Wandering Jew
Here, there and everywhere

a nice little monster

I have in my home, as of now, 2 PCs (a desktop, and a server/media-centre), 3 Android phones, an ebook reader, a crappy-but-cheap Chinese Android tablet - and 3 'netbooks'. The newest addition to the menagerie is an Asus Eee PC 1215N, which rather wipes the floor with the its two predecessors...

Device	Processor	Screen	Storage	Keyboard	Output
EeePC 701	Celeron @ 900MHz	7 inch 800x480	4G(?) SSD	Small and crap	VGA
Nexus One	Snapdragon @ 1GHz	3.7 inch 800x480	512MB flash	None	None
EeePC 901	Atom @ 1.6GHz (x2 threads)	8.9 inch 1024x600	16GB flash	Small and less crap	VGA
EeePC 1215N	Dual-core Atom @ 1.8GHz (x2 threads)	12.1 inch 1366x768	320GB HDD	Full-sized, chiclet	VGA & HDMI

Threw the N1 in there for comparison, just to make the point that a 2010-era smartphone can even outspec an EeePC 701, in the right light - same resolution screen, though obviously smaller with a much higher DPI, faster CPU in terms of raw clock speed, longer battery life and although the 701 has more storage than an N1, my N1 typically has a 16GB microSD card in it. Anyway, back to the 1215N.

I picked it up at the Hong Kong Computer & Communications Festival on 20th August - notable because there is, as far as I know, no firm release date for this machine in the US, and Amazon UK were listing it with a pre-order fulfilment date of August 23rd, but have just updated it to September 7th! I've had my eye on this model for a while, and knew it was due out late August or early September, but hadn't heard anything at all about Hong Kong release dates, so I did something a bit naive - I simply called Asus last week and asked them. After being passed around a couple of times, I was quite shocked to get a straight answer ("at the computer festival this Friday") to a straight question, since I was fully expecting to be told that they hadn't announced a date, and certainly weren't going to randomly disclose it to an anonymous individual caller - kudos to Asus.

Going back to that Amazon.co.uk listing, while the date has changed, the price has stayed the same, at £429 (US$666, €524, HK$5180). The machine is actually available in a few other places, and looking at a Swedish site they are listing it at 5290 Kronor (£459, US$712, €560, HK$5540). There is no price available for the US, but rumours are placing it around US$500 (£321, €393, HK$3888) - which to be fair would exclude any sales taxes, unlike the European prices. Me, I paid HK$3780 (US$486, £313, €382) in cash and took it home - there are no sales taxes in Hong Kong, and there was no delivery charge or delay - so I think I did pretty well there!

Inside the somewhat-sparse brown cardboard box was the laptop, the battery (see below), a charger with a UK (and therefore HK) figure-8 cable to plug into it, a warranty card, and a relatively simple manual in English and both Traditional and Simplified Chinese. The guys who sold it to me were nice enough to throw in a case - ugly-but-functional - an extra year of official Asus warranty, and an antivirus package - entirely useless to me. Not exactly an extensive package, but that's probably a good thing in these green days...

There appears to only be one 1215N model number across the world, but there are a few variable specs which will change depending on where you get the machine. In particular, mine has a 320GB hard drive (but some may have 250GB), a 6-cell battery (4-cell being the alternative), 3 USB 2.0 ports (some models advertised with 2 USB 3.0 and 1 USB 2.0) and 2 GB RAM in the form of 2 1GB sticks (as opposed to 4GB or even 1GB options). While I'd quite like the USB 3.0 ports, just for future-proofing, I'm reasonably happy with the HK spec, and while 4GB RAM would be nice, it would be pretty easy, and not particularly expensive, to upgrade it myself since the two SODIMM sockets are in fact the only easily-accessible and user-upgradable innards.

Now, I Don't Do Windows^TM. The 1215N came with Windows 7 Premium something-or-other, but I Don't Do Windows^TM so I got rid of it pretty sharp-ish - shoved Ubuntu on it, because that was what I had lying around, and what I've been running on my older EeePCs, but I'm not sure what it'll end up with. I did see Windows 7 running on demo units at the 'festival', and it seemed to run alright, for Windows. Did I mention that I Don't Do Windows^TM? The salesman did run up the Windows Experience doodad, and while I can't remember the exact scores, they were 5.something for the memory and disk tests, and 3.something for the CPU, graphics and gaming - not too bad in the scheme of things for a device like this, I think. Anyway, I Don't Do Windows^TM so let's move on.

