Tatsuhiko Miyagawa's blog

iPhone tethered with the new iPad: Bad Idea

Wed, 02 May 2012 16:06:00 -0700

iPhone’s WiFi periodically sleeps and disconnects from WiFi when the screen is locked.

iPad’s hotspot SSID is not visible when its screen is locked.

The combination of this means your iPhone keeps dropping the connection when it’s in your pocket, and you have to turn on iPad’s screen to reinitiate the WiFi connection. Not a good idea.

Now I’m using iPhone tethered through T-Mobile Android phone, till I get the SIM card from Straight Talk. It should sound like the stupidest thing you can do with an iPhone, but because Android’s hotspot advertises its SSID all the time, the connection gets reinitiated immediately, and works much better.

Sad.

What’s even more sad, is that the bandwidth speed isn’t as bad as AT&T’s “4G”, even with T-Mobile’s 3G (of course much slower than the new iPad’s blazingly fast 4G LTE).

UPDATE: as mentioned in the post, there’s a hack/workaround to let iPhone not going to “deep sleep” and hence keep the wifi connection alive: playing music. I cached lots of music files via iTunes match and play all the music while on the move. It’s silly but it seems to work very well, and doesn’t drain battery as much.

Android to iPhone

Wed, 02 May 2012 06:28:54 -0700

New phone.@ Apple Store instagr.am/p/KG1z7RA_0p/
— Tatsuhiko Miyagawa (@miyagawa) May 2, 2012

Wife has been an iPhone 4 user and her contract just got eligible for upgrade to 4S, and now that AT&T allows unlocking iPhones that got out of contract, thought it’s about time to get an iPhone for myself!

I just walked in to the Apple Store on Stockton, got a white 16GB iPhone 4S, and also replaced her iPhone 4 to the brand new one because the home button issue (thanks to Apple Care). All in $250 incl. taxes. Not so bad.

We activated the new 4S in store, and put back the new SIM to 4 so she can continue using it. My 4S is now activated but has no SIM, i’m using it with tethered to iPad’s Verizon LTE, but i just ordered Straight Talk SIM that should allow unlimited talk+text+data for $45 prepaid, even on AT&T locked phone. Updates on that later.

(Couple of Apple Store employees also have told me that AT&T would unlock your iPhone for international use if your account is clear for 60 days or more, like Verizon and Sprint, and that it’s a recent development. I still doubt that, but it sounds worth a try)

Coming from Android, this is my first iPhone (although I’ve used the original iPad and the new iPad, so iOS 5 and Retina display are not the first experience for me) and here’s my 12 hour impressions:

Camera’s quality is stunning.
Battery life is awesome. I will never complain about that coming from 6-hour ICS that always needs a micro USB cable in your pocket.
Notification Center is a mess. Turning off Sound notifications for each app is a pain, and can’t dismiss each notification with swipe?
The screen feels tiny. I know Retina Display is awesome, but its physical size is just too small. Note that I came from 4 inch Galaxy S, not like Galaxy Note or Nexus with the huge displays.
Yet, with the small screen, the device feels heavy, and is actually heavier than my Galaxy S.
I miss back buttons and Intent. And systeem dialer integration with Google Voice.

Overall I like it, but there are definitely things that worked better on Android, but there’s no perfect phone in the world. I’ll keep the Android phone around especially for international use and tethering. I hope Apple fixes tethering with iPad so that the same SIM card that can do tether fine with Android can do the same with the iPad.

Perl QA Hackathon 2012

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 14:49:00 -0700

Over the weekend I travelled to Paris, France for the wonderful Perl QA Hackathon 2012.

Paris

This is my second trip to Paris - the last time was around 2007 when I stayed at echolet’s place for Act Hacking, sponsored by the YAPC::Asia funds.

Paris is a great place to visit. Beautiful city, Great food, Subway stations for every 1 minute walk.

The things that bugged me during this travel was the lack of decent 3G prepaid plans for travelers (I wasted 2 days looking for a mobile phone/carrier shop that sells a prepaid SIM card with data, no avail) and hay-fever-like allergy that causes me drowsy eyes and sneezing all the time. Next time, I’ll make sure to find the exact place that sells 3G SIM for travelers and with handful of Claritin capsules.

