Chris Vail's Blog

Mobile blogging

2011-11-07

David Graeber, author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years, points out that the period from 800 BCE to 600 CE was a time of increasing militarism, as armies were created in order to loot the stockpiles of wealth in poorly defended cities. These armies were paid with coinage and supplied by commercial markets, and also promoted slavery. From 600 CE to 1450 CE coinage, markets and slavery disappeared, along with the huge imperial armies of the past. Some numbers illustrate: Alexander the Great marched on Persia with a force of 100,000 armed men. He was stopped by an Indian force of 300,000 armed men. The Roman Empire kept an army of 300,000 legionaries and auxiliaries. In comparison, during the Middle Ages an army of 10,000 was large. The first crusade was 100,000 men, women and children, and ended with an army of 10,000 holding Jerusalem against an army of 20,000 Moslems.

Starting in the 16th Century, gold from the New World flowed through Europe to China. Armies and markets and slavery got bigger. The Spanish Armada was supposed to facilitate the invasion of England with an army of 55,000 men. Napoleon invaded Russia with an army of 450,000 men. Except the West abolished slavery by the end of the 19th Century. Unless you want to count wage slavery as slavery.

Graeber sees Nixon going off the gold standard as the end of the age he starts in 1450. But has anything changed because of that? I think Nixon opening up China was more significant, and China's pegging its currency to the dollar compensated for the dollar's floating. The US ended the draft and adopted the volunteer army, but still outlasted the Red Army of the Soviet Union. It now appears that the US will hand its empire over to China, which does not look especially liberal politically. Currency, markets and military still rule.

Graeber recommends debt forgivveness with a year of Jubilee, such as was practiced in Mesopotamia before 800 BCE. This made sense in Mesopotamia because disaffected farmers could leave to join up with political rivals and come back to attack the city that indebted them. Debt forgiveness was cheaper than revenge. Where will today's disaffected go? What army can they join, to make debt forgiveness appear the cheaper option?


2011-11-01

In 1987 there was a stock market crash, which resulted in emergency actions by the Federal Reserve. There followed tepid growth and mild recession, and then deregulation (under Clinton) which spurred a stock market bubble and crash, followed by the subprime bubble and crash. That is, the problems which caused the 1987 crash have never been resolved, only deferred to become increasingly severe. OWS expresses the frustration that these problems are still not being resolved. It has been 20 years of willful blindness by the leadership of the West, while the Soviet Union was overthrown, China became an economic power, and the US had to start cutting back on its global influence (aka "Arab Spring").

Will resolving these problems mean the decline of the West, or will not resolving them mean that?


2011-06-24
Authority fails
Because the internet is
A chaos dragon.

2011-04-22
Playing sudoku
Like troubleshooting network:
Guessing means failure.

2011-04-05
An article in the NYT suggested that Microsoft's new smart phone could erode the iPhone's market share, by competing for the high end market. Certainly the customers for each (Winphone or iPhone) don't care about technology for the sake of technology. Or about paying too much for it. In fact, that seems to be their main objective, flaunting their wasting of money, rather like the watches that they buy.

2011-03-18
There has been some news about Microsoft making a deal with Nokia to make Windows phones. These include rumors that Nokia will also develop a tablet device based on Linux. I suspect these rumors are merely the symptoms of people at Nokia trying to save the jobs of software engineers.

2011-01-10
I finally installed my Android app on my new Android tablet. Now I see why Google was saying Android 2.2 was not optimal for tablets. So, my next step is to update my SDK and repackage the app, then see how the app looks on both smart phone and tablet.

2010-12-21

I finally got my 7 inch, wifi only, Android tablet (under $200, from Sears). It is a monster screen compared to my smart phones. It wants an SD card; my first project with it will be to put an Android apk file on an SD card and see if the SAM3.5 application on the tablet installs the apk file.

I have also signed up on getjar.com. The Android Market has a license server that I will need to integrate with my app, but that is restricted to Android devices that run the Android Market app, and not all Android devices run the Android Market app. Thus getjar.com.

