DaveWhite.Net

guid generator

Dave — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 09:30:21 +0200

I often have to generate GUIDs (Globally Unique IDentifiers) for applications, and I’m sick of the process of googling “guid generator”, and then going there. So, instead of simply adding a favourite, I built my own. Its here. Knock yourself out.

android apn for alice germany

Dave — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 14:02:52 +0200

The APN for the HTC Dream on Alice in Germany are as follows. I haven’t seen this published anywhere else, and some of it has been deduced by trial and error. There seem to be a couple of settings missing. Namely, the message indicator doesn’t light if you have voicemail, and some other things I’m working on now. The voicemail number is +4917993000333. More as I find it :-)

Name : Alice 3G
APN : internet.partner1
Proxy : <blank>
Port : <blank>
UserName : <blank>
Password : <blank>
Server : <blank>
MMSC : http://10.81.0.7:8002
MMS proxy : 82.113.100.41
MMS port : 8080
MCC : 262
MNC : 07

Enjoy :-)

progress

Dave — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 16:51:49 +0200

I guess it had to happen eventually. I’ve just wired some of our apartment for network. There’s now a 10GB (Cat.7) link between the router in the cupboard and the office. Originally there was a wireless bridge, but in order to set that up in such a way that we had good coverage I would have needed to have four routers and a bridge functioning all the time. Now I just have one router and one bridge.

The original idea was a a good one, and one that should have worked perfectly well. I have a router in the cupboard in the hall that handles the internet connection. Its relatively central in the apartment, and so would have been the perfect candidate for a base station for wireless. I would then have three more wireless repeaters in the office, bedroom and living room. Unfortunately I use (and already had two) Netgear routers. It turns out that when bridging with them that a) the base station can’t be connected to from a PC, and b) the base station wasn’t actually able to handle three dependant routers without seriously degrading the network throughput.

So there were two ways to proceed. I could fuck around with more expensive routers replacing the ones I had, or I could lay a cable to the office. We have parquet flooring here, which made it both simple and more difficult to work through. There is space under the floor for some cabling, but I would have had to lift a lot of floor to do that. The alternative was to go around the walls, using the small gap created between the wall, parquet and skirting boards to store the cables. However, in order to do that I would have to rip out the door sealant and handle some tricky corner work close to the office. I managed it though, and it has worked out pretty well. I’m going to need to add a then second layer of sealant to the one I’ve already put there, and get some parquet pins to re-secure some of the skirting boards, but other than that its finished.I now have gigabit cabled Ethernet in the office and 802.11n wireless throughout the apartment!

ie testing vpc images updated

Dave — Thu, 07 May 2009 16:28:24 +0200

VPC images of Windows, with IE6, 7 and 8 have been released by Microsoft. They are very useful for testing different browser versions on web sites. I use the latest one with IE8, Google Chrome, FF3, Safari 4 etc. The next image gets IE7, FF2, Safari 3 etc. Getting all three images allows a full browser suite test to be done in relatively short time.

IEBlog : IE Testing VPC Images Updated

i have no excuse

Dave — Thu, 07 May 2009 15:31:23 +0200

I have no real excuse for not posting. I’ve been busy, but not too busy. I just haven’t had the inclination really. I seem to get in this mood for a few months every couple of years. There’s lots I could blog about, but the motivation just isn’t there. So, here follows a collective update, without form or structure and in an almost free-associative manner.

I’m absolutely loving my new phone. the major update to it (commonly called Cupcake) came out last week, and its looking great so far. It comes with an on-screen keyboard which is pretty cool for short messages or text entry where you don’t want to flip out the keyboard. I like the auto-orientation feature; turn the phone on its side and the it orientates sideways. Turn it back up, and the orientation changes likewise. Its awesome. This works on any screen apart from the main screen (default screen? top page? home screen? Not entirely sure of the terminology), which makes sense even though I’ve read complaints about it on teh internets. Widgets are now allowed, and some of then are just cool. I’ve downloaded some brilliant apps for it so far, such as a travel planner for the German transport system, a shopping comparison package (scan the barcode of something in a shop and see if it really IS cheaper than the place down the road), and the Google maps tracks app. That one lets me set the GPS to record, and then allows me to track where the phone has been. For example, we went on a trip to the Englisher Garten last weekend, and then to one of the museums. That trip was recorded and is documented here.

I still have to get my bike repaired. I buckled the back wheel back when I fucked up my finger, and haven’t done anything about it yet. I’ll get that done soon.

I’m doing physiotherapy about three times a week at the moment. It hurts like hell, but is starting to pay off. I can move the last knuckle on the finger again, which is very cool. I have to remember when I’m doing the proscribed exercises that I need to concentrate on extension as well as flexion. Apparently if I don’t then the finger could end up in a permanent “dipped” state, which would obviously be bad.