Hacking

CPAN testers for cpanminus

On day 1 and 2 I suffered from the hay fever described above, but had a good conversation with garu on his attempt to implement CPAN testers report on top of cpanm’s build.log output. xdg’s blog post mentions this in details.

—test-only for cpanminus

I also implemented —test-only option for cpanminus which ticket was originally created 2 years ago. I was just reminded of the issue by charsbar, and discussed it briefly on irc and gave it a quick run to implement it. This is one of the nicest things about Hackathon - lots of tuits given by just talking to fellow hackers.

Note that --test-only actually installs dependencies if they are not installed. If you want to test a distribution with a fresh non-core dependency versions, you should combine it with -L option.

`TEST_REQUIRES` for MakeMaker

One of thing that I always wanted to implement was to skip test requires dependencies when --notest is specified. It felt kind of odd to implement features to skip installing test modules at a “QA Hackathon”, but well, who cares :)

rjbs’s post explains this in details, but overall, my cpanminus code handles the logic to skip test dependencies when --notest is in effect already, but because majority of build tools, i.e. MakeMaker and Module::Install merge test requires into build requires, the code has never worked like I hoped, in real world distributions.

rjbs took my complaint over our walk back to the hotel on day 2 and he implemented the patch to accept TEST_REQUIRES, as well as preserving test requires in META.json when dumping them into MYMETA.json.

carton bundle

Masaki Nakagawa, while absent from the hackthon, has implemented a pull request for carton bundle command a few months ago, and now it got merged. Now you can run carton bundle command to fetch the tarballs from CPAN mirrors and have 02packages file locally, which you can use to replay in the remote machine without relying on external CPAN mirrors on the deployment time. It’s a huge win.

cpanfile

On Day 3 when I recovered from the jet lag and hay fever, I got the speed at full gear and started implementing cpanfile which I briefly presented at London Perl Workshop 2011.

tl;dr

cpanfile is to CPAN what gemfile is to Rubygems. It allows you to describe dependencies for your Perl applications in a DSL pretty close to (and somewhat compatible to) Module::Install or Module::Build::Functions DSL.

Listing dependencies

First, Perl distributions usually have Makefile.PL and Build.PL to describe dependencies and the way to build, test and install dependencies. There’s nothing wrong with these files for CPAN distributions. Meanwhile, when your perl application (even if it is not a CPAN distribution per se) needs a way to describe dependencies when you expect other developers to run it locally cloned from github, or PaaS (Heroku, dotCloud, Stackato) to satisfy its requirements before running on the platform.

Most PaaS providers described above support cpanm --installdeps . to install dependencies, which means you should put Makefile.PL or Build.PL in the repository to push out to these platforms, but to me it always has felt like a non-ideal situation for several reasons:

What you’re writing is an app, not a CPAN distribution.
Your application is not meant to be installed. Rather, meant to be run from the current directory
Experienced developers usually use tools like dzil or Module::Install to list dependencies, and you don’t commit inc/ or generated files to git - which most PaaS uses to deploy files. Ugh.

Dzil has a releaser plugin to cope with this issue, and you can always write Makefile.PL with MakeMaker by hand, but there’s a gap to this problem.

Self-executing or Perl DSL

Second, these *.PL files are meant to be self-executed, i.e. you run it like a black box perl Makefile.PL; make; make install. In a recent batch of evolution in CPAN clients and ecosystem such as local::lib, I think it’s a better design for CPAN clients to figure out the way to extract dependencies and how to build & install the application. MYMETA spec and Leont’s CPAN static installer spec is a great way to achieve this, and you can consider cpanfile as an additional simplification to have a canonical syntax to represent the dependencies in a CPAN::Meta::Prereqs compatible format (in fact, CPAN::cpanfile module only has one method that generates the CPAN::Meta::Prereqs out of the cpanfile DSL).

cpanfile in cpanminus

I added a cpanfile support in cpanminus devel branch, which means you can just have cpanfile in your application root and expect cpanm --installdeps . to install dependencies, without having a Makefile.PL at all. It is a good start, and I’ll expect more support for cpanfile in the ecosystem such as Module::Install.

