What I didn’t realise when purchasing this certificate was that to activate it you need to reside within the United States, and in their defence it states that clearly on the front page as you go to purchase the item.  Upon not being able to activate the certificate, one of my colleagues sent the support team at GoDaddy a message asking how this situation was going to be resolved, and how we could go about activating the certificate.

What followed was rather funny:

Thank you for contacting online support. Unfortunately, our Premium SSL Certificates can only be issued to business based within the United States of Japan. If your business is located within another ocuntry, you will not be able to use the certificate. You will need to cancel the certificates and reply to this message so that we may refund the purchase.

The first comes from a wonderful and obviously successful wedding and bridal business in Florida called Yvette’s Bridal Forum (http://yvettesbridalformal.com/).

Yvette’s Bridal Forum http://yvettesbridalformal.com/

It can be described in one of two ways:

• the most repulsive site ever created; or
• the best surviving example of an early to mid 90s <HTML3 pioneer’s creation (commonly found on geocities***) with sporadic ghastly use of CSS (z-index and absolute positioning), and javascript (lovely bouncing stick men).

The worst thing is, a quick flick back through everyones favorite web time machine, show’s that it only started going downhill in 2007, before that it was at least slightly tasteful, progressing (yes, it got worse, and worse) to what I can only classify today as web vomit.

Looking at the source reveals even more of the madness too (yahoo sitebuilder… space aliens?!?!?)

<title>Yvette’s</title>
<meta name=”generator” content=”Yahoo! SiteBuilder/2.6/1.5.0_02″>
</meta><meta name=”author” content=”Vespasian”>
</meta><meta name=”keywords” content=”Yvette’s, health, fitness, weightloss, weight loss, religion, space aliens”>
</meta>

None the less, it’s a worthy addition to LinkFu, and should be probably be saved in its current state to show our children and generations ahead, the wonders of yesteryear.

*** More recently, this behaviour has been seen repeated in the wild on myspace pages of the masses. ech.

Update: Apparently viewing the site in Internet explorer yields even more delights, with wonderful music and even better animation

I’m a newbie and I try to execute this command “rm -rf” with the root privileges in root path.
- I try it on the emulator but the emulator freezes.
- I try it on the real device but nothing happens, the terminal seem to execute the command and return a new prompt line.
Thank you.

I’m not really sure what else to say…

Almost straight after my last Android post regarding my disappointment in HTC’s delay in their release of the promised Android 2.x release for the Hero (or Dream/G1, Magic/Sapphire, etc).  Thanks to a leaked build for the HTC Eris, dropped by a sketchy HTC staff member (or perhaps a creative community-driven beta testing process), a torrent of new custom Hero ROM’s were released.  Like always, each is slightly different with software/apps included or removed, and installed special optimisations, bug fixes and kernel hacks.

Since the 2nd of March:

• VillianROM v3.x by @nprussell
  • Creator of the fantastic clean Vanillian Vanilla build (new version soon)
  • Many versions released with many optimisations, bug fixes and handy included apps
• BeHero 1.2.x by @benocharm (1.3 on the way based on HTC Legend build – see below)
• HeroDroid v0.4 by @MaXo
• Defiance 2.1 by TheAshMan
• Neo ROM v1.34 by alias_neo
• Raidroid 1.0 by @raiderx303
• Clean Eris4Hero by @LoxDev

Anyone who’s been around the Hero/Android scene would probably have seen many of these names, and choice always keeps things interesting, but as you can see from the brief descriptions above, apart from different bootscreen/design/installed apps the optimisations in each are almost the same.

Unfortunately the issue is, I believe, while we don’t have access to the complete driver set or an updated (Android 2.x friendly) kernel, true creativity and customisation of each individual ROM isn’t particularly easy, at least from this posters point of view.

Flash forward to tonight (9th March) and a new dump has been leaked, this time for the HTC Legend (newer phone with almost exactly the same hardware specification as the Hero, except for that sweet AMOLED screen), which appears to have even more of the new Eclair features missing from the previous build, as well as more bug fixes I’d imagine!

Since then, I’ve been running it on all my machines, on linux, Windows and the Macbook.   Quite frankly, I love it, although I’m not sure whether the iPhone client would work very well, especially not with multi-lists and complicated layout, though I could be wrong (and have been before, obviously).

Recently however, I wiped my Ubuntu laptop recently, and after a fresh clean install and subsequent install of the right libraries, Adobe Flash, Air and finally TweetDeck, I was greeted with this:

Uh oh…

Unfortunately, most of the search results pointed back to Windows issues with an incorrect link back to the user’s home directory (thus, TweetDeck not being able to find the data), but obviously this wasn’t a huge help in the situation.

