I have a new post up on Makeuseof, regarding Firefox Addons for Privacy and Security. Maybe you won’t use all of them but even installing some of them (NoScript in particular) can really lower your chances of getting hit with a javascript exploit.

If you are like me, as soon as you start using Instant Messaging (Octrotalk, Windows Live Messenger, IM+, Palringo) on your Windows Mobile Device - your battery life goes out the window. I’m talking, 12 hrs max. That is not a good thing for a mobile device where you need it to last at least a full day, if not multiple days.

The problem is that IM networks need to remain connected - a ‘heartbeat’ signal is sent over the network to ensure the client is still online, and so that if you receive any instant messages they are delivered to you, well, instantly.

The reason text messages do not eat up battery life is because the cell phone network does not require your phone to have a heartbeat data connection to the cellular network - if a text message is sent to you, your phone picks it up when it communicates with the cell phone towers over the “control connection” - which all cell phones use to keep track of which cellular tower it is in range of (for more information on how SMS text messages work, see Howstuffworks).

Apparently this problem is due to IPv4 and how most devices use Network Address Translation to route traffic to your phone. This is where your phone has a private IP and keeps a connection open with a main server, using a keep alive signal, to maintain connectivity. According to this talk from Nokia, IPv6 solves this problem since there are enough IP addresses to assign each device a unique one. No longer will they need to juggle this IP, meaning that there is a substantial savings in battery time.

It can’t come a moment too soon. This has really made me look forward to the coming IPv6 transition. Even though IPv6 is a few years away, services are slowly coming online and eventually a ‘critial mass’ will propel adoption of the new protocol across all installation.

Twitter is a great social tool - halfway between an Instant Messaging client and e-mail. You can leave messages for people publicly or privately, and you can even import RSS feeds into your own twitter stream. It has blog integration in that you can have your blog put every post you make into your Twitter stream (much like this one will be posted to my twitter stream).

At first I thought the goal was to get as many people to follow you as you can. Then I read this post from Scobleizer that basically says: it’s not who follows you but who you follow. After mulling over this I realized it does make sense… I realize I’m not going to be as popular as some of the heavyweights on Twitter, and that really shouldn’t be your goal. My personal goal on twitter is to be connected with others, see whats happening, and maybe make some friends along the way.

An initial admission is probably in order: I don’t use a feed reader to follow news. I find that it is simply too much information to follow and much of it is duplicated content. I have a handful of websites/blogs that I visit on a daily basis to get an overview of general news (I am a news junkie) and I enjoy the format of websites and the associated images that go along with a story.

Along those lines, I found myself following some pretty neat feeds - @Makeuseof, @BreakingNewsOn, @nprnewsblog and others, which are basically imports of RSS feeds from their particular blog. Some of these ‘blog Twitterers’ also inject personal commentary into their streams.

After adding @engadget to my stream this morning it hit me: I am using Twitter as a Feed Reader! For those selected blogs that import their feeds into a Twitter user, or even those twitter users that have a blog which is synced up to Twitter, I find it awesome to be able to see what is going on, without having to manage “feeds” - mark items as read, and maybe even get additional commentary on stories. No marking of read items, no ‘old unread’ information to deal with, just a constant stream of feeds sent live to my twitter stream.

If I see an article I’m interested in, I click through (via the handy tinyurl link) and read to my hearts desire. If it doesn’t interest me, I just ignore it. It turns Twitter into a social feed reader, where you can talk about stories to other twitter users.

So will Twitter take over for feed readers in general? I think for some hardcore people, a direct feed is the only thing that will work. But for more ‘casual’ feed readers, such as myself, I think using Twitter as a feed reader is a great idea. Let me know your thoughts/experiences with it!

When I bought the Nokia N800 a key feature is not only the ability to surf the internet with Wifi but also to pair it with your phone via bluetooth and access the internet anywhere. have a Cingular 8525 (I guess now an AT&T 8525) which has 3G internet available, but it did not work out of the box with the N800.

To begin with some definitions, there are 2 ways that you typically connect to a phone for internet. Bluetooth DUN (Dial Up Networking) and Bluetooth PAN (Personal Area Network). Bluetooth DUN is the “old” way to connect, and some of the updates Microsoft is pushing out to their Windows Mobile devices are disabling it. Unfortunately, this is the way that the N800 uses to connect to the internet.

