Author Archives: Jethro Carr

Don’t abandon XMPP, your loyal communications friend

Whilst email has always enjoyed a very decentralised approach where users can be expected to be on all manner of different systems and providers, Instant Messaging has not generally enjoyed the same level of success and freedom.

Historically many of my friends used proprietary networks such as MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger and Skype. These networks were never particularly good IM networks, rather what made those networks popular at the time was the massive size of their user bases forcing more and more people to join in order to chat with their friends.

This quickly lead to a situation where users would have several different chat clients installed, each with their own unique user interfaces and functionalities in order to communicate with one another.

Being an open standards and open source fan, this has never sat comfortably with me – thankfully in the last 5-10yrs, a new open standard called XMPP (also known as Jabber) has risen up and had wide spread adoption.

XMPP brought the same federated decentralised nature that we are used to in email to instant messaging, making it possible for users on different networks to communicate, including users running their own private servers.

Just like with email, discovery of servers is done entirely via DNS and there is no one centralised company, organisation or person with control over the system -each user’s server is able to run independently and talk directly to the destination user’s server.

With XMPP the need to run multiple different chat programs or connect to multiple providers was also eliminated. For the first time I was able to chat using my own XMPP server (ejabberd) to friends using their own servers, as well as friends who just wanted something “easy” using hosted services like Google Talk which support(ed) XMPP, all from a single client.

Since Google added XMPP into Google Talk, it’s made the XMPP user base even larger thanks to the strong popularity of Gmail creating so many Google Talk users at the same time. With so many of my friends using it, is has been so easy to add them to my contacts and interact with them on their preferred platform, without violating my freedom and losing control over my server ecosystem.

Sadly this is going to change. Having gained enough critical mass, Google is now deciding to violate their “Don’t be evil” company moral and is moving to lock users into their own proprietary ecosystem, by replacing their well established Google Talk product with a new “Hangouts” product which drops XMPP support.

There’s a very good blog write up here on what Google has done and how it’s going to negatively impact users and how Google’s technical reasons are poor excuses, which I would encourage everyone to read.

The scariest issue is the fact that a user upgrading to Hangouts get silently disconnected from being able to communicate with their non-Google XMPP using friends. If you use Google Talk currently and upgrade to Hangouts, you WILL lose the ability to chat with XMPP users, who will just appear as offline and unreachable.

It’s sad that Google has taken this step and I hope long term that they decide as a company that turning away from free protocols was a mistake and make a step back in the right direction.

Meanwhile, there are a few key bits to be aware of:

My recommendation currently is do not upgrade to Hangouts under any circumstance – you may be surprised to find who drops off your chat list, particularly if you have a geeky set of friends on their own domains and servers.
Whilst you can hang onto Google Talk for now, I suspect long term Google will force everyone onto Hangouts. I recommend considering new options long term for when that occurs.
It’s really easy to get started with setting up an XMPP server. Take a look at the powerful ejabberd or something more lightweight like Prosody. Or you could use a free hosted service such as jabber.org for a free XMPP account hosted by a third party.
You can use a range of IM clients for XMPP accounts, consider looking at Pidgin (GNU/Linux & Windows), Adium (MacOS) and Xabber (Android/Linux).
If you don’t already, it’s a very good idea to have your email and IM behind your own domain like “jethrocarr.com”. You can point it at a provider like Google, or your own server and it gives you full control over your online identity for as long as you wish to have it.

I won’t be going down the path of using Hangouts, so if you upgrade, sorry but I won’t chat to you. Please get an XMPP account from one of the many providers online, or set up your own server, something that is generally a worth while exercise and learning experience.

If someone brings out a reliable gateway for XMPP to Hangouts, I may install it, but there’s no guarantee that this will be possible – people have been hoping for a gateway for Skype for years without much luck, so it’s not a safe assumption to have.

Be wary of some providers (Facebook and Outlook.com) which claim XMPP support, but really only support XMPP to chat to *their* users and lack XMPP federation with external servers and networks, which defeats the whole point of a decentralised open network.

If you have an XMPP account and wish to chat with me, add me using my contact details here. Note that I tend to only accept XMPP connections from people I know – if you’re unknown to me but want to get in touch, email is best at first.

