Computers

Evernote sucks

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Thumbing around the Android market, the Evernote app caught my eye again. So I decided why not give it a go, it’s probably the best note taking app for Android (and I admit, it probably is). Thus I installed the app, created an account, and went about setting up the Windows app for my desktop.

Last time I went searching for a note taking app, I settled on the Viki plugin for vim. I probably entertained a several dozen stuff, including Evernote. It never made it past the information gathering phase, since it lacks support for Linux and *BSD. Having adapted an ASUS Transformer as my primary system, Android support is now good enough. Evernote AFAIK is widely used and reasonably respected in the business of note taking software. No wonder—it’s about as useful as a notebook and a pencil.

I am not your “Joe” note taker, that I will admit. My notes are frequently pre-processed data. Things where re-parsing it back into my head and bringing order to notes is fairly important.

The desktop application failed glaringly as less than ideal support for:

  • Concept of sectioning is limited to font size/style and horizontal rules.
  • Structure is limited to indentation, bulleted lists, numbered lists, and tables.
  • Cross referencing data is primitive but effective.
  • Support for “Snippets” of formatted content is limited.
    • as in sample commands.
    • log data and program outputs
    • definition lists.

The Android tablet application despite the awesome user interface, suffers from all of the same plus the following gotcha’s when editing text notes:

  • Indentation is gone.
  • Adding links is gone.
  • Font styling is gone.
  • Adding tables is gone.
  • It’s to dismal a prospect to test how links, indents, font styles, and tables render when viewed in the app.

Simply put, ever note is more primitive a note taking system than Microsoft Word, and it’s only advantage of adding something like Dropbox or Google Docs to that mixture, is the sync feature. In fact this blog editor is much more powerful than Evernote, even more so because it can take raw HTML.

For a stress test to evaluate if I could tolerate life with Evernote, I tried to reformat one of my notes files from Viki by copy/pasting the content and adjusting. The note consists of numerous sections/subsections  (at least up to 3 deep) and various lists, links, and pre-formatted data; nothing you can’t do in raw HTML, LaTeX, etc. Or even plain text if you roll your own conventions as per org-mode or deplate.

After about 80% of the file, I  just gave up as it came to my mind that “Evernote is about as sophisticated as using a notebook of paper and a pencil, so why don’t I use that?”—It is just so far underpowered that I would get more value out of notepad.

Some could say that I’m being too strict, but hey, I am strict when it comes to software that I will spend *excessive* amounts of time using. If I really wanted to nit pick, I would mention the lack of folding, not that I expected that from an app focused on “Notes”.

Fun with tmux & dtach

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Generally the problem with running a terminal multiplexer like tmux or screen on a remote server: is if the server goes down so does your session. Like wise an issue will eventually crop up where in you have to SSH into another server or even the box you’re sitting in front of, if you don’t want a seperate xterm in order to do it; thus losing all that multiplexer goodness.

Well, I pretty much run the session (tmux btw) on my system, and then use dtach for running things I may want to detach from—like a big compile. One perk of this is I get to have my “notes” window in tmux without double the latency.

Today, I was thinking about how can I link this notes window to various tmux sessions? It is possible to link windows (linkw) in a session and entire sessions (new -t {other session}) but that is not what I want. dtach again to the rescue! My notes script already amounts to opening my “Scratch” note file in vim, and changing the window name to “notes” if used in tmux. So I modified it to be smart enough to run vim in dtach, or reattach. Thusly, I can have tmux sessions by project, home, etc, and share the same vim session between them using dtach.

Note tacular!

An interesting idea for Android development

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I could hook up my rooted phone to my netbook turned server, write the code using my ASUS Transformer, then run a batch job over SSH that compiles and installs the app on my phone.

