January 2011 Archives

Photo of Scruffy taken last week at about 7cm from the N900's lens to his nose using the Bless N900 camera app. The nice bit is the soft bokeh around the outer corners.

To all the folks in the Arab countries: Stand tall, protest, make your voices heard, and assert your rights even if your current government doesn't honor them.

Human rights is a term that is so bandied about that it has almost lost its meaning. By human rights, do we mean no torture, yes; do we mean no slavery, yes; do we mean no human trafficking*, absolutely.

In watching the people led uprisings against oppressive regimes in Iran 18 months ago, in Tunsia last month, and Egypt this week, it has become evident that we here in the West have taken for granted the most basic of human rights as defined in the last 200 years: the right to assemble, the right to free speech, the right to protest, the right to not agree with your government, the right to free press, the right to fair elections, and the right not be attacked or beaten by government agents/police/military/thugs.

If Mr. Mubarak actually believed that his government was elected by the people, then he should feel strong enough to allow the people to protest. But the heavy handedness of this week's government response and thuggery has belied his claims to power and to his own humanity.

If we the people believe deeply in the rights that the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights grants us, then we would do well to watch and renounce our own government's behavior when it is bad as well as celebrate and support all other people's desire for the freedom of speech, the freedom to assemble, the freedom to protest, the freedom to dissent, and the freedom from unwarranted government reprisals.

For all of those who fear the loss of the dictators in the Arab countries as it might mean the rise of Islamicists, take a chill pill and in turn encourage your governments to support real human rights and not authoritarian regimes who are client states to the West. Much of the claims, and resulting power, of the Islamicists derives from poverty, hopelessness, and the West's continuing support of oppressive dictatorships.

Egyptians have the right to wake up and not fear their government. Egyptians have the right to assemble. Egyptians have the right to speak up. Egyptians have the right to self-determination. Egyptians and Tunisians are us, just 235 years later.

Many are saying that this is the Arab world's 1989, I truly hope it is. If we really believe in democracy, let's support it in word, truth, and action.

My Favorite photo from this week: The most subversive protest of all: An Egyptian protestor kisses a riot police officer.

*****

* If you want to be a pimp, pimp yourself out, not someone else(s).

January 28, 1986 - I was passing the high school's outdoor monitor that was mounted just above a window in the secondary quad, it was the small gap time between 1st and 2nd period when one was traveling between classes. I was 17 years old and the second semester of my senior year of high school had just started.

As I walked by, I noticed that they were broadcasting the Challenger launch and a good sized crowd of students were looking up at the outdoor monitor . The countdown commenced, time lapsed, and then the space shuttle was not going up any more. There was a gasp and then silence. Silence before the news announcers quite knew what was happening.

I remember thinking, "But Christa McAuliffe is on that shuttle."

I was so proud that women were going into space.

Photo taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N8.

From yesterday's Sunday LA Times Art & Books section, David Hockney's friends in art: the iPad and iPhone:

"What fascinates me is not just technology but the technology of picture-making," says Hockney. "I spend more time painting, of course, but I treat the iPad as a serious tool. The iPad is influencing the paintings now with its boldness and speed."

One discovery feeds the next. From photography he moved onto photo collages and experiments with office copy machines -- cameras of another kind. His fax art allowed him to send exhibition artworks over telephone lines much as he recently e-mailed an exhibition worth of iPhone and iPad drawings to an art gallery at Paris' Fondation Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent (where "David Hockney: Fleurs Fraîches" is on view until Jan. 30.) "Who would have thought the telephone could bring back drawing?" Hockney asks in the Paris show's catalog.

Hockney's iPhone art began in 2008. A rotating group of about 30 friends, curators, dealers and writers regularly receive his e-mailed artworks, and the artist even urged his friends first to get iPhones, then iPads to archive the continuing e-mails. According to Gonçalves de Lima, Hockney has already sent out nearly 400 e-mail drawings on his iPhone and 300 more on his iPad.

"I had to get an iPad so I could receive the drawings on the same platform he used to make them," observes Stephanie Barron, senior curator of modern art at Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Barron, who has already curated three major Hockney shows for the museum, printed out about 20 iPad drawings for her office walls and often uses them as screensavers.

One wonders what would have happened if Ray Johnson had an iPad in the 1960s Mail Art scene, or maybe that is what Hockney and others are creating now.

