Singing in the rain February 8, 2010
Posted by a1291762 in : Uncategorized , add a commentOn Sunday I sang in a concert. It was supposed to be a nice sunny day on Mount Tamborine and we were to sing in the botanical gardens.
Unfortunately things didn’t quite workout that way. The weather wasn’t exactly great and record rainfall the night before cut off most of the roads there.
Nevertheless, the show went on and it was good.
Symbian’s open source promise realised February 5, 2010
Posted by a1291762 in : Uncategorized , add a commentCongratulations guys. I didn’t think this’d happen so quickly or completely.
I’m really starting to lean back towards Symbian and away from Android. Of course some decent, modern-spec phones to run it on would be nice. Hopefully we’ll get some more manufacturers doing Symbian phones because Nokia’s focus seems to be on cheap handsets for emerging markets.
Maybe now the platform is all there we’ll start to see Symbian getting ported to existing phones (like how Linux gets ported to everything). A Nexus One or (for less money) Liquid A1 should make a great Symbian phone.
It might even be worthwhile to look into running it on my Treo 650. Now that would be an interesting hack. Not sure if I’ll have the time though…
Isaac says… January 22, 2010
Posted by a1291762 in : Uncategorized , add a commentI had this fascinating exchange with my son on the way home from kindy the other day.
Isaac: Did you know that Dorothy (the dinosaur, from The Wiggles) has a second mouth insider her?
Me: What for?
Isaac: So she can talk.
Me: What’s wrong with her normal mouth?
Isaac: It doesn’t open.
He’s right of course but what an odd thing for a child to think of. He hasn’t seen any Wiggles recently though we do listen to them in the car.
Isaac fails night training January 6, 2010
Posted by a1291762 in : Uncategorized , add a commentIt’s only been 2 weeks but we’re giving up on night training Isaac again. The last two mornings he has failed to wake after wetting his bed, continuing to sleep in the wet puddle. He may be close but he’s not there yet and with normal routines starting up again we don’t have the time to wash his sheets every day.
Looking for a movie… January 6, 2010
Posted by a1291762 in : Uncategorized , add a commentSo I’m looking for a movie. It was a short film. The world was about to end (explode) and some guy meets a girl and they spend the rest of their lives together (though that’s only about half a day). It was pretty awesome and featured the song Emperor Norton by Electric Winter. I’d like to watch it again.
Here’s the annoying thing. I opened the history window in Firefox and typed ‘Emperor Norton’. This got me to the last.fm page that I visited after watching the movie but after that 2 things went wrong.
1) Since I used the search thing I couldn’t see sites visited before and after this one. Clearing a search doesn’t keep the focus on the selected entry.
2) Since I clicked on the link (and thus visited the last.fm page) Firefox CHANGED the history so that the last.fm page is now listed as being visited today ONLY.
So even though I know that I went to this last.fm page shortly after viewing the movie I now apparently have no way to back-track through my history (short of reviewing every entry individually) to find the movie. If I could remember what it was called I could search for that but I can’t remember so it seems I’m out of luck.
Bummer.
Update 6 January 2010
Aha! I found it. It’s called Forever’s Not So Long.
Night Training Update January 2, 2010
Posted by a1291762 in : Uncategorized , add a commentWe’ve had some success with Isaac though nothing consistent yet. When he does wet the bed it’s right as he wakes up and only a small amount so he’s almost there. I think he’s enjoying not wearing a nappy and is disappointed when he doesn’t wake up dry.
N900 Music FAIL December 17, 2009
Posted by a1291762 in : Uncategorized , add a commentMy new office is noisy (bugs in trees outside the window) so I’m trying out the N900 as a music player because it’s got noise-canceling earphones.
The earphones feel good in the ear and the silicone cap seals out noise quite effectively. However the clicker is too heavy so you need to have it anchored on your shirt or it’ll pull out the bud. The plug is non-standard (too long) so it doesn’t work in a regular device. I might consider getting a pair of regular earphones like this. I do seem to “hear” anything that touches the cord which can be a bit annoying.
Anyway, the earphones weren’t the worst of it. It turns out the mighty N900 can’t handle playing back my puny 128k MP3s properly. At first I used the media player widget on the home screen but that resulted in the music skipping quite often. Removing that widget from the home screen and actually launching the media player stops most of the skipping. Now it seems to only happen when something specific happens to the phone rather than every now and then. While playing music the whole phone runs many times slower than it usually does. This makes the usual “did that tap get registered?” problem much worse. The N900 will happily queue up taps so you have to be really patient if you try to do anything. I ran top but nothing is chewing up all of the CPU. Probably a latency/buffer problem. This thing uses PulseAudio and that’s widely regarded as a piece of crap.
So N900 as a music player? FAIL.
Windows/IE .zip recursion FAIL December 14, 2009
Posted by a1291762 in : Uncategorized , add a commentI was using my family’s computer on the weekend and for some reason, .zip files weren’t working how they should. It seems someone had set them to open with Internet Explorer…
I found this out when I clicked on a .zip file and IE went into a recursion-of-death loop. An IE window showed on the screen briefly, only to go away. Then it happened again. In fact, apart from a few moments of unexplainable IE hangs, it just sat there creating a window and removing it again over and over. I guess IE had decided it couldn’t handle .zip files and was passing the file to Explorer which consulted the associations and gave the file back to IE.
I installed 7-zip and told it to take over the associations but the FAIL didn’t end there. I actually had to log out and back in again to stop IE’s seizure-inducing window flashing.
I have an N900 December 14, 2009
Posted by a1291762 in : Uncategorized , add a commentI got assigned to a new project at work and part of that will be writing software for the N900 so I now have one.
First impressions aren’t that good. The device does seem to do well as a “hacker’s phone” (heck, I broke the thing while running dpkg from the command line – you can uninstall the phone’s software doing that!) but even the Greenphone (which wasn’t a polished and released product) didn’t have some of the obvious and glaring problems that the N900 has.
The thing has an abysmal partition layout. Only 80M free space on the root filesystem and app packages are allowed to write there?! Oh, and apps in the -devel and -testing repos like to install into /usr.
There’s a front camera but no software to use it? The thing has Skype for crying out loud but can’t do video calls!
There’s no on-screen keyboard mode indicator. The virtual keyboard can be easier to use as a result of this (though it’s crap for fast entry because it doesn’t support multi-touch).
I’m sure I’ll post more about the N900 over time. Maybe it’ll grow on me.
OVI FAIL December 14, 2009
Posted by a1291762 in : Uncategorized , add a commentI wanted to get Fring for my E90 so I went to store.ovi.com but you have to login before you can download (even though it’s a free app). I try to login but I can’t remember my password. I try to fetch my password but it says it doesn’t know who I am so I try to sign up but it says my login (a1291762) is already taken. WTF? FAIL!