It seems that in theory cruises can make for quite economical vacations. The cheapest prices tend to be around $100 per person per night for an “inside” cabin (IE no window) with two people (there is a significant extra fee for having a cabin with only one person). If you book a room in a half-decent hotel with a pool in some moderately desirable place then you will probably pay about $200 per night which might get you free breakfast but won’t include lunch or dinner. Cruises include all the free food you can eat for at least 16 hours of the day with maybe an extra fee for getting food in the middle of the night. When a cruise ship stops at the port you can pay for an expensive shore trip arranged by the cruise company or have a cheap trip that involves walking on the beach or taking a taxi to somewhere local. Of course there are lots of extras that can make a cruise really expensive, but if you don’t plan to eat at speciality restaurants or drink much alcohol then that shouldn’t be a problem.

I’ve just booked a short luxury cruise, mostly as a trial of the cruise concept. The process of doing so was difficult enough that even if I hadn’t previously needed a holiday then I’d probably need one now. It would be interesting to compare the amount of time that a reasonable person would be likely to spend choosing a holiday and purchasing it for the different types of holiday, I expect that cruising would be a long way behind everything that involves flying to a foreign city and staying in a hotel.

The Issues of Booking

When booking a regular holiday you choose where to visit, then choose the time of year, the accommodation, and travel. While the order can vary it’s generally a sequential process without too many variables at any stage.

With a cruise one of the first decisions is to choose the cruise line, different lines cater to various market segments – it’s clear what Disney cruises aim for but often not so clear for others. Apart from Disney the other cruise lines don’t seem to make clear statements about who they are and aren’t targeting. Then there are a variety of ships run by each cruise line which in many cases offer different features, do you want 1 pool or 4? Do you want ice skating? The cruise lines that I have investigated don’t offer clear comparisons of their ships. As a cruise ship is essentially a hotel, a collection of restaurants, and some other entertainment you can’t just arbitrarily choose one the way you might choose a random hotel with a suitable price and rating.

Now while you can choose a hotel and generally get a room when you want a cruise booking has to be made when the ship is in a convenient port. So your holiday needs to be scheduled around the availability of the ship. CruiseCritic.com is an excellent source of information on cruises and has a very active and useful advice forum [1]. The forum appears to be dominated by retirees, presumably because retirees have time to just wait for a ship they like to visit their local port while people who have to schedule holidays around work projects etc.

When booking a hotel I have found that Wotif.com is really good for comparing hotels and finding a reasonably cheap one and they also have periodic mail-outs about special deals. I have made a couple of short vacations based on Wotif offering me unusually good prices on a hotel in a place that I was mildly interested in visiting. There are also special deals on cruises, but it’s a lot more difficult to take them. Firstly as cruises aren’t as interchangeable as hotels it’s not as appealing to take an offer of a cruise you didn’t previously consider because it’s going cheap. The second factor is that according to cruise reviews there is more variation among cabins than there is among hotel rooms. The design of the ship that is needed to cram everything in the available space means that some cabins apparently have noise pollution from various activities on the ship while others are considered to have problems for people prone to sea-sickness. Discounts probably only apply after people who pay non-discount rates have had a chance to book what might be considered the better cabins. Of course it could be a good thing to have most of the ship booked out, CruiseCritic.com has some reviews of individual cabins and presumably there are people who compare hundreds of cabins to discover what is ideal for them.

The Problem with Princess

I have booked a Princess cruise. I chose it because it was going cheap, but the first two travel agents that advertised it were unable to take my order because Princess only allows US based agencies (which means the discount agents on the net) to sell to US customers – I don’t think that the people who run the Princess cruise company know what the Internet is about.

So I booked the cruise through the Princess web site, they took my money, told me that a good chunk of that money would never be returned if I cancelled, and then sent me to the web page for providing all the information that they need – which is a lot. The big problem was when their web site absolutely demanded a passport number and said that I would not be allowed to board without one even though their FAQ (and common sense) indicated that a cruise which doesn’t involve any international travel has no need of a passport. Taking someone’s money and then telling them that they can’t attend due to not having a valid passport is one way of making a future passenger very unhappy.

I called the support people (which was Carnival) and had to listen to some really strange hold music – it was difficult to determine if the music was produced by someone with unusual tastes in electronic music vastly different from my own preference or whether the computer which manages the phone calls was producing noise instead of music. Eventually I got through to an operator who was very helpful and stored my drivers’ license number which was adequate.

While on the topic of their web site, when booking a cruise with Princess they list which types of cabin (interior, balcony, etc) are available and list the price for the cheapest category of cabin in each price. However if the cheapest category is all sold out then it will still list that cheapest price and thus be advertising a price that can’t be booked. This is misleading and annoying.

