Jorge Herskovic

The ZTE Open with Firefox OS

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I bought a phone!

ZTE_Open_box

 

Granted, it’s not the latest and greatest. I even bought it used; it was less than $70 on a certain jungle-themed shopping website.

I’ll be doing some international travel soon, and it’s useful to have an unlocked, multi-band GSM smartphone. This fits the bill, and it gives me an opportunity to play with a different OS.  Firefox OS.

What is Firefox OS? It’s Firefox running on top of the Linux kernel (actually on top of parts of the Android Open Source Project), without a lot of the baggage of Android. A lot of the tooling keeps the Android heritage; for example, you update the OS using Android’s SDK tools.

First things first: please don’t go out and buy one of these unless you know what you’re doing. They are not consumer devices.

The hardware resembles an iPhone 3Gs. 3G-enabled, 256 MB of RAM, single-core ARM processor, 3 MP camera, 320×480 pixels. Full specs here. The screen is, by now, old-school. It’s way, way behind the glass. You can see a gap of at least 1 mm. Compared to a Galaxy S4 or an iPhone 5, it looks vaguely shameful.

The screen is also cheap. Viewing angle = 13.7 degrees to each side, or that’s what it feels like. I didn’t measure it.

The Gap

These would, of course, be terrible things in a flagship phone that retailed for $700. On a phone that costs literally 10% of that, meant for developers and enthusiasts who want to play with a new OS, it’s quite enough. The phone has a bog-standard mini-SIM slot, and a microSD card slot to supplement the meager 512 MB of storage it comes with.

I removed my Printrbot’s microSD card and repurposed it. The phone accepted it without complaints.

Like with any other phone, the first thing I did was check for updates. The phone didn’t report anything, so I assumed it had the latest OS image. About an hour later, I decided to Google “Firefox OS update.” That’s when I discovered that Firefox OS 1.0, the version that came on my phone, wasn’t actually capable of updating itself, so it didn’t report on updates.

See what I mean about “please don’t go out and buy one?”

Updating it was fairly straightforward for anyone who’s rooted an Android phone. In this case, I had to put the new OS image on the microSD card, boot to a special recovery mode, and install the image. Which erases all of the data on the phone. So please don’t go out and buy one yet. An iPhone, this is not.

It was uneventful,  except that it didn’t work the first few times I tried. It took me a while to realize that I mistakenly had downloaded the update from v1.1 to v1.1, instead of the one from v1.0 to v1.1. Which I think is a legitimate mistake, because it didn’t even cross my mind that there would be an update from 1.1 to 1.1. As far as typical version numbering goes, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Once 1.1 is actually up and running, you can use “the easy method” to install 1.2. The easy method involves rebooting the phone and, having the Android SDK installed on your computer, downloading the upgrade from ZTE’s Dropbox account and copying the updated Firefox OS piece by piece to the proper area on the phone’s filesystem. It reads something like this:

$ adb reboot bootloader
$ fastboot flash boot boot.img
$ fastboot flash userdata userdata.img
$ fastboot flash system system.img
$ fastboot flash recovery recovery.img
$ fastboot erase cache
$ fastboot reboot

It’s not rocket surgery, but it’s not a task that you want to dump on your typical end user.

Once the update is applied, the OS actually looks quite nice and runs smoothly, even on this decidedly low-end hardware. The browser of choice is, unsurprisingly, Firefox. It looks a tremendous amount like Firefox for Android.

The OS itself is clearly a work in progress, and somewhat rough around the edges. For one thing, this “official” 1.2 distribution comes loaded with test apps like “Membuster” (no, it isn’t a game) and “Template.”

2014-02-26-19-14-32

(also note that, in a very nice touch, the hardware supports an FM radio – something the iPhone still doesn’t have)

This wouldn’t be a big deal if you could delete the test apps. Just like on iOS, tapping and holding lets you delete apps by putting a red “x” in the corner of the icon. Unfortunately there’s a rendering glitch in the delete confirmation screen…

2014-02-26-19-39-38

Yup, the dock renders in front of the confirmation buttons, and doesn’t let you press them. Oh well, who wouldn’t want Test Container on their phone? A reboot seemed to cure this problem, though, and I was able to remove all the test apps just fine.