Firefox Mobile for Android CAs

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I’ve been using Firefox Mobile on Android for a while (thanks to the fact that it means I can use Firefox Sync between my laptop and mobile to share data). Overall it’s pretty good and the last few releases have fixed up a lot of the past stability issues and UI problems, it’s in a pretty decent state now.

One of the unfortunate problems I’ve had with it until recently is that the application was refusing to import custom certificate authorities. Whilst Android has it’s own CA store, add on browsers (inc Firefox Mobile) can have their own CA stores and the manageability of these can vary a lot.

In the case of Firefox Mobile, the ability to manage certificates was not ported across from the desktop version, meaning that none of my web applications would validate against my custom CA.

However as a passable solution, it’s now possible to import the CA file by downloading a PEM version of the CA certificate in the browser. Just upload a copy of the PEM formatted certificate to a webserver and download the file with the browser to install.

Installing CAs into Firefox Mobile (PEM formatted file).

Now the biggest problem left is sites and applications that have poorly written user agent detection and assume that the only mobile devices that possibly exist are devices that have the iPhone or stock Android user agent. :-( *glares at Atlassian in particular*

Android VNC

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Recently I’ve been using a few of my older Android smartphones for various projects where I’ll need to have the phones in a remote location or having the phones in a non-easily accessible location.

A conventional Linux system would be remote managed via SSH, but I need access to the graphical environment of the Android phones to run standard GUI touch applications. Generally I avoid VNC due to the fact it’s an unencrypted, insecure protocol, but in my case I was able to resolve the security concerns by tunnelling all my connections via a SSL VPN, which made VNC acceptable.

A few friends have asked me about VNC solutions for Android – in my case, I’ve been using a program helpfully named “VNC server” (click here for app store) on a mix of devices including older Android 2.2 devices running Cyanogenmod.

Generally it works well, but there are a few limitations with the application to be aware of:

The application requires the phone to be rooted.
It doesn’t always reliably resume following a reboot of the phone.
Android can end up terminating the application due to low memory available, particularly on the older phones. This isn’t a fault with the application specifically, but rather an architecture and design limitation of Android. If it happens, there’s not much you can do about it.

Once the application is installed and configured, it’s easily accessed using any regular VNC application from your computer. The main commands are:

Touch – Left Click
Back Button – Right-click
Home Button – Home key
Instant Lock Screen – End key

Note that there is one confusing quirk – when the phone screen locks, VNC displays the last thing that was on the screen. This can be confusing when you login and the phone doesn’t respond to any actions.

Unfortunately lock screen status is not correctly reflected...

Something isn’t quite right here….

The fix is to press the home key which makes the lock screen display and then to swipe in the usual manner by clicking and dragging the mouse. Sometimes the lock screen can take a while to render on VNC, so I tend to end up pressing home and then dragging before it even renders the lock screen.

You will also want to disable screen rotation, otherwise if you leave the phone in a rotated state inadvertently, it makes for a very annoying user experience.

Control all the phones!

So far I’ve found it pretty useful, but because of the way the Android OS handles memory, I would hesitate before relying on it 100% – there’s always the risk that my phone may have another process wanting to consume memory and it then suspending the VNC process to allocate more. I suspect there are some tweaks/hacks I could apply to the platform to make it more robust and there may be some stuff already in the app store that will help.

Having said all this, it’s worth nothing that cheap cost and high feature set of Android phones makes them an idea hacking platform and I’m using them for a few projects already such as cheap GSM SMS gateways, as well as considering using the older phones as wireless IP cameras.

Holy Relic of the Server Farm

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At work we’ve been using New Relic, a popular software-as-a-service monitoring platform to monitor a number of our servers and applications.

Whilst I’m always hesitant of relying on external providers and prefer an open source solution where possible, the advantages provided by New Relic have been hard to ignore, good enough to drag me away from the old trusty realm of Munin.

Like many conventional monitoring tools (eg Munin), New Relic provides good coverage and monitoring of servers, including useful reports on I/O, networking and processes.

Bro, I’m relaxed as bro. (server monitoring with New Relic)

However where New Relic really provides value is with it’s monitoring of applications, thanks to a number of agents for various platforms including PHP, Ruby, Python, Java and .NET.

