Skype on Nokia E71 - update

So, I've been using (native) Skype on the E71 for a couple of days now, and it really works quite well.
Faster then the Java version (and that's me saying this). And more complete.

It does, however, not honor the settings for

• Default access point

and

• Sign In [When Skype starts].

It currently ignores both.

I changed them to their other respective values, restarted Skype, changed them back, still no change.

Skype on Nokia E71

When I read that Skype was dropping support for the Java Mobile version of Skype (light), which I use on my E71, I just thought "What the f*"... [1]
Then I continued to read to find out, that there actually is a native Symbian version of Skype, that I totally missed during the last 1.5 years...

So, lets install it... just point your phone browser to skype.com/m.
Check back here to find out what my experience with it is.
Looks promising at first sight.

--
[1] yes, I literally thought "f asterisk"... :-)

Coding Canary

Yes.
Exactly.


via Geek & Poke

OpenOffice.org 3.2 available - a highly recommended update

via Malte Timmermann's Blog

This update is highly recommended, not only because of the many security fixes and security feature improvements, but also because of some noticeable performance improvements.

As always, make sure to only download from trusted sources, like http://OpenOffice.org. The reason is explained here.

Perfect Intro to Cluetrain and Web 2.0

Look at this excellent TED presentation by Alexis Ohanian of Reddit to understand how the Cluetrain Manifesto maps to Web 2.0...

And what it is, that corporations and organizations simply have to get.

Good code

So true.

via geek & poke

Facebook: Half-hearted email replies

For a couple of weeks now, Facebook allows you to reply to a notification (e.g. when someone comments on your status) via email.

Xxx Xxxxxx commented on your status:

"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Cras neque diam, tincidunt sit amet faucibus quis, tincidunt eu mauris. Nulla vitae est ipsum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. "

New Feature: Reply to this email to comment on this status.

To see the comment thread, follow the link below:
http://www.facebook.com/xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Thanks,
The Facebook Team

So just hit reply on this e-mail and type away your response.

A really nice feature, since most of the time I read the comment first via email, not on Facebook itself - no matter if mobile, iPod or Web. So being able to reply right from my mail-client is really convenient.

However, the one notification one cannot reply to via email, is a notification from a facebook message itself. If someone sends you a message on facebook, you have to log on to facebook and reply their.
Odd.
Half-hearted.
Please...

Urgent feature request for Google Reader

If some Google engineer reads this...(yeah, very likely):
Could you please do a quick hack in Google Reader that would allow me to "mark all items about iPad as read and boring".

That'd be helpful right now.

Cowardly admin

How nice... I got this error message on a webserver just now:

Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, /dev/null and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

The server administrator /dev/null... didn't know that admins are that self-conscious nowadays.

Regex Pitfall

I guess this was the first time ever that I had to search/match/replace with regular expressions across line boundaries.
Not the usual multi-line ("/m") operation; quite the contrary, I wanted the source string to be treated as one single line regardless of newline-characters in it.

In other words: the dot (".") should also match a newline.

Not that easy, it turns out.
Quoting from the Regex Tutorial:

The dot matches a single character, without caring what that character is. The only exception are newline characters. In all regex flavors discussed in this tutorial, the dot will not match a newline character by default. So by default, the dot is short for the negated character class [^\n] (UNIX regex flavors) or [^\r\n] (Windows regex flavors).

Changing this behavior is actually language dependent.
Since I needed it within JavaScript (XUL/Thunderbird) I had to revert to a [\s\S] instead of the .

JavaScript [does] not have an option to make the dot match line break characters. In
those languages, you can use a character
class such as [\s\S] to match any character.
This character matches a character that is either a whitespace
character (including line break characters), or a character that is not a
whitespace character. Since all characters are either whitespace or
non-whitespace, this character class matches any character.

Weird. Unreadable. Requires a comment.
But it works.

Who is Facebook afraid of?

These days Facebook is really pushy and aggressive to get the data of your contacts who are not yet on Facebook.

Exhibit A: Facebook FriendFinder

Facebook seems to shove the FriendFinder into your face these days, no matter when or where on Facebook you are at the time.

For a time there even were almost full-size banners on top of the main Facebook page (stream) for it.