I also need to make a youtube video of the Dan Cope Gallery. Hopefully I can display it on the tablet and shoot it with the Nexus One. Google has taken some pains to integrate youtube with smart phones.


2010-11-13
From our new Chinese overlords: "The serious defects in the U. S. economic development and management model will lead to the long-term recession of its national economy, fundamentally lowering the national solvency." That sums up our situation in a nutshell. Welcome to the 21st Century, where the best capitalists are the Chinese Communist Party.

2010-08-30
I have created the initial versions of the server side of my next two apps. I have also created my first client on my N900 (yay!). The Android clients will be straightforward and just take time. One will be free and go on getjar.com; the other will be paid and go on the Android market.

Next comes the video...

2010-08-13
Oracle has sued Google for infringement of Oracle's Java patents. This is what happens when you use proprietary languages. Of course, it is not a coincidence that Oracle is suing now, since Android has become the best selling smart phone in the US. Google will fight this, which puts a cloud over Android. OTOH, Oracle is a 20th Century company, while Google is a 21st Century company. Oracle may have bitten the wrong dog this time.

2010-08-02
I have downloaded my first "test" app for my N900. There are a lot of apps in the test repository. It would be very easy to spend all my free time doin QA, not my favorite! So what am I testing? The pidgin plugin for Office Communicator.

2010-07-13
I have updated my Nexus One smart phone to Android 2.2. The update did not have any problems. Now I can see some youtube videos (like "surprised kitty") on my smart phone. I also solved my fat-finger problem with the capacitive touch screen; I use my extended pinky (ala Dr. Evil) to type on the virtual keyboard. That makes it usable.

2010-07-08
I just received a copy of Forman and Danforth's Putting Metaclasses to Work. It is supposed to explain the next level of software devrlopment (beyond object orientation). More to the point, this book informed the development of Python, my favorite programming language. The material is graduate level. Still, every software engineer should know this.

2010-07-05
The killer app for the smart phone is the app store.

2010-06-26
So, you have to hold the new iPhone with your right hand, or risk losing your antenna gain. Too bad, non-southpaws! You must navigate the web left-handed! Typical of Steve "my way or the highway" Jobs.

2010-05-30
I have finally published my first Android app, and updated my web site accordingly. The artist I collaborated with has more ideas involving video. I also have my own project that I want to develop. I thought I would be starved for ideas, but now it looks like this could become another career.

2010-05-26
Nokia has announced their latest software upgrade for the N900 "mobile computer" (no longer a smart phone?). At the end of their announcement, they admit that the new Meego OS is not going to be deployed on the N900 for the foreseeable future. Is Red Hat that much worse than Debian? This means I have no incentive to start Meego development; meanwhile, Android is being deployed on new products that are all potential targets for my first app.

2010-05-23
I have finally got my first Android app running (in the emulator). Now I need to polish the user interface and figure out the packaging. It should be ready for the Android market by month end.

2010-05-18
My recent experience using Eclipse with the Android plugin to develop a Java app for the Android smart phone brought home to me that, regardless of the tools we use, at the end of the day a compiler is going to read a bunch of text files and turn them into code. How 20th Century! We really need a new paradigm that maps human ideas to machine circuits, one that gets away from text, or even words.

2010-05-15
I recently bought a Nexus One from Google's online store (as part of my initiation into the dark side). Now Google has announced that they will close their online store. It seems they weren't prepared to offer customer service. Since I never needed their customer service, I don't have any complaints about it. But perhaps Google has been too easily successful, and they don't understand how to work within constraints.

2010-05-01
I have joined the dark side and become an Android developer. Now I need to get an Android handset, so I can browse the Android market. Fortunately, Google sells an unlocked Nexus One suitable for T-Mobile, so I can use my existing SIM card.

2010-03-19
I finally figured out that Earthlink has moved my web site as part of an upgrade (RTF email), and now my blogging is working again.

