Oh dear : Eurovision

May 31st, 2010

Well we’ve done it again… Wooden spoon time.

Honestly, I don’t know why we bother. British music might be popular round the globe, but Eurovision isn’t normal music is it nor is the decision making!

The voting is quite amusing. I must admit it was a bit better this year, and not quite as predictable as it has been. A few years ago it looked like Russia would win it from now on. After all the ex-Soviet countries gained their independence they all gave Russia loads of votes, and there are so many of them Russia could be certain of almost reaching triple figures without any input from the rest of Europe. How much of this was down to shared culture and language, or how much was down to sheer terror of upsetting the big bear is unknown!

The Scandinavians would all be nice to each other with Iceland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark all giving each other votes.

The Balkan states would all throw votes to each other too. Greece, Turkey and Cyprus were all friend too.  All in an effort to show that there are no hard feelings I’m sure.

France and UK aren’t that dishonest, we don’t give each other any meaningful votes. Which is the way it should be! :o

Well this year it wasn’t so bad. The winning song was actually quite catchy.

I have to wonder why we even bother. Out here on the Western edge of Europe, on our little island, we really don’t have much in common with Europe. We speak a funny language and sit on America’s lap panting. This doesn’t go down well with the French (does anything?) and the Germans tend to mutter about it too. Ireland have ingratiate themselves with Europe by joining the Euro, and even they can’t win it these days. We might be on the European continent (unlike Israel!), but that’s about all we have in common!

And then there is the choice of song we entered… Written by Pete Waterman of all people! Pete hasn’t had an original thought since the 1980s! Even then when he produced Kylie, Jason Donovan and Rick (roll) Ashley, TV’s Spitting image had a sketch with a music making machine which had a big knob on it labelled “Rick / Kylie” (Link). Yes *thats* why they all sounded the same! It wasn’t the in sound of the 80s, it was the only sound the producers could get from their Casio keyboard!

Guess what, 20 years on the track he wrote/produced still sounded exactly the same! The arrangement, the instrumentation (sorry, synth sounds), everything! It could have been from Kylie’s first album!

What were they thinking when that was picked?!

What? We picked it? On a TV phone vote?

Yeah well… As I’ve always said, TV phone in votes/quizzes are a tax on stupidity. You’ve just let the stupid pick your track!

Well done.

Can we stop wasting money on it now?

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The great Thinkpad brain drain…

March 15th, 2010

I’m a techie, you might have noticed this, which means the world and his mother expect me to be able to fix anything vaguely technical they throw at me. Usually I manage to rise successfully to these challenges, and my geek-god status remains intact.

Recently however I was presented with a tricky one. A friend had bought a Lenovo Thinkpad SL500 about a year ago, and had been happy with it. Then one day they asked me to look at it because it was running very slowly and they couldn’t get it to connect to their home wifi point.

They weren’t kidding! I’ve seen children with abacuses crunch numbers faster.

The culpret seemed to be AVG, it was munching one of the two available processors cores 100%. I disabled AVG and the machine returned to its old self.

Right, remove AVG. Wipe all AVG related bits, install Avast. It was a bit better, but Avast was still using a lot of CPU time on one of the cores. The wifi was also iffy, the Thinkpad network switching application “Access Connections” was very sluggish.

Hmmmm… Removed Avast, everything returns to normal. Access Connections works again, and so does the wifi. Very odd.

Okay, last go… Microsoft’s Security Essentials. Well again it was better than AVG in that the machine was useable, but the CPU hogging was back again, and Access Connections turned back into a “click now wait 5 minutes for a reaction” application.

Too much of a coincidence for me. Access Connections must have something which is attracting the attention of these various anti virus products continually. Time to deploy Process Monitor.

Wadda you know… The AV seems to be very interested in

C:/Program Files/ThinkPad/ConnectUtilities/AccConnAdvanced.html

So I add it to the AV exclusion list, and POW the machine snaps out of it’s coma, throws off the hangover and is back up to speed.

Wonder what that file is thinks I, so I go to have a look. It’s huge! It’s a diagnostic log from Access Connections which seems to be updated several times a second with the most meaningless information! No wonder the AV packages have been going mad! Every update to this html file has triggered a file access scan!

Why on earth is Access Connections filling up several meg of drive space with an ever growing file? Why did they choose to give it a .html file extension which any AV package worth it’s salt will scan? Who knows!

This ever growing file will initially not be an issue. Small files are quick for the AV programs to scan, but as time goes on, and the file grows, so does the time it takes the AV package to scan it… Result, slowly degrading system performance until it grinds to a halt at the merest hint of network activity (which it feels the urge to log!). Oh, and yes doing anything with Access Connections is logged too!

