Fantastic… the day before I go on holiday to the Alps for a week my phone dies. And being one of my pieces of technology, it just has to die in the most irritating way possible. While attempting to send an SMS the screen just went blank, and now it won’t un-blank.

The rest of the phone works! It’s just received an SMS, and I can dial out and receive calls, but the screen remains totally black and non working. It can’t be a mechanical failure since I was using the phone when it happened, so all I can think is that the firmware has buggered itself in (it is a Windows Mobile device after all) and something has told the screen to turn off, but hasn’t told it to turn back on again.

So, before we go on holiday tomorrow, we’re off to the Orange shop to either get them to magic it back alive (highly improbable) or for me to buy a new phone. And it’s going to have to be a cheap phone since I wasn’t really intending on buying a phone again for a long time. I was going to buy a 1TB hard disk for my server, but now need to use that money for a sodding phone.

If I hadn’t been a mobile phone user for the past 10 years and this was my first experience with them, I’d probably not bother getting a replacement.

My phone has gone a bit nuts ever since I put the PAYG SIM in it. First it got stuck in a reboot loop until I managed to trick it into working by turning on ‘flight mode’, powering off the phone and putting the SIM in, then disabling flight mode. Then at the weekend it wouldn’t send text messages, instead simply queueing them up and greying out the ‘Send message’ option.

And yeah, the insurance didn’t carry over from when I cancelled my contract either.

Flight leaves tomorrow afternoon, so no updates until I return. When I do return, expect a torrent of back-dated entries (unless I find wifi over there).

Over on his blog Thoughtfix has written about why he thinks Linux on mobile devices is doomed. Having read the post, I can see his points and think the argument is valid for desktop Linux too, but he suggests a few ideas that would be exceedingly hard to implement

“Linux has the opportunity to learn from these competitors and blow them away.”

And yes, it does… but who is “Linux”? Arrange me a meeting with the CEO of “Linux” and its board of directors. That can’t be done, can it? There’s no one person in control, no one single vision or direction keeping things consistent… There’s just millions of individuals running around doing what they (or their own little communities) think is best.

He also says

“I hope some company is strong (or wealthy) enough to provide developers with the tools, distribution channels, and incentives to provide a rich application directory for their devices.”

But then we’ve just got another distribution out there justifying its existance as being “the one”. Every large Linux distro is the result of someone thinking these exact thoughts and saying “God this is a mess, I am going to sort it out and do things properly”.

The OSS community has, for so long, been hell-bent on competing with Microsoft and getting itself noticed. We’ve done that part now - I can buy a multitude of Linux based devices, my mum knows what a Linux is and compared with five years ago she could probably install it with as much difficulty as she’d encounter installing XP. It’s like winning a war and realising you’ve now got to create some law and order, without causing a riot.

Now the community needs to create some standards for what a “Linux” distribution really is. We’ve got to take the spirit of Open Source and apply it not just to the source, but to the whole concept.

Unfortunately none of this will happen since the instant you tell RedHat users that Debian’s package system is good you’ve got a holy war. And if a large company suddenly pops up and tries to do it, they’ll be knocked down instantly since the OSS community is riddled with people that hate any form of large business for no real concrete reason.

And that’s the whole damn problem from where I’m sat - there’s too many frothy mouthed zeolots running around on crazed holy missions to insert their own brand of Linux into as many PCs as possible, rather than people sitting down together and thinking “OK, so when someone sees a software package on the Internet and they click it… what exactly will happen?”, “They plug in a 1TB external HDD, where exactly will it mount?” “Let’s make KDE and Gnome operate in exactly the same way, with the same file manager standards so that when a user bookmarks their favourite locations in Firefox they can also see them in The Gimp”.

You know, basic stuff that Apple, Microsoft and everyone else has had since they first came out over 20 years ago…

Then again, Linux was never designed with any particular goals, so it’s hardly surprising things are chaotic.

Image from Wikipedia

See that old fashioned paper device? Remember those things from the 80s, they were as revolutionary as the PalmPilot when it first came out. All it is is some paper within a ringbinder. Big, bulky, hard to edit and most definitely not able to sync with your PC.

And you know what? It’s just saved me a lot of hassle and trouble. Do you see that rectangular plastic device sat on top of the FiloFax? That’s called a mobile phone, and is the current fancy way to store all that delicate info in your pocket. FiloFax out, smart PDA-like phone in.

Yeah, in theory… until it goes wrong… Like it did with me today.