2010-02-08
After reading an article in Business Week on the problems AT&T is having providing bandwidth to smart phones, including limiting services to smart phones and opposing network neutrality, I have decided to switch my wireless service to T-Mobile. T-Mobile offers unlimited data for $25 per month with no contract. It is true that sometimes there is not enough bandwidth to stream the Writer's Almanac podcast, but downloading the podcast is no big deal. I have been happy trying out T-Mobile's data service this past month, and I have been unhappy when AT&T terminates my phone calls after 20 minutes. T-Mobile treats me better.

2010-02-06
It turns out my login issue was a "numlock" problem. When I took my XP box to the PC Repair shop, the tech remembered that he had previously modified the registry key for numlock, and that afterwards he had to press numlock a couple of times before entering the password. Once I have retrieved my work from this box, I need to decide what to do with it. Do I wipe it and install Windows 7? Or do I keep it as is and keep it off the internet? It makes a nice DVD player...

2010-02-05
I have learned the hard way how Microsoft has locked in Internet Explorer to Windows. They have done this by requiring you get OS updates (including security patches) only via IE. This means you have to have IE installed on your Windows box, making you a target for 90% of the viruses on the internet. If you uninstall IE, you are still vulnerable to viruses using flash to infect your box. I'm afraid I lost my XP box to such a virus, and it is starting to look like my only alternative is to erase the disk and install Windows 7.

2010-02-04
OK, now I can blog from my smart phone. This is something I have wanted to do for years. It was my motivation for buying a Nokia N770 internet tablet, which got me hooked on Nokia technology. Now I look down my nose at iPhones and Androids. Does Android run Python in an xterm? Maybe someone has ported Jython to the Android platform, so you can use Python syntax to write Java...

2010-02-03
Test blog from my smart phone.

2009-12-25
I got myself a Nokia N900 smart phone. Unfortunately, the user interface was designed by Finns...

2009-03-19
Alta Vista has made me "lose my religion." When the video search category disappeared, I finally had had enough and started looking for alternatives. Good old wikipedia put me on to Cuil, and lo and behold! Stuff I haven't been able find for years in Alta Vista is now showing up in the same old places I never book marked because I relied upon the search engine to find it. I will still use Alta Vista to find articles in wikipedia, but for exploring the web, it is Cuil, for now.

2011-11-07

David Graeber, author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years, points out that the period from 800 BCE to 600 CE was a time of increasing militarism, as armies were created in order to loot the stockpiles of wealth in poorly defended cities. These armies were paid with coinage and supplied by commercial markets, and also promoted slavery. From 600 CE to 1450 CE coinage, markets and slavery disappeared, along with the huge imperial armies of the past. Some numbers illustrate: Alexander the Great marched on Persia with a force of 100,000 armed men. He was stopped by an Indian force of 300,000 armed men. The Roman Empire kept an army of 300,000 legionaries and auxiliaries. In comparison, during the Middle Ages an army of 10,000 was large. The first crusade was 100,000 men, women and children, and ended with an army of 10,000 holding Jerusalem against an army of 20,000 Moslems.

Starting in the 16th Century, gold from the New World flowed through Europe to China. Armies and markets and slavery got bigger. The Spanish Armada was supposed to facilitate the invasion of England with an army of 55,000 men. Napoleon invaded Russia with an army of 450,000 men. Except the West abolished slavery by the end of the 19th Century. Unless you want to count wage slavery as slavery.

Graeber sees Nixon going off the gold standard as the end of the age he starts in 1450. But has anything changed because of that? I think Nixon opening up China was more significant, and China's pegging its currency to the dollar compensated for the dollar's floating. The US ended the draft and adopted the volunteer army, but still outlasted the Red Army of the Soviet Union. It now appears that the US will hand its empire over to China, which does not look especially liberal politically. Currency, markets and military still rule.

Graeber recommends debt forgivveness with a year of Jubilee, such as was practiced in Mesopotamia before 800 BCE. This made sense in Mesopotamia because disaffected farmers could leave to join up with political rivals and come back to attack the city that indebted them. Debt forgiveness was cheaper than revenge. Where will today's disaffected go? What army can they join, to make debt forgiveness appear the cheaper option?


