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Since you (you know who you are) asked, this is what it looks like, with apologies for the slight misalignment; different resolutions on the monitors:

And as long as you’re brutal about keeping your folder structure, it’s not that hard to not have any desktop clutter!

One of the most interesting things I’ve discovered since I got my iPhone is how much more I use the internet now, than before, whilst on the go. To put this in perspective, during my entire N80 ownership period (October 2006 – March 2008), I used approximately 300 MiB of data on the phone, untethered. (If you include the tethered amount, that quintupled to about 1.5 GiB.)

By contrast, just in the past 30 days, I have used 380 MiB on my iPhone. Total usage since April? Approximately 1.2 GiB.

And there are two reasons for this (well, two and a half):

1. The browser. Unlike the S60 browser that takes months (and really, months) to startup – the iPhone’s Safari browser starts up immediately. The browser is hugely responsive. I never felt, like I did with my N80, that the browser was about to collapse. Going back to the N80, and trying out a friend’s E51, it hurts to see how sluggish a web experience S60 users have. I don’t disagree that the S60 browser has more features, but between features and speed, on a mobile device, I’d choose speed. And really, the S60 browser falls way behind Safari on the features that really matter to me – web standard compliance.
2. The RAM. Unlike my N80, which was perpetually starved for memory, the iPhone never seems to run out. Oh, it does, and sometimes, opening Terminal or Mail takes a few seconds longer than when the app is loaded in memory. However, it feels like a true multi-tasking OS. I was able to precisely once browse the internet and listen to music at the same time on my N80 – and that was when I was on a WAP site. Loading anything more complex than, say, Google’s homepage would instantly kill my music, or give me an “Out of memory!” error. I hear that Nokia is finally playing catchup and adding RAM, but the OS is still too slow and sluggish, feeling more like Mac OS 9 than Mac OS X. S60 was never designed as a multi-tasking OS, and all the hacks and improvements in the world will never change that. (Just see what happened when Windows was dragged screaming and kicking into the Windows 95 era to see how well OSes handle a fundamental structural change.) Perhaps Maemo will become the future platform of choice for Nokia, giving them a true multitasking OS, but speed and reliability will remain major issues.

The half-reason is the battery life. I tend to keep the WiFi running all the time, which probably doesn’t make for the best situation, but nonetheless, the iPhone runs about 36 hours before dying pretty consistently. In practice, this means that I can charge it every night, with a comfortable margin for excess usage during the day. By contrast, the N80, on a brand new battery would die within six hours if the WiFi network search was enabled. Note I said WiFi network search – not usage. Using WiFi would kill the battery dead in less than half that time. I left it off most of the time – using it briefly when I knew I was in range of my home network to use Fring, or some other bandwidth intensive application. I have no such compunctions about leaving the iPhone’s WiFi running 24×7. The battery keeps up.

Probably the most damning indictment of S60, though, is how the iPhone has changed my behaviour. Earlier, I would routinely sit with my N80, but if I had a quick question or something to lookup, I’d open up or start my laptop and do it there. Now, I grab my iPhone to do the same, often leaving my computer off. There have been weekends where I’ve not bothered to turn on my computer at all.

So I find myself agreeing with David Pogue (not one of my favourite writers – he specializes in something I affectionately call verbal diarrhea): we’re witnessing the birth of a fourth major platform – Windows, *nix, Mac OS, and now, iPhone. More and more, my iPhone is replacing my other machines to do everything. In time – not now, probably not with the iPhone 3G – I think that my iPhone will become my primary platform.

As someone who has been waiting for a good mobile platform – one that allows me to leave my computers behind for good – all I can say is “about bloody time”.

There’s this old story about a guy who comes to fix a problem. Spends a day looking at the widget, does something to it and sends a huge bill over to the widget’s owner. Said owner protests, saying “the fix cost $1 – please justify the rest of it”. The guy replies, “$1: fix. $ObsceneAmount – $1: knowing what to fix”.

That anecdote has real implications for Apple and the free software movement and Linux in particular.

For example, today I took a look at a Vista laptop that was bluescreening intermittently. Every few sleeps (not every sleep, nor every fixed x number of sleeps), it would start and immediately crash. And the question is, why?

