Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to everyone!

One of these things is not like the others
OR
The mole who wanted to be a penguin

(Taken with the N900).

As someone who most people would probably call a nerd, I do like smartphones. About two years ago I got a Windows Mobile phone (the HTC Herald) and now it’s slowly becoming time to make the switch to a new device. The reason for this post is that the smartphone scene has changed significantly in these past two years and here is my take on it (in reverse order of greatness):

Windows Mobile

• Slow and clunky interface
• Almost no customization
• Most available applications (at least the free ones) are either unusable or you don’t really need them
• Paying for applications is too difficult as there is no centralized shop
• I think if Microsoft doesn’t do a major overhaul here soon Windows Mobile will be dead

Android

• The idea of an Open Source system based on Linux is good
• There seem to be good applications available and there is an easy way to get them
• From what I hear, the interface is alright
• For my taste, there is too much Java
• Google is slowly becoming too ubiquitous and has a pretty tight hold on the platform¹

iPhone

• The interface is obviously great, but it’s customizable
• There are so many applications available and they are easy to get
• It’s a good platform for small developers to earn some money²
• I don’t like Apple’s style of locking down the device
• It’s starting to feel like everyone has an iPhone

Palm Pre

• The interface looks great
• There seems to be good support for Open Source applications
• It’s pretty new
• Come on, writing applications in HTML and Javascript only? And native applications only by trusted third-parties?
• There are rumors that the Pre gathers user information and uploads it to Palm

Nokia N900 & Maemo

• The idea of running Linux on a smartphone is just awesome
• So there’s also very good support for Open Source software
• The device is very powerful (real multi-tasking!), it really is a computer
• The interface looks good and intuitive
• Nokia seems to get the idea that openness is good

To me, the Nokia N900 and Maemo look like the best choice for a smartphone at the moment – if it will ever be released. And no, I won’t wait for the N900 Duke Nukem Forever edition.

I just updated my website:

• The Home page has been changed a little adding links to some social networking sites.
• I added the Games page where I keep a list of professionally developed (and published) games I’ve worked on.

  Currently, there are two games (well, actually three) which I worked on during the last year at SnapDragon Games:

  • J4G – A Girl’s World
  • PONS VokabelBuddy Englisch and PONS VokabelBuddy Französisch

  All were released in October 2009. Check Games for further details.

• I also added my GPG key to the Contact page.
• The design got a little tweaked.

Change is good. (Bullet points are good, too. )

After almost six years since my last major hardware purchase, I recently got a new PC! It was just on time as my old one just started to feel a little sluggish in heavy applications like Eclipse and OpenOffice.org.

New PC

A combination of my birthday present and my job made this configuration possible:

• AMD Phenom II X4 810
• 4 GB DDR3 RAM
• 500 GB hard disk
• Nvidia GeForce GTS 250 1 GB
• obviously a motherboard, case, power supply and DVD writer.

I ordered the whole thing from Atelco. Delivery was very fast. I ordered on a Sunday and got the system by Tuesday, but then the motherboard broke and it took them almost two weeks to replace it.

Now everything is running fine and it’s a good feeling to finally be on par with current technology again. I installed Arch64 on it and currently enjoy Grand Theft Auto IV and Dawn Of War II on a small Windows partition.

It has been seem time since my last post because I was ill, had to do Christmas shopping and was busy with work. I hope I’ll have more time next year.

Here’s my rating for 2008:
Rating:

Merry Christmas to everyone!

A few weeks ago, I decided that my laptop needed a different Linux distribution. It has been running Gentoo Linux for a some years, but I don’t think anymore that Gentoo is the right choice for a laptop because you can’t just install anything when you are on the go. For those who don’t know, Gentoo is a flavor of Linux where you don’t use binares, you compile anything from source. That naturally takes some time and is hard to do when you are running on battery or don’t have much time.

Besides, I also removed Gentoo from my desktop more than a year ago. My new choice of Linux is Arch Linux right now. It works with binary packages (I didn’t know installing software could be that easy! ), is optimized for newer processors (i686) and has a very good package manager.

So, the day before yesterday, I was installing Arch. It was already good on the way when I got the idea to check if the new kernel had built-in support for smart batteries (“SBS”, my laptop has on of those and back in 2004 there was almost no support for them in Linux). I was looking around somewhere in the /sys/ folder and catting some files to see their content. The machine then locked up, I couldn’t do anything except for doing a hard reset. I booted the Arch setup CD another time and from then on the hard disk didn’t work anymore.

There it is, the broken disk, looking so innocent

Fortunately, I had saved my most important files on another computer. I just hadn’t saved some files from the laptop’s Windows partition. There wasn’t a lot of important data, but losing one file was very annoying: My Sacred character. I’m currently playing Sacred with my girlfriend and our characters are already level 34.

To compensate my loss I downloaded an unskilled dwarf of level 30. From there on, it shouldn’t be too hard to get back to 34.

A last word on my SBS battery: With a new hard disk, that set me back 45 € for a 120 GB 2.5″ disk, and Arch completely installed, it’s now working without any problems. I don’t know if I just read the wrong files in /sys/ or if the hard disk was already a little faulty…

Since 2005, I have been playing with the thought of getting back into the blogging business. I had previously published a development log for a project pretty constantly in that year. Even though I have tried a few times to start a new blog, It didn’t really work out.

A few days ago I stumbled upon the term micro-blogging and got interested what such a thing might be. As it turned out it’s a concept of blogging that takes less time and so seems very attractive to me. My dilemma is that I feel my homepage needs a blog to be complete, but I don’t really want to spend hours writing something no one might read.
Apparently, there is something going on called tumblelogging that concentrates on publishing certain types of media (including text) with little or no comment. Rather quick, I came to like this concept and now I’m writing a post that’s conceptually too long for my new tumblelog.

Additonally to the tumblelogging stuff, I like to keep a record what I’m working on. You can find a list of my current projects going to the Projects (what else?) page of my site. I’ll post here when making progress or when I stumble upon interesting things.

Note that I’m using the full-blown blogging software Wordpress instead of some specialized tumblelogging software. I evaluated such software (mainly Chyrp), but there simply were too few plugins. Wordpress is easily adjusted to the task by adding plugins and in the end it comes down to what content you create anyway.

So in short this blog will be made of two ingredients: development log + tumblelog.

I’ve also updated the site in general, but only the new navigation image (at the top) really is a change that is visible at first.

Have fun!