2011-11-01

In 1987 there was a stock market crash, which resulted in emergency actions by the Federal Reserve. There followed tepid growth and mild recession, and then deregulation (under Clinton) which spurred a stock market bubble and crash, followed by the subprime bubble and crash. That is, the problems which caused the 1987 crash have never been resolved, only deferred to become increasingly severe. OWS expresses the frustration that these problems are still not being resolved. It has been 20 years of willful blindness by the leadership of the West, while the Soviet Union was overthrown, China became an economic power, and the US had to start cutting back on its global influence (aka "Arab Spring").

Will resolving these problems mean the decline of the West, or will not resolving them mean that?


2011-06-24
Authority fails
Because the internet is
A chaos dragon.

2011-04-22
Playing sudoku
Like troubleshooting network:
Guessing means failure.

2011-04-05
An article in the NYT suggested that Microsoft's new smart phone could erode the iPhone's market share, by competing for the high end market. Certainly the customers for each (Winphone or iPhone) don't care about technology for the sake of technology. Or about paying too much for it. In fact, that seems to be their main objective, flaunting their wasting of money, rather like the watches that they buy.

2011-03-18
There has been some news about Microsoft making a deal with Nokia to make Windows phones. These include rumors that Nokia will also develop a tablet device based on Linux. I suspect these rumors are merely the symptoms of people at Nokia trying to save the jobs of software engineers.

2011-01-10
I finally installed my Android app on my new Android tablet. Now I see why Google was saying Android 2.2 was not optimal for tablets. So, my next step is to update my SDK and repackage the app, then see how the app looks on both smart phone and tablet.

2010-12-21

I finally got my 7 inch, wifi only, Android tablet (under $200, from Sears). It is a monster screen compared to my smart phones. It wants an SD card; my first project with it will be to put an Android apk file on an SD card and see if the SAM3.5 application on the tablet installs the apk file.

I have also signed up on getjar.com. The Android Market has a license server that I will need to integrate with my app, but that is restricted to Android devices that run the Android Market app, and not all Android devices run the Android Market app. Thus getjar.com.

I also need to make a youtube video of the Dan Cope Gallery. Hopefully I can display it on the tablet and shoot it with the Nexus One. Google has taken some pains to integrate youtube with smart phones.


2010-11-13
From our new Chinese overlords: "The serious defects in the U. S. economic development and management model will lead to the long-term recession of its national economy, fundamentally lowering the national solvency." That sums up our situation in a nutshell. Welcome to the 21st Century, where the best capitalists are the Chinese Communist Party.

2010-08-30
I have created the initial versions of the server side of my next two apps. I have also created my first client on my N900 (yay!). The Android clients will be straightforward and just take time. One will be free and go on getjar.com; the other will be paid and go on the Android market.

Next comes the video...

2010-08-13
Oracle has sued Google for infringement of Oracle's Java patents. This is what happens when you use proprietary languages. Of course, it is not a coincidence that Oracle is suing now, since Android has become the best selling smart phone in the US. Google will fight this, which puts a cloud over Android. OTOH, Oracle is a 20th Century company, while Google is a 21st Century company. Oracle may have bitten the wrong dog this time.

2010-08-02
I have downloaded my first "test" app for my N900. There are a lot of apps in the test repository. It would be very easy to spend all my free time doin QA, not my favorite! So what am I testing? The pidgin plugin for Office Communicator.

2010-07-13
I have updated my Nexus One smart phone to Android 2.2. The update did not have any problems. Now I can see some youtube videos (like "surprised kitty") on my smart phone. I also solved my fat-finger problem with the capacitive touch screen; I use my extended pinky (ala Dr. Evil) to type on the virtual keyboard. That makes it usable.

2010-07-08
I just received a copy of Forman and Danforth's Putting Metaclasses to Work. It is supposed to explain the next level of software devrlopment (beyond object orientation). More to the point, this book informed the development of Python, my favorite programming language. The material is graduate level. Still, every software engineer should know this.

2010-07-05
The killer app for the smart phone is the app store.

2010-06-26
So, you have to hold the new iPhone with your right hand, or risk losing your antenna gain. Too bad, non-southpaws! You must navigate the web left-handed! Typical of Steve "my way or the highway" Jobs.

