Dear Siri

Dear Siri,

I know you're so glamourous, and everyone looks to you for guidance, and most people would be thrilled to spend some time with you, but you just don't do it for me.

When I first saw your ads, I was sceptical; I'd been burned by the Dragon in the past and I figured that if you were really as good as people were saying, I'd have heard about you before you were famous.

I decided to give you a go anyway, and despite having expected little, I guess I was still hopeful, as if I had been without hope, you couldn't have disappointed me so much.

You show off about your knowledge of the weather, but if I ask you what to wear when planning to go out, you refuse to tell me if it's more than 12 hours in advance.

When I ask what you know about some general knowledge topic, you're always quoting your hero Wolfram Alpha, but he never seems to answer the question I'm actually asking. It makes me feel like you prefer him to me.

I don't understand why you won't even help me with the simplest things like opening my applications. You want me to search through pages of this stuff when you could do it for me so easily. It just seems so lazy.

You don't know anything about my country. You come across very American-centric, and you haven't given any indication that you're willing to learn, which breaks my heart. Not only do you refuse to learn about businesses outside of the U.S., you even insist on me speaking U.S. English to you to give me any business information.

I know there are places you could seek this information, yet you are still incapable of telling me where there is a good pizza nearby.

Going further, based on how people talk about you, I'd pretty much expect you to not only suggest a good pizza place, but give me the menu, take my order and my payment details, ask the store to deliver it to my address, and then remember my favourites for next time I tell you I feel like pizza. You're meant to be a qualified personal assistant by trade, after all.

You don't even tell shops, banks or anything how to understand you, in order to make any of this possible. It's like you're just not interested in making friends. Everyone would pay with you if you'd only give them a chance.

Without the ability to remember anything that I tell you, without knowing my voice well enough to be able to make payments for me when I ask and without speaking directly with the vast world of systems out there, I just can't see what you bring to the table.

So that's why I'm leaving you. It's not for anyone younger... We both know you're better than Evi (though I have my eye on Majel). It's just that I think you need some time to grow up, experience some other cultures and think about what others want.

Maybe when you're older, I'll be more interested.

Regretfully,

David

Third-party Primaries League

The U.S. has a First Past the Post (FPTP) voting system, which I'm sure just about everyone out there knows. It means that a candidate can win an election with a plurality of the vote, rather than a majority, i.e. the highest number of votes, rather than more than one half of the votes.

To highlight why this is a problem, consider this:
- One candidate, who believes in X, and disagrees with Y, gets 10% if the vote
- Ten candidates, who believe in Y and disagree with X, each get 9% of the vote.

Who wins? The pro-X candidate.
Who should win? Anyone but the pro-X candidate.

That example is a bit contrived, but you only need 3 candidates to see the problem in practice. Think of Ralph Nader taking a couple of percent of the vote in 2000. Most of the Naderites would otherwise have voted for Al Gore. If that had happened, the difference in the election would have been too pronounced for Diebold to have gotten away with handing the election to George Bush.

Anyway, countries like Australia have solved this by using a preferential voting system. There are plenty of ways of implementing preferential voting, and Australia's is a little bit mathematically flawed, but it's far better than FPTP. It allows voters to specify who they want to win, in a decreasing order of preference, so that if there first choice gets too few of the votes, their next preference will be chosen, down the line, until one of their preferences is in the top two.

The benefit of this is that it recognises that everyone wants different things, and builds compromise into the electoral system. It seems that most Australians don't really understand how the system works, so they still vote for one of the two major parties. There are even plenty of people who complain when the system works so well that a third-party candidate actually wins a seat.

But back to America... FPTP voting forces people into voting for one of two options, because anything else is a waste. It takes a massive, expensive campaign to run as a third-party candidate, because more people need to have you at the forefront of their minds than anyone else, rather than finding you the least objectionable in aggregate.

So, why not have a third-party primary league? Get all the free-thinkers, radicals, liberals, crackpots, conservatives, fascists and civil libertarians who are not affiliated with the establishment to joust it out to see which one of them gets to compete in a given election against the establishment.

It could be the latest reality TV show, which would solve the problem of publicity and allow the winner to compete on a relatively even playing field. If the compromise results for the third spots were good enough, and some of the candidates started winning elections, then the U.S. might even consider moving towards a preferential voting system overall, which would break the back of the two-party system once and for all.

It could be called Little Brother.

What do you think?

Android Looping Error in LogsProvider

I just have to broadcast this as far and wide as possible in order to help anyone else out who ever falls prey to this ridiculously stupid error.

