While Chrome has one of the most secure sandboxes and has always survived the Pwn2Own contest during the last three years, we have now uncovered a reliable way to execute arbitrary code on any installation of Chrome despite its sandbox, ASLR and DEP.

I would hope an update to fix the exploit would be released soon, although sandboxing has already proved to be insecure which makes future exploits easier. Meanwhile, I’m going back to browsing by telnet hostname 80.

A few highlights:

• 1GHz Cortex A8 (Hummingbird) processor
• 512MB RAM and 16GB internal storage
• 4 inch WVGA contour display (yes it’s not flat)
• Android 2.3 “Gingerbread”

Android 2.3 platform was also announced, with SIP stack, Near Field Communications, more sensor support, multiple cameras support, Download Manager, and more. Now just waiting for a build is available for me Nexus One :)

Also on Google’s official blog.

After its outstandingly successful parent company topped a 100 Best Places To Work survey conducted by the US magazine Fortune, Google Australia has claimed the No.1 spot in a similar Australian poll.

BRW, which conducted the study, said Google had created a legendary corporate culture of perks, fun, appreciation and reward for its staff.

I actually had a privilege to tour the new Googleplex in Pyrmont last Thursday for the Google Partners’ Day. That was quite an experience. Read on to see what I have learnt on that day.

BLAH BLAH BLAH. <Silenced due to an NDA I have to sign with Google>.

Well. I guess I cannot actually say what I saw on the Google Partners Day, but just a few things in point forms (which I hope would not violate the terms in NDA):

• Google Maps sucks (on that day). The Googleplex address on Google Maps was actually around 500 metres North-West along Pirrama Road than what it actually is. It has already been fixed now (thanks Google), but I was trying to navigate myself to there, relying on Google Maps on my Nokia E71, and ended up right in front of a parkland. Google Maps can’t navigate me to Googleplex? Well, at least that was my excuse of being late on the day.

• Great networking time that you have opportunity talking to other Australia publishers — only if I was not that naive. Seriously, an engineer like me felt a bit out of place amongst the publishers, advertisers, agents, etc. I also skipped the after-event drinking networking time because I need to come back for MBF BST.

  Still, I had a short chat with Guy & Bevan from Stateless Systems — great guys.

• Seven plastic guitars — that’s how many they have for Guitar Hero and Rock Band. Cool.

• The best place to work in Australia, only if you are a single unattached geek who prefer marrying social life with work. Lots of freedom there. Lots of gadgets. Lots of social events as far as I can tell. Good food and good coffee machine. Moreover I am pretty sure you will be working with some of the best geeks in Australia over there.

  However if you are married with kids, have a different life outside work, other commitments (church activities for example) — I am not sure whether the Googler-style would be good.

Interestingly in the SMH article, top 5 of greatest places to work are all in Sydney. Maybe it tells us more about the city than those companies :)

So let me compare it with the Nokia E71 that I got in January, which is my current phone.

Instead of reviewing it feature by feature, I will share some of the things I would do (or would like to do) on the mobile phone, and how would HTC Dream stack up against Nokia E71 in handling those tasks.

