Mobile 15 comments

HTC Desire — problems writing to SD Card — #HTC

By on June 19th, 2010

As mentioned in a previous blog post I have ordered a HTC Desire and have received it a couple of weeks ago.

The HTC Desire is a great phone and I am very happy with it except for one minor issue I have with it.  There is a intermittent problem writing to the SD Card.  Here is the error message, for example when you want to take a picture or use the camcorder.

Unable to save file to SD card due to insuffucient file permissions.

Also when you send something to the phone via Bluethooth when the phone cannot write to the SD Card, nothing happens.  No error message that the file cannot be written to the SD Card.

Switching the phone off and the on again solve the problem for a while.  That while can be anything from a couple of minutes to a couple of hours. I have Googled and it seems that it is a known problem with the HTC Desire and also the new HTC Evo.  Most people have the view that it is due to inferior SD Cards that HTC uses.  Mine has a Sandisk SD Card in so do not know whether that is true.  I have also read that HTC is working on a patch for the Evo, not sure whether the Desire will get an update.

One suggestion is to reformat the SD Card which I will try sometime.  Since it is a normal FAT filesystem, I will just put the card in a Card Reader and use my Linux desktop, copy everything off the card as backup, reformat the card again as FAT and then copy everything back onto it.  Maybe what I should try first is to see if I can use a spare SD Card, format it and copy everything over to it and see if the spare have the same issue.

If anybody have some advice on what they think, please feel free to comment.

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Open Source No comments yet

Upgrade to WordPress 3

By on June 18th, 2010

This blog was just upgraded to WordPress 3.0 .. if you see anything funny and not behaving like it should be then please let me know.

Linux, Mobile No comments yet

Eat your heart out iPad — I want one of these

By on May 30th, 2010

From TechSource, I quote

On the hardware side, it has 1 external USB, 2 internal USB, motion sensor, Ethernet connector, microphone and headphone ports, front-facing web camera (2-Megapixel), ambient light sensor, accelerometer, and more. On the software side, the device is running Linux but we don’t have further details about it. It could be Android, or could be a heavily customized Linux distro. However, it’s certain that it will rely on HTML5-based applications, it will have Flash support, and it will feature Android-compatible development platform.

Some of the specs:

  • LCD 10.1“ resolution 1024×600
  • Multi-Touch Capacitive panel (with coverglass)
  • RAM 256MB DDR
  • 4GB internal Storage NAND-Flash (1GB to 8GB)
  • Ethernet 10/100
  • WiFi (Atheros) b/g
  • Bluetooth 2.1
  • SDHC card reader
  • Battery internal (8 hours+)
  • 3G (with internal USB dongle optional)
  • Zigbee (with internal USB dongle optional) — [Have no idea what this is]
  • Camera (2 Megapixel)
  • 2 x speakers 2 W
  • 5 buttons (on/off, + / – , home , menu)
  • Foldable foot
  • VESA mounting
  • Kensington lock — [Need this here in SA 🙂 ]
  • Size : 268 x 168 x 16 mm Weight : 800 gr.

Here is a short Youtube:

I am sure that there will be much more of these devices hitting the marker running some form of Linux or Android.

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Google, Ubuntu 2 comments

Why I use Google Chrome more and more on Ubuntu 10.04?

By on May 15th, 2010

I am running Ubuntu 10.04 and have both Google Chrome (v 5.0.375.38 beta) and Firefox (v 3.6.3) installed.  Although Firefox is still setup as my default browser, I find myself using Chrome more and more and it is mainly for the following reasons:

  • Chrome starts up much, much faster than Firefox.  I have almost the same amount of extensions of similar type in each browser.
  • After upgrading to Ubuntu 10.04 from Ubuntu 9.10, Flash stopped working in Firefox.  Have no problems with Flash in Chrome.  I have tried everything suggested to fix the Flash problem in Firefox but none seem to work.
  • Like the idea that I can install extensions in Chrome without restarting Chrome.
  • I sometime use standalone web-apps (Google Reader) and tried both using Prism and Chrome standalone and I just like the Chrome standalone better.
  • Overall Chrome just feel much more faster and snappy.
  • By default Chrome gives me more real estate – yes i know I can get some minimalist theme for Firefox.

There are a couple of IBM work extensions that I use that is only available in Firefox so will have to carry on using Firefox until they bring out Chrome versions.  This might be one of the reasons why Firefox loads so much slower, but I cannot think this couple of extensions can have so much influence on Firefox’s loading time.

In the long run, if this trend continue, I cannot see myself using Firefox that much anymore.  With each new version of Chrome it just gets better and better.  I can fully understand why Chrome is being considered as default for Ubuntu Maverick Netbook Edition.

Lotus Notes, Ubuntu No comments yet

Upgrade to Lucid — 2 done (sort of), 1 to go

By on May 10th, 2010

As mentioned in this post and this one, I have 3 machines to upgrade.