These agents hook into your applications and profile their performance in detail, showing details such as breakdown of latency by layer (DB, language, external, etc), slow DB queries and other detailed traces.

For example, I found that my blog was taking around 1,000ms of processing time in PHP when serving up page content. The VM itself had little load, but WordPress is just not a particularly well oiled application.

Before and after installing W3 Total Cache on my blog. Next up is to add Varnish and drop server times even further.

Toss out your crufty DBA, we have a new best friend! (just kidding DBAs, I still love ya)

New Relic will even slip an addition into the client-side content which measures the browser-side performance and experience for users visiting your website or application, allowing you to determine cause of slow page loads.

Generally my issue is too much large content + slow links

There’s plenty more offered, I haven’t even looked at all the options and features yet myself – best approach is to sign up for a free account and trial it for a while to see if it suits.

New Relic recently added a Mobile Application agent for iOS and Android developers, so it’s also attractive if you’re writing mobile applications and want to check how they’re performing on real user devices in the wild.

Installation of the server agent is simply a case of dropping a daemon onto the host (with numerous distribution packages available). The application agents vary depending on language, but are either a case of loading the agent with the application, or bundling a module into your application.

It scales well performance wise, we’ve installed the agent on some of AU’s largest websites with very little performance impact in most cases and the New Relic interface remains fast and responsive.

Only warning I’d make is that the agent uses HTTP by default, rather than HTTPS – whilst the security impact is somewhat limited as the data sent isn’t too confidential, I would really prefer the application use HTTPS-only. (There does appear to be an “enterprise security” mode which forces HTTPS agents only and adds other security options, so do some research if it’s a concern).

Pricing is expensive, particularly for the professional account package with the most profiling. Having said that, for a web company where performance is vital, New Relic can quickly pay for itself with reduced developer time spend on issues and fast alerting to performance related issues. Both operations and developers have found it valuable at work, and I’ve personally found this a much more useful tool than our Splunk account.

If you’re only interested in server monitoring you will probably find better value in a traditional Munin setup, unless you value the increased simplicity of configuration and maintenance.

Note that New Relic is also not a replacement for alert-monitoring such as Nagios – whilst New Relic can generate alerts for performance issues and other thresholds, my advice is to rely on Nagios for service and resource overload/failure and rely on New Relic monitoring for alerting to abnormal or negative performance trends.

I also found that I still find Awstats very useful – whilst New Relic has some nice browser stats and geography stats, Awstats is more useful for the “how much traffic and data has my website/application done this month” type questions.

It’s not for everyone’s requirements and budget, but I do highly recommend having an initial trial of it, whether you’re running a couple of servers or a massive enterprise.

KVM instances dying at boot

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I recently encountered a crashing KVM instance, where my VM would die at boot once the bootloader tried to unpack initrd.

A check of the log in /var/log/libvirt/qemu/vmname.log showed the following unhelpful line:

Guest moved used index from 6 to 229382013-04-21 \
06:10:36.029+0000: shutting down

The actual cause of this weird error and crash occurs when the host OS lacks disk space on the host server’s filesystems. In my particular case, my filesystem was at 96% full, so whilst the root user could write to disk, the non-root processes including Libvirt/KVM were refused writes.

I’m not totally sure why the error happens, all my VM disks are based on LVM volumes rather than the host root filesystem, I suspect the host OS disk is being used for a temporary file such as unpacking initrd and this need for a small amount of disk leads to this failure.

If you’re having this problem, check your disk space and add some Nagios alerting to avoid a repeat issue!

Age of Empires 2 HD on VirtualBox

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It’s been a few years since I’d last played it, but Age of Empires is still one of my all time favourite games. I started playing it back as a young noobling on Windows 98 with a Celeron 433mhz machine and loved the perfect balance the game achieved between simplicity and flexibility.

AOE 2 offered a large number of different civilisations with different research options, yet once you learnt the basics, it was quick and easy to pick up the rest and run with it – generally it made for a very fun game, both against the AI but also against friends multiplayer over a 10mbit LAN. ;-)

Whilst AOE 2 still ran on modern Windows, the game was showing it’s age with issues like hard coded resolutions (800×600 or 1024×768 anyone?), assumption of an optical media drive for the music to be loaded from and dated multiplayer functions.

