Today you would have been 63 years old; I hope you're chillin' wherever you are. Your two grandchildren are driving me nuts sometimes, but I guess this is payback :-)

Last week I was faced with the not-so-simple task of moving a lot of stuff from my old SonyEricsson C905 mobile phone (Symbian) to my brand new, shining, and spiffy HTC Wildfire. As reported previously, this task isn't as simple as it sounds. Parting with the C905 is hard. It is the one phone I've owned over the years that has never let me down, and its camera still beats most cell phone cameras, past and present. Parting with something you've gotten used to and come to like is always hard, and when the conversion process to another piece of equipment presents you with a massive mountain to climb, things don't get any easier :-)

Moving from a Symbian based cell phone to a "smart" Android phone is not a straight forward process.

MyPhoneExplorer to the rescue. Oh do read on .. :-)

Continue reading "How MyPhoneExplorer helps Android / HTC / Droid / X10 owners"

According to the chronicles of our past (i.e. "history"), Miyamoto Musashi was without a doubt a very successful Samurai warrior with a distinct style.

Whether or not he considered himself successful in the sense that he didn't die a warrior's death is up for discussion, but his book, The Book of Five Rings, and his teachings in the swordsmanship style The Art of War, many aspects of the Book of Five Rings can be applied in everyday life, in business, in your personal life, etc. Some of the writings aren't entirely clear in their meaning, in fact they sometimes sound like a fortune cookie (this may be a translation issue), but if you go back to them once or twice, it's somewhat easier to get a grasp of the meaning.

The thin red line throughout the entire book (my own interpretation) is "Stay focused and dedicated and you will develop and evolve, and possibly reach your goals, if they are true goals". The book is, however, much broader in the subjects covered than those in my personal reflection.

Read it!

Some other links:
musashi.altervista.org/pages_eng/
samuraiconsulting.ca/5rings/
feedbooks.com/book/3953.pdf (PDF)

popuri.us is a tool to check at-a-glance the link popularity of any site based on its ranking (Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, Technorati etc.), social bookmarks (del.icio.us, etc), subscribers (Bloglines, etc) and more! Simple, nice, clean!

All we need now is a zillion more ranking places to show up on popuri.us and we're home :-)

popuri.us

There are a few books out for CakePHP development. The main problem with them is that they're fairly old. There's also a book on the way (2010) that has not yet been released. And then there's Matt Curry's completely free CakePHP book for those that have managed to grasp the basics of CakePHP and want a guide to somewhat more advanced topics.

One can only congratulate Matt on a great idea and implementation; and what's not to like about a free book about CakePHP development?

An introduction to the book here: www.pseudocoder.com/free-cakephp-book/
Matt Curry's original blog post about it here: www.pseudocoder.com/archives/2009/05/13/free-cakephp-e-book-super-awesome-advanced-cakephp-tips/
The book's direct download link is here: www.pseudocoder.com/Super_Awesome_Advanced_CakePHP_Tips.pdf

More about CakePHP can of course be found on www.cakephp.org

Matt has also released a number of CakePHP plugins and code snippets here github.com/mcurry.


Thanks Matt!

Being an avid Linux user, I have come to "need" Xmouse functionality in my daily battles on the desktop (hmm.. that sounds like I could be describing something else, but I'm not).

Simply put, Xmouse lets you shift input focus from one window to another simply by moving the mouse pointer over the window to which you want to give focus, without raising the newly focused window to the top. This sounds like a lame requirement, but once you get used to it, you will realize its advantages of having to click on a window to give it input focus (or cycle through 20 windows using Alt-Tab or similar). Of course, if you're a "single threader", you may never have more than one window open at any given time, in which case this tip is not for you :-)

Anyway; for Windows XP, Microsoft had a utility called "Powertoys" and "Xmouse", where you could set this behavior. Obviously, they didn't remove the functionality in Windows 7, they just made it harder to activate it. Why Microsoft after a zillion years of desktop and window management hasn't made this a standard feature, configurable via the Control Panel is beyond my comprehension.

Open the Windows 7 registry by launching regedit.

go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop
Edit UserPreferenceMask value to be 9F 3E 07 80 12 00 00 00

Also in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop
Edit ActiveWndTrkTimeout, change 'Base' to Decimal and put in 25 as the 'Value Data'
(the original post says 150 here, but 25 works much better IMHO)

Log out and back in again, and Bob's your uncle.

Kudos for the solution found here.

Happy 10th Birhtday!

It's hard to believe, but 10 years ago on this day, a little rascal named Alexander was born! Now he's not so small anymore; but a rascal all the same :-)

To all the people I've disappointed,
To all the people I've hurt,
To all the people I didn't stop to say "Thank you" to,
To all the people I've taken for granted,

I'm sorry, and I hope I can make it up to you somehow.