Actually, rjbs has just jumped on the wagon a few minutes before I left the venue and implemented cpanfile releaser plugin for dzil.

I hope I can get more done in a coming Carton hackthon in Tokyo next week. I just scheduled this hackathon to work with hackers like Masaki and Tokuhirom, and can also work on features to fill up my slides for OSDC.TW in the weekend right after that. CDD++ :)

Acknowledgements

I want to give huge thanks to elbeho, BooK and French Perl Mongers for organizing the hackathon, and awesome sponsors who made the hackathon possible.

I heard the QA hackathon will continue going on at London in 2013, and can’t wait to participate to hack more.

Check out my flickr set for more photos taken in Paris.

rjbs's rubric: how I spent my Perl QA Hackathon

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 08:42:00 -0700

rjbs's rubric: how I spent my Perl QA Hackathon:

As we walked back to the hotel before dinner, I asked Miyagawa how his hackathon was going. He said he wanted to get better support for all of META.json’s prereq types (suggestions, test requirements, etc.) into cpanminus, but had been stymied by ExtUtils::MakeMaker’s lack of support for test requires. One big motivator for him was to speed up the —notest option by skipping test prereqs, but that wouldn’t work if EUMM had no mechanism for them.

…

I filed a pull request for adding TEST_REQUIRES with tests. It’s a bit of a mess, but that seems to be life with EUMM.

rjbs, like always, my hero!

Today I was looking around a way to override/patch Net::HTTP requests to a Sinatra app in tests, and...

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 16:01:00 -0700

Today I was looking around a way to override/patch Net::HTTP requests to a Sinatra app in tests, and happily found that the sham_rack gem exactly does that.

ShamRack.at("rackup.xyz").rackup do
  run MyApp.new
end

Put this snippet in your test_helper and all the calls to Net::HTTP inside your tests go through the Sinatra app. Neat.

I then wondered if someone has ported this to Perl, and voila: I did that almost an year ago.

my $psgi_app = sub { ... };  # any PSGI compat app
LWP::Protocol::PSGI->register($psgi_app);

and now all the LWP supporting libraries go to your app.

I really like moments like this.

resque-top

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 13:54:00 -0700

resque-top is my first Ruby gem released to the world of rubygems.

Like mytop and memcache-top, resque-top connects to the resque database and displays the information about queue and processing workers. Basically the same information available on the resque-web UI but on the command line.

Exciting Times

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 22:40:00 -0800

Here’s a quick (big) announcement: I’m parting ways with DotCloud and will join COOKPAD in February.

As for DotCloud, It’s been an interesting ride for me at 180 Sansome and I will definitely miss working with them, and wish the best luck at their challenge to be the best platform as a service. My last day at DotCloud is 1/31.

On February 1st, I will join COOKPAD, Inc. to work full-time as a senior developer. COOKPAD may not need any introduction for any Japanese audience, since it is everyone’s favorite recipe sharing website. Here’s a quick intro about the company in English.

As a weekend chef, I use the site a lot myself, and am thrilled to join the company to contribute to the growth. The company is Tokyo-based (with its lovely headquarters in Shirokanedai) but I will continue my life in San Francisco and will see my friends more often in my occasional visits to Tokyo.

I’m really excited to work with brilliant folks from COOKPAD, most notably the founder Aki Sano, and Daisuke Horie, who I enjoyed working with at Six Apart, along with very talented engineers in the team. (Oh, and I heard they’re hiring :D)

Exciting times!

Lumix DMC-GX1 JPEG settings

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 01:09:00 -0800

One of the problems I see with GX1 has been that the default JPEG output is so “flat” and it’s not my taste, especially when compared to the GF1. After a bunch of trial and errors, also with reviews on kakaku and 2ch, here’s something I came up with.

Feel free to cargo cult it, but don’t blame me for bad JPEG rendering because of that.

Mostly used with Summilux 25mm f/1.4. Some settings might not be appropriate when used with other lenses.

Before doing this, don’t forget to apply the firmware Version 1.1 update. It fixes the AWB performance and it’s really important.

