Fnord.

This is the quite-worth-it Solebon Solitaire Deluxe ($2). 35-odd card games, very well executed. Me, simpleton that I am, I just play Klondike draw one. At a roughly 3:1 loss:win ratio, that’s a lot of spare time, standing in line, etc.

The iPhone 3GS

On July 14th, hosting company Engine Yard posted a programming contest that was (presumably) to promote their services and generally create PR. First and second prize included…. new iPhones! (Actually, Dorian pointed the contest out to me – thanks!)

Now, I’ve only tried one programming contest, and it was An Epic Fail. EPIC.

Ahem. Traumatic memories.

Anyway, this time the coding problem was based around the SHA-1 hash algorithm, trying to find a close match to one posted by Engine Yard. What I know about hash algorithms is pretty basic, but we have a couple of friends who do lots of code & crypto, namely Dan Bernstein and Tanja Lange. I figured that if anyone had code laying about, it’d be them and that was in fact the case. I also guessed that CUDA would be the weapon of choice for this sort of pleasingly-parallel application; that also turned out to be correct. I fired off an email and promptly forgot about it in the rush to get ready to travel.

Luckily, Dan and Tanja had time, were interested, had compute resources and (most importantly to me) didn’t want an iPhone. Win!

(Insert scramble to find computers, of which I only got two and they got over 100)

Dan rolled out some seriously awesome code, starting with the OpenSSL SHA-1 codebase. His core2 tweaked version started at 2725 CPU cycles per hash, but by version 8 was down to 201 – a nice factor of 10+ speedup, and fast enough to do 10 million+ keys/second even on my laptop. It wasn’t parallel, so we just ran one version per CPU, which worked quite well.

As if that wasn’t enough, he wrote his first CUDA program and got it down to 35 cycles/hash, meaning that it really screamed. He and Tanja contacted a couple of their Taiwanese collaborators, who had GPUs to run the CUDA code, and we were off to the races. (They wanted the 2,000$ in cloud computing credits if we won, which was of no interest to me, Dan or Tanja – a perfect collaboration.) At peak, we were cranking over 3 billion keys per second, which was a tremendous advantage in a contest reliant on searching an enormous keyspace. You can see all the people, machines, rates and details on the page Tanja wrote for the contest.

It was a blast. We used Skype to text-chat during the contest, subversion for the code and that was all we needed. “We” is a bit strong, since I mainly cheerlead as far as code. (Dan doesn’t believe in comments, it would seem!) One odd thing was that the GPU version of the code gave my MacBook fits:

• I had to compile it as 32 and not 64 bit, or I’d get compile errors in the C++ ‘new’ header file. That was a head scratcher.
• You have to add -msse2 the compiler to get the cpucycles.c to compile
• As before, you need the DYLD fix.
• With gcc-4.0 and 4.2, running the binary would freeze the laptop. 100% repeatable, required a poweroff. Mouse still worked, but that’s it. The same code worked on the Linux boxes in Taiwan, so I’m stumped here. Other people had GPU code running on OSX, so it may be something in my configuration or the code.

Today I installed the wptouch plugin on fnord, so if you surf here from iphone/ipod, you see the website formatted to look like a native app:

Fnord on iPhone

Pretty darn cool, if you ask me. I’ll probably enable it on Annalog and Gemmacasa too.

Inspired by the recent news that Google now has free sync of calendars and address books, I set off to try and get the following working:

1. I want to share a group called ’shared’ from my address book to Chris and her iPod touch. (There’s a bunch of other entries she doesn’t want.)
2. We really need a family calendar that we can both easily view and edit, for stuff like daycare outages, pediatrician visits, house guests and the like. If at all possible, push sync to iPhone/iPod would rock.

Saw this today while pumping gasoline in University City, at the corner of Genesee and Governor:

I’ve never seen that circular symbol next to T-Mobile. Usually it says ‘E’ for EDGE.

Data access worked, so I’m mystified.

Update from Dan: This denotes GPRS. Ahh, makes sense now.

If so, I highly recommend spending $4.99 on Fieldrunners, a ‘Tower defense‘ type of game for the iPod touch and iPhone. Here’s a screenshot from last night:

(Sorry for the rotated image, seems to be a wordpress problem)

There’s a better and longer review at Ars Technica, but concisely I highly recommend it if you like tower defense-style games. Really well done indeed.

