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

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.

HTC Touch Diamond, personal review

I got a new mobile phone: the HTC Touch Diamond.

The good

• It comes in a nice black diamond shaped box. So shiny!
• The handset is very slim and light. Its case is great.
• The Teeter game using the accelerometer is so much fun!
• The camera images look really good, and it has auto-focus.
• Google maps with GPS… Wow! I could use up my 500Mb allowance in no time playing with this.
• Using Wifi & GPRS to browse websites is awesome, and it’s really easy to save pages for offline viewing.
• Hidden magnetic stylus that I didn’t even realise was there.
• It’s small and light enough

The bad

• The “TouchFLO 3D” menu is very slightly more jerky than I’d want it to be.
• The speakers are very tinny and too quiet, even on  loudest volume setting is pretty quiet.
• View emails and texts through the TouchFLO menu takes too many steps (there may be a shortcut I’m not aware of, but I have not been provided with a user manual, even after asking Orange for one).
• Shell32.exe crashed already. Within one day of using it! Didn’t actually have any bad effect though.
• HTCAlbum.exe also crashed. Again, no noticable effect.
• mbutton.exe crashed too. Okay that’s 3rd party, but it never, ever crashed on my SPV M3100.
• manila.exe crashed. [update: I complained to Orange about this and was told “Windows isn’t even stable on the desktop. We can’t investigate isolated crashes”.
• The on-screen keyboard irritatingly pops up and obscures forms and emails so you can’t read what you’re typing. The M3100 also had this problem, but then its on-screen keyboard was a lot smaller.
• I’m really feeling the lack of a hardware keyboard. It takes a lot more concentration to type.
• When on a phonecall, the screen switches itself off after 5 seconds of inactivity. I suppose this is a feature, but I wish I knew how to disable it.