Two weeks ago, Tyler mowed the lawn. He got $20 for his effort. And what an effort it was. He shared his travail with his Baha’i teacher Ms Victoria. She suggested that perhaps he might want to add edging to his repertoire and charge grampa a little extra for this additional service. So this weekend, he decided to put her idea into practice.

He headed out front with a shovel and started chopping the overgrowth one spadeful at a time. I peaked out the window to see his progress and I noticed that his friend Eli had joined the work crew. Tyler stood back and watched. I decided he needed a lesson in economics and doing his own work. I stepped outside. When I told him I wanted to talk to him about economics. He came over and pled his case. “But grampa, I was going to give him part of the profits!” And then Eli stepped forward to clarify. “Yeah and then I’m going to give it back to him so he can buy me a birthday present!”

I shook my head and walked back in to the house. I think he knows enough about the science of economics.

Is anyone else miffed when manufacturers only give you the diagonal measurement of the screen? I am. When you’re working on a touch screen keyboard, the width of the screen matters. The width of the screen is the practical limit of the key width. It would be nice if the key width was close to the width of my fat fingers. So I am interested in not just the pixel count (640×480 or 320×640) but also the size of each dimension.

Tapping my temple with my forefinger, I hit upon a solution provided by one Pythagoras a few years ago. Typically, the folks reviewing devices with screens will rave about the diagonal measurement, also known as a hypotenuse. The other measurements, the width and height are usually only given in pixel count. But some re3ally bad screens have lots of pixels but they are far apart. Some reallly good screens have fewer pixels, but much closer together. Let’s use these two facts to determine actual screen measurements!

Since the goal is to figure out the relationship between the pixels and the inches we have to use Pythagoras’ theorum to calculate that relationship. As you may recall, this says:

Hypotenuse is equal to the square root of the sum of the squares of the other two sides.

For the iPhone, the hypotenuse is 3.5 inches (I’ll use inches rather than millimeters to simplify my life). The screen width  is 320 pixels and the screen height is 480 pixels. So our formula becomes

3.5 = √(320)² + (480)²

Now we know that, the iPhone uses 576.88 pixels per inch. Well, we do if you do the math! That means that the width of the iPhone screen is

1.94 inches = 320 pixels / 164.8 pixels per inch wide

2.91 inches = 640 pixels / 164.8 pixels per inch long

The HTC (Sprint) Touch Diamond has a fabulous screen! It’s 2.8 inches measured diagonally with a 480×640 pixels. Using this information we now know that the Diamond measurements are

1.68 inches = 480 pixels / 285.7 pixels per inch wide

2.24 inches = 640 pixels / 285.7 pixels per inch long

The fabulous Palm Pre, which I’ve considered buying, is advertising a screen of 3.1 inches diagonally measured at the same resolution as the iPhone which is 320×480 pixels. This makes the screen size of the Pre

1.72 inches = 320 pixels / 186 pixels per inch wide

2.58 inches = 640 pixels / 186 pixels per inch long

My fingers are about 1/2 inch at the tips. The typical software keyboard has 10 keys on the QWERTY row. For the iPhone that leaves you with approximately 2/10ths of an inch per key plus the line in between each one. On the Diamond, it is about 1/6th of an inch per key. Which explains why the soft keyboards on the iPhone and iPod Touch seem easier to use… they’re around a whole .04 inches wider!

Lucky me. I bought a cell phone in 2007 called a Sprint Touch, also known as the HTC Vogue. It came with Windows Mobile 6.0 and a few months after buying it, HTC offered an upgrade to version 6.1 of Windows Mobile. This is a touch-screen only device. There’s no keyboard. Recently some fabulous hackers around the world crafted a version of Google’s phone software, Android, that would run on the Vogue. Katie gave me a Touch Diamond, an upgrade to the Touch for my birthday. It’s a capable phone. But I’ve had my eye on the Palm Pre. The reviews of Android indicate that it’s almost as good as sliced bagels. With Android in the mix, I have a choice: Touch Diamond with Windows Mobile 6.5, Palm Pre or Touch Diamond with Android.

So I thought I should try Android myself.