Then connect to my phone via VNC and test it off the same Transformer 🙂

PostScript (.ps) versus Portal Document Format (.pdf) – from a users perspective

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Generally, PS is pretty much a dead format today. The only time a user is likely to see significant amounts of it in my experience, is if they are dealing with quality printing. Reality is almost everything comes in PDF (or Word/Excell if from retards), and morons assume that Adobe Acrobat is the only reader for it. Most people don’t know that PS exists and to many are just to lost to figure out what a PDF is (ugh, grow up!). The simple facts:

  1. Post Script is text based
  2. PDF is a binary format annd offers some programmatic options where supported

Here is what makes that interesting! I have numerous files in PDF and PS formats. Most are under 5M and are PDF. Now there is a monster called The_Complete_FreeBSD.ps that weighs in at a whopping 60M!!! My largest PDF files were around 12M to 16M. I’m compressing stuff I don’t use frequently but don’t want to erase for space reclaimation. So I compressed everything over 2M with XZ to see what files will compress enough to be worth having to uncompress them next century. Most PDF files contained a few embedded images, so savings were on average about 1M, e.g. 15M becomes 14M. Useless. A few files that were more exessive on text shrunk from between 3.5M and 4M to between 1.5M and 2M. That is nice but still to small to care about, because of the original file size. The 60M PostScript file compressed down to 1.6M!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Size checks were done using du -h and compression with xz -e. Being more textual and less binary, I infer that we can get better compression ratios out of Post Script than PDF. Although it is possible to make a PS file that is pretty binary for all practical intents and purposes. But that was surprising….lol. Post Script: In point in fact, I think the only organizations that I have ever seen acknolledge other PDF readers exist, have been Canadian govermenta, which even went so far as to note XPDF, an old choice among Linux/Unix users. +1 for the Blogger app for Android remembering what I started writing ages ago witout me even having to click a draft entry, hehehe.

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Interesting findings. At work, my work station has always had problems using SMB/CIFS, in fact  it is almost useless but fortunately being Linux-oriented over here in Engineering, more traditional unix methods are favoured, so it is of little loss. Now the sad fact that most people use Windows, means that SMB/CIFS is easier to work with under Android than stuff like NFS or any of the multitude of similar techniques. As I rarely need to share stuff with multiple people, for my own stuff, I typically use SSHFS.

In fact, SSH is both such a part of my work flow between machines (here and espiecally at home), I wrote a handy script that lets me quickly mount my $HOME on a remote as ~/hosts/{hostname} locally. It’s useful. My workstation is setup both as a SSH client, server, and sshfs-mounter. But how to get stuff via Android, since I can’t just use CifsManager?

My ASUS Transformer obviously has support for FUSE, just looking at what `mount` says is enough to guess that. But there is no real support for SSHFS, all the goodies are missing. Since I have a very simple chroot of Debian stable, a quick `apt-get install sshfs` and bingo, all done :-). Since the stuff I’m interested in mounting at home (where SMB/CIFS works like a charm), I can just use SSHFS mounts and a shared socket. I.e. I can have things like my Dropbox mounted, get live sync, and even access locally!

Muahauhauauhuahuaaaa!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Geekicious mixed client workflow

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Okay, that is a post title that only a geek could love. So sue me, I’m geek lol. My battle pad is now fully operational, and should soon feature a charging cable extender and screen protector.

Today, I found that while the Debian chroot I have works well, sadly the linuxinstaller app in the market sucks at setting up resolv.conf. So I edited the init script it uses for an entry hook, to detect my home network and the corporate WiFi. Sadly, doing so results in DNS names going external, so something is still fraked. On the upside, editing the chroot’s /etc/hosts works, and that is what everyone here does. Never mind that the important servers have DNS names and OpenSSH can alias them to any shortname, but alas, it works.

One downside of running a terminal session on Android, BTEP will get reaped if you don’t use it for long enough. Like wise the linuxinstaller doesn’t run your bash as a login shell (!) and it’s a bug to remount the path to linuxchroot.sh as rw; so… I found how to kill two bugs with one rocket. I can leave a tmux session running and reattach at will. Muahuuahuahauhauhauaaa! Quite nicely, if I run the tmux session on the server-end, I can attach to it from another box (like my workstation), and use X forwarding; if I create a new tab from the X-terminal, it inherits enough environment to easily use the X-terminals X.Org server :-). This is even cooler because I can have the undesturned mobility of a ‘book or tablet, yet skip fouling my X session. There is also the VNC trick to run X clients on Android but I have not tried it, nor am I very interested right now.