Tickets for U2 have arrived, and July 18th can’t come around soon enough. I’ve also scored some tickets for Bell X1 next week. I don’t know that much of their stuff, and may have to look out for some over the weekend, but it promises to be a good gig. They are being supported by Duke Special, who I also haven’t heard before, but whose website produced some interesting sounds.

I have Windows 7 running now on both my laptop and one of the desktop machines. The release candidate is incredible. It has a stability and speed that frankly leaves Vista kicked face down in the dirt. I’ll do another blog post on it later, but if you don’t have it already then download it from Microsoft.com. Its free to use until march 2010.

I shouldn’t have tried to install Windows 7 on the spare laptop. I’ve porked it, as I knew I would. There just aren’t good drivers for Windows for that machine, so I’m going to re-install linux and… hmm, I’ve just had a VERY interesting idea about what to do with it. It’d be in addition to what I was using it for with linux a couple of days ago – to monitor some specific chat rooms for news about Android. I could use it to handle the nzb files that we process. There’s a pretty good handler for newzbin files for linux that might just do the trick. Have to look into that more…

I have an idea for an app I should write. Its for Android, and its just an different implementation of something that exist on that platform. It exists in such a way that it is cumbersome and unwieldy I have to say. I know how it can be done better.

London was dirty. I’ve been here in an almost sterile environment for the last year, and getting back to London was a touch of culture shock on a couple of levels. Firstly, there’s soot on everything. Its a lovely old city, but the operative word in that phrase is old. Many of the buildings haven’t had their exterior cleaned since the industrial revolution. You know what I mean… the old red-brick buildings where the soot and car exhausts have left the red covered in a thin layer of black smoke and soot. Its horrible, and I forgot just how pervasive it all is. I had also forgotten what it is not to have to walk around and constantly look at the ground to avoid things like dig shit. Secondly, and nothing to do with dirt, I realise that the feeling I get when talking to people here is fear. When I am required to talk in German, although I can mostly get along, it is a frightening experience. I don’t mean scary frightening, but it is definitely something that I prefer not to have to do. I didn’t have that in London – I was able to go in to shops and simply ask for stuff.

The sushi in London is awesome. The rice underneath a piece of salmon nigri (for example) was exactly the right sweetness, texture and moisture that it should have been. Here in Munich for some reason (that might have something to do with living two hundred and fifty thousand kilometres from the nearest ocean) the fish never tastes as fresh as in London, and the rice is always a little crumbly and more bitter. I miss sushi for lunch every day. Each time I pick up some here hoping for something that meets my taste expectations, I am disappointed.

We ate in the first Wagamama that I have ever been in that had windows in it! Its down by the Tower of London, go check it out.

htc dream

Dave — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 13:30:00 +0200

I’ve been looking for at getting a new phone for a while now. Not actively, and not seriously, but it has been on the back burner for a while now. Its interesting, I was talking with Dave last week about this, and I realised that I have never actually bought a mobile phone for myself before. My sister and I got our first mobiles from our parents when we were younger (could have been in ninety three or ninety four, and I think it was a Nokia 2110i, the pre-GSM version), and before the contract had expired and I had a chance to change phones I had moved to London. There I immediately got a company mobile, and have had two or three different models over the years.

They were all fairly basic though, which perhaps explains my reluctance to use a mobile for anything other than making calls and sending texts. I’ve always been of the opinion that mobiles should be used to make calls, and perhaps tethered to get your laptop online. I like the large form factor, or so I keep telling myself. So, I was never really that interested in the funky new things that the cool kids could do with their mobiles. Until recently that is. In the last six months or so, I’ve been looking at the mobile market, and how the technology is evolving. I believe that it has gotten to the point where tiny devices are in a position to be actually useful.

Let me illustrate that for you. I’ve always carried around a PDA, because my memory is crap and I need to be reminded of things. I use it for notes, lists, contacts, appointments etc. In the beginning I had Palm Pilots, which were brilliant even though they suffered from relatively crappy desktop connection software. At some point I replaced mine for a Windows CE device, and stuck with that platform for the Outlook integration. With that, I could schedule a meeting in Outlook, and have it automatically sync with our Meeting Maker system in the office, and my PDA. If I created meetings on the PDA, they just appeared in the right places. It was great, and I went through a bunch of them over the years, culminating in the HP iPaq hx4700 I have right now. Had up until recently actually, as it stopped working a couple of months ago. I’ve been fucked without it too I have to say. There were lost scraps of paper in numerous pockets with tasks that were never going to get done because I never found the notes. It really was time for a change.