Running TweetDeck from a console gave the answer away pretty quickly: “libgnome-keyring.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory”. After making sure I had libgnome-keyring and libgnome-keyring-dev installed, which it was (installed by default, the keyring is used everywhere), I remembered having an issue with installed libraries and Flash on a 64 bit install previously, a problem which is fixed by installing 32bit libraries for the apps that need them.  

A quick Google search, (which resulted any many more relevant results this time), a quick fix, and I was back up and running happily seconds later.

The Deck

Nom, nom, nom..

Months on, however, HTC have still not released an office 2.1/Eclair update for the Hero platform, nor have they provided (i.e let slip) an updated 2.1 dump for the cooks to play with.  No doubt this is because of the release of the Nexus, Legend and Bravo, so as not to steal their thunder, but I’m betting it’s because they just don’t care.  And why should they?  In this day and age of Lacoste, Guiness and Apple fanboy-ism, brand loyalty means nothing….. right?

But who am I to complain right? I’ve heard the tired old argument about manufacturers releasing devices to the market with a whole lot of push and marketing to get buyers, then stopping support/upgrade path for them soon after release.  Many do it, look at Samsung (the Galaxy fizzled and died as soon as hit the shelf), and from what I’ve seen support from Acer for the Liquid has been no better.  But after all, HTC is no different to any other company, they exist for the money and I guess we shouldn’t expect more.

She’s “cool”, Apple win.. HTC, on the other hand.. don’t.

This will most certainly be my last £0/fee per month contract phone though.  I love it, but 18 months with one device is just too long.  In the future, I’ll foot the ~£500 price tag for a new phone and sell it six months later for £300 repeating the process over again.

Ashamedly, I realise that my lust for new hardware and device happiness has the equal effect of giving the manufacturer exactly what they want, and keeping them happy… many times over.

http://hd911.com Redirecting Again

I didn’t think anyone had noticed, but I finally fixed the DNS issue I was having with hd911.com (www. was working fine as well as blackbox. and sybian. don’t you just want to know!?!).  A few weeks ago while moving an A record in my DNS registrar’s amazing control panel (GoDaddy, your application and advertising/spam-fest you call a shop/checkout area are an inspiration to us all), the default web host was stuck on the old address, even though it looked right in the control panel.

After a series of emails to support , I finally  talked to someone who could help, and they reset the hosts so now browsing to http://hd911.com redirects back to this page instead of the error page (you would have seen an IIS Under Construction page during this period).

The strange thing is, I’ve noticed more than just a few visitors coming in on this link (without the www.), so it must be up on a web directory somewhere that I don’t know about?!

CSS/Styling (mostly) Fixed

Before any designers/style-fascists say anything, I’m not a perfectionist, and this site is by no means perfect, but my tests in IE7/8, Safari, Firefox 3.6/3.7 and Chrome all look decent enough so I’m getting to the point with the layout/typography where I’m relatively happy.  Saying that, if anyone notices any complete style vomit or things plain don’t work, comment here and I’ll get onto them right away.   However, if this is being read in Internet Explorer 6, I know it looks odd, I like it that way, and if Google says “No, to IE6″ finally, then its good enough for me.

The Logo (or lack thereof)

This is something that has been bothering me, I need an idea for a logo, I’ve tried a few combinations of things that I think would look OK, like steel/boiler plated bold text, or an artist-ey cursive scribble to say, “If you weren’t reading me on the screen from half a world away, this would be written on a paper with a real feather and ink”.  I can’t for the life of me think of, or design something that would look OK in that corner though…

Any ideas?

The iPad

Note: I should note that this article contains nothing new, it’s just my thoughts on my new toy, the machine itself is 1-2 years old now and i’m sure has been blogged/reported and talked up for much longer than that.

Hardware – The Macbook Pro 15″

Having pretty much never laid a finger on one apart from selecting a new song in iTunes I often appreciated the Macbooks beauty from afar and snubbed any notion of getting one due to the price, lack of real customisabilty and every non-Apple minded person’s plight to escape from Apple wankery and the mindless drones that mill around the orchard at release time talking about the new iBrain that will revolutionise the way we think.  All that aside, it’s an amazing piece of hardware,  I am truly blown away by its shape, build quality, colour, weight and its uncanny ability to make you feel like you’re slitting your wrists every time you type on it, because the front edge is so sharp.

The Touchpad is far and above the best point device (that’s not a mouse) that I’ve ever used, and in most cases replaces all need for a mouse anyway, the two, three and four finger actions are amazingly useful and even though basic support for two finger scrolling is available in Windows 7 and can be enabled in *nix, the rest of the industry is years behind.

