Warning, this post is purely technical.  If you were looking for something fluffy, then go here instead.  I’ve just completely reset my phone. I’ve been running a continuous set of Cyanogen updates on it for several months now, and it has slowly been getting slower and slower.  In fairness, I’ve had Apps2SD running for a while and I suspect that the whole thing had simply become too fragmented and cluttered.  Apps2SD is short for Apps 2 SD Card and is a small hack that allows me to use a section of my SD card as internal phone memory.  Because I have a first generation phone, the internal space is limited and so this hack is required for installing the amount of applications I use.  I’ve been thinking lately about upgrading it to a newer model, but that’s a topic for another post.  Anyway, over the last several months it has been getting gradually slower, so I figured it was time for a reset. 

The procedure for doing this isn’t as complex as I had thought, but it is long-winded.  First thing to do was back up all data to the SD card.  In my case, that meant only one application; “Note Everything Pro”, which has a nice in-built backup/restore to/from SD card routine.  Everything else gets backed up automatically, or is stored on Google’s servers ready for syncing back later.  When that was done, I backed up the contents of the card to my PC, and then restarted the phone in Recovery Mode.  Once there, I was able to erase all three partitions on the SD Card (Linux EXT4, Linux Swap and Fat) and create some new ones.  I went with a 1GB Linux EXT2 partition (which I just remembered that I have to upgrade to EXT3 or maybe EXT4), 32Mb of swap partition, and the rest (approximately 7Gb) as a fat32 partition for data.  After that was done, I used the wipe commands to erase the user data on the phone completely and restarted.

Instead of booting into my usual screen, I was prompted (very quickly indeed) with the Android Setup screens which took me through the new-user process.  Within five minutes everything was completed.  Unfortunately for me, that’s when the real work started.  I had to then shutdown the phone, restore my data from the PC to the SD Card, restart the phone and start re-installing all the applications.  I post all of this because the commands that are needed in PARTED (the partition editor) always make me surf for about twenty minutes looking for them.  So, pay attention because this is the important bit.

That’s it… that’ll clean off the card and you can begin again.

Today, Google launched their public DNS project into public beta. The results are in, and they’re okay, but only okay. Over 1,003 queries for random domains from a pool of 10,003 Website addresses. I used Silverwolf’s excellent DPT to perform this test, and the results are below.

My ISP’s DNS Server
Number of Successful queries : 1,003.
Best Query Time : 62 Milliseconds.
Worst Query Time : 1,061 Milliseconds.
Average Query Time : 220 Milliseconds.
Timeouts (Not Counted in Stats) : 25.

Google’s Open DNS Server
Number of Successful queries : 1,003.
Best Query Time : 15 Milliseconds.
Worst Query Time : 1,186 Milliseconds.
Average Query Time : 167 Milliseconds.
Timeouts (Not Counted in Stats) : 32.

As you can see, the average query time is about 25% faster than my ISP, but there are more failures and a slightly higher worst query time. However, the best query time is 15ms from Google, which is pretty good in comparison to my ISP. Of course, results will vary depending on where the nearest Google data centre is to you, but its worth giving it a try.  It should be noted that certain content (streamed content for example) may actually be slower, as the servers that decide where to send you a stream from may think you are actually in a different location. I think I’ll configure my router with the new DNS now.  By the way, the addresses of the Google DNS Servers are awesome – 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 (IP addresses actually owned by Level 4 Communications).

The APN for the HTC Dream on Alice in Germany are as follows.  I haven’t seen this published anywhere else, and some of it has been deduced by trial and error.  There seem to be a couple of settings missing.  Namely, the message indicator doesn’t light if you have voicemail, and some other things I’m working on now.  The voicemail number is +4917993000333.  More as I find it :-)

Name : Alice 3G
APN : internet.partner1
Proxy : <blank>
Port : <blank>
UserName : <blank>
Password : <blank>
Server : <blank>
MMSC : http://10.81.0.7:8002
MMS proxy : 82.113.100.41
MMS port : 8080
MCC : 262
MNC : 07

Enjoy :-)

I guess it had to happen eventually.  I’ve just wired some of our apartment for network.  There’s now a 10GB (Cat.7) link between the router in the cupboard and the office.  Originally there was a wireless bridge, but in order to set that up in such a way that we had good coverage I would have needed to have four routers and a bridge functioning all the time.  Now I just have one router and one bridge.