On Thursday afternoon, I cleverly followed the instructions and behold! Android runs! I enabled voice and data on the Vogue, pulled the battery out of the Diamond and took my “new” phone home. All that evening I played with the phone. I connected it to my Gmail account. I ran the browser. I got used to the buttons. I had plans for Friday. I thought I’d use Android just for a few hours. But I kind of got to like it. So I thought I’d use it at least part way through Friday. Anyway, I had a backup plan. The only way to run Android on these devices is using Haret. This effectively sets up your WinMo phone as dual boot. If I got in over my head on Friday, I could always reboot and end up back in Windows Mobile.

First task Friday was to meet a co-worker at the Atlanta Inforum where some of our servers are located. I wanted to map out the network using a Fluke OptiView. How was traffic in downtown Atlanta? I used Android’s Google Maps to choose my route to the Inforum and validate the most traffic-free path. Ok – so where in the world IS this Inforum anyway? Well, of course it’s at 250 Williams Street in Atlanta. Thanks, Android/Google Maps!

But where was Bobby? He was late. I parked in “Visitors” and was limited to two hours. I waited. And waited. Finally I figured I should email or call or something! But Android didn’t have any of my contacts on it. I wasn’t able to transfer my Windows Mobile contacts (or my Google contacts) to Android. I finally settled on emailing him. I used the Android web browser to connect to the Outlook Web Access and send a message. It worked like a charm and Bobby arrived thirty minutes later.

After finishing up at the Inforum, I had an hour to kill. I’d like to find a Cariboo Coffee near by. They have Chai and free WiFi. So I used Google SMS (text message) to search for a Cariboo Coffee near the Inforum’s zip code, 30303. The nearest one was at Peachtree Center. I made a wrong turn on the way and decided to have lunch at another famous Atlanta landmark, the Varsity. It’s hard to find a cholesterol-friendly lunch there. But they do use canola oil for their onion rings. I figured that had to count for something!

I thought I’d use the WiFi at The Varsity to re-enable my Touch Diamond. But their WiFi was on the blink and I couldn’t get an IP address on my laptop. So I was left with Android for the afternoon. My next appointment was … what? Back to Outlook Web Access on Android. One o’clock meeting with ISACA-Atlanta at the Loudermilk Center. Where is that? Android/Google Maps again.

I got to the Center in plenty of time despite having a hard time finding the parking lot. Then I noticed ISACA provided lunch. I guess I should have read the email better. No onion rings though. During the meeting I didn’t want my phone making too much racket. Silence is an easy setting to find. Apparently other ISACA certified folks have a harder time finding the same setting on their iPhones and Blackberry’s.

Tyler had soccer practice at five that evening. He sent me a silent text message to let me know he’d had a rough day at school. Asking me if practice was on. Checking to see if I would be coaching the practice. I was able to respond rapid fire to these messages quietly. The on-screen keyboard is hard to hit just right. The Android code is designed for a capacitative touch screen but the Vogue has a resistive touch screen. As a result the touch often hits two or three keys or none. Fortunately, the keyboard that comes with the Cupcake version of Android makes backspace an easy key to hit… a lot.

After practice, Tyler and I headed home to pan seared salmon filets.

During the evening I decided to leave Android on the phone until Saturday. Tyler’s soccer game didn’t start until 10:30 so I could sleep in. I spent a few minutes setting the alarm on Android and choosing the wake-up call. I decided against Reveille and rooster. I picked a less irritating Claire de Lune. Precisely at 7:30am I woke up to the strains of deBussy, refreshed and ready to watch soccer! But first, I switched off Android and reverted to Windows Mobile on the Touch Diamond.