To all the people that have shared my tears,
To all the people who need me to share theirs,

I'm honored, thank you.

To all my friends who cannot be here,
To those who have helped me in the past,
To those who are helping me now,
To my Mom whom I miss beyond explanation,
To my Sister and my Brother,

I miss you, and I wish you the very best for Christmas.

Merry Christmas!

I am, I'm me.

I was just about to go ahead and order my Popcorn Hour C-200 when I ran into the EVA9150 from Netgear. And I'm happy I did. I had been keeping an eye on the Popcorn Hour since the first revision came out, and later the revised A110.

While waiting for the C-200 to come along, I had been using a Shuttle computer, placed next to the amplifier under the 42" Samsung LCD-TV. On the Shuttle, I was running Mythbuntu, a specialized Ubuntu-derivative focused on audio and video. Coupled with a Logitech diNovo mini keyboard, it made for a nice multimedia player. The only real problem was that the rest of the family wouldn't use it without me being around, and that sort of defeats the purpose for me. Sure, a souped up Shuttle computer doing screaming eagles at 3+ GHz with 4GB of RAM and a 1TB harddrive, with a Geforce-based graphics card with HDMI output, makes for a sweet media center, but if I'm the only one using it, it's a pretty useless heap of hardware :-)

I'm typically not a fan of the major manufacturers' attempt at putting these "complete solutions" into a box and slapping their label on it. They usually miss out on something vital, or corner you with mediocre hardware performance or lack of flexibility. This is one of the reasons I've been holding off on my purchase. I have to say that after having obtained the EVA9150 Digital Entertainer Elite from Netgear, some of my skepticism has been turned into appreciation for the fact that "complete solutions" doesn't have to be a bad thing. This has nothing to do with the fact that I actually put up money for it, had it not been useful, I would have gotten rid of it in a heartbeat.

Simply put, the EVA9150 works. And that's no small feat.

It plays my audio collection, mostly based on MP3 media. It plays my video collection, based on a number of common and not-so-common video formats, including full HD/1080p. It performs well on my N-draft home wireless network. It handles plugin USB-media. It handles configuration and updates via the Internet very well. It handles images, RSS-feeds, Internet Radio, Youtube, and a few other nice things quite well. From standby to ready, it takes but a few seconds. A cold start takes a while longer, but nothing that annoys anyone. My bundle included a 500GB Seagate Pipeline SATA drive, and a remote control. The interface is intuitive and simple enough for just about anyoen to use.

So.. isn't there anything that annoys me about the EVA9150? Well, there are a few things that I would have done differently, and there is one really annoying issue.

Performance when plugging in external USB-media sucks, in a word. I was using an external USB-drive to move parts of my multimedia collection between systems, because it's not feasible to transfer 500GB of data over a wireless network. I cannot for the life of me figure out why Netgear has not managed to boost USB connectivity to a better level of performance.

I would have made room for one more drive bay. An alternative would have been to have a harddrive inside the box and one in a pluggable drive bay. Sure, I can replace the drive with a 2TB drive, when there is one that the EVA9150 works with, but having the option of two drives still sounds like a better idea.

The only other thing that I don't quite understand is why Netgear has chosen to force DTS-sound to be passthru only. The appliance can downsample other high quality audio to 2-channel stereo output, but when it comes to DTS, it will only pass it straight through to the S/PDIF digital output connector. I understand that it requires CPU power to do DTS downsampling on-the-fly, but I would think this to be a nice challenge for the developers, rather than an obstacle.

Summary: You want a media center box that just about anyone in your family can manage to handle, that plays most media formats and just makes sense.. take a serious look at the Netgear EVA9150 Digital Entertainer Elite. On a scale 1-10 where 10 is the highest, I'd give the EVA9150 a 9.5 rating. Well done Netgear!

Something that has annoyed me for quite some time with WordPress is its inability to figure out which temporary path to use when installing new themes and plugins, as well as when you upgrade WordPress itself.

On most servers where I use WordPress, the "global temporary" /tmp is not available, and this is a good thing. Unfortunately, it causes some problems for WordPress since the default tits-up action is to default to /tmp when all else fails. That in itself isn't that big of a problem, but IMHO, there's a more appropriate way of figuring out where to put temporary files: use the configured UPLOAD path. And when I say the "configured UPLOAD path", I mean the one PHP thinks it should be using.

Why is this a good idea? Well.. a) the system administrator has configured it like it is configured for a reason, b) there's a fair chance WordPress can actually write to this directory, and c) it makes WordPress so much more flexible in multi-site environments.

Fortunately, there is a way to get WordPress to habla.

Find and edit your wp-config.php file in the WordPress root. Somewhere (it doesn't matter where, just as long as you put it inside the , put this line:

define ('WP_TEMP_DIR', ini_get ('upload_tmp_dir'));

Save the file and Bob's your uncle.

