Something that was bugging me about Android was the touch screen keyboard. I found it impossible to type anything with acceptable speed or accuracy. Unless you have child-sized fingertips, you’re relying on the dictionary guessing to figure out what word you mean, which is crap at the best of times, and useless if you’re not typing dictionary words. A side issue – I’ve noticed that if you *do* have child-sized fingers, it’s hard to get the touch screen to register at all, when you want it to. I don’t have child-sized fingers, of course, but my children do. When they want to press things, they have to hold their finger on the screen for a while, and sometimes it registers, sometimes it doesn’t. On the other hand, if they approach from behind and stab at the screen while you’re in the middle of doing something, it invariably registers straight away.

Anyway, before I got side-tracked by children’s fingers, I was going to say: But then I discovered the SlideType Keyboard!

The way this works (see the screenshot) is that pressing the buttons gives you the numbers, while pressing and sliding a short distance in the appropriate direction gives you the letters. Pressing Alt switches you to and from a second layout with symbols instead of letters. Additionally, you can ‘long-press’ a letter key to get a pop-up menu of accented versions of those letters. This is a really good idea, and I found I could type reasonably quickly with it straight away, and with perfect accuracy. The one thing lacking is the ability to customise the layout. In particular, I didn’t want to have to switch to the symbol layout and back just to get an apostrophe. This is simple requirement was where the yak shaving started…

Getting the source code was easy enough. Setting up Eclipse and the Android SDK was painful, but no big deal. Unfortunately though, I don’t get on with IDEs in general, and particularly not Eclipse. Although I got the minor changes I wanted done in 5 minutes, I spent the next 55 wrestling with bugs in Eclipse before I realised the error of my ways.

At this point, I ditched Eclipse and used Ant to build it instead. This was much better, and now I could easily build my modified keyboard application and run it in the emulator. To run it on a real device though, the package needs signing. After more messing about (generate key, sign package, ‘zipalign’ package), I had that side of things sorted out and had something I could, in theory, install on my phone.

The sensible way to do this is using ‘adb’, the Android Debug Bridge. In theory, you plug the phone into the USB port, type ‘adb install mypackage.apk’ and you’re done. In practice, it didn’t work due to various bugs and incompatibilities. For reference, using Karmic and a Samsung device, you have to do the following:

1. Create /etc/udev/rules.d/99-android.rules, with a+rx permissions, with the following line in it: SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="04e8", SYMLINK+="android_adb", MODE=”0666″.
2. Restart udev – sudo service restart udev
3. Build a non-broken version of adb – see the bug

Note that if the device is not a Samsung, you need to change the 04e8 to the appropriate vendor ID, which you can see as the first 4 digits of the device ID if you run lsusb with the device plugged in. You probably also don’t need the adb bug fix in that case.

Finally, two hours later, I have quote and an apostrophe on the ‘1′ button on the keyboard. I don’t know many year’s worth of typing I’ll have to do on it for the time saved to come close to those two hours, but at least I now have a decent Android development environment set up.

Stuart tracked down an Android application called On Air, which he seems mostly happy with. I gave it a quick whirl, and didn’t like it at all. Clearly we’re all different. What didn’t I like?

• It generates a random ‘password’ (actually a 4-digit number) every time you run it. This makes automating anything impossible.
• The user interface. It’s horrible. To me, that is. I guess some people like a great big arty fart drawing of a button the size of the screen, with the actually user interface relegated to a tiny dot in the corner. Usable software trumps software that (to some) looks nice. Especially when the giant button picture is taking up storage space, which is not infinite.
• You can only get to /sdcard, not the rest of the filesystem.
• It’s closed source. All my gripes, and Stuart’s minor ones, are simple five minute fixes. But not if the developer deliberately makes it impossible. Very annoying.

A bit of a washout then? No – the gem was the idea, not the software, and I found something much better. SwiFTP is GPL licensed, already includes all the required functionality that On Air was lacking, and has a sane user interface. Clearly the developer spent his ‘drawing a great big stupid button’ time on useful things instead.

