Tech Support Cheat Sheet

via xkcd

Nokia support is getting ridiculous

So last time Nokia support told me to "have some patience. The problem should be solved in the near future."

Wir bitten noch mal um etwas Geduld. Das Problem sollte sich naher Zukunft erledigen.
[1]
When today after a couple of days I inquired what they exactly mean by "near future" I was told they "could not give me more detailed information. In the near future means 3-4 weeks or more. We ask you for patience".

Wir können Ihnen leider keine genauere Auskunft geben. In naher Zukunft bedeutet 3-4 Wochen oder auch mehr.
Wir bitten um Geduld.

Just a reminder that first, they told me I was too stupid, and then that the website and the NSU database were just not in sync. Now the problem requires a couple of weeks (or possibly months) to be solved...

Just a reminder: the problem is to sync the information on the website with the NSU database requires 3-4 weeks or more... preposterous.

Well, this time I asked for the support manager... let's see what (s)he has to say regarding answers like those.
I'm waiting...

--
[1] re-reading this: they actually say (in German) that the problem would (more like) disappear in the near future.

Still no update...

this is getting boring (for you, dear subscribers/readers probably, too).
There is still no E71 update for me, and asking Nokia Care Center if waiting from Wednesday to Monday is ample time for them to synchronize their web-query and their NSU database, they choose not to answer.

One might think, that Nokia is not under pressure from Apple and Android/G1/HTC/...

Does NSU hate me ?

I'm getting the feeling, that the Nokia Software Updater (NSU) hates me.
See what it did on August 16h, 9:34 (a couple of minutes ago):

All I wanted was to update my E71...

(No) Update on Nokia Service

So I created a ticket with Nokia Care Center for the missing E71 update for my version.

First Level just got back to me with dummy "read the web pages" instructions and how I should download the Nokia Update Software.
Duuh.
I told them my exact problem and wishes.

So I told them again, ... and that I was expecting a more specific answer.
To which they replied that it can take some time between a new version being reported as available on the web page and actually being available through the updater.

"Hier kann es vorkommen, dass die Information auf der Webseite aktueller ist, wie [sic] die Information die der Nokia Software Updater bekommt.
Wir bitten Sie daher, den Vorgang des Update zu einem späteren Zeitpunkt erneut zu versuchen."

("It can happen that the information on the web page is more current than the information the Nokia Software Updater is receiving. We ask you to repeat the Update at a later time.")

Are more than 48 hours enough? One should think so... alas, they are not.
Updater still does not find the new version.

And the Nokia guy didn't even bother to check or involve some back-office / 3rd level support ... Again just a standard answer...

Annoying.

Nokia service (?) quality (?)

I've been waiting for a v2 or v3 update for my E71 for months now - and still am.
As others have ... and already ranted about it (rightfully so).

Problem is, that I have an operator (A1) branded handset, which come with their own product code. Nokia has to release the update specifically for each product code.
Which is OK... and necessary, since the operators should have their say with what goes onto their branded devices[1]... Fair, fair.

Still, the A1 gave Nokia the OK to release 200.xxx months ago... But Nokia did not release 200.xxx or 300.xxx via the updater.

Only yesterday a version higher than v1 (300.21.12) showed up.

Nokia Software Updater, however, on Windows (v1.7.3... to be sure the latest) does not find the new update:

Still wants to keep me on 100.07.76...

So... I complained about it to Nokia...
Let's wait and see...
(mostly wait I guess)

--
[1] not the non-branded ones

Facebook acquires FriendFeed

FriendFeed Blog: FriendFeed accepts Facebook friend request: "We are happy to announce that Facebook has acquired FriendFeed."

Not sure if I like this... hm...lets see what happens.

Thunderbird 3 attachment reminder

Today I got scared by Thunderbird 3 (beta), when it brought the following pop up when I was trying to send an email:

Huh?
Well at first I just hit "No, Send Now", because I never intended to attach a file...

Hours later it did it again with a different email, still did not want to attach anything.
Couldn't find any pattern when it would come up with the pop up or not.

Then I tried it out (could've googled it of course):
When the email you send contains the wort attached or attachment (or variations a I guess), but there is no attachment, Thunderbird assumes, you just forgot it... and warns you.

Try it yourself: Send an email that says "Attached you'll find nothing" to yourself, and voila...

Cool...

Thunderbird 3 Beta 3 Released

The Rumbling Edge :: Thunderbird 3 Beta 3 Released: "Thunderbird 3 Beta 3 has been released"

I'm installing it as I blog this ;-)

Qando being really really stupid

Qando is an excellent service for quering up to date (and realtime) information about the (mainly) Viennese public transport.
I used to know it from the iPhone - or rather from my iPod touch only, where it was not THAT useful, because it only worked when I had a WiFi connection ... it does an excellent job on a fully GPRS/3G connected iPhone, though.