Some other rough edges are evident in the App Marketplace (i.e. the Firefox OS equivalent of an App Store). For example, apps want to specify storage requirements, but many don’t.

2014-02-26-19-18-26I also haven’t been able to open the notifications drawer. On 1.0, sliding your finger down from the top of the screen did the trick. On 1.2, it doesn’t.

The default keyboard has all of the disadvantages of iOS’ keyboard, and none of the niceties. Swype this is not.

Searching

 

On this screenshot, you can see an interesting feature of the OS: systemwide search that goes beyond the phone itself. Without a Gmail app, the phone was able to “find” Gmail, style it like an app, and present it as a result in the main search pane. When you open it, it launches the mobile web version of Gmail in a full-screen browser automatically. Bam! Instant app.

Of course, every app on Firefox OS is just HTML5 and Javascript, so in practice the difference is mainly between “already installed on the phone and tweaked specifically for Firefox OS” or “retrieved from a server, and may or may not be custom-tailored.” In practice, the difference isn’t much.

All in all, it’s been fun to tinker with a new, obscure phone OS that runs quite well on obsolete hardware.

 

Not all obsolete hardware is the same. It turns out that there are two kinds of ZTE Open. One is sold directly by ZTE though eBay. The others are grey-market ones imported from elsewhere, with locked bootloaders, and incapable of running anything but ZTE firmware. Which lags behind the official Firefox OS quite a bit.

Ask me how I know.

Yup, I downloaded the entire Firefox OS source code and built my own copy. I’ve done this with Android variants like Cyanogenmod before. Although it isn’t for everyone, it’s actually a straightforward process. In this case, it wasn’t: it was impossible to install “straight” Firefox OS on my phone. It just kept rebooting over and over. The only thing that “cured” it was reinstalling ZTE’s 1.2 version full of test apps.

I bought the “wrong” version of the phone and I’m stuck with a bad firmware. Caveat emptor.

Would I recommend this phone to anyone, anywhere? Not unless you want to play with a Firefox OS device for cheap. Still, it’s been a few entertaining hours, and maybe someone will root it properly and open the bootloader up. Until then, I just hope ZTE throws us another update.

 

An invitation to become an editor, or perhaps a flower

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I can honestly say that I’ve never thought of myself as a flower.

Perhaps that’s why an invitation to join the editorial board of a journal in “the bouquet of STM JOURNALS” [sic] doesn’t really speak to me.

Or perhaps it’s because STM is on Beall’s list, and their invitation doesn’t quite ring true. It has the same hallmarks as my previous post. To wit,

  1. Ego service: “we are happy to know about you, your rich experience and the areas of interests/ scientific work, that encompass to a big extent. We shall really feel fortunate by having you as an editor; your joining will certainly enhance our expert representation in the esteemed editorial board. “
  2. Please give us content: “We shall also be grateful to you, if you could contribute review article (s). We prefer, review articles commissioned by us i.e. to include the contributions arising from the editorial board/ publication management team- members of the Journal.”
  3. No mention whatsoever of the fact that these are Open Access journals. I’m sure it was just an innocent omission.
  4. A journal with a scope so broad as to be nonsensical (and with misspelled terms, to boot). See below.

Now THAT'S scope

 

Of course, these aren’t my areas of expertise. I’ve never published in any of these. That’s no problem, though: I’m invited to peruse the (no doubt) fragrant bouquet of journals and settle on one, buzzy bee that I am.

Wait, I thought I was a flower.

I’m confused.

 

You, too, can be an editor!

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Part of being a scientist is curating the work of other scientists. This is called peer review. Peer review is critical to the well-being of science, because it helps ensure that the scientific record is important, correct, and has passed some level of validation before being put in front of other people.