The original idea was a a good one, and one that should have worked perfectly well.  I have a router in the cupboard in the hall that handles the internet connection.  Its relatively central in the apartment, and so would have been the perfect candidate for a base station for wireless.  I would then have three more wireless repeaters in the office, bedroom and living room.  Unfortunately I use (and already had two) Netgear routers. It turns out that when bridging with them that a) the base station can’t be connected to from a PC, and b) the base station wasn’t actually able to handle three dependant routers without seriously degrading the network throughput. 

So there were two ways to proceed.  I could fuck around with more expensive routers replacing the ones I had, or I could lay a cable to the office.  We have parquet flooring here, which made it both simple and more difficult to work through.  There is space under the floor for some cabling, but I would have had to lift a lot of floor to do that.  The alternative was to go around the walls, using the small gap created between the wall, parquet and skirting boards to store the cables.  However, in order to do that I would have to rip out the door sealant and handle some tricky corner work close to the office.  I managed it though, and it has worked out pretty well.  I’m going to need to add a then second layer of sealant to the one I’ve already put there, and get some parquet pins to re-secure some of the skirting boards, but other than that its finished.I now have gigabit cabled Ethernet in the office and 802.11n wireless throughout the apartment!

I have no real excuse for not posting.  I’ve been busy, but not too busy.  I just haven’t had the inclination really.  I seem to get in this mood for a few months every couple of years.  There’s lots I could blog about, but the motivation just isn’t there.  So, here follows a collective update, without form or structure and in an almost free-associative manner.

I’m absolutely loving my new phone.  the major update to it (commonly called Cupcake) came out last week, and its looking great so far.  It comes with an on-screen keyboard which is pretty cool for short messages or text entry where you don’t want to flip out the keyboard.  I like the auto-orientation feature; turn the phone on its side and the it orientates sideways.  Turn it back up, and the orientation changes likewise.  Its awesome.  This works on any screen apart from the main screen (default screen?  top page? home screen?  Not entirely sure of the terminology), which makes sense even though I’ve read complaints about it on teh internets.  Widgets are now allowed, and some of then are just cool.  I’ve downloaded some brilliant apps for it so far, such as a travel planner for the German transport system, a shopping comparison package (scan the barcode of something in a shop and see if it really IS cheaper than the place down the road), and the Google maps tracks app.  That one lets me set the GPS to record, and then allows me to track where the phone has been.  For example, we went on a trip to the Englisher Garten last weekend, and then to one of the museums.  That trip was recorded and is documented here.

I still have to get my bike repaired.  I buckled the back wheel back when I fucked up my finger, and haven’t done anything about it yet.  I’ll get that done soon.

I’m doing physiotherapy about three times a week at the moment.  It hurts like hell, but is starting to pay off.  I can move the last knuckle on the finger again, which is very cool.  I have to remember when I’m doing the proscribed exercises that I need to concentrate on extension as well as flexion.  Apparently if I don’t then the finger could end up in a permanent “dipped” state, which would obviously be bad.

Tickets for U2 have arrived, and July 18th can’t come around soon enough.  I’ve also scored some tickets for Bell X1 next week.  I don’t know that much of their stuff, and may have to look out for some over the weekend, but it promises to be a good gig.  They are being supported by Duke Special, who I also haven’t heard before, but whose website produced some interesting sounds.

I have Windows 7 running now on both my laptop and one of the desktop machines.  The release candidate is incredible.  It has a stability and speed that frankly leaves Vista kicked face down in the dirt.  I’ll do another blog post on it later, but if you don’t have it already then download it from Microsoft.com.  Its free to use until march 2010.

I shouldn’t have tried to install Windows 7 on the spare laptop.  I’ve porked it, as I knew I would.  There just aren’t good drivers for Windows for that machine, so I’m going to re-install linux and… hmm, I’ve just had a VERY interesting idea about what to do with it.  It’d be in addition to what I was using it for with linux a couple of days ago – to monitor some specific chat rooms for news about Android. I could use it to handle the nzb files that we process.  There’s a pretty good handler for newzbin files for linux that might just do the trick.  Have to look into that more…

I have an idea for an app I should write.  Its for Android, and its just an different implementation of something that exist on that platform.  It exists in such a way that it is cumbersome and unwieldy I have to say.  I know how it can be done better.

