There's a new trend in the air - camera tossing! It goes a little something like this. You face some brightly colored lights and give your camera a toss up in the air with a long shutter speed (1 second) and see what happens. Camera Tossing has become so popular that there are whole web galleries of camera tossed photos.

The photo to the right was the front of my duaghter's Shuttle PC with a USB memory card reader inserted and my nokia n800 with a new email (led blinking). I'm going to be playing more with this in the future because some of the photos others have taken have been amazing.

Check out the Camera Tossing Flickr page.

The frequency of smart phone news is quickening. With the release of the Palm Pre running on the 600mhz ARM cortex A8 processor we've been jetisoned into a different era. The iPhone 3GS was released quickly after using the same CPU and faster 3D acceleration.  Motorolla followed up with the Droid and now it seems weekly we have more 600 mhz cell phones being released. Not only do I wonder about having 600 mhz in my pocket I wonder about the effeciency of the software. There was a time when a 50mhz Motorolla 68060 was a screaming cpu that did everything you ever wished. Now we 600 mhz in our cell phones and are yearning for more. I think there's just too many levels of abstraction.

Anyway the purpose of this post is to comment on a new announcement by Ziilabs, a division of Creative Technology. The interesting point of their Concept phone is the cpu is a dual core ARM 9 (mhz unknown). This is the current generation CPU. The next phone they'll put out will migrate to a 1 ghz Cortex A8 based System on Chip. This would roughly be a 1 ghz iPhone. Not only that but the concept phone has the following specs.

• Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE, Tri-band WCDMA, HSDPA Cat 8 at 7.2mbps
• Linux-based Zii Optimized Android and Plaszma Support
• Accelerated OpenGL ES 3D Graphics, Video and Imaging
• 3.1" 480x800 16M colour Active Matrix OLED with capacitive multi-touch
• Mini HDMI port for 1080p video output
• Xtreme Fidelity#8482 X-Fi audio technology
• 5M pixel rear facing, auto-focus camera
• VGA forward facing camera for video conferencing
• USB 2.0 Micro port for connectivity and charging
• MicroSD storage expansion and SIM card slots
• 256MB low-power DDR memory
• Integrated Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g, Bluetooth 2.1 EDR and Hardware GPS
• Composite Video output
• 1130mAH lithium polymer battery

From this list you might have an idea where they're going with this phone since it has both HDMI and Composite Video output. They also mention Xtreme Fidelity audio and accelerated 3D support.  With the dual ARM 9 cpus they are able to support  1080p playback using H.264, plus 1080p, 24fps encoding, and simultaneous H.264 encode and decode at 720p for videoconferencing. When they move to the 1ghz ARM cortex A8 SoC they'l be able to support full Blu-Ray at 60fps. Get the picture yet? This is something thats very hard to do with the most powerful desktop PC. In addition to that the new cpu will provide 3D acceleration with up to 1 Gigapixel fill rate.

As a side note it runs two versions of Linux (of course) - a specially optimized version of Android and their own Plaszma Linux which I know nothing about.

A week or so ago I blogged about the future domination of Linux in the smartphone market. I mentioned that Palm spun off it's OS division into a company called Palmsource which was bought and renamed Access. Access then started working on a Linux replacement for the PalmOS to be used in Palm hardware devices. They took so long that Palm (the hardware company) created their own Linux based OS called WebOS which you can try out in the Palm Pre and Palm Pixie. Thought to be dead in the water without a hardware vendor Access just resurfaced on the First Else from Else Mobile. The interface is very interesting and new, a word that doesn't get used often in the smartphone industry these days. It seems since the iphone changed everything and became a sales hit everyone wants to mimic the iphone. Makes sense from a commercial standpoint but at some point you might want to be called "better than an iphone" instead of "as good as an iphone". Else is risking a bit but I welcome the diversity nonetheless.  I don't just blog about smartphones for the heck of it considering I don't even own one! I'm blogging about the Else because it's based on Linux. If this thing takes off we will have 4 major Linux platforms in the smart phone market - Android, Maemo, WebOS and Access Linux. This doesn't count the LiMo phones which never seem to materialize. I belive Access Linux is LiMo compatible though since they're a member.

