Argh Orange!

• They stopped sending me paper bills without me agreeing or even realising.
• They informed of this badly unwanted decision in some inscrutable marketing speak on one of my bills.
• They secretly charged £11/month for a travel bundle for 8 months when they assured me it would be stopped after one month.
• When I called up to find out how many minutes and texts I had in my package, the Indian call centre gave me the utterly wrong information.
• They send me a text message every month saying they have checked, and I’m on the best package for my phone usage, but then I find out I’m only using on average 114 minutes out of 600 free, and about 5 of my unlimited texts. So they lied.
• They cancelled my online account without warning because they said I didn’t use it often enough. Despite sending me multiple texts about other issue, they failed to warn me about this (ludicrous) policy.

Eclipse difficulty

I’ve heard Eclipse is a useful IDE. It looks very powerful, extensible and an active project.

Yet I can’t get the features I want to work. I’ve failed several times to set up these features:

• XML syntax highlighting
• Perl plugin “EPIC”

There’s a killer feature I’d love to get working as well:

• Step-through XSLT debugging

There seems to be an XSLT debugger in the WebTools package but I’m damned if I can understand how to get WebTools running.

Update: Oxygen IDE at least does syntax highlighting and keyword-completion. However, the syntax highlighting doesn’t seem quite as sophisticated and configurable as vim’s is. I also haven’t figured out how to turn off all the other annoying pop-up features.

Word 2007 language stupidity

I’m using Word 2007 on Windows Vista. I have two documents that are both set to the language: English (United Kingdom) all the way through.

I copy and paste text from one to the other.

Word changes it into the language English (United States).

WTF!?

TFL journey planner is useful, but stupid

Have you noticed that the Transport For London journey planner website actually gets things pretty wrong?

http://journeyplanner.tfl.gov.uk

e.g. going from W12 7TP to Charing Cross station: Walk to the tube, change once and you’re there. 37 mins. Fine.

But if I want to go from W12 7TP to WC2N 4HG, a short walk of not more than 5 minutes from Charing Cross station, it tells me a different route, this time taking 51 minutes. That’s not right!

It seems to work best if you try a variety of options and nearby locations, then use your own judgement to work out which is best.

Portable external hard drive filesystem?

How should one format a 500Gb Maxtor USB2 external drive for read/write use on both Windows and Mac?

I tried using NTFS, but you can’t write to it on the Mac, except using MacFUSE and NTFS-3G Read/Write Driver which *totally* corrupted all the data, after the computer crashed in the middle of writing to it.

I tried using FAT32, which had to be done using Swissknife, because 500Gb is too large for Windows to format in FAT32 natively, but it was immediately totally corrupted on the Mac.

It eventually worked though.

IMAP access to Gmail on your Blackberry

Orange told me that Gmail IMAP on the Blackberry Pearl they sold me is “not supported”, and couldn’t tell me how to set it up. In fact, it can be configured to work.

What you need to do is set up a new email account with an email such as anything_at_all @ site about nothing .com. The “site about nothing” part needs to be a domain that has a mail record set up, but don’t use gmail, hotmail or yahoo for this because the blackberry will set the mail server automatically without giving you the chance to choose IMAP.

It will tell you it cannot configure the email account for you, and offer the option of configuring it yourself.  You will have to follow through 3 or 4 pages saying the same thing, but you will reach a form that lets you enter all the fields you need to. Go on to enter the true details of your Gmail account, using mail server: imap.googlemail.com, port: 993.

It might be a little slow for your email actions to be synchronised between your blackberry device and your Gmail account, but it really does work! Now when I mark an email as read on my blackberry, it is also marked as read in my main Gmail account.

Crunch

The credit crunch. I thought this was just a media invention until Lehman Brothers closed down. 

Then I started to read about sub-prime loans, NINAs and NINJAs, world savings of 70 trillion usd, and I realised that there was a housing bubble, and it just burst. 

There is a very informative and humorous piece at thislife.com called The Giant Pool Of Money. Go and read it or listen to the recording.

http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=355

Blackberry Pearl review

This phone is great! Just get one, it does everything. Well, almost everything. It’s a million times better than Windows phones. The brilliant predictive text software makes sure you don’t even notice you’re using a new half-qwerty style keyboard.

But I must complain anyway:

• the email message system is a bit too ‘automatic’. By that I mean all received, sent and drafted emails are all in the same place: your inbox. Why they couldn’t have separate folders for sent and drafted email is beyond me. There is an SMS outbox but no email outbox. But there is a good customisable ’saved search’ function. So to see only mail you’ve sent, is as simple as typing alt-s, once you’ve set it up. If you don’t mind all that then its pretty cool because you can have your work and personal email, along with SMS, MMS, instant message conversations and saved web pages all in one list. 

• you can’t easily save attachments. Well you can save the email they’re attached to, but not the individual files. There’s some commercial software called BeamBerry, of which I have a 10-day trial, but its says that .htm and .jpg are “unsupported types”. So it’s not really possible to organise your files like we’re used to doing in a graphical file explorer program.
• I can’t figure out how to get the IMAP feature of synchronising ‘read message’ status from the phone to my web gmail account. Orange tell me it’s “not supported”. Maybe I can make my own IMAP proxy server that could do it!

Moonfruit flash

Moonfruit seems to be a way to build websites entirely from Flash.

It’s a good thing Google now indexes Flash!

But how good is Google’s Flash indexer, really?

BBC Olympics mobile site

I thought I’d see if watching video on my mobile phone via the BBC Olympics mobile site worked. Predictably, it didn’t work at all.

I was using the following technology stack:

• HTC Touch Diamond
• Windows Mobile 6.1
• Opera Mini 9.5 (build 1184)
• Windows Media Player 10, Version 10.3 Build 19591

The error was:

Server or data time out; tap play to reconnect.