There have been a bunch of different options I’ve considered over the last while. Getting an iphone is obviously not an option for me. Windows Mobile was something I have considered many times over the years, but having used a PocketPC for such a long time I can honestly say that the platform isn’t stable enough to rely on for making phone calls. Nokia have come out with a couple of interesting phones recently, but again nothing really inspiring. Then there’s Android, the new mobile operating system developed by Google. The only available handset at the moment comes from HTC, and is called the Dream. Its a touch screen model with a keyboard that slides out beneath the screen. Its small enough to still be a phone, and yet the screen is large enough to easily read emails and web pages with. There’s another one coming out soon, called Magic, which will have an updated Operating System and no keyboard. I really wanted the keyboard though, so the Dream was the way to go.

Unfortunately HTC have just been sued in Germany. They are very probably going to have to stop selling their handsets here until they pay an extortionate amount of money to a patent troll company (albeit one who have already successfully sued Nokia for fifteen billion dollars recently). This meant I had to get the phone soon, before they stop selling it here. My choices were simple; contract with T-Mobile, or developers handset direct from Google. There was no contest really, I bought the developers handset, because it was completely open and can be used on any network. I currently get DSL, landline and four mobiles with free calls between all of them from Alice here in Munich, and I’m mostly happy with their service. I didn’t see any reason to change, so I bought the handset from Google, and it arrived last week.

So far I’m loving it. It comes bundled with Gmail, Contacts, GTalk, Calendar and Maps, all of which are synced with their counterparts on Google. There’s a bunch of other apps installed by default too, such as the mobile version of the Webkit browser that powers Chrome and Safari, the ability to search Google by voice, media player, YouTube player and the Android Market. With the market you can download new applications, both free and by paying for them. Paid apps aren’t currently available on my version of the phone, but they’re coming with an update to the OS next month which is nicknamed Cupcake. Let me give you an example of how cool it is. Yesterday we were in Ikea in Eching. After looking around the shop and arriving at the checkout, we decided that we should get a CD shelf to hold our CDs and DVDs. However, we would have had to track back through the store to find the right shelves, and that would have taken ten or fifteen minutes (its a HUGE shop). So, out came the phone and I searched for “cd regale” (cd shelves) on ikea.de. The one we were thinking of was called Billy, and we found it in short order. I know that seems a bit lame to anyone who has used the net on a mobile before, but for me its like the second coming! Yes, of course I have searched on a mobile before, but always with WAP, or on a phone with such a crappy screen that it made no difference. This is the first time I’ve seen web pages rendered on a mobile device in such a way that it all starts to actually become useful.

Before we decided to go to Ikea, we needed the address. All we could remember was that it was in Eching, but we needed to program the GPS in the car for that. We could have used the phone too though. Opening the Maps application and searching for Ikea gives a list of results that you can scroll through either in a list, or on the map as you can see in the screenshot. Clicking on the result for Ikea Eching brings up a list containing their address, directions from the current location, a link to the web site and the ability to call them direct from the phone. Its a small thing, but incredibly useful. For me, there would be typically an intermediate step there, which is finding something to write the phone number on, or copying / pasting it into notepad or something. Removing that intermediate step is a small thing, but a thing of brilliance. I don’t know if other phones have this feature, and frankly I don’t care all that much to be honest. The simple thing here is that I’m new to all this, so I’ll get delight out of the smallest thing. Oh and yeah, I can copy and paste those details to somewhere else too. Take that iphone users!

once more…

Dave — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 13:25:58 +0200

Okay so I'm back, and I've got coffee. I’ve no real excuse for not posting except for being really busy. That and the inevitable blog-apathy that comes in early every year. If you could graph the frequency with which I posted I’m sure you’d come up with the winter being the least populous. Right, so after typing that last sentence, I did just that. I was wrong. My least frequent posting is done during the summer. Here is the average number of posts I’ve made every month for the last nine and a bit years.

	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Now	Dec
Avg. Posts	5	5	6	8	8	3	4	3	3	7	6	4

Naturally enough, I also drew a pretty graph about it. So what can we tell from all this? Well, I’m not the most prodigious of posters, that’s for sure. That’d be about it really. I do find it strange that the most frequent time of year for posting is actually in the Autumn, but that’s just me. Anyway, the reason I was able to get all this data into Excel really easily is that I’ve been working a little on a new design for here. I know I’ve been talking about this for months, I do have a good excuse for not rolling it out sooner. I’ve just been really busy with other things, and not in a position to do significant typing with my finger. So, even though I’m still in this cast, here’s a rundown on everything that’s going on at the moment.

