Alpha's Place

Kindle Fire & Nook Tablet are not fragmenting Android

Alpha_Cluster — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 02:25:24 +0000

So many people are talking about how with the open sourcing of ice cream sandwich we are going to see a new level of fragmentation of the Android ecosystem. The best part is these people use the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablets as examples of this. These tablets are actually not a part of the problem. They are actually examples of Google’s solution to the issue.

One of the main reasons that they are not fragmenting is they don’t claim to be Android. If you look at the ad pages for both the Amazon Kindle Fire and the Barns and Noble Nook Tablet you will not see android referenced other then on Amazons as the Amazon Android App store which no consumer that buys it is going to confuse it with Google’s app store. The fact that it is Android is something only the really geeky need to know. I am doubtful outside the tech circles anyone is going to be talking about it as android. The only really major reason that it is Android matters is that it’s using Android’s development libraries which means most apps that work on any Android tablet will work on the Kindle or Nook they just have to go through there separate stores. As for that causing issues as well I have used Amazon’s App Store in the past and would consider it on par with Google’s.

So really this is all what Google wanted. They wanted to make it so that any company could make their own personalized devices using Android quickly now we are finally seeing the results of this policy. Personally I think it’s better since it means Amazon or Barns and Noble can be on par with Apple in at least the tablet OS space and use that to deliver their much more plentiful content. In the end we are seeing more competition and less consumer confusion what more could you want?

Why I’ve lost faith in Android as a platform

Alpha_Cluster — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 01:52:31 +0000

This is a blog post a long time coming as over the last month I have struggled with my Android phone. I am going to start off saying if your just going to respond with “Just click X,Y, and Z and your issue is solved” at this point then stop reading now cause my whole argument is going to be ignored by you.

I had an Android phone for about 9 months. Over the course of those 9 months I spent all 9 of them trying to make my phone something better. I was using a Samsung Fascinate which is by no means a weak phone or in any ways should be a problem. The Galaxy S was the top line from Samsung who is not a bad phone manufacturer. Actually the hardware is great the phone has survived many drops with no signs of damage the thing that truely cripples the phone is it’s OS.

When I first got my Fascinate my first thought was “yay I can tweak the hell out of this thing” at the start. I spent a few weeks trying to use the default of this “amazing OS” I even tried all the different launchers and none of them fixed the fundamental flaw that was created by the buggyness and slowness of the OS provided by Samsung. So I started my journey of playing with ROM’s constantly on this phone. Now all I can say is that this lead to a phone only slightly more usable then before with just as many bugs. Even after Samsung finally got Froyo on the phone (6 months after promised) we merely got more bugs. Now this could be both Samsung’s and Verizon’s fault who knows which caused more bugs. Verizon’s attempts to replace Google with Bing couldn’t have made it any more stable.

Now all of this trouble comes from the fact that Android is too open. It doesn’t matter if your OS is really good if 90% of the users are given phones that slowly get buggier over time. We like to think of technology as advancing but Android devices I have used seem to only get more bugs as more versions of software is release look at the Droid X for even more examples. This is the key failing of the Android platform. People said there was going to be no consitancy to Android well I can tell you there is one constant it’s that phone makes can keep making bad phones that will just confuse normal users. I don’t care if you can fix it by restarting or pressing a key combo or turning off the defaulted to on GPS. None of these matter as normal users should never have to deal with this stuff. Fine it will work for tweakers and you guys can have your phones but there is no need for tweaker phones to be forced on the population as a really usable phone. I think Android as a platform is in a race to the bottom of devices. In an attempt to make devices cheaper and cheaper the quality goes out the window. Don’t get me wrong I’m sure the Nexus phones will be good for techies and the Kindle Fire will be perfect for normal users but neither of those will be the majority of devices.