A few things I will be using this for:

• Automatically transferring data to the phone from a queue – e.g. the latest Rathole Radio, for listening to in the car.
• Automatically backing up data from the phone.
• Automatically retrieving specific things, e.g. GPS tracks, photos, and putting them in the appropriate database.
• All kinds of other geeky and anal things beginning with the word ‘automatically’ that I haven’t thought of yet.

So, thanks to Stuart for sharing the idea, and thanks to Dave Revell for sharing the software.

Even at the best of times, there’s nothing more embarrassing than a politician trying to “communicate with the young”. But Ed Balls managed to take this one step further by engaging a bunch of manufactured gangsters to spearhead a ‘beat cyber-bullying’ campaign, as depicted in the artist’s impression opposite. The fake hoodlum standing alongside bully-boy Balls is Dappy, of N-Dubz, who shortly afterwards stole the mobile number of a Radio 1 listener who sent in a less than complimentary message about him, and used it to harass her, culminating in sending her a death threat. You couldn’t make this stuff up.

Behind the farce though, lurk more serious problems. How did we reach this sorry state where, in order to try and convince school children to stop bullying each other, it seems like a good idea to enlist the help of dubious role models who make a living pretending to be (or in this case actually being) illiterate thugs?

Balls, in his role as Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, presides over the state machinery that’s entrusted by most (and imposed by force on others, if he gets his way) with the education of their children. This is carried out in institutions (that’s the schools part) that tend to breed a culture bullying and violence – hence the need for this kind of campaign, and for metal detectors. Children are sectioned off into groups, all the same age, and left to formulate their own social structure, culture and rules, Lord of the Flies style, while lone adults known as teachers attempt to impose order – a task made more difficult as Ed and co relentlessly continue to turn the teaching profession into a job of administering tests, ticking boxes and imparting snippets of politically correct knowledge meticulously detailed by Westminster bureaucrats. Any other adults are suspected paedophiles, only allowed within a mile of children if armed with a “CRB check” – proof they haven’t been caught yet, and a nice little money-spinner for various parties too.

In the meantime, ever-younger children are force-fed sex, violence and “gangsters are cool” by the media and the music industry, and while the government Ed is a prominent member of meets the demands of this industry by imposing ill-conceived legislation to prop up it’s failing 20th century business model, Ed himself acknowledges the failure of the whole system by standing there next to one of these self-styled gangsters in a desperate and doomed attempt to get a message across to the inmates of his failing schools.

So there’s the schools part. What about children and families? Hang on a minute, aren’t they the same thing – aren’t children part of families? You might think so, but Balls is very keen of late on positioning himself as an arbitrator between parents and their children, as if he knows best and has some kind of right to say so. Phrases like “striking a balance between the rights of parents and the rights of children” crop up frequently in the rhetoric of Ed and his cronies. What? But in Ed’s world, families are not to be trusted with their children – they need to be monitored and inspected to be sure they’re not beating and starving them, or worse still teaching them things not in keeping with the politically-motivated dumbed-down drivel proscribed by the DCSF. Do you think it’s an accident that Schools comes in between Children and Families in the department’s title? I’m not so sure.

The modus operandi is the same as what we’re seeing with the dubious spectre of terrorism that seems to have us cowering, snivelling and slipping further into a police state for our own protection. In the past, when there was a real threat in the form of the IRA, this kind of thing would have properly been seen as giving in to the terrorists, letting them win. But not when it suits the agenda of a government obsessed with controlling everything and everyone. Likewise with children, one-off incidents are whipped up into a media frenzy and used to justify all manner of state intrusion where it doesn’t belong, all in the name of protection.

I think the Dappygate fiasco perfectly sums up this government and the nasty culture they’ve nurtured – characterised by bullying and incompetence, and like the majority of people in this country I can’t wait to see the back of them.

In winter, walks in daylight seemed impossible, what with it getting dark mid-afternoon. But that’s ridiculous, I realised. The vast majority of the time I work from home, so it should be no problem to get out in daylight. On the other hand, the only real downside of working from home is that even though you tend to start earlier and finish later than the office-folk, they still tend to assume you’re sitting there all that time. Even putting the computer aside for lunch can mean a stream of irate messages when you return.

