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One doesn't need to be a top-class industry analyst to notice that the sales of smart phones is currently exploding. These devices are simply everywhere. Shops are plastered with iPhones and Android phones. The word is that suppliers and manufacturers have difficulties coping with demand. Good times for smartphone makers, I suppose…

Although I guess that Android will grab the larger market share in the long run, the Apple iPhone has presently the edge. Apple is clearly the leader, not only in sales, but more importantly in design and technology, as well as in being the most expensive. And what do the other competitors do? Follow the leader, of course.

As a consequence, one can find a growing number of "i-phony" applications that make your device look like an iPhone. The must have ingredients are: 1) jewel case look - shiny multi-coloured icons on a matt black background, 2) finger-tip sized GUI elements (retire your stylus), and 3) sliding dynamics that allow users to pan and scroll virtual sceens across the display without scroll bars.

The old adage says: "If you can't make it, fake it." If you happen to own a device with an aging operating system, such as Symbian or Windows Mobile, there are ways to jazz up your phone without shelling out half a month's salary for a new smart phone. SPB's Mobile Shell 3.5, for example, will give your Pocket PC or phone a new coat of paint. It can't magically transform your device into an iPhone, but it's as "i-phony" as it gets without actually copying the Apple look.
 

Ubuntu 10.04 alias Lucid Lynx has arrived and because this is a long-time support version, many users are bound to upgrade within the next few weeks. It seems like the GUI people from Canonical were unusually daring this time. Not only is this the first Ubuntu version that sports a graphical interface that is NOT BROWN (shock!), but the window control buttons are on the wrong side, namely on the left (double shock!). Apparently, Mac OSX Leopard has godfathered here. Well, I am not going to get used window controls on the left side, so I applied a quick fix which is amply documented on the Internet, as many people seem to feel the same way. Otherwise, the new look is a welcome change, as the permutations of brown and orange seemed to have been exhausted.

The only thing that turned out to be slightly trickier was the Tomcat upgrade to 6.0.24. A surreptitious installation of Apache 2 (the purpose of which eluded me) took possession of port 80 which on my machine was previously occupied by the system-wide Tomcat installation. This was rather easy to solve with the command: sudo update-rc.d -f apache2 remove to disable Apache on boot. It turned out, however, that the application launcher jsvc was removed in Ubuntu 10.04. Since Tomcat previously used jsvc to launch Tomcat on privileged ports, Tomcat was not able to bind to port 80 any longer. I was able to solve this by setting the AUTHBIND variable in /etc/default/tomcat to ‘yes’. After that Tomcat started up on port 80 without complaints.

During the upgrade, the system politely asked whether to replace or keep manually changed system configuration files. I have chosen to replace most files, because, the upgrade manager is kind enough to create a copy of the existing configuration using the *.dpkg-old extension during the upgrade. That way I was able to diff configuration files later and incorporate any customisations into the new files. This method is superior to keeping the old files, because it allows for upgrading the configuration files in sync with the latest program versions, though, of course it takes a bit of work manually diffing and patching those files if you happen to have numerous customisations. You can alternatively keep the old files and then diff and patch the new files created by the upgrade manager with the *.dist extension. In summary, the upgrade was painless and took less than 90 minutes per machine.

Today, I came across an interesting article in the Forbes Magazine entitled “Computing 2010″. The interesting part is that this article was written ten years ago. The author, Kip Crosby, imagined what computers would look like in 2010: optical circuits instead of silicon, with a CPU running at 100 GHz, holographic mass storage offering several TB capacity, 256 GB optoelectronic RAM, biometric authentication, voice control, completely wireless and shaped like a frisbee. Whew! Looks like Kip was just a tad too optimistic. Optoelectronics hasn’t caught on and most computers are still boxy rather than frisbee-ish. In fact, todays’s PC looks pretty much like that of 2000, except that its capacity has increased roughly following Moore’s law. The only accurate prediction is about mass storage capacity, although that didn’t require optical technology.

Personally, I’ve begun the new computing year with a major upgrade, though still far away from Kip’s 2010 vision. I have replaced my 32-bit Windows OS with a 64-bit Linux OS, doubled RAM from 4 GB to 8 GB and added another external USB hard drive for backups. The Ubuntu installation turned out a little difficult, because Linux did not want to cooperate with the BIOS RAID-1 configuration, so I had to switch to SATA mode and wipe out the Windows installation. The rest was easy, however. I used to worry about not being able to make my 3G USB modem work with Linux, but our maid has solved this problem for me. She obliterated the device by putting it into the washing machine. Can’t really blame her for that. I probably shouldn’t have carried the modem in the pockets of my shorts.

Back to the topic. What are the computing trends in 2010? Just off the top of my head: cloud computing is becoming a mainstream technology (or perhaps a mainstream buzz; time will tell). Along with that, virtualisation is now widely used. Supercomputers have broken the petaflop mark and now operate in the range of large clouds (> 1 PFlop). CRT monitors are quickly becoming relics of a past epoch. Single-core CPUs are headed the same way. Functional programming languages are beginning to catch on. 64-bit hardware and software are overtaking 32-bit systems in mainstream IT. Java 7 is announced for 2010. It surely looks like an interesting year.