Sun 01.23.11 - If winter has you down, go visit the Huntington Library & Gardens in San Marino, Caliornia, as this second to the last weekend in January was it was bright, sunny, and quite warm at 82F (27.7C). The most glorious part of this time of year, particularly after all the rains in December plus the warm weather of the last two weeks, is how many of the camellias were already in full-bloom and quite a few of the Asian fruit trees in the Japanese and Chinese gardens were putting on a show in time for the upcoming new year.

Today was a lovely day to visit the gardens. All photos taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N8.

While I do have 3 blog posts waiting on the runway for me to find non-work-non-guilt* time to finish writing & editing them and then push the publish button, it isn't happening today. Sorry.

What did happen today: Lunch with a friend, Belle goes to the Vet and gets her surgery staples out, I become the Mayor of the Vet Clinic on FourSquare as no one else has checked in recently, and then I come home to work.

Wahoo. Exciting Saturday.

* The one problem with being a freelance/consultant type human is that one frequently has to work on the weekend and then on more than a few occasions has guilt if one is not working the whole weekend, even if one doesn't need to.

Fri 01.21.11 - Nearly eight months after local magnolia tree sapling was downed and stuck under the car in a Volvo accident and then the tree was hoisted back up by the next morning, it has continued to thrive, grow, and blossom twice in the last seven months with big showy flowers.

Today's new blossom comes after a stretch of growth for the tree, who other than a two pokey branches that were broken by the Volvo, the rest of the tree is growing well.

Photo taken on Scruffy's walk this morning with Ms. Jen's Nokia N8.

Thurs 01.20.11 - Late this afternoon, while walking Scruffy & Belle, I got to take a video of this big crane lifting a 20 feet lot / 10ft in diameter concrete pipe off a long flat bed truck, lift it over 25ft of trees and then lay the pipe nicely in a large trench. Biggest excitement of the day, all in the name of making sure Seal Beach has great storm drains and does not flood for any reason ever again.

Thurs 01.20.11 - Per the usual SoCal winter, January has dawned bright, overly sunny, and the ornamental pear trees are starting to bloom, even though the one's in my neighborhood have not lost all their leaves from the autumn yet.

Photo taken this morning by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N8.

Photo taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N8.

Tues. 11.18.11 - 20 Months and nearly all grown up... Well, maybe not, at least nearly 2 years old and Gracie's hair is long enough to put in a pony tail!

The best part is that Gracie stood still and moved her head while I tried to get the best shot of her hair up in a pony tail. And then she offered me a few of the sliced cucumbers she had in the bag in her hands.

Last Tuesday, I wrote a blog post on my frustrations with setting up a Mac OS X and/or Ubuntu Linux Qt install that would also compile Qt's Symbian modules. I received quite a bit of feedback in comments, emails, Google Buzz and via Twitter.

Feedback saying everything from, "Duh, just use Windows!" to "Ugh, I hear you and I also really want a full working for Qt toolchain for Mac/Linux" to nice Nokia/Qt employee-type folk* who checked and double-checked facts for me.

Thank you to all of you for your comments, be they helpful or not, as it spurred on my overly persistent nature and I spent most of Saturday trying out several different options to see what would work to set up a full working Qt Mobility/Symbian/QML development toolchain on my MacBookPro.

1) Per Emmanuel's suggestion, I decided to install VirtualBox on my MacBook Pro rather than fiddling with my previous Bootcamp set up. The pros of VirtualBox is that you don't have to reboot to access the other OS, but merely tab in and out of VirtualBox as it is just another window on the desktop. Very Nice.

The sad thing is that neither of my Windows disks would activate on VirtualBox at all.

2) So, I called Windows' Customer Service to see if we could get a new activation code for me, and after two fruitless calls with nice customer service agents who listened to me talk about how my Dell was dead and I was using the really old Windows XP SP2 disk on a virtualization and could they just give me a code. Really, I swear that this copy of Windows is not being used on another machine, no, it isn't. No, PLEASE don't forward me to Sales, Ugh.

Like I said before, I am not interested in purchasing a whole new copy of Windows just to run Qt with Symbian compile & build, as I have other financial goals for the next few months. That $200+ could be better spent in Austin, TX, not to enriching Redmond, WA, - not when I have 2 perfectly good copies of Windows that no longer have working computers attached to them.

