Samsung Galaxy S / Android review

On Monday I recieved my shiny new Samsung Galaxy S mobile phone. I’ve been putting off getting a smart phone for quite some years now as I never felt there was anything worth spending money on, and after some experience with my ipod touch I was put off getting an iphone. Anyway, I felt like writing my thoughts on the device now I’ve had it a week.

The hardware

My first impressions were that it does indeed look a lot like the iphone 3g, and I found I was trying to press the standby button which wasn’t there quite often, as well as picking it up and holding it upside down. As other reviews have pointed out, the handset does feel very light – this was a bit strange at first as I’m used to my wife’s iphone 3gs which weighs considerably more.

When I turned it on, I was genuinely impressed by how bright and sharp the display was – it easily outdoes the iphone 3g/3gs screen (I think the iphone 4 screen is probably better though.)

One thing a lot of reviews will skip over is how well the phone makes phone calls – I had no problems making a call from the phone, however because the phone’s speaker is on the back it’s sometimes hard to hear it ring if it’s on a flat surface.. bit of a weird issue but an issue non the less.

The sensitivity of the touch screen was reassuring. One reason why I’ve put off getting an android phone until now is because I’ve seen videos on the internet of slower devices and been really put off by the lag you can see when scrolling/pinching to zoom etc.. fortunately this isn’t a problem here. I did notice however that the accuracy of where you place your finger to begin with and then start to scroll is slightly off.. not a problem but I don’t think that happens on the iphone.

Inside, there is a SIM card slot (obviously) and an empty micro sd slot for adding more memory. My SGS came with 16MB of internal memory, which is strangely referred to as an SD card from within Android – my guess is that it does indeed use an internal sd card somewhere as it was probably a cheap way of manufacturing the thing.

Speaking of cheapness, the phone does feel a tad cheap compared to the iphone, although compared to any other device I’d say it’s fairly well built (certainly a lot better than my dell laptop for example!)

The GPS sensor on the phone seemed fairly good although it wasn’t so great when I went under some trees and when I began a walk to my local town to test it. There are known issues with the GPS which will be fixed next month (September) with a software update.

The compass and tilt sensors seem fairly standard. The compass only seems to be accurate if the phone is being held up rather than laid flat, but I guess that’s normal.

The front facing camera was fairly crappy, but I haven’t really found a use for it yet.. hopefully Skype will be released properly for Android soon so I can make use of it.

The software

Unfortunately, Samsung have decided to install their own custom software on the phone which is not easily removed (as far as I know you have to root the device.) This is apparent straight away as there’s a fairly naff locked screen thing and there’s a samsung task killer widget on one of your home screens. One of the nice things about android is you can customise it quite a bit so removing that widget and all the crappy samsung items from your home screens is easy enough.

I got this phone with version 2.1 of the Android OS also called Eclair, which is a fairly modern release although the most recent is 2.2 – Froyo which is due to be released for the SGS next month. One of the first things that struck me about the OS was how different it felt from the iphone operating systems (including iOS4.) Even though the home screen that the SGS uses is blatantly set up to mimic the iPhone’s, it’s still very different and there was certainly a bit of a learning curve to using it.

The first thing you notice is how there are more menus and options than on the iphone, which at first was a little bit strange, but now seems pretty logical. Rather than apps having a back button, there’s a physical button on the phone (a touch sensitive one,) along with a menu button which brings up a context menu much like right clicking something in windows. Having a back button is great, it’s certainly something I think Android has over the iPhone.

Another big feature of Android is the fact it does real multi tasking unlike the iPhone. This feature is certainly cool and useful, but requires some thought on the users part. I think this is the real deal breaker for whether someone will prefer Android to the iphone or not as some (bad) programs like to use up lots of CPU time when they’re in the background and this can slow things down and make stuff laggy. At first I was killing apps off left right and centre, but after doing a bit of a search on google I found that perhaps this isn’t the best idea.. and I think they’re right.. it’s basically working the same as your computer does by keeping apps resident in the memory it means if you ‘load’ them again or switch back this will be instant rather than having to load the app back of the internal storage. It’s quite complicated to explain, and for this reason alone I think anyone used to the iphone’s way of doing things will get pissed off with this until they ‘get it.’

Anyway, the apps from google seem very good, perhaps with the exception of google listen which seems to have a very laggy interface – which is surprising. I won’t go into any individual apps as there’s a lot of good/fun ones I’ve been playing around with and I don’t want to spend too long writing this.

All in all I’m very happy with the handset, I get fairly decent battery life out of fairly heavy (but careful) usage – perhaps just under 2 days. I’ll probably make some additions and corrections to this post over the weekend.

Ubuntu Lucid (10.04) on Dell Studio 1555

Ok, so I decided to natively install Ubuntu 10.04 on my Studio 1555.. fairly impressed.. almost everything works out the box which is a bit annoying.

The only issue I’ve had is that the included proprietary ATI driver fails when you try to use suspend, however this is apparently easily circumvented by using the most recent driver from the ATI site (it was a bug with their driver.)

Using the open source driver results in poor power management, so I’d advise against doing that.

Trac quick start on Debian

Trac is pretty easy to set up on Debian, here’s a mini guide of what I did to get it working nice and quick. You’ll probably want to configure users etc afterwards, but this should be enough to get going.

Install:

apt-get install trac libapache2-mod-wsgi


Initiate the trac environment:

trac-admin /var/www/srdev/trac/ initenv


Set permissions:

chown -R www-data /var/www/srdev/trac/


Install the wsgi script and web resources. The first argument before ‘deploy’ should match the install environment (the path above.) The second argument following ‘deploy’ can probably go anywhere, but I just shoved it in the trac dir.


trac-admin /var/www/srdev/trac/ deploy /var/www/srdev/trac/www/


Next, we need to tell apache how to call the wsgi script, we do this using an alias. You can use / if you just want it to be in the same dir as your virtualhost, but in my case I wanted trac to be in a sub directory of the site (www.mysite.com/trac.) Add this to your virtual host (/etc/apache2/sites-enabled/whatever.)

