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Today I had a chance to play with the Canadian equivalent of the Kindle Fire, the Kobo Vox. It’s an Android 2.3 device, which means that it effectively has access to the entire ecosystem of Android apps. What it lacks, unfortunately, is the official Google Market application. It did appear to have access to the Gmail app, which makes the lack of Google’s Android market surprising.

The Vox is a bit lackluster in the graphics department. Full-screen animations like zooms and fades are choppy: 5-10 frames per second. The same animations in the Kobo application on my Galaxy Tab 10 are fluid and smooth. This makes the Kobo Vox feel like a really cheap bit of hardware. It’s not a big deal while reading books in the Kobo application: paging is lightning fast, although it doesn’t have any sort of animation to indicate page flips.

One thing you get with the Vox that you won’t get with the plain Kobo application on other devices is the “Kobo Voice” social reading experience. You can annotate passages in books and share them with other readers. I don’t find this to be a big loss. The Vox also offers a way to lay out books in two-page landscape mode, which would be amazing on the Galaxy Tab 10, but feels a bit cramped on the smaller Vox screen.

The Kobo Vox does have a nice screen. The Dell Streak 7” tablet has issues with narrow viewing angles in portrait mode. From what I could tell, the Vox was beautiful in portrait and landscape orientation. The quality of the display feels pretty good.

Based on the five minutes I played with it, I don’t think it’s worth me buying. I’m tempted to look at the Kindle Fire for use in Canada, but I suspect that Amazon’s less-than-perfect support for Amazon services in Canada will make it less of an interesting piece of hardware. If you don’t already have a tablet, however, this might not be a bad device to purchase.

Comparable devices:

• Kindle Fire: $200
• Kobo Vox: $200
• Dell Streak 7”: $399 (terrible for reading in portrait!)
• Galaxy Tab 8.9: $400-600 (couldn’t find it for sale in Canada)
• Galaxy Tab 10.1: $649

EDIT: In a response to this post on Google+, Louis Gray says that he’s notified the team. I’ll update this post as I get more information.

The Google +1 extension for the Chrome browser sends an RPC event to Google for every page you visit, https or not.

I hate to be a downer on cool stuff like this, but I really don’t think this is acceptable. It’s even sending the querystring, which could potentially contain a secure session token. All of the communication to the Google servers happens over https, but I don’t think that excuses this. https:// traffic needs to be off-limits for auto-tracking like this.

I’d be OK if the button allowed you to disable auto-reporting of the current +1 count (this can default to ‘on’), and added a default-off option to show +1 counts for https sites.

Below is a screenshot of the RPC request sent to Google’s RPC endpoint, showing the https URL of a bank’s login URL, complete with query-string.

scp is a great way to securely transfer files from computer to computer, but wouldn’t it be nice if you could just automatically send files over the existing SSH connection you’ve already opened?

Back in the days of modem-based BBSes and dial-up machine access, file transfers were forced to run over the same TTY as your interaction with the system. A number of different solutions evolved for this, starting with the grandfather of transfer solutions, XModem. Other transfer protocols evolved, some starting from the ground up like Kermit, while YModem and ZModem build on the foundation of XModem.

The latest version of iTerm 2 added support for two features that were very interesting: Triggers, that match a regular expression to a line of text; and co-processes, that can feed input directly into a terminal. With these two features, we can add the ability to stream files to and from any server over an existing ssh session. As ZModem is most modern protocol with wide support (lrzsz is well-supported and packaged on both OSX and Linux), I’ll show you how to use it to automate piggy-backed file uploads and downloads in your iTerm sessions.

Setup

First of all, install lrzsz via brew. This will install the sz and rz binaries in /usr/local/bin/:

macbook-pro-2:~ matthew$ brew install lrzsz
==> Downloading http://www.ohse.de/uwe/releases/lrzsz-0.12.20.tar.gz
==> ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/Cellar/lrzsz/0.12.20 --mandir=/usr/local/Cellar/lrzsz/0.12.20/share/man
==> make
==> make install
/usr/local/Cellar/lrzsz/0.12.20: 13 files, 376K, built in 21 seconds

Secondly, grab the scripts from my iterm2-zmodem github repo, and save them in /usr/local/bin/.

Next, we’ll add a Trigger to your iTerm 2 profile that will trigger on the signature of the rz and sz commands. The setup for these commands differs based on the iTerm 2 version you have:

Build newer than 1.0.0.20111026

Regular expression: \*\*B0100
    Action: Run Coprocess
    Parameters: /usr/local/bin/iterm2-send-zmodem.sh

    Regular expression: \*\*B00000000000000
    Action: Run Coprocess
    Parameters: /usr/local/bin/iterm2-recv-zmodem.sh

Build older than 1.0.0.20111026 (only receive supported)

Regular expression: [\$#] rz( -v)?$
    Action: Run Coprocess
    Parameters: /usr/local/bin/iterm2-send-zmodem.sh

Note: ideally we’d be matching on the ZModem initial packet signature: \*\*\u0018B01 in all versions of iTerm 2, but earlier versions of iTerm 2 had a bug that broke this pattern detection in this case. Instead we’re matching against the pattern of the rz command typed at a shell for those older builds.

Receiving files from the server

To receive a file on your server, type the following at a shell prompt:

# rz

A file-picker dialog will then pop up asking you for the file to send. Once you choose the file to send, it will automatically transfer the file across your existing console session.

Sending files to the server

To send files from your server to your desktop, type the following:

# sz file1 file2 file3 /folder/file*

A folder picker will show up, asking where you want to drop the files. If you send multiple files, they will all appear in this folder.

Wrap-up

This is a pretty rough first pass at this, but the shell scripts are available on github if you’ve got ideas for improvement.

Follow me on Twitter: @mmastrac

Apple is quickly burning my goodwill towards with these silly patent fights. Two out of three of the patents were found not to be infringing, while the last one is a software patent that basically describes the functioning of a mobile device that deals with photos.

At this point, it’s probably worth pointing out that Apple’s notification bar is pretty much a rip-off of the Android one. And you know what? I really don’t care.

Companies should be riffing off each other’s designs and improving them as they do. We’ll get a lot further than if we give one company total control over a single domain. Apple has taken the Android notification bar and improved it, just as Google has done with various iPhone features. Both companies have built their mobile operating systems on the prior art of thousands of other inventions from the last thirty years.

As many people have stated, patents are a monopoly to advance science and the useful arts. They are not a monopoly to advance the profits of any given company, though that may be a side-effect of their existence.

Copyright and trademark law already exist to prevent direct copying of design. Would Apple have released the iPhone in the absence of software patents? Very likely. Would the iPhone/Android rivalry shaped up the same way without software patents? Very likely.
In their current form, software patents have been hindering the progress of computing. With that in mind, I say it’s time for them to go.

Follow me on Twitter: @mmastrac

I’m nearly ready to cut a 1.0 version of nanojson. I spent some time merging the two writer interfaces into a single API.

String json = JsonWriter.string()
  .object()
  .array("a")
    .value(1)
    .value(2)
  .end()
  .value("b", false)
  .value("c", true)
  .end()
.close();

There’s a new convenience static for quickly converting stuff to a string as well:

String json = JsonWriter.string(object);

I suspect I may rename the close() method to something that doesn’t infer closing of the underlying stream (maybe finish() or complete()?)

You’ll find it at GitHub here.