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"No Wonder He's Gotten So Tan" The pool facility has a nice outdoor splash area where he can play. http://flic.kr/p/8nPHBd

Prison Break

I commute and travel just enough to make easy-to-use portable entertainment a big deal for me. I've been a loyal iPod user ever since the original 5GB, Mac-only, no-wireless, less-space-than-a-Nomad, lame version. But when the iPhone came along, the attraction of gadget-convergence plus the online-anywhere functionality immediately consigned the iPods to the same dustbin of electronics past where my Discman-plus-Airhead setup still resides. Now I can listen to the same music and podcasts, and check RSS headlines, tweets, and Facebook updates on one 3.5" screen, all automatically synced through the same iTunes setup I had before. By making the iPod-to-iPhone transition so seamless, Apple's really build themselves a significant competitive advantage that other smartphone vendors can steal, but not match.

If one device is going to be my all-everything pocket master, it better be rock-solid stable and ready to go all the time. iPhone's barely-adequate battery life is well documented, but it's no problem for me to charge-and-sync every night, and keep an extra iPod cable at work for a quick top-up in case some rogue process sucks up all the juice. Plus the iPhone is sold unlocked in Taiwan out-of-the-box. That's why I've never bothered to look into jailbreaking my iPhone, despite all the supposed freedom from Apple tyranny and all that. Most folks around here jailbreak immediately, of course, mostly for the ability to pirate Apps, but also to install improved Chinese input methods or Bluetooth stacks. Far from me to judge on the legality or morality of those uses, at least for me none of those are deal-breaker functions, so I've been content with the vanilla Apple firmware. And Apple has done a relatively good job of consistently upgrading iOS across its entire line of devices, up 'til now.

Yes, the cut-and-paste function was a long time coming. The (pseudo) multi-tasking even longer, only arriving with the introduction of iOS 4, designed in parallel with iPhone 4. However, unlike the past iOS upgrades, the iOS 4 upgrade clearly segregates the iPhone generations, back-porting the multi-tasking support only one generation back. It's not entirely unreasonable, since the iPhone 3Gs carries more RAM than the previous iPhones, critical for holding all the multi-tasking Apps in memory. I could live without the wallpaper support for my not-yet-two years old iPhone 3G, but missing out on the signature feature of iOS 4 took a lot of juice out of the new-version-high.

Thankfully, the underground iPhone dev-team was hard at work even during the iOS beta stage, and they produced a jailbreak mechanism almost immediately after the formal release of iOS 4. I waited for a few more weeks for the supporting infrastructure to shake out the integration issues with the new major version. Then I went ahead and redsn0w'ed the puppy. Stayed away from the more garish themes and kept it vanilla-looking as much as possible. SBSettings is a practical addition, allowing easy toggling of many functions without digging into the Settings app. Had to install SSH, because it just ain't really hacking unless you can get a command line. But the main goal was to inject the single toggle to enable multi-tasking on the iPhone 3G.

The SBSettings display shows the amount of free memory remaining, and even on a fresh boot it was showing a precariously low number for multi-app usage. Sure enough, double-clicking the Home button to bring up the task-switcher and jumping to background apps resulted in long lags and crashes more often than not. Looks like we need more memory. Well, I wasn't about to go desoldering SMT RAM chips or anything like that. iOS's Unix foundation provides just the answer for this situation via the virtual memory system. Apple was even kind enough to leave their dynamic_pager VM manager in the default iPhone system setup, so all it takes to activate VM is to drop a property list file into the right LaunchDaemons directory and off it goes. Virtual memory storage on solid-state storage carries substantial risks, as frequent writing of the swapfile from heavy memory access will do bad things to the NAND flash chips due to their limited write-cycle lifetime. Nevertheless, it's such a simple mod that I decided to give it a try, figuring that I've already got my money's worth out of the 3G and betting that I wouldn't wear out the flash before iPhone 4's out on the local market.

The virtual memory gave the system the illusion of enough RAM breathing room to allow multi-task switching, but reading from the swapfile is still orders of magnitude slower than real-RAM access, so such switches still take an inordinate amount of time, and there's still a significant chance that the system will lose patience and just kill the task before the switch completes. As more apps get opened over time, the system keeps expanding the swapfile to fit them all in, resulting in the whole phone starting to lag over time. So I either had to reboot the phone to clean out the swapfiles, or keep opening up SBSettings to kill processes to manually free up memory, which seems to defeat the purpose of convenient multi-tasking. Kinda reminds me of the good old days, when I tried to make Switcher work on my puny 512KE Mac, shoehorning too many applications into too little memory on a system that wasn't designed to handle it.