The new Macbook Pro

The biggest down side on the hardware side is the lack of a 1920×1200 (or 1080p) screen, which I’ve had in my last four Dell laptop’s (15.4″ and 17″), and the stunted keyboard is very annoying.  I can get used to the swapped ‘@’ and double quote key (even though its apparently a UK keyboard combination), and the Apple Command key takes normal functionality away from the Control key while adding an extra layer of complexity to normal/standard key combinations.  For instance:

• In a web browser (any normal web browser anyway (Firefox, Chrome, Safari, etc)
  • Ctrl + W is close, Ctrl + T is new tab, Ctrl + L is open link/focus address bar, Ctrl + Tab is cycle between tabs
  • On the mac, the Ctrl key is replaced by the command key, except in the case of cycling between tabs where it’s still Ctrl + Tab (as Command + Tab selects windows in the OS).  Now to move between tabs I need to be alternating between the Command and Ctrl keys to perform functions that required no effort before.
  • Not just that, I’ve been much more prone to pressing Cmd + Q whilst changing thumb positions and quitting the browser completely, a few seconds wasted , but a common occurence.

The thing that annoys me most is the removal of the Delete, Home, End, PgUp and PgDn keys which are admittedly available through Fn + (Backspace, Left, Right, Up, Down) respectively.  This is poorly implemented and supported across applications within MacOS though, for instance going to the Home position on the start of the line in 3 different programs (Fn + Left (Normal behaviour), Command + Shift + Left (Eclipse, Don’t say a word!), Fn + Ctrl + Left (Terminal).  Really, it doesn’t take all that long to learn the combination for a different program, or situation, but I think it should have been standardised int he first place.

All in all, I shouldn’t bitch though, it’s a very nice machine and I’d much prefer to carry it around than my 17″ Dell (the behemoth), a task that is neither easy as its quite bulky but also quite painful on the back after a while.

Software – MacOS

Those who know my geeky side know I get around when it comes to OS’s, distributions and user interfaces, apart from the 50% of my time I usually spend in a console window, I’m never content without tinkering on a platform wether that be something like Gnome, something more lightweight like Fluxbox or Windows.  I’m 100% certain when I say this, a proper Linux Window manager setup like Gnome + Compiz + appropriate keyboard shortcuts, is absolutely the most efficient and productive interface I’ve used (apart from maybe the lack of a good word processor, if and when it’s needed )

MacOS on the other hand (whatever its Window Manager is called Aqua.. not Aero ?!?!), is made for idiots, and while it’s very beautiful I’ve found performing certain tasks a complete pain:

• I use terminal for more file operations as Finder is twice as interactive as Windows Explorer or Nautilus, but with the cost of reduced efficiency whilst choosing what display type you want or getting a few levels higher when browsing in column mode.  Coverflow is useless for anything but browsing through Cover art in iTunes or an iPhone/iPod (funny that…)
• Window location and traversal when you have loads of windows open is difficult as minimise isn’t the same.  (ever tried using expose when you have 20 text/code windows open?)
• The standard System Preferences seems to hide useful settings (to stop idiots doing what they’d do, I guess)
• The taskbar is cute and all, but can also get confusing with lots of apps open (though this is a mindset thing I’ll change over time)

But what can I say, I’m just as bad as the rest of them (apart from the teenspeak that is, eccch….)

All the praise aside, nothings perfect, and my little Hero was no exception. In fact it suffers from the same ailment as many devices fall victim too, where hardware vendors release their products with poor/inefficient software. So without going into too much detail on the ROM, as I’ve done that before, I’ve come up with what my idea of the perfect setup is for a fast, secure, ultra useful phone that does everything for you.

The ROM

In my previous article about the Android ROM’s, I blogged about some of the ROM’s available for the Hero platform, the most mature and reliable definitely being MoDaCo’s custom ROM (now at version 3.2).  After trialling Android 2.0/2.1 ROM’s I didn’t want to go back to a cupcake build (Android 1.5) so I’ve settled on Kagudroid 1.0-beta, made by Lox of LoxDev fame, a ROM which aims to be as clean as possible built from the AOSP sources.  It’s Sense-less in that it doesn’t have any of the HTC SenseUI software on there so there’s RAM and general speed improvements and runs smoothly and fast.

Kagudroid 0.1beta (running on AOSP 2.0)

The Perfect-ly Obvious

They deserve a mention as they’re used almost more than anything else on the phone, but any of the google suite is an absolute must if your a google account holder.  GMail, Maps, Places Directory and Tasks are what I use most often, but Google Goggles (image searching) is pretty nifty.

The Perfect Set of Utilities

Due to wiping the phone so many times, I’ve got a a set of applications (as well as their DB’s, so I don’t have to set them up every time), which I load before booting the new ROM.  I consider them essential and it’s just not the same without them.

