Archive for May 2007
Since I bought my new phone 4 weeks back I’ve discovered something new about it each day.
To anybody looking at my phone the biggest thing they will notice is the customisation that I’ve done. I like the default blue theme that O2 sells the phone with, but the bubbles on the O2 background doesn’t quite work with all the text and I wanted to put my own touch to it. I probably spent about 2 evenings (and one lunch hour!) trying to find a suitable to replace it, how ever all the different themes I tried didn’t look as good on the phone screen as on my pc screen. The colours were either too bright or too dull and boring. The only one that came close had a very nice background, but the rest of the scheme was bright pink, ew! In the end I learnt quickly how to create a theme and used the default blue colour screen with the one nice background. Since I’m not sure on the license yet I’m not posting it here.
The other customisation to the main screen was to remove the Owner Information, I know who I am and don’t need to be reminded. I then added Spb Weather (and excellent little app that displays the weather for the next 5 days), and Spb GPRS Monitor which acts like a little monitor program with some shortcuts that I use often. I also have a list of running programs at the bottom of the screen.
Other stuff that I’ve installed includes Smart Map and WM5torage. Think of Smart Map as like a TomTom, it shows you where you are on a map and tracks you, but it doesn’t guide you to a location like a TomTom does. It’s not something you can really use around town as there isn’t enough detail, but when I’m travelling and on the hills it will be good to see where I’ve been. It doesn’t cost that much ($24.95) and the maps are fairly cheap ($4).
WM5torage is the answer to my Linux compatibility problem. In a nut shell this little gem presents your phone as a usb stick to the computer. What the means is that you can plug it into any computer that understand usb mass storage (i.e. any modern pc), then it appears like any other usb stick. No need to install ActiveSync, and of course no need to be running Windows. I’ve done a quick test on my main pc (Ubuntu 7.04) and not only does it work a treat, but it’s faster than transfers through ActiveSync.
At the start I played quite a bit, installing and uninstalling different applications. Using the WiFi and GPS frequently. The battery life held up quite well but still need charging every other night. Since then I did a total reset, reinstalled favourite applications, set it up as things are now, and now it only needs charging twice a week or more if I hammer it one particular day.
From the start I knew that O2 didn’t make the Orbit, but now I’ve discovered that it’s actually a rebranded HTC 3300. Now I can get some accessories. 
While on hold on the telephone never ever say anything that you don’t mind a stranger hearing or being printed in a newspaper.
Why?
Simple – from the moment you get are connected to any system that puts you on hold there is a every chance that you are being recorded. How do I know this. Also a simple answer – in the past few days I’ve listened to a weeks worth of calls to the customer service department at work, and heard some very interesting conversations between colleges at the other end.
Big brother is listening even if a human isn’t…
Just released today (or at least in the last 24 hours) is VMware Workstation 6.0.
High lights for me are the headless virtual machines, multi-monitor support (sweet!), and improved full screen. There is plenty of other good stuff in this release, but for me these are the ones that have the biggest impact on the way I work and the work I do.
I’m so impressed with the features mentioned above that I’ve flexed the plastic and bought a copy instead of using the VMware Server version. First impressions do not disappoint.
The official page has details, but Chipx86 has a better summary.
P.S. It also appears to finally support the Ubuntu kernel out of the box…
Looks like the root partition on my main pc is corrupt. Turned it on tonight and it wouldn’t boot. fsck.ext3 wasn’t able to repair it, luckily I was able to get a copy of /etc and a list of installed packages.
Reinstalling as I speak.
Update: Basic reinstall done, now just to reinstall all the packages. The main disk appears to have gone, when my computer boots the BIOS gives a S.MA.R.T. error. Not good. Fortunately I have another disk spare so I’m using that,
I went and treated myself to a new phone last week. My previous phone was a Nokia 3510i which I believe was one the first phones to have a colour screen. It has served me well since the summer of 2003 and one of my friends continues to user hers today (although I don’t know when she got hers).
My new phone is the 02 Xda Orbit. Actually it’s not just a phone, it’s a PDA, phone and GPS receiver all squeezed into 58x108x16.8mm. That’s about the size of a Blackberry (depending on the model). Since my boss has a blackberry I was able to compare them side by side and they weigh about the same. My original plan was to get the 02 Xda Mini S but the O2 shop in York didn’t have one in stock when I went in, and the Orbit was £10 cheaper – plus the sales guy included a £40 bluetooth keyboard for free!
After a week of use and installing some extra applications I’m just about at the stage where I’m happy with it. Since I’m not on the top contact the GPS package is isn’t included, but there is plenty of other software that will work with the GPS reciever so I’m using them. This includes the TomTom software, just a pity that it’s so expensive.
Since the Orbit runs Windows Mobile 2005 getting it to work with Linux may prove to be a challenge. For now I’ve been using my work laptop to install application and sync it with a PC and for the most part this works quite well. At least I’m still able to charge it from a USB port in Linux even if I can’t do anything else with it.
I’ve another 6 days to decide if I want to keep it or go back and pay the extra £10 for the Mini S, at present I wont be using that option.
P.S. You don’t need to update your address book as I’m still keeping the same number .
I’ve just used the starter edition of VMware Converter to convert a pc to a virtual machine so as to free up the pc for another role.
The pc in question is a newish Dell with no PS/2 ports for connecting a keyboard and mouse, in place of the PS/2 ports there is a stack of USB ports. With a USB keyboard and mouse plugged in Windows XP detects and uses them with no bother, even the BIOS has no issues.
With no PS/2 port Windows XP doesn’t install the drivers for a PS/2 port, and with this being a special XP build (created by a college) it doesn’t have the drivers for the PS/2 on the disk. Bare this in mind.
Problem number one. Being a special build I couldn’t just point the converter at the pc, give it the administrator credentials and let it do the conversion. Something was blocking the process and I couldn’t figure it out. A local install of VMware Converter sorted the problem out and 2 hours later I had a 12G image of the pc on one of the servers.
Problem number two. After copying the image onto one of the virtual machine servers I connected to the server using the VMware Server Console, opened the image and booted it. After complaining about not being shutdown properly Windows XP was running and waiting for me to log in. “Success!” I thought, only to realise I couldn’t actually use the keyboard or the mouse.
Option number 2 was to remote desktop (using RDP) into the machine on it’s new IP address. “Connection Refused” was the response. In the end I changed the DHCP lease to give it the same address of the original pc and was then able to connnect. From there I could look in the hardware manager. Guess what. It had detected the PS/2 ports that VMware uses but couldn’t install the drivers since they weren’t on the disk. Fortunatly the install the of the VMware Tools installs it’s own keyboard and mouse drivers so after a quick install and a reboot I could use the keyboard and mouse from the VMware console.
Two lessons from this. First, “special” builds of Windows (any version) may cause you more problems down the line. Second, be aware of converting pc’s that don’t have a PS/2 port and then expecting it to work first time. I’m not the only one to come accross this problem.
