ongoing by Tim Bray
ongoing fragmented essay by Tim Bray
Nexus One PUK Unlock
Unless you found this article using a search engine, which means you?re probably having the same problem I did, you?re very unlikely to be interested in its solution, so you can stop reading now and get on with your life.
Certain SIM cards have to be unlocked by typing in a PIN every time you turn your phone on. For example, the Fonic SIM I?m using here in Germany. If you type the PIN in wrong three times, you get put into ?PUK lock?; to get out of it, you have to type in the much longer ?PUK code?, which is printed on the carrier the SIM card came in.
Only on a Nexus One (one running Android 2.2, anyhow) you can?t. There?s some toxic interaction with the unlock screen, and various settings reconfigurations couldn?t fix it, nor could the telephone company?s tech support.
So here?s the answer: Take the SIM out of your Nexus One, find someone with another kind of phone (a primitive no-frills Nokia worked just fine) and have them cycle the power: You?ll be able to type in the PUK and...
In recent days I?ve been thinking of JavaOne, as we kicked it around and decided we just couldn?t send speakers; and of Oracle OpenWorld, to which JavaOne will now serve as an appendage. It reminded me of a conversation I had last year about Oracle.
[Update: I reported this conversation, which I thought was instructive, carefully avoiding any conclusions. The commenters on the piece, however, drew lots of conclusions, which I enjoyed reading, and you might too. In particular, I thought some of the guesses as to my un-shared opinion on all this were quite illuminating.]
The conversation involved myself and a person with a convincing title who, as they?d say in the paper, was ?familiar with the situation?.
My question was: ?OpenWorld is this totally all-about-business conference. The Oracle Develop meeting is just a second-rate sidebar. Where does Oracle go about building developer mindshare??
I?ll try to reproduce the answer in full as best as I can remember it:
?You don?t get ...
So, there?s a new kind of Android device in the world. The world still isn?t sure just where it is that tablets are the right tool for the job. That granted, this is a nifty product. And I?m developing my own theory of what tablets are for.
My impressions are based on a couple hours playing with one, which at this point is a couple hours more than almost anyone else. The model I played was not quite production ? among other things, the product name stenciled on the back wasn?t ?Galaxy Tab? ? but close.
I won?t have one on next week?s trip to Mainz for MobileTech, but I?m pretty sure I?ll be able to take one along to GDD Tokyo and JAOO in Aarhus, Denmark.
Other coverage: At the Financial Times? ft.com/techbog, also Android Central (with a useful iPad comparo), also Engadget.
ImpressionsAll the apps I tried ran just fine, including a couple of immersive games that really benefited from the extra inches. I?ve heard of a few apps that misbehave, but their problems were obvious & eas...
I read Michael Lewis? The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine months ago, and have been feeling guilty about not recommending it, because this material is sort of essential for anyone who would like to understand how our economy ended up in the toilet. Read on, not just for a (spoiler: positive) review, but for potentially time- and money-saving advice.
Sidebar: Michael LewisI should disclose that I?m a hopeless Michael Lewis fan; in my review of Moneyball I wrote ?I suspect there may not be a greater living writer of reportorial non-fiction? and yes, I still suspect that. So you could either use my admitted bias to discount this review, or alternately join the club and next time you see a Lewis book in the airport bookstore, just grab it.
Sidebar: Maybe Don?t Read the BookThe book has its roots in a November 2008 piece in Portfolio magazine, The End. I?m not actually sure that the book is a better piece of work than the (much shorter) essay; and I am pretty sure that all...
I travel quite a bit, and I have found that the ?tethering & portable hotspot? facility in Android 2.2 is just absolutely wonderful. It has saved me considerable money and got me reasonably-good connectivity in places I wouldn?t otherwise have had it; I?m looking at you, big-name US hotel chains.
When I heard that telephone companies were charging extra for this, I couldn?t figure out how they were doing it; without considerable deep-packet inspection, how can you tell that there are other computers gatewaying through my Nexus One, which in fact seems to hotspot just fine on certain networks that are said to charge extra? The answer is obvious but only once you see it: the network operators modify Android on the locked phones they sell cheap along with a contract (perfectly legal, it?s open-source) to remove the built-in tethering/hotspot option, and replace it with one of their own, which they charge for.
I?m not going to weigh in on the pros and cons of the business model, becaus...
Some of these puppies have been keeping a browser tab open since April. No theme; ranging on the geekiness scale from extreme to mostly-sociology.
PeopleFirst, the good news. There?s real demand for senior people in our trade. Simon Phipps, who got me the job at Sun and whose opinions I pay careful attention to even when I disagree, has a new gig at ForgeRock, where they?re trying to build a sensible profitable business around open-source principles and some damn good technology that Oracle was too stupid to get behind.
Also, my long-time compatriot Dave Orchard just started looking for a gig; we had coffee the other day and he?s fielding some super-interesting offers. He hasn?t accepted any; if you want that sort of talent, better move fast.
On the other hand, half the people out there are women, and while I have to say that their progress through the educational and business worlds gives lots of reason for cheer, we still are mostly failing at attracting them to technology care...
Most people who have a cottage which isn?t a mini-mansion spend a lot of their cottage life maintaining and improving it. This can be a little stressful to those like me who are more or less entirely without home-improvement skills.
I dunno why I never got the bug. I do like the idea of being a builder, but I can?t make a nail or a saw proceed in a straight line very well, and I find that things that are supposed to fit together don?t, and once together can?t be made to come apart as expected, and the whole thing involves a lot of pain and swearing and small precious pieces that fall on the floor and roll under immovably-heavy objects.