The First Else has roughly the same hardware as an iphone/n900/Palm Pre/Droid which puts it on par with the best. The interface is really where it's at.  There's a video interview of Else Mobile's CEO at  TelecomTV.

Every time I go through security I feel this way. Credit to xkcd.com

One of my favorite meals is a Persian dish called Korescht-e Fesanjan or the slang term Fesenjoon. It's a meat "soup" of sorts with a Pomegranate and Walnut sauce. It's quite wonderful but also quite elusive in the dining world because of the lack of great Persian restaurants in the Seattle area. I've taken it to task to reproduce it at home. The first time I made it Jade proclaimed that he felt like he was "throwing up". Thankfully I've made progress since then. What I fixed last night got a thumbs up from everyone and Piper begged me to not change it (she knows me too well). I'm not satisfied but I'm on the right track. The texture and color are off and the flavors will need to be tweaked still. I paired it with fresh home made wheat pitas, steamed basmati and apple tea (really apple cider).

Linux has taken the mobile world by storm. About 5 yearas ago I mentioned in one of my classes that at some point Linux would dominate the entire embedded devices world. A student (who was an ameteur embedded developer) laughed out loud and when I asked him if he didn't believe me he replied "It's not that, I'm a realist and this is never going to happen".  I'd like to dedicate this post to that student and I hope wherever he is he's decided to join my reality.

Years ago there was a group of Cell phone manufacturors that joined to make the LiMo foundation - an organization for a unified Linux OS used for mobile applications. Members of LiMo include NEC, DOMOCO, Orange, Panasonic, Vodophone, Samsung, LG and Ericson. With a member list like that you'd think they would take over the world. Palm at the time was making their ancient 16 bit OS still but had decided to spin the OS portion of Palm into another company to focus on making a replacement for the PalmOS. That company, ACCESS announced that it's replacement would be based on Linux and they in turn joined LiMo. Intel on the other hand decided to go it's own way and created a Mobile OS called Moblin. The Moblin project is now under the Umbrella of the Linux Foundation which has members from all over the world. I'm not going to list the Linux Foundation members because that list includes virtually every major Tech company that you've ever heard of.

Nokia is missing from all of these lists because they had invested heavily in their own mobile OS - Symbian which came from the EPOC os of the 90s. Nokia dominated the smart phone market with about 80% saturation so they had no intentions of changing OSs just yet. About a year ago Nokia was down to about 35% saturation and released Symbian to the open source world thinking this was going to help developement. They also started working on Maemo a Linux based Mobile platform for Mobile Internet Devices (not phones).

Palm in the meantime was getting tired of waiting for ACCESS to create their new Linux based OS so they created their own - WebOS. At about the same time ACCESS announced they had finished their Linux based mobile OS but apparently nobody cares.

The big announcement was when Google decided to enter the Mobile Phone OS market with their Android. There was much fanfare and HTC released an Android phone then things got quiet again.

Windows Mobile continued to suck, Symbian continued to lose marketshare and the iphone continued to take that share because it was just awesome (even though it couldn't do copy and paste or multi-task, two features of just about every other OS out there).

Enter fall 2009. Palms new WebOS is amazing but unfortunately saddled to a lackluster phone. Nokia decideds that they will afterall release a Linux phone using Maemo 5. Verizon decides to sell a phone that someone actually wants and goes with the Motorola Droid - the first Android 2 device.

To summarize. The market leader in smart phones uses nothing but open source operating systems (Symbian and Maemo), the second place finisher that's eating up the market is using an mobile OS based on BSD (iphone), Google's Android is a steam roller destroying everything in it's path and will probably be number 2 in as many years and Palm will probably survive thanks to WebOS.

In 5 years I see all Smart Phones having a BSD or Linux OS. Who would have every thought that a 40 year old mainframe OS would become the market leader Cell Phone OS?

I'm currently running Android and WebOS in virtual machines on my desktop. I'll say it again, I love WebOS, they just need to put it on a phone I want.

