Planet Manipal

When it debuted, the iPhone was a beautiful device, although it lacked a lot of functionality, and the hardware wasn’t powerful enough. Yet, we defended, bought and loved it, making it one of the biggest hits of ‘07, and the fastest selling device in some countries. I, however, was one of those people who didn’t/couldn’t take the plunge¹. As with most new Apple products, I knew that rapid iteration was the name of the game, and no matter when I would buy one, it would be obsolete by the next big conference. I chose to hold out. And boy am I glad.

When it did arrive in India, the iPhone 3G was ridiculously priced, and it didn’t back that up with features that we were used to. The U.S. has been fairly backward when it comes to mobile phones, but India is not. For years, we have been Symbian toting users of Nokia phones (which holds a huge majority share here) who have come to expect a lot of features from our phones, even if we never really used them. Most of the people I know willingly pay for what it can do, and not what they really do with it. That, coupled with lack of 3G in the country (even though the same people would buy other 3G enabled devices), and superfluous requirements like SMS-forwarding turned people away. So it was really no surprise when the launch failed miserably.

But now comes the iPhone 3G S. The first iPhone I can really get on board with, and it’s not just because it’s faster and better than previous iPhones. That’s a big part, yes, but the decision is made so much easier because of the fact that the competition looks (to quote Steve Jobs) really last century.

The Grass is not Greener

No matter what one might think, most non-iPhone smartphones today sucks. I’ve had a Nokia 5800 XpressMusic for quite a while now, and am thoroughly frustrated (I’ve already argued about how it’s a smartphone even though Nokia never meant for it to be one). I’m frustrated with the UI, with the lack of apps, the terrible hog that is the OS, and the plastic-y feel to the build. It’s a good phone, but not for ‘09. I’ve seen the specifications and read reviews of the N97 as well, and am still not impressed. If you thought Nokia, the largest smartphone manufacturer, would maybe get it right after two iterations, you’re very wrong.

Competing phones from Samsung and Sony Ericsson are just glorified good looking devices that offer nothing beyond a touch interface to whatever has been there in the market for the last decade. I’ve not seen the Android phones because they haven’t launched in India, so I can’t say anything about them. Windows Mobile devices are in the same boat, and a downward spiral.

Basically, any non-iPhone device that is trying to compete with it at the moment, is a poor man’s version of the iPhone. They’ve clearly missed the point.

Apple has almost completely bridged the gap (features wise) with iPhone OS 3.0. The apps war wages on, but it has already won the battle with a massive head start the App Store and its 50,000+ apps has given it. The Ovi store is a joke (and I dare say too little too late), and the Prē is too new and too immature to be in reckoning for at least a year to come. Windows Mobile isn’t even relevant anymore in this department. The competition today, is where Apple and the Macintosh were in the 1980s — not differentiating enough, and hence, constantly playing catch-up, among other things. If all this sounds fanboy-ish, then let the numbers talk. Remember, this is just one model, on one carrier in 8 countries.

I guess what I’m saying, in a few words, is that iPhone shines through like a diamond in a coal mine that is the phone market today. But a diamond that shines by its own light, not reflected. It’s not an awesome device because everything around it sucks. It’s an awesome device, period.

It is finally something that meets my requirements from a portable device that is a worthy substitute for my computer when I’m on the move. And it’s constantly pushing that boundary to show me things I didn’t realise I wanted. For example, my favourite thing from this year’s WWDC was the peripherals’ support². The iPhone being able to 2-way communicate with other devices is such an awesome thing, that ideas like this don’t seem so unworldly crazy anymore. It’s not only innovating, it’s letting us innovate along with it as well.

Coup De Grâce

Apple started by making the smartphone usable. Now, it’s giving us things to use. Slow and steady will win this race, because that allows Apple to work on the features that people will use, and make them in a way that people will want to use. The iPhone is already its priority device, with maximum development and marketing efforts going into making it as much of a hit as the iPod was. And I’m glad that they are turning it into a device that people want because they like it, and not because it’s flashy. People are buying the iPhone to use it and be productive with it, do things that they did not or could not do with other phones, in a way that makes it a very pleasant experience. They’re actually having fun with their phones.

I’ll be buying one when I move to the UK this October, and I’m really looking forward to it. I’m half expecting an OS update by then, to iron out any bugs they might have found after the release (UPDATE: early signs of which are showing).

I am an Apple faithful, but sometimes it just takes a while. The wait, however, is so worth it.

Further Reading

R • Waffle
The iPhone Software Revolution • Coding Horror

I have decided to move some of my personal projects to Google Code so that it’d give me some impetus and make me get off my lazy ass and actually put some real effort into the things I like.

Er, not really. It’s more of a selfish decision. Right now I want other people to read and criticize my code so that I’d know where I’m going wrong and correct myself. Nothing’s more dangerous than complacency.

As a starter, I have uploaded the tiny mpd now playing plugin I wrote for xchat about an year ago when I was learning socket programming in python. Showing the current playing track was too easy. Right now I want it to become more like an interface to mpd that provides basic controls sitting in the comfort of xchat.

