rawsocket dot org

I have covered the new Java ME user interface toolkit, LWTUI in this post at my Forum Nokia blog. LTWUI (Lightweight UI Toolkit) is an open source project of cross-device UI toolkit for J2ME created so developers can develop compelling user interfaces without writing painful low-level Canvas code.

Here’s a video I made with it running on my Nokia N95. Pretty good, though it’s a bit slow. It works nicely also on Series 40 devices.

If you are like me and spent countless hours playing snake on your old Nokia monochrome phone, this will probably bring a smile to your face:

SNAKE Game in the Student House - video powered by Metacafe
From haha.nu

Miss it? Feel like playing a bit? There you go.

Interesting side note: In 2005, as the mobile gaming industry was starting to take itself seriously, a Finnish engineer named Taneli Armanto was honoured at the Mobile Entertainment Market awards for his achievements as the creator of Snake for Nokia phones. Nokia’s press release at the time states that there were an estimated 350 million phones in the market with snake installed (that figure has at least doubled since), making it one of the most popular video games in history.

Cheers and have a great weekend!
Bernardo

The Economist rap by Psikotic. It brightened my day. Hope it brightens your too!

From here, as recommended by Brazilian publisher extraordinaire Freddy Bilyk.

This…

… plus this…

… equals…

Mankind is doomed.

Great stuff. Not so great as finding out that Qualcomm does have a sense of humor after all.

His first goal on a official MLS game. Not just a pretty face, this one.

But will this Becks stunt be the thing that will make Americans care about soccer? I find it very unlikely. I have a theory, though, that people think I am crazy when I say it, but here it goes anyway. I think that with the investment being made in the sport in the United States it’s a matter of time before the US National Soccer team starts showing some real results in international competitions. I believe that in the next 20 years we may see them getting to the World Cup semi-finals. Wanna bet?

Well, I like free open source software as much as the next guy. I use it a lot, I recommend it, I have even participated in a couple of projects in the past. However, one thing that bothers me is the rabid evangelism, the bigotry and the mix of software, politics and ideology that never serves the interests of developers, businesses or software entrepreneurs - quite the opposite, actually.

Recently we had a big discussion about GPL Version 3.

First let’s recap a little bit about open source licenses. But before, a fair warning: I am by no means an expert on this, so I may be making some mistakes or omissions below. This is kind of a recollection of disconnected facts. (Shouldn’t all blog posts in the planet have such a disclaimer? :-) )

GPL, GNU General Public License, is one of the most widespread free open source software licenses out there. The main charateristic of GPL, and what makes it so popular is that any derived works of a GPL-licensed software is automatically GPL-licensed as well. This is quite a revolutionary thing, and very misunderstood in the tech community. Back in the days when Microsoft was just beginning to acknowledge the presence of open source software, Steve Ballmer compared the GPL to a cancer. But the GPL isn’t the only open source license available - there are other open source software licenses (BSD, Apache, X11) that do not require that derivative work have the same license as the original work, and there’s even a version of the GPL that’s not so restrictive (or not so free, depending on your point of view), the Lesser GPL or LGPL. Open-source licenses come in all shapes and sizes these days, and as businesses start embracing it, it is a big challenge to correctly analyze the available software, the licensing models and the risks to intelectual property those licenses may raise in the future.

Ok, now fast forward to 2006 and the first draft GPLv3 is being discussed. It is a major update to the GPL, patching up some obvious holes and it contains a timebomb: no GPL software can be used to implement and kind of Digital Rights Management (DRM). This generated a good amount of noise, to the point that Linus Torvalds, the creator and main keeper of Linux, said that Linux would stick to GPL v2, because the DRM thing is nuts and businesses, who are finally adopting Linux at a pace that’s making Microsoft worried, would drop Linux in a second if these restrictions against DRM prevailed. A number of draft versions follow and it looks like the DRM part gets dropped. There’s an explanation on the official GPL guide (go to section “Neutralizing Laws That Prohibit Free Software – But Not Forbidding DRM”). You can buy that explanation, or simply assume (as I do) that the Free Software Foundation could not afford to lose the flagship GPL-licensed software - Linux.