Things I liked about Android:

• It works. Yeah, it just plain works. No reboots, no runs no errors. That’s what you need in a phone. Phone’s shouldn’t stop working. I could do everything I needed to get done.
• Menus make sense. There are two ways to run a program. There is an upside window shade that scrolls UP. It has program icons on it. The other is to drag and drop these icons on the “desktop.” The desktop is three screens wide and you get from one to the other with a sideways swish of your finger.
• Best ever integration with Gmail. I’ve not seen anything that works with Gmail better than this. It’s outstanding.
• Excellent web browser. I had no trouble with any web page. The only thing that doesn’t work is Adobe Flash, not uncommon. It doesn’t work on iPhone or Windows Mobile either. 
• Multiwindow browser. One of the neat feature of the browser is its ability to show you multiple windows. You choose which one you want or even which one to close or open a new one.
• Easy to get used to.  I anticipated having problems getting used to the software. It was… well, different. But moving from one function to another was about as easy as it gets.
• Multitasking works. I found I could cut and paste between applications without any problem!

Things that I’d like improved about Android:

• I need more applications. Yeah, there’s an Android App Market. But not many apps. And I couldn’t figure out how to download any of them to my Vogue. I was off Twitter, couldn’t update my blog, had no way to read Word documents, couldn’t sync my Gmail contacts or Outlook/Exchange contacts, couldn’t check my RSS Feeds or listen to podcasts or VPN to work. Worst of all, I couldn’t sync my tasks with Remember the Milk! I’m moving to a cloud-based computing. All my information is in a cloud somewhere. But on the hand held side, I need access to that information. There just weren’t enough applications on Android to allow me to do everything I wanted to.
• The keyboard/screen integration didn’t work well. Of course, it doesn’t work well on most touch systems. But with no hand writing recognition to fall back on, it’s more important.

All in all, Android is much better than I thought it would be. If development continues to progress, choosing between Android and WebOS and Windows Mobile may be tougher than I expected.

This morning, I gave my alarm clock that evil look. You know, the one I reserve for things that really get my blood pressure up. As I lay back down on the pillow, I thought, would it not be lovely to be able to pre-hit the snooze button. That way, before I drift off to blissful sleep or wake in the middle of the night, I could decide to hit the snooze button and give myself a few extra minutes of uninterrupted sleep!

Then the idea of paying ahead got me thinking. Perhaps this would be useful during the Fast. At that time of year, I need to get to bed early so I can get up early to eat a solid breakfast, one that’ll last most of the day. So if I could eat breakfast the night before, I could sleep until sunrise!

Oh! and if you think of a way to solve a problem or accomplish a task at work, you could do it the night before and that way when you get in the office the next day, it would already be done!

Say, I could pre-charge my cell phone to make sure I never lost signal because my batter ran out of juice in the middle of that crucial call to the Pizza place on Friday evening.

And you know how that last good parking space is always gone by the time you get there? If you could just pre-park your car before you get there…

At that point, I realized that further sleep was useless. I got up, sneared at my alarm clock, grabbed a towel and went to take a shower. While the water dripped off my nose, I was thinking that, if I could only pay that shower ahead, I could have slept longer.

A few weeks ago I needed to put together a test network to use ipTables to forward TACACS authentication packets to the replacement server while logging the IP address of the requestor. I couldn’t use the live systems to test while I debugged the admittedly complex ipTables configuration. So I built a small network on my computer using VirtualBox.

I had three virtual computers running the SLAX distribution of Linux. One was the TACACS server being replaced, one the new TACACS server and one the authentication requestor. Once I had them all built, I realized I needed a DHCP server to complete the network and so I fired up another little computer to do that.

The process worked very well. I debugged the ipTables script in less time than I thought I would need because of the complete freedom I had to reboot and reconfigure the computers on the fly. I didn’t need to ask permission or apologize for a reboot!

It worked so well, that I decided to build a RADIUS authentication server in VirtualBox to test Linux authentication using pluggable authentication modules (PAM). Along the way, I put together a small virtual machine running FreeBSD. It simply worked with a text based interface. But along the way, I decided to build a little more pizzaz into the system.

I backed up my FreeBSD virtual machine (doesn’t everyone?). Then I installed X.org on it so I could have a GUI. But I’ve been very unhappy with Gnome in spite of its widespread adoption by Ubuntu, OpenSolaris and Fedora (no! not that one!) Fedora. And in spite of the overwhelming attachment that so many people have to KDE, I just can’t get into it. So rather than trying to build my own Linux distribution,  I decided to try out another option.

