The Captain’s (B)log

The "Professional" Package

After finally deciding to upgrade my venerable HTC G1 (which I reviewed here initially) that had served me well over the past year and a bit, I decided to go with the Motorola Droid.  It’s not the fastest anymore, and it sure as hell ain’t the prettiest (neither was the G1 — what is it with me and ugly phones?), but it’s the new Android phone for me.

Why the Droid?

Why the Droid?  Well, it’s already been out for about six months or so, and has developed quite the hacking community.  Even my favorite ROM for the G1, the Cyanogenmod, has a version available for it.

It’s easily rooted (mine was rooted in about 24 hours).

It comes stock with a 16GB SD card — very cool.  No need to upgrade this thing right off the bat like there was to the G1 and its pitiful 1GB card.

It has loads of custom kernels for it, some enabling the stock 550MHz chip to be overclocked to 1.3GHz, and even some that run at the stock 550MHz but with a much lower CPU voltage (enabling your battery to last much longer).  This phone isn’t going to be left behind in terms of speed for a while — I’m betting Motorola is even going to issue an update for it one day that will up the speed of the processor just a bit for newer versions of Android.

It has a hardware keyboard — not a very good hardware keyboard, sadly enough, but it’s good enough for things like low-level hacking of the ROM and telnet/ssh/console sessions, which is what I needed it for.

[This is probably my biggest gripe for the Droid -- the hardware keyboard seriously sucks.  The keys are all flat, not spaced apart, and it's honestly quicker to type with the onscreen keyboard, which I find myself doing nearly all of the time.  The G1's hardware keyboard was an absolute dream to type on compared to the Droid.]

It’s received fairly steady Android updates, and now is one of only a few devices running Android 2.1 (including the HTC Incredible and Nexus One), so it’s pretty certain to keep getting updates in the future.  This was one of the biggest problems with the G1 — even though it was once Android’s flagship device, the G1 was made before the “recommended” specs for running an Android device were fleshed out, and thus, not only is HTC not bothering to produce any more updates for it, it physically can’t receive them anyway, due to hardware limitations.

The entire phone, from top to bottom, is supposedly released under open source rules at https://opensource.motorola.com — while this doesn’t benefit me directly, as I don’t spend the time to make my own custom ROM’s and kernels, it will most assuredly help the hacking community in the future when and if Motorola does drop support for the Droid.

And finally, the price!  It’s been out for six months and is now cheap!  Ha ha!    I got the “professional” bundle (as you saw above), including a rapid car charger, car mount, and desk mount, for a wonderful price.

The Unboxing

The Very Tiny Unboxing

Well, there wasn’t much of an unboxing at all, to tell you the truth.  The Droid was packaged in some of the smallest packaging I’ve ever seen — the phone was nearly the size of the box, and took up most of the space.  Other than it, the battery, the tiny wall adapter for recharging, and a single mini-USB cable, that was it!

That’s one small difference between the Droid (and all newer phones, soon) and the G1 — the Droid uses the newer (thought still standard) “mini” USB cable, which is much smaller and flatter than the older “micro” cable.  Make sense?

[It's all because the EU decide a few years ago to make all manufacturers of cell phones in the EU market standardize to one type of cell phone recharger system -- I have to admit, I like it.  No longer will you need give different cell phone chargers for your entire family, if they've got five different types of phones -- on will work.  It reduces waste quite a bit.]

The battery door on the Droid was a bit of a pain to get off, but when I did, the battery snapped into place and I was well on my way to Android 2.1 goodness.

The First Week

What were my impressions of the Moto Droid after my first week?

The Good?  Well, number one, it’s definitely more compact than the G1.  Even though it actually weights a few ounces more (probably because it’s a solid chunk of metal), it still feels lighter, and it’s definitely much, much thinner, even with a hardware keyboard.  It feels solid in the hand, with a good degree of heft.

The battery lasts about as long as you’d think for a smartphone — nightly charging will become a ritual in your house.  Still, not bad — like I’ve said before, I wish I had a laptop with a battery that lasted a full day.

The screen is… well, the screen is out of this world.  The DPI is twice as high as most of the previous crop of LCD screens like the G1, and you can really tell — icons are incredibly clear and distinct, text is very easy to read, and pictures look amazing.  Not as deep as an OLED screen like on the Incredible and the Nexus One, but pretty damn nice, nonetheless.

Software-wise?  Well, one thing that I noticed right away when I needed to install my favorite Android applications is the speed at which they installed — fast as hell.  On my G1, I could install one application at a time; it technically allowed me to install more, but I’d be damned if it didn’t almost freeze up when I tried to do that.  On my Droid, I’m installing three or four apps at once.

