ssh-lroot

Small Update on VSNS

noreply@blogger.com (George Pantazis) — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 00:36:00 +0000

It took me almost 2 years to restart work on VSNS since I am busy at work but I finally started to work on it again, on a very slow pace mind you.

This is going to be a major release and it will have numerous changes and bug fixes, most of them though will be under the hood.

Major changes:

Subnetting, currently VSNS assumes always a /24 since it was originally designed to help in home networks. The next version will be able to identify the correct subnet and also provide helpfull tools (?IP Calc?, IP validation etc)
Update to the report engine, due to some changes in Win 7 SP1 & 8 although the scan finishes very fast, the reporting is done in a very slow pace. The report can take up to 10 seconds to finish. This will be fixed and I estimate a 1 sec delay for the report.
Better error reporting, the scanning engine has very generic errors, in some cases it reports that it cant finish a task while it actually does.
Ability to handle numerous IP's. It will now be able to first allow the user to select the Network to scan from the available networks and also automatically fill the most obvious network.
Address Map enhancements. First of all it will now work :) and also a few additions will be made (ie Range Capacity etc)

My goal is to have these done ASAP (2-3 months) and then slowly start working on the first Beta (Expect also some new features then, IPv6 Anyone :p).

My absolutely essential Android app list (Galaxy S)

noreply@blogger.com (George Pantazis) — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 16:00:00 +0000

ROM
Darky's ROM v9.3b1 XWJS5
Kernel: Voodoo stable 5.4.1 (2.6.32.9)

Entertainment:

Kindle
Battle.net Authenticator
IMDB
Photoshop Express
Pulse
PowerAMP
SoundHound
Steam Mobile
TuneIn Radio
TVme.gr
XBMC Remote

Business:

Backup to Gmail
Call Informer
Call Log Calendar
Barcode Scanner
CSipSimple
KeePassDroid
PhoneUsage
Pure Calendar
Pure Grid Calendar
SpringPad
Traffic Counter
Xpenser
ClickaDroid SMS
GTasks
OpenOffice Document
SpiderOak

Network:

Connect Cat
ClockSync
AndFTP
BTEP
BTEP SSH
CIDR Calculator
HTTP Inspector
IP CAM Viewer
Overlook Fing
Overlook Whiz
SNMP Manager
aSolusLabs
aWHMCS
TeamViewer
WiFi Analyzer
PocketCloud
ServerAssistant

Development/Web Tools:

CatLog
SEO Stats
SuperMySQL
Celica Database
DroidAnalytics
openSUSE Build

System:

2 My TimeZone
ROM Manager
Bluetooth File Transfer
BLN Control Pro
Elixir
TaskKiller

Its awesome how spammers interpret law

noreply@blogger.com (George Pantazis) — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 02:05:00 +0000

It is once more a holiday period and as usual the amount of spam is increasing. What I noticed though this year is that spammers are quoting legislature to try to convince us that they are not spammers, which is kinda funny.

Must of these types of spammers quote 2002/31/CE and A5-270/2001 on the ability they give for the unsolicited email receiver to remove himself from the list by replying to an email address. What is funny about that is that three aforementioned legislation states that a) the removal must be done with an automatic process

b) any account must be able to be removed by the owner of the domain, but in case of an alias it is difficult and time consuming to send an email

c) they are only to send email only after the email address was added to the list using a double opt-in process

Lets see now what they will think of next year, especially since the Greek market has finally woke up and found about the magical Internetz.

Location : Επικελευστή Απ. Ασπρογέρακα 46-64, Athens 10444,
Posted from my phone

B&N Still limits ebooks to US only :-(

noreply@blogger.com (George Pantazis) — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 04:32:00 +0000

I kind of liked their Android app and it was released just in time, only a few days after the kindle, but why do they still have region limitations? It seems ridicolous to me, and they have been doing that for some time now, last time I tried to buy a book from them for my phone about a year ago I stumbled on this. I hope they change their tactics soon, this isn't the period to limit your earnings with stupid DRM.