Now most readers will probably ask, “Well then what platform do you have faith in?” The saddest thing is I actually have to say there are two platforms that have it right. Windows Phone and iPhone. Yep Windows Phone . It’s not only more usable but as a user its less confusing. Instead of allowing you to bite yourself with 50 apps in the background Microsoft has seen what Apple did. Sure you can use your one app and the rest can run but in limited states to prevent the slowdown and freezing that became normal on my android. At the end I was rebooting almost daily wait no that wasn’t even me it would reboot ON ITS OWN! I think Microsoft will win the race to the bottom as they have a more intuative and simple user interface will most likely hit the right price points.

So there is my outlook. Windows Phone and iPhone on top with Android stuck with Blackberry in nitch markets. Sure the Android phones will have the latest tech but seriously does anyone really need NFC at this point? Or even LTE? Yay, I get instant downloads oh wait I need to plug in again. Apple and Microsoft are both smart about technology these days and know its worth waiting till its been proven. This will be the key to their success just watch!

Go Post #2: AES Encryption

Alpha_Cluster — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 03:44:15 +0000

So as I went over how to do a simple hashing program I figured next I would utilize some more of they crypto libraries provided. In this case I used AES to write a simple encryption and decryption program. How this works is rather simple. We pass in two arguments. The first is the plaintext message you want to encrypt and the second is the key used to encrypt the file. A warning here is do not have a default key that is horribly insecure and users will many times use the default. We will now take the encryption key and initialization vector (iv) to encrypt the message. Another warning is here though the iv is not as important as the key make sure you use one and that it’s not something really simple like in the example. The iv you use for encryption must match also between the encryption and the decryption. For this example I use the CFB block mode. This allows for us to have plaintext of any length which makes this example more simple. After we encrypt the message I then decrypt it and print it out just to show you can. After that we encode the ciphertext (the encrypted text) in base64 so that you can copy and paste it into a decrypter. This way you don’t need to use a file to store the data in this example. Plus it shows you base64 which is fun tool for storing binary data in a human readable format.

package main

import (
 "fmt"
 "os"
 "crypto/aes"
 "crypto/cipher"
 "encoding/base64"
 )
 var commonIV = []byte{0x00, 0x01, 0x02, 0x03, 0x04, 0x05, 0x06, 0x07, 0x08, 0x09, 0x0a, 0x0b, 0x0c, 0x0d, 0x0e, 0x0f}

func main() {
 // Load the plaintext message you want to encrypt.
 plaintext := []byte("hello, world")
 if len(os.Args) > 1 {
 plaintext = []byte(os.Args[1])
 }

// Setup a key that will encrypt the other text.
 key_text := "32o4908go293hohg98fh40gh"
 if len(os.Args) > 2 {
 key_text = os.Args[2]
 }

// We chose our cipher type here in this case
 // we are using AES.
 c, err := aes.NewCipher([]byte(key_text))
 if err != nil {
 fmt.Printf("Error: NewCipher(%d bytes) = %s", len(key_text), err)
 os.Exit(-1)
 }

// We use the CFBEncrypter in order to encrypt
 // the whole stream of plaintext using the
 // cipher setup with c and a iv.
 cfb := cipher.NewCFBEncrypter(c, commonIV)
 ciphertext := make([]byte, len(plaintext))
 cfb.XORKeyStream(ciphertext, plaintext)
 fmt.Printf("%s=>%x\n", plaintext, ciphertext)

// We decrypt it here just for the purpose of
 // showing the fact that it is decryptable.
 cfbdec := cipher.NewCFBDecrypter(c, commonIV)
 plaintextCopy := make([]byte, len(plaintext))
 cfbdec.XORKeyStream(plaintextCopy, ciphertext)
 fmt.Printf("%x=>%s\n",ciphertext, plaintextCopy)

// We must now convert the ciphertext to base64
 // this will allow for the encrypted data to be
 // visible to copy and paste into the decrypter.
 base64Text := make ([]byte, base64.StdEncoding.EncodedLen(len(ciphertext)))
 base64.StdEncoding.Encode(base64Text, []byte(ciphertext))
 fmt.Printf("base64: %s\n", base64Text)
 }

Next we have the decryption program. This program is setup pretty much the same as the encryption one except it takes in the base64 ciphertext and the key. The first thing we then have to do is decode the ciphertext form base64 into the normal binary format that we can decrypt. You will notice here that the iv matches the same as in the encryption program.