London was dirty.  I’ve been here in an almost sterile environment for the last year, and getting back to London was a touch of culture shock on a couple of levels.  Firstly, there’s soot on everything.  Its a lovely old city, but the operative word in that phrase is old.  Many of the buildings haven’t had their exterior cleaned since the industrial revolution.  You know what I mean… the old red-brick buildings where the soot and car exhausts have left the red covered in a thin layer of black smoke and soot.  Its horrible, and I forgot just how pervasive it all is.  I had also forgotten what it is not to have to walk around and constantly look at the ground to avoid things like dig shit.  Secondly, and nothing to do with dirt, I realise that the feeling I get when talking to people here is fear.  When I am required to talk in German, although I can mostly get along, it is a frightening experience.  I don’t mean scary frightening, but it is definitely something that I prefer not to have to do.  I didn’t have that in London – I was able to go in to shops and simply ask for stuff. 

The sushi in London is awesome.  The rice underneath a piece of salmon nigri (for example) was exactly the right sweetness, texture and moisture that it should have been.  Here in Munich for some reason (that might have something to do with living two hundred and fifty thousand kilometres from the nearest ocean) the fish never tastes as fresh as in London, and the rice is always a little crumbly and more bitter. I miss sushi for lunch every day. Each time I pick up some here hoping for something that meets my taste expectations, I am disappointed.

We ate in the first Wagamama that I have ever been in that had windows in it!  Its down by the Tower of London, go check it out.

Okay so I'm back, and I've got coffee. I’ve no real excuse for not posting except for being really busy.  That and the inevitable blog-apathy that comes in early every year.  If you could graph the frequency with which I posted I’m sure you’d come up with the winter being the least populous.  Right, so after typing that last sentence, I did just that.  I was wrong.  My least frequent posting is done during the summer. Here is the average number of posts I’ve made every month for the last nine and a bit years.

Naturally enough, I also drew a pretty graph about it. So what can we tell from all this?  Well, I’m not the most prodigious of posters, that’s for sure.  That’d be about it really.  I do find it strange that the most frequent time of year for posting is actually in the Autumn, but that’s just me.  Anyway, the reason I was able to get all this data into Excel really easily is that I’ve been working a little on a new design for here.  I know I’ve been talking about this for months, I do have a good excuse for not rolling it out sooner.  I’ve just been really busy with other things, and not in a position to do significant typing with my finger. So, even though I’m still in this cast, here’s a rundown on everything that’s going on at the moment. 

I finished watching Buffy last night.  The ending was good but lacked something I think.  Then again, I was used to having each of the series end with a cliff-hanger, and this one nicely tied up all the loose ends.  It left something for the future, but I guess that never panned out.  Overall it was a brilliant series.  There were high points, such as “Once More With Feeling”, “The Body” and of course “Hush”, and… well not much in the way of low points.  “Once More With Feeling”, was an episode that was filmed as a musical and was so good that I can’t get the music out of my head. Its very Sondheimey, and brilliantly written.  I also have the entire six series of Angel to watch, though I’m a bit tired now, so maybe that can wait for a few weeks. Awesome series though, I have no idea why I didn’t watch it years ago.  If you don’t already know, the guy who created the show is called Joss Whedon. He the one who created both Buffy and Angel, and also Firefly with its spin-off movie Serenity. He also created the excellent series Dollhouse, which is airing right now.  I had been a fan of his long before I knew who he was.

German classes are of course ongoing, though a little slowly at the moment.  There were so few applicants for my course (ie: two) that they decided to change the times around to once a week instead of two.  On top of that, our teacher has been out for the last week, so apart from some homework (which I got mostly wrong!) there’s fuck all happening there.  I thought I had a complete handle on the meaning of the words in the homework – obwohl, falls, wenn, dass, weil, um, damit etc.  English translations would be although, if, that…, at…, with etc, and it turns out I didn’t know them as well as I thought I did.  I actually though I had nailed the meanings of these words about a year ago and had no problem with them. Until now.  Oh well, there’s a major re-learning session coming up I think.

