Technorama

I'm with O2, but bizarrely the O2 website cannot configure my phone. I had to reset my phone the other day and rather than hang on the 0870 premium rate number to get them to send the MMS config again I researched online how to do it myself. The O2 site even tells me the configuration is coming, and the PIN, but it never arrives!

Fortunately the sonyericsson.com/support site has this Picture messaging (MMS) page which can send through the configuration. Sending through the settings and applying them to my K800i created in my Settings->Messaging->MMS a new profile, "O2 WAP GPRS", containing:

• Message server as: http://mmsc.mms.o2.co.uk:8002
• Select Internet profile "O2 WAP GPRS" (which the O2 Active had sent the correct config)

Other useful Sony Ericsson pages, email setup, and internet settings. Related O2 technical info is HM2K site.

Labels: Mobile

The net has changed a lot since I first jacked in back in '96. (I was using an Acorn A440 back i those days!). I remember the telegraph two page diagram I had on my wall then which illustrated what the World Wide Web was an how it was a layer on top of the "Internet" servers and dialup connections.

Things have moved on though, we don't say the World Wide Web any more, or even the WWW in capitals. We just say the "web" and some people even now say "interweb".

Another thing that has changed is we don't even use the www prefix on URLs often now, and to be frank they weren't necessary from the outset, as they are just an alias of the main domain. So take my site for instance, that runs on jguk.org's ANAME record, it would be the same machine that ran on www.jguk.org. I actually set up the www prefixed hostname to redirect after a short pause just so I don't miss any hits though still ;)

Of cause there is the counter view, take this one by HM2K. That doesn't mention that a hostname doesn't need to symbolise protocol information as well, ftp://jguk.org/ already symbolises the protocol nicely, so setting it up as ftp://ftp.jguk.org/ is not necessary. Likewise http://jguk.org/ already indicates that is a website URL because of the http:// prefix! HM2K follows the same logic that some programmers use by prefixing variable names with a string of letters to denote "type", when the development environment knows the type and will show it, and the debugger knows the type. As in programming, a prefix is really only good to denote scope, so internal.jguk.org is obviously not a public URL, and we will know that URL will not work from the internet.

URLs seem to be the wrong way around too (Tim Berners-Lee also said this recently I recall), they go from right -> left, alternate to the directory structure on the tail of the URL. When on the precursor to the internet people did write the other way, so UK.AC.CAM was probably the way Cambridge uni appeared!? (Should find example here!). So if we stuck to that with URLs, my website URL would actually be http://org/jguk/images/K800front.jpg

Returning to the WWW prefix debate, shorter URLs are also better for mobile devices! ;)

Labels: Future

Just had my K800i stop recording Answered, Dialled or Missed calls! I made two changes, one of which will have fixed it, try them in this order:

1. View call history ("All" tab), press "More" and select "Delete all". Press "Yes" if prompted. Restart the phone.
2. If step (1) doesn't work, go into Menu->Settings ("General" tab), choose "Master reset", then the "Reset settings" option (this doesn't delete contacts etc).

Do backup before you try any of these tips!

Labels: Mobile

The recent popular uprising in Myanmar, photos, is just the latest example of how photos and videos are what really raises awareness about tragic situations worldwide. The BBC have several photos in their picture power collection (some graphic images which people may find disturbing) Oklahoma baby, napalm attack in Vietnam, Misery in Darfur, Death of an Iraqi soldier, Death of a Viet Cong guerilla and Afghan Girl.

Media has brought us all more information and power with that, I hope it brings wider awareness and is not used to spin out a story.

Labels: Asia, Humanity

It's that time of year again, time to see if Java has improved enough to be usable. Facebook has a nifty image uploader applet written in Java. So I clicked through the Ubuntu updates to pickup Java Runtime Environment to give it a whirl.

All ok so far, but when I reload Firefox and login to Facebook I get this popup:

This would be expected if I was running in Japanese, but I'm not! This bug was present back in 2001 when I tried Java then. It is ignoring my LC_MESSAGES=en_GB.UTF-8 and erroneously picking up on my Japanese input setting (LC_CTYPE=ja_JP.UTF-8). Anyway... I clicked though, as I knew that [はい (Y)] means yes.

Then the directory of images pops up I notice that I can scroll down with my mouse wheel, but not up! and likewise I can click the down arrow on the directory window, but if I click the up arrow nothing! So need to keep dragging the slider up instead.

After painstakingly selecting all my images I click upload, and.... nothing happens.. a little upload popup appears and still nothing... its locked up, and its even crashed Firefox. Task watcher offers to Terminate it as its crashed, then I discover the Java VM crash log in my Home directory:

"An unexpected exception has been detected in native code outside the VM.
Unexpected Signal : 11 occurred at PC=0xAAD65FF5
Function=XFreeFontSet+0x15
Library=/usr/lib/libX11.so.6"

A quick disassemble later and we see the PC is resting on the line after a call:

0001afe0 :
1afe0: 55 push %ebp
1afe1: 89 e5 mov %esp,%ebp
1afe3: 53 push %ebx
1afe4: 83 ec 04 sub $0x4,%esp
1afe7: 8b 45 0c mov 0xc(%ebp),%eax
1afea: e8 78 63 ff ff call 11367 <_xvidtovisual@plt+0xe3>
1afef: 81 c3 19 c2 0a 00 add $0xac219,%ebx

Had a look and Blackdown Java site is down, and Sun's site has no email address to file this info. Looks like Java's not going to be usable for another year then.. They really need automated crash reporting with an email address we can pass feedback to them, so they don't remain where they are now.

Labels: GNU-Linux, Java

Problems with Tabbed browsing keep showing recently because websites account for their pages being tabbed.. so when I have two booking tabs open at TheTrainLine and choose my train in one tab, I go to the other tab and the train info has been lost because the other tab overwrote it! (known as a race condition)

The fix is for either websites with login and ordering process cookies and sessions to store and support multiple connections from the same user... or for browsers to neatly disguise each tab as a new session/browser instance. I favour the latter at present, as we're never going to be able to convince all website designers they should code in a way which supports tabs, and it seems neater to do it at the client side.

Personally, I really appreciate tabs for browsing reference information. However, I much prefer to have my web applications in separate windows so I can flick between them and paste text from a web page into my GMail compose window etc, and having different windows on each of my flat panels ;)

Labels: Future, Mozilla