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After breaking the display on my old phone some time ago I had to get a new one. My normal use is generally only making phone calls and sending SMS. Therefore, I did not actually need a fancy phone. However, the display on my compact camera broke within a few days after the phone and my MP3 player had also seen its best days. Moreover, I am quite found of technology and no excuse for getting some new toy is a bad excuse. Furthermore, it would have been nice to have a phone which could play music and take some decent photos while being on the run. Aditionally, I would have like to be able to syncronize my phone with the calendar in Thunderbird, Lightning and at last to be able to call using for instance Skype. Using Skype over wireless lan would save me a few bucks when being abroad.

After some frantic searching I landed on the Nokia N82. I have had the phone now for acouple of months or so and these are my thoughts so far … The phone looks nice, it is Nokia (which I like) and it should theoretically have all the features I wanted. To be fair, it works ok as a phone and cover all my real needs. However, there are several things I am not that satisfied with.

First of all, when compared to my girlfriend’s phone it looks like a clumpsy elephant next to an agile tiger. In comparison, It is huge! The share size is really not a problem but I envy the looks of the slimmer Nokia 5310. Second, the keys on the phone are just too small and not very comfortable. Third, the camera takes decent pictures but only in broad daylight. The phone was not intended to be a camera replacement but I hoped the image quality would have been slightly better. These are all minor issues which I can live with.

What is worse is the battery time. I knew that “smartphones” would have only limited battery time but it is worse than expected. It is annoying to be afraid of using the phone in case the battery runs out. I am perhaps exaggerating a bit but the phone is not very useful as a music player if the battery runs out. With farily limited use (a few short calls and messages) I have to charge it every second day. For some strange reason, this seems to have improved slightly after using it for a while but it is still not satisfying to worry about running out of battery unless I charge it all the time.

Next, it seems impossible to syncronize the phone with Thunderbird and Lightning (both contacts and calendar). I found one tool which should syncronize the contacts and it is apparently possible to syncronize the phone with Google Calendar. However, being a bit paranoid with large corporations I prefer having my calendar somewhere private. Customer service at Nokia mentioned Outlook, but that is out of the question.

There are however some positive issues as well. Skype is quite easily accessed through fringe. fringe enables the use of several chat/communication protocols like msn, Skype, and several on your mobile. Installation is easy and it seems to work quite alright. I have not tested it much though but it works. Moreover, I would say the headset/handsfree included in the package is decent and relatively comfortable. To sum it all up:

Positive:

• Decent handsfree
• Works fine as a phone
• A lot of features
• Works with Skype

Negative:

• Bad battery capacity
• It is huge
• No synchronization with Thunderbird and Lightning
• Camera needs quite a lot of light
• Uncomfortable keys on the keyboard
• Somewhat pricey (you get a lot of features but they do not live up to the price tag)
• And finally, did I mention poor battery capacity?

Conclusion:

Ok phone. Get something else unless you really need the features it provides. If you only need a phone have a look at something cheaper, smaller and less “smart”. If you need a fancy phone rather check out some of the newer models.

If you have problems using Subclipse inside of Eclipse and get an error message containing “cannot create tunnel” you might want to change the SVN interface you are using. For some reason JavaHL (JNI) does not always work. I have not figured out why but the problem disappears when using SVNKit. If you want to fix this open Eclipse, and open the menu illustrated above (Window->Preferences->Team->SVN) and change the setting. This has at lest solved my problems with SVN over SSH. The only problem is that it is at least two years since I last had to fix this and I had totally forgot …

I am using Ubuntu at work and I am equally impressed every time when I upgrade it. Upgrading the operating system actually works! I still remember trying to upgrade older Windows operating systems and I am not trying that again (must be said that this is some years ago). The Ubuntu Linux distribution is released as a major release about every 6 months. Inside these months plenty of the included packages and applications are updated. To upgrade from 8.04 (2008 April release) which is a Long Term Support (LTS) release to 8.10 (2008 October release) you must follow the steps here.

I have have one slight problem with some flickering when using alt+tab to change between running applications but I expect this to be handeled pretty fast. The frequent updates of the distribution (not a service release every leap year) is a very good thing.

I think Linux has become so simple that I am going to install it for my parents when I get them a new computer. Hopefully, they should manage. They already use Firefox and Thunderbird and I guess they should be able to use OpenOffice as well, even though … well you know how old folks are

I must admit that my ‘find‘ and ‘grep‘ (two Unix commands used to find files and to search in text) skills are not as good as they should be. Luckily, someone has made an application with a graphical user interface (GUI) which makes finding files based on their content quite easy. Regexxer is also included in the Ubuntu repositories and it can be easily installed through the Synopsis package manager. It made my day a lot easier when I was looking for a function in one out of a bunch of PHP files.

Wine is an open source implementation of the Windows API, meaning that it enables you to run a wide variety of Windows applications on Linux. I have known of Wine for quite some time but as normally have had a Windows computer around I have not gone to the trouble of installing it. I guess I have been a bit skeptical as well, however for no reason. Lately, I have put my Windows computer to rest at home and I am only using Linux (Ubuntu) on my work machine. Most of the applications I use are cross platform and of course open source.

Even though the Norwegian government has established a competency center for open source software, the government has only started using a few open source software applications. One of which is not open source is the application for getting travel refunds. This is clearly an important application but it is unfortunately only a Windows application.

Normally I have used this program on Windows but a few days ago I did not have any PC with Windows so I decided to try Wine. I must say I was impressed. I opened the Synaptic Package Manager in Ubuntu, searched for Wine and installed it. Piece of cake. Then I just downloaded and opened the msi-file for the travel refund application. Wine automatically fired up and installed the application perfectly. Within seconds I was completing my travel form (which is really a pain).

I have not used Wine much besides this travel refund application. However, it worked flawlessly with the Olypus DSS Player, which we use for listening to recordings of interviews, as well. Bottom line, I was impressed by Wine’s simple installation and that it worked flawlessly out-of-the-box. Based on my somewhat limited experience I would warmly recommend it.