• Blog
• Contact me

踎低噴飯

iPhone first week: things that bug me

（本文的中文版本在这里。）

iPhone is no doubt a revolutionary product, and as such has its limitations. Here is a list of issues that keep bugging me during my first week with it.

1. The earphone jack is not compatible with the standard mini-jack. The reason for this is that the useful earphone control button / mic requires special jack. But the design combined with the crappy sound quality of the earphone itself means you are trapped with crappy sound quality until Apple 1). ditches the non-standard jack, which is unlikely; 2). improves the sound quality of their earphones, which is equally unlikely given their past records.

2. MobileMail.app needs major overhaul. Seriously, a mail client that doesn’t do ‘empty trash’? (You have to delete mails in your trash box one by one!)

3. Can’t forward text message. Can’t delete individual message. Also, something less obvious but does pose an issue: the IM-style message session encourages fragmented input from the sender’s side, which can be a pain in the ass for the recipients who are using phones with traditional messaging interface (read: all non-iPhone-users).

People tend to break their sentences when interacting with an IM-style conversation interface. In the above example, the recipient would receive three messages which could have been combined into one.

4. The receiver’s volume seems to be a bit on the low side, and I don’t seem to be able to find a way to adjust it.

5. You can’t use the phone as an external hard drive (note #1), the only way to have media files (music, photo and video) and personal info (contact list, calendar) copied to the phone is iTunes synching. Yes, iPods are like that too (note #2), but this restriction sucks big time so I can’t let it slip through.

6. No official third-party development support. This has been pointed out by numerous people even before the phone hit the market. But it feels more counter-productive when you consider the thriving unsupported third-party development currently going on. Steve Jobs’ rationale for the decision is that closing the system ensures stability. But we all know that hackers would beat the system anyway, and which one do you think is more stable: third-party development with official support or without?

7. One thing that doesn’t necessarily count as an ‘issue’: the touch-screen of iPhone is temperature-sensitive. (So when Jobs dissed stylus when announcing iPhone for the first time, he meant it.) This can be annoying for (female) users with long fingernails because they get in the way when you try to tap the soft keyboard with fingertips, which more often than not results in no response. The usual way to work around is to use finger bellies, but that reduces precision. I wouldn’t have thought about this until my girlfriend tried her fingers on the machine, and this compromised experience surely is holding her from buying an iPhone.

-

Note #1: Granted, you can use the iPhone as an external hard drive via ssh. But that requires some tech-saviness and a WiFi connection. Also, transfer speed tends to suck unless you have a router that supports the 802.11n standard. (Maybe that’s an excuse to buy an Airport Extreme.) On the typical 802.11a/b/g network, I get less than 300KB/s.

Note #2: Not the iPod shuffle, which you can use as an iTunes-free USB stick / MP3 player with this Python script.

Photos from Software Freedom Day

All photos taken with iPhone, no tweaking at all (except for rotating and resizing) so you’ll see the capability of the phone’s 200-megapixel built-in camera�it’s better than I had expected.

The Chinese version is eligible to be TransNatorized.

Debian banner.

Mozilla Online. Their people pasted the silly sticker on my front without asking me at all, I took it off immediately of course. Your browser is a RAM hog, man.

I didn’t see Ubuntu CDs, maybe I was too late and they’ve been snatched up. I took the Edubuntu and Kubuntu ones though I’m not sure I’ll be using them anytime soon.

To date her you need to name at least three open source programming languages within five seconds and to use Emacs shortcuts with either one of your hands. Of course, the sinners at iPhoneSIMfree.com are already out.

Do I get a chance?

When I turn my back on you, I’m actually making a personal statement.

Official swags. (T-shirt and stuff.)

Mahjong game on Mac OS X!

Crowd listening to Su Zhe’s speech.

Poor Red Flag. There’s a reason for everything.