	HTC Dream	Nokia E71
Dimensions and Portability	117.7 x 55.7 x 17.1 mm @ 158g 1150mAh battery	114 x 57 x 10 mm @ 127g 1500mAh battery
	Dream is around 25% heavier than E71, although it is only a tiny bit longer and not much narrower. However, E71 is considerably thinner than HTC Dream — in fact it is probably one of the thinnest smart phones around. A slide out keyboard on Dream is not helping either. Both are quite “portable” in my standard, i.e. I am happy to slip either into my shorts pocket. However as of all mobile phones — smaller & thinner = better. Another aspect of portability is its battery life. On paper — Nokia E71′s 1,500mAh Lion battery is 30% juicier than Dream HTC’s. The reality is also true. I do around 1-2 hours of web surfing a day, and they stay on, connected to 3G and Wifi whole day. I have to recharge almost every single day on Dream, but my E71 could usually last 2-2.5 days. Dream can be recharged over USB though, whereas you need to get Nokia CA-100 cable for E71 to charge over USB power (which they ought to include that in the first place). Winner: Nokia E71
Making Phone Calls	Dial Number Press [Dial] button Select “Dialer” tab Input number on touch screen Press [Dial] button to make call Dial A Contact Press [Dial] button Select “Contacts” tab Slide out keyboard Type in partial name on keyboard Select matched contact Close keyboard Press [Dial] button to make call	Dial Number Press [Home] button Input number from keyboard Press [Dial] button to make call Dial A Contact Press [Contact] button Type in partial name on keyboard Select matched contact Press [Dial] button to make call
	One of the most basic functionality of mobile phones is, guess what, making phone calls! The call quality is “about the same” sucky GSM low pass filter sound, but the “process of calling” is a bit different. Nokia E71, with its permanent keyboard, makes it easier to turn on, type in a number and make phone calls. With HTC Dream however, you get the option of typing in phone number with either the full screen dialer (not as responsive as real keys), or slide out the actual keyboard to use the keys, and then slide back in before making phone calls (very awkward). Same with dialing a contact — dedicated contacts button on E71 makes the process a little bit easier and quicker. If you are buying a phone just to make phone calls, the choice is no brainer… (Which of course would be neither — $40 prepaid dumb phone from supermarket will suffice). Winner: Nokia E71
Email & SMS	Input Method 5 row QWERTY keyboard Application Support Email app with IMAP4/POP3 support Gmail app	Input Method 4 row QWERTY keyboard Predictive/suggestive input Application Support Email app with IMAP4/POP3 support Gmail app in Java Nokia Messaging with push email support
	One reason why I prefer a phone with QWERTY keyboard is because I do quite a bit of emailing when I commute. In this department, HTC Dream’s slide out keyboard is marginally better than Nokia E71′s. There are more spaces between keys, and there is a dedicated numeric row — which is something very useful I found. I have relatively small hands but it’s still quite easy to make mistakes on E71 when I am in a hurry. But I guess that’s where Nokia’s suggestive text input comes in. It will try to complete the words for you, or make a suggestion when you made a typo. It can be annoying sometimes (making wrong suggestions), but in general I found it quite helpful. Email application wise, Dream HTC is street ahead of Nokia E71. Out of factory E71 only comes with a simple email app that supports multiple IMAP4 and POP3 accounts. You can however get Nokia Messaging with IMAP4 IDLE/push email support (a much better client but no guarantee to be free in the future). If you are a Gmail user like me, you can also download Gmail Mobile, which is a J2ME application that feels half finished. On the other hand, HTC Dream has a nice looking email client + a much better Gmail Mobile application out of box, which actually supports HTML email viewing (but not composing, at least I have not found a way to do it). Well, you cannot blame Google for creating a better Gmail client for their own operating system, can you? Not just better Gmail integration — but also contacts/tasks/calendar events sync between the phone and your Google account. It’s so integrated that the only way to use a different Google account is by resetting the phone (doh). Whereas Gmail Mobile app on J2ME allows you to have multiple Gmail account logging in at the same time. Winner: Dream HTC
Web Browsing	Display 480×320 HVGA LCD screen Navigation Trackball or Touch screen Browser Webkit-based Android browser 3rd party browsers (Steel, OperaMini)	Display 320×240 QVGA LCD screen Navigation 4 way directional key Browser Webkit-based Nokia browser 3rd party browsers (OperaMini, Skyfire)
