Get Firefox?

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Get Firefox!Finally I decided the time was right to switch from Mozilla 1.7 to the new Firefox browser. As a browser it is impressive, but I do still miss having the integrated email client (the main reason I reverted back to the mainstream Mozilla version last time I tried Firefox. I now have Thunderbird as my email client, which again is great but separate.

Part of my reason for trying Firefox again now though was to see if it has the same memory leak problems that seem to be present in the Mozilla 1.x series of browsers. So far it does seem to be better, but only time will tell. If you’d like to try the latest version, whether you run Windoze, MacOS, Linux, Solaris or even AIX (and I’m sure more will follow), click on the button above.

Running Linux on an iPAQ

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IBM has posted an article on its developer site about running Linux on an iPAQ.

I have had my iPaq, a 3835 model that I picked up cheap in an online auction, running Linux for a couple of years now. My installation is now a bit out of date, but it runs happily with my Linksys compact flash Wi-Fi card in the sleeve. It is a little bulky by comparison to the newer models (mostly because of the need for the sleeve to get the CF slot).

If you have an iPaq that you no longer use on a daily basis, either because you have moved on from the whole PDA scene, or simply because you have upgraded to a newer model, running Linux on them can be a fun experiment. Not something for the novice yet though.

If you want more information, check out the excellent resources at handhelds.org. You will find all the software you need there to save your PocketPC installation and install Linux, as well as detailed instructions for every supported model.

Cell Phone with Built-in Hard Disc

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The folks over at Tech Digest report that Samsung has debuted a cell phone, the SPH-V5400, with a built-in 1.5 GB hard drive. As well as an integrated 1 megapixel digital camera, it also includes an MP3 player and an FM transmitter. Yes, transmitter! It can transmit those MP3 files over FM to a nearby receiver, such as the one in your car. This is a feature that other MP3 players could do with.

So, why buy a standalone MP3 player? Well, I can still see a couple of good reasons:

  1. It is still a very small hard drive; the iPod mini is 4GB and the new Creative MuVo2 is 5GB (it will also be shared with the camera, so it is going to fill up fast too if you use both features a lot)
  2. I don’t want to have to convince the aircrew on my next flight that the cell phone is off while I listen to MP3 tracks from it (even assuming it has a mode where the phone portion is off)

Engadget has pictures of the new phone for those interested.

Ping-o-Matic!

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Ping-o-Matic! is a service that can be pinged when a new entry is added to your blog, and they will then ping a number of other aggregator services.

“So what?” you ask… well, they also have a list of the last 100 sites that pinged them. I spent a very long time just selecting a link, opening a new tab and going to the link. A few don’t work, a few are in foreign languages, but most are blogs to check out. Some personal, some small businesses. The only down side is that they are not clickable links at the moment.

For clickable links, you could try weblogs.com instead (Ping-O-Matic! pings weblogs.com).

Update: Seconds after posting this, I try to go back to weblogs.com and I am presented with a username/password box. I guess that they are having server troubles (it is an MS IIS that they are running on according to the error I got by not giving them a username/password).

Canon EOS 20D Digital SLR

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Having my little Canon PowerShot S100 travelling without me, I was once again thinking about buying a digital SLR. My original thought was to get a Canon EOS Digital Rebel. While I was in Japan earlier in the year though I saw that they had a black version which I liked more. Why they don’t sell that in the US I will never know, but knowing it was available kind of put me off buying.

Anyway, I went looking again the other day and noticed that Canon had launched a replacement for the slightly higher-end EOS 10D in the form of the EOS 20D.

The US site is surprisingly lacking in detail at the moment; the Japanese site contains much more information, including a comparison with the Rebel (called Kiss in Japan) and even three sample images.

It is an 8.2 megapixel sensor (instead of the 6.3 megapixels in the 10D and Rebel models). That means images of 3520 x 2344. It also has next generation of the DiGiC image processor, and a USB 2.0 connection for higher speed uploading of your photos.

On the downside, they do not appear to be in stock anywhere at the moment, and it is not cheap at around $1500 without any lenses 🙁

Moved to WordPress

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The blog spam finally annoyed me enough to switch from MoveableType to WordPress. It took a little while to get everything the way I wanted it.

I started by installing it in a separate directory that I could play in while I got the various things sorted out. Installation was trivial following the 5-minute install instructions. After that I spent a long time working on the style sheet to get it to look close to my old MT one, and a few moments working on the index.php file.

Finally, I had to import all the old entries from my MT weblog. This took a few attempts to get right, but with some patches for both MT and WordPress from DrBacchus’ Journal and a slightly modified version of the Apache re-write engine rules from the same site, I have all the old entries imported and hopefully all the magic in place to fixup old links.

For those, like me, that have to use the .htaccess approach to the URL fixing, here’s the content of the .htaccess file I placed in my blog’s home directory:

# Movable Type -> WordPress fu
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^archives/([0-9]*).html index.php?p=$1 [PT]
RewriteRule ^archives/([0-9]*)_([0-9]*).html index.php?m=$1$2 [PT]
RewriteRule ^index.rdf$ wp-rss2.php [PT]

That seems to allow the links in search engines at least to find their way to the new home for my old entries (if you find any that are broken please send me the link). It also works for links using my sub-domain link mechanism.

Now it is all in place, and I hope working. WordPress has a number of options for dealing with the blog spam too (some of which are available in newer versions of MT too, but there were just too many hoops to jump through to get a newer version of MT).

SMS

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Finally, the US is starting to catch up with the rest of the world. My girlfriend flew out of San Francisco to Malaysia (via Hong Kong) yesterday. She took her T-Mobile GSM cell phone with her, and actually managed to send me a text message from Hong Kong airport when she arrived there, and then later on another one from Kuala Lumpur confirming that she received my text messages.

Seven years ago I was lucky enough to take a cruise from Hong Kong to Singapore. Most of the Europeans on the ship at that time were checking their text messages, voice mail and even making calls on their GSM phones every time we docked. A year after that I arrived here in the US to find that GSM was still new technology, and that it operated on a different frequency making the handsets incompatible with the rest of the world. Doh!

At last the handsets are mostly multi-band, so American residents can start to discover the joys of taking their phone with them on trips. And slowly the networks are linking up so text messages can be sent to anyone from anywhere. Why send text messages? They are much, much cheaper than the international roaming per minute charges! You can let friends and family know you are safe, or ask them simple questions for just a few cents. The message also waits in their phone for when they wake up (handy when you are in a time zone 8 or 9 hours away from them).

I’d give it another year or so and the US will have finally caught up with the rest of the world. Now if only they’d get over the whole NIH syndrome thing around CDMA (you know, the phones that still need a mile long antenna to work) and accept that GSM is the technology that works we’d all be better off. Verizon’s network may be better in the US, but I guarantee my little Nokia GSM handset will work in more places in the world than any Verizon one will!

Sirius Radio

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I was channel surfing on my Dish Network system the other day when I noticed that I a whole block of new radio channels all prefixed with the name Sirius. Some research on their website and I discovered that I now have 61 commercial free digital radio channels from the Sirius network. And they’re not bad (some of the DJs can get a tad annoying). Almost tempting me into getting a unit for my car.