To fix this problem, some maemo hackers put together a package called “maemo-pan“. This package enables the ability to connect to a bluetooth PAN and use the shared internet. The announcement and directions are here. In summary:

• Go to the system preferences and add your phone in the phone settings. Do not enter the wizard for configuring the dialup settings. PAN does not use them.
• Start internet sharing on your phone. It depends on your phone how and where to do this. On Windows Mobile 5, open the Start menu and select “internet connection sharing” from there.
• Make sure that Bluetooth is enabled on your internet tablet. Now open the connection dialog and you will see that there is a new connection called “Bluetooth-PAN”. Select it and you will be connected to the internet via PAN.
• When you’re finished, just close the connection the usual way. Wasn’t this easy?

Now on the 8525, this didn’t work for me flat out. I was using rom named “vp3G” which was Windows Mobile 6.0 which was released before the official AT&T one. I don’t know if this was causing my problem or not. I couldn’t get the N800 to find the 8525. I could get the 8525 to find the N800 but I still could not get bluetooth pan working.

I decided to flash the 8525 to a new cooked rom, because it had been several months since I had done so. To hedge my bets, I picked a ROM that included the old Bluetooth DUN package. There is an excellent webpage with far more information than I could provide on the subject of Flashing your 8525/Hermes - see MrVanx’s ROM Flashing Guide here. I chose Schap’s WM6.1 4.40 ROM. After the flash was complete - I tried to pair the two and had much better results.

I first paired them and it seemed to take this time. After that, I click “Internet Sharing” in the Programs on the 8525 and enabled it. Then I went onto the N800 and selected “bluetooth-pan” as the type of connection. Voila - it worked! I was surfing on a nice 3G connection. So for anyone out there trying to get this work without success - keep trying! It definately works but takes some configuration.

On a side note - being able to access an internet tablet via SSH is very cool. Here is top while playing Borat:

Mem: 124908K used, 1920K free, 0K shrd, 8K buff, 39452K cached
Load average: 1.56 1.20 0.98
PID USER STATUS VSZ PPID %CPU %MEM COMMAND
1574 user RW 26000 1573 69.7 20.4 mplayer
742 root SW< 15132 331 5.5 11.9 Xomap
864 root SW< 2176 331 2.3 1.7 esd
1573 user SW 11788 1 1.1 9.2 atabake
1592 root RW 1960 1578 0.9 1.5 top
1556 user SW 24556 1 0.3 19.3 python
788 root SW< 0 6 0.3 0.0 dsp/0
594 messagebus SW< 2428 331 0.1 1.9 dbus-daemon
1018 user SW< 40840 943 0.0 32.1 maemo-launcher

I’ve used RSS readers in the past - they are great for aggregating information from sites which I view. However - adding all of my daily sites, as well as all of my ’sometimes’ sites I quickly have 50 or 100 RSS Feeds and it is impossible to keep up to date on feeds because getting through all content takes forever.

Part of this problem, I’ve noticed, is that many articles around the web mirror each other - for example when the MacBook Air was announced, every site came out with a news item about it. That means I have to click through so many items in my newsreader to just mark it as read and make sure I haven’t missed anything.

So - what I am looking for is an RSS client which will not segregate each individual RSS feed, but create a mesh of all of them and highlight the important items, and somehow also promote smaller, less popular items that may have been missed by other sites. This would involve somehow analyzing the text and date of the post and correlating the items together. For less popular posts but ones that are nonetheless interesting, maybe create a ranking system based on social bookmarking sites like reddit or stumbleupon.

In a way this is done by some sites - Google News is one example of news sites; and TechMeme is another one for technology related items.

Does anyone know of a program, either online or offline, which will do what I am asking? If not, would you be willing to program it?

Downloading a CAB file to install onto your Windows Mobile device can be a pain - after downloading the cab file to your desktop, you need to first copy it to your device, then find the cab file to install and then proceed to install it.

CABviaActiveSync is a simple, free program that adds a context menu to automatically parse the cab file on your desktop and install it via activesync. This can save you a bunch of steps and is incredibly handy if you are like me and are always installing/uninstalling programs to check out.

Download CABviaActiveSync from Modaco.

I’m trying to get more people to contact me via Skype rather than cell phone - so feel free to use the ‘Skype Me’ button on the right; or Add me to your contact list.

