About Tracker, and being perfect

How hard can it be to just make a simple service to track a phone? Not that hard. Unless you want to be a perfectionist and overengineer the whole thing, several times over. And that is why I never seem to get anywhere close to finishing Tracker.

In the last five or so years I've learned a lot about web services and would of course like to apply ALL that knowledge somewhere. A hobby project seems like the perfect place!

• Code generation and custom tooling: avoiding repeative tasks by writing ten times as much code to maintain. And then there is this one thing that was not in the original specification and you'd basicly have to rewrite the whole thing.
• High availability and fault tolerance: considerable additional design and implementation complexity. Good luck getting anything ready when working on the project just some occasional weekends.
• Metrics: a whole universe in itself to set up, integrate and maintain.
• Devops, service orchestration and distributed configuration management: yet another whole universe, with yet more design and implementation complexity. As if you even get to this point. Sure you can devops your stub services, but that if anything is wasted time.
• Distributed tracing: better reinvent the wheel again! That way it works just the way I want.
• Extremely high performance: each small part is tuned for the best achiveable performance before integrating it to the larger system, and never finishing anything.

And of course everything needs to be P E R F E C T!

What good is a if it doesn't function as well as theoretically possible? This intra-process message queue can only pass 300 000 messages per second?? It should be able to do at least 500 000!! Better spend a week trying to optimize it before moving on to the next thing! A decryption routine that can only decrypt 20 000 packets per second? Needs to be able to do at least twenty times as much! Better to just give up or spend ages looking for a faster implementation.

How about this config file? Why it is on the file system? How to make it seamlessly work with multiple environments with different configs. What if those configs change dynamically? Better get to work already, there is much to do!

Hey, see that single point of failure? You'd better engineer it away! What failure point? I need to first map the whole system and get realtime metrics from every single thing it does, or doesn't.

And hey, see that middleware solution for solving that one problem you have? Better not use it and write my own. That way I learn so much more about the problem domain and can leave out unnecessary parts for blazing fast performance.

I'd like to have public test server for this? I wonder how I can set that up automatically. And better make sure that it does database migrations and all that automatically.

And did you know that you could run your code inside a custom operating system to save on context switching time with networking?

Oh, and there is this web application, too. What if I used modern JavaScript this time? And then the mobile app needs to be rewritten, too.

And what about...!

/dies

A new phone :O

Times really are changing. After about two years of actively looking for a replacement for my trusty - yet slowly rotting - Nexus 5, I finally think I found a suitable model! The Samsung Galaxy S9. 4k60 OIS video, USB-PD charging with USB 3.0 and dual SIM support. And a notification LED. Eat that, Nokia! A whole lineup of attractive phones, yet no LED. Why do you do this?

Unfortunately the Galaxy S9 isn't everything I had hoped for. I found a large amount of things I dislike in just a few hours, sorted roughly by category. I sincerely hope that I can cross out these pain-points as time goes on and I adjust to them, or find good workarounds. If not: fuck.

Physical:

• It is a lot harder to pick the phone up from a flat surface.
• The surface of the phone is extremely slippery. I wouldn't dare to try to hold it with woolen gloves, for example.
• Extra care and thought must be put to holding the phone; the edges of the screen pick up unintended touches rather easily.
• The phone has a very small chin, and this makes it hard to press the back-button when using it with just one hand.
• On an otherwise smooth phone there are disturbingly rough edges on the back-edges with the charging port, and the one opposite of it.

Hardware:

• The camera needs a really bright environment to work well at 60 fps. Lit indoors are just not enough.
• Charging is limited to 10 W even though the phone supports USB-PD, which allows for 100 W.

Software:

• Bixby can't be disabled without a Samsung account.
• No "Development shortcut" option in developer options for easily killing and uninstalling apps. No any shortcut to kill apps!
• Appinfo doesn't show the package name
• Screen turns on when charging with no way to disable this.
• A workaround is to install SnooZy Charger. The screen still turns on, but then immediately off. But it will also turn the screen off even when it was already ON prior to charging/ending charging :(
• Bloaty software that can't be uninstalled, some not even disabled.
• No option to disable charging LED notification.
• Annyoing popup to buy Samsung Secure Wi-fi VPN service when connecting to new Wi-Fi networks.
• I haven't (yet?) rooted the phone, so it is impossible to copy the settings and other saved data from some applications to the new phone. But this point applies to all other phones, too.
• Rooing will disable Knox, a type of TPM. I see no reason for this. With rooting the TPM would be an even more important component, allowing to store cryptographic secrets while preventing them to be extracted from the device.
• With fingerprint unlocking enabled, the phone will randomly ask for the password. No setting to make fingerprint work 100% of the time.