I think you probably make these expectations yourself though. I rarely do actually put the computer aside for lunch, preferring to drop crumbs in the keyboard instead, so I suppose it’s reasonable to be surprised when someone who’s pretty much always there is not there. However, with that in mind I’m going to make a new expectation which is that I’ll be taking a long walk, along with my trusty hound dog, in the middle of the day from now on. (Albeit with telephone, email and instant messaging in my pocket).

Of course, it’s easy to say you’re going to do something every day – harder to actually keep doing it. One really busy day leads into a really busy week and before you know it you’ve forgotten about the whole thing. So I decided to keep track of the walks on here, like this: today and yesterday. Will that help, or is it just an excuse to play with technology? Only time will tell.

I wish to make a formal complaint about this article regarding the tragic death of Khyra Ishaq.

Despite the fact that Ishaq was NOT electively home educated, but simply removed from school (technically a truant) for the vast majority of the period in question, you have for some reason chosen to devote a large portion of the article to providing a platform for the discredited Graham Badman to attempt to link this case to his shoddy review of home education.

Home education is entirely irrelevant to this case. The measures the Government hopes to put in place regarding home education following Badman’s recommendations would not have affected the outcome here. You say in the article that Badman says “children could still be ‘hidden’ from the system. ” The children involved in this case, the majority of whom were attending school anyway, were not hidden from the system at all. They were known to be at risk by several parties, all of whom failed to act.

By allowing Graham Badman (and indirectly the Government) to use this tragic case to make unrelated points about legislation which is currently being fiercely contested in parliament, you have shown the BBC, or at least the writer of the piece, to be biased and not impartial.

In relation to this, I specifically draw your attention to section 5.13 of the broadcasting code, which reads “Broadcasters should not give undue prominence to the views and opinions of particular persons or bodies on matters of political or industrial controversy and matters relating to current public policy in all the programmes included in any service (listed above) taken as a whole.”

I suggest that this is exactly what has happened here.

Update: For some real insight into this issue, try reading Gerald Warner or Renegade Parent.

Connecting to Facebook’s server is as simple as adding a new account in your favourite client, with chat.facebook.com as the server and your Facebook username as the user. Obviously then, they’re only contactable from the outside world by people who have an account within the walled garden already, but it’s a start. Anyway, it’s handy for people like me who have an account there but, for reasons of taste, common sense, downright dislike of having adverts stuck in their face, etc., don’t ever log in to it.

My first impressions are that their implementation is solid and well thought out. This is to be expected – despite any other criticisms I might have, Facebook have always struck me as a very technically capable organisation. Only one small problem is apparent to me so far, and it’s this: Say Bob is on the Facebook web site and Alice is using her XMPP client. Bob is browsing through the messages on the ‘I Dress Up As A Goat and Eat My Wife’s Underwear’ page, something he does regularly but (uncharacteristically, for a Facebook user) doesn’t want to tell the world about. At this point, Alice uses XMPP to send Bob a link to something on her web site. Bob clicks the link, and blam – his goat/underwear fetish is revealed in Alice’s server logs as the HTTP Referrer.

While I’m thinking of Facebook, something I’ve mentioned elsewhere but is worth repeating, is in relation to this story. Read the story, then look at the two images – in particular the copyright notice on those images. Do Facebook really claim copyright on those images, or have the Daily Mail got it wrong? Either way, it’s definitely something that should be making you go hmmmmm.

But what if that someone is a member of the House of Lords, commenting in public on an issue she is shortly to be charged with scrutinising legislation for? In that case it’s no longer forgiveable, it’s a shameful display of downright ignorance.

The comments on that post do a fine job of rebutting Baroness Deech’s ill-informed assumptions, so I won’t waste my time doing that. One thing did amuse me though. She made these comments in the context of talking about a visit to a “Girls’ School”. The idea that an appropriate way to gain the social skills needed for the real world would be spending all day in the company of only children of the exact same age, while being told to sit down and shut up, is questionable enough in itself. When you also add the ‘only children of the same gender’ restriction it becomes totally preposterous.

