Building Android Cyanogenmod 10 for the Nook Color/encore

UPDATE: latest local_manifest.

A crew at xda have been working on CM10 for the Nook color, and I finally got around to building a copy for myself. I'm documenting my steps here.

I launch a c1.xlarge (High CPU) Amazon AWS spot instance, Ubuntu Server 12.04.1 LTS, with a bid of $0.20. The process below takes just over two hours, and the market price for a c1.xlarge is $0.07, so the total cost to build is about $0.21. I bid high to keep the box from being terminated.

You should be able to cut and paste the following into a terminal.

http://pastebin.com/TZwXbpXM

screen -S admin
sudo mkdir /mnt/android
sudo chown ubuntu /mnt/android
ln -s /mnt/android ~/
mkdir ~/android/system
mkdir ~/bin
export PATH=$PATH:~/bin
sudo apt-get -y update
sudo apt-get -y install git-core gnupg flex bison gperf libsdl1.2-dev libesd0-dev libwxgtk2.6-dev squashfs-tools build-essential zip curl libncurses5-dev zlib1g-dev pngcrush schedtool libxml2-utils libxslt1.1 g++-multilib lib32z1-dev lib32ncurses5-dev lib32readline-gplv2-dev xsltproc openjdk-6-jdk

git config --global user.email 'john@example.com'
git config --global user.name 'Android Build'
git config --global color.ui true

cd ~/android/system/
curl https://dl-ssl.google.com/dl/googlesource/git-repo/repo > ~/bin/repo
chmod a+x ~/bin/repo
repo init -u git://github.com/CyanogenMod/android.git -b jellybean
curl 'http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=vZFKdc8m' > .repo/local_manifest.xml
repo sync -j8
cd ~/android/system/device/bn/encore/
./setup-makefiles.sh
cd ~/android/system/vendor/cm/
./get-prebuilts
cd ~/android/system/
. build/envsetup.sh
brunch encore


All Done! Just copy the /mnt/android/system/out/target/product/encore/cm-10-*.zip file somewhere.

Amazing work by fattire, @krylon360, eyeballer, keyodi, sluo et al.

The debates are too late for Romney

Markos Moulitsas wrote a nice post on how narrative works in presidential campaigns, using Romney as an example:

From Day 1, all of Mitt Romney's foes had a clear narrative about him—he was a callous, heartless, elitist, vulture capitalist. In other words, "a dick." 

The stage was set by Occupy with their "99 percent" narrative, which allowed Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich to get mileage with their "vulture capitalist" attacks against Romney before the party establishment shut them down.
...
And why is that narrative important? Because as people become aware of such narratives, they then try to decide whether it's legit. If you can reinforce a negative narrative, you're winning.

The first step in changing the trajectory of a campaign is to lay out a new narrative, a narrative that can reinforce people's preconceptions (Alinsky's rule number 2: "Never go outside the experience of your people.") but work to your advantage. When people talk about the debates as Romney's last chance to turn this around they are referring to the way debates can be key to communicating a narrative. As Paul Waldman points out, a debate can turn an underlying critique into an open criticism that explains the whole campaign:

what happened was that reporters decided those were the key moments, and kept writing and talking about them in the subsequent days and weeks. Not coincidentally, the moments that get chosen are those that reinforce the conclusions the press has already come to about a candidate's character weaknesses.

The first debate is scheduled for October 3rd, just under a week away. Romney has not settled on a narrative for Obama, or even for his own campaign:

While Obama doles out his sustained-applause lines freely, Romney is still honing his message. The GOP nominee has rolled out tougher rhetoric on China as a currency manipulator in recent days in order to tug at Ohioans who have been hit by outsourced jobs. He also speaks in front of a tally board that features the historic level of national indebtedness.

Romney is not building any coherent narrative this week, he has nothing to build on next Wednesday. He's still auditioning new lines of attack. With nothing to build on, he has no chance to use the debates to change anything about the election.

Medicare could win the House for Dems

A new Gallup poll, completed before Romney's 47% tape aired, show Obama with a growing advantage on Medicare, 50% to 44% in swing states, larger nationally. A new Reuters poll is showing Romney support collapsing among seniors:

Romney's double-digit advantages among older voters on the issues of healthcare and Medicare - the nation's health insurance program for those over 65 and the disabled - also have evaporated, and Obama has begun to build an advantage in both areas.

This kind of collapse, where a core constituency of one party becomes disenchanted with the party's platform, usually shows up as a collapse of party id and a growth of independents, then in a growth of the opposition party's id. And sure enough, that is what we see Republican id collapsing in Huffpost's party id trend:





This large change in party id of suggests a wave election, and Nancy Pelosi now puts the Democrat's chances of picking up the 25 seats they need to win the House at 60%. Her strategy? "Medicare, Medicare, Medicare."

Romney's done, Senate's held, House?

The campaign will downplay their chances, and they have to keep the pressure up all the way through, but the Presidential election has been over since July, and the Senate was locked down over the Democratic convention. So the strategic question for the Obama campaign is how can they use Romney to help us take back the House?