I named the project mpd-xchat

PS: Just after I had uploaded the code, I found a project by the name of xchat-mpd

I hope to add one more project in the next few days

So much for late night coding. Yesterday I missed out on a very important part about setting the hard limits on resources. But you need to have a superuser process to achieve this. Referring to the code of exec.c in the previous post, put in this after line no. 18.

limit.rlim_max =1;

This is actually the hard limit and as the man page says, it acts as a ceiling for the soft limit i.e. rlim_cur. The advantage being that if the process exceeds the limit and yet continues running such as by handling the SIGXCPU signal in the previous example, this time a SIGKILL will be issued which would force it to terminate.

Now compile exec.c as usual and run it as root. You won’t see any output as we set the hard limit equal to the soft limit.

• Soft limit reached, SIGXCPU sent
• Process tries to handle it
• At the same time the hard limit i.e. the ceiling for soft limit is reached too. So a SIGKILL is sent and the process terminates before any output.

References

setrlimit(2) man page

This might seem trivial at first sight but you have no idea how darn happy I’m to see this works . So happy that I decided to blog about it. I already hear trumpets blowing in the distance.

Here is what I was worried about:

Normally, exec() is carried out in a forked process. Setting resource limits on a forked process is straightforward using setrlimit(). But I was apprehensive whether those limits would hold once I exec() another binary image within that forked process, and it wouldn’t be overstating it if I said I was about to front kick my laptop in joy .

I tested by limiting the amount of CPU time(RLIMIT_CPU) that a running process is allocated since this would be the easiest to test IMO. The signal delivered to the process when it exceeds the CPU time limit is SIGXCPU.

Since this is all that is to it, wasting no more words, let’s get our hands dirty.

The program in which a process is forked and exec() is run (exec.c):

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <sys/resource.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/wait.h>
#include <unistd.h>

int main()
{
    int pid;
    int rv;

    if (!( pid=fork() ))
    {
        struct rlimit limit;
        getrlimit(RLIMIT_CPU, &limit);

        limit.rlim_cur = 1;

        setrlimit(RLIMIT_CPU, &limit);

        execl("./inf","inf",NULL);
    }
    else if(pid)
    {
        wait(&rv);
    }
    else
        printf("Error forking\n");

    return 0;
}

The program whose binary image is specified in exec() (inf.c):

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <signal.h>

void handler(int signum)
{
    if (signum == SIGXCPU)
        printf("Caught SIGXCPU signal, exec in peace\n");
}

int main()
{
signal(SIGXCPU, handler);
while(1);
return 0;
}

Now compile
$gcc -Wall exec.c -o exec
$gcc -Wall inf.c -o inf

and run
$./exec

You’ll see SIGXCPU being handled which means the resource limit is working!

I gave a talk this Friday on the lifecycle of a component in Flex 4. The talk went into the details of how the flash player works, why a component needs a lifecycle and the various stages of a components life.

Here are the slides and experimental code from the talk …

Here’s the code we played with to understand how frame rates work in the flash player …

FrameRates.as

Here’s the code we wrote with to understand the Elastic Racetrack …

ElasticRaceTrack.as

Here’s the experiment to understand marshaled slices …

MarshaledSlices.as

Download Slides
Download Source Code

The presentation was slightly long and I’ve already heard that some people found it boring but I hope that wasn’t the case for everyone

I would like to thank all the awesome people in the Flash/Flex community who have helped me understand all this by publishing some great articles and blog posts … here are just some of the articles that I’ve found very useful …

Ted Patrick on the Elastic Racetrack
Sean Christmann’s Updated ‘Elastic Racetrack’ for Flash 9 and AVM2
Ely Greenfrield on Building a Flex Component [PDF] (Thanks Ted Patrick for making it available on his blog)
“Diving Deep With the Flex Component Lifecycle,” by Brad Umbaugh and RJ Owen
White Paper by the guys at Development Arc on Component Lifecycle

Please do let me know what you thought of my talk and how I can improve it.

Astray amidst the arrow-headed approach of ambition.

Why couldn't I care about career and take control of the wheel of success I must steer.

Daze and delusional drudgery sweeps me off my sunken rooted feet..

It's mush and muck I am so firmly rooted in..

The mush of romanticism that must become much less pulls me gravitationally towards the roots..

I plunge in the dilemma of dreams and duty..

Trivialities of dressing and late-coming bound unto us by the norm of civilization is suffocating..

The corporate is killing the hippie..

The norms are confronting the free-spirit..

The need to fit in is weakening the feminist..

Esteem takes a whirl and then takes a bow and falls..

The much needed beams of faith of family are crumbling with their own need to sustain..

The other pillars of friends are crumbling due to lack of faith..

The lone standing in the this world of money, power and sex is causing reform..

Reform to confirm..

Reform of ruin..

The lead blunts out so must I stop now? Is it a sign?

I must.