	Darn. I love everything about web browsing on HTC Dream. The browser interface is slick. Text is rendered beautifully. Screen is twice the resolution as E71. You can scroll around with either the trackball or by dragging on the touch screen. I don’t have an iPhone, nor Windows Mobile 6 based devices so I cannot compare with them. But browsing experience on HTC Dream is on an entirely different level than E71. Nokia E71 came with Nokia Web Browser that is also Webkit based, although the quality of rendering makes it hard to believe that they actually share the same layout engine. There is no anti-alias fonts (which I think there’s a hack to turn it on). It’s slow. Half the website I visited would kill it. When the sites don’t kill it, they don’t render properly. However there is no way to change the default browser so I am stuck with it. There are other 3rd party browsers available on Nokia E71 though. OperaMini, an J2ME based browser, is my favourite, and it is also available on Android. Good for digesting the content rich site that would otherwise kill the defacto Nokia Browser, and it goes through a proxy that can really cut down the traffic to save cost. However it has no Javascript nor Flash. Yes I have tried Skyfire — it feels heavy and unresponsive to me. Winner: Dream HTC
Watching YouTube	Dedicated YouTube application	Nokia Browser + Flash Lite emTube/MobiTubia
	YouTube is fun. YouTube on your mobile is even useful — when you need to calm the kids and distract them :) On HTC Dream you have a dedicated YouTube application that allows you to search and watch videos on that nice HVGA screen. Just need to make sure you are on Wi-Fi connection so you don’t get a surprising bill at the end of the month. On E71 however, it’s not that straightforward. YouTube for mobile does not work on Nokia Browser, as video gets encoded in 3GP format which is not supported by the Real Player on E71. To watch YouTube video on out-of-box E71 however, you need to browse to the regular YouTube site, search for the video you wish to watch, and then use the built in Flash Lite to watch the content in its small QVGA screen. That’s if YouTube happens to render properly on Nokia Browser (most of the time it doesn’t), haven’t crashed it, and you can find the content you looking for before the browser grinds to a halt. Flash Lite is also a bit under-powered when it plays the content, and will likely skip every 3rd frame… Winner: Dream HTC Update: Apparently Google has just released an YouTube application for S60 platform, and watching YouTube video on my E71 is now just as easy as on HTC Dream :)
Remote Administration	SSH: ConnectBot RDP: Connectoid	SSH: PuTTY for Symbian RDP: Various commercial applications
	One thing I need to do (but have not managed to do it) is to be able to manage my servers remotely from my phone. For example if MySQL crashed, and I can just ssh into my box and restart it. Both ConnectBot on Android and PuTTY on Symbian are pretty good. However with bigger screen + better keyboard, HTC Dream might be sysadmin’s choice over E71. With ConnectBot I can actually fit 80 columns in a screen! It’s actually the first application I installed when I received the HTC Dream. No experience with RDP based administration. Yup I am lucky I know :) Winner: Dream HTC
Making VoIP Calls	Nil	Applications Nokia built in SIP client Fring Nimbuzz
	It’s 2009. There is basically no point paying ridiculous high mobile call rates and everyone should be onto VoIP — provided your phone actually supports it. Unfortunate I have not yet found a SIP client that works well on HTC Dream. Consider mobile carriers’ generally negative response to VoIP, I am not sure how soon will we see a full VoIP application on Android. On the other hand, there are heaps of options on Symbian/S60. SIP stack is built into the OS. The fully integrated client is available on E71, which you can set as the default action when you press [Dial] button. There are other clients integrated with other IM networks. Currently I am using Nimbuzz that also registers my phone onto PennyTel’s SIP service, MSN and Skype. Making VoIP calls on mobile is actually quite clear (when you have good 3G reception) and very economical. Winner: Nokia E71
Connect Computer to the Net	Nil	Modem via USB cable or Bluetooth Joikuspot
	When you are on the road and there is no Wi-Fi hotspot in sight, being able to use the phone as modem to connect to Internet via 3G/HSPA might be the best option. Again, I have not found a way to do it on HTC Dream other then rooting the phone to install tethering application. On the other hand, there are heaps of options for my Nokia. Nokia PC Suite can be used to connect your computer to Internet via a connection to the phone — from either USB cable, infrared or Bluetooth. For me I just need to turn the Bluetooth on, wait for PC Suite to detect the existence of the phone, and then click on a button to make that as a modem. Easy. The same functionality is also available on Mac and Linux, although it can be a bit fiddly (with PPP chat scripts) on Linux. The other possibility would be using a tethering application such as Joiku Spot, which turns your phone into an adhoc Wi-Fi access point, where multiple computers can use to connect to the Internet. Winner: Nokia E71