Still, I might've put up with all that, until I had to travel for work and left the comforts of my home cell network. Having the phone flash No Service on me at the airport was no joke when I was depending on roaming coverage to keep me in touch with my customer and for my own border pickup. Checked the Carrier settings and figured that the jailbroken OS image did not contain the roaming profiles for my home carrier, so it did not know what carrier it should attach to upon landing in a strange land, and unfortunately neither did I. So I had to click through each carrier and wait for it to try to associate with the network to see if it would take. This was no trivial task in a competitive market like Hong Kong with its myriad of wireless carriers. Wasted half an hour fiddling with the settings before I finally got a dial tone, so to speak. Thank goodness I knew where the carrier settings were hidden in the menu tree, whereas a less knowledgeable user might've been seriously hosed. Couldn't get the phone to associate with HKG's free Wifi service, either, but I was in too much of a hurry to work out that problem.

By the time I got out from behind The Great Firewall, iOS 4.0.1 had been released to fix issues unrelated to my phone. Others warned that installing the minor update would undo the jailbreaking process and to hold off until the dev-team could update the JB toolchain. On the other hand, undoing the jailbreak was exactly what I was looking to do at that point, and I dutifully clicked the Install And Update button when iTunes asked me about the new update when I synced the phone at home. Soon thereafter, my iPhone was back on the straight-and-narrow, without the multi-tasking and jailbroken apps, but with a new signal scale and hopefully improved stability.

Now before y'all come to take my geek-card away, I've still got my Tomato-re-flashed router, the debian-hacked NAS, an HTPC next to the TV, which also happens to run a virtualized Linux instance for all my external server needs. So I've already got more gear than I've got time to tweak. Right now my biggest challenge is figuring out how to crack the BabyOS that's running inside the kid's head. Let's see if we can get him to do something useful besides making funny faces.

And You Were Right Here All Along

For an Asian society with cuisine built on a thousand-year foundation of rice cultivation, Taiwan sure loves their white bread toast. Soft as a cloud and just as insipid, the ever-present squares are vital at breakfast shops where they're cut into triple-layer triangular pre-prepared sandwiches, or act as the doughy wrapping of a hot ham-and-egg breakfast sandwich. Considering the emphasis on texture in the local cuisine, it's a mystery how the flat and soggy toast came to be so widely accepted as a common breakfast food.

I'll grab the occasional pork floss, egg, and cucumber sandwich from the local breakfast cart when I'm in a hurry, but on a lazy weekend morning when I'm feeling indulgent, I might still hit McDonalds for an Egg McMuffin combo. Not so much for the processed cheese or the mystery meat patty, but for the English muffin bread. The more glutinous texture makes for a much more satisfying bite than white-toast, without scraping the roof of my mouth raw like a baguette's hard crust. Living in the States I'd taken English muffin's presence on the grocery shelves for granted. So it was a slightly irritating niggle to not have it around, except for extortionate prices at the fancy import grocery.

Not that I should be whining. It's not as if I'm hard up for breakfast options in the morning. Traditional Chinese breakfasts such as rice congee, or soy milk plus oil sticks are hearty and satisfying. The Japanese-style bakeries offer a vast variety of buns and breads stuffed with creative fillings that go well with a cup of coffee. And there are even pretty legitimate Euro-style bakeries popping up with real, crusty bread. On the other hand, the missing English muffins represents a loss of displacement, like how we couldn't have bell fruit during all the years in the USA.

So one of Mom's old friends from Hsinchu came up to Taipei to visit the other day. A former head-pharmacist, she usually comes bearing cheap Lipitor for mom, as well as loads of Hsinchu's local specialties like 肉丸 pork dumplings and 貢丸 meatballs. This time she brought bread, from the plebeian I-Mei chain. The burger buns I could've done without, but the English muffins were a sight. Outer surfaces were cornmeal-dusted, nooks-and-crannies inside and everything. The taste was right on, too. Maybe not quite up to Thomas's standards, but certainly at least as good as grocery store generics. Quite nice with just some butter and jam. Would make a good egg-and-cheese, too.

I Never Thought It Would Happen To Me

My first home computer was a 512KB Fat Mac, and I've stuck with Macs as my main computer through three processor architectures, running Systems 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and X. The latest of which now powered by a quad-core i5 with 8192-times the memory and orders of magnitude more CPU power compared to my first. Throughout that time I've waited patiently for Apple's product refreshes, and waited even more patiently to save up enough money to afford them. I bought idiosyncratic Apple-only accessories: the AAUI Ethernet transceivers, and numerous ADB keyboards and mice, all without much complaint, even though Wintel equivalents were cheaper and more available. While I'm not out there on the front-lines arguing for Apple on the Internet Battlefront, I've certainly put my money where my mouth would be.