ISP(Tellas) rep claims they dont support https for Security Reasons

noreply@blogger.com (George Pantazis) — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 00:01:00 +0000

What a fun day I had yesterday, for a few hours I had been having problems connecting to trac and doing commits to my subversion host (Project Locker).
Initially I blamed the hosting service but a few hours latter mostly spent in reading my RSS feeds and not working I thought I would have to contact them and get this resolved.
My only thought then was of they way I would open a ticket if I couldnt access their tracker, but a few seconds after I entered the URL their main site was staring at me.
Obviouslly only some of their hosts were down but something prompted me to check again from another location, thus I ssh'ed to work and there it was, by some weird higher power w3m could access the host I had problem with, a few seconds latter and after some nmap probing I was sure the problem was from my ISP, I could access the host as long as I didnt want to go through port 443. Unfortunately for me projectlocker requires https on the default 443 port.

It was time to contact the dreaded support peons at my ISP.

About 20 minutes on the phone and 2 dropped calls I managed to talk to a rep, after asking for a detailed description of my problem and telling me off for choosing to use a CISCO router and zyxel modem instead of their easier and better single wan-lan modem/router I was asked to hold. While listening to a horible midi of some incomprehensible christmas carol for about 5 minutes, she reapeared on the line and triumphally informed me that they do not support https because its not secure.
Until that time I was extremely polite and sympathetic (Involuntarily promissed to Irene to allways be polite) to the so called technical support employee but after such a ridiculous responce I dont think I could respond with anything else than this

"wtf are you talking about, how the **** do you login to your bank you idiot?".

Although she didnt like my reaction ;p she took detailed notes about the problem including the traces from home and work and by magic about 1 hour latter everything worked fine.

Note: Since my report there is one less hop for ADSL users in athens to oteglobe. It seems someone needs help in setting up their BGP ;-P

Note1: Up to last year it was possible to escalate a ticket/call to level 2 and even further back to about 2 years ago you could even reach NOC, it seems Tellas is now working with the absolute necessary number of engineers, thus dropping the support quality to a game of chance. If your problem isnt solved by a router reboot or system format (yes they recomend a system format to solve almost everything) you are out of luck.

Linux wallpaper - Linux: Power @ your fingertips

noreply@blogger.com (George Pantazis) — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 07:21:00 +0000

This time the wallpaper isn't openSUSE specific, and once more its a quite dark theme. The main difference from my other wallpapers is that I used stock photography. This wallpaper comes in two sizes, 1600x1200 and 1920x1080, I plan to offer at least these 2 versions from now on for all wallpapers but I may be adding even more for latter ones for use on netbooks, PDA's and phones. Other than the wallpaper I also made a box with the same design (I plan to use it in future wallpapers).

To get these, visit my new graphics related page (Static) or here for the 2009 wallpapers directly.

Published under the GPLv2 License, if you need it in another (open) license, just add a comment with the requested license and I will add it here :-)

N900 looks AMAZING

noreply@blogger.com (George Pantazis) — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 20:17:00 +0000

After the stellar N810 Nokia is now going to release the N900 from the Hardware perspective it is a definite upgrade and not a mere update (contrary to the N810 to N800) but where it shines is software.

Nokia's Maemo 5 (Code Name: Freemantle) is right now the most brilliant Linux Distro for mobile devices.

This is not an overestimation, it is open, it has been tested not only in a lab but in the field with actual consumers (N810, N800 and N700 were the real life beta test) and most importantly it is not someones wet dream, it is available now in a virtualised environment and .in less than a month in retail stores.

Nokia is tying the OVI services tight with Maemo which if done correctly will be the first Linux based OS to offer this kind of service, previously only found on platforms like Symbian and BlackBerry.

I was planning on keeping my E71 as my secondary phone but now the N900 will complement my E72, thats one less device to have with me(Now I have an E51, E71 and N810), not bad:-)

These 2 videos show off the new GUI.

New Tool: Very Simple DPI Changer (Windows)

noreply@blogger.com (George Pantazis) — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 19:39:00 +0000

During the development of one of our commercial applications for a vertical market, we found that our customers have to use a specific application provided by the Ministry of Transportation had a weird requirement, it needs to be executed on 120 DPI. Unbelievably the software is so badly written that it will not even check if the DPI is correct, it will just load in a non functional state.

While we talked about our own project (AutoLMg) with most of our customers we thought it would be a nice move to provide them of a way to easily change the DPI settings on windows, thus I wrote VSDPIChanger, it will either allow the change through its GUI, or in the way we implement it for all our current customers using a batch file.