Recently Microsoft re-released AOE 2 as “Age of Empires 2 HD” on steam, taking the opportunity to fix up the above issues and port the game to newer DirectX versions and adding in Steam support providing better multiplayer support.

AOE 2 HD on Steam

Now as a Linux geek I used to have a dedicated Windows PC hanging around for gaming – however with my move to AU, I now only have my Linux laptop and I wasn’t very keen to go back to a dual-booting world, having last done dual boot over 5 years ago.

Instead I have a Windows 7 VM inside VirtualBox which is a very good virtualisation product for desktop users offering easy management of VMs, good guest OS integration (eg desktop resizing) and also basic 3D acceleration.

I had tested the old AOE 2 original game in my VM which ran OK, but after AOE 2 HD was installed, I found the newer game would refuse to start with:

Error on start, subcode=1

The forums discuss a range of issues for this, but the general consensus is that with the move to a newer DirectX, the game would fail if some of the newer features were absent (eg shaders). I was worried about my Intel GPU being too poor as some posts suggested, but thankfully even the Intel GPUs from a few years ago are enough to play this game.

The issue was that the level of 3D acceleration being provided by VirtualBox was too low – this was easily verified by running “dxdiag” utility.

By default, Virtualbox delivers DirectDraw Acceleration but not Direct3D.

By default if you enable 3D acceleration and install the Guest Additions, the acceleration is limited to just the stable basic features. For more advance 3D features, a module is available, but needs to be specifically selected during the installation as it’s not “stable” yet.

The stability of this feature is also rapidly changing – after turning everything on and running the game, I was causing the VM to crash entirely on the Linux OS-side.

ShCrOpenGL[23043]: segfault at 7fd40d7c3f90 ip 00007fd3f47c2f9d sp
00007fd3f4a8ba90 error 4 in VBoxSharedCrOpenGL.so[7fd3f4732000+cb000]

Generally I’m not a fan of Segfaults on my system. In order to avoid any nasty surprises, you must upgrade to the absolutely latest upstream version (at time of writing, this was 4.2.12-84980). Make sure you grab the latest version from Oracle/VirtualBox themselves, as if you’re using a distribution version their latest version in the distribution repositories may not be as up-to-date.

After installing/upgrading VirtualBox, adjust your virtual machine to be using 3D Acceleration and give it the full 256MB video memory.

You kind of want to enable 3D acceleration for 3D to work ;-)

Once booted, install the latest version of Guest Additions (“Devices->Install Guest Additions” from VirtualBox VM menu). Older VirtualBox drivers still work for most tasks, but you must do this installation/upgrade in order to get the absolute latest 3D fixes for the game to run.

When installing, make sure you select “Direct3D Support (Experimental)” from the component selector.

3D support is an option, not a standard feature.

Note that VirtualBox will try and talk you into installing the stable basic 3D drivers. Make sure you select No and get the fully featured (but less stable) drivers.

No is Yes in our case.

Once installed, you’ll need to reboot and your Windows system should now feature the much better 3D support.

To verify, run “dxdiag” again to check the report:

Ready to party!

Once done, you should be good to play! :-D

Recommend going to full screen in VirtualBox, before launching the game, the directional edge-of-screen scrolling works a bit weirdly otherwise. There’s also a quirk with the launch videos, where they play but display a blank screen. Just click to skip through them and to get to the game launch screen.

And we’re live! Back to the mines peons!

Performance and stability seems to be OK – I haven’t been able to take advantage of the higher resolution support much thanks to my laptop having a wonderfully crap display of 1280×768, so I can’t be sure whether it works well on higher resolutions or if the 3D acceleration can’t handle it.

My test was done on a x86_64 Debian Wheezy system running kernel 3.6.7 using the Oracle provided VirtualBox package (4.2.12-84980~Debian~wheezy) and a fully patched 64-bit Windows 7 Home Premium guest with latest Guest Addition drivers.

I have not tested on MacOS, but I would assume the process and support to be the same, since VirtualBox uses OpenGL on the HostOS side for the 3D Acceleration Pass-through.

Marriage Equality

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New Zealand has passed legalisation for allowing same-sex marriage this evening! I’m so happy for my many LGBT friends and love the fact that no matter whom any of us love, we can get the same recognition and rights in not just law, but also have society recognise these choices.