The good news is that you can fix it.

1) Add the file to the exclusion list in your AV program. That way you’ll actually be able to get into Access Connections to correct the settings

2) Open Access Connections

3) If you’re in Basic mode, click the “Switch to Advanced” button up the top right.

4) Now you should have a tab labels “Tools”, go there then select “Diagnostics”

5) In the diagnostic dialog box select the “Event Log” tab.

6) Now click “Disable Logging”

7) Now you can go and remove the exclusion from the AV program, and regain some drive space by deleting the huge log file!

How and why this logging was turned on is a mystery, but judging from my searches on the net this is not an isolated incident.

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Owning the Nokia N97 – Ooops

February 19th, 2010

Well it’s been a while since I wrote anything here, there is a good reason.

My N97 got squashed! It fell out of my pocket as I got out of my brothers car a few months ago, and before I could grab it he pulled away and drove over it.

Unfortunately my brother doesn’t drive anything light, he drives a Landrover!

The result, one blank screen. It still rang, and I could still answer calls, but trying to use a phone without visual feedback, especially via touch screen, is somewhat tricky. Luckily I was able to type in my power on pin with the fold out keyboard.

I took it to bits, and apart from a squashed chrome front surround, and a couple of cracks in the case, there wasn’t actually anything visibly broken. I managed to plug it into my laptop and backup everything and then brought my old N95 back into service whilst I wondered what to do with the N97.

Being forced back to the N95 provided an interesting comparison. It’s just so much more responsive. It even recognised the 8gig MicroSD card I’d bought for the N97 (up until then I hadn’t tried anything bigger than 4gig in the old phone).

So what did I miss about the N97, well the big screen, keyboard and the GPS that locks quickly (the N95 takes ages, epecially if you dare to move).

What I didn’t miss was the touch-screen interface. On the N95 everything just feels like it’s all designed to work together. There is a button to do copy/paste, I don’t have to rely on the phone to provide a button the screen where the designers thing I might want to do copy/paste (they always seems to miss places I do use it).

Anyway, eventually I decided I had better have a look at fixing the N97. Having taken it to bits and found nothing visually broken I tried the unplug and reconnect all the boards technique. Unfortunately it wasn’t going to be that easy, so being presented with a blank screen I thought the first thing to try would be another LCD panel. £34.99 later and I have a fully working N97! I’ve had to hammer the chrome strip back into shape and reglue it onto the facia which has a few scratches, but it works! I didn’t even have to replace the facia which contains the touch sensitive surface!

I found there was a new firmware for the N97, V21.0.045. It’s probably not available for UK Country variant phones yet, but I lost patience waiting for UK CV approval last year with the V20 fiasco, so I’d changed the model number on my N97 so I can use generic Euro firmware updates.

I wiped the phone completely, installed V21, hard reset it again, then imported the business cards from the N95. All seems good.

The wireless reception is better than the N95 too, I’d forgotten how good it was in comparison, but you know what, I still prefer the N95’s touch-screen free interface.

I’m still unconvinced by the idea of touch-screen on mobiles. I was using my friend iPhone last month and it illustrated my main complaint, how are you supposed to select text on the screen when you’re putting a fat finger right in the way of what you are trying to do?! At least “old” “unresponsive” resistive screens let you use your finger nail, but on a capacitive screened iPhone you have to use something with capacitance, some people have even resort to frankfurters so they can keep their gloves on!

So now my SIM is back in the N97, it’ll be interesting to see if I prefer using it to the N95 or not. Not that I can do much if I don’t, I doubt anyone wants to buy a rather battered N97!

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Owning the Nokia N97 – Part 11 – The Ovi rip-off

October 1st, 2009

UK residents have recently been exposed to some very iPhone-esq “There’s an app for that” advertising from Nokia promoting the Ovi store. Except the only application that I’ve seen advertised is Gravity, a twitter client.

Being a recent signup to the twittering classes I’m still playing about with various twitter applications on my N97, so it was kind of nice to know of another one.

So off I go to the Ovi store… A search for “twitter” produced “Gravity – 10 day trail”… Oh, no mention of this in the advert, or maybe there was some small print on the bottom of the screen only visible on a 1080P HD broadcast. I wondered how much. £8! That’s a bit steep for a twitter client, it’s not exactly a complicated protocol, and I already had 3 applications that could do it on my N97 which cost a grand total of £0 (tweets60, Fring and Nimbuzz).