On paper, at least, it's somewhat comparable to the MacBook Air - the 1215N has a slightly smaller screen with a slightly higher resolution, a slower CPU but not massively so, the same amount of RAM, much bigger hard drive, theoretically-similar Nvidia graphics but with a lower-power, lower-performance Intel chip as well, and slightly more heft, 1.45kg (with 6cell battery) vs. 1.36kg for the MacBook Air. The Air is much much thinner, 19.4mm at its thickest compared with 37mm for the 1215n - but then the 1215n has a smaller 'face'. The kicker, of course, is that the Air costs over 3 times as much as the 1215n - I'm not trying to suggest that they are in the same class as machine, just point out that there isn't as much difference as you might think...

The hardware

For a netbook, it's pretty big and heavy. The photo shows a clear comparison with the Eees 901 and 701, but other photos clearly show why - the 12 inch screen is huge compared with the 9incher, and makes the 7 inch screen on the original Eee PC look like what it is, a toy. On the other hand, I've always called them 'little laptops' instead of netbooks, and that name fits well. The hardware is actually somewhat of a hybrid - it's a netbookish screen, but it has a full-sized keyboard and a CPU designed for a nettop (i.e. a 'little desktop'), with the upside being higher performance and the downside being less power management than chips designed for true 'netbooks'. As I mentioned above, it's also got hybrid graphics, with a low-power, low-performance Intel chip and a higher-performance, higher-power Nvidia chip, although the switching isn't working with Linux at the moment - I'm not much of a gamer, and multi-threaded decoding largely makes up for the lower graphics performance when viewing video files.

At this point, I'm pretty happy with the new toy. The Linux support is slightly lacking - small things like the sound driver needing a tweak to support the headphone socket, and bigger things like the Nvidia Optimus stuff being largely implement in the Windows drivers only. I'm sure things will improve - it's a pretty new machine, and Linux drivers have a nice habit of quietly getting better support for new hardware.

A short lecture

A friend of mine - technically interested, but not particularly knowledgeable - asked me about Chrome OS stuff. I wrote her a short lecture in return, and thought I'd dump it here as well :)

We'll start with 'cloud computing', which is actually an appropriately nebulous term... It's been traditional for a long long time, particularly when teaching computer networking, to use a cloud in a diagram to represent "all the stuff which happens on the network between computer A and computer B" - http://www.yourdictionary.com/computer/cloud - we don't care how the communication happens between A and D, we just assume they can talk to each other. This usage has been changed a bit, in the past 5 years or so, to add the idea of *services* which live in 'the cloud' - we don't care where they are, as long as we can communicate with them over the Internet, using standard tools from anywhere. A simple example would be using gmail/hotmail/yahoo for your email, rather than an email system supplied by your employer, school or ISP. Another simple example would be Facebook - you don't know anything about how it works, you don't have any relation with them other than being a user of the service, you can access it from anywhere...

So 'cloud computing' is the idea of taking things which previously ran either on your computer, or at least on your local network, and shoving them out into the cloud. It relies on a combination of 2 or 3 technologies, which are just about available now, but weren't 5 years ago - ubiquitous broadband, standard network protocols, and, to a slightly lesser extent, cheap/ubiquitous computing.

Chrome OS is what falls out of all that, if you're Google. It's an OS designed to run on cheap portable computers (i.e. netbooks) which are always on-line (wifi or 3G) and running a standard platform called a 'web browser'. It assumes that you use Gmail in your web browser, rather than Outlook connected to an Exchange server. It assumes that you use Google Docs rather than Microsoft Office. It assumes that you stream music and even video (TV, etc.) from the web, rather than storing and playing it locally. It assumes that you're using Google talk through your browser, rather than running a local chat program. It assumes that you're doing all of this on a 'secondary' computer.

They're not claiming that you can or should run your life like this yet. What they are saying - correctly, in my opinion - is that if you are willing to trust the 'cloud services', you can move a lot of what you do online without losing very much, and gaining ubiquitous access in return. You've got a big heavy laptop... I've got a little handheld phone... they both access the same online data, to a great extent, and my phone has a longer battery life, built-in 3G, and lacks the potential for spraining my back by carrying it.

As for running Chrome OS to take a look at it, there are a couple of options. You can't run it directly on your Mac, because it only runs on netbooks, and a small specific list at that. What you can do is run it under virtualisation - same same way I, for those rare occasions when I need it - run 'Windows in a window'. VirtualBox is a virtualisation tool, which will let you run Chrome OS in a window on top of your Mac OS. Alternatively, and much more simply, just load up the Chrome browser - technically, the chromium open-source browser, which is the core of Chrome, since Chrome is still Windows-only. Chrome OS is, in essence, a modified form of the Chrome browser running on streamlined Linux OS, so if you want to know what Chrome OS looks like today, running Chrome (or chromium) will get you a lot of the way there...

Chromium is pretty usable as a browser - I've been using it as my main browser for a few weeks now, with little trouble. Chrome OS, however, is not usable yet. It's expected to be released to hardware manufacturers sometime around the spring, and be on the market latish next year.