By the way, Skype, why won’t you get Caller ID working for US based phone numbers? This is the only thing stopping me, and I am sure a lot of people, from adopting Skype full on. Many people block Unknown numbers, or won’t answer if they see 0012345678 calling them!

On that topic… Skype Journal is a really great blog with regards to Skype and VOIP in general. If you are interested in VOIP, I would check it out!

Adobe take note - you need to add 3D acceleration to your software. I’ve just checked out Pictomio and it really has a kick-ass GUI which utilizes your 3D accelerating video card to view and zoom photos. This provides a much better viewing experience than my current image library software, Adobe Photoshop Elements. Photoshop elements uses what I assume is a 2D rendering of photos - both zooming and scrolling through your photos is slugging even on my fairly new PC. Take a look at Pictomio:

It is a pretty screenshot but you need to actually use the software to appreciate how smooth the GUI functions. This reminds of me of Coverflow and Apple - purchase this technology and incorporate it into your product Adobe - or your image library software will be out of date in no time.

Photoshop Elements releases about 1 version per year, and I do not see any reason to upgrade every year. First of all, it is expensive compared to other image cataloging software; secondly the number of features that are added just don’t justify the expense every year. Usually the updates are small little features that I do not use.

On another note; I also came across PicaJet which is another image catalog and management system and it also uses 3D acceleration in it’s interface. If Adobe doesn’t come around soon I may switch my 30,000+ photo catalog over!

Just a friendly reminder from your system administrator to upgrade your Wordpress installation to 2.3!

Lyris Listmanager is a nice mailing list management system. However, there are a few features that are missing out of the frontend that make it hard to get by your day-to-day office job. Fortunately, most of it is written with TCL routines which are not encoded, which makes for easy updates to this code.

Of course this is not supported by Lyris and if you have problems with it after making your changes, don’t expect them to support it. Make backup of your files - in Linux this is /usr/local/lm

For this example, I’m going to add the Full Name field to survey results. By default, it shows the email address but not the name of the responding user.

Step 1:

Backup!

cp -R /usr/local/lm /usr/local/lm.bak

Step 2:

Open the file which holds the routine for the “Survey Details” page. This is in /htdocs/reports/surveys/.tml

vi /usr/local/lm/htdocs/reports/surveys/.tml

Step 3:

Modify the code to add in FullName:

In the routine surveyreports::page_all_answers

Change
set sql "SELECT lyrSurveyResponse.WebDocID, lyrSurveyResponseAnswers.ResponseID as ResponseID, lyrSurveyQuestions.UserQuestionNumber, lyrSurveyResponse.ResponseTime, lyrSurveyResponse.MemberID, lyrSurveyResponse.RespondingIP, lyrSurveyResponse.MailingID, lyrSurveyQuestions.QuestionText, lyrSurveyAnswers.AnswerText, lyrSurveyResponseAnswers.FreeFormAnswer, [dbinfo::members_name].[dbinfo::members_emailaddr]

set sql "SELECT lyrSurveyResponse.WebDocID, lyrSurveyResponseAnswers.ResponseID as ResponseID, lyrSurveyQuestions.UserQuestionNumber, lyrSurveyResponse.ResponseTime, lyrSurveyResponse.MemberID, lyrSurveyResponse.RespondingIP, lyrSurveyResponse.MailingID, lyrSurveyQuestions.QuestionText, lyrSurveyAnswers.AnswerText, lyrSurveyResponseAnswers.FreeFormAnswer, [dbinfo::members_name].[dbinfo::members_emailaddr] as EmailAddr, members_.fullname_ as FullName


Change

array set heading_labels "AnswerText {Answer} ResponseTime {Date} QuestionText {Question} EmailAddr {Email Address}"

array set heading_labels "AnswerText {Answer} ResponseTime {Date} QuestionText {Question} FullName {Full Name} EmailAddr {Email Address}"

Change

array set column_width "ResponseTime 15 QuestionText 25 AnswerText 25 EmailAddr 25 Action_ 10"

array set column_width "ResponseTime 15 QuestionText 25 AnswerText 10 FullName 15 EmailAddr 25 Action_ 10"

Change

set sortable {QuestionText AnswerText ResponseTime EmailAddr RespondingIP}

set sortable {QuestionText AnswerText ResponseTime FullName EmailAddr RespondingIP}

Save this file and that is it! You will now have full names in your survey responses.