For many other things I do, they are pretty much on-par. HTC Dream almost always have flashy UI and Nokia E71 usually have good established commercial software support. One thing I like about HTC Dream and Android though, is its active developer community and the momentum behind it. When you open up Market Place in Android (another great piece, compare to Nokia’s pathetic “Download!”), you can easily search for new and popular applications — and they are usually free (whereas most apps on Nokia’s “Download!” cost). It’s easy to find new apps to review and install. Whereas with my Nokia, I hit Google search first, and then have to go through many banner-ad-filled web pages before I can find a download link.

And when you have the developer mind share — you are winning the game. Just ask Apple. From what I can see, although for the existing pool of software packages, there are more available on Symbian than on Android. Give it a year and two, and it will be very different I think. Nokia with its aging Symbian and S60 interface will have to fight very hard to win back the developers. Maybe Qt could help? Who knows…

Conclusion

HTC Dream verses Nokia E71 — who wins? It’s a draw for me. I love my Nokia E71 for its small form factor and ease of use, but envy the arguably better operating system that’s Android on HTC Dream. The deal breaker for me would be making VoIP calls and the ability to tether, which neither are available on HTC Dream yet. I believe they might not be something that are difficult to develop, but pressure from mobile carriers might prevent them to be included in the Android Market Place.

So for now, it’s Nokia E71 for me. My next phone in 2 years? Who knows. There is a big OS war out there — Symbian, Android, Windows Mobile, iPhone and Blackberry. Do we have big enough market for so many mobile operating systems? Who will survive and who will wither? Time will tell.

Yes, it’s Google Mail. Or to be more specific, Gmail part of Google Apps, and it is now hosting my (and Vivian’s) emails on this domain (yang.id.au).

I have been running my own email server for the last 10 years, hosting my own domains. It has been sendmail at the beginning, then qmail, and then postfix for the better part of last 10 years. I have tried various IMAP solutions. The ultra-insecure wu-ftpd first, then Courier-IMAP, and for the last 2 years Dovecot. The server has been running on various Linux distributions — RedHat, Mandrake and Gentoo. And in the recent years I also have to deal with email spams/virus. I have tried various combinations of Spam Assassin, ClamAV, Gld for greylisting and dspam.

Yes. Running a mail server — even for just two people — is a lot of work. Moreover I have not yet mention about hardware related issues that have been plaguing my home server for the last couple of weeks. What a pain!

So I am at the cross-road of choices again. Should I bow down to the Google god and submit all my private emails into the cloud in return of piece of mind that they will be in safe hands? Or should I continue to keep my ageing server running, and train that stupid bayesian filter that still can’t seem to figure out the difference between spam and ham…

Not the first time I had this internal battle. I always picked the former in the past years. However this time, under the “encouraging” words of josephb (yeah, I am just finding someone to blame in case it did not work out :), I picked the cloud. I think I made the right choice (so far).

Signing up and modifying the DNS records are easy. It’s also quite straight forward to set up IMAP4 so Vivian can still use Thunderbird to access her emails. Now I have fully integrated email solution that can be accessed from anywhere…

• Web-based access via Google Mail
• IMAP4-based access via Thunderbird
• Mobile-based access via Gmail J2ME app

So far so good. No more software upgrade, or ringing home from work “hey Vivian can you reboot the server?” Although I am no longer able to grep -r foobar ~/.maildir/ to scan through my mails, I can now search my emails like how I search on Google.

Copying all my existing emails (from the last 12 years) to Google did require a little bit more work. I will write about it in my next post.

Note that I have only started using Google AdSense in July 2005. So you might want to double the 2005 stats to get a more comparative number, assuming the traffic level in 2005 is constant. Also although there are still ½ month to go for December 2008, the stats shown above should give you a general idea. I have also changed to a new theme which may/may not affect the revenue generation. Finally, many of my most popular pages on this blog (mainly those WordPress plugin pages + the front page of this blog) don’t actually have ads shown on them.

So, what can I conclude from the stats generated from above?

• Lazy bloggers won’t make truck load of money. Actually, even if you are a heavily effective pro-blogger who can consistently produce a few well-written insightful blog posts a day, you probably still won’t make as much money as an investment banker or a seasoned J2EE/.Net engineer. Your blogs probably won’t sell for more than their redundant packages either, in the current economy climate.

  Still, a few hundred US greenbacks are more than enough to pay for the web hosting for this site and many others (which are currently on USD$20/month SliceHost VPS). Still got some spare changes for a treat every now and then…

• People are getting more and more blind to the online ads. While the number of impressions stays pretty constant, the number of clicks (and thus the click through rate) has dropped year after year. Assuming Google has maintained the quality of ads shown on this blog (finger crossed), I can only concluded that people have fed up with the online ads and become blind to them.