So it looks like the DRM nonsense was beat out of the GPL by the reality of facts. That’s not to say there aren’t problems left for businesses that have adopted or are planning to adopt Free Software. The so-called “Application Service Provider loophole” is kind of a big one. You see, when the GPL was conceived, software distribution meant the binaries were distributed and installed in the end-user’s computer. The user had posession of the binaries, and according to GPL requirements, also to the source code of that application. Then came the internet. Then came software-as-service. Then came Application Service Providers (ASPs). Software was not necessarily something you downloaded and installed, but more and more it was something that you accessed over the internet. That meant the ASP could get a hold of a GPL’d software, make alterations to his heart content and make it available through the internet and don’t have the requirement of making his source code available, since the software was installed in his own server.

Then comes the AGPL. The Affero GPL applies to the “ASP loophole” so anyone who is making a software available as a service over the internet must make any GPL’d source code available for download. That include any alterations performed by the ASP.

I will confess I never heard of the AGPL until a couple of days ago when I read this post from Russell Beattie. And I was a little shocked, because it shows that the Free Software Foundation is at it again - happily trying to shoot itself in the foot.

Why do I say that? Because despite many atempts, free open source software adoption on the desktop is at its early stages and if it will ever become a true contender to proprietary software in that space is anyone’s guess. It will be a tough battle.

However, in the server space, and by consequence, in the ASP space, the story is completely different. That’s where free software shines and has been adopted by all the major players in the industry: Google, Yahoo!, eBay, etc. all of them use free software to a certain extent in their service delivery. The ASP space is the only open source success story, and now it is being targeted by the AGPL with what could be dreadful consequences, like jeopardizing intelectual property and trade secrets. It’s no wonder that companies that are otherwise bigger supporters of open source software, like Google are not very excited by the AGPL.

The AGPL and GPLv3 are “compatible”, but the AGPL is optional. A developer may choose to “activate it” or not. So nobody knows if developers of open source software that can be used over the network will adhere to it or not. However, it is concerning that the main entity in the world of open source software, the Free Sofware Foundation, keeps on churning these licenses and recommending them to developers. It is concerning because these licenses can end up hurting the same businesses who, on the end of the day, are the biggest open source supporters and whose names are commonly dropped by open source advocates when they want to add credibility to their cause.

After some initial trouble, I managed to get the Symbian 9.2 Platform Security hack working on my N95 with 20.0.015 firmware. It does work fine, as long as you don’t reboot the phone, as you can see in these screenshots:

Hack is already done with Python script + AppTRK. Now I open Dr Jukka’s Y-Browser

Copying C:\Python\ball.py to the clipboard.

Pasting ball.py in C:\sys\bin. Ouch!

For those not familiar with the Symbian operating system, C:\sys\ and folders below are data caged (protected) folders that can only be read by applications given AllFiles capability (through Symbian Signed, with Platform Approval) and can only be written to by software with TCB capability, which needs to be approved by the manufacturer.

Y-Browser application does not have such advanced capabilities, since it’s signed with a self-signed certificate. Nevertheless, it can read from and write to C:\sys\bin, therefore gaining the possibility of copying any executable file into this directory, bypassing the installer and compromising the system.

The same blogger who unveiled the hack has now posted a guide on installing unsigned applications with the help of a file browser (hard way) and a Python script (easy way), thus allowing any application to have full capabilities, including the advanced ones I explained above.

As I said in my previous post, I do not recommend anybody to install untrusted applications this way, as those can potentially wipe out the entire file system, record phone calls, use the network in some nasty ways, causing you a lot of headache and possibly huge money losses (can you imagine a ‘nice’ app shooting 5 SMS messages a second? Man that’s gonna be a big bill). While I admit it’s a remarkable job by the hacker community, I still advise people to stick to signed applications, if they wanna stay away from viruses and malware.

Our man Todd Bender writes about new, creative QR code uses over at his blog. Those around me know that I find mobile codes one of the coolest things since the introduction of sliced bread, up there with the remote control and air conditioning, and I am prone to rant about it, specially after a couple of drinks.

And if you don’t want to listen to my rants, don’t worry - look at the small but persistent industry trend around it - Nokia is throwing some weight behind the technology by launching a portal dedicated to mobile codes some time ago and actively preloading code reading apps on its newer devices. Google Print Ads initiative include mobile readable codes by default. Those are just two examples off the top of my head.