Or you may do this to your ankle:

All puffed up, quite impressive:

Thankfully the bruising has faded, its been about 2 weeks. First time I’ve really rolled an ankle; usually if you let yourself fall into it you can avoid injury, but in this case I’d have fallen down a stairwell. 

Backstory: Late for a meeting, rushing down stairs, checking email on iPhone to see if a change had been sent out and missed that there was one more stair left. Oops.

I’ve been an RSS fan for years now, and with the advent of the iPhone/Google Reader combo I read even more. I used to use NetNewsWire, but by using Google Reader I’m always in sync on mobile and desktop. Their iPhone interface is really good, even on EDGE data rates.

Yesterday, I checked out Google Reader Trends, and found the following:

Umm, that’s a lot, right?

Kinda interesting. What I’m finding is that the iPhone allows me to do short newsfrouping sessions when I have a few spare minutes, so I end up reading more than I did before. I also really like that the load of loading feeds and pages is moved to Google, resulting in less laptop/PDA CPU usage and faster overall performance. It is, in a word, magnificent.

Even if you don’t have an iPhone or iTouch, Google Reader is still most excellent. If you do, fire up Safari and start keeping up with more of the world than previously possible!

Highly recommended.

P.S. I have several hundred feeds, with an unusual organization that I plan to post later. I’m also happy to share the list with you in OPML format if you want to jump-start your Reader setup.

Update: Here’s reading by time of day and day of week. Lots of late-night!

Yesterday, amid much hullabaloo and inflated expectation, Apple introduced the second generation iPhone or ‘iPhone 3G.’ Announced yesterday, it’ll be available July 11th. There’s a bunch of incremental improvements (Battery life, faster wireless, GPS, nicer shape, metal buttons) and some extraordinarily clever RF engineering (ten wireless bands on just 2 antennas – brilliant!), but the basic unit doesn’t change much. Much to my surprise, the software (iPhone 2.0) will also be free for generation-1 units such as mine. Previously, in iPods, new features were never released for older hardware, so this is a delightful change.

Nevertheless, as it stands now I won’t be getting one. And it’s a toddle that a lot of other geeks won’t be, either. Here’s why: The first-gen iPhones introduced the idea of ‘activation at home.’ Instead of sitting at a desk with some clerk, forking over credit card, SSN and driver’s license, you simply bought the iPhone and walked away. Once at home, you plug the phone into your computer, on your own time, and ran the streamlined activation via iTunes. As a way to reduce consumer frustration and humiliation, it was brilliant, and had the side benefit of helping stores too – you didn’t need activation staff, counter space, etc, and you could sell more phones in less time. Huzzahs all around.

(One of the main reasons this worked was the revenue model – the phone were expensive (started at $600) and AT&T had a monthly kickback to Apple based on subscriber revenue.)

The downside of this became evident later, as literally thousands of geeks bent their efforts to unlocking the iPhone for use on other networks, or simply to write and run their own programs. Since you didn’t have to activate in-store, or make any sort of promise, it was much easier to do and many (yours truly included) did just that. 

Now, however, they’ve changed the revenue model to copy other cell phones: The phones are subsidized down to $200/$300, with AT&T footing part of the bill. The elephant in the room is that you now have to activate before you leave the store. Think long lines, annoying idiot salespeople, and a required new 2 year contract with a minimum monthly cost of $70/month. (Your bill will be higher, due to taxes and such.)

Because of this, you can’t order one online any more, and anyone wanting to hack their phone faces the breach of contract fee from AT&T, which is probably at least $200. This is really going to put the hurt on iPhone hacking, which they probably accepted as an ancillary cost to reducing the numbers of unlocked iPhones in the wild. I wonder how they accounted for the customer backlash of in-store activation?

Tech companies such as Apple regularly ignore propellerheads such as myself for the very $imple rea$on of money: Though vocal, we’re just not that large of a market, and stuff that makes us happy doesn’t necessarily translate to mass sales. Therefore, those of us who wanted to upgrade and use it on, say, T-Mobile, are acceptable collateral damage. I do suspect that they’ve underestimated how peevish people are going to be at the bad old activation hassle, though. Fingers crossed for the resumption of sanity, because there’s one thing that I’m completely certain of: The iPhone 3G will get hacked anyway. People like this will make it happen, so why play King Canute?

(In the meantime, I’ll probably buy a 16G gen-one unit and give/sell my 8G to a relative that wants one.)