How about an open mobile phone platform sir?

Mobile phones have come a long way in the last 10 years in the UK. I remember when my friend got his first analogue mobile back in 1995 and how impressed I was! I've got a K800i myself now, it's the CyberShot 3MP camera model. A really impressive feature set over the K700i I had. The K800i's screen is bigger, web browser renders clearer in anti-aliased fonts and it even has an M2 memory card slot, hungry for MP3s and photos - going to be great rocking to some fab tunes on the ski slopes with this phone come new year ;) Now all the French Alps need is a snowfall!

There are a few things which could be improved though. The stability and reliability isn't perfect; PhotoDJ crashed while saving my edited photo, and it even crashed when I added Nite (langue à la mode?) to my words list! Interestingly it auto-restarts when it crashes, also restarts when engaging file transfer mode, it could just be rebooting into "File Transfer" mode though?

Now what would be cool is if Sony published the source code, I'd love to get the opportunity to write some features for this phone. Here are a few ideas I've had :-
General:

• Integrated search box on main GUI of the phone, which searches with Google.
  
• Modify Camera View and PhotoDJ to make the Zoom function always accessible.
• Optimise Next Word Prediction, a cool feature, but too slow to be usable at present.

Compose message features:

• Add a way to set the Subject on TXT and MMS messages.
• Revise the input mode to not switch the last letter to CAPS when I switching from abc to Abc input.
• Add a some words to the dictionary and share the list online, Blog and Nite etc. (or use the Mozilla dict?)
  
• Keep the order of msg in Drafts, at present it changes when they are viewed.
• In the Web browser jump into input mode when a key is pressed (need to press Edit each time atm).
• Know that peoples' names and cities first letter should be capitalised.
  

Past use statistics:

• Address book search using past usage stats, like I mentioned in 2004. Also stats for non dictionary words, just add them automatically to a local list.
  
• Unify and sort the extended character list by their usage frequency, atm there are two different orders in use on different dialogs in the phone!

Add Contact dialog:

• When you meet someone and get their mobile number you always enter the number first and then the name; so the Add Contact dialog should highlight that field first!
• Know that 079* is a mobile number, and add it as that rather than Home in the Address book.

Finally, I know mobile phone companies make money out of chargers and other accessories to cover their discounted phones, but it would be sooo much simpler if phones cost slightly more and had standard connectors. USB, headphone jack and charger connectors are pretty much standard on other devices, but even between my Sony models the connectors change! Korea and now China are leading the field with standardised mobile charger and USB sockets; they are even mandating USB chargers! Now we just need a standard headphone/handsfree/music player control port ;)

A positive development is the announced Linux-based Motorola Rokr E2, it shuns the 100 song limit Apple hobbled the Rokr E1 with to "protect" their iPod music player market. The more open and DRM-free approach of the E2 looks v.promising; let's hope it gets released eventually. Many interesting things forward to in the mobile arena, I can't wait ;)

Shouldn't diagnostic tools be included in Flash Memory?

PCs these days all have a BIOS which launches the OS bootstrap from disc. If the disc fails this leaves us stuck scrabbling for bootable CDs/USB Sticks/Floppies to diagnose the problem.

There is a lot to be said for booting from Flash memory, it is safe, quick, and if the disc does fail (I've had nine hardiscs fail in my home PCs in the last ten years!) you're not stuck in a situation where you're unable to run diagnostic software from a compact version of the OS in ROM. Acorn (the UK's last independent desktop computer manufacture!) produced machines for UK and Australian schools which ran Risc OS. They took the approach of putting the whole OS in a 4 MB ROM! It was not flashable, so when a new version of Risc OS came out we needed to buy new chips! This was all back in the 1990s, Acorn sadly aren't around now, but the idea lives on with me today.

Now we don't need the whole OS in ROM (could a modern desktop OS even fit in 4 MB!?), but we could take one aspect of this idea and put essential components in a Flash memory, putting everything supplementary on harddisc as at present. This would give us the best of both worlds, as normal operation would be the same as at present, but if needed they could hold down a key during boot and get access to a wealth of diagnostic software built into their own computer.