Further Hassle

But the difficulty doesn’t end here. On a cruise you have to book in advance for which dinner seating you desire – which is usually only early or late but some ships offer “anytime”. Then if you happen to be travelling with people who are in a separate cabin and paying separately (which one would expect to be fairly common) there is no obvious way of synchronising dinner preferences – the ship people might assign people to different tables. I admit that I haven’t fully explored the post-booking part of the Princess web site, maybe I can arrange a shared table – but for the moment my pain threshold for the cruise booking process has been exceeded.

Other Cruising Stuff

Insight Cruises (formerly Geek Cruises) offers a variety of educational cruises including science, astronomy, chess, art, history, and some other things [2]. From a casual inspection of their web site it seems that the cruise prices are around $300 per night for a 2 person cabin and the registration fees for the conferences are between $1200 and $1500. Most readers of my blog will consider this to be unreasonably expensive as registration for a Linux conference tends to be a lot less than $1000. But when compared to typical for-profit conferences $1500 isn’t anywhere near the high end of the range. Also while someone who is choosing a cruise holiday can easily get a cruise that costs less than $200 per day for a 2 person cabin, for commercial conferences it’s not uncommon to spend more than $300 per night for two people on accommodation and food. So the only noteworthy part about the cost is that accommodation will be quite expensive if you aren’t sharing a room.

If you want to run a conference on a cruise there are companies which specialise in such things, Landry and Kling is one company that specialises in planning corporate events [3]. They do seem to aim for the high end of the market, including chartering a small cruise ship or half a large cruise ship – that means ~1000 passengers. While there are some conferences with more than 1000 delegates it seems that most conferences top out at about 500 delegates. However I know that some conferences have limited the number of delegates to the maximum capacity of the biggest lecture hall available – as some cruise ships have a theater with more than 1000 seats it seems that similar conferences could potentially arrange a half ship charter. A half ship charter apparently allows exclusive access to one of the theaters (at least when it’s not needed for evening entertainment) and exclusive seating at the main dining room. It’s a standard feature that cruise ships have all the equipment you might need to run a conference.

Autism on the Seas is a brand used by the Alumni Cruise company for their holiday packages for special needs children [4]. They sell cruise tickets at the regular list price and the commission that they receive when acting as a travel agency is enough to hire staff to look after the kids while presumably still running at a profit. It seems to me that a similar model could be used for a computer conference, make a profit on cruise ticket sales and then have no extra costs for the conference – for people sharing a room that would be cheaper than most Linux conferences I’ve attended.

For smaller conferences and un-conferences there is no minimum reservation size. One down-side for a computer conference is the cost of Internet access, according to Wikipedia a personal installation of satellite net access costs $5 per megabyte and ship pricing for their Internet access is up around $30-$100 per hour per person! But in the old days when attending a conference meant a week of no net access we survived somehow.

It also seems to me that if a company had a small development team it could be productive to put everyone on a cruise ship with a server for testing and version control. They could do 9 hour days on board and still have lots of time for relaxation as it’s only a few minutes walk to the pool. Of course this wouldn’t work if some members of the team wanted to stay home due to slow and expensive net access.

• [1] http://www.cruisecritic.com/
• [2] http://insightcruises.com/
• [3] http://landrykling.com/
• [4] http://alumnicruises.org/Autism/Autism_Home.htm

I’ve now had a Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 for almost two months (here is a link for my first review) [1]. This is a phone that people seem to really dislike because the battery life is poor and Sony doesn’t allow replacing the kernel. I’m happy with mine, happy enough that after buying one for my wife and trying it out I bought one for myself. I knew about it’s problems in advance and wanted a relatively cheap phone with a large high resolution screen, and the Xperia X10 was the best match for my criteria.

Charging

There has been a recent trend towards using USB for charging devices. Sony provides a tiny wall-wart PSU which has a USB socket and a short (1m) USB cable that can be used to charge the phone from it’s PSU or from a PC. The size is really convenient, as the phone has a short battery life I’ll probably want to take the PSU to more places than I would for other phones I’ve owned.

The short USB cable saves weight and tangle when travelling, but can be inconvenient. I’m currently working on the phone while it’s plugged into my laptop, that works well and I can make calls while it’s connected. If the phone was connected to a USB port on a tower computer that was on the ground then the cable could be too short to make a call, if it was charging on a power point near the floor then I wouldn’t even be able to use the computer functionality let alone make calls without kneeling. My Viewty has a 175cm charging cable which alleviates these problems. I’ve got a 50cm USB extension cable that I use for charging my phone while I’m in bed – that is just long enough to allow me to check my email without getting out of bed!