But never underestimate the possibility of these new, potentially groundbreaking mobile technologies causing a knot in the otherwise clear thought processes of old time webheads, generating a bona fide case of the syndrome I like to call Eternal September 2.0.

Case in point: Joel Spolsky, who is undeniably one of the great software writers of all time, got a chip on his shoulder over mobile codes on late January. I meant to write about it then, of course I got lazy and didn’t, but Todd’s post prompted me to do it. He writes:

:CueCat is back!

(…) People have camera phones with web browsers now. Some things are still the same: typing URLs is not hard, this is a monumental chicken and egg problem, and this doesn’t provide any value to the consumers who are expected to install new software on their phones to go along with this ridonculous scheme.

Sometimes when the elders say to the youngsters, “don’t do that, we tried that, it failed,” it’s just because they’re failing to notice that the world has changed. But sometimes the elders are right, and the youngsters really are too young to know the history of the idea they think that they’ve just invented.

If you don’t know what he is talking about, the CueCat, launched in 2000, was a barcode scanner that you attached to your computer and used to scan proprietary barcodes of magazine ads. Upon scanning the barcode, the CueCat software would launch your browser and take you to the encoded URL. The business model (I guess) was around licensing the proprietary barcode format to advertisers once there were enough CueCats out there. This was, of course, a major fail and generally considered one of the dumbest tech products of all time. I am surprised to see there is still a website up telling the whole story and also Wikipedia has some good info.

Joel himself recognizes that when the Cuecat was launched, there wasn’t really a mobile web. Hell, camera phones were a novelty and Java-enabled phones (to mention a single platform), were probably still on the drawing board. A quick Google search shows me that in 2002 we had 180 million Java-enabled phones in the market and by 2001 some 30 million camera phones out there.

Now let’s fast forward to the end of 2007. 1.5 billion Java-enabled phones are in the market, with a very close number of camera phones - being that most camera phones are powerful enough to support Java and have at the very least a rudimentary browser. We have mobile web access growing exponentially, and this on a media that provides a number of constraints to designers and marketers: small screen sizes, slow transfer speeds, high data rates, and yes, painful data entry.

“Typing URLs is not hard” Joel says, and I can’t help but wonder if Joel hasn’t typed enough URLs on his phone. Of course, if you type one URL every six months on your phone and keep them neatly bookmarked, that is not a problem. However, if you want to really USE the mobile web, there’s a lot of typing to do. Which is not a problem if you are sitting around with time on your hands. But if there’s an info you want NOW, taking 30+ seconds to type a simple URL can be a pain.

To get around the painful data entry, SMS calls to action have been used for years: text WHATEVER to 55555 and get an URL. No need to type a long URL on your phone. But the responses rates have never been great - only 25% of the people who receive the SMS responses bother to click on the link, or maybe try to click and their device configuration is messed up, or are afraid to pay for data charges, etc. Mobile codes do not solve the whole nine yards of the mobile user experience problem, but at least marketers stop losing money by sending all those wasted SMSs. Granted - the presence of mobile code readers on devices right now is minimal, but could become big in coming years with big industry players rallying behind it.

That is all to say: Mobile codes are a cool and promising technology - the potential is there and it solves a very clear pain in the user experience of the mobile web, also opening a door to mobile marketers and designers to deliver instant gratification for the user on the move.

Will this potential materialize? That remains to be seen. But is it comparable to a major fail like the Cuecat? In your dreams, Joel Spolsky.

At least that’s what says this story run by Engadget Mobile:

App certificates have long been a bane to S60 users and developers alike, causing pain, frustration, and an almost obligatory cash outlay to get your hard work certified to run on the very platform Nokia is so quick to call "open." Finally, it truly is, thanks to the hard work of the Symbian hacking community that has developed an easy (or easy sounding, anyway) method of "jailbreaking" the Symbian 9.2 device in your life (S60 3rd Edition FP1 users, that’s you). After that, installed apps won’t need a certificate at all — let alone an invalid one — to do their dirty work. Open, indeed.

It points you to this site where instructios are given to unlock a single phone using AppTRK and a couple of Python scripts. The hack isn’t permanent, which means after a reboot your device gets back to normal. They say they’re working on a permanent hack, which would allow iPhone-style jailbroken firmwares running unsigned applications at full capabilities.

