As noted below, Fedora 9 came out recently, and I think its time my work computer would get a “brain transplant”. I can’t have a lot of downtime on this machine – its the one I do most of my work on, so this upgrade needs to be a “live updated” – I can’t afford the time to shut it down, load an installation of even a live CD (that doesn’t have my environment) and wait until it installs.
Its time to continue the E90 vs. the P1i shootout I think, as I’ve used both for a long time now. most of my last month was spent with the E90 – to compensate for the month or so I used the P1i exclusively before I got the E90, and in the last week I really started to use both at the same time (I’ll expand about it later). Another good excuse for me to get off my butt and write again is that the Sony Ericsson just crashed – hard, to a reset, and for the first time. It had “mini-crashes” before: applications would just crash and put up a dialog box that explained what crashed, but this time I got lots of crash dialogs about stuff I’ve never seen crashing before – including the connection manager – and the top status bar was gone. I was in the middle of writing an email and it wouldn’t send it nor receive any other email, so I quit the messaging application and the standby screen looked ok except for the missing status bar. I started the main menu in hopes that it will reset my status bar and it looked like it did – for a couple of second before the entire screen went blank.
Up till very recently my main phone was a Nokia 6600 – which was getting very long in the tooth (I think it was introduced more then 3 years ago. My specific device is about 2.5 years old). I love the PDA features, the full network experience (the internal Nokia browser was shit but with Opera For Mobile and Mini Opera you can actually use the web properly), and of course – the ability to run Putty to get SSH access to all my favorite servers :-). Anyways, I was in a market for a new smart phone, unfortunately the offering in the market right now are very poor, mostly as everything is in a state of transition now – The Windows Mobile platform is moving from the horrendous version 5 to the quite usable version 6, Linux is poised to launch as a major smart phone platform with OpenMoko, Google’s Android, Palm’s Treo devices are aging and we hope to see them soon replaced with the Access Linux Platform (what was once Palm Source), and Nokia… well Nokia are still doing their thing but you can also see that they are thinking about new stuff – if you look at the Nokia internet tablet devices (N810 is the latest) and some exciting demos Nokia had shown.
But still – I need a new phone now and all these exciting new devices will come out – maybe – in middle of 2008. So I have to choose from what I have in front of me, which is not much. Eventually I settled on the Sony Ericsson P1i, which is a very interesting smart phone from Sony Ericsson and is currently their main business offering. I hated many Sony Ericsson phones I’ve used in the past, but I saw some new UIQ3 devices and they seemed very nice so I decided to give it a chance. It also helped that compared to the alternative – a Windows Mobile 6 device – it was about half the price. Then my boss decided that I also need a new phone and went and bought me a Nokia E90 (well – it was a very lengthy and heated discussion and eventually we settled on the Nokia), which is currently the top Nokia business phone. And so the shoot out begins…
I’ve been using VirtualBox 1.5 to run MS-Windows guest virtual machines under my Linux operating system (Fedora 8 and Ubuntu) for some QA and stuff like that. This post is a summary of my experience with this virtualization solution, mostly so I won’t forget the details, and as such is expected to be updated from time to time.
The Novatel Wireless Merlin U740 is a good choice if you need network connectivity everywhere. This cellular modem is capable of HSDPA (the very latest 3rd generated data mode), but can also degrade down to GPRS (I haven’t tested HSCSD – the cellular old style dial-up modem, so I’m not sure its supported).
When you need to pick up a cellular modem, I highly recommend this one – mostly as installing it on a Linux operating system is completely trivial. In the past I covered setting up the Merlin U740 on Fedora 7 (post in hebrew) and while it was fairly easy using the Fedora 7 graphical configuration tools, its even easier on Ubuntu, so this time you get a story in pictures.
Just to let my readers know – those of you who are not avid followers of the trials and tribulations of “Microsoft vs. The World” (movie at 11) – Microsoft has successfully pushed ECMA, an originally European standards body better known for their standardization of JavaScript as ECMA-262, into ratifying Microsoft’s MS-Office XML based file format as an international standard. All this probably just as a primer for the Microsoft Office 2007 release, and for a push for ISO standardization of Microsoft Office, and I’m not joking – (more…)
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