Category: Uncategorized

Philips Streamium

I got my hands on a Philips Streamium. Not because I wanted one, but because I’m going to write a review for our broadband portal. I really wondered whether it was possible to use the device without the stupid musicmatch jukebox, so I went behind the scene using a network sniffer.

I will post a deeper review of what I’ve found (its just plain old XML over HTTP) later this day, because now I have to do some real work. Till then, you can have a look at the exchange between my musicmatch and the streamium here (and before you ask: I really have bought all the CD’s from which I have ripped the MP3’s you will see in the log. I rarely ever download music from P2P Networks).

Two more bugs… gone!

No. This is not about the new iPods, Apple announced today (of course I’ve ordered myself a 30GB one, but this really is another history).

I’m just very pleased that two Bugs in jEdit’s current CVS-Version that have been fixed by Slava the same day, I’ve reported them. This is just great!

If you are in need of a good editor, go and get jEdit!

Mario…

It just came to my mind: I am through with Super Mario Advance 2 on my GameBoy Advance SP – at least, I’ve finished all 96 goals. No I’ve only to get all Yoshi-coins, but when I think of the dammed special world, I come to the conclusion that I’ll possibly never manage to get those coins.

That’s nice…

You may know CrossOver Office from CodeWeavers: It’s a commercial Wine-Distribution specificially targeted at supporting MS Office and a couple of other often used Windows applications under Linux.

As you can imagine, the CodeWeavers people are implementing featrues for their product independent of the Wine community but feed them back to the OpenSource project once a new release of CrossOver Office is released. This practice makes sense as it allows them to get media coverage by announcing lots of not-there-before features, but still work together with the community.

Just now that CrossOver Office 2.0 got released, there was a thread on the Wine-mailinglist because someone tried to implement tablet support for the Open Source Version only to learn, that it is already there in CrossOver Office. The changes got commited to the Wine-Code, but there was soem discussion why it did not get announced to the community so sensless duplicated work could have been prevented.

I was really happy to see the response of the guy at CodeWeaver. I just hope, every company would react to and work with the community in that way…

Read a conclusion of the thread here

A name is a name… or not?

I really saw this mess coming when I read the announcement that Mozilla’s Phoenix will be called Firebird for now: Firebird is a spin off of the once open-sourced Interbase-Database Server by Borland existing for three years now and using the name “Firebird” since then.

As you can imagine, the Firebird (DB)-People were not too happy about this – Phoenix had to be renamed because of a naming conflict and the new solution still creates one – but this time it’s not a commercional product it’s conflicting with – its another Open Source project.

I can understand both sides:

Mozilla
The name Firebird has been checked by Netscapes/AOLs legal departement (why have they not noticed this? or is it maybe that they thought it would not matter?) and another name-change would again involve the legal departement which won’t please neither the BIOS vendor Phoenix not the Mozilla-Team as they will not release another milestone called phoenix.

Firebird
Firebrid already suffers from not really be known in the public. The RDBMS it spun off is known mainly by delphi-developers and neither Interbase nor Firebird were often in the press these days. A more known product with the same name will further divert attention. And the psycological reason: The name Firebird was chosen based on the real political mess around open-sourcing Interbase and is, in my oppinion, a very well chosen name.

Why I can understand the arguments on both sides, I can neither offer a solution pleasing for both projects (besides the question why Phoenix is not to be called simply “Mozilla” – after all, the Browser-Component in the Mozilla Suite is to be replaced by Firebird (the browser) anyway) nor can I understand the way the folks around Firebird (the DB) react to the problem (and here – an entry in Dave Hyatts blog). War is never a solution – never!

Long time no see

I really should have more discipline concerning this little weblog ;-)

Just some notes for now:

P800 and the calendar
About a week ago, after I’ve updated the SonyEricsson P800 Sync-Software to 1.3.1, it stopped synchronizing my calendar entries. There was no error message, but it did not work either – it id not touch the calendar entries at all. Then I performed a full synchronisation, overwriting the phone with the effect of having no entries at all on the phone.

Reinstalling the Sync-Software did not help. What finally had effect was reinstalling both Office (with outlook), cleaning the Registry from Office-Settings and the Sync-Software (first removing everything and then reinstalling it). This process took about 3 hours (and many of them figuring out how to fix it without having to reinstall everything). Stupid Software.

iPod and Linux
I am running Gentoo Linux using Kernel 2.4.20-gentoo-r2. Although I had HFS and IEE1394-Support int the kernel, one of the modules (sbp2 I think) oopsed when I plugged my Mac-Formated iPod and modprobe‘d ohci1394. Reformating the iPod with the FAT32-Filesystem (use the Windows-iPod-Updater from apple.com, but remove MacDrive if it’s installed – else your iPod will not be detected) did help me with this so I finally have a device to quickly exchange large amounts of data between home and office.