The socket for connecting the USB cable is protected by a plastic lid that is connected by a strip of rubber. For a socket that will be used at least twice a day this isn’t a good mechanical design. The plastic slide on the LG U990 Viewty seems like a much better design.

As an aside it’s a pity that they aren’t designing cars with USB charging sockets built in. Some new cars have a socket for one USB flash drive to be attached to the radio, but really they need at least one USB charging port per seat. It would also be nice if they made power points with USB charging sockets built in, I’d buy a few of those if they made them.

Preserving the Battery

I’ve been running “Juice Defender” to reduce the battery use, at the moment it is claiming to have extended battery life by 69%. That combined with turning off things that aren’t needed (such as WiFi) has made the phone reasonably usable. I can survive more than 12 hours during which I use the phone a lot without charging it.

XperiaX10.net has an interesting review of replacement batteries [5]. I’m not going to buy them because the largest battery requires a replacement back case which prevents using an external case to prevent damage and the smaller one doesn’t provide enough of a benefit – and the design of the phone makes it difficult to change batteries so carrying a spare battery isn’t a good option.

Cursor Control Keys

The HP/Compaq iPaQs that I own from ~10 years ago have a single button that can be moved up/down/left/right to act as a cursor, it can also be pressed inwards to act as an ENTER key (or whatever the application might want for a fifth function). Having some sort of hardware cursor control is really handy, I often end up deleting several characters when I want to replace one because getting the cursor onto the desired character is too difficult.

Adding more hardware keys would require making the phone bigger, but that would be fine by me. As described in my previous post about phone cameras I’d like to have a phone that’s thicker to have a better camera with a greater focal distance for a larger lens [2].

Core Phone Functionality

I really miss having separate green and red buttons for making/answering calls and for rejecting/ending calls.

A really common operation is to call back the last person who called. To do this on my LG U990 Viewty I press the green button twice on my home screen which took less than a second. On the Xperia this involves selecting the phone icon from the home screen, then the “call log” icon, then the call that is desired, then the “Call user” line. That is four presses in different parts of the screen compared to pressing the same hardware button twice. I’m investigating dialer applets right now, the “Dialler One” applet has a good interface for calling people who have called or been called recently – but it still requires two presses on different parts of the screen. With my old Viewty I could call back the last person by feel without even looking at the phone!

In the last 6 years the standard functionality of phones has been to include multiple profiles for noises. My Viewty has profiles named “Normal”, “Silent”, “Vibrate only”, “Outdoor”, “Headset” (automatically selected when a headset is connected), and three “customised” ones. The Xperia has only one setting, and that is three icon presses away from the home screen. It does allow changing the volume by hardware switches on the side which includes going to vibrate-only and silent mode. While this is useful, it’s not the best way that two precious hardware keys could be used. It also doesn’t allow control over all the different notifications, I’d like to be able to activate a noise profile and have every application respond to it in an appropriate manner. This is a deficiency in Android 2.1 not in the phone itself.

In many ways this phone has the worst phone functionality of any mobile phone I’ve ever owned, I think that this is more the fault of the Android designers than Sony Ericsson.

Android Updates

Sony had previously claimed that they wouldn’t support Android later than 2.1. Now Sony has announced that they will support “Gingerbread” – Android 2.3 [3]. So one of the major complaints about the Xperia will soon be addressed.

Tethering

The build of Android that the Xperia runs at the moment doesn’t support Wifi tethering. I’m currently using with Easy Tether for USB tethering [4]. It’s not free software and requires it’s own code to run as root on your Linux system that is being tethered (which is easily locked down with SE Linux), but it basically works. The down-side with Easy Tether is that it proxies all the connections so you can’t run traceroute etc and in the free version you can’t use UDP.

K9 Mail

K9 Mail fixes some of the problems in the default Android email program that I described in my previous post. It allows selection of SSL with a default port of 993 for IMAPs. It uses mail.example.com as the mail server address for an email address of user@example.com (so I’ll add a “mail” CNAME to the domains I run). When I connected initially it told me that the SSL key was not signed by a CA and asked if I wanted to save it or reject it – this is the correct and desired functionality. It also correctly parses URLs from the email (or at least has fixed the bug that I discovered in the default email app).

One problem I’ve found with K9 is that it seems to timeout on large folders. This is probably partly the fault of Virgin Mobile being slow for IP access, but I wonder whether K9 doesn’t pipeline IMAP commands as Virgin can do bulk transfer at reasonable speeds (80KB/s) and it mainly fails on latency (900ms being typical). The result is that a folder with more than 500 messages that need to be copied to the phone will never get synchronised. When I started reading mail on my phone I had to move mail from some of the bigger folders into other folders to avoid timeouts. As an aside the amount of time I’ve saved by reading email on the go has already paid for the phone.

