Tim Hardy

I’ve recently discovered an excellent new podcast on software engineering - Software Engineering Radio. I’ve long been a fan of IT Conversations and In Our Time and this is a very welcome addition to my listening schedule.

As I client I’ve been using my Nokia N95 after upgrading the firmware to v20.0.015. The upgraded phone has no difficulty addressing memory cards larger than 4G, vastly improved battery life while playing mp3s, no longer crashes from running out of memory (thanks to on demand paging which also cuts the boot time significantly) and has a podcast client built in that remembers where I left off a particular episode. This is ideal if, like me, you use podcasts to claw back otherwise wasted time and so often digest episodes in several minute chunks.

Oh, and you can sync up your subscriptions and download new episodes direct to the player using wireless which makes it extremely convenient.

I’m working through the Software Engineering Radio backlist at the moment and have particularly enjoyed the following episodes on game development, Erlang, Lisp and an interview with Erich Gamma. You know something must be good when you find yourself looking forward to doing the washing up because it will give you another ten minutes to listen to more of the latest episode. For anyone interested in software development, I’d heartily recommend it.

Following recommendations from Sumesh, Costas and Joyce, I’ve upgrade to the Nokia N95. It’s a great phone and the wireless is fantastic but it does have a few teething problems.

Once annoyance is the lack of a “normal” ringtone - or indeed anything that doesn’t make you look like a tasteless idiot when your phone goes off in pubic.

My favourite ringtone on the N70 was called Nostalgia. It sounds like an old fashioned, British telephone. Unfortunately the N95 does not come with this option.

Thankfully it’s easy to transfer from my old handset by using FileExplorer to navigate to Z:\Noka\Sounds\Digital\ then sending Nostalgia.aac to my new handset via bluetooth. Once saved to the new phone, it can be selected as a ringtone in Profiles.

There’s a bug with the Nokia data transfer application that stops it from working out of the box.

My old phone is a Nokia N70 but this should work for all other models.

If you set up your new phone and follow the clear instructions (that I won’t repeat here) then you will get as far as the N95 transferring an application called “DataMover.sis” to your old phone but no further. Trying to install DataMover.sis will give the warning: “Certificate may not yet be valid, is expired or phone’s date setting may be incorrect.”

The certificate has been incorrectly set to expire on 12 June 2007. To work around this, temporarily set your old phone’s date to some point before that in order to trick it into installing the application. (Tip: just change the year to 2006, it makes it easier to restore the correct date later.)

Once the application has been installed to your old handset the rest of the process should proceed smoothly.