  I guess that’s probably the reason why there are more and more aggressive ads on big news sites like SMH, where they take over the whole screen to make sure you see them. Did I say aggressive or annoying?

• Not just CTR, CPC has been dropping too! If you divide the revenue by the number of clicks, you will get the Cost Per Click (CPC), and you’ll see them drop year after year as well. That means you now need to get 150 clicks to make the same amount of money where you used to be able to make it with 100 clicks. That sucks more because CTR is dropping at the same time.

  I guess there might be multiple reasons behind it. Google AdWords bidding is still a mystery that I don’t think I will ever understand. No one wants to bid on my site anyway after seeing all the crappy writing I have here. The financial crisis and economy downturn has also reduced the marketing budget of many advertisers. Finally there are many more websites parked with AdSense to compete for the cake. No wonder my slice gets smaller and smaller.

Well. That’s about my it — my thoughts on Google AdSense on this blog. With imminent recession in 2009, I guess I can pretty much predict the number..

• Kogan Agora for AUD$299, and
• Kogan Agora Pro for AUD$399

Postage will be around $30+ to Sydney Australia.

Looks a bit like, hmm, Samsung Blackjack? Pretty impressive specification for a $399 phone though.

• 2.5-inch TFT-LCD flat touch-sensitive screen.
• Integrated QWERTY keyboard.
• High-speed 3G network connection.
• One-Touch Google Search.
• Easy Web Browsing.
• Easy-to-use email with attachment support for images, videos, music and documents.
• Customisable Home Screen with instant Email, text message and IM notifications.
• Instant access to mobile Internet services (Gmail, YouTube, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Google Maps).
• Music Player.
• Bluetooth 2.0 with Enhanced Data Rate
• microSD. expansion slot for all your storage needs.
• Wi-Fi network access.
• GPS navigation capability.
• 2.0 megapixel camera.

The $100-less non-Pro version will not get Wi-Fi and GPS. Network will be triband UMTS/HSDPA (850, 1900, 2100MHz) + GSM/EDGE (850, 900, 1800, 1900MHz). Oh, did I mention Android, Google-backed Linux-based mobile operating system?

I guess the reason why I am posting this is — I have actually been thinking about getting a new phone. Yes I know I’ve got a 3 Skypephone, but over one year of usage I found it is very much under-powered for what I want to use the phone for. Well, it is 2008 — not 1998. I actually don’t spend at of time talking on the phone. What I really want is a small portable computer that can fit into my pocket, and is well connected to the Internet. You happen to be able to dial a number to talk to someone as well, but talking on the phone is just so last century.

So I have been contemplating to get a Nokia E71 — the kind of portable computer phone that I think will fit my usage pattern very well. HSDPA connectivity for fast 3.5G mobile network. Wi-Fi when I am at home. GPS + AGPS to get you around the town. QWERTY keyboard for editing odd files in SSH (very important). Combined with Exetel HSPA plans at $5/month + $0.015/MB will get you online in most Australian cities in no time. Still want to make phone calls? Fring or Nimbuzz + cheap VoIP providers like PennyTel would have that covered — at a small fraction of cost that a mobile operator would normally charge you. You can get a Nokia E71 outright for around $499 at the moment. I’ll be buying this for my “business” against my ABN so hopefully will be tax deductible.

… and now this?! A pretty much spec-wise equivalent phone, at slightly lower price ($430+ delivered), but with Google Android! That certainly has made the decision harder.

Well. Spec-wise they do look similar. HSDPA? Check. GPS? Check. Wi-Fi? Check. QWERTY keyboard + QVGA screen? Check. Kogan Agora does have a less-impressive camera, but it does not bother me. What will be really against Agora would be its build quality. It does not look as metal-cladded as the Nokia. It’s probably contracted out to some cheap Chinese factory (like my 3Skypephone, which has some build quality issue).

The real competition is probably on the software. Symbian S60 or Google Android? Yes I would love to have Linux on my phone, and it does seem to have good looking interface. But what about the applications? Most of those on the market are probably categorised as “fun” rather than “useful”. I can’t even find a proper VoIP app that supports SIP! It’s tight integration with Google services can be worry as well. Maybe the app market will be different in 12 months time, but apps on S60 feel just so much more mature.

So. Nokia E71 (which has been available for 6 months) or Kogan Agora (won’t be available for another 2 months)? By the way, don’t suggest an iPhone.