At a latter time I will publish the tool I wrote that will selectively load an application depending on various settings (ex DPI, resolution, other programs already active etc).

Note: This application is published under the GPLv2 license.

For more information visit my new WiKi here http://wiki.ssh-lroot.net

reencode bash script using mencoder

noreply@blogger.com (George Pantazis) — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 15:12:00 +0000

I find myself needing to transcode video quite often and I mostly use mencoder for that sometimes ffmpeg directly but what I seem to strive for each time is to remember the full options for each encoding, so I chose a few days ago to create a small bash script. As usual with me I started adding and adding options to the script, in the end I needed to remember a new set of options for the script and although they were a lot less and easier to remember it was still not what I had in mind to begin with.

After about 6 revisions at that point, I chose to remove almost all the extra functionality and tried to automate the process as much as possible. My first choice is to try to detect the bit-rate of the original file and use it on the new file, since this script is made to just change from one format to the other, this wasn't much of a problem.

What I did to automate the process:

Most of the time I will use a 2 pass xvid codec and occasionally a CBR xvid codec so I made the 2 pass the default action and even added a lavc option just for the fun of it.
I tend to add a thread for each cpu core in the system since it doesnt tax the CPU much and will speed up the process a bit, the script will identify the number of cores and add threads accordingly.
For audio I prefer to keep the original format thus it is a direct copy of the original, I added an option to get it recoded to mp3 though.
To auto detect the bit-rate I use mplayer and parse the info which I then pass to the encoder. Since the bit-rate is not easily obtainable all the time in case I don't get the value I use a specific set value (1200).

It will self copy (install) itself if you execute it with the install option {./reencode install}, it will make a copy of itself in /usr/local/bin which should be in the exec path of most distributions allowing execution from anywhere. I plan to add an option that will use zypper to install required packages (mplayer for now) and maybe latter support other distros too.

I recently also added an option (-a) to only extract the audio part of the file, currently will enforce transcoding to mp3 but latter will allow for more options.

I want to add a few more things to the script but mainly automate the process of transcoding for my phones.

Download it here reencode v1.0.1.41

Update: I was going to fix this, overwriting the original file, in a new version some time in the future, but since I am publishing this I thought I would do a small fix now to protect users. It will now add the word NEW after the original filename. I see that already it has been downloaded 4 times, so I hope their RSS reader gets the update :-p

CloudFront can make a difference

noreply@blogger.com (George Pantazis) — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 19:29:00 +0000

Today I started playing around with CloudFront mostly because of curiosity, and I can say it can really make a difference in page loads. I started by playing with my blog (this one) in blogger, in about 15 minutes I had moved all the template images to an S3 bucket, had added a CNAME and changed the template links, this gave me a load time of 2.8 sec instead of the 5.19 sec I had before, I already new that the images used in the template were slowing the page down since I never changed the links from the ones the template author used.

Since blogger is already a very fast platform backed by Google, I wanted to try it on a normal hosting service, I use Netfirms for all my hosting needs till now (really dissatisfied with them) and I thought that this would be a good test to setup a test site based on joomla that would use CloudFront to lower page loads.

This took me a bit more time but in approximately 2 hours I had the basic install with most of the template elements hosted on CloudFront. The result was astonishing, since Netfirms is located in Canada the load times for non North American users were always terrible and the fact that their infrastructure seriously lacks made the use of CloudFront look like magic, the load time dropped from an awful 42 sec to a very respectable 9 sec, almost a five fold change.

The only problem is that there is quite a lot of work that needs to be done to move a full site to CloudFront, moving just the template is only half the work but it can seriously reduce load times.

Profimail can save your battery

noreply@blogger.com (George Pantazis) — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 07:42:00 +0000

It is almost one month now that I moved from the Nokia Mail Client to Profimail and I am extremely happy with it. Although I miss the extensive integration of Nokia Mail, I noticed a serious problem with it, it kills my battery.

When I initially installed it I though that the push service would be a lot more power conscious and even more that it would support the IMAP Idle extension, allas it doesn't do any of those. Profimail may not be well integrated if not integrated at all with the OS but it obviously uses power a lot more sensibly. One of its most important features is IMAP Idle, which is smart in that it keeps the session sleeping, it also has a very nice and modular setup for the email check intervals which can be different for each account. Since all the servers I use support Idle I only use the time setting for Nokia's own mail (OVI) and to wake up all connections every 2 hours in case I get disconnected from the AP.

