They claim ownership, copyright and the right to license my source code as they see fit.

For a group so focused on open source, you think they would know better.Recently, famous toe cheese eater and lead zealot of the FSF, Richard Stallman, made what some might consider comments of poor taste regarding the death of Steve Jobs.

I must admit once upon a time I shared the ideals of the FSF, but lately, not so much..

About NFMake

From the moment I laid eyes on a NeXT computer, I knew it was different. Anyone lucky enough to use a NeXT computer, or later NeXTStep or OpenStep probably felt the same way.

Those who declare themselves proponents of free software did what they most often do when confronted with something magnificent; They set about to copy without any innovation. They created a project called GNUStep designed to mimic OpenStep. They couldn’t even come up with an original name.

I confess to falling prey to this siren song. I had spent a decade programming in Objective-C and I wasn’t really quite sure if anything I wrote would be any more relevant than software I had written in AppleSoft, UCSD Pascal, or Turbo Pascal.

So I laid a plan to ensure I could take my Objective-C programs and compile them on a GNUStep target. Loathing makefiles, I created NFMake, a tool that would read the NeXT formatted Project Builder file format and build the same project on GNUStep.

The original source as I first released it
is available for you to peruse.

You will notice that nowhere in my original tarball do the initials GNU, FSF or GPL appear.

I last used NFMake when I was building software for the Palm platform. Eventually I abandoned it as GNUStep stalled, Palm died, an Apple released OSX and incredible tools like Xcode.

Copyright Who ?!?

If you do a Google search for NFMake, you can find it hosted on “gna”, the gnu project repository.

The difference is that almost every source file has had a header tacked on that starts with:


/*
Copyright (C) 1999 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

NFMake was not a work for hire (at least not hired by FSF), and the copyright was never assigned to them or anyone else.

Equally interesting is that the source is listed as LGPLv2, but at some point someone decided they could relicense it GPLv3, a license that I despise.

Whatever the reason, it should have never been done.

If you have ever released your source, you may want to take this moment to make sure the FSF isn’t claiming ownership of your work as well.

The famous Apple commercial, but narrated by Steve Jobs instead of by Richard Dreyfus.

In December of 1987 I went on a school trip to Washington DC. As part of that trip we visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. While there we learned all sorts of facts about the angle of reflection, how the memorial came to be, and dozens of other things that are now only a dim recollection.

What I do remember is that as our bus of high school students disembarked, the group I was with came upon a man who reeked of booze, and had on his back the clothes he probably lived in every day. Everyone in the group walked around him and avoided any interaction. But something about him seemed irregular for an average homeless man. I also really had no interest in the memorial. It is a list of 50,000+ people that I have never met.

He looked like he was looking for something, and muttering under his breath about “finding”. I must admit that my thought was that he had lost his shopping cart of belongings. Deciding that interacting with this homeless drunk was going to be a more worthy use of my time than looking at granite, I asked him what he was looking for in the hopes that I could help him find it.

He said he was looking for his friend. So I looked around for a similarly dressed drunk homeless man in the hopes that I could point him on the way. Seeing none nearby, I asked where he had last seen his friend in the hopes that I could point him in the right direction. I can’t recall the words, but with the words he spoke it was made clear that the last time he had seen his friend was in Vietnam.

The I understood. He wasn’t looking for a person. He was looking for a name.

Trying to find a name by reading them one at a time is difficult, although I did try for a minute. I then recalled that a few minutes earlier when listening to facts about the wall, that we were told about a stand on one end that had a alphabetical list of names since the names on the wall are in order of death.

It took a bit of convincing to get my new companion to go to the book, since he knew the name was somewhere on the wall, but at least now I understood what he was trying to find. The index on the pedestal was in the form of a phone book. Unlike the wall it lists the service, the rank, and a few other details also lost to memory.

The details he had were few, he had only a common last name, his rank, and the year he died.

The year was off by one. His friend received a posthumous promotion.

We walked down to the eastern panel listed in the index, and found the name. He broke down in tears, and I went to a nearby kiosk that sold kits for making name impressions. I helped him make an impression of the name, and left him there.

One of my pet peeves is the confusion of Memorial Day and Veterans Day, but I can never forget.

Memorial Day is for the war dead, the names on the wall.

Veterans Day is for those still alive with memories of the dead.

The first star was because it was an Android tablet, and there aren’t many of those.

The second star is because it isn’t an iPad.

The third star is because it runs pseudo flash. Everyone keep talking about flash support for mobile devices, but when you get down to the nitty and the gritty, it always seems to mostly be there, and usually just for playing videos off YouTube. As shown in the review, BBC flash doesn’t work.