On occasion I check out frozen stuffed pasta at the local grocery but almost always pass over them unless they're dirt cheap or they sound especially interesting. I've learned that fresh homemade pasta is just plain better. I have found though that there are several types of fresh (packaged) pasta available in the store - most are unaffordable by anyone but a first year Microsoft investor. QFC (our local "charge whatever they want because they have rustic tile floors" grocery store) had fresh packaged chicken and bacon borsetti that looked interesting. Interesting because it's not cheese or sausage ravioli. The pasta was usually $7 but was on sale for $4 and because of a special promo had a dollar off coupon so I bought it on impulse. The first night I cooked it I served it in the old standby - browned butter and sage sauce - and it worked fairly well. My kids couldn't place the flavor of bacon in the pasta because they weren't expecting it. The second time I cooked it I decided to put a little effort into it and make sweet pepper cream sauce. The sauce turned out very good but clashed with the strong flavors of the pasta. Oh well, live and learn.

I do however, think I'l be spending more time with borsetti. In case you don't know what they are they look like cute little bags of gold. I thought that maybe they'd be visible in the photo but they really aren't. You can see the top of the bag all bunched up in the right side of the pasta bowl. They seem really easy to make since they're just squares of pasta bunched up with filling. I think you'll be hearing more of borsetti in the future. Next time I'll just make them fresh. It's not that the chicken and bacon ones were bad, they just don't match what I had in mind.

So far I have $10 invested in the quarry tiles that I'm using as a poor mans brick oven. To get a flat surface I was looking into placing them in a baking sheet, bonding them onto a sheet of metal and other things. Because we were going to have a pizza party I basically ran out of time so I just laid the tiles on the metal racks in the ovens and winged it. I'm still going to work on a better solution because one rack of tiles weighs 16 lbs so the rack sags in the middle. My long term plan (at this moment) is to sand down the edges of the tiles so they fit together very tight and bond them to a sheet of metal some how. I think that if I bond them with the metal sprung a bit in the convex direction the tiles themselves will provide the structural strength. My only concern is replacing a tile if one breaks. I may look into fastening them a different way. Maybe I'll bond bolts to them and fasten those to the metal. Who knows, it's just ideas at this point.

To test out the tiles we made homemade pizza and set the oven to 550 degrees. I also had my old pizza stone on the bottom rack for comparison. The tiles worked wonderfully and even though I've not made any of the changes above I had no problem with them just laid on the racks and they had no problem with the heat.

We made pizza for us and made sure there were ingredients for people with narrower palettes as well. I poached pears in Chardonnay, simmered down our own BBQ sauce and made a marinara for standard pizzas. The pears I paired (ahem) with an herbed Chevre, rubbed the crust with a branch of rosemary dipped in olive oil and sprinkled with Balsamic Vinegar. The pizza in the photo I made the next night the same with but added shallots caramelized in Muscatel Sherry and pomegranate seeds.

For the narrower palette we made the BBQ sauce which we teamed up with grilled chicken breast and slices of smoked Gouda and sprinkled with cilantro. For the even narrower palette I made sure we had marinara, mozzarella and pepperoni available. Most of the kids ate that.

I think I need to say something about the dough for a minute. I've heard all kinds of horror stories about homemade pizzas and it mostly centers around the dough. I remember as a kid trying to make pizza at home and it always tasted funky but it was because we were trying to cut corners. We'd buy pizza dough in a can, pizza sauce in a can etc... Just skip to the chase because none of those things work very well. Pizza sauce (marinara) is a no brainer so I won't spend any time there. The dough however can be very picky so I've included the pizza dough recipe that we use in the recipe section. It's a bit more complex than some doughs (eg. Cooks Illustrated pizza dough) but I like it much better. It's such a wonderful dough to work with that it makes making pizzas a joy. You wil lneed to find durum flour and the recipe calls for bread flour as well but I cheat on that a lot and use a combination of bread flour and all-purpose depending on what I have. The recipe is in weights and is for 16 small pizzas so you'll probably want to do the math to cut it down.