The New Windows?

A while ago I saw an article online titled "Is Android the New Windows?"  At the time I didn't feel the comparison was fair, but it did raise some good points. Android was definitely surging toward the kind of market dominance that Windows has maintained. At one time Microsoft dominated 98% of the world's desktop PCs, and Android is already at around 80% of tablets and phones, depending on which set of statistics you care to adopt.

That success becomes a target on the back, inviting the global hacker community to invest heavily in attacking the dominant ecosystem. Rafts of malware and the need to run antiviral software are the result. In spite of its "sandboxing" features, Android devices have proved to be vulnerable.

But Android was an underdog, and who doesn't love those? It started out yapping around the heels of Apple's iPhone/iPad juggernaut and ended up as top dog. It ran on Linux at its core, sharing a code base with everything else in the world from set-top boxes and routers up to the fastest supercomputers -- even the Large Hadron Collider. And Android itself was at least sorta/kinda open source, with a vibrantly free marketplace for apps.

But recent experience has left me -- even as a fan -- with a discouraged feeling. I'm on my second Android phone, and I've previously raved about how much better it is than the first one. But it's end-of-contract time now, and the HTC Vivid is showing its age.

My first phone never had an Android upgrade at all, due to the rediculously convoluted steps required back then. (Download an installer program -- Windows only -- then connect your phone to the PC and use the software to push the update onto it, hoping not to brick it in the process.) It just wasn't worth it.

In contrast, the Vivid started out with an instant over-the-air upgrade to 4.0 that was painless and darn near automatic. But it turns out that was the last one it ever received. The next update never ran to completion, with the result that it has a permanent "Continue Update" link when you check the software status, but clicking the link does nothing.

Tech support? Start by resetting your phone to factory defaults. This is like the cure-all for Windows woes: wipe your hard drive, reinstall the OS, reinstall your apps, reinstall your data (you did back it up, right?). Leaving software updates in the hands of the carriers (AKA "the phone company") is like contracting with Radio Shack to do your Windows migrations for you. They are just not the right folks for the job.

So, OK, no more upgrades until I get a new phone. Not a problem, right? I can still run all the apps I like and update them due to a pretty good level of backward compatibility. But earlier versions of Android contained a nagging flaw that gets progressively worse over time. The flash memory in which the OS and all its apps and data live becomes ever more fragmented, producing sluggish performance.

How annoying is it? A widget that used to turn wifi on and off with a tap becomes unresponsive. You tap again, then find it just responded to the first tap, so you've now reversed what you wanted to do. Click the phone icon and wait, and wait for it to open. Tap a contact and wait to see if it will dial. Sometimes it won't! This is a phone, right? And so on.

If any of this sounds familiar then you may have had the experience of living with a Windows XP or even Windows 98 box with its frequent disk-thrashing and need to be "defragged." I find my phone issues are lessened if I simply reboot from time to time. Deja vu all over again. And due to the failed update, it insists on "optimizing" my 112 apps every time it starts up. 1, 2, 3 ... 112.

So is there any hope for us, or are we poor downtrodden consumers doomed to be stuck with inferior software support? Well, thankfully, software evolves. The newer versions of Android claim to have mitigated the fragmentation issue and to focus more on smooth user interaction. I know it's true because I also use a Nexus 7 tablet running version 4.3. If only my phone had been able to go along for the ride.

And of course there's always the hope that comes in the unopened box of a new device. This year's latest model, bigger, better, faster, smoother than ever before! Oh, and more secure, too. Talk about deja vu ...

[Next time ... In the sweet spot.]

Phone Envy, Phase Two

If you have any doubts that the pace of technological change is still accelerating, just upgrade your phone ...

Less than two years ago I first joined the smart-phone world (as I recorded here). The gizmo that accomplished this was an HTC Aria running Android 2.2. It was no iPhone, but it had the advantage of a 100% subsidized price from AT&T at a time when a reconditioned iPhone was going for $99. In other words, it was free.