I haven’t tested it myself, but it seems it works at least on Feature Pack 1 devices. I will test with my N95 with an application which requires all capabilities (including manufacturer-given) to see what happens.

Anyway, I would advise nobody to do it to their own devices, since this opens up the possibility of you installing apps whose authors you don’t know and can do real damage to your phone if they are making use of sensitive capabilities whose use is protected by the whole signing scheme.

Via [my own Forum Nokia blog]

see more crazy cat pics

Even being a Forum Nokia employee and blogger, I like to know what’s happening in the other companies of the mobile world (which I refer to as “the dark side”). And while reading Sony Ericsson’s Developer World rss feed, look at what I stumbled upon:

New Sony Ericsson Developer World Community zone
We have consolidated the Developer World discussion forums, Wiki and Knowledge Base into one, new web section called Community. Here you will find all our interactive services organized by subject area making it easier to find and share information

That’s a very interesting move, given that Forum Nokia did exactly the same thing in November ‘07

I don’t see this as a bad thing, as it validates FN’s idea of interacting with the developer community more closely and exchanging expertise with very experienced developers. It’s a validation of the concept we introduced, so it’s proved to be right.

However, I can’t avoid a little victory dance.

Interesting theory on this article on the Economist - certain internet “utilities” like e-mail haven’t been monetized yet, and maybe never will - currently, they are treated as loss leaders for capturing traffic for major web portals. That may also be the case with social networking: the business model people are so frantically looking for may not exist, period. Great news for Facebook and its $15B price tag.

Everywhere and nowhere
Social networking will become a ubiquitous feature of online life. That does not mean it is a business

Web-mail has certainly not become a business. Admittedly, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, AOL and other providers of web-mail accounts do place advertisements on their web-mail offerings, but this is small beer. They offer e-mail—and volumes of free archival storage unimaginable a decade ago—because the service, including its associated address book, calendar, and other features, is cheap to deliver and keeps consumers engaged with their brands and websites, making users more likely to visit affiliated pages where advertising is more effective.

Looking for online TV listings for my cable company (RCN), I came accross this fantastic setup screen on Yahoo! TV. If anyone has any clue which of the 15 available options I should select, I would really appreciate it.

… and start talking about how free is the future of business.

I just read the article (for free!), and it was worth it (hah, get it?). So here’s what I thought of it: it’s interesting but not nothing close to the revolutionary manifesto it intends to be. Which is fine. The greatest value of it was drawing the border around a pretty obvious trend and describing in a rather complete way. And I hear there’s a book coming on the same subject - now that I think will be a bit of a stretch - the article itself feels a bit long, I wonder how Chris Anderson will manage to stretch it to cover a whole book.

Anyway, the best part of the article is the taxonomy of the different types of “free” out there, it’s a good overview of the underlying business models (or lack thereof) in each approach.

There are a couple of assumptions or statements that felt a bit misguided or controversial to say the least. Here, for example:

The huge psychological gap between “almost zero” and “zero” is why micropayments failed. It’s why Google doesn’t show up on your credit card. It’s why modern Web companies don’t charge their users anything. And it’s why Yahoo gives away disk drive space. The question of infinite storage was not if but when. The winners made their stuff free first.

This is completely wrong. Micropayments failed not due to a “psychological gap” in the perception of value, but due to the lack of an enabling technical infrastructure that supported a transparent and easy model that would not scare or irritate consumers. Case in point, the mobile content and downloads market that has been fueled by carrier-provided “micropayments platforms” (term applied very loosely here). Automatic payments of small values to get access to content, games or applications have been used successfully in mobile for ages now.

You might argue that the absence of such platform on the web is a Good Thing, because their presence in the moble world means carriers get too powerful and get to dictate everything, and you are probably right. But their absence is not caused by some psychological gap.

Another thing that bothered me was, right after he goes through his “taxonomy of free”, he questions Milton Friedman’s maxim “there’s no such thing as free lunch”.

“But Friedman was wrong in two ways. First, a free lunch doesn’t necessarily mean the food is being given away or that you’ll pay for it later — it could just mean someone else is picking up the tab. Second, in the digital realm, as we’ve seen, the main feedstocks of the information economy — storage, processing power, and bandwidth — are getting cheaper by the day. Two of the main scarcity functions of traditional economics — the marginal costs of manufacturing and distribution — are rushing headlong to zip. It’s as if the restaurant suddenly didn’t have to pay any food or labor costs for that lunch.