Browsers (1)
Apple recently released Beta 2 of Safari. Looks great – especially the Tabbed Brwosing-Feature. Too bad I still don’t have my own Mac.

Mario
I’m in World 6 of Super Mario Advance 2 and the game really is great. If only the Special World would not be so difficult to master…

Browsers (2)
I recently tried out the latest build of Phoenix which will replace the browser-Part in the Mozilla-Suite someday. It really looks great and is a pleasure to use. I am thinking of dropping Mozilla entirely and use Phoenix for the web an Becky! for email.

So. That’s half a month of notable internet expirience. I promise to report more often in the future!

Just like SMS – only cheaper

When surfing around on my-symbian.com, I came across myBuddies, a free ICQ client for the P800. Most surprisingly it works quite well (I did my first testing with an active link to my desktop PC to avoid senseless GPRS charges).

What may look like a little toy is quite useful actually: GPRS connections are payed for transmitted data not for connection time so I can stay connected to the network without much cost and reach most of the people I usually send SMS to via the internet.

So let’s do a little calculation how many caracters I can send via ICQ to be as expensive as an SMS:

Swisscom currently charges CHF 0.20 for a SMS (max. 160 characters as you know). According to the current price list you get 10KBytes GPRS transfer volume for the same price which corresponds to 10240 Bytes. Subtract a protocol overhead of about 20%, you still get 8192 Bytes for the same price as an SMS – that’s 51 times cheaper than an SMS!

Drawback: Swisscom charges at least 10KB for every connection, so I will try to stay connected ;-)

Of course, if I’d switch to Sunrise it would get even cheaper: There is no 10 KB-Limit and it’s just CHF 7.50 per MByte (CHF 0.07 per 10 KBytes) so it’s 3 times cheaper than Swisscom [note to myself: I really should switch! NOW!] which means 8192*3 = 24576 Bytes for the same price as an SMS.

You get the idea how cool this seemingly senseless ICQ-Application for the P800 can be ;-)

If only someone would release a Jabber client allowing me to connect to my own pet jabber-server… Or maybe it’s time to really begin brushing up my Java-knowledge?

Mail for Windows as I like it

I had a problem.

My Problem was to still utilize Windows (I have customers requiring me to build windows-programs for them) but having a decent mail program anyway. With decent I mean that it must at least support the following featureset (in the order of decreasing importance):

  1. IMAP-Support. Not just IMAP-Support, but a good one with things as storing Sent-Mail on the server, using the server to search for messages (although I doubt the efficiency of this as long as I am using Courier on the server side. Searching through 10’000+ textfiles without any index whatsoever is not what *I* call efficient), but also some kind of local caching so that opening folders does not require to get all headers again (which disqualifies Mulberry [and Mutt on Linux]).
  2. Threading Support. I want to have nicely sorted message threads and I want to see a real tree structure
  3. Correct formatting of messages. I absolutly don’t want a thing like Outlook Express that does not allow proper quoting, mime-headers, line-breaks and so on…
  4. Multiple Identities. I have a corporate email-adress I use for customers and a more private one, I used to subscribe to some mailinglists. At least I need to be able to enter more than one Email-Adress per Account (Mullbery does this) or even better to tell the program to use different sender addresses depending on the currently opened folder.
  5. Adressbook synchronisation. As a reader of this weblog you may have seen that I am quite a “synchronization guy”. I want the addresses from my P800 to be in my Mail program. How does not matter for me.
  6. Checking for new Mail in subfolders. I am subscribed to a whole lot of mailinglists and I filter them already on the server (using Exim as MTA, this can be done even without spawning many subprocesses for every message). Many Mail Programs insist on just checking the “INBOX”-Folder for new messages despite the fact that Courier would provide a new message count for every folder.
  7. Color Coding of Messages (Quotations ins different colors).

    I’ve been using Mozilla Mail so far and it fails to support items 4, 5 and 6 in the list above. Mulberry which I tried for a month or two did even fail so support item 1. Calling mutt via ssh on the mailserver also worked, but I had problems with 1, 5 and 6.

    No the point of this article is, that I’ve finally found what I was looking for for the last three years. A Mail client for Windows supoprting the whole list above! The tool is called “Becky!” and comes from a japanese company called RimArts. Only the import of my adresses required a bit of hacking, but everything else (and even more like the “Mailinglist Manager”, the excellent editor, the possibility to use external editors, …) is there.

    Importing the adresses involved a tool called OutPod which is thought for getting a vCard-File out of outlook to store it on the iPod. Becky! has an import-filter for vCard-Files, so this worked nicely (Mozilla *does* have an import-tool for Outlook, but it did not work on my system).

    Just go and give Becky! a try. It’s great!