Here are the steps I followed:

1. Look at the log. Find out what the exact crash number was: 0x0000009F.
2. Look at the Internet. Determine that 0x0000009F is a driver crash. So, it looks like a driver that’s not suspending properly.
3. Look at the reliability monitor. What was installed about the time the first crash started happening? Interesting – no driver installs.
4. Some more digging around logs shows the Realtek ethernet driver is crashing just as the machine is going into sleep.
5. What? The laptop is connected via the Broadcom WiFi driver.
6. Go back to the log to see when the driver was last updated. Nothing – still the original Vista driver for it.
7. But what is this? “ZoneAlarm Free”?
8. AHA!
9. Fix it by installing a patch.

Total time needed to fix: 10 minutes. Maybe less.

Right now you’re thinking: ZoneAlarm? That firewall program that runs just fine on the XP machine sitting next door?

Of course, this requires some explanation … and some arcane knowledge of Windows. It’s probably pretty clear to you that ZoneAlarm works by getting in between the user side and hardware side of transmitting and receiving stuff from networks. Exactly where doesn’t really matter in this case. However, this was updated for Vista, wasn’t it? This is the Vista version, so the changes in the networking design were accounted for!

However (and this is the bit of arcane knowledge you need to know to make the connection between ZoneAlarm and a blue screen), one major, non-networking change was made to Vista. You may recall setting a XP machine to go to sleep, or telling it restart, or ordering it to shut down, and coming back x units of time later and finding that Word or Notepad or Paint was waiting for a response, so the XP machine hadn’t done what it was told. What Microsoft did was build in a maximum time that Vista would wait for an application to respond to such a request to sleep, restart or shutdown. Then it would simply terminate the program or freeze the contents of the memory.

And now you see what is happening: ZoneAlarm, like every well-designed program, unhooks itself from the networking stack when it receives such a request. It’s wise and I wish more programs did so: get out of the way when the OS is doing something ridiculously complicated like suspending dozens of devices and hundreds of programs and preparing the computer to start right back up again. The problem is, when such a thing is happening, there’s a lot to do – and a lot depends on random factors like when was the last message from the network connection, where the computer is writing stuff to the disk and so on. So if ZoneAlarm was waiting for the final “goodbye” message from the router and it arrived after Vista had decided time was up, the computer suspended with ZoneAlarm still hooked into the network stack. Not good.

Thus why it was so random: sometimes the wireless router responded in time, sometimes not. And depending on when the reply arrived late, the network driver would crash and messily take the rest of the system with it.

Now there are good arguments that the network driver should be protected from doing something like corrupting the core of the OS – and there is a great deal of isolation already – but sometimes, crap happens. The question is how do you learn to fix it?

And so now you see the problem with Mac OS or Linux: if something similar happened in either of those operating systems, besides searching the Internet in the hopes of an answer, I would have NEVER figured out a firewall was causing the computer to crash when it was resuming. To me, it would have smelled of a bad driver or bad hardware – exactly what happened here.

Thus even though power users are by nature the ones most fascinated by other operating systems (I have a Wubi installation of Ubuntu on this very Windows machine, and an Apple Mac Mini), they are also the ones with the most to loose: all those years of knowledge gathering about the internals of Windows, obscure settings and arcane know-how all goes to waste. There’s no way to get around it.

So if Mac OS or Linux want to be successful, then they have to get people early, before they go down the Windows path. Even if Windows users are willing to unlearn the Windows way of doing things, as I am, it takes a long time to rebuild a knowledge base to fix things that go wrong. Since things will always go wrong, and people will always build up such a base, consciously or unconsciously, the only alternative is an early catch so people don’t get frustrated their knowledge is going to waste.

In the meantime, I look forward to another crash free Windows laptop.

Firing up ye olde Apple Software Update (which insists on activating itself even when I try to disable it), I came across a new entry for Apple’s Safari browser, based on WebKit. Aside from the tiny point about “update” which Apple seems to forget when it pushes out a new product, Safari is an awful application except on Mac OS. Its subpixel rendering is subpar; maybe even non-existent. Its widgets do not conform to Windows UI conventions. Oh, and it makes Firefox 2 look like a lean memory machine.

Oh, and Apple is clearly in violation of anti-trust laws in the US – using its (legal) monopoly in one market to push another product. Some other examples:

• Standard Oil had a monopoly on oil. It used that to push certain railway operators.
• AT&T had a monopoly on long-distance telephony. It used that monopoly to push local telephony.
• Microsoft has a monopoly on operating systems. It used that monopoly to push a web browser.

Add to this this very clear example:

• Apple has a monopoly on the software used to manage iPods. It uses that monopoly to push a web browser.