So how about motherboards start shipping with a 16MB Flash? My Linux kernel is 1.5MB, and memtest is 86KB, so this leaves space for a ramdisc image with some other utils like fsck.ext3 and badblocks etc. Perhaps this could even be integrated with the LinuxBIOS project? A smart boot manager (GRUB etc), Master Boot Record (MBR) fixer would be *very* useful. Also, if full machine virtualisation takes off proper we'll see Hypervisors on the market, so there is scope for that being in Flash ROM as well ;)

Rich Web Typography - Just around the corner?

It's 2006 and it still feels like we're in 1995 as far as fonts on the WWW go. Time has moved on, we've stopped calling it the WWW and just say the web now. It's integrated into the fabric of our lives, we don't think about what's happening when we access information, it's just something we rely on.

Fonts on the web haven't kept up with the pace of change, the fonts which can be used in web pages are still limited to what ships with peoples computers! When the tech is in place, I want to see web sites providing fonts just like they provide an image or a vector graphic at present ;)

There are ways we can get custom fonts into pages, but they are either tied to a specific browser or require the user to download and install the TrueType Font themselves as administrator of their PC beforehand. Other approaches use Adobe's Flash as the means of rendering Anti-Aliased fonts in a browser, sIFR 2.0 is one framework which takes this approach; it does gracefully display using standard XHTML if the Flash plug-in is not installed, so users should not see any Flash errors at least.

Another key point is that users and companies need fonts they are allowed to distribute, home users might not be able to afford to buy special fonts. This means home users will either have to make their own (a time consuming affair, even more so for Asian languages!), or just put up with the bog standard Helvetica and Times fonts which most Linux, Mac and Windows installs come with (you need to maintain the common denominator between systems right! ;) One popular community produced free font is Gentium, I've also been using DejaVu Sans, check them out!

There is already a way to pull in our fonts, take this CSS example I wrote from the W3C's CSS2 spec, (dropped this from the CSS2.1 spec though!):

/* Define Maxus font to be downloaded if needed */
@font-face
{
font-family: "Maxus"; src: url("maxus.ttf") format(TrueType)
}

The W3C gurus have been discussing fonts too. Here's what I can see needs to be prioritised to get this in place:

• Common browsers need to support a finalised spec, pure and simple.
• As fonts take a long time to make, there aren't as many great ones going for nothing as their could be, so that area needs some targeted work by a collection of vendors, Universities or designers etc.

As a side note, these developments could create a whole market for fonts to be licensed for use on a website, or given away free under a non-commercial licence to home users etc.

So to summarise, let's focus on the open CSS2 specification we have. Plan of action: Web authoring tools vendors like Adobe need to support it, the W3C to promote it and web browsers to implement the support! ... possible? Yes. Will it ever happen? If no better solution comes along first, I hope it will!

WebDoc - A document format for all?

We've had PDF and PostScript for many years, they work okay, but they aren't as accessible as web pages are. What we really need is a format which combines XHTML and images into a single file. I call this proposal WebDoc. It could be a compressed ZIP archive with a .webdoc extension (mime type application/webdoc).

Simple to use, click on the file to open it in the web browser which then displays the index.html within. The reason this is better than a PDF or an OpenDocument file is that existing web browsers will be able to display, navigate, bookmark and copy/paste from the WebDoc, no extra PDF Viewer software such as Adobe Reader is required.

WebDoc is a collection of open formats in a ZIP archive, ergo this really opens the doors to accessibility products, such as screen readers or braille displays for the blind. Also automated translations are possible, keeping the flow of the document, and the result as complete as the original; not as nearly as difficult as dealing with PDF files at present! Let's see where we are with this development in a few years time; a vendor might have popularised their own equivalent proposal by then! ;)

Do views differ after success?