The GPS lock-in is much quicker, too — 2-3 seconds instead of nearly 10, and the wifi lock-in, too.

The “multimedia dock” and car mount are also both very cool — somehow, the Droid “knows” that it’s docked in each (don’t ask me how, as even I don’t know), and loads up specific apps that respond to each; the “Car Home” app for the car mount, and the “Desk Clock” app for the multimedia dock.  I’m glad I shelved out the extra money for the official Moto accessories, at least in this respect.

The Bad?  Well, the home screen operations — paging left and right between app screens, launching the app tray — are kinda slow and jerky.  I know, I know — a little thing, but still.  When sat next to an Incredible or a Nexus One, you can really tell.  Even with the Sense UI skin on top of the Incredible, the Incredible is still zippier.

In good company.

Also — the lack of a trackball on the outside of the phone that you can access without opening the hardware keyboard has started to nag me, just a bit.

I like using the software keyboard to type a lot of text, and when I make a mistake and have to put the cursor back to the where it was, merely tapping on the screen can sometimes take a few tries to get the cursor exactly where you want it.  With an external trackball, you could just roll it a bit and get the cursor exactly where you want it (I got quite used to doing this on the G1).

Final Thoughts

I like it.  It’s a good successor to the G1, so much so that I almost wish they had called it the “G2.”  As it was, Google, Verizon, and Motorola put a lot behind the marketing campaign of the original Droid, and it shows — “Droid” has now become a part of most people’s lexicon, insomuch as they at least know the word and know that it stands for a very nice phone (that’s not an iPhone).

I still need to get a nice case and screen protector for it, but all in all, it feels right at home.

I’ve been installing/reinstalling/testing a lot of browsers recently, so I thought I’d provide a little bit of data back to the programming community.

I tested on two different computers — my venerable Dell laptop and my largely MSI-powered gaming PC.

Some thoughts:

• The newest Opera 10 build on Linux does not like the SunSpider benchmark.  Understandably, it’s a benchmark put together by the WebKit browser team, but still — it performed about as bad as I’d suppose Internet Explorer would (were it to run on Linux).  I ran it twice just to make sure, and it was about 10k milliseconds each time.
• Chromium, whether it’s on Windows XP, or the pre-alpha build I’m using on Linux, is pretty damn fast.  Like scary fast.  Though, like I said, it is their own benchmark.
• Seamonkey on Linux is consistently faster than Firefox 3.1b3 on Linux.  I have no idea why, since they’re supposed to be powered by the exact same engine.
• It’s amazing how much faster an older computer (Like my Dell laptop) can feel when you use a browser that’s optimized to render JavaScript faster.  It seriously feels like an entirely different computer.
• I tried running this test in Internet Explorer 6.0 via Wine, on Ubuntu.  I figured it’s not exactly emulation (since Wine Is Not an Emulator and all), but it kept freezing on one of the “base64″ tests, and I got tired of waiting on it and killed the process.  Imagine that.

And now, the benchmark numbers, utilizing the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark (smaller numbers are better, all numbers in thousandths of a second):

Computer #1

Hardware:  Dell Laptop, Pentium 4-M 2.6 GHz, 1.5GB DDR Ram

Software:  Ubuntu 8.04 (x86)

• 10572.4ms:  Opera 10 Alpha, Build 4214
• 8435.8ms:  Flock 2.0.3
• 8171.8ms:  Firefox 3.0.8
• 5243.6ms:  Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 (Shiretoko)
• 4701.4ms:  Seamonkey 2.0 Alpha 3
• 1506.4ms:  Chromium Dev Build

Computer #2

Hardware:  MSI Mainboard, Athlon X2 2.5GHz (Brisbane), 2GB DDR2 RAM

Software:  Windows XP SP3 (x86)

• 6930.8ms:  Internet Explorer 8
• 2097.8ms:  Firefox 3.1 Beta 3
• 952.4ms:  SRWare Iron 2.0 (Chromium)

Well, I’m finished with my Prilosec regiment — just got done with it a week ago.

Taking the pills was a bother, like I mentioned before — you have to take them immediately after waking up (or at least before you eat anything in the morning), and optimally not eat until about an hour afterwards.  Little to say, this was a rule I often ignored.

After 14 days — well, almost;  I forgot one day and had to skip it, but the information I found on the US government’s Medline Plus site told me that it was perfectly fine if you forgot to take a day’s pill.  Either way, after about 14 days I was done.