Unfortunately the last is one of the serious shortcomings of Profimail, its AP management system isn't very good but Nokia's client isn't any better.

I still haven't found another app using such a stable AP management system as the one used By Fring. Each time you add a new AP it asks if you want it to use it again and that's it, you even have the ability to set preference between WiFi and 3G so if you set for example WiFi to be preferred you connect to 3G only if no WiFi AP that it already knows isn't available.

How To: Symbian(S60) SIP Settings for use with a CISCO (Linksys) SPA 9000

noreply@blogger.com (George Pantazis) — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 06:25:00 +0000

This How To uses a Nokia E71 with the latest firmware and a Linksys SPA 9000, with the following settings you will be able to register the mobile phone as a Basic SIP Client, do not expect full SLA functionality. I will try to be very detailed but for anyone already familiar with setting up SIP profiles on S60 devices, just look at the settings tables.

In the steps bellow substitute the
IP 192.168.1.249 for the IP of your SPA 9000
The 101 Extension for the Extension on the SPA 9000 you would like to use
Wherever a password is required use the password for the selected extension

Step by Step
Press Menu
Select Tools
Select Settings
Select Connection
Select SIP Settings
Press Options
Select New SIP Profile
Select Use default profile

SIP Profile

Profile name	SPA9000
Service profile	IETF
Default access point	(Your Access Point)
Public user name	sip:101@192.168.1.249
Use compression	No
Registration	When needed
Use security	No

The last two options are Proxy server and Registrar server which when selected will require more settings, use the following.

Proxy server

Proxy server address	sip:192.168.1.249
Realm	192.168.1.249
User name	101
Password
Allow loose routing	Yes
Transport type	Auto
Port	6060

Registrar server

Registrar server address	sip:192.168.1.249
Realm	192.168.1.249
User name	101
Password
Transport type	Auto
Port	6060

press Back until you are at the Connection Menu and
Select Internet tel.
Press Options
Select New profile
From the list select the SIP URI, for the above profile the URI will look like this
sip:101@192.168.1.249
You are presented with 2 options
Name
SIP profiles
you only change the Name option to your selected name and press back.

This is it, you are finished and you are ready to register the phone with the SPA 9000.

Here are screen shots of the settings

Why E71 is the best phone ever or...

noreply@blogger.com (George Pantazis) — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 17:56:00 +0000

...why it has been a lot more than 6 months since I bought a new phone*.

I was just using my E71 as usual and just realized once more how great it is, I am reading Panic in Level 4 on Mobireader, while playing Xandria over the Music player and at the same time using Mobbler so that my last.fm account is updated, I have Gravity and Profimail active and I am chatting with Irene and George over Fring. Two minutes ago Nokia Customer Care send me an SMS with an application link for Trivial Pursuit that they hadn't yet send to me (thank you congested :-) and I just opened it in the S60 browser and installed it all without the slightest disruption on my music and reading.

I hope the E72 will have all the things that made E71 this good and even more.

Now if only there was a native blogger app I would be the tiniest bit happier with my phone :-p

Until the E71 I was buying a new phone every 6 months, sometimes even sooner.

Is Nokia E72 bringing UPnP to the E-Series?

noreply@blogger.com (George Pantazis) — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 06:58:00 +0000

Yesterday I was using Forum Nokia - Remote Device Access and noticed that there was an E72 Prototype in there so I decided to play with it a little. I took a few screen shots which you can find below, I seriously hope though that we will get UPnP in E72 and maybe even in older E-Series devices in a future firmware upgrade.

(Note: This is a prototype)

In general there aren't many new differences in the GUI

Inside the applications menu I found the Home media application

Here are few more screenshots

Even simple and small applications/utilities require a manual

noreply@blogger.com (George Pantazis) — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 19:03:00 +0000

For many years I haven't been adding any type of help, manual* for my smaller utilities, I always tried to make them as intuitive as possible but it seems that what might seem intuitive to me is actually not.
A few months ago (Jan 2009) I published one application I have been using for a long time called HT Hex Editor, as its name implies it is an actual editor and not a viewer, but a percentage of the users never found how to change the mode.
This was enough to get more than 200 email messages either with questions on how to actually edit the file or with negative comments implying that I inappropriately tagged it freeware when it actually was shareware. Another thing that led people to the latter conclusion is that 2 features are disabled, the first one being the Direct Disk Access and the second the file Information.
After replying to these emails, almost everyone commented on why didn't they think of just doing that but the damage was already done, I had lost a lot more time than if I just had provided a way to notify the user.