I installed OpenBox as a desktop environment and SLIM as a graphical login manager. I finished it up sitting on the cold aluminum bleachers while watching Tyler’s evening soccer practice. I think it looks pretty good. I’ll keep adding little odds and ends to see if it becomes a usable desktop.

And all this in a virtual machine inside my little work laptop.

I enjoy the Fast. Some people don’t. Bahá’ís fast for 19 days from March 2nd to March 21st. This is the Bahá’í month of Alá (Loftiness). During this month, there is no eating or drinking (and the Arabic word for drinking also covers smoking!) during daylight hours for all of its 19 days. Now, there are provisions for the sick and pregnancy. In fact, the provision says, “not permitted.” And it’s a voluntary practice of an obligatory act. There’s no one checking that I am fasting other than my own self.

I find it odd that many folks don’t understand.

People ask me why I’m not having lunch and I say, “I’m fasting.” And they come back with one of two questions, “are you crazy?” and “are you trying to lose weight?” The first one I’m not so sure about, but the second one I can answer. “NO!” Because once the sun sets, I eat.

It is interesting that fasting has been around for ages. But note the changes over time. Jews fast during the Day of Atonement. One day. But many prophets fasted during their ministry. Moses fasted forty days for the sins of Israel. Jesus fasted forty days while in the wilderness and talked about it during His Sermon on the Mount. Moslems are commanded to fast for thirty days during the month of Ramadan.

I made a mistake yesterday (Saturday). I went to the grocery store during the afternoon. I knew it was a mistake from the start. As soon as I walked into the store, everything looked… edible! As I walked up and down the aisles getting what was on my list, I kept getting other stuff that “would be a really good dinner” or “would be a great side dish”. And that’s how we ended up yesterday eating quesidillas and corn with pot stickers and nachos. It was delicious but it was an odd combo.

When I pitched the idea to Tyler, he didn’t seem to mind. He likes quesidillas. He likes pot stickers. He likes nachos. So why not? Throw in a little chocolate milk and you’ve got a meal.

I notice that one of the main features of the Fast is remembering. I remember I’m fasting all the time. When I struggle with my alarm clock in them morning, I remember that I’m getting up earlier so I can prepare for the Fast during the day. All day long I have to remember not to snag a drink at the water fountain. And when evening comes and I want to eat bunches of food, I just literally have no stomach for more than I need. And that gets less and less throughout the month. And this remembering helps me to center things on spiritual matters.

“Fasting is the cause of awakening man. The heart becomes tender and the spirituality of man increases. This is produced by the fact that man’s thoughts will be confined to the commemoration of God, and through this awakening and stimulation surely ideal advancements follow…”

More information on the Bahá’í Faith can be found online.

Some interesting research on fasting in the Bible can be found online.

I spend a lot of time with my phone.

It’s a Touch Diamond thanks to my daughter’s kindness in handing me a little birthday present last Thanksgiving. I’ve customized its ROM and added Pointui Home as a front end (completely removing TouchFlow 3d). And now I’m testing blogging via phone. It all hinges on the keyboard. The Diamond doesn’t have one. I use TouchPal. But even as good as it is, I could see where a real keyboard could be better. So here I am. Trying to see if shelling out money for a Palm Pre or a Touch pro 2 is even worth the effort.

I’ll blog a bit on line and see how I do without a real keyboard. This might also tell me whether an iPhone is usable without a real keyboard. At least for me.

edit: TouchPal selected “are” enstead of “see” each time above. *sigh* score one for a real keyboard.

The other day, Tyler and I were discussing a pending fishing trip. He decided on Wednesday we should go fishing since we hadn’t been in a very long time. At breakfast, before school on Friday morning, he decided we needed to go over to Wal-Mart to get some worms. “Why?” I innocently asked, “There are plenty of worms in the garden.” “But the worms are out of season in the garden!”

We went to Walmart Saturday morning. The side benefit was that the MacDonalds there had a good to-go breakfast!

That afternoon, we were tossing the baseball around. Tyler pitched one to me pretty hard and I missed it. I picked it up and threw it back to him. He said, “you could have caughten that!”

“Arghhh!”, I said, “there’s no such word as ‘caughten’!”