A new idea occured to me while chatting with a friend, namely that I can export my notes directory from alice or my workstation, mount that on andrea over cifs/smb or NFS, edit locally, then get the Dropbox live sync goodness. Which still works because while alice is running at home, so is her Dropbox client and my cronjob to auto git commit my notes files!!!

Muhauhauhauahaaa!!!!!!

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Hmm, so far operations with Andrea are moving fairly smoothly. Today, i spent a little time using Eclipse to try and prototype an idea, but soon gave up. Eclipse is a reasonable enough IDE but for Android work, the extra editors and crap are just not as useful as opening the file in the text editor, and if I may as well, then I will use VIM and execute the Android tools directly in a shell. Piss off.

I’ve been exploring the Android market more of late, because Andrea has so much more storage. My phone has limited internal storage so I rarely will use an app unless it offers something I find practical, like Dropbox & Opera. Rooting it helps since more stuff can be moved to the MicroSD card. Andrea on the other hand, has a lot more storage capacity: about 28GB user accessible from a market value of “32GB”. I’m still principally interested in apps that get work done. Two that I’ve been playing with today, are TextTab which is pretty much using your phones SMS from your tablet via Bluetooth.It’s awesome, it works, it does exactly what I want, and I can’t say the say about the Bluetooth SMS app that I tried during yesterdays shopping expideition. Something else that I tried, is a TeamSpeak 3 client. From the look of the write up, they likely intend to charge for it once it exits beta but it works as an OK client. Not enough for admin work or anything but fine for the core use: VoIP.

Alice has also been setup as a server, as part of cleaning my room. It will likely operate similar to the development server at work but for my personal projects, I’ve also exported some parts of my $HOME to the network. Eventually most of that will likely become stored on Andrea but for now I’m more interested in having it available. Andrea the tablet-book definitely brings my routine closer to the cloud than Alice the netbook but so far I am liking it.

Using a netbook as a mixture of development server and network attached storage may seem very weird. To me, it also has the added benifit that while I may lose my connection as the router goes offline – in a power outage, my session state in tmux can be saved for as long as the battery runs. Plus I could reattach locally  and have the same keyboard as the system I was working on. Muahuahauahuaa!!!!!!

Day two and I almost kilt her but now I has root

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After setting up my Eee Pad Transformer over night and lunch, I went about trying to root her after getting home from work. Flashing Andrea seemed to work fine, give or take that I normally have reservations about flashing stuff I haven’t personally proofed. It was marked as being appropriate for my SKU and release but left Andrea booting into a garbled multi-colour screen….a small fortune in paper weights.

I quickly rebooted Andrea into APX mode and searched Google for a way to unroot back to a stock ROM, even if that meant the original version. That soon lead me to Roach’s Prime v1.4 ROM, which I flashed to recover to a blank, usable, and rooted state. You can’t upgrade from Prime v1.4/Honeycomb 3.1 via ASUS updates, so I hit the web again to see if he had released a newer version of the ROM, sure enough, he has gotten up to v1.9! A quick look about showed me Prime v1.7/Honeycomb 3.2 stable and a 1.8 version in beta. So I tried to install the Prime v1.7 ROM as an update. Now that isn’t so hard, you basically save the ZIP archive and install it using ClockWorkMod via a recovery boot. The problemo is the ASUS Eee Pad Transformer sticks the internal storage at /mnt/sdcard with a link to /sdcard. Using a real memory card or USB device will go in /Removeable/WhatEver. So CWM couldn’t use the update, ‘cuz it couldn’t mount /sdcard.