Romney's 47% video, and his doubling down on that view of the electorate, gives Obama the opportunity to frame him and the Republican party as a Goldwater extremists, when the Democrats won the largest share of seats since the New Deal. Talk of improving House chances has erupted across the Democratic Internet, sparked by Sam Wang's house outlook giving Democrats a 74% chance of taking over (Dylan Matthews at the Post dug into Wang's data a bit more):

In summer polls leading up to the 2012 conventions, Republicans were behindDemocrats by a median of 2%, a 9-point swing from 2010. Consequently, many seats won in that Republican wave are now at risk

Karl Rove's American Crossroads appears to be pulling back from Romney to focus down-ballot. Josh Marshall of TPM posted a note from a correspondent suggesting TPM shift focus to the House. Nate Silver pointed out in August that the GOP majority was at risk, and since then polls have moved to suggest the Democratic wave he saw as a possibility. The Obama campaign has seen a party ID shift in their polling (they lower the Democratic numbers internally in case the shift is a mirage), which is another indication of a wave. The Huffington Post House outlook has more Republican than Democratic races to watch,  and as more congressional polling becomes available we should be able to test Wang's predictions from the national polls.

Post convention, last chances for Romney

Conventions are one of the few opportunities a presidential candidate has to change how they are perceived by the broad American public, and with that change the trajectory of the election.  It is clear that Romney has wasted his convention, neither the convention nor his choice of Ryan changed anything about the way he is perceived by the electorate. Instead both reinforced the story the Obama campaign has been telling about Romney. Romney's remaining opportunities to significantly impact the election are the debates, but with no groundwork laid for a new story of Romney's candidacy he faces an impossible task. With the polls at status quo Romney loses.

Meanwhile the Obama campaign is more and more confident that they have this thing sown up. It's hard to argue with them, though Rahm and Democratic insiders I've talked to warn of hubris. The natural growth of minority share of the electorate, combined with Romney's disastrous performance among Hispanics, put this election out of reach for the Republicans. The election appears to be close, and will be fought on the ground to the last day, but the Obama campaign has a margin for error and Romney is out of opportunities to take that away.

I would bet the Democratic convention organizers are shifting emphasis from engaging Romney to outlining what Obama intends to do with another four years. Obama may use convention starting tomorrow as an occasion to set a course for America, rather than to reintroduce himself to the public.

The late season of a presidential campaign

Some of my rules for understanding the endgame of a presidential election:

• Voters draw their economic verdict on the incumbent by June.
• Late summer polls, after the primary bump and before the convention bumps, show the underlying state of the race.
• National polls become volatile and misleading through the convention and debate season.
• The results of a campaign's actions take a few weeks to show up in polls, immediate poll reactions are often misleading.
• The candidate making 'bold' or 'dramatic' moves late in the campaign is losing.

Presidential campaigns are large, slow moving things. It takes a lot of thought and effort to shape the opinions of a couple hundred million people. There is little room to change things in the last quarter of a campaign, if your strategy is not working and the underlying trend is against you, then you are probably out of time to change strategies.

Obama's knockout punch?

Obama's Bain attacks on Romney have begun hitting home (expressed in their purest form in Obama's brilliant "Firms" ad), and Romney appears to have been knocked senseless by them.

There was a chance, a few months back, that the economy would do Romney's job for him. Obama would have had real trouble winning with unemployment stuck at nine or ten percent. But unemployment dropped to the low eights, and that economic improvement is baked in to the election. Voters have made up their minds about Obama's economic performance: it's not great, but it's not disqualifying. The economy won't move enough in the remaining three and a half months to change that conclusion.

Obama's job has been to solidify his disillusioned base, disqualify Romney, then show America a vision of the future. In December of last year Obama signaled a shift from moderate centrism, bending over backward in an attempt to accomodate Republicans, to core Democratic values in his Osawatomie, Kansas speech. He began putting each of his achievements -- auto industry bailout, stimulus, financial reform, race to the top -- into a progressive context. Then, as the election year began, he touched each base: women, with Sandra Fluke and Planned Parenthood; African Americans with Trayvon Martin; Gays with his endorsement of gay marriage, and Hispanics with executive implementation of the DREAM act. In each instance Obama's appeal to his base was also an appeal to the basic decency of the American people. By June Democratic enthusiasm for Obama had recovered and outpaced Republican enthusiasm for Romney.

Romney's job was to win his primary, then convince enough Obama voters to support him. Obama won in 2008 with significant margins, and new voters, more and more of whom are college educated or Hispanic, are much more closely aligned with the Democratic party. Romney does not have the option of simply solidifying his base, he must convince Obama supporters to switch. But Romney is so beholden to an extremist Tea Party base, which hates Obama with a passion, that he is unable to craft an appeal to people who don't. He spent the primary moving right as he faced more and more extremist candidates.

There are only a few months left in the campaign, Romney is running away from his record as governor, and he wants his tenure at Bain to be off limits. So Obama has a free hand to define Romney as an un-American, job destroying plutocrat. This message is aimed squarely at the white working class, Obama's most dangerous weakness and Romney's only real opportunity take Democratic votes. Some Democratic observers are still skeptical of Obama's chances, but at this point the possibility of a Romney win looks more and more remote.