I love the fact that my beautiful lady friend can settle down with another beautiful lady friend should she chose to. I love the fact my awesome male friend can find another awesome male to spend life with should he chose. And I love the fact that their relationship does not impact on the meaning of my own conventional relationship with Lisa in any way.

Run conservatives! (credit to theoatmeal.com)

NZ has had civil unions for some time giving same-sex couples similar legal rights, but this removes the last barriers to equality and gives hetrosexual and homosexual relationships the same footing in society.

This may sound like a small thing, but it has huge ramifications – it removes the distinction of same-sex relationships as being different in some negative sense. In the eyes of the law, there is no difference in any marriage no matter what genders the participants are and this will reflect over time in society as well

It’s also solved the same-sex adoption issue, with the legalisation opening the door for the first gay adoptions to take place.

Generally New Zealand is very liberal – our government is almost entirely secular, generally mentioning and promoting religious views in government is the realm of fringe 1 or 2 MP parties, which has really helped with this legalisation as it hasn’t gotten so tangled up with religious arguments.

Whilst there were still a few ~~conservative fucktards~~ disturbed individuals who voted against the bill, the support has been strong across the entire house and across parties.

I’ve personally noted that the younger generations are the most open and comfortable around same-sex relationships, whereas the older generations tend to support their rights in general, but still raise their eyebrows when they see a same-sex couple, a hangover from decades of stigma where they still feel the need to point it out as something unusual.

There’s still some stigma and fights remaining – the law still won’t recognise polygamous marriage and government departments still tend to vary a lot on the gender question (although the new marriage laws allow you to be Partner/Partner rather than Husband/Husband, Wife/Wife or Husband/Wife; and NZ passports now have a X/Other gender option, so it’s getting better.).

There’s also some more understanding needed in society around the fluid nature of sexuality – if I sleep with guys and then settle down with a lady (or vice versa), it’s not a case of going through a phase before setting on straight or gay – there’s a whole range of gray areas in between which are very hard to define, yet I feel that society in general is very quick to label and categorise people into specific categories when the reality is that we’re just undefinable.

But despite a lot of remaining work, I’m extremely happy with this legalisation and happy that I voted for a party that supported it 100% as an undeniable human rights issue. Maybe even had a momentary twinge of patriotism for NZ. :-)

Launch Paywall!

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So far my time working at Fairfax Media AU has been pretty much non-stop from day one – whilst the media companies are often thought of as dull and slow moving, the reality is that companies like Fairfax are huge and include a massive range of digital properties and are not afraid to invest in new technologies where there are clear business advantages.

It’s great stuff for me, since I’m working with a really skilled group of people and being given some awesome and challenging projects to keep me occupied.

Since January I’ve been working with the development team to build up the infrastructure needed to run the servers for our new paywall initiative. It’s been a really fun experience working with a group of skilled and forwards thinking group of developers and being able to build infrastructure that is visible by millions of people and at such a key stage in the media business is a very rare opportunity.

Our new paywall has just been launched a few days ago on Sydney Morning Hearld and The Age websites for select international countries (including the US and UK) before we roll it out world wide later in the year.

Paywalls on SMH and The Age, as seen for select international countries.

Mobile hasn’t been neglected, a well polished interface has been provided there too.

Obviously paywalls are a pretty controversial topic, there’s already heaps of debate online ranging from acceptance to outright rage for the idea of having to pay for daily news content and plenty of reflection over long term sustainability of Fairfax itself.

I won’t go into too much detail, I have somewhat mixed personal views on the idea, but generally I think Fairfax has created a pretty good trade off between making content casually available and sharable. Rather than a complete block, the paywall is porus and allows a select number of article reads a month, along with liberal social media sharing and reading of links shared by others.

Changing a business model is always hard and there will be those whom are both happy and unhappy with the change, time will tell how well it works. Thankfully my job is about designing and managing the best infrastructure to run the vision that comes down from management rather than trying to see into the future of the consumption and payment of media content, which has got to the be the hardest job around right now….

Whatever your format of choice, we have your fix!

It’s been an interesting project working with a mix of technologies including both conventional and cloud based virtualisation methods and using tools such as Puppet for fast deployment and expansions of the environment, along with documenting and ensuring it’s an easy environment to support for the future engineers who operate it.

