Friday, October 31, 2008

No more email SMS notifications

So, after 8 years or so I finally switched off the SMS (=aka text) notifications from my private email account to my mobile, since 95% of those notifications are pure spam.
I sick and tired of being told by sms that my penis is to short...

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Being overconnected

Yesterday while I was travelling from Graz on the train back to Vienna a good friend and colleague (Chris) was trying to contact me to arrange for a meeting (a.k.a. beer) later that evening.
He was actually trying almost each every means of communication available to him, so I received (within 1 minute):
a) a voicemail
b) an email
c) a tweet

I cannot escape him.
(and I don't really want to)

Monday, October 27, 2008

Extension from Thunderbird to Shredder

I now updated my extension to also work with Shredder (the Thunderbird3 beta).
Seems like - again - the internals of the mail popup menu changed:

  • First of all the user agent now reports "Shredder" instead of Thunderbird.
  • Then - after a lot of debugging - I had to replace the
    document.popupNode.getAttribute('emailAddress')
    with
    document.popupNode.getAttribute('text').
  • Problem there is , that text contains more then just the emailAddress used to, and I had to parse it...
And XUL on Thunderbird/Shredder is still not easy to debug.

Sunday, October 26, 2008

My new Nokia E71

The Noka E71 is probably the best Nokia (smart) phone I ever laid my hands on.

And I have to admit that I hated Symbian based phones in the past... the communicator series, etc.

They were slow, hard to use, had a bad form factor (ok, that's not really related to Symbian), and so forth.

And when the iPhone was first released I really thought, I'd never move from my POMP (plain old mobile phone) to a Nokia SmartPhone...


Enter the E71.

  • It is fast.

  • It is lean (SW wise I mean)

  • It has an excellent form factor.

  • The display is brilliant.

  • It comes with Wifi, Bluetooth, 3G, GPS (my order of importance, should be more space between 3G and GPS … ;-) )

  • Email actually works:

    • not just „ POP over IMAP“, but the phone client and the server actually stay in sync.

    • I can actually read an email (ok, more display size related, then phone OS)

    • I can see and open attachments … and read or work with them too

  • The camera is OK (not really important to me, but still; see this for a test)

  • Gmail, Gmaps, Skype (via fring), flickr-upload work amazingly well for a phone.

  • The tiny QWERTZ (the german layout for QWERTY) keyboard does work well. Better than the virtual keyboards on iPhone and friends.

Still, there are some classical Nokia goofs (you did not expect me the ever stop ranting about nokia, did you?)

  • its predecessor, the E61i had the concept of access point groups , where you could group e.g. your home Wifi, your office Wifi and your 3G connections (i.e. access points) into one group, and then assign this access point group e.g. to your email connection settings. So email retrieval would work on any of those networks, but go over the faster and cheaper Wifi first.
    No longer possible with the E71.

  • Automatic email retrieval is a cool thing, but can you spot the missing item here ?

    Why - oh why - just not every (1) hour ?

  • I can no longer schedule a call in the calender. That's really a loss to me... I used that feature a lot for “scheduled call backs”. I still can set a reminder of course, but there is a lot more typing involved – both when entering the reminder as well as later when doing the call. It used to be just one click (on the green button).


And I get a full new set of typos when SMS/texting now that I moved from T9 to QWERTZ ;-)

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Wow - Mobilkom austria and fring launch partner program!

The only part where mobilkom austria seems to "get" the post PSTN/incumbant/closed-network era is VOIP...
Now they partner wirth fring (mobile skype et al client)

Mobilkom austria’s A1 and fring launch partner program!

via japhy.at - thanks

Monday, October 20, 2008

Sun Ray and Austrian Smartcards

Together with a good customer and active member of our Sun Ray community we finally got the Austrian Quick cards (sort of a nationwide e-Purse solution for Austria) to work in Sun Rays.

So you can now use your Maestro (“Bankomat”), University Campus Card and other cards of the same type and layout as a Sun Ray token.

Together with the Austrian health care card (“eCard”) we can now claim “100% pop coverage” - as mobile operators do – for Sun Ray compatible cards. Great. I love it.

I'm still unsure how willing users are to actually use a payment card for IT authentication. I know that we don't read any data from the card other than the serial number, but does an end user trust IT equipment with their “money“?

Let's see over the next couple of months.


Here's the way to get it to work:


Download the two smartcard configuration files that Niki Waibel was kind enough to create:

AustrianECard.cfg for the eCard and AustrianQuickEPurse.cfg for the Quick card (or most likely both).

Store them to the /etc/opt/SUNWut/smartcard/ directory on your Sun Ray server(s), and place them on a prominent position with the probe_order.conf (they are #1 and #2 in my configuration here ;-) )

utrestart the Sun Ray Server to make it pick up the change, and voila, you should be able to use the new cards as proper and valid Sun Ray tokens.

Feel free to use it. Should you experience problems, just post a comment here.

Warning: a new Sun Ray Server software patch will most likely remove those files or overwrite the probe_order.conf.


Thursday, October 16, 2008

Gadget week

Last week I got my new Lenovo Thinkpad T500 to replace my (still IBM) Thinkpad T43p (disk and fan already made noises like a bad diesel engine).
2 Days ago I got my Nokia E71 to replace my 6233.
And coming weeking I guess I'll buy me the Nikon D300 to replace my D70.

Expect postings on all of this next week.

Sunday, October 05, 2008

[TechCrunchIT] Selling the Downturn: Schwartz and the Silver Lining

Excellent analysis of Jonathan Schwartz's latest blogpost and Sun internal memo by Steve Gillmor

Selling the Downturn: Schwartz and the Silver Lining

The question now becomes: What insight does Schwartz bring now to the conversation with customers. If they are, as he writes, under stress, and therefore “open to change”, what combination of leading edge hardware and system integration of virtualization will produce immediate results in a climate where Sun’s focus on financial services is likely to be challenged by a wave of mergers, buyouts, and outright collapses. Schwartz and Sun have blazed a trail to the cloud computing enterprise, but now they have to defend themselves against having done perhaps too good a job of turning the market toward the new reality.

Firefox 3 and Twitter

... don't work well with each other.

For some days now (I feel that it was with the 3.0.2 or 3.0.3 update from FF) whenever I type into the twitter status input field, it slows down, grabs 100% of the CPU and I can type at a rate of 1 character per 2 seconds !!!

It seems that the javascript for updating the counter for the remaining characters (just right above the input field) is doing this, but I cannot really prove this.

Strangest thing is, it does not do this with IE or with the very same FF version running in a virtual box (different profile, though). I also started FF without any extensions (firefox -safe-mode) and disabled spell-checking.
No difference.

Could not find any hint or reference to this behavior on Google.
Strange.

Thursday, October 02, 2008

Delete nor Not Delete

I noticed a strange co-incidence between Lightning (the Calendar plugin for Mozilla Thunderbird) and the crappy mail client of my Nokia 6233...

Both cannot delete the item you are currently viewing.
Strange.

In Lightning (and I guess in Sunbird as well), when you open an event (or todo item) you cannot delete this very item from the menu or toolbar.

There is simply no delete function.
Only in the various calendar views, but not on the item itself.
This annoys me, because here is exactly the place where you see and know most about the potential delete candidate... what better place to delete it ?
(btw: I already filed bug #392021 against it, but it does not move... maby I'll grab it myself one day)

Same in the email client on my Nokia 6233:Not that anything really works there... The 6233 does something I dubbed "POP over IMAP", since it uses IMAP as a technical protocol layer but only offers POP like features.

There also, I cannot delete the mail I'm currently viewing. I have to go back to the inbox and delete it from there. Crappy.