The directory directive specifies some permissions for the script.

WSGIScriptAlias /trac /var/www/srdev/trac/www/cgi-bin/trac.wsgi
<Directory /var/www/srdev/trac/www/cgi-bin/trac.wsgi>
WSGIApplicationGroup %{GLOBAL}
Order deny,allow
Allow from all
&lt/Directory>


Finally, enable the wsgi module, and then restart apache. Now it *should* work

a2enmod wsgi
/etc/init.d/apache2 restart


What’s going on

I’ve recently moved john-hunt.com again, from Australia to Texas in the states. The reason for this is my web host here in Australia was crap and the server kept going down (among other things.) They weren’t that terrible (hence I won’t mention them), but not worth the hassle.

Anyway, hopefully this year john-hunt.com will undergo a bit of a transformation.

Converting SVG to png (with alpha channel)

Recently discovered this while creating some web graphics in inkscape:

http://studio.imagemagick.org/pipermail/magick-users/2007-August/020001.html

convert -density 100 -background None [filename].svg -compress none -depth 16 [filename].png

Really quite handy seeing as my version of inkscape loses the alpha channel when exporting.

Schöfferhofer Hefeweizen

Today’s beer, Schöfferhofer Hefeweizen is another German beer (there seems to be a few of these around at the moment.)

I drank this wheatbeer from a 500ml bottle. Apparently the fermentation is finished in the bottle.

Surprising at first, before the carbonation ruins it. I also suspect this beer is best drank a few degrees warmer than fridge temp.

Schöfferhofer Hefeweizen certainly isn’t that easy to categorise, the flavour feels like it’s hidden in there somewhere but won’t come out. Dissapointing really as it could have been pretty good.

Apparently this beer won a gold medal! Obviously I have no idea what I’m talking about.

Not a great review, but then not a beer that really stood out to me. 5/10 – Not foul by any means, but meh.

Fürstenberg

I thought it was about time I started reviewing some beer, at least as a reference for myself when I’m next out shopping for beer. In time I’ll start to do this properly, but for now it’s just a quick summary.

Today’s beer is Fürstenberg a 5.3% lager from Germany.

Approx. $18 for 6 330ml bottles from my local store. This is a german beer, and tastes very much like the beer we had at the world cup in Germany in 2006, so it brings back font memories for me. The first thing I’d note about Fürstenberg is that it goes down extremley well, it doesn’t seem too carbonated and there’s no bitterness to it at all, faily refreshing although not very sharp. This beer is lacking in flavour a bit, but then again it’s the kind of beer that isn’t meant to have a lot of flavour, it’s a real drinking beer – so I’m now off to drink the other 5!

I’ll hopefully revisit this review once I gain more experience and write some proper reviews. But for now, as a personal reference I’ll give this beer a solid 7/10 – it’s a good beer, but lacks anything special. Certainly better than most of the beer I seem to drink.

MySQL 5 and old clients (like php4)

Warning: mysql_connect(): Client does not support authentication protocol requested by server; consider upgrading MySQL client in /blah/somepage.php on line 123

The reason for this warning is because PHP4 can’t communicate with a MySQL5 server unless it’s using old passwords (set by using the OLD_PASSWORD() function below.)

There are two simple ways to fix this. The first would be to upgrade your version of php. Unless you *really* need php4 (or below?!) upgrade! I’m not sure php4 is supported any more and should be considered a security risk. If you can’t upgrade, just do this in your database:

update mysql.user set password=OLD_PASSWORD('thepassword') where user = 'theusername';
and:
flush privileges;

This should do the trick. Be warned, if you issue any GRANT statements after this you will have to update mysql.user again.

Auto_increment fun!

Discovered some fun things in MySQL today..

Set the variable @id to 0:
SET @id = 0;

Update the column id to be id + 1 – this will re-index your id column in one fell swoop. Very nice:
UPDATE tblname SET id = (@id := @id + 1);

Set the first value for an auto_increment column:
ALTER TABLE tblname AUTO_INCREMENT = 196;
(this won’t work if there are rows with a higher value already in the table)

All in all, a few nice bits and pieces for cleaning up your tables.

Ableton Live 7.3 under Wine

Amazingly, I’ve managed to get Ableton Live to work properly under Wine.. installation was a breeze, but getting it to decode MP3s properly was a head scratcher.

When I dragged an mp3 over into Ableton live, it would clip all over the place, even in the waveform which tipped me off that this wasn’t a hardware or emulation issue of some kind. Anyway, after faffing around with ffdshow and stuff, I finally found the answer:

http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=16226 the summary says:

Install Apple iTunes and change msacm.winemp3=winemp3.acm to msacm.winemp3=QuickTime.qts to fix mp3 issue.

Now, I tried to install iTunes 8, but that was a lost cause, so I got iTunes 7 here:

http://www.pcauthority.com.au/Download/59665,apple-itunes-7.aspx

Installed that, then edited ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system.ini and changed the above line. However this still didn’t work. What I needed to do was copy QuickTime.qts from it’s directory to system32:
cp ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/QuickTime/QTSystem/QuickTime.qts ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32/

Then it worked.. keep in mind that previously imported samples that are glitchy will still be glitchy as they need to be re-analysed, probably best to just delete and re-import them.

Oh, and make sure you’re using the latest version of Wine.