As for all the negatives mentioned, they don’t detract from the score at all.

Keeping up appearances – feels adequately sturdy and tough

Screen – However, the 7-inch display we have here is just a fairly standard TFT LCD. It’s bright and colourful enough

Connectivity –  not available in non-3G guise

Storage –  512MB of RAM …. de facto amount for these kind of portable devices

Performance and Battery Life –  not slick at all …. Scrolling down your average website is quite juddery …. Pinch-to-zoom is also a laggy affair

Accelerometer –  we found it constantly tilting the screen in ways we didn’t want it to …. increasingly frustrating experience

Multitasking –  did not suffer too much in this department

Maps –  obvious lag, which is disappointing

Battery Life –  We charged it to full capacity, and it was begging for more juice after about four hours of sporadic testing …. device gets extremely hot after watching videos or browsing the web for an hour …. doesn’t do a good enough job of harnessing its power in an efficient manor

Software not optimised? –  Google itself admits that the OS is not optimised for tablets yet …. Froyo is not optimised for use on tablets …. it’s just not a finished piece of software in terms of tablet optimisation …. graphics and text within them can look a bit blurry

Screen (Performance) –  the absence of an AMOLED display is a bit of a let-down, particularly at this premium price

Indoors –  Cartoons and Pixar-style 3D animations look best, while the screen does a less good job at handling darker colours

Outdoors – massive pain …. literally impossible to see anything on it at all …. screen makes life pretty difficult

Responsiveness –  not a fun device to use

Usability (Keyboard) –  keyboard is not exactly what you’d call ‘comfortable’ to use. Typing quickly is not easy at all

Flash support –  no noticeable performance issues here, it just works

Multi-tasking –  Android 2.2 supports multitasking, and thus so does the Samsung Galaxy Tab

Copy and paste –  Copy and paste features are included

Email and extras –  We heart Android here at TechRadar

Camera –  To say the Samsung Galaxy Tab’s camera is mediocre would be to put it bluntly …. quite awkward to take snaps with …. hard to get a proper grip on the device and to then hold it still …. Images lack detail in all areas …. most photographs looking quite washed out …. Colours look faded rather than vivid …. The camera struggled to deal with both bright and dark conditions

Video Recording – There’s no HD recording …. results were still mostly disappointing …. handling of motion isn’t too bad …. quality isn’t great …. Colours are washed out …. contrast is quite poor …. Galaxy Tab’s video quality is not great

Media –  it’s limited to which codecs and support Google has added to the OS …. some of our files worked while others didn’t

Youtube –  browsers will always try to take you away from the 720p versions of videos even if you use the direct URL

BBC Video – some browsers, we were told that our ‘phone’ does not support iPlayer yet …. main browser …. it’s a bit tricky to get videos playing well …. It’s a fiddly experience

Verdict –  massive identity problem …. most bipolar gadget we’ve ever tested …. Is it a phone? No …. Is it a tablet? Again, no …. sluggish web browsing is very frustrating …. screen is also quite disappointing …. camera, too, is fairly poor …. you expect all the features to be top-notch… But they’re not …. If portability and Android are your main concern, the Galaxy Tab is certainly a handy gadget to have in your geeky arsenal

As I went down the lines counting, I could not believe the amount of stress that I induced in those being counted.  People quickly began to worry about whether they were too far back in line to get a phone, or even if they were in the right line.  I was stopped about every 25 people asking what their number in line was. I had to explain over and over that I wasn’t counting for any purpose.

For the record, by the time 7 AM rolled around there were 700 total people in the two lines.  During that time I’m sure the line grew, because I started with the no-reservation line first, and then proceeded to the reserved line, which wound around the building in a different direction.  Between 7AM and 7:20, another 82 people showed up in the reserved line behind me.

Either I’m missing something, the initial iPad apps are going to suck, or we haven’t yet been told that iPad-native apps won’t be available for some period of time after the iPad’s launch.

You are missing something.

The problem, of course, is that before day one, we won’t have iPads ourselves for development and testing. This wasn’t a problem for iPhone development: by the time the SDK was released, we had all been using iPhones for many months. We knew how iPhone apps should look and behave, and we could test our apps on our iPhones during development for three months before anyone could sell apps to customers.

No, we didn’t. You might have, but thousands of others were left out in the cold, unwelcome to develop for the iPhone. Apple tightly controlled who they allowed in, and many didn’t get developer keys until months after the App Store was opened for business. Yes, we could develop on the simulator, but not on the phone itself. This preferential treatment continued with the release of later beta SDKs and Firmwares. The entire time this was going on Apple was very coy about what they were doing.

