This will be my last post from Taiwan, and I’m placing it in my tech section. Shortly I will be flying to Hong Kong, and then traveling into China. I’m not bringing my laptop with me. I’m always a little wary of using public computers, especially in many of the poorly run internet cafes. Often the logged in user is the administrator, and we all know the computers are obviously crawling with worms and keyloggers. What can I do?

I had a 128MB flash drive, which is the perfect size fo this. I’ve installed the following applications to run directly from it:

• Portable Clamwin - I plan to fire it up and do a memory scan before I start typing any passwords.
• Portable Putty - This is useful for two reasons. Firstly, in case my server (or any server with SSH) needs help, I’m on it. Secondly, and more importantly, for security. Putty can easily be used as a SOCKS5 proxy over SSH, so I can tunnel Firefox and IM securely. Password sniffers, be gone! A side benefit is the ability to bypass the “Great Firewall”, if needed (e.g. the block my Google account).
• Portable Miranda - In case I’m feeling home sick, or have some crazy desire to talk on IRC. Don’t count on it.
• Firefox - I tried the Portable Apps package, yet it didn’t work.

I noticed in the “known issues” that it doesn’t work if loaded on a drive with a non-asci path, which this machine (and those in China) usually have. The “resolution” is to run it in Win98 compat mode, but this didn’t work for me. To get around this, I downloaded the normal Firefox, installed it, copied the contents of “Mozilla Firefox” and dumped it in /Firefox. Then I created a profile directory called /FFProfile, and created a bat file called “firefox.bat”:

start \Firefox\firefox.exe -profile \FFProfile

Double click the bat file, and you have FF running on your usb drive.
I’m in a search for a better keylogger detector, as I don’t know how complete ClamAV will be. If you know of one, let me know. Until then, I’m going to pretend I have the perfect traveling USB companion.

Two weeks ago I had the privilege of meeting up with some of the OpenMoko guys. You’ve seen me write a little bit about this project, but meeting them and actually getting to play with a device was quite enlightening.

Most foreigners in Taipei take taxis, but not I. I already had an idea how to go to FIC headquarters, yet it was – rough. I jumped on the right bus, going the right direction, yet didn’t really know where to get off. In my broken Chinese I started talking to a group of high school kids, who somewhat pointed me in the right direction. At one point we were coming up to a light and a lady just said: “get off, go down that road.” I grabbed my bag and jumped off the bus. The street signs started to resemble the characters I had written down, but I didn’t know which direction to go in. I asked a travel agency, and they pointed me in the right direction – and then it started to rain. I luckily found FIC without getting too wet, and quickly met Sean, the project leader for OpenMoko.

Sean, myself, and several other OpenMoko developers went out to lunch and talked shop. Mickey pulled out a Neo, the hardware platform OpenMoko is going to be based off of. I’ll admit, when I saw photos I wasn’t really impressed – but in person, it is pretty sexy. Not too big, but big enough to be functional. In one of my previous posts I mentioned learning C++ back in university, and having basically not touched it since. In a way, I haven’t had to, and I’ve recently found Python, which is just fun. However, I’m so excited about the OpenMoko, I’ve picked up the K & R bible to read while we are traveling. Not the ideal way to learn a language, but the concepts are somewhat a refresher. I can’t wait to play with SIP/IAX on this thing, it will then be my dream phone.

Well, I have one more post to make to get some thoughts off my chest. If you want a postcard, send me an email.

The buzz of Computex is finally wearing off, so I’ll finally scribe my account of the event. YS was kind enough to go with me, we actually called it a date. The scene was quite similar to the trade shows we saw last year, however there seemed to be fewer people. This might be because we went on the final day, although we suspect there weren’t that many people because there aren’t “sweet” deals to be had. Regardless, there were several main “halls” filled full of stuff. The first three (two were in one building) weren’t particularly interesting. I mean, there were some cool displays and lots of technology, but nothing that left me thinking “oh, that’s cool” or “oh, me wanna.” Until we hit the last hall.

The first place we stumbled upon was the SunComm booth, which seemed to have more “traffic” than any of the other VoIP booths. Let me say this: I think VoIP stuff is awesome, that it is going to be the future, and I dig looking at demos. Even though the SunComm website pretty much looks quick ugly, their products are way cool. I was lucky enough to purchase a phone directly from them, and have it mailed directly to my house in Taipei (which was just around the corner from their office). They don’t normally do this.

Next up was one of the main reasons I even wanted to go to Computex: to see the OpenMoko phone. To be honest with you, if I had a million dollars, this would be one of the first things I would buy. The other would be a new ThinkPad X61s. So why is this phone so cool? First off, it is based on Linux, which if you haven’t gathered, I like. The entire stack is open, or nearly open. I’ve always purchased pretty average phones, or been given them for free. The reason I do this is because my requirements have never been met: I want a SIP/IAX client on a wifi tri (or preferably quad) band phone. GPS is a plus, but not necessarily required. So far, I haven’t been able to fine anything that has suited my needs – the HTC Universal almost would work, apparently. The slogan is “Free Your Phone”, but I think of this project more to “make your phone never become obsolete.” Indeed, the hardware may become obsolete, but the software never will. I keep being reminded that this project could really put a dent in the future iPhone sales. I can’t wait to get one with WiFi and start hacking on it – in the meantime, I’ll need to refresh my C.

Up next, directly across the aisle, was Via’s new line of motherboards. At Computex there were quite a few small sets of motherboards, but nothing quite like this. Smaller than mini-itx. Smaller than nano-itx. We have pico.

This thing is freaking small. Seeing this little board made me realize my desire to minimize how much (and the size) of the technology I own. Currently I’m selling my AMD Athlong64 3000 (it has two gigs of RAM), and will at some point attempt to switch to a single laptop solution (with Xen, of course). At the same time, I’m considering how useful one of these little boards could be. Many have two NICs, which would make perfect routers. I’ve seen some boards for as inexpensive as $65usd.