Planet 無 Matt

A braindead network management daemon.

Why would you ever prefer a wireless connection over a wired connection. The wired connection you probably needed to manually connect the hardware, indicating there's a good chance you want to use it. The wireless connection is probably your neighbors' unconnected wireless access point.

This is yet one more thing that NetworkManager seems to do wrong--worse, telling it to disable wireless while it's trying to connect to one doesn't cause it to fall-back to the wired network; that only happens if it sees another cable inserted (i.e. unplugging and re-plugging the cable in).

see: unhelpful

In February 2010, BroadVoice decided to suspend my account because I'd switched credit cards--but not until after it'd already successfully charged the card which seems to make the entire thing somewhat suspicious not to mention frustrating. Because I primarily use the number for incoming calls (I don't tend to use voice calls), it took me two days to realize this, and after sending an e-mail to BroadVoice support, it took them four days and a follow-up from me to respond with an explanation.

I'm still confused as to why they need authorization after already charging my card, and why this wasn't better communicated earlier. I'm also curious as to why they need this information after I've been using their service for over two years without incident.

I started using BroadVoice as my VoIP to POTS gateway provider a few years back, and haven't had any significant problems. There have been a few minor hiccups:
* Certain users of Sprint Nextel's Blackberry service don't properly appear with caller ID information which breaks some caller-based rules.
* For these same users, outgoing calls over BroadVoice don't get redirected to voicemail.
* I can't specify my outgoing caller ID information which is frustrating if I want people to call me back at a specific number (e.g. my mobile) rather than my VoIP line.

More recently however, my BroadVoice service was silently suspended, which I consider a bit more severe as this is somewhat isolating. The reason appears to be because I switched credit cards, and they've changed their policies regarding necessary authorization. I do feel like this could have been better handled.

I bought a Neuros Link from Thinkgeek during their Gamma program (named as it followed their beta product, but preceded an official release). As part of the program, there was a no-questions asked refund policy that lasted for several months. I returned my unit through DVRUpgrade who manages the programs refunds and apparently technical support for Neuros Technologies, and two complete months after having record of its delivery, the most I've received (after actively following-up after a month) from either company was an acknowledgement that the product had been received and was being processed.

Dating web sites are the logical progression from online classifieds, providing a specialized location for people who want to date, get married, or otherwise socialize. Their most important asset is their userbase, which tends to have high turnover as needs are met. Some, such as match.com have been notorious for having staff go on dates with no intention of progressing a relationship further, but only to provide the feeling that the site was helping connect the user with potential partners.

An "international" dating website which has only 30 profiles, all in their early twenties, and all from Toronto, Ontario.

Not everybody using your web site with a mobile browser wants it to look like an iPhone app. If they did, they'd probably have an Apple iPhone mobile device.

Mozilla's mobile FireFox web browser was codenamed Fennec. It has a well-done, simple to use interface and has surfaced some common tasks in very intuitive places. However, the rendering engine seems to have a few issues still, which is a little surprising given that it should be not much different from the desktop version.

The MicroB web browser is the default web browser for the Maemo operating system. For the most part, its developers have done a good job of integrating it into the Maemo environment, but certain aspects that are not expected to be seen by everyday users have some glaring lack of polish, such as the plug-ins dialog which looks to be holding onto its antecedent toolkit (possibly XUL--despite the product itself not supporting XUL in the browser).

MicroB sometimes has problems such as being non-responsive or stalling. In bugs filed against it at bugs.maemo.org, the suggestion has been to clear history and cache--although the specific bug with these recommendations should have been fixed with the first Maemo update of 2010.

There are three main options that I've seen for web browsers on the Nokia N900, which is the flagship Maemo product. Two of the browsers are based on Mozilla's Gecko layout engine while the third is based on the webkit layout engine.

The MicroB web browser is probably the first that any Maemo user comes across. It's the default browser, based on Gecko, and is a continuation of the line of browsers on earlier Nokia Internet tablets. Of the three browsers, it's the most hildonized, feeling most at home on the platform. It uses the same status-bar slide-in to call-up customization options and Maemo notifications as the rest of the platform. It has some stability issues, however, and is internally the least consistent. Areas of the browser that are less common, such as extensions and plug-ins, did not get the hildonzied appearance resulting in needing to use an old-fashioned scroll bar.

The Midori web browser is the second option. It's based on the same rending engine as Mobile Safari and the Android's web browser. It renders about the same, and has built-in support for user-agent spoofing so that sites treat it just like if you were using an Apple iPhone mobile device instead of the higher-resolution N900. There are some rendering differences, which I haven't quite figured out the cause of given that they do both use the same underlying engine. Midori also has shown some odd behaviours, like forgetting about touch-scrolling at one point until it was restarted.

Finally, Mozilla Fennec, the code name for the mobile version of Mozilla FireFox. While MicroB supports limited ad-ons and extensions, Fennec is a mostly-compatible version of the desktop FireFox browser and supports many of the same ad-ons. The UI work that went into customizing Fennec for the N900 is impressive, and it does feel very natural. With that said, there are a few things I miss from MicroB, such as the "swirling" magnification. Fennec has only a double-tap that changes from zoomed-in to zoomed-out (somewhat reminiscent of Opera Mini's "map" feature), but does not allow one to continue to zoom in like MicroB does. On the other hand, some may find that double-tapping as a toggle makes zooming through a page quicker than MicroB which continues to zoom in on each double tap.