First of all I should have completely removed the GUI elements for stuff that was disabled, or at least had provided an explanation in a dialog. Most importantly I shouldn't have assumed it was obvious how to change modes.

So how do you change the mode? you simply click on the Read Only button on the status bar, this will switch between modes allowing you to save any changes you did on the file. A simple balloon would have informed the user of the functionality and spared me from having to answer all those emails.

I will provide here the reason of disabling the other two features.

Why was DDA disabled? not because you have to pay for it but because it proved to be unstable in cases where either you were using software RAID or when you used older versions of drivers that allowed Linux, MAC OS X, disks to be loaded under windows. The results of editing the disk could brake those FS requiring repair from native tools. Since I cant guarantee data safety and this is just a freeware tool I chose to completely remove that code. Noting here though that HT Hex Editor is completely safe to use on those occasions as a file editor, no assurances of course ;-). You can find this option enabled and working in older versions of this tool, it still was freeware and it has managed to break FS consistency on at least 4 occasions, I will not provide those versions for download and I have tried to find any place that were hosting them and requested that they update the file to the latest safe version.

The file information tab and button do not work because the library I was using hasn't been updated by me for a long time and was never tested on anything newer other than W2000, it is on my very very loose ToDo list.

I am pretty sure I have said that before but I think I should make a more detailed post about this, it seems that many users do not appreciate the work that has been done on OSS or even freeware applications, they think that they can demand features and bug fixes and even send vulgar emails to the authors, I truly dislike this but at least I am "thick" enough to not actually care, it is not uncommon though for authors to stop further progress of their creations because of that exact reason.

* Not actually true, I did a small search to my internal repo spanning 10 years of work and I am not including manuals most of the time for even complex tools :-(, a very bad habit.

Barcelona, Spain one of the un friendliest cities for Mobile Internet.

noreply@blogger.com (George Pantazis) — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 07:20:00 +0000

Upon arriving in Barcelona my first move before even getting a taxi for the hotel was to check for mobile signal strength and a data connection, immediately I was greeted with a nice strong signal and profimail and fring were immediately connected and I started receiving email over a 3G connection although this wasnt a serious indication, I was in a brand new airport anyway I still was happy enough.

A few hours latter when we were strolling over La Rambla we reached Plaça de Catalunya and found a department store called El Corte Inglés in the electronics department there was a Vodafone store and although the stuff was trying to be helpful couldn't understand the tiniest bit of English (a pattern that repeated everywhere, it seems that in Barcelona don't speak any English and a few Spanish, their actual language is Catalan). Since Irene can speak Spanish and we found a representative of Vodafone on the phone that could translate the more technical terms to the store clerks I managed to purchase a prepaid card with "unlimited" (unlimited of course meant up to 1GB of data) HSDPA service for 7 days, the total cost was 52 Euro, I also added another 20 Euro for Voice calls in order to not have to change the SIM every time I wanted to make a call.

After installing the card and sending the activation SMS I received a message in Catalan although I registered as an English speaker and a few minutes latter the settings SMS. I immediately added a new AP Group to SmartConnect including the setup AP's in order of preference, HSDPA, 3G, GPRS.

The next hours I had a very weak 3G connection that would drop every few minutes, that day I didn't even once get an HSDPA connection. While the day was ending and on the road home the connection completely died, at the time I thought that was due to the signal not reaching the Metro tunnel but I couldn't get a connection even when we got to the Hotel, again I thought that probably that area didn't have data coverage.

The next day while we were in the same area as the day before where I had a steady connection over GPRS I decided to call Vodafone to get an explanation, it was really weird that in their IVR wasnt given an option either for english prompts or an english speaking representative. To cut this short after 6 calls I managed to reach an operator that could understand the following "I would like to speak with an English speaking representative" and she gave me another number to call.