This little jewel became my constant companion, singing and reading to me as I made my way to and from work each day, answering my questions, finding my way, sending my emails and messages, uploading the photos I took with its camera. Its weight in my shirt pocket became as familiar as the feel of the wallet on my hip.

Then about 8 months ago it slipped out of its comfy perch and landed face down on a pebble on a concrete floor. Don't talk to me about Gorilla Glass. If you hit it right, it breaks. It's GLASS! Miraculously, the pieces of the screen held together, and with a plastic protector over it the thing still worked almost perfectly -- which was just as well, because replacing this free phone before my 2 year contract was up would have cost me $350. Ouch!

Since then I've been peeking once in awhile to see how close I am to the end of the contract and what phones I might be able to get as a replacement. Last week the time came, and the result -- while not as revolutionary as the whole smart-phone concept -- is another leap in performance and usability.

The case in point is an HTC Vivid (certified reconditioned), which came out in the last quarter of 2011, and was available at the same price point (0.00) as the old Aria. Of course, out of gratitude for this free gift I spent $52 for two pieces of plastic. One is called a "case" and the other is a "screen protector."

While you might argue that the screens should come with protection, and that a case around the case should not be necessary, these items qualify as "personalization" and give you the opportunity to customize the look and feel of your mass produced device. Needless to say, these purchases also subsidize the "free" phone, along with the $480 I will spend over the next two years for the required data plan that comes along with it -- which of course is on top of the monthly phone charges.

But how can I complain? Just look at the difference between the old and new phones:

Speed: My old processor poked along at 800Mhz with a single core. The new phone has a Qualcomm Snapdragon dual core. Twice as good, right? No, actually more like three times as fast because the Snapdragon cooks at 1.2Ghz.

Space: With only 256 megs of RAM, 512 megs of ROM, and a dinky 2 gigabyte SD card, my old phone was cramped. I quickly ran out of space for apps, and the SD card could hold only about a dozen albums from my vast music collection. The new Vivid has 1 gig of RAM and 16 gigs of onboard storage, or about 4x the memory and 8x the storage even before I add an optional SD card, which can increase it by up to 32 gigs more. I can still recall paying $160 back in the 1990's for a whopping 10 gig hard drive to add to my PC. The cost per gig of the thumbnail-sized SD card is now about $1, and this phone will fly loop the loops around that old desktop computer.

Size: First a 2G network connection, then 3G, now 4G -- faster, yes. More power consumptive, yes, that too, but not so much. The real power hog on the new beast is the screen. According to the Vivid's own confession in its statistics, the screen uses over 60% of the power, at least the way I use it. But at 4.5" it sure is easier on the eyes than the old one which was less than 3". At 540x960 it's bigger than an iPhone, though not quite as high res. The iPhone claims 326ppi while the Vivid is about 245ppi -- but after all, 300ppi is good enough for laser printing, so what do you want? With my eyes I can't see the dots anyhow.

Video: Speaking of the screen, it's suddenly big enough to make watching videos interesting, so I've added Netflix and Ted Talks to my list of apps. And while my old camera was 5 megapixels, the new one has dual cameras, 8 megs rear and 2 megs front -- so necessary for those Skype video calls. (Another SciFi dream comes true. Back in the 1960's comic-strip cop Dick Tracy traded in his old 2-Way Wrist Radio for a new 2-Way Wrist TV. That happened because radio was no longer fantastic enough.)

Audio: And speaking of media, the Vivid comes with Beats audio -- which as it turns out is only a marginal improvement in sound quality. As far as I can tell it's just a kind of equalizer setting that you can't even adjust. (That, and a way to sell really expensive fashion-statement ear buds.) As soon as I get around to it I'll be looking for a new media player with a more complete equalizer that I can adjust for different kinds of music. But I guess after investing $300 million in Beats, HTC is pretty much obligated to include it with all their products.