Having missplaced my USB stick some time between work and vacation prep, I gave it no attempt to try that option and instead went looking for memory cards. I had purchased a pair of SD cards when I had bought a digitial camera a couple years ago, as it hadn’t lasted very long, my mother inherited them for her Dell Streak 7″. She had no idea where they went, so I checked her streak and found one – loaded the archive, stuck the card in the docks slot and bingo, same problem. So I removed the file, stuck that back in my mother’s tablet, and ripped the MicroSD card out of my phone. Sure enough that worked and in a few minutes was greated by a Honeycomb 3.2 versiion of Prime :-).

So now Andrea is alive, functional, and rooted. I just had to trade ASUS support for the brillance of Roach (that ROM saved my pad), and had to reinstall everything because I didn’t do a proper backup first. But that was a simple fix of redownload stuff off the Android Market via the website. I ain’t stupid, lol. When I get home, I will probably try to update to the v1.9 if it seems stable enough, but by the time I can get around to that, I will want to backup my stuff first.

After getting everything settled, I finally decided that it would be a good idea to register on xda-developers, since their forum is like most important place on the web for stuff like this. They have the most awesome forum registeration process ever, including a video. It’s worth it lol. Poking around the forums for my devices, it seems that it may be possible to flash a stock ROM after all but I would rather stick with Prime at this point. I’m also interested in seeing what gets cranked out but will need to aquire a suitable memory card before I can likely do much serious backing up.

I’m really thankful that Roach and cie made that available…lol

Enjoying the Android platform

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It’s about 13:37 here and about half way through the work day. Normally I use a mixture of my workstation, Alice, and my phone; lately I have been using Alice quite heavily. I guess there is enough crap going through the wires that sometimes it is better to offload some of the heavy network traffic, plus it is rather handy that if I need to get up and walk around to do something, I can bring my /entire/ session along with me. So my workstation isn’t Mission Critical to doing my job. In fact, it is pretty much a heavy weight client doing what a humble X terminal could do really.

The important things to getting work done around here, in regards to all that, is a terminal, SSH client, and a web browser. Last night I setup the free Android Terminal Emulator app that I have on my phone, only to find that it seems to be crash happy on Andrea :'(. Likewise I setup ConnectBot for SSH access, only to find that it doesn’t support real modifier keys. So I can’t use it with my docks actual Control, Tab, Alt, etc. ConnectBot does work great on  my touch screen phone though. How did I solve these problems? After spending for the tablet and dock, I can’t bitch about paying another $4 for Better Terminal Emulator Pro (BTEP). Not only is it stable, it includes ash (probably dash but I haven’t checked), bash and busybox in its toolset. Dropbear is even slipped in for SSH, which while not something I like, will do fine for at work needs.

I can SSH into the development server at work, use tmux & vim, and go about doing stuff. Heck on a good signal day, I could stand next to the Microwave with the tablet portion and keep coding! I can do that with my phone too but practical issues like screen size/virtual keyboard, mean going from vim to ed. Emacs should even work but I don’t use it. All that is missing is a native X Server, and I could fix that with some rooting and VNC stuff, or maybe try to write one, idk. My workstation can deal with that slice of stuff easily.

To top it off, 94.9 has always been a bug to keep playing since they moved to a Flash based web player. The iHeartRadio app on my phone works but ahem, sound quality blows. The app doesn’t support Honeycomb tablets but I was able to download and install it manually, then setup the radio station to play using portrait orientation: the app doesn’t do landscape. So now I can finally work and listen to music without having to periodically stop to kick the radio stream into working 🙂 🙂 :-).

I is satisified so far!

Hello Andrea :-)

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Today, I went out and bought an ASUS Eee Pad Transformer from the local Microcenter. It is very much like the ASUS EeePC, or at least the 1015PE I have been using since retiring Dixie. In point of fact, I am typing this up on my new Transformer! It took quite a while to charge up enough to get to the updating but it was a very simple, quick, and easy process to update from Android 3.0 to 3.2; one of the things to attract me to this device, has been that ASUS seems to be supporting it much better than most companies have been supporting their mobile phones.