This is a dead end for now. But of course, there is a back-door here.

3) After Lucien Tumota of Forum Nokia, advised that I take the wiki info I had that Qt's remote compiler was not working with Ubuntu 10.10 with a grain of salt, he followed up with the nice folks who are on the remote compiler team and confirmed that it is working with Ubuntu 10.10 (aka Maverick Meerkat).

4) By late Saturday afternoon, I had 2 installs of Windows**, both un-activate-able, and 1 install of Maverick Meerkat on Virtual Box. The remote compiler is working on Ubuntu 10.10. But still no long term solution for developing a Qt or QML app for my Nokia N8 on my Mac.

After all of this fiddling, installing, being patient, learning the ins and outs of Virtual Box, enjoying myself thoroughly, I decided that rather than arguing farther up the food chain at Windows Customer Service to get a working activation code, that I would do the following until Nokia and Qt provide a full Qt Symbian dev toolchain for Mac or Linux:

I will develop my app in Qt on my Mac as if I was only developing for Maemo, then when it is time to test for Symbian, I will put the project files in my shared folder, open up Virtual Box, hope my 30 days of non-activation aren't over yet, and then build the Symbian app on the Windows Qt. When my 30 days are up, then I will delete that Windows VirtualBox, and start again.

A hack, yes. A bit overwrought, yes. And yes, it will be 2 hours down the drain to reinstall Windows & Qt to full working order, but hopefully, within 30 days, Nokia will have released a full working Qt for Mac & Linux.

A mobile dev girl can hope, can't she?

* Big Thanks to Lucien Tumota, Henrik Hartz, and Ville Vainio for all the help. Y'all rock.

** Once I got Windows installed on Virtual Box, I then installed Qt SDK from Forum Nokia and Qt for Symbian from qt.nokia.com, so that I could 'harvest' the Symbian folder and sis files for later use, of which the biggest goal is to make sure that my N8 is ready for dev testing.

Things happened today. Photos gotten taken, but not posted.

What I did do today is spend another 6-8 hours fiddling with VituralBox, Windows, calling Windows Customer Service, installing Linux on VirtualBox, attempting to install and test the various components of Qt on Linux and Mac, etc. Basically, a whole day on my computer setting up a dev environment. More on this later.

Here are some links to some interesting tidbits:

Small Surfaces on Is the phone the next Swiss Army Knife?:

"Fortunately, mobile phones don't get bigger when you install new software on them. But there's been a long-standing debate about the utility of strong-specific digital tools (e.g. the digital camera) and weak-general tools (the camera-phone)."

The LA Times on Engelmann oaks, better than beautiful:

"You don't have to be a descendant of one of the fathers of American botany to share in what De Fato recalls as his pleasure and amazement. The arboretum's grove of Quercus engelmannii, pictured above, is one of the last local stands of a native tree once so common to the foothills that an alternate common name is the Pasadena oak.

The first thing that strikes you upon reaching this group of roughly 200 trees is how much more animated it is by birds, butterflies and scampering lizards than the more cultivated parts of the garden.

The second is that it is drop-dead beautiful.

Better than beautiful. Engelmanns are the oak lover's oak."

Make your own DUCK BACON. Yes, Duck Bacon!
Camont on Duck Prosciutto-Charcutepalooza Challenge#1. My Duck Bacon.

Wed 01.12.11 - 5:58pm - I could have entitled this post, "Belle, post-surgery, coming down off of general anesthesia, ecstatically happy, about to tip over".

Belle is now the proud possessor of 4 staples, about 6 x 3 inches of shaved fur, and breath that smells of dancing unicorn farts. I am sure tomorrow when all the happy anesthesia has worn off she won't be quite so happy. The ride home on the 22 fwy with two accidents making traffic very stopped was made better by Belle's extra extra extra happy mood.

Per usual, thanks to Dr. Kali at North Tustin Veterinary Clinic for an excellent vet experience.

I have been trying to develop a Qt mobile app for the Nokia N8 since October, except there is one not so small problem: There is no symbian module for Qt for Mac OS X or Linux. There is also the not so small problem that only half the Mobility API has been released, but that is another issue.

