Tim Hardy

Links for October 21st through October 25th:

• Exclusive: my golden secret about property prices | Matthew Parris: My Week - Times Online - “The number of property owners in Britain now in the position to trade down or divest themselves of real estate without much trouble is so significant that mark my words a plateau will bring a tumble. Our economy cannot float for ever on bidding up the price of each other’s houses.
• Firebug - Web Development Evolved - Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of web development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.
• Simply Blog Archive How to: Install and play Quake on your Symbian Phone! - How to install and play Quake on your mobile. I had Doom on my N70 and I’m looking forward to putting Quake on my N95
• N95 Best Tips and Tricks: Best Tips and tricks for Nokia N95 - Excellent advice on getting the most out of an N95 including many links to useful tools and utilities.
• Python Framework for Symbian Series 60 phones - Very useful info
• GeeXboX uShare UPnP A/V Media Server HomePage - uShare is a UPnP ™ A/V & DLNA Media Server. It implements the server component that provides UPnP media devices with information on available multimedia files. uShare uses the built-in http server of libupnp to stream the files to clients. GeeXboX uSha
• Getting started - WidSets Developer Site - Getting Started with WidSets Widget Development
• Nokia N95 blog - Essential add-ons for S60 - 1. Nokia add-on stuff - Smart2go a.k.a. Nokia Maps - Nokia Podcasting - Nokia Mobile Search (get the latest version) - WidSets - Barcode Reader (not that useful yet, but loads of potential) - Download! Client a
• Nokia Podcasting - Download podcasts direct to your phone

Links for October 13th through October 20th:

• Embedded.com - How video compression works - How video compression works BDTI explains how video codecs like MPEG-4 and H.264 work, and how they differ from one another. It also explains the demands codecs make on processors
• Facebook | Programming Puzzles - I’m not looking for a job - and must be one of the few people on the planet not to have a Facebook account - but these porgramming puzzles look like fun.
• Hacker. Dropout. CEO. - Mark Zuckerberg - Facebook - Social Networking - Good profile of Mark Zuckerberg
• Mike Davidson - How to Snatch an Expiring Domain - Well written account of how to grab an expiring domain
• ii.com · Power Pine: Getting the Most Out of Unix-, Mac- & PC-Pine by Nancy McGough - Advice on setting up pine
• Battle Tanks - “Battle Tanks is a funny battle on your desk, where you can choose one of three vehicles and eliminate your enemy using the whole arsenal of weapons. It has original cartoon-like graphics and cool music, it’s fun and dynamic, it has several network modes”
• ONLamp.com — An Introduction to Erlang - An Introduction to Erlang
• Speaking UNIX, Part 13: Ten more command-line concoctions - Nice command line tips - including the use of tac - like cat, but in reverse!
• Extract and decompile .chm file to view as html file under Linux - arCHMage is an extensible reader and decompiler for files in the CHM format. This is the format used by Microsoft HTML Help, and is also known as Compiled HTML. arCHMage is based on python-chm binding to chmlib from GnoCHM project.

Many thanks to Renato for the following useful tip:

On your existing box:
COLUMNS=180 dpkg -l | awk '{print $2}' | xargs > /tmp/t

Then (having backed up then restored the list to /tmp/t, on the new install:
apt-get install `cat /tmp/t`

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.

Main Entry: prof·i·teer
Pronunciation: “prä-f&-’tir
Function: noun
: one who makes what is considered an unreasonable profit especially on the sale of essential goods during times of emergency
- profiteer intransitive verb

Properteer
Main Entry: prop·er·teer
Pronunciation: “prä-p&-’tir
Function: noun
: one who drives up the prices of a limited, essential resource by treating homes as an investment
- properteer intransitive verb

I have finally tired of mailsnare’s poor customer service. For a long while, the only way to get a response to a ticket was to post on the forums and publicly shame them into responding. Then they deleted the forums.

After trying several candidates, I have finally settled on webmail.us.

There are IMAP providers out there offering more bells and whistles but webmail.us advertises 99.99% uptime and offers 24 hour support by email, web or phone. With that kind of service, I can live without cutting edge, alpha-geek features that aren’t much use when the email server has been down for three days and no one is responding to requests for service…

Migrating several years worth of email from one imap provider to another has proved a little trickier than expected.

The low-tech solution is to set up Thunderbird to check both accounts and drag messages from one to the other. Unfortunately you cannot create folders on dragging which makes it necessary to manually create all target folders. Moreover, if you interupt the copy process (for example by opening another folder) then it is aborted and not all messages will be copied across. This grows old very quickly.

Enter imapsync to the rescue.

Syncing the two accounts over ssl is as simple as:

imapsync --host1 mail.mailserver1.com --user1 username1 --password1 secret1 --host2 mail.mailserver2.com --user2 username 2 --password2 secret2 --ssl1 --ssl2


All necessary folders are created in the second account and flags and datestamps are preserved. The man pages are very comprehensive and deserve close reading.

Debian Etch contains the package by default and apt-get will handle all the perl dependencies. (Etch also includes a similar tool imapcopy which looks promising but I have yet to try it.) Users of other distros - or operating systems - should try the imapsync project page.

Edit - I did run into a problem with messages being copied more than once on subsequent reruns of imapsync.

This was easily solved by following the advice in the FAQ. Some IMAP servers add headers for each message transfered so each time you run the process, imapsync thinks all the messages are new. Rather than dig through the headers to work out exactly where this was happening, I took the lazy option and instructed imapsync to just use the Message-ID header when comparing messages and to ignore any size changes.

imapsync ... --useheader 'Message-ID' --skipsize

Voila. Four and half years worth of email effortlessly transfered from one IMAP account to another.

The google personalised homepage is back up with a new feature. The search giant has added themes to the pages, a charming series of bright, cartoonish skins that change depending on the time or weather.

To enable themes, you need to have modified your page already otherwise the option is not triggered. The impatient might consider adding random widgets until the option “Select Theme” appears to the left of “Add Stuff” at the top right of the page.

Mac users may have difficulty viewing themes (and/or the option to view themes) on their default home page, http://www.google.com/ig.

If you are using a Mac - Safari or Firefox - and themes are not showing on the google personalised home page - you should instead try the following url: http://www.google.com/ig?hl=en.

Again, if the option is not there yet, try adding some widgets and adjusting their settings (you can always delete them later).

Nicholas Negroponte coined the phrase “the Daily Me” in the mid-nineties to describe a digital newspaper personalised to the individual reader. Google ig is that newspaper but it’s not been working for the last few hours.

My configuration appears to have been (I assume temporarily) lost. I am missing it already.

David MacIver drew my attention to Chickenfoot today: “a Firefox extension that puts a programming environment in the browser’s sidebar so you can write scripts to manipulate web pages and automate web browsing.” It sounds like a slightly better Greasemonkey (although I must admit I haven’t touched Greasemonkey for a long time and it has no doubt changed since then.)

Being unable to install it was the final straw in making me decide to upgrade firefox. I’ve been running the default debian version out of a combination of laziness and paranoia about security but in the last few months I’ve really began to notice how out of date it is. More and more sites have been crashing my browswer. Fewer and fewer extensions have been working. But like the proverbial frog in the pan of boiling water, I have noticed all this happening but failed to jump out.

Turns out it was very simple to do. I just added backports my /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://www.backports.org/debian sarge-backports main

then

apt-get update && apt-get install firefox -t sarge-backports

Now I’m finally able to install Chickenfoot but I haven’t played with it yet because I’m catching up on the 1000+ unread posts in bloglines that I haven’t been able to read for months since the sites last upgrade made it crash my browser.