Photo Style: Custom (STD) / Contrast +2 / Sharpness +1 / 彩度 -2 / NR -1
Aspect ratio: 3:2
Resolution: L 14M
Quality: RAW + Super Fine
Intelligent Resolution 超解像: Weak 弱
iD Range Control: Weak 弱
ISO high limit: 800 (might not appropriate if you use the zoom lens)

This setting makes a personally satisfying JPEG rendering, and the auto white balance seems more appropriate than Lightroom in many cases with the firmware update. (Lightroom tends to color things more warm and make it look like more dramatic)

Yet, if you take shots in a dark room, shooting with RAW will probably get you a better white balance and exposure adjustments. See my photo gallery for samples - those with .JPG (uppercase) are GX1 auto JPEG and .jpg (lowercase) are published from Adobe lightroom 4 beta.

I will mostly use JPEG and only render from RAW for such underlight photos or failed shots with over/under exposure.

Oh by the way, if you render from RAW, you can still make geotagging work, if your software supports the XMP sidecar files. You still have to transfer from Eye-Fi to your computer wirelessly, instead of reading directly from the SD card though.

Shit San Francisco hipsters says at hipster cafes.

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 17:11:39 -0800

Shit San Francisco hipsters says at hipster cafes.

LUMIX DMC-GX1 Firmware update

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 14:54:31 -0800

LUMIX DMC-GX1 Firmware update:

DMC-GX1 firmware update version 1.1 is available from the Panasonic website.

I applied the update this morning and it’s yet too early to judge if it actually got better, but i definitely see the differences.

GX1 AWB, v1.1:

RAW Lightroom 4 AWB:

Kindle Touch Software Update 5.0.3

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 14:48:23 -0800

Kindle Touch Software Update 5.0.3:

We have a new, free software update available for your Kindle Touch that you can manually download. We will be delivering this update over Wi-Fi in the coming weeks. This update features general software improvements for Kindle Touch.

This software update definitely brings a better page turn performance on Kindle Touch.

チベットのラッパ犬

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 12:36:51 -0800

椎名誠の超常近未来アジア風SF小説最新作。舞台設定は直近のひとつ目女に近い感じの近未来中国。武装島田倉庫あたりから続くこちら系が好きな人にはおすすめ。後半のペースダウンが残念。

チベットのラッパ犬

posted with amazlet at 12.01.24

椎名誠
文藝春秋
売り上げランキング: 475307

Amazon.co.jp で詳細を見る

Tell Your World on iTunes US Store

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 01:50:00 -0800

Tell Your World on iTunes US Store:

Absolutely the best song ever by Hatsune Miku, produced by @kz_lt. If you haven’t, check out Google Chrome commercial featuring this song.

Thank you kz and TOY’S FACTORY for making it available on the iTunes US store. Now I can’t wait for the EP release in March that contains my fave songs such as Far Away, Star Story and Fly Out.

The JSON license

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 22:22:00 -0800

The JSON license:

I was looking at the acknowledgement screen of Apple TV today and found that the JSON license is there and includes the following text:

The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.

a) is this license (for JSON.org parser I assume) compatible to OSI? I guess not.

b) isn’t Apple doing anything evil? Who decides what is evil anyways?

Quick google search shows the same question on Quora.

Build and Analyze #58

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 07:56:00 -0800

Build and Analyze #58

06:09~

DB: Power Grid, by Rio Grande Games.

MA: Yeah, very good. The whole family enjoyed it. I think this is the first relatively complex game that … none of us knew how to play it and we learned it by reading instructions, not by like having somebody teach us..

DB: (laughter) I’m sorry, there’s a picture on the Amazon page where people can upload their own images, there’s a picture of what looks like a family playing it, and the family looks completely bored out of their mind. I’m going to try this URL in the show notes…

MA: Oh you’re right, red shirt on the left?

DB: Yeah.

MA: Oh my God.

DB: That’s a great picture.

On the Verge 002

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 07:38:00 -0800

(06:05~)

JG: It ended up that, just through Email, I have written mailing lists and stuff like that, I’ve written like three or four books worth of email. That’s why I feel like…

JT: Not a narrative though.

JG: No. Not like one single thing.

JT: People were like, “I don’t understand this email”

(laughter)

JG: Right.

JT: “Chapter 4”, “I don’t get this, John”

Fotoshop by Adobé (by Jesse Rosten). Brilliant.