I’ve only been here 6 months and have already picked up a huge range of new skills, I’m sure that the next 6 months will be even more exciting. :-)

Google Play Region Locking

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Sadly Android is giving me further reason for dissatisfaction with the discovery that Google Play refuses to correctly detect the current country I’m in and is blocking content from them.

Being citizens of New Zealand and living in Australia, both Lisa and I have a mixture of applications for services in both countries – a good example being banking apps, where we tend to want to be able to easily manage our financial affairs in both countries.

The problem is, that all my phones are stuck as being in New Zealand, whilst Lisa’s phone has decided to be stuck to AU. This hasn’t impacted me much yet, since the Commbank application isn’t region locked and being treated by Google as being “inside” NZ I can install the ANZ Go Money application from within AU.

However because Lisa’s phone is the other way around and stuck in AU, she’s unable to install both the ANZ Go Money and Vodafone NZ My Account application, thanks to the developers of both applications region locking them to NZ only.

What makes the issue even more bizarre, is that both of Lisa and my Google Accounts were originally created in New Zealand yet are behaving differently.

Thou shalt not pass!

There’s a few particularly silly mistakes here. Firstly ANZ shouldn’t be assuming their customers are always in NZ, us Kiwis do like to get around the world and tend to want to continue managing our financial affairs from other countries. The app is clearly one that should be set to a global region.

I suspect they made this mistake to try and avoid confusing AU and NZ ANZ customers with different apps, but surely they could just make it a bit clearer in the header of the app name…

Secondly Google… I’m going to ignore the fact that they even offer region locking for applications (urgghhg DRM evil) and going to focus on the fact that the masters of information can’t even detect what fucking country a user is in properly.

I mean it must be so hard to do, when there are at least 4 ways of doing it automatically.

Use the GPS in every single Android phone made.
Use the SIM card to determine the country/region.
Do a GeoIP lookup of the user’s IP address.
Use the validated credit card on the user’s wallet account to determine where the user is located. (Banks tend to be pretty good at validating people’s locations and identity!)

Sure, none of these are guaranteed to be perfect, but using at least 3 of the above and selecting the majority answer would lead to a pretty accurate system. As it is, I have several phones currently powered up around my apartment in AU, none of which are validating as being in AU at all:

Hey guys, I’m pretty sure my OPTUS CONNECTED PHONE is currently located in AU.

Instead there is an option buried somewhere in Google’s maze of applications and settings interfaces which must be setting the basis for deciding the country our phones are in.

But which one?

The internet suggests that Google Wallet is the deciding factor for the user’s country. But which option? Home address is set to NZ, phone number is set to NZ – have even added a validated NZ credit card for good measure!
Google Mail keeps a phone number, timezone and country setting.. all of which are set to NZ.
Google+ keeps it’s own profile information, all of which is set to NZ.
I’m sure there’s probably even more!

To make things even more annoying is that I can’t even tell if making a change helps or not. How do I tell if the phone is *reading* the new settings? I’ve done basic stuff like re-sync Google, but also have gone and cleared the Google Play service cache and saved settings on the phone, to no avail.

It’s a bit depressing when even Apple, the poster child for lock down and DRM makes region changing as simple as signing into iTunes with a new country account and installing an application that way.

Restricting and limiting content by geographic regions makes no sense in a modern global world and it’s just sad to see Google continuing to push this outdated model instead of making a stand and adopting 21st century approaches.

If anyone knows how to fix Google to see the correct country it would be appreciated… if you know how to get Google to fix this bullshit and let us install the same applications globally, even better.

Android 4.2.2 Issues

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Having just flown from Sydney AU to Christchurch NZ, my Galaxy Nexus suddenly decided to finally offer me the Android 4.2.2 upgrade.

Since I got the phone in 2012, it’s been running Android 4.1 – I had expected to receive Android 4.2 in November 2012 when it was released by Google since the Galaxy Nexus is one of Google’s special developers phones which are loved and blessed with official updates and source code.

However the phone has steadily refused to update and whilst I was tempted to build it from source again, seeing as 4.2 lacks any particular features I wanted (see release changes), there was little incentive to do so. However after 4.2.2 was magically revealed to me following changing countries, I ~~decided~~ was nagged to death to update and ended up doing so… sadly I wish I hadn’t….