As far as I can tell, it’s working… the other day, we had a “chili cook-off” at my workplace, and not only did I try every type of chili there (four different bowls), I followed it up by drinking a Coca-cola.

If you’re a heartburn sufferer, you probably winced a little bit at that description.

So, I waited, and… nothing.  Not heartburn, no gas — nothing.

Am I cured?  Do I still need to “take it easy?”  I still will, probably, because of one semi-unrelated thing I discovered during my regiment.

You know those boxes of “Instant Brown Rice” you can buy in stores, under various brand names?  (I just buy the Wal-Mart brand, myself.)  Yeah — my stomach, really, really, really doesn’t like that stuff.  It’s happened several different times now, with several different meals, and it’s the only common denominator — one time the pain kept me up all night.

I guess it’s got something to do with the rice’s natural “quick-cooking-by-absorbing-any-and-all-water” properties.

Wow. Seriously, if you haven’t seen Michael Moore’s movie Sicko, watch it now.

And don’t worry, it’s not some sappy-crappy story about people without health care — Moore says that in the first 5 minutes. Instead, the movie is about people who have health care but had their health care dropped the minute their health care company actually had to pay something out.

He travels to England, France, and Canada and shows how their “socialized medicine” systems work (and work well) — one country I wished he would’ve visited too is Japan. Japan’s the closest a country comes to us economically (read: they’re very, very capitalist there), yet even they seem to have free health care for everyone!

As I understand, Japan has a very good mix of private and public health care, with the only government control being that you have to be offered it by your employer (or if you don’t have an employer, by the government). Why we can’t at least have this kind of system here in America, I don’t know!

The best parts in the movie for me were just the expressions on the faces of the people in other countries when Moore asks them about how much they have to pay for their health care, or how much medicine costs, or where they go to pay their bill after they get out of a hospital — they look at him like he’s from another planet. “Why would someone make you pay if they’re trying to keep you alive?” they seem to ask.

Also, listen closely when they play back the old Oval Office tapes of Nixon — that man was a goddamn monster. He basically just comes out and says, flat out, that the goal is to keep people sick and sad.

If you haven’t visited “Rifftrax”:http://rifftrax.com before, check it out!

It’s the guys from Mystery Science Theater 3000 doing their thing again — they’re not in space, and the two guys who did the voices of Crow and Tom Servo are just playing as themselves, now (trademarks and all that), but let me tell ya; they’re just as funny now as they ever were. They were obviously the writers and well as the actors back on MST3K, and it shows.

How their stuff works now: you get set up at Rifftrax.com, and you buy an MP3 audio track directly from them (they’re usually about 3-4 bucks). Then, you sync it up and play it along while you’re watching the movie (don’t worry, it’s easy) — just play it on anything you want: an MP3 player, your stereo system (Nina and I played it on her laptop).

And, let me tell you… they haven’t lost it, not one bit. I swear to God, I thought my sides were going to split open at times.

I don’t mind paying them the three or four bucks to download it, either — this is the world of “new” media I’ve been telling people about, and I don’t mind helping it out.

It can be free; “go see for yourself”:http://radiohead.com.

“This article”:http://www.rutlandherald.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071015/OPINION03/710150323/1039/OPINION03 sums up what’s happend so far. According to a survey taken of the people who’ve downloaded the new album, about a third paid nothing at all: $0.

Some people make a big deal of that (like Fark’s headline, “A third of the people offered Radiohead what their new album is worth: $0″:http://forums.fark.com/cgi/fark/comments.pl?IDLink=3136034), but they’re missing the big picture — if a third of downloaders got it for free, that means that *the other two thirds paid for it, even when they _could’ve got it for free_*.

According to the survey, many paid more than $20, and the average price was $8 (I paid about $4, myself). Do the math — even with this survey not necessarily representing all people who downloaded the album, that means that at an average price of $8 times 2/3 of a million downloaders (~8*666,000), that’s like…

*5.3 MILLION DOLLARS*.

And that’s money that’s going straight to the band. No middlemen, no greedy record executives to pay, no RIAA cartel to cozy up to — just straight hard cash going to Radiohead so that they can continue to make good music.

What’s the downside of this type of purchasing system again?

Nothing, from what I can see. Everything I’ve ever heard of seen tell me that bands make very little money off of album sales when they go through a major label and an organization like the RIAA — most of the money they make is through performances and band “stuff” (you know, t-shirts, autographs, and the like).