Android: Which brings us to the operating system itself. Online specs seemed to indicate this phone ran Android 2.3 but could be upgraded. I felt a little dubious about that after my experience with the old Aria. That came with version 2.2, but when an upgrade was offered by AT&T (via email and text message) it involved downloading an update package to a PC, then installing an installer program (Windows only), connecting the phone to the PC with a USB cable, being prepared to lose everything on the phone if it didn't succeed, and praying. After reading the instructions I said to hell with it and continued using the old version for the rest of the phone's short (see above) life.

The first pleasant surprise was that the Vivid arrived with Android 3 (perhaps as a result of being "reconditioned"). And then as soon as it woke up it immediately offered to install an "important security update" right over the air. Still not completely trusting this process, I figured the time to try it was before I wasted hours tweaking the settings and installing all my apps. But nothing could have been simpler. Truly, a COMPLETE IDIOT could do it. Just touch the button and wait for the process to complete. At the end the phone reboots, and voila -- not version 3.1 but 4.0 instead!

One Ring to Rule Them All: Yes, one major version per year since 2010. And the newest one is really pretty nice, very smooth animations, easier screen manipulations, and improved media experience. One footnote here -- HTC and Android ran into patent problems with Apple over the use of the "slide to unlock" feature, so they came up with an alternative where you "pull a ring" instead. Which kind of demonstrates how small the nits are being legally picked. But I like the ring. It also offers shortcuts to the most likely destinations, such as Phone (after all, underneath all the bells and whistles it is still a phone). The moral of this story is that if someone sues you for patent infringement the best thing to do is to invent something better.

The Future: If such progress continues I expect that in 2 years I will be able to upgrade to a quad-core processor running at 2.5+ Ghz, with 4 gigs of RAM, 250 gigs of storage, Android 6.0, a high-def 3D screen with optional goggles and surround-sound headpiece, and further wonders we can only imagine. And the price? Still zero.

From the Annals of Cyber Monday

When it's too late to take the stitch in time that would have saved nine ...

I've had better Mondays. Coming off the Thanksgiving weekend I spent my re-entry day dealing with two critical problems where I work. I started thinking that instead of "Cyber Monday" it should be called "Blue Monday."

The first issue was that one of our printers, an expensive laser photo-imaging device, was down. Indications were that one or more of its lasers were not working (it has red, green, and blue ones). There are also three computers driving this beast. The first prepares images to be printed, the second is dedicated to feeding them to the printer because it's a delicate operation that requires tight synchronization. Neither of those systems had any problems, but the one that sends the images lit up with a warning screen about the bad lasers.

A call to tech support for the printer reminded me to check the third computer, which is tucked away inside the machine and normally not used by the operator. Unlike the first two computers, which run HP Unix, this shy unit runs a command-line-only version of ... you'll never guess ... Windows 98! Which kind of shows how old the whole thing is. Anyway, this computer has a job to do in controlling the lasers, and it was simply powered off.

But why? It's supposed to come on when you start the machine. Turned out the little button battery that keeps the CMOS memory alive when it's powered down had finally run out of juice. (That's where all the BIOS settings are saved.) After all, it was at least 10 years old. Apparently when that computer failed to boot up properly the system just shut it down. Tech support coached me on how to put the BIOS settings in manually so we could get up and running, and we sent out for a replacement battery. For want of a $6 part the whole thing was dead. Problem solved.

In the middle of all this the second problem came up. One of our Mac users couldn't get on the network. I couldn't find any obvious reason. Then a Windows user came to report that he had the same problem -- in fact "the whole network" was down. Well, I knew that wasn't true because I'd just been on the network at my desk. And the Mac user confirmed that at least some of the other Macs were not having any problem. While I was looking into the network settings on the Windows machine it suddenly started working again. So, maybe a temporary glitch? But no, the other computers were still having problems.

We now had a select group of Windows PCs, Macs, and even one Unix machine exhibiting the connection problem, and scattered between our two buildings. It couldn't be a network switch, because most likely that would have affected all the computers connected to it, but I restarted the switches anyway. No help. We tried our wireless access point and could connect to it, but could not access the Internet, so it seemed to be having the same problem -- it couldn't connect to the network gateway to the Internet. It seemed like it had to be something on the server, but the server appeared to be working normally and to have Internet access itself. Time to call in our friendly IT support company which does all the heavy lifting on our server issues.