First, Friedman’s free lunch (or universal lack thereof :-) ) means exactly that: someone always has to picks up the tab. In the realm of public spending, which is where this maxim applies (though I am not 100% sure that Friedman coined this sentence), the taxpayer always pays for someone else who’s getting the free lunch through subsidies, tax breaks, pensions or whatever mechanism.

If you go through his “taxonomy of free”, every single model means someone else is picking up the tab. Be it the premium subscriber, advertiser or the consumer himself (by purchasing another product that subsidize the free lunch or by exchanging free labor in return for content). The two cases where free is really free, “gift economy” and “zero marginal cost”, people are motivated by altruism, exposure, fame, etc. and though they are an important motivators for big trends like Wikipedia, Open Source, free alternative music, I fail to see the business model there.

Second, though the operational costs of storage, processing power, bandwidth are dropping dramatically, that is not exactly true of the costs of R&D, end-user support, software licensing, and many other costs that do not scale so well. And even when we talk about bandwidth, these costs are SMALL, not ZERO, and they can pile up fast. Do you remember right before Google bought YouTube when there was speculation on the tech blogs that their bandwidth bill ran at more than one million dollars a month? That’s before they had any viable business model (other than being acquired by Google).

There is definitely a trend here, but the example of the restaurant that doesn’t have to pay for food or labor costs is naïve to say the least. And naïvité is the main problem of the article, though it doesn’t take away from its good points. Go read it, it’s free.

So Daniel, the guy who started this blog with me but never posts here has given me an ultimatum - he wasn’t going to post here again until I changed the template - he hated the one we’ve been using for the past year. So there you have it, Daniel. Satisfied?

(I must say that being a pain in the ass is not the only reason Daniel is not writing here -he is writing a book, so probably this “writing for free” thing has lost its glamour for him. I’ll let him ellaborate more on the book when he gets around to posting here, which should be any time now, I hope)

So, new layout, My twitter widget on the left there, a little about us section on the right, I guess it’s getting better. Now let’s crank up some content, shall we?

Russell Beattie posts about the cost of SMS for mobile applications and how nobody has created a feasible business model around free SMS yet. The ones who tried have burnt through piles of money while people exploited the system to send spam or just jumped through many hoops just to send free peer-to-peer messages. The example he mentions rings a bell from my time working with SMS-based communities:

a segment of the users began using Mippin as a free P2P messaging service despite the inconveniences of doing so. This actually generated over 95% of messages through Mippin.

People will go through hell and back to send a free SMS - you would be amazed. Which is my main head scratcher about Twitter: what’s the business model around all those free messages? Some weeks ago there was an article on the New York Times style section about Twitter. The columnist, a mother of three teenagers, describes how she wanted to use it to keep the family always in touch and to make more efficient the SMS communication that already takes place. Twitter is sold as a free group messaging app. What’s the business model there, really? Unless they are cutting revenue sharing deals with operators (I don’t think they are) they are paying those bulk SMS fees and hope a business model (or an acquisition) comes along before the money runs out.

Am I missing something?

Let’s talk a little bit about politics, shall we? I try to avoid it, but I can’t.

We are exposed to several myths (ranging from the religious to the Hollywoodian) in our lifetime, but they normally sneak up on us and it’s really hard to witness the creation of one. That is, until now - at right this moment we are witnessing the birth of a myth right before our eyes, with the Obama-mania that is sweeping America.

This is something I have suspected for quite some time, but it wasn’t really clear to me until I read this article on the New York Times last Monday. It’s terrible journalism, but a fantastic piece from an anthropological perspective - it shows how Obama, the man, has turned into Obama, the myth - way bigger than himself, to the point of summoning Cassandras that go to the press and foresee his demise in the hands of evil men. Though it is not written in the article, you just now that that the logical outcome of his sacrifice is that his blood will wash our away our sins, redeem us and give us eternal life.

