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.

Apollo

Talk around the neighborhood is the cat, known as Apollo, is a bit of a creature of the night if you know what I mean, visiting many households, kind of like an Egyptian prince and his haram, except we are just one of many wives in an otherwise sordid affair.

Meeting

Anyway, I thought I’d introduce him to Prince Mahiki, it only seemed fair, Apollo got on well with the prince for several seconds…

Prince Mahiki

On a side note, this blog received almost no visits for the last four days, way under (percentage wise) the monthly average.. As the writer of this publication once pondered “if I build it, they will come…”, they came to an extent, but not quite like I wanted them to.

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.

I quite like the read, it’s interesting enough, but I can’t help feeling it’s the same message over and over again, presented in blog style messages with every post revolving around the idea of the tribe with leaders and followers.  Godin’s message (my take, anyway) is that anything, wether that be a product, service, group or religion, can be successful with the right passion, leadership and loyal base.  No surprises there, but it’s more than that, as its a stab at how the old style corporate factories don’t necessarily generate the huge profits like they used to and its the daring guy with the good idea that will most often succeed.  This is backed up by success stories of your Apples and Teslas, Wikipedias and David Changs.

Tribes – Seth Godin

One thing I can’t understand at all is this section:

The Balloon Factory and the Unicorn

“I’m not sure you’ve ever visited a balloon factory.  Probably not.

The people who work in the balloon factory are timid.  Afraid, even.  They’re very concerned about pins, needles and porcupines.  They don’t like sudden changes in temperature.  Sharp objects are a problem as well.  The balloon factory isn’t really a bad place to work if you rationalize a bit.  It’s steady work, witha  bit of a rush around New Year’s.  The rest of the time it’s quiet and peaceful and not so scary.

Except when the unicorns show up.

At first, the balloon factory folks shush the unicorn and warn him away.  That often works.  But sometimes, the unicorn ignores them and wanders into the factory anyway.

That’s when everyone runs for cover.

It’s amazingly easy for a unicorn to completely disrupt a calloon facory.. That’s because the factory is organized around a single idea, the idea of soft, quiet stability.  The unicorn changes all that.  The balloon factory is all about the status quo.  And leaders change the status quo.”

What the? The rest of the book made relative sense, but this is something straight out of Fear and Loathing or Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

Join the tribe, live the passion

A good book, none the less, definitely an insightful read.

Now to start Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting… Aye cannae tell ye hea much ea bin looking forward tae that!

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?