I just found this on Infosync

http://www.infosyncworld.com/news/n/8980.html

They have videos and pictures of the n95 successor, it looks pretty cool! I like the looks, but it will probably be a fingerprint magnet. It doesn’t seem to be that different from the n95 though, just the new looks and the mobile tv.

I agree with their take, symbian s60 is not really that cool anymore… and where is the touchscreen? that’s the only thing I really miss.

My dear N95 has been saving my day in unexpected ways lately.

Last week I went with a friend for lunch, but oh, when I was there I realized that they didn’t accept credit cards and I was out of cash (and my friend didn’t have enough as to lend me), but they accepted the Food card, but mine had no credit. No problem! N95 connected to the wi-fi and I was able to deposit some money to my food card just there. Ok.. any phone with wi-fi can do that.

But today, I was late for a class and I was supposed to turn in a report which I had already done but not printed, and to make matters worse, there was a construction going on through my usual way there, and me being as poorly oriented as I a m would have gotten lost if not for the GPS enabled phone, just took a minute (of course I stopped outside of the road) and I knew what to do. By the way if you don’t want to pay for GPS service on your n95 check www.nav4all.com, it’s free!

Anyway, I was still late, and I had not yet printed my report so… I ended up using putty from my n95 while walking from the parking lot to the classroom and printing from the command line, thanks to that I was able to pick up my printing and submit it just in time. I still want to see an iPhone doing all that.

Well, i took 2 months off…

The first month passed quickly, I went back home, had an awesome vacation, spent a lot of time with my family and friends. I went to the beach (beautiful Cancun) and to a wedding in Monterrey, it was a pretty busy winter, and I had so much fun.

I spent the second month moving back to North Carolina, it felt like it was years since I’ve been here, even though I only spent 6 months in California. I got a car (and oh, getting all the requirements was so complicated, I will talk about that later).

Anyway, here I am back to posting!

There was really nothing interesting during thanksgiving (well, a lot of deals) but nothing catched my eyes enough to make me spend so I won’t comment on that.

Anyway, a friend just let me know that the new Nokia’s media sharing service has some interesting features which I considered worth mentioning.

You get quite good storage (unlimited?) or at least all you can upload within your 250 MB a month and a 100 MB maximum file size all for free, both are considerably larger than lets say Picasa (1GB/???/20MB max) or Flickr (Unlimited/100MB per month/10MB max).

Also a weird thing is that there is no automatic filtering at all, so you may find all kind of content in there (it doesn’t take too long to find nudity for example, but it is not like its everywhere). The idea is that if a picture is censored by five members it will be removed.

Since you can share all kinds of media I am surprised why people haven’t started using it that much… because of the space, bandwidth and flexibility and I don’t doubt people would be interested in using it for shady purposes (I am not doing this, nor suggesting, encouraging,  etc, etc)

Branding and having a established community are really important features that make it hard to compete with the good old ones, but I think it is worth giving a try.

NOTE/DISCLAIMER

I DO work for Nokia… at least until the end of this week when my internship ends, but I am not getting paid or anything like that for commenting on this. I just happened to find this interesting as everything else I have commented on.

Since I moved to the U.S. I have been looking for cheap ways to call home, and so far the best one in my opinion is Vonage. It is relatively cheap (19.99 for basic service and 5.99 for a proxy number at home) and i get 500 minutes, quite a good deal. It gets forwarded to my cellphone so everyone can call me and it is completely transparent for them and for me.

However since I really don’t use the local service, I never use it to call (I only use the cellphone) and I don’t even use the equipment they gave me, I feel like I really shouldn’t have to pay the first 19.99, so I looked for new options.

Jajah is a startup company providing phone call services through VoIP, but unlike Vonage they don’t give you a number, or a rent plan. It is simple, you enter your number and the number you want to dial, they will do the connection and “call” you, when you pick the call the person you are calling will be about to be connected.

The rates are very good, (more expensive than Skype though) and if the other party has the service you get 150 minutes free! The main problem I found was that you needed to be connected to internet and log into the site to be able to dial (of course the cellphone internet can come to the rescue but it is annoying)

Fortunately that problem is gone and now with Jajah Direct you can enter your friends number and get a “proxy number” that you can use that will redirect your call to your friend. This is exactly the way that Jaxtr works, with the difference that Jaxtr for not very high usage purposes is practically free (you get 100 minutes a month for free, and getting minutes by referring people is easy).

The problem with Jaxtr is that the quality of the call (both sound quality and delay) is quite poor, and sometimes the calls don’t even connect (I am NOT complaining, heck it is free!) and for sometime I used as my main way to calling back home (since I cannot make calls with vonage without paying extra, only receive).

So now, having Jajah Direct and convincing people to join is a very cheap way to communicate long distance with very decent quality (Skype still sounds a bit better though).

So… what about Skype? Having to use it through the computer is not very “portable” and although there are solutions that allow you to use it through your cellphone like Fring, the sound quality degrades quite badly, and it is nice to have some VoIP that doesn’t eat up your bandwidth (I should try other options like Gizmo but I have been lazy)

Of course, that is Skype now. If Google buys Skype from eBay as speculated (I wonder if Nokia in its acquisition spree will jump in there too), pairing it with GrandCentral (and maybe even android) may result in a solution that will be far superior to all the other ones I have mentioned.

I am definitely looking forward to see what happens, for now I will keep my Vonage account for some more time until I feel that one of the alternative solutions is reliable enough (or Vonage launches a plan that suits my need… sadly after all the problems they have had with Verizon I really doubt it)

When I bought my Nintendo DS lite about almost a year ago, I noticed within 5 minutes of playing that it had one nasty red dead pixel…. oh I felt so unlucky. Fortunately Nintendo had a policy stating that they would replace a DS Lite even with only one dead pixel, but they asked to try to live with it and only send it if it was really annoying.

