The Nokia N900 in use, a perspective.

I’ve had my Nokia N900 for almost 48 hours, and while I’ve have a few frustrations, I’m equally satisfied with the product. And so to keep it geeky and simple:

  • I’ve logged into the device (not really a phone) with SSH from my desktop. And it just looks like a standard Linux system.
  • I’ve logged in to my Opensolaris from the device shell (X Terminal) with SSH and that works like normal.
  • I’ve connect to the VLC server on my server, with VLC, from the device, and while the navigation of the screen size differences will be ‘fun’, it works as expected
  • I’ve Blogged from the device using MaStory.
  • I’ve sent SMS and received SMS’s, I received Phone calls. (gee)
  • I’ve been fetching emails, full html support (must turn off images)
  • I’ve found my location with GPS.
  • I’ve loaded up some songs, and they sound great with the stereo speakers
  • I’ve listened to internet radio, that works great.
  • I’ve used the keyboard, and I’m getting faster the more I use it.
  • I’ve browsed the internet, and it’s amazing, although my blog identifies it as a PDA (must fix that)
  • I’ve used the device to diagnose a neighbors laptop WiFi connection
  • I’ve taken a photo, not so great on the first try, no image stabilization, but relatively sharp
  • I’ve managed to post a photo to my Flickr account.
  • I’ve synced up my calendar and contacts with my Nokia 6300 backup using the Nokia PC suite (as OVI suite does not work)
  • I’ve connected to AOL and Yahoo IM with the Pidgin application.

However there is another list, of frustrations;

  • Battery life really sucks, mostly because I’ve had everything turned on (default) and have not found all the places to ‘tune’ them to better setting.
  • I can NOT get the Twitter application Mauku to connect to Twitter
  • I can NOT get the weather with OMWeather it won’t connect
  • I couldn’t get the MaxRoam SIM to dial anyone, though I could SMS
  • Some Apps from the App Manager WILL NOT DOWNLOAD no matter what I do, and there no indication about why they won’t download
  • I can’t get the FaceBook application which came pre-installed, to actually install, or function. It’s the same with several of the ‘pre-installed’ apps, they just don’t work without being ‘installed’ and they won’t install.

I am currently using a Vodafone Pay-as-you-Go SIM and it does indicate that I am connected with 3G. I have NOT tested it for dataroaming, or performance. The MaxRoam SIM did indicate that I was connected to a 3.5G O2 network But like I mentioned, I couldn’t call anyone, only SMS. I assume that it was my ignorance of setting for the MaxRoam SIM.

As for the phone itself, I like it, it’s a bit heaver than I thought, but a great deal smaller, it is not really any wider or taller than a Samsung Tocco Lite, but it’s almost twice as thick.

The keyboard is very small and not really thumb friendly, I started out using my fingernails to type. Now I can feel the contours of the keys, it sped up my typing a bit. I have a clear snap on case I bought from Amazon a month ago, but the screen section obscures the upper row on the keyboard, so I don’t have it on, so just the back is attached.

The resistive touchscreen is very sensitive. I have a Palm T/X and I know! It is nothing like the resistive screens of the past. There is virtual NO give to the surface, and while you can tell that it is ‘softer’ than a capacitive touchscreen, it has a great deal more precision. Just try and draw something in the ‘sketch’ app or better yet, the XJournal application.

Overall I could say that it’s a keeper, a Geeky keeper, and looks like it will be a learned love. It does do what I need it to do, be a computed device, with a phone in it.

I’m sure there will be other revelations, but I may be too busy playing with my new toy.

UPDATE : I’ve managed to get the missing FaceBook App to install and Mauku and OMWeather are working after I changed some of the connection setting on device to fixed ip addresses on my WiFi router.

Failed WordPress Upgrade to 2.8

I attempted to upgrade WordPress to 2.8 from 2.7.1 and got this message, now I’ve not sure if I should try the automated upgrade again or resort to a manual one.

Downloading update from http://wordpress.org/wordpress-2.8.zip

Unpacking the core update

Could not copy file: /public_html/wp-content/upgrade/core/wordpress/wp-comments-post.php

Installation Failed

I suppose I should be grateful that it’s all still working.

WordPress MySQL exercises

Not that this is going to be instructive, but about a month ago I thought that separating my technical blogging from my ‘life’ blogging would improve the clarity of my thinking. But it has not, it was a distraction, and a bit schizophrenic, and actually an inhibitor to posting. I can’t really separate my techie from my personal opinions. They are intertwined and interact on more levels than would seem, at first, to be evident. So in that vein, I was required to reintegrate the two blogs.

This looked easy, but since I had included all the posts from my three or four years of blogging, selected from each by their respective ‘slants’. It was not a simple dump and load of the MySQL database in which the content resided. So I downloaded the latest MySQL community server and various tools and recreated databases containing the two dumps from the blog databases and cross seeded them to patch them back together. Simple! Except that the original blog was wordpress 2.6.2 and I had built the second one as 2.7. Guess what, my original MySQL dump that included ALL the compied posts before the split, was a different schema from the the newer dumps. But owing to the fact that I’m a brilliant DBA, it only required two days of backbreaking, mind exercising MySQL learning to solve the issues 😉

Now I’ll never be a WordPress expert, but I actually liked the work. It’s refreshing to learn, that I can learn new things at my age. While I am an excellent Sybase DBA, and now feel very good about knowledge of MySQL also.

They just have to fix this one quibble or two I have with MySQL where it involves ……