Meanwhile I noticed that all the machines having the problem had similarly misconfigured IP addresses. Our network uses 10.1.1.x addresses, and these all had 192.168.3.x addresses. I tried manually configuring one of them with a correct address. It still didn't work, but now we were thinking about DHCP.

[If you want to know, that stands for Dynamic Host Control Protocol, which is simply a procedure by which a server can control the addresses of the computers on its network. When each computer starts up it shouts down the hallway, "Hey, I'd like to join the network -- what address can I use?" Everyone else on the network ignores this request, but the server shouts back something like "10.1.1.203."]

The first thing the support tech told me was that the DHCP service was not running on the server. Aha! that made sense. Only those computers that had recently rebooted, or whose addresses had to be renewed, were having connection issues, because they couldn't get an address on the network. All those that had been left on over the weekend were still running normally. So, just as simple as starting the DHCP service up again, right?

Not really. Because we didn't know what had caused it to shut down. And we didn't know where those bogus IP addresses were coming from. Normally if the computer asks for an address and can't get one, then it simply has no address; it doesn't substitute a different one. The network engineer deduced that something else on the network -- either an unauthorized device or a piece of malware -- was acting as a DHCP server. If that was the case, then it would cause the Windows server to stop its own DHCP service to avoid conflicts. And it would explain where all those similar IP addresses were coming from.

We had not added any new equipment, so the only thing to do was try to find out which machine was the culprit. Time to play detective. The engineer began unplugging one system at a time from the patch panel in the server room. After each one he tried to connect to the network with his iPad. As soon as he was unable to get an address, he knew he had unplugged the offending device. The answer was port 18 on the patch panel. Using our sketchy documentation of our wiring plan we located the guilty party.

If your prejudices are like mine, you probably think that either someone had plugged in their own router somewhere, or else one of the Windows machines had gotten a virus. But surprise -- it was a Mac Pro workstation.

So now we knew where and what, but not how. Why would one of the Macs suddenly decide to start acting as a DHCP server? Consulted by phone, a Mac guru identified the problem by that "3" in the IP address, which is not commonly used. It's an address range used by the Internet connection sharing service on the Mac, by means of which one computer can share its network access with a group of other computers, and which works by acting as a DHCP server.

But why would this service suddenly be switched on? We questioned the users -- had they made any changes, had network problems that they tried to solve? No, but, now that we mentioned it, the only unusual thing about that Mac was that over the weekend it had been moved from one desk to another, so it was plugged into a different port on the wall. But why should that change anything?

Of course, it shouldn't. But the Mac Pro has two ethernet ports on the back which can be configured differently. Sure enough, the other port did NOT have Internet connection sharing enabled. All that had happened is that when the computer was moved the network cable had been switched to the other port, with all the resulting complications. Normally it would not have been a problem, and everything would have "just worked" as Macs are famous for. But somewhere in the past someone must have configured that other port for some long-forgotten reason, and it had emerged to bite us.

They say you're always supposed to learn from your mistakes, but that implies that you can figure out what your mistakes were. What we learned from this is that the littlest things -- like that bad CMOS battery -- can have far reaching implications. In an organization of any size, where the network must run smoothly, even a small glitch can bring everything to a standstill. In this case, we lost several hours of impaired production time while we tried to find something that should have been apparent as soon as it happened.

If an IT support person -- me, for example -- had moved the Mac instead of one of the users, then the problem still might have come up. After all, there was a 50/50 chance that I might plug into the "wrong" ethernet port, and even if I were careful about testing the connection the problem might not have been noticable on that computer because it was the one causing the problem. But at least I would have known that this was the last thing that had changed on the network, and I could have started looking there. I might have just disconnected it, and when that solved the problem we could have left it disconnected until we had a chance to get down to the source of the problem. Instead, since I was working in the dark, we had to take the long way around to the solution.

