a much less dramatic way some simple examples of how our resources could have been better applied this second millennium since Jesus. It seems almost non sequitur after all I have said, but believe it or not, this post has provoked my end of year meditation.

Web 2.0

I actually hate this term coined by software publishing mogul, Tim O'Reiley, but I like the concept. Cyberpanopticon provides a link to a useful compendium of popular Web 2.0 sites.

Secondly, one of the sites listed was for the Google Web Toolkit. With this toolkit, coding Web 2.0 AJAX sites is much easier through Java wrappers. I only just discovered this, but I plan to spend significant time making use of it.

Net Neutrality II

Economist Tyler Cowen has a reasonable argument in favour of 'Net Neutrality.'

Lynne Kiesling points to a potentially better middle ground.