Marina Hyde's Grauniad article highlights an interesting rockstar phenomenon: They live like aristocrats, Now they think like them. They've changed their views after they've moved up in the world. Politicians do exactly the same, remember Tony's manifesto New Britain: My Vision of a Young Country back in 1996? I was 17 when that was published, in fact I recall pointing out in our sixth form mock General Election how PR driven New Labour were. The Torygraph highlights how Tony's position on ID cards has changed since back then: ID cards don't work – even Tony says so famously sold the Body Shop to . To give another example, Dame Anita RoddickL'Oréal (parce que l'éthique le vaut bien!?) this year, after she rallied against them for the last 30 years.

Fortunately most people don't change for the worse though, some companies have an even greater focus after their business succeeds, consider Google and their do no evil motto, they've setup google.org now too; and John Bird kept the focus at the The Big Issue. Then there are people who have a switch of focus after they have been successful for sometime, consider how Bill Gates' Foundation is tackling issues world-wide; or how Mark Shuttleworth has helped Ubuntu forward to become the most widely adopted GNU-Linux distribution in the last 2 years, available completely no-charge.

I'll do my best to keep my principals if I'm ever that successful ;) がんばりますね！

Mobile phone dictionaries

Dictionaries are funny things, never complete due to the way languages change so quickly; but then on the other hand it's surprising my Sony Ericsson K800i doesn't have blog, or colloquialisms such as hey and hiya, or even Mrs in its dictionary for that matter.

If the mobile platform was more open, I'd just be able to edit or import the English dictionary of my choice. David Bartlett maintains the excellent English dictionary which is used by Thunderbird and OpenOffice. Of cause, as the mobile platform isn't yet open we can't use David's dictionary; we just have to make do.

In addition, the K800i doesn't notice that I only type "Hiya!", it always suggests "Hiya.", then I need to select the exclamation mark myself. Adding "Hiya!" to the dictionary is the workaround.. but the phone should really take my input as a training set, to tune its ability to make suggestions based on data!

Future mobile innovations

I wonder what's going to be big in the next couple of years in the mobile arena? We've had basic phone functionality for some time (see my Sony Ericsson K800i to the right), but it's all still a bit clunky and prone to reception problems when we're on trains etc. I think we're going to see a few things appear over the next few years:

• Cheap wireless BB, mobile and computer wireless technology / protocols will converge, providing an open platform with much better coverage.
• Galileo/GPS SatNav and accurate terrain height reading features for mapping.
• VoIP providers and many new innovative ideas will thrive in this mobile arena, think what the open platform of the Web did for computers and consider how many millions more people have their mobile with them at all times!

That's enough for today ;) Post any ideas in the comments section!

Risc OS still not so open

Interestingly Castle and Risc OS Open Ltd have announced they will release the source code of Risc OS. Risc OS is the Operating System which used to power Acorn computers in the 90s. I first suggested to riscos.org's Paul Vigay back in May 2002 that they could take the monumental step of opening-up, this announcement is a big step but they need to go one step further. They decided against releasing the source code under a Free Software license and went with a Shared Source licence; this doesn't give all the freedoms developers and users might like compared to GNU-Linux though. In a couple of years down the line they might release source code under a different licence.. but will it be too late by then? Drobe has the reaction to this announcement from the industry. Fond memories of Acorn aside, I personally hope Risc OS succeeds ;)

Simon Phipps - Sun's saving grace?

Simon Phipps is Sun's Open Source guru, he's also their saving grace. I'll explain why: Sun is a company stuck in it's traditional UNIX background, it's developed great technologies like NFS and Java, but it's not really known what position to take since GNU-Linux came on the scene. Sun execs didn't fully "get" what was happening in the market after the monumental shift back towards open/free development approaches. Sun obviously didn't read The Cathedral and the Bazaar back in 1999 when the FSF and Netscape etc were radically overhauling their development models. Perhaps someone bought Jonathan Schwartz a copy of Producing Open Source Software? Who knows.. but finally in 2006 Simon has convinced the execs that if you can't beat 'em, you should join 'em. So Sun are now embarking on an open Java platform strategy, and I wish them well. They won't end up bankrupt like SGI, at least for the moment ;) Too little too late? We'll see.

