David Pitkin

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Happy Halloween! Mark create a great site about Candy Corn Rangers, Tabblo has some great Halloween content and check out the background in textmate

What real long term good does suing Lik-Sang do Sony? Imagine the most hard core gamers who will pay almost any price to get products being denied. Imagine if Sony could figure out a way to ship DRM-exploding-batteries to their customer list in retaliation for buying out of market games and consoles.

On Thursday I picked up an E62 on my way home. As one of the latest and greatest Symbian S60v3 devices I knew I would not be entirely disappointed, that it was a Cingular branded device made me a little scared but my Cingular 6682 worked out just fine.

• The terrible:
  • No camera they aimed the phone a corporate users taking a note from a RIM Blackberry.
  • Locked Java there is no way to authorize Google Maps to always allowed to access the internet.
  • No iSync I had to buy the nova media phone plugins, they worked great but it was still an extra 10 Euro.
  • No 3.5mm headphone jack it does have a 2.5mm jack for a normal phone and a standard mini USB but I want to just plug my Sony headphones in.

• The great:
  • 150 dollars very inexpensive
  • Big Screen, keyboard, thin and light what more could you ask for
  • Symbian, Symbian, Symbian
  • Awesome S60 web browser the best I have ever used on a mobile device

So far I have done the following to the phone to make it more usable.

1. Updated it to the latest firmware via the Nokia Software Updater
2. Installed a few applications
   1. ShoZu
   2. Putty
   3. Google Maps
   4. Nokia Search
3. Grabbed a new theme
   1. Turquoise
4. Setup my personal email to forward to an IMAP account (free one at “fastmail.fm”fastmail.fm)
5. Bought a 1GB miniSD card from Amazon.com
6. Turned on Active Standby mailbox (Settings->Config->Idle Screen) they moved this from the E61 where it is in the email settings

I am happy with the phone overall. It is a little big but it should be a great device on a crowded train.

While waiting for my EVDO ExpressCard from Booster-Antenna I decided to try out a Cingular 3G phone. The only one that was interesting was the LG CU500 which was also their first. The phone hardware itself is nice, sturdy and the keys are easy to press, dual color displays and a solid flip.

The good: The data speed on this phone is really fast, compared to about 150kbps and ping response times above 800ms on a good day via bluetooth with my Nokia 6682 the LG achieved speeds of 600kbps and response times were in the mid 150ms. These speeds were all via bluetooth to my MacBook Pro. A few of the built in applications that came on the phone were great, Java applications on phones are getting there. I like the MusicID service from Shazam Entertainment and the JamDat Tetris was great.

The bad: The phone has no support for syncing with iSync, can’t run applications I use all the time like ShoZu or Google Maps and 3G coverage is very poor around Boston. I had great coverage at work where we have 2 wifi devices but the 30 minute train ride home had two 5 minute pieces of good coverage.

My conclusion is that I am going to stick with the 6682 for a until at least when the Nokia E62 comes out later this month, I do really miss a qwerty keyboard.

At the office Friday Eddie and I installed Nokia Sensor on our Nokia 6682 phones. Nokia Sensor is a application distributed in Europe that runs on your phone and via bluetooth advertises a folio to other sensor users in the immediate bluetooth vicinity. Your folio is a picture and any other facts you want to share such as your age or where you live. If you ever found another person running sensor on a Series 60 phone you can then do all sorts of weird socially things if staring at a tiny 2" screen is social. The funniest part is the buddy alert whistle noise that plays, it kept going off as the two phones connected and disconnected. On the subway ride home I fired it up and was VERY surprised to see it found another person. What it did was find any discoverable bluetooth phones, I could then send a message via bluetooth including to recommend Sensor, pretty clever.

Mission accomplished as far as getting the blog back up and running in a stable environment. Now my trusty Mac Mini is running lighttpd under launchd which means Apple says it should stay up all the time. I updated to the latest revision of typo and away we go again. Still to do is fix up my theme away from the azure. Since themes seem to be an active parts of typo this might prove to be some work. Launchd is great, after reading this post the only piece missing for me was that I had to change the environment PATH variable for launchd. Probably a result of the patchwork of programs I am running on it.

This blog is now running via lighttpd on a mac mini PPC!

I still need to move the blog to /blog/ but that is for another day or week.

Vacation in London and Paris was fabulous. In related French news there is a professor at the Ecole Polytechnique who’s students are at the top of every investment bank recruiters list for big bucks. Nicole El Karoui is an amazing math professor who has the best classes for quantitative analysts in the derivatives market. This demand for “quants” is also very strong in marketing hiring and new college grads who have studied these fields along with statistics are in high demand.

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