Though, now watch the Apple zealots arrive to jump on the argument with half-thought out excuses because it’s anti-Apple. Doesn’t matter if it was an optional update; so was Windows 98 over Windows 95 – Microsoft was still convicted of an anti-trust action. Ditto IE4 over IE3, and IE5 over IE4. You use one monopoly to push another, no matter how easy it is to opt-out, you’re guilty of abusing your monopoly.

I fully suspect that the DoJ will not prosecute though. You’d need a lawyer with guts to stand up to the Slashdot groupthink.

Hey maybe the EU Commission will instead!

As promised, I made a list of the software that I need to use and that I’d like to have around since I do use it from time to time.

If anyone can help me fill out the blanks – particularly the red exclamations – that would be great.

In fact, the only thing stopping me from going to Mac OS tomorrow is that I absolutely need a replacement to Paint.NET. PC Suite is too much of a killing block for me to move. And, no, the GIMP and GIMPshop do not count – I don’t have enough hair left to pull out in frustration. I suppose I could buy Photoshop, but I feel unclean going back to non-FOSS software. Not to mention, I’d be out several hundred dollars for features I’ll barely use.

In the past week or so, in part driven by the Compaq laptop display problem, I have been inspired to do a general clean up of my computers and computing muck.

So here’s what I’ve been doing, with each gadget/device.

• My Nokia N80 (“hoth”) has received a general cleanup of numbers and a physical cleaning. I have also updated the applications I was using extensively (Gmail, Google Maps, Putty, for instance) and installed a couple of new applications that I wanted to have installed on it, including the new Internet Radio application and the new and improved Frozen Bubble. Once all that is done, the pictures and movies that I’ve taken will be emptied to make way for new ones and the phone backed up in its entirety. One thing that I still have to do is a figure out a way to keep it in sync with my contacts on the computer. When I was earlier using Outlook, I didn’t have much trouble syncing – Nokia’s PC Suite natively supports syncing the phone with Outlook, Lotus Notes and a couple of other providers, but not Thunderbird. While there is a plugin to sync Thunderbird with PC Suite, I have yet to see it work properly here. I hope to have this done by the end of December.
• My Nokia N800 (“chandrila”) will see most of the existing applications removed when I upgrade the tablet to the latest version of the Internet Tablet OS, OS2008. While a developer preview is now out, given that I have yet to see the majority of projects moved over, I think I will wait until the final version is out and any bugs with the programs I use the most (claws-mail, Skype, Abiword, Gnumeric) are sorted out. I would also like to figure out a way to get Samba working on it so I can use the network of computers and drives that are otherwise inaccessible. While I would like to see the final version of OS2008 out by the end of December so I can clean this up, I suspect a mid- to end- January 2008 release is more likely. So this will pend till then.
• My 5G iPod (“geonosis”) needs to be updated with the latest iPod firmware and refilled. However, my iTunes library is in bad shape, so I suspect for the time being, it’ll just have to sit around as it is. And of course, for the first time, I’m going to have to make an effort to sort out all the music as I have finally got more music in my library than space on the iPod. Hope to have that done a day or so after I’m done with cleaning up my music library.
• My iPod Shuffle (“ossus”) is doing fine. Nothing doing.
• My Mac Mini (“coruscant”) is chugging along, slowly. Since it’s just been effectively reformatted thanks to Leopard, nothing I need to do, except reinstall a couple of pieces of software for which I couldn’t find the discs. Perhaps it’s time to sell it though; it’s too sluggish for my needs, even though it is otherwise a competent machine. That would also likely mean the end of my three year old Mac experiment. So either I’ll keep it until it no longer works, or I’ll sell it by March. One way or the other, nothing needs to be done by the end of this year. I would like to be less reliant on it for a backup system, though, which I’ll talk about in just a minute.
• My Ubuntu box (“bespin”) is working great. I think there’s really nothing to be done here until April 2008, when Ubuntu Linux 8.04 LTS “Hardy Heron” comes out. Again, like the Mac Mini, I’m not sure I need this laptop any more. I’m slowly warming to the idea of dual-booting Linux and Windows Vista on my Compaq. What’s previously prevented me from doing this was: (a) the hardware incompatibilities; (b) insufficient hard drive space; and, (c) unfamiliarity with Linux. Given the impressive improvements in Ubuntu since 6.06, the significantly lower prices of massive laptop hard drives and my dogged effort to learn more about Ubuntu, I think I’m basically out of excuses not to use Linux more. About the only applications that I have to use on Windows are the games (I’m addicted to Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri and Age of Empires), and Photoshop. Both Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard” and Windows Vista seem less stable and more concerned with serving their respective corporate masters’ interests than in doing what I want to do, my way. So, maybe by March, I’ll either send the laptop home to my parents, or sell it.
• My Windows Vista box (“cerea”) is, well, okay. I have had a bout of hardware trouble (some of which is documented here, another story to come). As I wrote, I’ve not really had much specific trouble with Vista, but it’s also not quite as intuitive as Windows XP was for me. There’s really not much to write about it, except as I described above, I’m thinking about selling one or more of my computers and upgrading the hard drive from the proceedings in order to setup a dual-boot system. Basically, nothing needs to be done here until April or later.

