Marc Charbonneau’s Blog

Last week I bought a new cell phone; a Sony Ericsson w810i from Cingular AT&T. My last phone was purchased years ago, back when even having a color screen was a high-end luxury option, so I’ve been having fun with all the new features on the w810i. In case anyone else is considering using this phone with a Macintosh, here’s a short summary of my experience so far.

Bluetooth Internet

Internet access works great from my PowerBook. Once I paired the phone with my laptop, all I had to do was click the bluetooth menu icon and select ‘Join Network on W810i’. That’s much easier than I would have expected. It’s going to be great the next time I go on vacation; no more trips to the public library just to check my email over the wireless network.

iSync Compatibility

Address Book syncing works, but in a kind of poor way. It’s all done through iSync, and while names, phone numbers and email addresses all seem to transfer fine, the phone itself doesn’t always know how to parse these fields. The biggest issue is with extensions. If I have a phone number in Address Book formatted as (555)555-5555 x555, the phone tries to dial 555 555 5555 555. With the extra three digits at the end, the call doesn’t go through and I receive a recorded error message instead. I guess if I want to sync with Address Book I have to remove any extensions, which is very disappointing.

Although Address Book lets you dial numbers and send SMS messages through bluetooth, these features don’t work with the w810i. I’ve read that there’s an unofficial work-around, but I haven’t bothered with it yet.

iCal syncing also goes through iSync, and although I haven’t used it much it seems to work fine.

File Transfers

File transfers work great using bluetooth. I’ve tested it by sending and receiving a few photos and songs, and I haven’t run into any issues. The phone also comes with a USB cable, but I haven’t found a need for it yet. If you’re going to be transferring a large number of files, I’d suggest buying a card reader for the memory stick (the phone includes a 256MB card). Bluetooth works great, but it’s still a little slow.

Camera Capability

As a camera, the phone is fine. 2MP, autofocus, and it even has a very powerful LED light that works as a decent flash. The shots are a little grainy, but it is a camera phone after all. I took some shots of a band playing in a dark nightclub last week, and they turned out surprisingly good.

Media Player

The FM radio is neat, even though I didn’t buy the phone for it’s media capabilities. The best feature is that when you’re browsing stations, the phone shows you the name of the station along with the frequency. Very useful if you’re traveling and not familiar with the local radio stations.

The music player itself seems decent enough, but I doubt it will ever replace my iPod.

Email

The built-in email application is extremely disappointing. It only supports a few providers (Yahoo!, MSN, and AOL basically), and even if I did use one of them I doubt I’d care too much for the client application. I know you can download GMail and other java clients, but you still lose push email and you can’t replace the big email icon on the main menu with your preferred application.

I’ve also been playing around with Google Maps and a few other java applications, but that’s really getting off the topic of the phone itself.

Feel free to leave a comment if there are any other features I should look into.

One of the nice things about having a Software Assurance subscription at work is that I have access to Windows Vista Enterprise, which comes with all sorts of goodies and can be downloaded straight from microsoft.com. Now, the way volume licensing is handled is completely different than it was in Windows XP, so I was a little concerned when I tried to activate Vista today and it complained about a DNS error, 0x8007232b.

After reading this thread, I found the solution. Right click on My Computer, select Properties, and click on Change product key at the bottom of the window. You’re then prompted to enter your key (I’m using MAK, but I assume KMS would work the same way), and Vista should connect to the internet and validate the key without any errors.

It’s a weird bug, and it seems like a lot of customers are running into it; not the type of thing I would expect to slip by QA. I hope it’s resolved by the time I start rolling out Vista to our users.

WiFi support in Windows Mobile is horrible. I received an HP hx2495 recently, and I simply could not connect it to an encrypted wireless network, either at work or at home. I doubt it was anything wrong with the access points or a configuration issue; I’m very familiar with wireless security, and tried pretty much every possible configuration except for WEP.

Anyway, it so happens HP ships Odyssey Access Client on the extras CD with their higher-end line of PDAs. After finding and installing it, I had zero problems. WiFi at work and at home connected fine on the first try, even after enabling the highest security settings (WPA2 AES) on my access point. That’s surprising; even many PC laptops can’t do WPA2 reliably.

Odyssey Access Client is now owned by Juniper; you can find it here. Licenses are $50, but the cost is worth it, and I’m not aware of any other real competitor.

FreeBSD versions 5 and 6 no longer includes perl with the base system. That’s good and bad news for me, since I like the idea of a “stripped down” base system, but I do need perl for some of the software I’m planning on using.

It’s easy enough to install perl from the ports collection ((If you didn’t include the ports collection when you setup FreeBSD, get it now by running sysinstall and selecting ports from the Configure -> Distributions menu.)) though. Just run these commands:

cd /usr/ports/lang/perl5
make
make install
make clean

Keep in mind that this will install perl to /usr/local/bin/perl, rather than /usr/bin/perl as some scripts expect.