Not totally let down I made a call to that number and was prompted by a multilanguage IVR, after sellecting english and waiting for about 15 minutes I finally heard an operator on the line BUT he still spoke spanish (or Catalan) saying the magic sentence as before I was put on hold and then send to the root of the IVR again making the selection. After 2 hours I was in a loop, I chose english and I got a spanish only speaking agent, I thought I would call it a day since I was already irritating Irene by being on the phone for so long.

After visiting Sagrada Família I had a revelation, was I burning my voice credits? was it possible that the auto setup message I received wasnt using the correct gateway? my only problem was that Vodefone ES was of no help, to test my theory I decided to top up my account, of course the only cards I could find were of 25 Euro, deciding that at worse I would just leave spain with an account holding hundreed of hours of talk time, I bit the bullet and added the credit. After less than 5 minutes profimail, fring and gravity were again online validating my suspicion.

For the next 6 hours I would call the international support call center of Vodafone ES, if I got a spanish speaking agent I would hang up(talking about an irritating behavior :-), you cant imagine my excitement when the agent that answered on the last call was speaking something like english, after having to explain everything at least 6 times trying to use the most basic vocabulary I could I manage to convince the agent to send me the correct settings OTA unbelievably though I got the same exact settings.

It is safe to assume that every other call for almost the whole day was a complete fail, only managing to finally piss off Irene :-p . While going back to the hotel for the night I managed to again reach another agent that could speak something resembling English, at least this time she could understand English quite well. I managed to explain the problem and was promised that I would get the correct settings soon.

At last I had an active connection over 2.5G (GPRS) and could start replying to mail, checking the work network status and open tickets, after sending some work orders we got out for a drink, during the route to Drassanes and to a Bar we visited near Maremàgnum the connection was working, the same to the route back.

The next day of course I again didn't have a connection, not in the hotel or any place we visited including a few were I previously was connected, I again started making calls for a few hours but to no avail and I finally gave up, this was even worse than work, in general I have to speak over the phone a lot less, just to note that trying the older AP that used the voice credits didn't work either.

Lots of hours latter finally back at the Hotel I got quite pleasant surprise, when I asked the agent if she spoke English she said something in Spanish and then I heard the familiar broken "please wait", a few minutes latter I heard the agent present herself in perfect English, she informed me that because of the large volume of calls I made without getting my problems resolved they forwarded my call to an English speaking agent, outside of Spain, she couldn't tell me where she was located but she informed me she was Argentinian. She let me hold the line for 5-6 minutes to review all my calls and then requested that I would wait for a few more, finally she informed me that I would get a kind of charge back for the mistake they made with the settings they send me in the form of voice credits, I was also informed that there were general problems that day in most of Barcelona with data connections and after giving her the Post Code of the Hotel and waiting a minute or two she told me there was no coverage and there wasn't an ETA for a fix, she reassured me that I would have a proper connection from then on to any place there was a connection available.

True to her words (and I would like to thank her whoever she was) the next day I had intermittent connection, the rest of our vacation days was a little bit better but never had anything above 2G or 2.5G anywhere except for near Port Vell where I got a strong 3G signal.

Since I was on vacation I have to say that I liked Barcelona and Spanish people a lot and I think that culturally they are very close to Greeks, if you exclude one or two instances they were extremely polite and helpful even with the language barrier.

Finally the last day while we were going to the airport I got a message from Vodafone ES informing me that I got 10 Euro credits, maybe I will use them the next time I will be in Spain:-P

This article was written in Barcelona, Spain on 25/05/2009 using Quickoffice on a Nokia E71

Ridiculous R.M. Stallman Bashing

noreply@blogger.com (George Pantazis) — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 17:08:00 +0000

It is unbelievable but today a man that had attended an [RMS] talk not only is trying to defame him accusing him of making sexist jokes but also publishes the private correspondence between them about this matter. It is obviously clear that this man actually had a problem with the fact that the joke was actually targeted to religion (?his religion?). I really like the hypocrisy of the majority of religious people that demand their right to believe, but do not accept the fact that others do not, even more that they can "bend" their decency rules to fit their cause.

Dont get me wrong, I have never being a fan of [RMS] and his mantra that if its not GNU it shouldn't exist, but since I got stable decency "rules" I find this ridiculous and inflammatory and at least here it is illegal since he doesn't anywhere mention that he is posting the email with permission.