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 10:14:49 -0800

Fotoshop by Adobé (by Jesse Rosten). Brilliant.

Looks like an old news, but Jenna Marbles is my favorite video...

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 10:11:48 -0800

Looks like an old news, but Jenna Marbles is my favorite video blogger.

Android phones suck

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 00:27:00 -0800

While I am a supporter of Android (been a user for almost 2 years now), I have to say that parislemon’s “Why I Hate Android” post has a point.

Nexus One was a great idea, although it was meant to fail when Google gave up Verizon and Sprint models in favor of Droid and EVO.

I’ve been using Samsung Galaxy S Vibrant, running MIUI ROM with 2.3 Gingerbread. I like the software (MIUI is a great improvement over stock and CyanogenMod) and that I have a total control and the ability to customize every aspect of the phone. My monthly fee is $30/mo Monthly 4G with Unlimited data, text and 100 minute voice and tethering doesn’t incur any additional charges.

However the hardware is getting old and is kind of slow, and the battery life is a joke (8-10 hours of life with moderate use under 3G), no support for HSPA+, GPS is crap - that’s why I want to upgrade the phone.

There are hundeds of Android phones available in the market. No, there’s absolutely no single Android phone that I want to use. Why? Here’s the requirements for my new phone:

WCDMA Unlocked, support 2100MHz and hopefully AWS (T-Mobile)
Maximum 4 inch screen (my hand is small)
Support HSPA+ 42Mbps
Good battery life (No LTE)
Stock, no bloatware
Ability for tether/Wi-Fi hotspot with no additional cost
CyanogenMod / MIUI support would be nice

and I don’t really care about camera quality or front facing camera, and I don’t need LTE.

That’s not a huge list of requirements, but can’t find a phone that satisfies the requirements. Only thing I’ve found yet is LG’s T-Mobile G2X available on Amazon/craigslist around $250, but that’s almost one year old and i heard its battery life is shitty.

Also, the obvious other choice is an unlocked iPhone 4S. Or I should wait for iPhone 5.

GX1 JPEG output update

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 22:38:00 -0800

GX1 JPEG output update:

bulknews:

I got Panasonic Lumix GX1 from amazon.co.jp (order placed on 12/31 and received the item on 1/1 - that’s an amazing logistics in Japan).

I love the performance of this camera and there’s tons of improvements over GF1, especially the horizontal meter, EXIF orientation and touch to focus ala…

I spent the whole afternoon to the evening today to shoot lots of photos with GX1 changing key parameters and configurations.

The takeaway was as follows - however, note to take this with a grain of salt, since there are so many parameter configurations, I couldn’t test all the possible combinations one by one, rather testing one parameter enabled/disabled, and often compare photos with multiple values different: it’s not all scientific.

White Balance and Exposure Bias

GX1’s auto white balance is pretty good in the most scenes.

When using aperture-priority or program AE, the JPEG output feels a bit dark, at least compared to GF1 or iA+ mode, so I tried setting the Exposure Bias to +0.33~1 EV (which was the opposite of what I did with GF1).

f/1.4, ISO 160, Auto WB, +0.33 EV

f/1.4, ISO 160, Auto WB, +0.66 EV

Under the sun light though, most of the time, you can just use iA or iA+. It works so well that I feel stupid and waste time by fiddling with the aperture settings myself to avoid over exposure.

f/5.0, ISO 160, Auto WB, 0 EV (iA+ mode)

f/4.5, ISO 160, Auto WB, 0 EV (iA+ mode)

f/1.6, ISO 160, Auto WB, 0 EV (Aperture priority AE)

However, as shown in the previous post, auto white balance doesn’t work well under the room light, especially when taking people: their skin turns red. You need to adjust the white balance in that situation, but doing that could potentially turn everything into yellow, which is actually the same problem we have with GF1. I couldn’t have time to test it today, hence haven’t yet found a solution (except shooting with RAW, obviously).