Mediascape

The Sony Mediascape software is used for categorising photos. One function of this is to assign names to photos, the names come from the contact list so if you photograph someone who you can’t phone then you need to add a contact list entry for them. This also means that you couldn’t conveniently add names to non-humans, I guess I could have added a contact list entry “Mr Crash Dump” for photos of system crash logs. But a bigger problem is that it decides what is a picture of a person, a picture of someone who is not centered in the photo or a profile picture can be regarded as not a photo of a person and therefore not subject to being associated with a contact list. Finally when selecting a name for a picture it displays the entire contacts list in a small font instead of displaying favorites, I have the phone numbers of many clients in my contacts list who I will never photograph…

Mediascape just isn’t much good. If I feel the need to do something serious in this regard I’ll search the app store for something free that’s better.

Protection

For $15 each I bought one grey and one clear “Gel Case” from J2K. This case covers the sides and back of the phone with a firm rubber layer that will hopefully allow it to bounce rather than break. It also extends slightly higher than the screen which should stop the screen being scratched if the phone is left face-down on a hard surface on the vibrate setting.

One problem with the Gel Case is that by it’s design it has to cover the buttons on the sides, due to a design or manufacturing problem the clear case that my wife uses can press slightly on the shutter button which disables the three main buttons on the front. So when the menu or back button stops working she has to slightly move the Gel Case out from the side. I’m thinking of just cutting out a section of the Gel Case there, that will make it difficult to press the shutter button, but you can use the touch screen to take photos and there doesn’t seem to be any other use for the shutter button so this shouldn’t be a problem. The clear and grey cases have different designs, the grey one has a hole over the raised Sony logo which makes it fit a little better as well as not having the shutter problem, so it seems to be a later design – I don’t know whether all clear cases have the same problem but I recommend that someone who only has one Xperia X10 get the grey case just in case.

Web Browsing

I’m experimenting with using my own web proxy to compress the data sent to the phone. Unfortunately the Android settings for a web proxy only apply to the main web browser, not to all the other applications that use web services. Also the built-in web browser requires pressing the “settings” hardware button followed by at least two touch-screen presses to change between windows or close a window and it doesn’t seem to support making the short-press action be to open a link in a new window. So I will have to find another web browser to use.

Bandwidth Use

The “3G Watchdog” applet is really good for tracking the data transfer and optionally cutting off 3G access before the quota is exceeded. Unfortunately Virgin has already sent me a bill with $234 in extra charges for bandwidth use because I used 1.6G instead of my 1.5G quota. A Virgin representative had told me over the phone that the billing period would be based on the end of the month, so while every calendar month has had less than 1.5G used because I used more than average in the end of March and the start of April that counts as excess data in the 14th March to 13th April period.

I’m going to appeal this to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman, I don’t think that it’s reasonable that I should be billed almost 7* the normal bill for exceeding the quota by 7.4% based on following the instructions of a Virgin employee. While I could have read the previous bill that they sent me to discover the end of billing period dates, I don’t think that I should be expected to distrust everything that a Virgin employee says. If they billed me an extra $20 then I’d just pay it, but $234 is unreasonable.

Conclusion

Since using the phone I’ve found significant benefits in web browsing and reading email with the major limitation being the small screen (relative to a Netbook or Laptop). So if I was to buy another phone I would probably consider a Dell Streak which seems to be the largest Android phone on the market at the moment.

Given the amount of use that I’ve got I would be happy to spend more money and therefore consider a more expensive phone. But I don’t regret the decision to save money by getting an Xperia X10.

Finally when a telco tries to stick me with a $234 excess charge it really detracts from the value of having a phone contract. If I end up having to pay that then it’s half the value of a smart-phone lost in one telco scam. This is enough to make a contract with Virgin a bad option, after this contract expires I may use VOIP and a pre-paid SIM from Telstra NextG if their network is still the best. Another possibility is to just use a small tablet and skip having a mobile phone, email and Jabber plus SMS from the people who lack net access will probably do.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2011/02/18/xperia-x10i-first-experience/
• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/11/26/quality-of-cameras-in-phones/
• [3] http://blogs.sonyericsson.com/products/2011/03/25/update-on-xperia%E2%84%A2-x10/
• [4] http://www.mobile-stream.com/easytether/android.html
• [5] http://www.xperiax10.net/2010/08/02/mugen-power-xperia-x10-battery-review-%E2%80%93-part-1/

I’ve recently got a new Xperia X10 Android phone for my with with Virgin mobile, it’s generally been working OK although I am having some issues [1], I’ll write another blog post soon about other problems I’ve discovered with the phone and how I’ve solved some of the previous ones.