I decided to have a look at exactly what this £8 application could provide that the others couldn’t. As Ovi is particularly crap at giving detailed information on applications, I did a little google for the author and ended up on their main site. You can buy it direct from there too (don’t forget you’re a Nokia owner, not an iPhone owner who is tied into one source!)… Guess what… £6.05!

Funny value, probably due to a currency converstion, but even allowing for a little fluctuation, it still won’t come close to the Ovi store’s £8.

I guess you the Ovi store customer are paying rather directly for the advert!

So let this be a warning, just because it’s in the Ovi store, it doesn’t mean you have to purchase it from there. Use the freedom of not being an Apple drone, and have a look for other sources, it could save you more than a few pennies.

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Owning the Nokia N97 – Part 10

September 30th, 2009

V12 Firmware finally available to UK users

Well Nokia, or whichever third party they have in the UK for distributing firmware updates, have finally pulled their finger out and released V12, only 6 weeks after world+dog got it.

Still no news from Nokia about why there is such a delay for UK phones.

I would like to claim some personal responsibility for it finally being release. 48 hours before it became available I got fed up and changed the model number of my UK CV (country variant) N97 to that of a generic Euro model. I then used NSU to check the firmware, it told me V12 was available, and installed it. Therefore I think I can claim under the ground of sods law!

What does V12 give us, ummmm, well nothing really. It is supposed to help with main memory use by the browser, but I haven’t seen much improvement. There are many reports of V12 updates corrupting existing wifi connection configurations, and worse preventing correction or creation of new ones. This bug was reported by world+dog when they got V12 six weeks ago, so it’s pretty obvious that the delay for UK users wasn’t caused by Nokia fixing anything!

One of the regular readers of this blog experienced this problem, he kindly detailed the steps he took to get things working again. Have a read here if you are experiencing problems.

None of the annoying bugs I have experienced with V11 have been resolved. The automatic screen pin lock (if you use it), sometime has the keypad in alphabetic mode when you try to unlock. Which means you have to have your wits about you when you unlock, otherwise you end up entering a string of letters instead of numbers and having your code rejected.

The browser still has my favourite “did they ever test this?” bug…

If you want to experience it yourself, got to a webpage with a text entry box, something like the comment box on this site for example. Now with the phone closed (so you get predictive text), start writing a new, unknown word (preferably one you won’t mind having added to the dictionary, as I don’t know how to remove custom words!

Eventually the predictive text will give up and give you the option to spell the word manually. Do it, and when you confirm you will be back to the web page text box with your new word shown. Unfortunately right after the new word will be the last word/letter combination the predictive text tried before giving you the spell option! Genius!

So if you have V11, and your phone is working, just leave it! Skip V12, too many headaches and risks, and no real fixes for issues. Wait for V20 which is due in October.

Not long… Well not for me anyway, I don’t have a UK model phone now… I also have a voided warranty! Who knows how long UK phones will have to wait. Maybe Nokia might have taken notice of the campaign for UK firmware equality. You have signed it haven’t you?

Hopefully V20 will be the firmware the N97 was supposed to have at launch. I get the feeling the N97 was rushed out to preempt the iPhone 3GS, V11 and V12 firmware releases have just been firefighting and bug fixes, and not very good ones at that.

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Opera Mini 5 beta web browser

September 17th, 2009

om5-frontToday I have been mostly playing with Opera’s latest public beta of their mini web browser.

I’ve been a fan of the Opera Mini browser for quite a few years. I installed version 4 on my Nokia N95 and found it a great improvement on Nokia’s early attempts at writing their own browser.

So when I got my N97 it didn’t take much for me to install Opera mini 4.2 on that too. In fact it was the Nokia browsers terrible habit of eating all the main storage which made me do it… Aparantly this is fixed in firmware V12, but being a UK resident with an unbranded UK phone, and the V12 firmware only having been release a month ago, I have not been deemed worthy of having an update.

Opera Mini V4.2 worked fine on the N97. It had some strange quirks, mainly associated with it not being designed for a touch screen device, but overall it was very good.

om5-keyboardOpera Mini V5 beta *has* been designed with touch screen in mind, and boy is it good. This beta is more stable and finished than some of the software supplied on the N97 by Nokia… The buggy/restricted Facebook application for example.

Opera Mini V5 mini supports tabs, has an onscreen keyboard for text input, can render pages reduced to fit the screen or zoomed. Pages can be dragged about with your finger. It really is very good.