I use Google Calendar for my planning and organising, without it I’m screwed. My phone has all my phone numbers in, without them I’m equally screwed. Losing my phone would be bad, so I need a way to back them up, preferably so they’re readable on my PC too. Having tried using a Windows Smartphone with anything but Windows before, I decided that to make life easy I’d try and use the phone in the way it was designed…

Phone <–> ActiveSync <–> OutLook

ActiveSync was already on my PC, and I just needed to install OutLook, plug in my phone and it’d back all my contacts up, and then that’d be it. Except it wasn’t since ActiveSync was most insistent that I didn’t have Outlook installed, and then after a bit of prodding, gave me a random error number and refused to sync. Some Googling turned up a hint that I need to re-pair my phone with my PC and then it’d work properly.

So I deleted my phone from ActiveSync, dismissing a confusing dialog that said I’d lose the contents of my phone when synced with this PC (It was one of those fantastically bad dialogs that said “Bad things will happen if you continue” and then just an ‘OK’ button to press). Well I wasn’t syncing, I was deleting the phone from ActiveSync… surely that’s not a bad thing to do?

Well… yeah… it is actually. ActiveSync started up and merrily synced my Outlook with my phone. By ’sync’ I mean ‘make empty OutLook and full phone match by emptying the phone’.

Fortunately for me I had meticulously copied out my contacts at the weekend into my 80s PDA equivalent, and merely had to sync that with OutLook using the good old fashioned method of typing everything into my PC. The only cool part of this was that as soon as I’d saved a contact in OutLook it sent it to my phone.

I don’t like the way my data is now trapped within OutLook and the magic ActiveSync system, but it’s better than having it just on my phone. I’ll investigate LDAP addressbooks next I think.

Oh, by using the Google Calendar Sync tool I managed to get my Google Calendar into Outlook and then into my phone, which was quite a nice feat. It even works the other way - I can write appointments on my phone and send them to Google Calendar.

My phone’s working now. But to do this I had to

1. Ring them back and tell them it wasn’t working
2. Ring back again because their computers weren’t working
3. Be transferred three times, eventually going back to the ever-helpful “concerns department” back in the UK
4. And then be put on hold because the previous call centre had my account locked
5. Then I had to ring the call centre again to link my debit card to my phone for topups
6. And now the only thing not working is the website stuff - it thinks I still have a contract, and happily informs me that my account is disabled. I did try ringing up about this, but failed to get my point across at all

My phone now has £10.01 in credit, I am on the Dolphin calling plan and have 300 free messages to abuse.

I’m stopping my Orange contract and have just received a PAYG SIM and topup card from them. Amusingly the topup card expires in 2029 so I’m going to make it my aim to keep it until then

When ringing the activation number I first managed to confuse the voice recognition system, and then the human I got through to explained he couldn’t help me because his computer wasn’t working. I laughed, lots and will phone back later.

The stereo in my car has no external input, making it difficult to listen to music on my Nokia N810. I have to resort to a slightly fuzzy FM transmitter that dangles around in the passenger footwell and occasionally needs retuning if I go for long drives through the country. I have a spare car stereo from a previous car, but because my car’s OEM stereo is an odd shape I’ll need a replacement fascia.

Thinking I could get a replacement I hit eBay…

That seems a sensible search term, I own a 2005 Panda and need a stereo fascia. Let’s see what comes up…

Well that’s fantastic! It found 39 items. Right, must be a bargain in here…

Wait, something is wrong…

Look at the search string, it’s been modified. And if you squint at the tiny bit of writing you see some curious search logic being applied. It turns out that if eBay can’t find results for your search query, they modify it and search for that instead, and then modify what you typed into the search box. How they modify the search is unknown. All we know is that they are now giving us results for something we didn’t ask for. I don’t want a new stereo for my car, I want a fascia for my car, but that vital, important, required keyword has been stripped off!

This is a fine example of a system second-guessing its users and getting it totally wrong. There is no way a search engine can guess what I mean, the best it can do is give me alternates that are likely, or let me set the context and narrow the searches down, which is what eBay is trying to do. Unfortunately it also then decides to totally erase my previous search leading to confusion. I bet like me you look in the search box to double-check your search criteria if the search doesn’t work.

If you do a similar search on Google and it spell checks or thinks you mean something else, a much better display is presented to the user:

As you can see, Google thinks it knows better, but rather than totally obliterating your mental map of what to expect, it notifies you of its suggestion but then gives you what you asked for. It’s up to the user to use the alternate.

And that’s the way eBay should work. Rather than second guessing me and giving me pages of cars, it should tell me the search failed and then offer a suggestion for me to click on. The clicking on part is important - it links an action to a consequence and is vital to preventing your users from becoming confused. Since don’t forget, confused users often get irritated and angry and then feel the need to tell the world about this using their blogs

After trying various permutations of modchip, bypass wires, reflashing and a second XBox and its modchip I have come to the conclusion my new modchip is faulty. I’ve sort of confirmed this by hot-swapping it and by accident, noticing that by pressing down on the chip with my finger it flashes its little red LED.

