Mark J Cox, mark@awe.com  
   
mark :: blog :: trips

[ 1 | 2 | 3 ] next >>



20120928_prime For a two day trip I decided to test using my Android tablet instead of also taking a laptop, and it worked out okay for the most part.

I was booked to go to Red Hat HQ in Raleigh, NC at the start of August for a two-day business trip, well more accurately two-days in the office and another two-days of travelling. I'd usually take my trusty ThinkPad x201 on the trip with me, it's small and light, but it's battery life isn't so great anymore. Earlier this year I'd bought an Android tablet, an ASUS Transformer Prime which with a long battery life would be perfect for movies, but could it replace my ThinkPad completely and save me travelling with two devices? I worked through my requirements and it seemed plausible in theory, so here is how it stacked up in practice:

  • Connectivity. In the UK you can only buy the Prime with the keyboard dock, the keyboard dock is great. The in-built wifi was okay for the airport, hotel, and office. I carry a USB network adapter anyway just in case the hotel has a physical connection. The wifi signal on the Prime is terrible compared to other things (like a phone) though, so be prepared to walk around a bit to the best signal. Partial Win.

  • In flight entertainment. I wanted something to watch movies (as US Airways transatlantic don't yet have seat-back video, really!). The large internal memory meant I could store a few films in decent quality to watch and battery life wasn't a problem. I'd used the tablet continously (without wifi) with the keyboard connected for 6 hours and wasn't even down to 50% battery. Although hardware decoding of videos was a bit hit-and-miss, and after trying a dozen apps only "BS Player" seemed to do a reasonable job. A couple of the movies I'd brought had low audio and I couldn't figure out a way to boost it enough to hear over the noise of the plane, even with decent in-ear noise blocking headphones. Having the keyboard dock helped considerably as with the tablet on the tray-table I could set a decent angle to watch a movie. Win.

  • Reading material. I had a few papers and magazines to read which I'd preloaded onto the tablet in PDF format. The Adobe PDF viewer is acceptable, but it seems a little sluggish for something running on a quad-core processor, and the screen resolution isn't really good enough for magazines. The new Transformer Infinity would help here. Partial Win.

  • Keeping in touch with home. The standard Android GMail app and Facebook app are okay, and I was able to use GMail talk to have video chats with my family from both the hotel and office. Win.

  • Working. With just a couple days away I figured all that was needed was the ability to read and send email and browse intranet internal web pages. The standard VPN client on the Prime worked perfectly, and along with the Firefox beta app gave me perfect access to internal sites. For email I prefer command-line text-window clients anyway, so I just needed to be able to connect to a work machine. "Connectbot" on Android works well enough for ssh, and there are a few forked versions you can get that work with the Prime keyboard. The AndChat app works for irc. Win.

  • Presentations. I was giving a presentation at a meeting, but fortunately they had a laptop set up with the projector and I didn't need to worry about taking a HDMI lead and hoping it was a recent projector. Unexpectedly I needed to edit an existing OpenOffice presentation to remove a couple of slides and then convert to PDF to send to another company. I had to ask a colleague to do it for me. There are apps that can view OpenOffice files, but no native OpenOffice suite for android. I'd probably make sure I had access to a VNC server in the future and use a VNC client for anything like this. Fail.

  • Privacy. My thinkpad has full-disk encryption but I didn't bother for Android as I wasn't going to be storing anything sensitive on the machine. My thinkpad has a 3M privacy filter, which is great for airplanes and airports to stop people either side and behind you looking at your screen. The same filters do exist for Android, but are not as straightforward (it of couse only works in one orientation and attaches like a screen protector, so isn't the easiest thing to continuously take on and off, and forces you to use your screen in portrait mode for everything). Fail.

  • Printing a boarding card. When it was time to return home I was able to use Firefox to check in online, and printing my boarding passes gave me a PDF file. I didn't have any printer apps set up, but it was easy enough to email a PDF to a colleague to print for me. Partial Win.

So in summary I think I got away with it; having just the tablet didn't stop me doing anything that had to be done on the trip and I'll definately do the same thing again in the future for very short trips. For anything more than a couple of days or where connectivity might be an issue I'd miss having a full-featured OS.



I'm out on holiday soon to Arizona, so we've been looking for ways to geocode the photos we'll be taking and get a record of our route. I use a Mio A701 phone which has built-in GPS, and this time we'll be using Tom Tom in the USA rather than Mapopolis. The problem with Tom Tom Navigator is that it doesn't keep a track log, and there doesn't seem to be any plugins to allow it to do so. So here is the solution I've been experimenting with over the weekend.

On the PocketPC:

  • Make sure the GPS Intermediate Driver is enabled, on the MIO there is a built-in "GPS Settings" utility where I have it set to COM4 and "Manage GPS automatically"
  • Use the GPS2Blue utility. Make sure it's set to GPS on COM4, 4800 baud, with logging only of GGA/GLL/RMC/VTG NMEA, and select 'Log processed raw data...'. You don't need to enable the "2blue" bit, we're just using it to write the tracklog.
  • Make sure your camera has a date and time that is close to the one being shown by GPS2Blue from the satellites
  • Start TomTom. Make sure it's also set to COM4, 4800 baud. This will work because the GPS Intermediate Driver is opened by GPS2Blue. You can't start TomTom first, but you can exit GPS2Blue and leave TomTom running.
  • After finishing you end up with a NMEA track log with an hour of logging taking up about 1.6Mb. Transfer it to your Fedora machine.