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "os"
    "crypto/aes"
    "crypto/cipher"
    "encoding/base64"
)
var commonIV = []byte{0x00, 0x01, 0x02, 0x03, 0x04, 0x05, 0x06, 0x07, 0x08, 0x09, 0x0a, 0x0b, 0x0c, 0x0d, 0x0e, 0x0f}

var ciphertext []byte

func main() {
    // Load the base64 ciphertext from the arguement.
    if len(os.Args) > 1 {
        // Decode the ciphertext to put it in a usable binary format.
        dbuf := make([]byte, base64.StdEncoding.DecodedLen(len(os.Args[1])))
        base64.StdEncoding.Decode(dbuf, []byte(os.Args[1]))
        ciphertext = []byte(dbuf)
    } else {
        fmt.Printf("Error: At least one argument required!")
        os.Exit(-1)
    }

    // Load the key from the second argument.
    key_text := "32o4908go293hohg98fh40gh"
    if len(os.Args) > 2 {
        key_text = os.Args[2]
    }

    // We chose our cipher type here in this case
    // we are using AES.
    c, err := aes.NewCipher([]byte(key_text));
    if err != nil {
        fmt.Printf("Error: NewCipher(%d bytes) = %s", len(key_text), err)
        os.Exit(-1)
    }

    // We use the CFBDecrypter in order to decrypt
    // the whole stream of ciphertext using the
    // cipher setup with c and a iv.
    cfb := cipher.NewCFBDecrypter(c, commonIV)
    plaintext := make([]byte, len(ciphertext))
    cfb.XORKeyStream(plaintext, ciphertext)

    // We then print out the resulting text.
    fmt.Printf("%x=>%s\n",ciphertext, plaintext)
}

Well I hope this gives people a good example of how to do encryption with go. I felt the need to write this because I could not find a article anywhere on this topic. Most of the examples I used to come up with this were from the cfb_test.go testing code that comes in the source code. These test files have some good examples for using the code if your not afraid of poking around the code base. I also hope this might help people understand some more of the basics of encryption which can come in handy with any application you develop. One last word of warning though this code is in no way ready to be used with actual data and keep it safe. If you want to do that you should probably read up some more on encryption as using encryption without understanding the proper uses of it is not much better then not using it at all.

While installing Gentoo I ended up with Kubuntu

Alpha_Cluster — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 04:09:42 +0000

So today I thought would be a good day to switch my desktop back to Linux. As normal when i try out Linux again I tried Gentoo. Last time I tried I managed to get a booting kernel on the first try and everything worked. Well this time it couldn’t been further from the truth. I didn’t start with high hopes. I spent some time this morning reading some of the Gentoo blogs and to say the least the amount of fighting the Gentoo developers are doing right now is pretty scary. Little did I know that the developers relationships were in better condition then there installation documentation.

While trying to install the 64bit version of Gentoo I managed to find numerous places in the Gentoo handbook where there were either files mentioned that no longer seemed to exist as well is a complete lack of updates (they had no mention of ext4 but still mentioned reiser as though its something people really use still). In the end I managed to get my setup configured or at least I thought though with the instructions I felt as though I messed up smoe of the networking. That didn’t matter though as on boot it got to USB loading and just stopped. Well normally I would recompile the kernel and try again but tonight I figured the few hours I had already spend were enough.

Well I pulled out my Kubuntu 11.04 disk and amazingly it worked… for the most part. I managed to crash the partition manager by attempting to click the format checkbox for the swap partition but that was about all. In the end I got a fresh install of Kubuntu now. Going to have some fun tomorrow playing with Go now that I don’t have to work in VM’s to do the work.