I think there’s a bad solder joint on the chip itself, or a damaged track. I’ve probed the soldering I did extensively and the chip appears to have continuity with everything… but having to bend it isn’t a good sign.

I was going to simply return the chip to the place I bought it from, and wait for a replacement, but there was a problem; the place I bought it from has a slightly irritating £7 “testing” charge for all returned items, and the postage is at my expense. I paid £10 for the chip so paying £7 plus £3 postage just to send it back is not a sensible cost-effective idea. Also I think I bought the last modchip so there isn’t a replacement for them to send to me.

So I’ve done the next best thing; I found a different place and bought a different brand of modchip. It also cost a different price (£20) but hopefully it’ll work too. A bit of searching the web revealed that the modchip I bought is actually a clone and looking at the PCB reveals some rather cheap and bad manufacturing. The edges of the PCB are quite rough with pieces of fibreglass sticking out, and some of the tracks run very close to the edges.

Here it is. A blue Fiat Panda 2005 edition. Like I mentioned in the previous post, I got it from my parents after my mum crashed it.

It’s been repaired since, and is now almost as shiny as when it came out the factory. I had a good look around it, and apart from some very new looking bits inside the engine bay you’d never know it’d been this badly mangled. If your car ever looks this bad, you’re looking at £2000 worth of repair btw.

It’s quite a difference to my old car. Power steering is possibly one of the best things invented. The ability to park with ease can’t be underestimated. The car has an even more powered “city” mode that means I can turn the wheel with a fingertip for even tighter parking spots. I had the radio out yesterday to try and fit my old one since it has an AUX input for my N800. Unfortunately the Fiat radio is non-standard, and contains a non-standard cage. The facia is a giant square thing so while I could connect my old radio up electronically and have it work, there would be no way to secure it into the car. It’s frustrating being defeated by a few bits of metal and plastic. Looks like I’m back on the RF transmitter again and the associated wiring mess.

I had a slightly surreal and amusing time at Carcraft though. We were all sat around a table after looking at my car and going “that’s an interesting noise it makes”, when they produced a piece of paper and gave it to me. Thinking it was some valuation I gave it a glance.

… then looked again slightly confused …

It wasn’t a valuation, it was a printout of my Livejournal entry for the other day. Somehow, presumably through my email address or a lucky Google search, they’d managed to find my LJ and printed it out for a good laugh. It did explain the odd comments they made while looking at my car

They made selling my car nice and easy. They looked at it, then I  just had to show various bits of paperwork to prove it was mine, and that I was who I claimed to be. That was all I had to do. They even allow dogs in the showroom which prevented Amy and Twinkle from having to wait outside in the cold and strong winds.

So, to the Carcraft / webuyanycar.com (go on, admit it, your name is a little daft) people - hello!

After trying to read something on tabletblog.com my work PC decided to curl up its toes and fall over. MSIE completely failed to do anything until I’d repeatedly mashed the “X” in the corner and someone noticed. How did I trigger this fatal death of my web browser? Did I run some crazy Javascript or ActiveX control? No, I did the outrageous thing of clicking on a hyperlink.

Helpfully Microsoft offered me some further information about the crash. Here it is:

Problem caused by Windows

This problem was caused by Windows, which was created by Microsoft Corporation. Currently, there is no solution for the problem that you reported.

Also, when attempting to edit things on my Wordpress site I got this moronic error from our stupid web filter:

Access to the page:

http://www.piku.org.uk/diary/wp-admin/edit-comments.php

… has been denied for the following reason:

Weighted phrase limit exceeded.

Whisky Tango Foxtrot…

And of course, I have now completely forgotten what I was doing.

Here is a collection of pictures I took over the weekend. The first is of my Amiga 1500 on the desk Amy gave to me. It’s a fairly standard PC desk with the usual shelves and stuff to hide your bits of PC and mess in. I was going to use it for my PC, but one look at the neatly arranged wire under my desk put me off pretty quickly. Everything under my desk is cable-tied together neatly and then hung from hooks to prevent me standing on it.

The next picture is something I took while in the Meadowhall Shopping Centre. It’s a good old crashed machine image. This seems to be an XP machine running Powerpoint. The dialog explains a serious error has occurred and that Microsoft are very sorry about it. The Meadowhall Centre is a very confusing place to walk around, the maps aren’t that accurate and the general throng of headless chickens parading about makes stopping to find your bearings tricky.

We did find another amusing thing to take a picture of though. The main food centre has a fresh juice bar with possibly the most silly name on the planet. The people behind the counter looked at us with resignation as we whipped out our cameras to take a photo. I’m sure they keep a tally of people who point, laugh or take photos of their stand. I know I would.

I present to you… LoveJuice…

Please ignore the ‘creative’ image placement. WordPress’s visual editor has weird issues with image placement. It also now seems to strip the LJ tags from my posts, which is a bit irritating.