I upgraded my wife’s phone first because I can’t be without Nagios SMS messages if things don’t work. So now that things are generally working I want to get myself an Xperia through Virgin (and have my wife’s phone get the Nagios SMS in the mean-time). But since last Friday the entire Virgin sales infrastructure has apparently been down. It started with just declining my attempts to purchase a new phone on a separate account, but when I decided to add a second phone to my wife’s account the web site told me that they are upgrading their CRM system and it should be fixed on the 22nd of Feb (yesterday). The web site is now saying that I should “check back in 2 hours for an update“, it’s been saying that for a couple of days now.

So for most of a week potential Virgin customers have been turned away. It could be that Virgin stores are processing sales on paper, but they offer some significant discounts for web sales – the plan I want is a $39 per month plan and I’ll get 3 months free for buying on the web. I’m not about to visit a store and lose $117! I’m sure that many people are losing confidence in Virgin and taking their business elsewhere. I have only just installed the “3G Watchdog” free Android app that monitors bandwidth use and automatically turns off 3G when the quota is reached. For the first few days of using the phone which were more data intensive than usual I had no monitoring and no way of using the Virgin web site to discover how much was used. If Virgin bill me extra for data use I’ll complain and demand that they alter the bill.

This is even worse for pre-paid customers who can’t add credit to their account while this happens!

Virgin state that they are “upgrading the hardware, operating system and database our platform uses to ensure that we can service our Members even better for years to come” [2]. I wonder how people get themselves into such a mess. I guess they didn’t have a decent test environment to allow testing the upgrade process before doing it on the live data, I can understand a routine small upgrade going wrong and corrupting data in a way that takes some time to resolve. But when everything is upgraded then everything should be tested, and tested before going live! One thing that Virgin could do to regain some credibility is to publish what went wrong and what they learned from it. I would be much more happy to trust my personal data and my business critical phone to a company that learns from it’s mistakes and publishes plans on how they do better than one that just does PR.

According to Whirlpool they did the same thing on the 25th of January, so they have had two outages of their billing/CRM system in two months! [3]. The Whirlpool thread has discussion about last month’s down-time and this month’s down-time.

On the up-side, Whirlpool user Kevin JD is a Virgin representative who advised customers to send email to telesales@virginmobile.com.au with a contact phone number if they have any issues. It’s good to see a company engaging with it’s customers.

Update: An hour after emailing the URL to this post to Virgin I got a call from a service representative. It wasn’t a very productive call as I already knew that their servers are down and they can’t do anything. But it’s good to know that they are very enthusiastic about making things better. One useful thing that I learned is that my wife’s service is probably on a pro-rated bandwidth quota. As she got the phone in the middle of the month we can only do 100M of data transfer not 200M before the end of the month, by my rough calculations I’ve downloaded well over 50M of data (maybe as much as 100M) from the Android marketplace. So it might be necessary to negotiate about the bill as soon as their CRM system works.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2011/02/18/xperia-x10i-first-experience/
• [2] http://www.virginmobile.com.au/upgrade
• [3] http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=1626553

I have just got a new Xperia X10i for my wife. It’s with Virgin who use the Optus network. Optus apparently have better coverage than Three (who we have been using for 6.5 years) and Virgin offers the best deals – they have good phones on low monthly rates and do nice things like selling most phones unlocked (the Xperia is one that comes unlocked).

I chose the phone for use in system administration work. A large screen should be good for reading email and running a ssh client. Hopefully I will be able to use the phone’s Wifi to provide mobile net access to a laptop for any problem that can’t be solved on a tiny screen. My wife doesn’t do much sysadmin work nowadays, but it’ll save some effort if we can both use the same model of phone. Also according to Amobil.no the Xperia X10 is the second best phone for camera-phone functionality [1], and my wife would really like to take some good pictures with her phone (she loves the LG U990 Viewty that she has right now).

Screen

One major reason for choosing this phone is that it has the biggest and highest resolution of any phone that doesn’t cost a huge amount of money. It does well in this regard, the screen is very good to look at. However it is apparently not particularly sensitive and we still have the protective cover on the screen which makes the swipe to unlock operation quite difficult. My wife generally likes to keep the protective plastic on such screens for a while to prevent damage, but she may take this off sooner than on other devices.

Sony Foolishness

One reason that this phone is cheaper than any other phone with similar specs is that it’s made by Sony. Sony won’t provide updates to Android 2.2 or better and they have their own stupid applications installed in an intrusive manner. The main screen of the phone has a large icon for the Sony Timescape program. If you choose a background image of a person’s face then the Timescape logo is in the ideal location to obscure the person’s eyes. Generally it’s not desired to have the person in your phone background look like Zorro. Fortunately you can delete icons from the home screen, you just have to press and hold the icon until a trash-can appears at the bottom of the screen and then drag it to the trash.