James Su Zhe’s speech at Software Freedom Day

The Software Freedom Day this afternoon was a rich event with a lot of good stuff tucked in. Apart from the swag (’stuff we all get’) bag, people involved in several major Linux distributions were giving out free Live CDs. There is also a booth of OpenMoko, the buzz-generating touch-screen cellphone based on Linux. They’ve prepared two prototypes of the phone for people to try out. After playing with it for a couple of minutes, it seems clear to me that the emphasis is on the word ‘prototype’: the phone took about one minute to boot up, comes with an ugly, over-sized stylus (contrary to the touch-screen of iPhone, which responds to the touch of objects with a certain temperature�stylus or fingernails don’t work at all, OpenMoko’s screen responds to any touch), and is nearly unusable in terms of its soft keyboard input. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been using soft keyboard on a regular basis even before owning an iPhone. If you want to browse the Internet with your Wii or DS Lite, soft-keyboard-based Opera browser is your only choice at the moment. Despite the limited size of DS Lite’s screen, Nintendo has managed to squeeze in a reasonably-sized (at least for me) soft keyboard. The OpenMoko is on the brink of unusable in this regard; the keys are even too small for the tip of a stylus, let alone one’s fingertip. To be sure, one shouldn’t expect too much from a prototype, but even today, serious software developers are not supposed to show anything to the public before their software at least hit the Beta mark. If we borrow that metaphor, OpenMoko is probably still in the Alpha stage.

The content of the Software Freedom Day consists of lectures from open source developers, product managers and Linux enthusiasts. I walked out on the bored, corporate-style speech of the second speaker, the product manager of a Chinese flavour of OpenOffice.org. But the first speech is well-worth the trip from northeast third-ring road across town to Tsinghua University.

Before the event started, I was having a little chat with the guy sitting next to me. At one point he mentioned the fact that a certain Su Zhe will give a talk later. The way he said this was not unlike a Linux geek would have when he learns that Eric Raymond or Guido van Rossum is coming to town. The name did strike a bell, but at that moment, I had no idea who Su is except for the fact that he works for Google China.

A slightly large-framed guy walked up on stage and began to speak in a casual manner. His first slide revealed him as the author of SCIM, the most widely used Chinese input method on the Linux platform. (I don’t have statistics here, but considering the termination of fcitx, it’s safe to make that argument.) Its popularity is justified by its superior user interface and flexibility over fcitx. Although I no longer use Linux as my main working platform, I still have respect for SCIM and its developers, and would recommend it to Linux newbies with no reserve.

Su Zhe (aka James Su) has an unassuming but confident stage presence. With his left hand holding the frame of the podium during the whole speech, he has the same kind of deadpan coolness of, dare I say, his top-boss Larry Page. Most of his speech is made up of anecdotes and stories instead of ‘FOSS philosophy‘, which was inevitably trumpeted by the two moderators at the beginning of the event. Kudos to Richard Stallman for his genius of initiating free-as-in-free-lunch word-of-mouth marketing!

As it happened, Su’s preoccupation with computer started in the early days of Zhonghua Xuexiji, an OEM version of Apple ][ in the early 1980s. Later he moved on with the real Apple ][ and 8086, 8088 boxes. When pursuing his degree in physics (incidentally, the author of fcitx also majored in physics) in Tsinghua University, he spent most of his time coding in dorm. One of his more famous early projects is Smart Boot Manager, a utility that enables one to install two or more OS on the same platform - a daunting task for many in the old days. His expertise with managing multiple OS eventually led to geeky satisfaction: a system admin at one of the top American universities (whose name Su has forgotten) used a little app of his to automatically boot into Linux and restoring the Windows partition on the same machine, which was routinely polluted by non-expert students with malware and fishy third-party apps during daytime.

SCIM is Su’s second open source project. The idea came as he was crunching a C++ textbook and trying to figure out something that he can do with the language. He ended up writing 100,000 lines of code all by himself. ‘If you are fresh out of college and trying to get a job, the experience of having written 100,000 lines of code in C or C++ surely helps a lot,’ Su said. SCIM gained popularity pretty fast, generating buzz among developers in the open source community from all over the world. Currently the project encompasses input methods for dozens of languages, and the original title ‘Simplified Chinese Input Method’ was soon proved to be inadequate and misleading. Reluctant to ditch the well-known acronym, Su later changed the full title to its current form: Smart Common Input Method.