I’m thankful Baroness Deech will not be descending on my children to lecture them on how great the Lords are, particularly the “expertise” part. Perhaps though, she was not referring to herself when she talked of expertise, because there are Lords who make the effort to understand before they speak. Just not this one.

This is the third list of books I’ve been reading. (One and two). I’m not sure what made me start doing this. Even writing a couple of sometimes sarcastic comments about each book can be hard work. It’s worth doing though, I reckon. To be accurate, the first two of these should have really been included in the last batch, but I forgot about them so they’re here instead. Anyway, without any further ado, here is the list:

Victory – Joseph Conrad: I really enjoyed this, particularly all the very interesting and utterly dislikeable characters. I’ll definitely be reading more of Joseph Conrad’s books.

Time and Tide – Edna O’Brian: I remember the quality of this being a refreshing change after whichever crap I’d read before it, but for some reason by about half way through I’d lost track of who was who and what was supposed to be going on, so I cast it aside. Probably my fault, not the book’s.

Angels and Insects – A. S. Byatt: Two novellas in one book. The first, Morpho Eugenia, is superb. The second, The Conjugal Agent, has it’s moments, but is ultimately pretty tedious.

Doors Open – Ian Rankin: I bought this at the supermarket because the supply of books of unknown origin lying around the house had run out. I tend to like Ian Rankin’s stuff, and also everything else Morrison’s had to offer looked absolutely awful. Literary masterpiece, it was not. Good read and entertaining, it was.

Consider Phlebas – Iain M Banks: I bought this one off eBay. I love anything by Iain M Banks, or at least what I’ve read so far, so obviously I loved this.

Matter – Iain M Banks: I actually bought this one from a real bookshop. It lived up to expectations, which is to say it was just as great as all his other work, except for Look To Windward which is so good it would be nearly impossible to match.

Lord Jim – Joseph Conrad: After enjoying Victory so much, I expected great things of Lord Jim, but I was a bit disappointed with it. Apart from being heavy going, writing an entire lengthy novel in speech marks is a very strange thing to do. I remember several “someone said that someone said” kind of situations where it ended up nested three levels deep in the pesky things. As I programmer, I ought to be able to cope with that kind of thing better than most, but I just found it annoying.

Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad: Another speech marks extravaganza. This time there was an occasional oasis of non-in-speech-marks narrative which, although it usually lasted only a sentence or two, was a blessed relief. That aside, I found the whole thing rather vague and tedious, despite Conrad’s excellent writing.

Tom Hodgkinson – How To Be Idle: There’s a lot I could have said about this, but I decided to stay in bed an for extra couple of hours and ponder the patterns on the ceiling instead.

Sleepers of Mars – John Wyndham: Five stories by John Wyndham. Some better than others. A recurring theme in his work is that some new technology can be invented, but then the inventor destroy their work (or someone else can) and it’s gone. This is preposterous. Pretty much all new technology is but an incremental improvement on the previous thing. If I ‘invent’ something new, then destroy all my work, it makes no difference because umpteen other people will have invented the same thing at the same time, or soon will. This is one of several reasons I dislike the whole idea of patents. Software patents, in particular, are completely ridiculous. This has nothing to do with the book whatsoever though.

Permutation City – Greg Egan: Very refreshing, in fact unprecedented I think, for me to read a book about technology and software where the author actually has a clue what he’s talking about. An excellent book. (Andy, thanks for the loan – I’ve added this to the pile of borrowed books I’m supposed to be giving back to you!)

Equinox – Michael White: This was a great book, and it was also a pleasant surprise to find that Isaac Newton was a major character in it. A surprise because I didn’t read the back of the book. I never read the back of books – I think it spoils the story to have it summarised before you’ve even started. You shouldn’t have read this really.

If you’re unlucky you’ll have heard of unboxing videos, where someone laboriously unpacks their latest gadget purchase, appreciatively describing each piece of cardboard and polystyrene in excruciating detail, and videoing the whole thing for the ‘benefit’ of the world. Frequently the gadget in question seems to be made by Apple, because who else but a purchaser of Apple products would do such a thing? Anyway, not to be outdone, here is my re-boxing post and photograph.