Phone Book

The core phone functionality is fairly important for a mobile phone. But it seems that every modern phone has some serious failings in this regard. The Xperia comes with a phone book that is reasonably good for managing contacts and partially coalesces multiple entries with the same name – which is convenient as I somehow managed to import 3 copies of each entry in my wife’s phone book. The down-side is that the multiple entries are still stored, so when it comes time to update someone’s phone number my wife will have to separate the entries and then delete all but one of them, adding probably a minute of effort for each one. With 60 phone book entries that’s probably an hour of wasted time during the course of her phone use.

They really should do a time based analysis of phone use and optimise the UI for efficiently performing common tasks. I think that an ideal design would start off by asking the user to rate the importance of phone functionality, camera, facebook, twitter, etc and then give a UI that matches the important tasks. A device that has 384M of RAM, 1G of built-in Flash storage, and an 8G micro-SD card (which Virgin provided with the phone) should be able to offer a selection of UIs.

Camera

The configuration for the camera allows some settings to be changed easily and others have to be changed through the “advanced” settings which requires one more button press and a few extra taps on the screen. One real stupidity is to have the phone light be in the advanced settings, so if the room happens to be a little darker than expected you suddenly need to go to a lot of extra effort to turn on the light.

Finally it would be really good to be able to take a quick picture. I would like to be able to be able to press a combination of buttons and have it immediately take a picture regardless of what had been running before. Not press the main menu button, the camera icon (which I made a link from the home screen), wait a second for it to load, and then press the shutter button. Ideally I would like to press a combination of hardware buttons to have it immediately take a picture even when the screen is locked. I don’t want to wait for the screen unlock process, sometimes the perfect shot is only available for a second.

Wifi

It doesn’t support ad-hoc networks. This is really annoying for me as I don’t own an access point – and I don’t plan to buy one just for a phone. My laptop (Thinkpad T61 with Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG [Golan]) doesn’t seem to support running as an access point, and my EeePC 701 with an Atheros AR5001 has the same problem, here is the error message:

# iwconfig wlan0 mode master essid x
Error for wireless request “Set Mode” (8B06) :
SET failed on device wlan0 ; Invalid argument.

I have a cheap Realtec USB Wifi device that claims to support being an access point but just fails when I try it. So presumably it doesn’t really support it but the driver is buggy.

It seems that I may need to put a custom Android installation on it to get ad-hoc working.

Also it’s apparently necessary to root the Xperia to get Wifi tethering to work for providing net access to a laptop. So I guess I’ll hacking it soon.

Internet Access

The Virgin web site couldn’t help me set up the Internet access because I ported a phone number from another Telco. I had to use the phone number supplied by Virgin to login to their web site and the site then wanted to “sent” (probably SMS) the settings to my phone, but of course it couldn’t SMS to that number as I’ve got the Three number active. Presumably they were expecting that customers would setup Internet access before porting their old number.

I phoned the Virgin tech support and used the settings they suggested, but it didn’t work. Then I took the phone to a Virgin store and it started working after they rebooted it with no changes to settings. Just like Windows used to be. :(

Email Access – Default App

The email setup defaults to port 143 IMAP access, so even when a mail server provides access on port 993 for IMAPS and on port 995 for POP3S probably most users will not use any encryption because their phone doesn’t default to it. Also one annoying feature is that when I gave it the email address “test@coker.com.au” it decided to use “test” as the user-name for IMAP by default. It seems that a very large portion of the active email accounts nowadays are on systems that handle multiple domains and thus require the domain name in authentication, and a large portion of the remainder accept domain names even when they aren’t required. Besides it’s a lot easier to delete a domain name when it’s not needed than to type it in when it is.

The default hostname for sending and receiving mail is the domain name, if the MUA configuration program had checked the MX record it would have known that smtp.sws.net.au is a better default choice for the mail server. I’ve now started the practice of creating a CNAME entry named “m” in every domain I run, so when someone is setting up a mobile phone they just have to add “m.” to the start of the default hostname to use for sending and receiving mail. By doing this I can probably save an average user at least 30 seconds of typing, which is particularly important if I happen to be talking them through the process!

The MUA uses IMAP commands to load the text of the message without attachments and then loads attachments on demand, this will be handy for when people attach unreasonably large files. With IMAP caching and partial loads the core functionality seems OK, and some quick tests of standard but not commonly used IMAP functions such as noticing that mail has been deleted by another client seemed to work well. The performance of loading a new mailbox with 369 message was quite poor, I’m not sure how much of this is due to the network connection and how much is due to the client implementation. This is a real concern for me as I typically have about 7,000 messages in my IMAP account and 3,000 unread messages most of which are in two folders.