Go Post #1: Simple Hashing

Alpha_Cluster — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 20:10:07 +0000

Ok so most people start learning a new language with hello world but that is just too simple to show off a new language. So instead of hello world I am going to post the first program I tried to write in go (of course after hello world). It was just a very simple hashing program which you pass in a string when you run the program and then you get back the string and what the hashed version of that string looks like.

package main

import(
    "fmt"
    "flag" // command line option parser
    "crypto/sha256"
    "hash"
)

var plaintext string

func main() {
    flag.Parse() // Scans the arg list and sets up flags
    if flag.NArg() > 0 {
        plaintext = flag.Arg(0)
    }

    h := sha256.New()  // h is a hash.Hash
    h.Write([]byte(plaintext))

    fmt.Printf("%s: %x\n", plaintext, h.Sum())
}

So lets looks at what exactly is going on in the example code. First you will notice import this is used just like in pretty much every other language and tells the compiler what libraries you want to include. Now if you don’t want sha256 hash you can change the import line that calls for crypto/sha256 with a different hashing algorithm. I was very happy at the selection of hashing algroithms you can chose from (md4, md5, sha1, sha256, sha384, sha512, md5sha1, ripemd160) basically to change the hash you use just change the import and later change the has you create.

Next in the code you see a variable definition it shows just a simple declaration of a string. It’s a bit different then most lanuagues but nothing to strange. After that you get to the real meat. The main function. Unlike your traditional C program I used the flag library in go which allos you to parse a list of flags (not shown here) as well is iterate through parameters. The if statement merely checks how many arguments were passes and if there is more then one it grabs the first one and sets it to the plaintext.

The last section is where the main work happens. I used go’s handy feature where you can define a variable when you first create it to create h which is the hash. The declaration happens with the := assignment. This is also the line that you chose your hashing algorithm. It should match whatever one you chose to import. In the next line I write the content of the plaintext into the hashing algorithm and you see how simple it is to cast a string into the byte array.

To finish it all off the last statement sums the hash and prints it out to the console. It’s that simple. Now at this point there are a few notes I would like to make. First, notice the lack of semicolons. Yes, this language does have them but the only spot they are needed is in for loops and if you want multiple statements per line. Second, notice the bracing format. While I truly dislike the one true brace style its forced by the language and I have accepted it since Go provides so many neat features.

Well there you go that’s how you do a simple hash in Go and some of the language basics. Now since someone will complain if I don’t here is a more simple version of the hashing program using hello world.

package main

import (
“fmt”
“os”
“crypto/sha256″
)

func main() {
plaintext := “hello, world”
if len(os.Args) > 1 {
plaintext = os.Args[1]
}
h := sha256.New() // h is a hash.Hash
h.Write([]byte(plaintext))
fmt.Printf(“%s\n%x\n”, plaintext, h.Sum())
}

UPDATE: Added code from comments to replace hello world. (May come back and rework this article)

Starting on adventures with Go

Alpha_Cluster — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 05:37:29 +0000

So go sparked my interest when it was first announced but back then it had little support yet and really wasn’t very useful. Now this last month when I was going through some Google IO videos I happened across one about Go again. Needless to say Go has gone pretty far in the last few years and so I have been looking at it again. It’s a fun language and seems to really be easier to understand when it comes to reading your final code. I will try and post some examples of Go code in the near future as I have noticed nobody seems to actually be posting much example code. This is specially frustrating me when it comes to ciphers. Expect to see some interesting encryption examples once I figure it out. For more information about go checkout the site for it at http://golang.org.