It’s a good choice to have Su talked at the event. The audience consists of mostly computer science students who, like the majority of Chinese college students, worry about their career perspective after graduation above anything else. As a Google (and ex-Novell) employee, Su is clearly effective in injecting confidence into the Chinese open source community. Dick Hardt’s fans may frown at the style of his slideshow, but compared to the pretentious or ill-prepared talks made by many contemporary artists which I attend on a monthly basis, Su Zhe’s no-bullshit speech is a true bliss.

本日最佳娱乐

网站糟蹋器

在 Target 后面填入地址可以糟蹋任何一个网站。别忘了从下拉式菜单选择各种不同的糟蹋方式。个人最爱：Dog Poop, Text Sucker, Demonstration, Dinosaurs.

iPhone 成功解锁（免费，软件方案）

炒卖 877 卡的，收上千元搞硬件破解的家伙可以洗洗睡了。谁也没有想到第一个免费的 iPhone 软件破解方案是在「九一一」事件六周年的那天放出。

教程在这里，看上去好像一堆代码很吓人的样子，其实只不过是两件事：上传文件到 iPhone 和执行命令。仔细点照着一步步做应该就没问题。我试了一次就成功了。一张广东动感地带的 137，一张北京动感地带的 158，都可以用。短信和电话收发都没问题。不过由于 iPhone 还暂时没有中文输入法（线上版不算），只能发英文或拼音短信，收中文短信没有问题。

目前只剩 YouTube 功能尚未出现完美破解。（Visual Voicemail 不算，因为需要运营商支持。）

当然，免责声明还是要的，一台机器成功不等于台台成功。如果你照上述教程操作导致 iPhone 变砖，我不负任何责任。

感谢 iPhone Dev Team 的所有人，‘DVD’ Jon, Geohot，以及……iPhoneSIMfree.com 小组。

消息转发：北京软件自由日

时间：二零零七年九月十五日（星期六）下午一点
地点：清华大学信息大楼（FIT 楼）二层多功能报告厅（位于清华大学东门内西侧二十米）。看地图。

软件自由日是一个全球性的、由普通人参与的向公众宣传软件自由的重要性、以及推广自由及开源软件的活动。每年九月的第三个星期六，全球各地的团队都会组织一些活动。最近一次的活动中，全世界有二百多个团队参加。

……

几个将参会的名角：

* 著名的自由办公套装 OpenOffice.org
* 浏览 Web、发送电子邮件以及管理网站的解决方案
* 使用自由软件制作的专业三维动画及其中文支持社区
* 更多让你惊奇的东西，诸如三维桌面以及以往只能想像的东西，全部是自由软件！

怎么参加？到时露面即可！欲携友参加亦不必犹豫。

详情：sfd.beijinglug.org

洋葱对钢琴家的功效

听了波哥雷利奇吃洋葱的故事之后，一时兴起去 YouTube 找了一圈，还真有几个干货。明显，这些都是吃洋葱之前的波哥雷利奇。

一九八三年在日本的独奏会，拉威尔的「夜之加斯帕」第三段「斯卡波」。演绎和后来在德国留声机唱片公司录的版本基本一致。这是波哥雷利奇技巧全盛期。

同一场音乐会上弹的萧邦「第三钢琴奏鸣曲」第四乐章。九十年代在德国留声机录制的 DVD 版本是他最精彩的发挥之一。这个廿五岁时的版本自然火气旺、速度快，主题最后一遍出现时几乎时疯速，甚至导致左手碰错几音。