I finished watching Buffy last night. The ending was good but lacked something I think. Then again, I was used to having each of the series end with a cliff-hanger, and this one nicely tied up all the loose ends. It left something for the future, but I guess that never panned out. Overall it was a brilliant series. There were high points, such as “Once More With Feeling”, “The Body” and of course “Hush”, and… well not much in the way of low points. “Once More With Feeling”, was an episode that was filmed as a musical and was so good that I can’t get the music out of my head. Its very Sondheimey, and brilliantly written. I also have the entire six series of Angel to watch, though I’m a bit tired now, so maybe that can wait for a few weeks. Awesome series though, I have no idea why I didn’t watch it years ago. If you don’t already know, the guy who created the show is called Joss Whedon. He the one who created both Buffy and Angel, and also Firefly with its spin-off movie Serenity. He also created the excellent series Dollhouse, which is airing right now. I had been a fan of his long before I knew who he was.

German classes are of course ongoing, though a little slowly at the moment. There were so few applicants for my course (ie: two) that they decided to change the times around to once a week instead of two. On top of that, our teacher has been out for the last week, so apart from some homework (which I got mostly wrong!) there’s fuck all happening there. I thought I had a complete handle on the meaning of the words in the homework – obwohl, falls, wenn, dass, weil, um, damit etc. English translations would be although, if, that…, at…, with etc, and it turns out I didn’t know them as well as I thought I did. I actually though I had nailed the meanings of these words about a year ago and had no problem with them. Until now. Oh well, there’s a major re-learning session coming up I think.

I’m going to be potentially doing some interesting work for James soon, if a couple of quotes that we have sent out are accepted. More on that as it happens, but there’s a chance to get better at some things I’ve been familiar with but never used extensively in the past. Oh, and in the next post I’ll tell you about my new mobile. I’ll start that in a while, just have to go do some things first.

training wheels off!

Dave — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 19:59:37 +0200

Today I started a new German course. I guess its official that I’m not actually a beginner at this language anymore. This course is for middle tier students, which is pretty cool when you think about it. Sure I took some classes in London, and they were a great foundation, but I never really considered myself anything other than a beginner before. I believe that after I have finished this course that I can take the official “Look mommy, I can speak German” test. This is the official test that you get a Government certificate for! We have the same teacher as last term which is good.

We’re experimenting with using Moodle to enhance the course, but I have to say we’ve been relatively unsuccessful so far. This is mainly because of a lack of discipline on my part I think. I take notes on my PC every class, and transcribe them into better German / English later on when I’m studying or doing homework. I should really be using Moodle to ask questions of my teacher, but I find that its easier to simply look up the information I need on the net. I use Leo, Chemnitz University’s excellent Beolingus service and a couple of other online resources to do things like this. I also have a rather large paper dictionary at home that I turn to should the online research bear no results, or indeed should I not actually be online. Not online: What a quaint idea.

road to hell

Dave — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 12:55:38 +0200

U2 have been doing their thing all over the BBC for the last couple of days. Someone commented somewhere that the BBC was acting like their own personal publicity machine, which would be really cool if if only it were true. Anyway, they just signed a big contract with Live Nation to handle their concerts and merchandising for the next twelve years. This morning I went to take a look and see if there had been any more details about the tour released yet, but alas there was nothing. I did find some other groups of interest playing in Munich though, but fuck me were they expensive. Tickets for Madonna range from €70 up to €195! Eagles are coming in June, priced at €110.50 or €127.75. Springsteen prices range from €79.40 to €96.65. Compare that to Bell X1, whose tickets are €15.16, or Simply Red for €48.05. Its a fucking crime. If it were just me then I’d be hard pushed to justify spending €80 on a single event, but it isn’t just me. There are two of us, which drives the prices sky high. Oh this is interesting… I would never actually have complained about these sorts of prices when we were living in London. That city was substantially more expensive, and I had a well paying job. Here though my awareness of the price of expensive things is heightened probably because everything is cheaper and I don’t have a regular job.

Anyway, we went on a walking trip yesterday. We started in Starnberg, walked through the Maisinger Gorge to Maising and the lake, then on to Aschering. We were supposed to walk through about 2km of forest west of Aschering and then turn north, but there was a navigational malfunction and we ended up heading south to Machtlfing and then on to Erling and up to Andechs. All in all we covered about 20km. I have to say, walking through snow is incredibly difficult. When it comes up to your knees you discover just how hard water is to walk through. I haven’t had any exercise in the last three weeks, and am dreadfully out of shape (even more so than usual) so I found everything beyond Machtlfing fucking hard. Every step to Erling was hell, and even the thought of getting some good food and a few beers at Andechs wasn’t much consolation. Still, we made it, and there’ll be more too. I badly need to get in shape, as does Anna, so this is a good start. Click the picture to see the route we took, the red line is where we walked, the yellow where we should have gone.

dave with beard

Dave — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 20:27:08 +0200

Mum was asking earlier about how I looked now with a beard. Well, this is how I look. I have to say that I don’t see it lasting much longer. Maybe I’ll give it another week or so. No, apparently I really never do smile for photos... have to change that. You can go ahead and click the picture if you want a larger version.