Today, I bit the bullet and did my IBM production workstation.  As mentioned in this post, the upgrade path is not the normal Ubuntu one but an internal IBM one.  It went fairly well except for the internal part that failed.  Luckily I knew what internal repositories get used and updated my sources.list and ran the update which downloaded and upgraded some internal packages.

After the upgrade, the window buttons were sitting on the left and I hated it.  I immediately changed it back to the right. One thing that does not look right is Lotus Notes which does not display everything properly.  Will have to dig into it tomorrow to figure out what is going on.  For those that run Lotus Notes under Ubuntu, the mail and calendar tab display properly but the home tab is just blank and the resync tab has also got issue.  When opening a mail in a tab, the top part, including the toolbar does not display.

Overall it seems to be stable but I have this impression that booting takes a couple of seconds more.

Mobile 4 comments

HTC Desire – ordered

By on May 9th, 2010

I have always been a Nokia man, but have decided to broaden my horizons and go for an Andriod phone.  Yesterday I popped into my local MTN shop and placed my order for the HTC Desire. 

On Twitter, MTNSouthAfrica last week said and I quote

The HTC Desire should be in stores next week – global flight crisis and limited availability from HTC have been a problem!

Hope I do not regret it like when I used a Samsung phone for a short while.  Cannot even remember what Samsung it was, but it was horrible and I moved back to my trusted Nokia.

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Ubuntu 1 comment

Ubuntu EMEA Regional Board – 2 from SA

By on May 6th, 2010

Congratulations to David and Jonathan who was elected to the Ubuntu EMEA Regional Board.  It is great to see 2 South Africans flying the Ubuntu flag.  Here is the full EMEA Board:

  • Jonathan Carter (still on board)
  • Laura Czajkowski
  • Alan Pope
  • Dennis Kaarsemaker
  • Stéphane Graber
  • Oliver Grawert
  • David Rubin

Also good to see some ladies making it onto the board also.

You can read the full story on Fridge.

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Ubuntu 2 comments

Upgrade to Lucid — 1 done, 2 to go.

By on May 2nd, 2010

Yes, upgraded one of my Karmic desktops to Lucid.  It was the machine that I guessed would have been the easiest to upgrade since it was a fresh install of Karmic and not much was added in the sense of PPA’s. 

The upgrade went smooth except at one place it poped up a window that said Grub Install or something like that.  It listed all my partitions with all unselected.  There was no explanation of what needs to be done except for a Forward button at the bottom.  I assume it wanted to know what partitions should be mounted at boot and I went ahead and selected all of them since I wanted all the partitions mounted. Click the forward button and the upgrade went ahead and threw a lot of errors in the terminal window.  Eventually it displayed a window that said, Grub install failed and whether it should continue.  I selected the tickbox and click forward.  The upgrade completed and asked me to Reboot which I did.  The machine booted fine and seem to be running fine.

So I have no idea what that is suppose to do and whether I had to select all the partitions.  Anybody out there that knows what this is all about?  I have another desktop to do and would like to know what one is suppose to do in this situation.

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Linux, Ubuntu 1 comment

Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) — when to upgrade

By on April 30th, 2010

So Ubuntu 10.04 was released yesterday with some problems.  First there was the memory leak issue and then some issue around GRUB2 which meant that the ISO’s had to be re-rolled. 

I have 3 machines that needs to be upgraded over the next week or so.  One of them is my IBM (yes I work for IBM and run Ubuntu as my primary workstation) workstation and here the upgrade process is not the same as the normal Ubuntu one due to some changes we (as in IBM) has made to Ubuntu.  We have our own internal upgrade process and that will still take a couple of weeks before that hits stable.

At home I have 2 desktops and one will definitely go through an upgrade process over the weekend.  The other one is a fairly old Ubuntu install and have gone through a couple of upgrades already. I am debating whether it is time for a fresh install on that machine.

If anyone has gone through the upgrades already and you have some comments and advice, please share with us.

Happy upgrading….

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business No comments yet

SEO business is a rip-off — well at least some of them.

By on April 24th, 2010

I was asked by a company to advise them on their business processes and how to automate this and just create an more integrated online environment.  While I was meeting with them, they mentioned to me that they pay another company R2500.00 a month for a SEO report.  I asked to have a look at the report that was produced and what a rip-off.  This report is just taking Google Analytics data and represent it in some Word doc report form. 

This I think is not on.  How can somebody do this?  What value is added for this R2500.00 .. in my view, absolutely nothing.

I know there is other SEO companies that does add value by evaluating keywords, meta tags and other content to ensure that one ends up higher in search engine searches.  In this report from this company I could not find any recommendations like this.

I immediately advised then to get rid of this SEO company.  

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