Locale – Event Driven Profiles

(http://www.twofortyfouram.com/)

Locale’s that profiles menu on your old Nokia 5110, revitalised in way that profile selection is made almost completely automatic, driven by an event system that can act on almost anything thing the phone does, like GPS location, WIFI availability, time, date, battery health, availability of networks/services, etc etc and hundreds of combinations of each.

The Locale Profile Screen

These are my standard set of profiles (in order of preference, as they’ll override each other):

• Bedtime - In the vicinity of ‘Home’ after 11pm on a week night, phone notifications are silent, GPS turned off and Alarms set on loud to make sure I wake up the following morning
• Home – In the vicinity of the house, WIFI and bluetooth on, and volume set to relatively low
• Low Battery – Triggered anytime the battery is below 20%, basically shuts down 3G/Wifi data, GPS and Screen time out to increase time until phone death
• Office - In the vicinity of the office, WIFI/Bluetooth on and phone almost on silent, screen timeout set on high and Screebl (see below) disabled
• Default – Phone on loud setting, GPS/WIFI on (for location services) but most other services off as they’re unused

See?  Infinitely useful, and I’m only just using the most basic of features.

Screebl

(http://www.keyeslabs.com/joomla/index.php/projects/screebl)

Screebl is a simple app with one purpose, it saves battery life by keeping the screen timeout as low as possible, but at the same time using the phones accelerometer to detect when the phone is being held and keep the screen on while using Google Maps, messaging, web browsing etc.  The new version (v2.0) includes Locale plugin support to change Screebl settings on Locale profile change.

Wavesecure – Security

(https://www.wavesecure.com/)

Wavesecure definitely deserves a mention, even though I’ve fortunately not had to use it’s most useful features.  It’s a security app, that runs constantly and checks into a remote server where if the phone is lost/stolen you can physically lock down the device to disable it, and if required wipe it clean to protect personal data.  It’ll also report phones location upon request and can backup files/SMS on a scheduled basis.

Advanced Task Manager

(http://arronla.com/)

Advanced Task Manager is perfect for keeping the phone running as quickly as possible at all times, by automatically closing all non essential apps and freeing up much needed RAM.

The Perfect Set of Apps

There’s a load of other apps I use as well on a constant basic, but may not be quite as essential as those listed above

Dolphin Browser

(http://www.dolphinbrower.com)

I’m yet to see the newest HTC and/or Android brower from Android 2.1, but Dolphin Browser is much better and fuller featured than the Cupcake browsers that I used, it’s got tabs (on the screen where you can see them), Google bookmark sync to help typing out those pesky web address’s and a simple to use gesture feature which make the touch screen experience even easier.

Twidroid (or Seesmic too for ping.fm support) – Twitter Clients

(http://www.twidroid.com)

What can I say, I’m a Twitter geek, and Twidroid is defintely the most full features twitter client i know of, it lacks the streamlined integration of Peep, the HTC client but’s very configurable and looks sharp

Newsrob – Google Reader Client

Simple idea, scheduled retrieval of RSS/Podcast and Blog updates from my Google Reader account

Truphone & SIPDroid – VOIP Clients

(http://www.truphone.com)

You may remember Truphone from my N95 articles from a while back and I still use it too for cheap world wide phone calls, and free voip -> voip or skype calls all from within the program.  I’ve been testing SIPDroid as well with my VOIP carrier sipgate.co.uk.  The only problem I’ve got now is choosing which number to give to people as my primary number, I’ve no doubt within a very short time period VOIP accounts like this will be the norm on all data plans.

XBMC Remote Android (android-xbmcremote)

(http://code.google.com/p/android-xbmcremote/)

I’d only recently started using XBMC remote on an old laptop and it has revolutionised the way I watch media on TV, but one thing that annoyed me was needing a wireless keyboard/mouse to interact with it (or even worse, getting up and going to the TV to change media), until I found XBMC remote, like a virtual remote that works via HTTP over WIFI.  It can access almost every function within XBMC including whats playing, media list, info, etc and will even do WOL (Wake on LAN) to start the computer up after its been switched off.  I’ll never have to get off the couch again!!!

Others

• Transdroid – For access to a transmission-daemon for torrent monitoring, I use it for a number of torrent clients now, very useful! (http://www.transdroid.org/)
• chompSMS – Not essential, but who wouldn’t want the IPhone’s message screen, an almost exact copy from what I can see (http://www.chompsms.com)
• Better Keyboard and/or Shapewriter/Swype – Keyboard replacements that definitely make typing faster on the device (in fact, I’m typing this blog post with it right now!… .Not, but you get the idea)
• SetCPU – for over/underclocking to increase performance or increase battery life (one of life’s true dilemmas)