Exhibit B: The new iPhone app

The new Version 3.1 of the FaceBook app for the iPhone allows you to sync your iPhone Contacts with Facebook. Now as nice and handy this may be for syncing the Facebook contact information (picture, phone number, address, birthday, ...) down to your iPhone I'd never let all my phone contacts by synced up to Facebook.

Well, I don't have an iPhone (yet), but a - in this regard - functionally equivalent iPod Touch, which obviously does not contain as much contact information as my phone. And the E71 app for the iPhone is way to broken to ever get such a sync feature.

So this is not a problem for me, but I'd not even sync my handful of iPod contacts to Facebook. Even if I could.

They are really kind of desperate to get all your contacts data, i.e. your whole social graph.

New Austrian ecard still not a Citizen Card

So during my previous attempt to activate my national health card ("ecard") as a citizen card ("Bürgerkarte") I was told that this very most recent version of the ecard was not yet supported and I should check back in January.

Guess what I did today...

Well to cut a long story short, it still does not work.

Why did I even bother to try...
I've been working in the IT industry for the last 20 years now [1], always on - sort of - the production side: vendor, developer, ... never really on the consumer side...

So I should know what a vendor or developer means by saying "in January". It's rather like February 12th or so... and not January 18th... duuuh... should've known... been there...

So, if anyone cares to try this "in January", i.e. before 18-Feb-2010, just be so kind and post a comment with your results here.

--
[1] OMG...that long?

Show sender's picture in Thunderbird 3

With Thunderbird 3 you now can store a photo to each contact.

Nice feature, but totally pointless without an option to actually display this photo next to the emails.

Now for the good part: there is an add-on to do exactly this...

Contact Photos :: Add-ons for Thunderbird

It looks if it can find the sender of the email in any of your address books, and there is a picture stored with this record. If so, it will be displayed in the message header. If not, a dummy picture is displayed.

You can control the behavior a bit...

I know the Mac folks will now brag that their Apple Mail software could do this for years... And you are right... It was overdue.

Now all we need is a way to easily collect those photos (with gravatars not being that popular). Since the address book in Thunderbird still lacks usability, there is of course no way to simple drag and drop images into the address book... Maybe I'll hack this...

Quiz: What Do Facebook Quizzes Know About You?

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) wrote an published a Facebook app that reveals how much data a Facebook app can actually see from you and your friends.
Nice thing, is that they made it in the form of the quite popular quizzes.

Read the story here, or try it yourself (if you are on Facebook) ...
HINT: always choose the worst possible (from a privacy point of view) answer... that will help...

Turns out that an app can see almost everything, regardless of what you say in your privacy settings, and - more shockingly - it can see a lot about your friends as well... and they don't even know about it...
The ACLU quiz demonstrates this by actually showing you some of your friends data.

Go directly the quiz on Facebook.

Key take away:
So some of your profile data might even be read by an app that a friend is using... you don't even know it, much less authorized it.

So:
#1 Don't take those quizzes
#2 Accepting a friend request on Facebook just got one more thing to consider ('cause you don't know what apps they use)

Sees Scott McNealy was right: "There is no privacy - get over it" [1].
I still hate that attitude... but he seems to be more and more right...

--
[1] there are slight variations of this quote... but all to the same effect.

Gartner acquires Burton Group

Oha, coming home from a 3 days vacation (not even that offline) I stumbled upon this
Burton Group Identity Blog: Gartner acquires Burton Group: "Gartner acquires Burton Group"

Scheduled Sync for the E71

Just when I was about to rant about the lack of periodic or automatied calendar sync on the E71 (over-the-air/OTA via SyncML) I did in fact google for it and found that the Bergamot project on Google Code does provide exactly this.

The program is called SWIM and this is what it does:

Swim is a utility for automatic periodic synchronization of data with internet servers such as Google Calendar (through GooSync), Mobical, Zyb, ScheduleWorld, Ovi or any system running Funambol. It makes use of the existing SyncML support in the system, and adds timing capabilities, something both UIQ and S60 mysteriously lack! You can set it to sync your data every 15 minutes, every hour, every 4 hours, every 12 hours, daily, or weekly.

Swim uses the existing Synchronization functionality and profiles from the E71... which is cool, so there is no difference if you sync manually through the menu or run the synchronization scheduled.