And while $20-25 bucks (what you’ll pay in a store) for a new album is FAR too much if you ask me, paying the same amount to be 10-20 feet from my favorite band whilst screaming my head off along with thousands of other people? Now, _that’s_ worth $20. I’ve paid that amount before to see bands play in a venue (hell, I usually pay twice that), and I’ll continue to do so — but I haven’t paid for an CD in years.

In case you were wondering, I’ve got some other sites that you might be interested in (this is mostly for you-know-who):

*1) http://mdm-adph[dot]blogspot[dot]com*
There’s “http://mdm-adph[dot]blogspot[dot]com” (feel free to replace the [dot]‘s with periods). This is my work blog — I’m not hotlinking it here for obvious reasons (referrers can be tracked, and I’d rather not let my employers pick up on anything personal that I write).

I write about mostly tech-related subjects here, keeping firmly away from the areas of personal life or politics. I know they’re probably logging everywhere I surf to at work, so I make sure and keep this blog clean.

2) “http://threshold-zero.com/blog”:http://threshold-zero.com/blog
This will soon be a new blog of mine, or a place where I’ll put specific types of entries (movie reviews, book reviews, etc.). Really, I just wanted to use the new version of “Movable Type”:http://movabletype.org that was recently released, because it’s finally gone free again.

3) “http://threshold-zero.com”:http://threshold-zero.com
This is probably where I’m going to tie all of my sites into to — I bought this domain name about a year ago, and even though I haven’t done anything with it yet, I’ve grown rather attached to it. (There’s nothing there now, of course!)

4) “http://gallery.macnahanchey.com”:http://gallery.macnahanchey.com

I’m trying to make this into a members-only photo-sharing site for members of my family, but I (and they) have been slow to get together and start putting pictures up. (By the way, if any of you are reading and need help putting some pictures here, feel free to ask for help.)

4) “http://board.macnahanchey.com”:http://board.macnahanchey.com

This is going to be the same kinda thing, just for messages and posts instead of pictures.

And that’s about it!

Over the years, I’ve become quite the connoisseur of rice. Do I have a special liking to rice? No, not so much as I just appreciate being to buy 10 lbs. of food for $3!

You can’t beat it. Rice is the staple food (and for some, the only) of most of the world — this is what most of humanity eats along with breakfast, lunch, and dinner (if they get three meals a day at all).

Me — I just eat it to save money. Why eat more?

*Regular-old White Rice*
Nothin’ fancy about this rice — it’s what your mom used to cook for you. Two cups water, one cup rice, boil, and then simmer for 20 minutes. Doesn’t get much harder than that. If eaten plain (I don’t recommend it), this type of rice is utterly tasteless and has a texture that will bore you to tears.

*Basmati Rice*
Grown in the foothills of the Himalayas, Basmati rice has a naturally fragrant smell — you can really notice the first time you cook a pot. The rice has a slightly longer grain than you might be used to, and when fully cooked is slightly drier as well — this is probably due to the lesser water requirement of Basmati rice (1 ½ cups water to 1 cup rice).

I’ve only ever been able to find it in these big 10 lbs. woven bags with a whole bunch of Pakistani writing on it — a neat touch.

*Jasmine Rice*
The particular brand of Jasmine Rice I bought was from Thailand — Jasmine Rice had a very nice flavor and texture, slightly fragrant but not too much so. Now that I think about it, there wasn’t very much special about Jasmine Rice, except for that it seemed to be of a slightly higher “quality” — I know that’s real subjective, but it was just something about the way it looked, tasted and smelled.

*Botan (Calrose) Rice*
When I first opened this rice’s bag, I instantly noticed a difference — the rice’s grain was very, very small! Seriously, it’s like half the size of a “normal” grain of rice like what you’re used to.

Its requested ratio for cooking was slightly different, too — the bag requested a ratio of 1.5 cups rice to 2 cups water. The rice, when done, was very, very sticky — just how I’d expect from a type of rice used in sushi!

*Saffron Rice*
The mother of all rice — a rice with such a nice natural flavor that you can just eat it plain. It’s rice flavored with a spice known as “saffron”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saffron — whatever the hell Saffron is, I know it’s good!

You can have this rice with a curry or a stir-fry, but just eaten plain it is a dream. It’s not spicy or overpowering, but has such a _rich_ taste that you won’t want to put down your bowl.

“No negotiations with Microsoft in progress — MarkShuttleworth.com”:http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/127

Give ‘em hell, Mark.

I like the way he approaches this from a business standpoint, too, and not just one of “Microsoft Bad — No Deals with Them!”