Ever since I started reading about Office 2007 I’ve been looking forward to the new RSS features in Outlook. Now that I’ve been using it for a few weeks, I’ve really grown to love it. As a newsreader there’s nothing special about Outlook (in fact, there are some things about it that are downright annoying), but what’s great is that each feed is stored as a regular Outlook mail message, in a regular Outlook mail folder.

If you have an Exchange account that you widely use, this is simply a great way to manage your feeds. Everything is stored under your Exchange mailbox, so you can use any computer with Outlook, even older versions. Same thing with Outlook Web Access, or syncing with your PDA, if you’re away from home. The only real downside is that you’ll have to leave Outlook 2007 open to actually refresh the feeds, since it’s the client generating them, and not the Exchange server itself.

It’s just a rumor at this point, but I have it on good authority the next version of Office for OSX will include a new, greatly improved Remote Desktop client. This is, of course, good news for anyone using the old RDC client, which hasn’t been updated since way back in 2004. Not that it doesn’t still work well enough, but it’s long overdue for an overhaul.

One of the first things you’ll want to do after installing FreeBSD is add your user account to the wheel group. This will let you use su to run commands as root, without having to log out or open a new terminal.

pw usermod  -G wheel

FreeBSD may not require a lot of resources, but it seems to under-estimate itself when it comes to automatic partitioning. For most servers, you’re much better off choosing your own partitioning scheme than letting the installer do it for you.

• swap – I’ve always used 2.5x the physical RAM in the machine, although I’ve heard 2x and 1.5x as well. In any case, it’s not something I’d worry too much about unless you need to fine-tune a server’s performance.
• / (root) – The default (512MB) should be fine.
• /var – For most configurations, the default is way too small. You need to allocate space based on what you intend to do with your server; if you’re planning on running a web or mail server, you would probably want to give /var most of your disk space. Even if you’re not going to keep much data in /var I would still give it a couple gigs, just to make sure you don’t have any trouble with log files filling up all your free space.
• /tmp – You’ll want to allocate extra space here as well, since install scripts may fail if they need to unpack large files. I’ve heard 2GB is a good value.
• /usr – Your user accounts live here, along with custom programs you install (including the ports collection). It’s entirely up to you how much space you want to allocate; I would give it around 4GB if you don’t plan on storing user data on the server.

I took the afternoon off work today to attend the Windows Vista Developer Launch Event (free coffee and a copy of MS Office 2007, how could I miss it?). It was an interesting time; the MS technology evangelist gave a four hour talk about the new developer features of Vista and .NET 3.0, and also Office 2007 development (which actually looks pretty neat, it seems like you can pretty much develop a complete .NET application inside an Office product now). I still don’t think .NET 3.0 is too exciting for the average developer, but it did raise my interest in it a bit.

Anyway, one of the biggest talking points was on the Windows Presentation Foundation, a new technology for creating user interfaces in .NET applications and webpages. WPF is more like Flash than a traditional UI library. It’s easy for non-developers to design their own widgets, either from right scratch or mixing and matching with the default look. Like Flash, there’s lots of animation, embedded media, and vector graphics. The end result is turned into an XML document that the developer can drop into his .NET application.

What I’m getting at though, is that no where during this talk did anyone mention any sort of style or interface guidelines. Rather, the designer is pretty much given carte blanche to do as they please. One of the examples she gave was a “fish button;” a button that looked, well, like a fish. That kind of thing scares me. If every developer starts using WPF there’s really no telling what Windows applications will look like. Maybe I’m being a bit paranoid, but without a good interface guideline I can easy imagine a program full of fish buttons, and the developer wouldn’t even know he did something wrong.

As a side note, those of you who don’t care much for Vista will be happy to note that the presenter’s laptop crashed, a lot. I think there were three reboots before the talk was done, and at one point the Microsoft evangelist went so far as to say “you know, I have three gigs of RAM in this laptop, but sometimes it’s still not enough for Vista.” Vista was pretty, though.

Regis Duchesne:

VMware products have had a semi-hidden switch for some sort of 3D support in virtual machines on Linux and Windows since VMware Workstation 5.0, which was released almost 2 years ago (April 2005).

Since then, work on the 3D front has been progressing steadily, with DirectX 8.1 support in VMware Workstation 6 and VMware Fusion (both are built from the same code base).

Internally, our goal is to support DirectX 10 for Windows Vista’s Aero.

I use virtualization (VMWare and Microsoft) heavily at work, and I plan to take full advantage of it at home on OSX once I finally upgrade to an Intel Mac. 3D support will be great, since otherwise I’d have to keep a bootcamp partition around in addition to one or two virtual machines I plan on running. Parallels fans shouldn’t worry; rumor is they’re working on 3D support as well.