Nokia OVI Store Fail!

noreply@blogger.com (George Pantazis) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 17:17:00 +0000

If you exclude the first couple of weeks of the OVI store where it was almost impossible to use and even if you did you didnt have anything interesting to download, I have been a happy camper.

After a failed problematic launch I started seeing interesting software and although I found that in almost all cases there wasnt a price advantage I still started buying everything from the store instead of the developers with the thought that it would be easier to have a single point to reinstall on firmware upgrades etc. I was completely fooled.

Last week Nokia released another firmware release for E71 which had a few fixes that seemed interesting and after installing it I found that the camera has an even better quality and the bug I had with the flash occasionally rebooting the phone is fixed.

Nokia OVI Store doesnt provide a way to download the software you purchase after that first install

Immediately after upgrading I started installing the software I had purchased from the vendors directly, thinking that this would be the most difficult task, after a couple of hours I was finally ready to login to the OVI store and finish with the installs but it was then I realized that the store prompted me to re purchase every application I had already bought.

Thinking that this is a problem with my account I send a message to Nokia through their contact us form, while filling up the form there was a field to enter a phone number and since I had my company provided phone on me I entered that, since it was indicated as a contact phone. The next day I received an email that the matter was going to be handled soon and I would receive links through SMS messages to install the already purchased software.

For a still unexplained reason the Nokia Customer Center started sending messages on the company phone with the links, the problem is that that phone is kept by the person that acts on emergency calls to NOC and that day I wasnt its user. Another problem is that the specific phone is an S40 device and is used just for its ability to keep the charge for days thus it didnt provide any means of forwarding the messages to my proper phone. What is though unbelievably curious is that Nokia send software I had purchased to a phone that wasnt in my account and was never used with any nokia services.

When the colleague called me to inform me of the send messages I send another email to Nokia about the problem and since it was friday I received another responce the next Monday informing me that the new email was again escalated and that I would soon receive the links which I did 5 hours latter.

Nokia stuff doesn't check the phone number registered with your account instead will use any number you provide as a contact while opening the ticket.

Upon installing the software I found that many applications were not send so I again contacted Nokia about this and the next day I was again told that it was escalated and that I would soon receive the links. This time instead of getting the links the same day their message was delivered I had to wait another day.

Unbelievably the next day Nokia send again all the links they had send the first time still missing the same applications and believe it or not again on the wrong phone, this time another colleguae was the recipient of the messages.

After sending another message I received a call from a Greek speaking representative asking me if everything was ok and to inform me that by mistake they had send all the links again, I informed him that they again send them to the wrong phone and was told that this time they would send only the ones that I hadnt yet received to the correct number.

About 2 hours latter I received just one link and some minutes latter a call from the same representative telling me that unfortunately only this one could be send and because the other applications were removed from the store, I would be refunded refunded for them.

Many applications that you purchase are not available for re download even from the Nokia Customer Care Center you have to repurchase them anyway (in theory you get refunded for them)

Finding this weird I send another message to Nokia and a few hours latter their reply stated something completely different, it said that they didnt have the ability to send some of the applications , no actual reason given, and not that the applications were not on the store and was told again that I would be refunded.

In total it took me a couple of hours to install software I had purchased from vendors directly and 7 days to install just a few of the applications I purchased from the OVI store.

Of course I find that behaviour at least problematic if not provocative of Nokia actually taking money from the user and the vendor for a service that they actually dont provide. I did contact a few of the vendors and I found that these problems are extremely common from customers of the OVI Store and a few even have already started providing a service to move the purchased license from OVI to their own infrastructure (most just require that you send them the receipt you received from OVI).

The store is quite new and Nokia hasn't yet released firmware for many devices after its launch and although it is a problem it hasn't yet come out of proportions, but the more time Nokia delays a fix for this, more users will suffer. It seems that lots of devices will have new firmware after this summer both new and old and I am not sure Nokia will be able handle the support tickets that will be created from all this, it already is a slow and tedious process.

Customer support is cumbersome and slow, the store itself doesn't help the user in any way and is missing basic features every other application store provides.