It's more than a little insane

Anyone looking to feel like a minor celeb or rock star, and who happens to be a) white and b) fat (and possibly c) male) should head to Lan Kwai Fong (henceforth LKF) on Halloween. It gets very very very busy, and you'll be pretty popular with the crowds.

For minor background: LKF is the leading nightlife district in Hong Kong - it consists of two L-shaped streets on a hill just south of Central, Hong Kong's main commercial area. The bigger of the two streets is called D'Aguilar Street, and the smaller one, which fits into the angle of the bigger L, is LKF itself. The area holds many 10s of bars, pubs, restaurants and nightclubs, is moderately busy on a random weeknight, can be very busy at the weekend (when it's pedestrianised) and insanely busy on holidays like New Year (both 'secular' and Chinese), Christmas and - yes - Halloween. It can get insanely busy enough that in 1992 a crush formed at New Year and 21 people were killed, ever since when there have been police crowd control measures on holidays.

If you were a cynic, you might ask why Halloween even features in Hong Kong, which is a largely Chinese city with a Christian minority left over from colonial days, but it has absolutely zero religious connotation here. Hong Kong is nothing if not a party town, and Halloween is the sort of party they like - dressing up, going out, special offers and decorations in shops and restaurants - and LKF is the epicenter of party life in Hong Kong. Every bar, pub and restaurant is fully-booked, and the the streets, well, they would be a crush if the police crowd control didn't calm things down slightly. As for the crowd control, it's typical of the Hong Kong police - it's reasonably effective, while still being relatively laid-back, friendly and pragmatic. In theory, once the crowd control is in action, you can only enter LKF at the bottom of D'Aguilar street (the bigger L) and leave at the top, and you will be moved through slowly and smoothly. In practice, as long as there's no trouble, they don't work too hard to move people along, and you can easily walk against the official direction. There are plenty of officers around, and I'm sure they'd tighten things up if needed, but as things weren't too mad tonight they weren't too bothered. They had recorded announcements playing in Cantonese and English (slightly randomly, quite clearly Scottish English), as LKF is a central point for expats in Hong Kong, but other than half-heartedly moving people on every now and again if knots were forming, they mainly held back and kept an eye on things.

Costumes. A small minority of the crowd (including my gf, and a friend of ours) wear 'serious' costumes, some traditional Chinese things, some pop culture (at one point, there were two rubber-suited Batmans having photos taken together) and some more traditional costumes - witches, cats, policemen/women, etc. Most of the rest of the crowd have something small, a token nod to dressing up like some horns on a headband, a bit of fake blood, or just something silly. Having worn a large foam rubber wig in the form of a quiff last year, I kept things simple this year - just a novelty oversized green bow-tie and a novelty oversized green plastic glasses frame. Also, a non-novelty oversized green(-clothed) stomach. I was asked a few times if my stomach was real, which is a little disturbing, but other than that it was pretty much the star of the show.

Everyone in the crowd has a camera. Everyone in every crowd has a camera nowadays, of course, built in to their phone, but quite a lot of people in this crowd had real cameras, from point'n'shoots, to DSLRs, to serious pro cameras, as well as cheap handheld video cameras, and one or two professional video rigs. A lot of the people who aren't in serious costumes are there to take photos of the people who are, and that's where the minor celeb feeling comes from. Standing with my gf and our friend, both of them in full-face makeup and costumes, I was at least as popular a photo target as they were. Even in Hong Kong, which genuinely has different norms for privacy and public behaviour from 'the West', it's not common for a local to approach a stranger and ask to take a photo with them, but at LKF on Halloween, it's perfectly normal. I spent maybe 2 hours standing in the street, having my photo taken, mainly with completely random strangers. Young, old, male, female, dressed-up or not, there were times when I had 2 or 3 people asking for a photo at the same time, virtually queuing to have their photo taken with me. It's quite odd, quite enjoyable in small doses, and I can imagine it would be quite infuriating if it happened all the time, wherever you went.

This is the second year I've been to LKF at Halloween with my gf - she has been going in costume for years - and I had a look around online last November, and found not only photos of her from that year, but from previous years. There's something slightly creepy about strangers publishing photos of her online, even if she does go wanting to be photographed...

Photos of the event are available on Facebook, or by request :)

It's a long and bureaucratic process

As we left the story last time, I was waiting to hear if I'd been approved-in-principle for a Quality Migrant visa. The results being published approximately quarterly, I was expecting end-of-August results to be followed by end-of-November results, but the end of November came and went without any sign of results on the QMAS website. I will admit that I got a little obsessive, checking the website hourly, and getting more and more frustrated. Finally, while out for dinner in the first week of December, I checked the website on my phone and found that - woohoo! - it had been updated. Unfortunately, as mentioned before, the list is published as a PDF, and - boo! - my phone didn't have a PDF reader on it. I managed, tapping away madly on my phone in a restaurant, largely ignoring two understanding friends, to find a web-based PDF reader which worked, only to find - double boo! - that all they publish is a list of approved application number, and I couldn't actually remember my number. Rushed home, pulled out one of the letters with the application number on it, loaded up the list, and...