If you think I overreact, here are some of the juiciest parts of the article:

(…)In Colorado, two sisters say they pray daily for his safety. In New Mexico, a daughter says she persuaded her mother to still vote for Mr. Obama, even though the mother feared that winning would put him in danger. And at a rally here, a woman expressed worries that a message of hope and change, in addition to his race, made him more vulnerable to violence.

(…)Yet worry they do, with the spring of 1968 (Note: Forty years ago) seared into their memories, when the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated in a span of two months.

(…)Not long ago, his advisers worried that some black voters might not support his candidacy out of a fierce desire to protect him. It was a particular concern in South Carolina, but Mr. Obama said he believed the worry was also rooted in ‘a fear of failure.’

(…)“The national and international profile of Senator Barack Obama gives rise to unique challenges that merit special concern,” Mr. Thompson wrote. “As an African-American who was witness to some of this nation’s most shameful days during the civil rights movement, I know personally that the hatred of some of our fellow citizens can lead to heinous acts of violence. We need only to look to the assassinations of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and 1968 presidential candidate Robert Kennedy (Note: Forty years ago) as examples.”

(…)“Barack scares those of us who think of the possibility of an assassination in a different way,” Mr. Posner said. “He represents so much hope and change. That is exactly what was taken away from us in the 1960s.”

(…)That afternoon, Mr. Obama’s motorcade passed Dealey Plaza and the Texas Book Depository building, where the fatal shot was fired at President Kennedy in 1963. Several campaign aides looked out their windows, silently absorbing the scene.

And the best part of the article is the single bit of what could be called hard evidence and real reporting in the whole piece:

The Secret Service does not discuss details of its protection, including whether Mr. Obama is receiving more protection than Mrs. Clinton.

Which means that there is absolutely no evidence that Obama is under greater danger than the ordinary presidential candidate. And then we come to the creation of a myth - when a man is capable of creating, voluntarily or not, such a powerful reality distortion field around himself, you can be sure this is not an ordinary person, but someone with mythical qualities. Whether he will fullfill the profecies by making the ultimate sacrifice for mankind remains to be seen. But fear not - he’s scheduled to raise from the dead on the third day, ressurected in all his glory and just in time for the swearing-in cerimony.

Toshiba just threw in the towel. Blu-ray is the winner of the format war. Did anyone see that one coming? I certainly didn’t - I expected the format war to drag itself for another year or so before there was a clear winner.

I have a hunch that the decisive market factor behind this was the huge number flat-screen hi-def TVs that are flying off the shelves these days. I have no numbers to back my assumption and I’m too lazy to do a Google search on it, but it looks like everybody and their brother are buying a big LCD screen and prices are dropping quickly.

With a significant number of households owning these TVs, the consumer facing part of the value chain started to feel the pressure to decide for one of the player formats, after all, they are losing revenue here - there’s no better time to shove down a $200 player down someone’s throat than when that someone is already spending $800 on a big-ass TV. Keeping double inventories for different technologies was OK when high definition players were a novelty, but when a market starts to build up it stops being fun and it becomes a real nuisance. And that’s when people like Best Buy or Netflix said “enough is enough” and went the direction the market was heading. The rest is history.

To follow the story, go here to Engadget or here for the AP article.

In other news, the Early Majority Pragmatist in me is getting ready to break the piggy bank and buy himself a PS3. Stay tuned.

P.S.: Question - in a historical perspective, is this victory important enough for Sony to feel vindicated for the Betamax defeat 20+ years ago? In the long run, what will be most discussed? How Sony messed up with Betamax or how Sony nailed it with Blu-ray? That, of course, considering that HD-DVD’s loss is an automatic Blu-ray victory and physical media is not condemned to the garbage bin of history in the next, say, 6 months. Something to think about.

The best pieces of advice I got in my life were from cigar-smoking whisky-drinking israelis sitting by the beach. So based on my experience you can’t go wrong trusting this guy.

Saw this on Marc Andreessen’s blog. I’ll defer to comment as the quote speaks for itself.

Huawei rails at 3Com deal security concerns

The Chinese company participating in the planned buy-out of a US telecoms equipment maker has angrily rounded on US politicians who claim the deal could endanger US national security.

Xu Zhijun, chief marketing officer at Huawei Technologies, told the Financial Times that the concerns expressed by some US lawmakers were “bullshit”.

Fantastic approach to government relations.