Google have messed with the camera application yet again completely changing the UI – the menu now appears where ever you touch the screen, which does make it easier to select options quickly in some respects, but they’ve removed the feature I use the most – the ability to jump to the gallery and view the picture you just took, so it’s not really an improvement.

Secondly the Android clock and alarm clock interface has been changed yet again – in some respects it’s an improvement as they’ve added some new features like stop watch, but at the same time it really does feel like they change the UI every release (and not always in good ways) and it would be nice to get some consistency, especially between minor OS revisions.

However these issues pale in comparison to the crimes that Google has committed to the lock screen…. Lock screens are fundamentally simple, after all, they only have one job – to lock my phone (somewhat) securely and prevent any random from using my device. As such, they tend to be pretty consistent and don’t change much between releases.

Sadly Google has decided that the best requirement for their engineering time is to add more features to the lock screen, turning it into some horrible borg screen with widgets, fancy clocks, camera and all sorts of other crap.

Go home lockscreen, you’re drunk. So, so, drunk.

Crime 1 – Widgets

The lock screen now features widgets, which allow one to stick programs outside of the lockscreen for easy access (defeating much of the point of having a lock screen to begin with) and offering very limited real benefit.

Generally widgets serve very limited value, I use about 3 widgets in total – options for tuning on/off hardware features, NZ weather and AU weather. Anything else is generally better done within an actual application.

Widgets really do seem to be the feature that every cool desktop “must have” and at the same time, have to be one of the least useful features that any system can have.

Crime 2 – Horribly deforming the pattern unlock screen

With the addition of the widgets, the UI has been shuffled around and resized. Previously I could unlock by starting my swipe pattern from the edge of the device’s physical screen and drawing my pattern – very easy to do and quick to pick up with muscle memory.

However doing this same unlock action following the Android 4.2 upgrade, will lead to me accidentally selecting the edge of the unlock “widget” and instead of unlocking, I end up selecting a popup widget box (as per my screenshot) and then have to mess around and watch what I’m doing.

This has to the single most annoying feature I’ve seen in a long time purely because it impacts me every single time I pickup the phone and as a creature of habit, it’s highly frustrating.

And to top this off, Android now vibrates and makes a tone for each unlock point selected. I have yet to figure out what turns this highly irritating option off, I suspect it’s tied into the keyboard vibration/tone settings which I do want…

Crime 3 – Bold Clocks

We’ve had digital clocks for over 57 years, during which time I don’t believe anyone has ever woken up and said “wow, I sure wish the hours were bolder than the minutes”.

Yet somehow this was a good idea and my nicely balanced 4-digit 24-hour clock is unbalanced with the jarring harsh realisation that the clock is going to keep looking like a <b> tag experience gone wrong.

I’m not a graphical designer, but this change is really messing with my OCD and driving me nuts… I’d be interested to see what graphic designers and UX designers think of it.

So in general, I’m annoyed. Fucked off actually. It’s annoying enough that if I was working at Google, I’d be banging on the project manager’s door asking for an explanation of this release.

Generally I like Android – it’s more open than the competing iOS and Windows Mobile platforms (although it has it’s faults) and the fact it’s Linux based is pretty awesome… but with release I really have to ask… what the fuck is Google doing currently?

Google has some of the smartest minds on the planet working for them, and the best they can come up with for a new OS release is fucking lock screen widgets? How about something useful like:

Getting Google Wallet to work in more locations around the world. What’s the point of this fancy NFC-enabled hardware if I can’t do anything with it?
Improve phone security with better storage encryption and better unlock methods (NFC rings anyone?).
Improve backups and phone replacement/migration processes – backups should be easy to do and include all data and applications, something like a Timemachine style system.
Free messaging between Android devices using an iMessage style transparent system?
Fixing the MTP clusterfuck – how about getting some good OS drivers released?
Fix the bloody Android release process! I’m using an official Google branded phone and it takes 5 months to get the new OS release??

The changes made in the 4.2 series are shockingly bad, I’m at the stage where I’m tempted to hack the code and revert the lockscreen back to the 4.1 version just to get my workflow back… really it comes down to whether or not the pain this system causes me ends up outweighing the costs/hassle of patching and maintaining a branch of the source.