The summary report is that I'm using a combination of the three. With many sites wanting to treat everything as an iPhone, I use Midori in iPhone-spoofing mode to see what sites consider their superior mobile presentation, and am trying Fennec for most normal browsing right now, mostly because of its support for tabs which MicroB lacks (but Midori does have).

A portable, network-enabled, electronic device whose main purpose is networked applications and communication. These often take various forms, including that of networked personal digital assistances or small tablet computers. There is an arguably blurry line distinguishing between smartphones and mobile Internet devices.

Maemo is a pretty neat Linux-based operating system that was developed by Nokia for its mobile Internet devices and later merged with Intel's similar Moblin operating system. Maemo makes for a decent appliance operating system assuming its touch interface is practical for the application. Unfortunately, there are still binary blobs required for most implementations.

The Nokia N900 comes with a root filesystem with a minuscule 256MB. Nokia and the Maemo community have done a good job of making Maemo work with this through the liberal use of symlinks, but a limitation is still a limitation, and Nokia's still trying to get it right.

This morning I had about 27MB of free space, or about 10%, free. This hasn't been a big problem before, but today the first Maemo update after I received my device was released, and it need about 14MB to hold the downloaded files, and would need about 17MB of space extra after extraction. After combing my
filesystem, I realized that I had over 6MB of Maemo themes installed to the root filesystem.

After cleaning that up, I had 33MB free, which I would have thought were enough, but unfortunately, it wasn't for the Maemo application manager. A solution that seemed to work was to do it the old fashioned way and pull up an xterm window and run sudo apt-get dist-upgrade manually. That seemed to work just fine.

Both the Verizon Hub (bad user experience) and O2 Joggler (funny name) appear to be based on the OpenPeak OpenFrame or a related product. My research about the Verizon Hub--besides it not being available in my area--is that it's consumer-unfriendly (non-negligible monthly fee and shoves adverts in your face). The 02 device probably isn't even available on my continent.

So where can I get either an unbranded OpenFrame or an end-user focused version of either the OpenFrame or the OpenTablet? They both, along with the JooJoo appears to be very similar in concept to the Apple iPad, so I would have expected them to be more visible after Apple's announcement of their new tablet device.

Measures that are put in place to make the miscellaneous rabble feel safer without actually providing any safety. In many cases, this includes fascist measures that are designed as a show of strength to reassure the target audience that the "securing" entity is strong and can keep them safe.

In this post 9-11 world many people put on security theater rather than make decisions based on safety.

prox posted the interesting update that Israel has a law going through the legislative process which mandates electronic mail portability in a similar manner as the United States mandates for phone number portability.

This will be interesting to watch for. Presumably only forwarding would be required as anything else is exceptionally ridiculous.

My phone's wireless manager is significantly more reliable and intelligent than the NetworkManager daemon that comes with Ubuntu Linux and other distributions, and I haven't the foggiest idea why that would be given that the latter is supposedly older and more mature, not to mention having more resources to work with, including electrical juice. Nevertheless, the NetworkManager never seems to connect to the correct network--it bypasses the hidden network I always tell it to connect to (and which my phone has no problem finding); it doesn't even connect to the open network I sometimes connect to because it covers the entirety of the campus unlike my favoured hidden network. Instead it'll ask me for a password to one of a dozen networks that I always tell it not to use.

My phone connects to my network. Every single time, except when I told it to always use the 3G UMTS network.

Why is this so difficult for the desktop system and Ubuntu?

Google Buzz is the reason I finally removed the few Google Mail users on my Jabber roster.

The Maemo Project Gutenberg reader, MGutenberg, is a really neat application that is a general e-book reader application with built-in search and retrieval support for Project Gutenberg's massive library of public domain books. It supports downloading and storing the book to the device and resuming from the same location you left, as well as both portrait and landscape views, and is generally very pleasant to use with the "inverted" display (white text on black screen).

Philips' DVP5990 dvd player allows the user to change the region through an undocumented sequence. Without a DVD in the player, hit the setup button on the remote, and move to the preferences tab. Using the numeric pad on the remote, enter the sequence 138931. This should now show a menu selecting the region to which you want to set your player. For convenience, I would suggest setting the region to '0' (disabling region checking) and only change it if you come across a disc that won't play.

It seems that every VoIP service provider that I've seen that connects to the plain old telephone system will override the caller identification information that you send to them with what they have on file.

I've been using BroadVoice as my primary VoIP to POTS service provider for a few years now. BroadVoice markets its service primarily for people who want to connect a single VoIP device in order to make cheap calls. It provides a full-featured slew of options (some available as upsells), but all of which are also available via the Asterisk PBX. My primary reason for running Asterisk is the voicemail and dilaing plan flexibility, both of which imply that I would want Asterisk to handle all calls, and don't make use of any of BroadVoices features beyond connecting the call.

The one problem that I've noticed with BroadVoice is that they won't let me change outgoing caller identification information which is a bummer.