The how-to section is quite ok... here are some tips and tricks from my installation, though:

• For my E71 I needed version 0.41 from the download section. The more recent v 0.50 did not do anything.
  The tricky part is, getting the beast signed using the Symbian Open Signed Online tool.
  This is also well explained in the How To Install section: just upload the unsigned .SIS file, download the signed .SIS file and install this to the phone.
• However, I ran in to the problem that my phone said that the certificate of the signed .SIS file was “not yet” valid. A google search for that revealed that this is a common problem with - as it seems - the clock of the signing server and the phone being too far out of sync. The trick is, to put the phone 1 day ahead, install the software, and the put the phone back today.
  Frankly, I don't really see why I should (self-)sign software at all, if the only way to install it, is with a kludge like that.
• Anyway, after that it ran just fine, I put it to 30min synchronization interval for starts and thats what it did... After a day of observation (without any problem) I put it to 12hrs, which is sufficient to have my corporate (Sun) calender synched with my phone...

So Hooray and thanks to the Bergamot project...

Extra Folder Columns :: Add-ons for Thunderbird

For the Thunderbird 3 users out there:

You'll probably be missing the Total/Unread/Size columns in your folder pane...
To get it back, install the Extra Folder Columns :: Add-ons for Thunderbird add-on.
It was specifically created for TB3, but did not support the latest betas and RCs... Now with version 0.4 it supports the final 3.0 release and also works with the smart folders...

Easiest way as usual: open the link in Firefox (or any browser), open the add-on dialog in Thunderbird and then drag the "Download Now" button from the browser to the add-on list in Thunderbird. Voila. No need to download and open the file afterwards (unless you want to archive the .xpi on your local disk)

Now that Thunderbird 3 is out...

... maybe the extension/add-on developers could update their extensions...

The beta-phase was long enough and gave ample time to update... (like I did).

btw: here are the release notes of TB3 in case you haven't installed it yet.

Austrian eCard vs Citizen Card

The Austrian Federal Government and their e-government guys really want to push the Austrian Citizen Card ("Bürgerkarte") for all online transactions.
One step to - allegedly - make getting your citizen card easier is the online activation for the public healh-card ("e card") almost every citizen owns.
Should be really easy:

• get your smart card reader (like the one I got, even subsidized for ecard holders)
• install the drivers
• install the citizen card SW
• log in to the one application where you already have a validated/trusted login, namely "finanz online", the online application for your (federal) tax declaration and (more importantly) returns.
• and from there you can activate your ecard as a citizencard.
  (if you will: extend the already established trust from finanz online to the new card)
  

Nicely summarized here.

Attempt #1:
My ecard already containt a PIN or some file, which did not allow the activation of the card.
Called the ecard hotline, was sent a replacement card. Very competent, very friendly.

Attempt #2 - with the new card:
Still got an error message...

Die Bürgerkartenumgebung hat bei der letzen Anfrage folgenden Fehler geliefert: Unbekannter Infoboxbezeichner. SESSION ID :

Searched the fora, found some entries, but no solution (other than re-install).

A-trust say, they don't care, because it's not their software... (very supportive, thanks)
However when you call the toll support number (1,09 EUR per minute, !!!) they are willing to help.

I told the call center agent (very friendly, very competent again) the error message, and he immediately went:

Agent: "Do you have a very new ecard?"

me: "yes, like 4 days old"

Agent: "One with the embossed braille printing on it?"

me: "yes, cause my old one did not work".

Agent: "Well the new one won't work either, because they changed the chip on it, and we don't yet support it. You have to wait until January."

me: "Ok. Thanks. But can you please have that info posted to a forum of FAQ?"

Agent: "Oh, good idea. I'll pass that on."

Still major hurdles... I simply cannot imagine my mother [1] going through that process.

So, still way to go for proper e-government in Austria.

--
[1] both my real mother, as well as the proverbial mother that appears in all technology problems.

Facebook app for the E71 - just crap

So I tried the newly released facebook app for the E71. And after the first disappointment, I wanted to post a side-by-side feature-by-feature comparison against the iPhone/iPod facebook app here.

Well, I won't.
Simply because the app is such a crap and lacks every single conceivable feature, that I won't waste the space here with a 50 [1] rows table that only states iPhone "yes", Nokia "no".

Just forget it.

--
[1] roughly, could easily be extended to 120 ;-)