What else could we have done? Well, if time travel was an option, I would suggest going back to when that second ethernet port was configured to support some external device. Then we could document what was done, and why. We might even label the port as being dedicated to a specific purpose in the hopes this might prevent someone in the far future from trying to use it to connect to the network.

The moral, I guess, is that the future arrives sooner than we think, and the past -- in which all mistakes happen -- is right now.

Phone Envy

I'm a victim of inconspicuous consumption ...

If a future historian ever reads this blog the way we read the diary of Samuel Pepys, trying to find out what life was like in the past, one thing that will no doubt prove amusing is the way I can rhapsodize about technologies that will soon become quaint.

This has happened to me before. Way back when I was in college I learned to program on an IBM 360 mainframe computer that ate punch cards, recorded its memories on reels of magnetic tape, and spat out reams of text on multipart green-bar paper. The room-sized beast had a face full of glittering lights and no video screen. It had less computing power than what is contained now in my watch.

Later I worked for a company that used just such a machine to process payroll records. Years afterward I wrote about my experiences there ... the room full of chattering keypunch machines like a nest of machine guns, the "bursting and decollating" room where printed reports were torn apart, the dumpster full of used data cards that were disposed of each night. One comment about this in a writing workshop was, "this might as well be Bartleby, the Scrivener." Just as Melville's quirky clerk, with his job (scrivening?) of copying documents in longhand, has vanished like a covered wagon heading West, so too this "modern" technology quickly passed into history almost while we watched. The next time I saw an IBM 360 it was behind glass in the Computer History Museum in Boston. The curators had recreated a programmer's office, circa 1965, including a scribbled note that said, "Bob - I can get you an hour on the machine between 3 and 4 AM tomorrow."

With all that in mind, let me tell you about my new phone (an HTC Aria running Android). One of the nice things about arriving late to a party like the smart phone revolution is the delightful experience of the "how long has this been going on?" feeling. Of course I've been reading about the developments all along, watching coworkers check their email on their phones, even listen to music and browse the Internet. And my own last two phones have at least had cameras built in and a way to send pictures out into the world. And yes, I even experienced some envy for the first iPhone adopters and their endless fascination with flipping through screens with their bare fingertips.

No more phone envy. My new phone has "apps" (more quaintly known as "applications," a usage of the word that comes from the idea of applying computer power to some task). It doesn't matter to me that the iPhone currently has more of them; there are already more than I can bother to find out about. This number is effectively in the "jillions." And unlike the painful, laborious, and sometimes catastrophic experience of installing software on a desktop computer, apps are designed to plug in like popping a Chiclet in your mouth. I was soon playing with a bubble level, a compass, and a map. The phone knows which way is up, which way is north, and where it is located - which gives it a leg up on many humans.

Naturally it has a camera, both photo and video, now standard equipment on any self respecting phone, as well as the ability to play music, and even a built in FM radio to tie me into NPR. (Hey, Apple - when will you let people play with the deactivated radios in YOUR phones? Oh, never mind - I realize that will not happen until there's a way to make them pay for it.)

But the thing that really brought me up short was pushing the little icon that said "Voice Dialing." A window opened up that said "Listening ..." like the ship computer on Star Trek used to say. I assumed I would have to record the sound of my voice saying a name and then train the phone to identify this with an entry in my address book. But when I said my wife's name a moment later her phone number appeared on screen ready to dial. The phone understood me!

Like I said. The "how long has this been going on" feeling. Last time I paid any attention to voice recognition software it was an expensive application that demanded a desktop computer with plenty of horsepower and didn't work very well even then. Apparently now a phone has all the horsepower needed for this, and it works pretty well. I guess I should have caught on from all the recent conversations I've had with phone answering robots when I call the phone company.

So, for you in the future, to whom Implanted Direct Cerebral Communication (or IDCC) is commonplace, and to whom the very idea of a "phone" is so arcane that it requires explanation, just remember where you came from. And remember too, that even your wonderful toys will someday become laughable.