The week is almost at an end again. The beginning of the winter feels like yesterday and I already feel the spring in the air. The weather's actually warm enough to walk around in shirts without fearing for you life, which wasn't quite what we had for the past few months. The connections and the questions of the winter seem to be gone again, and as the world begins to move along with coming of the summer I realize yet again why the April is the cruelest month of the year, at least according to certain very well known poet recited world wide.

The diybio nyc is coming to pass and as promised before I am trying to busy myself with a lot of work in and outside of school. At the moment the android and processing hacking continues, though with the things that have been happening recently I haven't been able to pay as much attention to them as I would have liked (as I'm typing this I am beginning to realize that the sound of click and the print of a key on the screen isn't exactly in tandem. While they sound like they happen at the same time there's a very subtle time difference that's throwing me off for some reason. Or am I overly sensitive right now? Why would I be?). I need to find bunch of stuff for the diybio nyc community, and I need to keep coming up with stuff so that we don't lose the momentum of the movement. I've seen too many organizations and groups of worthy cause simply disspate and disappear for lack of action. I don't know what I can do alone at the moment and I certainly don't want to give off the feeling of someone crazy for control of the group, so I guess I need to be patient for a while. I was never good with all the interpersonal stuff. I'm just sincerely hoping that the group will have someone who can take all those responsibility soon.

The android is a fascinating operating system. I don't like how it has the trappings of the much hyped 'cloud' computing system built into some of its components. I'm guessing the reported horrible battery life on the G1 device is in most part due to the fact that the machine makes extensive data calls to the net in order to keep all the google things synchronized with the mainframe somewhere over the net. 3G data connection at all times of the day cannot help but to drain through the battery. Other than that single fact however, I like the platform. I think it might even be stable enough to run on some of the computer systems as a dedicated operating system (provided that we can do something about the whole driver issues, iron out some kinks that's stopping some of the major hardware developers from jumping onto the bandwagon), which would be epic. A handset os and desktop/laptop grade os sharing a single depository of available applications would be a dream come true for developers, especially when that platform is (more or less) opensource. I am not an opensource/GNU zealot, but I do agree that on fundamental level freeing developers from needing to make a payment to develop for certain platform means more applications and mature platform. Considering that grand social and economical implications of the opensource operating systems technology, I am putting a lot of hope onto the whole android os project. All the ideologies aside, I think android os would make a really interesting beginner hacking platform for all parties, regardless of age and experience. The helloworld example of the android platform is easy enough for most mid-high school students to follow, and even advanced examples are fully doable with enough patience and effort. This is the os that should have been on the OLPC project. Low-cost, web/development friendly computing platform that can help people make money off their skills and knowledge directly, all safely protected under the opensource banner (no lawyers knocking down your door for some licensing fees or copyright violation, unlike some other OSes I can think of).

While the possibilities of the android os boggles the mind, the hardware side of things had been rather disappointing. The G1 is so far the only phone that actually carries the android os as the platform of choice, and not a whole lot of handsets are on the horizon, citing various reasons usually revolving around the relative immaturity of the platform itself. It's a valid complaint. The android os is somewhat buggy as the things stand. It's not 'beta' state buggy, but it definitely have quirks that are ironed out in some of the more mature mobile oses. However, I'm beginning to think that the lack of android os based phones on the market isn't simply due to the immaturity of the platform itself. It might have more to do with the business side of things, with mobile manufacturers who had been in close relationship with cellphone service providers for years being reluctant to invest in developing a handset that might not go down every easy with the service providers. After all, for service providers, more control=more profit, and they have a vested interest in keeping customers locked into specific platforms and specific softwares usually produced by the in-house divisions of the service providers themselves (take a look at this situation and weep, the zealots of freemarket goodness). I do believe that decent mobile with android os will come along sooner or later (I'm particularly grim about the fact that G1 doesn't allow you to take videos, something that would have given the G1 a definite edge over the iPhone), but I am also beginning to suspect that handset manufacturers and service provider companies need to work out a new business model in order to make that happen. Perhaps the days of subsidized and locked in handsets are coming to a close? It was a ridiculous concept from the beginning when you think about it. Let's put it this way. AOL or Optimum Online subsidizes Dell/HP/Apple and when you buy a relatively cheap computer from them, you need to be locked into two year service agreements where you can use your own computer only if you agree to connect to the internet using AOL/Optimum Online. If you move to some city or country outside the coverage range, your computer effectively goes dead (or you get slammed with 'roaming' charges that are x10 what you normally pay). The scheme might have made sense when computer and internet connection were novelty products (one-per-village) and flying in an airplane to foreign country was only for the privileged few, but in modern age where they are trivial tools for making a living, you are really putting a dampener on the social/economical/technological progress. And all of that for a scheme that we are not even sure if it actually ends up making a profit.

The part about the global roaming really irks me. I travel frequently, around Korea/Japan and back to the US for both business and pleasure. And with the screwed up bandwidth division all over the place, I'm never really sure if my given phone will be able to work in some other country. Don't even get me started on the roaming prices. For all the fuss over globalization and it's effects on societies across the world, I don't really feel that the infrastructure is global at all. It's actually as local as it gets.

The processing hacking is going well. Since I have some moderate experience with mathematica and python, learning how the processing works wasn't all that difficult. Being able to put together a complex project however, seem to be a different story. I'm jumping through a lot of hoops to get the processing engine for the augmented whale project to work. I downloaded the whole Blue Whale mitochondrial DNA (Magaptera Novaeangliae) sequence from the genbank, but that was the easy part. Now I need to figure out a way to build a decent sound and graphics generator that will provide generative content from the DNA sequence input. For the difficulty of figuring out the basic octave settings I am actually thinking of using codon sequences instead of raw nucleotide sequences, which will provide me with more variety to work with. Simply generating beeps and lights from the sequence isn't really good enough either. I need to be able to create something capable of catching the essence of the whale, so to speak. I'm thinking Shoji Kawai-ish ambient music, but it's to be worked out as the project progresses. The deadline is an April so I have about a month or so of time to work on it, which really isn't a whole lot considering that I need to work on all the school stuff and the diy-bio nyc will be needing some dedication on mypart. This is still much better than having nothing to do, as Bernard Shaw put it somewhere.