On my Fedora machine:

  • Use gpsbabel to convert the NMEA track log and clean it up a bit. I used:
    gpsbabel -i nmea -f GPS_2008-03-03_122630.log -x discard,hdop=10,sat=5 -o gpx -F out.gpx
    
  • Use gps2photo.pl to add the geocoding to your images. This script looks at the time and date the photo was taken and tries to match it up to an entry in the tracklog, so you may need to play with the timeoffset to deal with timezone differences. Although we have snow, being in the UK in the Winter has it's advantages as we're UTC+0, so I just used:
    gpsPhoto.pl --geoinfo=osm --dir ./ --gpsfile out.gpx --timeoffset 0 \
        --city=auto --sublocation=auto --state auto --country auto --kml out.kml
    

The exif metadata inside each jpeg now contains the approximate co-ordinates of where you were when you took the photo along with a guess of the location (city, country, etc). You can load out.kml into GoogleEarth to see the tracklog and photos on a map. If you've allowed Flickr to read the location data from exif then uploading a geotagged photo will automatically place it on a map. (Make sure you consider the consequences before enabling that option or you may end up unintentionally leaking information like the location of your friends houses or parties you've been to). Here's a quick pic taken in the snow today to test it out:

Test of photo Geocoding output from exiftool:
GPS Position                    : 55 deg 46' 58.21" N, 4 deg 0' 5.50" W
City                            : Motherwell
Province-State                  : Scotland
Country-Primary Location Name   : United Kingdom



Nalin gave a great presentation in the last summit slot about single sign on. One of his slides read simply "Passwords Suck. More Passwords Suck More". I think this is a useful phrase that I am going to now subvert for a short rant:

American Airlines Experiences Suck
More American Airlines Experiences Suck More

First was the debacle which was a 7 hour delay getting to Nashville after a flight was cancelled. Now, at 9pm the day before my 6am flight from Nashville to London tommorrow they cancel my flight and are unable to get me to London in time for my Monday meeting. So I miss my meeting and total for the week I'll have had 18 hours of delays. Although perhaps I shouldn't blog this until I'm home as I'm still in Nashville and, nice that it is, don't want to spend another year here. So thats four out of my last six AA trips that have gone significantly wrong, and I only used AA this time because I wanted to upgrade and had miles left.

However, rant aside, this trip was all about the Red Hat Summit. I was pleasantly suprised by how smoothly it ran and how useful it was to have face-to-face meetings with some of the people I interact with daily by computer. There's a few cool things that the trip acted as a catalyst for, but you'll need to wait to find out ;) I tried to speak to many different attendees over breaks in the days, and consensus was positive with all the first-timers wishing to attend again in the future.

a few of my photos from the summit



After a busy day yesterday at the Summit we partied over at the Wildhorse Saloon. Popped out for an hour with a couple of colleagues to grab a few local geocaches, and saw some sights in Nashville we'd otherwise have missed. Holy bat ring!



After completing all my presentations yesterday I was able to relax at the conference party. Perhaps we relaxed a little too much.

babygotback



Just back from my two presentations and I've uploaded the final versions (which replace the ones distributed on the conference CD).



I did eventually make it to Nashville, although with a 7 hour delay in Chicago. Yesterday was mostly catching up and a little local geocaching.

Earlier today we made public a new service from the security team: OVAL patch definitions for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 and 4. Some summary information is available at our OVAL FAQ, or if you are at the Summit pop along to my talk starting in about 45 minutes.



Previous flights to the US have all ended in disaster so I've been avoiding travelling for some time. However this morning I set off from Glasgow to Nashville for the Red Hat Summit. I'm giving a couple of security presentations on Wednesday. Except that's Glasgow to Chicago and Chicago to Nashville. And the Chicago to Nashville flight got cancelled due to Air Traffic Restrictions (whatever that means it means AA didn't want to take responsibility). Then the bad weather hit and, well, I'm still here 5 hours later, with no sign of the last flight of the day being actually able to leave. Fortunately I flew out a day earlier as I kind of predicted the risk that this sort of thing would happen.



Hot isn't enough of a descriptive word for Karslruhe this week; 34C with no aircon on the show floor or hotel. I'd planned on taking a few hours out to go geocaching but so far don't fancy waking the mile round trip. Instead I managed a couple of webcam caches yesterday and I'm waiting for the weather to break. Did a couple of talks today (for partners) but the big FudCon talk is tommorrow morning, which should be more fun. Got to play with a Nokia 770 (shame it doesn't have a nice desktop stand charger), and find out some more about Xen. Time to go find some more nice Eis.



Off to Germany tommorrow for LinuxTag, FudCON2 and a few presentations. Unfortunately I get the first talk on Friday morning, just after the social event on Thursday night. Or it could be fortunately - this means that I could possibly get away with lower quality slides if the event goes well and everyone drinks lots. As some light relief today I found some gummi worms to photograph for my "Linux Worms" slide and some cute playmobil penguins. I'm looking forward to some real Haribo made in Germany, rather than the inferior "made in UK" versions I bought in Macro. I'm also looking forward to visiting Deutsche Bundesbank to exchange all my DM cash into Euros!

[ 1 | 2 | 3 ] next >>

       


Hi! I'm Mark Cox. This blog gives my thoughts and opinions on my security work, open source, fedora, home automation, and other topics.

pics from my twitter:


popular tags: [all], apache, apachecon, apacheweek, cve, cvss, fedora, financial, geocaching, ha, metrics, microsoft, nashville, north carolina, red hat summit, redhat, security, trips


Subscribe to RSS feed