You have based your 3 possibilities on a bed of false assumptions.

You have assumed that you can go to the local Apple Retail store, buy an iPad and install software.

This is not supported in the current SDK. At this point you can’t even compile code to the A4.

Apple hasn’t said when it will be supported.

Most importantly there is no guarantee that your current developer certificate will allow you to cryptographically sign and install software on the iPad at all.

Your certificate may work for iPhone and iPod touch only.

Apple may require a separate enrollment fee to get a iPad certificate.

Apple may limit iPad certificates to a select few developers. This limitation may be temporary or permanent.

You have assumed that Apple will accept iPad apps from you sometime on or before “day 1″.

Apple has made no such commitment.

They have committed to their future iPad users that iPad specific apps will be ready on day 1, but they haven’t committed to any developers (AFAIK) that they can submit them.

When it comes to the AppStore, Apple is not a matchmaker helping developers connect to users in a frictionless manner. It sure seems that way and as an indie developer I like the AppStore, but it is what it is, which is Apples playground.

You have assumed that there is a submission queue.

Developers like data structures like FIFO, and lots of them refer to the “submission queue” but I have never seen documentation from Apple that submissions are handled in a first come first served manner. Anecdotal evidence seems to indicate that the are several submission piles, and they are serviced at different rates.

This has been driving me crazy for awhile now, so I looked into the problem and found a “solution”. While I can’t vouch that it will work for everyone, I wanted to share it in the hopes that it might work for some.

This is going to be long so that everyone can understand the cause and possible soutions.

The problem firsrt showed up when I started using SVN 1.5. I upgraded all my repositories on my linux and mac servers, and the mac server was working well, but the linux server would ocassionally just hang in Versions. As part of the 1.5 upgrade there are some caches that you can either prebuild or build as needed, so I assumed the slowness was just those caches slowly being updated.

That was until this morning when I had the problem with a brand new empty repository. I found that when Versions was running, access to the repository was slow even from the command line. But if I wasn’t running Versions, performance was lightning fast from the command line.

It turns our the problem is related to the way SVN 1.5 uses random numbers. On linux (and OS X), there are two sources of random numbers. One is /dev/random, and the other is /dev/urandom. /dev/random produces true cryptographically secure random numbers. If there isn’t enough entropy available it will hang waiting for secure random numbers to become available. urandom on the other hand will sacrafice cyrptographica quality and always produce random numbers.

Svnserve on my linux box uses /dev/random, and if the random numbers aren’t available it blocks until they are. This in turn leads to Versions blocking waiting for svnserve to respond, which will happen eventually as sources of entropy like network traffic occur.

The problem is compounded when you turn on “Show Updates from Repository”. For me this is the entire reason for having a program like Versions, so that I can keep track of what repositories I’m working with have experienced changes, so I can make sure my source stays up to date and that I’m aware of who is making what changes to the source.

The problem is that the SVN server doesn’t do much besides serve svn connections. So there isn’t much entropy available. Eventually /dev/random runs out of random numbers and svnserve will hang, causing Versions to hang. Versions should be a bit smarter about realizing that if a request isn’t critical (like say a commit or update) that it can just terminate the connection on quit.

The solution is to either rebuild the Apache Portable Runtime library that svnserve from source and change it to use /dev/random instead of /dev/urandom. This would need to be done on the server.

The other choice is to simply remove /dev/random and replace it with the equivalent of urandom. This will affect all programs running on the server.

The commands are not for the faint of heart and can easily render the box unusable if done improperly. These are for a Fedora Core 9 box, and won’t work on OSX or other platforms. The commands must be run as root.

rm /dev/random
mknod /dev/random c 1 9
chmod 666 /dev/random

For me, this has completely solved the problem of Versions hanging on quit, and I’m back to mostly happy with the product.

At some point I need to have some trust that the data it holds is secure, and Apple can’t possibly guarantee the long term security of the data and access. In the end the most they can do when a screw up occurs is shrug and say sorry.

If on the other hand there was a set of tools that came with OSX Server that allowed my iDisk and related mobile syncing to be on a server I or my organization control I would feel a lot more comfortable.

The zip file (7.3MB) contains a high-rez image of the newton (1276×2074) from scanning the face on a flat bed scanner. The original newton was very beat up, an the photshop file is from after airbrusing some of the junk and scratches off.

This was then used to make a much smaller skin for POSE.

Included in the zip is also a 1200×1920 version that I just created to use as a background for a 23″ monitor in portrait style.