So It’s Called The “iPad” !

 Computing, iPhone  No Responses »
Jan 272010
 

Enough details have leaked from the announcement to talk a little about Apple’s new toy – the iPad (which seems to be one of the less popular guesses about the name – I went with the “iSlate” possibility). For those looking for the specifications :-

  • 1.25cm thick.
  • 700g heavy
  • 25cm multitouch display
  • 1GHz Apple A4 chip – presumably an ARM variant.
  • Between 16GB and 64GB of flash memory
  • Around 10 hours of battery life.

And it starts at $499 for a 16Gbyte one limited to WiFi access – what’s the betting that means £499 in the UK ?

Basically it’s a big iPhone with all the advantages and disadvantages that brings – both great usability and savage vendor lock-in. There are a few new presumably built-in applications to allow for the greater functionality possibilities – an eBook reader, iWorks, etc.

Interestingly Apple also announced a keyboard for the iPad and implies that it should work with any bluetooth keyboard. Finally admitted that not allowing keyboards on the iPhone was a mistake ? Maybe Steve Jobs finally listened to me 🙂 Who knows ? Maybe the next version of the iPhone software will include keyboard support.

And where’s the forward facing webcam ? That is perhaps the biggest missing feature. Whilst you may want a separate device for making normal videos, a webcam suitably placed for video chatting is pretty much the norm for those little Netbooks that Steve hates so much.

There are other things missing too :-

  • A set of magnets to let you stick the iPad to your fridge in the kitchen – get a recipe up on the iPad, stick it onto the fridge whilst you cook.
  • An SD card slot or two. Who wants to buy a replacement iPad if you find that the 16Gbyte version is not quite big enough. Well Steve wants you to, but an SD card slow would let you hold off on that extra purchase.
  • A USB port or four. Sure there’s Apple’s dock connector and I’m not suggesting they get rid of it. But not have a USB port to allow emergency charging and connecting to a portable hard disk ? Or a USB keyboard ?

The funny thing about the Apple site is that special section proclaiming how green Apple is with their iPad. Total rubbish of course. There is no user replaceable battery and no expandable storage, so the only option you are left with when the battery life declines to a level where it becomes useless or you run out of storage, is to throw the old iPad away and buy a new one. Being green isn’t just about using less environmentally hostile materials.

But does it do anything about the vendor lock-in for content ? It does not seem very likely – this is Apple we are talking about after all. However it does seem that the iBook application (and it used to be the name of a nifty Apple laptop) does support the ePub format. Whether that means that content bought through iBook will be transportable to other devices remains to be seen.

Whilst most of us are used to vendor lock-in when it comes to software – Windows software runs on machines running Windows; OSX software runs on Apple computers, and Linux software runs everywhere(!). We are not so used to the idea that content is only available on one device.

If I buy a book, a film on disc, a magazine, I own a physical object that I can put on shelves and go back to later. If I buy an eBook to go on the iPad, can I read it on anything else ? My Sony reader ? Anything else ? Well we do not have enough details to say, but I doubt it.

Content “hoarders” who accumulate scarily large piles of books, etc. are unlikely to be too keen on a content paradigm that means that content stays locked to a device. I have books that are in the region of 100 years old, and even some tatty paperbacks that belonged to my grandfather; will I still be able to read eBooks that I bought on the iPad in 40 years time ?

As it is an Apple product is has a certain “cool” aura, and I am sure it will sell. Heck, if Apple announced a downgraded iPod Classic they would have fans who would buy it without checking that the new hard disk (120Gbytes) was smaller than the old (160Gbytes). Will it change the way we think of consuming content ? I somehow doubt it. It will however push forward the idea of tablet type devices as a way of consuming content; not enough to gain iPhone-like status (which effectively put the smartphone into the hands of the ordinary consumer, and gave a swift sharp kick to other smartphone manufacturers).

Would I buy one ? Well if I had not already bought a netbook/slate to use as a couch potato machine – I tend to look things up whilst watching TV – I might very well do so. But would it replace my Sony eReader if I managed to put my own DRM-free eBooks onto it in a satisfactory manner. Hmm … will Stanza adapt well to the iPad ?

Hey! Apple, want to donate one in return for a review ? 🙂

Still not convinced by the name – iPad ? Sounds kind of American and comes across kind of odd to British ears – Apple’s crash-pad, a pad for dealing with spills, not a notebook that we use for scribbling notes in.

It’s Not The Web Stupid!