I was quick to get it up and running, and it takes network/proxy setting from Internet Explorer, but offers to import bookmarks, passwords and history from Firefox.

I have been running it for the last 30 minutes. Here are some first impressions.

• Fast. Really fast. WebKit is Fast. V8 is FAST. The whole Internet speeds up. Woohoo!
• It did not import my passwords from Firefox correctly because I have master password on.
• Element and resource inspector is pretty cool. Not as good as Firebug, but better than the vanilla DOM inspector.
• There’s no status bar. When you hover over a link, the URL just pops up at the lower-left-hand corner.
• Lack of title bar is annoying, because you can’t really easily see the full title (well you can only when you hover over the tab and the full title comes up in tool tip).
• Crashed twice on me I have to go to Task Manager to kill all chrome.exe. While the offending tab crashes (which happens to be Gmail, how ironic), the entire Chrome window + other tabs become unresponsive.

Lack of plugin also means it might not be as useful for developers, but general browsing it beats Firefox hands down in terms of speed and responsiveness. Like most Google software it’s still in beta — and if it is like Gmail it would be in “beta” for possibly a few years — so I might cut it some slack here. I might actually try to use it as my primary browser for the next week or two.

By browsing the 5-chapter comic book you basically learnt that

• Chrome is a new Open Source web browser developed by Google.
• WebKit is used as the rendering engine.
• Super-fast JIT Javascript VM “V8″ was developed in Denmark and will be used to power the next generation web applications.
• Each browser tab will be in its process (just like IE 8) so (1) memory gets properly cleaned by the OS after you close the tab (2) a crashed web page won’t bring down the entire browser.
• OmniBox will be more awesome than Firefox 3′s AwesomeBar, with full Google integration.
• New fast-opening home page with all the history tracking and favourite search terms, will hopefully replace about:blank.
• Sandboxing each tab into individual processes not only provides stability, but also enhance security.
• It’s developer centric — open source, open standard, HTML5, local storage via Gear.

This comes as a surprise especially after Google has just renewed their deal with Mozilla until 2011. If Chrome is so much better (and indeed it would be, if what has been described is true), then why bother? Buying time before Chrome can take over the world?

From my understanding Chrome is indeed more than just a browser competing against IE, Firefox, Opera or Safari. With its own process management and client-side enhancement like V8, Gear and HTML5, it is aiming to be the GUI of Google Operating System, the platform of future applications.

It is also a major win for WebKit — which is now the rendering engine for Apple Safari, iPhone, Adobe AIR, KDE Unity, Google Android and now Google Chrome. I am pretty sure there are more projects using WebKit which is arguably having a much better C++ code base than Gecko. And it’s fast — really really fast.

Can’t wait to download it tomorrow.

• Web serving environment, including a Python runtime environment + Django framework. Competes with Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud.
• Persistent storage powered by Google BigTable and Google FS, supporting its own query language and transactions using optimistic locking (what?! no MVCC?) Competes with Amazon’s Simple Storage Service and SimpleDB.
• API for authenticate Google users, sending emails, fetching URLs, etc.

Looks much more restrictive than Amazon’s EC2 where you get your own Xen VPS. However Google also gives you 500MB storage, 200M megacycles of CPU time/day and 10GB data transfer/day for free, which is enough for any startup to prototype their next killer app. Developing for a sandbox is never fun though, but the SDK provides an emulated environment so you can do your development locally before uploading to Google App Engine.

Biggest winner? I think it is Python. Hopefully we will see more Python-based web applications this year.

Update: TechCrunch has already coded and deployed their first HotOrNot-type application on Google App Engine — and it took the RoR guy only 4 hours to sign up, figure out Python, code up the site and deploy. Too bad that it’s already too popular and ran out the quota.

Update 2: Interesting response from Joyent, which has already made its way into providing utility computing via its Accelerator/Solaris Container products. Basically what Joyent is saying — no root, not open! Obviously they are still stuck in the mindset of doing all the scaling themselves which is only possible when you have the admin access to the running instances. It is great when you have root — sometimes — when you want to tinker with the setup yourself. What Google is saying here is, just worry about coding around the framework, and they’ll do the scalability for you. Having “root” will only blow a hole in your foot in this case.