It does have a couple of quirks, the main one I notice is then using the N97 in landscape (keyboard deployed), it still shows the onscreen touch keyboard when you have a field to type in (which obscures the bottom half of the page). You can use the N97’s real keyboard, but for some reason the SYM button is disabled, which prevents access to certain characters, like underline which I use in a lot of my user names. This is still accessible by the virtual touch keyboard, so it’s not a show stopper. I did try to do a screen grab, but unfortunately my screen grab app didn’t seem to realise what landscape mode was and made rather a mess of it!

om5-tabsSo what are you still doing here?

Go and get it (for the N97 use the java version).

If you are using your phone right now, go here

If you are on your PC, go here

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N97 V12 Firmware still not available for UK

September 15th, 2009

There seem to be quite a few unimpressed people out here in intarweb.uk land.

Go sign the petition.

http://discussions.nokia.co.uk/discussions/board/message?board.id=swupdate&thread.id=56895

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Owning the Nokia N97 – Part 9

September 12th, 2009

Themes

Well I’ve had the phone for a couple of weeks, and whilst waiting for V12 firmware to bother appearing for UK phones, I’ve been playing about with themes.

I found a bug!

It appears that some of the colour settings don’t take effect until you turn the phone off and on. For example I had been using built in theme “Nseries 2″ since I got the phone. This is quite a dark theme. Today I thought as it was a nice day, I would switch to another built in theme “Nseries 1″ which is nice and sunny with a blue background.

Everything seems to switch fine. However, if you go to contacts and then want to start typing a name (in the rather strange on-screen, only shows letters which are possible from the contacts you have, keyboard)… Suddenly you find all the the little touch boxes, which have a light background, have the letters written in white… Ummm… I couldn’t see anything!

Turning the phone off and back on again makes the letters now appear in black, which is far better against the light background.

So it looks like the foreground text colour for this strange predictive keyboard only takes effect when the phone is turned on… tut tut.

Online themes

I was hoping to review a few themes, unfortunately I have a gripe. Many many many sites (including quite a few that should know better), group the 5800 and N97 together. Sure they have similar specs, and the same size screen, and they are both touch screen, but there are some big differences. The N97 has dedicated call/cancel and application buttons below the screen, it doesn’t have/need virtual touch ones like the 5800. Unfortunately many of the themes and wall papers either draw, or have some graphical effect to make the 5800’s virtual buttons look sexy. This just looks stupid on an N97.

I thought I might as well try to fix a couple of themes, I’ve already downloaded the Carbide developers app and N97 SDK, but as yet I can’t work out how to create/edit themes. I fear I need to download a different version of Carbide purely for themes. Wonderful!

I have looked at writing myself a simple app for the phone, but I am finding carbide totally inaccessible. I have been a software developer for more years than I care to think about. I’ve programmed in everything from 6502/Z80 machine code in the 80s (when I should have been doing my school homework), TSRs in DOS and more recently windows programming and some venturing into Linux.

So programming is not a problem. The carbide IDE (integrated developer environment) is! I’ve looked for online guides, unsuccessfully. If anyone can point me in the right direction, please do!

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Barclays bank security

September 11th, 2009

pin_sentryWell it was bound to happen, from the moment the damn thing arrived through the door I knew this day would come.

Now it has… I’ve lost my pinsentry!

Pinsentry is the calculator like device Barclays forced upon their customers a couple of years ago to improve online security. The introduction was far from smooth. I discovered I needed one when online one day and trying to add a new destination account for a money transfer. I then had to make a phone call to request one. How nice of them to be so pro-active! (not!). Honestly fancy locking your customers out of some of their account services and not sending them the key in advance? If my money transfer was something urgent, business related, there could have been big trouble. As it was it was just some money to my brother who had picked something up for me on his credit card.

Anyway, it arrived a few days later, and now I have to use it to log in on the website.

Their reasoning is that it improves website security… Hmmm… If it’s so good, why haven’t I seen other banks issuing them? I’ve had this damn thing for over a year. If they were really that worried about website security they could have just improved their old password system… This system insisted on a password of at least 6 characters (that’s fine, maybe a little low, but good it’s that high), unfortunately it then insisted on it being 8 characters of less… not good. Stay with me, it gets better.

So I type in a good secure (well as good as I can get with 8 characters maximum) password, mixture of letters and numbers. Guess what? No numbers allowed. Jeeez.

No I know a little bit about system security, I’ve been a programmer for many years. I’ve worked for very large defence contractors, been vetted under the official secrets act and assisted a company pass PCI accreditation.

Why no numbers? The 8 character maximum is obviously because their database field was defined too small, but why remove 10 possible characters from each of the 8 bytes of storage they do have? Obviously you don’t want people to put in their phone numbers as passwords, but the normal industry standards just insist on a mixture of numbers and letters.