 Computing, iPhone  No Responses »
Jan 252010
 

According to an article from The Register, there has been a study to show that people in Britain rarely use their smartphones to “connect to the Internet”, and in the very next sentence mentions “surfing the web”. Well which one do they mean ?

Yes there is a difference, and that difference is important as we’ll go on to find out …

The exception to the trend are iPhone users who do use their smartphones to connect to the Internet more than other smartphone users. As an iPhone user myself, I can point out two things that to anyone who thinks that “accessing the Internet” and “surfing the web” are the same thing appears to be contradictory :-

  1. I very rarely browse the web on the iPhone.
  2. I frequently connect to the Internet using different applications on the iPhone – in particular instant messaging, email, and various reference tools (such as Wikipanion).

Now that’s got most of the dumb IT industry analysts going “Uh?”.

The reason that nobody browses the web on a smartphone is that the screen is just too small. Ok, the iPhone screen is pretty nice, but it is still too small for browsing the web – all that pinching in and out so you can see the web page as a whole and then read the content, is just a little tedious. And why not wait a few minutes until you have access to a better screen ?

Where the Internet usage comes from are the little applications that effectively present the Internet in an appropriate way for such a small screen – the map that shows the nearest bars, the search tool that looks up what you enter in a dictionary, in Wikipedia, etc. And of course instant messaging and VoIP.

Apple’s iSlate And Other Tablets: Hit or Miss ?

 Computing  No Responses »
Jan 252010
 

For those coming by a bit late, this was written before the Apple “iSlate” (if it gets called that) is released. I am not intending to update this when it does get released – making changes to star-gazing blog entries after the event comes close to cheating.

The suspicion is that Apple’s new tablet computer will be a scaled up iPhone rather than a scaled down Macbook, although what difference this makes when both run essentially the same operating system is open to question (for those who question this, have you logged into a jail-broken iPhone? No? Well you don’t know what you’re talking about then). After all a number of Hackintosh people have put OSX onto tablet PCs to roll their own iSlates complete with handwriting recognition with software provided in every copy of OSX.

The funny thing about all the fuss about Apple’s new device is that the numerous ARM-based slates that showed up at CES gathered far less fuss that you might expect.

The interesting thing are the number of people who believe Apple could well succeed where other Tablet computers have “failed”. Not everyone believes this of course, although I’m not sure how seriously you need to take someone who believes that Microsoft invented the tablet computer in 2001. After all Microsoft released “Pen Windows” to sabotage GO’s PenPoint OS (and apparently stole many of the basic concepts) way back in 1992!

So have tablet computers really failed ?

Perhaps you do not see A5-A4 sized tablets at every business meeting, but tablets are still widespread in particular markets. It would seem that those declaring doom and despondency have limited visions of what “success” means – if someone makes a profit selling tablet PCs, they are a success.

But those watching Apple are expecting or hoping that Apple will turn the tablet into a mainstream product – to have as much success with their tablet as they have had with their iPhone. Maybe it will and maybe it won’t. It all depends on the whimsical nature of the marketplace.

Do tablet computers have a place in the mainstream ? Quite possibly as long as it is not seen as a competitor to the laptop or the desktop. This is chiefly because the screen size is just not going to be big enough to work in the way we are used to.

There are those who claim that the lack of a keyboard will stop a tablet from succeeding. There are two mistakes here – firstly they are assuming that tablets will be used like laptops. And secondly they are assuming that a large on screen keyboard is not sufficient for the occasional bit of typing – a few instant messaging comments, commenting on a video, etc.

Of course there is nothing stopping you from adding a bluetooth keyboard (or even wired) to a tablet computer. You would need some form of stand to hold the tablet in a laptop configuration – like this (ok that is not really a stand, but you get the idea).

But what will make a tablet computer big is the content – tablets are by their nature devices for consuming content. Reading books, watching videos, browsing the web, etc. The rumour is that Apple is looking to get subsidies for their tablet by going to content creators; the danger with that is that the content creators will expect their investment back and then some – with the risk that they will overprice the content discouraging it’s use.

iPhone: What’s Missing (4) – Turn Off Auto Landscape

 iPhone  No Responses »
Jan 232010
 

When you first encounter those iPhone apps which automatically rotate into some form of landscape mode (often with a larger on screen keyboard), you think “Oh cool”. And it seems pretty useful.

Well the landscape mode certainly is, but the automatic rotation between portrait and landscape mode can begin to grate a little – it often seems to activate when you don’t want it to, and refuses to activate when you want it to. Not that it’s the fault of the iPhone really. It is just the our usage of the iPhone is too unpredictable to say that whenever the iPhone is in a landscape orientation that we want to use it in that orientation. We may simply have bent over to scratch a knee and accidentally rotated the iPhone.