I had been downloading heaps of apps during Google's celebration of 10 billion marketplace downloads, where they have about 10 applications per day, for 10 days, at 10 cents each. As such, I was starting to get concerned that I might run out of space on my phone, which eventually led to encountering an extremely annoying bug relating to LogsProvider that would constantly reappear modally on my phone.


Now let's take a step back to understand how storage on my Galaxy S2 works, which is, I assume, similar to on other devices: There is "16GB" of internal phone memory. This is broken up into about 2GB of internal device memory and 11.5GB of, what is for some inexplicable reason, called USB memory; I assume there is some direct USB interconnect inside the phone that Samsung thought would be the right way of hooking up extra storage. This is then supplemented by whatever SD card the owner wants to put into the phone. In my case, I've got another 16GB card.

I didn't want to run out of either the internal device memory, which was down under 1GB, or the USB space, which was down to about 3.5GB, so I did what is often recommended: I started moving applications from the phone to the SD card, which is an option on the app management page.

After I'd moved about half a dozen apps, I started getting a popup about "the application LogsProvider (com.sec.android.provider.LogsProvider) has stopped unexpectedly. Please try again." Click ok, and up it comes again, with just a sliver of a second in which to try to click other things to navigate on the phone. Awesome.

So I tried several things, like deleting some apps, as equivalent messages would come up when trying to start almost any application with a message stating that there wasn't enough memory (which memory: Phone, USB or SD?).

Eventually I found a post where someone had the same problem, also after moving things to the SD card. The solution, as given by seljanempire, was to navigate to the LogsProvider application under Settings -> Applications -> Manage Applications -> All -> LogsProvider. Then select LogsProvider and click Clear Data. Worked perfectly, and a way better option to the original poster who had their phone factory-reset by a person at the store.

So, WTF? How can a phone have a modal error message that can so completely cripple the phone by running on a loop? Surely it would be ok to show it once, or once every 5 minutes, then suppress it in some kind of mode meaning "OK, I get it, now let me debug the problem without constantly annoying me and getting in my way." It's modal for crying out loud, and after clicking OK, it came back within, I would estimate, a quarter of a second.

Anyway, so my problem is solved, and I hope this post is found by someone in the same situation who can use it to avoid having to reset their phone.

And if anyone working on Android ever reads this: Please fix your error notification design, and the bug while you're at it that causes this problem when moving apps to the SD card. In fact, make it so the memory is treated monolithically in some way where I don't need to know about it. kthxbai

UPDATE: Stay tuned, but it looks like I can't actually go into any non-settings application, due to them crashing, and even trying to run a software update won't work. Looks like a factory reset might still be on the cards. It also appears to only be a temporary fix, as the message recurs after a few failed attempts to run apps. Even the phone won't work, but the camera does for some reason.

UPDATE 2: Tried doing a factory reset, but even that app crashes. I'll have to wait until I can get a cable to connect to the computer, and try to do something with Samsung Kies, as I can't connect to wifi now either. Holy crap, Google! What the hell have you guys allowed to be done to my phone? I say Google instead of Samsung, because the forums would suggest that this issue has happened to people on Android devices from other manufacturers. I was really starting to think it was a good phone, and with all the apps I'd been downloading, many of which were replacing ones I had on my iPod Touch, I was starting to see it as a single, replacement for multiple devices. Turns out it seems more like a single point of failure.

UPDATE 3: This posting has been getting quite a few hits from around the world, and it's been left unresolved, so I should update it finally: Sorry people, but I ended up having to do a factory reset by booting up into admin mode. All my important data was still preserved on the SD card in the end, but I had to reinstall everything afterwards. That includes having to remember exactly which free apps I had downloaded, as they don't seem to get registered against the user's account like paid ones do. Sorry to start the posting so positively and end it so negatively.

The Occupy Process

I finally went along to OccupyMelbourne today. I brought along enough ingredients to make about 80 sandwiches, and the UPS from my computer, in order to offer people the ability to charge mobile devices.

I thought the story I would find would be the expected one about the right to freedom of assembly or a protest about, at its root, a lack if government transparency and accountability. These are real issues, being dealt with as primary problems by the movement, but the real story is the meta one. It is about a system of decision making that far exceeds what is in place in our parliament, which by contrast seems primitive.

A Case for a Bill of Rights

I am a civil libertarian. That is to say that I believe that people's fundamental freedoms are paramount. The government is not a separate tool to control the people. It is a tool of the people, by the people and for the people. I don't believe that governments have rights, other than those that we bestow upon them. So around a dozen years ago, when given the chance to overthrow our pointless monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, I said no.