So, this picture requires some explanation.
At the cottage, we have this lovely deck built around huge trees overlooking Howe Sound, and we like to eat out there, but we don?t have much of a table; a flimsy round plastic thing that tends to spill one?s beer when jostled by a bouncy child.
We also have a big stack of lumber, trees that were cut down...
I?ve been so busy at work this last little while, I still take lots of pictures but don?t have time to run that many. I was glancing back over the library and pulled out a few to publish for my pleasure and I hope yours. These have in common that they?re sort of opaque; in the range from non-self-explanatory to mysterious.
The above opaque piece of marine architecture is located just offshore of Vancouver?s shiny new convention centre. Maybe a former helipad?
The above opaque piece of marine architecture is located just off the premises of Barnabas Family Ministries, a very nice church-run retreat/camp establishment located on Keats Island just around the corner from our cottage.
Obviously you can tie boats up to it, but I?m not sure what the woodwork is in aid of, and most floating anchorages aren?t made of richly-rusting iron.
Above could be the attack of the feral boys, driving ashore somewhere on Vancouver?s Spanish banks to inflict endless video games and bad movies on the ...
Last Thursday evening Michael Gartenberg, who?s a smart analyst, and blogger, tweeted that he?d searched for ?Jewish? in Android Market and came up with some Nazi trash. Sure enough, he was right. The moron who was selling a ?Hitler theme? and other related junk had used ?jewish? and ?jews? as keywords. Mind you, this crap was like five screens down, you really had to be working to see it.
Anyhow, Android Market has pretty clear-cut policies about this kind of thing and someone filed a takedown request in the right place, and now that stuff is gone. The next morning Mr. Gartenberg wrote: ?From Google. ?the apps have been removed as a violation of Android content policy? the system does work.? I think so too; thanks for that, Mr. G.
Check out Joshua Topolsky?s Editorial: Waiter, there's a Nazi theme in my Android Market over at Engadget, which, while it gives this particular tempest more attention than its teapot size probably deserves, does ask the right question: Might the be...
Two of them in the last couple of days, both courtesy of having the Internet in my pocket.
SFO WinI was traveling home Wednesday evening and at 7PM found myself in the United lounge at San Francisco airport, wanting to videoconference into an internal meeting, one I really didn?t want to miss. (At 7PM in this case because we needed some folks across the Pacific on board). The problem was that I needed to be not only online but on Google?s VPN; you can buy airport WiFi from T-Mobile but the price is exorbitant and the quality only so-so.
T-Mobile?s 3G coverage, on the other hand, is very solid around SFO. So I found a place to plug in my Nexus One, created a local hot-spot, and got online with my Mac; check. Tried launching Google VPN; check. Fired up the videoconference plug-in, and there I was, looking at my co-workers? faces. The video occasionally lagged a bit but the sound was perfectly decent. After an hour-long videoconference, though, I have to say that poor little phon...
That?s what Samsung is calling their Android phones, the latest wave of which is getting reviewed all over the place. I?ve seen a few of ?em at Android HQ, and no doubt about it, they?re nice; but so are the other recent Androids. What I?m astounded by is Samsung?s marketing virtuosity; they?ve managed to line up every big mobile telecom I?ve ever heard of, all over the world, to carry one of these devices. I don?t recall ever seeing anything like it from any handset maker. I wonder how it?s done?
I don?t know what the acronym stands for, but JAOO 2010 is in Aarhus, a place I?ve never been to in Denmark; Oct 4-6. It?s a popular event and I?m honored to be among the speakers. What happened was, before I started at Google, they invited me to come and talk about my Doing It Wrong piece, which I regard as summing up my years at Sun. After I joined Google, I wrote back and asked ?Can I talk about Android too?? so I?ll be speaking twice on successive days.
Observant readers will note that this is the week after I speak in Tokyo; which has to constitute a major travel-planning failure. I think the events are (just) far enough that it makes sense to go the long way round, stopping in Vancouver for a couple nights? sleep at home in Vancouver. Blecch.
GDD stands for Google Developer Day; since not everyone can come to Google I/O, we take I/O on the road to various points in several continents and both hemispheres. GDD Tokyo, on September 28th, is 2010?s first; I?ll be helping out there talking Android in the keynote. I assume the Tokyo Googlers will find something else useful to do while I?m there. Regular readers here know that I have a special relationship with Tokyo ? can?t wait to be back.
That?s MobileTech Conference in full, a new conference in Mainz, about which I know nothing except for it?s near Frankfurt. It?s by the same people who do the well-known ?JAX? conference series all over Germany. September 6-8; notable for being my first keynote appearance on behalf of my new Android day job.
The primary recreational activity in our cottage life isn?t boating or hiking or swimming or any of those undoubtedly worthy and improving pastimes; it?s leaning back in a comfy chair on the deck admiring the view, frequently through a camera with a great big chunk of glass on the front, with a refreshing drink (this can range from a stiff G&T to a nice cuppa T).
In this series, the tool is the big Tokina, the subject is faraway mountains, and the drink is Quail?s Gate Rosé, which works just fine with those mountains and that lens.
The effect you get, when shooting through several kilometres of air with a fixed-focal-length 400mm lens, is sort of hazy and ethereal and I like it a lot. I shot these in early summer when there was still lots of snow on the mountains.
I?m not sure there are any better ways to enjoy a glass of wine.