It would be nice if the iPhone OS had two additional features :-

  • The ability to turn off the autorotation feature at a global level.
  • The ability to manually switch into landscape mode – presumably with some sort of twist gesture on the screen.

Interestingly it seems that others may also agree as I have come across other iPhone apps that do offer the facility to turn off auto-landscape mode.

OpenSolaris, and mod_security2

 Computing  No Responses »
Jan 072010
 

For various reasons I have decided that I need to install mod_security2 on my personal web server. This is a Solaris zone running on an OpenSolaris global zone with various bits of software provisioned by OpenCSW. Unfortunately (or fortunately at least from the point of view that I get to do something interesting), mod_security2 is not something provided by OpenCSW.

For even more various reasons, I decided to “formalise” my notes on building, installing, and configuring mod_security2.

Before attempting to build mod_security2, it is important to have a functional build environment. This includes :-

  • Installing the apache2_devel package from OpenCSW (pkg-get -i apache2_devel)
  • Installing the gcc3 package from OpenCSW
  • Installing the following OpenSolaris packages (pkg install XXX) :- SUNWhea, SUNWarc, SUNWbtool
  • Installing the SunStudio package from Sun. It may be possible that gcc3 is not necessary with this installed, but I ended up with both so advise you too as well. In addition to installing it in the standard location (/opt/SUNWspro) it is also necessary to create a symlink in the place where the OpenCSW developer placed his/her copy of SunStudio :- mkdir -p /opt/studio/SOS11; ln -s /opt/SUNWspro /opt/studio/SOS11/SUNWspro

The next step is to setup a shell environment appropriate to configuring and compiling mod_studio2 :-

export PATH=$PATH:/opt/SUNWspro/bin
export PATH=$PATH:/opt/csw/bin
export PATH=$PATH:/usr/ccs/bin
export PATH=$PATH:/opt/csw/gcc3/bin
export CC=gcc

(The above presumes the use of a shell that understands the above syntax)

The next step is to unpack the module source code, and configure it  :-

cd /var/tmp
gunzip -c modsecurity-apache_2.5.11.tar.gz | tar xvf -
cd modsecurity-apache_2.5.11
cd apache2
./configure --with-apxs=/opt/csw/apache2/sbin/apxs \
   --with-pcre=/opt/csw \
   --with-apr=/opt/csw/apache2 \
   --with-apu=/opt/csw/apache2//bin/apu-config

That should successfully general a Makefile. Edit this makefile and remove all references to “-Wall” (for APSX_EXTRA_CFLAGS, also remove the proceeding “-Wc,”). This is because modules will compile with SunStudio’s compiler no matter what we try to do to stop it, and SunStudio does not understand “-Wall”.

Now finally you can compile the software :-

make
sudo make install

Now we are at the point where we can start configuring mod_security2.

In the main httpd.conf file, add the following two directives somewhere appropriate (i.e. close to the other “LoadModule” directives) :-

LoadFile /opt/csw/lib/libxml2.so
#   Check that this library is installed!
LoadModule unique_id_module libexec/mod_unique_id.so
#   This will be already in the file but may be commented out
LoadModule security2_module libexec/mod_security2.so
#   And this is the one we're interested in.

At this point, try a graceful restart (/opt/csw/apache2/sbin/apachectl graceful) to be sure that the relevant code loads. Now onto enabling the module and configuring it with the “Core Rule Set” …

First copy the rules subdirectory to an appropriate place and fix the permissions :-

cp -rp rules /opt/csw/apache2/etc/modsecurity
chown -R root:root /opt/csw/apache2/etc/modsecurity
chmod -R o+r /opt/csw/apache2/etc/modsecurity
find /opt/csw/apache2/etc/modsecurity -type d -exec chmod o+x {} \;

In the file modsecurity/modsecurity_crs_10_global_config.conf, change SecDataDir to /var/tmp.

In the file modsecurity/modsecurity_crs_10_config.conf :-

  1. Change SecAudditLog to var/log/modsec_audit.log
  2. Change SecDebugLog to var/log/modsec_debug.log

Now add the following to httpd.conf :-

Include etc/modsecurity/modsecurity_crs_10_global_config.conf
Include etc/modsecurity/modsecurity_crs_10_config.conf
Include etc/modsecurity/base_rules/*conf

And gracefully restart Apache.

At this point, mod_security2 is running and blocking stuff, but has not been finely “tweaked” to the local applications – at the very least it partially breaks WordPress, and may well break other applications.

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