Being so much like Alice, which is also an ASUS product, I have named this Android “Andrea”. The Transformer has interested me since I learned of it’s existence, but I didn’t quite think I would be purchasing one so soon lol. I will admit, that the differences between an Atom N450 and a Tegra 2 interest me. As does the notion of pushing Android harder to its limits. What really makes it worth while how ever, is between the dock and the tablet, the battery life should be insane.

Compared to the EeePC 1015PE, it is very similar: most external differences are more cosmetic or a reflection of the change in internals; like the ports involved. Andrea has basically the same keyboard as Alice. Except the left Windows and Alt keyshave ben replaced by “Home” and “Search keys”. Android doesn’t understand function keys, so rather tha being Fn+F* combos, various operations are instead directly accessible via the top most row of keys. There is also no numpad to enable via Fn+F* key, not that I have ever used this on a mobile. Oddly, delete has been replaced with lock where as appropriately, escape was replaced with “Back”. While docked the keyboard operates as you would expect, there are only a few noticable irregularities when coming from a PC. Mostly things like Control+Arrow-key or Control+Backspace are not working, although Control+A, Control+C, Control+X, Control+V combos working. Fair enough on a touch screen oriented OS I guess. Alt+Tab even works, more or less like long-pressing the home button on an Android 2.x phone. Using the cursor/tab keys to move around does not generally work as good as a PC user is used to, although such PC users are probably a dying breed. The touch pad however is very nice and useful. Very enjoyably you use left click/tap as on a phone and right click as an alias for the back button. Context menu is usually a soft button on the bottom or top side of the screen.

As a tablet, I personally would prefer a smaller screen like my mother’s 7″ Dell Streak. It just feels more managable in my hands. As Andrea is meant to be docked, I am quite happy to have a full 10.1″ screen. The resolution is also one up from what Alice supports, which makes for an interesting experience! It is so much easier to use Android on a 10.1″ at this resolution then my phones lowly ~3.2″ HVGA display. Changes to apps like GMail and the like, generally seem to be improvements for having a tablet sized screen in Honeycomb; I am somewhat interested to see what happens in Ice Cream Sandwich and Jelly Bean.

I have the TF101-B1 version, so 32GB is a lot. Most stuff on my phone is on the MicroSD card, and I only maintain 35-50MB of space. Andrea came loaded with something like 200MB of space in use out of 28GB accessible, a pretty good deal. Especially since unlike my phone, it isn’t loaded down with applications, even if the updates to 3.2 added more. Alice is only 11-13GB with a bunch of software installed on GNU/Linux, less than 4GB of which amounts to my home directory. So I am pretty sure that I don’t need to wory much here! I can also use memory cards and USB devices for more stuff. ASUS preloads it with a bit of My* apps, including a form of ASUS Web Storage. I have tried it under Froyo and Windows XP, Dropbox is better, and has the advantage (unlike ASUS Web Sotrage) of being able to access stuff in app when you are disconnected. Android client is OK other than requiring Network access (or side stepping out of app) but the Window PC version just sucks, period. FWIW though the integration into MyCloud and the procing is very nice—but I will stick with Dropbox.

Honeycombs UI is very enjoyable for me, and I am kind of impressed by the bundled office app: Polaris Office. Haven’t used it very much (just for documents) but it is nice. Something that really aces it for me, the Browser app is much more like Google Chrome than the Froyo version. Running off a 1Ghz dual core instead of a little 600Mhz single cored ARM, it is also fast enough that I don’t need to reach for Opera Mobile.

So far, I’m lovin’ it. Really the main lossage is a native X server. I would have to root Andrea and set things up using X/VNC. Except for a few things I do at work, I don’t need X, as a decent shell environment or a SSH client to one, does most of what I need. Hehe. My only real complaint is that while Alice has a _long_ charging cord/adaptor, Andrea has a short one :-/.