这个更珍贵了，是他在八零年萧邦大赛上的录像！弹的是萧邦练习曲作品十第十首。

至于吃洋葱之后的波哥雷利奇，成了这个样子：

（零六年在纽约大都会美术馆的演出）

Photo: Nan Melville for The New York Times

再引焦元溥

原文在这里，去年台湾《联合报》对张悬和焦的访谈。

問：焦元溥訪談世界知名鋼琴家的計畫，進行得如何了？這些鋼琴大師為何會理你？

元：我已經訪問五十三個鋼琴家了，現在還差九個，我還有十萬字要寫。

訪問前十個最難，要透過我認識的音樂界的人牽線；後來就寄電子郵件讓經紀公司看我曾訪問過誰、寫書的目的。這要花時間啦，丟一次郵件，等一個月，還要排時間。

比如紀辛（Y.Kissin）就說因為我訪問過的鋼琴家，看得出都是真正名家，所以他願意受訪；也有鋼琴家說，如果我的名單裡出現郎朗，他們是絕不可能受訪的（笑）。

善哉善哉。

焦元溥谈波哥雷利奇

在 Google News 台湾站偶尔看到关于焦元溥新书的消息，顺便搜索了一下这位我初中时最爱读的乐评人，不想竟然是张悬的哥哥。另外还找到这篇有趣的。拷贝放在这里，主要是考虑台湾网站从大陆连太没有保证。

波哥雷利奇來台
　

這一週真是活活累死

上週四
本來只是想看看能不能訪問到Pogorelich
結果非常順利地訪問到了

我想
我就是週四和他週日音樂會會見到他
不料大錯特錯

週五就接到NSO的電話
說Pogorelich希望我去聽他排練
接下來
每天都有活動
從上週四到本週三
天天都在陪Pogorelich
音樂會完了甚至更累
因為他向我借CD
在旅館一起和我們(我和陳毓襄)聽CD聽到十二點
之後他去按摩
我則可憐地回家準備明天要聽的CD
最後
還陪他去機場
除了接機以外
幾乎無役不與

雖然是累翻天
但是和Pogorelich學到很多東西
這人的聰明超乎想像
對音樂認識極為深刻
最可怕的
還是他的鋼琴技巧和”分析技巧的能力”
很難想像這種”功夫”竟然真實存在
Pogorelich花了三十年修練
現在簡直深不可測
令我歎為觀止
如非親眼所見
實在很難相信這世上竟存在如此技巧

Pogorelich個性變了
但本質我覺得可能還是相同
我們有一篇非常精采的訪問
可是呀
Pogorelich不希望自己和其他鋼琴家放在一起
(well,他可能誰都看不上眼)
所以我也不知道將來要如何發表
Pogorelich希望我明年去歐洲找他
看看能否擴充這篇訪問變成一本書
(怎麼和齊瑪曼一樣…..真是受夠了!)
我不知道這個計劃是否可行
等明年再說了

最後貢獻一個Pogorelich提供的治過敏方法–洋蔥茶

將三個中型洋蔥(未經處理,有很多外皮的)
把外皮洗淨後剝下
用熱水煮2-3分鐘
連皮帶湯放入杯中加蓋悶10-15分
將洋蔥皮取出後
即成深褐色”洋蔥茶

據Pogorelich所說
這個洋蔥茶含有高量維他命
並能徹底改變過敏體質
一日午晚餐後喝一杯(此茶很強勁,一定要飯後喝)
連喝三日
隔一週後再喝三日
如此連喝六週
停六週
再喝六週
18個月後體質即會改變
(之前一定要休息,因為非常強烈…..)

我喝了的確很有效
一整天都不會咳嗽
在此推薦給大家

至於剩下的洋蔥呢?
well, Pogorelich說洋蔥是永保青春的秘方
他天天生吃一個洋蔥–
真的是生吃,他吃洋蔥就像吃蘋果一樣
我努力效法
頂多吃1/4個就宣告放棄………
不怕辛辣和流淚的人可以嘗試

以上是Pogorelich的克羅埃西亞保健秘方
請大家參考

祝
心想事成

元溥敬上2005.10.21.

赚钱的和讲艺术的

我和 We Make Money Not Art 的赫欣·迪巴提（Régine Debatty）在位于北京 SOHO 现代城的金朗园茶餐厅。这是我们去年来北京后发现的第一家有咸柠七供应的港式茶餐厅。（东直门东方银座广场的「又一桟」也有，而且更好，用的是钢杯！）

镜子里手拿相机的是 We Need Money Not Art 的创始人 aaajiao。摄影李振华。照片原载 WNMNA。

赫欣是学拉丁文和古希腊文的，还能讲英文、法文、意大利文，不懂技术，跟我之前想象的威廉·吉布森小说里的人物大不相同。