It is very hard to build a Symbian^3 mobile application for the Nokia N8, when the only platform that has the full Qt SDK to develop for Symbian is Windows.

Right now, I have only my MacBook Pro and an old Dell with Ubuntu Linux, I don't have a Windows machine nor to I have a version of Windows that will both activate on a Bootcamp partition and will run the full Qt SDK*.

I have installed and re-installed various versions of Qt from various download places to both my Mac and to my Ubuntu install and each time have run into many walls of frustration and still no Symbian module.

Nokia, why does this have to be so hard? I want to develop apps for Nokia Nseries phones, but at this point I have spent more hours trying to get the dev environment running than it would have taken to code an alpha version of the app.

Please release the full & equal Qt SDK for all three major computer platforms**.

Please do release a full Mac & Linux SDK with Symbian, as well as the rest of the Mobility API, soon - before Feb 15, 2011, so there is still at least six weeks to develop & test an app before the March 31st Calling All Innovators deadline.

Thank you.

* And the truth of the matter is that when I converted the Dell to Ubuntu in 2005, it was because I was completely and utterly over Windows in any shape or form. That was a bit more than five years ago. Every time I have to deal with Windows, my chest tightens and I feel my blood pressure raise. Nokia, I love you, but not at the expense of my health & well being.

** Calling the Mac SDK 'Beta' and leaving out major bits but having the docs in the SDK as well as the docs on Forum Nokia act like it is the full version equal to Windows is an evil little mind f*ck.

Sun 01.09.11 - I drove up to Elite Restaurant in Monterey Park to meet up with Jason & Tiffany for a delicious dim sum lunch. I am so very glad that Ms. Brown has joined us here in SoCal. We had a lovely time talking tech, culture, and other bits.

Today is a bad day in the neighborhood. A shooter, or set of folks, decided that they would gun down at very short range a congresswoman, a judge, a 9 year old girl, and others outside a supermarket in Tuscon, Arizona.

Assassination is never the answer, is only a chaos maker. Assassination or attempted assassination may seem like the fast and cheap way out of a sticky political situation, but it involves people being murdered.

If we passionately believe in the idea and/or myth of the United States of America, then assassination is never an option. Lobbying your congress human or senator, yes. Writing letters, yes. Peaceful protests, yes. Running for office yourself to do the work of change, yes. Working at civil discourse, discussion and debate, yes.

Killing people, no. Never.

I don't care what your opinion is on guns or gun laws, killing or attempting to kill another person is not an option, it is wrong. I don't care what your political point of view is, killing is wrong.

My condolences go out to the family, friends and neighbors of the folks killed and injured today in Tuscon. I sincerely hope that all the folks who are in the hospital, including Congresswoman Giffords will have a full recovery.

Photos taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia n8.

Fri 01.07.11 - Today was an lovely day, with the highlight being an extended conversation about mobile, as well as dinner at Bar Pintxo in Santa Monica,

Wed 01.05.11 - I love winter, real winter with snow & ice, and the shame is that I live in a place that has no winter to speak of. As a 5th generation Californian and 4th generation SoCal-ian who is restless and wants out, if you know of a great mobile job north of the 50th parallel line, particularly in a part of Europe that gets snow, let me know. I must escape the tyranny of sun, palm trees, and flowers in January.

Mon 01.03.11 - This afternoon I helped my sister and mom pick up Allison's new used Prius at the Penske Toyota dealership in Santa Margarita, as we drove to south east Orange County the rain clouds opened up and blue sky peeped through an avocado grove. It was beautiful.

By the time I got home, it was time for Scruffy's evening walk and off we went. Only two and half hours from the time I took the first photo in the Orange County hills, it was cloudy and ominous in north west oceanic OC. As we set out for our walk, the sun will finished setting and the last refracting blue light of dusk was shooting through the clouds at odd angles on top of the yellow cast street light bouncing off the houses.

Photos taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N8, no post-processing other than resizing done to either image.

Sun 01.02.11 - The famed Mr. B is at the 0:11 & 0:26 mark. Apparently the commercial aired yesterday during the B.S. Bowl.

Photo taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N8.

Sat 01.01.11 - Hello 2011, Nice to meet you. May you be a fruitful and abundant year, providing a new job and a relocation. May you be a year of laughter, love, hope, and some silliness.