My main purpose for upgrading to the iMac was to support the extra storage and processing requirements of my photography. Sure it's mostly just pictures of food and family, but those baby pictures are precious just the same. The bigger hard disk meant I can shoot RAW files instead of JPG, the improved CPU and GPU lets me run Aperture at acceptable speed, and the humongous 27" LED-lit IPS display makes it all look great. Apple even added an SD-card slot to make it easy to download pictures from the camera without having to fumble with cables.

The screen of the iMac being so wide meant that the side surface with the card slot isn't readily visible. But with such a thin profile it's easy to find the slot by feel and push the card in blind. So there I was ready to check out wife's latest lot of baby pictures as I tried to pop in the SD-card fresh out of the camera. Funny how that slipped in more easily than usual, I thought. Waited for a few beats and the card didn't mount on the desktop. Peered my head over the side and found the SD slot to be empty. That was when I realised to my horror that I'd pushed the memory card into the adjacent DVD slot by mistake.

Panic! But a closer look showed that a corner of the card was still just visible. Quickly grabbed a utility knife to try to nudge the card out. But in my haste I failed the DEX check and bumped the card into the dark abyss behind the felted cover of the DVD drive. Now it was time to PANIC, as I was pretty sure that this wouldn't be covered by AppleCare. Did some more fishing with various thin implements on-hand, but in my agitated state I couldn't snag the card hidden in the invisible mechanical labyrinth.

At least the inert memory card wasn't doing any harm sitting inside the DVD drive. So I could power down the computer safely and sleep on the problem overnight. Tried to do some preliminary research to see what's the best way to go about retrieving the lost memory card. But most of the Google results consisted of incredulous comments lambasting the special kind of imbecile that would mistake the DVD slot for the SD slot. Heck I would've been one of the hecklers, too, if I weren't on the special-imbecile side of the story. Thankfully, a thread on Apple's support forum offered a ray of hope, as other people who made the same mistake were able to fish out the memory card using an unbent paper clips and careful patience.

Come the next evening I was ready to give it another shot. Carefully unbent a biggie paper-clip into an L-shaped hook, stuck it into the DVD slot, and started scraping hoping to catch the SD card.

Nothing.

Kept twirling and swiping with the hook and still no luck. Now it's time for drastic action. The card's obviously stuck in some nook deep within the DVD drive and a bendy piece of wire wasn't going to dislodge it. On the Net one person had to swing and swirl his stricken iMac get the SD card out. I was hoping it wouldn't come to that since the 27" iMac is a heavy mofo. But now it seems like it's time to Hulk-up and do the shake-shake-shake. I figured the unibody-aluminum enclosure should be able to handle it, but the smooth surface doesn't lend it self to a good grip, and one can easily imagine the whole machine flying out of my hands and crashing to the ground in the course of centrifugal action. That would've been about the only way for this situation to get any better. Where by better I mean worse, of course.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. So I wiped my hands to make sure they were dry, then grabbed on tight and swung that iMac like they do in Dancing With The Stars. First try didn't yield any results, so I had to try a couple more times, swinging along different axes to apply normal forces on the hidden memory card. Finally, just as my back and shoulders were about to give out, I saw to my immense relief the blue corner of the SD card just peeking out of the DVD slot. Immediately grabbed my unbent paper clip and this time got a good grip with the L-hook to pull the entire thing out.

The moral of the story? Maybe Apple is capable of design flaws in their new machines. And when it comes to Apple gear, always keep paper clips handy. They're just as useful for Macs now as they were back in 1986.

Minor Milestone

Or, Freezer Freedom

Our moms didn't breast-feed because they were sold on the convenience and new-and-improved-ness of baby formula, and because they were busy at work with no accommodation for new mothers at all. Now we know that breast-milk is still the best way to go, so the wife was worried about providing enough for the baby. It was tough for the first few days, but natural instincts and evolutionary mechanics kicked in and the mom-juice flowed smoothly thereafter. With a little help from the breast pump we were able to stock up the freezer for the nanny to feed him during the day while wife's at work. We shared some with other moms who had trouble producing enough milk themselves. Or even take some expired milk to make cute soaps out of it.

