Cell phone – mania
I do seem to have a thing with gadgets and cell phones...
Although I'm pretty sure I'm really not interested in cell phones what so ever, I do find myself
buying another one very often lately.
Quick sum up of the last, say 6 months ...
Mio A701
- Pretty good explanations can be given for this handy for the dislike afterwards
Sony K750i
- Really good phone, although I do miss some of the more pocket-pc / smartphone related features like wifi (calling with fring or skype when at home, checking mail from anywhere)
And after reading some good reviews,
All About Symbian
Tweakers.net (in dutch)
and looking in to the images / dimensions given on the nokia site I decided this could be a really good phone for me overall.
Doesn't look like a lunch box when holding it, relatively small screen but hey
- no lunch box look !
Wifi / Bluetooth / Symbian Os with possibility to add TomTom etc ...
Looks really well..
I just hope that I don't get scammed by the Turkishly-named German selling me the phone on eBay 
How to run tests in TFS
(Post found on Buck Hodges - How to run tests in a build without test metadata files and test lists (.vsmdi files) in TFS Blog)
Although I normally never copy paste complete posts of other people I found this article very interesting and it took me quite some time to figure the following (bottom of the post) out so here it goes...
Since the beginning, running tests in Team Build (or MSBuild in general) has meant having to use .vsmdi files to specify the tests to run. Tons of people have complained about it, as it's a burden to create and edit the files, as either VSTS for Testers or the full suite is required in the 2005 release, and merging changes to the file is painful when multiple developers are updating the file. While mstest.exe has a /testcontainer option for simply specifying a DLL or load/web test file, the test tools task used with MSBuild does not expose an equivalent property.
Migrated my blog to WordPress
Hi Y'all,
Although I was pretty sure I would stay on iWeb I decided to move away once again.
So I just spend the last few hours setting up my new blog and copy pasting my older posts.
Why leave iWeb ?
- the website it creates is incredibly large. And for some reason my ftp connection always gets lost while uploading this massive amount of (always the same) data. Since iWeb always publishes a complete site, you will always re-ftp the complete site.
- iWeb needs post processing (iWeb++ for example ) You can't add html (google ads, youtube movies etc)
- you can't switch themes
- you can't add blog posts when you're away from your Mac ...
- no really nice way to have integrated comments / trackbacks (without a .mac account)
- no way to search blog posts (without a .mac account)
The user interface however is truly amazing and the ease of use also but alas only blogging on my Mac and struggling with uploading a massive site feels so stupid...
So here we go again...
Update 16/5/2007:
Added snap shots to the external links.
Inconvenient truth … about smartphones
Pocket PC’s - Smartphones - Gps phones still suck.
After using my Mio a701 for over 6 months the overall feeling is the sentence mentioned above.
Today it really crossed the line.
The specs look great, even the battery isn’t a reason for complaining but what about the following:
1) When someone calls you and you pick up, you will have to deal with the 1-4sec bug. This means the first few seconds of the call they cannot hear you speak. (even the r65 firmware)
This results in 3 possible resolutions:
* Break the f*cking phone
* Repeat your name twice (+/- 2 sec) but looks kinda weird for people standing next to you
* Be patient and count till 3 and start speaking
2) The phone will crash at least once a week, and yes also with the newest firmware and a clean re-install. And I am aware of the fact that it is a Windows Mobile 5 but still this kind of bugs tend to annoy me.
Possible resolutions:
* Break/Throw the f*cking phone
* Reboot and try to remember that all Mobile 5 devices tend to do this
3) Sometimes the phone will freeze when someone calls you, resulting in the following behaviour. You see the phone come alive (screen becomes active), you hear your ringtone, you try to unlock the phone and answer the call.... and nothing, you try again, ... still nothing... OK Reboot now, guess what : you can’t see who called you because apparently this becomes recorded in a sequence after the freeze up?
Possible resolutions:
* Break it
* Throw it
* Reboot it
4) Sometimes the a701’s phone functions have crashed but the phone isn’t frozen. So it looks like nobody called you in +6 hours but in fact the phone part is dead. This can easily be tested by trying to make a call yourself. If this results in an error message you can be damn sure that someone is pissed at you ! Result: messages will look delivered by the person who did send them, and you won’t have a clue. If someone called you however they tend to be stored however.
Although this device gets straight A’s on the googled reviews I do want to mention that from the 4 people I know with this device 3 are experiencing this behaviour and the other one, well, ... just doesn’t have any friends Just kidding ofcourse but he seems to be doing fine, but then again he also thinks that Vista is the biggest innovation since sliced bread.
So I will sell it or use it as a gps-only and buy another -really cheap- phone (Nokia / SE) so that when I feel the need to break it (phone), I will only lose 100 euro instead of +500
At the moment I am still thinking about throwing the damned Mio against the wall while taping it and publish it later on YouTube next to the Wii movies.
Is really nobody else facing these trouble and thinking:
No way I will cope with this bullshit, back to the oldschool phone and f*ck it, I’ll wait for a year or 3 until they get it figured out ? - Or the iPhone becomes affordable
I mean really:
- Sending messages with a stylus whilst driving your car, you need to be a pro if you don’t want to spill your cola ...
- Trying to call someone with only your fingers (And I mean without a stylus with the former sentence), only for the really patient once, or with only 3 friends / relatives
- Leaving Bluetooth on and try to call someone a few hours later - thats a nono - battery will die on you whilst calling.
- Using the excel / word on these things: get real !
The iPhone looks promising but I will pass on this one, will wait for a few years to see what happens on this geeky market.
iWeb++ launched
ell, after using iWeb for a couple of days I was getting annoyed with the lack of commenting and adsense support provided. (none what so ever !)
I looked into some apps namely: iWebEnhancer, iComment and iWebMore and thought it couldn’t be to big of a problem to create a tool that could do all that I wanted, in objective-c and provide it for free ofcourse.
(iWebEnhancer and iComment are not free ware)
So here it goes ...
I proudly present iWeb++ 0.1 (download link is at the Apps page)
Features included at the moment:
- insert comments in the likes of what iComment does (for maximum compatibility)
- make it possible to add adsense / youtube / flash in an easy manner
- (new) replace the slideshow_assets with a nicer version (usefull for non .mac owners)
So how does it work, pretty simple, look at the screenshot below:
To have the comments do the following:
Create a rounded shape and type the text as mentioned in the screenshot, simple as that.
The tool will ask you for your haloscan userid and arrange the rest itself. (do get a haloscan account at http://www.haloscan.com it’s free!)
See screenshot below for more info
If you want a youtube movie or adsense plugin then look at the above screenshot again, the template folder should contain .txt files like adsense.txt, youtube1.txt where you paste the to-be-inserted code.
You should however prefix these names in a rounded shape with <@[ and end them with ]@>.
(like iWebMore, see screenshots above)
If you find a bug, have any questions, feature requests, shoot ...
(stefan.venken at gmail.com)