I’m going to be potentially doing some interesting work for James soon, if a couple of quotes that we have sent out are accepted.  More on that as it happens, but there’s a chance to get better at some things I’ve been familiar with but never used extensively in the past.  Oh, and in the next post I’ll tell you about my new mobile.  I’ll start that in a while, just have to go do some things first.

This one is mostly for me.  Kurt Shintaku put some instructions on the net some time about installing Vista from a USB Key.  I’ve reproduced them here as I just got an error when loading his website, and I use these with some regularity.  These instructions have been tested only on Windows XP and Vista.  You will need a large fast USB key and the original Vista (or Vista plus SP1) installation DVD.

Open a command prompt, in elevated mode if you’re using Vista.  Go through the following :

1. diskpart
2. list disk (Look to see which disk is your USB key.  Make sure you get this right, or you’ll end up wiping something else.)
3. select disk x (where x is your USB key).
4. clean
5. create partition primary
6. active
7. format fs=fat32
8. assign
9. exit
10. xcopy d:\*.* /s/e/f h:\ OR robocopy d:\ h:\ /MIR (where d:\ is your Vista DVD and h:\ is the newly formatted USB Key. xcopy for Windows XP, robocopy for Vista)

That’s basically it.  You now have a USB Key that installs Vista.

Kurt Shintaku's Blog: HOWTO: Install Windows Vista from a high speed USB 2.0 Flash Drive

I interviewed recently for a really interesting job.  The position is ostensibly called “Web Architect” which doesn’t tell you much until you realise that some of it is about putting web solutions together for a company and specifying the technologies used.  There’s an element of coding too, some administration, some presentation and some marketing.  All in all it struck me as perfect, and I want it.  There might be another interview soon, so we shall see how it pans out.

During the 30 or so minutes I took me to write the previous paragraph I encountered some issues.  Firstly, the latest version of Windows Live Writer comes with an interesting bug in it.  It is a late beta, so that’s pretty much expected.  However, this is one that I have never seen before with this product, and it only happens under a specific set of circumstances.  Your blog must be using the MetaWeblog API as an interface, and you must not have upgraded this version from a previous build.  When you try and detect the blog, it will take you through the entire process before throwing an exception.  I haven’t gone to the trouble of running a trace on the XML conversation, and to be honest I think this error happens in the code after the conversation is complete.  I was talking to Joe Cheng who works on the Live Writer team at Microsoft, and he said they had found the bug and would release a patch soon.  Can’t give you an exact timeframe on that though.  So, if you are thinking of installing the latest build of Live Writer (the “Wave3” betas) and use BlogEngine.Net then make sure that you upgrade rather than fresh installing. 

The second issue was that the ping services tab in BlogEngine.Net was all of a sudden empty of entries.  I don’t know why, but they had all been erased.  While trying to update them, I discovered a problem with the identity field for the table that holds the ping servers – it was setup incorrectly.  I think something happened when I copied the data from my dev to the live server a few weeks back, but because I was only posting from Live Writer I hadn’t noticed it.  At some point I have to draw up a smoke test for BlogEngine.Net that goes through testing for ALL of the functions before rolling out live.  Anyway, in addition to the table issue, I had to go and get a new list of ping servers as I noticed that a few have gone inactive.  One thing that I noticed is that Microsoft still don’t have one for their live search, though they do allow submission of a site map.  However, the transaction causes a nicely handled exception which dumps out the results to a log file.  Anyway, here is the new list of ping servers I have gathered:

http://api.moreover.com/rpc2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rpc2
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/xmlrpc
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://pinger.blogflux.com/rpc
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/rpc2
http://rpc.pingthesemanticweb.com/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.twingly.com/
http://rpc.weblogs.com/rpc2
http://services.newsgator.com/ngws/xmlrpcping.aspx
http://www.bloglines.com/ping

Dave just posted that he had forgotten the password to his machine.  It is co-incidental that we should both have decided to change our passwords on the same day, but that’s what happens when you work with someone for so long that even your attempts at firing him don’t work ;-)  I have used the same password on most places on the net for a couple of years now.  Actually, apart from some sites, I really only had two passwords; one weak and one strong.  Today I decided that it was time for a change.  There are a couple of strategies I could potentially use for passwords.