Why broadband will continue to fail in the US

Alpha_Cluster — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 00:14:15 +0000

With Google announcing it was going into the ISP business or at least into the ISP infrastructure business it looks like maybe we might see more broad band with the promised gigabit connections it might provide. But will this really solve Americas broadband crisis? Guess what IT WONT! Though Google would probably be the first one to go into the areas that are least served (leave and minor city and you can find under served areas) and claim the funds for it why would it? Would that really help them with their goals? These areas have been abandoned by the major ISPs look at Verizon selling off its rural phone lines. Why would they do this? Oh wait FiOS is more expensive to lay in the country and there just is not the money to be made there. So what happens? Well at lot of Americans still live outside the cities! So we get horrible broadband rate. Well lets look back at Google. Sure they could pull into these smaller towns an under covered rural areas but what would they gain? There would be no pressure (hell most of the major telecoms feel stuck in these areas) and at worst they will look like the bad guys as many of these areas are served by local companies that cannot afford to make needed upgrades. Now maybe if Google is just wanting to make the infrastructure this could work but still where is the pressure? It would be most good Google could do and sure would get great PR I mean I can read the headlines now “Google solves broadband issues the government could not!” ok it wouldn’t be that long but you get the drift.

Basically in the end I have this feeling that people outside of the major metropolitan areas are screwed. A year ago wireless was going to save rural broadband but Verizon has 3G in most everywhere but if you leave a city the towers are so sparse the connection is worse than dial-up. No one wants to invest in rural America which used to be seen as the heart of America. Now it has just been forsaken its paying for all the cities junk and never getting any investment.

Obligitory iPad Post or Finally a true Tablet

Alpha_Cluster — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 19:14:16 +0000

Ok lets get something straight iPad is by far the WORST name for this device. iSlate or iTab (short of iTablet) would have worked ten times better. But the name is iPad and so we will live with it.

Now personally I love the idea of tablet computing. I have been wanting it since back in the day when Microsoft was showing it off with styluses and overlays on Windows XP. Now that seems like a good idea but most people know most PC OS’s are not designed for small screens or for touch screens. Buttons are too small and data is crammed into space to efficiently for it to work out. Also may of these devices were large and clunky. Now we see the iPad which is effectively almost exactly what a Tablet should really be. The key to a tablet is it MUST be more mobile then a laptop. Sure a laptop with a rotating screen could do the same but the key there is you have an interface which is not as mobile. Its just not easy to use Windows with a touch screen. HP has spent lots of money making custom UI’s solely to make it so their touchsmart PC’s are easier to use.

Now Apple has made that easy to use interface. But there are two major issues. One which people have brought up a bunch and is unfounded and then an oddly missing issue from the discussion.

The first issue that people seem to be way to worried about is flash support. Many people are all worried about how you just cannot get a true internet experience without this. Well I am sorry but I think I would rather wait till html5 is ubiquitous then have my mobile device be as hot as a overheated breakfast burrito. One of the biggest issue with flash is that it is to be nice UTTER CRAP. On even the most advanced computers it somehow will end up pulling 100% of a CPU core to just show a YouTube video. Why the hell would I want that in my mobile device? Not to mention the most important fact that is flash NEEDED? I think we can safely say no. HTML 5 will be common place once it is approved. Safari already supports it and it can do pretty much anything flash does. If anything else we can at least think of the flash blocking as a free ad blocker. No I don’t want to punch that monkey or punch out Bin Laden I just want to read the site!

The second issue is one nobody has brought up (that I have noticed at least). Where is handwriting recognition. Sure the stylus sucks with the problem that you lose it. But please could we at least take notes using handwriting recognition? I would love to be able to just use a stylus while taking notes. It allows for a more natural experience. Personally I have never liked taking notes with a keyboard. Maybe I am just crazy with this idea. Let me point out lack of handwriting recognition is not a feature that will kill the product for me.

So what do I think about the iPad? Well I am sure nobody really cares but I will say it anyways. The iPad is the first step to real tablet computing. This is the future that pretty much any big sci-fi fan has been wanting. The device that you could bring anywhere and do pretty much anything with. This is what many thought netbooks would do but finally we see a device that is truly forward looking and not backwards like the netbook.