I tried, it was annoying sometimes (yeah… probably not many people would care but it breaks the magic) , still I kept it for quite a long time, then one day I noticed a second dead pixel (that one was really unnoticeable), so I decided to send it for repairs (If I ever wanted to sell it no one would buy it and the first one was bad enough).

I was lazy and time passed, so finally when the warranty was about to expire I realized that I had to send it or live with it. Anyway I dropped it in the UPS box (they paid for shipping) and today, within only 8 days of sending it, I have my renewed flawless DS Lite with no dead pixels…. now that’s great service.

Is Google hiding the Android kernel source?

Ok, that was a bit extreme… but definitely Google/OHA is not making it easy to reach the android kernel source code. You can of course google it, and find git.android.com and find a git repository of what we can call version A of Android source, but other than the announcement in the ARM Linux Kernel Mailing List (about which I commented in a previous post) there is really no way to get to it from anywhere else (in particular from the Android website or the OHA one).

However if you go through the “fine print” in the Android website (that is, go to Download the SDK, and then go to the bottom of the page and click through the not so flashy link Android project page ) and that will take you to what I would call version B. I am giving different names because they are definitely not the same thing.

Version A last update seem to have been on November 8 (13 days of no activity by the time of this post), and version B is a static tar.gz file dated November 11 (I don’t even know if that file is being updated).

There are of course more differences than the latest modification, for instance version A clearly is focused on mach_msm (for the Qualcomm chipset I mentioned in my previous post) and has as the proposed board definition the “halibut”, it is noticeable that most of the code contributions in this one are found in the architecture section of the code (arch/arm/mach-msm).

In Contrast version B is targetted to mach_goldfish and uses the board definition for “goldfish”, in this one the specific code is equally split between the architecture section and the drivers section (this one clearly named drivers/android).

Halibut and Goldfish are two of the at least four boards that Google registered at the ARM Linux Machine Registry (being the other two Sardine and Trout), it is funny that instead of having a single repository including the two, they have this two separate versions… there is something fishy here, and I am not talking about the board names.

Probably there is much more that can be inferred about potential specifications by looking at both sources, but I will leave that for another day.

Maybe I am just being paranoid about the android here and there is some reason to all this, but I am failing to see it.

As seen on Slashdot, a security researcher at Cambridge found a very interesting use for Google (full story) .

I am shocked… I didn’t know that WordPress is storing our precious passwords without a salt! and even more shocking is that Google is so great at storing and indexing everything that you can even use it to infer passwords giving the MD5 hash… that’s scary.

Of course if you have a strong password it won’t work, but it is a trivial way to break passwords of people oblivious to computer security using plain dictionary words as passwords, I don’t really know the trends but I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of people still do that (when the site does not enforce a stronger password policy)

It is amazing how many things can be done with Google (maybe it will work with some other search engine… but I didn’t feel like trying), and it is really disappointing that WordPress got so careless, for most cases there is no reason to not use a salt, and the extra coding effort is negligible…. anyway if you have some simple wordpress password consider changing it.

I was hoping for the material to be available already so I could link to it, but it is not yet the case.

So what is in store for Xen?

As I mentioned previously for day one some directions on Xen roadmap were shown some interesting xen extensions were shown, one I found particularly interesting is JavaGuest (Java running on top of Xen, allowing a full Java stack… more on that in a post to follow).

Day 2 started with AMD and Intel updates, and as I said it is really great that they are caring about virtualization. I am particularly excited about the features coming up with Intel VT-d which allows DMA for IO devices by means of DMA remapping (basically assigning regions of host physical memory as “protection domains”, assigning devices to this domains and remapping DMA access to host physical addresses on this domains, the remapping being done in HW).

Also very interesting was Samsung’s presentation on the ARM port of Xen, which they showed originally on the previous Xen Summit. Now it is even more advanced, they even showed Doom running in one of the domains, and following the current trend of disaggregating Dom0, they have a separate domain for drivers. Very good work, I really hope they release their work, there are a lot of great things that can be done with it.

Very interesting work for consolidating memory in Xen (the more VMs you run the more important this will become) by using Copy on Write was also shown, and a great approach at treating Xen VM as transactional applications (checkpointing the VM every few milliseconds, executing speculatively and holding any output in between checkpoints).

Finally, the recently announced OracleVM (Sun, Novell and RedHat also showed their stuff), now that Viridian is going to be released soon, pretty much all the major players have a virtualization solution in hand, this is definitely getting big.

Where is my Genji Set? I can’t steal from Elmdor! and I spent a lot of time trying! There is another quest where you can get it, though, but not all of it (just the sword and the armor)

What happened to the spells/attacks quotes? “Layer upon layer make your mark now! Haste!” anyone? I really liked those, and I even used those while playing FFXI (some people liked it some others got really annoyed… anyway that was a long time ago).

Where are the other two intro videos? I understand… they are not widescreen, but they could have remade them just as the first one, those two videos are really good… I guess you can just download those videos and put them in your PSP to get the classic feel.

*Spoiler here *

I like the new quests, I enjoyed beating Algus (Argath?) an additional time, getting more stuff with Beowulf and Reis (with interesting extra story), seeing Ovelia one last time before going to beat Ultima (I like that one better than the original). I still don’t have the Dark Knight because I haven’t had played that much yet, and the Onion Knight sucks for now, maybe I’ll get something to make it better.

*End of Spoilers

I insist it was totally worth my money, but I have to finish with this quickly so I can start playing my Castlevania and Silent Hill… too many games, not enough time.

See my early review here