But the baby has grown and been introduced to solid food, and it's tiresome to find time and place every few hours to hide away and pump. So we didn't do much to force the issue as the breast milk began to diminish, and little by little baby began to eat through the freezer stash. Until finally we were done. Two and a half shelves worth of freezer space reclaimed for groceries and popsicles. All that empty space almost tempted me to run out to Costco for bulk packages of... anything. We go to Costco for bulk boxes of Pampers (now in XL!) anyway.

During the day, he thinks he's a big boy and pushes the bottle of formula away. But before he goes to sleep and after he wakes up he still likes some warm soothing milk. With him passing the 10kg mark, even the part-time feedings add up in a hurry in baby formula, especially with the recent price hikes getting close to NTD 1K per can. Good thing he seems to enjoy trying other foods. Started with apple sauce and mashed bananas, moving up to rice gruels from stock with soft-cooked carrots or broccoli. Now that both upper and lower teeth have sprouted we can let him try even more fruits like papaya and tomato. His aunts have promised to take him to McDonalds for burgers and fries anytime he wants, but they'll have to go through us first.

With our mothers' wide social networks, it's inevitable that we'd be regaled with stories of how someone else's kid is already walking/talking/playing/showing off amazing talents at his age. Meanwhile, although our kids is cute and good-natured and all, Baby Einstein he's not. Took him the longest time to even learn to wave goodbye, and even then only occasionally, when he feels like it. Well, he's finally got a schtick of his own now.

Who you callin' a genius now, huh? Can't wait for him to show that off for all the relatives at Chinese New Year time.

Internet Famous

I don't know who decided having everyone introducing all their products, in one place, all at once was a good idea, but the Consumer Electronics Show is now that occasion and the monster's out of control. There are the big-name conglomerates throwing out TVs, camcorders, cameras, and laptops by the dozen, all named with inscrutable alphanumeric strings. Then there's Intel promising faster chips, promising Nokia more cell phones for everybody, and Microsoft promising not much of anything new (Engadget: "And... that's it? Wow. Incredibly boring. Incredibly incredibly boring. Really."). As the tide of rumors about the yet-non-existent Apple products threatens to steal the show.

A major theme at CES recently, even more so now with the semi-demise of the Macworld show, is the explosion of accessories and add-ons for the iPod ecosystem. But even with the dedicated coverage of sites like iLounge, the never-ending arrays of speakers, docks, headphones, and cases do get old after a while, and it takes a real unique product to stand out.

Parrot had managed to break through the clutter once before with their premium Philip Starck-designed floor-standing dock-speakers. But in the end it's just another set of speakers and one's attention moves on quickly to the next new thing. However, their big CES reveal of the AR. Drone remote-controlled helicopter is perfectly designed to capture the imagination of any iPhone wielding male. What big-boy wouldn't want an iPhone-piloted hovering quad-copter with built-in video cam, streaming live-view pictures back to the iPhone screen? It was certainly impressive enough for the hardened cynics at Engadget to proclaim "we're already lined up and we're not worrying about the cost."

Even with all the gadget blogs, it's still impossible for one team to cover everything at CES, not to mention singular mainstream journalists. Even as the pseudo-all-knowing tech-columnist of the New York Times, David Pogue is still just one man amongst the sea of CES press-releases. So when I saw his favorites-of-CES on CNBC featured something as mundane as custom earbud covers made from earhole photos, I couldn't resist shooting him a tweet about the AR Drone. To my surprise, he quickly replied.

chungiwang: @Pogue Come on, iPhone-controlled wifi-enabled surveillance mini-copter couldn't beat out icky earhole pictures? http://j.mp/5N6gWq>

Pogue: DANG! definitely does. Never saw it.

Then he fired off a new tweet to his 1,304,619 followers:

Pogue: iPhone-controlled quadricopter with video-eye-view... too damn cool! http://bit.ly/7O1vPa (via @chungiwang)

Like a good journalist should, the story was properly attributed to moi, and he left enough slack in the tweet to allow the entire text, including @-attributions, to be re-tweeted by others. And soon thereafter, references of Pogue's tweet, and my name, began to pop up all over the Twitter-verse.

Yeah, it's a vanity ego-boost that means nothing in the real world. But after industriously tweeting away in my own little corner to an uncaring world for months on end it's kinda cool to experience the power of the real-time-web communication's network effect in action, even just in a slight reflection of its full extent. Although to be fair it's not my first brush with celebrity-twits, having gotten a public reply from The Sports Guy (a.k.a. @sportsguy33, 1,144,934 followers) before. I think it's because of time-zone reasons my replies come near US midnight time, as they do their final Twit-checks and other followers have gone to bed, so I have a slightly better chance of breaking through the tweet-noise.