Instead, here’s how auto white balance works in the night.

f/1.4, ISO 800, Manual WB (Cloudy), 0 EV

f/1.4, ISO 1250, Auto WB, 0 EV (Program AE)

f/1.4, ISO 1600, Auto WB, 0 EV, 0.02 sec

f/1.4, ISO 800, Manual WB (5000K), 0 EV, 0.04 sec

Shooting Modes

As I said above, when there’s a plenty of sun light you can just use iA or iA+ and forget everything else. Otherwise, I guess most people would use the Aperture priority mode, where you set the f value and let the camera figure out the ISO and exposure. That probably works well if you know what’s the right value of aperture in a dark environment, but that’s not the case with me.

Actually, when I use my favorite lens Summilux f/1.4 25mm in a dark environment, most of the time I just use f/1.4 (open). In that situation, Program AE feels more convenient, since it suggests the best aperture and shutter speed combination for me, yet I can shift the dial to change aperture and shutter speed at the same time, if I need more bokeh, or make it more focus in the background.

f/1.4, ISO 500, Auto WB, 0 EV (Program AE)

f/1.4, ISO 800, Auto WB, 0 EV, 0.05 sec (Program AE)

Shutter speed priority mode is also useful if you have a tripod and want to take a still night shot.

f/7.1, ISO 160, Manual WB (5000K), 0 EV, 3.2 sec (Shutter speed priority)

I didn’t use a tripod but put my camera on the handrail, then use the 2 second timer.

Tweaking JPEG output

The other problem was that the default JPEG output looks very light or flat, that I don’t see much color depth as I see with GF1’s JPEG output. After some research on internet forums and testing, there are two solutions (or workarounds) to this. Again, if you shoot RAW and use lightroom/aperture, you can skip this entire section - or actually, the whole post!

One is to decrease the maximum ISO value. The default is set to ISO 1600, and I changed it to ISO 800.

f/1.4, ISO 800, Auto WB, 0.017 sec

f/1.4, ISO 200, Manual WB (Cloudy), 0.067 sec

ISO 800 makes a pretty good contrast, yet with a fast shutter speed with less blurry car moves. Also, even in the dark environment, Auto WB makes a warm color output, which I like.

Also, it seems setting 超解像 (Intelligent Resolution) to 弱 or 拡張 (weak or extended) is recommended if you want a deep color JPEG output. The extended (拡張) setting makes the JPEG rendering/save take a bit more time.

f/1.4, ISO 160, Auto WB, +0.66 EV, Intelligent Resolution (Strong)

f/1.6, ISO 160, Auto WB, 0 EV, Intelligent Resolution (Strong)

f/1.4, ISO 800, Manual WB (Cloudy), 0.02 sec

Lastly, I saw on some reviews that the default JPEG’s noise reduction is aggressive. I created a custom color setting and decreased the noise reduction to -1. It is a cargo cult, and I haven’t really tested it based on evidence.

Summary

This is a great upgrade from GF-1 and it is by far the best micro 4/3 camera. I still need to test more settings with people’s faces under the room light, which I couldn’t test today: I guess reducing ISO and increasing the Intelligent Resolution should help a bit. If the white balance problem still remains with the tweaks, I should take RAW shots in such situation, until Panasonic possibly fixes an update.

Tatsuhiko Miyagawa's blog

iPhone tethered with the new iPad: Bad Idea

Android to iPhone

Perl QA Hackathon 2012

Paris

Hacking

CPAN testers for cpanminus

—test-only for cpanminus

TEST_REQUIRES for MakeMaker

carton bundle

cpanfile

tl;dr

Listing dependencies

Self-executing or Perl DSL

cpanfile in cpanminus

Acknowledgements

rjbs's rubric: how I spent my Perl QA Hackathon

Today I was looking around a way to override/patch Net::HTTP requests to a Sinatra app in tests, and...

resque-top

Exciting Times

Lumix DMC-GX1 JPEG settings

Shit San Francisco hipsters says at hipster cafes.

LUMIX DMC-GX1 Firmware update

Kindle Touch Software Update 5.0.3

チベットのラッパ犬

Tell Your World on iTunes US Store

The JSON license

Build and Analyze #58

On the Verge 002

Fotoshop by Adobé (by Jesse Rosten). Brilliant.

Looks like an old news, but Jenna Marbles is my favorite video...

Android phones suck

GX1 JPEG output update

White Balance and Exposure Bias

Shooting Modes

Tweaking JPEG output

Summary

`TEST_REQUIRES` for MakeMaker