The Phone

The phone is definitely at the “entry level” end of the market, but the camera is usable, the screen sometimes correctly detects where I’ve poked my finger and is quite bright. The battery life is dire, it’s brand new and hardly makes it through the day – I would guess this is a combination of Android’s architecture and the phone itself, but who really knows. The build quality isn’t great – I’ve already got a tiny chip out of the casing from just leaving it in my bag, and there’s barely a mark on my two year old iPod Touch.

The winning quality is really the price. On Talk Mobile, I get 1Gb of data 200 mins, 200 txts for 12 quid: stunning. That’s just £288 which can’t be much more than the phone cost to produce.

Android

I’m a big fan of iOS, but I’m not a real fanboy of any platform – I use Windows, OS-X and Linux, and like them all. In the premiership, I want all the teams to win – at least until Saints get back into the league. I’ve voted for most of the main political parties and will probably complete a full house next time around. So where Android lacks the fancy animations of iOS and doesn’t feel as squidgey, it takes a more holistic approach. Thus, when it finds two contacts with the same name, it asks you to associate them. You click a link in one app, and it takes you seamlessly to another. You log into Google from a completely new app, and it doesn’t ask for your password. You end up in some strange app, press the back button and you’re back in the previous app. This integration seems to go pretty deep, hinting at fathoms of API coverage. I really want to get into programming Android; I suspect the learning curve will be significant.

So in summary, another good OS to choose from.

Also, Apple has convinced many mac users that they are more secure than Windows users. This is not entirely accurate. Now, back in the ’90s just after I installed Windows XP, I got a worm within 5 seconds. I knew exactly what I’d done wrong – I’d plugged the network cable into the modem directly and not into the router – had I been more careful and plugged it into the router, I’d have had firewall protection, which Windows XP lacked. Guess what, OS X ships with a very powerful firewall, but it’s disabled by default. One interesting titbit from the article:

The UNIX design came from a time when security was less of an issue and not taken as seriously as it did, and so does the job adequately. Windows NT (and later OSes) were actually designed with security in mind and this shows. Windows was not such a target for malware because of its poor security design; it is because the security functionality was never used.

I don’t mind which platform I use, they’re all pretty insecure. The weakest link is the human being.

import os
import shutil
import fnmatch

source_dir = r'C:\Users\Ed\RAW Pictures'
destination_dir = r'C:\Users\Ed\Pictures'

def locate(pattern, root=os.getcwd()):
    for path, dirs, files in os.walk(root):
        for filename in [os.path.abspath(os.path.join(path, filename)) for filename in files if fnmatch.fnmatch(filename, pattern)]:
            yield filename

for file in os.listdir(source_dir):
    searchstr = os.path.splitext(file)[0] + '.JPG'
    for filematch in locate(searchstr, root=destination_dir):
        print filematch
        shutil.copyfile(os.path.join(source_dir, file), os.path.join(os.path.dirname(filematch), file))
        break

Thanks to this blog for the locate function.

I’m assuming you already have Python installed. I did this on Python 2.5. You may need to make some changes for other version of Python. My starting point was the tutorial on the py2exe website.

Install py2exe and create hello.py:

print "hello world"

Create a script to run hello.py, call it exec_hello.py:

import runpy
import sys
import os

sys.path += [os.path.dirname(sys.argv[0])]
runpy.run_module('hello.py')

Create a setup.py script:

from distutils.core import setup
import py2exe
setup(console=['exec_hello.py'])

Run this at the command prompt to generate the distribution:

python setup.py py2exe

Copy hello.py into the dist directory.

You should now be able to run dist/exec_hello.exe at the command prompt and it will call hello.py.

I tided things up by getting the setup script to remove unnecessary files and to copy in the hello.py script. It also renames exec_hello.exe to hello.exe:

import os
import shutil
from distutils.core import setup
import py2exe

setup(console=['exec_hello.py'])
os.remove('dist/bz2.pyd')
os.remove('dist/unicodedata.pyd')
os.remove('dist/w9xpopen.exe')
shutil.rmtree('build')
shutil.copy('hello.py', 'dist')
shutil.move('dist/exec_hello.exe', 'dist/hello.exe')

Presumably flipping your screen upside down is not something you want to do often (unless you’re a vampire/bat).

Quite right.
In the end I found exactly what I was looking for in google code.

Why did I install Windows 7? Well, not just to get the shiney window borders, it was mainly to try and help my PC come out of sleep. Fail. Still doesn’t work. As a last resort, I grit my teeth, pull on the rubber gloves, and upgrade the BIOS. Yup, that was the problem <groan>.

First impressions? Shiney, a bit more usable, and wierdly, everything seems bigger; I think that’s because of the chunkey borders. Now, on with the install… <deep breath>.

There’s not much to say about it really – it looks like the Chrome browser, and that’s pretty much the whole OS. It should boot in seven seconds and will only run on special hardware, slightly larger than a netbook.