I cannot tell you what awaits in the
shadows of my mind, because you would
not understand.

Few people have been in my shadows.

But you have reached so far into my
soul that I am certain that you will
see what lies beyond.

I'm not asking you to comprehend what
you see, nor am I asking you to listen
to me when I describe what you see.

You have to feel it, because if you're
not feeling it, then you're not seeing
it.

I am grateful, without shame or debt.

My pain is without end, but it is not
all dark because my happiness is also
without end. Some people call it
bipolar, I call it life; because I do
not know another life.

But then again, those people have never
lived my life.

I cannot say it in a less complicated way:

I love you.
I love you.
I love you.


"In my shadows", joho 2009-11-08

For a number of reasons, I have Telia's "mobile broadband" service for my laptop (or netbook); it works as it should, and apart from being too slow, I have no issues with the technical delivery. Mobile connectivity, however, is so much more than a "broadband on a USB-stick".


Mobile roaming

Some time ago, EU put limitations on how much money the various operators could charge with their so-called "roaming services". This covered call costs. But what happened to data? Are you telling me they spent EUR-millions on meetings, working groups, drafts, arguing, etc. and they did not do this for data communication charges? Apparently, some sort of instrument is to be put in place by 2010 that will also cover data communication charges when roaming. After consumers and companies have spent a few more billion EUR on these data transfers. Well done EU, go go go! There's nothing like fast and responsive politicians to build confidence. And there's nothing like politicians that keep up with the times. Can you say INTERCONNECTIVITY? INTERNET? You may have heard of it. Läkerol doesn't make people talk; the Internet does.


Airport surfing

Airports and airlines need to get their act together. It is ridiculous to sit in an airport and not be able to connect to the internet unless you pull out your credit card and pay anywhere from EUR 3 to EUR 10 for an hour worth of internet connectivity. Seriously.. do you really want to sit with your credit card "out in the open", typing in the numbers and other details, in an airport? Of course, if I go into the executive lounge, the wireless connectivity is "free". Why not simply add this to the ticket price if you can't deliver this as a free service. It's an insult to travellers all around the world. Most people don't have stop-overs longer than two hours.


Telia

So I have Telia as my mobile broadband provider. So I go on a business trip and happen to stop-over at the Copenhagen airport in Denmark. Being greeted by the "Welcome to Copenhagen Aiport WLAN, the cost for one hour access is ..." banner when I open up my web browser, made me reach for the "USB-stick" that has Telia written on it. I connect it to the computer and initiate an internet connection. Telia is a pretty big operator in Scandinavia. Shortly after having connected to the 3G network, I receive an SMS to the computer that states "Welcome to Telia Network services Nordic AB; the following rates apply..", and in the midst of that text message, it says "data traffic rate, 25 kr/MB". That's roughly EUR 2,4 per megabyte! The reason I cannot use my flat rate service is because I'm roaming. I'm roaming with the SAME COMPANY that I have a flat rate subscription with in Sweden. Way to go EU, way to go Telia (other operators do the same thing, because they can).


It would not surprise me one bit if the EU will put a cap on roaming charges levied on data traffic and word it in a way that'll make the operators find loopholes (again) and screw their customers out of more money. Something along the lines of "these limitations shall be placed on GSM, GPRS, and 3G/UMTS data traffic" -- making the operators jump up and down with joy since they're about to launch their 4G networks. Politicians should not make decisions about things they don't have the first f-ing clue about. But then again, if we did that, we wouldn't have any decisions made ever :-)


Affordable and efficient interconnectivity, regardless of my location, home network or provider, is a fundamental requirement to bring the EU, its people, and people outside the EU closer together. Calling these idiotic charge mechanisms trade obstacles is an understatement of no small proportions.


I would tell you to go to your local EU politician and yank their ear, if I thought they understood and cared about what you were talking about; but I have no such illusions.

Region 20, in 1986 :-)

Region,20,Sweden,S,Mats_Knuts,46-40-54-9189,2400,!#CT1/2/3/4
;
Host,501,Sweden,Malmoe_Sweden,Mats_Knuts,46-40-54-9189,2400,!#CT1/2/3/4
Pvt,4601,Day_Rainbow,Karlstad_Sweden,Conny_Jonsson,-Unpublished-,1200,#CT3
,4602,Sun_City_Fido,Karlstad_Sweden,Lennart_Svensson,46-54-16-6988,300,!CT1/2
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,4604,Yellow_PC,Stockholm_Sweden,Lennart_Eliasson,46-8-760-3312,300,CT1
Pvt,4605,Bell_annex,Karlstad_Sweden,Lennart_Svensson,-Unpublished-,1200,!B1/2:RE
,4606,PathFinder,Huskvarna_Sweden,Haakan_Bohman,46-36-13-0575,300,*CT1
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