Another problem is the fact that there seems to be no way of searching in the list of messages, sorting/grouping by subject or sender, or showing unread messages. This makes the Xperia unsuitable for the task of reading mailing lists when on public transport. I would really like to be able to sort through a folder of mailing-list mail, delete messages that I don’t need to keep and flag ones that need attention when I have the resources of a desktop system when I’m on a tram or in other situations where a laptop can be inconvenient.

One undeniable bug I discovered (as opposed to the missing features I listed) is that when a message has a line with a URL followed by many spaces it won’t load correctly in the web browser, the spaces will be treated as part of the URL. I’ve changed the default signature in my email to have a description followed by a URL to avoid triggering this bug. Presumably other Android phones are bug for bug compatible. :(

Moxier Mail

There is a complete set of email and calendaring applications preloaded from Moxier.com. The Moxier mail client uses company.com as an example domain name (they should use example.com – does no-one read the RFCs?). It’s nice that they verify the SSL certificate and display the details when it’s not signed.

Unfortunately Moxier doesn’t support anything other than Exchange, and I can’t delete it either as it’s part of the base set of applications from Sony.

SMS

The SMS application is supposedly “conversation” based. This doesn’t seem like a benefit to me, it’s a pity that there is no option to make it act more like every other SMS implementation I’ve used over the last 12 years.

Battery

The battery is described as having a capacity of 1500mAh, for comparison a AA rechargeable batteries have capacities ranging from 1800mAh to 2800mAh. My first mobile phone had a rechargeable battery that took the same space as 4*AA batteries and the phone was designed to run on AA batteries if the main battery wasn’t charged. I would like to have an Android phone that had a battery pack of similar size to at least 2*AA batteries, and 4*AA would be OK too.

The Xperia battery was reported as being half discharged after playing with the phone for less than an hour. Basically when doing anything with the phone that is remotely intensive I need to have it plugged in. Unless of course I’m using one of the star-chart applications…

Lights

There are two white leds in the gaps between the keys for Settings, Main-Menu, and Back on the front. They are quite bright and annoying to look into at night.

SSH

SSH was one of the reasons for getting an Android phone, but it was one of the last things I worked on because everything else was so much fun. I’m currently using ConnectBot, it supports storing ssh host keys, generating a key-pair from random screen touches, locking and unlocking the key-pair (with a pass-phrase) and pasting the public key to an open window. All the basic functions just work although it’s rather inconvenient to enter the CTRL keys.

The next thing to investigate is a small and light Bluetooth keyboard. Using an external hardware keyboard will save me from the pain of entering CTRL keys (which is even worse than the pain of entering passwords that contain digits and mixed case). It will also allow me to type a lot faster and use the entire screen for the ssh session.

Current Bug Summary

Wifi doesn’t do ad-hoc mode or tethering.

MUA doesn’t correctly handle URLs in messages if many spaces follow the URL and is also unsuitable for mailing list mail.

Sometimes requires a reboot to make Internet access settings take affect.

Camera light can’t be easily turned on and off.

This isn’t too bad.

Conclusion

Most things do what I want. Once I get a MUA working with all my email, Wifi doing what I want, and a Bluetooth keyboard it’ll be a fairly ideal mobile sysadmin terminal. I’ll probably order one for myself this weekend.

• [1] http://www.amobil.no/artikler/norges_beste_kameramobil/79081

Rachel Botsman gave an interesting TED talk about Collaborative Consumption, various ways of sharing and redistributing objects to save money and reduce their environmental impact [1]. It’s a pity that there isn’t something like swap.com in Australia.

P2P Car Rental

Among other things she mentioned P2P car rentals. The first company she listed is Drive My Car (link to the Australian site) [2] which has a good range of vehicles. They charge 16.5% as an admin fee, the rest is paid to the owner. Strangely they have a web page to estimate what you can get for your vehicle, but the rates that are returned by that page seem to be a lot lower than what cars are actually advertised for (I guess that the owner can ignore the recommendation and charge whatever they want). They deal in daily rentals and the owner may specify a minimum period – 4 days seems common. There are no changes needed to the car and the car owner only has to pay $25 per annum to be listed.

Relay Rides operates in Boston and San Francisco [3], they operate on a per-hour basis and require some sort of RFID unlocking device to be added to each car. The normal setup fee for a car owner is $250 but they currently have a promotion that waives that fee.

Get Around is a beta service that presumably operates only in the US (they seem US centric and don’t specify locations) [4]. They appear to offer per-hour rentals and require hardware to unlock the car. It seems that to get most of the useful information (prices etc) you need to sign up which is a mistake on their part.