Peer review is unpaid, tedious work. Most Universities know that their faculty will spend some time performing peer review. Official institutional CVs and promotion paperwork therefore have space for review activities, so that you can show you’re contributing to the larger scientific community. It also makes you feel like a good citizen, which it should, since no one will ever thank you for it.

A step above this (and a major time sink) is the -still unpaid- position of editor of a scientific journal. A good editor knows his or her field well, has plenty of experience in the peer review trenches, and performs invaluable service to the scientific community.

Being the editor of a scientific journal, or part of the editorial board, brings some academic bragging rights. It is also somewhat expected (implicitly, of course; no one will ever say this) that your friends and colleagues will want to publish their stuff in your journal. Whether it’s because of the expectation of better service, faster reviews, helping a buddy out, or perhaps a less careful look at the flaws of the science in a paper, is not normally explained.

This post was prompted by an email I get every few weeks. The company, journal, and sender are always different, but the content isn’t.

Editorial Spam

Where, oh where should I start?

Let’s begin at the bottom. You’d think that being invited to be the editor of a journal, a big honor, merits a personalized email drafted after (one imagines) much careful deliberation. I’d wager that being invited to edit Science, or Nature, or (a bit further down the ladder) our Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association gets you exactly that. No one has invited me to edit any of those, which is probably for the best. I’d be a terrible editor.

Being invited to edit this journal-that-shall-not-be-named comes via spam, with a telltale line at the end giving away that this particular “eminent personality” (me) was picked from a database, and will be invited to edit again by Mail Merge in the future.

Let’s move on to the actual meat of the problem, though. I’ve never published a paper in this field. Ever. My “immense contribution” to the field is exactly ZERO.

What is this, then? It is, like most spam, about money. This is an Open Access journal (fact carefully omitted from the body of the email), which means that scientists will pay publication fees if their papers pass peer review and get published. I strongly suspect that ANY paper sent to this journal will get published, based on their selectivity choosing editors.

It is, then, an offer of a line for my CV (“Editor for the Journal of IMPRESSIVE_SOUNDING_NAME”) and ego service (“Immense contribution!” “Eminent personalities!”) in return for the possibility of guiding some colleague with a paper that can’t-quite-get-published to an unknown Open Access journal edited by his or her buddy. Any paper will do; note that they strive to serve “biological, medical, and engineering fields”. I suspect that a paper on weather patterns in Mars is a-ok too.

I want to be absolutely clear about this: OPEN ACCESS IS A PHENOMENALLY GOOD IDEA. These clowns are polluting, distorting, and corrupting Open Access in the same way that “Barrister BENJAMIN KOFFI, A Legal Representative to late Mr.B A Herskovic” devalues email for everyone else.

Not that it matters, though. As far as I can tell from its website, this journal has never published an article. Nothing in the “current issue”. Nothing in “past issues”. “Articles in press”? Empty. It’s not included in the Journal Citation Reports or Scopus. Not that it should, given that it hasn’t published squat, but I checked for completeness’ sake.

How many editors does this journal that, so far, publishes nothing has on its editorial board? According to its website, twenty-one. It sure seems like a lot of people to edit zero articles, but it’s the only way to get people to consider the journal and get those sweet, juicy Open Access fees flowing.

Ick.

 

Research and negative results

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There’s a big debate in science about research and what to do with negative results. It boils down to more or less this:

We scientists publish only positive results. There’s a lot of reasons for this, some more valid than others. The first one is that it’s hard to prove things beyond a shadow of a doubt (Popper, stop spinning in your grave). Formally, you can disprove things. If we ever witnessed, and recorded, an apple that failed to fall from a tree and just hovered there, we’d have a tremendous challenge to our understanding of gravity.

We can accumulate evidence for things, and a lot of what we do is precisely that. But we can’t prove things as a mathematician can.

This leads to strangeness when science meets the real world. Witness the debate about whether evolution is “just a theory,” which is entirely predicated on a profound misunderstanding on how science works.

When you run an experiment and you don’t get results there are many things that can explain that. Perhaps your data was bad. Perhaps one of your assumptions was wrong. Perhaps you were unaware that you were making assumptions in the first place.