My number was on it.

After more than 4 months of waiting, I had an approval-in-principle, meaning that they had accepted my application, and as long as I could prove that all the papers I'd submitted had been genuine, and that I hadn't otherwise falsified anything on my application, I should be in. Sounds simple, isn't. A couple of weeks later, I got a letter confirming the approval-in-principle, and instructions on what paperwork they needed me to bring to my 'interview', which should be booked by calling them within 3 months. They asked me to bring:

• That letter
• My passport
• A completed copy of an attached survey, just for their records
• Proof of no criminal record from UK and HK police
• Originals of a variety of papers which I'd previously submitted copies of

The letter, my passport and the survey weren't exactly a big deal. For the police paperwork, all I had to do was submit the appropriate forms to the Metropolitan police in London, and similar to the Hong Kong police - except that being local, I went in person and got fingerprinted. I will admit that I'm not too fast when it comes to paperwork - I just hate doing it - so by the time the police processing was done, it was time to go for my interview.

Except there was one other little issue. I got my Dad (aka my lawyer/solicitor) to send me the originals of some papers he holds for me, so I had all the other paperwork I needed - all the paperwork I'd submitted, that was. For some odd reason, something had apparently got mixed up at the Immigration office, and they asked for the originals of some references I'd given them to support work visa applications in 2005 and 2007. I don't know where the papers are from back then, so I just decided to ignore them and hope they'd go away...

Paperwork collected or on the way, I called to book my interview mid-February and was given an early-March date. I got my papers together, rechecked them a few times - yes, slightly obsessively - and was all ready when the interview date rolled around.

Or Android 1.5, as it's properly known

About 20 minutes ago, jbq (aka Jean-Baptiste Queru, Android engineer and community friend par excellence) announced on the #android IRC channel that Android 1.5 - the release formerly known as Cupcake - was done, tagged and released. And that being done, he was going on vacation...

There's a somewhat full feature list here, but the things I'm really interested in are:

• A2DP, or stereo Bluetooth support, coupled with AVCRP for remote control. To be honest, I'm not hugely bothered about it being stereo as such, since I mainly listen to podcasts and other spoken content, but without A2DP, only calls can go over Bluetooth, regardless of the number of channels in your audio. I had A2DP on my Treo years ago, thanks to Softick Audio Gateway, a third-party shareware A2DP driver, and it's good to know that Android has caught up a bit.
• On-screen keyboard. The G1 is the first phone I've ever owned which slides, flips, rotates or otherwise isn't a single block with a keyboard on the front, and while the slide keyboard is pretty decent for a phone, it's pretty annoying to have to flip the phone open to enter a URL, a search term, or some other short text - and it's almost unusable one-handed, say when holding onto something in order not to fall over on a moving vehicle. I've had a fiddle with the soft keyboard in the 1.5 preview SDK, and it seems pretty usable, at least for short things. Not sure I'd want to type an email, blog post, IM, etc. on it, but we'll see
• Widgets. One of the most-requested features for the home screen - apart from not taking a few seconds to rebuild itself after being kicked out of RAM to make use for something else - widget support appeared as somewhat of a surprise a couple of months back, and not quite in the expected way. Rather than being HTML/CSS/Javascript widgets, they are implemented as an application interface, so they are richer (and probably faster), but a little harder to write. There are already lots of ideas floating around, and at least one community widget competition which should hopefully produce some interesting things. I wonder how long until the 3-screen home screen becomes limiting?
• Browser performance. Not that the existing browser is particularly slow, but it'll be nice to see it faster.
• General polish and performance. There's been a bunch of screenshots floating around recently, and thing are looking a little more form-over-function. Not that it really really matters, of course, but prettier phones sell more units, and I want Android to sell as many units as possible - both because I think it's a good platform and good for the mobile market, and because, selfishly, I hope to release some Android software soon, and more users (customers?) would be better

The interesting question, of course, is when it'll get shipped or pushed to users. The HTC Magic should be the first device shipping with 1.5 out-of-the-box, and it's expected to be released on May 5th, which really isn't far away. For the G1, T-Mobile Germany have already announced that they expect to push a 1.5 update to users in May, so it's not unfair to expect T-Mobile in other countries to do something similar - I have a US G1, so I should get the push whenever T-Mobile US gets round to it. I suspect Dream (same device, but not T-Mobile branded/released) users might have to wait slightly longer, but hopefully not too long.

Roll on donut!