The first is to use a separate password for each site or application and store them somewhere in a list. While this method would be secure, it requires the presence of a master list.  That list could be a pen and paper, a piece of software or a web site.  Paper and pen are portable but ephemeral and susceptible to tampering or theft.  I would also need to carry them with me wherever I go in order to access any of the things I wanted.  This isn’t an ideal situation as I would prefer not to be dependent on something that isn’t my own memory.  There is also an issue of compatibility.  While I could potentially carry around my password list on an encrypted USB key, I would be dependant on compatible software being on a target computer in order to decrypt my list.

One of the newer options would be to use a site like VeriSign’s Personal Identity Portal (PIP).  This would offer the advantage of the stability of the VeriSign systems and the longevity of a well established company, but suffers from a typical lack of support on the Internet.  So far, there are about sixty sites that support it, but that isn’t nearly enough. It is close though.  If it had an online generator that was targeted to specifically match the criteria of each site (ie: cases and symbols allowed etc) then I would definitely think about using it.  It has a simplified authentication system too – I could download a managed card and use that or my username and password and that would be enough to authenticate me.  While researching all of these methods, I tried the PIP and signed into a couple of sites with it, and I have to say it has a lot of potential. You can install a browser button that pops up a window showing you the sites you have stored logins for.  Clicking on those sites signs you straight in, provided you have authenticated at the site previously.  Its a pretty neat solution, but needs more support.

The second option is to use a far more limited set of passwords, ie: two or three depending on the situation.  My preferred solution is to use complex but easy to type passwords.  For example, the word qpwoalsk, which is meaningless and therefore not prone to dictionary attacks, is also very easy to type.  It can actually be done very quickly with two fingers if you look at it on a keyboard.  It also doesn’t have to be remembered, as the shapes of the typing are squares.  Look at it again. With the left hand you type Q-W-A-S which is a square, alternating P-O-L-K which is another square. They are simply alternated from left to right to make up the password.  Stronger again would be qPwOaLsK, and then qPwO-aLsK.  Neat eh?  Another method would be to use an online password generator and use the phonetics it comes up with to remember the results.  For example fruT32ya actually reads as foxtrot romeo uniform TANGO Three Two yankee alpha.

As you can see, there are lots of different options available.  The only thing to do is to find the right one.

Recently I discovered a fabulous project called ybox2.  It is a very small set-top box that you have to self assemble.  By very small, I mean that it fits inside an “Altoids” box, which would be slightly larger than a pack of cigarettes to those over this side of the Atlantic. It comes with a TV output, an Ethernet connection and a lot of interesting programming capability.  Most interesting to me is the Twitter app that receives updates from your feed.  There are some other good applications available too which might make it worth the investment in time.

The original YBoxes were made for Yahoo’s Open Hack Day and subsequently sold off for about $130. One of the guys at the event was a designed called Robert Quattlebaum, who subsequently hacked together some updates and released them to the public.  His updates weigh in at less than half the price of the original, and are supposedly more flexible.  The only drawback that I can see is the reliance on television to handle the display.  Now, there is another option which seems to be to buy an old portable DVD player and use it for display purposes.  That’d likely double the price though, which isn’t really the goal of this project. 

It comes with a built-in web server, which does give it some interesting possibilities.  It has 32k RAM which doesn’t allow that much storage, but the CPU is very powerful and does have enormous potential. Oh, it fits inside an Altoids tin, did I mention that? 

An interesting thing happened over the last twenty four hours.  I had saved this post as a draft and went away to do other things.  The concept really excited me however, and I wanted to do something with a small device that would display interesting information to me.  It had to be separate from any of the PCs I have here, and I had to be able to display a Twitter feed on it.  That was my main motivation really.  I wanted to be able to keep up to date with the news without having to start my PC or switch to a different application. Then it hit me. I have something that does this already. Not only that, but it has an operating system that I can write applications on. It is of course my Pocket PC, my trusty iPaq that I have had sitting here for ever.

I recently updated it from Windows Mobile 5 to version 6, which has resulted in a substantial speed increase.  This version also allows remote display of Windows Sidebar applications, which has a lot of potential for.. well play really.  I would post screen shots and a mini review of it, but it unfortunately doesn’t work with the Toshiba Bluetooth drivers on my laptop.  I presume there will be a fix however which will deal with that issue soon enough.