“Sure there is! That’s what your clothes are made of.”

Yeah, over the weekend I decided to put my technical prowess to work and build a video recorder. It being Georgia’s Sales Tax Free Weekend, I figured it would be a snap to find what I needed and knock that six percent sales tax off as well! I headed over to Microcenter after work to pick out a nice shiny and potentially less expensive USB based TV tuner.

I found the shelves with TV Tuners right away. There must have been a hundred variations on the theme “TV-PVR/HVR/USB/2.” I’d read carefully on the MythTV website that some were simply not supported. So I tried to use my newly upgraded mobile phone’s browser to avoid those. When it came down to it, I took a box labeled Hauppauge 850 over to the sales counter. The young lady was ever so nice as she politely informed me that since this was an entertainment device… I’d still be charged tax. RATS!

I took the little goody home. I plugged it into a Dell Optiplex I just happened to have laying around. I anticipated all the cool features that a video recorder would provide:

• Live TV with pause/fast forward and rewind!
• TV Recording for later viewing
• Commercial identification
• Weather on demand (yes! On Demand!)
• Internet connectivity with my TV Remote
• Picture, Video and FM radio

Ah – it was going to be so cool. And then the fun started.

I spent the next several hours tweaking and tuning a MythTV implementation built on top of Ubuntu call MythBuntu. For some reason, nothing worked. I finally took the little device to my home brew dual core AMD box and loaded up the drivers. That’s when I noticed something odd. The driver listed the device as HVR-950 not HVR-850. I checked inside the box I’d discarded in a big hurry when I got home. There was a little slip of paper inside that said, “thanks for buying this HVR-850. We’re a little short of these right now so we’ve substituted a HVR-950 enstead.”

I thought this was the fix. I used Google to search for the driver for the 950 when a closer look revealed it wasn’t a HVR-950 at all, but a HVR-950q! In the words of one of the websites I visited, there ain’t no driver. It’s too new!

So, after wasting much of Friday evening, some of Saturday, and most of Saturday evening. I had to reluctantly conclude that the Linux version wasn’t going to come to fruition.  In installed Windows on the little Dell Optiplex to try the provided application. When I plugged the HVR-950q in, I got an error message. It said, “this device can perform faster…” ARGHHH! The Optiplex only had USB 1.1 ports and the now well-read manual clearly states that the HVR-950q only works with USB 2.0. It was 8:50pm. So I dashed quickly down to the local BestBuy just before closing and bought a PCI card with two USB 2.0 ports on it. Surely this would do the trick! No such luck. While WinTV worked, I just couldn’t figure a way to make the device work on its own.

In the meantime, I came across a couple of other options. These looked like Windows versions of MythTV and they might be able to play a role.

The first one was GB-PVR. One of things you should learn when playing with computers is to read the fine print *before* you press the install button. I didn’t. After struggling for at least an hour with GB-PVR I noticed that it requires an onboard hardware MPEG2 encoder. *sigh* The HVR-950q doesn’t have one.

The second one was more promising. It is MediaPortal. It was happy to run without the hardware MPEG2 encoder. However, I couldn’t get the little HVR-950q to initialize without running the included WinTV application provided by Hauppauge. No matter what I tried, it wasn’t going to light up without it. But once I got the server installed (leaving WinTV up and running), it looked like it was going to work.

I hurried upstairs to connect up a laptop and install the Viewer MediaPortal system. It worked! Sort of. Watching an episode of Saving Grace on the actual TV and on the MediaPortal at the same time, I noticed the lips on Grace moved ten minutes sooner on the TV than the computer. The sound was somewhere in between. No matter what kind of tuning and prompting I did, it didn’t change the delays.

I picked up the HVR-950q. I gently put it back in the box. I unplugged all the cables and wrapped them neatly. I replaced all the systems, keyboards, monitors and mice I had laying around the living room. It looks much cleaner there now. I’m going to take back the HVR-950q today. It just doesn’t work. And tonight, when I get home, I’ll just watch TV on the TV. Hmmmmm. Or maybe I’ll buy a TiVo. But what fun is there in that?