Whip Car advertises their service on a supposed relationship between the car owner and the renter [5], I’ve met the people who live in about 10 houses of the 50 in my street, so if a random person in my street offered a car for rent then there would be a 80% chance that I don’t know them – but I guess if one of my neighbors had a car to rent at a low price I might be more inclined to get to know them. The information page says that drivers must have a UK driving licence which implies that they only operate in the UK. Why don’t these people state clearly on their web site the country that they service? Their business model seems interesting, I can imagine a few people who live near each other pooling funds to buy a vehicle and then using Whip Car to control reservations and manage sharing the costs.

P2P Rental of Other Things

A logical extension of the Whip Car concept is to have a service which only mediates sharing between trusted parties. It would have a web site that manages bookings including issues such as the minimum time between bookings, charges a flat fee per item that is managed, and then gives a summary to all parties of what the use was. Ideally it would allow for bidding for peak times. This could work for cars, computers, cameras, holiday homes, or anything else which can usefully be transferred between different users.

• [1] http://www.ted.com/talks/rachel_botsman_the_case_for_collaborative_consumption.html
• [2] http://www.drivemycarrentals.com.au/
• [3] http://relayrides.com/
• [4] http://www.getaround.com/
• [5] http://www.whipcar.com/

Just over a month ago I bought a Wikireader [1] from Officeworks (an Australian chain of stores that sell all manner of office supplies). It cost only $99, thanks to Brianna for informing me about this [2]. When I purchased my Wikireader an Officeworks employee had to get one from the back office and told me that I was the first person to buy one. I suggested to him that when a product isn’t mentioned in their advertising and isn’t put on the shelves it’s unlikely to sell in quantity and that they shouldn’t rely on bloggers to promote what is possibly one of the most desirable products that they stock.

The Wikireader stores a copy of the text of the English language version of Wikipedia on a micro-SD card. They have a service whereby you can get two updates posted to you every year for $29, which would make it pretty close to free once postage and the cost of the micro-SD cards is taken into account. Also you can download new content. I have no immediate plans for updating my Wikireader as the content is more than good enough to answer idle questions while waiting for a bus but as it’s lacking external links due to no net access and images it can’t be used for serious Wiki reading IMHO.

Brianna has documented the process of updating a Wikireader to add more content [3], she added the Chinese version and discovered that inter-wiki links are preserved! I have no immediate plans to add extra content (I don’t know any other language well enough to read an encyclopaedia). Also an 8GB MicroSD card (which is the minimum requirement to use multiple languages) costs $35 and is a significant portion of the original purchase price.

In terms of functionality the device is pretty good. The screen is not back-lit, but if it was then the two AA batteries wouldn’t last anywhere near a year. The screen is not high resolution and the touch functionality isn’t particularly accurate or sensitive – but I guess that’s a necessary trade-off to get the $99 price. The Wikipedia content seems quite complete, so far the only page which I found to be missing was the bio of an Australian architect, I’m not sure if his page was removed from the Wikireader to save space or whether my device has a snapshot that predates the addition of the page.

The Wikipedia page about downloading the database is interesting [4], it’s 6GB of compressed data for the text of the English pages (not including history or talk pages) and for years they haven’t even tried to provide a dump of the images. So I guess that a Wikireader that displays pictures is out of the question.

The Wikireader has a parental filter, in my quick tests the only page that has been blocked is “Sexual Intercourse“, I could read all about safe-sex, infidelity, and lots of other related “adult” topics without being asked for a password. It also shows pages about “goatse” and other related things without asking for a password – NB if you don’t know what “goatse” is then you probably don’t want to learn, trust me that it’s something that most people won’t want their children to learn about. The filter is so bad that I think they shouldn’t include it, it will just give people false confidence. It’s OK to sell a cheap device that is designed to give a detailed description of goatse etc on request to anyone, but IMHO it’s not OK to sell such a device with a claim that it is “kid safe” and has “parental controls“. Note that holding down the History button will allow you to clear your history – this is useful if you have just verified that goatse isn’t blocked and you want to give the device to a young child.

There is a button to give a random page, I believe that this would be more useful if it had some metric to make it more often return pages that might be interesting. It could weight the randomness by the length of the page (usually a longer page is more interesting to more people and has more links to other pages) or by some other metric that indicates the potential popularity. Random links often get me pages about obscure country towns and other things that probably aren’t of interest to people who don’t live near them.

But overall this is a great product, $99 is not much to pay, and I recommend getting one!

• [1] http://thewikireader.com/
• [2] http://brianna.laugher.id.au/blog/68/wikireaders-in-officeworks
• [3] http://brianna.laugher.id.au/blog/70/updating-my-wikireader-a-tale-of-7-zip
• [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download