The star of the show is a Samsung i7500 Galaxy, which I suppose you would describe as an Android-based smartphone. In other words it’s like an iPhone but better, not least because you can run any software you want on it without having to ask Steve Jobs for permission. Unfortunately, this particular specimen is under the impression that a ghostly hand is pressing the buttons down the right-hand side of the phone at random intervals, especially when it’s making a noise. This has many annoying side effects, not least that every incoming call gets cut off and sent to voicemail – fair enough, since that’s my most common response to an incoming call. I’d rather have the choice though, so it’s gone back in the box and O2 are (hopefully) bringing a replacement today.

Apart from this irritating behaviour, first impressions are good. I’ve had it about a week and the only real complaint I have is the battery life. Poor battery life is a common feature of all these new-fangled phones though, and turning things off when you’re not using them (especially GPS and background sync) makes things a lot better.

The only other issue is that it ships with Android 1.5, and Samsung are currently saying they won’t be shipping a 2.0 upgrade for this model. Right now I’m not that bothered, but I know I will be later. If they stick to that, then like many others I won’t touch another Samsung product as long as I live. The option is always there to re-flash the whole thing with an unofficial Android 2 build anyway.

Applications

All the data I have on the phone is synced online to various places, so replacing it is no great hassle. The only thing I’ll have to do is reinstall the various applications I’ve installed so far, a job that will take less than five minutes, especially as I’ve made this list:

• ConnectBot – SSH client. Using this with a touchscreen keyboard is sheer hell – it took me over 5 minutes to type ‘tail /var/log/rabbitmq/rabbit.log’, for example. Handy for emergencies only.
• GPS Speedometer – it’s a speedometer. Not all that useful in itself, but it’s the only application I’ve found so far that holds the GPS open permanently. Without it, if you’re using Google Maps and switch away to another application, you can end up losing the GPS lock and have to wait for it to get it again when you switch back.
• Compass (Snaptic) – does what it says on the tin.
• GPSTest – good for figuring out what’s going on with the GPS, what satellites it’s using, what accuracy you’re getting, etc. Probably unnecessary, but my 2001-vintage handheld GPS shows all this by default when it’s powering up, so I feel lost without it.
• Google Sky Map – brilliant – point it at the sky and it tells you what you’re looking at. I normally use Stellarium for this, but a PC doesn’t know which direction you’re looking, and you have to tell it where you are. Plus, you rarely have one in the pocket of your jeans.
• Ultimate Stopwatch and Timer – everyone needs a stop watch, don’t they?
• Mustard – StatusNet-compatible microblogging client.
• Bubble – not so many people need a spirit level, but it comes in handy.
• Barcode Scanner – I haven’t (yet) found a genuine use for this, but maybe I will one day.

Why? Because in the interests of global harmony, code sharing, encouraging of contributions, etc, all my Python projects will now follow the PEP 8 guidelines. This doesn’t affect my contributions to other projects, since they’re always in the style required by that project (consistency always trumps religion), but it does mean that others can use and contribute to my stuff more easily, and hopefully in time I’ll get so used to seeing 1 + 1 = 2 that it won’t look stupid any more.

So, on the subject of PEP 8, a couple of tips I figured out along the way:

Fixing Indentation

There are a few ways to handle this, but the simplest and most reliable seems to be an example that’s part of the Python distribution itself. On Debian-based systems, this script is packaged separately in python-examples. Re-indenting a file to PEP 8 standards in that environment can be done like this:

python /usr/share/doc/python2.6/examples/Tools/scripts/reindent.py yourfile.py

Checking Code

There’s a handy utility, aptly named pep8, for checking code against the PEP 8 guidelines. The simplest way to install it is:

easy_install pep8

After that, you can just run

pep8 *.py

to get a list of your crimes against style and readability. Note that, in the current release at least, it doesn’t seem to do a perfect job. For example, this is flagged as an error:

    value = func(-x, -y)

It doesn’t like that fact that there are no spaces around the unary minus, which I think is wrong. Moreover, it seems to be impossible to write that code in a way that it does like – if you put spaces, it complains about that instead.