Found out that it is also available as a JavaME version for more or less or other handsets, including my E71.

Installs OK, starts fine, however, it could NOT access my GPS device (a common problem for JavaME apps).

But I wouldn't even let me enter station/address data by hand.
There is a search input field, but I failed miserably to enter anything there...

...except for numbers, I found out after a while.

And then I played with it a little more, and noticed that - get this! - emulate a T9 input, even when the phone has a full QWERTY keyboard!
So if I hit e.g. the 4-key 3 times it will walk through g-h-i... like it would on a 12 key phone[1].

Aaaaaa... how stupid can one be as a programmer. Who in this century (or the last 20-30 years for that mattters) codes keyboard input and key-stroke-decoding by hand! Let the opsys do that! That's what it is here for. Even on a phone.

So please, Qando programmers, you can do better! And it's a lot easier for you!
--
[1] or whatever the correct number of keys on a numeric-pad-only phone is.

No wait ...

via xkcd - A Webcomic - Estimation

XP/centrino crashes under Vbox 3.02

Just installed the newly released VirtualBox 3.02 today, and my (guest) XP started to crash after I de-installed the "old" (2.2.x) guest additions and installed the 3.02 additions.
Turned out that this is a known windows virtualization problem on Centrinos [1] like documented here.

So I rebooted (for the umpteenth time), F8-ed and selected the last known working settings, regedited the

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Intelppm

to the value 4.

Rebooted, and voila... works again.


---
[1] yes, this was on my beloved laptop.

OpenOffice.org Calc shortcuts

I just learned that Ctrl-+ and Ctrl-- add (or remove, respectively) a cell/line in Calc.

Haven't noticed that before, and I only learned it, because I wanted to zoom in/out (like in Firefox)...
Boy, I'm glad there was a popup, and I did not ruin my spreadsheet without knowing it...

Firefox 3.5 - finally

So, on Tuesday I upgraded all my machines to FireFox 3.5...
without any problems.

It really is a lot faster (still in the final, not only in the betas).
And finally also my twitter performance (as ranted about here) works smoothly again...

Go and upgrade.

OpenOffice 3.1 finally working

So after a debug and (re-)install marathon yesterday, I finally got OOo 3.1 to properly run on my laptop – it did run fine on my desktop and in my virtualboxes. Only on my laptop Calc (scalc.exe) would refuse to work.

Turns out that when trying to fix the Java-UNO-bootstrap problem under OOo 3.0 I manually copied a couple of .DLLs to different locations, which were now interfering with with the 3.1 installation.

I only noticed after completely removing 3.1 for the 2 ^nd or 3 ^rd time that there still were .DLL files in the OpenOffice directory. So I manually removed that, re-installed (must have been the 5 ^th time) 3.1 and – voila – it finally worked. Calc now runs fine, even controlled from Java through UNO.

Should have thought of looking into the installation directory earlier... grrrrr...

ORF vs BBC

BBC - the public broadcasting corporation - is widely regarded as the one broadcaster who managed to "get" new media [1] ... e.g. by opening up their archives, streaming their program (or should I say programme) , ...

Compare that to ORF - the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation, public as well, mainly funded by public license fee as well: not even close: hardly any streaming (except for FM4 alternative radio afaik) , some podcasts, no public archive...

One nice indicator of this difference is that on a BBC podcast like the Friday Night Comedy on Radio 4 they start with thanking you for downloading the podcast... whereas on ORF e.g. OE1 Digital Leben ("living digital") at the end of the podcast they tell you that "this show is also available as a podcast"... duh...

Just shows they don't even care to slightly change / cut a program in post-production for podcast... they just "copy" the radio show... instead of using the place/time on the podcast to refer to other podcasts or "real" radio program or in any other way directly address the podcast-only listeners (like myself).

Yet another chance missed.

[1] or rather "the 21st century" ;-)

After the cluetrain has arrived

If only companies were getting the Cluetrain Manifesto...

via Geek&Poke

btw: here's the book:
The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual

Facebook, Friendfeed, Xing and Twitter

Since Facebook became more stream-oriented there is an ongoing discussion (or rather a fight, it sometimes seems) on whether Facebook is better then Twitter or the other way round? If geeks are present then FriendFeed also comes into the discussion. So I'd like to share my thoughts on those tools, and I'll include Xing for completeness and to have a rather different platform here as well. [1]

1. Noise
One way to differentiate those platforms is noise or the concept of the signal-to-noise-ratio (for the engineers amongst us), short SNR.
As Wikipedia puts it quite well:

"In less technical terms, signal-to-noise ratio compares the level of a
desired signal (such as music) to the level of background noise. The
higher the ratio, the less obtrusive the background noise is."