Say that, for some reason, I run a double-blind, randomly-controlled, properly-powered (i.e. with enough samples), long-enough, well-sampled (lots of brands) experiment to see if people who drink tap water get less cancer than people who drink bottled water. I have no idea why this could be the case, since I just made it up, but bear with me. Now imagine that I discover that the rate of cancer among people who drink tap water is 25% of the rate of cancer among people who drink bottled water, p<0.00001 and all that. It survives peer review and gets published in a major journal. The media will probably be all over it.

You won’t care why, and you won’t care how, but you’re damn sure switching the people you care about to drinking tap water from now on.

Eventually, someone will discover which ingredient in bottles is dissolving in the water, and how it affects human DNA, and so on. There will be entire scientific careers, many papers, and perhaps a few conferences on why and how this happens. But the fact itself that tap water is safer (or that bottled water caused cancer) is important, right here, right now.

Now picture the much more likely scenario in which I perform the same experiment, and find that absolutely nothing happens. What does it mean? Does it mean that bottled water is just as safe, cancer-wise, as tap water? Maybe. Is this unexpected? No. Most sane people fully expect tap water and bottled water to be just as safe as each other. The experiment, and its result, add very little in the way of new information to the world. This makes them less valuable.

There’s also the problem that I could’ve simply missed something. Perhaps my sample missed a brand with a radioactive bottle (Nuka-Cola?) and no one noticed, because the team never heard of it. When you get a positive result, there’s something there to dissect, analyze, and learn from. When you get a negative result, something isn’t there. You failed to catch it. What can be learned from it, at least as a first approximation, is that the same steps are unlikely to catch that thing.

This is why cryptozoologists persist. They can’t be proven wrong. You can’t show them that there is no Sasquatch. Most people, given enough negative evidence, will generalize that a statement is false and move on. Most of us believe there is no Sasquatch. We believe that there is no Sasquatch because people try and fail to capture a Sasquatch over, and over, and over. 

Those failed attempts to capture Sasquatchii, then, have a little bit of value to everyone. This is why the scientific community would like negative results published: because we can still learn from them. Some more (great, obvious ideas that should work but don’t), and some less (stuff that ends published in the Annals of Improbable Research).

Even if there are errors, and omissions, and mistakes, we should still learn from our work. But who’s going to curate, collect, peer-review, and publish all that?  Writing stuff up for publication is a lot of work, and reviewing is thankless, unpaid, and a lot of work as well. But here’s the thing: we self-censor everyday negative results. We don’t send them out for publication, we don’t bother too much with them.

We might as well just put them on the Internet, and let people quote and cite and learn from, or ignore, them as they will.

What if there’s a great idea there, and someone takes it from me? Well, I hope that humanity benefits, for one. I hope that they credit me, if they took my idea. And I hope I’m not so conceited as to think that I have many great ideas. A few good ones, I hope.

So I’ll start posting stuff I do here. It will be (hopefully) interesting, (perhaps) thought-provoking, (potentially) flawed, and unfit for regular academic publication. At least for the time being. If you like it, let me know. If you use it, please credit me – I am, after all, an academic, and need credit. If you improve it, or fix it, I’d love to know about it. If you don’t care about it, ignore me.

 

James Mickens is a great writer

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A computer scientist, a systems programmer, a gentleman, and a scholar. And a Microsoft Employee, but he works for the Research division, so that makes it sort of ok.

But all of that pales in comparison to the most hilarious thing you’ll read on the Internet today, if you’re of a hackerish persuasion.

The Night Watch

Writing inspiration

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I’ll post more as I come across them.

On writing

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Well, it had to happen. I decided I need more writing practice. And what better way to practice writing than by, you know, writing?

For a long time I’ve held back from having an actual blog, because:

  1. Another blog? Really?
  2. Who’s going to want to read it?
  3. I don’t want to be another person who is wrong on the Internet.

To some extent, though, the only way to be right is to cross the valley of wrong and get the scars that come with it. So, then, let me be wrong. At least for a while.