2010-05-30
I have finally published my first Android app, and updated my web site accordingly. The artist I collaborated with has more ideas involving video. I also have my own project that I want to develop. I thought I would be starved for ideas, but now it looks like this could become another career.

2010-05-26
Nokia has announced their latest software upgrade for the N900 "mobile computer" (no longer a smart phone?). At the end of their announcement, they admit that the new Meego OS is not going to be deployed on the N900 for the foreseeable future. Is Red Hat that much worse than Debian? This means I have no incentive to start Meego development; meanwhile, Android is being deployed on new products that are all potential targets for my first app.

2010-05-23
I have finally got my first Android app running (in the emulator). Now I need to polish the user interface and figure out the packaging. It should be ready for the Android market by month end.

2010-05-18
My recent experience using Eclipse with the Android plugin to develop a Java app for the Android smart phone brought home to me that, regardless of the tools we use, at the end of the day a compiler is going to read a bunch of text files and turn them into code. How 20th Century! We really need a new paradigm that maps human ideas to machine circuits, one that gets away from text, or even words.

2010-05-15
I recently bought a Nexus One from Google's online store (as part of my initiation into the dark side). Now Google has announced that they will close their online store. It seems they weren't prepared to offer customer service. Since I never needed their customer service, I don't have any complaints about it. But perhaps Google has been too easily successful, and they don't understand how to work within constraints.

2010-05-01
I have joined the dark side and become an Android developer. Now I need to get an Android handset, so I can browse the Android market. Fortunately, Google sells an unlocked Nexus One suitable for T-Mobile, so I can use my existing SIM card.

2010-03-19
I finally figured out that Earthlink has moved my web site as part of an upgrade (RTF email), and now my blogging is working again.

2010-02-08
After reading an article in Business Week on the problems AT&T is having providing bandwidth to smart phones, including limiting services to smart phones and opposing network neutrality, I have decided to switch my wireless service to T-Mobile. T-Mobile offers unlimited data for $25 per month with no contract. It is true that sometimes there is not enough bandwidth to stream the Writer's Almanac podcast, but downloading the podcast is no big deal. I have been happy trying out T-Mobile's data service this past month, and I have been unhappy when AT&T terminates my phone calls after 20 minutes. T-Mobile treats me better.

2010-02-06
It turns out my login issue was a "numlock" problem. When I took my XP box to the PC Repair shop, the tech remembered that he had previously modified the registry key for numlock, and that afterwards he had to press numlock a couple of times before entering the password. Once I have retrieved my work from this box, I need to decide what to do with it. Do I wipe it and install Windows 7? Or do I keep it as is and keep it off the internet? It makes a nice DVD player...

2010-02-05
I have learned the hard way how Microsoft has locked in Internet Explorer to Windows. They have done this by requiring you get OS updates (including security patches) only via IE. This means you have to have IE installed on your Windows box, making you a target for 90% of the viruses on the internet. If you uninstall IE, you are still vulnerable to viruses using flash to infect your box. I'm afraid I lost my XP box to such a virus, and it is starting to look like my only alternative is to erase the disk and install Windows 7.

2010-02-04
OK, now I can blog from my smart phone. This is something I have wanted to do for years. It was my motivation for buying a Nokia N770 internet tablet, which got me hooked on Nokia technology. Now I look down my nose at iPhones and Androids. Does Android run Python in an xterm? Maybe someone has ported Jython to the Android platform, so you can use Python syntax to write Java...

2010-02-03
Test blog from my smart phone.

2009-12-25
I got myself a Nokia N900 smart phone. Unfortunately, the user interface was designed by Finns...

2009-03-19
Alta Vista has made me "lose my religion." When the video search category disappeared, I finally had had enough and started looking for alternatives. Good old wikipedia put me on to Cuil, and lo and behold! Stuff I haven't been able find for years in Alta Vista is now showing up in the same old places I never book marked because I relied upon the search engine to find it. I will still use Alta Vista to find articles in wikipedia, but for exploring the web, it is Cuil, for now.