I guess that is everything for now. Why did I even get the new phone if I hate it so much? That is a valid question. The biggest reason is of course the fact that the older phone was becoming unuseable. The same thing that happened when I had to upgrade my otherwise perfectly fine 4790k-based desktop PC oto 8700k. That was actually even worse, as the performance gains were only marginal.

With this new phone I have high hopes that the greatly increased computing power shortens iteration times with mobile application developement when I eventually get back to doing it. And now I can once again use the phone for fun things, instead of just swearing it for being so slow. But I wonder what those fun things are. Is there other things to do with a phone other than just browse reddit? The greatly upgraded camera will hopefully also enable a whole new class of things to do.

And USB-PD support will make it easier to charge the phone when traveling light - without needing other extra investments - as it allows to charge the phone with the same charger I use for charging my laptop (Dell XPS 13). I could charge the phone via the laptop, but the USB outputs of the laptop work unreliably when it is turned off; can't risk it. But travel battery charging setup would be a whole topic on its own, so let's not get into it now.

In conclusion: I loved Nexus, can S9 get anywhere near it? That is what I'm hoping for; time will tell.

Mission accomplished?

Oh god. I’ve been more busy than ever. I guess I really got a life like I was wondering the last time. Or I just suck with time management; have I really done anything? So… Let’s review the year despite there still being plenty of it still left and see if we can answer the question in the title.

First of all, as the previous post might have made you guess, I kinda lost the motivation to develop the Tracker project further, at least for now. Again. There is just so much work to be done, and I’m just one person. And with all the things I’m going to list below I just didn’t have the time, either. I really hope that I can get back to it at a later time and better focus. This was also a conscious decision in part. The project did, and would have taken so much time, and I just had to prioritize. I also mentioned how it is a potential topic for the Master’s thesis. But before I can dive into that, I must finish my Bachelor’s. And that means passing a course in that disgusting language that is not to be named. But I’ve really tried to learn it! Been doing Duolingo almost every day since April. In addition I’ve almost completed one other online course on it as suggested by a teacher. I really really really hope that I can pass the course by the end of this year. I should have all the motivation I need, but somehow that still isn’t quite enough :(

I’ve also tried to be a bit more social, the camera I bought serving as a catalyst. Let’s just say that it is a work in progress :S A work in progress with results! I have started a vlog, and so far I’ve shot, edited and uploaded eight (8) full episodes! Although none are public, at least at the moment. And the latest three aren’t even on Youtube because I haven’t dared to yet purchase a music licensing subscription. I’ve also been getting back to photography and started an Instagram account and been trying to post my “best” pictures there. It is a rather random collection of pictures without any great theme, so getting any real followers will probably be rather impossible. Not that they appear without “marketing”... But that is not important. Right? Right??

Oh, and I also bought a house. Wow. So much space. “Oispa tilaa” (“[I wish I had] more space”) was already becoming quite a catchphrase for me. So much space!! This, of course, wasn’t a decision done lightly and took considerable time investment, too. And furnishing the whole house is an ongoing process. More time sinks! I’m unable to describe this in more detail currently. But I’ve talked about the house in the vlog a bit, and will talk more later. Maybe even a blog post, but don’t try to push it.

And last but certainly not the least: my very hard work really paid off, and I finally found a relationship in January! This was and is a huge time sink, but I couldn’t be happier! But this is all you need to know about that.

For the next year I hope to get more free time which I can spend on gaming, code, tv / movies and some other ambitions, like more camera and social stuff. Maybe music. And other™ things! Remains to be seen how it will turn out.

And the answer for the topic? You decide.

PS. I’m currently dying trying to figure out a replacement for my five year old Nexus 5 which has been slowly dying over the past few years. The time for replacing is really close, but I just can’t find single satisfactory device on the market!