And the E-Book wars begin!

Alpha_Cluster — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 18:51:12 +0000

First shots are now being fired in the real start of the e-book wars. Many would argue that the e-book wars started a with the Kindle trying to rival the Sony Book Reader. Back then epub seemed young and weak and Amazon was the 800 pound gorilla. And this has seemed to be true for the last year or so. The Kindle was synonymous with e-book reader and pretty much every other reader went epub hoping that the “openness” would win readers over from the Kindle. Now Apple with the announcement of the iPad has showed up on the scene and if Amazon was a 800 pound gorilla, well Apple is some kind of shiny new 20 ton battle tank.

Sure we have seen Amazon king for awhile now but what is going on now? Amazon the biggest book retail just lost a deal with Macmillan! This shows that Amazon has got to be to powerful. They are so powerful the book publishers are willing to walk away to someone they know they can challenge them but will give them a better posision. Apple says it will price match Amazon well if your books are not even on Amazon what is there to price match? Jobs talks about publishers pulling out of Amazon. Apple is providing a perfect marketplace for the book publishers. They are using epub (the open standard publishers agree on) and not using mobi like Amazon. Apple never said anything at their event about DRM for the e-books but we can assume that they will start with Apple’s own version of DRM. The question though is will Apple be able to force ebooks to become DRM free as it did with MP3s?

The fact that Apple is doing epub is something many may not realize the importance of. Epub in the past has always been a format that even though its an standard and open has always been controlled by Adobe. Adobes renderer has been the bane of many people who really know the epub spec and write a document to the spec only to find Adobe’s renderer does not work as it was intended. Apple now has a chance to come in and show the true power of epub.

What we are watching right now is just a minor skirmish who knows what wonderful things we will get out of this ebook war. We may finally see affordable college textbooks that don’t break students backs economically or physically. We may see DRM be gone from another media format. Really though all to truly know at this point is it will be very interesting to watch.

Has Apple’s Deal with AT&T saved us all?

Alpha_Cluster — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 18:16:01 +0000

Now I know this sounds completely out there. Few people think AT&T offer good service these days. Personally I don’t care about AT&T to much cause I live somewhere they don’t even cover. But lets put that all behind us as that is not what I want to look at today.

A few years ago Apple announced a minor mobile device known as the iPhone. They announced it on AT&T exclusive and everyone has complained about this for the last few years. Now how about we look back to that time and contemplate a different chain of events. What could have happend if Verizon had gotten exclusivity of the iPhone instead of AT&T? Well many times it has been reported about how much AT&T has gained in subscribers thanks to the iPhone. What if AT&T had never got these gains? Would we see these two huge companies AT&T and Verizon dooking it out on the airwaves to get our money? I have this odd feeling had Verizon gotten the iPhone deal we would be seeing once again the monopoly of one phone service. If we go back to when the deal was struck AT&T was not in the position it was not. Sure it was one of hte bigger cell phone companies but it really didnt rivel Verizon at the time. Verizon was king. Now look we got two giants fighting it out!

Now fast forward to this week. We hear that AT&T now has exclusivity on the iPad. What does that really mean though? The iPad is unlocked GSM and uses a micro-sim sure it doesn’t support T-Mobiles band of the wireless spectrum but that doesn’t matter as much as the bigger news. Apple has managed to force AT&T to not only get a lower data rate but also make it not require a contract. Do you think Verizon would have accepted that? Not right now but in a year when the next version of the iPad comes out how much do you want to bet there will be a 4G version which will support all the LTE carriers? What will that mean? Well dataplans will actually have to compete with each other instead of over who has what device.

So what is the moral of this? Well Apple has managed to do something the FCC has failed at doing. They have prevented a Verizon monopoly and actually forced a move into more reasonable rates for Data Plans. But hey lets just ignore that progress and just complain that AT&T. Sure they don’t have 3G anywhere but I can tell you Verizon 3G is nothing to write home about when it comes to actual speed.