In yet other terms for social network streams: "How much crap is there on a stream/feed in relation to the interesting stuff."

It of course depends on you and the platform (Facebook, Twitter, ...) what to consider noise and what to consider the signal.
Lets take the "status updates".

• On Twitter the status updates *are* the signal... so the signal-to-noise is 1:1 or 0 dB :-)
• On Facebook the status update are part of the whole point of Facebook, but not the only one... they are not strictly noise, but also not the only signal... SNR > 0 dB, but not too high either.
• Xing does have status updates, but - fortunately - they are rarely used. The stream on Xing that I'm interested in is "Who changed job?" "Who got connected to whom?"... Compared to this signal, the status-update-noise is fairly low... excellent SNR there.
• Friendfeed to me is somewhere between Twitter and Facebook.

2. Persistance

• Twitter is only a stream. What you don't see when it floats by, you'll miss. Yes, you can search (thanks to the acquisition and integration of summize into twitter), but that's it. And as far as I saw, only a couple of weeks of history.
  So Twitter only consists of triggers, and does not really have a state.
• Facebook has both, the stream of status updates and more static content like Group memberships, Fan-ness, etc.
• Xing is totally static and is actually designed to keep historical data (if you wish so). On Xing I can look up which companies a person worked for in the past years. I don't have to search through status updates to find that out, it's just there on one neat little page.
• Friendfeed like Twitter, does not really have a state, but is more browseable, again somewhere between Twitter and Facebook.

3. Relationships

• Twitter and Friendfeed are insofar unique as they support (and are actually designed for) unidirectional relationships. I can follow you, but you still don't have to follow me. Neither technically, nor is it socially mandated. If I follow you on Friendfeed, and you still choose not to follow me there, I hold no grudge against you.
  This also means I can unfollow you anytime.
  Also, this relationship does not have a quality associated with it ("Business", "Family", "Friend").
• Facebook and Xing require confirmation from both parties to start a relationship. Ignoring or even denying a friend-request or link there is visible to the requester and thus considered rather impolite. It is therefore also rare to unfollow ("unfriend", "unlink") someone, once the connection is established.

So those 4 social platforms have quite different qualities, and that's totally OK with me.
I use them for separate purposes.
I use them at different times.
I think I do have a different style on those.

However, I'm still not quite sure what to do with FriendFeed - a service that I really love... but whatever I do with it, I could also do with Twitter or Facebook. Currently, it's just the better and more complete userinterface into Twitter for me. I guess the main reason is, that more people/friends are on Facebook and Twitter than on FriendFeed.
So sign-up ... and follow me there.


[1] yes, I know there are others like LinkedIn, Plaxo, ... but I rarely use them, or not at all (like myspace)

Wolfram|Alpha only half-intelligent

There are numerous posts about the failure of the "computational knowledge engine" Wolfram|Alpha, just launched.

I don't consider it a failure - at least not yet.

However, one thing that I noticed: they tend to be very intelligent around your input and interpret it in the most meaningful way...

Still - they failed on an easy one.

Try to enter an ambiguous date like "4.5.1980" to find everything for May 4th, 1980... at least that's what you'd expect when you are in central europe (or more generally speaking: outside the U.S.)
Wolfram|Alpha's interpretation, however, is April 5th. ... well, that's not to uncommon for U.S.-centric sites.

What strikes me as odd, is that on the very same page, they show me the weather for Vienna, Austria for that day... nice feature... Yet, they are telling me, that they exactly know that I'm not from the U.S. and the date should be interpreted as a European date, i.e. day.month.year and not the other way round.

Guys, how could you miss that one???

OpenOffice 3.1 is available - really ?

and ready for download.

However, after installing OOo 3.1 I could not longer work with Calc. Neither thru starting scalc.exe or opening a .ods document, or creating a new spreadsheet from within a running openoffice instance.

Through the UNO/Java API I saw that there is a problem in loading the SCMI.DLL library, but no further indication on what exactly fails there.
Removing and re-installing did not help.
Using the US English version instead of German didn't help either (could've been a build problem with the German build). No hint on google either.

Had to revert back to 3.0.1 - calc now works again.

I'm quite angry - mostly at myself, because I usually test new versions in my virtualbox... This time I did not,.... argh!!!