Charon's activity.log

I have experienced first false positive spam message ever since I started using DSPAM spam filter. Anyway ... check Monty Python's definition of spam as something unsolicited or undesired. In this case the original canned meat known and sold here in Prague as "lunch meat".

I have just read an interesting article Top 10 reasons why you should quit Facebook. There are a lot of complatins about privacy, unethical behavior, technical incompetence etc. which are definitely relevant and significant, but the truly gem there is located at the end of the text as the no. 1 reason: "the application itself sucks". I would sign that!

I created my Facebook profile because of an online marketing campaign in my work and since the firt moment I wondered why so many people use a love such a terrible web application as Facebook?

It has really horrible user interface (UI), for instance:

• Non-intuitive navigation - the most items are somewhere else than you would expect and it takes time to locate anything
• More ways of reaching the functionality - You can choose more ways of accessing certain functionality, which is not good itself. The worse is there are different options depending on the way you navigated (for example reding external RSS feed into Notes).
• Important features missing - Why we can not edit the post in we make a typo? No editing, just delete and repaste once more ... with another typo maybe? :)
• Bugs - Even the core features have bugs. If you use cut&paste to fill the wall post and have longer text, you get wrong alignment. The only way to keep it correct? Retype!
• Options hell - The ton of different settings seems to be designed only to annoy the user to be kept at the default.
• Low availability - I wouldn't declare myself as a heavy Facebook user, but even though I regularly get "Page is currently not available, try later" message or load of the page just dies and the content remains disabled in grey and the only way is to reload the page - even the links on the page do not work anymore?!

That reminds me of another "UI comparison" that hits the nail - Regular TV remote vs. Apple remote.

Found an interesting article discussing the same strategy/process behind original Apple Mac in 1984 and today with iPhone/iPad. One of the original Mac developers describes Steve Job's success formula. Check at least IMO most inspiring chapters "Fearless leader" and "Steve's razor".

Old vs. new, racket money, industry break-through ... check out the strategy in Engadges in-depth analysis.

Ever wanted to remix somebody elses music, but never did because you don't have the right tools? Not a problem anymore. Remix online at MixMatchMusic ... preview it with Delphic - This momentary tracks preloaded.

The only recent Mac OS X client for my favourite peer-to-peer network Soulseek is dead. SolarSeek is now history as announced by original authors. Is there anybody out there who would pick up the glove? Or any suggestions where to look for fresh alternative mp3 stuff?

I started to use OpenOffice Base today. I decided to use it for as a budget and plan review tool, but tim will tell whether it was a wise decicision, because so far I have mixed experience :( The basics (meaning really basics - tables and relations) work well, forms work (but far from well) and I'm completele unable to create queries with simple join of two tables. SQL query semms allright, but Base complain about syntax error anyway. Damn this will be probably tough.

Anyway the good place to start are Base tutorials at ShowMeDo by Dai Just. Respect!

13 years old boy from UK has switched from his iPod to original 1979 Sony Walkman. The most interesting output of this story is to see the difference regarding the features of such devices - they are not technology driven anymore, but content driven. For instance from the report: "I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette."

Check out complete review and head-to-head comparison of the devices on BBC.

I have been using a T-Mobile G1 phone with new open source Android operating system for a while. It was a sort of "least evil" decision first, but later I started to like the phone. One the main reasons I changed my mind was the ability to flash other firmwares that the original. This is where the real power of open source comes in - you are free to change anything you want.

I haven't time to play with the phone to create the environment to be able reflash the firmware - particularly to create so called "Gold card" which enables you to store file on this SD card which will be used in the recovery mode as a source of new firmware. I approached one of the users of Android forum [czech only] to help with this. Thanks and respect to Xsoft.

When I got everything to flash a new firmware a natural question appeared - which one to flash? You can find quite extensive overview of the firmwares in JAB ROM database. My experiences with the major ones are:

• Haykuro - Heavily modified with stuff from HTC meaning more features on one hand, but bugs, a lot of chineese on the other hand. Visually more flashy and coloured, but not as polished and clean.
• Jesus Freke - One of the first mods, the base for most other builds. Enough for everyone, visually clean and polished based on original Google user interface.
• The Dude's - I used only version 1.2 and it is completely horrible visually with modified theme, icons and everything. Otherwise seemed allright.

I found two others which seemed to me OK - Cyanogen (a.k.a. "Jesus Freke on steroids" performance optimized, stripped to tha base) and TwistedUmbrella (Jesus Freke with ports of some HTC enhancements), but none of them has a important feature to me because of ability use GSM banking with my bank - SIM Toolkit application. They are both based on US version of Jesus Freke firmware which probably does not contain it in contrast to EU version.

So started hacking it ... and here you have a simple guide how to create your customized firmware.

1. Get and unpack the base firmware you would like to modify.
2. Change the content of the directory structure as you wish (copy the apps into it in /system/apps, add media files into /media, ...). The easiest way is reuse other firmwares, but of course you can experiment much more.
3. Download and unpack SignApk application to be able sign the firmware package (private keys and certificate compatible with recovery image are included).
4. Delete the signature in /META-INF - files CERT.RSA, CERT.SF and MANIFEST.SF
5. Zip all the content in your structure into a your_firmware.zip file and put it into the directory where you unpacked SignApk.
6. Sign the zip file with SignApk: java -jar signapk.jar testkey.x509.pem testkey.pk8 your_firmware.zip your_firmware-signed.zip

Now you can proceed firmware flash with this signed file. If you do not want to get into here is my modified Cyanogen's firmware version 3.4. Changes are:
- SIM Toolkit added,
- MarketEnabler 3.0 beta added,
- few media files from JF 1.51 (ringtones, notification etc.) added.

Download it here: update-cm-3.4-mod_ch-signed.zip [46.8 MB].

Check in out at Time article. You can guess what company has more than one entry :)

Finally OpenOffice is going to get a major User Interface overhaul. Features improvements were impressive in last two big releases - version 2.x and few weeks ago 3.x, but UI mostly stayed horrible as it is since the beginning. Now there is "Project Renaissance" ongoing to adapt UI to 21st century.

So far more than ten proposals were submitted. Some just minor changes, some too difficult to understand in 20 seconds watching the page :), some promising. Check out especially Flux UI and Iced Coffee.

The good news is according to Harward University Circumvention report there are various tools how to defeat the firewalls of the countries which filter the Internet traffic and these tools work well. Time to setup Tor server somewhere has probably come.

Attendance at any big conference meeting is a good opportunity to scan other people's computers. Once you connect into a WiFi network at such event a list of other computers appears immediately via Bonjour / Zeroconf services. There is of course nothing interesting or valuable at those computers, but one is tempted to scan them anyway :) This time at ICANN meeting I found Evil computer!

Wonder what was on that computer? Honestly I don't know as I didn't browse it, becuase I was scared I could find something truly evil.

Check your favourite programming language and the related religion here. I'm glad my favourite "has abandonded whole concept of goto hell".

If you are the user of OpenOffice.org office suite, there is a survey you might participate and help the development team to imporve the software in the future. So don't wait, take your part and answer following 38 questions.