In frustration I typed “Aaarrggh”. Guess what? That failed too. Too many repeated letters! Honestly, one night I will sit down and work out the possible permutations they are excluding with all their funny filters!

I eventually got something accepted. I’m not going to tell you what it is though. Let’s just say that it would fail a dictionary attack! Brilliant eh? Oh well, you still need the pinsentry and my pin, and my card… And right now I don’t have the pinsentry, so even I can’t get in!

Which means I can’t pay my credit card. I could write a cheque, but before that gets cashed I need to move some money into the current account to meet it. To do that I need to log on, and… Aaarrggh!

So tomorrow I have to go and face one of the bods behind the bullet proof screen and ask them for a new pinsentry. I bet they don’t keep any in the branch, but they damn well should!

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Owning the Nokia N97 – Part 8

September 10th, 2009

Firmware

Well true to the word of their automated message, I did get a reply to my “where is V12 for the UK N97″ question I sent to Nokia. Unfortunately it reminds me a lot of the old pilot lost in the fog joke (link).

The firmware in a Nokia phone is dependent on the country it is released for as the cellular networks in every country are different to varying degrees. The release of a firmware update is dependent upon 2 things :

1 – General adaptation to the specific networks found within the country in question,

2 – Adaptation by specific networks for use with phones SIM locked to their networks.

In your case, of course, only the former applies. Please be patient, it will be released shortly.

Can anyone define “shortly”… There really should be a ban on using that completely valueless measurement of time!

Oh well… It was worth a try wasn’t it?!

Instant messenging and VOIP

Well now we get down to some fun stuff. I’m sure you have an instant messenger account of some variety. Microsoft, yahoo, AIM, Skype, ICQ to name but a few. Well how about having them on your mobile phone (with your “unlimited” data connection)?

I have been using an application called Fring for quite a while on my N95. It works very well, and I’ve had quite a few conversations with people over skype whilst taking advantage of open wireless points in some strange parts of the world. Having a chat with friends back home whilst costing absolutely nothing is rather cool.

In 2008 there was a new arrival on the mobile IM/VOIP block, Nimbuzz, so I thought I would give it a go on my N97.

One of my main reasons for even thinking of trying a new IM client is a short coming they both share. I have two messenger account, one I use for business, and one I use for personal. Unfortunately both Fring and Nimbuzz only allow you to have one Microsoft messenger connection open at a time, a restriction I don’t have on my desktop thanks to Trillian. So although they both have the restriction, there is nothing to stop me running both Fring and Nimbuzz side by side, and can you think of a better way to test them?

(I will apologise in advance as I interchange “messenger”, “MSN” and “Windows Live” when talking about the instant messenger from Microsoft, they have changed its name too many time! I believe that this month it’s officially “Windows Live Messenger”).

So far today they have both been perfectly well behaved. Nimbuzz does strike me as a little more polished, and Fring does make me feel slightly sea-sick with it’s over-friendly huggy huggy website. It could be the green colour scheme, but the comic font really doesn’t help!

One of the issues I have always had with Fring is checking for updates. On the app you have to go into the about page, find the version, then open the website, dig about a bit to find the version history, then decide if you are out of date and download/install. just having the current version number shown on the download page would be an improvement.

Nimbuzz is far more integrated. There is a check for update link on the application. As the meerkats would say “Simples” (non UK readers will just have to take my word that you just missed the most hillarious joke ever typed on the intarweb).

So how do they measure up?

Well for my use there is not much to choose between them, both do Skype, Windows Live (MSN), yahoo, AIM and ICQ. I think I err slightly towards the new boy right now. Fring can do Twitter (but I already have a twitter client I like – Tweets60), Nimbuzz can do Gadu Gadu (ask any Polish friend).

fring

Some of Fring's IM connection "add-ins"

nimbuzz

Some of Nimbuzz's IM "Communities"

The one thing that really does swing it in favour of Nimbuzz, in a big way, is the Windows Live status message, the little one liner you can do in messenger to say “Eating my dinner”. In Nimbuzz you can set this to whatever you like. Fring on the other hand sets this to “On mobile by www.fring.com”, a bit of self promotion is okay I guess, but this isn’t a default, that is it! You can’t change it! The earlier versions of Fring did not do this, and I don’t appreciate this being forced upon me. Apart from anything else, if I am using this as a professional contact point, I don’t want my contacts to know I’m away from my desk/office and doing my shopping! Even worse, it seems to be alarmingly persistent, even after you log in with a real Windows live Messenger client, the Fring advert status remains.

–> Part 9

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