Gmail running our email domains

Wouldn't it be cool if Gmail ran our email domains? I've got my own domain jguk.org, that could just forward the email onto my Gmail account, but Gmail could actually run the domain's MX record and then have the ability to better manage spam email. Employing techniques like issuing SMTP's Reject 554 code for hosts connecting which were known to send spam or if the incoming email looks like it's definitely spam.

Sending the Reject code means you refuse to take and pass on this spam email, I prefer this approach to accepting all email and then sorting and storing spam in a Junk folder, as then I've still got to sift through all those Junk emails to double check. I read my email using Thunderbird on my laptop, but that's not as portable as I'd like, and I still get junk mail slipping through like these:

(Thunderbird's Bayesian filters does a good job of classifying junk mail which does get through!)

Therefore, spam prevention and rejection decisions need to be taken during the SMTP session when computers connect, dramatically cutting out the market for spammers. David Mazières's MailAvenger implements these ideas which should reduce spam.

If anyone from Google is reading this, how about adding a feature to host our MX records directly with you? Then there could be a simplified one stop spam rejection system put in place, rejecting connections and emails determined spam before Gmail takes responsibility for them. This would require a performance intensive change to perform tests during the SMTP session, but is definitely doable with one of the clusters Google has!

One final idea, why not use a Domain Ranking system coupled with SPF checks to maintain tuned weights which give an indication of how likely a particular domain is to be sending spam.

Update: Google have already had part of this idea, they provide a Hosting service which could be used. Not sure if the MailAvenger style anti-spam measures idea is integrated h it.

Mobile Payments a replacement for cash?

It strikes me as obvious that we really need mobile instant banking. People live their lives at quite a pace, purchases will be made and completed in minutes, but then people have to wait for the money and their bank statement through the post. It would be so simple to instantly send and receive payments via mobile number. Conventional functions like banking need to catch up with the way people live and work in the 21st century! It could even form the basis of a replacement for the age old system of carrying cash around!

Saving Energy

We can all do our bit to save energy by switching off appliances when they are not in use. However, what we really need is for there to be an easily accessible switch to do this. The switch needs to be a physical switch to stop the current flowing, as even devices on standby still consume energy. Mobile phone chargers and other transformers don't yet have a switch, so we need to switch them off at the wall. I don't know about you, but my study is crammed with so much stuff that getting to a socket or 4-way adaptor would require some serious crawling!

Consider the example of my friend James' Laptop, it's a Lenovo ThinkPad, even when it is off the Ethernet and power LEDs are lit, the router LED is also lit. Wake On LAN is disabled, so there is no good reason that a certain amount of current being used for these functions when it is off. What we need is a new type of physical switch to turn laptops on and off, one which when pressed completes a magnetic relay circuit, which keeps the connection established. When the laptop is shutdown the relay magnet is switched off which disconnects the power completely.

Laptops have a special need to charge their internal batteries, a couple of ideas to cover that area:

1. The power transformer needs a physical switch on the side of it.
2. The battery monitoring/charging circuit could be the only part of the laptop which is using any current when the laptop is off.
3. The power transformer could be integrated into the laptop as their mass is so tiny these days.
   

In addition, appliances which have clocks like DVRs could be designed to have a battery backed clock so we can switch them off when they're not in use.

When you think of how many appliances each of us have on standby, or even off but using power like the laptop you see that every little change helps us save energy and thus the environment. There could easily be 10 Million mobile phone chargers and laptops plugged in and using energy as we speak!

Automated Lip Reading

Frank Hubner has developed some rather clever tech which can produce a transcript of what someone is saying in a silent film. Image processing techniques are used on the video of their lips as they speak, this is then profiled against a database of recognised words to produce a transcript of what was said. This tech could be coupled with existing voice recognition techniques to give more accurate results.



In addition, this opens the way for automatic sub-title generation, and even automatically translated subtitles for all those Japanese films like 男たちの大和 I'd love to watch, but which presently don't have 英語字幕 (English subs).

First post on new weblog

I've switched my weblog to the blogger.com system. It has lot's of good features which will allow me to concentrate on my tech aspects ;)