My opinion is that the OVI store is still an alpha version and it shouldn't yet sport software or services for pay, it should have been tested a lot more by hosting only free software to remove all the software bugs first, it is obvious though that everything on it is an after thought except the charging part, from checking out forums both official and unofficial a common pattern emerges of charging but not delivering purchases.

For the moment I would suggest that users stop purchasing any software from the OVI store and wait for Nokia to fix it first.

Nokia N810 Icons

noreply@blogger.com (George Pantazis) — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 06:03:00 +0000

These are the N810 Icons I promissed, again I post the 2 icon files with all the default sizes and colour modes for the icons, 22 for the standard one and 23 for the Vista compatible one (the last one is 256px). I will be doing some more icon work soon for the new server's we will be getting at work.

N810 Preview

Download Icon File
Vista Version(256px)

Nokia E71 Icons

noreply@blogger.com (George Pantazis) — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 05:12:00 +0000

Since I was playing with GiMP and Inkscape I thought I would also create a couple of new icons for my favorite devices. In this post I am publishing the Nokia E71 Icons for the Grey and Silver versions, in a latter post I will publish my N810 Icons.

Each Icon file has 22 versions of the icon in various (standard) sizes and colour modes.

Grey E71 Preview		Download Icon File Vista Version(256px)
Silver E71 Preview		Download Icon File Vista Version(256px)

openSUSE Wallpapers 2009 Part 3

noreply@blogger.com (George Pantazis) — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 07:25:00 +0000

This will probably be the last wallpaper for 2009, it is the 3rd theme I worked on and I think its my favorite. I left the upper left corner quite empty so that Its easy to add text, I will be using this on all my new VM's in SUSE Studio.

This is a small variation with a beveled title on top:

Published under the GPLv2 License, if you need it in another (open) license, just add a comment with the requested license and I will add it here :-)

Update: Licensed under GPLv2, LGPL

Updated: openSUSE Wallpapers 2009 Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (George Pantazis) — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 19:23:00 +0000

This is the 4th theme, I thought I should just publish what I got till now since I am already getting a bit bored with this :-p, plus I don't have enough time. This one doesn't have any variations, I may revisit it in a couple of months since I got a few ideas I would like to try.

I will do some more work on the 3rd theme and publish it quite soon, as for the 1st one, its not going well so I may be abandoning it completely.

Updated: By mistake I uploaded a JPG version.

Published under the GPLv2 License, if you need it in another (open) license, just add a comment with the requested license and I will add it here :-)

Update: Licensed under GPLv2, LGPL

Geeko Star Trek Engineering Insignia

noreply@blogger.com (George Pantazis) — Sun, 31 May 2009 11:40:00 +0000

I was playing with my wallpaper's and being inspired with the new Star Trek movie I decided to create an Engineering Insignia icon (256x256 pixels) with Geeko :-) .

It scales nicely down to 32x32.

Published under the GPLv2 License, if you need it in another (open) license, just add a comment with the requested license and I will add it here :-)

openSUSE Wallpapers 2009 Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (George Pantazis) — Sat, 30 May 2009 16:10:00 +0000

A bit late this year but I finally started creating my new wallpapers, I have 4 ideas for wallpapers and I don't know if I will manage to actually do them all. In this post I will publish the 2nd idea (2009b) and this time I plan to have a couple of variations on each theme.

	2009b Grey Basic
	2009b Grey - Morse Code
	2009b Grey - Klingon
	2009b Green Basic
	2009b Green - Morse Code
	2009b Green - Klingon

Notes:

All images are going to be at 1600x1200 I am going to publish other resolutions at a latter date.

All images are in PNG, if you arent using a Linux WM then you probably need to convert them to JPG.

Published under the GPLv2 License, if you need them in another (open) license, just add a comment with the requested license and I will add it here :-) .

Vista SP2 fails when GRUB is used

noreply@blogger.com (George Pantazis) — Wed, 27 May 2009 04:01:00 +0000

	It seems that Microsoft is really trying to stop people from using windows more and more each day.
If you try to install the RC version of SP2 and you are using GRUB (probably any boot manager) you are tortured by waiting for the whole process to finish and on the last stage of the upgrade you get a nice message "service pack did not install. reverting changes" after the restore point is restored and the system finally boots you get an even nicer Unspecified error of Error: E_FAIL(0x80004005).