My backup system (which I’ve nicknamed “perlemian”) needs a through rethinking. For one, it’s too darn complicate and requires active thought to get going, and doesn’t cover all the devices I’d like backed up. That’s not acceptable. I’m writing up a long post about a backup system and I’ll try to have it up by the end of this weekend. The new system itself will take quite some time yet to implement, so… let’s see. Maybe by mid-year next year depending on what the configuration of computers looks like.

Most radically of all, given what I realize now is my typical usage scenario, I’m beginning to wonder whether I should begin my getting rid of all my gadgets and starting afresh. Had I known how I would be using my gadgets before I started buying them or acquiring them, I would have gone a completely different route:

• A powerful, dual-booting, desktop computer. Considering I have hard drives, a DVD burner and other parts, I basically need the “guts”: an Intel Core 2 processor, Asus motherboard, 2-4GB of RAM and an 8800GT video card can be had for less than $700.
• A tiny, limited laptop, like the 10″ Asus EeePC due out sometime in April (estimate it at $500).
• A phone like the Nokia N95 (who knows how much this will cost then).

Nonetheless, my computer system here is working quite well. The only gains will be from consolidation and reduction now. That’s what I’ll be working on next year.

A few years ago, I had a debate with Stakface about the relative speed of operating systems. While my laptop is in the shop, I’m using my Mac as a main computer for the first time in… years? Certainly, A Very Long Time. And my first impression of multi-tasking in Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard” is that it’s slow and unresponsive. To be sure, this computer is aging (what isn’t?), but even then it’s not quite three years old and acting much, much older. To compare my Toshiba laptop from 2002 running Vista to this Mac Mini from 2005 running Leopard would probably result the Toshiba winning the responsiveness award, even with half the memory that this machine has (512MB of RAM there versus 1GB here).

I find that while Windows has an unhappy habit of running very responsively 99% of the time, every half hour or so, Windows will find some background task that will suck away every single available computing resource and the interface will crawl to a halt. Surprisingly, no data really gets lost in the process, though. Vista in particular has a nasty habit of doing this more often, which I attribute to a combination of its resource hungry indexing engine and its pointless and ultimately futile DRM algorithms.

By contrast, Mac OS X feels slow all the time, but there are never really any surprising changes in speed. Whether it’s the Adium list in the background where animations are supposed to take five seconds and take between ten and 12, or whether it’s the time before switching applications, the interface as a whole feels sluggish. What is even more annoying though about this process is that occasionally when you switch applications – even though the menu bar has drawn itself and I’m waiting for the window to appear – data gets misdirected, adding to the frustrations. So my typing a space causes iTunes to stop playing, even though iTunes is no longer the foremost application.

Much like the screen wipes in Windows 98, where it would literally take several seconds for a minimized window to disappear and be replaced with the desktop, the Mac OS doesn’t feel like a multi-tasking OS. This perception is reinforced by things which happen in the background in Windows whereas they are modal in the Mac interface. For example: printing from the Mac usually brings up an application modal “Printing…” box, forcing me to stop working on the document instead of the Windows scenario where after you hit “Print” or “OK” in the Print dialog box, you can continue working, letting some background process handle the printing. It’s frustrating and irritating to have that happen, particularly if, like me, you’re trying to edit your new resume and make sure the alignment is okay on a piece of paper, which requires multiple little edits and reprints.

If you grow up with the Mac interface, I think most people find it responsive enough. Coming from Windows, however, the entire interface responsiveness philosophy feels wrong. Which brings me back to the debate I had with Stakface all those many months ago: small, occasional disruptions are excusable and even expected in Windows; consistent slowdowns are not. He believed it was more disruptive to have a sudden slowdown in performance rather than to just have a slow, consistent interface.

Different philosophies indeed.