Emporium of Uselessness

I have had the HTC Dream from Rogers for a couple of months now and it is by far the best phone I’ve ever had. I love the way it works and it is fast and feature-packed!  But this is not a review, I just want to list the things I DON’T like about it that you would consider bugs that need to be addressed. Hopefully they are fixed in the future.

• Pictures don’t seem to load in Gmail unless the person sent from a gmail account. I don’t know if this is by design or not, but there should be at least the option (“click here to show pictures”).
• Crashes happen occassionally. Usually turning the phone off and on fixes things. But in one instance the google maps app crashed on startup every time and would never work. I had to do a factory reset and start from scratch.
• Apparently there are different user profiles or something like that, and they seem to get mixed up. Let me try to explain.
  • on Friday morning I turned on my phone and it looked like my “profile” was gone; it looked like a factory reset had been done. But most of my settings were in place for wireless, etc. I turned it off and back on and it booted up to my regular “profile” like I expected. Whew.
  • Friday night I turned my phone off for a while. When I turned it back on, my profile was gone again and it looked like it had been reset. I tried turning it off and on, removing the battery for a while, etc. But it wouldn’t bring my stuff back. So I recreated my shortcuts and reinstalled all my apps. Boo.
  • The following Wednesday (today) I turn on my phone and it has my original profile back! What the heck?
  • UPDATE: I turned it off and on again, and it wouldn’t load up. It wouldn’t go past the initial Rogers screen. So I had to do another factory reset (and reinstall everything, again). We will see how it goes this time…

So it is a great phone but there are definitely some issues. I don’t know if there will be patches or anything to address these or if I just have to live with it until my contract expires. Rogers support always says you need to do a factory reset on the phone. Which of course does solve all the problems – temporarily.

UPDATE: Apparently there is a ROM update for the phone (I have version 1.85 and there is a 1.86 update from the Rogers website). I have installed that and maybe that will solve all my problems. Why Rogers Support didn’t tell me this, I don’t know.

“Although its name suggests perhaps even grander capabilities, Windows enthusiasts are excited over the discovery of a hidden “GodMode” feature that lets users access all of the operating system’s control panels from within a single folder.”

“To enter ‘GodMode,’ one need only create a new folder and then rename the folder to the following:

GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

Once that is done, the folder’s icon will change to resemble a control panel and will contain dozens of control options. I’m not sure it’s my idea of playing God, but it is a handy way to get to all kinds of controls.”

Source: CNET

I get asked this a lot.

• Open Control Panel.
• Under User Account and Family settings click on the “Add or remove user account.” Even though this is not at all what you want to do. This should really just say “Edit User Accounts” or something like that.
• Click Continue when UAC asks you for permission to look in there.
• Click the “Go to the main User Account page” link at the bottom.
• Under “Make changes to your user account” click on the “Turn User Account Control on or off” link at the bottom of the list.
• Give your permission to UAC by clicking Continue.
• Click to uncheck the “Use User Account Control (UAC) to help protect your computer” checkbox.
• Click OK.
• Now, of course, it has to restart to apply those settings.

Had some trouble setting up the TTX touch screen (which uses an eGalax touch sensor). It seemed to be plug and play (it uses USB connection) but the x-axis was flipped. Luckily I found this handy post:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1225205

Short instructions:

• edit /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/20thirdparty/50-eGalax.fdi and add a “merge key” line with the others like this:
  <merge key=”input.x11_options.SwapX” type=”string”>1</merge>
• run Administrator -> Calibrate Touchscreen
• hit Enter, then tap the X’s, but swap the left and right. That is, tap them in this order:
  • top right
  • top center
  • top left
  • middle right
  • middle center
  • middle left
  • bottom right
  • bottom center
  • bottom left
• Restart and it should work!

After setting this up correctly, the web server will know who you are based on your Windows domain login if you use IE. Other browsers will be prompted for username and password. This procedure assumes that the apache2 web server and PHP have already been set up and working, and the network has been configured. In this example, our server is called “fileserver”, the domain is “your.domain” with domain controllers “controller1″ (10.10.0.1) and “controller2″ (10.10.0.2).

• install apache auth module: sudo apt-get install libapache2-authenntlm-perl
• move to apache configuration directory: cd /etc/apache2/conf.d
• create config file for auth module: sudo touch ntlm.conf
• edit ntlm.conf to contain the following (I used vi but use any command line editor):

<location />
PerlAuthenHandler Apache2::AuthenNTLM
AuthType ntlm,basic
AuthName Basic
require valid-user
PerlAddVar ntdomain “your.domain controller1 controller2″
PerlSetVar defaultdomain your.domain
PerlSetVar splitdomainprefix 1
</location>

• ensure that /etc/resolv.conf contains the following lines (no changes made in my case):

domain your.domain
search your.domain
nameserver 10.10.0.1
nameserver 10.10.0.2

• restart apache webserver: sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
• test on a PHP page to make sure it is authenticating by putting the following PHP code in index.php at the root of the site:

<?php echo “You are logged in as <b>” . $_SERVER['REMOTE_USER'] . “</b>”; ?>

• visiting http://fileserver/ in the browser now returns:

You are logged in as UserName

Also, crunching sounds.

It sure is pretty though.

Working on a website rebranding for The Flower Bank in the UK, with design by The Designworks.

5th - 18th October 2009

This one was actually done a while ago and I forgot to mention it. The festival is over now but we’re still proud of our work on the site, which was designed by our friends at The Designworks in the UK.